A Hazard of New Fortunes, v3
by
William Dean Howells
This etext was produced by David Widger
[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks at the end of this file
for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making
an entire meal of them. D.W.]
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
By William Dean Howells
PART THIRD
I.
The scheme of a banquet to celebrate the initial success of 'Every Other
Week' expanded in Fulkerson's fancy into a series. Instead of the
publishing and editorial force, with certain of the more representative
artists and authors sitting down to a modest supper in Mrs. Leighton's
parlors, he conceived of a dinner at Delmonico's, with the principal
literary and artistic, people throughout the country as guests, and an
inexhaustible hospitality to reporters and correspondents, from whom
paragraphs, prophetic and historic, would flow weeks before and after the
first of the series. He said the thing was a new departure in magazines;
it amounted to something in literature as radical as the American
Revolution in politics: it was the idea of self government in the arts;
and it was this idea that had never yet been fully developed in regard to
it. That was what must be done in the speeches at the dinner, and the
speeches must be reported. Then it would go like wildfire. He asked
March whether he thought Mr. Depew could be got to come; Mark Twain, he
was sure, would come; he was a literary man. They ought to invite Mr.
Evarts, and the Cardinal and the leading Protestant divines. His
ambition stopped at nothing, nothing but the question of expense; there
he had to wait the return of the elder Dryfoos from the West, and Dryfoos
was still delayed at Moffitt, and Fulkerson openly confessed that he was
afraid he would stay there till his own enthusiasm escaped in other
activities, other plans.
Fulkerson was as little likely as possible to fall under a superstitious
subjection to another man; but March could not help seeing that in this
possible measure Dryfoos was Fulkerson's fetish. He did not revere him,
March decided, because it was not in Fulkerson's nature to revere
anything; he could like and dislike, but he could not respect.
Apparently, however, Dryfoos daunted him somehow; and besides the homage
which those who have not pay to those who have, Fulkerson rendered
Dryfoos the tribute of a feeling which March could only define as a sort
of bewilderment. As well as March could make out, this feeling was
evoked by the spectacle of Dryfoos's unfailing luck, which Fulkerson was
fond of dazzling himself with. It perfectly consisted with a keen sense
of whatever was sordid and selfish in a man on whom his career must have
had its inevitable effect. He liked to philosophize the case with March,
to recall Dryfoos as he was when he first met him still somewhat in the
sap, at Moffitt, and to study the processes by which he imagined him to
have dried into the hardened speculator, without even the pretence to any
advantage but his own in his ventures. He was aware of painting the
character too vividly, and he warned March not to accept it exactly in
those tints, but to subdue them and shade it for himself. He said that
where his advantage was not concerned, there was ever so much good in
Dryfoos, and that if in some things be had grown inflexible, he had
expanded in others to the full measure of the vast scale on which he did
business. It had seemed a little odd to March that a man should put
money into such an enterprise as 'Every Other Week' and go off about
other affairs, not only without any sign of anxiety, but without any sort
of interest. But Fulkerson said that was the splendid side of Dryfoos.
He had a courage, a magnanimity, that was equal to the strain of any such
uncertainty. He had faced the music once for all, when he asked
Fulkerson what the thing would cost in the different degrees of potential
failure; and then he had gone off, leaving everything to Fulkerson and
the younger Dryfoos, with the instruction simply to go ahead and not
bother him about it. Fulkerson called that pretty tall for an old fellow
who used to bewail the want of pigs and chickens to occupy his mind.
He alleged it as another proof of the versatility of the American mind,
and of the grandeur of institutions and opportunities that let every man
grow to his full size, so that any man in America could run the concern
if necessary. He believed that old Dryfoos could step into Bismarck's
shoes and run the German Empire at ten days' notice, or about as long as
it would take him to go from New York to Berlin. But Bismarck would not
know anything about Dryfoos's plans till Dryfoos got ready to show his
hand. Fulkerson himself did not pretend to say what the old man had been
up to since he went West. He was at Moffitt first, and then he was at
Chicago, and then he had gone out to Denver to look after some mines he
had out there, and a railroad or two; and now he was at Moffitt again.
He was supposed to be closing up his affairs there, but nobody could say.
Fulkerson told March the morning after Dryfoos returned that he had not
only not pulled out at Moffitt, but had gone in deeper, ten times deeper
than ever. He was in a royal good-humor, Fulkerson reported, and was
going to drop into the office on his way up from the Street (March
understood Wall Street) that afternoon. He was tickled to death with
'Every Other Week' so far as it had gone, and was anxious to pay his
respects to the editor.
March accounted for some rhetoric in this, but let it flatter him, and
prepared himself for a meeting about which he could see that Fulkerson
was only less nervous than he had shown himself about the public
reception of the first number. It gave March a disagreeable feeling of
being owned and of being about to be inspected by his proprietor; but he
fell back upon such independence as he could find in the thought of those
two thousand dollars of income beyond the caprice of his owner, and
maintained an outward serenity.
He was a little ashamed afterward of the resolution it had cost him to do
so. It was not a question of Dryfoos's physical presence: that was
rather effective than otherwise, and carried a suggestion of moneyed
indifference to convention in the gray business suit of provincial cut,
and the low, wide-brimmed hat of flexible black felt. He had a stick
with an old-fashioned top of buckhorn worn smooth and bright by the palm
of his hand, which had not lost its character in fat, and which had a
history of former work in its enlarged knuckles, though it was now as
soft as March's, and must once have been small even for a man of Mr.
Dryfoos's stature; he was below the average size. But what struck March
was the fact that Dryfoos seemed furtively conscious of being a country
person, and of being aware that in their meeting he was to be tried by
other tests than those which would have availed him as a shrewd
speculator. He evidently had some curiosity about March, as the first of
his kind whom he bad encountered; some such curiosity as the country
school trustee feels and tries to hide in the presence of the new
schoolmaster. But the whole affair was, of course, on a higher plane; on
one side Dryfoos was much more a man of the world than March was, and he
probably divined this at once, and rested himself upon the fact in a
measure. It seemed to be his preference that his son should introduce
them, for he came upstairs with Conrad, and they had fairly made
acquaintance before Fulkerson joined them.
Conrad offered to leave them at once, but his father made him stay.
"I reckon Mr. March and I haven't got anything so private to talk about
that we want to keep it from the other partners. Well, Mr. March, are
you getting used to New York yet? It takes a little time."
"Oh yes. But not so much time as most places. Everybody belongs more or
less in New York; nobody has to belong here altogether."
"Yes, that is so. You can try it, and go away if you don't like it a
good deal easier than you could from a smaller place. Wouldn't make so
much talk, would it?" He glanced at March with a jocose light in his
shrewd eyes. "That is the way I feel about it all the time: just
visiting. Now, it wouldn't be that way in Boston, I reckon?"
"You couldn't keep on visiting there your whole life," said March.
Dryfoos laughed, showing his lower teeth in a way that was at once simple
and fierce. "Mr. Fulkerson didn't hardly know as he could get you to
leave. I suppose you got used to it there. I never been in your city."
"I had got used to it; but it was hardly my city, except by marriage. My
wife's a Bostonian."
"She's been a little homesick here, then," said Dryfoos, with a smile of
the same quality as his laugh.
"Less than I expected," said March. "Of course, she was very much
attached to our old home."
"I guess my wife won't ever get used to New York," said Dryfoos, and he
drew in his lower lip with a sharp sigh. "But my girls like it; they're
young. You never been out our way yet, Mr. March? Out West?"
"Well, only for the purpose of being born, and brought up. I used to
live in Crawfordsville, and then Indianapolis."
"Indianapolis is bound to be a great place," said Dryfoos. "I remember
now, Mr. Fulkerson told me you was from our State." He went on to brag
of the West, as if March were an Easterner and had to be convinced.
"You ought to see all that country. It's a great country."
"Oh yes," said March, "I understand that." He expected the praise of the
great West to lead up to some comment on 'Every Other Week'; and there
was abundant suggestion of that topic in the manuscripts, proofs of
letter-press and illustrations, with advance copies of the latest number
strewn over his table.
But Dryfoos apparently kept himself from looking at these things.
He rolled his head about on his shoulders to take in the character of the
room, and said to his son, "You didn't change the woodwork, after all."
"No; the architect thought we had better let it be, unless we meant to
change the whole place. He liked its being old-fashioned."
"I hope you feel comfortable here, Mr. March," the old man said, bringing
his eyes to bear upon him again after their tour of inspection.
"Too comfortable for a working-man," said March, and he thought that this
remark must bring them to some talk about his work, but the proprietor
only smiled again.
"I guess I sha'n't lose much on this house," he returned, as if musing
aloud. "This down-town property is coming up. Business is getting in on
all these side streets. I thought I paid a pretty good price for it,
too." He went on to talk of real estate, and March began to feel a
certain resentment at his continued avoidance of the only topic in which
they could really have a common interest. "You live down this way
somewhere, don't you?" the old man concluded.
"Yes. I wished to be near my work." March was vexed with himself for
having recurred to it; but afterward he was not sure but Dryfoos shared
his own diffidence in the matter, and was waiting for him to bring it
openly into the talk. At times he seemed wary and masterful, and then
March felt that he was being examined and tested; at others so simple
that March might well have fancied that he needed encouragement, and
desired it. He talked of his wife and daughters in a way that invited
March to say friendly things of his family, which appeared to give the
old man first an undue pleasure and then a final distrust. At moments he
turned, with an effect of finding relief in it, to his son and spoke to
him across March of matters which he was unacquainted with; he did not
seem aware that this was rude, but the young man must have felt it so; he
always brought the conversation back, and once at some cost to himself
when his father made it personal.
"I want to make a regular New York business man out of that fellow," he
said to March, pointing at Conrad with his stick. "You s'pose I'm ever
going to do it?"
"Well, I don't know," said March, trying to fall in with the joke.
"Do you mean nothing but a business man?"
The old man laughed at whatever latent meaning he fancied in this, and
said: "You think he would be a little too much for me there? Well, I've
seen enough of 'em to know it don't always take a large pattern of a man
to do a large business. But I want him to get the business training, and
then if he wants to go into something else he knows what the world is,
anyway. Heigh?"
"Oh yes!" March assented, with some compassion for the young man
reddening patiently under his father's comment.
Dryfoos went on as if his son were not in hearing. "Now that boy wanted
to be a preacher. What does a preacher know about the world he preaches
against when he's been brought up a preacher? He don't know so much as a
bad little boy in his Sunday-school; he knows about as much as a girl.
I always told him, You be a man first, and then you be a preacher, if you
want to. Heigh?"
"Precisely." March began to feel some compassion for himself in being
witness of the young fellow's discomfort under his father's homily.
"When we first come to New York, I told him, Now here's your chance to
see the world on a big scale. You know already what work and saving and
steady habits and sense will bring a man, to; you don't want to go round
among the rich; you want to go among the poor, and see what laziness and
drink and dishonesty and foolishness will bring men to. And I guess he
knows, about as well as anybody; and if he ever goes to preaching he'll
know what he's preaching about." The old man smiled his fierce, simple
smile, and in his sharp eyes March fancied contempt of the ambition he
had balked in his son. The present scene must have been one of many
between them, ending in meek submission on the part of the young man,
whom his father, perhaps without realizing his cruelty, treated as a
child. March took it hard that he should be made to suffer in the
presence of a co-ordinate power like himself, and began to dislike the
old man out of proportion to his offence, which might have been mere want
of taste, or an effect of mere embarrassment before him. But evidently,
whatever rebellion his daughters had carried through against him, he had
kept his dominion over this gentle spirit unbroken. March did not choose
to make any response, but to let him continue, if he would, entirely upon
his own impulse.
II.
A silence followed, of rather painful length. It was broken by the
cheery voice of Fulkerson, sent before him to herald Fulkerson's cheery
person. "Well, I suppose you've got the glorious success of 'Every Other
Week' down pretty cold in your talk by this time. I should have been up
sooner to join you, but I was nipping a man for the last page of the
cover. I guess we'll have to let the Muse have that for an advertisement
instead of a poem the next time, March. Well, the old gentleman given
you boys your scolding?" The person of Fulkerson had got into the room
long before he reached this question, and had planted itself astride a
chair. Fulkerson looked over the chairback, now at March, and now at the
elder Dryfoos as he spoke.
March answered him. "I guess we must have been waiting for you,
Fulkerson. At any rate, we hadn't got to the scolding yet."
"Why, I didn't suppose Mr. Dryfoos could 'a' held in so long. I
understood he was awful mad at the way the thing started off, and wanted
to give you a piece of his mind, when he got at you. I inferred as much
from a remark that he made." March and Dryfoos looked foolish, as men do
when made the subject of this sort of merry misrepresentation.
"I reckon my scolding will keep awhile yet," said the old man, dryly.
"Well, then, I guess it's a good chance to give Mr. Dryfoos an idea of
what we've really done--just while we're resting, as Artemus Ward says.
Heigh, March?"
"I will let you blow the trumpet, Fulkerson. I think it belongs strictly
to the advertising department," said March. He now distinctly resented
the old man's failure to say anything to him of the magazine; he made his
inference that it was from a suspicion of his readiness to presume upon a
recognition of his share in the success, and he was determined to second
no sort of appeal for it.
