The next week was a busy one for the Montagues. The Robbie Wallings had
come to town and opened their house, and the time drew near for the
wonderful débutante dance at which Alice was to be formally presented
to Society. And of course Alice must have a new dress for the occasion,
and it must be absolutely the most beautiful dress ever known. In an
idle moment her cousin figured out that it was to cost her about five
dollars a minute to be entertained by the Wallings!
What it would cost the Wallings, one scarcely dared to think. Their
ballroom would be turned into a flower-garden; and there would be a
supper for a hundred guests, and still another supper after the dance,
and costly favours for every figure. The purchasing of these latter had
been entrusted to Oliver, and Montague heard with dismay what they were
to cost. “Robbie couldn’t afford to do anything second-rate,” was the
younger brother’s only reply to his exclamations.
Alice divided her time between the Wallings and her costumiers, and
every evening she came home with a new tale of important developments.
Alice was new at the game, and could afford to be excited; and Mrs.
Robbie liked to see her bright face, and to smile indulgently at her
eager inquiries. Mrs. Robbie herself had given her orders to her
steward and her florist and her secretary, and went on her way and
thought no more about it. That was the way of the great ladies—or, at
any rate, it was their pose.
The town-house of the Robbies was a stately palace occupying a block
upon Fifth Avenue—one of the half-dozen mansions of the Walling family
which were among the show places of the city. It would take a catalogue
to list the establishments maintained by the Wallings—there was an
estate in North Carolina, and another in the Adirondacks, and others on
Long Island and in New Jersey. Also there were several in Newport—one
which was almost never occupied, and which Mrs. Billy Alden
sarcastically described as “a three-million-dollar castle on a desert.”
Montague accompanied Alice once or twice, and had an opportunity to
study Mrs. Robbie at home. There were thirty-eight servants in her
establishment; it was a little state all in itself, with Mrs. Robbie as
queen, and her housekeeper as prime minister, and under them as many
different ranks and classes and castes as in a feudal principality.
There had to be six separate dining-rooms for the various kinds of
servants who scorned each other; there were servants’ servants and
servants of servants’ servants. There were only three to whom the
mistress was supposed to give orders—the butler, the steward, and the
housekeeper; she did not even know the names of many of them, and they
were changed so often, that, as she declared, she had to leave it to
her detective to distinguish between employees and burglars.
Mrs. Robbie was quite a young woman, but it pleased her to pose as a
care-worn matron, weary of the responsibilities of her exalted station.
The ignorant looked on and pictured her as living in the lap of ease,
endowed with every opportunity: in reality the meanest kitchen-maid was
freer—she was quite worn thin with the burdens that fell upon her. The
huge machine was for ever threatening to fall to pieces, and required
the wisdom of Solomon and the patience of Job to keep it running. One
paid one’s steward a fortune, and yet he robbed right and left, and
quarrelled with the chef besides. The butler was suspected of getting
drunk upon rare and costly vintages, and the new parlour-maid had
turned out to be a Sunday reporter in disguise. The man who had come
every day for ten years to wind the clocks of the establishment was
dead, and the one who took care of the bric-à-brac was sick, and the
housekeeper was in a panic over the prospect of having to train
another.
And even suppose that you escaped from these things, the real problems
of your life had still to be faced. It was not enough to keep alive;
you had your career—your duties as a leader of Society. There was the
daily mail, with all the pitiful letters from people begging
money—actually in one single week there were demands for two million
dollars. There were geniuses with patent incubators and stove-lifters,
and every time you gave a ball you stirred up swarms of anarchists and
cranks. And then there were the letters you really had to answer, and
the calls that had to be paid. These latter were so many that people in
the same neighbourhood had arranged to have the same day at home; thus,
if you lived on Madison Avenue you had Thursday; but even then it took
a whole afternoon to leave your cards. And then there were invitations
to be sent and accepted; and one was always making mistakes and
offending somebody—people would become mortal enemies overnight, and
expect all the world to know it the next morning. And now there were so
many divorces and remarryings, with consequent changing of names; and
some men knew about their wives’ lovers and didn’t care, and some did
care, but didn’t know—altogether it was like carrying a dozen chess
games in your head. And then there was the hairdresser and the
manicurist and the masseuse, and the tailor and the bootmaker and the
jeweller; and then one absolutely had to glance through a newspaper,
and to see one’s children now and then.
