Aliens. William McFee
nothing at first, and Mac, annexing an unusually large piece of cheese, grinned.
"Say," he said, "suppose we get Miss Fraenkel's opinion of the chap with the hooked nose. She's American; she'll be sure to have an opinion."
"No doubt," I conceded. "We shall see whether we have not taken too much for granted. There's only one thing, and that is, are we not exposing Miss Fraenkel to temptation by exciting her curiosity yet more about her neighbour?"
"Oh, bunk!" said Mac. "Women don't have to be led into that sort of temptation. They take it in with their mother's milk."
"You cynical old devil!" exclaimed Bill, indignantly.
"Well, it's true," he defended himself stoutly. "I'll bet you a quarter Miss Fraenkel's already tried them and found them guilty."
"Of what?" demanded Bill.
"Oh, ask Miss Fraenkel," said he. "How should I know?"
"I think," I said, gently, "you are making a mistake. Consider! Miss Fraenkel is no doubt interested in her neighbours, like any other woman. But you make a big mistake if you imagine that ordinary people, people who are not professionally concerned with human nature, are accustomed to draw conclusions and observe character, as—as we do, for example. I have always thought," I went on, stirring my coffee, "that Jane Austen made this same mistake. She takes a small community, much like Netley, N. J., and suggests, by the conversation of the characters, that they are all as observant and as shrewd as herself. We feel it was not so. Nay, we know it was not so, for Jane's genius in that direction was almost uncanny. Now there is, I am safe in saying, nothing uncanny about Miss Fraenkel."
"She's very nice!" said Bill, nodding blithely at me over her cup.
I am loth to give any colour to the suspicion that I am about to confuse my narrative with extraneous details; but I must confess that Bill's laconic benison had for me a personal appeal. She was, I felt, entirely and generously right. She had not overstepped the mark at all. Miss Fraenkel was very nice, but—it has nothing to do with my story. It is a point of honour with me to put Miss Fraenkel in her place, if I may express it so without discourtesy, and that place is certainly modest and inconspicuous. Miss Fraenkel's light was very clear and very bright, but illuminated only a small area. She wrote an admirable paper and read it clearly and impressively at the Women's Club on "The Human Touch in Ostrovsky." Indeed, for one who had read so little of Ostrovsky it was a most creditable piece of work. It was in her estimate of the English character that she was, I venture to think, less successful, more narrow in fact. You see, she was naturally confused by two facts. In the first place the similarity of the English and American languages seemed to her to warrant a certain similitude between the two nations; and secondly, her intimacy with the English people was practically confined to us three, who had been in America nearly seven years, and who, in consequence, had shrouded our more salient insularities beneath a cloak of cosmopolitan aplomb. Neither our speech nor our outlook upon life could be taken as typical of our great and noble-hearted nation. Yet she did take us in that sense, with the result that in her conception of the United Kingdom it was a rather fantastic and clumsily-fashioned small-scale model of the United States.
We had first met her, not in New Jersey at all, but in New York. After the earthquake, which I have mentioned as lifting us and many others from more or less comfortable sockets in San Francisco and scattering us over the Union, we found it a matter of some difficulty to rise to our accustomed level in New York. It really seemed, what with the failure of inspiration and our lack of suitable introductions, that the mighty mill-stream of Manhattan would bear us away and fling us over the rocks to destruction before we could ever get our heads above the surface.
Of those first days in East 118th Street none of us are disposed to speak. We might have gone back to England—surely so dire a calamity, so utter a personal ruin, justified a relinquishment of our purpose. But we had not gone anyway. We could not contemplate the solicitous sympathy of friends who disliked America, who had protested against our emigration in the first place. We did not dislike America, nor did we blame her for our misfortunes. Our friends, even the painter-cousin, could not understand that we did not dislike America. They were misled by our occasional and quite natural sighs for a sight of the quiet English landscape, and our joking remarks about the customs regulations. So we stayed and fought, with our backs to the not over-clean walls of 118th Street. It was slow progress from 118th to 18th Street and from there to a real flat in Lexington Avenue, where it so happened that Miss Fraenkel had, and still has, a married sister. Bill and the married sister became warm friends, discovering in each other a common dislike of pink, and it was she who introduced us formally; though in a casual way Miss Fraenkel and I met occasionally on the stairs. And so it came about that when we felt able to abandon Lexington Avenue, in favour of a purer air and water supply, Miss Fraenkel chanted the praises of her own Netley in the Garden State, and Bill, journeying thither to spy out the land, returned an hour late for dinner, and incoherent with horticultural details.
It will be seen that though undoubtedly competent to criticize Ostrovsky or Mrs. Carville per se, Miss Fraenkel's opinion of the painter-cousin's discovery would be interesting only for its novelty and irrelevance. I did not express my conviction quite as frankly as this, since my friend, though in sympathy with his wife's matrimonial plans, could not forbear to indulge in a mild hazing at my expense. I contented myself with opening the piano and pushing him into the seat. It is our custom to have music after dinner.
Only those who have written verse professionally can realize the extent to which music acts as a solvent upon apparently insoluble difficulties of rhyme and sentiment. It had become a habit with me to leave any such problem of prosody to one side and take it up again only when my friend opened his piano. Having completed an opera some time before, I had at this time no such trouble, and so, as he broke abruptly into that prodigious composition, the Overture to Tannhäuser, I gave myself up to an unfettered consideration of the mystery of life and the complexity of our multitudinous contacts with one another. It is not enough, I reflected, to say that we make and pass. We make and remake, we pass and, pausing on the brink of oblivion, return to spoil our first fine careless raptures. We make and pass; but the early dawn of our making is reddened by the sunset of another's decline. We are agitated by the originality of our ideas, unaware that they are born simultaneously in a thousand minds, and are woven into the texture of our time-spirit in a thousand-times-repeated design. Von Roon, in Chelsea, used to say that "a man's mind was like a chamber papered with used postage stamps. Examine them separately and they were of no value; they were merely cancelled symbols of forgotten messages. View them as a whole and they formed an interesting and confusing composition." Time, and our proximity to other cancelled symbols is no guarantee of interior understanding. The Great Decorator has arranged us without regard for our individual merits or past intrinsic values, we are but points of colour in his immense and arbitrary arrangement. I was following up this thought, when the brass Canterbury Pilgrim that serves us for a knocker was vigorously sounded, and I sprang to open the door to Miss Fraenkel.
She stepped briskly into the room, looked round and smiled.
"Three times," she declared as I assisted her to remove her jacket. "But I forgive you if you'll only play that won—derful thing again!"
In person Miss Fraenkel was of middle size, admirably proportioned and situated in tone on the borderland between the blonde and the brunette. By which I mean that her hair was brown, her eye a warm hazel, and her skin of a satiny pallor that formed an effective background for a delightful flush that suffused her piquant features whenever her enthusiasm was roused. And her enthusiasm was continually being roused. To us cold Britons the abandon with which she, in common with her countrywomen, gave herself up to the enjoyment of a picture, a book, a landscape, or for that matter of a person, was a most fascinating spectacle. American women strongly resemble champagne. At a certain age they are incomparably stimulating, but intimacy with them involves a sort of "headiness" that demands discretion; a nervous energy emanates from them that tends to relax the critical faculty. There is, moreover, a tendency to turgescence in their speech that leads the unwary into a false estimate of their intellectual range.
It was some time before the conversation could be guided round to the subject which