"She was giving Alois a free hand in planning surroundings"
"'I felt I must see you--must see you at once'"
"'You are my life, the light on my path'"
*LIGHT-FINGERED GENTRY*
*I*
*A MATRIMONIAL MISTAKE*
Toward noon on a stifling July day, a woman, a young woman, left the
main walk through the deserted college grounds at Battle Field, and
entered the path that makes a faint tracing down the middle of Pine
Point. That fingerlike peninsula juts far into Otter Lake; it is a
thicket of white pines, primeval, odorous. Not a ripple was breaking the
lake's broad, burnished reach. The snowy islets of summer cloud hung
motionless, like frescoes in an azure ceiling. But among the pines it
was cool, and even murmurously musical.
In dress the young woman was as somber as the foliage above and around
her. Her expression, also, was somber--with the soberness of the
ascetic, or of the exceedingly shy, rather than of the sad. She seemed
to diffuse a chill, like the feel of a precious stone--the absence of
heat found both in those who have never been kindled by the fire of life
and in those in whom that fire has burned itself out. There was not a
trace of coquetry in her appearance, no attempt to display to advantage
good points that ought to have been charms. She was above the medium
height, and seemed taller by reason of the singular conformation of her
face and figure. Her face was long and slim, and also her body, and her
neck and arms; her hands, ungloved, and her feet, revealed by her
walking skirt, had the same characteristic; the line from her throat to
the curve of her bosom was of unusual length, and also the line of her
back, of her waist, of her legs. Her hair was abundant, but no one
would have guessed how abundant, or how varied its tints, so severely
was it plaited and bound to her head. Her eyes were of that long narrow
kind which most women, fortunate enough to possess them, know how to use
with an effect at once satanic and angelic, at once provoking and
rebuking passions tempestuous. But this woman had somehow contrived to
reduce even those eyes to the apparently enforced puritanism of the rest
of her exterior. She had the elements of beauty, of a rare beauty; yet
beautiful she was not. It was as if nature had molded her for love and
life, and then, in cruel freakishness, had failed to breathe into her
the vital breath. A close observer might have wondered whether this
exterior was not a mask deliberately held immobile and severe over an
intense, insurgent heart and mind. But close observers are few, and
such a secret--if secret she had--would pass unsuspected of mere shallow
curiosity.
Within a few yards of the end of the peninsula she lifted her gaze from
the ground, on which it had been steadily bent. Across her face drifted
a slight smile--cold, or was it merely shy? It revealed the even edge
of teeth of that blue-white which is beautiful only when the complexion
is clear and fine--and her complexion was dull, sallow, as if from
recent illness or much and harassing worry. The smile was an
acknowledgment of the salutation of a man who had thrown away a
half-finished cigarette and had risen from the bench at the water's
edge.
"How d'ye do, Neva," said he, politely enough, but with look and tone no
man addresses to a woman who has for him the slightest sex interest.
"How are you, Horace," said she, losing the faint animation her smile
had given her face. Somewhat constrainedly, either from coldness or
from embarrassment, she gave him her hand.
They seated themselves on the bench with its many carvings of initials
and fraternity symbols. She took advantage of his gaze out over the
lake to look at him; but her eyes were inscrutable. He was a big,
powerful-looking man--built on the large plan, within as well as
without, if the bold brow and eyes and the strong mouth, unconcealed by
his close-cropped fair mustache, did not mislead. At first glance he
seemed about thirty; but there were in his features lines of experience,
of firmness, of formed character, of achievement, that could not have
come with many less than forty years. He looked significant,
successful, the man who is much and shall be more. He was dressed more
fashionably than would be regarded as becoming in a man of affairs,
except in two or three of our largest cities. In contrast with his
vivid, aggressive personality--or, was it simply because of shy,
supersensitive shrinking in his presence?--the young woman now seemed
colorless and even bleak.
After a silence which she was unable or unwilling to break, he said,
"This is very mysterious, Neva--this sending for me to meet
you--secretly."
"I was afraid it might not be pleasant for you--at the house," replied
she hesitatingly.
His air of surprise was not quite sincere. "Why not?" he inquired.
"There isn't anyone I esteem more highly than your father, and he likes
me. If he didn't he would not have done all the things that put me
under such a heavy debt of gratitude to him." His tone suggested that
he had to remind himself of the debt often lest he should be guilty of
the baseness of forgetting it.
"It was eighteen months yesterday," said she, "since you were--at the
house."
He frowned at what he evidently regarded as a disagreeable and therefore
tactless reminder. "Really? Time races for those who have something to
do besides watch the clock." Then, ashamed of his irritation, "I
suppose it's impossible, in an uneventful place like this, to appreciate
how the current of a city like Chicago sweeps a man along and won't
release him. There's so much to think about, one has no time for
anything."
"Except the things that are important to one," replied she. "Don't
misunderstand, please. I'm only stating a fact--not reproaching
you--not at all."
"So, your father has turned against me."
"He has said nothing. But his expression, when I happened to speak of
you the other day, told me it would be better for you not to come to the
house--at least, until we had had a talk."
"Well, Neva, I don't feel I have any reason to reproach myself. I'm not
the sort of man who stands about on the tail of his wife's dress or sits
round the house in slippers. I'm trying to make a career, and that
means work."
"Chicago is only six hours from Battle Field," she said with curiously
quiet persistence.
"When I got the position in Chicago," he reminded her with some
asperity, "I asked you to go with me. You refused."
"Did you wish me to go?"
"Did you wish to go?"
She was silent.
"You know you did not," he went on. "We had been married nearly six
years, and you cared no more about me--" He paused to seek a
comparison.
"Than you cared for me," she suggested. Then, with a little more energy
and color, "I repeat, Horace, I'm not reproaching you. All I want is
that you be frank. I asked you to come here to-day that we might talk
over our situation honestly. How can we be honest with each other if
you begin by pretending that business is your reason for staying away?"
He studied her unreadable, impassive face. In all the years of their
married life she had never shown such energy or interest, except about
her everlasting painting, which she was always mussing with, shut away
from everybody; and never had she been so communicative. But it was too
late, far too late, for any sign of personality, however alluringly
suggestive of mystery unexplored, to rouse him to interest in her. He
was looking at her merely because he wished to discover what she was
just now beating toward. "In the fall," he said, "I'm going to New York
to live. Of course, that will mean even fewer chances of my
coming--here--coming home."
At the word "home," which she had avoided using, a smile--her secret
smile--flitted into her face, instantly died away again. He colored.
"I heard you were going to New York," said she. "I saw it in the
newspapers."
"I suppose _you_ will not wish to--to leave your father," he resumed
cautiously, as if treading dangerous ground.
"Do you wish me to go?"
He did not answer. A prolonged silence which she broke: "You see,
Horace, I was right. We mustn't any longer refuse to look our situation
squarely in the face."
His heart leaped. When he got her letter with its mysterious, urgent
summons, a hope had sprung within him; but he had quickly dismissed it
as a mere offspring of his longing for freedom--had there ever been an
instance of a woman's releasing a man who was on his way up? But now,
he began to hope again.
"Ever since the baby was born--dead," she went on, face and voice calm,
but fingers fiercely interlocked under a fold of her dress where he
could not see, "I've been thinking we ought not to let our mistake grow
into a tragedy."
"Our mistake?"
"Our marriage."
He waited until he could conceal his astonishment before he said, "You,
too, feel it was a mistake?"
"I feared so, when we were marrying," she replied. "I knew it, when I
saw how hard you ere trying to do your 'duty' as a husband--oh, yes, I
saw. And, when the baby and the suffering failed to bring us together,
only showed how far apart we were, I realized there wasn't any hope.
You would have told me, would have asked for your freedom--yes, I saw
that, too--if it hadn't been for the feeling you had about father--and,
perhaps also--" She paused, then went bravely on, "--because you were
ashamed of having married me for other reasons than love. Don't deny
it, please. To-day, we can speak the truth to each other without
bitterness."
"I shan't deny," replied he. "I saw that your father, who had done
everything for me, had his heart set on the marriage. And I'll even
admit I was dazzled by the fact that yours was one of the first and
richest families in the State--I, who was obscure and poor. It wasn't
difficult for me to deceive myself into thinking my awe of you was the
feeling a man ought to have for the woman he marries." He seemed to
have forgotten she was there. "I had worked hard, too hard, at
college," he went on. "I was exhausted--without courage. The obstacles
to my getting where I was determined to go staggered me. To marry you
seemed to promise a path level and straight to success."
"I understand," she said. Her voice startled him back to complete
consciousness of her presence. "There was more excuse for you than for
me."
"That's it!" he cried. "What puzzles me, what I've often asked myself
is, 'Why did she marry me?'"
"Not for the reason you think," evaded she.
"What is that?" he asked, his tone not wholly easy.
"It wasn't because I thought you were going to have a distinguished
career."
This penetration disconcerted him, surprised him. And he might have gone
on to suspect he would do well to revise his estimate of her, formed in
the first months of their married life and never since even questioned,
had not her next remark started a fresh train of thought. "So," she
said, with her faint smile, "you see you've had no ground for the fear
that, no matter how plainly you might show me you wished to be free, I'd
hold on to you."
"A woman might have other reasons than mere sordidness for not freeing a
man," replied he, on the defensive.
"She might _think_ she had."
"That is cynical," said he, once more puzzled.
"The truth often is--as we both well know," replied she. Then,
abruptly, but with no surface trace of effort: "You wish to be free.
Well, you are free."
"What do you mean, Neva?" he demanded, ashamed of the exultation that
surged up in him, and trying to conceal it.
"Just what I say," was her quiet answer.
After a pause, he asked with gentle consideration of strong for weak
that made her wince, "Neva, have you consulted with anyone--with your
father or brother?"
"I haven't spoken to them about it. Why should I? Are not our
relations a matter between ourselves alone? Who else could understand?
Who could advise?"
"What you propose is a very grave matter."
Again her secret smile, this time a gleam of irony in it. "You do not
wish to be free?"
His expression showed how deeply he instantly became alarmed. She
smiled openly. "Don't pretend to yourself that you are concerned about
my interests," she said; "frankness to-day--please."
"I'm afraid you don't realize what you are doing," he felt compelled to
insist. "And that is honest."
"You don't understand me. You never did. You never could, so long as I
am your wife. That's the way it is in marriage--if people begin wrong,
as we did. But, at least, believe me when I say I've thought it all
out--in these years of long, long days and weeks and months when I've
had no business to distract me."
"You are right," he said. "We have never been of the slightest use to
each other. We are utterly out of sympathy--like strangers."
"Worse," she replied. "Strangers may come together, but not the husband
and wife whose interest in each other has been killed." She gazed long
out over the lake toward the mist-veiled Wabash range before adding,
almost under her breath, "Or never was born."
"I have a naturally expansive temperament," he went on, as if in her
train of thought. "I need friendship, affection. You are by nature
reserved and cold."
She smiled enigmatically. "I doubt if you know me well enough to
judge."
"At least, you've been cold and reserved with me--always, from the very
beginning."
"It would be a strange sort of woman, don't you think, who would not be
chilled by a man who regarded everyone as a mere rung in his
ladder--first for the hand, then for the foot? Oh, I'm not criticising.
I understand and accept many things I was once foolishly sensitive
about. I see your point of view. You feel you must get rid of whatever
interferes with your development. And you are right. We must be true
to ourselves. Worn-out clothes, worn-out friends, worn-out ties of
every kind--all must go to the rag bag--relentlessly."
