look. Then as he saw the address his expression changed.
He opened his coat and put it carefully in his pocket.
"Thank you, sir," he said finally.
I turned away with the consciousness that I had had a new light thrown
on life, and had found it more selfish than I had dreamed. I had begun
with high hopes. It was, indeed, ever my nature to be hopeful, being
healthy and strong and in the prime of vigorous youth. I was always rich
when at my poorest, only my heavy freighted ship had not come in. I knew
that though the larder was lean and storms were beating furiously off
the coast, somewhere, beating her way against the contrary winds, the
argosy was slowly making headway, and some day I should find her moored
beside my pier and see her stores unladen at my feet. The stress and
storm of the struggle were not unwelcome to me. I was always a good
fighter when aroused; but I was lazy and too indolent to get aroused.
Now, however, I was wide awake. The greatness of the city stirred my
pulses. Its blackness and its force aroused my sleeping powers, and as I
stepped into the surf and felt the rush of the tides as they swept about
and by me, I felt as a fair swimmer might who steps for the first time
in a fierce current and feels it clutch his limbs and draw him in. I was
not afraid, only awakened and alive to the struggle before me, and my
senses thrilled as I plunged and rose to catch my breath and face the
vast unknown. Later on I found that the chief danger I had not counted
on: the benumbing of the senses, the slow process under which spirit,
energy, courage, and even hope finally die.
One who has never had the experience of starting in a big city alone,
without a connection of any kind, cannot conceive what it means: the
loneliness--utter as in a desert--the waiting--the terrible
waiting--being obliged to sit day after day and just wait for business
to come, watching your small funds ooze out drop by drop, seeing men
pass your door and enter others' offices and never one turn in at yours,
till your spirit sinks lower and lower and your heart dies within you.
One who has not felt it does not know what it is to be out of work and
not able to get it. The rich and fat and sleek--the safe and
secure--what know they of want! Want, not of money, but of work: the
only capital of the honest and industrious poor! It is the spectre that
ever haunts the poor. It makes the world look as though the whole system
of society were out of joint--as if all men were in conspiracy against
you--as if God had forgotten you. I found men in a harder case than
mine--men in multitude, with wives and children, the babe perishing at
the mother's withered breast, the children dying for food, staggering
along the streets seeking work in vain, while wealth in a glittering
flood poured through the streets in which they perished. This bitter
knowledge I came to learn day after day till I grew almost to hate
mankind. The next step is war against society. Not all who wage it hate
the men they fight. It is the cause they hate. There I sat day after
day, full of hope and eagerness and--now that my conceit was somewhat
knocked out of me--with not only abundant ability, but the stern resolve
to transact any business which might be entrusted to me, and just
rotted to despair. No wonder men go to the devil, and enlist to fight
the whole establishment of organized society. I almost went. When I look
back at it now it seems like a miracle that I did not go wholly. Pride
saved me. It survived long after hope died. Sometimes, I even thought of
the pistol I had in my trunk. But I had made up my mind to live and win.
There, too, came in Pride. I could not bear to think of Lilian Poole and
Peck. How she would congratulate herself and how Peck would gloat! No, I
could not give him that satisfaction. Peck did me a good turn there. A
strong enmity, well based, is not always without good results; but Peck
should not smear my memory with pretended pity. So I starved, but held
on. When I got so that I could endure it no longer, I used to go out and
walk up and down the streets--sometimes the fashionable streets--and
look at the handsome residences and the fine carriages and automobiles
flashing by and the handsomely dressed people passing, and recall that I
was as good as they--in my heart, I thought, better. Some of them with
kind faces I used to fancy my friends; but that they did not know I was
in town. This conceit helped me. And at times I used to fancy that I
lived in a particular house, and owned a particular team: thus living
for a brief moment like a child in "making pictures." A house is
sometimes personal and well-nigh human to me. It appears to have
qualities almost human and to express them on its face: kindness,
hostility, arrogance, breadth or narrowness, and brutal selfishness are
often graven on its front. I have often felt that I could tell from the
outside of a house the characteristics of the people within. Arrogance,
ignorance, want of tact, pretentiousness and display, spoke from every
massy doorway and gaudy decoration with a loudness which would have
shocked a savage. This being so, what characters some of the wealthy
people of our cities must have! It must be one of the compensations of
the poor that the houses of the rich are often so hideous and
unhome-like.
