Priceless Pearl — Chapter II Part 1
CHAPTER TWO
The following Thursday afternoon Pearl stepped from the fast train to the platform of the Southampton station.
Since the train reached Quogue she had been agreeably aware of the damp saltness in the air, which comes only from proximity to the open ocean.
But now, on the platform, she smelled nothing but the fumes of innumerable exhausts, saw nothing but masses of automobiles crowding toward the station like a flock of parti-colored elephants.
She stood dazed for a minute by the noise of self-starters and the crowd of arrivals, until, darting in and out under the elbows of chauffeurs and passengers, she saw a little bareheaded, barefooted figure in a dirty white dress edged with the finest Valenciennes lace.
Pearl felt an instant conviction that this was her future charge.
"Antonia," she said in her deep voice, and the child made a rush for her.
"Are you Miss Exeter?"
she exclaimed, and she gave a little boyish shake to her head.
"I must say I think you are much more than pleasing.
My mother said you'd be much less.
She drew me a picture of what she thought you'd look like.
Mother doesn't draw very well.
I'm glad you're not like that.
If I'd taken that as a guide I'd never have found you at all."
She beckoned to a large green touring car, and having arranged about Pearl's trunk and seen the bags put into the car, she herself sank beside Pearl on the wide back seat, while to steady herself on the slippery leather she raised one leg and clutched the back of the front seat with her bare flexible toes.
"How do you like Southampton?"
she said.
If they had gone down the main street Pearl would have seen some old gray-shingled houses and elm trees that she would have honestly admired but they had turned eastward and were now driving down a perfectly straight road at the end of which, through a dip in the dunes, the deep blue of the afternoon sea could be seen.
The country was flat in every direction except the north, where a wooded rise in the ground cut off the horizon.
To be candid, Pearl did not greatly admire the prospect, but she said tactfully, "I love the sea."
"Can you swim?"
"Yes."
"Can you play tennis?"
"Yes."
"Can you drive a car?"
"No." "Good!"
said the child with her friendly smile.
"I'm glad I've found something you can't do.
Beckett," she said, leaning forward and shouting in the ear of the chauffeur, "I mean to teach Miss Exeter to drive."
"Maybe it'd be as well to learn yourself first, miss," said the man coldly.
Antonia sighed.
"Beckett's cross," she said, "because I bent the fender coming up.
My legs are too short to reach the foot brake in a hurry.
Beckett knows that, but he doesn't make allowances."
"Is it safe for you to drive, then?"
asked Pearl.
"Well, if you ask me, no," said Antonia candidly; "but as long as mother lets me do it, of course I'm going to.
I wonder if you're going to like us.
I don't see how anyone could like Dolly."
"What's the matter with Dolly?"
"Oh, about everything," answered Antonia.
"I'll tell you the kind of person she is: If you forget something she asks you to do she treats you as if you were a moron to have forgotten it, and if she forgets something you ask her to do she treats you as if you were a moron to have asked her to do it."
"There must be something to be said for her," Pearl suggested.
Antonia considered the question.
She was, as her uncle had said, the justest of created beings.
"I suppose there must be, but I don't know what it is.
Then there's Durland--he's great--only he doesn't notice me much.
I wish I were a boy.
I want to wear trousers and be free."
"You seem to me pretty fairly free."
Antonia laughed.
"That's funny," she said.
"I mean it's funny that you said that exactly the way Uncle Anthony talks--that gentle tone that makes you feel like nothing at all.
Do you like Uncle Anthony?
Do you think he's handsome?"
"Yes, indeed I do," answered Pearl, with the modest enthusiasm which she thought under the circumstances Augusta would have allowed herself.
"So do I," said Antonia.
"So does Miss Wellington, whose mother has the house next us.
She took it before she knew Uncle Anthony was going to be away all summer--at least that's what mother and I think.
Miss Wellington told me she thought him handsome and she said 'And you can tell him I said so,' but I didn't--for rather a spiteful reason; I thought she wanted me to."
"It sounds that way to me, too," said Pearl.
"I'm glad you like him," Antonia went on.
"He likes you too.
He telephoned mother about you.
He said he had found a pearl--wasn't that funny?"
It was funnier than Antonia knew.
"So now mother always speaks of you as the priceless pearl.
Mother's rather amusing, like that.
He said you were not so much on looks--just pleasing, he said.
But I think you are perfectly beautiful.
Do you think you're beautiful, Miss Exeter?"
This was the first crisis.
Pearl knew that if she said no Antonia would distrust her honesty, and if she said yes it might be used against her.
So she compromised.
"I'll answer that question the day I leave," she said.
"I'll tell you something funny about that," said Antonia.
"Perhaps I oughtn't to, but I'm going to.
