# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 39/Number 2/Renfrew and the New Generation

from The Red Book Magazine, June 1922, pp. 65–69, 122, 124, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
Illustration: “Excuse me,” Muriel interrupted. “I'm not likely to send Mr. Mears any message.”
Renfrew and the New Generation
By Booth Tarkington
Illustrated by Arthur William Brown
MURIEL ELIOT had taken upon her young and comely shoulders the principal burdens of our ancient world. That it is to say, the world still wabbled along, unconscious of the relief, and Muriel's mother warned her to be more careful of her health. “You'll lose your fine color,” Mrs. Eliot said, “if you sit all the time in the house, reading and writing. You'll bleach out into one of those pale women with spectacles, and you don't want to be like that, do you? If you wont respect your constitution, you might at least have some regard for your looks. What is all this writing you're doing?”
“It isn't writing,” Muriel informed her, glancing up from the pretty desk. “It's thinking. It's merely an embalmed thinking.”
“Embalmed?” the mother repeated. “Embalmed?”
“Yes. Thinking embalmed in ink. Don't you like my saying that?”
“It seems a little unpleasant.” Mrs. Eliot responded. “It's not an impropriety exactly, I suppose.”
“'Impropriety'!” Muriel cried, and threw down her pen. “If you knew how: that word offends me!”
“Impropriety should offend all nice people,” said Mrs. Eliot. “Not the word, but impropriety itself. Why do you dislike the word?”
“Because it's a word of all the old tyrannies! Because it belongs to a dying fetichism! Because it's a—a tarnished symbol of discredited Victorianism!”
“Good gracious! the mother exclaimed. “I don't understand a thing you're saving! Wont you please try to talk a little more plainly, dear?”
“Yes, I will!” Here, in her enthusiasm, Muriel jumped up an accompanied her oratory with a fluent eloquence of gesture. “Mother,” she began, “you and your generation haven't been able to realize that the young people of today are thinking as they never thought before.”
“Well, that's very nice,“” Mrs. Eliot said placidly. “But of course it isn't so very surprising. It's natural for them to think more at twenty and twenty-five they did at ten and fifteen.”
“I don't mean that. I mean the young people of today are thinking more than any young people ever thought before. When your generation was young, Mother, it didn't think.”
“Didn't it?”
“No. It simply accepted what the old people taught it.”
“Well, no,” the mother said. “There's a difference I might point out. We accepted what the good old people taught us.”
“Pooh! You just accepted the Victorian standards of conduct. The old people told you a thing was good, and you never examined it to see if it was good. They ruled you with words like 'impropriety!' If they told you something was an 'impropriety,' you shivered and kept away from it. Well, we don't. You can't scare us off that way. We go and see for ourselves; we don't let the old people lead us in blinders.”
Mrs. Eliot shook here head. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Are you sure some of the old people aren't leading you?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I was just wondering if maybe old people weren't leading you, after all; only instead of its being the good old people, maybe its the bad old people. Some old people always lead the young people, ou know, Muriel.”
“How absurd! Look at the French Revolution. Look at every revolution that happened. The young people—”
“Yes, the young people took all the risks,” Mrs. Eliot interrupted. “But old people had the ideas that got the young people into it. Of course, the young people thought these were their own ideas; I know that. You see when a young person gets an idea, he usually doesn't stop to notice where it came from. The way he feels about it, when he finds some money in his pocket, he thinks it must belong to him, and when he finds an idea in his head he thinks it's his own idea of course. No; the old people are behind everything. if you look for them.”
“Well, they're not behind the ideas of my generation,” Muriel declared. “And you'll never get us to believe a thing is improper just because you Victorians called in an impropriety.”
“I wish,” her mother said rather plaintively, “I do wish you'd stop calling me a 'Victorian,' Muriel. I was born under Hayes and Wheeler, and I grew up under Garfield and Cleveland and Hendricks, and Harrison and—”
“Never mind!” Muriel interrupted. “You know perfectly well what I mean. My generation is in revolt against everything yours accepted. We shall change all that, but first we shall put everything to the acid test.”
Illustration: “Are you in earnest?" she inquired. “Do you deliberately state you didn't mean you want to marry me?”
“What sort of test do you mean?” asked her mother.
“The acid test of experiment. What we like we may retain; what we don't like, we'll—”
“Oh, you'll keep what you like?” Mrs. Eliot said. “Nothing about right and wrong?”
“Our ideas of right and wrong are not Victorian, Mother.”
“Oh, my!” Mrs. Eliot sighed. “'Victorian'!”
Muriel returned to her desk. “If you really care to know what I'm writing,” she said, “it's an essay on 'Marriage, a Victorian Delusion'!”
“You mean that's the title of your essay?” Mrs. Eliot queried.
“Yes,” replied Muriel.
Mrs. Eliot laughed. “How funny!” she said.
“'Funny?' What on earth do you find 'funny' about it?”
“Why, it sounds as though you believed Queen Victoria was never really married but just thought she was!” And Mrs. Eliot again laughed in a manner that caused her daughter to look at her with the frowning perplexity all parents must behold when their children can only suspect themselves to be unaccountably descended from idiots.
