An American family : a novel of to-day

Front matter

! Pa meh

WAR SERVICE = LIBRARY

POLO] GPNSG2 ~ - PROVIDED-BY THETEOULE 4. OF-THE ga. UNITED-STATES <\° THROUGH-THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION FOR.

CHAPTER I ‘ , Y HEN a clock somewhere in the big strange house

struck a deliberate three, Jean Gilbert sat up in

bed and craned forward for a better look out of the

window at the June night. No signs of dawn yet, though

there might be if it weren’t for a thin old moon high up in

the sky. Anyhow, there would surely be daylight in an hour,

and she did not believe she would fall asleep sooner than that.

If she did not it would be fair to say, wouldn’t it (to her-

self, of course. She did not mean to confide the adventure to any one else), that she had lain awake all night?

It was sultry still. Chicago, it seemed, had gone to sleep at last. It must be half an hour anyway since the last motor had gone howling by in the Drive. She could hear quite plainly the tired little waves collapsing on the beach beyond the slender strip of parkway.

She pulled her two thick braids forward over her shoulders and dropped back on the pillow again. She hoped she wouldn’t go to sleep. There were so many wonderful things to think about; memories—fresh warm memories, all less than a week old which she had not half got through the catalogue of.

_ She had said the other day in answer to Mrs. Corbett’s blunt “How old are you, child?’ that she was not quite seventeen. And three breaths later she had added scrupulously and with great dignity, “That is, I am more than sixteen and a half.” She was—a matter of days.

It had not been an easy admission to make in the circumstances, and indeed Mrs. Corbett had exclaimed, “Heavens! Youw’re a baby.” But nothing happened. The maid went on hooking the miraculous bridesmaid’s dress, and Anne Corbett, who was going to be the bride, looking at her with half-shut eyes to get the effect, said:

“Nonsense, mother! She’s Muriel’s height to a hair and the gown might have been made for her.”

It would all have remained wonderful enough, to be sure, even if “more than sixteen and a half” had been adjudged fatally too young for this last ineffable honor they proposed for her; just the sober facts, which were—Il] try to be brief with them—these:

Jean’s father was Captain Roger Gilbert of the United States Army. He was poor; had nothing to live on but his pay. And he was young—only forty when Jean had her sixteenth birthday. His wife was even younger; only thirty-seven —twenty-one when Jean was born—a fact which proclaims romance upon its face.

Jean’s grandmother, old Mrs. Myron Crawford, strongwilled and able-minded, put by her husband’s untimely death in unchecked control of a very large estate, had had her own way in nearly everything; certainly with the first three of her children. The girl, Christine, married an English aristocrat and the elder sons lived up to this event. But the last pair, Frank and Ethel,—they were twins—were brought up less rigorously. Frank was allowed his heart’s desire, West Point, and it was thus his sister Ethel and young Roger Gilbert met.

They fell in love, it is almost true to say, at sight. It was one of those tolerably rare cases (fortunately rare, a prudent person might be tempted to say, because they always produce an explosion of some sort and not infrequently, a tragedy) of a genuine, unmistakable affinity. They would have married eventually, no doubt, even if the form of the widow Crawford’s opposition had been subtle—Machiavellian—serpentine.

As it was, a reckless and quite indiscriminate anger simply flung the pair of children together, and they married rather madly, offhand, and had a baby upon a second leutenant’s salary.

So Jean, as if no such institution as indulgent grandmotherhood existed in the world, grew up as best she could, in one army post after another. She went thrice to the Philippines. She spent a miserable year in a Washington boardinghouse. There was a place called, temporarily, home in the Presidio, in Fort Riley, in Brownsville, in other places—more than she could remember.

Her formal education, of course, was perfectly ramshackle and fortuitous. What she had really been brought up on was her father’s code—that of an officer and a gentleman. She could ride straight and speak the truth. She could obey orders with a stiff mouth. And when she was afraid, no one knew it.

