Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905. Various
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mother’s housekeeping. I cannot allow you to be a burden on them during my absence; and consult Stephen whenever you are in doubt. Good-by, Deena – I am sorry to leave you.”
He puckered his lips into the hard wrinkles that made his kisses so discreet, and gave her a parting embrace. She stood at the open door watching the distribution of his luggage, which he superintended with anxious care, and then he stepped into the one free seat reserved for him, and the driver squeezed himself between a trunk and roll of rugs, and they were off.
Simeon waved his hand, and even leaned far out from the carriage window and smiled pleasantly, and Deena wiped her eyes, and began the awful work of making an old house, bristling with the characteristic accumulations of several generations, impersonal enough to rent. She had plenty to do to keep her loneliness in abeyance, but in the back of her consciousness there was a feeling that she had no abiding place. Her family had urged her to marry Simeon, and he was now throwing her back upon her family, and her dignity was hurt.
At sunset Stephen came to see how she was getting on, and they had a cup of tea beside the dining-room fire, and talked about the voyage and the ports Simeon would touch at; and Stephen, who had the power of visualizing the descriptions he met with in his reading, made her see his word-painted pictures so clearly that she exclaimed:
“When were you in South America, Mr. French?” and he laughed and declared himself a fraud.
They talked on till the firelight alone challenged the darkness, and then French remembered he was dining out, and left her with an imagination aglow with all the wonders Simeon was to see. Lest she should be lonely, he undid a roll of papers, and took out several new magazines which he said would keep her amused till bedtime, and somehow he put new courage into her heart.
Presently she went into the study and lit the Welsbach over the table, and curled herself up in Simeon’s great chair to enjoy her periodicals, and then her eye fell upon a parcel of proof, directed but not sent, and she read the address, weighed and stamped the package, and rang the bell for the servant to post it. As she took up her magazine once more, she noticed on the outside cover the same name of street and building as on Simeon’s direction, and she wondered whether the same publishers lent themselves to fact and fancy.
Her servant brought her something to eat on a tray – women left to themselves always find economy in discomfort – and she nibbled her chicken and read her stories till she felt surfeited with both, and fell to pondering on what made a story effective. Her eye lit upon a short poem at the end of a page; it seemed to her poor to banality – did it please the public or the editor? Her own verses were a thousand times better.
She sat up suddenly with a heightened color and shining eyes, and laughed out loud. She had an inspiration. She, too, would become a contributor to that great publishing output; she would try her luck at making her brains pay her bills. The name “Mrs. Simeon Ponsonby” would carry weight with the magazine she selected, but, while disclosing her identity to the editor, she determined to choose a pen name, fearing her husband’s disapproval.
From childhood Deena had loved to express herself in rhyme, and of late years she had found her rhyming – so she modestly called it – a safety valve to a whole set of repressed feelings which she was too simple to recognize as starved affections, and which she thought was nature calling to her from without. It was nature, but calling from within, thrilling her with the beauty of things sensuous and driving her for sympathy to pen and ink.
Tossing down her book, she ran to her own room, unlocked a drawer, took out an old portfolio and returned to the study. There were, perhaps, twenty poems she had thought worth preserving, and her eye traveled over page after page as she weighed the merits and defects of each before making her choice. A sensitive ear had given her admirable imitative powers in versification, and her father, before dissipation had dulled his intellect, had been a man of rare cultivation and literary taste. Deena, among all his children, was the only one whose education he had personally superintended, and she brought to her passion for poetry some critical acumen.
She finally selected a song of the Gloucester fishermen she had written two years before – a song of toil and death – but with a refrain that effaced the terror with the dance of summer seas. She wrote a formal note to the editor, saying the price was fifteen dollars, that if accepted the signature was to be Gerald Shelton, and the check to be made to her, and she signed her own name. Simeon should know as soon as he came home, but she thought he could have no objection to Geraldine Ponsonby accepting a check for the supposititious Gerald Shelton.
Before all this was accomplished, her servant had gone to bed and Deena, afraid to be left alone downstairs in a house so prone to spooky noises, followed her example, but alas! not to sleep. She tossed on her bed, sacred for many years to the ponderous weight of old Mrs. Ponsonby, till suddenly all she had suffered from the maxims and example of her mother-in-law took form, and she wove a story half humorous, half pathetic, that she longed to commit to paper; but her delicacy forbade. She was even ashamed to have found a passing amusement at the expense of Simeon’s mother, and she tried to make her mind a blank and go to sleep. Toward morning she must have lost consciousness, for she dreamed – or thought she dreamed – that old Mrs. Ponsonby sat in her hard wooden rocking-chair by the window – the chair with the patchwork cushion fastened by three tape bows to the ribs of its back; the chair Simeon had often told her was “mother’s favorite.” The old lady rocked slowly, and her large head and heavy figure were silhouetted against the transparent window shade. A sound of wheels came from the street, and she raised the shade and looked out, leaning back, in order to follow the disappearing object till it was out of range, and then she buried her face in her hands and sobbed the low, hopeless sobs of old-age.
Deena found herself sitting up in bed, the early daylight making “the casement slowly grow a glimmering square.” The impression of her dream was so vivid that the depression weighed upon her like something physical. It was impossible to sleep, and at seven o’clock she got up to dress, having heard the servant go downstairs. On her way to her bath she passed the rocking-chair, and lying directly in her path was a little card, yellow with age. Deena picked it up and read: “From Mother to Simeon.” The coincidence worked so on her imagination that she sank into the nearest chair trembling from head to foot, and then she reflected that she must have pulled the card out of the table drawer when she went to fetch the portfolio the night before, and she called herself a superstitious silly, and made her bath a little colder than usual, as a tonic to her nerves. Cold water and hot food work wonders, and after breakfast young Mrs. Ponsonby forgot she had ever had a predecessor.
Her family paid her flying visits during the day, with a freedom unknown in Simeon’s reign, and she worked hard at her preparations for renting, but in the evening, when the house was quiet, she settled herself at the study table and made her first attempt at story writing, this time steering clear of the personal note that had brought such swift reprisal the night before. The occupation was absorbing; she neither desired nor missed companionship. She was not the first person to find life’s stage amply filled by the puppets of her own imagination.
At the end of the week two things had happened. The Illuminator had accepted her poem, and her story was finished. She determined to submit it to Stephen, and yet when he looked in at five o’clock, she was ashamed to ask him; what she had thought so well of the night before, in the excitement of work, suddenly seemed to her beneath contempt.
He lingered later than usual, for he mistook her preoccupation for unhappiness, and hated to leave her alone.
“When do you move to your mother’s?” he asked, for he thought anything better than her present desolation; the genteel poverty brought about by Mr. Shelton’s habits, the worldliness of Mrs. Shelton, and the demands upon time and temper made by the younger brothers and sisters, were only the old conditions under which she had grown up.
“Next week,” she said, sadly. “I shall be sorry to leave here.”
“You are not lonely, then, poor little lady?” he said, kindly, while he searched her face to see whether she told the whole truth.
His eyes were so merry, his smile so encouraging, that Deena blurted out her request.
“I haven’t felt lonely,” she