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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Carolyn Wells' novel 'The Matrimonial Bureau' is a light-hearted yet insightful look into the world of marriage agencies in the early 20th century. The book, written in Wells' signature humorous style, follows the escapades of a young woman who decides to open a matchmaking agency in New York City. Through witty dialogue and clever plot twists, Wells explores the societal norms and expectations surrounding courtship and marriage during this time period. The novel's engaging narrative and well-developed characters make it a delightful read for fans of early 20th-century literature. Carolyn Wells, a prolific writer of her time, was known for her talent in blending humor with insightful social commentary. Her experiences in high society and her sharp wit likely inspired the creation of 'The Matrimonial Bureau'. This book is recommended for readers interested in historical fiction, romantic comedies, and early feminist literature. Wells' clever writing and engaging storytelling guarantee an enjoyable reading experience.
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The Matrimonial Bureau
Table of Contents
Illustrations
Tea On The East Porch“I’m Not A Spoiled Child”In The Broiling Sun, Oblivious Of The Heat“Suppose You Take Miss Fowler Home”
Chapter I
Think you there was, or might be such a man as this I dreamed of?—Antony and Cleopatra.
It all happened in the most curious fashion to begin with. If Lieutenant Adams had not sent to Miss Esther the particularly heavy box which contained some sort of a plaster cast which he had picked up somewhere, and which necessitated a great deal of packing-stuff to keep it from breaking, Tekla never would have found the paper. Then, too, she never would have found the paper if Michael had been about the place on the afternoon the box came. But he wasn’t, and Miss Esther was impatient. The box had to be unpacked, so she and Tekla, armed with a hatchet, a screw-driver, and a monkey-wrench, went at it.
“I expect it’s broken,” said Miss Esther, after the protecting boards had been removed, with that lack of dexterity but determined effectiveness which characterizes the carpenter work of the average woman; “I have no doubt it’s broken all to pieces.”
“Yes ‘m, I suppose it is; they always are,” said Tekla, cheerfully, as she pulled out the bunches of paper which were stuffed about the cast.
“It was packed carefully enough,” said Miss Esther.
“Yes, indeed, ma’am. They must have used all the papers they had saved up for housecleaning time. I don’t know what they’ll have left to put on their pantry shelves.”
“I’m glad they did; this is a specially fine cast, and I do hope it isn’t broken. It looks as if it were, though.”
Miss Esther took hold of the end of the cast and tried to lift it out. She succeeded in extricating it from the mass of papers and carried it off in triumph.
Tekla brought a basket and began picking up the crumpled papers from the kitchen floor. Some large figures on one bit caught her eye.
“ ‘Circulation yesterday, 840,327,’ ” she read; “must have used ‘em all.”
She went on picking up the papers, carefully smoothing out those pieces which she believed might be of use for such purposes as suggest themselves to the careful housewife. “I wish,” she thought, “that they hadn’t crumpled these things up so much. They might just as well have left them flat. We could have used them then.”
At the very bottom of the box she found several voluminous Sunday newspapers that apparently had never been opened. “At least here’s a few smooth ones,” she continued with a satisfied air.
As she laid them aside, a conspicuous picture attracted her attention. “That,” said Tekla, after a long, steady stare at it, “is the kind of place I’m going to live in. There should be cows—yes—like those,” and she held the picture at arm’s length. “Chickens—yes—and dogs. Some calves, maybe, and pigeons and pigs, the same like those! Ah!”
Again she held the picture out before her and gazed at it. “It is all there, all—but the man—not!”
Taking down the big shears from their nail, Tekla cut out the picture and pinned it up above the kitchen table. “But I will have the cow-sheds nearer the house,” she said as she turned away. “They are not handy, so.”
In the household of Miss Esther Adams, a Sunday newspaper was almost an unknown quantity. To Tekla the discovery of three or four complete sheets, with all the various “sections” carefully put together, was an event of thrilling importance. She hurried through her work, and sat down that evening to enjoy without interruption the unexpected windfall.
By a slow and laborious process of elimination she laid aside the primarily colored pages, the reproduced photographs, the editorial sections, and other interesting but unbelievable stories, and reserved only the advertisements.
These she read eagerly, marking with her pencil such pictured glories of feminine apparel as appealed to her somewhat barbaric taste.
