Chapter NINE: Bertie

§ i

Claudine had put aside her philosophers that morning, and sat in her little glade, listless and wretched. An insufferable, intolerable summer, a summer altogether wrong and harmful. And inevitably six weeks’ more of it.

“It isn’t right to keep the children here in idleness,” she said to herself. “Healthy, intelligent adults, wasting months and months.... They ought to be doing something. They ought to be busy and useful.... I suppose I got these ideas from poor little Mr. Stephens, but they’re good ideas. There was something very admirable about him....”

She smiled at the recollection of the “nice little beast,” but the smile vanished instantly.

“They’re both so discontented and restless--begging me to take them away. And I can’t do anything! I haven’t any power, any authority! I can’t do the least thing--I can’t even leave this place without Gilbert’s consent....”

A few miserable tears started to her eyes.

“That’s the reason I have no control over them. A mother ought to be wise and firm and--free. But I can’t do what I think ought to be done. I’ve never been able to. I have to argue with Gilbert, or deceive him. That’s what it really is, although I like to call it tact. They ought to go home, and study, or work. They don’t need a holiday! But I can’t make him see that; not possibly. He sneers about ‘a lot of idle women,’ but he won’t let us be anything else.... And the older I get, the more--cowardly I become. I can’t bear to argue and argue with him. I know I can’t win. I haven’t any influence over him. I can’t--charm him, or coax him, and I can’t convince him. He’s so obstinate.”

She clasped her hands.

“Oh!” she cried. “If I could only, only have had my darling Andrée alone, I could have done so much for her! So much! I could have been so wise, so gentle, so patient, that she would have loved me with all her heart! I could have influenced her and helped her--”

She hastily wiped her eyes, ashamed of her emotion.

“How did it happen? Why did I become so helpless? Whose fault is it? Gilbert’s? No, I can’t think that. Other women with husbands just as bad as Gilbert don’t allow themselves to be submerged. It’s my fault; it must be. There’s something wrong with me, some horrible moral weakness.”

Her eye fell upon Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.

“No; they’re no use--only a drug. I call it training my mind, but it’s only trying to dull my feelings. I ought to fight and struggle. I must! I must! I must get hold of my children. Now when Bertie’s coming, when he hasn’t seen me for two months.... I ought to be able to do something with him. He adores me.”

She fell into a reverie upon her incorrigible boy. No doubt that Bertie was lazy, frivolous, and something a little worse--“wild,” her friends called him. And yet she never worried seriously about him. He was so obviously the sort of person who always comes out on top. It was impossible to imagine him defeated. He was the cleverest of all her children, alarmingly clever, and he was also in some ways the finest of them. He had more sensibility than his sisters, more heart. That was the reason she was so shamefully indulgent toward his follies; she was aware, almost by instinct, that they were of no significance.

She decided upon an attitude; she would not be so fond, and full of half-playful remonstrances. No; she would be friendly, but firm and wise; she would show him the significance of life.

§ ii

They went, one or the other of them, to meet all the reasonable trains.

“Why not?” said Andrée. “For mercy’s sake, what else have we to do?”

But he did not come by any of them. As a sort of punishment for his shocking lack of industry during his late year at the Polytechnic Institute, he had been banished to a solitary camp in Maine with Lance, selected as a tutor of the most serious possible sort. And as Lance--who was perfectly indifferent to the boy’s moral defects--wrote encouragingly of his mental attainments, he was allowed a two weeks’ visit to his mother and sisters.

When he didn’t come by the five o’clock train, they gave him up for that day. They were all dressed with an eye to his acutely critical taste, and a little crestfallen at their unregarded condition. They came down onto the veranda to wait until the bell rang for dinner, and sat there patiently with the old ladies.... When there came, along the mountain road, a terrific roaring, a dense cloud of dust, and a motor-car came up at a hair-raising speed, an eccentric, purple car, very low, with a gigantic engine. From this affair sprang out a figure in a duster, wearing goggles and a plaid cap put on backward.

