ARCADIA AND YANKEEDOM

We have given a more or less detailed account of the misunderstanding just described because of the fact that the mental relation it inaugurated was responsible, more than any one other thing, for the separation of Harry and James Wimbourne for a period of nearly seven years.

No one, not even Lady Fletcher herself, had any idea that this would come to pass at the time Harry left the country. One thing led on to another; Harry was put in a preparatory school for two or three terms soon after his arrival in England; he was so happy there and the climate and the school life agreed with him so well that it seemed the most natural thing, a year or so later, to send him up to Harrow with some of his youthful contemporaries, with whom he had formed some close friendships. This was done, be it understood, in accordance with Harry's own wish. There was an atmosphere, a quality, a historical feeling about the English schools that after a short time exerted a strong influence on Harry's adolescent imagination, and made St. Barnabas seem flat and unprofitable in comparison. It would not have been so with many boys, but it was with Harry.

Of course James was a strong magnet in the other direction, but not quite strong enough to pull him against all the forces contending on the English side. There was a distinct heart-interest there; within a year after Harry's arrival in the country, the majority of his friends were English boys. How many vice-Jameses were needed to offset the pull of one James we don't know, but we do know that there were enough. James at first objected strenuously to the change in plans, but Harry countered the objection with the proposal that James should leave St. Barnabas and go up to Harrow with his brother. This was considered on the American side as such an inexplicable attitude that further argument was abandoned and the matter of Harry's schooling given up as a bad job.

The one valid objection to Harrow was that if Harry was to become an American citizen, the place to educate him was in America. Sir Giles saw this, and gave the objection its full value.

"If I were to consult my own inclination alone," he said to Harry when they were talking the matter over, "I should undoubtedly want to make an Englishman out of you. I think you would make a pretty good Englishman, Harry. You could go to Oxford, and then make your career here. Parliament, you know, or the diplomatic. But there seems to be some feeling against such a course. They want you to be an American. They seem to think that your having been born and bred an American makes some difference. Fancy!"

"Fancy!" echoed Harry, as capable as any one of falling in with the spirit of what Lady Fletcher called Sir Giles' "arising-out-of-that-reply" manner.

"And I won't say they are wholly wrong. The question is, can we make a good American of you over here in England? By the time you have gone through Harrow, won't you be an Englishman of the most confirmed type? Won't you disappoint everybody and slip from there into Oxford, as it were, automatically?"

"I am of the opinion," replied Harry judicially, "that the honorable member's fears on that score are ungrounded. You see, Uncle G.," he went on, dropping his parliamentary manner, "I shall go back to America to go to college, anyway. I couldn't possibly go anywhere except to Yale. We've gone to Yale, you see, for three generations already."

"I thought, when you came over here, that you couldn't possibly go to school anywhere except at St. Barnabas. It seems to me I remember something of that kind."

"This is quite different," said Harry firmly, "quite different. I was brought up in Yale, practically. I'm sure I could never be happy anywhere but there. Besides, I don't want to become an Englishman. That's all rot."

"Well," said his uncle, "if that's the case, we'll risk it. And—" he unconsciously quoted his wife on a former occasion—"there are always the vacations."

But that is just where the honorable member proved himself mistaken. The vacations weren't there, after all. And that was where the mutual misunderstanding between the two ladies came in.

We don't mean to say that this was wholly responsible for the uninterrupted separation. Other things came into it; coincidence, mere fortuitous circumstances. Plans were made, on both sides of the Atlantic, but they were always interrupted, for some reason or another. James and Cecilia would write cheerfully about coming over next summer and bringing young James and one or two of their own children with them. That would be from about October to January. Then, along in the winter, it would appear that their plans for the summer were not settled, after all. Ruth was not well enough to travel this year, or James could not leave his work and Cecilia could not leave him. Or, on the other hand, Aunt Miriam would talk breezily at times of taking Giles over and showing him the country—Giles had never been to America except to marry his wife—and taking Harry too, of course; or she would casually suggest running over with him for a fortnight at Christmas. But Harry's summer vacation was so short, only eight weeks, and there were Visits to be made in September; the kind of visits that implied enormous shooting parties and full particulars in the Morning Post. And when Christmas drew near either Giles or Miriam would develop a bad bronchial cough and have to be packed off to Sicily. It is odd how things like that will crop up when two women are fully determined to have nothing to do with each other.