“You really think it's funny, do you, Mamma?”:
“Very!” said Mrs. Eliot. “Is the rest of it as funny as the title?”
Muriel's color appeared to be in no danger of bleaching, and it grew still higher with annoyance as she answered: “Precisely! The rest of it is precisely as 'funny' as the title.”
“Do you go on and explain how poor Queen Victoria got her delusion?”
“Mamma!” the girl exclaimed angrily. “There isn't a word about Queen Victoria in my paper, and you know there isn't!”
“Well, then, what is in it?”
“If you care to know, I attack the whole institution of marriage. Marriage is purely a device of the wretched capitalistic system to secure the inheritance of private property to so-called legitimate offspring.”
“Good gracious!”
“That's all it is,” Muriel declared. “Yet your generation accepted it without question.”
“Well,” her mother returned mildly, “wasn't it rather a good thing for your generation that we did? Otherwise—” Here she paused, however, then inquired: “What do you propose to do about marriage, you new-generationers?”
“For my part,” her daughter replied, “I believe that the whole institution ought to be done away with. I do not intend to marry, myself, Mamma.”
“I'm very glad to hear it. Your father and I feel it's a great privilege to have you with us. Lately we'd been getting a notion, though—”
“What notion?” Muriel asked rather sharply, as her mother hesitated.
“Why, of course we've noticed that young Renfrew Mears doesn't seem to exhibit any great opposition to the institution of marriage, and your father and I have been thinking that just possibly Renfrew might be making some progress toward getting you to share his views.”
“What nonsense!”
“Is it?” Mrs. Eliot laughed apologetically. “Well, of course we hope so, because we'd rather keep you ourselves. We only thought that if there should be anyone—”
“There isn't!” Muriel interrupted, with emphasis.
“No. But if there ever were—well, of course nobody can live across the street from you all his life and keep you from knowing pretty much all there is to know about him; so we're sure Renfrew is a good young man.”
“No doubt,” Muriel said wearily, “—according to the Victorian standards.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Eliot assented. “And his Victorian grandfather, old Ebenezer Mears, was very nice about Renfrew in his will. What is it you don't like about him, Muriel?”
“That young man is an outsider,” the daughter replied coldly. “He and I have absolutely nothing in common.”
“What! Why, you've lived all your lives in the same neighborhood; you have the same friends, the same—”
“I have not one single thought,” Muriel interrupted, “not one, that I could share with him, not one that he could even understand.”
“What about his thoughts? Can't he share his with you?”
“That's the trouble,” said Muriel. “He knows none of mine, but I know all of his, and they bore me.”
“Why?” Mrs. Eliot inquired, and added with some sharpness: “Because they're Victorian?”
“Because what few ideas he has are utterly commonplace and antiquated. We young people are going to build up a new world, Mamma: we don't think your generation did very well with the old one, and we decline to accept it. We've taken it from your hands and we're going to remodel it to suit ourselves. Renfrew Mears hasn't any part in the work, and when I talk about it, he hasn't the faintest idea of what I mean.”
Illustration: He stood close by, addressing himself heatedly to delighted auditors. “I think they ought to be put a stop to!” he declared. “What have you been doing to the poor thing, Muriel?” Eleanor inquired.
“Neither have I, her mother said promptly. “Have you?”
At this, Muriel looked both plaintive and resentful. “In the course of a discussion,” she said, “I fail to see why anyone should resort to insult! And if you think that's the way to make me like Renfrew Mears any better—” But here she suddenly gulped and turned away, because her sense of injury had naturally expanded within her almost unbearably as she heard herself defining her mother's question as an “insult.” That is to say, having declared herself insulted, she began really to feel insulted; for thus in controversy do we frequently inflate our own emotions
“Oh,” she cried, “I simply can't stand him!” And she added: “I think he's the very stupidest person I ever knew in my whole life, and if you're going to talk any more to me about him, I merely ask to be excused!”
Her notable eyes threatened too moist a brilliancy, and Mrs. Eliot in haste made an unfortunate appeal. “Please don't be so absurd, child. Don't get so upset over nothing.”
“Absurd!” Muriel cried. “I'm 'absurd'? I believe if you will excuse me, Mamma, I'll take your advice and go out for a walk. It's not always too pleasant at home!”
She had already thrown open the door of the closet where she kept her hats, and her extended hand brought forth a simple but expensive structure of rough brown straw so readily that she must have selected it in her mind's eye during the emotional exchanges with her mother. She placed it upon her graceful head, swallowing reproachfully as she did so, and not even going near a mirror, the which abstention she offered as a final proof of the depth of her injury. Then, not glancing back, she hurried silently from the room, leaving Mrs. Eliot to the meditations of a parent irretrievably convicted of persecution.
Pausing before the mirror in the hall downstairs only long enough just to touch her brown hat and brown hair, Muriel let the front door close behind her, not with a crash, but with a moderated sound sufficient to add something to the remorse upstairs, and went out into the afternoon shade and sunshine.
She had little more than passed through the gate, when a young man of hopeful aspect came hurrying from the house across the street; he must have been watching for her, so simultaneous was his sally.
