The Gay Cockade | Page 2

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 kind of bait which would lure the fine souls whose presence gave to her hospitality the stamp of exclusiveness.
They had a small car, and it was when Jimmie motored up to Washington that we saw him. He had a fashion of taking us out to lunch, two at a time. When he asked me, he usually asked Duncan Street. Duncan and I have worked side by side for twenty-five years. There