Nemesis meanwhile had overtaken old Mrs. Crawford. Her two oldest sons were drowned in a yachting accident, one in the attempt to save the life of the other. With one daughter married abroad, the other estranged from her, and her one remaining son in the army, she would be, to all intents and purposes, childless. So the only thing to be done was for Frank to resign his commission, come home, and take his post as titular head of the family. Disaster had shaken her a good deal and softened her a little, and, as she never had really established the habit of tyrannizing over her youngest son, she found it easier to defer to his judgment; especially as it was nearly always good. An example of it, to her notion, was his marriage with the eldest Corbett girl, Constance. This was distinctly his own doing, but she admitted she couldn’t have chosen better herself.

fhe bond between Frank Crawford and his twin sister, Ethel, had never been broken, and his own marriage strengthened rather than weakened it. Constance, who was five years younger than Ethel, had always known her, of course; the Corbetts and the Crawfords both dated back to old West Side Chicago. To Constance, as to her bosom friends Frederica and Harriet Aldrich, Ethel’s romantic marriage had been a wonderful event.

The Gilberts were away in the Philippines when Frank and Constance were married, but when they came back, five years later, Constance broached to her husband a plan which she had kept mellowing in the wood for a long time.

“Jean’s a dear,’ she said, “and beautifully brought up. But, Frank, it can’t go on like that! It would be wicked to let it. She’s just got to the age where things begin to make a difference. And that isn’t going to be her life, really. At least it needn’t be unless she wants it to. She ought to have the right kind of friends, and she ought to go to a good school for two years anyway.”

Frank agreed to all this, but didn’t at first see how it was feasible.

“T’ve talked to Roger about it; come as close as I dared. But they can’t afford it and they won’t take money. His face looked like a piece of armor-plate when I hinted at it.”

“Well, don’t hint,” said Constance. “Come straight out with it. Let me go and talk with Ethel. Look here! Let’s get them to give her to us. Roger’s sure to be sent to the border and she’ll go with him. But even they can’t think of taking the child down there. We won’t go into details at all. We'll just say we want her for three or four years to do as we like with.” She understood very well the expression she saw go across her husband’s face. “It’ll be, I suppose,” she admitted, “sort of a shock to Mother Crawford when we tell her what we’ve done. But, Frank, down in her heart that’s what she wants. She’s hoping for it—something like that. Only, of course, she can’t say so.”

Frank turned it over meditatively for a while. “How about you?” he asked at last. “With two kids of your own already and another on the way, haven’t you got your hands full?”

But Constance was clear that she hadn’t. “I’m really selfish about it,” she said. “I want her.”

After a while Frank finished the subject with a nod. “All right,” he said, “go to it. I shan’t be surprised if you put it over.”

On Jean the news fell, astonishingly, all at once without even a premonitory murmur. Her father said to her one evening, just after retreat, in the crisp serious manner he used for orders:

“Jean, you're to be made a young lady of. You're to be packed and ready to leave for Chicago a week from to-day. Yow’re going to live for a while with your Uncle Frank Crawford and his wife. They’ve got plans for you that we’ve all agreed are good.”

So far as getting results went, he understood the girl even better than her mother did. She squared her shoulders and brought her boot-heels together with a click (she was in riding things). “Yes, sir,” she said. An old sergeant couldn’t have done it better.

He stood before her as rigid as she was, but she saw the tears springing to his eyes before her own came to blind her. He came up close and took her by the shoulders.

“There are a lot of good reasons we talked about when Constance was here,” he said. “You haven’t had an orthodox bringing up, and I suppose you’re entitled to it. Within the next ten years there’s a good chance that you’ll find yourself rich; opportunities open to you that, if we go on like this, you won’t understand nor know what to do with. They say you ought to have a look around first. That sounds like good sense, too.

“But my reason—my real reason for letting you go, I haven’t told even your mother. I shan’t tell it to any one but you. Ethel’s getting homesick after all these years. She wouldn’t admit it to me under torture, but I know it’s true. She’d like to have the door open to her own people again. She’d like to be reconciled to her mother before the old lady dies. And it’s through you, by this plan, that the thing can be done. I’m willing to give you up for three or four years for that. Do you see, chicken? Now go find your mother and tell her you’re happy about it. We’re neither of us allowed to cry where she can see.”