He did not like it that she said these things so placidly and without
the least bitterness. He admitted they were true; but her wisdom jarred
upon him as "unwomanly," as further proof of the essential coldness of
her nature; he would have accepted as natural and proper the most
unreasonable and most intemperate reproaches and denunciations. He
hardened his heart and returned to the main question. "Then you really
wish to be free?" He liked to utter that last word, to drink in the
clarion sound of it.
"That has been settled," she replied. "We _are_ free."
"But there are many details----"
"For the lawyers. We need not discuss them. Besides, they are few and
simple. I give you your freedom; I receive mine--and that is all. I
shall take my own name. And we can both begin again."
He was looking at her now; for the first time in their acquaintance he
was beginning to wonder whether he had not been mistaken in assigning
her to that background of neutral-colored masses against which the few
with positive personalities play the drama of life. As he sat silent,
confused, she still further amazed him by rising and extending her hand.
"Good-by," she said. "You'll take the four-fifty train back to
Chicago?"
It seemed to him they were not parting as should two who had been so
long and, in a sense, so intimately, each in the other's life and
thought. Yet, what was there to be said or done? He rose, hesitated,
awkwardly touched her insistent hand, reluctantly released it.
"Good-by," he stammered. He had an uncomfortable sense of being
dismissed--and who likes summarily to be dismissed, even by one of whose
company he is least glad?
Suddenly, upon a wave of color the beauty that nature had all but given
her, swept, triumphant and glorious, into her face, into her figure. It
was as startling, as vivid, as dazzling as the fair, far-stretching
landscape the lightning flash conjures upon the black curtain of night.
While he was staring in dazed amazement, the apparition vanished with
the wave of emotion that had brought it into view.
Before he could decide whether he had seen or had only imagined, she was
gone, was making her way up the path alone. A sudden melancholy
shadowed him--the melancholy of the closed chapter, of the thing that
has been and shall not be again, forever. But the exhilarating fact of
freedom soon dissipated this thin shadow. With shoulders erect and
firm, and confident gait he strode toward the station, his mind gone
ahead of him to Chicago, to New York, to his future, his career, his
conquest of power. An hour after his train left Battle Field, Neva
Carlin was to Horace Armstrong simply a memory, a filed document to be
left undisturbed under its mantle of dust.
*II*
*A FEAST AND A FIASCO*
"There'll be about six hundred of us," Fosdick had said. "Do your best,
and send in the bill."
And the best it certainly was, even for New York with its profuse ideas
as to dispensing the rivers of other people's money that flood in upon
it from the whole country. The big banquet hall was walled with
flowers; there were great towering palms rising from among the tables
and so close together that their leaves intermingled in a roof. Each
table was an attempt at a work of art; the table of honor was strewn and
festooned with orchids at a dollar and a half apiece; there was music,
of course, and it the costliest; there were souvenirs--they alone
absorbed upward of ten thousand dollars. As for the dinner itself, the
markets of the East and the South and of the Pacific Coast had been
searched; the fish had come from France; the fruit from English
hothouses; four kinds of wine, but those who preferred it could have
champagne straight through. The cigars cost a dollar apiece, the
boutonnieres another dollar, the cigarettes were as expensive as are the
cigars of many men who are particular as to their tobacco. Lucullus may
have spent more on some of his banquets, but he could have got no such
results. In fact, it was a "seventy-five a plate" dinner, though Fosdick
was not boasting it, as he would have liked; he was mindful of the
recent exposures of the prodigality of managers of corporations with the
investments of "the widow and the orphan and the thrifty poor."
Fosdick, presiding, with Shotwell on his right and Armstrong on his
left, swelled with pride in his own generosity and taste as he gazed
round. True, the O.A.D. was to pay the bill; true, he had known nothing
about the arrangements for the banquet until he came to preside at it.
But was he not the enchanter who evoked it all? He hadn't a doubt that
his was the glory, all the glory--just as, when he bought for a large
sum a picture with a famous name to it, he showed himself to be greater
than the painter. He prided himself upon his good taste--did he not
select the man who selected the costly things for him; did he not sign
the checks? But most of all he prided himself on his big heart. He
loved to give--to his children, to his friends, to servants--not high
wages indeed, for that would have been bad business, but tips and
presents which made a dazzling showing and flooded his heart with the
warm milk of human kindness, whereas a small increase of wages would be
insignificant, without pleasurable sensation, and a permanent drain. Of
all the men who devote their lives to what some people call finance--and
others call reaping where another has sown--he was the most generous.
"A great, big, beating human heart," was what you heard about Fosdick
everywhere. "A hard, wily fighter in finance, but a man full of red
blood, for all that."
Having surveyed the magic scene his necromancy and his generosity had
created, he shifted his glance patronizingly to the man at his
right--the man for whom he had done this generous act, the retiring
president of the O.A.D., to whom this dinner was a testimonial. As
Fosdick looked at Shotwell, his face darkened. "The damned old
ingrate," he muttered. "He doesn't appreciate what I've done for him."
And there was no denying it. The old man was looking a sickly, forlorn
seventy-five, at least, though he was only sixty-five, only two years
older than Fosdick. He was humped down in a sort of stupor, his big
flat chin on his crushed shirt bosom, his feeble, age-mottled hand
fumbling with his napkin, with his wineglass, with the knives, forks,
and spoons.
"The boys are giving you a great send off," said Fosdick. As Shotwell
knew who alone was responsible for the "magnificent and touching
testimonial," Fosdick risked nothing in this modesty.
Shotwell, startled, wiped his mouth with his napkin.
"Yes, yes," he said; "it's very nice."
Nice! And if Fosdick had chosen he could have had Shotwell flung down
and out in disgrace from the exalted presidency of the O.A.D., instead
of retiring him thus gloriously. Nice! Fosdick almost wished he
had--almost. He would have quite wished it, if retiring Shotwell in
disgrace would not have injured the great company, so absolutely
dependent upon popular confidence. Nice! Fosdick turned away in
disgust. He remembered how, when he had closed his trap upon
Shotwell--a superb stroke of business, that!--not a soul had suspected
until the jaws snapped and the O.A.D. was his--he remembered how
Shotwell had met his demand for immediate resignation or immediate
disgrace, with shrieks of hate and cursing. "I suppose he can't get
over it," reflected Fosdick. "Men blind themselves completely to the
truth where vanity and self-interest are concerned. He probably still
hates me, and can't see that I was foolishly generous with him. Where's
there another man in the financial district who'd have allowed him a
pension of half his salary for life?"
But such thoughts as these in this hour for expansion and good will
marred his enjoyment. Fosdick turned to the man at his left, to young
Armstrong, whom he was generously lifting to the lofty seat from which
he had so forbearingly ejected the man at his right. Armstrong--a huge,
big fellow with one of those large heads which show unmistakably that
they are of the rare kind of large head that holds a large brain--was as
abstracted as Shotwell. The food, the wine before him, were untouched.
He was staring into his plate, with now and then a pull at his cropped,
fair mustache or a passing of his large, ruddy, well-shaped hand over
his fine brow. "What's the matter, Horace?" said Fosdick; "chewing over
the speech?"
Armstrong straightened himself with a smile that gave his face instantly
the look of frankness and of high, dauntless spirit. "No, I've got that
down--and mighty short it is," said he; "the fewer words I say now, the
fewer there'll be to rise up and mock me, if I fail."
"Fail! Pooh! Nonsense! Cheer up!" cried Fosdick. "It's a big job for
a young fellow, but you're bound to win. You've got _me_ behind you."
Armstrong looked uncomfortable rather than relieved. "They've elected me
president," said he, and his quiet tone had the energy of an inflexible
will. "I intend to be president. No one can save me if I haven't it in
me to win out."
Fosdick frowned, and pursed his lips until his harsh gray mustache
bristled. "Symptoms of swollen head already," was his irritated inward
comment. "He's been in the job forty-eight hours, and he's ready to
forget who made him. But I'll soon remind him that I could put him
where I got him--and further down, damn him!"
"Some one is signaling you from the box straight ahead," said Armstrong.
"I think it's your daughter."
As the young woman was plainly visible and as Armstrong knew her well,
this caution of statement could not have been quite sincere. But
Fosdick did not note it; he was bowing and smiling at the occupants of
that most conspicuous box. At the table of honor to the right and left
of him were the directors of the O.A.D., the most representative of the
leading citizens of New York; they owned, so it was said, one fifteenth
and directly controlled about one half of the entire wealth of the
country; not a blade was harvested, not a wheel was turned, not a pound
of freight was lifted from Maine to the Pacific but that they directly
or indirectly got a "rake off"--or, if you prefer, a commission for
graciously permitting the work to be done. In the horseshoe of boxes,
overlooking the banquet, were the families of these high mightinesses,
the wives and daughters and sons who gave the mightiness outward and
visible expression in gorgeous display and in painstaking reproduction
of the faded old aristocracies of birth beyond the Atlantic.
Fosdick had insisted on this demonstration because the banquet was to be
not only a testimonial to Shotwell, but also a formal installation of
himself and his daughter and son in the high society of the plutocracy.
Fosdick had long had power downtown; but he had lacked respectability.
Not that his reputation was not good; on the contrary, it was
spotless--as honest as generous, as honorable as honest.
Respectability, however, has nothing to do with honesty, whether reputed
or real. It is a robe, an entitlement, a badge; it comes from
associating with the respectable, uptown as well as down. Fosdick,
grasping this fact, after twenty years' residence in New York in
ignorance of it, had forthwith resolved to be respectable, to change the
dubious social status of his family into a structure as firm and as
imposing as his fortune. His business associates had imagined
themselves free, uptown at least, from his vast and ever vaster power;
at one stroke he showed them the fatuous futility of their social
coldness, of their carefully drawn line between doing business with him
and being socially intimate with him, made it amusingly apparent that
their condescensions to his daughter and son in the matter of occasional
invitations were as flimsily based as were their elaborate pretenses of
superior birth and breeding. He invited them to make a social function
of this business dinner; he made each recipient of an invitation
personally feel that it was wise to accept, dangerous to refuse. The
hope of making money and the dread of losing it have ever been the two
all-powerful considerations in an aristocracy of any kind.
Respectability and fashion "accepted."
So, Fosdick, looking across that resplendent scene, at the radiant faces
of his daughter and son, felt the light and the warmth driving away the
shadows of Shotwell's ingratitude and Armstrong's lack of deference. But
just as he was expanding to the full girth of his big heart, he chilled
and shrunk again. There, beside his daughter, sat old Shotwell's wife.
She was as cold as so much marble; the diamonds on her great white
shoulders and bosom seemed to give off a chill from their light. She
was there, it is true; but like a dethroned queen in the triumphal
procession of an upstart conqueror. She was a rebuke, a damper, a
spoiler of the feast. She never had cared for old Shotwell; she had
married him because he was the best available catch and could give her
everything she wanted, everything she could conceive a woman's wanting.
She had tolerated him as one of the disagreeable but necessary incidents
of the journey of life. But Shotwell's downfall was hers, was their
children's. It meant a lower rank in the social hierarchy; it meant
that she and hers must bow before this "nobody from nowhere" and his
children. She sat there, beside Amy, in front of Hugo, the embodiment of
icy hate.
