Thurley

“ Don’t become lop-sided, Thurley, or change into a crabbed spinster. Live and let love come to you—you are a genius, a super-creature—you have the right to love as you please!”
“You do believe so?” Thurley fairly whispered the words. She fancied she had so stolidly locked away love from her wild-rose heart!
“I know so! The greatest artists have always been exceptions to the rule, never meek slaves of the law.” ”

“ Lorraine summarized. “Now help other men to become used to ‘life as usual.’ Thurley calls stay-at-homes and quiet workers ‘gray angels’ because we are considered ineffectual, simply keeping things going. You can be a gray angel, Dan. It’s the most peaceful feeling in the world! Help the boys at Thurley’s Fincherie to be average men, neither heroes nor martyrs, talk to them as only a man who is one of them can talk,—there lies your duty and your salvation.” ”

“ Thurley asked, feeling the simple girl from Birge’s Corners again, a de luxe Topsy!
“The wind, the death cry of a warrior and a woman’s sobs,” he answered so quickly she knew it had been clear to him for a long time. “No one will ever write the sonata, so words must do their best. At least, I choose to whom they shall be said. For it is as if you were looking into the very soul of me, as a mother does when she first sees her newborn child, the instant when the mysterious bond between them is formed for all time, despite all happenings.” ”

“ As soon as midsummer came, he explained to Thurley, there would be yellow lilies with heavy sweetness, the clean fragrance of shy heliotrope, creamy, bending tassels of spiræa forming an aisle up to the white stucco house with its contrasting dark, wooden trimmings.
But when they entered the hall, Thurley gasped with amused dismay, for she had seldom seen such conglomeration and disorder. It was true there were pink marbleized [213] walls, tall lapis lazuli pillars capped with gold and an emerald malachite cornice with a black baseboard in the big studio. ”

“ I am better placed as I am; but you, Thurley, are running amuck. Why this shallow flippancy? This false basis of theories, mistaking shadow for substance? Because you hear such and such a great diva bore a child for a crown prince—that this artist acts under the influence of morphine and that one paints only when addled from absinthe—you must not pursue these phantoms of self-indulgence—and you who sit there looking confused yet combative, you are at this very moment halfway inviting an intrigue with an honest country lad—Dan Birge! ”

“ So the dingy white wagon was anchored across from Betsey Pilrig’s, to Philena’s delight, and, while Thurley’s father stayed inside to sob in half-drunken fashion about “his loss,” Thurley made rapid inroads on Betsey’s and Philena’s hearts.
For that matter, she had made inroads upon the hearts of Birge’s Corners en masse. Even Lorraine loaned her a black hat for the funeral and stripped her garden of late blossoms to lay in the wasted fingers.
Thurley had sung at her mother’s funeral. “They always have music,” she told them, and, besides, “it made her feel better inside.” ”

“ Philena suggested enviously.
“No, there’s as much about children that grownups don’t understand, as there is about grownups we don’t understand,” Thurley said sagely. “But you can always remember that God said that straight to me—‘cripples can be conquerors’—just like He told me at Midland City, Illinois, ‘You let me catch you cutting off your hair and trying to run away and I’ll stop your singing mighty quick!’ See, Philena?” ”

“ Thurley could almost fancy she heard the answer being made, as glorious a feat as there ever was to be, to have children speak one’s name with admiration, to have shown America over-rich in all physical attributes, as taking for her spoils the greatest lesson of all, re-educating her artists so they might draw on the wonderful and hitherto barely skimmed surface of her astral or mystical energy which lies waiting for all true idealists. ”

“ Blessed Memory, buried in the wildest part of Maine, with the nearest post office entirely unpronounceable, proved to be an advance sample of paradise. Being perfect there was nothing complex about it—and very little to tell concerning it. Time flew, the hours tumbling over themselves like babies at play. It was exactly like the thirsty traveller coming upon the ice-cold mountain spring and drinking his fill with no comment but the satisfied and grateful, “A-a-h, man alive!” So it was with Thurley. ”

