Maud Hart LoveLace and deLos LoveLace

Transcription

Collected Stories of
Maud Hart Lovelace
and D elos L ovelace
Volume One
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
Copyright © 2012 by Julie A. Schrader
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction in whole or in part of any portion in any
form without permission of the author or publisher is
strictly prohibited.
For more information, contact:
Minnesota Heritage Publishing
205 Ledlie Lane, Suite 125
Mankato, MN 56001
www.mnheritage.com
ISBN: 978-0-9850937-1-6
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2012944129
Published by Minnesota Heritage Publishing
Printed in the United States of America
by Corporate Graphics, North Mankato, MN
First Edition
Cover Photograph from the Estate of Merian Lovelace Kirchner
Maud and Delos Lovelace, 1918. Taken on the porch of the Thomas Hart
home on 25th Street in Minneapolis, MN.
CONTENTS
Borghild’s Clothes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
The Carcassonne Flyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Carmelita Widow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
The Daring of Daphne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Dollars & Doughnuts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Emma Middleton Cuts Cross Country . . . . . 85
Engaged . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Fires of Genius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
The House that Dee Built . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
In a Tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
The Little White Lamb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Love’s Daily Dozen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Books Written by Maud Hart Lovelace . . . . 207
Books Written by Delos W. Lovelace . . . . . 208
Collected Stories of Maud Hart Lovelace and Delos Lovelace
Modern Pricilla Magazine
Borghild’s Clothes
April 1922
By Maud and Delos Lovelace
Illustrated by Julia Greene
Two tiny, pointed, haughtily heeled, silver slippers rested unoccupied upon the
marble-tiled floor.
Two tinier, gray silk clad feet curled their toes about the second rung of the
solid stool.
Came the fluted edge of a pale pink satin knicker, a swirl of pale mauve taffeta
and, above a string of corals, a swirl of soft, bright, yellow hair, crowning a tiny,
well poised head, bent over a ledger.
This was John Williams’s first view of Borghild. It began with the slippers. He
had dived into the cage which she occupied, head bent, in pursuit of a rolling
pencil. It culminated in the ledger, her absorption in which was the most inexplicable part of her, and she was in her entirety wholly inexplicable. His first
thought was that a bright canary had fluttered by chance through the window
into the solemn confines of the Midwestern National Bank and had perched
on the stool with a whimsical inclination to take a flyer in banking. His second
thought was that canaries did not add to the dignity of the institution, and his
surprised stare changed into a disapproving frown.
She had lifted her head and was inspecting him serenely. While not unfriendly,
her gaze held no trace of coquetry and more than a trace of hauteur. It moved
him, in spite of his disapproval, to mumble an apology and hurry out, backwards and without his pencil.
“Who is the rainbow lady?” he inquired with decided irritation.
The senior ladies’ teller, who looked like the illustration for an article on “How
the Woman in Business Should Dress,” showed an answering irritation.
“You mean Miss Carlson?” she asked. “She’s from some little town somewhere.
Her father used to be a friend of Mr. Stevenson, and arrangements for her
coming were made by letter.”
“She looks it,” said John Williams, his frown deepening. “She’s darn bad for
the bank.”
1
“She’s certainly bad for the department,” said Miss Maxon and sighed.
The bank was not merely the pride but practically the whole of John Williams’s
existence. A vice-president at twenty-eight, he was of the only type which makes
a vice-president at twenty-eight, serious, single-minded, and indefatigable. He
was a slenderly built chap with straightly brushed-up brown hair, intent blue
eyes under habitually contracted brows, and a clear skin which his moderately
and conscientiously taken doses of golf failed to tan appreciably. He dressed
admirably, conformed to all of the discreeter standards of convention; and it
was not in any way his fault that a singularly pleasing smile marked his countenance. Indeed, he was entirely unconscious of this smile, else he would have
smiled even more rarely than he did.