She did cry, of course, when she was by herself—experienced some pretty desolate hours. The parents she was leaving comprised an unusually large part of all her world, and what there was besides was to be left behind with them. An emigrant setting out for a rumored America is hardly upon a less foreseen adventure. She had moments of panic when nothing but the life-long habit of military obedience pulled her through—saved her from begging to be let off. To have begged would seem as disgraceful to her as it would to her father.

But, these bad hours aside, there was a joyous thrill about the prospect that was almost as disconcerting as the panic. Tt didn’t seem loyal to be as happy as it made her feel to think of going to “the right kind of school” where she’d make friends with girls of her own age. She hadn’t had a girl friend since she was seven years old. And the notion of pretty frocks—plenty of them, and a big house with real servants in it—acting the way they do in books—“‘Yes, Miss. Thank you, Miss’—and a motor she would be entitled to ride in was thrilling. Would Uncle Frank let her learn to drive it herself?

What gave the adventure the silky unbelievable texture of a fairy-tale from the moment of her arrival in Chicago, almost, was the wedding of Anne Corbett, her Aunt Constance’s younger sister. The romance began, it happened, right at the beginning.

Jean’s train, which Frank Crawford had engaged to meet, frustrated him by getting very late and then in the last couple of hours making up half an hour or so, with the result that Jean, emerging through the gate and looking in vain for a familiar face, found herself upon her own resources.

She was not at all alarmed and she adopted almost at once the correct explanation of her uncle’s failure to be there. There were various things she could do. She could find out at the Information Bureau how to get to Lake Forest, where the Crawfords lived, and go out there all by herself. Only that might give them a bad hour or two wondering what had become of her. Or, she could telephone her Aunt Constance and put herself under orders. But that seemed a rather helpless, bothersome way to act. Her aunt, no doubt, was busy

THE HOUSE ve and would probably, Jean suspected, put herself to superfluous trouble about her.

There remained the third alternative of simply waiting in the station for her uncle to turn up. Only how would he find her in a big place like that? The likeliest place to wait for him, she decided, was under the train bulletin, which he would probably consult as soon as he came in for the purpose of finding out how much longer he’d have to wait.

So she lugged her suit-case over to the big blackboard and took her station there. She was quite comfortable both in body and mind. She had learned from her father the military trick of standing still without getting tired, and she wasn’t worried a bit. She would give her uncle half an hour. If he had not come by then, she would telephone to Lake Forest. Meantime there were plenty of amusing things to look at.

She was aware, of course, that other people were looking at her. There were men loitering about the place—men of various sorts, who looked at her a good deal. But she was not afraid of their annoying her. People somehow didn’t.

Presently her own interest focussed itself upon a man—a big man, a lot taller than her father she was sure, though he stood a full six feet—who came up to consult the train bulletin. There was a sort of general rightness about him that gave her a little thrill of pleasure the moment he came into her field of vision. To her eye, accustomed to a military precision of gait and carriage, there was something pleasurably flexible about the way he moved.

She got a chance to look at his face while he was studying the board. It was a lean, rather narrow, face, just a little like—not the real Indians she had seen so many of, but the sculptured, idealized Indians—bronze Indians in parks. She liked the look in his face, too, when he saw how late his train was, the train he was waiting for some one to come in on; rueful but half amused, as if, after all, it didn’t greatly matter. It couldn’t be, she decided, his wife or sweetheart he was waiting for.

Just as he turned away he looked at her, his eye simply picking her up as it traversed the space she occupied, and focussing itself on her for an instant, very keenly.

He set himself a long, leisurely patrol of the concourse from one end to the other, and always as he receded from her, she let her gaze follow him. It seemed to her that if anything happened—anything violent or frightful, there in that railway station, that he would be quite certain to be in the thick of it doing tremendous deeds. She made up an idle little romance about him and cast herself for the heroine.