Uncle Anthony made mother promise not to send you away until he came back, no matter what happened; but mother says she knows a way to get round that if the worst comes to the worst.
You see, I don't want to hurt your feelings; but we all felt it was rather hard on us to have a governess at all in summer.
Mother thinks it's hard too.
She says it's just one of Uncle Anthony's ideas.
She says a man can't take an interest in anything unless he thinks he's running it.
So she just lets him think he runs the family, and then when he's away she does what she thinks best.
This is our gate now.
What do you think of the house?
We only rent it.
There's Durland going in for a swim before dinner.
I wonder if he'd wait for us.
Durland!
Durland!"
It was quite extraordinary the volume of sound that could issue from so small a person as Antonia.
She sprang out of the car over the closed door and ran round the house toward the ocean, while Pearl entered the front door alone.
A slim, gray-haired figure in delft blue came out of a neighboring room and said "Good heavens, you are not Miss Exeter, are you?"
Pearl smiled her most winning smile.
"Won't I do?"
she said.
But merriment did not seem quite in order.
Mrs. Conway's manners were perfect, but she was not going to begin by being any more friendly than she could help.
She answered politely, "Oh, perfectly, I feel sure.
Only you do not look quite as my brother's description led me to expect; but then men are not very good at describing women."
Her hair, prematurely gray, gave more the effect of powder.
Her brows were arched so much that she seemed to be looking up from under a thatch.
They were blue eyes; not quite China blue, as Pearl had heard the family eyes described; they were sad, appealing eyes, which kept veiling themselves in an effort to seem dignified and remote.
Yes, Pearl thought, there was something pathetic about Mrs. Conway--something that made her feel just a little bit as Alfred's lost paw made her feel; so she beamed gently down upon her new employer while that lady continued: "I don't see how Antonia ever found you--from his account.
Fortunately the child is wonderfully quick or you would be waiting at the station still.
Where is she, by the way?"
Pearl explained that she had dashed down to the beach to ask her brother to wait for them, and would it be all right if she went swimming too?
Over Mrs. Conway's shoulder Pearl could catch a glimpse of the piazza, and beyond that the faultless blue rim of the horizon;
and as she talked she could hear close by the thud and hiss as a wave went up the beach.
She longed to be in the water.
"Oh, yes, go if you want to," said Mrs. Conway.
She was not exactly cordial.
Gentle, friendly people like Edna Conway always go too far when they try to be cold; they have no experience in the rôle.
"But try not to keep them waiting too long.
My children hate to be kept waiting."
"I do myself," answered Pearl gayly.
"Really?"
said Mrs. Conway, and the arched eyebrows went up under the gray thatch.
Pearl saw she had said the wrong thing; but whether it was wrong for a governess to dislike being kept waiting, or presumptuous to put herself into the same interesting group as the Conway children, she had no idea.
She did not much care either.
The smooth blue sea was waiting for her, and she went springing upstairs, slinging off a string of beads--translucent pearl-gray glass, the color of her eyes--and thinking to herself that it was a mercy she had had sense enough to put her bathing dress in her bag.
She tore it out from the lower layers so violently that shoes and brushes flew into the air like stones from a volcano; and in a surprisingly short time she was running through the deserted sitting room, out across the piazza, down the steep wooden steps to the beach.
At the edge of the water Durland was standing with his back to her.
Although he was a thin boy of fifteen in a striped red-and-blue bathing suit, he was standing with one knee advanced, his hand on his hip and a cigarette dangling from his lip, as if he were the late King Edward VII at Homburg.
Beside him, Antonia was digging a hole like a dog--possibly her sleeping hole for the evening--and talking all the time.
She was talking about Miss Exeter.
Durland was deeply opposed to the idea of Miss Exeter.
In the first place he was opposed to women, as a prisoner is opposed to stone walls.
He was surrounded by them, dominated by them.
His mother, his mother's maid, who had been with them forever, his sister Dorothy--they all bullied him and cut him off from his fellow men.
Sometimes, with disgust, he heard himself using the feminized vocabulary of the women about him, and though he was as masculine as possible--smoked and everything--he could not shake off their influence.
Then he hated governesses as representing that most emasculated form of that most emasculated thing--learning.
His friends had already made fun of him about it.
It had been said on the beach, "I hear they're getting a governess to keep you in order, Durlie."
He had decided to make it clear that he had nothing to do with the woman.
He doubted if he even allowed her to teach him algebra, though as a matter of fact he wanted to pass his examination.
And then, last but not least of his reasons, he felt opposed to anything that Antonia so wildly recommended, because that was one way of keeping her in the complete subjection to him in which she lived.
So while she chattered of Miss Exeter and her beauty and her youngness and the sort of niceness of the way in which she looked at you, he stood gazing out to sea as if the best he could do for his little sister was just not to hear her at all.
