Chapter III

Like Harvey, Horatia had no doubts as to her ability to look out for herself. To a certain extent she had been already doing it and she had begun doing it early so that it was natural for her to be independent and vigorous. Her father had died when she was five and after that her mother had not seemed to care enough about living to keep it up. She had been a pretty, intense woman who had taken her wifehood and maternity very seriously, so seriously that she had quickly faded and at the time of her death had not looked at all like the lovely young girl in leg-o’-mutton sleeves, who smiled out of the photograph in the West Park parlor.

She had two children, both girls to her secret relief and her husband’s secret disappointment, and she fussed over their clothes and their childish illnesses interminably. In spite of or perhaps because of her fussing, they were, when she left them, two sturdy little girls with pleasant tempers and good digestions. They accepted the change in their fortunes quietly, taking all the kissing and patting and uncomprehended signs of sympathy which came their way, and, climbing into the big walnut bed at the Grant house on the first night of their transference there, they cuddled closely together and fell asleep.

George Grant, their uncle, came in to see if they were asleep a little later and stood looking down at them in a kind of puzzled wonder and with a rusty throb of pity at the fact that they looked very small indeed in the big bed. It was as near to a definite emotion towards them as he ever got. He was their father’s brother and had officially “taken them” because it was the natural and proper thing to do. He was the head of a dry-goods establishment and by dint of steady application and learning one thing, the wholesale dry-goods business, well, he had made money in a slow accumulating way. And he had built his house, which perfectly expressed him. Like it he was good and substantial and like it also, provincial, unimaginative and unconscious of his limitations and lacks. His wife was enough like him to have been his sister and whether this was the result of slow absorption of his characteristics or had been the original bond between them, no one knew. Mrs. Grant knew as much about clean housekeeping as he knew about dry-goods. She had a subsidiary passion for church work and was an authority on church suppers and foreign missions.

She also had taken her brother-in-law’s children because it was the obvious thing for a childless, well-to-do couple to do. But perhaps because the Grants had been married for twelve years without having any children, the desire for them had either died or never been cultivated and they took Maud and Horatia without warmth. From the very beginning the house on the hill meant repression to them. There was never cruelty or even unkindness but it was all cold. Even in the kitchen there was no freedom or expansion. The food was measured and counted and it was not a place where an enterprising or hungry girl might take a pot of jam or a dozen cookies and abscond with them for an after-school lunch. To be sure if they were hungry they were allowed to have bread and butter and brown sugar--or a doughnut perhaps. But their aunt or the raw-boned Swedish girl who helped her gave it out always with an air of rationing and several admonitions not to drop the crumbs.

At intervals, all along their path through grammar school, High School and Sabbath school, came the supposedly high spots of recreation, parties which they themselves gave or which they went to as guests. Even at a very early age they had no question as to which kind they enjoyed most. They liked to go to parties and they hated them at home. Parties in other houses usually involved some stiffness at the beginning but they warmed up to gaiety and a joyous kind of disorderliness which sent all the children home flushed, tired and happy. At the Grant house they were functions all the way through. Mrs. George Grant modeled them on the parties she gave to the ladies of the Missionary Guild.

“I hate parties at home,” Maud would grumble to her sister when some morning Mrs. Grant would gravely announce that she thought one was due, and Horatia, always braver, would say, “But Aunt Caroline, what shall we do at the party?” Aunt Caroline, her mind already on the refreshments and the exact dozen of napkins which she would dedicate to the use of the children, had always the same answer, “Why, play games, Horatia--just as you always do.”

The children all came. Parties were never events to be ignored, and the young public of West Park was not discriminating if refreshments were involved. They came, all clean and scrubbed, and were sent down to the big bare hall which a freshly-lit fire tried in vain to heat, and they seconded the embarrassed efforts of Maud and Horatia to get up some games. But Mrs. Grant sat by the wall and watched with a mother or two flanking her, and there was no abandon. The refreshments, served in the big dining-room, were all that saved the situation, and even those were spoiled for the two hostesses by a feeling of their aunt’s eyes lurking for crumbs. Yet, afterwards, when the children had gone home again and all traces of them were carefully removed, Mrs. Grant would smile and say to her nieces, “Did you have a nice time?” And faithfully, true to a convention which they did not in the least understand, they answered, “Oh, yes, Aunt Caroline.”