The romance was broken in upon by the realization that a little group of rowdy youths—harmless enough, no doubt, but an affront alike to the eye and the ear, with their jokes, their nudges, their vacuous laughs, their shoves and bumps and remonstrances—had her for an objective; for an audience anyway. They weren’t dangerous, of course, but she hoped they wouldn’t come any nearer. If they did, she’d have to pick up her bag and move away. And that act in itself would be a form of communication with them.

And then she caught her breath. Because her big man, coming by just then, checked his patrol, turned at right angles, and walked up beside her; not close beside—a couple of paces, maybe, away. He didn’t speak to her nor look at her. So far as she could see, he didn’t even look at the boys. But the little group faded aimlessly away. He stayed—not rigid like a sentry, nor elaborately casual either, but clearly on guard. If her father’s battery of three-inch field-pieces had come galloping up and parked around her, she couldn’t have felt more secure.

If only there were some possible way of thanking him! Only, if he’d wanted to be thanked he could easily have given her the opportunity. Of course he wouldn’t. He wasn’t the sort that would.

Five minutes later she caught a sight of Frank Crawford hurrying toward the board. Could she tell him about it, she wondered? Get him to tell the stranger how much obliged she was? It seemed dreadfully unsatisfactory just to go off and leave him there without any acknowledgment—not even a bow.

To her surprise, it was not upon her, but upon the tall stranger that her uncle’s eye alighted.

“Hello, Hugh!” he sang out. “What are you doing down here ?”

“Tm collecting another bridesmaid for Anne,” Jean heard him say. His voice, she thought, was—well, somehow, just right, like the rest of him. “Half an hour yet to wait.”

“T’m meeting my . . .” Frank began. “Why, hello! How in the world did you get here? They said your train was two hours late.”

“Tt made up a little,’ Jean explained. “I haven’t been waiting long.”

Her uncle was most awfully sorry. Was she sure she was all right? Hadn’t been frightened or anything?

“Not a bit,’ said Jean.

“Well, come along,” her uncle said. “The car is here. We'll drive straight out.” Then, “Oh!—this is my niece, Jean Gilbert.”

It was one of those one-sided introductions that Frank was addicted to when he felt in a hurry. But the big man swiftly rectified it.

“Tm Hugh Corbett,’ he told her, and held out a lean hand. “Ill probably see you again before the wedding, but surely then.”

It was a friendly, altogether delightful smile he had, a rather—special smile. There was a humorous recognition in it of the something between them—the almost nothing but not quite—which neither of them had said anything to Frank about.

“He’s Constance’s brother,’ Frank explained as_ they walked away; “one of her four brothers. They’re all here for the wedding.”

Jean rode out to Lake Forest entranced. The dim out- _ lines of the fairy-tale were already beginning to show through. » Jean inquired with great propriety about her grandmother and could not be blamed for an inaudible sigh of relief on learning that the old lady was not at home. She was still at Hot Springs—an annual pilgrimage of hers for fortifying her invincible health against all conceivable attack. She would not come anywhere near Lake Michigan until that mercurial climate had settled to its six months of good behavior. She figured, naturally enough, in Jean’s fairy-tale as the wicked old witch.

The queen, that is to say her Aunt Constance, was still to be reckoned with. But the first evening—oh, the first five minutes really, settled all that. Constance’s smile, like that of her brother Hugh, had something special about it; a humorous friendliness.

“You won’t mind,” she asked (this was when Jean was going to bed and her aunt had come in, ostensibly to see that she had everything that she wanted) ; “you won’t mind if I— play dolls with you a little? You see my two are both boys and you can’t do it with them. Td like to dress you up. Will you go shopping with me in the morning?”

Thus it was that Constance changed her réle to that of the fairy godmother. ‘They were, of course, simple, suitable things that Constance bought the next day. But she did a thorough job; provided for all reasonable contingencies. And Jean, to whom any single new garment had always been an important event, who had never dreamed of being new all over, was in Paradise.

