so around through Old Slip. They were on business; but this was also a
pleasure trip to the elder. He walked doubly in spirit through those
old streets--a boy by his father's side, a father with his son at his
elbow. He had not been often in the region of late years. You remember,
he was a man of pleasure. He was one of the first-fruits of metropolitan
growth and social culture. His father had made an idler and _dilettante_
of him. It was only half a life at best, he thought, happy as he had
been; blessed as he was in wife and child. He was going to make a
business man of his own boy. After all, it was through the workers that
great cities grew. Perhaps we were not ripe yet for that European
institution, the idler. He himself had certain accomplishments that
other Americans had not. He could _flaner_, for instance. But to have to
_flaner_ through fifty or sixty or seventy years palled on the spirit,
he found. And one thing was certain, if any Dolph was ever to be an
accomplished _flaneur_, and to devote his whole life to that occupation,
the Dolph fortune must be vastly increased. Old Jacob Dolph had
miscalculated. The sum he had left in 1829 might have done very well for
the time, but it was no fortune to idle on among the fashionables of
1852.
Something of this Mr. Dolph told his son; but the young man, although he
listened with respectful attention, appeared not to take a deep interest
in his father's reminiscences. Jacob Dolph fancied even that Eustace did
not care to be reminded of the city's day of small things. Perhaps he
had something of the feeling of the successful struggler who tries to
forget the shabbiness of the past. If this were the case, his pride must
have been chafed, for his father was eloquent in displaying the powers
of an uncommonly fine memory; and he had to hear all about the slips,
and the Fly Market, and the gradual extension of the water-front, and
the piles on which the old Tontine was built, and the cucumber-wood
pipes of the old water-company, still lying under their feet. Once, at
least, he showed a genuine enjoyment of his father's discourse, and that
was when it ran on the great retinue of servants in which Jacob Dolph
the elder had indulged himself. I think he was actually pleased when he
heard that his grandfather had at one time kept slaves.
Wandering in this way, to the running accompaniment of Mr. Dolph's
lecture, they came to Water Street, and here, as though he were reminded
of the object of their trip, the father summed up his reminiscences in
shape for a neat moral.
"The city grows, you see, my boy, and we've got to grow with it. I've
stood still; but you sha'n't."
"Well, governor," said the younger man, "I'll be frank with you. I don't
like the prospect."
"You will--you will, my boy. You'll live to thank me."
"Very likely you're right, sir; I don't deny it; but, as I say, I don't
like the prospect. I don't see--with all due respect, sir--how any
gentleman can _like_ trade. It may be necessary, and of course I don't
think it's lowering, or any of that nonsense, you know; but it can't be
_pleasant_. Of course, if _your_ governor had to do it, it was all
right; but I don't believe he liked it any better than I should, or he
wouldn't have been so anxious to keep you out of it."
"My poor father made a great mistake, Eustace. He would admit it now,
I'm sure, if he were alive."
"Well, sir, I'm going to try it, of course. I'll give it a fair trial.
But when the two years are up, sir, as we agreed, I hope you won't say
anything against my going into the law, or--well, yes--" he colored a
little--"trying what I can do on the Street. I know what you think about
it, sir," he went on, hastily; "but there are two sides to the question,
and it's my opinion that, for an intelligent man, there's more money to
be made up there in Wall Street in one year than can be got out of
haggling over merchandise for a lifetime."
Jacob Dolph grew red in the face and shook his head vigorously.
"Don't speak of it, sir, don't speak of it!" he said, vehemently. "It's
the curse of the country. If you have any such infernal opinions, don't
vent them in my presence, sir. I know what I am talking about. Keep
clear of Wall Street, sir. It is the straight road to perdition."
They entered one of a row of broad-fronted buildings of notable severity
and simplicity of architecture. Four square stone columns upheld its
brick front, and on one of these faded gilt letters, on a ground of
dingy black, said simply:
ABRAM VAN RIPER'S SON.
There was no further announcement of Abram Van Riper's Son's character,
or of the nature of his business. It was assumed that all people knew
who Abram Van Riper's Son was, and that his (Abram Van Riper's)
ship-chandlery trade had long before grown into a great "commission
merchant's" business.
