THINGS

BY Alice Duer Miller Author of “The Blue Arch,” “Calderon’s Prisoner,” etc.

NEW YORK Charles Scribner’s Sons 1914

Copyright, 1914, by Charles Scribner’s Sons

Published April, 1914

THINGS

THINGS

I

THE great alienist sat down at his desk, and having emptied his mind of all other impressions, held it up like a dipper for his new patient to fill. Large, blond, and handsome, she was plainly accustomed to being listened to. Before she had fairly undone her furs and folded her hands within her muff, the doctor’s lateral vision had told him that, whatever her problems, it was not about her own nervous system that she had come to consult him.

Not too quickly her story began[4] to take shape. Her household, her husband, her four children—three small boys and an older daughter, a girl of seventeen....

“My only thought has been my children, Dr. Despard.”

“Your only thought, Mrs. Royce?”

She assented. The daughter was the problem—the daughter of seventeen.

“She and I have been such friends; I have always been a friend to my children, I hope, as well as a parent. And Celia’s little arrangements, her clothes and her small parties, have been as much my interests as hers—more, perhaps. The bond between us has been peculiarly close until the last year or so. Lately a rebellious spirit has begun to develop. I have tried to make allowances, but[5] naturally there are certain questions of manners and deportment—small but important—about which one cannot yield. I am almost ashamed to confess how unaffectionate are the terms that we have reached. The situation will strike you as a strange one between a mother and daughter——”

He shook his head. “You are by no means the only mother and daughter whose relations are unsatisfactory.”

“Ah, the young people of to-day!” she sighed. “What is the matter with them, with the age, Dr. Despard? They are so hard, so individualistic. I myself was one of a large family, and we lived in the house with my grandparents and aunts. My life was made up of little duties[6] for older people—duties I never thought of questioning. They were a pleasure to me. But if I ask Celia to go on an errand for me—or even to attend to something for herself—I am met by the look of a martyr or a rebel. But that is not the worst. At times, Dr. Despard, her language to me is violent—is—actually profane. I cannot help looking on this as an abnormal manifestation. At last I saw her case was pathological. No nice girl swears at her mother, and”—Mrs. Royce smiled—“my daughter is a nice girl.”

It seemed to him that Mrs. Royce must be a very nice mother indeed. Soft, serious, and eminently maternal, she appealed profoundly to all his bachelor ideals.

“And your husband?” he asked.[7] “How does he get on with his daughter?”

“Admirably,” she returned warmly; “they hardly see each other.”

He glanced quickly at her to see if her intention were humorous, but something mechanical in her smile had already warned him that her mind was bent on other of life’s aspects than the comic. Now she was quite serious, and he replied with equal gravity:

“It is often the solution.”

They decided, at length, that he was to spend a few days with them in the country. To bring the girl to his office would be useless. He would find her a gentle, well-behaved little creature, perhaps too much interested in her books. The exigencies of the children’s education kept the[8] Royces in town during the week, but they spent Saturday and Sunday at the old Royce place on the Hudson. Here Despard promised to come at the first opportunity.

She thanked him, and held out a strong, firm hand.

No, he thought when she had gone, he could not understand a girl’s swearing at such a mother—at once so affectionate and so intelligent, for, with pardonable egotism, Despard reckoned her bringing the problem to him a proof of rare domestic intelligence. Most women would have made it the subject of anger or tears.

He himself held no special brief for youth. The younger generation did not attract him. His own nephews and nieces never made him return disgusted to his loneliness, but[9] rather raised his enjoyment of his solitude.

Before he admitted his next patient he stood a moment contemplating the sacrifices made by a parent. “It’s stupendous, it’s too much,” he thought; and smiled to think that, if he had married, a child of his might now be conducting him to a doctor’s office, for of the two he would undoubtedly have been the first to swear.

After a week particularly crowded with the concerns of other people Despard arrived, at high noon of a day in early April, at the Royces’ place. Never, he thought, had he seen peace so clearly embodied. A dense, fresh lawn sloped down to the hazy river; splendid old trees were everywhere; the serious stone house had been built with the simple[10] notions of comfort that existed a hundred years ago.