"The advertising department is the heart and soul of every business,"
said Fulkerson, hardily, "and I like to keep my hand in with a little
practise on the trumpet in private. I don't believe Mr. Dryfoos has got
any idea of the extent of this thing. He's been out among those
Rackensackens, where we were all born, and he's read the notices in their
seven by nine dailies, and he's seen the thing selling on the cars, and
he thinks he appreciates what's been done. But I should just like to
take him round in this little old metropolis awhile, and show him 'Every
Other Week' on the centre tables of the millionaires--the Vanderbilts and
the Astors--and in the homes of culture and refinement everywhere, and
let him judge for himself. It's the talk of the clubs and the dinner-
tables; children cry for it; it's the Castoria of literature and the
Pearline of art, the 'Won't-be-happy-till-he-gets-it of every en
lightened man, woman, and child in this vast city. I knew we could
capture the country; but, my goodness! I didn't expect to have New York
fall into our hands at a blow. But that's just exactly what New York has
done. Every Other Week supplies the long-felt want that's been grinding
round in New York and keeping it awake nights ever since the war. It's
the culmination of all the high and ennobling ideals of the past."
"How much," asked Dryfoos, "do you expect to get out of it the first
year, if it keeps the start it's got?"
"Comes right down to business, every time!" said Fulkerson, referring the
characteristic to March with a delighted glance. "Well, sir, if
everything works right, and we get rain enough to fill up the springs,
and it isn't a grasshopper year, I expect to clear above all expenses
something in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars."
"Humph! And you are all going to work a year--editor, manager, publisher,
artists, writers, printers, and the rest of 'em--to clear twenty-five
thousand dollars?--I made that much in half a day in Moffitt once. I see
it made in half a minute in Wall Street, sometimes." The old man
presented this aspect of the case with a good-natured contempt, which
included Fulkerson and his enthusiasm in an obvious liking.
His son suggested, "But when we make that money here, no one loses it."
"Can you prove that?" His father turned sharply upon him. "Whatever is
won is lost. It's all a game; it don't make any difference what you bet
on. Business is business, and a business man takes his risks with his
eyes open."
"Ah, but the glory!" Fulkerson insinuated with impudent persiflage.
"I hadn't got to the glory yet, because it's hard to estimate it; but put
the glory at the lowest figure, Mr. Dryfoos, and add it to the twenty-
five thousand, and you've got an annual income from 'Every Other Week' of
dollars enough to construct a silver railroad, double-track, from this
office to the moon. I don't mention any of the sister planets because I
like to keep within bounds."
Dryfoos showed his lower teeth for pleasure in Fulkerson's fooling, and
said, "That's what I like about you, Mr. Fulkerson--you always keep
within bounds."
"Well, I ain't a shrinking Boston violet, like March, here. More
sunflower in my style of diffidence; but I am modest, I don't deny it,"
said Fulkerson. "And I do hate to have a thing overstated."
"And the glory--you do really think there's something in the glory that
pays?"
"Not a doubt of it! I shouldn't care for the paltry return in money,"
said Fulkerson, with a burlesque of generous disdain, "if it wasn't for
the glory along with it."
"And how should you feel about the glory, if there was no money along
with it?"
"Well, sir, I'm happy to say we haven't come to that yet."
"Now, Conrad, here," said the old man, with a sort of pathetic rancor,
"would rather have the glory alone. I believe he don't even care much
for your kind of glory, either, Mr. Fulkerson."
Fulkerson ran his little eyes curiously over Conrad's face and then
March's, as if searching for a trace there of something gone before which
would enable him to reach Dryfoos's whole meaning. He apparently
resolved to launch himself upon conjecture. "Oh, well, we know how
Conrad feels about the things of this world, anyway. I should like to
take 'em on the plane of another sphere, too, sometimes; but I noticed a
good while ago that this was the world I was born into, and so I made up
my mind that I would do pretty much what I saw the rest of the folks
doing here below. And I can't see but what Conrad runs the thing on
business principles in his department, and I guess you'll find it so if
you look into it. I consider that we're a whole team and big dog under
the wagon with you to draw on for supplies, and March, here, at the head
of the literary business, and Conrad in the counting-room, and me to do
the heavy lying in the advertising part. Oh, and Beaton, of course, in
the art. I 'most forgot Beaton--Hamlet with Hamlet left out."
Dryfoos looked across at his son. "Wasn't that the fellow's name that
was there last night?"
"Yes," said Conrad.
The old man rose. "Well, I reckon I got to be going. You ready to go
up-town, Conrad?"
"Well, not quite yet, father."
The old man shook hands with March, and went downstairs, followed by his
son.
Fulkerson remained.
"He didn't jump at the chance you gave him to compliment us all round,
Fulkerson," said March, with a smile not wholly of pleasure.
Fulkerson asked, with as little joy in the grin he had on, "Didn't he say
anything to you before I came in?"
"Not a word."
"Dogged if I know what to make of it," sighed Fulkerson, "but I guess
he's been having a talk with Conrad that's soured on him. I reckon maybe
he came back expecting to find that boy reconciled to the glory of this
world, and Conrad's showed himself just as set against it as ever."
"It might have been that," March admitted, pensively. "I fancied
something of the kind myself from words the old man let drop."
Fulkerson made him explain, and then he said:
"That's it, then; and it's all right. Conrad 'll come round in time; and
all we've got to do is to have patience with the old man till he does.
I know he likes you." Fulkerson affirmed this only interrogatively, and
looked so anxiously to March for corroboration that March laughed.
"He dissembled his love," he said; but afterward, in describing to his
wife his interview with Mr. Dryfoos, he was less amused with this fact.
When she saw that he was a little cast down by it, she began to encourage
him. "He's just a common, ignorant man, and probably didn't know how to
express himself. You may be perfectly sure that he's delighted with the
success of the magazine, and that he understands as well as you do that
he owes it all to you."
"Ah, I'm not so sure. I don't believe a man's any better for having made
money so easily and rapidly as Dryfoos has done, and I doubt if he's any
wiser. I don't know just the point he's reached in his evolution from
grub to beetle, but I do know that so far as it's gone the process must
have involved a bewildering change of ideals and criterions. I guess
he's come to despise a great many things that he once respected, and that
intellectual ability is among them--what we call intellectual ability.
He must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous
instincts, and I don't see why it shouldn't have reached his mental make-
up. He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into
suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity. That's the
way I philosophize a man of Dryfoos's experience, and I am not very proud
when I realize that such a man and his experience are the ideal and
ambition of most Americans. I rather think they came pretty near being
mine, once."
"No, dear, they never did," his wife protested.
"Well, they're not likely to be in the future. The Dryfoos feature of
'Every Other Week' is thoroughly distasteful to me."
"Why, but he hasn't really got anything to do with it, has he, beyond
furnishing the money?"
"That's the impression that Fulkerson has allowed us to get. But the man
that holds the purse holds the reins. He may let us guide the horse, but
when he likes he can drive. If we don't like his driving, then we can
get down."
Mrs. March was less interested in this figure of speech than in the
personal aspects involved. "Then you think Mr. Fulkerson has deceived
you?"
"Oh no!" said her husband, laughing. "But I think he has deceived
himself, perhaps."
"How?" she pursued.
"He may have thought he was using Dryfoos, when Dryfoos was using him,
and he may have supposed he was not afraid of him when he was very much
so. His courage hadn't been put to the test, and courage is a matter of
proof, like proficiency on the fiddle, you know: you can't tell whether
you've got it till you try."
"Nonsense! Do you mean that he would ever sacrifice you to Mr. Dryfoos?"
"I hope he may not be tempted. But I'd rather be taking the chances with
Fulkerson alone than with Fulkerson and Dryfoos to back him. Dryfoos
seems, somehow, to take the poetry and the pleasure out of the thing."
Mrs. March was a long time silent. Then she began, "Well, my dear, I
never wanted to come to New York--"
"Neither did I," March promptly put in.
"But now that we're here," she went on, "I'm not going to have you
letting every little thing discourage you. I don't see what there was in
Mr. Dryfoos's manner to give you any anxiety. He's just a common,
stupid, inarticulate country person, and he didn't know how to express
himself, as I said in the beginning, and that's the reason he didn't say
anything."
"Well, I don't deny you're right about it."
"It's dreadful," his wife continued, "to be mixed up with such a man and
his family, but I don't believe he'll ever meddle with your management,
and, till he does, all you need do is to have as little to do with him as
possible, and go quietly on your own way."
"Oh, I shall go on quietly enough," said March. "I hope I sha'n't begin
going stealthily."
"Well, my dear," said Mrs. March, "just let me know when you're tempted
to do that. If ever you sacrifice the smallest grain of your honesty or
your self-respect to Mr. Dryfoos, or anybody else, I will simply renounce
you."
"In view of that I'm rather glad the management of 'Every Other Week'
involves tastes and not convictions," said March.
III.
That night Dryfoos was wakened from his after-dinner nap by the sound of
gay talk and nervous giggling in the drawing-room. The talk, which was
Christine's, and the giggling, which was Mela's, were intershot with the
heavier tones of a man's voice; and Dryfoos lay awhile on the leathern
lounge in his library, trying to make out whether he knew the voice. His
wife sat in a deep chair before the fire, with her eyes on his face,
waiting for him to wake.
"Who is that out there?" he asked, without opening his eyes.
"Indeed, indeed, I don't know, Jacob," his wife answered. "I reckon it's
just some visitor of the girls'."
"Was I snoring?"
"Not a bit. You was sleeping as quiet! I did hate to have 'em wake you,
and I was just goin' out to shoo them. They've been playin' something,
and that made them laugh."
"I didn't know but I had snored," said the old man, sitting up.
"No," said his wife. Then she asked, wistfully, "Was you out at the old
place, Jacob?"
"Yes."
"Did it look natural?"
"Yes; mostly. They're sinking the wells down in the woods pasture."
"And--the children's graves?"
"They haven't touched that part. But I reckon we got to have 'em moved
to the cemetery. I bought a lot."
The old woman began softly to weep. "It does seem too hard that they
can't be let to rest in peace, pore little things. I wanted you and me
to lay there, too, when our time come, Jacob. Just there, back o' the
beehives and under them shoomakes--my, I can see the very place! And I
don't believe I'll ever feel at home anywheres else. I woon't know where
I am when the trumpet sounds. I have to think before I can tell where
the east is in New York; and what if I should git faced the wrong way
when I raise? Jacob, I wonder you could sell it!" Her head shook, and
the firelight shone on her tears as she searched the folds of her dress
for her pocket.
A peal of laughter came from the drawing-room, and then the sound of
chords struck on the piano.
"Hush! Don't you cry, 'Liz'beth!" said Dryfoos. "Here; take my
handkerchief. I've got a nice lot in the cemetery, and I'm goin' to have
a monument, with two lambs on it--like the one you always liked so much.
It ain't the fashion, any more, to have family buryin' grounds; they're
collectin' 'em into the cemeteries, all round."
"I reckon I got to bear it," said his wife, muffling her face in his
handkerchief. "And I suppose the Lord kin find me, wherever I am. But I
always did want to lay just there. You mind how we used to go out and
set there, after milkin', and watch the sun go down, and talk about where
their angels was, and try to figger it out?"
"I remember, 'Liz'beth."
The man's voice in the drawing-room sang a snatch of French song,
insolent, mocking, salient; and then Christine's attempted the same
strain, and another cry of laughter from Mela followed.
"Well, I always did expect to lay there. But I reckon it's all right.
It won't be a great while, now, anyway. Jacob, I don't believe I'm a-
goin' to live very long. I know it don't agree with me here."
"Oh, I guess it does, 'Liz'beth. You're just a little pulled down with
the weather. It's coming spring, and you feel it; but the doctor says
you're all right. I stopped in, on the way up, and he says so."
"I reckon he don't know everything," the old woman persisted: "I've been
runnin' down ever since we left Moffitt, and I didn't feel any too well
there, even. It's a very strange thing, Jacob, that the richer you git,
the less you ain't able to stay where you want to, dead or alive."
"It's for the children we do it," said Dryfoos. "We got to give them
their chance in the world."
"Oh, the world! They ought to bear the yoke in their youth, like we
done. I know it's what Coonrod would like to do."
Dryfoos got upon his feet. "If Coonrod 'll mind his own business, and do
what I want him to, he'll have yoke enough to bear." He moved from his
wife, without further effort to comfort her, and pottered heavily out
into the dining-room. Beyond its obscurity stretched the glitter of the
deep drawing-room. His feet, in their broad; flat slippers, made no
sound on the dense carpet, and he came unseen upon the little group there
near the piano. Mela perched upon the stool with her back to the keys,
and Beaton bent over Christine, who sat with a banjo in her lap, letting
him take her hands and put them in the right place on the instrument.
Her face was radiant with happiness, and Mela was watching her with
foolish, unselfish pleasure in her bliss.
There was nothing wrong in the affair to a man of Dryfoos's traditions
and perceptions, and if it had been at home in the farm sitting-room,
or even in his parlor at Moffitt, he would not have minded a young man's
placing his daughter's hands on a banjo, or even holding them there;
it would have seemed a proper, attention from him if he was courting her.
