The Perennial Bachelor

As she lay floating in the grey river that flows between sleeping and waking, Maggie Campion knew, without remembering why, that it was a happy day. And when she opened her eyes, the sunlight falling on the carpet in stripes of pale warm gold, the warm buff walls, even the fat little buff potichomanie flagons with their crimson rosebuds, all held a secret happiness⁠—what was it? The looped-back muslin curtains were like ladies in billowing white, curtseying to each other, two in each window, and even Maggie’s stout scuffed little shoes on the floor where she had left them when she undressed, pointed their toes in the first position of dancing.

She lay pressing her hands together under the blankets, floating in this still bright bliss. She remembered now what it was. It was Papa’s birthday, and he was coming home from New York.

Maggie was ten years old, with light eyes looking out from under dark scowling brows, brown hair that fell straight and limp from curling-rags even as they were unrolled, and a face covered with freckles. She was more like a boy than a girl, everyone said. She was always carrying hop-toads about in her hat, or tearing her petticoats climbing trees and sliding down the ice house roof. She was sometimes as bold as brass and sometimes one crimson blush of shyness, and she had the strangest ways of showing people that she loved them⁠—boasting in front of them in a loud gruff voice, making awful faces, twisting one leg around the other, or standing on the sides of her feet.

Papa tore into the driveway, Trusty yelping behind him, and flung up a welcoming hand to them just as the wind caught a little white shawl from his wife’s shoulders and flung it flapping into the mare’s face. As she swerved with a great buck, he shot into the air and fell headfirst on the road.

“God, his neck’s broken!” Sam Blow cried: and Lizzie began to scream, thin and high above the wind, like a rabbit in a trap. But no one paid any attention to her, for Margaret had gone crumpling down onto the steps.

In the last hour of Victor Campion’s birthday his son was born.

“Victor, dearest little boy, I have some news for you, something that’s going to make Mamma and all of us so happy. Look, Mamma’s crying, but it’s only because she’s so happy⁠—isn’t that silly? You’re going to have a new Papa⁠—won’t that be lovely, darling? A dear new Papa to love us all and take care of us⁠—Mr. Lacey⁠—”

Victor was as rigid as iron. His face, his large ears, his thin little neck turned scarlet. His whole body was scarlet under his nightshirt. And suddenly like a cork flying out of a bottle a loud “No!” burst from him, and another and another. She couldn’t soothe him, she couldn’t stop him. Scarlet, furious, he went on crying “No! No! No! No!” as if his cries were torn out of him by terror and despair.

“Hush, darling, hush! He wants to take us all across the ocean in a great big ship, as big as this house⁠—won’t that be fun? Perhaps we’ll see a whale! Think of that! And Mamma will love Victor a thousand thousand times as much as ever⁠—”

She tightened her arms about him, she tried to draw his head down on her breast, rocking back and forth with broken murmurs of “sh-sh, sh-sh.” But nothing would stop those tearing cries.

And at last she promised. He was safe. He lay in the big chair by the window, exhausted, giving now and then a long shuddering sob⁠—but safe, safe! Mamma had promised.

“I can’t leave him! I promised Mamma!”

“She had no right to let you.”

“She had! And anyway I couldn’t leave him.”

(“Where are you? I can’t find you! Oh, where are you?” And the other was crying, “Come back to me! I am lost! Come back!” But so far apart, they could no longer hear each other. They could hear nothing but anger, feel nothing but anger that filled the room so that the crimson curtains, the red geraniums, the fire-colored fish, the fire itself, seemed part of its blazing.)

“He’s always come between us⁠—always. Even the last night before I went west he was down after us, calling you away. I’d give up my work⁠—it isn’t that⁠—but you’re the only person in the world that matters to me, and I must be first to you or I won’t be anything. I won’t take just what you can spare me from Victor. If you love me, you’ll come.”

“He needs me.”

“I need you.”

“Not as much as he does⁠—no one needs me as much as he does.”

“It’s Victor or me, Maggie.”

The baby lay in the big wash-basket under the wistaria vine wailing until she came to comfort him, the child ran to her from

Maggie hung Victor’s dress-suit on the clothesline to get rid of the smell of camphor. He was going to New York to stay at the Fifth Avenue Hotel where Papa had stayed, and to go to Lucy Hawthorn’s ball. There had been a glazed cream-colored invitation for the girls, too, that Lily kept lying carelessly on the hall table, where everyone could see it; but Maggie said, of course, they couldn’t think of going.

May had thought of it. Just for a moment she saw herself at the ball, dancing, floating in the arms of a tall stranger with a fascinating ugly face⁠—

Not being able to have a new dress wouldn’t matter⁠—she could fix up the eau de Nil corded silk with the coffee stain on the skirt that Aunt Priscilla had given them, and that had been too grand for anything they would be apt to go to. She was so slender she could take that front breadth right out. And she had seen just the trimming for it in Wilmington⁠—bands of tiny shells. Rainbow-colored shells peeping from waves of faint water-green silk⁠—a mermaid come from the foam.

“I have been looking for you all my life. Where have you been hidden away?”

“Where? Where?” the violins cried. “Where?” cried the plucked strings of the harp.

“But now that I have found you⁠—”

But, of course, she knew that they couldn’t afford it. They really couldn’t afford it for Victor, but for him they would manage somehow.

Coming back from the clothesline, Maggie stopped by the bed of lilies-of-the-valley by the porch, such a convenient place for cherry stones. How sweet, how sweet!