Read Ebook: We Three by Morris Gouverneur Hutt Henry Illustrator

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Ebook has 1569 lines and 66584 words, and 32 pages

"I'm so sorry," I said, when the children had gone. "I ought to have remembered that even very little babies in the cradle understand everything that's said to them. May I praise them now? Because they are the two most delicious babies in the world. I'd like to eat them."

"When I'm tired or worried," said Fulton, his eyes lighting with tenderness, "Hurry always knows. And she comes and climbs into my lap and leans against me without saying a word, and she keeps creepy-mouse still until she knows that I'm feeling better. Then she chuckles, and I hug her. Sometimes I wish that she was made like a tennis ball; then I could hug her as hard as I wanted to without hurting her."

"Her real name is Lucy," said Fulton, "same as her Mumsey, but they look so ridiculously alike that I was afraid I'd get 'em mixed up. And so we call her Hurry, because she always hurries; she hurries like mad. Same as her Mumsey."

"Do you," I asked, "hurry like mad?"

She gave a comical hurried nod that made me laugh right out, and Fulton said:

"She has smashed the more haste the less speed fallacy all to pieces." You could see that the man was glowing with pride. And he began to boast about her, and though she tried to stop him, she couldn't help looking perfectly delighted with herself, like some radiant child in the new dress for the party.

When Fulton had finished his eulogy, a long one, filled with humor, character drawing, and tenderness--something in his voice rather than his words, perhaps, always gave people the feeling that he had a wonderfully light touch, and a point of view at once sentimental and humorous--I reproached him, in turn, for praising a child to her face.

"In India," I said, "it's considered beastly unlucky."

Mrs. Fulton sprang to his defense. "I'm not a child," she defied me, "I'm a married woman."

They took me to the front door themselves, and watched me as far as the gate. I know this, because although I did not look back, it was when I reached the gate that I heard the door close, and I thought: "Now if I looked back, and the door was transparent, I'd see a pretty picture. It's a thousand to one shot that he's caught her in his arms and is kissing her and that she's perfectly delighted."

It is not easy for me to keep away from Lucy Fulton either on paper or in real life. The latter I have to do, for I think that I am able to keep a promise, and I ought to do the former as much as I can, if I am to tell her story and her husband's and my own in their true proportions. Otherwise we should but appear as one of those "eternal triangles" to which so much of French dramatic genius has been devoted; whereas it appears to me, though not, I am afraid, to Fulton, that if our relations to each other could be symbolized by a figure, that figure would not be a triangle; but a cross, let us say, between a triangle and a square.

Fulton was studious and enamored of knowledge for its own sake. I was lazy and only interested in such pieces of knowledge as I felt might be of use to me. But we both stood well in our classes; he because he had brains and knew how to use them, and I because the Lord had gifted me with a capital sight memory.

Fulton's friend Ludlow has just published the best book on the birds of New York, past and present, that was ever written. My friend Pierson died the other day of pneumonia. As a boy he had the constitution of an ox, and ought to have thrown off pneumonia as I would throw off a cold in the head, but the doctors say that he had simply burned up his powers of resistance with overdoses of alcohol. You never saw him drunk or off his balance or merry in any way; he simply and slowly soaked himself till his insides were like sponges dipped in the stuff. And Pierson's not the only man in my circle who has gone out like that; and as they went so will others go; strong and well Saturday to the casual eye, and dead Monday.

This is not the time to take up those great issues which have risen between those who are tempted by drink and fall, and those who are not tempted and don't. But I am very sure of this: that a vast majority of the men who make the world go round drink or have drunk; and that when at last the world comes to be governed by those who don't and haven't, it will be even worse governed, more pettily and meddlesomely, than it is at present. And that is saying a good deal, even for a butterfly.