Of course even all Mrs. Grant’s passion for routine could not prevent some crises arising. One came when Maud refused to do any more studying after she graduated from the High School. In spite of her lamentable monthly report card, Maud had been destined for a teacher and her sudden rebellion at the end of her seventeenth year shocked her aunt terribly. But Maud had a way of being silent and sullen and she had secret reinforcement from Harvey Williams, who was one of the reasons why she did not intend to go to the University. She rather concealed the fact of Harvey at the time of her rebellion, but after she had gained her point, Harvey became a steady caller at the Grant house. Maud had insisted that she was going to earn her own living but she postponed beginning to do it and it shortly became very obvious that she might better spend her few unmarried days preparing a trousseau. Harvey was quite an eligible person, beginning a law practice in the city and living with his mother in West Park. The Grants, once adjusted, smiled in their cheerless way upon the match. Maud’s love-making had gone on during Horatia’s last year at High School and first year at the University. She was at first tremendously impressed by the fact that Maud’s brown curls and pink skin were desirable to the point of matrimony. She recognized the fact that Maud was pretty but rooming with the prettiness and eternally removing jars of cold cream and boxes of pink powder from her side of the bureau had lessened its effectiveness for her. It was, none the less, a great thing to have Maud being made love to and to think of her in secret as the recipient of passionate kisses and delightful murmured phrases of love. Maud jarred on the romance by being Maud throughout, inclined to giggle and enjoy even Uncle George’s crude jokes about Harvey, and Harvey had done his share of the jarring by being a blushful, diffident young man who shot side glances at his fiancée and giggled heavily himself. Horatia did her best to forget them actually and to remember the delightful fact that they were lovers, hoping against hope that they spent their evenings in moonlight walks instead of holding hands at the movies.

By the time Maud was married, her sister was more sophisticated. She had finished her first year at the University and begun to read a great deal. Many subjects, more or less taboo in West Park, she had heard discussed freely by both students and professors. She had decided that there was something wrong with the social and economic systems of the world, that West Park was a small and narrow place, that flirting was silly, that she must devote a great deal of time to reading essays and books on psychology, and that she would like to meet some “real men” and get away from West Park. In spite of all this accumulated philosophy, she was oddly glad to get on a street-car labeled “West Park” when she came home on her first vacation, and to see all the familiar landmarks on the way to the stone house on the hill. She never forgot that homecoming. It was home, and not even the facts that Aunt Caroline was at a missionary meeting and that Maud had a cold in her head and wanted to talk about the initialing of her linen could keep Horatia from romancing somewhat over it.

But by evening she felt indefinably let down. It was a warm June night and the windows were open in the dining-room so that as they sat at dinner Horatia could see the city below, its lights just beginning to sparkle through the first dusk, and the slow freighters on the great lake beyond passing and repassing with grave dignity. It was all beautiful and quiet and familiar outside and yet no one at the table seemed to feel it except herself. Uncle George at the head of the table in his black house-jacket, ate silently, his broad, unemotional face fallen into heavy lines of contentment. The day was over, his day’s business had been good and after dinner he would water the lawn.

At the other end of the table his wife was talking to the girls about Maud’s coming wedding. And as usual her mind was focused on the food, the napkins and silver and especially the cleaning necessary, and Horatia once more suffered the feeling of reluctant chill of the old days when her aunt proposed a children’s party. Thank God this one would be the last.

Her aunt broke into her thought.

“And then I suppose Horatia will be the next one,” she said with a heavy facetiousness.

“Didn’t you meet any fellows at the ‘U’?” asked Maud. “Most of the girls come back simply laden with pictures. Esther Dinsmore has a man who motors up to see her every week or so--clear across the state.”

“I didn’t go in for that sort of thing.” There was a trace of self-righteousness mingled with the humor in Horatia’s tone. “And I am afraid I won’t be the next one, Aunt Caroline, because I don’t want to get married for ages. I’ve lots of things to do first.”

“Teaching?” asked Maud in disgust.

