Josephine Daskam Bacon

“ Again a pause, and now Miss Jencks addressed Margarita, affectionately, but firmly—oh, very firmly!
"What do you find so absorbing out of the window, my dear?"
Margarita started like a forgetful child, blushed a little, murmured impatiently in French and then smiled delightfully at me.
"But this is Jerry, Miss Jencks, Roger's and my Jerry," she said beseechingly. "You do not mean that I must be polite to Jerry?"
"Most assuredly," returned Miss Jencks. "When a gentleman, even though he be an old friend, makes a journey to see one after a long absence, he expects and deserves to be entertained!" ”

“ I pressed my face against his dear, quivering coat, I surrendered my cheek to his warm, rough tongue, I translated each happy convulsive wriggle.
"Dear old Kitch—good fellow!" I muttered, none too steadily, for I was not strong yet, and he seemed suddenly the only friend on whom I could unreservedly count. Roger had wished to stay with me, I knew, but of course he must go with his wife, and I am glad that I never grudged his absence a moment. For this cause shall a man leave his life-long friend and cleave only to her, and there is no other way. ”

“ I think no woman's name is so purely sweet to the ear, so grateful on the tongue. My Margarita! Alas, alas....
As to that walk by the sea, I have never been able to get any satisfactory account of it. Any, that is, which could hope to prove satisfactory to one who did not know Roger. Such an one might be incredulous, in face of all that had gone before, when assured that Roger paced back and forth on the firm sand, filling his lungs in the clean sea air, puffing his cigar in perfect silence, Margarita at his heels as silent as he, and the big Danish hound at hers, more silent than either. ”

“ Had he gone on to the club where I was waiting for him; had we dined, played out our rubber, dropped in at the occasional chamber concert that was our usual and almost our only dissipation in those days, I should not now be ransacking old letters and diaries from which to make this book, nor would Margarita's picture—her loveliest, as Juliet—lean toward me from the wall. She is smiling; not as one smiles in photographs, but as a flesh-and-blood woman droops over the man she loves and smiles her heart into his lips, reaching over his shoulder. ”

“ But I have never known a juster man, and though he talked little of the "rights" of women, and then in a brief, blunt fashion that would have exasperated the fast-emerging sex most terribly, he nevertheless respected the rights of every human creature most scrupulously. Though he had the private appreciation of the unmistakable good points of the harem-seclusion shared by every healthy male, he would never have shut Margarita into a New York house or a honeymoon-island against her will, and I think he was too proud to reason with her on the only lines open to him. ”

“ It was as much a part of her enchanting personality, and as little a defect in my indulgent eyes, as the three tiny moles under her chin (true grains de beauté) or her utter refusal to affect an interest in people's affairs or to eat the insides of her rolls and bread-slices. All faults, doubtless—but who would have or love a faultless woman? Not I, at any rate, for I loved her and love her and shall love her till my heart is a handful of dust, and she was far from faultless, my Margarita. ”

“ Either the comfort of renewed relations with her children mended her health or the fatality of the shock was overestimated, for she did not die, not then nor for many years, but lived, happier, perhaps in her affliction than before it, for the bond between her and Roger and Mother Mary, strengthened when she was preparing for death, never loosened again, and more than once, a black-robed, white-coiffed figure has visited the home of her father's like a slim shadow, and carried with her one of the Church's greatest blessings, surely—the healing of old wounds and the restoring of human loves. ”

“ They stand so still in this picture, those big, non-committal British, each gnawing his lip a little under the drooping mustache; the women's shoulders are ivory against the panelled oak and bowls of Guelder roses in Chinese bowls; that beautiful line from the base of the throat to the top of the corsage which America has not to give her daughters, as yet, heaves and droops; the Romneys smile behind their wax candles in sconces. It is only a waltz of the street, but she has bewitched us with it, has our Margarita. ”