You mustn't gather that Fulton and his friends were a goody-goody set of boys. They erred and strayed from their ways at times, like the worst of us. There was Browning for instance, a born experimenter, who so experimented with cocktails one fine morning that he marched into Madame Castignet's French class, drunk as a lord, full of argument, and was presently expelled from the school. It was commonly said that the disgrace of it would hound him through life. Far from it! Those who at this day pack Carnegie Lyceum to hear him play the violin, and who listen, laughing and crying, and comparing him to the incomparable Kreisler, perceive no disgrace in that youthful episode, rather they see in it an early indication of the divine temperament trying to shake off its fetters and be free.

One boy that I went to school with is on the famous Meadowbrook team; another has played in Davis Cup matches; another brought home a First from the Olympic games. In the pack that I run with there is even one Roper who achieves a large income by writing fiction for the magazines, but even he isn't in the least like that brilliant little circle to which Fulton belonged. For we feel that we are paying him an immense compliment when we say, "Would you ever suspect that he was an author?" Good at games, fond of late hours and laughter, with the easiest and most affectionate good manners, he is quite convinced, if you can get him to talk shop, at all, that art for art's sake is bunk, and that there is more amusement and inspiration to be had on Bailey's Beach and in the Casino at Newport than in the whole of Italy.

I must set Roper off against Fulton's friend Garrick. Poor Garrick slaved and slaved and reached after perfection. Some say that in the thin little volume that he succeeded at last in getting published, and leaving behind for the delight of posterity, he actually touched perfection. Perhaps he did. I don't know. But I do know this: that he had enough talent and energy to make a living, and didn't. That he loved his art more than his wife and family, and that they all starved together. Is it worse to starve your family for love of liquor than for love of art? Roper loves his liquor but he fights against it and makes a handsome income; Garrick gave himself up body and soul to his love for art, and if it wasn't for his friends Mrs. Garrick would be working in a sweatshop.

Fulton and I discussed him once , but we had to give it up as a topic. Fulton saw something fine and generous in the man, and could not speak of him without emotion, while I found it impossible to speak of him without contempt.

Fulton himself fell away from his friends in later years, not spiritually but physically. Lucy Fulton simply had to go on living among the people with whom she had been brought up, and in the manner to which she was accustomed; and Fulton seeing her pine and grow sorrowful in other conditions, and bored and fretful, gradually fell into her ways and wishes, as a gentleman shouldn't , and made his new friends among those who are born to be amused. Her love and happiness were far more important to him than changed ways and the injured feelings of old friends. Once he talked to me about this . I remember he said:

And yet he had come to wear the hallmarks of the pack, and to talk the language of the world that only asks to be happy and amused. He took to games seriously and played them well, and you couldn't point to him as one of those cautious persons who never by any chance drank even one cocktail too many. Indeed, he often became hilarious and witty, and added no end to the gayety of occasions, and was afterward privately reproached by Lucy. Coming from another, the hilarity and wit would have rejoiced her, but, coming from her nearest and dearest, her mind narrowed, and the cold fear that women have of liquor possessed her.

To me it has always been comical, even when I didn't feel well myself, to see the husbands come into the club after a big night; each wearing upon his face, as plainly as if they had been physical scratches, the marks of the wifely tears which he had been forced to witness, and of the reproaches which he had been forced to hear, and yet each trying to look as if he was the master of his own house and his own destiny. No well-born woman, however cold and calculating, can silently put up with her husband's drinking, yet how easily she overlooks it in any other man! How many excuses she will find for him:

"Why, he's quite wonderful! Of course I knew at once that he was tipsy, but he was perfectly sensible--perfectly."

If men didn't drink, women wouldn't have so many parties to go to or so much money to spend. How many teetotalers let their wives spend them into ruin and disgrace? It is the drinking American who indulges his wife and lets her make a fool of herself and him. It's his unconfessed, and perhaps unadmitted, remorse seeking a short cut to forgiveness.

It seems that I played too much pool and billiards for a small boy; and got into too much city mischief, for I learned at the end of a delightful Newport summer that I was to finish my schooling, not at Mr. Cutter's, but at Groton.

In those Groton days I let matches strictly alone; I neither played with them, nor used them to light cigarettes with. I was vaguely ambitious to be great and splendid, and I was down on purposeless boys who didn't behave themselves.

