THE CHRISTENING
The christening of Enid’s baby, delayed until David’s return from Washington, was to be at our house because Enid and her little son had already come to us, but we, being past seventy, could not so easily go up in Connecticut to Enid. At all events that was what they told us, though Pelleas and I smiled somewhat sadly as we permitted our age to bear the burden of our indolence. Besides, I would always be hostess rather than guest, for the hostess seems essentially creative and the guest pathetically the commodity.
Therefore on a day in May we rose early and found our shabby drawing-room a kind of temple of hyacinths, and every one in the room—by whom I mean its permanent inhabitants—rejoicing. The marble Ariadne, on a pedestal in a dark corner, guided her panther on a field of jonquils which they two must have preferred to asphodel; the Lady Hamilton who lived over the low shelves folded her hands above a very home of Spring; and once, having for a moment turned away, I could have been certain that the blindfold Hope above the mantel smote her harp softly, just loud enough, say, for a daffodil to hear.
“Ah, Pelleas,” I cried, “one would almost say that this is The Day—you know, the day that one is expecting all one’s life and that never comes precisely as one planned.”
“Only,” Pelleas supplemented positively, “this is much nicer than that day.”
“Much,” I agreed, and we both laughed like children waiting to be christened ourselves.
Pelleas was to be godfather—I said by virtue of his age, but Enid, whose words said backward I prefer to those of many others in their proper order, insisted that it was by office of his virtue. There were to be present only the Chartres’ and the Cleatams, Miss Lillieblade and Lisa and Hobart Eddy and a handful besides—all our nearest and dearest and no one else; although, “Ah, me,” cried Madame Sally Chartres while we waited, “haven’t you invited every one who has lately invited you to a christening?” And on, so to speak, our positive negative, she added: “Really, I would have said that in these social days no one is even asked to a funeral who has not very recently had a sumptuous funeral of her own.”
“Who was my godfather?” Pelleas asked morosely. “I don’t think I ever had a godfather. I don’t know that I ever was christened. Have I any proof that I was named what I was named? I only know it by hearsay. And how glaringly unscientific.”
“You are only wanting,” cried Madame Polly Cleatam, shaking her curls, “to be fashionably doubtful!”
“Religions have been thrown away by persons who had no more authentic doubts,” Pelleas gravely maintained.
“I dare say,” Miss Lillieblade piped. “In these days if a man has an old coat he puts on a new doubt, and society is satisfied.”
Thereafter the baby arrived, a mere collection of hand embroidery and lace, with an angel in the midst of these soft billows. The baby looked quite like a photograph made by the new school, with the high lights on long sweeping skirts and away up at the top of the picture a vague, delicious face. Our grandniece Enid is an adorable little mother, looking no less like a mermaid than does Lisa, but with a light in her eyes as if still more of the mystery of the sea were come upon her. And, as a mer-mother should, she had conversation not exclusively confined to the mer-child. I heard her on the subject of prints with the bishop’s lady, and the mer-child was not three months old.
The christening was to have been at eleven o’clock, and at twelve Pelleas had an appointment which it was impossible to delay, or so he thought, having a most masculine regard for hours, facts, and the like. Therefore when, at fifteen after eleven, the bishop had not yet arrived, Pelleas began uneasily suggesting taking leave. Enid looked at him with a kind of deep-sea-cave reproach before which every one else would have been helpless; but Pelleas, whose nature is built on straight lines, patted her and kissed the baby at large upon the chest and, benign, was still inexorable.
“But who will be godfather?” Enid cried disconsolately, and, young-wife-like, looked reproachfully at her young husband.
At that moment the hall door, as if it had been an attentive listener as long as it could and must now give the true answer, opened and admitted Hobart Eddy, come late to the christening and arrived with that vague air of asking why he was where he was which lent to him all the charm of ennui without its bad taste.
“Hobart,” Enid cried ecstatically, “you shall be godfather!”
Hobart Eddy continued to bend to kiss my hand and then sought the hand of Madame Sally and next the hand of Madame Polly Cleatam. Finally he bowed before Enid and fixed his monocle on the baby.
“It opens and shuts its eyes,” he earnestly observed; “how these baby people imitate the doll factories. It’s disgraceful.”
“Kiss him!” the mer-mother commanded, as if she were the prompter.
Hobart Eddy obediently kissed the baby’s thumb.
“Man and brother,” he greeted him solemnly; “Lord, to think I’ll take it to luncheon sometime and hear it know more about the town than I do.”