Then Antonia cried "Here she is!"
and executed a four-footed leap on finger tips and toes; and then Durland was aware of a circular motion of white arms and long white legs whirling past his shoulder, and the new governess had plunged into the Atlantic.
This really wouldn't do at all--governess doing hand-springs.
It looked peculiar, and yet it did pique the curiosity.
He sauntered a step nearer with a slow, sophisticated, loose-kneed walk.
Miss Exeter and Antonia were behaving foolishly, and noisily, too--splashing each other and laughing.
He himself went in as if the object of a swim were not to disturb one unnecessary drop of water.
He swam a stroke or two under the surface, and coming up out of a wave found himself face to face with Pearl.
The wonderful radiance of those gray eyes came to rest on his; and his heart melted within him like a pat of butter.
It wasn't just her beauty though that would probably have been enough; but it was the immense, generous friendliness toward all the world when the world would allow her to be friendly that warmed and comforted his young spirit.
He gazed at her, and suddenly the gaze was cut short by Pearl's decision to stand on her head.
Two white feet clapped together in front of Durland's nose.
If she had been less beautiful he would have said to himself that she really did not know how to behave.
As it was, he thought that she would certainly lay herself open to unkind criticism.
He wanted to protect her, and he was not without tact.
He said, when she came to the surface, blinking the water from her long, matted eyelashes, "It's nice to have our own beach, isn't it?
--to be able to do what we like--stand on our heads or anything without being talked about."
She did not seem to get it at all.
"Let's swim out," she said, and laid her ear upon the face of the sea as if she were a baby listening to the ticking of a watch.
He swam beside her, looking into her face, and she gave him a friendly little beam every now and then.
It was wonderful to be under no necessity of suppressing her cheerful kindness of heart.
"Let it do its deadly work" was her feeling.
They had a good long swim, and when they came in were met by Mrs. Conway at the head of the steps.
She was dressed for dinner in a faint pink tea gown with pearls.
She said civilly, but all on one note, "Dinner is ready, Miss Exeter."
Yes, she who had so often waited uncomplainingly for hours for her children, pretending that the clocks were wrong, or the dinner hour changed, or that the mistake had been hers, was now feeling outraged at being obliged to wait ten minutes for this governess her brother had so obstinately insisted on engaging.
"Oh, I won't be a minute, Mrs. Conway," said Pearl, feeling genuinely sorry to have inconvenienced anyone, but not feeling at all guilty as Mrs. Conway wanted her to feel.
"Yes, I do hope you'll contrive not to be very long," she said, and could not understand the cause for a dark look her son gave her as he pursued his shivering way upstairs.
She went into the sitting room, where her daughter Dorothy was already waiting.
It was not a miracle that Dolly was ready on time, but a phenomenon to be explained by the fact that she had a bridge engagement immediately after dinner.
She was a pretty, round-faced girl, rather like her mother, except that her hair was still a natural light brown, and her eyes were brown too.
She did not raise her head, as her mother entered, from the fashion paper which she was languidly studying.
"Not a very promising beginning, is it?"
said Mrs. Conway.
She knew Dolly would be annoyed and she wished to cut herself off completely from the guilty one.
"Do you suppose she's going to keep us waiting for dinner half an hour every evening?"
Dolly bent her head to examine a picture of an ermine wrap.
"Oh, well, mother," she said, "what can you expect if you give in to every whim of Uncle Anthony's?"
Mrs. Conway made a pathetic little grimace--pathetic because it was so obviously intended to win Dolly to her side--to make the girl feel that she and her mother had a secret alliance against the world at large.
"You'll find, my dear," she said, "that in dealing with men it's easier to yield at the moment and find a way out at leisure."
But Dolly, who had not even looked up long enough to see the grimace, answered with a bitter little laugh, "It may be easier for you, but not for us.
We have to suffer.
That's the trouble with you, mother--you think of no one in the world but yourself."
Her mother did not answer--she could not.
Tears rose in her blue eyes.
She had enormous capacity for being hurt.
Strangely enough, there was something in her that drove those she loved to say exactly the thing that would hurt her most.
It had always been so with her husband, and now it was so with her children.
A misplaced fortitude always led her to hide the fact that she was hurt.
She said now with false gayety, "Well, my dear, I hope some day you will find someone who loves you even better than I do, then."
"I'm sure I hope so," said Dolly, turning the page.
Her manner suggested that if she could not do that much her life would indeed be a failure.
Mrs. Conway stepped out on the piazza.
That was the way--you gave up your life to making your children happy, to shielding them from grief and anxiety, and then they blamed you and hurt you horribly for something that was not at all your fault.
She felt a moment of resentment toward her brother.
