WHO CARES?

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WHO CARES?

A STORY OF ADOLESCENCE

by COSMO HAMILTON

TO

MY YOUNG BROTHER

ARTHUR

WHO PLAYS THE GAME

"Another new novel?"

"Well,--another novel."

"What's it about?"

"A boy and a girl."

"A love story?"

"Well,-- it's about a boy and a girl."

"Do they marry?"

"I said it was about a boy and a girl."

"And are they happy?"

"Well,-- it's a love story."

"But all love stories aren't happy!"

"Yes they are,-- if it's love."

CONTENTS

PART ONE

SPRING IN THE WORLD

PART TWO

THE ROUND-ABOUT

PART THREE

THE GREAT EMOTION

PART FOUR

THE PAYMENT

I

SPRING IN THE WORLD AND ALL THINGS FOR THE YOUNG

Birds called. Breezes played among branches just bursting into
green. Daffodils, proud and erect, stood in clumps about the
dazzling lawn. Young, pulsing, eager things elbowed their way
through last year's leaves to taste the morning sun; the wide-eyed
celandine, yellower than butter; the little violet, hugging the
earth for fear of being seen; the sturdy bourgeois daisy; the pale-
faced anemone, earliest to wake and earliest to sleep; the blue
bird's-eye in small family groups; the blatant dandelion already a
head and shoulders taller than any neighbor. Every twig in the old
garden bore its new load of buds that were soft as kittens' paws;
and up the wrinkled trunks of ancient trees young ivy leaves chased
each other like school-boys.

Spring had come again, and its eternal spirit spread the message of
new-born hope, stirred the sap of awakening life, warmed the bosom
of a wintry earth and put into the hearts of birds the old desire to
mate. But the lonely girl turned a deaf ear to the call, and rounded
her shoulders over the elderly desk with tears blistering her
letter.

"I'm miserable, miserable," she wrote. "There doesn't seem to be
anything to live for. I suppose it's selfish and horrid to grumble
because Mother has married again, but why did she choose the very
moment when she was to take me into life? Oh, Alice, what am I to
do? I feel like a rabbit with its foot in a trap, listening to the
traffic on the main road--like a newly fledged bird brought down
with a broken wing among the dead leaves of Rip Van Winkle's
sleeping-place. You'll laugh when you read this, and say that I'm
dramatizing my feelings and writing for effect; but if you've got
any heart at all, you'd cry if you saw me (me of all girls!) buried
alive out here without a single soul to speak to who's as young as I
am--hushed if I laugh by mistake, scowled at if I let myself move
quickly, catching old age every hour I stay here."

"Why, Alice, just think of it! There's not a person or a thing in
and out of this house that's not old. I don't mean old as we thought
of it at school, thirty and thirty-five, but really and awfully old.
The house is the oldest for miles round. My grandfather is seventy-
two, and my grandmother's seventy. The servants are old, the trees
are old, the horses are old; and even the dogs lie about with dim
eyes waiting for death."

"When Mother was here, it was bearable. We escaped as often as we
could, and rode and drove and made secret visits to the city and saw
the plays at matinees. There's nothing old about Mother. I suppose
that's why she married again. But now that I'm left alone in this
house of decay, where everybody and everything belongs to the past,
I'm frightened of being so young, and catch looks that make me feel
that I ought to be ashamed of myself. It's so long since I quarreled
with a girl or flirted with a boy that I can't remember it. I'm
forgetting how to laugh. I'm beginning not to care about clothes or
whether I look nice."

"One day is exactly like another. I wander about aimlessly with
nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to speak to. I've even begun to
give up reading novels, because they make me so jealous. It's all
wrong, Alice. It's bad and unhealthy. It puts mutinous thoughts into
my head. Honestly, the only way in which I can get the sort of
thrill that I ought to have now, if ever I am to thrill at all, is
in making wild plans of escape, so wild and so naughty that I don't
think I'd better write about them, even to you, dear."

"Mother's on her honeymoon. She went away a week ago in a state of
self-conscious happiness that left Grandfather and Grandmother
snappy and disagreeable. She will be away four months, and every
weekly letter that comes from her will make this place more and more
unbearable and me more restless and dangerous. I could get myself
invited away. Enid would have me and give me a wonderful time. She
has four brothers. Fanny has begged me to stay with her in Boston
for the whole of the spring and see and do everything, which would
be absolutely heaven. And you know everybody in New York and could
make life worth living."