And the boys themselves, could they not go over alone and stay with their relations, at least as soon as they were old enough to make the voyage unaccompanied? James wanted to do something of that kind very much at times; wanted to far more than Harry, who thought that he would have enough of America later on and was meanwhile anxious to get as much out of the continent of Europe as possible. One reason why James never did anything of the sort was that he was afraid; actually a little afraid to go over, unsupported, and find out what they had made of Harry. James' thoughts were apt to run in fixed channels; after he had been a year or two at St. Barnabas, the idea that there was another school in the country, fit for Harry to attend, or in any other country, never entered his head. Harry's decision in favor of Harrow, and particularly Harry's lighthearted suggestion that he should come over and go to Harrow with him, filled his soul with consternation. He, James, leave St. Barnabas for Harrow!...

And to the receptive mind the mere fact that Aunt Cecilia was at this time his closest friend and confidante will explain much. She never made derogatory remarks to him about his Aunt Miriam, nor did she reveal to him, any more than to any one else, the antagonism of feeling that existed between them; but in some subtle, unfelt way she imparted her own attitude to him, which was, in a word, Keep Away. She herself would have said, if any one asked her point blank, that she had Given Harry Up. She never approved of his staying over to be educated; she would have had him back, away from Miriam and Europe (Aunt Cecilia wasted no love on that Continent) inside two months, if she could have had her own way. But her opinion was worth nothing; she was not the boy's guardian!

There was a time, two or three years after his arrival in England, when Harry was consumed by a desire to see his brother again, if only for a few weeks. He told his Uncle Giles about it—he soon fell into the habit of confiding in him sooner than in his aunt—and Uncle Giles sympathized readily with his wish, and promised to run over to America with him the next summer. But when, a few days before the date of their sailing, Harry came home from school, his uncle met him in the library with a grave face and told him that he had been called upon to stand for his party in a by-election early in September, and could not possibly leave the country before that. Afterward there would be no time.

"It is quite a compliment to me," explained Sir Giles; "they want me to go in for them at West Bolton because it is a doubtful and important borough, and they think I can win it over to the Conservatives if any one can. Whereas Blackmoor is sure, no matter who runs. It pleases me in a way, of course, but I hate it for breaking up our trip."

"Oh, dear, I did want to see James," said Harry, leaning his elbows on the mantelpiece, and burying his face in his hands to hide his tears of disappointment.

"Poor boy, it is hard on you," said Sir Giles, and impulsively drew Harry to him and clasped him against his broad bosom. "Do you remember the man in the play, that always voted at his party's call and never thought of thinking for himself at all? That's me, and it makes me feel foolish at times, I can tell you. But if you want so much to see James, why can't he be brought over here?"

"I don't know," said Harry, "I wish he would come, but I'm sure he won't. I don't know what's the matter, but I'm certain that if I am to see him, it will have to be I that makes the journey. I've felt that for some time."

"Well, what about your going over alone? I could see you off at Liverpool, and they would meet you at New York."

But that would not do, either. Harry had counted so much on having his uncle with him and showing him all the interesting things in America that his uncle's defalcation took all the zest out of the trip for him. So he remained in England and helped Sir Giles win the by-election, which interested him very much.

Lady Fletcher was right when she prophesied that Sir Giles would become fond of Harry. He was just such a boy as Sir Giles would have given his Parliamentary career, his K. C. B., and his whole fortune to have for his own son. The two got on famously together. Sir Giles liked to have Harry with him during all his vacations, and visits during summer holidays—visits, that is, on which Harry could not be included—were almost completely given up, as far as Sir Giles was concerned. They spent blissful days with each other on the golf links, or fishing in a Scotch stream, or exploring the filthiest and most fascinating corners of some Continental town, while Aunt Miriam, gently satirical, though secretly delighted, went her own smart and fashionable way, joining them at intervals.

