Pott's Painless Cure - Edward Bellamy (ebooks children's books free .TXT) 📗

she has loved an ass. Don't you suppose Titania suffered a good deal from the loss of her ideal?"

There was a general snicker at Sturgis's expense.

"Well, now," continued Potts gravely, "a woman who should fall in love with one of us fellows and deem him a hero would be substantially in Titania's plight when she adored Bottom, and about as much an object of pity when her hero disclosed an asininity which would be at least as near to being his real character as the heroism she ascribed to him."

"That 's all very well," said Merril dryly, "but it strikes me that it's middling cheeky for you fellows to be discussing how you 'll jilt your sweethearts with least expense to their feelings, when the chances are that if you should ever get one, you 'll need all your wits to keep her from jilting you."

"You are, as usual, trivial and inconsequential this evening, Merril," replied Potts, when the laughter had subsided. "Supposing, as you suggest, that we shall be the jilted and not the jilters, it will be certainly for our interest that the ladies should spare our feelings by disenchanting us,--saying, as it were, the charm backward that first charmed us. He who would teach the ladies the method and enlist their tender hearts in its behalf would be, perhaps, the greatest benefactor his much-jilted and heart-sore sex ever had. Then, indeed, with the heart-breakers of both sexes pledged to so humane a practice, there would be no more any such thing as sorrow over unrequited affections, and the poets and novelists would beg their bread."

"That is a millennial dream, Potts," responded Merril. "You may possibly persuade the men to make themselves disagreeable for pity's sake, but it is quite too much to expect that a woman would deliberately put herself in an unbecoming light, if it were to save a world from its sins."

"Perhaps it is," said Potts pensively; "but considering what perfectly inexhaustible resources of disagreeableness there are in the best of us and the fairest of women, it seems a most gratuitous cruelty that any heart should suffer when a very slight revelation would heal its hurt. We can't help people suffering because we are so faulty and imperfect, but we might at least see that nobody ever had a pang from thinking us better than we are."

"Look at Hunt!" said Sturgis. "He does n't open his mouth, but drinks in Potts's wisdom as eagerly as if he did n't know it was a pump that never stops."

There was a general laugh among those who glanced up in time to catch the expression of close attention on Hunt's face.

"Probably he 's deliberating on the application of the Potts patent painless cure to some recent victim of that yellow mustache and goatee," suggested Merril, with the envy of a smooth-faced youth for one more favored.

Hunt, whose face had sprung back like a steel-trap to its usual indifferent expression, smiled nonchalantly at Merril's remark. One whose reticent habit makes his secrets so absolutely secure as Hunt's private affairs always were is stirred to amusement rather than trepidation by random guesses which come near the truth.

"If I were situated as Merril flatteringly suggests, I should enjoy nothing better than such an experiment," he replied deliberately. "It would be quite a novel sensation to revolutionize one's ordinary rule of conduct so as to make a point of seeming bad or stupid. There would be as much psychology in it as in an extra term, at least. A man would find out, for instance, how much there was in him besides personal vanity and love of approbation. It would be a devilish small residue with most of us, I fancy."

The talk took a new turn, and the fun grew fast and furious around Hunt, who sat puffing his pipe, absorbed in contemplation. At about half-past nine, when things were getting hilarious, he beat a retreat, followed by the reproaches of the fellows. He was determined to administer the first dose of Potts's painless cure to his interesting patient that very evening, if she had not already retired. He was in high good humor. Potts was a brick; Potts was a genius. How lucky that he had happened to go up to college that night! He felt as if an incubus were lifted off his mind. No more pangs of conscience and uncomfortable sense of being a mean and cruel fellow, for him. Annie should be glad to be rid of him before he had ended with her. She should experience a heartfelt relief, instead of a broken heart, on his departure. He could n't help chuckling. He had such confidence in his nerve and his reticent habit that his confidence and ability to carry out the scheme were undoubting, and at its first suggestion he had felt almost as much relief as if he had already executed it.

On arriving home, he found Annie sewing alone in the parlor, and a little offish in manner by way of indicating her sense of his offense in leaving her to spend the evening alone.

"Really, Annie," he said, as he sat down and unfolded the evening paper, "I try to give you all the time I can spare. If, instead of sulking, you had taken a piece of paper and calculated how many hours this week I have managed to give you my company, you would scarcely have felt like repining because you could n't see me for an hour or two this evening."