All this Mrs. Robbie explained at luncheon; it was the rich man’s
burden, about which common people had no conception whatever. A person
with a lot of money was like a barrel of molasses—all the flies in the
neighbourhood came buzzing about. It was perfectly incredible, the
lengths to which people would go to get invited to your house; not only
would they write and beg you, they might attack your business
interests, and even bribe your friends. And on the other hand, when
people thought you needed them, the time you had to get them to come!
“Fancy,” said Mrs. Robbie, “offering to give a dinner to an English
countess, and having her try to charge you for coming!” And incredible
as it might seem, some people had actually yielded to her, and the
disgusting creature had played the social celebrity for a whole season,
and made quite a handsome income out of it. There seemed to be no limit
to the abjectness of some of the tuft-hunters in Society.
It was instructive to hear Mrs. Robbie denounce such evils; and
yet—alas for human frailty—the next time that Montague called, the
great lady was blazing with wrath over the tidings that a new foreign
prince was coming to America, and that Mrs. Ridgely-Clieveden had
stolen a march upon her and grabbed him. He was to be under her
tutelage the entire time, and all the effulgence of his magnificence
would be radiated upon that upstart house. Mrs. Robbie revenged herself
by saying as many disagreeable things about Mrs. Ridgley-Clieveden as
she could think of; winding up with the declaration that if she behaved
with this prince as she had with the Russian grand duke, Mrs. Robbie
Walling, for one, would cut her dead. And truly the details which Mrs.
Robbie cited were calculated to suggest that her rival’s hospitality
was a reversion to the customs of primitive savagery.
The above is a fair sample of the kind of conversation that one heard
whenever one visited any of the Wallings. Perhaps, as Mrs. Robbie said,
it may have been their millions that made necessary their attitude
toward other people; certain it was, at any rate, that Montague found
them all most disagreeable people to know. There was always some
tempest in a teapot over the latest machinations of their enemies. And
then there was the whole dead mass of people who sponged upon them and
toadied to them; and finally the barbarian hordes outside the magic
circle of their acquaintance—some specimens of whom came up every day
for ridicule. They had big feet and false teeth; they ate mush and
molasses; they wore ready-made ties; they said: “Do you wish that I
should do it?” Their grandfathers had been butchers and pedlars and
other abhorrent things. Montague tried his best to like the Wallings,
because of what they were doing for Alice; but after he had sat at
their lunch-table and listened to a conversation such as this, he found
himself in need of fresh air.
And then he would begin to wonder about his own relation to these
people. If they talked about every one else behind their backs,
certainly they must talk about him behind his. And why did they go out
of their way to make him at home, and why were they spending their
money to launch Alice in Society? In the beginning he had assumed that
they did it out of the goodness of their hearts; but now that he had
looked into their hearts, he rejected the explanation. It was not their
way to shower princely gifts upon strangers; in general, the attitude
of all the Wallings toward a stranger was that of the London
hooligan—“‘Eave a ’arf a brick at ’im!” They considered themselves
especially appointed by Providence to protect Society from the vulgar
newly rich who poured into the city, seeking for notoriety and
recognition. They prided themselves upon this attitude—they called it
their “exclusiveness”; and the exclusiveness of the younger generations
of Wallings had become a kind of insanity.
Nor could the reason be that Alice was beautiful and attractive. One
could have imagined it if Mrs. Robbie had been like—say, Mrs. Winnie
Duval. It was easy to think of Mrs. Winnie taking a fancy to a girl,
and spending half her fortune upon her. But from a hundred little
things that he had seen, Montague had come to realize that the Robbie
Wallings, with all their wealth and power and grandeur, were actually
quite stingy. While all the world saw them scattering fortunes in their
pathway, in reality they were keeping track of every dollar. And Robbie
himself was liable to panic fits of economy, in which he went to the
most absurd excesses—Montague once heard him haggling over fifty cents
with a cabman. Lavish hosts though they both were, it was the literal
truth that they never spent money upon anyone but themselves—the end
and aim of their every action was the power and prestige of the Robbie
Wallings.
“They do it because they are friends of mine,” said Oliver, and
evidently wished that to satisfy his brother. But it only shifted the
problem and set him to watching Robbie and Oliver, and trying to make
out the basis of their relationship. There was a very grave question
concerned in this. Oliver had come to New York comparatively poor, and
now he was rich—or, at any rate, he lived like a rich man. And his
brother, whose scent was growing keener with every day of his stay in
New York, had about made up his mind that Oliver got his money from
Robbie Walling.
