in the persistent drizzle of a paris winter morning susy lansingwalked back alone from the school at which she had justdeposited the four eldest fulmers to the little house in passywhere, for the last two months, she had been living with them.
she had on ready-made boots, an old waterproof and a last year'shat; but none of these facts disturbed her, though she took noparticular pride in them. the truth was that she was too busyto think much about them. since she had assumed the charge ofthe fulmer children, in the absence of both their parents initaly, she had had to pass through such an arduousapprenticeship of motherhood that every moment of her wakinghours was packed with things to do at once, and other things toremember to do later. there were only five fulmers; but attimes they were like an army with banners, and their power ofself-multiplication was equalled only by the manner in whichthey could dwindle, vanish, grow mute, and become as it were asingle tumbled brown head bent over a book in some corner of thehouse in which nobody would ever have thought of hunting forthem--and which, of course, were it the bonne's room in theattic, or the subterranean closet where the trunks were kept,had been singled out by them for that very reason.
these changes from ubiquity to invisibility would have seemed tosusy, a few months earlier, one of the most maddening of manycharacteristics not calculated to promote repose. but now shefelt differently. she had grown interested in her charges, andthe search for a clue to their methods, whether tribal orindividual, was as exciting to her as the development of adetective story.
what interested her most in the whole stirring business was thediscovery that they had a method. these little creatures,pitched upward into experience on the tossing waves of theirparents' agitated lives, had managed to establish a rough-and-ready system of self-government. junie, the eldest (the one whoalready chose her mother's hats, and tried to put order in herwardrobe) was the recognized head of the state. at twelve sheknew lots of things which her mother had never thoroughlylearned, and susy, her temporary mother, had never even guessedat: she spoke with authority on all vital subjects, fromcastor-oil to flannel under-clothes, from the fair sharing ofstamps or marbles to the number of helpings of rice-pudding orjam which each child was entitled to.
there was hardly any appeal from her verdict; yet each of hersubjects revolved in his or her own orbit of independence,according to laws which junie acknowledged and respected; andthe interpreting of this mysterious charter of rights andprivileges had not been without difficulty for susy.
besides this, there were material difficulties to deal with.
the six of them, and the breathless bonne who cooked and slavedfor them all, had but a slim budget to live on; and, as junieremarked, you'd have thought the boys ate their shoes, the waythey vanished. they ate, certainly, a great deal else, andmostly of a nourishing and expensive kind. they had definiteviews about the amount and quality of their food, and werecapable of concerted rebellion when susy's catering fell beneaththeir standard. all this made her life a hurried and harassingbusiness, but never-- what she had most feared it would be adull or depressing one.
it was not, she owned to herself, that the society of the fulmerchildren had roused in her any abstract passion for the humanyoung. she knew--had known since nick's first kiss--how shewould love any child of his and hers; and she had cherished poorlittle clarissa vanderlyn with a shrinking and wistfulsolicitude. but in these rough young fulmers she took apositive delight, and for reasons that were increasingly clearto her. it was because, in the first place, they were allintelligent; and because their intelligence had been fed only onthings worth caring for. however inadequate grace fulmer'sbringing-up of her increasing tribe had been, they had heard inher company nothing trivial or dull: good music, good books andgood talk had been their daily food, and if at times theystamped and roared and crashed about like children unblessed bysuch privileges, at others they shone with the light of poetryand spoke with the voice of wisdom.
that had been susy's discovery: for the first time she wasamong awakening minds which had been wakened only to beauty.
>from their cramped and uncomfortable household grace and natfulmer had managed to keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations,shabby discontents; above all the din and confusion the greatimages of beauty had brooded, like those ancestral figures thatstood apart on their shelf in the poorest roman households.
no, the task she had undertaken for want of a better gave susyno sense of a missed vocation: "mothering" on a large scalewould never, she perceived, be her job. rather it gave her, inodd ways, the sense of being herself mothered, of taking herfirst steps in the life of immaterial values which had begun toseem so much more substantial than any she had known.
on the day when she had gone to grace fulmer for counsel andcomfort she had little guessed that they would come to her inthis form. she had found her friend, more than ever distractedand yet buoyant, riding the large untidy waves of her life withthe splashed ease of an amphibian. grace was probably the onlyperson among susy's friends who could have understood why shecould not make up her mind to marry altringham; but at themoment grace was too much absorbed in her own problems to paymuch attention to her friend's, and, according to her wont, sheimmediately "unpacked" her difficulties.