"But Grandfather won't let me go. He likes to see me about the
house, he says, and I read the papers to him morning and evening. It
does me good, he considers, to 'make a sacrifice and pay deference
to those whose time is almost up.' So here I am, tied to the
shadows, a prisoner till Mother comes back--a woman of eighteen
forced to behave like a good little girl treated as if I were still
content to amuse myself with dolls and picture books! But the fire
is smolderin Alice, and one fine day it will burst into flame."

A shaft of sunlight found its way through the branches of a chestnut
tree and danced suddenly upon the envelope into which Joan had
sealed up this little portion of her overcharged vitality. Through
the open windows of her more than ample room with its Colonial four-
post bed, dignified tallboys, stiff chairs and anemic engravings of
early-Victorianism, all the stir and murmur of the year's youth came
to Joan.

If her eyes had not been turned inward and her ears had not been
tuned only to catch her own natural complaints, this chatter of
young things would have called her out to laugh and tingle and dance
in the haunted wood and cry out little incoherent welcomes to the
children of the earth. Something of the joy and emotion of that
mother-month must have stirred her imagination and set her blood
racing through her young body. She felt the call of youth and the
urge to play. She sensed the magnetic pull of the voice of spring,
but when, with her long brown lashes wet with impatient tears, she
went to the window and looked out at the green spread of lawn and
the yellow-headed daffodils, it seemed more than ever to her that
she was peering through iron bars into the playground of a school to
which she didn't belong. She was Joan-all-alone, she told herself,
and added, with that touch of picturesque phrasing inherited from
her well-read mother, that she was more like a racing motorboat tied
to a crumbling wharf in a deserted harbor than anything else in the
world.

There was a knock on her door and the sound of a bronchial cough.
"Come in," she said and darted an anxious look at the blond fat face
of the clock on the mantelshelf. She had forgotten all about the
time.

It was Gleave who opened the door, Gleave the bald-headed manservant
who had grown old along with his master with the same resentfulness-
-the ex-prizefighter, sailor, lumberman and adventurer who had
thrown in his lot with Cumberland Ludlow, the sportsman, when both
were in the full flush of middle age. His limp, the result of an
epoch-making fight in an Australian mining camp, was emphasized by
severe rheumatism, and the fretfulness of old age was heightened by
his shortness of breath.

He got no further than: "Your grandfather--"

"I know," said Joan. "I'm late again. And there'll be a row, I
suppose. Well, that will break the monotony, at any rate." Seizing
the moment when Gleave was wrestling with his cough, she slipped her
letter into her desk, rubbed her face vigorously with her
handkerchief and made a dart at the door. Grandfather Ludlow
demanded strict punctuality and made the house shake if it failed
him. What he would have said if he could have seen this eager,
brown-haired, vivid girl, built on the slim lines of a wood nymph,
swing herself on to the banisters and slide the whole way down the
wide stairway would have been fit only for the
appreciative ears of his faithful man. As it was, Mrs. Nye, the
housekeeper, was passing through the hall, and her gasp at this
exhibition of unbecoming athletics was the least that could be
expected from one who still thought in the terms of the crinoline
and had never recovered from the habit of regarding life through the
early-Victorian end of the telescope.

Joan slipped into Mr. Cumberland Ludlow's own room, shut the door
quickly and picked her way over the great skins that were scattered
about the polished floor.

"Good morning, Grandfather," she said, and stood waiting for the
storm to break. She knew by heart the indignant remarks about the
sloppiness of the younger generation, the dire results of modern
anarchy and the universal disrespect that stamped the twentieth
century, and set her quick mind to work to frame his opening
sentence.

But the old man, whose sense of humor was as keen as ever, saw in
the girl's half-rebellious, half-deferential attitude an impatient
expectation of his usual irritation, and so he merely pointed a
shaking finger at the clock. His silence was far more eloquent and
effective than his old-fashioned platitudes. He smiled as he saw her
surprise, indicated a chair and gave her the morning paper. "Go
ahead, my dear," he said.