“ There likewise came an impulse not worthy of the real Thurley—nevertheless it came as strongly and with as much temptation as all the rest of her tempestuous plans. When she was rich and famous and still beautiful, she would return to the Corners to haunt Dan Birge as he had never dreamed a woman could haunt him. She would have some sort of romantic interest in her life even if she had given her pledge to Miss Clergy never to make the hideous mistake of marriage. ”

“ Do you think I ought to change?” for it suggested itself to her that Bliss Hobart might drop in for greetings.
“I should. You can’t be too particular, Thurley. The time is coming when the world will want to know what sort of frocks you wear every clock stroke of the day.” Here Miss Clergy yawned and settled back among innumerable cushions and Thurley spied the cover of a popular novel—one of Caleb’s, to make it the more amusing—peeping forth. ”

“ The difference between the peasant and the patrician, Thurley concluded, after restless reflection, was that the peasant cannot endure pain, physical or mental, as well as he can stand hardships, lack of the niceties of existence, whereas the patrician can endure anguish but he cannot tolerate discomfort. A poorly fitting or coarse gown would prevent Ernestine from playing her best, whereas Thurley could sing in calico, standing on the steps of her old box-car wagon. ”

“ After the last act, when Thurley’s dressing-room was a buzz of animated conversation and the scent of the flowers almost sickish, when her new maid fluttered nervously [236] about and Bliss Hobart came in to say, “I knew you would—so there’s nothing to exclaim about, is there?”—and all the sisters of the press clamored for “a word,” with others crowding about and looking properly animated and delighted, Miss Clergy whispered,
“My darling, how proud I am,” and Thurley recoiled, she knew not why.
“A finer bridegroom than Dan Birge,” the ghost-lady was murmuring, “fame! ”

“ Neither of these young people realized the harm it incurred. They cheated themselves into believing it “merely palship” or “an expression of individuality”—a very nice sort of garden and not wild oats affair!
Sometimes Thurley met Dan with a zest for his boyish mannerisms, his telling of the rise in wool goods, what a splendid housewife Lorraine was—only she didn’t understand things—how jealous he was of the basso who [331] made love to Thurley on the opera stage. ”

“ I had a passion for coaching tours and those horrible alderman-like banquets. I seemed to be tremendously popular with the buds—I was cad enough to keep all their letters for a long time. When they began to have grandchildren send me notes saying, ‘Granny says to ask if you remember the time you played Romeo and so and so’—I stopped being such a great house, ordered health-last shoes and got a line on the really reliable sanitariums. But you, Thurley,”—The old-beau aspect of himself seemed dimmed; he appeared a fatherly old gentleman rich in experience and therefore wise in judgment. ”

“ In truth America’s sixth race can be the inspiration of the bleeding, older world. That, Thurley, by degrees, must be our part in reconstruction—the winning for America of the violet crown.”
Thurley paused in her walking of the floor.
“But when one is so young and—when—” She faltered, all the wild-rose self of her returning, like a child reluctant to confess its misdoings.
Hobart took her hands in his. “The personal twist to any problem is for the person to solve; no one else can estimate it as well. Only to you have I told my vision, confided my hopes. ”

“ Mark was rapidly becoming a selfish neurasthenic; his better self died hard, it is true, but dying it was. Although the actress part of Thurley delighted in the unwise excitement of a flirtation with some one else’s property, the real Thurley looked askance at the changes being swiftly wrought in the boy, his over-emphasis on petty detail concerning his comfort, his ill humor at minor happenings which were not as he had wished, his sluggishness regarding work—the critics began to hint he was too bulky of figure. ”