“No--I don’t think so. Social work, maybe.”

“Slum work?” It was Aunt Caroline this time.

“We don’t call it that any longer.” Horatia was patient. “No---- Lots of the social work is scientific work in an office. Collecting statistics.”

Aunt Caroline preened herself just a little.

“I may be very old-fashioned but this statistic collecting seems very foolish to me. Just a fad. Now when we send out a missionary to a heathen country we don’t ask for statistics. We want to know how many souls he has saved.”

“That might in itself be a modest statistic,” laughed Horatia.

“And,” concluded Aunt Caroline with the air of one who quotes the irrefutable and has a right to quote it, “I’m sure ‘the poor ye have always with you.’”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Maud giggled.

“Let’s stop the deep stuff, for pity’s sake. There he comes, Horatia.”

Harvey could be seen passing the dining-room windows. Maud giggled again and jumped up to look at herself in the mirror of the sideboard. Then she went through the hall to meet her fiancé.

“Horatia’s home,” they could hear her saying, “she’s an awful highbrow. Not much like poor chicken-brained me.” She made her apologies for her lack of mind with enormous pride and Harvey said something in a low voice at which there was another giggle. Horatia felt reluctant to meet him again but she folded her napkin and went out on the porch where the two lovers had settled themselves. Harvey shook hands with her a little awkwardly but not as awkwardly as she had expected. Working in the city had put a keener edge on him. He held his head better and talked better English--not entirely the slangy boy and girl stuff which she had always had from him. On the whole, as she looked him over, Horatia thought her sister was doing rather well. Nothing exceptional in Harvey, of course, but after all he would make a good husband. They talked for a little and Harvey was intelligent on all the subjects which she, a little priggishly, introduced. He was a graduate of her University and full of reminiscence. But for all his pleasant conversation Horatia found herself feeling in the way. Harvey’s arm stealing over the back of Maud’s chair--Maud’s affected, immensely assured little laugh as if she had a world at her feet and need make no effort--it puzzled Horatia. It seemed inconceivable that this well-ordered young man should want her to go so that he could make silly love to a giggling Maud and yet---- She stood up and prepared to go into the house. Neither protested.

From that vacation on, Horatia began to be the “intellectual one” in her circle of friends. At first she resented it, then liked it and grew ultimately into complete indifference to what West Park did or didn’t think. But that was later. At first she found herself set apart and left out of the jokes. Before she went back to the University Maud was “settled,” not in West Park, but in an apartment in the city itself, more accessible for Harvey and better suited to his wife’s budding passion for storming the society of the city. With her going Horatia had dropped out of the circle of friends who used to come to the children’s parties. The girls had married or gone East or to Normal schools. The boys were marrying or flirting with city girls. Yet, though the reality of her relations with the suburb had all changed, faded, she never lost the feeling that she belonged to it and was in a measure bound to go back to it. She knew that her aunt and uncle wanted her to live with them--and that dull as their affection was, they were used to her and wanted her. But stronger than their call was her feeling of West Park’s physical beauty, of the vigor of its cool, brisk winds and of the greatness of the great lakes spread out at the foot of the city and all its suburbs. It was always a relief to come back from the flat little university town.

She had done rather well at the University, though, as she told Maud, she had not “gone in” for the social side of the undergraduate life, the life which was so important to many of the girl students. A great deal of that side of the University bothered her and repelled her. There were girls who seemed to care about nothing except prolonged tumultuous flirtations which included an immense amount of kissing and physical demonstration. Horatia allied herself with the group which considered such things a disgrace to the college. It was a strong group, not too large, and they substituted for the flirtations of the other girls an intense interest in and elaborate discussion of the modern woman and her relations to men. They were constantly exchanging cold-blooded little ideas for perfecting the sex. And underneath their scorn for the hand-holding undoubtedly persisted an interest in the very thing they scorned, judging by the time they put on the subject.