“At all events,” Madame Sally Chartres begged gravely, “don’t ask him to lunch until he’s been christened. In Society you have to have a name.”
“But,” Enid settled it with pretty peremptoriness, “you must be godfather even if he never lunches. Hobart—you will?”
“Its godfather?” said Hobart Eddy. “I? But yes, with all pleasure. What do I have to do? Is there more than one figure?”
When at length the arrival of the bishop followed close on the departure of Pelleas, regretful but absurdly firm, we were in a merry clamour of instruction. The situation had caught our fancy and this was no great marvel. For assuredly Hobart Eddy was not the typical godfather.
“On my honour,” he said, “I never was even ‘among those’ at a christening, in my life, and I would go a great distance to be godfather. It’s about the only ambition I’ve never had and lost.”
The service of the christening holds for me a poignant solemnity. And because this was Enid’s baby and because I remembered that hour in which he had seemed to be Pelleas’ dream and mine come back, my heart was overflowingly full. But I missed Pelleas absurdly, for this was one of the hours in which we listen best together; and to have learned to listen with some one brings, in that other’s absence, a silence. But it was a happy hour, for the sun streamed gayly across the window-boxes, there were the dear faces of our friends, the mer-mother and her young husband were near to joyful tears and the bishop’s voice was like an organ chord in finer, fluttering melody. Through the saying of prayer and collects I stood with uplifting heart; and then Enid’s husband gave the baby’s name with a boyish tremble in his voice; and after the baptism and its formalities the bishop read the words that were the heart of the whole matter; and the heart of a matter does not always beat in the moment’s uplift.
“‘And thou, Child,’ the bishop read, ‘shalt be called the prophet of the Highest; for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways.
“‘Through the tender mercy of our Lord, whereby the day spring from on high hath visited us.
“‘To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’”
As he read a hush fell upon us. It seemed suddenly as if our conventional impulse to see Enid’s baby christened was an affair of more radiant import than we had meant. From the words of exhortation that followed I was roused by a touching of garments, and I looked up to see a trim, embroidered maid holding the baby toward Hobart Eddy. The moment for his service as godfather was come. As he held out his arms he questioned Enid briefly with his eyes, and then earnestly gave himself to establishing the little man and brother in a curve of elbow. It was after all, I suppose him to have been reflecting, as sternly required of a man that he be an efficient godfather as that he perfectly fill all the other offices of a man of the world. I even suspected him of a downward glance to be assured that the soft skirts were gracefully in place, quite as if he were arranging tableaux vivants. Thereafter he stood erect, with his complaisant passivity of look, as perfectly the social automaton as if the baby were a cup of tea. Really, to accept dear Hobart Eddy as godfather was rather like filling a champagne glass with cream.
“What shall be the name of this child?” once more demanded the bishop.
“Philip Wentworth,” prompted the young father a second time, presenting a serious, young-father profile to the world.
The bishop waited.
“Philip Wentworth,” obediently repeated Hobart Eddy with, I dare be sworn, the little deferential stooping of the shoulders with which I had seen him return many and many a fan.
The bishop, his face filled with that shining which even in gravity seemed sweeter than the smile of another, fixed his deep eyes upon the godfather, and when he spoke it was as if he were saying the words for the first time, to the guardian of the first child:—
“‘Dost thou, in the name of this Child, renounce ... the vain pomp and glory of this world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow nor be led by them?’”
Hobart, his eyes fixed on the open prayer-book which he held, read the response quickly and clearly:
“‘I renounce them all, and by God’s help I will endeavour not to follow or be led by them.’”
“‘Wilt thou, then,’” pursued the bishop benignly, “‘obediently keep God’s holy will and commandments and walk in the same all the days of thy life?’”
“‘I will,’” said Hobart Eddy, “‘by God’s help.’”
There was no slightest hesitation, no thought, or so it seemed to me; only the old urbane readiness to say what was required of him. What had he said, what had he done, this young lion of the social moment, beau, gallant, dilettante, and was it possible that he did not understand what he had promised? Or was I a stupid and exacting old woman taking with convulsive literalness that which all the world perhaps recognizes as a form of promise for the mere civilized upbringing of a child? I tried to remember other godfathers and I could remember only those who, like Pelleas, had indeed served, as Enid had said in jest, by office of their virtue. And yet Hobart Eddy—after all I told myself he was a fine, upright young fellow who paid his debts, kept his engagements, whose name was untouched by a breath of scandal, who lived clear of gossip; so I went through the world’s dreary catalogue of the primal virtues. But what had these to do with that solemn “I renounce them all”?
