The blue room

Front matter

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PART I I “ Western Union on the phone, sir.”

Everything had conspired to make Mr. Wainwright late for breakfast, — an elusive stud, an intricate and diabolical nest of pins in a clean shirt, a snick of a razor on the lobe of an ear and the consequent drip of blood, — and the 8 :16 waited for no man, not even the President of the Wainwright National Bank.

“ All right, Father, I ’ll take it.”

Cool and efficient as usual Martha arranged in front of the frazzled commuter a cup of coffee milked for instant consumption, an enticing arrangement of eggs and bacon duly peppered and salted, and two slices of toasted bread buttered in anticipation. “ There are seven and a half minutes before you need go,” she added, smoothing down a feather on the top of her father’s fine head, “ make a good breakfast, darling.” It was an incontestable fact that Jonathan Wainwright was the President of his bank. It was equally incontestable that Martha his eldest daughter was the President of his home.

There was a whoop of joy from the telephone closet in the hall, a rush back into the dining-room, and a message read in a young, round voice which trembled with something more than excitement.

“ Embark this morning Leviathan with whole bunch Major Bill Mortimer in charge loud cheers Tom.”

Nearly performing the nose trick with a mouthful of coffee, Wainwright set down his cup, sprang to his feet, seized the girl with the dancing eyes and whirled her round the pompous and astonished room. The dead accuracy of banking had not succeeded in drying up the well of emotion in this man’s soul.

Breakfast discarded, train forgotten, conferences left in mid-air, and with a damn-all feeling for the responsibilities of the day in the face of the glorious news of his son’s escape alive and whole from the great graveyard of France, old man Wainwright with the heart of a boy and the love of a father dashed upstairs to his ailing wife, and shut the door. No one but she could share, or be permitted to see, his utter thankfulness.

The chauffeur, with his eyes on his watch, sat waiting in the car.

For a moment, breathless and disheveled, Martha stood alone in the big room with the slip of paper held tight against her heart. But when, with a little choking cry, she raised it to her lips it was not the name of her brother that she kissed first but of the other man, the gallant Bill who had n’t the remotest idea that, within a mile of his parental house, there lived a little girl whose constant prayers had helped to keep his name from being stamped upon German bullets.

At the first warning honk from the car Martha also took to the stairs, nipped up three at a time and tapped on the door which must not, her gift of sympathy told her, be opened.

“ Fa-ther!”

“ I ’m not catching this train. Hang work ! ”

Again the honk.

“ Fa-ther.”

“ I tell you I ’m chucking the city to-day. Can’t I give it a miss in balk once in a lifetime? ”

And then a quiet voice from the bed at the side of which knelt old man Wainwright, — not so precious old as all that goes either. “ I think you ’d better go, dear.”

“ Yes, but Tom ’s coming home. My Heaven, what ’s the matter with a round of golf with Martha to celebrate? . . .”

Once more the honk, — the last.

“ Fa-ther! ”

“ Oh well then ! ” He scrambled to his feet. He had intended to go. There was so much to be done. The financial situation in Europe was in utter chaos and it behooved American bankers to shake off parochialism and look across the narrowed Atlantic. But he was n’t going to let Martha see his face until he had it under control, or the chauffeur either.

“ So long, Elizabeth. Thank the good God our boy ’s coming back ! ”

But after all his head was turned away from Martha as he passed her and went down. A man needs sons and daughters before he can understand the meaning of love. He must also have built up a big business to appreciate the difficulty of letting it run without him.

From the bedroom window Martha watched the car disappear and lingered there, eyeing the trees in their first faint flush of green, and listening to the mating call of birds. She, too, wanted to let something go out of her eyes before she turned to her mother. She felt that they were blazing like beacons.

“ He ’ll be in time,” she said.

“ To find me out and about, I trust.” Mrs. Wainwright added up the days of the Leviathan' s voyage. Whatever happened she must meet that ship.

“ Martha!”

Beacons or not that little cry must be answered. . . . They held each other in inarticulate gratitude and wept a little for joy. Those two years had been almost too long.

“ But I must n’t keep you, my dear,” said the mother at last. “ What .should I do without you? ”

With visions of a long ordering list, a new cook to diplomatize and the man to see about the new awnings Martha went to the glass to straighten her hair and prepare herself for action. She turned at the door and waved a kiss. She could trust herself now, she thought.

Mrs. Wainwright’s eyes were very sharp. “What other good news have you heard ?” she asked.