No one was prouder or more pleased than Harry when—a year or two after he came into the Rumbold property, curiously enough—Sir Giles was given a G. C. B. and a baronetcy by his grateful party; or when, in the Conservative landslide that followed the Boer War, he rose to real live ministerial rank, and had to go through a second election by his borough and became a "Right Honorable." The fly in the ointment was that he saw less of his uncle than formerly. The Fletchers moved from their smart but restricted quarters in Mayfair to an enormous place in Belgrave Square, "so as to be near the House," as Aunt Miriam plausibly but rather unconvincingly put it, and Sir Giles seemed to be always either at the House or the Colonial office—have we said that he became Secretary for the Colonies? However, Harry was treated as though he were a son of the house, and was given carte blanche in the matter of asking school friends to stay with him when he came home. This permission also applied to Rumbold Abbey, the estate in Herefordshire that formed the chief part of the aforementioned property. There was no abbey, but there was a late Stuart house of huge proportions; also parks and woods and streams that offered unlimited opportunities for the destruction of innocent fauna, of which Harry and a number of his contemporary Harrovians soon learned to take advantage.

On the whole, Harry led an extremely joyous and entertaining life during the days of his exile. At school he fared no less well than at home; he was never a leader among his fellows, but he was good enough at sports to win their respect and attractive enough in his personality to make many friends. The natural flexibility of his temperament enabled him to fit in fairly easily with the hard-and-fast ways of English school life. He accepted all its conventions and convictions, and never realized, as long as he remained in England, that they were in any way different from those of the schools of his own country. He soon got to dress and to talk like an Englishman, though he never went to extremes in what he loved to irritate his schoolfellows by calling the "English accent." While not exactly handsome, he became, as he reached man's estate, extremely agreeable to look upon. He had a clear pink complexion and dark hair, always a striking and pleasing combination, and he was tall and slim and moved with the stiff gracefulness that is the special characteristic of the British male aristocracy. In general, people liked him, and he liked other people.

His vacations, as has been said, were usually spent with Sir Giles either in the British Isles or on the Continent, but there was one Easter holiday—the second he spent in England—when he was, to quote a phrase of Aunt Miriam's, thrown on the parish. The Fletchers were booked to spend the holiday in a Mediterranean cruise on the yacht of a nautical duke, who was so nautical and so much of a duke that to be asked to cruise with him was not merely an Engagement; it was an Experience. In any case, there could be no question of taking Harry, and Lady Fletcher was in perplexity about what to do with him till Sir Giles suggested, "Why don't we send him to Mildred?" So to Mildred Harry went, and spent an important, if not a wildly exciting, month.

Mildred was Sir Giles' only sister, Lady Archibald Carson. She lived in a little house in the Surrey hills, and though the land that went with it was restricted, it was fertile and its mistress went in as heavily as her means would allow for herbaceous borders and rock gardens and Japanese effects. Her two children, both girls, lived there with her. Her husband, Lord Archibald, was also, in a sense, living with her, but the verdant domesticity of the Surrey hills had no charm for him and he spent practically all of his time in London and other busy haunts of men, or even more busy haunts of women. He was a younger son of a long line of marquises who for their combination of breeding and profligacy probably had no match in the British peerage. Within five years of his marriage he had with the greatest casualness in the world run through his own patrimony and all he could lay his hands on of his wife's. Having bullied and wheedled all that he could out of her he now consistently let her alone and depended for his income on what he could bully and wheedle out of his brother, the eleventh marquis, who was known as a greater rake than Lord Archibald merely because he had greater facilities for rakishness at his command.

Lady Archibald was a tall, light-haired, pale-eyed woman with a tired face and a gentle manner. She had no interests in life beyond her children and her garden, but she had a kind heart and welcomed Harry cordially on his arrival at the little house in Surrey. He had seen her once before at the Fletchers' in London, but he had never seen her children. It was, therefore, with a rather keen sense of curiosity that he walked through the house into the garden, where he was told that Beatrice and Jane were to be found. He saw them across the croquet lawn immediately, and he underwent a mild shock of disappointment on seeing, as he could, at a glance, that they were just as long of limb, just as straight of hair and just as angular in build as most English girls of their age.