They all started up, joyfully, and Andrée rushed to meet him.

“Where did you get that thing?” she cried.

“It’s Pendleton’s. What do you think of it? It’s a French car.”

“It’s _très chic_. Come and see Mother!”

He sprang up the steps, pulled off cap and goggles, and kissed Claudine. And try as she would, she couldn’t help looking at him indulgently, instead of wisely. There was something about him.... He was a very slight boy, barely eighteen, with an unusually dark skin and sleek black hair; he had a trick of keeping his mouth open, which showed his brilliantly white teeth, and gave him a stupid air; he had a smooth, oval face, narrow eyes, a rather weak chin; he looked at first glance like a silly young ass. But after you had looked again you were more inclined to think him a most engaging young devil. He had an odd, sidelong glance and a grimace of gamin impudence; he was never bad-tempered or sullen, but sometimes a little malicious.

“How did you get on with Cousin Lance, my dear?” asked his mother.

“Splendidly!” he answered. “Aren’t you pretty, Mammy! But a bit spindly. Why don’t you drink ale?”

“I’m very well, Bertie. Why did you take Mr. Pendleton’s car? Isn’t it rather a risk?”

“His look out. He offered it. He’s a nice little playmate. He took me out to dinner the first night I got home, because the old man said he was busy. _Some_ dinner! Andrée, what is there to do here?”

“Lots! You can knit and embroider and play solitaire--”

“We’ll change all that, don’t worry! Here’s the latest thing in evolution, as old Lance would say, come to put a little pep into the fossils. Mammy, don’t you think I’ve evoluted a whole lot further than Father? Lance says it takes two million years to grow a new toe, or lose one, I forget which, but it seems to me--”

“That’s the dinner bell,” said Edna. “Come in just as you are. No one dresses here.”

“_Noblesse oblige!_” said Bertie. “I’m going to dress. Tell them to keep the kettle on the hob--whatever that is--for a few minutes.”

He came down again very promptly, with his black head sleek as a seal, and a new and marvelous dark suit. He disdained all the various washable materials; they were “a mess,” he said, no one had any business to be hot enough to want them. He was absolutely correct in every detail, a very model of fashion and deportment; how were they not to be proud of him and delighted with him? He was very attentive to his mother, and even if it were a rather ostentatious courtesy, it warmed her heart.

She grew annoyed, though, when he persisted in smoking cigarettes between courses.

“It’s very bad manners,” she said. “It’s disrespectful to me and your sisters. And what’s more, no one smokes here in the dining-room. It isn’t a hotel.”

“I’ll teach it to be. And it’s not disrespectful, dear creatures. It’s simply being done now.”

“And you’re too young to smoke. It’s very harmful at your age. I can’t bear to see you, Bertie!”

“Mammy, don’t spoil my poor little holiday! Two weeks--that’s all! Up there with old Lance, I neither smoke, chew, drink, spit nor cuss. Let me have my brief day!”

When they went out onto the veranda after dinner, his quick ear caught the sound of distant music.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Dancing down at the hotel,” answered Edna.

“Free for all, and leave your guns at the door?” he asked.

And after this, nothing would do, but that they must all stroll down to “look it over,” and Bertie, entering ostensibly to buy a magazine in the lobby, looked in at the ball-room and said it looked “good enough.”

“You and Edna sit out here on the piazza, and I’ll take a few turns with Andrée,” he said. “The music’s not bad and the floor looks good.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Claudine. “They’re not at all a nice sort of people here. I don’t think it’s quite the thing--”

Bertie fell back into Edna’s arms like a log.

“Oh--h--h!” he groaned. “Why?”

“It’s not dignified--”

“You don’t have to be dignified till you get married or inherit money. Tell you what! You come, Mammy! You can dance some nice, old-fashioned sort of waltz. Come on!”

“I ought to!” she thought. “It’s my duty to enter into their amusements--as long as I can’t stop them.”

But after half an hour spent there, she was more than ever determined to influence them--all of them--in an opposite direction, away from this unpalatable and promiscuous vulgarity.