The best interests of the Midwestern National Bank so dominated John Williams that he would, as a matter of routine, have instituted an immediate,
vigorous campaign against Miss Carlson’s retention had she been the protégée
of any person other than Old Stevenson. He was deterred not from motives of
fear but of expediency. Old Stevenson was not merely president of the bank.
He was, by reason of his heavy stock holdings, dictator of its policies. This was
not the first time that he had installed friends or sons and daughters of friends
in positions of minor importance, and John Williams had found that in their
defense the old man could be particularly mulish. The best way to handle Miss
Carlson, John Williams knew from experience, was to give her a quantity of
rope quite ample to achieve her own execution. He never dreamed, and can
hardly be blamed for not dreaming, that she could put good rope to any other
use.
“Well, let her have a chance to show what she’s made of,” he instructed Miss
Maxon, smiling. And Miss Maxon smiled back at him in amused recognition
of his craftiness.
b
But only three days later, a pleasantly perplexed Miss Maxon came to him at
the noon hour.
“She’s a worker, that little Borghild Carlson. She learns slowly, like so many
of the Scandinavians, but she sticks right at things till she gets them, and she’s
full of ideas.”
John Williams glanced skeptically to where a glint of silver green and a knot of
adoring males, moving slowly toward the exit, betokened Miss Carlson on her
way to lunch.
2
“Yes!” she queried, and waited in evident, faint amusement.
3
the challenge of his glance. In vain did Miss Maxon, in those later days when
John Williams alone refused a seat upon the band wagon of Borghild Carlson’s famous Banks for Women campaign,——in vain did Miss Maxon offer her
propitiating suggestions——“just from a small town, Mr. Williams”——“doesn’t
grasp things quickly”——“really expected to please you.” But he was no more
implacable than Borghild Carlson who, progressing steadily into the respect
and friendship of the bank, greeted him and every mention of his name with
persistent scorn. Within the sober walls of an office may grow a bitterness
which battlefields never know. Such a bitterness grew now in the office of the
Midwestern National between the youngest vice-president and Miss Maxon’s
rapidly rising assistant. Perhaps she would not have risen so rapidly if she had
not had her desire for vengeance as a spur. But as things were, she rose with
startling speed.
It was as Miss Maxon had originally attested——“She’s a worker, that little
Borghild Carlson——she’s full of ideas.”
She was full of all sorts of ideas, good ones and bad ones, and she carried them
all in simple good faith to Old Stevenson. She was as unruffled by his indifference or his amusement as by his praise. Perhaps she argued that among such an
assortment of ideas of all sizes, there was bound at last to be a Big One. There
did eventually arrive a Big One. Old Stevenson, probably the only person in
the bank who did not know of the feud, hurried toward John Williams’s desk
one morning with his scanty white locks ruffled into a surprising semblance
of profusion. “Carlson’s girl——you know, the pink silk chiffon one——has a
Big Idea!” he cried, and was hurt when John Williams returned no echo of his
enthusiasm.
b
The Big Idea was, of course, the Banks for Women campaign. That is the
nickname bestowed upon it by the force, but it is not quite accurate, for Miss
Carlson’s idea was not Banks for Women, but the Midwestern National Bank
for women, the Midwestern National Bank above all other bank for that curious, eager, triumphant line of women which is filing so endlessly into the ranks
of wage earners.
She was ready with a formidable array of statistics——the number of women
which the war had brought into industry, the proportion which post——war
conditions had left there, their average earnings and their average savings. It
was Borghild’s idea that the Midwestern National should open a campaign
aimed directly at business women, to awaken their interest in saving and then
take prompt advantage of it. She had worked out every detail.
8
“We want to get them,” she had explained to Old Stevenson with the fervor
which had sent his excitable hands to his hair. “We want to get them, every
one. We want to get their money out of their mesh bags and out of their silk
stockings and into our vaults. We want to turn the talk at that ‘hour for lunch’
in Y. W. C. A. cafeterias and white-tiled restaurants in our direction. Women
have been saving for their husbands ever since Adam turned his first shiny
stone over to Eve for safekeeping. Now they are going to start saving for themselves Women made the original discovery that it pays to advertise, Remember
Adam never would have been heard of, if it hadn’t been for Eve. And now
they’re going to advertise some bank, when they start chattering about the
financial world in which they are just becoming interested!”