That was the first gun of the campaign. She looked up in blank surprise, too much astonished, for the moment, to be indignant at such a vulgarly conceited remark from him. Without giving her time to speak, he proposed to read the newspaper aloud, and at once began, making a point of selecting the dullest editorials and the flattest items and witticisms, enlivening them with occasional comments of studied insipidity, and one or two stories, of which he carefully left out the "nubs." He was apparently making an unusual effort all the while to be entertaining, and Annie, finding no opening for expressing her vexation, finally excused herself and went upstairs, with no very angelic expression of countenance.

"Pretty well for a beginning," was Hunt's muttered comment as he laid down the paper.

At breakfast Mr. Gifford asked him:--

"Shall I give you some tongue?"

Looking around with the air of one saying a good thing, he replied:--

"Thank you, I have enough of my own."

The silence was painful. Mr. Gifford looked as if he had lost a near friend. Mrs. Gifford at length, remembering that Hunt was a guest, forced a momentary, ghastly smile. Annie was looking melancholy enough before, but a slight compression of the lips indicated that she had received the full effect. Certain degrees of badness in jokes stamp the joker as a natural inferior in the eyes of even the most rabid of social levelers. Scarcely any possible exhibition of depravity gives quite the sickening sense of disappointment in the perpetrator imparted by a genuinely bad or stale joke. Two or more similar sensations coming near together are multiplied by mutual reverberations so as to be much more impressive than if they occurred at considerable intervals. Hunt's tongue joke not only retroacted to deepen the impression of vulgarity which his last evening's performance had given Annie, but in turn was made to appear a far more significant indication of his character on account of its sequence to that display.

That evening he made her a little present, having selected as a gift a book of the day of which he had chanced to overhear her express to a third person a particularly cordial detestation. It was decidedly the best book of the year, he said; he had read it himself. She was obliged to thank him for it, and even to tell one or two polite fibs, which wrenched her terribly, and the memory of which lent a special spite to the vehemence with which she threw the book into a corner on reaching her room. Then she went remorsefully and picked it up again, and after holding it awhile irresolutely, proceeded to hide it away in a far corner of one of the least used drawers of her bureau.

Not sleeping very well that night, she came downstairs next morning just as Hunt was leaving. He kissed his hand to her and called out "Aw revore." At first she was merely puzzled, and smiled, and then it occurred to her that it was doubtless the barbarous way he pronounced _au revoir_, and the smile gave place to an expression of slight nausea. As Hunt well knew, her pet aversion was people who lugged mispronounced French phrases into their conversation under the impression that they imparted a piquant and graceful effect. It was a touch of vulgarity which inspired her with a violent contempt absurdly disproportioned to the gravity of the offense. It had always been a cherished theory of hers that there were certain offenses in manners which were keys to character. If persons committed them, it implied an essential strain of vulgarity in their dispositions. Judged by this theory, where would her lover come out?

Hunt managed to get into a political discussion with Mr. Gifford at table that noon, talking in a rather supercilious tone, and purposely making several bad blunders, which Mr. Gifford corrected rather pointedly. Annie could not help observing that her lover's conceit and ignorance of the subjects discussed seemed about equal.

"How do you like your book?" he asked that evening.

She murmured something confusedly.

"Haven't begun it yet?" he inquired in surprise. "Well, when once you do, I 'm sure you 'll not lay it down till it's finished. And, by the way, your judgment in literary matters is so good, I 'd like to get your opinion on the essay I 'm getting up for Commencement. I think it's rather the best thing I 've written."

He proceeded to read what purported to be a sketch of its argument, which proved to be so flat and vapid that Annie blushed with shame for his mental poverty, and was fain to cover her chagrin with a few meaningless comments.

Her mind was the theatre of a struggle between disgust and affection, which may be called ghastly. Had he been openly wicked, she would have known how to give a good account of all disloyal suggestions to desert or forget him. But what could she do against such a cold, creeping thing as this disgust and revulsion of taste, which, like the chills of incipient fever, mingled with every rising pulse of tender feeling? Finally, out of her desperation, she concluded that the fault must be with her; that she was fickle, while he was true. She tried hard to despise herself, and determined to fight down her growing coldness, and reciprocate as it deserved the affection with which he was so lavish. The result of these mental exercises was to impart a humility and constrained cordiality to her air very opposite to its usual piquancy and impulsiveness, and, by a sense of her own shortcomings, to distract her mind from speculation, which she might otherwise have indulged, over the sudden development of so many unpleasant qualities in her lover. Though, indeed, had her speculations been never so active and ingenious, the actual plan on which Hunt was proceeding would probably have lain far beyond the horizon of her conjecture.

Meanwhile, Hunt was straitened for time; only eight or ten days of the term were left, and in that time he must effect Annie's cure, if at all. A slow cure would be