“ Nature had given her long dark lashes with perfect verisimilitude, but had at the last moment capriciously decided against man's peace and hidden behind them, set deep behind them under flexible Italian brows, those curious slate-blue eyes that fixed her face in your mind inalterably. You could not forget her. I know, because I have been trying for twenty years.
"You are not, I take it, accustomed to dining out, Miss Margarita?" said Roger, amused, contented, ignorant of the cause of his sudden sense of absolute bien être, or attributing it, man like, to his good dinner. ”

“ Much as I regretted that this issue should have arisen in Roger's household, like Sue Paynter I had a secret sympathy with Margarita. Roger was never fond of the stage, and I was. He preferred chamber-music and symphony to opera, and was never deeply sensible to the solo voice, though a good critic of it. The glamour of the stage—that lime-light that has eternally dazzled the sons of Adam—had little effect upon him: he was the last man in the world to marry an actress. ”

“ I can see the circle now—they form in the classic amphitheatre that knows no century nor country; a humpback pushing a barrow of something before him stops near us; a woman, coughing frightfully, leans on it, muttering to herself, staring at Margarita's scarf-wrapped head.
The cockney's address begins, "O my brothers ..." but I do not attend: I want to get Margarita out of the growing crowd, listless, but lifted for a moment from their sordid treadmill of existence by the light and the muffled, rhythmic crush and the high-pitched sing-song. ”

“ What do you know of the private life of the man in the next house? Have you a friend who cannot tell you from one to three melodramatic tales, lying quite within his experience, at which you will gasp, "Why, it's as exciting as a novel!" The best novels never get into print and the most blood-curdling, goose-pimpling dramas are played by the boxholders. The longer I live the more firmly am I convinced that the really quiet life is relatively rare.
To Roger, indeed, after his climax in the four-wheeler, it seemed impossible that life could ever again be quiet. ”

“ The day that Roger and I first met is as clear in my mind as if, in the current phrase, it were but yesterday. I was a slender little lad of ten and he a great, strapping fifteen-year-old. I was trundling my hoop about the part of the schoolyard usually given over to the little fellows, as blue as indigo, homesick for my mammy-O, and secretly ashamed of the French school-boy cape I had worn at Vevay, which all my mates derided, but she in her woman's thrift had thought too good to throw aside. No doubt she was right, but oh, what you make us suffer, you gentle widow mothers! ”

“ The darling imbecile—could anything have been so hopelessly enchanting as Margarita? It is impossible. If you can picture to yourself a boy—but that is misleading, directly, when I think of her curled close against me on the rocks, her hand on my arm and all my veins tingling under it. She was all woman. And yet who but me who knew her can ever have heard from the lips of any woman such absolute naïveté, such crystal frankness? It was like those dear talks with some lovely, loved and loving child. ”

“ Her long braids were bound around her beautiful round head, and this fashion of hair-dressing, with its classic parting, brought out the purity of her features and the coin-like regularity of them. I saw at once that she was older than I had thought her on the beach: I had not given her twenty then.
Roger took her hand and led her into the room.
"This is Margarita," he said simply, but his face told all he did not say, and I thanked heaven that neither Elder nor I had been foolish enough to attempt what we should probably have called reasoning with him.
"Is this the man that will marry us?" ”

“ I found that I had insensibly drifted into a state of mind in which we five, Roger, Miss Jencks, Dolledge, Caliban and I seemed to be at home, contented, occupied, attached by every interest domestic and romantic, to the spot that was dearest on earth to us, while Margarita, a brilliant bird of passage, but lingered with us for the moment, before she took up her journey through the world—for that she was destined for the world, who could doubt? ”

“ What was it in Margarita that drew that old, primitive passion, that ancient world-stuff out of its decorous grave, all planted with orchids and maiden-hair, that woke it with a rough shout in us and offered us at the same time its natural gratification—a fierce fight and a certain victory? God knows and knows better, perhaps, than the Devil that Roger's ancestors would have been quick to credit with the exclusive knowledge. ”

“ Many a time have we discussed it since, with a curious, frightened wonder: why should that furnace have seemed so all-important to me? At best we expected to spend but few days at the Island when it could have been necessary; Margarita had grown up among Atlantic winters and had more times than she could count broken the ice in her bedroom ewer; such a luxurious whim would never have occurred to Roger, who, like most men of his type, expected every one to be as hardy as himself—how many generations of his ancestors had stoically toasted their shins while their backs were freezing! ”