Why had Anthony insisted on this silly plan?
She had been too considerate of Anthony's feelings; she ought to have refused to have a governess at all.
It was much wiser in this world to be stern and cruel.
She decided to be stern and to begin with Miss Exeter, who entered the sitting room at this moment.
She was wearing a plain cream-colored dress out of which her lovely head--all brown and rose color and gold--seemed strangely bright colored.
"I suppose you're Dolly," she said in her deep warm voice, and held out an open hand.
Dolly, like most young people, estimated beauty as the best of gifts.
She might have been almost as much captured by Pearl's as her brother had been, except that her ego was taken up with the outrage of her being kept waiting--she, the most important person in the house, who had taken the trouble not only to order dinner on time but--what did not always happen--to be on time herself.
She rose, and allowing a limp hand to pass rapidly through Miss Exeter's, she said, "Do let's go in to dinner, mother."
"Yes, indeed," said her mother, coming in rapidly from the piazza.
"We dine at eight, Miss Exeter.
Another evening I'm sure you will be on time."
This was not perhaps a very terrible beginning to a régime of sternness; but to Durland, just getting down, it appeared one of the most disgusting exhibitions of slave driving that he had ever heard.
"It is entirely my fault that we are late," he said, giving his mother a steady, brave look.
She answered irrelevantly, "Why, Durland, how nice you look!
Are you going anywhere this evening?"
"Very likely," he answered coldly.
He thought to himself, "Why must she give Miss Exeter the impression that I look like a cowboy generally?"
He was of course going nowhere.
So, having completely alienated her two elder children--Antonia had early supper by herself--Mrs. Conway found herself obliged to direct her conversation to the interloper.
She had her revenge, if she had only known it, by talking about her brother, questioning Miss Exeter about him.
Had he seemed very much rushed?
Did he say anything about his golf clubs?
Wasn't it a delightful office?
Wonderful!
So cool in summer.
Pearl hazarded that the harbor was very beautiful, and learned that Mr. Wood's office looked north--up the Hudson.
She must be careful.
Durland inquired with a friendly grin whether Uncle Anthony had frightened her to death.
"Frightened me?"
said Pearl, trying to gain time.
"Some people are awfully afraid of him."
"Naughty little boys are," said Dolly.
It always annoyed her to see her brother sitting at the foot of the dinner table.
They had fought about it for five years--whether she as eldest child or he as the only man in the house ought to occupy this place of honor.
"I'm not afraid of him," said Durland.
"Oh, are you a naughty little boy?"
said Dolly, laughing in an irritating way.
Mrs. Conway, to avert war, began talking about the day's schedule--the problem of how to work in a few lessons without interfering with any of the more important pleasures of her children.
"Antonia first, I think.
Wouldn't that be your idea, Dolly--Antonia at half past nine?
Dolly and Durland sometimes sleep rather late--so good for them, I think--but Antonia is up early.
She reads sometimes from five o'clock.
She reads a great deal--everything."
"Quite the little genius, according to mother," said Dolly.
"She is clever," answered Mrs. Conway passionately.
"I don't know why you two are always so disagreeable about your little sister."
"Because you spoil her so, mother," said Dolly.
"Because she's so dirty, mother," said Durland.
Mrs. Conway made this attack a means of aligning herself with her children against the governess.
"Oh, well," she said, "that is all going to be changed now.
Miss Exeter is going to make us all over.
Antonia is to be clean and tidy, though why in the world your uncle thinks it desirable for a child of eleven to think of nothing but clothes I can't see.
And Durland is to be made into a mathematician.
I suppose I'm very ignorant, but I never could see what good algebra does a person--all about greyhounds leaping after hares, and men doing pieces of work at seventy-five cents a day.
I wish I could find some like that.
Poor Durland, like so many people with a creative turn of mind, simply cannot do mathematics."
"More people than creative geniuses are poor at mathematics," said Pearl genially; and Durland, afraid that she would identify him with his mother in this ridiculous point of view, looked into those pools of gray light and said modestly that he was just a dub at problems.
"Then at half past eleven," Mrs. Conway went on, "you'll be free to take Antonia to the beach--the public beach, where she likes to get a swim and see her little friends."
"Fight a round or two with her little enemies," said her brother.
"She's only fought once this summer," said his mother.
"And I for one think she was perfectly right.
Maud is the most annoying child--ugly and impertinent like her mother, and very badly brought up."
"Well, that's not a patch on what they think about Antonia," said Durland, and he turned to Miss Exeter.
"Gee, it was great!
This Maud child said something rude about Antonia's bare feet, and she sailed in and landed her one on the jaw; and they fought so that the nurses and governesses all ran screaming away and the life-saving men had to come in and separate them."
Mrs. Conway hated this story about her youngest child.