Here, again, the problem would have been simple, if it had been another
person than Robbie; Montague would have concluded that his brother was
a “hanger-on.” There were many great families whose establishments were
infested with such parasites. Siegfried Harvey, for instance, was a man
who had always half a dozen young chaps hanging about him; good-looking
and lively fellows, who hunted and played bridge, and amused the
married women while their husbands were at work, and who, if ever they
dropped a hint that they were hard up, might be reasonably certain of
being offered a cheque. But if the Robbie Wallings were to write
cheques, it must be for value received. And what could the value be?
“Ollie” was rather a little god among the ultra-swagger; his taste was
a kind of inspiration. And yet his brother noticed that in such
questions he always deferred instantly to the Wallings; and surely the
Wallings were not people to be persuaded that they needed anyone to
guide them in matters of taste. Again, Ollie was the very devil of a
wit, and people were heartily afraid of him; and Montague had noticed
that he never by any chance made fun of Robbie—that the fetiches of the
house of Walling were always treated with respect. So he had wondered
if by any chance Robbie was maintaining his brother in princely state
for the sake of his ability to make other people uncomfortable. But he
realized that the Robbies, in their own view of it, could have no more
need of wit than a battleship has need of popguns. Oliver’s position,
when they were about, was rather that of the man who hardly ever dared
to be as clever as he might, because of the restless jealousy of his
friend.
It was a mystery; and it made the elder brother very uncomfortable.
Alice was young and guileless, and a pleasant person to patronize; but
he was a man of the world, and it was his business to protect her. He
had always paid his own way through life, and he was very loath to put
himself under obligations to people like the Wallings, whom he did not
like, and who, he felt instinctively, could not like him.
But of course there was nothing he could do about it. The date for the
great festivity was set; and the Wallings were affable and friendly,
and Alice all a-tremble with excitement. The evening arrived, and with
it came the enemies of the Wallings, dressed in their jewels and fine
raiment. They had been asked because they were too important to be
skipped, and they had come because the Wallings were too powerful to be
ignored. They revenged themselves by consuming many courses of
elaborate and costly viands; and they shook hands with Alice and beamed
upon her, and then discussed her behind her back as if she were a
French doll in a show-case. They decided unanimously that her elder
cousin was a “stick,” and that the whole family were interlopers and
shameless adventurers; but it was understood that since the Robbie
Wallings had seen fit to take them up, it would be necessary to invite
them about.
At any rate, that was the way it all seemed to Montague, who had been
brooding. To Alice it was a splendid festivity, to which exquisite
people came to take delight in each other’s society. There were
gorgeous costumes and sparkling gems; there was a symphony of perfumes,
intoxicating the senses, and a golden flood of music streaming by;
there were laughing voices and admiring glances, and handsome partners
with whom one might dance through the portals of fairyland.—And then,
next morning, there were accounts in all the newspapers, with
descriptions of one’s costume and then some of those present, and even
the complete menus of the supper, to assist in preserving the memories
of the wonderful occasion.
Now they were really in Society. A reporter called to get Alice’s photo
for the Sunday supplement; and floods of invitations came—and with them
all the cares and perplexities about which Mrs. Robbie had told. Some
of these invitations had to be declined, and one must know whom it was
safe to offend. Also, there was a long letter from a destitute widow,
and a proposal from a foreign count. Mrs. Robbie’s secretary had a list
of many hundreds of these professional beggars and blackmailers.
Conspicuous at the dance was Mrs. Winnie, in a glorious electric-blue
silk gown. And she shook her fan at Montague, exclaiming, “You wretched
man—you promised to come and see me!”
“I’ve been out of town,” Montague protested.
“Well, come to dinner to-morrow night,” said Mrs. Winnie. “There’ll be
some bridge fiends.”
“You forget I haven’t learned to play,” he objected.
“Well, come anyhow,” she replied. “We’ll teach you. I’m no player
myself, and my husband will be there, and he’s good-natured; and my
brother Dan—he’ll have to be whether he likes it or not.”
So Montague visited the Snow Palace again, and met Winton Duval, the
banker,—a tall, military-looking man of about fifty, with a big grey
moustache, and bushy eyebrows, and the head of a lion. His was one of
the city’s biggest banking-houses, and in alliance with powerful
interests in the Street. At present he was going in for mines in Mexico
and South America, and so he was very seldom at home. He was a man of
most rigid habits—he would come back unexpectedly after a month’s trip,
and expect to find everything ready for him, both at home and in his
office, as if he had just stepped round the corner. Montague observed
that he took his menu-card and jotted down his comments upon each dish,
and then sent it down to the chef. Other people’s dinners he very
seldom attended, and when his wife gave her entertainments, he
invariably dined at the club.
