Priceless Pearl — Chapter II Part 2
She rose from table in order to interrupt it, observing that Durland needn't worry, as now they were all going to be made perfect.
Pearl on the whole felt encouraged.
Augusta, with all her efficiency, could not have swung this job, she thought.
It required a solid, almost irrational good temper, which Augusta did not possess.
Mrs. Conway would have rendered Augusta acid and powerless in one evening.
Pearl was not so efficient in certain ways, but she had good temper and a robust will.
She and Durland went into the sitting room while Mrs. Conway was getting Dolly off to her bridge party.
Durland did what, alas, men have been doing for many centuries--he attempted to impress the object of his affection by doing one of the things most certain to alienate her.
He stood before her, lighting a cigarette, shaking the match deliberately in the air, his legs rather wide apart.
Pearl, who had sunk into a nice deep chair, sprang up and put her hand on his shoulder.
"Oh, don't smoke," she said.
Hundreds of women had said that to him.
Even the lovely Caroline Temple--his former love--had said that her parents had forbidden her to have him at the house on account of his smoking; such a bad example.
"Caroline," he had said quietly, "I simply do openly what all the others do secretly."
He had not wavered about it.
Neither had her parents.
He and Caroline met at the tennis club and at the beach--no longer at her house.
But he had never thought of changing his habits.
His cigarette was to him what a car is to a theatrical star--a symbol of greatness.
He was firm now, even under the pleading of a new idol.
"I'm afraid I can't give it up," he said.
"I'm afraid it has too much of a grip on me for that."
He frowned as one who, looking inward, saw nothing but vice and ruin.
He was disappointed to find that she just let it drop--as if she were not vitally interested in saving him.
But before he had time to commit the natural mistake of asking her why she did not rescue him from his worse self, his mother came back into the room.
Her first words were, "Do you think that a good picture of my brother?"
Something mocking and teasing in her tone unnerved Pearl a little; so that instead of following the direction of Mrs. Conway's eyes she said rather wildly, "Where?"
Durland came to her rescue by politely giving her a large silver frame in which was the photograph of a man she was prepared to admire, and so she did admire him--so much that something tense was apparent as she gazed into those China-blue eyes, which looked--if one had not had private information--as if they were brown.
Mrs. Conway watched with sly amusement.
The mocking quality in her question had not arisen, as Pearl half feared, from any doubt as to the new governess' identity, but rather from the suspicion that there was more between her brother and this lovely creature than had been confessed.
Like many gentle sweet people, Edna Conway was extremely suspicious; her mind ran rapidly over a situation, examining though not necessarily believing all the darkest possibilities.
She did not actually suspect her brother of finding a safe home for a dangerous girl during his absence, but she did say to herself--perhaps not unnaturally, "There's more in this than meets the eye."
A voice from the piazza called, "Did Anthony's pearl arrive?"
And a woman in evening dress entered.
"Yes, Cora, this is she," said Mrs. Conway, and she added with a certain hint of malice, "You ought to know each other--both so consecrated to doing whatever Anthony wants done.
Miss Exeter, Miss Wellington."
Miss Wellington's emotions were clearly written on her face.
She had been in love with Anthony ever since he succeeded.
This which sounds like a paradox was the simple truth.
To her, success was not necessarily financial--though Wood's had had this agreeable aspect--but importance and preëminence were to her as essential elements in male attraction as feminine beauty is to most men.
When she was eighteen and Anthony still in the School of Mines there had been sentimental scenes which had left her cold.
She occasionally referred to them as "the time when you thought you wanted to marry me," and he did not contradict her.
He had thought he did.
He still admired her--she was elegant in appearance, beautifully dressed, competent in all the practical aspects of life.
If she had married someone else he would have said to her, "Your marriage was a great blow to me, Cora.
I had always fancied that some day you and I----" But he never would have said it until after she was safely married.
She had, however, no intention of marrying anyone else--for the simple reason that Anthony was by far the most attractive man of importance that she knew.
Her feelings on discovering Pearl--the young person she had heard described as being of merely pleasing appearance--to be an exuberant beauty, and discovering her, moreover, staring sentimentally at Anthony's picture, were not suspicions; she had the conviction of disaster.
She couldn't be cordial; and, Pearl, who had the kind of sensitiveness that comes from generosity, not from egotism, saw that the moment had come for her to go upstairs and write her first letter to the man whose face she liked so much.
She had always been a poor correspondent.
She had never enjoyed writing before, but now the idea of pouring herself out--or rather not herself, but her observation of a situation in which he was vitally interested--delighted her.
All of us, it has been said, can write well if we have something interesting to say.
What Pearl had to say could not fail to be interesting to the man she was writing to.
There was no motive for caution.
At last she had found a man with whom she could be candid and natural.