It was full summer, and there were no doors between the pillars to bar
entrance to the gloomy cavern behind them, which stretched in
semi-darkness the whole length and width of the building, save for a
narrow strip at the rear, where, behind a windowed partition, clerks
were writing at high desks, and where there was an inner and more
secluded pen for Abram Van Riper's son.
In the front of the cave, to one side, was a hoistway, where bales and
boxes were drawn up from the cellar or swung twisting and twirling to
the lofts above. Amidships the place was strewn with small tubs,
matting-covered bales and boxes, coils of bright new rope, and
odd-looking packages of a hundred sorts, all of them with gaping wounds
in their envelopes, or otherwise having their pristine integrity
wounded. From this it was not difficult to guess that these were samples
of merchandise. Most of them gave forth odors upon the air, odors
ranging from the purely aromatic, suggestive of Oriental fancies or
tropic dreams of spice, to the positively offensive--the latter
varieties predominating.
[Illustration]
But certain objects upon a long table were so peculiar in appearance
that the visitors could not pass them by with a mere glance of wonder.
They looked like small leather pies, badly warped in the baking. A clerk
in his shirt sleeves, with his straw hat on one side of his head,
whistled as he cut into these, revealing a livid interior, the color of
half-cooked veal, which he inspected with care. Eustace was moved to
positive curiosity.
"What are they?" he inquired of the clerk, pride mingling with disgust
in his tone, as he caught a smell like unto the smell which might arise
from raw smoked salmon that had lain three days in the sun.
"Central American," responded the clerk, with brevity, and resumed his
whistling of
"My name is Jake Keyser, I was born in Spring Garden;
To make me a preacher my father did try."
"Central American _what_?" pursued the inquirer.
"_Rubber!_" said the clerk, with a scorn so deep and far beyond
expression that the combined pride of the Dolphs and the Des Anges
wilted into silence for the moment. As they went on toward the rear
office, while the clerk gayly whistled the notes of
"It's no use a-blowing, for I am a hard 'un--
I'm bound to be a butcher, by heavens, or die!"
Eustace recovered sufficiently to demand of his father:
"I say, sir, shall I have to handle that damned stuff?"
"Hush!" said his senior; "here's Mr. Van Riper."
Mr. Van Riper came to the office door to welcome them, with his thin
face set in the form of a smile.
"Ah!" he said, "here's the young man, is he? Fine big fellow, Dolph.
Well, sir, so you are going to embrace a mercantile career, are you?
That's what they call it in these fine days, Dolph."
"I am going to try to, sir," replied the young man.
"He will, Van Riper," put in his father, hastily; "he'll like it as soon
as he gets used to it--I know he will."
"Well," returned Mr. Van Riper, with an attempt at facetious geniality,
"we'll try to get his nose down to the grindstone, we will. Come into my
office with me, Dolph, and I'll hand this young gentleman over to old
Mr. Daw. Mr. Daw will feel his teeth--eh, Mr. Daw?--see what he
_doesn't_ know--how's that, Mr. Daw? You remember Mr. Daw, Dolph--used
to be with your father before he went out of business--been with us ever
since. Let's see, how long is that, Daw? Most fifty years, ain't it?"
[Illustration: "Looks like his father," was Mr. Daw's comment.]
Mr. Daw, who looked as though he might have been one hundred years at
the business, wheeled around and descended with stiff deliberation from
his high stool, holding his pen in his mouth as he solemnly shook hands
with Jacob Dolph, and peered into his face. Then he took the pen out of
his mouth.
"Looks like his father," was Mr. Daw's comment. "Forty-five years the
twenty-ninth of this month, sir. You was a little shaver then. I
remember you comin' into the store and whittlin' timber with your little
jack-knife. I was only eleven years with your father, sir--eleven years
and six months--went to him when I was fourteen years old. That's
fifty-six years and six months in the service of two of the best houses
that ever was in New York--an' I can do my work with any two young
shavers in the town--ain't missed a day in nineteen years now. Your
father hadn't never ought to have gone out of business, Mr. Dolph. He
did a great business for those days, and he had the makin' of a big
house. Goin' to bring your boy up like a good New York merchant, hey?
Come along here with me, young man, and I'll see if you're half the man
your grandfather was. He hadn't never ought to have given up business,
Mr. Dolph. But he was all for pleasuring an' the play-houses, an' havin'
fine times. Come along, young man. What's your name?"
"Eustace Dolph."
"Hm! Jacob's better."