“ And heaven grant you won’t need the ooze, Thurley, for a little! Still, it is a lovely, plastic state of thought—like those lavender and gold butterflies you find lingering in the corners of Whistler’s paintings or that flutter in the margins of special editions.”
“Why don’t you have the—the ooze be real—live [157] a fifty-fifty sort of existence?” Thurley borrowed Dan’s slang.
“It would be like blending chilblains and poetry or mosquitoes and mahogany—impossible! That is why they say all genius is a trifle mad. Remember, the ooze is your best friend! ”

“ He paused with a characteristic Birge tilt of the head.
Thurley’s eyes were serious as she answered, “I’m sorry for you. When you’re a man and have a little boy, I hope you’ll bring him up better than you have been brought up. You’ll go to jail, if you keep on acting so wicked.”
“Jail? Why, my pa knows the sheriff an’ everybody. I guess he knows the president.”
“If he knows so many people and is so smart, why don’t he live some place besides this funny town?” Thurley demanded.
This stumped Dan for a moment, then he answered, “His property is here and he can do what he’s a mind to. ”

“ So Lissa coached you! I knew the voice assassin’s marks of violence.”
He busied himself with getting Thurley’s voice in shape for her opening night. They did not talk again of the vision or Thurley’s snap judgment regarding life. Once Thurley ventured to say he looked tired and he answered that when a man is used to really ‘living’ for three months of the year, to be shunted into another channel tells on his disposition, but he would weather it all right and he was very glad to have been of service.
“I think one of the hardest things in the world,” he added, “is to be the man highest up! ”

“ Lorraine answered fearlessly. “You knew I always loved you. If Thurley would not marry you and you asked me in her stead, I felt that you would better be married. You might have done some ugly, cheap things, Dan, if you had not been engaged to me. I love you enough to make myself—content, by keeping your house and having your name. I know I’m not Thurley,” she smiled wistfully, “but I’ll always be Lorraine. Some day you may come to care a little more.” ”

“ Her possibilities being above the average, Thurley, inside of the few months in New York, had come to the settled conviction that folks were really just folks no matter how they were dressed, and the artists quite the same as the population of Birge’s Corners, only in a different setting and with a different set of values. ”

“ For Lorraine would have probably remarked, after viewing Thurley’s apartment, “How in the world does she ever get the work done!” letting the panorama of joys and possibilities sweep on uncomprehended.
Therefore, Dan had decided, after very arduous sophistry, it was not wrong to see Thurley, to keep her in his bewildered heart as a sort of lovely idol, something set apart from the Corners and his house-and-garden life—something as different as the scarlet tanager or the jewelled dragon-fly is different from the barn-swallow or the field-daisy! Each has its own place. ”

“ Dan stayed at home that evening as if wishing to prove his devotion to Lorraine. Usually he would have wandered down to the hotel or the lodge room. They talked of everything else but Thurley’s return, although each thought of nothing else, and in the morning Dan said carelessly,
“Don’t call on Thurley unless you like. I dare say she does not expect it. Every gawk of a country girl will crowd in on her, curious and self-seeking, and if Thurley wants to see any one, she’ll come to them. She doesn’t belong to the town any more but to the world.” ”

“ Thurley was just realizing the parasites, so-called artistic, who beg, steal or demand their living from those who really work and earn one. She was beginning to classify the large army of restless rebel women who really delude themselves into believing they have a mission in life, badgering all those who simply do the work they were intended for. These women interested Thurley. ”

“ Thurley will sing the songs and mind the babies so the mothers can attend the meetings and Philena is to preach and pray and make white dresses for every one. If Lorraine McDowell wants to she can travel in America and raise funds for the cause but nobody shall ever be the same dear friends as Thurley Precore and Philena Pilrig. ”

“ Although they were humorous and a trifle pathetic, they were dangerous, to Thurley’s mind.
“What havoc they could raise!” she said to Hobart one afternoon. “They would be capable of playing gnome at sane and settled doorways and calling, ‘Leave your tasks—come out—come out,’ and a great many would follow them. They are seething with discontent and they have the determination which keeps them going, yet they do not tell themselves the truth; they magnify home wrongs and future glories and their own possibilities. ”