Part 12 (2/2)
That's part of the genius of Ellabelle, knowing when she can and when she positively cannot, and making no foolish struggle in the latter event.
”Back they come to New York and young Angus went to the swellest college Ellabelle could learn about, and they had a town house and a country house and Ellabelle prepared to dazzle New York society, having met frayed ends of it in her years abroad. But she couldn't seem to put it over. Lots of male and female society foreigners that she'd met would come and put up with her and linger on in the most friendly manner, but Ellabelle never fools herself so very much. She knew she wasn't making the least dent in New York itself. She got uncomfortable there. I bet she had that feeling you get when you're riding your horse over soft ground and all at once he begins to bog down.
”Anyway, they come West after a year or so, where Angus had more drag and Ellabelle could feel more important. Not back to Wallace, of course.
Ellabelle had forgotten the name of that town, and also they come over a road that misses the thriving little town of North Platte by several hundred miles. And pretty soon they got into this darned swell little suburb out from San Francisco, through knowing one of the old families that had lived there man and boy for upward of four years. It's a town where I believe they won't let you get off the train unless you got a visitor's card and a valet.
”Here at last Ellabelle felt she might come into her own, for parties seemed to recognize her true worth at once. Some of them indeed she could buffalo right on the spot, for she hadn't lived in Europe and such places all them years for nothing. So, camping in a miserable rented shack that never cost a penny over seventy thousand dollars, with only thirty-eight rooms and no proper s.p.a.ce for the servants, they set to work building their present marble palace--there's inside and outside pictures of it in a magazine somewhere round here--bigger than the state insane asylum and very tasty and expensive, with hand-painted ceilings and pergolas and cafes and hot and cold water and everything.
”It was then I first see Ellabelle after all the years, and I want to tell you she was impressive. She looked like the descendant of a long line of ancestry or something and she spoke as good as any reciter you ever heard in a hall. Last time I had seen her she was still forgetting about the r's--she'd say: 'Oh, there-urr you ah!' thus showing she was at least half Iowa in breed--but nothing like that now. She could give the English cards and spades and beat them at their own game. Her face looked a little bit overma.s.saged and she was having trouble keeping her hips down, and wore a patent chin-squeezer nights, and her hair couldn't be trusted to itself long at a time; but she knew how to dress and she'd learned decency in the use of the diamond except when it was really proper to break out all over with 'em. You'd look at her twice in any show ring. Ain't women the wonders! Gazing at Ellabelle when she had everything on, you'd never dream that she'd come up from the vilest dregs only a few years before--helping cook for the harvest hands in Iowa, feeding Union Pacific pa.s.sengers at twenty-two a month, or splitting her own kindling at Wallace, Idaho, and dreaming about a new silk dress for next year, or mebbe the year after if things went well.
”Men ain't that way. Angus had took no care of his figure, which was now pouchy, his hair was gray, and he was either shedding or had been reached, and he had lines of care and food in his face, and took no pains whatever with his accent--or with what he said, for that matter. I never saw a man yet that could hide a disgraceful past like a woman can.
They don't seem to have any pride. Most of 'em act like they don't care a hoot whether people find it out on 'em or not.
”Angus was always reckless that way, adding to his wife's burden of anxiety. She'd got her own vile past well buried, but she never knew when his was going to stick its ugly head up out of its grave. He'd go along all right for a while like one of the best set had ought to--then Zooey! We was out to dinner at another millionaire's one night--in that town you're either a millionaire or drawing wages from one--and Angus talked along with his host for half an hour about the impossibility of getting a decent valet on this side of the water, Americans not knowing their place like the English do, till you'd have thought he was born to it, and then all at once he breaks out about the hardwood finish to the dining-room, and how the art of graining has perished and ought to be revived. 'And I wish I had a silver dollar,' he says, 'for every door like that one there that I've grained to resemble the natural wood so cunningly you'd never guess it--hardly.'