“Don’t you think it is better to be bored than to amuse yourselves in such a way as this?” she asked, on the way home.

“No!” said Andrée and Bertie, simultaneously.

“It seems a pity to me that young people like you--intelligent and well-bred, should be so mad about amusement,” she said. “I can’t understand it! If you were brainless and dull, it would be different. But there are so many really interesting things in the world, so many wholesome and fine recreations--”

“Never heard of them, Mammy! What are they?”

“When I was a girl, we thought it a pleasure to take a country walk with an interesting companion--”

“You wouldn’t like the companions that we’d think were interesting,” said Andrée.

“No,” said Bertie, sadly. “There aren’t any nice amusements left, Mammy. Evolution has done away with ’em.”

She looked at the three faces, at that clever and devilish Bertie, at the sensible, clear-sighted Edna, at Andrée, filled with a strange and wayward inner light.

“But you can’t enjoy that sort of thing!” she cried. “You can’t like to be there, in a room crowded with vulgar, noisy people whom you don’t even know! You must see that these new dances are--to say the very least--ill-bred!”

“I accept!” said Bertie. “Lance was telling me about some fellow that made that his motto, and I think it’s a gol-durned good one! I accept--anything that comes my way.”

“But it doesn’t mean that, Bertie. It means resignation.”

“I know. And we are all resigned, except you. You want to--let’s see--put back the clock of human progress. Very wrong Mammy!”

§ iii

The next morning Bertie went again to the big hotel, and came back innocently with a new magazine for his mother. In the afternoon he went down to the garage and drove back in the startling purple car, and asked his mother to come for a drive. Filled with terror, she accepted, and spent two hours in mortal anguish, flying perilously along the edge of precipices, breathless from the terrific speed. There was no chance then for the serious talk she wished to have with her son, and after dinner he disappeared again, and didn’t return until midnight.

But she was waiting for him on the veranda.

“Bertie!” she said. “Where have you been?”

“Dancing around a little, Mammy!”

“With whom?”

“Some girls at the hotel. Very respectable and humble, Mammy. I didn’t have any trouble with them at all.”

“I don’t like it. And I’m sure your father wouldn’t like it.”

“So am I. But I’m used to that. It’s crabbed age and youth--”

“Don’t be disrespectful to your father! Bertie ...! Did you--have anything to drink?”

“Oh, yes! A couple of seltzer lemonades.”

“I mean--anything--intoxicating?”

“Nothing that intoxicated me, Mammy!”

“Don’t be so flippant and provoking! Bertie, I really feel in despair about you. Haven’t you any serious or--worthy thoughts or ambitions?”

“They haven’t come yet. But I’m only a child. Give me a chance!”

“What do you expect to do with your life?”

“Don’t you know,” he said, solemnly, “that that’s really a ridiculous question, Mammy? It doesn’t lie with me. I’m a puppet in the hands of Nature. I’m going to be used by a Blind Force--”

“Please don’t joke!”

“I don’t think I am. It seems to me it really is like that. I don’t see much use in spending all your life squirming. I’d rather go along with the rest of the crowd--wherever they’re going. We don’t count much. We’re just one more generation. It’ll take about a billion years to change us or improve us. So what care I?”

“Bertie!” she cried, quite shocked. “Where did you get such ideas?”

“Lance has corrupted me. I was a poor innocent child who wanted to be an engineer and build bridges. But when I was taught to think a million years at a time, I lost interest.”

“But you’ve got to pass your life in some sort of work, dear.”

“I’ll go into Father’s office and show him how to run the show. Then I’ll take a wad and buck the stock market and clean up a few millions and never worry again.”

“Go to bed!” she said, half-laughing. “You’re too silly to talk to! I suppose some time you’ll grow up and be a man. And I hope with all my heart I’ll be able to be proud of you.”