The elder girl rose from her seat and sauntered slowly across the lawn, followed by her sister. She stared coolly at Harry as she walked toward him, but said nothing, even when she was quite near. He met her gaze with perfect self-possession, and suddenly realized that she was waiting to see if he would make the first move. He instantly determined not to do so, it being her place, after all, to speak first; so he stood still and stared calmly back at her for a few seconds, till finally the girl, with a sudden fleeting smile, held out her hand and greeted him.

"You're Harry Wimbourne, aren't you?" she said, cordially enough. "This is my sister Jane. We are very glad to see you; we've heard such a lot about you. Come over here and tell us about America."

In that meeting, in her rather rude little aggression and Harry's reception of it, was started a friendship. She deliberately tested Harry and found that he came up to the mark. He did not fidget, he did not blush, he did not stammer; he simply returned her stare, waiting for her to find her manners. Nothing he could have done would have pleased her better; she decided she would like him, then and there.

Harry on his side found her conversation, even in the first hour of their acquaintance, stimulating and agreeable, and like nothing that he had experienced before in any young girl of thirteen, English or American.

"You needn't be afraid that we shall ask foolish questions about America," Beatrice went on. "We know the Indians don't run wild in the streets of New York, and all that sort of thing. We even know what part of the country New Haven is in; we looked it up on the map. It's quite near New York, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Harry, "you're quite right; it is. But how do you pronounce the name of the state it is in? Can you tell me that?"

"Connecticut," replied the girl, readily enough; but she sounded the second c, after the manner of most English people. Harry explained her mistake to her, and she took the correction smiling, quite without pique or resentment.

"Now go on and tell us something about the country. Something really important, you know; something we don't know already."

"Well," said Harry, "there seems to be more room there; that's about the most important difference. Except in the largest cities, and there there seems to be less, and that's why they make the buildings so high. And nearly all the houses, except in the middle of the towns, are made of wood."

He went on at some length, the two girls listening attentively.

At last Beatrice interrupted with the question:

"Which do you think you like best, on the whole, England or America?"

"Oh, America of course; but only because it's my own country. I can imagine liking England best, if one happened to be born here. Some things are nicer here, and some are nicer there."

"What do you like best in England?"

"Well, the old things. Cathedrals and castles. Also afternoon tea, which we don't bother about much over there. And the gardens."

"And what do you like best about America?"

"Trolley cars, and soda water fountains, and such things. And the climate. And the way people act. There's so much less—less formality over there; less bothering about little things, you know."

"Yes, yes, I know exactly. Silly little things, that don't matter one way or the other. I know I should like that about America."

"I think you would like America, anyway," said Harry, looking judicially at his interlocutrix. "You seem to be a free and easy sort of person."

"Well, I wouldn't like trolley cars," interrupted Jane with firmness, "They go too fast. I don't like to go fast. It musses my hair, and the dust gets into my eyes."

"Shut up, silly," said her sister; "you've never ridden in one."

"No, but I know what it is to go fast, and I don't like it. I don't think I should care much for America."

"Well," said Harry, laughing, "we won't make you go there. Or if you do go there, we won't make you ride on the trolley cars. You can ride in hacks all the time; they go slow enough for any one."

Beatrice's first impression of Harry underwent no disillusionment as the days went on. She seemed to find in him a companion after her own heart. He had plenty of ideas of his own, and he was entirely willing to act on hers; he never affected to despise them as a girl's notions, nor did he ever object to her sharing in his amusements because of her misfortune of sex. They climbed trees and crawled through the underbrush on their stomachs together with as much zest and abandon as if there were no such things as frocks and stockings in the world. Harry had never known this kind of companionship with a girl before, and was delighted with her.

"Oh, dash, there goes my garter," she exclaimed one day as they were walking through a country lane together. She had got rather to make a point of such matters, to over-emphasize their possible embarrassment, simply in order to see how beautifully he acted.