But Martha was out before the question was finished. It ’s a trick all daughters have. And before going down to take hold of the reins so often and so fretfully resigned by the delicate woman whose bronchial tubes made her a frequent prisoner to her bed, the girl ran along the passage to her own room and opened the little box in which she hid her secret. . . . The snap-shot was of a tall, wiry, dark-haired man in polo kit, with one foot on the rail of a chair and the sun slanting across a laughing face. Photography failed to show the deep tan of the skin, the gray of the eyes or the toudh of red in the small mustache. But it captured the virility and strength of the body, the width of chest, and the hardness of a well-developed forearm. It was Bill Mortimer playing the last of a lifetime of games before he got into khaki to play the one whose ultimate goal was set up at the further end of a field of death. . . .

Not with the skin-deep hero-worship of a child of seventeen had she secured this picture but with the sort of love that takes root in the heart of a woman and if it never bursts into blossom and eventually has by its side another plant remain* forever the first and the best. In his father’s house away across the meadows and the woods she had met Bill Mortimer and trembled as the arrow had winged into her heart. Perhaps a dozen times since then she had listened to his laugh, shivered at the careless touch of his hand, stored up the easy words that he had said to her (“ the little Wainwright kid ”), watched him, through a blinding mist of tears, drive off to the city, knowing instinctively that he had been at home to say good-by, and then, without his even remembering that she lived, patterned the floor of Heaven with her prayers. . . . They had been heard and he was coming back ! . . . “ Hope sees a star and listening Love can hear the rustling of a wing.”

II

It was ten o’clock before Martha had set her house in order for the day. The new cook, an Irish woman with antagonistic eyes and the manners of a prizefighter, had demanded an interview. Like many others of the same kind this had taken place in the library where at a desk at a respectful distance from her father’s Martha docketed her bills and sorted away her receipts. With a back as flat as a billiard table and a face like that of one of those white horses which hauled great lorries about in the narrow streets in the roaring Forties, this terrible woman with the romantic name of Eileen McCarrow gave out her first list of grievances. Her bedroom was too small and the window faced east. She must have a new set of kitchen utensils and one of those white enamel arrangements full of drawers for tea and coffee and pepper and salt and mustard and flour and a hundred other things which help to decorate a kitchen and are never by any chance used. The waitress might perhaps remain but the rest of the servants and especially the chauffeur must be cleared out at once. “ Otherwise, as God ’s my judge, I ’ll not be stayin’, an’ that ’s flat.”

To all of which, with a deep knowledge of the breed, Martha replied, “ There ’s a nice train back to town at 12.22. If you will have your trunk packed by twelve o’clock I will have a taxi here for you.” Whereupon Eileen McCarrow, a mere common bully like the rest of her type, gave one quick glance at the charming figure with the steady blue eyes, snorted and disappeared into the kitchen. “ I ’ll be givin’ der place a chance,” she murmured, as she stumped away.

After one more visit to her mother to see that she had everything that she needed, Martha went out into the garden. It was grass cutting day and the two gardeners, Tony Caruso and Leonardo Benvenuti, were typical Wops and had a way, when the day was warm and nobody was keeping an eye upon them, of leaving their machines behind a zareba of trees, of making themselves particularly comfortable under their shade and discussing the virtues of Orlando and the intricacies of the League of Nations while they ate youthful onions newly plucked from the warm earth. It was very human and characteristic, but wages, like everything else, were high, and grass had a way of growing exuberantly in the spring. Being possessed of an extreme amount of moral courage Martha routed them into the open and warned them that if the lawns were not properly cut by twelve o’clock there would be two more picturesque Italians looking for new jobs. Both of them had a healthy respect for the girl who used simple words with quiet emphasis and were very well aware of the fact that empty threats were not in her line. It was wonderful to see with what energy these two undersized, unwashed specimens of a sunny country immediately pursued the even tenor of th^ir way. The clack of their two machines inspired all near-by birds to song.

Armed with the slip of paper which meant as much to Bill’s people as it did to herself and her father and mother Martha made her way down to the road which led to the old Mortimer place, the landmark of that part of Westchester. About half a mile from her own house it lay far back from the road surrounded by trees and led up to under a long and winding avenue. Somewhere about a hundred and fifty years old, its numerous windows looked over five hundred acres of woods and farm land. A dear old rambling building upon which the hand of a vandal had never been laid, with a high Colonial portico which gave it dignity and charm, it wore an air of extreme well-being and mothered many out-houses and a low stable building with a square courtyard which had obviously been built in the days of coaching. Every inch of it reeked with history and was pervaded with the spirits of those fine Americans who had carried on the traditions of Washington. A sunken rose garden with warm brick paths caught the eye as one approached, and a dozen great oak trees stood sentinel on the edge of a rolling lawn.