“How’ll I get them?” asked Old Stevenson.
Borghild, with cheeks as pink as her filmy dress, answered promptly: “Let me
go after them.” And he did.
How she got them isn’t the story. It was a swift, vivid pursuit, but not so different in its employment of newspaper, street-car, and billboard advertising, from
other campaigns of the sort. At first women depositors began to filter, then
they swarmed, then they crowded. John Williams said that the bank coming to
look at all hours as though a remnant sale were in progress.
John Williams was the only associate of the Midwestern National who didn’t
stand behind Borghild and cheer. He remained a cynic on the side lines. Some
of his remarks were passed along to Borghild, whose costumes gained in number and brightness as her star rose. She received them with a quiet smile of
triumph.
But finally one caused her to frown. It was a worried, little frown, which dwelt
on her delicate, golden brows all through one afternoon and was still there
when she requested a conference with Old Stevenson after closing time.
“Is it true,” she asked with that bluntness which Miss Maxon had deplored,
“that these small woman accounts I’m bringing in are proving more bother
than they’re worth?”
“Oh, hardly that,” answered Old Stevenson, who liked her tremendously. “But
they’re proving something of a bother. They will, I suppose, until the women
learn.”
“What do they need to learn? “ asked Borghild.
9
He was, indeed, attempting to analyze the queer sensation that held him, mute,
gazing, when Borghild looked up.
The tears stopped instantly. The draggled figure drew rigid with anger. Two
flaming eyes tried to scorch him into abasement, but he withstood their fire,
gained strength under it, sharply knew with certainty his emotion, He wanted
to take the tired girl before him into his arms and take upon his own shoulders
her woe.
“Please don’t cry.” He had followed her a drenched mile and a half to say.
She was silent. He gained courage.
“Borghild! My dear! Borghild! Will you forgive me?” He caught her hand. The
touch broke her passivity, Hostile eyes again met his.
“I hate you!” Borghild said. “Don’t you dare touch me! I hate you! I hate you!
Yes, I do!”
She rose and darted off. This time, John Williams did not follow.
“Borghild! My dear! Borghild!
Will you forgive me?”
15
Engaged!
The Ladies World
December, 1916
An emotional adventure, showing the endless
adventures of comforming to popular desire.
By Maud Palmer Hart
Illustrated by F. Graham Cootes
“And Thaddeus may take Susanne,” added Mrs. Leavenworth in a manner that
was intended to be casual. The little circle of after-dinner coffee-drinkers about
Mrs. Leavenworth’s fire rose with visible reluctance to prepare for the drive to
the opera. It broke into smaller groups, which drifted with commingling badinage and laughter toward the stairs. Thaddeus drew Mrs. Leavenworth aside.
“See here, Aunt Kate! Let me take you” he began nervously, running long,
slender, white fingers through his superabundant brown hair.
“Tut!” said Mrs. Leavenworth. “I’ve given you the very prettiest débutante.
Don’t rumple your hair, my dear. This is a drawing-room and not a laboratory.”
“Laboratory!” repeated Thaddeus bitterly. “I have no more use for a laboratory
than you have. I’m not a chemist. I’m simply a bibliographer. Now, listen,
Aunt Kate! I came to this fool dinner to please you. You ride over to the opera
with me to please me. There’s a lamb.”
“I shall do nothing of the kind,” replied Mrs. Leavenworth with decision.
Meanwhile, Susanne, wrapping herself in satin and fur, was berating her
mother.
“Mummie, for the land’s sake, why didn’t you speak up and insist on taking
me with you?”
“Mr. Brown is a delightful young man,” returned Mrs. Sinclair obstinately.
“From the way I’ve been thrown at his poor dear head, it’s obvious that
you approve of him,” retorted Susanne, glowering at herself in the mirror.
Mrs. Sinclair looked injured.