"This damn dinner is entirely too long," muttered Fosdick, though he did
not directly connect his dissatisfaction with the cold stare from
Shotwell's wife.
But Mrs. Shotwell was not interfering with the enjoyment of Amy and
Hugo.
If Fosdick had planned with an inquisitor's cunning to put her to the
most exquisite torture, he could not have been more successful. From
his box she had the best possible view of the whole scene; and, while
Shotwell had told her only the smallest part of the truth about his
"resignation," she had read the newspaper reports of the investigation
of the O.A.D. which had preceded his downfall, and, though that
investigation had changed from an attack on him to an exoneration, after
he yielded to Fosdick, she had guessed enough of the truth to know that
this "testimonial" to him was in fact a testimonial to Fosdick.
Hugo and Amy, the children of a rich man and unmarried, had long been
popular with all the women who had unmarried sons and daughters; this
evening they roused enthusiasm. Everybody who hoped to make, or feared
to lose, money was impressed by their charms. Amy, who was pretty, was
declared beautiful; Hugo, who looked as if he had brains, though in fact
he had not, was pronounced a marvel of serious intellectuality. The
young men flocked round Amy; Hugo's tour of the boxes was an ovation.
To an observant outsider, looking beneath surfaces to realities, the
scene would have been ludicrous and pitiful; to those taking part, it
seemed elegant, kindly, charming. Mrs. Shotwell was almost at the
viewpoint of the outsider--not the philosopher, but he who stands hungry
and thirsty in the cold and glowers through the window at the revelers
and denounces them for their selfish gluttony. And by the way of chagrin
and envy she reached the philosopher's conclusion. "How coarse and
low!" she thought. "New York gets more vulgar every year."
Amy, accustomed all her life to have anything and everything she wanted,
had been dissatisfied about the family's social position and eager to
improve it; but the instant she realized they were at last "in the
push," securely there, she began to lose interest; after an hour of the
new adulation, she had enough, was looking impatiently round for
something else to want and to strive for.
Not so Hugo. Society had seemed a serious matter to him from his
earliest days at college, when he began to try to get into the
fashionable fraternities, and failed. He had been invited wherever any
marriageable girls were on exhibition; but he had noted, and had taken
it quickly to heart, that he was not often invited when such offerings
were not being made. He had gone heavily into a flirtation with a young
married woman, as dull as himself. It was in vain; she had invited him,
but her friends had not, unless she was to be there to take care of him.
He had attributed this in part to his father, in part to his married
sister--his father, who made occasional slips in grammar and was
boisterous and dictatorial in conversation; his sister, whose husband
kept a big retail furniture store and "looks the counter-jumper that he
is," Hugo often said to Amy in their daily discussions of their social
woes. Now, all this worriment was over; Hugo, touring the boxes, felt
he had reached the summit of ambition. And it seemed to him he had
himself brought it about--his diplomatic assiduity in cultivating "the
right people," the steady, if gradual, permeation of his physical and
mental charms.
Amy sent a note down to Armstrong, asking him to come to the box a
moment. As he entered, Hugo was just leaving on another excursion for
further whiffs of the incense that was making him visibly as drunk, if
in a slightly different way, as the younger and obscurer members of the
staff of the O.A.D. downstairs. At sight of Armstrong he put out his
hand graciously and said: "Ah--Horace--howdy?" in a tone that made it
difficult for Armstrong to refrain from laughing in his face.
"All right, Hugo," said he.
Hugo frowned. For him to address one of his father's employees by his
first name was natural and proper and a mark of distinguished favor; for
one of those employees to retort in kind was a gross impertinence. He
did not see just how to show his indignation, just how to set the
impudent employee back in his place. He put the problem aside for
further thought, and brushed haughtily by Armstrong, who, however, had
already forgotten him.
"Just let Mr. Armstrong sit there, won't you?" said Amy to the young man
in the seat immediately behind hers.
The young man flushed; she had cut him off in the middle of a sentence
which was in the middle of the climax of what he thought a most amusing
story. He gave place to Armstrong, hating him, since hatred of an
heiress was not to be thought of.
"What is it you want so particularly to see me about?" Armstrong said to
her.
She smiled with radiant coquetry. "Nothing at all," she replied. "I
put that in the note simply to make sure you'd come."
Armstrong laughed. "You're a spoiled one," said he. And he got up,
nodded friendlily to her, bowed to her Arctic chaperon and departed, she
so astonished that she could think of nothing to say to detain him.
Her first impulse was rage--that _she_ should be treated thus! she whom
_everybody_ treated with consideration! Then, her vanity, readiest and
most tactful of courtiers, suggested that he had done it to pique her,
to make himself more attractive in her eyes. That mollified her, soon
had her in good humor again. Yes, he was as much part of her court as
the others; only, being shrewder, he pursued a different method. "And
he's got a right to hold himself dear," she said to herself, as she
watched him making his way to his seat at the table of honor. Certainly
he did look as if he belonged at or near the head of the head table.
Soon her father was standing, was rapping for order. Handsome and
distinguished, with his keen face and tall lean figure, his iron-gray
hair and mustache, he spoke out like one who has something to say and
will be heard:
"Gentlemen and ladies!" he began. "We are gathered here to-night to do
honor to one of the men of our time and country. His name is a
household word." (Applause.) "For forty years he has made comfortable
an ever increasing number of deathbeds, has stood between the orphan and
the pangs of want, has given happy old age to countless thousands."
(Applause. Cries of "Good! Good!") "Ladies and gentlemen, we honor
ourselves in honoring this noble character. Speaking for the directors,
of whom I am one of the oldest--in point of service"--(Laughter.
Applause.)--"speaking for the directors, I say, in all sincerity, it is
with the profoundest regret that we permit him to partially sever his
official connection with the great institution he founded and has been
so largely instrumental in building up to its present magnificent
position. We would fain have him stay on where his name is a guarantee
of honesty, security and success." (Cheers.) "But he has insisted that
he must transfer the great burden to younger shoulders. He has earned
the right to repose, ladies and gentlemen. We cannot deny him what he
has earned. But he leaves us his spirit." (Wild applause.) "Wherever
the O.A.D. is known--and where is it not known?" (Cheers and loud
rattling of metal upon glass and china.)--"there his name is written
high as an inspiration to the young. He has been faithful; he has been
honest; he has been diligent. By these virtues he has triumphed."
(Cheers.) "His triumph, ladies and gentlemen, is an inspiration to us
all." (Cheers. Cries of "Whoope-ee" from several drunken men at the
far tables.)
"Let us rise, gentlemen, and drink to our honored, our honorable chief!"
The banqueters sprang to their feet, lifting their glasses high. Old
Shotwell, his face like wax, rose feebly, stared into vacancy, passed
one tremulous hand over the big, flat, weak chin, sunk into his chair
again. Some one shouted, "Three cheers for Shotwell!" Floor and boxes
stood and cheered, with much waving of napkins and handkerchiefs and
clinking of glasses. It was a thrilling scene, the exuberant homage of
affairs to virtue.
"I see, ladies and gentlemen, that my poor words have been in the
direction of your thoughts," continued Fosdick. "And now devolves upon
me the pleasant duty of----"
Here a beflowered hand truck, bearing a large rosewood chest, was
wheeled in front of the table of honor. The attendants threw back the
lid and disclosed a wonderful service of solid gold plate. This
apparition of the god in visible, tangible form caused hysterical
excitement--cheers, shouts, frantic cranings and wavings from floor and
gallery.
"--The pleasant duty of presenting this slight token of appreciation
from our staff to our retiring president," ended Fosdick in a tremendous
voice and with a vast, magnanimous sweep of the arms.
Old Shotwell, dazed, lifted his chin from his shirt bosom, stared
stupidly at the chest, rose at a prod from his neighbor, bowed, and sat
down again. Fosdick seated himself, nudged him under the table,
whispered hoarsely under cover of his mustache, "Get up. Get up!
Here's the time for your speech."
The old man fumbled in his breast pocket, drew out a manuscript, rose
uncertainly. As he got on his feet, the manuscript dropped to the
floor. Armstrong saw, moved around between Shotwell and his neighbor,
picked up the manuscript, opened it, laid it on the table at Shotwell's
hand. "Ladies and gentlemen," quavered Shotwell, in a weak voice and
with an ashen face, "I thank you. I--I--thank you."
The diners rose again. "Three cheers for the old chief!" was the cry,
and out they rang. Tears were in Shotwell's eyes; tears were rolling
down Fosdick's cheeks; some of the drunken were sobbing. As they sang,
"For he's a jolly good fellow," Fosdick's great voice leading and his
arm linked in Shotwell's, Armstrong happened to glance down at the
manuscript. The opening sentence caught his eye--"_Fellow builders of
the Mutual Association Against Old Age and Death, I come here to expose
to you the infamous conspiracy of which I have been the victim._"
Before Armstrong could stop himself, he had been fascinated into reading
the second sentence: "_I purpose to expose to you, without sparing
myself, how Josiah Fosdick has seized the O.A.D. to gamble with its
assets, using his unscrupulous henchman, Horace Armstrong, as a blind._"
Armstrong, white as his shirt, folded the manuscript and held it in the
grip a man gives that which is between him and destruction. The singing
finished, all sat down again, Shotwell with the rest. Had his mind
given way, or his will? Armstrong could not tell; certain it was,
however, that he had abandoned the intention of changing the banquet
into about the most sensational tragedy that had ever shaken and torn
the business world. Armstrong put the manuscript in his pocket. "I'll
mail it to him," he said to himself.
But now Josiah was up again, was calling for a "few words from my
eminent young friend, whom the directors of the O.A.D., in the wise
discharge of the trust imposed upon them by three quarters of a million
policy holders, have elected to the presidency. His shoulders are
young, gentlemen, but"--here he laid his hand affectionately upon
Armstrong--"as you can see for yourselves, they are broad and strong."
He beamed benevolently down upon Armstrong's thick, fair hair. "Young
man, we want to hear your pledge for your stewardship."
Horace Armstrong, unnerved by the narrowly averted catastrophe, drew
several deep breaths before he found voice. He glanced along first one
line, then the other, of the eminent and most respectable directors,
these men of much and dubious wealth which yet somehow made them the
uttermost reverse of dubious, made them the bulwarks of character and
law and property--of all they had trodden under foot to achieve
"success." Then he gazed out upon the men who were to take orders from
him henceforth, the superintendents, agents, officials of the O.A.D.
"My friends," said he, "we have charge of a great institution. With
God's help we will make it greater, the greatest. It has been one of
the mainstays of the American home, the American family. It shall
remain so, if I have your cooeperation and support."
And he abruptly resumed his seat. There were cheers, but not loud or
hearty. His manner had been nervous, his voice uncertain, unconvincing.
But for his presence--that big frame, those powerful features--he would
have made a distinctly bad impression. As he sat, conscious of failure
but content because he had got through coherently, old Shotwell began
fumbling and muttering, "My speech! Where's my speech! I've lost it.
Somebody might find it. If the newspapers should get it----"
But the dinner was over. The boxes were emptying, the intoxicated were
being helped out by their friends, the directors were looking uneasily
at Fosdick for permission to join their departing families. Fosdick took
Shotwell firmly by the arm and escorted him, still mumbling, to the
carriage entrance, there turning him over to Mrs. Shotwell.
"He's very precious to us all, madam," said Fosdick, indifferent to her
almost sneering coldness, and giving the old man a patronizing clap on
the shoulder. "Take good care of him." To himself he added, "I'll
warrant she will, with that pension his for his lifetime only."