The mansion I selected finally as mine was a light stone mansion, simple
in its style, but charming in its proportions; not one of the largest,
but certainly one of the prettiest in the whole city. Amid a waste of
splendid vulgarity it was almost perfect in its harmonious architectural
design and lines, and had a sunny, homelike look. It stood in an ample
lot with sun and air all around it, and grass and flowers about it. Our
fathers used to say, "seated," which has a more established and restful
sound. It looked a home of refinement and ease. Its stable was set back
some distance behind and a little to one side, so that I could see that
it was of the same stone with the mansion and just enough of the same
general style to indicate that it belonged to the mansion, and the teams
that came out of it were the nattiest and daintiest in the city.
One day as I was walking, trying to divert myself from my loneliness, a
brougham rolled out of this stable with a pair of airy, prancing bays,
shining like satin, and drew up to the carriage-block a little before
me, and a young lady came out of the house as I passed by. My heart gave
a leap, for it was the girl I had seen on the train. I took her in,
rather than scanned her as she tripped down the stone steps, and she
glanced at me for a second as if she thought I might be an acquaintance.
She made as she stood there one of the loveliest pictures I had ever
laid eyes on: her trim, slim figure, exquisitely dressed, in the
quietest way; soft, living brown hair, brushed back from a white, broad
forehead; beautiful, speaking eyes under nearly straight brows; and a
mouth neither too big for beauty nor too small for character; all set
off by a big black hat with rich plumes that made a background for what
I thought the loveliest face I had ever seen.
Something pleasant had evidently just happened within; for she came out
of the door smiling, and I observed at the same moment her eyes and her
dimples. I wondered that people did not always smile: that smile
suddenly lit up everything for me. I forgot my loneliness, my want of
success, myself. Her hands were full of parcels as she came down the
steps, and just as I passed the wind lifted the paper from one--a bunch
of flowers, and in trying to recover it she dropped another and it
rolled down to my feet. I picked it up and handed it to her. It was a
ball, one of those big, squashy, rubber balls with painted rings around
it, that are given to small children because they cannot do anything
with them. She thanked me sweetly and was turning to her carriage, when
under a sudden impulse, I stepped to the door, just as I should have
done at home, and, lifting my hat, said, "I beg your pardon, but mayn't
I open your door for you?"
She bowed, looking, perhaps, just the least shade surprised. But, having
handed her in, I was afraid of embarrassing her, and was backing away
and passing on when she thanked me again very graciously. Again I lifted
my hat and again got a look into her deep eyes. As the carriage rolled
off, she was leaning back in it, and I felt her eyes upon me from under
the shade of that big hat with a pleasant look, but I had assumed an
unconscious air, and even stopped and picked up, as though carelessly, a
couple of violets she had dropped as she crossed the sidewalk; and after
a sniff of their fragrance, dropped them into my pocket-book, because
they reminded me of the past and because I hated to see them lie on the
hard pavement to be crushed by passing feet. The book was empty enough
otherwise, but somehow I did not mind it so much after the violets were
there.
"Who lives in that house?" I asked of an officer.
"Mr. Leigh, the banker and big west-side street-car man--runs all the
lines out that way--all the Argand estate don't run," he added. He waved
his arm to include a circle that might take in half the town or half the
world. "The big house in the middle of the block is Mrs. Argand's--the
great Philanthropist, you know? Everybody knows her." I did not, but I
did not care; I knew all I wanted to know--I knew who Miss Leigh was. I
reflected with some concern that this was the name of the vice-president
of the Railway whom I had attacked through Kalender and of the man to
whom Mr. Poole's perfunctory letter was addressed. I went back to my
office in better spirits, and, having no brief to work on, even wrote a
poem about the violets--about her leaving a track of violets behind her.
I was drawn to that street a number of times afterward, but I saw her no
more.