That the sartorial harmonies might not be lacking, his dress betokened a hopefulness in keeping with his countenance. The shoes were unflecked white; so were the trousers; a coat of lively gray sprouted cornflowers at the left lapel; and the sprightliness of scarf and hat-ribbon were hard to match. Yet the hopeful young man was not confident; for there was a breath of the plaintive upon his brightness, and his hope was of kind that knows with what fatal readiness things go wrong. Although he smiled and his pleasing complexion was far from pallor, his eyebrows were slightly distrustful of destiny
“Well, I declare!” he said, as he crossed to join the resentful lady. “I just happened to be coming outdoors too. You wouldn't mind if I went along with you a little way, would you?” Then, as he took note of her exceptional color and brooding gaze, he added nervously: “Or—or would you?”
“Oh, I don't know,” she returned gloomily. “I suppose you can come along a little way if you have to.”
Naturally this left him in some doubt, but he decided to take it at the best interpretation; so he said: “Well—well, thanks. I guess I will, then.” And as she made no response, in silence, he ventured to remark, as in explanation of his reason for accepting so dubious a permission: “It's such a nice day.”
“Is it?”
He looked at her in surprise. “Don't you think it's a Muriel?”
“My idea of 'a nice day,'” she said, “is a day when something pleasant happens.”
Oh, I see,” he responded, somewhat faintly. “I expect you mean nothing pleasant has happened to you today, so far.” Then, with a flickering of his hopefulness, which already was near disappearance, he said: “Well, I hope nothing exactly unpleasant has happened to you, either.”
“Do you?” She laughed with a discouraging brevity. “I've been having a discussion with my mother!”
“Oh, is that all?” he said, and at once showed the most complete relief. “I was afraid you meant my happening to come out just when you did and joining you. I'm glad it wasn't that.”
She seemed not to hear him, but walked on, keeping her eyes steadily forward. “The discussion wasn't very pleasant,” she informed him.
“I'm sorry.”
“It was about you,” she said abruptly.
What!”
“Oh, yes.”
Young Mr. Mears was astonished, but his hopefulness, before expiring, prevailed for a final moment.
“I'm afraid your mother doesn't like me very much,” he said. “I'm sorry she—”
“Oh, no,” Muriel interrupted quietly. “It was she who was on your side.”
“She was?” Then, as he made an obvious deduction, the young man found himself unable to offer any comment more eloquent than “Oh, my!” However, he said it twice, and the dismalness of his voice expressed his feeling well enough.
“You don't seem to be very appreciative.” Muriel observed coldly. “You don't appear to value my mother's opinion of you.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” he returned, with a feebleness of emphasis almost painfully contradictory of what he said. “I do, indeed. I value your mother's good opinion very highly, indeed. But—but—”
“But what?”
“But—” Again he hesitated.
“But what?”
“Well—” he said. “But—well, see here!”
For an instant she relaxed so far as to let him see more than her profile, and gave him a disapproving look from both eyes. “You seem to want to say something, Renfrew. Aren't you able to express yourself at all?”
“Yes, I am,” he returned. “What I mean is, I was wondering—well, if your mother was standing up for me, well, then—”
“Well, then, what?”
“Well, were there any other people around?” he inquired. “Or were just you and your mother having this discussion all by yourselves?”
“All by ourselves,” Muriel replied distinctly. “Just she and I.”
“Oh, my!” Renfrew said. “Oh, my!”
“Well, what?”
“Well, I'm afraid it looks as if—as if—”
“Yes, it does,” said Muriel. “If you care for details, she seemed to feel that you were an eminently respectable character.”
“And you didn't?” he cried. “You didn't even think I was respectable, Muriel?”
“Oh, yes, I did!”
“Well, then, if you agreed with her
“I didn't say I agreed with her, Renfrew. The respectable is just what I happen to deplore.”
“You do? You'd rather I shouldn't be respectable?”
“Oh, dear!” she sighed. “I hate respectability—Victorian respectability! Victorian smugness!”
“I don't seem to follow you.” Renfrew said pathetically. “Is it something or other you've been reading lately, Muriel?”
It was indeed; but this direct and naïve arrival at the fact was far from soothing her. “Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “You talk just like Mamma! Don't you suppose there are some people on earth who do their own thinking?”
“Oh, I know you do,” he assured her hastily. “I know you always think for yourself, Muriel. I understand all about that, of course.”
“You don't do anything of the kind!”
“I don't?”
“No!” she said. “That's one of the things I told my mother. You don't understand anything whatever about me.”
“You mean that's what you told your mother, Muriel? Just for argument, you mean?”
“I told her,” Muriel said deliberately, “I told her that you haven't even the faintest idea of one single thought of mine. while I know all about every thought you ever had, or could have, in your whole life!”
“You do?” he asked, and with a remarkable inspiration inquired further: “Was that what you were telling her you didn't like about me, Muriel? Did you say you couldn't put up with me much because I'm so respectable and you know everything I think, and I don't know anything you think?”
“I suppose so,” she said. “Something like that.”
“And do you think it's so?”
“Well, aren't you respectable?”
“I meant more particularly,” he said, “are you really sure you know everything I think?”
“Goodness, yes!”
“Well, for instance, Muriel,” he said in a rather feebly argumentative tone, “about what?”