And he went home, to sleep the sleep of a good man at the end of a good
day.
*III*
*"ONLY COUSIN NEVA"*
Letty Morris--"Mrs. Joe"--was late for her Bohemian lunch. She called
it Bohemian because she had asked a painter, a piano player and an
actress, and was giving it in the restaurant of a studio building. As
her auto rolled up to the curb, she saw at the entrance, just going
away, a woman of whom her first thought was "What strange, fascinating
eyes!" then, "Why, it's only Cousin Neva"; for, like most New Yorkers,
she was exceedingly wary of out-of-town people, looking on them, with
nothing to offer, as a waste of time and money. As it was, on one of
those friendly impulses that are responsible for so much of the good,
and so much of the evil, in this world, she cried, "Why, Genevieve
Carlin! What are _you_ doing _here_?" And she descended from her auto
and rushed up to Neva.
"How d'ye do, Letty?" said Neva distantly. She had startled, had
distinctly winced, at the sound of those affected accents and tones
which the fashionable governesses and schools are rapidly making the
natural language of "our set" and its fringes.
"Why haven't you let me know?" she reproached. As the words left her
lips, up rose within herself an answer which she instantly assumed was
_the_ answer. The divorce, of course! She flushed with annoyance at her
tactlessness. Her first sensation in thinking of divorce was always
that it was scandalous, disgraceful, immoral, a stain upon the woman and
her family; but quick upon that feeling, lingering remnant of discarded
childhood training, always came the recollection that divorce was no
longer unfashionable, was therefore no longer either immoral or
disgraceful, was scandalous in a delightful, aristocratic way. "But,"
reflected she, "probably Neva still feels about that sort of thing as we
all used to feel--at least, all the best people." She was confirmed in
this view by her cousin's embarrassed expression. She hastened to her
relief with "Joe and I talk of you often. Only the other day I started
a note to you, asking you when you could visit us."
She did not believe, when Neva told the literal truth in replying: "I
came to work. I thought I wouldn't disturb you."
"Disturb!" cried Mrs. Morris. "You are so queer. How long have you
been here?"
"Several weeks. I--I've an apartment in this house."
"How delightful!" exclaimed Letty absently. She was herself again and
was thinking rapidly. A new man, even from "the provinces," might be
fitted in to advantage; but what could she do with another woman, one
more where there were already too many for the men available for idling?
"You must let me see something of you," said she, calmer but still
cordial. "You must come to dinner--Saturday night." That was Letty
Morris's resting night--a brief and early dinner, early to bed for a
sleep that would check the ravages of the New York season in a beauty
that must be husbanded, since she had crossed the perilous line of
thirty. "Yes--Saturday--at half-past seven. And here's one of my cards
to remind you of the address. I must be going now. I'm horribly late."
And with a handshake and brush of the lips on Neva's cheek, the small,
brilliant, blonde cousin was gone.
"What a nuisance," she was saying to herself. "Why _did_ I let myself be
surprised into attracting her attention? Now, I'll have to do something
for her--we're really under obligations to her father--I don't believe
Joe has paid back the last of that loan yet. Well, I can use her
occasionally to take Joe off my hands. She looks all right--really,
it's amazing how she has improved in dress. She seems to know how to
put on her clothes now. But she's too retiring to be dangerous. A
woman who's presentable yet not dangerous is almost desirable, is as
rare as an attractive man."
The delusion of our own importance is all but universal--and everywhere
most happy; but for it, would not life's cynicism broaden from the
half-hidden smirk into a disheartening sneer? Among fashionable people,
narrow, and carefully educated only in class prejudice and pretentious
ignorance, this delusion becomes an obsession. The whole hardworking,
self-absorbed world is watching them--so they delight in imagining--is
envying them, is imitating them. Letty assumed that Neva had kept away
through awe, and that she would now take advantage of her politeness to
cling to her and get about in society; as Mrs. Morris thought of nothing
but society, she naturally felt that the whole world must be similarly
occupied. She would have been astounded could she have seen into Neva's
mind--seen the debate going on there as to how to entrench herself
against annoyance from her cousin. "Shall I refuse her invitation?"
thought Neva. "Or, is it better to go Saturday night, and have done
with, since I must go to her house once?" She reluctantly decided for
Saturday night. "And after that I can plead my work; and soon she'll
forget all about me. It's ridiculous that people who wish to have
nothing to do with each other should be forced by a stupid
conventionality to irritate themselves and each other."
Saturday afternoon, each debated writing the other, postponing the
engagement. Neva had a savage attack of the blues; at such times she
shut herself in, certain she could not get from the outside the cheer
she craved and too keen to be content with the cheer that would offer
shallow, wordy sympathy, or, worse still, self-complacent pity. As for
Letitia, she was quarreling with her husband--about money as usual. She
was one of those doll-looking women who so often have serpentine craft
and wills of steel. Morris adored her, after the habit of men with such
women; she made him feel so big and strong and intellectually superior;
and her childish, clinging ways were intoxicating, as she had great
physical charm, she so cool and smooth and golden white and delicately
perfumed. She always got her own way with everyone; usually her
husband, her "master," yielded at the first onset. Once in a while--and
this happened to be of those times--he held out for the pleasure of
seeing her pout and weep and then, as he yielded, burst into a radiance
like sunshine through summer rain. If she had had money of her own he
might have got a sudden and even shocking insight into the internal
machinery of that doll's head; as it was, his delusion about the
relative intelligence and strength of himself and his Letty was intact.
Mrs. Joe did not share his enthusiasm for these "love-tilts"; she did
not mind employing the "doll game" in her dealings with the world, but
she would have liked to be her real self at home. This, however, was
impossible if she was to get the largest results in the quickest and
easiest way. So she wearily played on at the farce, and at times grew
heartsick with envy of the comparatively few independent--which means
financially independent--women of her set, and disliked her Joe when she
was forced to think about him distinctly, which was not often. In
marriages where the spirit has shriveled and died within the letter,
habit soon hardens a wife to an amazing degree toward practical
unconsciousness of the existence of her husband, even though he be
uxorious. Letty's married life bored her; but she had no more sense of
degradation in thus making herself a pander, and for hire, than had her
husband, at the same business downtown. She saw so many of the "very
best" women doing just as she did, using each the fittest form of
cajolery and cozening to wheedle money for extravagances out of their
husbands, that it seemed as much the proper and reputable thing as going
to bullfights seems to Spaniards, or watching wild beasts devour men,
women, and children seemed to the "very best" people of imperial Rome.
For the same reason, her husband did not linger upon the real meaning of
the phrase "legal adviser" whereunder the business of himself and his
brother lawyers was so snugly and smugly masked--the business of helping
respectable scoundrels glut bestial appetites for other people's
property without fear of jail.
The quarrel had so far advanced that Saturday night was the logical time
for the climax in sentimental reconciliation. However, Mrs. Morris
decided to endure a twenty-four hours' delay and "get Neva over with."
She repented the instant Neva appeared. "I had no idea she could be so
good looking," thought she, in a panic at the prospect of rivalry, with
desirable available men wofully scarce. She swept Neva with a
searching, hostile glance. "She's really almost beautiful."
And, in fact, never before was Neva so good looking. Vanity is an air
plant not at all dependent upon roots in realities for nourishment and
growth. Thus, she, born with rather less than the normal physical
vanity, had been unaffected by the charms she could not but have seen
had she looked at herself with vanity's sprightly optimism. Nor was
there any encouragement in the atmosphere of old-fashioned Battle Field,
where the best people were still steeped in medieval disdain of
"foolishness" and regarded the modern passion for the joy of life as
sinful. Also, she was without that aggressive instinct to please by
physical charm which even circumvents the regulations of a chapter of
cloistered nuns.
Until she came to New York, she had given her personal appearance no
attention whatever, beyond instinctively trying to be as unobtrusive as
possible; and even in New York her concessions to what she regarded as
waste of time were really not concessions at all, were merely the result
of exercising in the most indifferent fashion her natural good taste, in
choosing the best from New York's infinite variety as she had chosen the
best from Battle Field's meager and commonplace stocks of goods for
women. The dress she was wearing that evening was not especially grand,
seemed quakerishly high in the neck in comparison with Letty's; for
Letty had a good back and was not one to conceal a charm which it was
permissible to display. But Neva, in soft silver-gray; with her hair,
bright, yet neither gold nor red, but all the shades between, framing
her long oval face in a pompadour that merged gracefully into a simple
knot at the back of her small head; with her regular features shown to
that advantage which regular features have only when shoulders and neck
are bared; and with her complexion cleared of all sallowness and
restored to its natural smooth pallor by the healthful air and life of
New York--Neva, thus recreated, was more than distinguished looking, was
beautiful. "Who'd have thought it?" reflected Letty crossly. "What a
difference clothes do make!" But Neva was slender--"thin, painfully
thin," thought Mrs. Morris, with swiftly recovering spirits. She
herself was plump and therefore thought "scrawniness" hideous, though
often, to draw attention to her rounded charms, she wailed piteously
that she was getting "disgracefully fat."
Neither of the men--her husband and Boris Raphael, the painter--shared
her poor opinion of Neva after the first glance. Morris did not care
for thin women, but he thought Neva had a certain beauty--not the kind
he admired, but a kind, nevertheless. Boris studied the young woman
with an expression that made Mrs. Joe redden with jealousy. "You think
my cousin pretty?" said she to him, as they went down to dinner far
enough ahead of Neva and Morris to be able to talk freely.
"More than that," replied Boris, "I think her unusual."
"If you ever chance to see her in ordinary dress, you'll change your
mind, I'm sorry to say," said Letty softly. "Poor Neva! Hers is a sad
case. She's one of the ought-to-bes-but-aren'ts."
"It's my business to see things as they are," was the painter's
exasperating reply. "And I'd not in any circumstances be blind to such
a marvelous study in long lines as she."
"Marvelous!" Mrs. Morris laughed.
"Long face, long neck, long bust, long waist, long legs, long hands and
feet," explained he. "It's the kind of beauty that has to be pointed
out to ordinary eyes before they see it. I can imagine her passing for
homely in a rude community, just as her expression of calm might pass
for coldness."
Mrs. Morris revised her opinion of Boris. She had thought him a most
tactful person; she knew the truth now. A man who would praise one
woman to another could never be called tactful; to praise
enthusiastically was worse than tactless, it was boorish. "How
impossible it is," thought she, "for a man of low origin to rise wholly
above it." She said, "I'm delighted that my cousin pleases you," as
coldly as she could speak to a man after whom everyone was running.
"I must paint her," he said, noting Letty's anger, but indifferent to
it. "If I succeed, everyone will see what I see. If that woman were to
love and be loved, her face would become--divine! Divinely human, I
mean--for she's flesh and blood. The fire's there--laid and ready for
the match."
When he and Morris were alone after dinner he began on Neva again,
unaffected by her seeming incapacity to respond to his efforts to
interest her. "I could scarcely talk for watching her," he said. "She
puzzles me. I should not have believed a girl--an unmarried
woman--could have such an expression."
"She's not a girl," explained Morris. "She has taken her maiden name
again. She was Mrs. Armstrong--was married until last summer to the
chap that was made president of the O.A.D. last October."
"Never heard of him," said the artist.