”At that his break didn't faze any one but Ellabelle. The host was an old train-robber who'd cut your throat for two bits--I'll bet he couldn't play an honest game of solitaire--and he let out himself right off that he had once worked in a livery stable and was proud of it; but poor Ellabelle, who'd been talking about the dear Countess of Comtessa or somebody, and the dukes and earls that was just one-two-three with her on the other side, she blushed up till it almost showed through the second coating. Angus was certainly poison ivy to her on occasion, and he'd refuse to listen to reason when she called him down about it. He'd do most of the things she asked him to about food and clothes and so forth--like the time he had the two gold teeth took out and replaced by real porcelain nature fakers--but he never could understand why he wasn't free to chat about the days when he earned what money he had.
”It was this time that I first saw little Angus since he had changed from a governess to a governor--or whatever they call the he-teacher of a millionaire's brat. He was home for the summer vacation. Naturally I'd been prejudiced against him not only by his mother's praise but by his father's steady coppering of the same. Judiciously comparing the two, I was led to expect a kind of cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and the late Sitting Bull, with the vices of each and the virtues of neither.
Instead of which I found him a winsome whelp of six-foot or so with Scotch eyes and his mother's nose and chin and a good, big, straight mouth, and full of the most engaging bedevilments for one and all. He didn't seem to be any brighter in his studies than a brute of that age should be, and though there was something easy and grand in his manner that his pa and ma never had, he wasn't really any more foreign than what I be. Of course he spoke Eastern American instead of Western, but you forgive him that after a few minutes when you see how nice he naturally meant to be. I admit we took to each other from the start.
They often say I'm a good mixer, but it took no talent to get next to that boy. I woke up the first night thinking I knew what old silly would do her darndest to adopt him if ever his poor pa and ma was to get b.u.t.tered over the right of way in some railroad accident.
”And yet I didn't see Angus, Junior, one bit the way either of his parents saw him. Ellabelle seemed to look on him merely as a smart dresser and social know-it-all that would be a 98 cent credit to her in the position of society queen for which the good G.o.d had always intended her. And his father said he wasn't any good except to idle away his time and spend money, and would come to a bad end by manslaughter in a high-powered car; or in the alcoholic ward of some hospital; that he was, in fact, a mere h.e.l.ling scapegrace that would have been put in some good detention home years before if he hadn't been born to a father that was all kinds of a so-and-so old Scotch fool. There you get Angus, _fills_, from three different slants, and I ain't saying there wasn't justification for the other two besides mine. The boy could act in a crowd of tea-drinking women with a finish that made his father look like some one edging in to ask where they wanted the load of coal dumped. But also Angus, _peer_, was merely painting the lily, as they say, when he'd tell all the different kinds of Indian the boy was. That very summer before he went back to the educational centre where they teach such arts, he helped wreck a road house a few miles up the line till it looked like one of them pictures of what a Zeppelin does to a rare old English drug store in London. And a week later he lost a race with the Los Angeles flyer, account of not having as good a roadbed to run on as the train had, and having to take too short a turn with his new car.
”I remember we three was wondering where he could be that night the telephone rung from the place where kindly strangers had hauled him for first aid to the foolish. But it was the boy himself that was able to talk and tell his anxious parents to forget all about it. His father took the message and as soon as he got the sense of it he begun to get hopeful that the kid had broke at least one leg--thinking, he must have been, of the matched pacing stallions that once did himself such a good turn without meaning to. His disappointment was pitiful as he turned to us after learning that he had lit on his head but only sustained a few bruises and sprains and concussions, with the wall-paper sc.r.a.ped off here and there.
”'Struck on his head, the only part of him that seems invulnerable,'
says the fond father. 'What's that?' he yells, for the boy was talking again. He listened a minute, and it was right entertaining to watch his face work as the words come along. It registered all the evil that Scotland has suffered from her oppressors since they first thought up the name for it. Finally he begun to splutter back--it must have sounded fine at the other end--but he had to hang up, he was that emotional.