Mr. Royce, who met him at the station, seemed a peaceful sort of person, too—a man whose forebears had been more like fairy god-parents than ordinary ancestors, for they had given him a handsome, healthy body, a fair fortune, a respected name, and, best of all, an unquestioning belief in all the institutions of his own time, such as matrimony, the ten commandments, and the blessings of paternity.

Despard turned the conversation toward the daughter, but was soon aware that he was getting a mere echo of Mrs. Royce’s opinions.

“The child has worked herself into an abnormal frame of mind,” said her father.

[11]“You draw this from your own observations?”

“Well, more from her mother’s. I leave that sort of thing to my wife. She has great cares, great responsibilities. She takes life almost too seriously.” He sighed. The next instant his face lighted up in pointing out to Despard a giant chestnut-tree just saved from a blighting disease. For a few minutes he spoke on the subject with extraordinary vividness.

Despard was quick to recognize expert knowledge, and Royce, with something approaching a blush, admitted that he did understand the care of native trees. “I have sometimes thought of writing a book about it,” he said timidly.

“You certainly should.”

[12]“Ah, it’s so difficult to find time.”

Despard smiled. Who had leisure if this favored being had not? He himself, without one hour in the twenty-four that he could call his own, was already at work on his third.

He met the whole family assembled at luncheon: a pale German governess, three little boys, and the dark-eyed Celia, sweet-mouthed but sullen-browed.

Despard, who had had no breakfast, thought more than he would have confessed about the victuals set before him. Any family ought to be amiable, he thought, on food at once so simple and delicious. His opinion of Mrs. Royce rose still higher.

Within the next hour he came to[13] the conclusion that, in spite of his extended knowledge of American interiors, he had never before been in a really well-appointed house—a house, that is, where one wise and affectionate person directed every detail. Mrs. Royce, he found, knew every aspect of her home. She not only knew her flowers almost as individuals, but she knew the vase and the place where each appeared to the best advantage. She knew better than her husband which chair he liked, where he kept his cigars, and which little table would be best at his elbow. Nor was her consideration confined to her own family. She had thought of a tired doctor’s special needs. She had given him “a little room, where he could be quiet and get a glimpse of the river.”

[14]Shut in this room, not so very little after all, he walked to the writing-table to make a memorandum. It had more than once happened to him to find, in a house accounted luxurious, only a dry, encrusted inkstand in the spare room. Not so here. Never was ink so fluidly, greenly new; never was blotting-paper so eagerly absorbent. He noticed, besides three sizes of paper and envelopes, that there were cable blanks, telegraph blanks, and postal cards, as well as stamps of all varieties.

It was not Despard’s habit to notice life quite as much in detail as this, but now it amused him to pursue the subject. Luxury he knew; but this effective consideration he rated as something higher.

II

HE had arrived on a Friday, and on Sunday at five—things were apt to happen by a schedule in the Royce household—he was to give his report on Celia.

He entered the library—the spot designated by Mrs. Royce—by one door as Churchley, the butler, came in at the other to serve tea.

The dark, shining little table was brought out, noiselessly opened, covered with a cloth—the wrong cloth, Mrs. Royce indicated. Churchley whisked away and returned incredibly quickly with the right one. The tray, weighted with silver and blossoming with the saffron flame[16] of the tea-kettle, was next put before her, and then another little structure of shelves was set at her right hand. Her eye fell on this.

“I said brown-bread toast, Churchley.” The man murmured and again whisked away.

All this time Despard had not sat down, although between orders Mrs. Royce had more than once urged him to do so. He stood, having shut the door behind him, leaning the point of his shoulder against the wall.

Utterly undisturbed by his calm eyes fixed upon her, Mrs. Royce said:

“Poor Churchley, he has been with us for six years, but I’m afraid I can’t keep him. He forgets everything.”