"That shows how little you know about what's going on downtown. When
Galloway died--you've heard of Galloway?"
"I painted him--an old eagle--or vulture."
"We'll say eagle, as he's dead. When he died, there was a split in the
O.A.D., which he had dominated and used for years--and mighty little he
let old Shotwell have, I understand, in return for doing the dirty work.
Well, Fosdick finally cooked up that investigation, frightened everybody
into fits, won out, beat down the Galloway crowd, threw out Shotwell and
put in this young Western fellow."
"What is the O.A.D.?"
"You must have seen the building, the advertisements everywhere--knight
in armor beating off specters of want. It's an insurance company."
"I thought insurance companies were to insure people."
"Not at all," replied Morris. "That's what people think they're
for--just as they think steel companies are to make steel, and coal
companies to mine coal, and railway companies to carry freight and
passengers. But all that, my dear fellow, is simply incidental.
They're really to mass big sums of money for our great financiers to
scramble for."
"How interesting," said Raphael in an uninterested tone. "Some time I
must try to learn about those things. Then your cousin has divorced her
husband? That's the tragedy I saw in her face."
"Tragedy!" Morris laughed outright. "There you go again, Boris. You're
always turning your imagination loose."
"To explore the mysteries my eyes find, my dear Joe," said Boris,
unruffled. "You people--the great mass of the human race--go through
the world blindfold--blindfolded by ignorance, by prejudice, by letting
your stupid brain tell your eyes what they are seeing instead of letting
your eyes tell your brain."
"I never heard there was much to Neva Carlin."
"Naturally," replied Boris. "Not all the people who have individuality,
personality, mind and heart, beat a drum and march in the middle of the
street to inform the world of the fact. As for emotions--real
emotions--they don't shriek and weep; they hide and are dumb. I, who
let my eyes see for themselves, look at this woman and see beauty
barefoot on the hot plowshares. And you--do not look and, therefore,
see nothing."
Morris made no reply, but his expression showed he was only silenced,
not convinced. He knew his old friend Boris was a great painter--the
prices he got for his portraits proved it; and the portraits themselves
were certainly interesting, had the air that irradiates from every work
of genius, whether one likes or appreciates the work or not. He knew
that the basis of Raphael's genius was in his marvelous sight--"simply
seeing where others will not" was Boris's own description of his gift.
Yet when Boris reported to him what he saw, he was incredulous. "An
artist's wild imagination," he said to himself. In the world of the
blind, the dim-eyed man is king, not the seeing man; the seeing man--the
"seer"--passes for mad, and the blind follow those with not enough sight
to rouse the distrust of their flock.
When the painter returned to the drawing-room Neva was gone. As his
sight did not fail him when he watched the motions of his bright, blond
little friend, Mrs. Joe, he suspected her of having had a hand in Neva's
early departure. And she thought she had herself. But, in fact, Neva
left because she was too shy to face again the man whose work she had so
long reverenced. She knew she ought to treat him as an ordinary human
being, but she could not; and she yielded to the impulse to fly.
"You must take me to sec your cousin," said he, his chagrin plain.
"Whenever you like," agreed Letty, with that elaborate graciousness
which raises a suspicion of insincerity in the most innocent mind.
"Thank you," said Boris. And to her surprise and relief he halted
there, without attempting to pin her down to day and hour. "He asked
simply to be polite," decided she, "and perhaps to irritate me a little.
He's full of those feminine tricks."
*IV*
*THE FOSDICK FAMILY*
In each of America's great cities, East, West, South, Far West, a cliff
of marble glistening down upon the thoroughfare where the most thousands
would see it daily; armies of missionaries, so Fosdick liked to call
them, moving everywhere among the people; other armies of officers and
clerks, housed in the clifflike palaces and garnering the golden
harvests reaped by the missionaries--such was the scene upon which
Horace Armstrong looked out from his aerie in the vastest of the palaces
oL the O.A.D. And it inspired him.
Institutions, like individuals, have a magnetism, a power to attract and
to hold, that is quite apart from any analyzable quality or
characteristic. Armstrong had grown up in the O.A.D., had preached it
as he rose in its service until he had preached belief in it into
himself--a belief that was unshaken by the series of damning exposures
of its Wall Street owners and users, and had survived his own
discoveries, as the increasing importance of his successive positions
had forced the "inside ring" to let him deeper and deeper into the
secrets. He had not been long in the presidency before he saw that the
whole system for gathering in more and more policy holders, however
beneficent incidental results might be, had as its sole purpose the
drawing of more and more money within reach of greedy, unclean hands.
The fact lay upon the surface of the O.A.D. as plain as a great green
serpent sprawled upon the ooze of a marsh. Why else would these
multimillionaire money hunters interest themselves in insurance? And not
a day passed without his having to condemn and deplore--in his own
mind--acts of the Fosdick clique. But morals are to a great extent a
matter of period and class; Armstrong, busy, unanalytic, "up-to-date"
man of affairs, accepted without much question the current moral
standards of and for the man of affairs. And when he saw the inside
ring "going too far," here and there, now and then, he no more thought
of denouncing it and abandoning his career than a preacher would think
of resigning a bishopric because he found that his fellow bishops had
not been made more than human by the laying on of hands.
Where he could, Armstrong ignored; where he could not ignore--he told
himself that the end excused the means.
The busy days fled. He had the feeling of being caught in a revolving
door that took him from bedtime to bedtime again without letting him out
to accomplish anything; and he was soon so well accommodated to the
atmosphere of high finance that he was breathing it with almost no
sensation of strangeness. When old Shotwell died--of "heart
failure"--Armstrong took out the undelivered speech.
The day after the "testimonial," he had decided that to read that speech
would be dangerously near to the line between honor and dishonor;
besides, it probably contained many things which, whether true or
prejudiced, might affect his peace of mind, might inflict upon his
conscience unnecessary discomforts. A wise man is careful not to admit
to his valuable brain space matters which do not help him in the
accomplishment of his purposes. Should he mail the manuscript to
Shotwell? No. That might tempt the old man to a course of folly and
disaster. Armstrong hid the "stick of dynamite" among his private
papers. But now, Shotwell was dead; and--well, he still believed in the
O.A.D.--in the main; but many things had happened in the months since he
came on from the West, many and disquieting things. He felt that he
owed it to himself, and to the O.A.D., to gather from any and every
source information about the Fosdick ring. He unfolded the manuscript,
spread it before him on the desk.
Eleven typewritten pages, setting forth in detail how Fosdick had slyly
lured Shotwell into committing, apparently alone, certain
"indiscretions" for which there happened to be legal penalties of one to
ten years in the penitentiary at hard labor; how Shotwell, thus
isolated, was trapped--though, as he proceeded to show, he had done
nothing morally or legally worse than all the others had done, the
Fosdick faction being careful to entangle in each misdeed enough of the
Galloway faction to make itself secure. And all the offenses were those
"mere technicalities" which high finance permits the law to condemn only
because they, when committed in lower circles, cease to be justifiable
exceptions to the rule and become those "grave infractions of social
order and of property rights" which Chamber of Commerce dinners and bar
associations of corporation lawyers so strenuously lecture the people
about. And so, Shotwell had fallen.
Armstrong read the document four times--the first time, at a gallop; the
second time, line by line; the third time, with a long, thoughtful pause
after each paragraph; the fourth time, line by line again, with one hand
supporting his brow while the index finger of the other traced under
each separate word. Then he leaned back and gazed from peak to peak of
the skyscrapers, stretching range on range toward harbor and river. He
was not thinking now of the wrongs, the crimes against that mass of
policy holders, so remote, so abstract. He was listening to a
different, a more terrible sound than the vague wail of that vague mass;
he was hearing the ticking of a death-watch. For he had discovered that
Fosdick had him trapped in just the same way.
As a precaution? Or with the time of his downfall definitely fixed?
Armstrong began to pace the limits of his big private room. For a turn
or so it surprised him to find that he could move freely about; for,
with the thought that he was in another man's power, had come a physical
sensation of actual chains and bolts and bars, of dungeon walls and
dungeon air. In another man's power! In Fosdick's power! He, Horace
Armstrong, proud, intensely alive and passionately fond of freedom, with
inflexible ambition set upon being the master of men--he, a slave,
dependent for his place, for his authority, for his very reputation.
Dependent on the nod of a fellow man. He straightened himself, shook
himself; he clenched his fists and his teeth until the powerful muscles
of his arms and shoulders and jaws swelled to aching, until the blood
beat in his skin like flame against furnace wall.
The door opened; he saw as he was turning that it was Josiah Fosdick; he
wheeled back toward the window because he knew that if he should find
himself full face to this master of his before he got self-control, he
would spring at him and sink his fingers in his throat and wring the
life out of him. The will to kill! To feel that creature under him,
under his knees and fingers; to see eyes and tongue burst out; to know
that the brain that dared conceive the thought of making a slave of him
was dead for its insolence!
"Good morning, my boy!" Josiah was saying in that sonorous, cheery voice
of his. He always wore his square-crowned hard hat or his top hat well
back from his brow when he was under roof downtown; and he was always
nervously chewing at a cigar, which sometimes was lighted and sometimes
not. Just now it was not lighted and the odor of it was to Armstrong
the sickening stench of the personality of his master.
"My master!" he muttered, and wiped the sweat from his forehead; with
eyes down and the look of the lion cringing before the hot iron in its
tamer's hand he muttered a response.
"I want you to put my son Hugo in as one of the fourth vice-presidents,"
continued the old man, seating himself and cocking his trim feet on a
corner of the table. "He must be broken to the business, and I've told
him he's got to start at the bottom of the ladder."
Armstrong contrived to force a smile at this ironic pleasantry of his
master's. He instantly saw Josiah's scheme--to have the young man
inducted into the business; presently to give him the dignity and honor
of the presidency, ejecting Armstrong, perhaps in discredit to justify
the change and to make it impossible for him to build up in another
company.
"You'll do what you can to teach him the ropes?"
"Certainly," said Armstrong, at the window.
Fosdick came up close to him, put his hand affectionately on his
shoulder. "You've grown into my heart, Horace. I feel as if you were
another son of mine, as if Hugo were your younger brother. I want you
to regard him as such. I'm old; I'll soon be off the boards. I like to
think of you two young fellows working together in harmony. It may be
that----"
Armstrong had himself well within the harness now. He looked calmly at
Fosdick and saw a twinkle in those good-natured, wicked eyes of his, a
warning that he had guessed Armstrong's suspicion and was about to
counter with something he flattered himself was particularly shrewd.
"It may be I'll want your present place for the boy, after a few years.
Perhaps it will be better not to put him there; again it may be a good
thing. If I decide to do it, you'll have a better place--something
where there'll be an even bigger swing for your talents. I'll see to
that. I charge myself with your future."
Armstrong turned away, bringing his jaws together with a snap.
"You trust me, don't you?" said Fosdick, not quite certain that
Armstrong had turned to hide an overmastering emotion of gratitude.
"I'd advise against making Hugo a vice-president just at present," said
Armstrong.
"Why?" demanded Fosdick with a frown.
"I think such a step wouldn't be wise until after this new policy
holders' committee has quieted down."