I don't believe that love often comes at first sight; but that it may
come thus, or at least, at second sight, I have my own case to prove. It
may be that my empty heart, bruised and lonely in that great city, was
waiting with open door for any guest bold enough to walk in and claim
possession. It may be that that young lady with her pleasant smile, her
high-bred face and kindly air, crossing my path in that
stranger-thronged wilderness, was led by Providence; it may be that her
grace and charm were those I had pictured long in the Heavenward dreams
of youth and but now found. However it was, I went home in love with an
ideal whose outward semblance was the girl with the children's
toys--truly in love with her. And the vision of Lilian Poole never came
to me again in any guise that could discomfort me. From this time the
vision that haunted me and led me on was of a sweet-eyed girl who
dimpled as she smiled and dropped her violets. The picture of Lilian
Poole, standing by the marble mantel in her plush-upholstered parlor,
adjusting her bracelet so as to set off her not too small wrist, while
I faced my fate, flitted before my mind, but she was a ghost to me, and
my heart warmed as I thought of the lady of the violets and the
children's toys.
XVI
THE SHADOW OF SHAM
I soon changed back to my first boarding-house. After my two weeks were
out for which I had prepaid, I went to my landlady, Mrs. Starling, a
tall, thin woman with high cheek bones, a cold eye and a close mouth,
and told her frankly I could not pay any more in advance, and that,
though I would certainly pay her within a short time, it might not be
convenient for me to pay her by the week, and I left it with her whether
she would keep me on these terms. She did not hesitate a second. Her
first duty was to herself and family, she said, by which she meant her
daughter, "Miss Starling," as she always spoke of her, but whom the
irreverent portion of the boarders whom I associated with always spoke
of as "Birdy," a young woman who dressed much in yellow, perhaps because
it matched her blondined hair, played vehemently on the piano, and
entertained the young men who boarded there. "Besides, she wanted the
room for a dressing-room for a gentleman who wished a whole suite," she
added, with what I thought a little undue stress on the word
"gentleman," as the "gentleman" in question was the person who had
borrowed my money from me and never returned it: Count Pushkin, who
occupied the big room next my little one. He had, as I learned, cut
quite a dash in town for a while, living at one of the most fashionable
hotels, and driving a cart and tandem, and paying assiduous attention to
a young heiress in the city, daughter of a manufacturer and street-car
magnate; but latterly he had taken a room at Mrs. Starling's, "in
order," he gave out, "that he might be quiet for a time," as a duke or
duchess or something--I am not sure he did not say a king--who was his
relative, had died in Europe. He had taken the greater part of the
boarding-house by storm, for he was a tall, showy-looking fellow, and
would have been handsome but for a hard and shifty eye. And I found
myself in a pitiful minority in my aversion to him, which, however,
after a while, gained some recruits among the young men, one of them, my
young reporter, Kalender, who had moved there from Mrs. Kale's.
The boarding-house keeper's daughter was desperately in love with
Pushkin, and, with her mother's able assistance, was making a dead set
for him, which partiality the count was using for what it was worth,
hardly attempting meantime to disguise his amusement at them. He sang
enough to be passable, though his voice was, like his eye, hard and
cold; and he used to sing duets with Miss Starling: the method by which,
according to a vivacious young Jew, named Isadore Ringarten, who lived
in the house, he paid his board. I never knew how he acquired his
information, but he was positive.
"I vish," said Isadore, "I could pay my board in vind--vith a little
song. Now, I can sing so the Count he would give me all he is vorth to
sing so like I sing; but I am not a count--efen on this side."
However this was, Pushkin paid the girl enough attention to turn the
poor thing's head, and made her treat harshly my reporter, Kalender, who
was deeply in love with her, and spent all his salary on her for
flowers, and lavished theatre tickets on her.
The evening before I left I had to call Pushkin down, who had been
drinking a little, and I must say, when I called, he came promptly. It
was after dinner in "the smoking room," as the apartment was called, and
he began to ridicule poor Victoria cruelly, saying she had told him her
hair was yellow like that of the girls of his own country, and he had
told her, no, that hers was natural, while theirs was always dyed, and
she swallowed it.
"She is in loaf mit me. She swallow whatefer I gif her--" he laughed.