By the time that the service was well over I could have found it in my heart to proclaim to our guests that, as the world construed it, a christening seemed to me hardly more vital than the breakfast which would follow.
This however I forbore; and at the end every one pressed forward in quite the conventional way and besieged the baby and Hobart and showered congratulations upon them both and kissed Enid and was as merry as possible. And as for Hobart, he stood in their midst, bowing a little this way and that, giving his graceful flatteries as another man gives the commonplaces, complaisant, urbane, heavy-lidded....
I omitted the baby and looked straight at the godfather.
“How do you like the office?” I asked somewhat dryly.
He met my eyes with his level look.
“Dear friend,” he said softly, “you see how inefficient I am. Even to describe your charming christening toilet is my despair.”
“Hobart Eddy,” said I sharply, “take Enid in to breakfast.”
While May was still stepping about the fields loath to leave her business of violets and ladywort, Madame Sally Chartres sent pleasant word from Long Island that a dozen or more of her friends were to spend a day with her, and no one would willingly disregard the summons. The Chartres’ lived on the edge of an orchard and another edge of field. I dare say they lived in a house although what I chiefly remember is a colonnade of white pillars, a library shelved to the ceiling, and a sprinkling of mighty cushioned window seats whereon the sun forever streamed through lattices. Perhaps Madame Sally and Wilfred had assembled these things near an orchard and considered that to be house enough. At all events there could have been no fairer place for a Spring holiday.
Pelleas and I went down by train, and the morning was so golden that I wholly expected to divine a procession of nymphs defiling faintly across the fields in a cloud of blossoms rooted in air. I have often wondered why goblins, dryads and the like do not more frequently appear to folk on railway trains. These shy ones would be quite safe, for by the time the bell rope should have been pulled and the conductor told why the train must be stopped and the engine and cars brought effectually to a standstill, the little shadowy things could have vanished safely against the blue. Perhaps they do not understand how sadly long it takes a spirit to influence the wheels of civilization.
The others coached down to the Chartres’ with Hobart Eddy, although there must be made one important exception: Madame Sally had insisted that Enid bring the baby; and Enid and her husband, who since the christening were lingering on in town, had given the baby and his new nurse to the charge of Pelleas and me. We arrived ahead of the coach and stood on the veranda to welcome the others.
Lisa was among these, with Eric at her side; and Madame Polly and Horace Cleatam and Miss Lillieblade, all three in spite of their white hair and anxiety about draughts stoutly refusing to ride inside. There were four or five others, and from the box seat beside Hobart Eddy I saw descending with what I am bound to call picturesque deliberation a figure whom I did not remember.
“Pray who is that?” there was time for me to ask Madame Sally.
“My dear,” she answered hurriedly, “she is a Mrs. Trempleau. I used to love her mother. And Hobart wanted her here.”
“Hobart!” I exclaimed. “That Mrs. Trempleau?” I comprehended. “You don’t think ...” I intimated.
Madame Sally’s eyebrows were more expressive than the eyes of many.
“Who knows?” she said only, and made of her eyebrows a positive welcome to our friends.
Mrs. Trempleau came toward us flickering prettily—I protest that she reminded me of a thin flame, luminous, agile, seeking. She had hair like the lights in agate, and for its sake her gown and hat were of something coloured like the reflection of the sun in a shield of copper. She had a fashion of threading her way through an hour of talk, lighting a jest here, burning a bit of irony there, smouldering dangerously near the line of daring. And that day as she moved from group to group on the veranda the eyes of us all, of whom Hobart Eddy was chief, were following her. I think it may have been because her soul was of some alien element like the intense, avid spirit of the flames, though when I told Pelleas he argued that it was merely the way she lifted her eyes.
“Where is Mr. Trempleau?” Pelleas added, his nature as I have said being built on straight lines.
“There may be one,” I answered, “but I think he lives on some other continent.”
Pelleas reflected.
“Hobart Eddy and Pelham and Clox look in love with her,” he said; “if she doesn’t take care there won’t be enough continents.”
In no small amusement during luncheon we watched Hobart Eddy, especially Pelleas and I who, however, besides being amused, were also a little sad. Mrs. Trempleau’s appropriation of him was insistent but very pretty. Indeed, if she had on a night of stars appropriated Sirius I dare say the constellations would have sung approval. She had the usual gift of attractive faults. But above Mrs. Trempleau’s shoulders and beyond the brightness of her hair I had, at luncheon, glimpses which effectually besought my attention from the drama within. The long windows overlooked the May orchards, white and sweet and made like youth, and I was impatient to be free of the woman’s little darting laughs and away to the fields. Some way, in her presence it was not like May.