Not altogether with the approval of her good parents, to whom the extraordinary story of the Mortimers was a matter of frequent and rather starchy discussion, Martha had become the affectionate and admiring protegee of the distinguished white-haired lady who had been inspired to retire from the world at precisely the right moment. The fascination of spring for autumn and of a young girl for a woman whose life had run its active course, naturally came into this friendship, and hardly a day passed that did not find these two wandering together among the old gardens newly astir and ebullient, the one to listen eagerly to the stories about Bill which the other was only too anxious to tell. It was with the utmost pleasure therefore that Martha hurried round to break the good news which had just been received over the cable from Tom.

To Martha who rose at seven o’clock the day was no longer young. To the Mortimers it was only just beginning.

A man of elaborate portliness, important presence and canonical dignity was tapping a barometer that hung on a wide beam to the left of the front door as the girl arrived at the house, her buttercolored hair bare to the sun. By the subordinates who were ruled by him with that mixture of ingenious blasphemy and autocratic firmness which belongs to drill sergeants Albery was known as the greyhound, because he made a little hair go a long way. The pun was a bad one, but its effect on people who had never heard it before and who marveled at the painstaking way in which several strands of black hair were plastered upon an otherwise bald head was an instant gust of mirth. He was one of the last of a breed of butlers who regard their work as a vocation and come to it with the tradition of many butler ancestors.

Hearing a quick light step on the veranda he turned and bowed, with just the faint beginning of a respectful smile. “ Good morning, Miss Martha,” he said, his voice denoting a lifelong run of enviable wine-cellars.

“ Good morning, Albery. Is Mrs. Mortimer down yet ? ”

Not yet, Miss. Nor Mr. Mortimer neither. And there is breakfast to go, during which I must not allow them to be disturbed.”

Oh yes, I forgot that. But I ’ve run over with great news and I thought I ought to give it at once.”

Albery shrugged his shoulders and went so far as to permit himself to chuckle. “ It ’s as much as my life ’s worth to advance a remark during the process of the first meal, Miss, — let the news be good or bad. But if you have an hour to spare and would be pleased to spend it in the garden. . . .”

Martha smiled, nodded, wheeled about and with the precious piece of paper on which she had scribbled Tom’s message clasped tightly in her hand went over a clean-shaven lawn and along a wide, tree-shaded road to the stables. She had never ventured to break in upon the almost religious routine of that house so early before and knowing the cut and dried ways of those two old people almost as well as Albery did, appreciated the necessity of elimination without further discussion. There was a whinny of welcome from an old hunter with a white star between his eyes and a series of movements in a line of loose boxes. The girl with the soft voice and courageous hand had many friends in that spotless place. She would spend an hour there with delight.

Ill

In the room in which the famous General Barclay Mortimer was brought into the world and, eventually, at the ripe age of eighty-four departed from it, and in which Judge William Mortimer, Governor of New York State, fought death for exactly a year before being beaten in a contest which is always an unequal one, Mr. Barclay Mortimer, ex-commodore of the New York Yacht Club, was making up for breakfast.

Being now a man of sixty, who had sailed through a gorgeous and much to be deplored life with the face of Adonis and the figure of Apollo, it goes without saying that Barclay Mortimer had a standing grievance against “that damned Anno Domini,” as he called it, which had laid relentless hands upon his handsome features and perfectly

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balanced body. With the pathetic reluctance of a woman who has been a celebrated beauty to face the sere and yellow, he made use of every known weapon with which to disguise the brutal and disfiguring blows of the implacable hand of time. His dressing table was covered, therefore, with bottles whose mysterious liquids were known only to himself and his valet, — dyes and astringents and the rest prepared by ingenious people who catered to the vanity of frail humanity at a profit of several hundred per cent. If the daily process of making up was long and tiresome its effect, in a doubtful light, was to take ten years off Mortimer’s appearance and give him the supreme satisfaction of saying to himself, as he looked at his white-haired wife across the breakfast table, “ Either, my dear friend, she must have snatched you out of the cradle or you are her youngest brother.”