Idly scanning one of the more uninteresting looking pages, she chanced upon a sort of advertisement which seemed to her to be wholly new. Nothing like it had ever fallen under her observation.
SPINSTERS ATTENTION!
Why remain unappropriated blessings? Why waste your sweetness on the desert air? Somewhere there is a heart that beats for you alone. He may be on our list. We have bankers, brokers, clergymen, lawyers, merchants, farmers,—
“Farmers!” said Tekla, thoughtfully.
—machinists, carpenters, masons, and others. Every one of our clients is a worthy, honorable gentleman who wants a wife. If you will send $1 and your photograph, we will enter your name upon our records.
Tekla read and re-read this advertisement. “Only a dollar,—that is not so much. And they said farmers.”
She raised her eyes to the picture she had pinned up on the wall.
“A farm—and a farmer, and some cows yet, and chickens. A house like that, and two pigs and two horses and a kitchen all over white paint—with a yellow floor—”
She hesitated, looked at the picture again doubtfully, and continued. “It stands in the advertisement that there should be a farmer. I will do it! I will send yet one dollar.” Tekla had lived under the influence of Miss Esther so long that whatever she did was more or less tinged with the old-fashioned fineness which characterized her large-hearted, gentle-minded mistress. Therefore, after a considerable amount of earnest effort, she produced this letter:
Whitfield, June 8th.
DEAR SIR,—I have read your advertisement and would say that I inclose herewith one dollar. Please enter my name on your records, and I would like a farmer.
The farm must contain many acres, also many cows, pigs, sheep, and a donkey. But there must be no bees, as I do not enjoy stinging.
I have never lived on a farm, but I have a picture of one, and I am sure it will be good. I have lived with Miss Esther for seven years and she has trusted me with the care of her large house, and she says I am too good for James, who drives for the Doctor.
So please, Dear Sir, if among your worthy and honorable gentlemen there is a farmer with a farm which I have described, I should be glad to hear from you by return of post.
Yours to Command,
TEKLA KLEIN.
P. S.—My Mother is dead.
Tekla carefully copied the address given in the advertisement, folded her letter, and inclosed it in the envelope. Then she took from the top drawer of the old dresser, which stood in the kitchen closet, a new dollar bill, which Major Bradford had given her on his last visit. That was the day, Tekla remembered, when she had taken particular pains with the brushing of his uniform—it was the day of the dedication of the soldiers’ monument. She regarded the new bill with real affection. She had had it more than a year. For a moment she hesitated. What if the farmer were not forthcoming in response to her request? But before her hung the picture of the farmhouse, the horses, cows, chickens—not one single bee was visible.
Tekla’s sense of justice was such that she felt a certain responsibility to Miss Esther for the spending of her wages, but surely, she thought, with this particular dollar she had every right to do as she chose.
Therefore, trusting that the end would justify the means, she neatly folded the bill and placed it carefully with the letter in the already stamped and addressed envelope, and sealed it.
And so, as we said at first, if Lieutenant Adams had not sent the cast to his cousin, and if Michael had not been absent the day it came, and if Miss Esther had not in her impatience insisted upon Tekla’s opening the box, the little German girl would not have seen the picture of her farm, the letter would not have been written, Adolf Hecksher would never have come to Whitfield, this story would never have been written—and what would you have done then?
Chapter II
This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake our tyring-house; and we will do it in action.—Midsummer Nights Dream.
How the town came to be named Whitfield nobody who was fortunate enough to live there could remember, even if ever there had been any accurate information on the subject. The town was as old as those others in central and southern New York which are still worrying along under the burden of names bestowed upon them by that band of surveyors who, fresh from the schools where they had learned much of the history of ancient cities, had christened the still unpopulated quarter sections with the names of classic heroes, states, and battles. Utica, Syracuse, Troy, Palmyra, Cicero, Manlius, Sparta, Homer, Ovid, Ithaca,—these towns, it had been hoped by their sponsors in baptism, might grow up to be a credit to their distinguished namesakes. Whitfield may have been named for an eminent Methodist clergyman. Or possibly not. And it didn’t matter anyway.