“If you care for an instance: about marriage. You take the Victorian attitude; you believe in it as an institution; you believe in all the old institutions, Renfrew. You've simply accepted life as your parents and teachers taught it to you. You don't really belong to the new generation at all.”
“I see what you mean,” he said meekly
“No, you don't. You merely say so to agree with me, but you don't really see, Renfrew.”
“Why, don't I?”
“You couldn't!” she replied, with a cruelty natural enough under the circumstances; for she was deeply offended with her mother, and her mother had been Renfrew's champion. Somewhat as a favored pupil is tormented after school as a proxy for the inaccessible teacher, Renfrew was harried now; and Muriel had already constructed in her mind a fragment of drama that urged her on with the work. The parents of the heroine of this fragment meant to force upon her an undesirable person, incapable of any thought or act that could interest or surprise her, and to drag her down to that person's level by means of the discredited institution of marriage. Such also was the purpose of that person himself. Naturally, she was not the less inclined to see him suffer on that account, and she gave herself this consolation from time to time, as they walked along, though most of her observation of him was with the edge of her eye, in profile.
HIS color had become as high as hers, his expression that of one who bears almost as much as he will; but when he spoke, he seemed to be (vocally, at least) still placative and humble.
“I suppose I couldn't understand,” he said. “Probably you're right, Muriel, and I don't belong to what you call the new generation, and wouldn't know how to understand 'em if I tried. It's kind of funny, though.”
“What is?”
“Why, when I'm at a dance, or out at the Country Club, or anywhere where they are,—I mean the ones you and I grew up with,—why, they don't seem so terribly mysterious.”
“I should think not! I don't mean those, Renfrew!”
“Don't you? Who do you mean?”
“I mean the ones that think.”
“Well, which ones?” he insisted mildly. “For instance, take the other girls—”
“I certainly don't mean any of them!”
“Well, the other young men—”
“Nor any of them!”
“Well, then,” he said reasonably, “who do you mean, Muriel?”
“I mean all those over the country who are doing the real thinking and leading.”
“But you don't know any like that in this town? I mean, except you?”
“Never mind,” she said.
“I only meant if you're the only one around here, why, how many do you suppose there are in the other—”
“Never mind!” she repeated, more sharply.
“All right,” he returned. And yet if she had looked at him then (as she did not), she would have seen upon his face, for an instant, the expression of one who makes a desperate resolution. However, this external symptom passed at once, leaving the usual smooth surface; and he said, as submissively as before: “I guess I got off the subject. Anyhow, I was really thinking about what you said about marriage.” And without altering his tone he continued, as by a casual afterthought: “I think all such things ought to be put a stop to, myself.”
“All what things?”
“Why, Muriel!” he exclaimed, with the air of coming upon a bright thought. “What makes you ask me that? If you know everything I think, why would you ever have to ask me a question?”
THIS drew from her a sigh lamenting that she need be at the pains to explain so simple a matter. “I have to ask you questions because you express your thoughts so vaguely that often no one can be sure what you're trying to say. Just then you mentioned marriage and went on to say that you thought 'all such things ought to be put a stop to.' But since you believe in marriage—”
He interrupted her. “What makes you say that, Muriel? What makes you think I believe in marriage?”
“What makes me?” she echoed, and laughed disdainfully. “When you proposed to me only last week!”
“I did?” he said, wonderingly. “It's funny I don't remember it.”
“Yes, it would be!” she agreed.
“I mean, you must have misunderstood me.”
“No doubt!”
“But Muriel,” he protested, “a proposal is usually understood to mean when a man asks a girl to marry him.”
“Didn't you ask me to marry you?”
“I certainly didn't.”
“What!”
“I didn't say a single word about any such thing,” he said firmly, “—not about my marrying you or your marrying me, that is. I don't know how you ever got such an idea.”
At this she turned her head to observe him with a sudden intensity. “You deliberately deny that you proposed to me?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I only meant I didn't propose anything like our getting married.”
“Then what was it you did propose?”
“Well—I just thought—” He hesitated. “I only—I only thought—”
“Go on!” she said dangerously. “If you claim that you weren't proposing marriage to me, what were you proposing?”
“Why, I wouldn't propose getting married. Not to anybody!” he exclaimed. “Didn't I just tell you I think it ought to be put a stop to? For instance, I've got a theory—”
“I don't care to hear any of your theories,” she informed him sternly. “What was it you proposed to me?”
“Why, I didn't really propose anything to you,” he replied, with increasing embarrassment. “If—if you'll just remember our—our conversation, Muriel—why, you'll see I never said anything positive, right out, at all. I—I just thought maybe you'd be willing to kind of be engaged to me, or something.”
“What!”
“That was all,” he said. “I only meant we could be engaged or something. You don't have to get married just because you're engaged or anything like that, of course. Why, probably four or five times as many people get engaged as get married, and of course they're right about it, and there are good reasons for it. You take people that are engaged or anything like that, well, just look how much happier they look than married people! And besides, anybody can tell that engaged people think twice as much of each other as married people do. Why, anybody that's got any sense at all would like to be engaged, or something, but when it comes right down to marrying,” he concluded, “why, that's a mighty different question. Myself, I believe it ought to be put a stop to!”