And he led the neophyte away.
"Curious old case," said Mr. Van Riper, dryly. "Best accountant in New
York. See that high stool of his?--can't get him off it. Five years ago
I gave him a low desk and an arm-chair. In one week he was back again,
roosting up there. Said he didn't feel comfortable with his feet on the
ground. He thought that sort of thing might do for aged people, but _he_
wasn't made of cotton-batting."
Thus began Eustace Dolph's apprenticeship to business, and mightily ill
he liked it.
* * * * *
There came a day, a winter day in 1854, when there was great agitation
among what were then called the real old families of New York. I cannot
use the term "fashionable society," because that is more comprehensive,
and would include many wealthy and ambitious families from New England,
who were decidedly not of the Dolphs' set. And then, the Dolphs could
hardly be reckoned among the leaders of fashion. To live on or near the
boundaries of fashion's domain is to lower your social status below the
absolute pitch of perfection, and fashion in 1854 drew the line pretty
sharply at Bleecker Street. Above Bleecker Street the cream of the cream
rose to the surface; below, you were ranked as skim milk. The social
world was spreading up into the wastes sacred to the circus and the
market-garden, although, if Admiral Farragut had stood on his sea-legs
where he stands now, he might have had a fairly clear view of Chelsea
Village, and seen Alonzo Cushman II., or Alonzo Cushman III., perhaps,
going around and collecting his rents.
But the old families still fought the tide of trade, many of them
neck-deep and very uncomfortable. They would not go from St. John's
Park, nor from North Moore and Grand Streets. They had not the
_bourgeois_ conservatism of the Greenwich Villagers, which has held them
in a solid phalanx almost to this very day; but still, in a way, they
resented the up-town movement, and resisted it. So that when they did
have to buy lots in the high-numbered streets they had to pay a fine
price for them.
It was this social party that was stirred by a bit of scandal about the
Dolphs. I do not know why I should call it scandal; yet I am sure
society so held it. For did not society whisper it, and nod and wink
over it, and tell it in dark corners, and chuckle, and lift its
multitudinous hands and its myriad eyebrows, and say in innumerable
keys: "Well, _upon_ my word!" and "Well, I _should_ think----!" and "Who
would _ever_ have thought of such a thing?" and the like? Did not
society make very funny jokes about it, and did not society's
professional gossips get many an invitation to dinner because they
professed to have authentic details of the way Mr. and Mrs. Dolph looked
when they spoke about it, and just what they had to say for themselves?
And yet it was nothing more than this, that Mr. Dolph being fifty-four,
and his wife but a few years younger, were about to give to the world
another Dolph. It was odd, I admit; it was unusual; if I must go so far,
it was, I suppose, unconventional. But I don't see that it was necessary
for Mr. Philip Waters to make an epigram about it. It was a very clever
epigram; but if you had seen dear old Mrs. Dolph, with her rosy cheeks
and the gray in her hair, knitting baby-clothes with hands which were
still white and plump and comely, while great dark eyes looked
timorously into the doubtful, fear-clouded future, I think you would
have been ashamed that you had even listened to that epigram.
The expected event was of special and personal interest to only three
people--for, after all, when you think of it, it was not exactly
society's business--and it affected them in widely different ways.
Jacob Dolph was all tenderness to his wife, and all sympathy with her
fears, with her nervous apprehensions, even with her morbid forebodings
of impossible ills. He did not repine at the seclusion which the
situation forced upon them, although his life for years had been given
up to society's demands, until pleasure-seeking and pleasure-giving had
grown into a routine, which occupied his whole mind. His wife saw him
more than she had for many years. Clubs and card-parties had few
temptations for him now; he sat at home and read to her and talked to
her, and did his best to follow the injunctions of the doctor, and
"create and preserve in her a spirit of cheerful and hopeful
tranquillity, free of unnecessary apprehension."
But when he _did_ go to the club, when he was in male society, his
breast expanded, and if he had to answer a polite inquiry as to Mrs.
Dolph's general health, I am afraid that he responded: "Mrs. Dolph is
extremely well, sir, extremely well!" with a pride which the moralists
will tell you is baseless, unworthy, and unreasonable.
As for Aline herself, no one may know what timorous hopes stirred in her
bosom and charmed the years away, and brought back to her a lovely youth
that was almost girlish in its innocent, half-frightened gladness.