Late into the night the sound of a portable typewriter could be heard ticking from the room of the new governess.
It was not easy to put a routine into operation in the Conway household.
At half past nine, the hour set for Antonia's lessons, Antonia was nowhere to be found.
Pearl at last ventured to tap at Mrs. Conway's bedroom door.
Mrs. Conway was sitting up in bed, in white satin and yellow lace, with her breakfast tray on her lap.
In response to the news that her youngest child was missing, she answered, "She's probably gone crabbing.
I'm afraid that if you want to do lessons in summer you will have to get up a little earlier.
She was out of the house by seven, I dare say."
And she smiled maliciously.
Pearl saw that coöperation was unlikely, hostility probable, and withdrew.
Durland, her second pupil, presented himself a little ahead of time.
He came downstairs at ten, drank a cup of black coffee and ate a peach.
He was recklessly wearing his last pair of clean white trousers.
He was paler and more like a young bird than usual.
He, too, had his problems.
While willing to oblige Miss Exeter in every particular, while eager to help her and make her appear a worker of miracles, her mere proximity prevented his mind from functioning at all.
Do what she could, her efforts to get him thinking about the problem of three men, A, B and C, who, working together, could do a piece of work in three days, was like trying to crank a dead automobile.
She tried beaming upon him, she tried being severe; either way his intense emotion flooded his mental processes.
She thought, "I've solved worse problems than this, but I'm sure I don't know what to do."
He himself gave her the clew.
She had explained for the third time that if you let _x_ equal the number of days that it took A, working alone--when he interrupted her.
He was sitting beside her, leaning his head on his hand and staring at her in a maze of admiration.
Suddenly he said, "Do you like teaching, Miss Exeter?"
"I like teaching girls," she answered with a quick inspiration.
He drove his unwilling intelligence to take in this incredible statement.
"Girls," he said, opening his honest blue eyes and wrinkling his forehead.
"Why girls?"
"They're so much cleverer than boys."
She tossed it off as if were a well-known and generally admitted fact.
He was gentle with her.
"People think just the opposite," he said.
"Men do."
"I think you're wrong about that, really," Durland said.
"I think anyone--even a very just man like Uncle Anthony--would say that women can't think, at least not like men."
"Would he, indeed?"
said Pearl.
"Well, I don't know him; but he may be the kind of man who prefers inferior people of both sexes."
Durland, unable to believe she really thought this, looked wistfully into her face for a sign of relenting.
"Of course," he said, "you are very unusual.
You must not judge other women by yourself."
"I was fifteenth in my class," said Pearl.
"Quite stupid compared to the others; but even I never had any trouble with algebra.
I put my mind on it.
That's the trouble with boys--they're so scattered."
This was cruel, considering who had scattered him; but like many cruelties it worked.
As the hour finished, Dolly came downstairs and said, without looking at anyone, that she herself was going immediately in the motor to Shinnecock for her golf lesson and could not delay an instant; but if Antonia were there and ready there was no objection to dropping her and Miss Exeter at the public beach.
At that moment Antonia, who, just as her mother had suggested, had been crabbing since dawn, appeared on the lawn, streaked with seaweed and exuding a faintly ancient and fishy smell.
Dolly was like steel and would not allow her a moment for changing; and so, dropping her crabs and nets on the piazza, Antonia with Miss Exeter got into the car after Dolly, and were duly dropped at the little group of dark-red bathing houses that formed the entrance to the public beach.
Pearl found the child, in spite of her personal untidiness, a most agreeable companion.
She had read widely and with imagination.
She knew a great deal of poetry--rather martial poetry--by heart; all of Horatius, for instance, which she said she usually recited to herself in the dentist's chair and from which she gained comfort.
They were walking up the wide steps to the bathing house as she spoke, and she stopped and bent down to examine a boy's bicycle--she was a connoisseur of bicycles.
They came in sight of the beach now--all set out with bright-colored umbrellas like gay poisonous mushrooms.
It was the hour when the beach was given over to children.
Pearl was thinking that it looked very pretty, when once again she heard Antonia's clarion voice break out at her elbow.
"Hi, there, you kids!
Leave that fort alone!
It's mine!"
She darted down the narrow boardwalk toward an immense hole in the sand, scattering a band of neatly dressed children, much as the effete Romans were scattered by the first onslaught of the northern barbarians.
Pearl could not help laughing as she saw children run to their governesses or snatched back by their nurses; but the next moment she was sorry, for she saw that it was being said in various tongues that Antonia was quite the worst brought-up child in the world.
Pearl was nothing if not a partisan, and she was already completely on Antonia's side.
She and Antonia were supposed to bathe early so as to leave the two Conway bathhouses free for Mrs. Conway and Dolly when they appeared at a later and more fashionable hour.
"Everything in our family is done for Dolly," said Antonia when she was finally dragged out of the water.
