The Gay Cockade | Page 2

to think of Jimmie happy in his old house. But
I never really expected to see it. I had reached the point of expecting
nothing except the day's work, my dinner at the end, a night's sleep, and
the same thing over again in the morning.
Yet Jimmie got all of us down, not long after he was married, to what
he called a housewarming. He had inherited a few pleasant acres in
Virginia, and the house was two hundred years old. He had never lived
in it until he came with Elise. It was in rather shocking condition, but
Elise had managed to make it habitable by getting it scrubbed very
clean, and by taking out everything that was not in keeping with the
oldness and quaintness. The resulting effect was bare but beautiful.
There were a great many books, a few oil-portraits, mahogany
sideboards and tables and four-poster beds, candles in sconces and in
branched candlesticks. They were married in April, and when we went
down in June poppies were blowing in the wide grass spaces, and
honeysuckle rioting over the low stone walls. I think we all felt as if we
had passed through purgatory and had entered heaven. I know I did,
because this was the kind of thing of which I had dreamed, and there
had been a time when I, too, had wanted to write.
The room in which Jimmie wrote was in a little detached house, which
had once been the office of his doctor grandfather. He had his
typewriter out there, and a big desk, and from the window in front of
his desk he could look out on green slopes and the distant blue of
mountain ridges.
We envied him and told him so.
"Well, I don't know," Jimmie said. "Of course I'll get a lot of work done.
But I'll miss your darling old heads bending over the other desks."
"You couldn't work, Jimmie," Elise reminded him, "with other people
in the room."

"Perhaps not. Did I tell you old dears that I am going to write a play?"
That was, it seems, what Elise had had in mind for him from the
beginning--a great play!
"She wouldn't even, have a honeymoon"--Jimmie's arm was around her;
"she brought me here, and got this room ready the first thing."
"Well, he mustn't be wasting time," said Elise, "must he? Jimmie's
rather wonderful, isn't he?"
They seemed a pair of babies as they stood there together. Elise had on
a childish one-piece pink frock, with sleeves above the elbow, and an
organdie sash. Yet, intuitively, the truth came to me--she was ages
older than Jimmie in spite of her twenty years to his twenty-four. Here
was no Juliet, flaming to the moon--no mistress whose steed would
gallop by wind-swept roads to midnight trysts. Here was, rather, the
cool blood that had sacrificed a honeymoon--_and, oh, to honeymoon
with Jimmie Harding_!--for the sake of an ambitious future.
She was telling us about it "We can always have a honeymoon, Jimmie
and I. Some day, when he is famous, we'll have it. But now we must
not."
"I picked out the place"--Jimmie was eager--"a dip in the hills, and big
pines--And then Elise wouldn't."
We went in to lunch after that. The table was lovely and the food
delicious. There was batter-bread, I remember, and an omelette, and
peas from the garden.
Duncan Street and I talked all the way home of Jimmie and his wife.
He didn't agree with me in the least about Elise. "She'll be the making
of him. Such wives always are."
But I held that he would lose something,--that he would not be the
same Jimmie.

* * * * *
Jimmie wrote plays and plays. In between he wrote pot-boiling books.
The pot-boilers were needed, because none of his plays were accepted.
He used to stop in our office and joke about it.
"If it wasn't for Elise's faith in me, Miss Standish, I should think myself
a poor stick. Of course, I can make money enough with my books and
short stuff to keep things going, but it isn't just money that either of us
is after."
Except when Jimmie came into the office we saw very little of him.
Elise gathered about her the men and women who would count in
Jimmie's future. The week-ends in the still old house drew not a few
famous folk who loathed the commonplaceness of convivial
atmospheres. Elise had old-fashioned flowers in her garden, delectable
food, a library of old books. It was a heavenly change for those who
were tired of cocktail parties, bridge-madness, illicit love-making. I
could never be quite sure whether Elise really loved dignified living for
its own sake, or whether she was sufficiently discriminating to
recognize the