She couldn’t have believed that the day had not reached its climax in the purchase of a pink dancing frock, almost low in the neck, and with slippers and stockings that matched. But it had not. The real climax was late that afternoon.

“T want to stop in and see mother a few minutes,” Constance had said, “before we go home.” And Jean caught her breath again when she saw where the car was turning in.

A high iron fence with a monumental gate in it, a wide insolent lawn that reached from one cross-street to the next, and had its own opinion, evidently, of the ornate, close-built mansions on either side that had to get up to the Lake Shore Drive somehow. In the middle of it a house that Well, Gregory Corbett remains one of the few Chicagoans of the great old days who managed to get himself adequately represented in stone. Whoever the architect was (I’m not sure whether it was Richardson or not) he succeeded in building something that stood unmistakably for the old man. The sand-stone of which he built it was Gregory Corbett’s color ; the great monolithic lintels had something the look of his level craggy brows. The whole thing was self-contained like him, and heavy, and enormously big, and one had the feeling that it would live to be old like him—as old for a house as he was for a man.

To Jean, of course, the fairy-tale took another jump. Here was the palace, the face of it dark against the declining sun. Anything could happen in a place like this.

She followed, breathless, close behind Constance, aware, but afraid to look, that there were a lot of people about, that there was a victrola going somewhere and, she thought, dancing; that a deferential gentleman in a premature dress-suit was conveying a low-toned message to her aunt.

“All right,” Constance said. “Come along,’ and Jean followed her up a very broad and endlessly long flight of stairs, down a hall and to a door where Constance knocked.

It was opened by a maid, but before either she or Constance could speak a barytone voice boomed out from the depths of the room, “Who is it?”

Constance said who she was, and added, “I’ve got Jean Gilbert with me.”

“Bring her along,” the voice commanded. “Where have you been? I’ve been wanting you for hours.”

Her aunt’s reply, whatever it may have been, was lost on Jean, because by that time she was in the room, and all she could manage for a moment was a panic-stricken attempt not to stare.

A big—oh, a huge!—iron-gray woman sat in a proportionate armchair. Her hair was formally dressed, as if for a ball. She had on a black satin dressing-gown with enormous red and yellow tulips on it. A table with a tea-tray stood beside her chair. She held a cup in one hand and a slice of bread and butter in the other. Crouching before’ her was a man with a black leather bag on the floor beside him. Her feet and her thick white calves were bare, and he was working away, with a little chisel-shaped knife at one of her toes.

“Kennedy here,” she said, indicating him by pointing with the foot, “although Vm his oldest customer, and getting a daughter married off besides, won’t leave that precious office of his till after hours. That’s why he’s here now. I’ve no doubt there are better men at his business here in town that would, but in matters of corns I’m conservative.”

“Mother,” Constance said, turning to Jean, “thisis . . .

“1 don’t need to be told who she is,’ Mrs. Corbett broke in. She finished her tea in a gulp, set down her cup and held the disengaged hand out to the girl. “Let’s look at you, child. You’re your mother again—with a difference. Heavens, how have you had time to get as big as that? It seems no time at all since your mother ran off with that lieutenant of hers. Do you want some tea? If you do, tell Briggs and she'll get it up. Sit down somewhere anyway. I want to talk to your aunt.”

Thus released, Jean retreated to a window-seat—about the remotest place in sight; out of range, she hoped, of the confidential conversation which was to follow. She knew now who was the queen of the fairy story. She had never understood what they were like before.

In thinking she had withdrawn out of ear-shot, Jean had reckoned without Mrs. Corbett’s voice. It boomed straight along without any soft-pedal at all. There was no use trying not to hear.

“V’ve got to have you down here, Connie, and that’s flat. You'll have to come to the house and stay till it’s over. Between my father-in-law and my feet, ’m done. I don’t blame my feet. They’re overworked. I’m too big to trot around, though I could manage it if it weren’t for him. But this wedding has stirred him up. He wouldn’t believe for a long time, that ‘little Anne’ was old enough to be married. Every time we spoke of it, he pretended not to know what we were talking about.