nat was not getting what she had hoped out of his europeanopportunity. oh, she was enough of an artist herself to knowthat there must be fallow periods--that the impact of newimpressions seldom produced immediate results. she had allowedfor all that. but her past experience of nat's moods had taughther to know just when he was assimilating, when impressions werefructifying in him. and now they were not, and he knew it aswell as she did. there had been too much rushing about, toomuch excitement and sterile flattery ... mrs. melrose? well,yes, for a while ... the trip to spain had been a love-journey,no doubt. grace spoke calmly, but the lines of her facesharpened: she had suffered, oh horribly, at his going to spainwithout her. yet she couldn't, for the children's sake, affordto miss the big sum that ursula gillow had given her for herfortnight at ruan. and her playing had struck people, and led,on the way back, to two or three profitable engagements inprivate houses in london. fashionable society had made "alittle fuss" about her, and it had surprised and pleased nat,and given her a new importance in his eyes. "he was beginningto forget that i wasn't only a nursery-maid, and it's been agood thing for him to be reminded ... but the great thing isthat with what i've earned he and i can go off to southern italyand sicily for three months. you know i know how to manage ...
and, alone with me, nat will settle down to work: to observing,feeling, soaking things in. it's the only way. mrs. melrosewants to take him, to pay all the expenses again-well sheshan't. i'll pay them." her worn cheek flushed with triumph.
"and you'll see what wonders will come of it .... only there'sthe problem of the children. junie quite agrees that we can'ttake them ...."thereupon she had unfolded her idea. if susy was at a looseend, and hard up, why shouldn't she take charge of the childrenwhile their parents were in italy? for three months at most-grace could promise it shouldn't be longer. they couldn't payher much, of course, but at least she would be lodged and fed.
"and, you know, it will end by interesting you--i'm sure itwill," the mother concluded, her irrepressible hopefulnessrising even to this height, while susy stood before her with ahesitating smile.
take care of five fulmers for three months! the prospect cowedher. if there had been only junie and geordie, the oldest andyoungest of the band, she might have felt less hesitation. butthere was nat, the second in age, whose motor-horn had drivenher and nick out to the hill-side on their fatal day at thefulmers' and there were the twins, jack and peggy, of whom shehad kept memories almost equally disquieting. to rule thisuproarious tribe would be a sterner business than trying tobeguile clarissa vanderlyn's ladylike leisure; and she wouldhave refused on the spot, as she had refused once before, if theonly possible alternatives had not come to seem so much lessbearable, and if junie, called in for advice, and standingthere, small, plain and competent, had not said in her quietgrown-up voice: "oh, yes, i'm sure mrs. lansing and i canmanage while you're away--especially if she reads aloud well."reads aloud well! the stipulation had enchanted susy. she hadnever before known children who cared to be read aloud to; sheremembered with a shiver her attempts to interest clarissa inanything but gossip and the fashions, and the tone in which thechild had said, showing strefford's trinket to her father:
"because i said i'd rather have it than a book."and here were children who consented to be left for three monthsby their parents, but on condition that a good reader wasprovided for them!
"very well--i will! but what shall i be expected to read toyou?" she had gaily questioned; and junie had answered, afterone of her sober pauses of reflection: "the little ones likenearly everything; but nat and i want poetry particularly,because if we read it to ourselves we so often pronounce thepuzzling words wrong, and then it sounds so horrid.""oh, i hope i shall pronounce them right," susy murmured,stricken with self-distrust and humility.
apparently she did; for her reading was a success, and even thetwins and geordie, once they had grown used to her, seemed toprefer a ringing page of henry v, or the fairy scenes from themidsummer night's dream, to their own more specializedliterature, though that had also at times to be provided.
there were, in fact, no lulls in her life with the fulmers; butits commotions seemed to susy less meaningless, and thereforeless fatiguing, than those that punctuated the existence ofpeople like altringham, ursula gillow, ellie vanderlyn and theirtrain; and the noisy uncomfortable little house at passy wasbeginning to greet her with the eyes of home when she returnedthere after her tramps to and from the children's classes. atany rate she had the sense of doing something useful and evennecessary, and of earning her own keep, though on so modest ascale; and when the children were in their quiet mood, anddemanded books or music (or, even, on one occasion, at thesurprising junie's instigation, a collective visit to thelouvre, where they recognized the most unlikely pictures, andthe two elders emitted startling technical judgments, and calledtheir companion's attention to details she had not observed); onthese occasions, susy had a surprised sense of being drawn backinto her brief life with nick, or even still farther and deeper,into those visions of nick's own childhood on which the triviallater years had heaped their dust.
