As we passed the Jack Brokenshire cottage, Larry Strangways and Broke,
with Noble, the collie, bounding beside them, came racing down the lawn
to overtake us. It was natural then that for the rest of the way Chips
and Noble should form one company, Broke and his sister another, while
we two elders strolled along behind them.
It was the hour of the day for strolling. The mellow afternoon light was
of the kind that brings something new into life, something we should be
glad to keep if we knew how to catch it. It was not merely that grass
and leaf and sea had a shimmer of gold on them. There was a sweet
enchantment in the atmosphere, a poignant wizardry, a suggestion of
emotions both higher and lower than those of our poor mortal scale. They
made one reluctant to hurry one's footsteps, and slow in the return to
that sheerly human shelter we call home. All along the path, down among
the rocks, out in the water, up on the lawns, there were people, gentle
and simple alike, who lingered and idled and paused to steep themselves
in this magic.
I have to admit that we followed their example. Anything served as an
excuse for it, the dogs and the children doing the same from a similar
instinct. I got the impression, too, that my companion was less in the
throes of the discretion we had imposed upon ourselves, for the reason
that his term as a mere educational lackey was drawing to a close. It
had, in fact, only two more days to run. Then August would come and he
would desert us.
As it might be my last opportunity to surprise him into looking at me in
the way Mrs. Rossiter had observed, I kept my eye on him pretty closely.
I cannot say that I detected any change that flattered me. Tall and
straight and splendidly poised, he was as smilingly impenetrable as
ever. Like Howard Brokenshire, he betrayed no wound, even if I had
inflicted one. It was a little exasperating. I was more than piqued.
I told him I hadn't heard of his return from New York and asked how he
had fared. His reply was enthusiastic. He had seen Stacy Grainger and
was eager to be his henchman.
"He's got that about him," he declared, "that would make anybody glad to
work for him."
He described his personal appearance, brawny and spare with the
attributes of race. It was an odd comment on the laws of heredity that
his grandfather was said to have begun life as a peddler, and yet there
he was a _grand seigneur_ to the finger-tips. I said that Howard
Brokenshire was also a _grand seigneur_, to which he replied that Howard
Brokenshire was a monument. American conditions had raised him, and on
those conditions he stood as a statue on its pedestal. His position was
so secure that all he had to do was stand. It was for this reason that
he could be so dictatorial. He was safely fastened to his base; nothing
short of seismic convulsion of the whole economic world was likely to
knock him off. In the course of that conversation I learned more of the
origin of the Brokenshire fortunes than I had ever before heard.
It was the great-grandfather of J. Howard who apparently had laid the
foundation-stone on which later generations built so well. That
patriarch, so I understood, had been a farmer in the Connecticut Valley.
His method of finance was no more esoteric than that of lending out
small sums of money at a high rate of interest. Occasionally he took
mortgages on his neighbors' farms, with the result that he became in
time something of a landed proprietor. When the suburbs of a city had
spread over one of the possessions thus acquired, the foundation-stone
to which I have referred might have been considered well and truly laid.
About the year 1830, his son migrated to New York. The firm of Meek &
Brokenshire, of which the fame was to go through two continents, was
founded when Van Buren was in the presidential seat and Victoria just
coming to the throne. It seems there was a Meek in those days, though at
the time of which I am writing nothing remained of him but a syllable.
It was after the Civil War, however, when the grandson of the
Connecticut Valley veteran was in power, that the house of Meek &
Brokenshire forged to the front rank among financial agencies. It formed
European affiliations. It became the financial representative of a great
European power. John H. Brokenshire, whose name was distinguished from
that of his more famous son only by a distribution of initials, had a
house at Hyde Park Corner as well as one in New York. He was the first
American banker to become something of an international magnate. The
development of his country made him so. With the vexed questions of
slavery and secession settled, with the phenomenal expansion of the
West, with the freer uses of steam and electricity, with the tightening
of bonds between the two hemispheres, that pedestal was being raised on
which J. Howard was to pose with such decorative effectiveness.
His posing began on his father's death in the year 1898. Up to that time
he had represented the house in England, the post being occupied now by
his younger brother James. Polished manners, a splendid appearance, and
an authoritative air imported to New York a touch of the Court of St.