Therefore, when Pelleas had been borne to the stables by his host and when the others had wandered back to the veranda, I went away down what I think must have been a corridor, though all that I remember is a long open window leading to the Spring, as if one were to unlatch an airy door and reveal a diviner prospect than our air infolds. A lawn, cut by a gravel walk bounded by tulips, sloped away from this window to the orchard and I crossed the green in the frank hope that the others would not seek me out. But when I turned the corner by the dial I came fairly on two other wanderers. There, with the white-embroidered nurse-maid, sat, like another way of expressing the Spring, Enid’s baby. Was ever such happy chance befallen at the gate of any May orchard whatever?
“Ah,” I cried to the little nurse, “Bonnie! Come quickly. I see a place—there—or there—or there—where you must bring the baby at once—at once! Leave the perambulator here—so. He is awake? Then quickly—this way—to the pink crab apple-tree.”
I sometimes believe that in certain happy case I find every one beautiful; but I recall that Bonnie—of whom I shall have more to tell hereafter—that day seemed to me so charming that I suspected her of being Persephone, with an inherited trick of caring for the baby as her mother cared for Demophoön.
To the pink crab apple-tree! What a destination. It had for me all the delight of running toward, say, the plane tree in the meadow of Buyukdere. I remember old branches looking like the arms of Pan, wreath-wound, and rooms of sun through which petals drifted ... who could distinctly recall the raiment of such an hour? But at length by many aisles we came to a little hollow where the grass was greenest, hard by the orchard arbour, and we stood before the giant pink crab apple-tree. Has any one ever wondered that Sicilian courtiers went out a-shepherding and that the Round Table, warned to green gowns, fared forth a-Maying?
“Spread the baby’s rug!” I cried to Bonnie; “here is a little seat made in the roots for this very day. Pull him a branch of apple blossoms—so. And now run away, child, and amuse yourself. The baby and I are going to make an apple-blossom pie.”
Bonnie, hesitating, at my more peremptory bidding went away. I have no idea whether she was caught up among the branches by friendly hands or whether the nearest tree trunk hospitably opened to receive her. But there, in May, with the world gone off in another direction, the baby and I sat alone.
“O—o-o-o-o—” said the baby, in a kind of lyric understanding of the situation.
I held him close. These hours of Arcady are hard to win for the sheltering of dreams.
Voices, sounding beyond a momentary rain of petals, roused me. Enid’s baby smiled up in my eyes but I saw no one, though the voices murmured on as if the dryads had forgotten me and were idly speaking from tree to tree. Then I caught from the orchard arbour Mrs. Trempleau’s darting laugh. It was as if some one had kindled among the apple blossoms a torch of perfumed wood.
“I am sailing on Wednesday,” I heard her saying in a voice abruptly brought to sadness. “Ah, my friend, if I might believe you. Would there indeed be happiness for you there with me, counting the cost?”
It was of course Hobart Eddy who answered quite, I will be bound, as I would have said that Hobart Eddy would speak of love: with fine deliberation, as another man would speak the commonplaces, possibly with his little half bow over the lady’s hand, a very courtier of Love’s plaisance.
She replied with that perpetual little snare of her laughter laid like a spider web from one situation to the next.
“Come with me then,” she challenged him; “let us find this land where it is always Spring.”
“Do you mean it?” asked Hobart Eddy.
I do not know what she may have said to this, for the new note in his voice terrified me. Neither do I know what his next words were, but their deliberation had vanished and in its stead had come something, a pulse, a tremor....
I remember thinking that I must do something, that it was impossible that I should not do anything. I looked helplessly about the great empty orchard with its mock-sentinel trees, and down into Enid’s baby’s eyes. And on a sudden I caught him in my arms and lifted him high until his head was within the sweetness of the lowest boughs. He did what any baby in the world would have done in that circumstance; he laughed aloud with a little coo and crow at the end so that anybody in that part of the orchard, for example, must have heard him with delight.
The two in the orchard arbour did hear. Mrs. Trempleau leaned from the window.
“Ah,” she cried, in her pretty soaring emphasis, “what a picture!”
“Is he not?” I answered, and held the baby high. On which she said some supreme nonsense about Elizabeth and the little John and “Hobart—see!” she cried.