Fosdick laughed and waved his arm. "Those smelling committees! My boy,
I'm used to them. Every big corporation has one or more of 'em on hand
all the time. The little fellows are always getting jealous of the men
who control, are always trying to scare them into paying larger
interest--for that's what it amounts to. We men who run things
practically borrow the public's money for use in our enterprises. You
can call it stocks or bonds or mortgages or what not, but they're really
lenders, though they think they're shareholders and expect bigger
interest than mere money is worth. But we don't and won't give much
above the market rate. We keep the rest of the profits--we're entitled
to 'em. We'd play hob, wouldn't we, lying awake of nights thinking out
schemes to enable John Jones and Tom Smith to earn thirty, forty, fifty
per cent on their money?"
"But this committee--" There Armstrong halted, hesitating.
"Don't fret about it, young man. The chances are it'll quiet down of
itself. If it doesn't, if it should have in it some sturdy beggar who
persists, why, we'll hear from him sooner or later. When we get his
figure, we can quiet him--put him on the pay roll or give him a whack at
our appropriation for legal expenses."
"But this committee--" Armstrong stopped short--why should he warn
Fosdick? Why go out of his way to be square with the man who had
enslaved him? Had he not done his whole duty when he had refused to
listen to the overtures of the new combination against Fosdick? Indeed,
was it more than a mere suspicion that such a combination existed?
"This committee--what?"
"You feel perfectly safe about it?"
"It couldn't find out anything, if there was anything to find out. And
if it did find out anything, what'd it do with it? No newspaper would
publish it--our advertising department takes care of that. The State
Government wouldn't notice it--our legal department takes care of them."
"Sometimes there's a slip-up. A few years ago----"
"Yes," interrupted Fosdick; "it's true, once in a while there's a big
enough howl to frighten a few weak brothers. But not Josiah Fosdick,
and not the O.A.D. We keep books better than we did before the big
clean-up. A lot of good those clean-ups did! As if anybody could get
up any scheme that would prevent the men with brains from running things
as they damn please."
"You're right there," said Armstrong. He had thought out the beginnings
of a new course. "Well, if you put Hugo in, I suggest you give him my
place as chairman of the finance committee. My strong hold is executive
work. Let those that know finance attend to taking care of the money.
I want to devote myself exclusively to getting it in."
Armstrong saw this suggestion raised not the shadow of a suspicion in
Fosdick's mind that he was trying to get rid of his share in the
responsibility for the main part of the "technically illegal" doings of
the controllers of the company. "You simply to retain your _ex officio_
membership?" said he reflectively.
"That's it," assented Armstrong.
"If you urge it, I'll see that it is considered. Your time ought all to
be given to raking in new business and holding on to the old. Yes, it's
a good suggestion. Of course, I'll see that you get your share of the
profits from our little side deals, just the same."
"Thank you," said Armstrong. He concealed his amusement. In the
company there were rings within rings, and the profits increased as the
center was approached. He knew that he himself had been put in a ring
well toward the outside. His profits were larger than his salary, large
though it was; but they were trifling in comparison with the "melons"
reserved for the inner rings, were infinitesimal beside the big melon
Josiah reserved for himself, as his own share in addition to a share in
each ring's "rake off." The only ring Josiah didn't put himself in was
the outermost ring of all--the ring of policy holders. There was
another feature in which insurance surpassed railways and industrials.
In them the controller sometimes had to lock up a large part of his own
personal resources in carrying blocks of stock that paid a paltry four
or five or six per cent interest, never more than seven or eight, often
nothing at all. But in insurance, the controller played his game wholly
with other people's money. Josiah, for instance, carried a policy of ten
thousand dollars, and that was the full extent of his investment; he
held his power over the millions of the masses simply because the
proxies of the policy holders were made out in blank to his creatures,
the general agents, whom he made and, at the slightest sign of flagging
personal loyalty, deposed.
Fosdick was still emitting compliment and promise like a giant
pinwheel's glittering shower when the boy brought Armstrong a card. He
controlled his face better than he thought. "Your daughter," he said to
Fosdick, carelessly showing him the card. "I suppose she's downtown to
see you, and they told her you were in my office."
"Amy!" exclaimed Fosdick, forgetting his manners and snatching the card.
"What the devil does _she_ want downtown? I'll just see--it must be
important."
He hurried out. In the second of Armstrong's suite of three offices, he
saw her, seated comfortably--a fine exhibit of fashion, and not so
unmindful of the impression her elegance was making upon the furtively
glancing underlings as she seemed or imagined herself. At sight of her
father she colored, then tossed her head defiantly. "What is it?" he
demanded, with some anxiety. "What has brought _you_ downtown to see
me?"
"I didn't come to see you," she replied. "I sent my card to Mr.
Armstrong."
"Well, what do you want of him?" said Josiah, regardless of the presence
of Armstrong's three secretaries.
"I'll explain that to _him_."
"You'll do nothing of the sort. I can't have my children interrupting
busy men. Come along with me."
"I came to see Mr. Armstrong, and I'm going to see him," she retorted
imperiously.
Her father changed his tactics like the veteran strategist that he was.
"All right, all right. Come in. Only, we're not going to stay long.
"I don't want you," she said, laughing. "I want him to show me over the
building."
"Lord bless my soul!" exclaimed Fosdick, winking at the three smiling
secretaries. "And he the president! Did anybody ever hear the like!"
And he took her by the arm and led her in, saying as they came, "This
young lady, finding time heavy on her hands uptown, has come to get you
to show her over the building."
Armstrong had risen to bow coldly. "I'm sorry, but I really haven't
time to-day," said he formally.
Fosdick's brow reddened and his eyes flashed. He had not expected
Armstrong to offer to act as his daughter's guide; but neither had he
expected this tone from an employee. "Don't be so serious, young man,"
said he, roughness putting on the manner of good nature. "Take my
daughter round and bring her to my office when you are through."
To give Armstrong time and the opportunity to extricate himself from the
impossible position into which he had rushed, Amy said, "What grand,
beautiful offices these are! No wonder the men prefer it downtown to
the fussy, freaky houses the women get together uptown. I haven't been
here since the building was opened. Papa made a great ceremony of that,
and we all came--I was nine. Now, Mr. Armstrong, you can count up, if
you're depraved enough, and know exactly how old I am."
Armstrong had taken up his hat. "Whenever you're ready, we'll start,"
said he, having concluded that it would be impossible to refuse without
seeming ridiculous.
When the two were in the elevator on their way to the view from the top
of the building, Amy glanced mischievously up at him. "You see, I got
my way," said she. "I always do."
Armstrong shrugged and smiled stolidly. "In trifles. Willful people
are always winning--in trifles."
"Trifles are all that women deal in," rejoined she.
At the top, she sent one swift glance round the overwhelming panorama of
peak and precipice and canon swept by icy January wind and ran back to
the tower, drawing her furs still closer about her. "I didn't come to
see this," she said. "I came to find out why you don't--why you have
cut me off your visiting list. I've written you--I've tried to get you
on the telephone. Never did I humiliate myself so abjectly--in fact,
never before was I abject at all. It isn't like you, to be as good
friends as you and I have been, and then, all at once, to act like
this--unless there was a reason. I haven't many friends. I haven't any
I like so well as you--that's frank, isn't it? I thought we were going
to be _such_ friends." This nervously, with an air of timidity that was
the thin cover of perfect self-possession and self-confidence.
"So did I," said Armstrong, his eyes on hers with a steadiness she could
not withstand, "until I got at your notion of friendship. You can have
dogs and servants, hangers-on, but not friends."
"What did I do?" she asked innocently. "Gracious, how touchy you are."
In his eyes there was an amused refusal to accept her pretense. "You
understand. Don't 'fake' with me. I'm too old a bird for that snare."
"If I did anything to offend you, it was unconscious."
"Perhaps it was--at the time. You've got the habit of ordering people
about, of having everybody do just what you wish. But, in thinking
things over, didn't you guess what discouraged me?"
She decided to admit what could not be denied. "Yes--I did," said she.
"And that is why I've come to you. I forgot, and treated you like the
others. I did it several times, and disregarded the danger signals you
flew. Let's begin once more--will you?"
"Certainly," said Armstrong, but without enthusiasm.
"You aren't forgiving me," she exclaimed. "Or--was there--something
else?"
His eyes shifted and he retreated a step. "You mustn't expect much from
me, you know," said he, looking huge and unapproachable. "All my time
is taken up with business. You've no real use for a man like me. What
you want is somebody to idle about with you."
"That's just what I don't want," she cried, gazing admiringly up at him.
And she was sad and reproachful as she pleaded. "You oughtn't to desert
me. I know I can't do much for you, but-- You found me idle and oh, so
bored. Why, I used to spend hours in trying to think of trivial ways to
pass the time. I'd run to see pictures I didn't in the least care
about, and linger at the dressmakers' and the milliners' shops and the
jewelers'. I'd dress myself as slowly as possible. You can't
imagine--you who have to fight against being overwhelmed with things to
do. You can't conceive what a time the women in our station have. And
one suggestion you made--that I study architecture and fit myself to
help in building our house--it changed my whole life."
"It was the obvious thing to do," said he, and she saw he was not in the
least flattered by her flattery which she had thought would be
irresistible.
"You forget," replied she, "that we women of the upper class are brought
up not to put out our minds on anything for very long, but to fly from
one thing to another. I'd never have had the persistence to keep at
architecture until the hard part of the reading was finished. I'd have
bought a lot of books, glanced at the pictures, read a few pages and
then dropped the whole business. And it was really through you that I
got father to introduce me to Narcisse Siersdorf. I've grown _so_ fond
of her! Why is it the women out West, out where you come from, are so
much more capable than we are?"
"Because they're educated in much the same way as the men," replied he.
"Also, I suppose the men out there aren't rich enough yet to tempt the
women to become--odalisques. Here, every one of you is either an
odalisque or trying to get hold of some man with money enough to make
her one."
"What is an odalisque? It's some kind of a woman, isn't it?"
"Well--it's of that sex."
"You think I'm very worthless, don't you?"
"To a man like me. For a man with time for what they call the
ornamental side of life, you'd be--just right."
"Was that why--the _real_ reason why--you stopped coming?"
"Yes."
He was looking at her, she at the floor, gathering her courage to make a
reply which instinct forbade and vanity and desire urged. Hugo's head
appeared in the hatchway entrance to the tower room. As she was facing
it, she saw him immediately. "Hello, brother," she cried, irritation in
her voice.
He did not answer until he had emerged into the room. Then he said with
great dignity, "Amy, father wants you. Come with me." This without a
glance at Armstrong.
"Would you believe he is three years younger than I?" said she to
Armstrong with a laugh. "Run along, Hugo, and tell papa we're coming."
Hugo turned on Armstrong. "Will you kindly descend?" he ordered, with
the hauteur of a prince in a novel or play.
"Do as your sister bids, Hugo," said Armstrong, with a carelessness that
bordered on contempt. He was in no very good humor with the Fosdick
family and Hugo's impudence pushed him dangerously near to the line
where a self-respecting man casts aside politeness and prudence.
Hugo drew himself up and stared coldly at the "employee." "You will
please not address me as Hugo."
"What then?" said Armstrong, with no overt intent to offend. "Shall I
whistle when I want you, or snap my fingers?"
Amy increased Hugo's fury by laughing at him. "You'd better behave,
Hugo," she said. "Come along." And she pushed him, less reluctant than
he seemed, toward the stairway.
The three descended in the elevator together, Amy talking incessantly,
Armstrong tranquil, Hugo sullen. At the seventeenth floor, Armstrong had
the elevator stopped. "Good-by," he said to Amy, without offering to
shake hands.