James's. Mrs. Billing had called him a dolt. Perhaps he was one. If so
he was a dolt raised up and sustained by all that was powerful in the
United States. It was with these vast influences rather than with the
man himself that, as Larry Strangways talked, I began to see I was in
conflict.
In Stacy Grainger, I gathered, the contemporaneous development of the
country had produced something different, just as the same piece of
ground will grow an oak or a rose-bush, according to the seed. People
with a taste for social antithesis called him the grandson of a peddler.
Mr. Strangways considered this description below the level of the
ancestral Grainger's occupation. In the days of scattered farms and
difficult communications throughout Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota
he might better have been termed an itinerant merchant. He was the
traveling salesman who delivered the goods. His journeys being made by
river boats and ox-teams, he began to see the necessity of steam. He was
of the group who projected the system of railways, some of which failed
and some of which succeeded, through the regions west of Lake Superior.
Later he forsook the highways for a more feverish life in the incipient
Chicago. His wandering years having given him an idea of the value of
this focal point, he put his savings into land. The phoenix rise of the
city after the great fire made him a man of some wealth. Out of the
financial crash of 1873 he became richer. His son grew richer still on
the panic of 1893, when he, too, descended on New York. It was he who
became a power on the Stock Exchange and bought the big house with which
parts of my narrative will have to do.
All I want to say now is that as I strolled with Larry Strangways along
that sunny walk, and as he ran on about Brokenshires and Graingers, I
got my first bit of insight into the immense American romance which the
nineteenth century unfolded. I saw it was romance, gigantic, race-wide.
For the first time in my life I realized that there were other tales to
make men proud besides the story of the British Empire.
I could see that Larry Strangways was proud--proud and anxious. I had
never seen this side of him before. Pride was in the way in which he
held his fine young head; there was anxiety in his tone, and now and
then in the flash of his eye, in spite of his efforts not to be too
serious.
It was about the country that he talked--its growth, its vastness. Even
as recently as when he was a boy it was still a manageable thing, with a
population reckoned at no more than seventy or eighty millions. It had
been homogeneous in spirit if not in blood, and those who had come from
other lands, and been welcomed and adopted, accepted their new situation
with some gratitude. Patriotism was still a word with a meaning, and if
it now and then became spread-eagleism it was only as the waves when
thrown too far inland become froth. The wave was the thing and it hadn't
ebbed.
"And do you think it has ebbed now?" I asked.
He didn't answer this question directly.
"We're becoming colossal. We shall soon count our people by the hundred
million and more. Of these relatively few will have got our ideals.
Some will reject them. There are mutterings already of other standards
to which we must be taught to conform. Some of our own best people of
pure Anglo-Saxon descent are losing heart and renouncing and denouncing
the democratic tradition, though they've nothing to put in its place.
And we're growing so huge--with a hugeness that threatens to make us
lethargic."
I tried to be encouraging.
"You seem to me anything but that."
"National lethargy can easily exist side by side with individual energy.
Take China, for instance. There are few peoples in the world more
individually diligent than the Chinese; and yet when it comes to
national stirring it's a country as difficult to move as an unwieldy
overfed giant. It's flabby and nerveless and inert. It's spread half
over Asia, and it has the largest and most industrious population in the
world; and yet it's a congeries of inner weaknesses, and a prey to any
one who chooses to attack it."
"And you think this country is on the way to being the China of the
west?"
"I don't say on the way. There's danger of it. In proportion as we too
become unwieldy and overfed, the circulation of that national impulse
which is like blood grows slower. The elephant is a heavily moving beast
in comparison with the lion."
"But it's the more intelligent," I argued, still with a disposition to
be encouraging.
"Intelligence won't save it when the lion leaps on its back."
"Then what will?"
"That's what we want to find out."
"And how are you going to do it?"
"By men. We've come to a time when the country is going to need stronger
men than it ever had, and more of them."
I suppose it is because I am a woman that I have to bring all questions
to the personal.
"And is your Stacy Grainger going to be one?"
He walked on a few paces without replying, his head in the air.
"No," he said, at last, "I don't think so. He's got a weakness."
"What kind of weakness?"