But here, in such a house as this, with the daughter of a man who had
made as much money as he had, he did not know but it was a liberty.
He felt the angry doubt of it which beset him in regard to so many
experiences of his changed life; he wanted to show his sense of it, if it
was a liberty, but he did not know how, and he did not know that it was
so. Besides, he could not help a touch of the pleasure in Christine's
happiness which Mela showed; and he would have gone back to the library,
if he could, without being discovered.
But Beaton had seen him, and Dryfoos, with a nonchalant nod to the young
man, came forward. "What you got there, Christine?"
"A banjo," said the girl, blushing in her father's presence.
Mela gurgled. "Mr. Beaton is learnun' her the first position."
Beaton was not embarrassed. He was in evening dress, and his face,
pointed with its brown beard, showed extremely handsome above the expanse
of his broad, white shirt-front. He gave back as nonchalant a nod as he
had got, and, without further greeting to Dryfoos, he said to Christine:
"No, no. You must keep your hand and arm so." He held them in position.
"There! Now strike with your right hand. See?"
"I don't believe I can ever learn," said the girl, with a fond upward
look at him.
"Oh yes, you can," said Beaton.
They both ignored Dryfoos in the little play of protests which followed,
and he said, half jocosely, half suspiciously, "And is the banjo the
fashion, now?" He remembered it as the emblem of low-down show business,
and associated it with end-men and blackened faces and grotesque shirt-
collars.
"It's all the rage," Mela shouted, in answer for all. "Everybody plays
it. Mr. Beaton borrowed this from a lady friend of his."
"Humph! Pity I got you a piano, then," said Dryfoos. "A banjo would
have been cheaper."
Beaton so far admitted him to the conversation as to seem reminded of the
piano by his mentioning it. He said to Mela, "Oh, won't you just strike
those chords?" and as Mela wheeled about and beat the keys he took the
banjo from Christine and sat down with it. "This way!" He strummed it,
and murmured the tune Dryfoos had heard him singing from the library,
while he kept his beautiful eyes floating on Christine's. "You try that,
now; it's very simple."
"Where is Mrs. Mandel?" Dryfoos demanded, trying to assert himself.
Neither of the girls seemed to have heard him at first in the chatter
they broke into over what Beaton proposed. Then Mela said, absently,
"Oh, she had to go out to see one of her friends that's sick," and she
struck the piano keys. "Come; try it, Chris!"
Dryfoos turned about unheeded and went back to the library. He would
have liked to put Beaton out of his house, and in his heart he burned
against him as a contumacious hand; he would have liked to discharge him
from the art department of 'Every Other Week' at once. But he was aware
of not having treated Beaton with much ceremony, and if the young man had
returned his behavior in kind, with an electrical response to his own
feeling, had he any right to complain? After all, there was no harm in
his teaching Christine the banjo.
His wife still sat looking into the fire. "I can't see," she said,
"as we've got a bit more comfort of our lives, Jacob, because we've got
such piles and piles of money. I wisht to gracious we was back on the
farm this minute. I wisht you had held out ag'inst the childern about
sellin' it; 'twould 'a' bin the best thing fur 'em, I say. I believe in
my soul they'll git spoiled here in New York. I kin see a change in 'em
a'ready--in the girls."
Dryfoos stretched himself on the lounge again. "I can't see as Coonrod
is much comfort, either. Why ain't he here with his sisters? What does
all that work of his on the East Side amount to? It seems as if he done
it to cross me, as much as anything." Dryfoos complained to his wife on
the basis of mere affectional habit, which in married life often survives
the sense of intellectual equality. He did not expect her to reason with
him, but there was help in her listening, and though she could only
soothe his fretfulness with soft answers which were often wide of the
purpose, he still went to her for solace. "Here, I've gone into this
newspaper business, or whatever it is, on his account, and he don't seem
any more satisfied than ever. I can see he hain't got his heart in it."
"The pore boy tries; I know he does, Jacob; and he wants to please you.
But he give up a good deal when he give up bein' a preacher; I s'pose we
ought to remember that."
"A preacher!" sneered Dryfoos. "I reckon bein' a preacher wouldn't
satisfy him now. He had the impudence to tell me this afternoon that he
would like to be a priest; and he threw it up to me that he never could
be because I'd kept him from studyin'."
"He don't mean a Catholic priest--not a Roman one, Jacob," the old woman
explained, wistfully. "He's told me all about it. They ain't the kind
o' Catholics we been used to; some sort of 'Piscopalians; and they do a
heap o' good amongst the poor folks over there. He says we ain't got any
idea how folks lives in them tenement houses, hundreds of 'em in one
house, and whole families in a room; and it burns in his heart to help
'em like them Fathers, as be calls 'em, that gives their lives to it.
He can't be a Father, he says, because he can't git the eddication now;
but he can be a Brother; and I can't find a word to say ag'inst it, when
it gits to talkin', Jacob."
"I ain't saying anything against his priests, 'Liz'beth," said Dryfoos.
"They're all well enough in their way; they've given up their lives to
it, and it's a matter of business with them, like any other. But what
I'm talking about now is Coonrod. I don't object to his doin' all the
charity he wants to, and the Lord knows I've never been stingy with him
about it. He might have all the money he wants, to give round any way he
pleases."
"That's what I told him once, but he says money ain't the thing--or not
the only thing you got to give to them poor folks. You got to give your
time and your knowledge and your love--I don't know what all you got to
give yourself, if you expect to help 'em. That's what Coonrod says."
"Well, I can tell him that charity begins at home," said Dryfoos, sitting
up in his impatience. "And he'd better give himself to us a little--to
his old father and mother. And his sisters. What's he doin' goin' off
there to his meetings, and I don't know what all, an' leavin' them here
alone?"
"Why, ain't Mr. Beaton with 'em?" asked the old woman. "I thought I
heared his voice."
"Mr. Beaton! Of course he is! And who's Mr. Beaton, anyway?"
"Why, ain't he one of the men in Coonrod's office? I thought I heared--"
"Yes, he is! But who is he? What's he doing round here? Is he makin'
up to Christine?"
"I reckon he is. From Mely's talk, she's about crazy over the fellow.
Don't you like him, Jacob?"
"I don't know him, or what he is. He hasn't got any manners. Who
brought him here? How'd he come to come, in the first place?"
"Mr. Fulkerson brung him, I believe," said the old woman, patiently.
"Fulkerson!" Dryfoos snorted. "Where's Mrs. Mandel, I should like to
know? He brought her, too. Does she go traipsin' off this way every
evening?"
"No, she seems to be here pretty regular most o' the time. I don't know
how we could ever git along without her, Jacob; she seems to know just
what to do, and the girls would be ten times as outbreakin' without her.
I hope you ain't thinkin' o' turnin' her off, Jacob?"
Dryfoos did not think it necessary to answer such a question. "It's all
Fulkerson, Fulkerson, Fulkerson. It seems to me that Fulkerson about
runs this family. He brought Mrs. Mandel, and he brought that Beaton,
and he brought that Boston fellow! I guess I give him a dose, though;
and I'll learn Fulkerson that he can't have everything his own way. I
don't want anybody to help me spend my money. I made it, and I can
manage it. I guess Mr. Fulkerson can bear a little watching now. He's
been travelling pretty free, and he's got the notion he's driving, maybe.
I'm a-going to look after that book a little myself."
"You'll kill yourself, Jacob," said his wife, "tryin' to do so many
things. And what is it all fur? I don't see as we're better off, any,
for all the money. It's just as much care as it used to be when we was
all there on the farm together. I wisht we could go back, Ja--"
"We can't go back!" shouted the old man, fiercely. "There's no farm any
more to go back to. The fields is full of gas-wells and oil-wells and
hell-holes generally; the house is tore down, and the barn's goin'--"
"The barn!" gasped the old woman. "Oh, my!"
"If I was to give all I'm worth this minute, we couldn't go back to the
farm, any more than them girls in there could go back and be little
children. I don't say we're any better off, for the money. I've got
more of it now than I ever had; and there's no end to the luck; it pours
in. But I feel like I was tied hand and foot. I don't know which way to
move; I don't know what's best to do about anything. The money don't
seem to buy anything but more and more care and trouble. We got a big
house that we ain't at home in; and we got a lot of hired girls round
under our feet that hinder and don't help. Our children don't mind us,
and we got no friends or neighbors. But it had to be. I couldn't help
but sell the farm, and we can't go back to it, for it ain't there. So
don't you say anything more about it, 'Liz'beth."
"Pore Jacob!" said his wife. "Well, I woon't, dear."
IV
It was clear to Beaton that Dryfoos distrusted him; and the fact
heightened his pleasure in Christine's liking for him. He was as sure of
this as he was of the other, though he was not so sure of any reason for
his pleasure in it. She had her charm; the charm of wildness to which a
certain wildness in himself responded; and there were times when his
fancy contrived a common future for them, which would have a prosperity
forced from the old fellow's love of the girl. Beaton liked the idea of
this compulsion better than he liked the idea of the money; there was
something a little repulsive in that; he imagined himself rejecting it;
he almost wished he was enough in love with the girl to marry her without
it; that would be fine. He was taken with her in a certain' measure, in
a certain way; the question was in what measure, in what way.
It was partly to escape from this question that he hurried down-town, and
decided to spend with the Leightons the hour remaining on his hands
before it was time to go to the reception for which he was dressed.
It seemed to him important that he should see Alma Leighton. After all,
it was her charm that was most abiding with him; perhaps it was to be
final. He found himself very happy in his present relations with her.
She had dropped that barrier of pretences and ironical surprise. It
seemed to him that they had gone back to the old ground of common
artistic interest which he had found so pleasant the summer before.
Apparently she and her mother had both forgiven his neglect of them in
the first months of their stay in New York; he was sure that Mrs.
Leighton liked him as well as ever, and, if there was still something a
little provisional in Alma's manner at times, it was something that
piqued more than it discouraged; it made him curious, not anxious.
He found the young ladies with Fulkerson when he rang. He seemed to be
amusing them both, and they were both amused beyond the merit of so small
a pleasantry, Beaton thought, when Fulkerson said: "Introduce myself,
Mr. Beaton: Mr. Fulkerson of 'Every Other Week.' Think I've met you at
our place." The girls laughed, and Alma explained that her mother was
not very well, and would be sorry not to see him. Then she turned, as he
felt, perversely, and went on talking with Fulkerson and left him to Miss
Woodburn.
She finally recognized his disappointment: "Ah don't often get a chance
at you, Mr. Beaton, and Ah'm just goin' to toak yo' to death. Yo' have
been Soath yo'self, and yo' know ho' we do toak."
"I've survived to say yes," Beaton admitted.
"Oh, now, do you think we toak so much mo' than you do in the No'th?"
the young lady deprecated.
"I don't know. I only know you can't talk too much for me. I should
like to hear you say Soath and house and about for the rest of my life."
"That's what Ah call raght personal, Mr. Beaton. Now Ah'm goin' to be
personal, too." Miss Woodburn flung out over her lap the square of cloth
she was embroidering, and asked him: "Don't you think that's beautiful?
Now, as an awtust--a great awtust?"
"As a great awtust, yes," said Beaton, mimicking her accent. "If I were
less than great I might have something to say about the arrangement of
colors. You're as bold and original as Nature."
"Really? Oh, now, do tell me yo' favo'ite colo', Mr. Beaton."
"My favorite color? Bless my soul, why should I prefer any? Is blue
good, or red wicked? Do people have favorite colors?" Beaton found
himself suddenly interested.
"Of co'se they do," answered the girl. "Don't awtusts?"
"I never heard of one that had--consciously."
"Is it possible? I supposed they all had. Now mah favo'ite colo' is
gawnet. Don't you think it's a pretty colo'?"
"It depends upon how it's used. Do you mean in neckties?" Beaton stole
a glance at the one Fulkerson was wearing.
Miss Woodburn laughed with her face bowed upon her wrist. "Ah do think
you gentlemen in the No'th awe ten tahms as lahvely as the ladies."
"Strange," said Beaton. "In the South--Soath, excuse me! I made the
observation that the ladies were ten times as lively as the gentlemen.
What is that you're working?"
"This?" Miss Woodburn gave it another flirt, and looked at it with a
glance of dawning recognition. "Oh, this is a table-covah. Wouldn't you
lahke to see where it's to go?"
"Why, certainly."
"Well, if you'll be raght good I'll let yo' give me some professional
advass about putting something in the co'ners or not, when you have seen
it on the table."
She rose and led the way into the other room. Beaton knew she wanted to
talk with him about something else; but he waited patiently to let her
play her comedy out. She spread the cover on the table, and he advised
her, as he saw she wished, against putting anything in the corners; just
run a line of her stitch around the edge, he said.
"Mr. Fulkerson and Ah, why, we've been having a regular faght aboat it,"
she commented. "But we both agreed, fahnally, to leave it to you; Mr.
Fulkerson said you'd be sure to be raght. Ah'm so glad you took mah
sahde. But he's a great admahrer of yours, Mr. Beaton," she concluded,
demurely, suggestively.
"Is he? Well, I'm a great admirer of Fulkerson," said Beaton, with a
capricious willingness to humor her wish to talk about Fulkerson.