it was curious to think that if he and she had remainedtogether, and she had had a child--the vision used to come toher, in her sleepless hours, when she looked at little geordie,in his cot by her bed--their life together might have been verymuch like the life she was now leading, a small obscure businessto the outer world, but to themselves how wide and deep andcrowded!
she could not bear, at that moment, the thought of giving upthis mystic relation to the life she had missed. in spite ofthe hurry and fatigue of her days, the shabbiness and discomfortof everything, and the hours when the children were as "horrid"as any other children, and turned a conspiracy of hostile facesto all her appeals; in spite of all this she did not want togive them up, and had decided, when their parents returned, toask to go back to america with them. perhaps, if nat's successcontinued, and grace was able to work at her music, they wouldneed a kind of governess-companion. at any rate, she couldpicture no future less distasteful.
she had not sent to mr. spearman nick's answer to her letter.
in the interval between writing to him and receiving his replyshe had broken with strefford; she had therefore no object inseeking her freedom. if nick wanted his, he knew he had only toask for it; and his silence, as the weeks passed, woke a fainthope in her. the hope flamed high when she read one day in thenewspapers a vague but evidently "inspired" allusion to thepossibility of an alliance between his serene highness thereigning prince of teutoburg-waldhain and miss coral hicks ofapex city; it sank to ashes when, a few days later, her eye liton a paragraph wherein mr. and mrs. mortimer hicks "requested tostate" that there was no truth in the report.
on the foundation of these two statements susy raised one watch-tower of hope after another, feverish edifices demolished orrebuilt by every chance hint from the outer world wherein nick'sname figured with the hickses'. and still, as the days passedand she heard nothing, either from him or from her lawyer, herflag continued to fly from the quaking structures.
apart from the custody of the children there was indeed littleto distract her mind from these persistent broodings. shewinced sometimes at the thought of the ease with which herfashionable friends had let her drop out of sight. in theperpetual purposeless rush of their days, the feverish making ofwinter plans, hurrying off to the riviera or st. moritz, egyptor new york, there was no time to hunt up the vanished or towait for the laggard. had they learned that she had broken her"engagement" (how she hated the word!) to strefford, and had thefact gone about that she was once more only a poor hanger-on, tobe taken up when it was convenient, and ignored in theintervals? she did not know; though she fancied strefford'snewly-developed pride would prevent his revealing to any onewhat had passed between them. for several days after her abruptflight he had made no sign; and though she longed to write andask his forgiveness she could not find the words. finally itwas he who wrote: a short note, from altringham, typical of allthat was best in the old strefford. he had gone down toaltringham, he told her, to think quietly over their last talk,and try to understand what she had been driving at. he had toown that he couldn't; but that, he supposed, was the very headand front of his offending. whatever he had done to displeaseher, he was sorry for; but he asked, in view of his invincibleignorance, to be allowed not to regard his offence as a causefor a final break. the possibility of that, he found, wouldmake him even more unhappy than he had foreseen; as she knew,his own happiness had always been his first object in life, andhe therefore begged her to suspend her decision a little longer.
he expected to be in paris within another two months, and beforearriving he would write again, and ask her to see him.
the letter moved her but did not make her waver. she simplywrote that she was touched by his kindness, and would willinglysee him if he came to paris later; though she was bound to tellhim that she had not yet changed her mind, and did not believeit would promote his happiness to have her try to do so.
he did not reply to this, and there was nothing further to keepher thoughts from revolving endlessly about her inmost hopes andfears.
on the rainy afternoon in question, tramping home from the"cours" (to which she was to return at six), she had said toherself that it was two months that very day since nick hadknown she was ready to release him--and that after such a delayhe was not likely to take any further steps. the thought filledher with a vague ecstasy. she had had to fix an arbitrary dateas the term of her anguish, and she had fixed that one; andbehold she was justified. for what could his silence mean butthat he too ....