“I never thought to hear you address me in that tone, Susanne,” she remarked
plaintively.
107
“I never thought I’d be weak-minded enough to let you bully and wheedle me
into making a début,” said Susanne crossly. “Can’t I study medicine next year,
mamma?”
So it was a very sulky Susanne that an unusually rebellious Thaddeus assisted
into the soft-scented dimness of his limousine. And it was in an ominous silence that they were whirled down the night gleam of West End Avenue.
Thaddeus would have resented the imputation that he was a woman-hater.
Theoretically, he approved of women. He considered them, taken collectively,
pleasant and useful members of society. Actually, he had for them a feeling
akin to terror. He found them, individually, more than disconcerting.
In the seclusion of his library, he sometimes day-dreamed of them. But the
ladies of his dreams were medieval creatures——golden-haired, blue-eyed, silkyskinned, gentle-voiced, slender princesses, languishing in wind and wave-swept
towers, Dresden shepherdesses, roaming in flower-sprinkled meadows. He was
bewildered by the girls he met at the dances and dinner parties to which he
was occasionally dragged. They were as frank and friendly as so many boys, and
they had an unholy curiosity.
b
Man wants but little here below, and Thaddeus wanted even less than most.
Peace and the privilege of pursuing his beloved profession constituted all of his
demands on life; but, humble as they were, they were denied him. He had other attractions besides grave good looks, oddly chivalrous manners and a rapidly
growing reputation among men of letters. The haughty old house down on
Washington Square, where he lived very quietly with several rather antiquated
servants, represented a family almost as old as New York and a fortune which
even in these days could be accounted comfortable. He was quite alone in the
world, his father and mother having died during his infancy, but every season
some determined matron pounced upon him and, using the leverage of friendship with his mother, raised him up to meet her protégé.
This season, Susanne had been the protégé. He had found her different from
the others and far more objectionable. She had a certain piquancy. When
she was engrossed in conversation, her eyes grew big and her cheeks pink. But
now——
She was enveloped in an oppressive silence. As they emerged into the glitter of
Broadway, Thaddeus was driven to speech.
108
She wore her hair according to the whim
of one Mrs. Vernon Castle, and there was
something delightfully boyish about her.
“Aunt Kate certainly gives corking dinners,” he offered, assuming an animation he was far from feeling.
Susanne made no response. When they had attained the clamor of Fortysecond Street, Thaddeus tried it again.
“That Adcock seemed a good sort of a chap. Booky——that’s what I like,” he
ventured.
But she manifested no interest.
Have you ever heard the Koenigs Kinder?” he inquired desperately, as they
rolled up to the entrance of the Metropolitan.
And suddenly he felt a small firm hand close over his.
“Mr. Brown,” said Susanne briskly, “I want to tell you something. Won’t you
ask the man to drive around a little longer? That is, if you don’t mind missing
the first act.”
Thaddeus, a bit dazed by the request, repeated it to the chauffeur. The chauffeur, who was enamored of a certain housemaid, turned the car with sympathetic alacrity and directed it toward the Park. Thaddeus was annoyed to find
that although Susanne had removed her hand he still felt it on his. Her fingers
were soft but agreeably strong. She leaned toward him in the fragrant dusk
of the swiftly moving car. Her wrap of shining flame-color glimmered in the
occasional lights, and a huge collar of fluffy whiteness framed her eager face.
She wore her hair according to the whim of one Mrs. Vernon Castle, and there
was something boyish about the smooth contour of her head. There was something boyish, too, in the quick, blunt way she spoke.
109
About the Authors
Editors Note: The following autobiographies were published in Minnesota
Writers, A Collection of Autobiographical Stories By Minnesota Prose Writers, edited
and annotated by Carmen Nelson Richards and published by T.S. Denison &
Company, Inc. Minneapolis in 1961.