Miss Eliot halted abruptly and faced him. “Are you in earnest?” she inquired. “Do you deliberately state that you didn't mean you want to marry me?”
“But, Muriel, how could I have wanted to go as far as that when I believe, myself, it ought to be put a sto—”
“Are you crazy?”
“Why, no. I only—”
But she cut him short. “Then, if you please, I'll ask you to go home.”
“Why, I just left there.”
“Go anywhere!” she said fiercely. “Anywhere in the world except near me!”
Upon that, she turned sharply about, and with her head high and her expression destructive, went hurrying back to her own gate. Passing within its protection, she swept it to a violent closure behind her, and at the same moment, from between compressed lips, seemed to address it injuriously. “Idiot!” she said.
Indoors, she avoided contact with her mother, and having reached her own room, locked the door and repeated to that quiet and pleasant apartment the word that she had just hurled at the gate. “Idiot! Idiot!” she said. Then she tossed her brown hat on the bed, and apparently called either the hat, or the bed, or both, the same thing; after which she threw herself upon a blue lounge and spoke in a like manner to the ceiling.
“I FIND You Everywhere,” she had written, in a poem produced at seventeen, before her discovery of free verse struck from her the shackles of rhyme.
I find You everywhere,
In ev'rything: in stars
And in the sea, the sky, the air,
The clouds, the earth—oh, even in the cars
That on the shining rails go speeding there!
The unexpected “theory” of young Mr. Mears had at least won him a ubiquity rivaling that of her loved “You” of the poem; for Muriel found him everywhere and in everything that day. Even after sunset, as she paced up and down the yard in the dusk, alone, she was still naming things “Idiot!” for Renfrew.
Although her windows offered of his dwelling-place a view that usually included too many views of Renfrew himself, a fortnight now passed during which the insulting young man remained invisible to her. It might be supposed that Muriel did not so much as glance in the direction of the house opposite; but a consuming indignation is so like a consuming fondness that she looked at it perhaps even oftener than if she had been a victim of the latter. No one was permitted to be a witness of these glances, however, and when she went outdoors by daylight, there was not a hint of such a thing; but from the shadowy interior of her room her eyes searched with a hot fire the house and yard across the street, while her favorite definition was heartily breathed in that direction. Members of Renfrew's family were unconscious recipients of both the fiery glance and the definition, as they went in and out or lounged in the pleasant yard; but the theorist himself, Muriel decided, must either have left town or contracted the habit of using his alley gate and back door. Yet she doubted his possessing intelligence enough to be that much ashamed of himself.
THEN, one day at lunch, she had sudden news of him from her father. “Has young Renfrew Mears been having any trouble with his face?” he inquired, addressing his daughter.
“'Trouble with his face'?” she repeated, frowning. “Not more than he inherited from his parents, I suppose.”
Mr. Eliot, an absent-minded man, looked rather surprised. “Why, I declare! Haven't you noticed his face Muriel?”
“Never with any pleasure,” she returned. “Not at all, lately.”
“Why, I declare!” her father said, his surprise increasing. “I thought he was usually over here about three or four times a day! And you haven't seen his face at all lately? Well, I declare!”
Muriel offered no vocal response, though the coldness of her silence conveyed the impression that she was a person of refinement, not pleased by the introduction of such a topic as this face her father appeared to find so interesting. Mrs. Eliot, on the contrary, showed a friendly anxiety. “I hope the poor boy hasn't been in an accident,” she said. “Was it bandaged?”
“No, not at all,” Mr. Eliot replied. “But I rather think it ought to be. A bandage would certainly look a great deal better.”
“It isn't anything serious, is it?”
“Yes, I rather believe it is,” he returned judicially. “I think it must be considered so. At least, from the point of view of appearance I think I'd call it pretty serious.”
“But what is it? Has he broken out with something?”
“Well, that describes it fairly well,” said Mr. Eliot. “He's raising a beard.”
At this Mrs. Eliot uttered an exclamation of relief. “Oh, is that all!” she added.
“You wouldn't say so,” her husband informed her, shaking his head, “not if you could see it. The greater part of it is very unsuccessful.”
“Good gracious! What in the world is he doing such a thing for?”
“I didn't inquire,” her husband said. “It's one of those questions people who don't want their feelings hurt learn not to ask.”
“Where did you see him?”
“Downtown,” said Mr. Eliot. “He was walking about quite openly.”
“Mercy! Is it as bad as that?”
“Worse than anyone could tell you,” he said. “You'd have to see it.”
“But what in the world is he doing it for?”
“You've already asked me,” her husband reminded her. “But it's a question that's kept haunting me too, ever since I saw him. It struck me that no one could deliberately do such a thing except for some unavoidable medicinal reason, so to speak. That's why I asked Muriel if she knew of any trouble he'd been having with his face; and yet, when I looked at him, it didn't seem as if that could be the reason. There were plenty of transparent places where I could see that his complexion hadn't a blemish on it.”
“How terrible!”
“No,” said Mr. Eliot thoughtfully. “It doesn't inspire terror exactly. Wonder—a kind of sympathizing wonder—is what you feel. I should call it a wonderful effort.”