"It makes me tired the way mother indulges every whim of hers."
Rebellious or not, however, Antonia was dressed--as much dressed as she ever was, which was about three-quarters as much as other little girls--by half after twelve.
She and Pearl went back to the beach and sat down under the red-and-black-striped umbrella which the life-saving man had stuck in the sand for them as if he were about to do a pole vault with it.
And presently Durland, ready for his swim, came and plopped down beside them, and immediately a girl in a one-piece tomato-colored bathing dress rose from another part of the beach and came and sat on the other side of him.
Antonia, with a thin brown arm, still smelling very slightly of crabs in spite of her swim, clasped about Pearl's neck, blew in her governess' ear the information that this was Caroline Temple, Durland's best girl.
Like so many courtships, this one, to the outside world, seemed to be carried on principally by the lady.
She neither looked at nor spoke to Pearl and Antonia.
To Durland she said, "Shall we go in now?"
Durland was digging a small hole near Miss Exeter's hand; his shoulder was turned to Caroline and he did not shift it as he replied, "You can if you like."
There was a pause.
Apparently she didn't like, for she did not move, and after a time she said in the same tone of lowered confidence, "I have the car here.
I'll drive you home."
"Thanks," said Durland.
"I'm on my bicycle."
Another pause.
"Shall we play tennis this afternoon?"
"I may," answered Durland.
Pearl began to feel her sex pride wounded.
She bent forward, and beaming upon the newcomer, she said, "You play tennis?"
Caroline just glanced at her.
"Of course I do," she said.
She had not the smallest intention of being rude, for she was a sweet-tempered child; even less did it occur to her to be jealous of an elderly woman of twenty-four; but her mind, concentrated upon the pursuit of Durland, was rendered irritable by inconsequential interruptions.
Durland, however, though no critic of manners, was aware that a gesture of friendship from a goddess had not been gratefully received.
"You might be civil about it," he said, and then looking up at Pearl, he asked in a softened tone of adoration whether she would like to play tennis that afternoon.
"Doubles?"
said Caroline, as if this were, of course, possible though utterly undesirable.
"Would you like to play doubles?"
Durland asked again.
"If it is convenient to your mother," said Pearl.
Durland dismissed such an idea as repellent to him and, glancing over his shoulder to Caroline, he said, "All right.
Miss Exeter and I will play you--if you can get a fourth."
It was not the way Caroline had designed the set and she said so.
She said clearly and rather complainingly that she had expected to play with Durland, and yet she did not seem wounded so much as thwarted.
"I'm sure I don't know whom I can get," she said.
"I suppose you can get the faithful Wally--anyone can get Wally."
"I thought you did not like Wally."
"I?"
said Durland, as if it were far beneath him ever to have been aware of Wally's existence; and without any further answer he got up and walked into the Atlantic so suddenly that Miss Temple, scrambling as rapidly as possible to her feet, was several yards behind him as he dived into his first wave.
"Isn't she pretty?"
said Antonia.
"She's been his best girl for two summers."
"I don't think he's very nice to her," said Pearl.
"Well," said Antonia, giving one of her little shakes of the head, "it would seem wonderful to me if Durlie spoke to me at all.
However, it may be over.
Like what Shakespeare says--one foot on land.
Next time I have a chance I'll look and see if her picture is still in the back of his watch."
Presently they were back in the same order--Durland first, and Miss Temple following.
He sat dripping, and taking a cigarette from a package he had left on the sand, he began groping for a match.
"Oh, Durland," said Miss Temple, "I do wish you wouldn't smoke.
It isn't good for you.
It looks so badly."
Durland gave a short laugh that seemed to say that if he had regarded public opinion he would have made of life a very different thing.
In her distress Caroline turned to the stranger whose presence she had so far refused to acknowledge.
"Don't you think it's wrong for him to smoke?"
she said.
It was Pearl's moment.
"Why, no," she answered, "I can't see anything wrong about it."
She put out a lazy hand and took one from the little paper envelope.
Durland's hand, with the match in it, was arrested.
"But--you're not going to smoke--here?
On the public beach?"
"Isn't it allowed?"
asked Pearl, all innocence.
"It must be--you are smoking.
Let me have a match."
"I haven't a match," he said, and threw away his own cigarette so that she could not get a light from that.
It was an important moment in his life.
He thought rapidly.
"I hope you won't think me fresh or anything," he said, "but I don't think a governess ought to smoke, if you know what I mean--not in public anyhow."
She wasn't angry, only thoughtful.
"Well, that's only your opinion."
It touched him that she knew so little of the world--or of her own position.
He said gently, "I'm afraid you'd find it was everybody's opinion."
"Ought you to be so much influenced by the opinion of other people?"
"Yes, indeed," he answered.