"He's a capital fellow; generous, magnanimous, with quite an ideal of
friendship and an eye single to the main chance all the time. He would
advertise 'Every Other Week' on his family vault."
Miss Woodburn laughed, and said she should tell him what Beaton had said.
"Do. But he's used to defamation from me, and he'll think you're
joking."
"Ah suppose," said Miss Woodburn, "that he's quahte the tahpe of a New
York business man." She added, as if it followed logically, "He's so
different from what I thought a New York business man would be."
"It's your Virginia tradition to despise business," said Beaton, rudely.
Miss Woodburn laughed again. "Despahse it? Mah goodness! we want to get
into it and woak it fo' all it's wo'th,' as Mr. Fulkerson says. That
tradition is all past. You don't know what the Soath is now. Ah suppose
mah fathaw despahses business, but he's a tradition himself, as Ah tell
him." Beaton would have enjoyed joining the young lady in anything she
might be going to say in derogation of her father, but he restrained
himself, and she went on more and more as if she wished to account for
her father's habitual hauteur with Beaton, if not to excuse it. "Ah tell
him he don't understand the rising generation. He was brought up in the
old school, and he thinks we're all just lahke he was when he was young,
with all those ahdeals of chivalry and family; but, mah goodness! it's
money that cyoants no'adays in the Soath, just lahke it does everywhere
else. Ah suppose, if we could have slavery back in the fawm mah fathaw
thinks it could have been brought up to, when the commercial spirit
wouldn't let it alone, it would be the best thing; but we can't have it
back, and Ah tell him we had better have the commercial spirit as the
next best thing."
Miss Woodburn went on, with sufficient loyalty and piety, to expose the
difference of her own and her father's ideals, but with what Beaton
thought less reference to his own unsympathetic attention than to a
knowledge finally of the personnel and materiel of 'Every Other Week.'
and Mr. Fulkerson's relation to the enterprise. "You most excuse my
asking so many questions, Mr. Beaton. You know it's all mah doing that
we awe heah in New York. Ah just told mah fathaw that if he was evah
goin' to do anything with his wrahtings, he had got to come No'th, and Ah
made him come. Ah believe he'd have stayed in the Soath all his lahfe.
And now Mr. Fulkerson wants him to let his editor see some of his
wrahtings, and Ah wanted to know something aboat the magazine. We awe a
great deal excited aboat it in this hoase, you know, Mr. Beaton," she
concluded, with a look that now transferred the interest from Fulkerson
to Alma. She led the way back to the room where they were sitting, and
went up to triumph over Fulkerson with Beaton's decision about the table-
cover.
Alma was left with Beaton near the piano, and he began to talk about the
Dryfooses as he sat down on the piano-stool. He said he had been giving
Miss Dryfoos a lesson on the banjo; he had borrowed the banjo of Miss
Vance. Then he struck the chord he had been trying to teach Christine,
and played over the air he had sung.
"How do you like that?" he asked, whirling round.
"It seems rather a disrespectful little tune, somehow," said Alma,
placidly.
Beaton rested his elbow on the corner of the piano and gazed dreamily at
her. "Your perceptions are wonderful. It is disrespectful. I played
it, up there, because I felt disrespectful to them."
"Do you claim that as a merit?"
"No, I state it as a fact. How can you respect such people?"
"You might respect yourself, then," said the girl. "Or perhaps that
wouldn't be so easy, either."
"No, it wouldn't. I like to have you say these things to me," said
Beaton, impartially.
"Well, I like to say them," Alma returned.
"They do me good."
"Oh, I don't know that that was my motive."
"There is no one like you--no one," said Beaton, as if apostrophizing her
in her absence. "To come from that house, with its assertions of money--
you can hear it chink; you can smell the foul old banknotes; it stifles
you--into an atmosphere like this, is like coming into another world."
"Thank you," said Alma. "I'm glad there isn't that unpleasant odor here;
but I wish there was a little more of the chinking."
"No, no! Don't say that!" he implored. "I like to think that there is
one soul uncontaminated by the sense of money in this big, brutal, sordid
city."
"You mean two," said Alma, with modesty. "But if you stifle at the
Dryfooses', why do you go there?"
"Why do I go?" he mused. "Don't you believe in knowing all the natures,
the types, you can? Those girls are a strange study: the young one is a
simple, earthly creature, as common as an oat-field and the other a sort
of sylvan life: fierce, flashing, feline--"
Alma burst out into a laugh. "What apt alliteration! And do they like
being studied? I should think the sylvan life might--scratch."
"No," said Beaton, with melancholy absence, "it only-purrs."
The girl felt a rising indignation. "Well, then, Mr. Beaton, I should
hope it would scratch, and bite, too. I think you've no business to go
about studying people, as you do. It's abominable."
"Go on," said the young man. "That Puritan conscience of yours!
It appeals to the old Covenanter strain in me--like a voice of pre-
existence. Go on--"
"Oh, if I went on I should merely say it was not only abominable, but
contemptible."
"You could be my guardian angel, Alma," said the young man, making his
eyes more and more slumbrous and dreamy.
"Stuff! I hope I have a soul above buttons!"
He smiled, as she rose, and followed her across the room. "Good-night;
Mr. Beaton," she said.
Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson came in from the other room. "What! You're
not going, Beaton?"
"Yes; I'm going to a reception. I stopped in on my way."
"To kill time," Alma explained.
"Well," said Fulkerson, gallantly, "this is the last place I should like
to do it. But I guess I'd better be going, too. It has sometimes
occurred to me that there is such a thing as staying too late. But with
Brother Beaton, here, just starting in for an evening's amusement, it
does seem a little early yet. Can't you urge me to stay, somebody?"
The two girls laughed, and Miss Woodburn said:
"Mr. Beaton is such a butterfly of fashion! Ah wish Ah was on mah way to
a pawty. Ah feel quahte envious."
"But he didn't say it to make you," Alma explained, with meek softness.
"Well, we can't all be swells. Where is your party, anyway, Beaton?"
asked Fulkerson. "How do you manage to get your invitations to those
things? I suppose a fellow has to keep hinting round pretty lively,
Neigh?"
Beaton took these mockeries serenely, and shook hands with Miss Woodburn,
with the effect of having already shaken hands with Alma. She stood with
hers clasped behind her.
V.
Beaton went away with the smile on his face which he had kept in
listening to Fulkerson, and carried it with him to the reception.
He believed that Alma was vexed with him for more personal reasons than
she had implied; it flattered him that she should have resented what he
told her of the Dryfooses. She had scolded him in their behalf
apparently; but really because he had made her jealous by his interest,
of whatever kind, in some one else. What followed, had followed
naturally. Unless she had been quite a simpleton she could not have met
his provisional love-making on any other terms; and the reason why Beaton
chiefly liked Alma Leighton was that she was not a simpleton. Even up in
the country, when she was overawed by his acquaintance, at first, she was
not very deeply overawed, and at times she was not overawed at all.
At such times she astonished him by taking his most solemn histrionics
with flippant incredulity, and even burlesquing them. But he could see,
all the same, that he had caught her fancy, and he admired the skill with
which she punished his neglect when they met in New York. He had really
come very near forgetting the Leightons; the intangible obligations of
mutual kindness which hold some men so fast, hung loosely upon him;
it would not have hurt him to break from them altogether; but when he
recognized them at last, he found that it strengthened them indefinitely
to have Alma ignore them so completely. If she had been sentimental, or
softly reproachful, that would have been the end; he could not have stood
it; he would have had to drop her. But when she met him on his own
ground, and obliged him to be sentimental, the game was in her hands.
Beaton laughed, now, when he thought of that, and he said to himself that
the girl had grown immensely since she had come to New York; nothing
seemed to have been lost upon her; she must have kept her eyes uncommonly
wide open. He noticed that especially in their talks over her work; she
had profited by everything she had seen and heard; she had all of
Wetmore's ideas pat; it amused Beaton to see how she seized every useful
word that he dropped, too, and turned him to technical account whenever
she could. He liked that; she had a great deal of talent; there was no
question of that; if she were a man there could be no question of her
future. He began to construct a future for her; it included provision
for himself, too; it was a common future, in which their lives and work
were united.
He was full of the glow of its prosperity when he met Margaret Vance at
the reception.
The house was one where people might chat a long time together without
publicly committing themselves to an interest in each other except such a
grew out of each other's ideas. Miss Vance was there because she united
in her catholic sympathies or ambitions the objects of the fashionable
people and of the aesthetic people who met there on common ground. It
was almost the only house in New York where this happened often, and it
did not happen very often there. It was a literary house, primarily,
with artistic qualifications, and the frequenters of it were mostly
authors and artists; Wetmore, who was always trying to fit everything
with a phrase, said it was the unfrequenters who were fashionable. There
was great ease there, and simplicity; and if there was not distinction,
it was not for want of distinguished people, but because there seems to
be some solvent in New York life that reduces all men to a common level,
that touches everybody with its potent magic and brings to the surface
the deeply underlying nobody. The effect for some temperaments, for
consciousness, for egotism, is admirable; for curiosity, for hero
worship, it is rather baffling. It is the spirit of the street
transferred to the drawing-room; indiscriminating, levelling, but
doubtless finally wholesome, and witnessing the immensity of the place,
if not consenting to the grandeur of reputations or presences.
Beaton now denied that this house represented a salon at all, in the old
sense; and he held that the salon was impossible, even undesirable,
with us, when Miss Vance sighed for it. At any rate, he said that this
turmoil of coming and going, this bubble and babble, this cackling and
hissing of conversation was not the expression of any such civilization
as had created the salon. Here, he owned, were the elements of
intellectual delightfulness, but he said their assemblage in such
quantity alone denied the salon; there was too much of a good thing.
The French word implied a long evening of general talk among the guests,
crowned with a little chicken at supper, ending at cock-crow. Here was
tea, with milk or with lemon-baths of it and claret-cup for the hardier
spirits throughout the evening. It was very nice, very pleasant, but it
was not the little chicken--not the salon. In fact, he affirmed, the
salon descended from above, out of the great world, and included the
aesthetic world in it. But our great world--the rich people, were
stupid, with no wish to be otherwise; they were not even curious about
authors and artists. Beaton fancied himself speaking impartially, and so
he allowed himself to speak bitterly; he said that in no other city in
the world, except Vienna, perhaps, were such people so little a part of
society.
"It isn't altogether the rich people's fault," said Margaret; and she
spoke impartially, too. "I don't believe that the literary men and the
artists would like a salon that descended to them. Madame Geoffrin, you
know, was very plebeian; her husband was a business man of some sort."
"He would have been a howling swell in New York," said Beaton, still
impartially.
Wetmore came up to their corner, with a scroll of bread and butter in one
hand and a cup of tea in the other. Large and fat, and clean-shaven, he
looked like a monk in evening dress.
"We were talking about salons," said Margaret.
"Why don't you open a salon yourself?" asked Wetmore, breathing thickly
from the anxiety of getting through the crowd without spilling his tea.
"Like poor Lady Barberina Lemon?" said the girl, with a laugh. "What a
good story! That idea of a woman who couldn't be interested in any of
the arts because she was socially and traditionally the material of them!
We can, never reach that height of nonchalance in this country."
"Not if we tried seriously?" suggested the painter. "I've an idea that
if the Americans ever gave their minds to that sort of thing, they could
take the palm--or the cake, as Beaton here would say--just as they do in
everything else. When we do have an aristocracy, it will be an
aristocracy that will go ahead of anything the world has ever seen.
Why don't somebody make a beginning, and go in openly for an ancestry,
and a lower middle class, and an hereditary legislature, and all the
rest? We've got liveries, and crests, and palaces, and caste feeling.
We're all right as far as we've gone, and we've got the money to go any
length."
"Like your natural-gas man, Mr. Beaton," said the girl, with a smiling
glance round at him.
"Ah!" said Wetmore, stirring his tea, "has Beaton got a natural-gas man?"
"My natural-gas man," said Beaton, ignoring Wetmore's question, "doesn't
know how to live in his palace yet, and I doubt if he has any caste
feeling. I fancy his family believe themselves victims of it. They say
--one of the young ladies does--that she never saw such an unsociable
place as New York; nobody calls."
"That's good!" said Wetmore. "I suppose they're all ready for company,
too: good cook, furniture, servants, carriages?"
"Galore," said Beaton.
"Well, that's too bad. There's a chance for you, Miss Vance. Doesn't
your philanthropy embrace the socially destitute as well as the
financially? Just think of a family like that, without a friend, in a
great city! I should think common charity had a duty there--not to
mention the uncommon."
He distinguished that kind as Margaret's by a glance of ironical
deference. She had a repute for good works which was out of proportion
to the works, as it always is, but she was really active in that way,
under the vague obligation, which we now all feel, to be helpful. She
was of the church which seems to have found a reversion to the imposing
ritual of the past the way back to the early ideals of Christian
brotherhood.
"Oh, they seem to have Mr. Beaton," Margaret answered, and Beaton felt
obscurely flattered by her reference to his patronage of the Dryfooses.
He explained to Wetmore: "They have me because they partly own me.
Dryfoos is Fulkerson's financial backer in 'Every Other Week'."
"Is that so? Well, that's interesting, too. Aren't you rather
astonished, Miss Vance, to see what a petty thing Beaton is making of
that magazine of his?"