"Good-by," responded she, extending her hand, insistently. "Remember,
we are friends again."
With a slight noncommittal smile, he touched her gloved fingers and went
his way.
There was no one in Fosdick's private room; so, Hugo was free to ease
his mind. "What do you mean by coming down here and making a scandal?"
he burst out. "It was bad enough for you to encourage the fellow's
attentions uptown--to flirt with him. You--flirting with one of your
father's employees!"
Amy's eyes sparkled angrily. "Horace Armstrong is my best friend," she
said. "You must be careful what you say to me about him."
"The next thing, you'll be boasting you're in love with him," sneered
her brother.
"I might do worse," retorted she. "I could hardly do better."
"What's the matter, children?" cried their father, entering suddenly by
a door which had been ajar, and by which they had not expected him.
"Hugo has been making a fool of himself before Armstrong," said Amy.
"Why did you send him after me?"
"I?" replied Fosdick. "I simply told him where you were."
"But I suspected," said Hugo. "And, sure enough, I found her flirting
with him. I stopped it--that's all."
Fosdick laughed boisterously--an unnatural laugh, Amy thought. "Do
light your cigar, father," she said irritably. "It smells horrid."
Fosdick threw it away. "Horace is a mighty attractive fellow," he said.
"I don't blame you, Mimi." Then, with good-humored seriousness, "But
you must be careful, girl, not to raise false hopes in him. Be
friendly, but don't place yourself in an unpleasant position. You
oughtn't to let him lose sight of the--the gulf between you."
"What gulf?"
"You know perfectly well he's not in our class," exclaimed Hugo, helping
out his somewhat embarrassed father.
"What is our class?" inquired Amy in her most perverse mood.
"Shut up, Hugo!" commanded his father. "She understands."
"But I do not," protested Amy.
"Very well," replied her father, kissing her. "Be careful--that's all.
Now, I'll put you in your carriage." On the way he said gravely,
tenderly, "I'll trust you with a secret--a part of one. I know
Armstrong better than you do. He's an adventurer, and I fear he has got
into serious trouble, very serious. Keep this to yourself, Mimi. Trust
your father's judgment--at least, for a few months. Be most polite to
our fascinating friend, but keep him at a safe distance."
Fosdick could be wonderfully moving and impressive when he set himself
to it; and he knew when to stop as well as what to say. Amy made no
reply; in silence she let him tuck the robe about her and start her
homeward.
*V*
*NARCISSE AND ALOIS*
When Amy thought of her surroundings again, she was within a few blocks
of home. "I won't lunch alone," she said. "I can't, with this on my
mind." Through the tube she bade the coachman turn back to the
Siersdorf offices.
A few minutes, and her little victoria was at the curb before a
brownstone house that would have passed for a residence had there not
been, to the right of the doorway, a small bronze sign bearing the
words, "A. and N. Siersdorf, Builders." Two women were together on the
sidewalk at the foot of the stoop. One, Amy noted, had a curiously long
face, a curiously narrow figure; but she noted nothing further, as there
was nothing in her toilet to arrest the feminine eye, ever on the rove
for opportunities to learn something, or to criticise something, in the
appearance of other women. The other was Narcisse Siersdorf--a strong
figure, somewhat below the medium height, like Amy herself; a certain
remote Teutonic suggestion in the oval features, fair, fine skin and
abundant fair hair; a quick, positive manner, the dress of a highly
prosperous working woman, businesslike yet feminine and attractive in
its details. The short blue skirt, for example, escaped the ground
evenly, hung well and fitted well across the hips; the blue jacket was
cut for freedom of movement without sacrificing grace of line; and her
white gloves were fresh. As Amy descended, she heard Narcisse say to
the other woman, "Now, please don't treat me as a 'foreign devil.' If I
hadn't happened on you in the street, I'd never have seen you."
"Really, I've intended to stop in, every time I passed," said the other,
moving away as she saw Amy approaching. "Good-by. I'll send you a note
as soon as I get back--about a week."
"One of the girls from out West," Narcisse explained. "We went to
school together for a while. She's as shy as a hermit thrush, but worth
pursuing."
"You're to lunch with me," said Amy.
Narcisse shook her head. "No--and you're not lunching with me, to-day.
My brother's come, and we've got to talk business."
Amy frowned, remembering that those tactics were of no avail with
Narcisse. "Please! I want to meet your brother--I really ought to meet
him. And I'll promise not to speak."
"He's a man; so he'd be unable to talk freely, with a woman there,"
replied Narcisse. "You two would be posing and trying to make an
impression on each other."
"Please!"
They were in the doorway, Narcisse blocking the passage to the offices.
"Good-by," she said. "You mustn't push in between the poor and their
bread and butter."
Amy was turning away. Her expression--forlorn, hurt, and movingly
genuine--was too much for Narcisse's firmness. "You're not especially
gay to-day," said she, relentingly.
Amy, quick as a child to detect the yielding note, brought her flitting
mind back to Armstrong and her troubles. "My faith in a person I was
very fond of has been--shaken." There was a break in her voice, and her
bright shallow eyes were misty.
"Come in," said Narcisse, not wholly deceived, but too soft-hearted not
to give Amy the benefit of the doubt, just as she gave to whining
beggars, though she knew they were "working" her. Anyhow, was not Amy
to be pitied on general principles, and dealt gently with, as a victim
of the blight of wealth?
Amy never entered those offices without a new sensation of pleasure.
The voluntary environment of a human being is a projection, a
reflection, of his inner self, is the plain, undeceiving index to his
real life--for, is not the life within, the drama of thought, the real
life, and the drama of action but the imperfect, distorted shadowgraph?
The barest room can be most significant of the personality of its
tenant; his failure to make any impression on his surroundings is
conclusive. The most crowded or the gaudiest room may tell the same
story as the barest. The Siersdorfs conducted their business in five
rooms, each a different expression of the simplicity and sincerity which
characterized them and their work. There was the same notable absence
of the useless, of the merely ornamental, the same making of every
detail contributory both to use and to beauty. One wearies of rooms
that are in any way ostentatious; proclamation of simplicity is as
tedious as proclamation of pretentiousness. Those rooms seemed to
diffuse serenity; they were like the friends of whom one never tires
because they always have something new and interesting to offer.
Especially did there seem to be something miraculous about Narcisse's
own private office. It had few articles in it, and they unobtrusive;
yet, to sit in that room and look about was to have as many differing
impressions as one would get in watching a beam of white light upon a
plain of virgin snow.
"How _do_ you do it!" Amy exclaimed, as she seated herself. She almost
always made the same remark in the same circumstances. "But then," she
went on, "_you_ are a miracle. Now, there's the dress you've got
on--it's a jacket, a blouse, a belt and a skirt. But what have you done
to it? How do you induce your dressmaker to put together such things
for you?"
"You have to tell a dressmaker what to do," replied Narcisse, "and then
you have to tell her how to do it. If she knew what to make and how,
she'd not stop at dressmaking long. As I get only a few things, I can
take pains with them. But you get so many that you have to accept what
somebody else has thought out, and just as they've thought it out."
"And the result is, I look a frump," said Amy, half believing it for the
moment.
"You look the woman who has too many clothes to have any that really
belong to her," replied Narcisse, greatly to Amy's secret irritation.
"There's the curse of wealth--too many clothes, to be well dressed; too
many servants, to be well served; too many and too big houses, to be
well housed; too much food, to be well fed." Then to the office boy for
whom she had rung, "Please ask my brother if he's ready."
Soon Siersdorf appeared--about five years younger than his sister, who
seemed a scant thirty; in his dress and way of wearing the hair and
beard a suggestion of Europe, of Paris, and of the artist--a mere
suggestion, just a touch of individuality--but not a trace of pose, and
no eccentricity. He was of the medium height, very blond, with more
sympathy than strength in his features, but no defined weakness either.
A boy-man of fine instincts and tastes, you would have said; indolent,
yet capable of being spurred to toil; taking his color from his
surroundings, yet retaining his own fiber. He was just back from a year
abroad, where he had been studying country houses with especial
reference to harmony between house and garden--for, the Siersdorfs had a
theory that a place should be designed in its entirety and that the
builder should be the designer. They called themselves builders rather
than architects, because they thought that the separation of the two
inseparable departments was a ruinous piece of artistic
snobbishness--what is every kind of snobbishness in its essence but the
divorce of brain and hand? "No self-respecting man," Siersdorf often
said, "can look on his trade as anything but a profession, or on his
profession as anything but a trade."
During lunch Amy all but forgot her father's depressing hints against
Armstrong in listening as the brother and sister talked; and, as she
listened, she envied. They were so interested, and so interesting.
Their life revealed her own as drearily flat and wearily empty. They
knew so much, knew it so thoroughly. "How could anyone else fail to get
tired of me when I get so horribly tired of myself?" she thought, at the
low ebb of depression about herself--an unusual mood, for habitually she
took it for granted that she must be one of the most envied and most
enviable persons in the world.
Narcisse suddenly said to her brother, "Whom do you think I met to-day?
Neva Carlin." At that name Amy, startled, became alert. "She's got a
studio down at the end of the block," Narcisse went on, "and is taking
lessons from Boris Raphael. That shows she has real talent, unless--"
She paused with a smile.
"Probably," said Alois. "Boris is always in love with some woman."
"In love with love," corrected Narcisse. "Men who are always in love
care little about the particular woman who happens to be the medium of
the moment."
"I thought she was well off," said Alois; and then he looked slightly
confused, as if he was trying not to show that he had made a slip.
Narcisse seemed unconscious, though she replied with, "There are people
in the world who work when they don't have to. And a few of them are
women."
"But I thought she was married, too. It seems to me I heard it
somewhere."
"I didn't ask questions," said Narcisse. "I never do, when I meet
anyone I haven't seen in a long time. It's highly unsafe."
With studied carelessness Amy now said: "I'd like to know her. She's
the woman you were talking with at the door just now, isn't she?"
"Yes," said Narcisse.
"She looked--unusual," continued Amy. "I wish you'd take me to see
her."
"I'll be very glad to take you," Narcisse offered, on impulse. "Perhaps
she's really got talent and isn't simply looking for a husband.
Usually, when a woman shows signs of industry it means she's looking for
a husband, whatever it may seem to mean. But, if Neva's in earnest
about her work and has talent, you might put her in the way of an order
or so."
"I'll go, any day," said Amy. "Please don't forget."
She departed as soon as lunch was over, and the brother and sister set
out for their offices--not for their work; it they never left. "Pretty,
isn't she?" said Alois. "And extremely intelligent."
"She is intelligent in a scrappy sort of way," replied his sister. "But
she neither said nor did anything in your presence to-day to indicate
it."
"Well, then--she's pretty enough to make a mere man think she's
intelligent."
"I saw you were beginning to fall in love with her," said the sister.
"I? Ridiculous!"
"Oh, I know you better than you know yourself in some ways. You've been
bent on marriage for several years now."
"I want children," said he, after a pause.
"That's it--children. But, instead of looking for a mother for
children, you've got eyes only for the sort of women that either refuse
to have children, or, if they have them, abandon them to nurses. Let
the Amy Fosdick sort alone, Alois. A cane for a lounger; a staff for a
traveler."
"You're prejudiced."
"I'm a woman, and I know women. And I have interest enough in you to
tell you the exact truth about them."