Once in a while they tried to put some of their theories into practice. Horatia would find some young man attracted to her and meet him honestly and simply as she would have met any girl. She would talk in her best manner and tell him about the things she was thinking. And inevitably she drove him away, for the young men were not at the age when they looked for straight comradeship from girls. There was another code among them. They liked Horatia well enough, rather admired her, but they left her alone. It worried her a little. She did not want to go through life without love. She had heard and read too much about it. And, transcending her talk about the new spirit of friendship between men and women, of a partnership marriage, came flashes of feeling as she read her Keats or stumbled on a boy and a girl saying a clinging good-night in some dark corner of the campus. She felt left out.

After all it did not matter much, because in the spring of her Sophomore year everything changed. The United States had declared war and all the most interesting young men had melted away, leaving only indistinguishable stars in the University service flag. And it was by the war that Horatia’s last two years at the University were colored. She had not had much of a point of view about the European trouble as she vaguely characterized it when it had been purely European. She had talked once of becoming a nurse and going abroad but it was one of her wildest dreams and not an especially cherished one. But now for a year and a half the University had mobilized itself. Appeals for help, lectures from returned soldiers, classrooms and halls filled with flaring war posters, constant campaigns for funds, a sudden hierarchy springing up among Red Cross workers, blue veils, red veils and white veils shrouding the heads of the earnest bandage makers, and constant efforts on the part of every instructor to relate his or her branch of study to the great war, realizing that only by so doing could he hold any number of his pupils--such things did the war mean to the college. The interest in athletics died down like an untended fire--seriousness came into vogue--and there was even more to it. All these young students, still mentally adolescent, suffered. They suffered because they had been taught that they should understand life, because the supernatural had been left out of their philosophies and blind faith had been discarded. Yet they were face to face with horrors, with facts, philosophies which they could not comprehend and they strained their minds trying to understand. Those who had been mildly Socialist turned with repugnance from Bolshevism. Those who had always had a smug trust in their financial solidity saw fortunes vanish or become useless in the face of misfortune. Individualists realized that their social duty was unescapable. For two years these students who had gone to college to learn facts, as they supposed, found themselves in a chaos of changing ideas, guided only unsurely by instructors as bewildered as they were themselves. No one wanted to stay in college. They stayed only because of parental pressure and because the University authorities introduced as much practical war work as was possible. And the cold-blooded philosophy and psychology Horatia had been absorbing was melted in the heat of the great world emotionality.

Then at the height of all this enthusiasm came the armistice revealing to the world suddenly and fearfully the confusion the world was in--confusion of politics, of sociology, and ethics.

For the first few months after the signing of the armistice the word “reconstruction” flew about the campus. War funds became “reconstruction funds.” And then doubt began to creep about. What did reconstruction mean and what would it lead to? Discontents penetrated the campus grounds. The instructors, their own opinions in a state of flux and bound to wait for further developments before crystallizing, were poor leaders, dealing out generalities and ambiguousness. A certain fixed curriculum dragged its way through the months. They were all conscious that they were holding to outworn forms. Who knew what the University of the future would be? Perhaps those diplomas given out in June, 1919, were the least valuable of any ever given. Students went out into a life which the instructors could not forecast. In wartime it was possible to preach courage and sacrifice. In these strange new peace times who knew whether courage and sacrifice were cardinal virtues?

This of course was all under the surface, hardly felt perhaps by many of both teachers and students. But the unrest, the doubts were there, revealed to the least probing. To some of them, among them Horatia, a strange thing happened. She had been trained at first to believe in a pragmatic philosophy which the war had swept away in its wind of romantic sacrifice and heroism. In her first two years she had felt rather scornful of the silliness of college men. And then they were drawn out of her life into the great struggle and became heroes. Horatia had come to believe in heroism. She had heard of so many young lives offered nobly, read many young loose-hung fighting autobiographies. And she had come out of college as thorough a young romanticist as ever lived in the Middle Ages, but a puzzled young romanticist with neither Church nor king to give her guidance. She brought her strong faith in young men, her growing desire for all the romance life could give, home. Home to West Park and after a taste of the dull routine of Aunt Caroline’s days and the gossiping wedding of Edna, had decided that she could not bear the let-down, the drop from romantic idealism and noble ideas into the actuality of a corner of life. There was more in life which she must have and go after posthaste. And so it was that the morning after the wedding, she had set off adventuring and found the road open and pleasant.