At the moment when Martha had arrived breathless and filled with a generous desire to share her joy with Bill’s parents, Barclay Mortimer was standing in front of a pier glass dabbing his wellshaped mustache with an evil smelling liquid which had been poured upon a small sponge. Crouching behind him the faithful Denham was lacing up a pair of stays which, in doing away with a slight rotundity in the neighborhood of the lower buttons of the waistcoat, gave the elderly victim the appearance of a pouter pigeon. The sunny brown of hair which should have been a benign and woolly white was a shade darker than the mustache, the color scheme of which was to give an effect of sun bleach. The eyebrows matched the hair, whose center parting was continued down to the nape of the neck. The face had been massaged first with a small electrical instrument and then with cream of honey and finally cleaned off with a lemon flavored wash mixed with alcohol. Ultimate powder, neatly applied, had been fanned away. A thousand dollars had been paid to a French beauty doctor in New York so that Denham might achieve the secrets of all the art and craftiness of preservation and disguise, and he performed his daily task with infinite care and affection. He had been twenty years in the service of “ the old buck,” as he called him, and it was a matter of personal pride to turn him out looking like an actor manager of ripe age made up to play the part of a leading juvenile. The keen sense of humor that was possessed by them both lightened the hours devoted to this process of camouflage.

Having risen at eight it was ten o’clock before Mr. Barclay Mortimer regarded himself as finished, and took a last look in the pier glass that stood between the two windows of a bedroom which was the acme of comfort and was filled with delightful old pieces of Colonial furniture.

Tall and slight and graceful, dressed in a beautifully cut suit of Irish homespun golf clothes which gave out a pleasant reek of bog and tobacco, with brown stockings and white shoes with brown leather strappings which required the hand of an artist to clean, the old gentleman whose abominable past gave him great joy to contemplate tucked a colored handkerchief into his pocket and turned with a smile. “Congratulations, Denham,” he said, “I feel fifty-two and look forty-eight. You actually achieve what Canute attempted.”

“ Thank you, Sir,” replied Denham, standing back with the air of a portrait painter. He didn’t know who Canute was, and didn’t care. The remark was a favorite one and he understood that it was the last word in praise. It meant that he could now retire to the servants’ porch to smoke a pipe and read the morning paper with the complete satisfaction of having done his job for the day.

At five minutes past ten, as usual, the old buck left his room, went jauntily along the wide corridor that was hung with the full length portraits of his deserving ancestors, descended the stairs humming an air from “ Sumurun,” crossed the hall under the disapproving eyes of Mortimers who had taken life with desperate seriousness, and swung into the breakfast porch to be welcomed by an outburst of song from innumerable canaries and an enigmatical smile from Mrs. Barclay Mortimer.

The white haired lady, who was three years younger than her husband, had been down, as usual, for an hour. Having wisely decided to let nature alone and grow old gracefully she had had an hour to give to the garden, that wonderful and peaceful old garden, and had brought back with her a bunch of lilies of the valley, the most virginal and modest of all flowers. A woman built on noble lines, tall and straight and willowy, there was all about her, despite her snowy hair, that essence of loveliness that a beautiful woman never quite loses if she is content to leave well alone. She had real dignity and charm and kindliness, a low soft laugh in which there was something suggestive of the notes of a harpsichord and at the tail end of her dark eyes a hint of ironic humor. Especially about her hands with their long thin fingers and polished nails was her breeding and fastidiousness to be detected. She permitted herself the use of one inimitable pearl ring, around which there were tender memories. There would have been no breakfast for her if she had known that Bill, the apple of her eye, was aboard the transport that was to bring him, with other members of the Headquarters staff, from Brest.

They met, these two, more like people who were newly married than those who had been married and almost wholly separated for thirty-five years. Raising her hand to his lips with an air of respectful admiration and courtliness Mortimer gave her his usual greeting. “ Good morning, Madame. How charming you look ! ”

To which, with the faintest suggestion of amusement, she replied, “ Good morning, Commodore. I return the compliment with interest.”

And then followed the inevitable business, watched with extreme sympathy by the silent Albery, of escorting her to her chair, placing it for her and pushing it in, — all done with the studied gracefulness of old fashioned comedy as though before an audience, — as indeed it was. In addition to the many canaries there were, in that glassed-in breakfast porch, a collection of parrots and parakeets, love birds in large cages and a tiny marmoset chained to a perch.

Then followed the first meal of the day, during which letters were opened and commented upon, the front pages of the papers glanced at and discussed, the morning welcome extended to a couple of extremely well-bred water-spaniels whose silky black curls had been carefully brushed and parted. An hour of a day which had no duties and few occupations was thus delightfully killed.