"No woman ever knows the side of another woman that she shows only to
the man she cares for."
"A very unimportant side. Its gilt hardly lasts through the wedding
ceremony. If you are going to make the career you've got the talent
for, you don't want an Amy Fosdick. You'd be better off without any
wife, for that matter. You ought to have married when you were poor, if
you were going to do it. You're too prosperous now. If you marry a
poor woman, you'll spoil her; if you marry a rich woman, she'll spoil
you."
"You're too harsh with your own sex, Narcisse," said Alois. "If I
didn't know you so well, I'd think you were really hard. Who'd ever
imagine, just hearing you talk, that you are so tender-hearted you have
to be protected from your own sentimentality? The real truth is you
don't want me to marry."
"To marry foolishly--no. Tell me, 'Lois, what could you gain by
marrying--say, Amy Fosdick? In what way could she possibly help you?
She couldn't make a home for you--she doesn't know the first thing about
housekeeping. The prosperous people nowadays think their daughters are
learning housekeeping when they're learning to ruin servants by ordering
them about. You say I'm harsh with my sex, but, as a matter of fact,
I'm only just."
"Just!" Alois laughed. "That's the harshest word the human tongue
utters."
"I've small patience with women, I will admit. They amount to little,
and they're sinking to less. Girls used to dream of the man they'd
marry. Now it's not the man at all, but the establishment. Their
romance is of furniture and carriages and servants and clothes. A man,
any man, to support them in luxury."
"I've noticed that," admitted Alois.
"It's bad enough to look on marriage as a career," continued Narcisse.
"But, pass that over. What do the women do to fit themselves for it? A
man learns his business--usually in a half-hearted sort of way, but
still he tries to learn a little something about it. A woman affects to
despise hers--and does shirk it. She knows nothing about cooking,
nothing about buying, nothing about values or quantities or economy or
health or babies or-- She rarely knows how to put on the clothes she
gets; you'll admit that most women show plainly they haven't a notion
what clothes they ought to wear. Women don't even know enough to get
together respectably clever traps to catch the men with. The men fall
in; they aren't drawn in."
"Yet," said Alois, ironic and irritated, "the world staggers on."
"Staggers," retorted Narcisse. "And the prosperous classes--we're
talking about them--don't even stagger on. They stop and slide
back--what can be expected of the husbands of such wives, the sons and
daughters of such mothers?"
Narcisse was so intensely in earnest that her brother laughed outright.
"There, there, Cissy," said he, "don't be alarmed--I'm not even engaged
yet."
Narcisse made no reply. She knew the weak side of her brother's
character, knew its melancholy possibilities of development; and she had
guessed what was passing in his mind as he and Amy were trying each to
please the other.
"You yourself would be the better--the happier, certainly--for falling
in love," pursued Alois.
"Indeed I should," she assented with sincerity. "But the man who comes
for me--or whom I set my snares for--must have something more than a
pretty face or a few sex-tricks that ought not to fool a girl just out
of the nursery."
No arrow penetrates a man's self-esteem more deeply than an insinuation
that he is easy game for women. But Alois was no match for his sister
at that kind of warfare. He hid his irritation, and said
good-humoredly, "When you fall in love, my dear, it'll be just like the
rest of us--with your heart, not with your head."
Narcisse looked at him shrewdly, yet lovingly, too. "I'm not afraid of
your marrying because you've fallen in love. What I'm agitated about is
lest you'll fall in love because you want to marry."
Alois had an uncomfortable look that was confession.
*VI*
*NEVA GOES TO SCHOOL*
Boris let a week, nearly two weeks, pass before he went to see Miss
Carlin. He thought he was delaying in hope that the impulse to
investigate her would wane and wink out. He had invariably had this
same hope about every such impulse, and invariably had been
disappointed. The truth was, whenever he happened upon a woman with
certain lines of figure and certain expression of eyes--the lines and
the expression that struck the keynote of his masculine nerves for the
feminine--he pursued and paused not until he was satisfied, sated, calm
again--or hopelessly baffled. And as he was attractive to women, and
both adroit and reckless, and not at all afraid of them, his failures
were few.
In this particular case the cause of his long delay in beginning was
that he had just maneuvered his affair with the famously beautiful Mrs.
Coventry to the point where each was trying to get rid of the other with
full and obvious credit for being the one to break off. Mrs. Coventry
was stupid; even her beauty, changelessly lovely, bored and irritated
him. But nature had given her in default of brains a subtle craftiness;
thus, she had been able to meet Boris's every attempt to cast her off
with a move that put her in the position of seeming to be the one who
was doing the casting--and Boris had a feminine vanity in those matters.
At last, however, his weariness of his tiresome professional beauty and
his impatience to begin a new adventure combined to make him indifferent
to what people might say and think. Instead of sailing with Mrs.
Coventry, as he had intended, he abruptly canceled his passage; and
while she was descending the bay on the _Oceanic_, he was moving toward
Miss Carlin's studio.
"You have not forgotten me?" said he in that delightfully ingenuous way
of his, as he entered the large studio and faced the shy, plainly
dressed young woman from the Western small town.
"No, indeed," replied she, obviously fluttered and flattered by this
utterly unexpected visit from the great man.
"I come as a brother artist," he explained. He was standing before her,
handsome and picturesque in a costume that was yet conventional. He
diffused the odor of a powerful, agreeable, distinctly feminine perfume.
The feminine details of his toilet made his strong body and aggressive
face seem the more masculine; his face, his virile, clean, blond beard,
his massive shoulders, on the other hand, made his perfume, his plaited
shirt and flowing tie, his several gorgeous rings and his too neat boots
seem the more flauntingly feminine. "What I saw of you," he proceeded,
"and what your cousin told me, roused my interest and my curiosity."
At "curiosity" his clear, boyish eyes danced and his smile showed even,
very white teeth and part of the interior of a too ruddy, too healthily
red mouth. Like everything about him that was characteristic, this
smile both fascinated and repelled. Evidently this man drew an intense
physical joy from life, had made of his intellect an expert extractor of
the last sweet drop of pleasure that could be got from perfectly
healthy, monstrously acute nerves. When he used any nerve, any of those
trained servants of his sybarite passions, it was no careless, ignorant
performance such as ordinary mortals are content with. It was a
finished and perfect work of art--and somehow suggestive of a tiger
licking its chops and fangs and claws and fur that it might not lose a
shred of its victim's flesh. But this impression of repulsion was
fleeting; the charm of the personality carried off, where it did not
conceal, the sinister side. Because Boris understood his fellow beings,
especially the women, so thoroughly, they could not but think him
sympathetic, could not appreciate that he lured them into exposing or
releasing their emotions solely for his own enjoyment.
But Neva was seeing the artist so vividly that she was seeing the man
not at all. Only those capable of real enthusiasm can appreciate how
keenly she both suffered and enjoyed, in the presence of the Boris
Raphael who to her meant the incorporeal spirit of the art she loved and
served. He, to relieve her embarrassment and to give her time to
collect herself, turned his whole attention to her work--a portrait of
Molly, the old servant she had brought with her from Battle Field.
He seemed absorbed in the unfinished picture. In fact, he was thinking
only of her. By the infection to which highly sensitive people are
susceptible, he had become as embarrassed as she. One of the chief
sources of his power with women was his ability to be in his own person
whatever the particular woman he was seeking happened to be--foolish
with the foolish, youthful with the young, wise with the sensible,
serpentine with the crafty, coarse with the grossly material, spiritual
with the high-minded. He had all natures within himself and could show
whichever he pleased.
As he felt Neva's presence, felt the thrill of those moving graces of
her figure, the passion that those mysterious veiled eyes of hers
inspired, he was still perfectly aware of her defects, all of them, all
that must be done before she should be ready to pluck and enjoy. It was
one of her bad mornings. Her skin was rather sallow and her eyelids
were too heavy. Since she had been in New York, she had adopted saner
habits of regular eating and regular exercise than she had had, or had
even known about, in Battle Field. She was beginning to understand why
most people, especially most women, go to pieces young; and for the sake
of her work, not at all because she hoped for or wished for physical
beauty, she was taking better care of herself. But latterly she had been
all but prostrate before a violent attack of the blues, and had been
eating and sleeping irregularly, and not exercising. Thus, only a Boris
Raphael would have suspected her possibilities as she stood there,
slightly stooped, the sallowness of her skin harmonizing drearily with
her long, loose dark-brown blouse, neutral in itself and a neutralizer.
He saw at a glance the secret of her having been able to deceive
everybody, to conceal herself, even from herself. He felt the
discoverer's thrill; his blood fired like knight's at sight of secret,
sleeping princess. But he pretended to ignore her as a personality of
the opposite sex pole, knowing that to see her and know her as she
really was he must not let her suspect she was observed. He reveled in
such adventures upon soul privacy, not the least disturbed because they
bore a not remote resemblance to that of the spy upon a nymph at the
forest pool. He justified himself by arguing that he made no improper
use of his discoveries, but laid them upon the high and holy altars of
art and love.
Far from being discouraged by the difficulties which Neva was that
morning making so obvious, he welcomed the abrupt change from the
monotonous beauty of Doris Coventry. She had given him no opportunity
for the exercise of his peculiar talents. With her the banquet was
ready spread; with this woman practically everything had to be prepared.
And what a banquet it would be! When he had developed her beauty, had
made her all that nature intended, had taught her self-confidence and
the value of externals and had given her the courage to express the
ideas and the emotions that now shrank shyly behind those marvelous eyes
of hers-- How poor, how paltry, how tedious seemed such adventures as
that with Doris Coventry beside this he was now entering!
As if he were her teacher, he took up the palette and with her
long-handled brushes made a dozen light, swift touches--what would have
been an intolerable insolence in a less than he. To be master was but
asserting his natural right; men hated him for it, but the women liked
him and it.
"Oh!" she cried delightedly as she observed the result of what he had
done. Then, at the contrast between his work and her own, cried "Oh,"
again, but despondently.
"You must let me teach you," said he, as if addressing the talent
revealed in her picture.
"Do you think I could learn?" she asked wistfully.
He elevated his shoulders and brows. "We must all push on until we
reach our limit; and until we reach it, we, nor no man, can say where it
is."
"But I've no right to _your_ time," she said reluctantly.
"I teach to learn. I teach only those from whom I get more than I give.
You see," with his engaging boyish smile, "I have the mercantile
instinct."
She looked at him doubtfully, searching for the motive behind an offer,
so curious, so improbable in and of itself. She saw before her now the
outward and visible form of the genius she revered--a very handsome man,
a man whose knowledge how to make himself agreeable to women must
obviously have been got by much and intimate experience; a man whose
sensuous eyes and obstreperous masculinity of thick waving hair and
thick crisp reddish beard, roused in her the distrust bred by ages on
ages of enforced female wariness of the male that is ever on conquest
bent and is never so completely conqueror as when conquered. But this
primordial instinct, never developed in her by experience, was feeble,
was immediately silenced by the aspect of him which she clearly
understood--his look of breadth and luminousness and simplicity, the
master's eye and the master's air--the great man.
"You will teach me more than I you," he insisted.
"Why?" she managed to object, wondering at her own courage as much as at
his condescension--for such an offer from such a man was, she felt,
indeed a condescension.
"Because you paint with your heart while I paint rather with my head."
"But that is the greater."
"No. It is simply different. Neither is great."
"Neither?"
"Only he is supremely great who works with both heart and mind."