The Cords of Vanity. A Comedy of Shirking

I understood. Even then I knew something of the occasional insufficiency of words.

'It is a big world,' I assented, 'and lots of people are having a right hard time in it right now. I reckon there is somebody dying this very minute not far off.'

'It's all—waiting for us!' Stella had forgotten my existence. 'It's bringing us so many things—and we don't know what any of them are. But we've got to take them, whether we want to or not. It isn't fair. We've got to— well, got to grow up, and—marry, and—die, whether we want to or not. We've no choice. And it may not matter, after all. Everything will keep right on like it did before; and the stars won't care; and what we've done and had done to us won't really matter!'

'Well, but, Stella, you can have a right good time first, anyway, if you keep away from ugly things and fussy people. And I reckon you really go to Heaven afterwards if you haven't been really bad,—don't you?'

'Rob,—are you ever afraid of dying?' Stella asked, 'very much afraid—Oh, you know what I mean.'

I did. I was about ten once more. It was dark, and I was passing a drug-store, with huge red and green and purple bottles glistening in the gas-lit windows; and it had just occurred to me that I, too, must die, and be locked up in a box, and let down with trunk-straps into a hole, like Father was…. So I said, 'Yes.'

'And yet we've got to! Oh, I don't see how people can go on living like everything was all right when that's always getting nearer,—when they know they've got to die before very long. Because they dance and go on picnics and buy hats as if they were going to live forever. I—oh, I can't understand.'

'They get used to the idea, I reckon. We're sort of like the rats in the trap at home, in our stable,' I suggested, poetically. 'We can bite the wires and go crazy, like lots of them do, if we want to, or we can eat the cheese and kind of try not to think about it. Either way, there's no getting out till they come to kill us in the morning.'

'Yes,' sighed Stella; 'I suppose we must make the best of it.'

'It's the only sensible thing to do, far as I can see.'

'But it is all so big—and so careless about us!' she said, after a little. 'And we don't know—we can't know! —what is going to happen to you and me. And we can't stop its happening!'

'We'll just have to make the best of that, too,' I protested, dolefully.

Stella sighed again, 'I hope so,' she assented; 'still, I'm scared of it.'

'I think I am, too—sort of,' I conceded, after reflection. 'Anyhow, I am going to have as good a time as I can.'

There was now an even longer pause. Pitiable, ridiculous infants were pondering, somewhat vaguely but very solemnly, over certain mysteries of existence, which most of us have learned to accept with stolidity. We were young, and to us the miraculous insecurity and inconsequence of human life was still a little impressive, and we had not yet come to regard the universe as a more or less comfortable place, well-meaningly constructed anyhow—by Somebody—for us to reside in.

Therefore we moved a trifle closer together, Stella and I, and were commonly miserable over the Weltschmerz. After a little a distant whippoorwill woke me from a chaos of reverie, and I turned to Stella, with a vague sense that we two were the only people left in the whole world, and that I was very, very fond of her.

Stella's head was leaned backward. Her lips were parted, and the moonlight glinted in her eyes. Her eyes were blue.

'Don't!' said Stella, faintly.

I did….

It was a matter out of my volition, out of my planning. And, oh, the wonder, and sweetness, and sacredness of it! I thought, even in the instant; and, oh, the pity that, after all, it is slightly disappointing….

Stella was not angry, as I had half expected. 'That was dear of you,' she said, impulsively, 'but don't try to do it again.' There was the wisdom of centuries in this mandate of Stella's as she rose from the bench. The spell was broken, utterly. 'I think,' said Stella, in the voice of a girl of fifteen, 'I think we'd better go and dance some more.' 

5

In the crude morning I approached Stella, with a fatuous smile. She apparently both perceived and resented my bearing, although she never once looked at me. There was something of great interest to her in the distance, apparently down by the springhouse; she was flushed and indignant; and her eyes wouldn't, couldn't, and didn't turn for an instant in my direction.

I fidgeted.

'If,' said she, impersonally, 'if you believe it was because of you, you are very much mistaken. It would have been the same with anybody. You don't understand, and I don't either. Anyhow, I think you are a mess, and I hate you. Go away from me!'

And she stamped her foot in a fine rage.

For the moment I entertained an un-Christian desire that Stella had been born a boy. In that case, I felt, I would, just then, have really enjoyed sitting upon the back of her head, and grinding her nose into the lawn, and otherwise persuading her to cry ''Nough.' These virile pleasures being denied me, I sought for comfort in discourteous speech.

'Umph-huh!' said I, 'and you think you're mighty smart, don't you? Well, I don't want you pawing around me any more, either. I won't have it, do you understand! That was what I was going to tell you anyhow, you kissing- bug, even if you hadn't acted so smart. And you can just stick that right in your pipe and smoke it, you old Miss Smart Alec.'

Thereupon I—wisely—departed without delay. A rock struck me rather forcibly between the shoulder blades, but I did not deign to notice this phenomenon.

'You can't fight girls with fists,' I reflected. 'You've just got to talk to them in the right way.'

2. He Loves Extensively

1

I saw no more of Stella for a lengthy while, since within two days of the events recorded it pleased my mother to seek out another summer resort.

'For in September,' she said, 'I really must have perfect quiet and unimpeachable butter, and falling leaves, and only a very few congenial people to be melancholy with,—and that sort of thing, you know. I find it freshens one up so against the winter.'

It was a signal feature of my mother's conversation that you never understood, precisely, what she was talking about.

Thus in her train the silly, pretty woman drew otherwhither her hobbledehoy son, as indeed Claire Bulmer Townsend had aforetime drawn an armament of more mature and stolid members of my sex. I was always proud of my handsome mother, but without any aspirations, however theoretical, toward intimacy; and her periods of conscientious if vague affection, when she recollected its propriety, I endured with consolatory foreknowledge of an impendent, more agreeable era of neglect.

I fancy that at bottom I was without suspecting it lonely. I was an only child; my father had died, as has been hinted, when I was in kilts…. No, I must have graduated from kilts into 'knee-pants' when the Democracy of Lichfield celebrated Grover Cleveland's first election as President, for I was seven years old then, and was allowed to stay up ever so late after supper to watch the torchlight parade. I recollect being rather pleasantly scared by the