"I'm not going to tell you," he laughed. "It's enough to say that it's
one which I think will put him out of commission for the job." He gave
me some inkling, however, of what he meant when he added: "The country's
coming to a place where it will need disinterested men, and
whole-hearted men, and clean-hearted men, if it's going to pull through.
It's extraordinary how deficient we've been in leaders who've had any of
these characteristics, to say nothing of all three."
"Is the United States singular in that?"
He spoke in a half-jesting tone probably to hide the fact that he was so
much in earnest.
"No; perhaps not. But it's got to have them if it's going to be saved.
Moreover," he went on, "it must find them among the young men. The older
men are all steeped and branded and tarred and feathered with the
materialism of the nineteenth century. They're perfectly sodden. They
see no patriotism except in loyalty to a political machine; and no
loyalty to a political machine except for what they can get out of it.
From our Presidents down most of them will sacrifice any law of right
to the good of a party. They don't realize that nine times out of ten
the good of a party is the evil of the common weal; and our older men
will never learn the fact. If we can't wake the younger men, we're done
for."
"And are you going to wake them?"
"I'm going to be awake myself. That's all I can be responsible for. If I
can find another fellow who's awake I'll follow him."
"Why not lead him? I should think you could."
He turned around on me. I shall never forget the gleam in his eye.
"No one is ever going to get away with this thing who thinks of
leadership. There are times in the history of countries when men are
called on to give up everything and be true to an ideal. I believe that
time is approaching. It may come into Europe in one way and to America
in another; but it's coming to us all. There'll be a call for--for--" he
hesitated at the word, uttering it only with an apologetic laugh--"for
consecration."
I was curious.
"And what do you mean by that--by consecration?"
He reflected before answering.
"I suppose I mean knowing what this country stands for, and being true
to it oneself through thick and thin. There'll be thin and there'll be
thick--plenty of them both--but it will be a question of the value of
the individual. If there had been ten righteous men in Sodom and
Gomorrah, they wouldn't have been destroyed. I take that as a kind of
figure. A handful of disinterested, whole-hearted, clean-hearted, and
perhaps I ought to add stout-hearted Americans, who know what they
believe and live by it, will hold the fort against all efforts, within
and without, to pull it down." He paused in his walk, obliging me to do
the same. "I've been thinking a good deal," he smiled, "during the past
few weeks of your law of Right--with a capital. I laughed at it when you
first spoke of it--"
"Oh, hardly that," I interposed.
"But I've come to believe that it will work."
"I'm so glad."
"In fact, it's the only thing that will work."
"Exactly," I exclaimed, enthusiastically.
"We must stand by it, we younger men, just as the younger men of the
late fifties stood by the principles represented by Lincoln. I believe
in my heart that the need is going to be greater for us than it was for
them, and if we don't respond to it, then may the Lord have mercy on our
souls."
I give this scrap of conversation because it introduced a new note into
my knowledge of Americans. I had not supposed that any Americans felt
like that. In the Rossiter circle I never saw anything but an immense
self-satisfaction. Money and what money could do was, I am sure, the
only topic of their thought. Their ideas of position and privilege were
all spuriously European. Nothing was indigenous. Except for their sense
of money, their aims were as foreign to the soil as their pictures,
their tapestries, their furniture, and their clothes. Even stranger I
found the imitation of Europe in tastes which Europe was daily giving
up. But in Larry Strangways, it seemed to me, I found something native,
something that really lived and cared. It caused me to look at him with
a new interest.
His jesting tone allowed me to take my cue in the same vein.
"I'm tremendously flattered, Mr. Strangways, that you should have found
anything in my ideas that could be turned to good account."
He laughed shortly and rather hardly.
"Oh, if it was only that!"
It was another of the things I wished he hadn't said, but with the words
he started on again, walking so fast for a few paces that I made no
effort to keep up with him. When he waited till I rejoined him we fell
again to talking of Stacy Grainger. At the first opportunity I asked the
question that was chiefly on my mind.
"Wasn't there something at one time between him and Mrs. Brokenshire?"
He marched on with head erect.
"I believe so," he admitted, reluctantly, but not till some seconds had
passed.