"Oh," said Margaret, "it's so very nice, every way; it makes you feel as
if you did have a country, after all. It's as chic--that detestable
little word!--as those new French books."
"Beaton modelled it on them. But you mustn't suppose he does everything
about 'Every Other Week'; he'd like you to. Beaton, you haven't come up
to that cover of your first number, since. That was the design of one of
my pupils, Miss Vance--a little girl that Beaton discovered down in New
Hampshire last summer."
"Oh yes. And have you great hopes of her, Mr. Wetmore?"
"She seems to have more love of it and knack for it than any one of her
sex I've seen yet. It really looks like a case of art for art's sake,
at times. But you can't tell. They're liable to get married at any
moment, you know. Look here, Beaton, when your natural-gas man gets to
the picture-buying stage in his development, just remember your old
friends, will you? You know, Miss Vance, those new fellows have their
regular stages. They never know what to do with their money, but they
find out that people buy pictures, at one point. They shut your things
up in their houses where nobody comes, and after a while they overeat
themselves--they don't know what, else to do--and die of apoplexy, and
leave your pictures to a gallery, and then they see the light. It's
slow, but it's pretty sure. Well, I see Beaton isn't going to move on,
as he ought to do; and so I must. He always was an unconventional
creature."
Wetmore went away, but Beaton remained, and he outstayed several other
people who came up to speak to Miss Vance. She was interested in
everybody, and she liked the talk of these clever literary, artistic,
clerical, even theatrical people, and she liked the sort of court with
which they recognized her fashion as well as her cleverness; it was very
pleasant to be treated intellectually as if she were one of themselves,
and socially as if she was not habitually the same, but a sort of guest
in Bohemia, a distinguished stranger. If it was Arcadia rather than
Bohemia, still she felt her quality of distinguished stranger. The
flattery of it touched her fancy, and not her vanity; she had very little
vanity. Beaton's devotion made the same sort of appeal; it was not so
much that she liked him as she liked being the object of his admiration.
She was a girl of genuine sympathies, intellectual rather than
sentimental. In fact, she was an intellectual person, whom qualities of
the heart saved from being disagreeable, as they saved her on the other
hand from being worldly or cruel in her fashionableness. She had read a
great many books, and had ideas about them, quite courageous and original
ideas; she knew about pictures--she had been in Wetmore's class; she was
fond of music; she was willing to understand even politics; in Boston she
might have been agnostic, but in New York she was sincerely religious;
she was very accomplished; and perhaps it was her goodness that prevented
her feeling what was not best in Beaton.
"Do you think," she said, after the retreat of one of the comers and
goers left her alone with him again, "that those young ladies would like
me to call on them?"
"Those young ladies?" Beaton echoed. "Miss Leighton and--"
"No; I have been there with my aunt's cards already."
"Oh yes," said Beaton, as if he had known of it; he admired the pluck and
pride with which Alma had refrained from ever mentioning the fact to him,
and had kept her mother from mentioning it, which must have been
difficult.
"I mean the Miss Dryfooses. It seems really barbarous, if nobody goes
near them. We do all kinds of things, and help all kinds of people in
some ways, but we let strangers remain strangers unless they know how to
make their way among us."
"The Dryfooses certainly wouldn't know how to make their way among you,"
said Beaton, with a sort of dreamy absence in his tone.
Miss Vance went on, speaking out the process of reasoning in her mind,
rather than any conclusions she had reached. "We defend ourselves by
trying to believe that they must have friends of their own, or that they
would think us patronizing, and wouldn't like being made the objects of
social charity; but they needn't really suppose anything of the kind."
"I don't imagine they would," said Beaton. "I think they'd be only too
happy to have you come. But you wouldn't know what to do with each
other, indeed, Miss Vance."
"Perhaps we shall like each other," said the girl, bravely, "and then we
shall know. What Church are they of?"
"I don't believe they're of any," said Beaton. "The mother was brought
up a Dunkard."
"A Dunkard?"
Beaton told what he knew of the primitive sect, with its early Christian
polity, its literal interpretation of Christ's ethics, and its quaint
ceremonial of foot-washing; he made something picturesque of that.
"The father is a Mammon-worshipper, pure and simple. I suppose the young
ladies go to church, but I don't know where. They haven't tried to
convert me."
"I'll tell them not to despair--after I've converted them," said Miss
Vance. "Will you let me use you as a 'point d'appui', Mr. Beaton?"
"Any way you like. If you're really going to see them, perhaps I'd
better make a confession. I left your banjo with them, after I got it
put in order."
"How very nice! Then we have a common interest already."
"Do you mean the banjo, or--"
"The banjo, decidedly. Which of them plays?"
"Neither. But the eldest heard that the banjo was 'all the rage,' as the
youngest says. Perhaps you can persuade them that good works are the
rage, too."
Beaton had no very lively belief that Margaret would go to see the
Dryfooses; he did so few of the things he proposed that he went upon the
theory that others must be as faithless. Still, he had a cruel amusement
in figuring the possible encounter between Margaret Vance, with her
intellectual elegance, her eager sympathies and generous ideals, and
those girls with their rude past, their false and distorted perspective,
their sordid and hungry selfishness, and their faith in the omnipotence
of their father's wealth wounded by their experience of its present
social impotence. At the bottom of his heart he sympathized with them
rather than with her; he was more like them.
People had ceased coming, and some of them were going. Miss Vance said
she must go, too, and she was about to rise, when the host came up with
March; Beaton turned away.
"Miss Vance, I want to introduce Mr. March, the editor of 'Every Other
Week.' You oughtn't to be restricted to the art department. We literary
fellows think that arm of the service gets too much of the glory
nowadays." His banter was for Beaton, but he was already beyond ear-
shot, and the host went on:
Mr. March can talk with you about your favorite Boston. He's just turned
his back on it."
"Oh, I hope not!" said Miss Vance. "I can't imagine anybody voluntarily
leaving Boston."
"I don't say he's so bad as that," said the host, committing March to
her. "He came to New York because he couldn't help it--like the rest of
us. I never know whether that's a compliment to New York or not."
They talked Boston a little while, without finding that they had common
acquaintance there; Miss Vance must have concluded that society was much
larger in Boston than she had supposed from her visits there, or else
that March did not know many people in it. But she was not a girl to
care much for the inferences that might be drawn from such conclusions;
she rather prided herself upon despising them; and she gave herself to
the pleasure of being talked to as if she were of March's own age.
In the glow of her sympathetic beauty and elegance he talked his best,
and tried to amuse her with his jokes, which he had the art of tingeing
with a little seriousness on one side. He made her laugh; and he
flattered her by making her think; in her turn she charmed him so much by
enjoying what he said that he began to brag of his wife, as a good
husband always does when another woman charms him; and she asked, Oh was
Mrs. March there; and would he introduce her?
She asked Mrs. March for her address, and whether she had a day; and she
said she would come to see her, if she would let her. Mrs. March could
not be so enthusiastic about her as March was, but as they walked home
together they talked the girl over, and agreed about her beauty and her
amiability. Mrs. March said she seemed very unspoiled for a person who
must have been so much spoiled. They tried to analyze her charm, and
they succeeded in formulating it as a combination of intellectual
fashionableness and worldly innocence. "I think," said Mrs. March,
"that city girls, brought up as she must have been, are often the most
innocent of all. They never imagine the wickedness of the world, and if
they marry happily they go through life as innocent as children.
Everything combines to keep them so; the very hollowness of society
shields them. They are the loveliest of the human race. But perhaps the
rest have to pay too much for them."
"For such an exquisite creature as Miss Vance," said March, "we couldn't
pay too much."
A wild laughing cry suddenly broke upon the air at the street-crossing in
front of them. A girl's voice called out: "Run, run, Jen! The copper is
after you." A woman's figure rushed stumbling across the way and into
the shadow of the houses, pursued by a burly policeman.
"Ah, but if that's part of the price?"
They went along fallen from the gay spirit of their talk into a silence
which he broke with a sigh. "Can that poor wretch and the radiant girl
we left yonder really belong to the same system of things? How
impossible each makes the other seem!"
VI.
Mrs. Horn believed in the world and in society and its unwritten
constitution devoutly, and she tolerated her niece's benevolent
activities as she tolerated her aesthetic sympathies because these
things, however oddly, were tolerated--even encouraged--by society;
and they gave Margaret a charm. They made her originality interesting.
Mrs. Horn did not intend that they should ever go so far as to make her
troublesome; and it was with a sense of this abeyant authority of her
aunt's that the girl asked her approval of her proposed call upon the
Dryfooses. She explained as well as she could the social destitution of
these opulent people, and she had of course to name Beaton as the source
of her knowledge concerning them.
"Did Mr. Beaton suggest your calling on them?"
"No; he rather discouraged it."
"And why do you think you ought to go in this particular instance? New
York is full of people who don't know anybody."
Margaret laughed. "I suppose it's like any other charity: you reach the
cases you know of. The others you say you can't help, and you try to
ignore them."
"It's very romantic," said Mrs. Horn. "I hope you've counted the cost;
all the possible consequences."
Margaret knew that her aunt had in mind their common experience with the
Leightons, whom, to give their common conscience peace, she had called
upon with her aunt's cards and excuses, and an invitation for her
Thursdays, somewhat too late to make the visit seem a welcome to New
York. She was so coldly received, not so much for herself as in her
quality of envoy, that her aunt experienced all the comfort which
vicarious penance brings. She did not perhaps consider sufficiently her
niece's guiltlessness in the expiation. Margaret was not with her at
St. Barnaby in the fatal fortnight she passed there, and never saw the
Leightons till she went to call upon them. She never complained: the
strain of asceticism, which mysteriously exists in us all, and makes us
put peas, boiled or unboiled, in our shoes, gave her patience with the
snub which the Leightons presented her for her aunt. But now she said,
with this in mind: "Nothing seems simpler than to get rid of people if
you don't want them. You merely have to let them alone."
"It isn't so pleasant, letting them alone," said Mrs. Horn.
"Or having them let you alone," said Margaret; for neither Mrs. Leighton
nor Alma had ever come to enjoy the belated hospitality of Mrs. Horn's
Thursdays.
"Yes, or having them let you alone," Mrs. Horn courageously consented.
"And all that I ask you, Margaret, is to be sure that you really want to
know these people."
"I don't," said the girl, seriously, "in the usual way."
"Then the question is whether you do in the un usual way. They will
build a great deal upon you," said Mrs. Horn, realizing how much the
Leightons must have built upon her, and how much out of proportion to her
desert they must now dislike her; for she seemed to have had them on her
mind from the time they came, and had always meant to recognize any
reasonable claim they had upon her.
"It seems very odd, very sad," Margaret returned, "that you never could
act unselfishly in society affairs. If I wished to go and see those
girls just to do them a pleasure, and perhaps because if they're strange
and lonely, I might do them good, even--it would be impossible."
"Quite," said her aunt. "Such a thing would be quixotic. Society
doesn't rest upon any such basis. It can't; it would go to pieces, if
people acted from unselfish motives."
"Then it's a painted savage!" said the girl. "All its favors are really
bargains. It's gifts are for gifts back again."
"Yes, that is true," said Mrs. Horn, with no more sense of wrong in the
fact than the political economist has in the fact that wages are the
measure of necessity and not of merit. "You get what you pay for. It's
a matter of business." She satisfied herself with this formula, which
she did not invent, as fully as if it were a reason; but she did not
dislike her niece's revolt against it. That was part of Margaret's
originality, which pleased her aunt in proportion to her own
conventionality; she was really a timid person, and she liked the show of
courage which Margaret's magnanimity often reflected upon her. She had
through her a repute, with people who did not know her well, for
intellectual and moral qualities; she was supposed to be literary and
charitable; she almost had opinions and ideals, but really fell short of
their possession. She thought that she set bounds to the girl's
originality because she recognized them. Margaret understood this better
than her aunt, and knew that she had consulted her about going to see the
Dryfooses out of deference, and with no expectation of luminous
instruction. She was used to being a law to herself, but she knew what
she might and might not do, so that she was rather a by-law. She was the
kind of girl that might have fancies for artists and poets, but might end
by marrying a prosperous broker, and leavening a vast lump of moneyed and
fashionable life with her culture, generosity, and good-will. The
intellectual interests were first with her, but she might be equal to
sacrificing them; she had the best heart, but she might know how to
harden it; if she was eccentric, her social orbit was defined; comets
themselves traverse space on fixed lines. She was like every one else,
a congeries of contradictions and inconsistencies, but obedient to the
general expectation of what a girl of her position must and must not
finally be. Provisionally, she was very much what she liked to be.