"Well, tie it up or something," said he, sauntering on a few steps.

Beatrice did what was necessary and ran on and caught up with him.

"I never could see why a garter shouldn't be as freely talked about as any other article of clothing," said she. "All that sort of modesty is such rot; people have legs, and legs have to have stockings to cover them, and stockings have to have garters to keep them up. And women have legs, just as much as men; there's not a doubt of that. Perhaps that's news to you, though?"

"No, I knew that."

"You really, honestly aren't shocked at what I'm saying?" asked the girl, scanning his face intently.

"Not in the least; why should I be? You're not telling me anything shocking."

Beatrice drew a long breath of pure enjoyment.

"It is a comfort to meet a person like you once in a while," she said. "Tell me, are women such fools about their legs in America as they are here?"

"Yes, quite," said Harry fervently; "if not actually worse. That's one thing that we don't seem to have learned any better about. It always makes me tired."

The two saw each other, infrequently but fairly regularly, throughout Harry's stay in England. They never corresponded, both admitting that they were bad letter writers, but when they met they were always able to pick up their friendship exactly where they had left it.

When Sir Giles came into the Rumbold property there was naturally a corresponding change in the circumstances of Lady Archibald and her daughters. Every penny of the property, which came to Sir Giles through the death of a maternal uncle, was entailed and inalienable from his possession; but he was able to alleviate her condition by giving her a large yearly allowance out of his income; and it was pointed out that such an arrangement would have the advantage of keeping the money safe from her husband. Lady Archibald took a small house in South Street and spent the winter and spring months there, and in the due course of time Beatrice was brought out into society.

Her undoubted beauty, which was of the dark and haughty type, and her excellent dancing were enough to make her a social success. This was a tremendous comfort to her mother, who was never obliged to worry about her at dances or scheme for invitations at desirable houses, and could confine her maternal anxiety to merely hoping that Beatrice would make a better match than she herself had. But Beatrice hated the whole proceeding, heartily and unaffectedly.

"The dancing men all bore me," she once said to Harry; "and I bore all the others. Almost all men are dull; at any rate, they appear at their dullest and worst in society, and the few interesting ones don't want to be bored by a chit like me, and I can't say that I blame them. As for the women—when they get into London society they cease to be women at all; they become fiends incarnate."

"I hope that success is not embittering your youthful heart," said Harry, smiling.

"Not success, but just being in what they are pleased to call society; that will make me bitter if I have much more of it. I don't know why it is; people are nice naturally—most of them, that is. Of course some people are born brutes, like—well, like my father; but most of them are nice at bottom. But somehow London makes beasts of them all. If I am ever Prime Minister—"

"Which, after all, is improbable."

"Well, if I am, the first thing I shall do will be simply to abolish London. We shall have just the same population, but it will be all rural. We shall all live in Arcadian simplicity, and while we may not be perfect, at least we shan't all be the scheming, selfish, merciless brutes that London makes of us."

"And pending the passage of that bill you want to live in Arcadian simplicity alone. I see. I quite like the idea myself. I should love to found Arcadia with you somewhere in rural England, when I have time. Where shall we have it? I should say Devonshire, shouldn't you? Clotted cream, you know, and country lanes. It will be like Marie Antoinette's hamlet at Versailles, only not nearly so silly. We will pay other people to milk the cows and make the butter, and do all the dirty work, and just sit around ourselves and be perfectly charming. No one will be admitted without passing a rigid examination in character, and that will be the only necessary qualification. Arcadia, Limited, we'll call it; it sounds like a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, doesn't it?"

"Whom shall we have in it? Uncle Giles—he could pass all right, couldn't he?"

"Oh, Heavens, yes, Magna cum. And Aunt Miriam—perhaps. She would need some cramming before she went up. What about your mother?"

"I'm afraid Mama could never get in," answered Beatrice, smiling rather sadly. "I've talked to her before about such things and she never answers, but just looks at me with that sad tolerant smile of hers that seems to say 'Arcadian simplicity is all very well, but you'll find the best way to get it is through a husband with ten thousand a year or so.' And the dreadful part of it is that she's right, to a certain extent."