The cigarette with which she was still playing might separate them forever.
His mother, he knew, was just waiting for a good excuse to send her away, and where could she find a better one?
She argued it further, tapping the cigarette on her hand as if she were about to place it between her lips.
"But you don't pay any attention when people say you oughtn't to smoke."
Even then he did not know that a trap had been set for him.
On the contrary, he thought he had an original idea of some beauty when he said impulsively, "I tell you what, I'll swear off if you will."
She seemed to debate it through an agonizing second or two, while he looked at her with dog-like eyes.
Then she smiled and gave him a strong hand.
"All right," she said.
"That's a bargain."
Durland felt flooded with joy--not only at having saved a beloved woman but at having done it in just the right way.
He picked up the package of cigarettes and flung it toward the sea.
It did not quite reach the water and Caroline sprang up and brought it back to him.
"I suppose you thought that was empty," she said.
He tossed it away again without thanking her, but at last to her repeated clamors he yielded the information that he had given up smoking.
"Oh, Durland," she said, "now you can come to the house again.
Is that why you did it?"
He did not want to deceive the girl, but he could not resist the temptation of allowing her to deceive herself.
He did not answer directly; but rising, he said, "Anyone who wishes to swim to the barrels with me may now do so."
It was more like an invitation than anything he had said all morning, and they were soon swimming side by side.
Presently Mrs. Conway in a dark-blue silk bathing dress with ruffles appeared and dropped a string of pearls into the lap of the governess as if they had been beads.
Pearl had never had such pearls in her hands before.
They were heavier--much heavier than she had imagined, and brighter, more iridescent, better worth looking at.
She was not given to envy, but she was aware of thinking that there was something slightly wrong with a world where Mrs. Conway had pearls and she had not.
Antonia insisted on her putting them around her neck.
"It's much safer--you can't drop them in the sand--Cousin Cora always does--that's Miss Wellington; she's no relation, but she likes us to call her cousin--she wants us to call her aunt, but mother says, 'Wait till she is.'
" "Oh," said Pearl, conscious of a distinct pang, "is she going to be?"
Antonia gave one of her head shakes.
"Mother says, 'Say not the struggle nought availeth.'
Older people make a lot of fun of their best friends, don't they?"
"Would you like her for an aunt?"
said Pearl.
"Yes and no," Antonia replied.
"I think the wedding would be fun, and I think I'd be a bridesmaid or something; but as a family we prefer to keep Uncle Anthony to ourselves.
Mother says if he marries Cora we wouldn't lose him as much as if he married a stranger.
There was a Russian actress one year, with red hair; I didn't think her a bit pretty.
She used to send mother flowers and seats for her plays.
They were all pretty sad though.
Then there was another time--she was married this time, but mother said----" Antonia broke off to call Pearl's attention to Dolly, who was coming down the boardwalk in a bathing dress of as many hues as Joseph's coat.
Everything about her was bent--her back, her knees, her elbows, her fingers, and every crook was obviously intended to charm the young man by whose side she was walking, who was staring out to sea and very thoughtfully putting cotton in his ears.
Even Pearl, indifferent as she then supposed herself to be to all men, could not but admit that he was as splendid an example of young blond manhood as she had ever seen.
Then as he came nearer she saw a certain pale red-rimmedness about the eyes, and she thought, "He's the kind you'd have to describe as handsome, and yet if anyone else did, you'd say, 'Oh, do you think him handsome?
I don't like his looks at all.'
" Antonia meantime was pouring his life history into her ear.
"Allen Williams.
He's twenty-one and has been a freshman for two years--isn't he handsome?
--and very vicious--gambles and drinks and everything.
I heard the Williams' governess telling someone the other day that Monsieur Allen was _déjà très connu dans le monde--le monde gal--gal_--something or other.
I wish I knew more French.
You can't really tell much what goes on on the beach unless you know French.
Of course, he's just amusing himself with Dolly."
"I tell you what I think," said Pearl, suddenly becoming aware that she had been staring, and not only this, but also stared at.
"I think it's horrid of you to be against your own sister."
"But look at the way she's giggling and wriggling.
I feel ashamed of her," said Antonia.
"That's the very time you ought to stick up for her," said Pearl.
"Well, it's a point of view," said Antonia.
"That's what Uncle Anthony always says when he doesn't agree with you but is too lazy to argue it out."
Dolly and Mr. Williams had reached them by this time.
Dolly was for passing by, but Williams stopped and said in a voice clearly audible, "And who is the beautiful girl in the pearls?"
Dolly's voice was too low to be audible.
She stopped.
Spoiled and selfish she might be, but she was at heart a lady.
She introduced Mr. Williams to Miss Exeter with perfect civility.
Williams took Pearl's hand and looked at her with something fierce and blank in his eyes.
Oh, how well she knew that look!