The underlying irony in the comedy of this felicitous scene would have given immense joy to those worldly people who had known the handsome Barclay Mortimer in the zenith of his career as a lady killer and sportsman and the lovely Lylyth as the leader of New York society on whose entrance to her box at the Metropolitan Opera House the vast audience had nearly risen to its feet.

An eccentric but very human couple this, who had been driven by encroaching years reluctantly to retire from a world that was full of things to enjoy and sensations with which to experiment and were now playing their parts sexlessly at the latter end of a marriage which they had never properly played at the beginning of it. They might still have continued separately on their way to the outpost of eternity had they not been mutually bound by two common desires, — the one to cultivate each other’s acquaintance in the old house beloved by them both, the other to bask in the smiles of Bill, whom they adored, delighted in and conspired to marry to a girl young and sweet enough to be the mother of a new line of Mortimers. To this good end, — good, that is, from their own point of view, — they were the last to take into account the rakish record of their only son, — they had their eyes on Martha Wainwright. In her they saw all the makings of a fine young reviver of their honored but recently uncared-for name, a girl born of honest and scrupulous parents, of responsible and sensible upbringing, unspoiled by wealth and fashionable schooling, who would come to marriage with an old fashioned ecstasy and that keen sense of duty which seems to have gone out with the puffed sleeve and the bustle. They divided this supreme ambition between them and while waiting for its fulfillment trod the little private stage of their own with all the zest and whimsicality that hard living had left to them.

Follies cease only with the flight of youth, — and sometimes not even then.

IV

When Mrs. Mortimer rose to say “ sweetsweet” to her pet canary before going up to her boudoir to write her bi-weekly letter to Bill, the Commodore lingered in the breakfast porch.

Whether he was inspired to a genuine sentiment by the glory of that spring morning, or merely grasped at an excuse to see whether he had not wholly forgotten his gift of saying delightful nothings to a woman, or felt the faint flicker of his old hot fire of amorousness, no one could have told and he did n’t stop to discover. The fact remained that presently he placed himself in his wife’s way in front of the door, and put a quiver of emotion into his well modulated voice.

“ Lylyth, my dear,” he said humbly and with great tenderness, “ let me say for once how greatly I appreciate the privilege of this St. Martin’s summer with you.”

Mrs. Mortimer gave one of her low soft laughs. This little outburst was totally unexpected and was like a speech to which no cue had been provided. It did not surprise her, however, or more than lightly touch one of the easily reached spots of a vanity that age had not yet withered. He often said such things at carefully chosen moments. “My dear Barclay,” she answered teasingly, “I have the mail to catch and a long letter to write. Please may I go? ”

“ No, no,” he said, taking one of her long thin hands in both his own and holding it against his heart, — a trick that he had often practised with a certain Italian prima donna away back in ’89. “ No, no. Stay just for a moment. I am moved to speak sincerely, and surely there is enough room for silence in the grave? ” He could just see himself in an oval glass that hung at the other end of the porch. His attitude pleased him.

“ Cut it as short as you can then. I want to tell Bill about the new filly and write more tactful things about the future of the family.” She let him see that she took his so-called sincerity with a pinch of salt, but made no real effort to go. She owned that there was something curiously intriguing in living under the same roof with a man who had frankly taken his pleasures elsewhere ever since the decline of their honeymoon thirty-five years ago. It was like standing in front of a fire of spent embers that was railed off by a guard.

But Mortimer was not to be put off. He had breakfasted well. He felt fifty-two and looked forty-eight. The fight over the formation of a League of Nations that was to put an end to fighting was almost over. Bill must soon be home again. He was well and happy. Under such excellent conditions it seemed a pity not to draw once more upon the fountain of his eloquence, — even if it were shrewdly understood and unappreciated. “ My dear,” he went on, holding his pose, “ I know that you have much to forgive and many things to forget. I have not been a good husband to you. Having seen you daily now. for several months and discovered in you a host of lovely qualities that escaped me in my riotous youth, I want to say how deeply I deplore my former blindness and how greatly I desire to atone, now that we have come together at last, for my many omissions.”

“ You speak like a book, Barclay,” said his wife. “ If you were always able to command such language no wonder you were such a success with women. Some of them fall more easily to style than to brute force, — Juliet for instance.” She laughed again and drew aside. “ There. Now you can get a better view of yourself in the glass.” It was perhaps a little cruel.