Lucy's brother was in my form. She used to come to visit him, with her parents, in their car. Even for Groton parents the Ludlows were enormously rich, or if they weren't enormously rich, they were enormous spenders.

Lucy was seven years our junior, but even in those baby days she had the laughing mouth and the praying eyes that were to play such havoc later on. She was a child of the world; natural, straightforward, and easy-going.

Lucy at nine was so pretty, so engaging, and had so much charm and magnetism that I remember having regretted, very solemnly, and with youthful finality, that we did not belong to the same generation. I was sorry that she was not fifteen or sixteen like myself; so that I could be in love with her and she with me!

Once Lucy was so sick that they thought she was going to die, and Schuyler was called home from school. The whole school was affected, so strong and vivid was its memory of an engaging and fearless child. I remember being sorrier than ever that I had been confirmed into a system which makes disease contagious instead of health, and asking one of the masters how he reconciled the death of a kid like that, whom everybody loved, with his conception of an all-wise and all-merciful God. He answered, it has always seemed to me very lamely, that if we didn't believe that all was for the best, in this best of all worlds, we should never get anywhere.

The first rime I rode with Lucy through the Aiken woods, I recalled this famous illness of hers, and I think it had something to do with all that happened afterward.

We had lost ourselves, a little, as you do at Aiken, among the infinity of sand trails beyond the Whitney drive. We knew where we were, of course, and we knew where Aiken was, but every trail that started toward it fetched up short with a wrong turning. It was one of those bright hot days in late February, when a few jasmine flowers have opened, and you are pretty sure that there won't be any more long spells of rain or freezing cold. Even Lucy, who loved riding, was content to sit a walking horse, and bask in the sunshine.

I mentioned her famous illness, and she remembered nothing about It. "I'm always too busy," she said, "with what's going on right now to remember things."

"Why," I said, "Schuyler was sent for, and you were given up half a dozen times. Don't you really remember at all?"

"They wouldn't have told me I was being given up right and left, would they? Probably it didn't hurt much, and I was given a great many presents. It seems to me I do remember one particularly great time of presents, when lots of old gentlemen came to see me."

"I hoped you'd remember better," I said; "because at the time it seemed to me one of the most important things that had ever happened in the world."

Lucy listened eagerly. She didn't in the least mind a conversation that was all about herself.

"The whole school," I said, "was touched with solemnity. Now you wouldn't take me for a praying man, would you?"

"I don't know. Wouldn't I?"

"Whether I am or not," I said, "doesn't matter now, because I have so little to pray for. But at that time I went down on my knees and prayed that you'd get well."

"You were very fond of Schuyler, weren't you?"

"And am. But that wasn't the reason. I don't know just what the reason was. Maybe I was looking forward to this ride, and didn't want to miss it! I was ashamed to be seen praying, so I prayed in bed. But I was afraid that wouldn't do any good, so when my roommate had gone to sleep I got up in the dark and went down on my marrowbones on the bare icy floor, and I prayed like a good 'un."

Lucy's mouth laughed, but her eyes prayed.

"Then, maybe," she said, "if it hadn't been for you, I wouldn't be here now."

"I'd like to think that," I said; "but there must have been lots of others who prayed. I should like nothing better than a Carnegie hero medal, with the attached pension, but the jury require proofs."

"It's funny," she said, "to think of you kneeling on the icy floor and praying for me."

"I think it would have been nicer if you had prayed for me. Didn't you--even a little?"

"If I had realized that I could be seven years older than you and still belong to the same generation, my prayers would have been altogether different, and there would have been more of them."

She turned into it without waiting for an answer, and urged her pony into a gentle amble.

I caught up with her and said: "I know this trail. It will take us straight to the Whitney drive. Then we can go right up over the hill and come out by Sand River."

"It's fun," she said, "to find somebody that likes riding. Everybody's mad about golf. John rides whenever I ask him, but it's cruel to separate him from the new mid-iron that Jimmie made for him. And he won't let me ride alone."

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