Mrs. Eliot glanced at her daughter, then meditated for a moment, and said cheerfully: “I suppose they all have to go through a transition period, but come out very nicely afterward.”
“You are now referring to young men,” her husband inquired, “or to whiskers in general?”
“Yes,” she said. “Don't they usually look all right by the time they're completed?”
“When they can be, no doubt they do, sometimes—to those that like them.” Having thus responded, not without some rather ominous implications, Mr. Eliot accepted a cup of black coffee, applied the flame of a small silver dragon to the end of his cigar, and turned upon Muriel the solemn gaze of a father settling down in perfect bodily comfort to the bedevilment of his offspring. “I was going to suggest, Muriel,” he said, “that you somehow get it hinted to him that your taste has changed.”
“I'm afraid you don't always make your meaning quite clear,” his daughter returned coldly, not condescending to humor his mood, which she easily perceived to be a frivolous one. “I believe we may as well change the subject.”
“Why, no,” he said. “If I'm so foggy that you don't understand the subject of my discourse, how do you know that you wish to change it? For the sake of greater lucidity I'll explain that Renfrew's attempted beard gave me the idea you might have been speaking admiringly to him of King George, or of Marx, or possibly of Moses, or even Grand Admiral von Tirpitz—or could it have been Henri of Navarre, or François Premier, or perhaps Lord Salisbury, or Mr. Secretary Hughes? George Washington, Cromwell and Julius Cæsar were shaven men, but on the other hand Abraham, Homer, Charlemagne and Michelangelo are understood to have been whiskered. This early part of the twentieth century is provincial in time, which is really as stupid as being provincial geographically: the nineteen-twenties are too local, so to speak, to recognize that many of the very greatest figures have been bearded; and it takes a heroic spark in so young a man as Renfrew Mears to imitate them in the teeth of our modern populace. Knowing him well, my reason immediately makes me conclude that any such spark must have been implanted from without.
“The rest of the deduction,” pursue: Mr. Eliot, “is childishly simple for any schoolboy, as people say who don't know schoolboys. You, my daughter, are the most probable implanter of sparks within that bosom, I seem to gather, and therefore I take it that about two or perhaps three weeks ago you spoke to him of the admirableness of some bearded magnifico, or perhaps it was only of the admirableness of beards. He has kept out of your sight, I go on to deduce, until he can bring you, not the flecked and feeble bud, but the full flower in blossom. On the other hand, a moment's startled observation of the growth has convinced me that his ever attaining so far is a matter of the gravest doubt. On that account I suggested your getting word to him that you don't care for rococo architecture as much as you thought you did—in a word, that your taste in hirsutics has changed. Then the poor young thing might take heart to shave, and come over here once more. Does this make the matter any clearer?”
“Yes, thank you,” Muriel said with no increase of geniality. “Now may we change the subject?”
“Yes. Let us now turn to the discussion of Renfrew's emotion when he receives your liberating message. Will he feel just the joy of a simple heart, or will he know a shade of regret for—”
“Excuse me!” Muriel interrupted, rising abruptly. “I'm not likely to send Mr. Mears any message.” And with a stony dignity she walked out of the room, leaving her father to the reproaches of his wife for not knowing when to display a little tact.
MURIEL'S stony dignity was of the kind that has a fire smoldering within the stone; the surface is somewhat reddened with the heat of it. So, when she came out of her gate, a little before five o'clock that afternoon, a casual passer-by might have bephrased her as a “blushing young divinity;” but indeed her blush had no divinity, being on the contrary inspired by the Furies. For although the windows across the way gave no sign of life, yet it seemed hatefully possible that there was a rat behind the arras; the interstices of the lace curtains were ample for spy-holes.
Had there been such a spying eye as she suspected, she was worth the work, it may be said—her appearance being far beyond what mere self-respect demands of a girl who is going to a garden party She had been deliberately at the pains to make herself beautiful, putting more time and mind upon her garnitures than would popularly be thought consistent in an Intellectual. Briefly, she was in the most exquisite and highest state of afternoon toilet possible, and why should any lady get herself into such a state except to be a treat to the eye? Of course the answer is that too much treating may be cruel; moreover there can be no doubt about the identity of the person whom she desired to punish; and yet, with the suspicion that he might be looking at her she became the more furious!
Like almost all anger, this was anger thrown away, for she was spied upon by no one. The scene of the festival whither she was bound lay not far beyond the next corner; and even at a little distance from the place she heard sounds betokening a liveliness unusual in so mild a gathering as she expected. A hedge intervened, but when she had passed round it and entered the garden, the first figure to meet her eye was that of young Mr Mears.
TO see him at once, singling him out from the two score or so of young people in the garden, was inevitable; for he stood among them much as a star of the theater stands among his company centralized to the point of highest conspicuousness by the general action and grouping. The emphasis thus placed upon him was the more remarkable for being a feature of Renfrew's première, to speak, as a focus of social attention Characteristically, he had always been a background figure, “correct” and a little timid, one of those indistinguishable hoverers at a tea, ready to murmur laughter as an instantaneous token of geniality when so little as the weather was mentioned. But today proved his timidity to be of the type that upon occasion more than merely reversing itself, turns completely inside out, exposing strange things from an unsuspected interior.