Sitting bolt upright, with her back to the shaded light, her
charming profile with its little blunt nose and rounded chin thrown
up against the dark glistening oak of an old armoire, Joan began to
read. Her clear, high voice seemed to startle the dead beasts whose
heads hung thickly around the room and bring into their wide, fixed
eyes a look of uneasiness.

Several logs were burning sulkily in the great open fireplace,
throwing out a pungent, juicy smell. The aggressive tick of an old
and pompous clock endeavored to talk down the gay chatter of the
birds beyond the closed windows. The wheeze of a veteran Airedale
with its chin on the head of a lion came intermittently.

They made a picture, these two, that fitted with peculiar rightness
into the mood of Nature at that moment. Youth was king, and with all
his followers had clambered over winter and seized the earth. The
red remainders of autumn were almost over-powered. Standing with his
hands behind him and his back to the fire, the old sportsman
listened, with a queer, distrait expression, to the girl's reading.
That he was still putting up a hard fight against relentless Time
was proved by his clothes, which were those of a country-lover who
dressed the part with care. A tweed shooting-coat hung from his
broad, gaunt shoulders. Well-cut riding breeches, skin tight below
his knees, ran into a pair of brown top-boots that shone like glass.
A head and shoulders taller than the average tall man, his back was
bent and his chest hollow. His thin hair, white as cotton wool, was
touched with brilliantine, and his handsome face, deeply lined and
wrinkled, was as closely shaved as an actor's after three o'clock.
His sunken eyes, overshadowed by bushy brows, had lost their fire.
He could no longer see to read. He too heard the call without, and
when he looked at the young, sweet thing upon whom he was dependent
for the news, and glanced about the room so full of memories of his
own departed youth, he said to himself with more bitterness than
usual: "I'm old; I'm very old, and helpless; life has no use for me,
and it's an infernal shame."

Joan read on patiently, glancing from time to time at the man who
seemed to her to be older than the hills, startlingly, terribly old,
and stopped only when, having lowered himself into his arm-chair, he
seemed to have fallen asleep. Then, as usual, she laid the paper
aside, eager to be up and doing, but sat on, fearful of moving. Her
grandfather had a way of looking as though he would never wake up
again, and of being as ready as a tiger to pounce upon her if she
tried to slip away. She would never forget some of the sarcastic
things he had said at these times, never! He seemed to take an
unexplainable delight in making her feel that she had no right to be
so young. He had never confided to her the tragedy of having a young
mind and an old body, young desires and winter in his blood. He had
never opened the door in his fourth wall and let her see how
bitterly he resented having been forced out of life and the great
chase, to creep like an old hound the ancient dogs among. He had
never let her suspect that the tragedy of old age had hit him hard,
filling his long hours with regret for what he might have done or
done better. Perhaps he was ashamed to confess these things that
were so futile and so foolish. Perhaps he was afraid to earn a young
incredulous laugh at the pathetic picture of himself playing Canute
with the on-coming tide of years. He was not understood by this
girl, because he had never allowed her to get a glimpse into his
heart; and so she failed to know that he insisted upon keeping her
in his house, even to the point of extreme selfishness, because he
lived his youth over again in the constant sight of her. What a long
and exquisite string of pearls there could be made of our unspoken
words!

The logs glowed red; the hard tick of the pompous clock marked off
the precious moments; and outside, spring had come. But Joan sat on
with mutinous thoughts, and the man who not so long ago had stalked
the beasts whose heads and skins were silent reminders of his
strength, lay back in his chair with nodding head.

"He's old," she said to herself, "dreadfully, awfully old, and he's
punishing me for being young. Oh! It's wicked, it's wicked. If only
I had a father to spoil me and let me live! If only Mother hadn't
forgotten all about me in her own happiness! If only I had money of
my own and could run away and join the throng!"

She heard a sigh that was almost a groan, turned quickly and saw two
slow tears running down her grandfather's face. He had been kicking
against the pricks again and had hurt his foot.

With all the elaborate care of a Deerslayer, Joan got up, gave the
boards that creaked a wide berth--she knew them all--and tiptoed to
the door. The fact that she, at eighteen years of age, a full-grown
woman in her own estimation, should be obliged to resort to such
methods made her angry and humiliated. She was, however, rejoicing
at one thing. Her grandfather had fallen asleep several pages of the
paper earlier than usual, and she was to be spared from the utter
boredom of wading through the leading articles which dealt with
subways and Tammany and foreign politics and other matters for which
she had a lofty contempt. She was never required to read the notices
of new plays and operas and the doings of society, which alone were
interesting to her and made her mouth water.