on the hall-table lay a typed envelope with the paris postage-mark. she opened it carelessly, and saw that the letter-headbore mr. spearman's office address. the words beneath spunround before her eyes .... "has notified us that he is at yourdisposal ... carry out your wishes ... arriving in paris ... fixan appointment with his lawyers ...."nick--it was nick the words were talking of! it was the fact ofnick's return to paris that was being described in thosepreposterous terms! she sank down on the bench beside thedripping umbrella-stand and stared vacantly before her. it hadfallen at last--this blow in which she now saw that she hadnever really believed! and yet she had imagined she wasprepared for it, had expected it, was already planning herfuture life in view of it--an effaced impersonal life in theservice of somebody else's children--when, in reality, underthat thin surface of abnegation and acceptance, all the oldhopes had been smouldering red-hot in their ashes! what was theuse of any self-discipline, any philosophy, any experience, ifthe lawless self underneath could in an instant consume themlike tinder?
she tried to collect herself--to understand what had happened.
nick was coming to paris--coming not to see her but to consulthis lawyer! it meant, of course, that he had definitelyresolved to claim his freedom; and that, if he had made up hismind to this final step, after more than six months of inactionand seeming indifference, it could be only because somethingunforeseen and decisive had happened to him. feverishly, sheput together again the stray scraps of gossip and the newspaperparagraphs that had reached her in the last months. it wasevident that miss hicks's projected marriage with the prince ofteutoburg-waldhain had been broken off at the last moment; andbroken off because she intended to marry nick. the announcementof his arrival in paris and the publication of mr. and mrs.
hicks's formal denial of their daughter's betrothal coincidedtoo closely to admit of any other inference. susy tried tograsp the reality of these assembled facts, to picture toherself their actual tangible results. she thought of coralhicks bearing the name of mrs. nick lansing--her name, susy'sown!--and entering drawing-rooms with nick in her wake, gailywelcomed by the very people who, a few months before, hadwelcomed susy with the same warmth. in spite of nick's growingdislike of society, and coral's attitude of intellectualsuperiority, their wealth would fatally draw them back into theworld to which nick was attached by all his habits andassociations. and no doubt it would amuse him to re-enter thatworld as a dispenser of hospitality, to play the part of hostwhere he had so long been a guest; just as susy had once fanciedit would amuse her to re-enter it as lady altringham .... but,try as she would, now that the reality was so close on her, shecould not visualize it or relate it to herself. the merejuxtaposition of the two names--coral, nick--which in old timesshe had so often laughingly coupled, now produced a blur in herbrain.
she continued to sit helplessly beside the hall-table, the tearsrunning down her cheeks. the appearance of the bonne arousedher. her youngest charge, geordie, had been feverish for a dayor two; he was better, but still confined to the nursery, and hehad heard susy unlock the house-door, and could not imagine whyshe had not come straight up to him. he now began to manifesthis indignation in a series of racking howls, and susy, shakenout of her trance, dropped her cloak and umbrella and hurriedup.
"oh, that child!" she groaned.
under the fulmer roof there was little time or space for theindulgence of private sorrows. from morning till night therewas always some immediate practical demand on one's attention;and susy was beginning to see how, in contracted households,children may play a part less romantic but not less useful thanthat assigned to them in fiction, through the mere fact ofgiving their parents no leisure to dwell on irremediablegrievances. though her own apprenticeship to family life hadbeen so short, she had already acquired the knack of rapidmental readjustment, and as she hurried up to the nursery herprivate cares were dispelled by a dozen problems of temperature,diet and medicine.
such readjustment was of course only momentary; yet each time ithappened it seemed to give her more firmness and flexibility oftemper. "what a child i was myself six months ago!" shethought, wondering that nick's influence, and the tragedy oftheir parting, should have done less to mature and steady herthan these few weeks in a house full of children.
pacifying geordie was not easy, for he had long since learned touse his grievances as a pretext for keeping the offender at hisbeck with a continuous supply of stories, songs and games.
"you'd better be careful never to put yourself in the wrong withgeordie," the astute junie had warned susy at the outset,"because he's got such a memory, and he won't make it up withyou till you've told him every fairy-tale he's ever heardbefore."but on this occasion, as soon as he saw her, geordie'sindignation melted. she was still in the doorway, compunctious,abject and racking her dazed brain for his favourite stories,when she saw, by the smoothing out of his mouth and the suddenserenity of his eyes, that he was going to give her thedelicious but not wholly reassuring shock of being a good boy.
thoughtfully he examined her face as she knelt down beside thecot; then he poked out a finger and pressed it on her tearfulcheek.
"poor susy got a pain too," he said, putting his arms about her;and as she hugged him close, he added philosophically: "tellgeordie a new story, darling, and you'll forget all about it."