Profuse as had been Mr. Eliot's verbosity at lunch, it had not quite prepared Muriel for what she now saw actually before her. The hair upon Renfrew's head was of a lustrous brown, charmingly polished with golden lights, and no one could have anticipated the fitful auburn that had made its appearance upon his well-shaped cheeks and chin. An admirer might have called it the red badge of courage, for although the people to whom it was now being exhibited were all of a neighborly and everyday familiarity with Renfrew, as with one another, they were young and correspondingly unsympathetic. A high degree of must unquestionably be allowed him.
“Howdado!” the young hostess said, when Muriel greeted her. “You've noticed him, haven't you? I mean Renfrew Mears. What on earth's come over him?”
“I don't know.”
“Well, if you don't, nobody does! Of course everybody thinks you told him you admired somebody with a beard, Muriel. Didn't you?”
“I did not.”
“Well, it's really nothing for you to get up-stage over,” the girl returned “Of course everybody's sure you're responsible somehow. Honestly, what did you—”
“I have nothing whatever to do with him or his affairs.”
“No? Well, the only other explanation is that you've driven him about crazy: he certainly talks like it. Just listen to him!”
To listen to Renfrew just then was unavoidable, in fact. He stood close by, addressing himself rather heatedly to a group of attentive and delighted auditors. “I never in my life said anything of the kind!” he declared. “I always did feel about such things the way I do now. I think they ought to be put a stop to!”
THE response was one of those choruses of laughter not infrequently heard upon school-grounds when a taunting circle gathers round some unfortunate child. “You can laugh!” Renfrew retorted hotly. “But you better look out!” With that, he turned away, went to join another group, and apparently explained a grievance. He was received with hypocritical sympathy, which shifted to the frankest mockery only a moment later. “I know what I'm talking about!” he could be heard protesting. “I know from my own thinking about it, and it ought to be put a stop to!”
The haughty Muriel walked to the other end of the garden, as far from the merrymakers surrounding Renfrew as the limits of the place permitted; but she found it impossible to remove herself from the orbit of his new celebrity. The most devoted of her girl-friends, Eleanor Middleton, following to join her, could speak of nothing else.
“What have you been doing to the poor thing, Muriel?” Eleanor inquired.
“What 'poor thing?'”
“Muriel!” the friend exclaimed. “Don't be such a hypocrite! What's the use with me? Besides, everybody else knows it as well as I do; the poor thing couldn't break out this way unless it was something about you. Look at that gang around him now; they're giggling at him, but they're all looking at you!” And she added, in a frank way: “For that matter, so's everybody else!”
“Let them look!”
“But aren't you going to tell just me, Muriel,” the friend begged.
“Tell you what?”
“What you've been doing to him.”
“Eleanor Middleton,” said Muriel, “will you be kind enough never in your life to speak to me again of that Clown!”
“Oh!” said Miss Middleton.
“I mean it!”
“Yes, but don't you want to hear—”
“No, I don't!”
“I mean,” Miss Middleton insisted, “I mean he's saying things as peculiar as his face looks. I wont ask you to tell me anything; I just wanted to know if you wouldn't like to hear what he's been talking about.”
“I asked you never in your life to—”
“Oh, yes,” Miss Middleton returned. “Only he says he's got a theory—at least he calls it a theory—I thought you might want to know what—”
“I do know his 'theory,' thanks!”
“A right,” her friend acquiesced good-naturedly. “I only meant that since everybody thinks you're responsible, of course, for whatever he thinks and does—”
“That's enough I said!”
“Oh, well,” the other girl murmured, and relapsed into a silence somewhat moody, while the corresponding silence of Muriel Eliot might be understated as a seething one. it was true that the group about Renfrew looked curiously at her; and as Miss Middleton had pointed out, others, too, glanced at her from time to time with interested and covertly mirthful eyes, so that Muriel began to find her position intolerable.
The giggling evoked by Renfrew's oratory grew louder; he seemed to approach the passionate, and even at the other end of the garden could be heard declaiming: “I tell you it ought to be put a stop to!”
“Oh!” Muriel exclaimed in a low voice. “I wont stay here!”
But as she moved to depart, Miss Middleton followed hastily. “Muriel! Don't do that!”
“No, I'll go, Eleanor! I wont stay another instant in such a silly place!”
“If you go home when you've really just got here, they will have something to talk about!”
“Why?”
“They'll think you're upset about Renfrew.”
“I? About that Clown!”
“They couldn't help believing it if you trot off home like this.”
Muriel paused in her movement toward the street, her state of mind partaking visibly of a desperate indecision. “I wont stand it,” she said. “I wont!”
“If I were you, dear,” the sympathetic Miss Middleton suggested, “I'd act just as if I didn't notice anything. I'd behave as if nothing at all were happening.”
“Go tell that Clown to come here to me!” said Muriel
“What? Right before everybody?”
“What difference does that make now? Go tell him!”
The friendly Eleanor hesitated, evidently of half a mind to remonstrate against the supreme conspicuousness of such a course. But even a devoted friend may not always resist the temptation to become an important actor in a dramatic climax,—there are not many tests of friendship more severe than this,—and Miss Middleton's hesitation was brief, for within her a universal human yearning had been roused. She said, “All right!” and went.