Just as she had maneuvered her way across the wide, long room and
was within reach of the door, it opened and her grandmother hobbled
in, leaning on her stick. There was a chuckle from the other end of
the room. The blood flew to the girl's face. She knew without
turning to look that the old man had been watching her careful
escape and was enjoying the sight of her, caught at the moment when
freedom was at hand.

Mrs. Ludlow was one of those busy little women who are thorns in the
flesh of servants. Her eyes had always been like those of an
inspecting general. No detail, however small, went unnoticed and
unrectified.

She had been called by an uncountable number of housemaids and
footmen "the little Madam"--the most sarcastic term of opprobrium
contained in their dictionary. A leader of New York society, she had
run charitable institutions and new movements with the same
precision and efficiency that she had used in her houses. Every hour
of her day had been filled. Not one moment had been wasted or
frittered away. Her dinner parties had been famous, and she had had
a spoke in the wheels of politics. Her witty sayings had been passed
from mouth to mouth. Her little flirtations with prominent men and
the ambitious tyros who had been drawn to her salon had given rise
to much gossip. Not by any means a beauty, her pretty face and
tiptilted nose, her perennial cheerfulness, birdlike vivacity and
gift of repartee had made her the center of attraction for years.

But she, like Cumberland Ludlow, had refused to grow old gracefully
and with resignation. She had put up an equally determined fight
against age, and it was only when the remorseless calendar proved
her to be sixty-five that she resigned from the struggle, washed the
dye out of her hair and the make-up from her face and retired to
that old house. Not even then, however, did she resign from all
activity and remain contented to sit with her hands in her lap and
prepare herself for the next world. This one still held a certain
amount of joy, and she concentrated all the vitality that remained
with her to the perfect running of her house. At eleven o'clock
every morning the tap of her stick on the polished floors was the
signal of her arrival, and if every man and woman of the menage was
not actively at work, she knew the reason why. Her tongue was still
as sharp as the blade of a razor, and for sloppiness she had no
mercy. Careless maids trembled before her tirades, and strong men
shook in their shoes under her biting phrases. At seventy, with her
snowy hair, little face that had gone into as many lines as a dried
pippin, bent, fragile body and tiny hands twisted by rheumatism, she
looked like one of the old women in a Grimm's fairy tale who
frightened children and scared animals and turned giants into
cowards.

She drew up in front of the frustrated girl, stretched out her white
hand lined with blue veins and began to tap her on the shoulder--
announcing in that irritating manner that she had a complaint to
make.

"My dear," she said, "when you write letters to your little friends
or your sentimental mother, bear in mind that the place for ink is
on the note paper and not on the carpet."

"Yes, Grandmother."

"Try to remember also that if you put your hand behind a candle you
can blow it out without scattering hot grease on the wall paper."

"Yes, Grandmother"

"There is one other thing, if I may have your patience. You are not
required to be a Columbus to discover that there is a basket for
soiled linen in your bedroom. It is a large one and eager to fulfill
its function. The floor of your clothes closet is intended for your
shoes only. Will you be so good as to make a note of these things?"

"Yes, Grandmother."

Ink, candle grease, wash basket--what did they matter in the scheme
of life, with spring tapping at the window? With a huge effort Joan
forced back a wild burst of insurrection, and remained standing in
what she hoped was the correct attitude of a properly repentant
child. "How long can I stand it?" she cried inwardly. "How long
before I smash things and make a dash for freedom?"

"Now go back and finish reading to your grand father."

And once more, trembling with anger and mortification, the girl
picked her way over the limp and indifferent skins, took up the
paper and sat down. Once more her clear, fresh voice, this time with
a little quiver in it, fitted in to the regular tick of the
querulous clock, the near-by chatter of birds' tongues and the hiss
of burning logs.

The prim old lady, who had in her time borne a wonderful resemblance
to the girl whom she watched so closely,--even to the chestnut-brown
hair and the tip-tilted nose, the full lips, the round chin and the
spirit that at any moment might urge her to break away from
discipline,--retired to carry on her daily tour of inspection; and
the old man stood again with his back to the fire to listen
impatiently and with a futile jealousy to the deeds and misdeeds of
an ever-young and ever-active world.