Whitfield was like a hundred other towns of its sort. One may find the sort in almost any state except perhaps Arizona. It had an escape about three miles wide from being on the railroad, and in consequence there was little manufacturing. There was a long street which ran out at both ends of the town and got lost somewhere in the country. This street was cut at right angles by another of less pretension. Both streets were bordered by great old trees, maples and elms and an occasional hickory, which had been left from the days when there had been a forest thereabouts. Looking at the town from the surrounding hillsides, these trees shut out all view of the houses, but when the casual visitor arrived in the village he found that they merely shaded them, and they were grateful. There were other streets in the village, and according to the census reports Whitfield had a population of 896, but that was before the Henderson twins were born, and before the Richardsons—eight of them—had moved into the Bradley house. Of course, this increase had been offset somewhat by the death of Kirk Buckley, who in a moment of temporary inebriety had walked one dark night into Deacon Wilson’s stone quarry, with a fatal result.
So Whitfield had remained for some years practically stationary as to population. It was a quiet, orderly, rather dignified town. Its officials took it seriously. Casual visitors, who were entirely unsympathetic because they had been born in cities, were apt to smile a little at its peculiarities, which were not peculiarities, but only the natural outpourings of a heart interested in the doings of whosoever came within the line of vision. That was, and is to this day, the Whitfield of this story.
At one corner of the long street and the shorter one which intersected it stood the Adams house. When it had been built, a century before, the Putnam Adams who built it had called the place Elmwood, but the name had been forgotten. The house itself showed that essential severity which characterized the Adamses, and was the pride of all Whitfield. It reproduced, as well as wood and white paint could do so, the development of the classic impulse which had its beginnings in eastern New York at the time when Sir William Johnson was made colonel of the Six Nations.
The broad, low pediment set squarely upon four Ionic columns, the wide stone veranda and massive stone steps were as much a part of the landscape as the historic Whitfield elms. The interior of the house reflected the Adams attitude of mind and action. There were few curves in the decorations. The white-painted panels were uncompromisingly square. The mahogany balustrade ran straight up from the broad hall, and the stairs opened frankly at the top into the wide corridor which cut the upper floor into two halves,—five rooms on one side, five on the other, all precisely similar in size and shape. Every line which, architecturally, had to do with the making of the house, was straight up and down or straight across. There were no angles but right ones. There were no curves except those of the Ionic columns, and Colonel Adams had said after the house was built that he even wished he had made these square. But it was too late, and to-day in Whitfield these same columns stand, a lasting monument to the one weakness of decision in the character of Colonel Putnam Adams, of His Majesty’s forces in the Colonies.
But there was one other monument—the library.
While the library as it exists now could not, in the very nature of things, have been built entire by the first Putnam Adams, yet he laid the foundation for it; and when he was sent to America by the king, and found a place where he was to build his home, he fetched with him from England the library which he had collected in France and Italy and Germany. Begun with little thought as to its ultimate fate, this collection of books had grown with the changing tastes of the young soldier. There were the classics in original and translation; much Greek poetry, a wonderful edition of Horace, picked up in Rome, and bound in leather and gold, which bore the magic signature, deeply wrought, of Leonardo da Vinci. Then there was a Machiavelli and the stories of his wars and his methods of statesmanship; there was the story of the Life, which Benvenuto Cellini himself had written, and this book the Colonel had caused to be inclosed in a case of silver which bore upon its cover the arms of the House of the Cenci. This book he worshiped with a worship which was little short of idolatry. In the long evenings, when the Indians were at rest and the messages from Sir William were such as to allow him some freedom, he would shut himself in his rooms—wherever he might be—and sit the whole night through, living again with the Benvenuto those fearsome hours when he fought his way through the streets of Florence, leaving in his wake a line of fourteen dead men’s bodies—but rushing on to his Art and his Love.
Perhaps, after all, that was why Colonel Putnam Adams decided on the curves for the capitals of the columns which guarded the entrance to the home which he had built for Margery, the daughter of the governor of Plymouth Colony.
The second Putnam Adams inherited his father’s tastes and spent much of his time among the books, eagerly adding to the shelves such volumes as his somewhat limited opportunities made possible.
Miss Esther’s father, the third Putnam Adams, enlarged the collection still further, for in his time the flood of literature which marked the Victorian era had already begun. He acquired not only valuable classics, as had his ancestors, but also contemporary fiction, essays, and poetry.