"There was a big fight, wasn't there," I persisted, "between him and Mr.
Brokenshire--over Editha Billing--on the Stock Exchange--or something
like that?"
Again he allowed some seconds to go by.
"So I've heard."
I fished out of my memory such tag ends of gossip as had reached me, I
could hardly tell from where.
"Didn't Mr. Brokenshire attack his interests--railways and steel and
things--and nearly ruin him?"
"I believe there was some such talk."
I admired the way in which he refused to lend himself to the spread of
the legend; but I insisted on going on, because the idea of this
conflict of modern giants, with a beautiful maiden as the prize,
appealed to my imagination.
"And didn't old Mrs. Billing shift round all of a sudden from the man
who seemed to be going under to--?"
He cut the subject short by giving it another twist.
"Grainger's been unlucky. His whole family have been unlucky. It's an
instance of tragedy haunting a race such as one reads of in mythology
and now and then in modern history--the house of Atreus, for example,
and the Stuarts, and the Hapsburgs, and so on."
I questioned him as to this, only to learn of a series of accidents,
suicides, and sudden deaths, leaving Stacy as the last of his line,
lonely and picturesque.
At the foot of the steps leading up to the Rossiter lawn Larry
Strangways paused again. The children and dogs having preceded us and
being safe on their own grounds, we could consider them off our minds.
"What do you know about old books?" he asked, suddenly.
The question took me so much by surprise that I could only say:
"What makes you think I know anything?"
"Didn't your father have a library full of them? And didn't you
catalogue them and sell them in London?"
I admitted this, but added that even that undertaking had left me very
ignorant of the subject.
"Yes; but it's a beginning. If you know the Greek or Russian alphabet
it's a very good point from which to go on and learn the language."
"But why should I learn that language?"
"Because I know a man who's going to have a vacancy soon for a
librarian. It's a private library, rather a famous one in New York, and
the young lady at present in command is leaving to be married."
I smiled pleasantly.
"Yes; but what has that got to do with me?"
"Didn't I tell you I was going to look you up another job?"
"Oh! And so you've looked me up this!"
"No, I didn't. It looked me up. The owner of the library mentioned the
fact as a great bore. It was his father who made the collection in the
days of the first great American splurge. Stacy Grainger has added a rug
or a Chinese jar from time to time, but he doesn't give a hang for the
lot."
"Oh, so it's his."
"Yes; it's his. He says he feels inclined to shut the place up; but I
told him it was a pity to do that since I knew the very young lady for
the post."
I dropped the subject there, because of a new inspiration.
"If Mr. Grainger has places at his command, couldn't he do something for
poor Hugh?"
"Why poor Hugh? I thought he was--"
I gave him a brief account of the fiasco in Boston, venturing to betray
Hugh's confidence for the sake of some possible advantage. Mr.
Strangways only shrugged his shoulders.
"Of course," he said. "What could you expect?" I was sure he was looking
down on me with the expression Mrs. Rossiter had detected, though I
didn't dare to lift an eye to catch him in the act. "You really mean to
marry him?"
"Mean to marry him is not the term," I answered, with the decision which
I felt the situation called for. "I mean to marry him only--on
conditions."
"Oh, on conditions! What kind of conditions?"
I named them to him as I had named them to others. First that Hugh
should become independent.
He repeated his short, hard laugh.
"I don't believe you had better bank on that."
"Perhaps not," I admitted. "But I've another string to my bow. His
family may come and ask me."
He almost shouted.
"Never!"
It was the tone they all took, and which especially enraged me. I kept
my voice steady, however, as I said, "That remains to be seen."
"It doesn't remain to be seen, because I can tell you now that they
won't."
"And I can tell you now that they will," I said, with an assurance that,
on the surface at least, was quite as strong as his own.
He laughed again, more shortly, more hardly.
"Oh, well!"
The laugh ended in a kind of sigh. I noted the sigh as I noted the
laugh, and their relation to each other. Both reached me, touching
something within me that had never yet been stirred. Physically it was
like the prick of the spur to a spirited animal, it sent me bounding up
the steps. I was off as from a danger; and though I would have given
much to see the expression with which he stood gazing after me, I would
not permit myself so much as to glance back.