“ And Roger, in spite of the fact that he was forty and a conspicuously practical person (or was it, perhaps just because of this fact? I confess I am not quite sure!) actually left that house of mystery carrying a yellow earthen pitcher of milk, a crusty loaf of new bread, a great slice of sage cheese and a blueberry pie, followed by Margarita and the Danish hound, Margarita prattling of Broadway, the dog licking her hand, Roger, I have no sort of doubt, intent on conveying the food in good order to its destination! ”

“ At high tide these would not show, but they were there, always guarding, always bare-toothed, and as far again beyond them a bell-buoy mounted on a similar ledge seemed to point to the existence of a double barrier. It was a great lonesome bay of the Atlantic that he looked at, its arms on either side desolate, scrubby and forbidding, with not a hint of life. Suddenly, as he stared, wondering, and Margarita stood quiet beside him, a long, quavering bellow came from behind him.
"It is the cow," said Margarita reassuringly, as he whirled around, "she is calling Caliban to milk her, I suppose." ”

“ My mother, like old Mrs. Upgrove, is living still; well and happy, both of them, thank God, and as proud of their sons as if either had ever done anything to deserve it. Neither of them has much to say of Margarita, I have noticed, though both fondle her children, a little absently, perhaps, and feign to wonder what it is we see in Peggy that blinds us to the excellencies of the others—stouter children and more respectful, my dear!
And Death, that spares them both, and old Madam Bradley, too (eighty-eight now and half paralysed for nearly twenty years!) ”

“ She belonged, properly speaking, to the advance guard of the natural method, the school of intelligence and subtle dramatic skill. I cannot imagine Margarita a stout, tightly laced, high-heeled creature, advancing to the footlights, jewelled finger-tips on massive chest, emitting a series of staccato fireworks interspersed with trills and scales apropos of nothing in this world or the next.
Such performances constituted Roger's main objection to the opera, and though he was considered Philistine once, it is amusing to see how the tide of even popular opinion is setting his way, now. ”

“ I have never in my life stood in a room so contradictory, so utterly unrelated to its supposed intention. Occupied it certainly was: towels and soap and sponge, and nightgown neatly folded on the patchwork quilt, showed that. But of all teasing suggestion of femininity, all the whimsical, rosy privacy of a girl's bedchamber, all the dainty nonsense and pretty purity, half artless, half artful, with which romance has invested this retreat and poetry and song have serenaded it, Margarita's apartment was entirely void. ”

“ It is not difficult now to see why the crowd followed; her voice is like a child's lost in the wood, but brave, and sure of ultimate protection; it has a curious effect of the country and the hedgerows. They listen eagerly, they like it.
"Come, Margarita, I think we ought to get away—the crowd is getting thicker. People are staring at us."
"No, no, Jerry, let me alone! Oh, see the poor woman, she is too ill to sing! She has lost her voice—do you know it?" ”

“ They are as sudden, as unexplained in my memory, as those crowds in dreams, so definite, so individualised, where haunting, special faces stand out and hands clasp and shoulders touch—and all fades away. Around the vivid emerald lawn they group themselves, and Margarita, a pearl [260] in pearly trailing laces, sits on a stone bench, defaced and mossy, in the centre, at the back; the lads adore at her feet, the banjo drops tinkling handfuls of chords at intervals, the birds flutter through the ivy overhead, the watered turf smells strong and sweet in the fanlike rays of the slow sun ”

“ I stood there, lost in a maze of Cairo streets, and the babel of the shrieking, blue-clad donkey-boys was the scream of gulls to my ears and the sun on the swaying brass platters was the reflection of a polished sun-dial. The turquoises on the scarab-seller's tray were turquoises about Margarita's waist, the lemonade was borne by Caliban, and the child that rode astride those strong shoulders had hair like corn-silk burned in the sun and eyes as blue as any turquoise! ”