VII
Margaret Vance tried to give herself some reason for going to call upon
the Dryfooses, but she could find none better than the wish to do a kind
thing. This seemed queerer and less and less sufficient as she examined
it, and she even admitted a little curiosity as a harmless element in her
motive, without being very well satisfied with it. She tried to add a
slight sense of social duty, and then she decided to have no motive at
all, but simply to pay her visit as she would to any other eligible
strangers she saw fit to call upon. She perceived that she must be very
careful not to let them see that any other impulse had governed her; she
determined, if possible, to let them patronize her; to be very modest and
sincere and diffident, and, above all, not to play a part. This was
easy, compared with the choice of a manner that should convey to them the
fact that she was not playing a part. When the hesitating Irish serving-
man had acknowledged that the ladies were at home, and had taken her card
to them, she sat waiting for them in the drawing-room. Her study of its
appointments, with their impersonal costliness, gave her no suggestion
how to proceed; the two sisters were upon her before she had really
decided, and she rose to meet them with the conviction that she was going
to play a part for want of some chosen means of not doing so. She found
herself, before she knew it, making her banjo a property in the little
comedy, and professing so much pleasure in the fact that Miss Dryfoos was
taking it up; she had herself been so much interested by it. Anything,
she said, was a relief from the piano; and then, between the guitar and
the banjo, one must really choose the banjo, unless one wanted to devote
one's whole natural life to the violin. Of course, there was the
mandolin; but Margaret asked if they did not feel that the bit of shell
you struck it with interposed a distance between you and the real soul of
the instrument; and then it did have such a faint, mosquitoy little tone!
She made much of the question, which they left her to debate alone while
they gazed solemnly at her till she characterized the tone of the
mandolin, when Mela broke into a large, coarse laugh.
"Well, that's just what it does sound like," she explained defiantly to
her sister. "I always feel like it was going to settle somewhere, and I
want to hit myself a slap before it begins to bite. I don't see what
ever brought such a thing into fashion."
Margaret had not expected to be so powerfully seconded, and she asked,
after gathering herself together, "And you are both learning the banjo?"
"My, no!" said Mela, "I've gone through enough with the piano. Christine
is learnun' it."
"I'm so glad you are making my banjo useful at the outset, Miss Dryfoos."
Both girls stared at her, but found it hard to cope with the fact that
this was the lady friend whose banjo Beaton had lent them. "Mr. Beaton
mentioned that he had left it here. I hope you'll keep it as long as you
find it useful."
At this amiable speech even Christine could not help thanking her.
"Of course," she said, "I expect to get another, right off. Mr. Beaton
is going to choose it for me."
"You are very fortunate. If you haven't a teacher yet I should so like
to recommend mine."
Mela broke out in her laugh again. "Oh, I guess Christine's pretty well
suited with the one she's got," she said, with insinuation. Her sister
gave her a frowning glance, and Margaret did not tempt her to explain.
"Then that's much better," she said. "I have a kind of superstition in
such matters; I don't like to make a second choice. In a shop I like to
take the first thing of the kind I'm looking for, and even if I choose
further I come back to the original."
"How funny!" said Mela. "Well, now, I'm just the other way. I always
take the last thing, after I've picked over all the rest. My luck always
seems to be at the bottom of the heap. Now, Christine, she's more like
you. I believe she could walk right up blindfolded and put her hand on
the thing she wants every time."
"I'm like father," said Christine, softened a little by the celebration
of her peculiarity. "He says the reason so many people don't get what
they want is that they don't want it bad enough. Now, when I want a
thing, it seems to me that I want it all through."
"Well, that's just like father, too," said Mela. "That's the way he done
when he got that eighty-acre piece next to Moffitt that he kept when he
sold the farm, and that's got some of the best gas-wells on it now that
there is anywhere." She addressed the explanation to her sister, to the
exclusion of Margaret, who, nevertheless, listened with a smiling face
and a resolutely polite air of being a party to the conversation. Mela
rewarded her amiability by saying to her, finally, "You've never been in
the natural-gas country, have you?"
"Oh no! And I should so much like to see it!" said Margaret, with a
fervor that was partly, voluntary.
"Would you? Well, we're kind of sick of it, but I suppose it would
strike a stranger."
"I never got tired of looking at the big wells when they lit them up,"
said Christine. "It seems as if the world was on fire."
"Yes, and when you see the surface-gas burnun' down in the woods, like it
used to by our spring-house-so still, and never spreadun' any, just like
a bed of some kind of wild flowers when you ketch sight of it a piece
off."
They began to tell of the wonders of their strange land in an antiphony
of reminiscences and descriptions; they unconsciously imputed a merit to
themselves from the number and violence of the wells on their father's
property; they bragged of the high civilization of Moffitt, which they
compared to its advantage with that of New York. They became excited by
Margaret's interest in natural gas, and forgot to be suspicious and
envious.
She said, as she rose, "Oh, how much I should like to see it all!" Then
she made a little pause, and added:
"I'm so sorry my aunt's Thursdays are over; she never has them after
Lent, but we're to have some people Tuesday evening at a little concert
which a musical friend is going to give with some other artists. There
won't be any banjos, I'm afraid, but there'll be some very good singing,
and my aunt would be so glad if you could come with your mother."
She put down her aunt's card on the table near her, while Mela gurgled,
as if it were the best joke: "Oh, my! Mother never goes anywhere; you
couldn't get her out for love or money." But she was herself overwhelmed
with a simple joy at Margaret's politeness, and showed it in a sensuous
way, like a child, as if she had been tickled. She came closer to
Margaret and seemed about to fawn physically upon her.
"Ain't she just as lovely as she can live?" she demanded of her sister
when Margaret was gone.
"I don't know," said Christine. "I guess she wanted to know who
Mr. Beaton had been lending her banjo to."
"Pshaw! Do you suppose she's in love with him?" asked Mela, and then
she broke into her hoarse laugh at the look her sister gave her. "Well,
don't eat me, Christine! I wonder who she is, anyway? I'm goun' to git
it out of Mr. Beaton the next time he calls. I guess she's somebody.
Mrs. Mandel can tell. I wish that old friend of hers would hurry up and
git well--or something. But I guess we appeared about as well as she
did. I could see she was afraid of you, Christine. I reckon it's
gittun' around a little about father; and when it does I don't believe we
shall want for callers. Say, are you goun'? To that concert of theirs?"
"I don't know. Not till I know who they are first."
"Well, we've got to hump ourselves if we're goun' to find out before
Tuesday."
As she went home Margaret felt wrought in her that most incredible of the
miracles, which, nevertheless, any one may make his experience. She felt
kindly to these girls because she had tried to make them happy, and she
hoped that in the interest she had shown there had been none of the
poison of flattery. She was aware that this was a risk she ran in such
an attempt to do good. If she had escaped this effect she was willing to
leave the rest with Providence.
VIII.
The notion that a girl of Margaret Vance's traditions would naturally
form of girls like Christine and Mela Dryfoos would be that they were
abashed in the presence of the new conditions of their lives, and that
they must receive the advance she had made them with a certain grateful
humility. However they received it, she had made it upon principle, from
a romantic conception of duty; but this was the way she imagined they
would receive it, because she thought that she would have done so if she
had been as ignorant and unbred as they. Her error was in arguing their
attitude from her own temperament, and endowing them, for the purposes of
argument, with her perspective. They had not the means, intellectual or
moral, of feeling as she fancied. If they had remained at home on the
farm where they were born, Christine would have grown up that embodiment
of impassioned suspicion which we find oftenest in the narrowest spheres,
and Mela would always have been a good-natured simpleton; but they would
never have doubted their equality with the wisest and the finest. As it
was, they had not learned enough at school to doubt it, and the splendor
of their father's success in making money had blinded them forever to any
possible difference against them. They had no question of themselves in
the social abeyance to which they had been left in New York. They had
been surprised, mystified; it was not what they had expected; there must
be some mistake.
They were the victims of an accident, which would be repaired as soon as
the fact of their father's wealth had got around. They had been
steadfast in their faith, through all their disappointment, that they
were not only better than most people by virtue of his money, but as good
as any; and they took Margaret's visit, so far as they, investigated its
motive, for a sign that at last it was beginning to get around; of
course, a thing could not get around in New York so quick as it could in
a small place. They were confirmed in their belief by the sensation of
Mrs. Mandel when she returned to duty that afternoon, and they consulted
her about going to Mrs. Horn's musicale. If she had felt any doubt at
the name for there were Horns and Horns--the address on the card put the
matter beyond question; and she tried to make her charges understand what
a precious chance had befallen them. She did not succeed; they had not
the premises, the experience, for a sufficient impression; and she undid
her work in part by the effort to explain that Mrs. Horn's standing was
independent of money; that though she was positively rich, she was
comparatively poor. Christine inferred that Miss Vance had called
because she wished to be the first to get in with them since it had begun
to get around. This view commended itself to Mela, too, but without
warping her from her opinion that Miss Vance was all the same too sweet
for anything. She had not so vivid a consciousness of her father's money
as Christine had; but she reposed perhaps all the more confidently upon
its power. She was far from thinking meanly of any one who thought
highly of her for it; that seemed so natural a result as to be amiable,
even admirable; she was willing that any such person should get all the
good there was in such an attitude toward her.
They discussed the matter that night at dinner before their father and
mother, who mostly sat silent at their meals; the father frowning
absently over his plate, with his head close to it, and making play into
his mouth with the back of his knife (he had got so far toward the use of
his fork as to despise those who still ate from the edge of their
knives), and the mother partly missing hers at times in the nervous
tremor that shook her face from side to side.
After a while the subject of Mela's hoarse babble and of Christine's
high-pitched, thin, sharp forays of assertion and denial in the field
which her sister's voice seemed to cover, made its way into the old man's
consciousness, and he perceived that they were talking with Mrs. Mandel
about it, and that his wife was from time to time offering an irrelevant
and mistaken comment. He agreed with Christine, and silently took her
view of the affair some time before he made any sign of having listened.
There had been a time in his life when other things besides his money
seemed admirable to him. He had once respected himself for the hard-
headed, practical common sense which first gave him standing among his
country neighbors; which made him supervisor, school trustee, justice of
the peace, county commissioner, secretary of the Moffitt County
Agricultural Society. In those days he had served the public with
disinterested zeal and proud ability; he used to write to the Lake Shore
Farmer on agricultural topics; he took part in opposing, through the
Moffitt papers, the legislative waste of the people's money; on the
question of selling a local canal to the railroad company, which killed
that fine old State work, and let the dry ditch grow up to grass, he
might have gone to the Legislature, but he contented himself with
defeating the Moffitt member who had voted for the job. If he opposed
some measures for the general good, like high schools and school
libraries, it was because he lacked perspective, in his intense
individualism, and suspected all expense of being spendthrift. He
believed in good district schools, and he had a fondness, crude but
genuine, for some kinds of reading--history, and forensics of an
elementary sort.
With his good head for figures he doubted doctors and despised preachers;
he thought lawyers were all rascals, but he respected them for their
ability; he was not himself litigious, but he enjoyed the intellectual
encounters of a difficult lawsuit, and he often attended a sitting of the
fall term of court, when he went to town, for the pleasure of hearing the
speeches. He was a good citizen, and a good husband. As a good father,
he was rather severe with his children, and used to whip them, especially
the gentle Conrad, who somehow crossed him most, till the twins died.
After that he never struck any of them; and from the sight of a blow
dealt a horse he turned as if sick. It was a long time before he lifted
himself up from his sorrow, and then the will of the man seemed to have
been breached through his affections. He let the girls do as they
pleased--the twins had been girls; he let them go away to school, and got
them a piano. It was they who made him sell the farm. If Conrad had
only had their spirit he could have made him keep it, he felt; and he
resented the want of support he might have found in a less yielding
spirit than his son's.
His moral decay began with his perception of the opportunity of making
money quickly and abundantly, which offered itself to him after he sold
his farm. He awoke to it slowly, from a desolation in which he tasted
the last bitter of homesickness, the utter misery of idleness and
listlessness. When he broke down and cried for the hard-working,
wholesome life he had lost, he was near the end of this season of
despair, but he was also near the end of what was best in himself.
He devolved upon a meaner ideal than that of conservative good
citizenship, which had been his chief moral experience: the money he had
already made without effort and without merit bred its unholy self-love
in him; he began to honor money, especially money that had been won
suddenly and in large sums; for money that had been earned painfully,
slowly, and in little amounts, he had only pity and contempt. The poison
of that ambition to go somewhere and be somebody which the local
speculators had instilled into him began to work in the vanity which had
succeeded his somewhat scornful self-respect; he rejected Europe as the
proper field for his expansion; he rejected Washington; he preferred New
York, whither the men who have made money and do not yet know that money
has made them, all instinctively turn. He came where he could watch his
money breed more money, and bring greater increase of its kind in an hour
of luck than the toil of hundreds of men could earn in a year. He called
it speculation, stocks, the Street; and his pride, his faith in himself,
mounted with his luck. He expected, when he had sated his greed,
to begin to spend, and he had formulated an intention to build a great
house, to add another to the palaces of the country-bred millionaires who
have come to adorn the great city. In the mean time he made little
account of the things that occupied his children, except to fret at the
ungrateful indifference of his son to the interests that could alone make
a man of him. He did not know whether his daughters were in society or
not; with people coming and going in the house he would have supposed
they must be so, no matter who the people were; in some vague way he felt
that he had hired society in Mrs. Mandel, at so much a year. He never
met a superior himself except now and then a man of twenty or thirty
millions to his one or two, and then he felt his soul creep within him,
without a sense of social inferiority; it was a question of financial
inferiority; and though Dryfoos's soul bowed itself and crawled, it was
with a gambler's admiration of wonderful luck. Other men said these
many-millioned millionaires were smart, and got their money by sharp
practices to which lesser men could not attain; but Dryfoos believed that
he could compass the same ends, by the same means, with the same chances;
he respected their money, not them.