His exploits that week, however, were certainly nothing to be proud of. He took a golden-haired maiden from the hotel out one afternoon and quite wrecked Mr. Pendleton’s car, leaving it helpless on a mountain road to be taken back to the garage on a truck. He ran up a startling bill at the hotel for cigarettes, candies, and “seltzer lemonades” which she suspected strongly, and when she confronted him with it, he said, with chagrin:

“Pshaw! I told ’em not to send it till after I’d gone!”

She paid this herself from her own allowance, but the bill for the garage was beyond her. It was going to cost six hundred dollars to repair Mr. Pendleton’s car.

“But he’ll pay it himself!” Bertie protested. “He’s a good sport. He knows I’m a young and inexperienced driver, and sure to have accidents.”

“I’m ashamed of you, Bertie, to think of such a thing. I shall have to tell your father, and I’m afraid he’ll be very angry.”

“I don’t believe in family rows. It might give him apoplexy. I should think you’d rather sell your jewels.”

But she did tell Gilbert, and he was furious. It was not a pleasant week-end, but it didn’t depress Bertie.

“I’m the reed, you know, Mammy, that bows its head to the storm,” he said. And the very next day, told her he wanted to, and was socially obliged to, give a dinner-party to some of his friends at the hotel.

“You can’t, my dear. Mrs. Dewey wouldn’t--”

“She says she will. I hinted at it. We can have it at eight, when the others have finished. She says she’ll do it in grand style, for my sake.”

“It would cost a great deal. Your father--”

“Andrée and Edna will pay for it, out of their little savings, like sisters should, for their brother’s honour. All you have to do is to look lovely and be dignified.”

“But I don’t care to encourage those hotel people!”

“They won’t bother you when I’ve gone. Besides, you can freeze ’em thoroughly at the dinner. I don’t care how rude you are to them.”

It was a horrible dinner, of the sort that Claudine most thoroughly detested. Silly, over-dressed girls and, one or two of their mothers, and a handful of boys who seemed to her prejudiced eyes nothing but cheap travesties on her fascinating son. She was quite perfect, with the affability and politeness she never displayed so well as when among people she disliked.

But after he had gone away, she was very glad she had done this for Bertie. She missed him beyond measure; of all her children he was the one who had most of her own detached and fatalistic point of view, and he, like herself, could find but cold comfort in his own heart. She understood him, how futile all achievement seemed to him, how terribly necessary was happiness. He _must_ be happy; it was that alone which he required from life, not success, like Andrée, not self-approbation, like Edna, but joy in the moment, like herself.

She remembered him as a little boy, a beautiful child, a gay and cajoling little thing, his grandmother’s favourite ... certainly a very much spoilt child. She liked to remember his passionate admiration of her, how she had always stopped in at the nursery to let him see her, dressed for the evening. How he had called her “pretty Mammy,” quite unabashed by his father’s disgust for his effeminacy.

Even now, with all his weaknesses, his petty vices seemed to her very innocent, very unimportant. It was only his way of looking for happiness. She felt sure that when he grew older, he would find a better way. And if he remained as he was, frivolous, reckless, pleasure-loving, wasn’t it better, after all, than being stolid, prudent, money-loving?

“My dear, dear boy!” she thought, with tears in her eyes, but a smile on her lips. “Poor Bertie!”

§ iv

The long, long summer wore away; wasted and arid days they seemed to her. She found but little pleasure in her flowers and birds, no more consolation in her philosophers.

“I suppose I’m growing old!” she thought, and she allowed herself to dally with the idea of growing really old, when nothing would be expected of her, but dignity, which would be no trouble at all.

“But I’m barely forty!” she reflected. “I suppose there’ll be at least twenty years more of this!”

And her heart sank.

“It’s peace I want!” she said. “I’m not made for struggling or achieving. I’ve been a wretched failure.... I suppose I’ve even failed Gilbert--in some sort of way. All I can do is to go on blundering and trying--for all that terribly long time.... If I can only see the children on the right road!... And I don’t even know what the right road is!”

She was happy to see her daughters so full of new interest and energy when the time came for going home.

“I can live in them!” she said. “If they’ll let me!”

_BOOK THREE_

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