II

Joan was thankful when lunch was over, and murmured "Amen" to grace
with a fervor that would have surprised an unimaginative and
unobservant person. Like all the meals in that pompous dining-room,
it was a form of torture to a young thing bubbling with health and
high spirits, who was not supposed to speak unless directly
addressed and was obliged to hold herself in check while her
grandparents progressed slowly and deliberately through a menu of
medically thought-out dishes. Both the old people were on a rigid
diet, and mostly the conversation between them consisted of grumbles
at having to dally with baby-food and reminiscences of the admirable
dinners of the past. An aged butler and a footman in the sere and
yellow only added to the general Rip van Winklism, and the presence
of two very old dogs, one the grandfather's Airedale and the other
Mrs. Ludlow's Irish terrier, with a white nose and rusty gray coat,
did nothing to dispel the depression. The six full-length portraits
in oils that hung on the walls represented men and women whose
years, if added together, would have made a staggering grand total.
Even the furniture was Colonial.

But when Joan had put on her hat, sweater and a pair of thick-soled
country boots, and having taken care to see that no one was about,
slid down the banisters into the hall on her way out for her usual
lonely walk, she slipped into the garden with a queer sense of
excitement, an odd and unaccountable premonition that something was
going to happen. This queer thing had come to her in the middle of
lunch and had made her heart suddenly begin to race. If she had been
given to self analysis, which she was not, she might have told
herself that she had received a wireless message from some one as
lonely as herself, who had sent out the S.O.S. call in the hope of
its being picked up and answered. As it was, it stirred her blood
and made her restless and intensely eager to get into the open, to
feel the sun and smell the sweetness in the air and listen to the
cheery note of the birds.

It was with something of the excited interest which must have
stirred Robinson Crusoe on seeing the foot-prints on the sand of
what he had conceived to be a desert island that she ran up the
hill, through the awakened woods whose thick carpet of brown leaves
was alight with the green heads of young ferns, and out to the
clearing from which she had so often gazed wist fully in the
direction of the great city away in the distance.

She was surprised to find that she was alone as usual, bitterly
disappointed to see no other sign of life than her friends the
rabbits and the squirrels--the latter of which ambled toward her in
the expectation of peanuts. She had no sort of concrete idea of what
she had expected to find: nor had she any kind of explanation of the
wave of sympathy that had come to her as clearly as though it had
been sent over an electric wire. All she knew was that she was out
of breath for no apparent reason, and on the verge of tears at
seeing no one there to meet her. Once before, on her sixth birth
day, the same call had been sent to her when she was playing alone
with her dolls in the semitropical garden of a hired house in
Florida, and she had started up and toddled round to the front and
found a large-eyed little girl peering through the gate. It was the
beginning of a close and blessed friendship.

This time, it seemed, the call had been meant for some other lonely
soul, and so she stood and looked with blurred eyes over the wide
valley that lay unrolled at her feet and, asked herself what she had
ever done to deserve to be left out of all the joy of life. From
somewhere near by the baying of hounds came, and from a farm to her
left the crowing of a cock; and then a twig snapped behind her, and
she turned eagerly.

"Oh, hello," said the boy.

"Oh, hello," she said.

He was not the hero of her dreams, by a long way. His hair didn't
curl; his nose was not particularly straight; nor were his eyes
large and magnetic. He was not something over six feet two; nor was
he dressed in wonderful clothes into which he might have been poured
in liquid form. He was a cheery, square-shouldered, good-natured
looking fellow with laughter in his gray eyes and a little quizzical
smile playing round a good firm mouth. He looked like a man who
ought to have been in the navy and who, instead, gave the impression
of having been born among horses. His small, dark head was bare; his
skin had already caught the sun, and as he stood in his brown
sweater with his hands thrust into the pockets of his riding
breeches, he seemed to her to be just exactly like the brother that
she ought to have had if she had had any luck at all, and she held
out a friendly hand with a comfortable feeling of absolute security.

With some self-consciousness he took it and bowed with a nice touch
of deference. He tried to hide the catch in his breath and the
admiration in his eyes. "I'm glad it's spring," he said, not knowing
quite what he was saying.

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