After he got his face human again he says to us:
”'Would either of you think now that you could guess at what might have been his dying speech? Would you guess it might be words of cheer to the bereaved mother that nursed him, or even a word of comfort to the idiot father that never touched whipleather to his back while he was still husky enough to get by with it? Well, you'd guess wild. He's but inflamed with indignation over the state of the road where he pa.s.sed out for some minutes. He says it's a disgrace to any civilized community, and he means to make trouble about it with the county supervisor, who must be a murderer at heart, and then he'll take it up to the supreme court and see if we can't have roads in this country as good as Napoleon the First made them build in France, so a gentleman can speed up a bit over five miles an hour without breaking every bone in his body, to say nothing of totally ruining a car costing forty-eight hundred dollars of his good money, with the ink on the check for it scarce dry. He was going on to say that he had the race for the crossing as good as won and had just waved mockingly at the engineer of the defeated train who was pretending to feel indifferent about it--but I hung up on him. My strength was waning. Was he here this minute I make no doubt I'd go to the mat with him, unequal as we are in prowess.' He dribbled off into vicious mutterings of what he'd say to the boy if he was to come to the door.
”Then dear Ellabelle pipes up: 'And doesn't the dear boy say who was with him in this prank?'
”Angus snorted horribly at the word 'prank,' just like he'd never had one single advantage of foreign travel. 'He does indeed--one of those Hammersmith twin louts was with him--the speckled devil with the lisp, I gather--and praise G.o.d his bones, at least, are broke in two places!'
”Ellabelle's eyes s.h.i.+ned up at this with real delight. 'How terrible!'
she says, not looking it. 'That's Gerald Hammersmith, son of Mrs. St.
John Hammersmith, leader of the most exclusive set here--oh, she's quite in the lead of everything that has cla.s.s! And after this we must know each other far, far better than we have in the past. She has never called up to this time. I must inquire after her poor boy directly to-morrow comes.' That is Ellabelle. Trust her not to overlook a single bet.
”Angus again snorted in a common way. 'St. John Hammersmith!' says he, steaming up, 'When he trammed ore for three-fifty a day and went to bed with his clothes on any night he'd the price of a quart of gin-and-beer mixed--liking to get his quick--his name was naked 'John' with never a Saint to it, which his widow tacked on a dozen years later. And speaking of names, Mrs. McDonald, I sorely regret you didn't name your own son after your first willful fancy. It was no good day for his father when you put my own name to him.'
”But Ellabelle paid no attention whatever to this rough stuff, being already engaged in courting the Hammersmith dame for the good of her social importance. I make no doubt before the maid finished rubbing in the complexion cream that night she had reduced this upstart to the ranks and stepped into her place as leader of the most exclusive social set between South San Francisco and old Henry Miller's ranch house at Gilroy. Anyway, she kept talking to herself about it, almost over the mangled remains of her own son, as you might say.
”A year later the new mansion was done, setting in the centre of sixty acres of well-manicured land as flat as a floor and naturally called Hillcrest. Angus asked me down for another visit. There had been grand doings to open the new house, and Ellabelle felt she was on the way to ruling things social with an iron hand if she was just careful and didn't overbet her cards. Angus, not being ashamed of his scandalous past, was really all that kept her nerves strung up. It seems he'd give her trouble while the painters and decorators was at work, hanging round 'em fascinated and telling 'em how he'd had to work ten hours a day in his time and how he could grain a door till it looked exactly like the natural wood, so they'd say it wasn't painted at all. And one day he become so inflamed with evil desire that Ellabelle, escorting a bunch of the real triple-platers through the mansion, found him with his coat off learning how to rub down a hardwood panel with oil and pumice stone.
Gee! Wouldn't I like to of been there! I suppose I got a lower nature as well as the rest of us.
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