When he now heard Mrs. Mandel and his daughters talking of that person,
whoever she was, that Mrs. Mandel seemed to think had honored his girls
by coming to see them, his curiosity was pricked as much as his pride was
galled.
"Well, anyway," said Mela, "I don't care whether Christine's goon' or
not; I am. And you got to go with me, Mrs. Mandel."
"Well, there's a little difficulty," said Mrs. Mandel, with her unfailing
dignity and politeness. "I haven't been asked, you know."
"Then what are we goun' to do?" demanded Mela, almost crossly. She was
physically too amiable, she felt too well corporeally, ever to be quite
cross. "She might 'a' knowed--well known--we couldn't 'a' come alone,
in New York. I don't see why, we couldn't. I don't call it much of an
invitation."
"I suppose she thought you could come with your mother," Mrs. Mandel
suggested.
"She didn't say anything about mother: Did she, Christine? Or, yes, she
did, too. And I told her she couldn't git mother out. Don't you
remember?"
"I didn't pay much attention," said Christine. "I wasn't certain we
wanted to go."
"I reckon you wasn't goun' to let her see that we cared much," said Mela,
half reproachful, half proud of this attitude of Christine. "Well,
I don't see but what we got to stay at home." She laughed at this lame
conclusion of the matter.
"Perhaps Mr. Conrad--you could very properly take him without an express
invitation--" Mrs. Mandel began.
Conrad looked up in alarm and protest. "I--I don't think I could go that
evening--"
"What's the reason?" his father broke in, harshly. "You're not such a
sheep that you're afraid to go into company with your sisters? Or are
you too good to go with them?"
"If it's to be anything like that night when them hussies come out and
danced that way," said Mrs. Dryfoos, "I don't blame Coonrod for not
wantun' to go. I never saw the beat of it."
Mela sent a yelling laugh across the table to her mother. "Well, I wish
Miss Vance could 'a' heard that! Why, mother, did you think it like the
ballet?"
"Well, I didn't know, Mely, child," said the old woman. "I didn't know
what it was like. I hain't never been to one, and you can't be too
keerful where you go, in a place like New York."
"What's the reason you can't go?" Dryfoos ignored the passage between
his wife and daughter in making this demand of his son, with a sour face.
"I have an engagement that night--it's one of our meetings."
"I reckon you can let your meeting go for one night," said Dryfoos.
"It can't be so important as all that, that you must disappoint your
sisters."
"I don't like to disappoint those poor creatures. They depend so much
upon the meetings--"
"I reckon they can stand it for one night," said the old man. He added,
"The poor ye have with you always."
"That's so, Coonrod," said his mother. "It's the Saviour's own words."
"Yes, mother. But they're not meant just as father used them."
"How do you know how they were meant? Or how I used them?" cried the
father. "Now you just make your plans to go with the girls, Tuesday
night. They can't go alone, and Mrs. Mandel can't go with them."
"Pshaw!" said Mela. "We don't want to take Conrad away from his meetun',
do we, Chris?"
"I don't know," said Christine, in her high, fine voice. "They could get
along without him for one night, as father says."
"Well, I'm not a-goun' to take him," said Mela. "Now, Mrs. Mandel, just
think out some other way. Say! What's the reason we couldn't get
somebody else to take us just as well? Ain't that rulable?"
"It would be allowable--"
"Allowable, I mean," Mela corrected herself.
"But it might look a little significant, unless it was some old family
friend."
"Well, let's get Mr. Fulkerson to take us. He's the oldest family friend
we got."
"I won't go with Mr. Fulkerson," said Christine, serenely.
"Why, I'm sure, Christine," her mother pleaded, "Mr. Fulkerson is a very
good young man, and very nice appearun'."
Mela shouted, "He's ten times as pleasant as that old Mr. Beaton of
Christine's!"
Christine made no effort to break the constraint that fell upon the table
at this sally, but her father said: "Christine is right, Mela. It
wouldn't do for you to go with any other young man. Conrad will go with
you."
"I'm not certain I want to go, yet," said Christine.
"Well, settle that among yourselves. But if you want to go, your brother
will go with you."
"Of course, Coonrod 'll go, if his sisters wants him to," the old woman
pleaded. "I reckon it ain't agoun' to be anything very bad; and if it
is, Coonrod, why you can just git right up and come out."
"It will be all right, mother. And I will go, of course."
"There, now, I knowed you would, Coonrod. Now, fawther!" This appeal
was to make the old man say something in recognition of Conrad's
sacrifice.
"You'll always find," he said, "that it's those of your own household
that have the first claim on you."
"That's so, Coonrod," urged his mother. "It's Bible truth. Your fawther
ain't a perfesser, but he always did read his Bible. Search the
Scriptures. That's what it means."
"Laws!" cried Mely, "a body can see, easy enough from mother, where
Conrad's wantun' to be a preacher comes from. I should 'a' thought she'd
'a' wanted to been one herself."
"Let your women keep silence in the churches," said the old woman,
solemnly.
"There you go again, mother! I guess if you was to say that to some of
the lady ministers nowadays, you'd git yourself into trouble." Mela
looked round for approval, and gurgled out a hoarse laugh.
IX.
The Dryfooses went late to Mrs. Horn's musicale, in spite of Mrs.
Mandel's advice. Christine made the delay, both because she wished to
show Miss Vance that she was (not) anxious, and because she had some
vague notion of the distinction of arriving late at any sort of
entertainment. Mrs. Mandel insisted upon the difference between this
musicale and an ordinary reception; but Christine rather fancied
disturbing a company that had got seated, and perhaps making people rise
and stand, while she found her way to her place, as she had seen them.
do for a tardy comer at the theatre.
Mela, whom she did not admit to her reasons or feelings always, followed
her with the servile admiration she had for all that Christine did; and
she took on trust as somehow successful the result of Christine's
obstinacy, when they were allowed to stand against the wall at the back
of the room through the whole of the long piece begun just before they
came in. There had been no one to receive them; a few people, in the
rear rows of chairs near them, turned their heads to glance at them, and
then looked away again. Mela had her misgivings; but at the end of the
piece Miss Vance came up to them at once, and then Mela knew that she had
her eyes on them all the time, and that Christine must have been right.
Christine said nothing about their coming late, and so Mela did not make
any excuse, and Miss Vance seemed to expect none. She glanced with a
sort of surprise at Conrad, when Christine introduced him; Mela did not
know whether she liked their bringing him, till she shook hands with him,
and said: "Oh, I am very glad indeed! Mr. Dryfoos and I have met
before." Without explaining where or when, she led them to her aunt and
presented them, and then said, "I'm going to put you with some friends of
yours," and quickly seated them next the Marches. Mela liked that well
enough; she thought she might have some joking with Mr. March, for all
his wife was so stiff; but the look which Christine wore seemed to
forbid, provisionally at least, any such recreation. On her part,
Christine was cool with the Marches. It went through her mind that they
must have told Miss Vance they knew her; and perhaps they had boasted of
her intimacy. She relaxed a little toward them when she saw Beaton
leaning against the wall at the end of the row next Mrs. March. Then she
conjectured that he might have told Miss Vance of her acquaintance with
the Marches, and she bent forward and nodded to Mrs. March across Conrad,
Mela, and Mr. March. She conceived of him as a sort of hand of her
father's, but she was willing to take them at their apparent social
valuation for the time. She leaned back in her chair, and did not look
up at Beaton after the first furtive glance, though she felt his eyes on
her.
The music began again almost at once, before Mela had time to make Conrad
tell her where Miss Vance had met him before. She would not have minded
interrupting the music; but every one else seemed so attentive, even
Christine, that she had not the courage. The concert went onto an end
without realizing for her the ideal of pleasure which one ought to find.
in society. She was not exacting, but it seemed to her there were very
few young men, and when the music was over, and their opportunity came to
be sociable, they were not very sociable. They were not introduced, for
one thing; but it appeared to Mela that they might have got introduced,
if they had any sense; she saw them looking at her, and she was glad she
had dressed so much; she was dressed more than any other lady there, and
either because she was the most dressed of any person there, or because
it had got around who her father was, she felt that she had made an
impression on the young men. In her satisfaction with this, and from her
good nature, she was contented to be served with her refreshments after
the concert by Mr. March, and to remain joking with him. She was at her
ease; she let her hoarse voice out in her largest laugh; she accused him,
to the admiration of those near, of getting her into a perfect gale. It
appeared to her, in her own pleasure, her mission to illustrate to the
rather subdued people about her what a good time really was, so that they
could have it if they wanted it. Her joy was crowned when March modestly
professed himself unworthy to monopolize her, and explained how selfish
he felt in talking to a young lady when there were so many young men
dying to do so.
"Oh, pshaw, dyun', yes!" cried Mela, tasting the irony. "I guess I see
them!"
He asked if he might really introduce a friend of his to her, and she
said, Well, yes, if be thought he could live to get to her; and March
brought up a man whom he thought very young and Mela thought very old.
He was a contributor to 'Every Other Week,' and so March knew him;
he believed himself a student of human nature in behalf of literature,
and he now set about studying Mela. He tempted her to express her
opinion on all points, and he laughed so amiably at the boldness and
humorous vigor of her ideas that she was delighted with him. She asked
him if he was a New-Yorker by birth; and she told him she pitied him,
when he said he had never been West. She professed herself perfectly
sick of New York, and urged him to go to Moffitt if he wanted to see a
real live town. He wondered if it would do to put her into literature
just as she was, with all her slang and brag, but he decided that he
would have to subdue her a great deal: he did not see how he could
reconcile the facts of her conversation with the facts of her appearance:
her beauty, her splendor of dress, her apparent right to be where she
was. These things perplexed him; he was afraid the great American novel,
if true, must be incredible. Mela said he ought to hear her sister go on
about New York when they first came; but she reckoned that Christine was
getting so she could put up with it a little better, now. She looked
significantly across the room to the place where Christine was now
talking with Beaton; and the student of human nature asked, Was she here?
and, Would she introduce him? Mela said she would, the first chance she
got; and she added, They would be much pleased to have him call. She
felt herself to be having a beautiful time, and she got directly upon
such intimate terms with the student of human nature that she laughed
with him about some peculiarities of his, such as his going so far about
to ask things he wanted to know from her; she said she never did believe
in beating about the bush much. She had noticed the same thing in Miss
Vance when she came to call that day; and when the young man owned that
he came rather a good deal to Mrs. Horn's house, she asked him, Well,
what sort of a girl was Miss Vance, anyway, and where did he suppose she
had met her brother? The student of human nature could not say as to
this, and as to Miss Vance he judged it safest to treat of the non-
society side of her character, her activity in charity, her special
devotion to the work among the poor on the East Side, which she
personally engaged in.
"Oh, that's where Conrad goes, too!" Mela interrupted. "I'll bet
anything that's where she met him. I wisht I could tell Christine!
But I suppose she would want to kill me, if I was to speak to her now."
The student of human nature said, politely, "Oh, shall I take you to
her?"
Mela answered, "I guess you better not!" with a laugh so significant that
he could not help his inferences concerning both Christine's absorption
in the person she was talking with and the habitual violence of her
temper. He made note of how Mela helplessly spoke of all her family by
their names, as if he were already intimate with them; he fancied that if
he could get that in skillfully, it would be a valuable color in his
study; the English lord whom she should astonish with it began to form
himself out of the dramatic nebulosity in his mind, and to whirl on a
definite orbit in American society. But he was puzzled to decide whether
Mela's willingness to take him into her confidence on short notice was
typical or personal: the trait of a daughter of the natural-gas
millionaire, or a foible of her own.
Beaton talked with Christine the greater part of the evening that was
left after the concert. He was very grave, and took the tone of a
fatherly friend; he spoke guardedly of the people present, and moderated
the severity of some of Christine's judgments of their looks and
costumes. He did this out of a sort of unreasoned allegiance to
Margaret, whom he was in the mood of wishing to please by being very kind
and good, as she always was. He had the sense also of atoning by this
behavior for some reckless things he had said before that to Christine;
he put on a sad, reproving air with her, and gave her the feeling of
being held in check.
She chafed at it, and said, glancing at Margaret in talk with her
brother, "I don't think Miss Vance is so very pretty, do you?"
"I never think whether she's pretty or not," said Becton, with dreamy,
affectation. "She is merely perfect. Does she know your brother?"
"So she says. I didn't suppose Conrad ever went anywhere, except to
tenement-houses."
"It might have been there," Becton suggested. "She goes among friendless
people everywhere."
"Maybe that's the reason she came to see us!" said Christine.
Becton looked at her with his smouldering eyes, and felt the wish to say,
"Yes, it was exactly that," but he only allowed himself to deny the
possibility of any such motive in that case. He added: "I am so glad you
know her, Miss Dryfoos. I never met Miss Vance without feeling myself
better and truer, somehow; or the wish to be so."
"And you think we might be improved, too?" Christine retorted. "Well,
I must say you're not very flattering, Mr. Becton, anyway."