Although in matter of years Beatrice was a few weeks Harry's junior, she was at this time twice as old as he, for all practical purposes. She was an honored guest at Lady Fletcher's big dinners—almost the only ones that did not bore her to death—into which Harry would be smuggled at the last minute to fill up a vacant place, or else calmly omitted from altogether. Nevertheless, he was her greatest comfort all through her first season; nothing but his jovial optimism, which saw the worst but found it no more than amusing, kept the iron from entering into her soul. Such an occasional conversation as the above-quoted would put sanity into her world and fortify her for days against the commonplaces of dancing men and the jealous looks of less attractive maidens. And how she would pine for him during the intervals! How she would long for the arrival of the next vacation or mid-term exeat that would bring him up to town! There was a freshness, a wholesomeness about his way of looking at things that was soothing to her as a breath of country air.

It is not surprising, then, that Beatrice began to dread the nearing date of Harry's departure for America and college more than any one else, even Sir Giles himself, to whom Harry had become by this time almost as dear as a son. Poor Uncle Giles, though he wanted Harry to stay in the country more than any other earthly thing, made it a point of honor never to dissuade the boy from his original project of returning to his own country when he was ready to go to college and becoming an American again. Beatrice, however, was bound by no such restriction and complained bitterly of his desertion.

"What is the point of your going back to some silly American college?" she would ask. "It isn't as if you didn't have the best universities in the world right here, under your very nose. Why aren't Oxford and Cambridge good enough for you, I should like to know? They were good enough for Milton and Thackeray and Isaac Newton and a few other more or less prominent people."

"Very true," replied Harry with perfect good-humor. "The only thing is, those people didn't happen to be Yankees. I am, you know. It's been a habit in our family for two hundred years or more, and it doesn't do to break up old family traditions. Must be a Yankee, whatever happens."

"But that doesn't mean that you have to go to a Yankee college, necessarily," argued Beatrice. "You won't learn nearly as much there as you would at Oxford. You are as far along in your studies now as the second year men at Yale; I heard Uncle Giles say so himself."

"Yes, I know, that's very true. I can't argue about it; you've got all the arguments on your side. I just know that there's only one possible place on earth where I can go to college, and that is Yale. Better not talk about it any more, if it makes you peevish."

"Well, we won't. I'll tell you one thing, though; we have got to start a correspondence. You can spare a few ideas from your Yankees, I hope. I shall simply die on the wooden pavements if I can't at least hear from you occasionally."

"Certainly; I should like nothing better. I'll even go so far as to be the first to write, if you like, and that's a perfectly tremendous concession, as I'm the worst letter writer that ever lived."

So there the matter was left. Harry left Harrow for good at Easter, and spent one last golden month in London, seeing Beatrice almost every day and being an unalloyed joy and comfort to his uncle and aunt. In May he took a short trip through Spain with Sir Giles; it was a country neither of them had visited before, and they had planned a trip there for years. Uncle Giles worked double time for a fortnight in order to be able to leave with a clear conscience, but he found the reward well worth the labor.

They parted at Madrid, the plan being for Harry to sail for New York from Gibraltar, arriving in time to take his final examinations in New Haven in June.

There were tears in Sir Giles' kind blue eyes as he bade Harry good-by, and Harry saw them and knew why they were there. Suddenly he felt his own fill.

"I don't want to go very much, Uncle Giles," he said in a low voice. "Now that it comes to the point, I don't like it much. You've all been so wonderful to me.... It's not a question of what I want to do, though. It's just what's got to be done."

"Yes," said his uncle; "I know. You're quite right about it. It's the only thing to do. But perhaps you won't mind my saying I'm glad, in a way, that you find it hard?"

"Thank you; that helps, too. There's more that comes into it, though; more than what we have talked over together so often.... I mean—"

"James?"

"Yes," said Harry, "that's it."

They clasped hands again and went their separate ways; Sir Giles to the train that was to take him north to Paris and home, and Harry to the train that was to take him south to Gibraltar and home.