The others laughed, too. But I did not. I thought of Lilian Poole and
Peck. Perhaps, I was thinking of my money, and I know I thought of the
account of the ball which took place the day I arrived. I told him what
I thought of his ridiculing a girl he flattered so to her face. He
turned on me, his eyes snapping, his face flushed, but his manner cool
and his voice level.
"Ha-ah! Are you in loaf mit her, too, like poor Kalender, who spent all
hees moneys on her, and what she laugh at to make me amused? I gif her
to you, den. I too not want her--I haf had her, you can take her."
He made a gesture as if tossing something contemptuously into my arms,
and put his cigarette back in his teeth and drew a long breath. There
were none but men present, and some of them had stopped laughing and
were looking grave.
"No, I am not in love with her," I said quietly, standing up. "I only
will not allow you to speak so of any lady in my presence--that is all."
I was thinking of a girl who lived in a sunny house, and had once taken
a lot of little dirty-faced children to feed them, and once had smiled
into my eyes. I only knew her name, but her violets were in my pocket
near my heart. I was perfectly calm in my manner and my face had
whitened, and he mistook it, for he blurted out:
"Oh! I vill nod? I vill nod speaks in your presence. You vill gif me one
little lesson? You who know te vorl so vell. I tank you, Millot!"
He bowed low before me, spreading out his arms, and some of the others
tittered. It encouraged him and he straightened up and stepped in front
of me.
"I vill tell you vat I vill does," he proceeded. "I vill say vat I tam
please before you about anybodies." He paused and cast about for
something which would prove his boast. "Tere is nod a woman in tis town
or in America, py tam! that vill nod gif herself to fon title--to me if
I hax her, and say, 'tank you, Count.' Ha, ah?" He bent his body forward
and stuck his face almost into mine with a gesture as insulting as he
could make it, and as I stepped back a pace to get a firm stand, he
stuck out his tongue and wagged his head in derision. The next second he
had turned almost a somersault. I had taken boxing lessons since
Wolffert thrashed me. I saw the bottom of his boots. He was at precisely
the right distance for me and I caught him fairly in the mouth. His head
struck the floor and he lay so still that for a few moments I thought I
had killed him. But after a little he came to and began to rise.
"Get up," I said, "and apologize to these gentlemen and to me." I caught
him and dragged him to his feet and faced him around.
"You haf insulted me. I vill see about tis," he spluttered, turning
away. But I caught him with a grip on his shoulder and steadied him. The
others were all on my side now; but I did not see them, I saw only him.
"Apologize, or I will fling you out of the window." He apologized.
The affair passed. The Count explained his bruises by some story that he
had been run down by a bicycle, to which I learned he afterward added a
little fiction about having stopped a runaway and having saved some one.
But I had left before this little touch occurred to him. Mrs. Starling
must have had some idea of the collision, though not of the original
cause; for she was very decided in the expression of her wishes to have
possession of "the dressing room" that night for the "gentleman," and I
yielded possession.
The curious thing about it was that one reason I could not pay Mrs.
Starling again in advance was that he still had my money which he had
borrowed the day after I had arrived.
From Mrs. Starling's I went back to my old boarding-house, kept by Mrs.
Kale, as a much cheaper one, in a much poorer neighborhood, where I was
not asked to pay in advance, but paid at the end of the month by pawning
my scarf-pins and shirt studs, and gradually everything else I had.
I was brought up to go to church, my people having all been earnest
Christians and devoted church people; but in my college years I had gone
through the usual conceited phase of callow agnosticism; and partly from
this intellectual juvenile disease and partly from self-indulgence, I
had allowed the habit to drop into desuetude, and later, during my first
years at the bar, I had been gradually dropping it altogether. My
conscience, however, was never quite easy about it. My mother used to
say that the promise as to training up a child in the way he should go
was not to be fulfilled in youth, but in age, and as my years advanced,
I began to find that the training of childhood counted for more and
more. Lilian Poole, however, had no more religion than a cat. She wished
to be comfortable and to follow the general habit of the feline class to
which she belonged. She went to the Episcopal Church because it was
fashionable, and whenever she had half an excuse she stayed away from
church unless it were on a new-bonnet Sunday, like Easter or some such
an occasion, when she made up by the lowness of her genuflexions and the
apparent devoutness of her demeanor for all omissions. I must confess
that I was very easily influenced by her at that time, and was quite as
ready to absent myself from church as she was, though I should have had
a much deeper feeling for her if she had not violated what I esteemed a
canon of life, that women, at least, should profess religion, and if she
had not pretended to have questionings herself as to matters as far
beyond her intellect as the Copernican system or Kepler's laws. I
remember quoting to her once Dr. Johnson's reply to Boswell, when the
latter asked if Poole, the actor, were not an atheist: "Yes, sir, as a
dog is an atheist; he has not thought on the matter at all."