The wife of the third Putnam Adams died when Esther was a baby, and the child grew up in the great house with only her father for guide, counselor, and friend. He was a silent man,—not stern with his little daughter, but maintaining the uncompromising dignity of the Adams family. He spent his days in the library, and Esther was allowed to stay there only on condition that she should not speak to him when he was reading. Often the child would stand wistfully waiting until he should lay down his book. But often he would do so only to take up another, and Esther would turn hopelessly away to amuse herself. Her amusements were peculiarly her own, and were not those which would have been considered entertaining by most children. She invented her own games. For the lonely child there was a certain fascination about a crowd of people, and her games always included certain strange individuals, who, though invisible to others, were very real to her. She peopled the stairs with vast armies marching valiantly up the hill and down again; she crowded the parlors with squires and dames of high degree, who danced minuets of great intricacy, bowing gallantly and languidly waving feathered fans.
The old Adams stables she filled with palfreys and milk-white steeds, and the barnyard with peacocks and falcons. In the grass plot in front of the house Esther could see a sun-dial where she fully expected in some year to come to hold tryst with a lover who should wear a velvet cloak and a curling feather, and who would say “Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I could say goodnight till it be morrow,” and then would kiss her hand—just as Romeo did in the wonderful old engraving in the Gilbert Shakespeare.
Thus Esther Adams grew up. She went through the Whitfield school as a matter of course, but her tasks were easily learned and her school life was casual and perfunctory and quite outside the sentient part of her being. She lived in “that land where Rosalind and Imogen are—a Paradise apart” The woodland about the old place was the Forest of Arden. The bank of the brook formed the shores of Illyria where the musicians played before the duke, and where Esther played the part—yes, lived the part—of Viola, and told to the wondering birds how she was letting concealment feed on her damask cheek.
Instead of these fancies passing away, later years brought to Esther Adams a stronger sense of reality in her dreams, and she but the more thoroughly identified herself with the creatures which her imagination had appropriated. Through girlhood to womanhood she lived Romance, sometimes as Rosalind, sometimes as Iseult, and sometimes, when in desperate mood, as Catherine of Medici.
But though the grass plot and the stairs had certain advantages of stage-setting, yet it was in the library that Esther gave her fancy fullest rein. The reason for this was too subtle to be understood by the child; but she had an inexplicable, intangible sense of the atmosphere of the books. As she grew older, this became clear to her, and she enjoyed her library with the definite knowledge of the satisfaction to be derived from the actual physical presence of books.
For forty-five years she had enjoyed this library, as she believed, as much as was possible for her, without quite realizing that there was a sense of restraint in the presence of her father. Though she adored the silent man and gladly submitted to his mandates, the restrictions placed upon her as a child were never removed until the day of her father’s death, and it was not until after that event that she came to know what freedom from even unconsciously obeyed authority meant. And in the ten years since she had invested the room with more of her own personality, and instead of being as it had been before, merely a library, it was now her home.
Although always surrounded by her unreal associates, for the last seven years Miss Esther’s only human companion had been Tekla, the maid, and Tekla was very human. When she came to live at the Adams house, Miss Esther was shocked at her deplorable ignorance, and immediately began to teach her at least the rudiments of an education. The good lady consciously and laboriously taught her charge reading and writing, but far more easily yet, she unwittingly instilled in Tekla’s mind a romantic sort of fancy not unlike her own. And that’s how it happened that Tekla’s stolidly practical German adaptation of Miss Esther’s ideas clothed the problematical farmer with a reality only second to Miss Esther’s Romeos.
Chapter III
But where Is Kate? where is my lovely bride?—Taming of the Shrew.
Not that Miss Esther had preferred imaginary Romeos. Imagination was all very well in its place, but she would have gladly welcomed a hero who could have spoken his own lines. Although she had never consciously or definitely wished for a husband, yet she had often felt the lack of that companionship which she knew could only be afforded by association with one whose mentality was equal to her own, whose tastes were congenial, and whose temperament was similar.
Without reflection upon her own sex, but with total indifference to the lack of feminine comradeship, Miss Esther preferred masculine society. During their long and somewhat lonely life together, her association with her father had been a real friendship; and though not a whit mannish, indeed being herself the essence of femininity, men’s traits and characteristics appealed strongly to Esther Adams.
More than this, she had, and knew she had, the capability to be a great deal to some one man. Responsive, tactful, loyal, and possessed of an instant perception, she demanded these qualities in the man she could love.
No one in Whitfield had ever qualified.
