Saturday, Nov. 14, 1903
Up all night feeling lonely and fathomless. There's a fine grown-up twinge between nose and forehead, now, growing steadily sharper with the light o' morn. Ilse's left Mrs. Adamson's and rooming a little way up the hill. She still believes I black-beaned her friend, and snubs most of the S&O in retaliation. Certain of the others have taken to making unkind remarks and leaving me out of things. Sweet, stupid Paul Laird can't imagine that it could have been me, but Paul Laird never did have much of an imagination. In any event, The Affair of the Black-Bean has quite eclipsed the matter of Frank Sitwell and May's behaviour at the Methodist pie social and any number of whispers regarding Ilse Burnley, S.H.. I've half a mind to write it up for the Mercenary myself and get a few pennies for my troubles.
Snow melted by last Thurs.; sleigh ride relocated indoors, which turned out rather less jolly than suffocating, for the most part. May and Kate at each other's throats over something; Ilse refusing to speak to anyone with any civility due to the incident of the S&Os, but showing up anyway to glare and flash and pick the twigs from innocent trees, a greater than usual concentration of Butterworths and Carswells, and no one to talk to. Mary did nothing all night but putter and fret and shove baskets of fresh plum puffs at me to be distributed; she's infuriating when she turns domestic. She hasn't the least aptitude for it and it's positively grotesque, in the manner of one of our Jaunty Bootblacks of Stovepipe or Hardscrabble extraction essaying a fine old Dominion Day speech. Really, it was a dreadful ordeal- for the first three or four hours. The odd thing was that we didn't simply go home. No, we stayed, hovering near Elvira Butterworth's end-tables, memorizing book spines, hanging around the edges of each others' conversations, for hours as though some magic might happen.
And after a dreadfully long time- sometime past the magic hour of eleven o' clock, I think – Mary having begun to pluck a thin tune on the old upright (the Butterworths not being flighty enough to have thrown away good money on a Victrola) and Sam sat down on the bench beside her and began a rumbling harmony, and Kate, whose voice is as sweet as her temper is foul, stopped dead in the middle of a false compliment and began to sing.
By the brook down in the meadow, by the gentle weeping willow. . . . .
And Ilse, who can't sing but whose voice and bearing are so rich and bright that it doesn't matter, joined in with a kind of luminous smirk on her face, as if to say, "Yes, my darlings, the piano is out of tune and so am I, but what does that matter? The moment is its own music!" Then it seemed as though we had only been fooling ourselves all that time into thinking we were uncomfortable and bored and unhappy with one another, and it was clear that we had really been having a splendid time, and were and would always be the best of friends. Sam played two more songs, and Ilse all but shoved him off the bench and began to improvise, with predictable cacophonies, and Ilse and May and I made up some wholly unedifying additional verses to "The Bird in a Golden Cage," at least one of which caused poor Mary to put her apron up over her face and turn bright red.
And for an hour, as happens late at night, it didn't matter that Ilse and Ray and Frank Sitwell think that Evelyn Blake black-beaned Emily Starr, or that Evelyn knew that Ilse had been out prowling with a certain Bootblack till nearly dawn the night before, or that Kate and May were both "not speaking to" Ilse on some obscure point of honour regarding Caleb Carswell or that Mary was terrified to speak to Ilse at all for fear she might start ranting about me again in her incomprehensible medical-dictionary argot. All of that seemed an illusion, fragile as soap-bubbles in the dry heat of a kitchen stove, and the songs and delicious, mysterious feeling of happiness to be somehow the truth, a real life revealed to us at last.
Which is the only real reason, I submit, for anyone to be such a fool as to stay up past eleven PM with a lot of silly girls and boys. And in the morning. . . but you know what melts away and what endures as well as I do, Diary. Still, it's a pity you're not human- you'll never know what enchantments these "frivolous" evenings of ours can cast.
Mr. Towers sent a card c/o Aunt and Uncle Henry to inquire whether I was going to send any more columns from Cynthia. When she saw it, Aunt Iz sniffed: "Don't they know we have a subscription?" I told her with excruciating politeness that it was, in fact, a request for me to become a Times correspondent. I really shouldn't enjoy being excruciatingly polite as much as I do, Diary. Her little mouth shrank and she snapped the card out of my hands. "Poor child," she said coldly. "I'm glad you're too sensible to be fooled by such nonsense."
I could have spit in her eye and smashed her pince-nez under my boot, but I simply lowered my eyelids and smiled pityingly. "Mr. Towers has not asked anything of you," I said. "I don't think it's any of your concern."
She laughed her hard flat laugh and pushed the card down face-first on the table, twisting a little as she did, so that it was wrinkled slightly. I picked it up and read it over again. I'm welcome to send a new column any time in the next week, and should rest assured that there are no bars to my return. Dear old Mr. Towers! Where on earth did he learn such generosity in Greater Shrewsbury? Not from his old friend Kenneth Blake, I'll warrant. He has no doubt, he notes, that I will send him a fresh and amusing column in time for the Women's Page deadline.
But I don't know that I will. Yes, I know. It would be unforgivably childish indeed to have one story in Harper's and decide I was too good to write fashion for the Shrewsbury Times. And it would be worse than beastly to behave ungratefully toward Mr. Towers when he seems determined to give me a second chance at everything. And I liked writing Cynthia. It was the sort of frothy unkind wit that comes most easily to me, especially during History lectures. It's simple and safe and satisfying- all the things I purport to want out of life, when speaking aloud- which is to say, when I am not being wholly honest with myself and others. There is no real reason for me to give it up again, now that I know I can come back to it.
Still, it isn't the best of me. And Uncle Henry et al. would drag me home by the hair even if I were to make a hundred dollars a month by writing. And if I am to be a sort of decorative parasite, it seems I ought to make something of that privilege, and try what I can do in the way of Literature. No, I'm not going to comment on how childish I sound, nor yet on how dull and repetitive I've become; that's how serious I am. For the moment.
So the card from J. Towers, Ed., sits unanswered on my desk, for now, and I must study- for real and by myself this time! There's a McCullough's Latin on my desk and a new bottle of ink and four new pens, which I present to you as rather heavy-handed symbols of my new-found seriousness. I have bought me one sage-green fascinator, a pearl-button collar, and an album for Mary out of my Harper's cheque, and put the rest away for. . . what? Oh, some foolish future or another.