“He’s on the edge of a nervous[17] breakdown,” answered Despard coolly, and he added: “The housemaid is a pronounced neurasthenic. As for your daughter——”

“Ah, Celia, poor, dear child! Must we send her away?” her mother asked, but before the doctor had time to answer, Churchley, by a miracle of celerity, again entered, this time bearing toast of the desired complexion.

After he had finally disappeared, Mrs. Royce busied herself with flame and kettle and tea-caddy before she repeated her question, and her voice had in it a faint sediment of these preoccupations:

“I hope you do not think it necessary to send Celia away, Dr. Despard?”

He drew a chair forward and sat[18] down. “No, Mrs. Royce,” he said; “I think it necessary to send you away.”

“Me?”

He bowed.

“But my health is excellent. Oh, I see,” she smiled. “My husband has been talking to you about my responsibilities. Yes, they are great, but one is given strength to do what is required of one. I shall not have to desert my post. I am strong.”

“I know you are strong, Mrs. Royce,” said he, “but you are the cause of weakness in others. We need not multiply examples: your daughter, the governess, Churchley——”

She broke in—“Of course, I admit their weakness. But don’t you see how I protect and support them?[19] How could you imagine that I was the cause?”

“Isn’t it suggestive that practically every one with whom you come in contact——”

“My husband,” she retorted, quoting an instance against him.

“Your husband has great natural calm, and spends eight hours a day out of the house. You have made this home, this really wonderful home, for those you love. No one admires the achievement more than I do. But you have sacrificed too much of yourself in doing it; and I’m not speaking of your physical strength. In this library, in which you are so fond of sitting, how many books have you ever read?”

“I was a great reader as a girl,” she answered.

[20]“Which of these have you read in the last ten years?”

She murmured that he perhaps hardly understood the demands upon her time.

“You never read. You can’t,” he returned. “Since my first hour here I have been watching you, not your daughter. Her case is simple enough. You don’t read, Mrs. Royce, not because you have no time, but because you have no concentration. This is one of the many sacrifices you have made to your household—a serious one, and we must face the results. I have watched you each day carrying the morning papers about with you until evening, and then, if you read the headlines, it is as much as you can accomplish.”

She had been staring at him as[21] though in a trance, but now she came to, with a laugh.

“My dear Dr. Despard,” she said, “if you were the mother of four children and the head——”

He held up his hand. “You must let me finish,” he said. “You have made this home, and you administer it with consummate ability; and yet no one is really happy in it, least of all yourself. Why? Well, I need not remind you that no one is made happy merely by things. Some continuity of inner life is absolutely necessary, not only to happiness but to health. Remember, I am speaking as a nerve specialist. You, Mrs. Royce, are an enemy to continuity. You dispel concentration as a rock dispels a wave. Even I find no little difficulty, when in your[22] presence, in pursuing a consecutive train of thought, and, as for you yourself, such a thing has long been impossible for you. Even now, on this matter so immensely important to you, you have not been able to give me your undivided attention. Other facts have kept coming up in your consciousness—that a bell rang somewhere; that the hearth has not been swept up. Acutely aware as I am of your point of view, these breaks in your attention have been breaks in mine, too; but I have been able to overcome them, and follow

my ideas to the end, because I have been trained to do so, and, besides, I’ve been here only two days. In two days more I would not answer for myself. I should begin to see things, things, things, and to believe[23] that all life was merely a question of arrangements. Even your religion, Mrs. Royce, in which most people find some continuity, is a question of things—of Sunday-schools and altar decoration. That poor little clergyman who lunched here to-day—he came emanating a certain spiritual peace; but he went away crushed by your poor opinion of him as an executive. At this moment he is probably breaking up the current of his life by a conscientious attention to things.”