DELOS W. LOVELACE
Delos Wheeler Lovelace was born in Brainerd, Minnesota. Before attending the University of Minnesota, 1916 to 1917, he was a newspaper reporter in Fargo, North Dakota,
and Minneapolis. He studied at Cambridge (England) and Columbia also. In the first
World War, he served as captain of the 339th machinegun battalion. From 1922 to
1930, he wrote about one hundred short stories to such leading magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, American, Ladies’ Home Journal, Country Gentleman,
American Legion Weekly. Since retiring from the New York Sun, he and his wife,
Maud Hart Lovelace, have made their home in Claremont, California.
b
The writing of books (novels and juveniles) is certainly my vocation, now that
I am more or less retired, but over the long pull I have been chiefly a newspaperman. Such books of any sort, written between l913——when I got a reportorial job on the Fargo, North Dakota, Courier, long extinct——and 1952 when I
resigned as staff-writer on the World Telegram and Sun, New York, were merely
sandwiched in among a limitless variety of editorial assignments and posts.
In the year on the Courier-News, I went from proof-reader to general assignments, including sports, and met my first major league ball player. Who else remembers Bob Unglaub, formerly of the Philadelphia Nationals but in 1913 the
frustrated manager of the semi-demi pros who made up the Fargo-Moorhead
crew? In 1914, I went to Minneapolis and the Daily News there and, in 1915,
was fired for telling the very good city editor to Gotohell and caught on with
the Minneapolis Tribune, perhaps because the city editor was a good friend of
mine.
My early days on the Tribune were made nightmarish by veteran rivals on the
Daily News and Journal who scooped me regularly until I began to haunt the
documents room of the county courthouse. There I dug up trivial two-paragraph oddities that my rivals were too lazy to go after and these spotted the first
page of the Tribune’s early edition until the rivals offered to dicker. They would
cut me in on their big beats if I would share the oddities, about which their
201
times do. If the telephone rings earlier, I, being a City Room veteran——able to
interrupt any sentence, take the call and note down all messages for my wife.
Although I maintain that writing is the work I prefer, I shall not even now
pretend that it is easy. Plots are easy. Characters, such as they are, are easy. But
the task of assembling plot and characters and all attendant complexities, especially of saying precisely what I believe ought to be said, is bitter hard!
I am, nevertheless, glad that I chose writing and, if I had to do it all over, I
would choose the same way. I am glad, also, that my daughter seems to have
chosen similarly. She is the wife of the managing editor of Space-Aeronautics, a
magazine full of such discombobulating neologisms that I seldom stray past the
masthead. She worked on several magazines but now is free-lancing so diligently that her first novel may appear in print before her dilly-dallying father’s next.
MAUD HART LOVELACE
Have you ever stood at the railing of the long bridge over the Minnesota Valley near
Fort Snelling and wondered what life was like on that river and up at the Fort over a
hundred years ago when the army was first stationed there? Maud Hart Lovelace has
told the story of those early days in her historical novel, “Early Candlelight.” So vividly
and accurately did she write that, when her novel was published in 1929, the Third
Infantry, the army’s oldest regiment, paraded in her honor—the first time a regiment ever
accorded a woman such recognition.
Mrs. Lovelace was born in Mankato, Minnesota. At the University of Minnesota, she
served on the staffs of the Minnesota Daily and the Minnesota Magazine. After a
short period of study abroad, she was married, in 1917, to Delos Lovelace, a journalist.
As co-authors of several novels, they have made a happy writing team, as he enjoyed
working out the plots and she would do the research. Then she would write the parts
appealing to women and he, the parts that needed a masculine viewpoint. Four of Mrs.
Lovelace’s novels and the Betsy-Tacy books have Minnesota backgrounds.
Mr. and Mrs. Lovelace now make their home in Claremont, California.
b
I cannot remember back to a year in which I did not consider myself to be a
writer, and the younger I was the bigger that capital “W.” back in Mankato, I
wrote stories in notebooks and illustrated them with pictures cut from magazines. When I was ten my father, I hope at not too great expense, had printed a
booklet of my earliest rhymes. Soon after, I started bombarding the magazines
and sold my first story when I was eighteen.
203

Maud Hart LoveLace and deLos LoveLace

Transcription

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