“Now that he’s made up his mind to it, he wants to know what’s the matter with the boys—why none of them is mar-

Ey ried. He roars at me till I can’t hear myself think; as if it was my fault. Your father simply takes to flight; gets telegrams and things; and the boys are too wary by half. They dodge around like quick-silver. I’m too big to dodge. When I married Robert, it was grandsons his father wanted. Well, he can’t deny I did my best for him. Now it’s greatgrandsons. And he looks to me for them.”

“He’s got two,” said Constance.

“They don’t count,” her mother assured her bluntly. “They aren’t Corbetts. Oh, unreasonable [’ll agree! Well, I may be unreasonable myself when I’m eighty-one. But that doesn’t make it any easier for me just now. I’ve got to have you on the spot. You can take him off my hands, or you can chaperon some of these parties and let me get off my feet; that’s just as you like.”

What Constance said was lower-keyed, and Jean didn’t hear it, but the mother’s reply made the nature of it evident enough. |

“Oh, Frank’s a fuss! What if you are going to have a baby! If I hadn’t kept going with mine, [’d never have got anywhere, heaven knows.”

There was another inaudible fragment contributed by Constance, then Mrs. Corbett said:

“Jean? Oh, bring her along with you. There’s room. She’s a nice little thing; knows how to stand up, which is more than most girls do now-a-days. She'll be somebody to play with Carter. Has she got any clothes? Not that it matters.”

lt was getting to seem like a dream, the way the fairy story moved along. No sooner had the fairy godmother provided the ball dress than the queen invited her to come and stay at the palace. It was—well, scary in a way, to have things happen like that. One thing bothered her a little. Who was Carter whom she was to play with?

Driving out to Lake Forest for dinner (because Mrs. Corbett had failed to induce her daughter to abandon Frank without at least an evening’s warning. They were to come straight back after breakfast) she asked Constance about him.

“T tried not to hear,” she explained, “but somehow I couldn’t help it.”

Constance laughed. “No. Mother’s not a confidential person. Why, Carter’s her baby—my youngest brother. THe’s twenty; has just finished his junior year at Yale. We’re all very proud of him,” she went on, “because he made end on the All-American last fall and Bones this spring.

“T suppose,” she concluded thoughtfully, “that Carter will never be as old again as he is right now. Mother’s funny with him because she doesn’t see that at all.”

Jean was vague about the All-American, and Bones was an unelucidated mystery to her. But her aunt’s intention to warn her not to count upon Carter as a playmate was unmistakable. She might easily have been a little alarmed over the prospect of meeting so formidable a person, had it not been for her encounter in the railway station the day before. The big man who had stood guard over her for fifteen minutes, not knowing in the least who she was, and then, finding out, had made himself, with just one look of his smiling eyes, completely her friend—almost an older friend than her uncle was—that man was this terrifying Carter’s big brother. With him at hand she need not be afraid of anybody.

The next real step in the fairy story happened three days before the wedding, right when the whirl of luncheons, matinée parties, tea-dances, dinners and so on, was at its swiftest. It had to be a tragedy for somebody else. That’s the way things happen in fairy stories.

Muriel Ware, one of the bridesmaids, developed a stye. Of course, it had not been a sudden event for her. There had been a day when she caught up her hand-mirror and looked at that eyelid with suspicion, and told herself positively that it was nothing; another day when she spent her solitary moments rubbing it frantically with a gold ring, studying it in the glass and deciding it was really going away; another day when people began looking at her and asking what was the matter with her eye, to which she had answered that she had almost had a stye, but that it was getting better. There was a day when she flew despairingly to the doctor and demanded surgery—capital surgery, if necessary—anything— absolutely anything, to stop that thing. The resources of modern surgery, the doctor had said, were equal, one might say, to anything except the instantaneous obliteration of all traces of its work. But for that no substitute had yet been discovered for time. There was nothing to be alarmed about. In a week or ten days she would be looking as well as ever. The wedding was three days off.