The two came out of the arbour, and Mrs. Trempleau made little dabs at the baby and then went picturesquely about filling her arms with blossoms. Hobart Eddy threw himself on the grass beside me and watched her. I looked at them all: at the woman who was like thin flame, at the man who watched her, indolent, confident, plainly allured, and at Enid’s baby. And,
“There,” said I, abruptly to the baby, “is your godfather.”
Hobart Eddy turned on his elbow and offered him one finger.
“It’s like being godfather to a rose,” he said smiling, and his smile had always the charm and spontaneity of his first youth.
“When the rose is twenty-one,” said I, “and this luncheon party which I heard you prophesying the other day comes off, what sort of godfather will you be then, do you think?”
“What sort am I now, for that matter?” he asked idly.
“Ah, well, then,” said I boldly; “yes! What sort are you now?”
When one is past seventy and may say what one pleases one is not accountable for any virtue of daring.
He looked at me quickly but I did not meet his eyes. I was watching Mrs. Trempleau lay the apple boughs against her gown.
“Ah, pray don’t,” he besought. “You make me feel as if there were things around in the air waiting to see if I would do right or wrong with them.”
“There are,” said I, “if you want me to be disagreeable.”
“But I!” he said lightly. “What have I to decide? Whether to have elbow bits on the leaders for the coaching Thursday. Whether to give Eric his dinner party on the eighth or the nineteenth. Whether to risk the frou-frou figure at Miss Lillieblade’s cotillon. You don’t wish me to believe that anything in the air is concerned with how I am deciding those?”
“No,” said I with energy, “not in the air or on the earth or under the sea.”
“Ah, well, now,” he went on with conviction, and gave to the baby a finger of each hand—beautiful, idle, white fingers round which the baby’s curled and clung, “what can I do?” He put it to me with an air of great fairness.
With no warning I found myself very near to tears for the pity of it. I laid my cheek on the baby’s head and when I spoke I am not even sure that Hobart Eddy heard all I was saying.
“... ‘in the name of this child,’” I repeated, “was there not something ‘in the name of this child’—something of renouncing—and of not following after nor being led by....”
For a moment he looked up at me blankly, though still with all his urbanity, his conformity, his chivalrous attention.
“I’m not preaching,” said I briskly, “but a gentleman keeps his word, and dies if need be for the sake of his oath, does he not? Whether it chances to be about a bet, or a horse, or—or a sea lion. For my own part, as a woman of the world, I cannot see why on earth he should not keep it about a christening.”
Hobart Eddy turned toward me, seeking to free his fingers of that little clinging clasp.
“Jove,” he said helplessly, “do they mean it that way?”
“‘That way,’” I cried, past the limit of my patience. “I dare say that very many people who are married would be amazed if they were told that their oath had been meant ‘that way.’ But they would sell their very days to pay a debt at bridge. ‘That way!’ Let me ask you, Hobart Eddy, if ‘I will, by God’s help’ does not mean quite as much at a marriage or a christening as it does in society?”
And at that Enid’s baby, missing the outstretched fingers, suddenly leaned toward him, smiling and eager, uttering the most inane and delicious little cries. A baby without genius would simply have paid no attention.
Hobart Eddy took the baby in his arms and looked down at him with something in his face which I had never seen there before. The baby caught at his hand and pulled at the cord of his monocle and stared up at the low blossoming boughs. As for me I fell gathering up stray petals in a ridiculous fashion and I knew that my hands were trembling absurdly.
I looked up as Mrs. Trempleau came toward us. She was dragging a burden of flowering branches and she looked some priestess of the sun gone momentarily about the offices of the blossoming earth.
“Ah, the baby!” she cried. “Let me have the baby.”
Hobart Eddy had risen and had helped me to rise; and I fancy that he and Enid’s baby and I hardly heard Mrs. Trempleau’s pretty urgency. But when she let fall the flowers and held out her arms, Hobart looked at her and did not let the baby go.
“This little old man and I,” he said, “we understand each other. And we’re going to walk together, if you don’t mind.”
On Wednesday Mrs. Trempleau sailed for Cherbourg alone. But when I told Pelleas the whole matter he shook his head.
“If those two had intended eloping,” he said, “all the christenings in Christendom wouldn’t have prevented.”
“Pelleas!” I said, “I am certain—”
“If those two had intended to elope,” he patiently began it all over again, “all the—”
“Pelleas,” I urged, “I don’t believe it!”
“If those two—” I heard him trying to say.
“Pelleas!” I cried finally, “you don’t believe it either!”
“Ah, well, no,” he admitted, “I don’t know that I do.”