A FEW moments later an instinctive prophecy of hers was amply fulfilled: she became for the time one of the three most interesting persons at the party, and the very focus of low-voiced inquiry, as Renfrew somewhat nervously crossed the garden to the agitated lady who had summoned him.
“How—how are you, Muriel?” he said. “I—I haven't seen you for several days. Are you all well in your family?”
She looked at him, but not reassuringly, and forbore to reply; whereupon he tanned himself with his hat, remarking placatively: “It's kind of warm this afternoon. Well, we're all well over at our house.”
At this, her voice became just audible in embittered laughter, and he looked apprehensive. “Eleanor Middleton said you wanted to tell me something or other, Muriel.”
“Yes,” she said. “I'm surprised to hear that your family are in good health, though!”
“You are?” he inquired. “Why shouldn't they be?”
“They have to live in the same house with you,” she explained.
“Oh, my!” he said, dismayed. “Are you angry with me about something?”
“How dare you!” she said. “Yes, how dare you come here or anywhere else looking like that?”
“I don't see what you mean,” he said with a brazenness that took her breath. “Do you mean I look different from usual, some way or other?”
“Oh!” she cried, and the exclamation seemed to enlighten him.
“Oh, you mean about my face?” he said. “Well, I don't need to tell you my idea about that.”
“Your 'idea'!” she said scornfully. “What idea could anybody have for doing such a thing?”
“Why, you know, of course,” he answered confidently. “You know, Muriel.”
“I don't! How could I know anything as idiotic as that? And how dare you go about telling people you have a 'theory' that marriage 'ought to be put a stop to'?”
“Well, if I did anything like that, of course I wouldn't have to explain it to you, Muriel.”
“You wouldn't? I think you'd better!” she cried. “It's a pretty position for a girl to be in, isn't it? Everybody's thought for years that you've been wanting to marry me—and you go about telling them you only believe in engagements—good heavens!—as you had the horrible candor to explain to me! And to make things pleasanter for me, you make yourself look like this! I suppose so that everybody'll believe you're trying to discourage me from even getting engaged to you!”
“But I haven't been—”
“Did you tell them,” she interrupted, “did you tell them that you had explained your 'theory' to me?”
“Muriel! I never said a word about any such theory to anybody except you.”
“What!” she cried. “Why, you've been doing it all afternoon! I've heard you, myself, all over the place bleating: 'It ought to be put a stop to!' How dare you deny it?”
“But that wasn't about marriage, Muriel. What I've been explaining to 'em this afternoon, why, that's been about a totally different theory of mine. This one isn't against marriage, Muriel.”
“No?” she said incredulously. “What is it 'against'?”
“I was reading an article not long ago,” he explained. “It said everybody had all been getting too artificial or something for the last three or four hundred years, and we ought to be more kind of natural about everything. So I got an idea. For instance, people that just used water to wash in were probably a lot more natural and had fewer diseases, and they kept cleaner, too. I began to think we oughtn't to use so much soap. That's all I was talking about, Muriel. I wasn't telling 'em marriage ought to be put a stop to, but too much soap.”
“What!” she cried. “You expect me to believe such a story as that?'
“Well, it's so,” he returned. “That's why I thought it would be sort of consistent if I didn't use it much, so it seemed I'd better let my face be the way it would naturally. You believe me, don't you, Muriel?”
“Why, it's horrible!” she said.
“You mean me?” he inquired meekly. “Or do you only mean the way I look?”
“I mean everything about you!” she said fiercely. “Why, you—you aren't respectable!”
HE had been standing before her much as a schoolboy, embarrassed under reproof, stands before a severe teacher; but upon this outburst of denunciation he brightened amazingly—certainly to the amazement of her who played the angered teacher. “Well, now you like me, don't you?” he said.
“'Like you'!” she cried. “Don't you know that when you behave like this everybody in town thinks I'm responsible?”
“Well, you are,” he responded with perfect simplicity.
She uttered a faint outcry. “I'm responsible for your insulting me as you did the other day? I'm responsible for your 'theory' about—soap? I'm responsible for the state of your—your face?”
“Why, of course,” he answered in a gentle voice. “You know all my ideas about everything, so that nothing I do could be a surprise to you. Well, then, if I had an idea of doing anything that would bother you, why, you'd tell me beforehand, so I wouldn't do it. So you know why I—”
“Quit saying 'You know' to me!” she cried. “I don't know anything about you, and I don't want to! You seem to forget how you insulted me the other day!”
“Why, Muriel!” he exclaimed. “I just wanted to be one of the new generation. You're always so against everything, I wanted to be against things too. And if people say you're responsible for whatever I do, why, you know they're right! I've been this way ever since you came home from college.”
She stared at him, then said abruptly:
“Go home!”
“Wh-what?” he stammered.
“I said 'Go home'!” she repeated angrily. “Go home and don't dare to come over to see me this evening after dinner until you've made yourself respectable!”
It was then that the garden-party audience stopped whispering and became open-mouthed, stricken with a complete and sudden mystification. Renfrew was tall, and above the hedge there was a fine view of his triumphant smile, merged in auburn fluff, as he went gayly down the street.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1946, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 78 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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