Outside, this great, wise, eminently proper world that she lived in
girded at the old woman who was to bear a child, and laughed behind
tasselled fans, and made wondrous merry over Nature's work; but within
the old house she sat, and sewed upon the baby-clothes, or, wandering
from cupboard to cupboard, found the yellowing garments, laid away more
than a score of years before--the poor little lace-decked trifles that
her first boy had worn; and she thanked heaven, in her humble way, that
twenty-four years had not taken the love and joy of a wife and a mother
out of her heart.
She could not find all her boy's dresses and toys, for she was
open-handed, and had given many of them away to people who needed them.
This brought about an odd encounter. The third person who had a special
interest in the prospect of the birth of a Dolph was young Eustace, and
he found nothing in it wherewith to be pleased. For Eustace Dolph was of
the ultra-fashionables. He cared less for old family than for new ideas,
and he did not let himself fall behind in the march of social progress,
even though he was, as he admitted with humility born of pride, only a
poor devil of a down-town clerk. If his days were occupied, he had his
nights to himself, and he lengthened them to suit himself. At first this
caused his mother to fret a little; but poor Aline had come into her
present world from the conventional seclusion of King's Bridge, and her
only authority on questions of masculine license was her husband. He,
being appealed to, had to admit that his own hours in youth had been
late, and that he supposed the hours of a newer generation should
properly be later still. Mr. Dolph forgot, perhaps, that while his early
potations had been vinous, those of the later age were distinctly
spirituous; and that the early morning cocktail and the midnight
brandy-and-soda were abominations unknown to his own well-bred youth.
With port and sherry and good Bordeaux he had been familiar all his
life; a dash of _liqueur_ after dinner did not trouble his digestion; he
found a bottle of champagne a pleasant appetizer and a gentle stimulant;
but whiskey and gin were to him the drinks of the vulgar; and rum and
brandy stood on his sideboard only to please fiercer tastes than his
own. Perhaps, also, he was ignorant of the temptations that assail a
young man in a great city, he who had grown up in such a little one that
he had at one time known every one who was worth knowing in it.
However this may have been, Eustace Dolph ruled for himself his going
out and his coming in. He went further, and chose his own associates,
not always from among the scions of the "old families." He found those
excellent young men "slow," and he selected for his own private circle a
set which was mixed as to origin and unanimously frivolous as to
tendency. The foreign element was strongly represented. Bright young
Irishmen of excellent families, and mysterious French and Italian counts
and marquises, borrowed many of the good gold dollars of the Dolphs,
and forgot to return an equivalent in the local currency of the
O'Reagans of Castle Reagan, or the D'Arcy de Montmorenci, or the
Montescudi di Bajocchi. Among this set there was much merry-making when
the news from the Dolph household sifted down to them from the
gossip-sieve of the best society. They could not very well chaff young
Dolph openly, for he was muscular and high-tempered, and, under the most
agreeable conditions, needed a fight of some sort every six months or
so, and liked a bit of trouble in between fights. But a good deal of low
and malicious humor came his way, from one source or another, and he,
with the hot and concentrated egotism of youth, thought that he was in a
ridiculous and trying position, and chafed over it.
[Illustration]
There had been innuendos and hints and glancing allusions, but no one
had dared to make any direct assault of wit, until one evening young
Haskins came into the club "a little flushed with wine." (The "wine" was
brandy.) It seems that young Haskins had found at home an ivory rattle
which had belonged to Eustace twenty years before, and which Mrs. Dolph
had given to Mrs. Haskins when Eustace enlarged his horizon in the
matter of toys.
Haskins, being, as I have said, somewhat flushed with brandy, came up to
young Dolph, who was smoking in the window, and meditating with frowning
brows, and said to him:
"Here, Dolph, I've done with this. You'd better take it back--it may be
wanted down your way."
There was a scene. Fortunately, two men were standing just behind Dolph,
who were able to throw their arms about him, and hold him back for a few
seconds. There would have been further consequences, however, if it had
not been that Eustace was in the act of throwing the rattle back at
Haskins when the two men caught him. Thus the toy went wide of its mark,
and fell in the lap of Philip Waters, who, old as he was, generally
chose to be in the company of the young men at the club; and then
Philip Waters did something that almost atones, I think, for the
epigram.