Deeply protesting as she was in her heart, something in his hard, clear look kept her silent, and he went on:

“Your daughter is—to use a big word—an intellectual. For the time being she is interested only in things[24] of the mind. New ideas, books, poetry are the great adventures of life to her at present. To all this you are an obstructionist——”

“There, at least, you are utterly at fault,” cried the poor lady, with a passion she had not known for years. “I have done everything in my power to help. I am very ambitious in regard to my children’s education. Their schools, their teachers——”

“Ay,” said Despard, “you have set out the counters for them but you have never let them play the game. You were interested in making the arrangements, but you had no interest at all in the state of mind which could take advantage of them. Your daughter knows, not only that you take no thought for such matters[25] yourself, but that every phase of your contact with her demands her attention for other matters—clothes, manners, hours, and dates. You have no respect for her preoccupations. Not once, not twice, but fifty times a day, you interrupt her, with a caress, or an errand, or more often a reproof. Yesterday, when she was obviously absorbed in reading that bit of verse to her father, you sent her up-stairs to change her shoes——”

“They were wet; she would have caught cold.”

“If you had listened you would have seen she had only four more lines to read. You do all this, not only when she is in your domain, at meals and in the drawing-room, but you follow her to her own room and[26] go in without knocking. I venture to say that that child works at night, for the simple reason that to work in this house during the daytime is impossible.”

“Really,” said Mrs. Royce, “with the best will in the world I do not understand you. Celia’s friends sometimes seem to feel that I ought to neglect her manners and pronunciation, ought to allow her to become selfish and self-centred, so that she may—” She broke off as if words failed her. “But I have never heard a grown person suggest that such a course would be right.”

“Ask your clergyman what is right,” answered Despard. “I am here to tell you what is healthy; I am here to prescribe. Now, notice, please, I do not tell you to change.[27] I don’t think you could. The reactions have taken place too many times. I tell you to go away. We can call it a rest cure. You shall have beautiful surroundings, comfort, and, above all that leisure that recent years have failed to give you. In return I shall ask you to concentrate your mind for a certain number of hours each day.”

“You talk,” she cried bitterly, “as if I enjoyed the treadmill of my daily life.”

“You have unusual executive ability, and most of us enjoy the use of our powers.”

“The best refutation of all that you have said is that I am eager to go,” she returned. “Ah, I cannot tell you how inviting such a prospect seems to me—not to order dinner,[28] not to have to decide and arrange for every one, not to be the pivot of the whole structure. Ah, Dr. Despard, I would so gladly go, but——”

“But?”

“But what would happen to my family without me?”

“They must try looking out for themselves,” he answered. He glanced at his watch, for he was to take a train that afternoon; and Mrs. Royce collected herself enough to touch the bell—it always hung within tempting reach of her hand—and gave Churchley orders to send for the motor and have the doctor’s bags brought down.

During this interval Despard walked to the window and stood looking out. It is not always so easy to apply the knife psychologically as physically. He wondered if he could have been[29] more gentle and equally effective. As he stood there Celia came sauntering across the lawn, her head bent, her hands deep in the pockets of an enveloping dun-colored coat. The brow which had first seemed sulky to him appeared now simply thoughtful.

III

THE strength of Mrs. Royce’s character was shown by the fact that she obeyed—she actually went. She went almost gladly—a state of mind induced by the extraordinary activity of her last days at home. In one brilliant flash of prophecy and power she foresaw and forestalled every contingency that could arise in her absence. She departed in a condition of exhaustion fully justifying the doctor’s story of a needed rest.

Her weariness lasted through the first few days at the sanatorium. She was well content to lie in bed and[31] think of nothing. But by the fifth or sixth day she began to wonder where she had left the key of the cedar closet; and several possibilities of error in the arrangements she had made to reach from garret to cellar began to creep into her consciousness. Her elder boy was subject to throat trouble; her younger was subtly averse to bathing. She had not, perhaps, sufficiently emphasized these two dangers. She had, however, given her promise not to communicate with her household except in case of necessity.

Conscientious in her determination to do what she had set out to do, she took out some of the books she had brought with her, but they seemed an unsatisfactory lot: the novels, trashy; the essays, dull; the history, heavy.[32] Strange, she thought, how people will recommend books which really did not even hold one’s attention.

The word attention, bringing with it the recollection of Despard’s speech, recalled her to her obligations. Heavy or not, she was resolved to make her way through the volume.