Becton would have liked to answer her according to her cattishness, with
a good clawing sarcasm that would leave its smart in her pride; but he
was being good, and he could not change all at once. Besides, the girl's
attitude under the social honor done her interested him. He was sure she
had never been in such good company before, but he could see that she was
not in the least affected by the experience. He had told her who this
person and that was; and he saw she had understood that the names were of
consequence; but she seemed to feel her equality with them all.
Her serenity was not obviously akin to the savage stoicism in which
Beaton hid his own consciousness of social inferiority; but having won
his way in the world so far by his talent, his personal quality, he did
not conceive the simple fact in her case. Christine was self-possessed
because she felt that a knowledge of her father's fortune had got around,
and she had the peace which money gives to ignorance; but Beaton
attributed her poise to indifference to social values. This, while he
inwardly sneered at it, avenged him upon his own too keen sense of them,
and, together with his temporary allegiance to Margaret's goodness, kept
him from retaliating Christine's vulgarity. He said, "I don't see how
that could be," and left the question of flattery to settle itself.
The people began to go away, following each other up to take leave of
Mrs. Horn. Christine watched them with unconcern, and either because she
would not be governed by the general movement, or because she liked being
with Beaton, gave no sign of going. Mela was still talking to the
student of human nature, sending out her laugh in deep gurgles amid the
unimaginable confidences she was making him about herself, her family,
the staff of 'Every Other Week,' Mrs. Mandel, and the kind of life they
had all led before she came to them. He was not a blind devotee of art
for art's sake, and though he felt that if one could portray Mela just as
she was she would be the richest possible material, he was rather ashamed
to know some of the things she told him; and he kept looking anxiously
about for a chance of escape. The company had reduced itself to the
Dryfoos groups and some friends of Mrs. Horn's who had the right to
linger, when Margaret crossed the room with Conrad to Christine and
Beaton.
"I'm so glad, Miss Dryfoos, to find that I was not quite a stranger to
you all when I ventured to call, the other day. Your brother and I are
rather old acquaintances, though I never knew who he was before. I don't
know just how to say we met where he is valued so much. I suppose I
mustn't try to say how much," she added, with a look of deep regard at
him.
Conrad blushed and stood folding his arms tight over his breast, while
his sister received Margaret's confession with the suspicion which was
her first feeling in regard to any new thing. What she concluded was
that this girl was trying to get in with them, for reasons of her own.
She said: "Yes; it's the first I ever heard of his knowing you. He's so
much taken up with his meetings, he didn't want to come to-night."
Margaret drew in her lip before she answered, without apparent resentment
of the awkwardness or ungraciousness, whichever she found it: "I don't
wonder! You become so absorbed in such work that you think nothing else
is worth while. But I'm glad Mr. Dryfoos could come with you; I'm so
glad you could all come; I knew you would enjoy the music. Do sit
down--"
"No," said Christine, bluntly; "we must be going. Mela!" she called out,
"come!"
The last group about Mrs. Horn looked round, but Christine advanced upon
them undismayed, and took the hand Mrs. Horn promptly gave her. "Well, I
must bid you good-night."
"Oh, good-night," murmured the elder lady. "So very kind of you to
come."
"I've had the best kind of a time," said Mela, cordially. "I hain't
laughed so much, I don't know when."
"Oh, I'm glad you enjoyed it," said Mrs. Horn, in the same polite murmur
she had used with Christine; but she said nothing to either sister about
any future meeting.
They were apparently not troubled. Mela said over her shoulder to the
student of human nature, "The next time I see you I'll give it to you for
what you said about Moffitt."
Margaret made some entreating paces after them, but she did not succeed
in covering the retreat of the sisters against critical conjecture. She
could only say to Conrad, as if recurring to the subject, "I hope we can
get our friends to play for us some night. I know it isn't any real
help, but such things take the poor creatures out of themselves for the
time being, don't you think?"
"Oh yes," he answered. "They're good in that way." He turned back
hesitatingly to Mrs. Horn, and said, with a blush, "I thank you for a
happy evening."
"Oh, I am very glad," she replied, in her murmur.
One of the old friends of the house arched her eyebrows in saying good-
night, and offered the two young men remaining seats home in her
carriage. Beaton gloomily refused, and she kept herself from asking the
student of human nature, till she had got him into her carriage, "What is
Moffitt, and what did you say about it?"
"Now you see, Margaret," said Mrs. Horn, with bated triumph, when the
people were all gone.
"Yes, I see," the girl consented. "From one point of view, of course
it's been a failure. I don't think we've given Miss Dryfoos a pleasure,
but perhaps nobody could. And at least we've given her the opportunity
of enjoying herself."
"Such people," said Mrs. Horn, philosophically, "people with their money,
must of course be received sooner or later. You can't keep them out.
Only, I believe I would rather let some one else begin with them. The
Leightons didn't come?"
"I sent them cards. I couldn't call again."
Mrs. Horn sighed a little. "I suppose Mr. Dryfoos is one of your fellow-
philanthropists?"
"He's one of the workers," said Margaret. "I met him several times at
the Hall, but I only knew his first name. I think he's a great friend of
Father Benedict; he seems devoted to the work. Don't you think he looks
good?"
"Very," said Mrs. Horn, with a color of censure in her assent. "The
younger girl seemed more amiable than her sister. But what manners!"
"Dreadful!" said Margaret, with knit brows, and a pursed mouth of
humorous suffering. "But she appeared to feel very much at home."
"Oh, as to that, neither of them was much abashed. Do you suppose
Mr. Beaton gave the other one some hints for that quaint dress of hers?
I don't imagine that black and lace is her own invention. She seems to
have some sort of strange fascination for him."
"She's very picturesque," Margaret explained. "And artists see points in
people that the rest of us don't."
"Could it be her money?" Mrs. Horn insinuated. "He must be very poor."
"But he isn't base," retorted the girl, with a generous indignation that
made her aunt smile.
"Oh no; but if he fancies her so picturesque, it doesn't follow that he
would object to her being rich."
"It would with a man like Mr. Beaton!"
"You are an idealist, Margaret. I suppose your Mr. March has some
disinterested motive in paying court to Miss Mela--Pamela, I suppose, is
her name. He talked to her longer than her literature would have
lasted."
"He seems a very kind person," said Margaret.
"And Mr. Dryfoos pays his salary?"
"I don't know anything about that. But that wouldn't make any difference
with him."
Mrs. Horn laughed out at this security; but she was not displeased by the
nobleness which it came from. She liked Margaret to be high-minded, and
was really not distressed by any good that was in her.
The Marches walked home, both because it was not far, and because they
must spare in carriage hire at any rate. As soon as they were out of the
house, she applied a point of conscience to him.
"I don't see how you could talk to that girl so long, Basil, and make her
laugh so."
"Why, there seemed no one else to do it, till I thought of Kendricks."
"Yes, but I kept thinking, Now he's pleasant to her because he thinks
it's to his interest. If she had no relation to 'Every Other Week,' he
wouldn't waste his time on her."
"Isabel," March complained, "I wish you wouldn't think of me in he, him,
and his; I never personalize you in my thoughts: you remain always a
vague unindividualized essence, not quite without form and void, but
nounless and pronounless. I call that a much more beautiful mental
attitude toward the object of one's affections. But if you must he and
him and his me in your thoughts, I wish you'd have more kindly thoughts
of me."
"Do you deny that it's true, Basil?"
"Do you believe that it's true, Isabel?"
"No matter. But could you excuse it if it were?"
"Ah, I see you'd have been capable of it in my, place, and you're
ashamed."
"Yes," sighed the wife, "I'm afraid that I should. But tell me that you
wouldn't, Basil!"
"I can tell you that I wasn't. But I suppose that in a real exigency,
I could truckle to the proprietary Dryfooses as well as you."
"Oh no; you mustn't, dear! I'm a woman, and I'm dreadfully afraid. But
you must always be a man, especially with that horrid old Mr. Dryfoos.
Promise me that you'll never yield the least point to him in a matter of
right and wrong!"
"Not if he's right and I'm wrong?"
"Don't trifle, dear! You know what I mean. Will you promise?"
"I'll promise to submit the point to you, and let you do the yielding.
As for me, I shall be adamant. Nothing I like better."
"They're dreadful, even that poor, good young fellow, who's so different
from all the rest; he's awful, too, because you feel that he's a martyr
to them."
"And I never did like martyrs a great deal," March interposed.
"I wonder how they came to be there," Mrs. March pursued, unmindful of
his joke.
"That is exactly what seemed to be puzzling Miss Mela about us. She
asked, and I explained as well as I could; and then she told me that Miss
Vance had come to call on them and invited them; and first they didn't
know how they could come till they thought of making Conrad bring them.
But she didn't say why Miss Vance called on them. Mr. Dryfoos doesn't
employ her on 'Every Other Week.' But I suppose she has her own vile
little motive."
"It can't be their money; it can't be!" sighed Mrs. March.
"Well, I don't know. We all respect money."
"Yes, but Miss Vance's position is so secure. She needn't pay court to
those stupid, vulgar people."
"Well, let's console ourselves with the belief that she would, if she
needed. Such people as the Dryfooses are the raw material of good
society. It isn't made up of refined or meritorious people--professors
and litterateurs, ministers and musicians, and their families. All the
fashionable people there to-night were like the Dryfooses a generation or
two ago. I dare say the material works up faster now, and in a season or
two you won't know the Dryfooses from the other plutocrats. THEY will--
a little better than they do now; they'll see a difference, but nothing
radical, nothing painful. People who get up in the world by service to
others--through letters, or art, or science--may have their modest little
misgivings as to their social value, but people that rise by money--
especially if their gains are sudden--never have. And that's the kind of
people that form our nobility; there's no use pretending that we haven't
a nobility; we might as well pretend we haven't first-class cars in the
presence of a vestibuled Pullman. Those girls had no more doubt of their
right to be there than if they had been duchesses: we thought it was very
nice of Miss Vance to come and ask us, but they didn't; they weren't
afraid, or the least embarrassed; they were perfectly natural--like born
aristocrats. And you may be sure that if the plutocracy that now owns
the country ever sees fit to take on the outward signs of an aristocracy
--titles, and arms, and ancestors--it won't falter from any inherent
question of its worth. Money prizes and honors itself, and if there is
anything it hasn't got, it believes it can buy it."
Well, Basil," said his wife, "I hope you won't get infected with Lindau's
ideas of rich people. Some of them are very good and kind."
"Who denies that? Not even Lindau himself. It's all right. And the
great thing is that the evening's enjoyment is over. I've got my society
smile off, and I'm radiantly happy. Go on with your little pessimistic
diatribes, Isabel; you can't spoil my pleasure."
"I could see," said Mela, as she and Christine drove home together, "that
she was as jealous as she could be, all the time you was talkun' to Mr.
Beaton. She pretended to be talkun' to Conrad, but she kep' her eye on
you pretty close, I can tell you. I bet she just got us there to see how
him and you would act together. And I reckon she was satisfied. He's
dead gone on you, Chris."
Christine listened with a dreamy pleasure to the flatteries with which
Mela plied her in the hope of some return in kind, and not at all because
she felt spitefully toward Miss Vance, or in anywise wished her ill.
"Who was that fellow with you so long?" asked Christine. "I suppose you
turned yourself inside out to him, like you always do."
Mela was transported by the cruel ingratitude. "It's a lie! I didn't
tell him a single thing."
Conrad walked home, choosing to do so because he did not wish to hear his
sisters' talk of the evening, and because there was a tumult in his
spirit which he wished to let have its way. In his life with its single
purpose, defeated by stronger wills than his own, and now struggling
partially to fulfil itself in acts of devotion to others, the thought of
women had entered scarcely more than in that of a child. His ideals were
of a virginal vagueness; faces, voices, gestures had filled his fancy at
times, but almost passionately; and the sensation that he now indulged
was a kind of worship, ardent, but reverent and exalted. The brutal
experiences of the world make us forget that there are such natures in
it, and that they seem to come up out of the lowly earth as well as down
from the high heaven. In the heart of this man well on toward thirty
there had never been left the stain of a base thought; not that
suggestion and conjecture had not visited him, but that he had not
entertained them, or in any-wise made them his. In a Catholic age and
country, he would have been one of those monks who are sainted after
death for the angelic purity of their lives, and whose names are invoked
by believers in moments of trial, like San Luigi Gonzaga. As he now
walked along thinking, with a lover's beatified smile on his face, of how
Margaret Vance had spoken and looked, he dramatized scenes in which be
approved himself to her by acts of goodness and unselfishness, and died
to please her for the sake of others. He made her praise him for them,
to his face, when he disclaimed their merit, and after his death, when he
could not. All the time he was poignantly sensible of her grace, her
elegance, her style; they seemed to intoxicate him; some tones of her
voice thrilled through his nerves, and some looks turned his brain with a
delicious, swooning sense of her beauty; her refinement bewildered him.
But all this did not admit the idea of possession, even of aspiration.
At the most his worship only set her beyond the love of other men as far
as beyond his own.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Affectional habit
Brag of his wife, as a good husband always does
But when we make that money here, no one loses it
Courage hadn't been put to the test
Family buryin' grounds
Homage which those who have not pay to those who have
Hurry up and git well--or something
Made money and do not yet know that money has made them
Society: All its favors are really bargains
Wages are the measure of necessity and not of merit
Without realizing his cruelty, treated as a child
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