"Dr. Samuel Johnson?" she asked. "You mean the one who wrote the
Dictionary?" and I saw that she was so pleased with her literary
knowledge in knowing his name that she never gave a thought to the
matter that we were discussing, so let it drop.
As David said, that in his trouble he called upon the Lord, so now, in
my solitude and poverty, I began once more to think on serious things,
and when Sunday came I would dress up and go to church, partly in
obedience to the feeling I speak of, and partly to be associated with
people well dressed and good mannered, or passably so. The church I
selected was a large stone edifice, St. ----'s, with a gilded cross on
its somewhat stumpy spire, toward which I saw a richly clad congregation
wending their way Sunday morning.
The rector, as was stated in gilded letters on a large sign, was the
Rev. Dr. Bartholomew Capon. I cannot say that the congregation were
especially refined looking or particularly cordial; in fact, they were
very far from cordial, and the solemn verger to whom I spoke, after
turning a deaf ear to my request for a seat, took occasion, as soon as
he had bowed and scraped a richly dressed, stout lady up the aisle, to
look me over on the sly, not omitting my shoes, before he allowed me to
take a seat in one of the rear pews.
The preacher--"The Rector," as he spoke of himself in the notices, when
he occasionally waived the rather frequent first personal pronoun--was a
middle-aged gentleman with a florid complexion, a sonorous voice, a
comfortable round person, and fair hands of which he was far from
ashamed; for he had what, but for my reverence for the cloth, I should
call a trick of using his hand with a voluminous, fine cambric
handkerchief held loosely in it. His face was self-contained rather than
strong, and handsome rather than pleasing. He was so good-looking that
it set me on reflecting what relation looks bear to the rectorship of
large and fashionable churches; for, as I recalled it, nearly all the
rectors of such churches were men of looks, and it came to me that when
Sir Roger de Coverley requested his old college friend to send him down
a chaplain, he desired him to find out a man rather of plain sense than
much learning, of a good aspect, a clear voice, a sociable temper, and,
if possible, a man who knew something of backgammon. His sermon was
altogether a secondary consideration, for he could always read one of
the Bishop of St. Asaph's or Dr. South's or Dr. Tillotson's. Possibly,
it is something of the same feeling that subordinates the sermons to the
looks of rectors of fashionable churches. However, I did not have long
to reflect on that idea, for my thoughts were given a new and
permanently different, not to say pleasanter, direction, by the sudden
appearance of a trim figure, clad in a gray suit and large gray hat,
which, as it moved up the aisle, quite eclipsed for me "the priest and
all the people." I was struck, first, by the easy grace with which the
young girl moved. But, before she had turned into her pew and I caught
sight of her face under the large hat which had hidden it, I knew it was
my young lady, Miss Leigh, whom I had helped up on the train and
afterward into her carriage. It is not too much to say that the Rev. Dr.
Capon secured that moment a new permanent member of his congregation.
Before the service was over, however, I had been solemnized by her
simple and unaffected devoutness, and when, in one of the chants, I
caught a clear liquid note perfectly sweet and birdlike, I felt as
though I had made a new and charming discovery.
The rector gave a number of notices from which I felt the church must be
one of the great forces of the city for work among the poor, yet, when I
glanced around, I could not see a poor person in the pews except myself
and two old ladies in rusty black, who had been seated near the door. I
was struck by the interest shown in the notices by my young lady of the
large hat, from whose shapely little head with its well-coiled brown
hair my eyes did not long stray.