He looked at the date on the rattle, and then he rose up and went
between the two young men, and spoke to Haskins.
"Young man," he said, "when Mrs. Jacob Dolph gave your mother this
thing, your father had just failed for the second time in three years.
He had come to New York about five years before from Hartford, or
Providence, or--Succotash, or whatever his confounded town was. Mr.
Jacob Dolph got Mr. Van Riper to give your father an extension on his
note, or he would have gone to the debtors' prison down by the City
Hall. As it was, he had to sell his house, and the coat off his back,
for all I know. If it hadn't been for the Dolphs, devil the rattle you'd
have had, and you wouldn't have been living in Bond Street to-day."
[Illustration: "If it hadn't been for the Dolphs, devil the rattle you'd
have had."]
After which Mr. Philip Waters sat down and read the evening paper; and
when young Haskins was able to speak he asked young Dolph's pardon, and
got it--at least, a formal assurance that he had it.
The baby was born in the spring, and everybody said she was the image of
her mother.
* * * * *
There will come a day, it may be, when advancing civilization will
civilize sleighing out of existence, as far as New York is concerned.
Year after year the days grow fewer that will let a cutter slip up
beyond the farthest of the "road-houses" and cross the line into
Westchester. People say that the climate is changing; but close
observers recognize a sympathy between the decrease of snow-storms and
the increase of refinement--that is, a sympathy in inverse ratio; a
balanced progress in opposite directions. As we grow further and further
beyond even old-world standards of polite convention, as we formalize
and super-formalize our codes, and steadily eliminate every element of
amusement from our amusements, Nature in strict conformity represses her
joyous exuberance. The snow-storm of the past is gone, because the great
public sleigh that held twenty-odd merry-makers in a shell like a circus
band-wagon has gone out of fashion among all classes. Now we have,
during severe winters, just enough snow from time to time to bear the
light sleigh of the young man who, being in good society, is also horsy.
When _he_ finds the road vulgar, the poor plebeian souls who go
sleighing for the sport of it may sell their red and blue vehicles, for
Nature, the sycophant of fashion, will snow no more.
But they had "good old-fashioned" snow-storms eighty years after the
Declaration of Independence, and one had fallen upon New York that
tempted Mrs. Jacob Dolph to leave her baby, ten months old, in the
nurse's charge, and go out with her husband in the great family sleigh
for what might be the last ride of the season.
They had been far up the road--to Arcularius's, maybe, there swinging
around and whirling back. They had flown down the long country road, and
back into the city, to meet--it was early in the day--the great
procession of sleighing folk streaming northward up Broadway. It was one
of New York's great, irregular, chance-set carnivals, and every sleigh
was out, from the "exquisite's" gilded chariot, a shell hardly larger
than a fair-sized easy-chair, to the square, low-hung red sledge of the
butcher-boy, who braved it with the fashionables, his _Schneider_-made
clothes on his burly form, and his girl by his side, in her best Bowery
bonnet. Everybody was a-sleighing. The jingle of countless bells fell on
the crisp air in a sort of broken rhythm--a rude _tempo rubato_. It was
fashionable then. But we--we amuse ourselves less boisterously.
They drew up at the door of the Dolph house, and Jacob Dolph lifted his
wife out of the sleigh, and carried her up the steps into the
breakfast-room, and set her down in her easy-chair. He was bending over
her to ask her if her ride had done her good, when a servant entered and
handed him a letter marked "Immediate."
He read it, and all the color of the winter's day faded out of his face.
"I've got to go down to Van Riper's," he said, "at once; he wants me."
"Has anything happened to--to Eustace?" his wife cried out.
"He doesn't say so--I suppose--I suppose it's only business of some
sort," her husband said. His face was white. "Don't detain me, dear.
I'll come back as soon as--as soon as I get through."
He kissed her, and was gone. Half an hour later he sat in the office of
Abram Van Riper's Son.
There was no doubting it, no denying it, no palliating it even. The
curse had come upon the house of Jacob Dolph, and his son was a thief
and a fugitive.
It was an old story and a simple story. It was the story of the
Haskins's million and the Dolphs' hundred thousand; it was the story of
the boy with a hundred thousand in prospect trying to spend money
against the boy with a million in sight. It was the story of cards,
speculation--another name for that sort of gambling which is worse than
any on the green cloth--and what is euphemistically known as wine.