He pleaded a business engagement for the evening; and as brother Dan
did not appear, Montague did not learn any bridge. The other four
guests settled down to the game, and Montague and Mrs. Winnie sat and
chatted, basking before the fireplace in the great entrance-hall.
“Have you seen Charlie Carter?” was the first question she asked him.
“Not lately,” he answered; “I met him at Harvey’s.”
“I know that,” said she. “They tell me he got drunk.”
“I’m afraid he did,” said Montague.
“Poor boy!” exclaimed Mrs. Winnie. “And Alice saw him! He must be
heartbroken!”
Montague said nothing. “You know,” she went on, “Charlie really means
well. He has honestly an affectionate nature.”
She paused; and Montague Said, vaguely, “I suppose so.”
“You don’t like him,” said the other. “I can see that. And I suppose
now Alice will have no use for him, either. And I had it all fixed up
for her to reform him!”
Montague smiled in spite of himself.
“Oh, I know,” said she. “It wouldn’t have been easy. But you’ve no idea
what a beautiful boy Charlie used to be, until all the women set to
work to ruin him.”
“I can imagine it,” said Montague; but he did not warm to the subject.
“You’re just like my husband,” said Mrs. Winnie, sadly. “You have no
use at all for anything that’s weak or unfortunate.”
There was a pause. “And I suppose,” she said finally, “you’ll be
turning into a business man also—with no time for anybody or anything.
Have you begun yet?”
“Not yet,” he answered. “I’m still looking round.”
“I haven’t the least idea about business,” she confessed. “How does one
begin at it?”
“I can’t say I know that myself as yet,” said Montague, laughing.
“Would you like to be a protégé of my husband’s?” she asked.
The proposition was rather sudden, but he answered, with a smile, “I
should have no objections. What would he do with me?”
“I don’t know that. But he can do whatever he wants down town. And he’d
show you how to make a lot of money if I asked him to.” Then Mrs.
Winnie added, quickly, “I mean it—he could do it, really.”
“I haven’t the least doubt of it,” responded Montague.
“And what’s more,” she went on, “you don’t want to be shy about taking
advantage of the opportunities that come to you. You’ll find you won’t
get along in New York unless you go right in and grab what you can.
People will be quick enough to take advantage of you.”
“They have all been very kind to me so far,” said he. “But when I get
ready for business, I’ll harden my heart.”
Mrs. Winnie sat lost in meditation. “I think business is dreadful,” she
said. “So much hard work and worry! Why can’t men learn to get along
without it?”
“There are bills that have to be paid,” Montague replied.
“It’s our dreadfully extravagant way of life,” exclaimed the other.
“Sometimes I wish I had never had any money in my life.”
“You would soon tire of it,” said he. “You would miss this house.”
“I should not miss it a bit,” said Mrs. Winnie, promptly. “That is
really the truth—I don’t care for this sort of thing at all. I’d like
to live simply, and without so many cares and responsibilities. And
some day I’m going to do it, too—I really am. I’m going to get myself a
little farm, away off somewhere in the country. And I’m going there to
live and raise chickens and vegetables, and have my own flower-gardens,
that I can take care of myself. It will all be plain and simple—” and
then Mrs. Winnie stopped short, exclaiming, “You are laughing at me!”
“Not at all!” said Montague. “But I couldn’t help thinking about the
newspaper reporters—”
“There you are!” said she. “One can never have a beautiful dream, or
try to do anything sensible—because of the newspaper reporters!”
If Montague had been meeting Mrs. Winnie Duval for the first time, he
would have been impressed by her yearnings for the simple life; he
would have thought it an important sign of the times. But alas, he knew
by this time that his charming hostess had more flummery about her than
anybody else he had encountered—and all of her own devising! Mrs.
Winnie smoked her own private brand of cigarettes, and when she offered
them to you, there were the arms of the old ducal house of Montmorenci
on the wrappers! And when you got a letter from Mrs. Winnie, you
observed a three-cent stamp upon the envelope—for lavender was her
colour, and two-cent stamps were an atrocious red! So one might feel
certain that it Mrs. Winnie ever went in for chicken-raising, the
chickens would be especially imported from China or Patagonia, and the
chicken-coops would be precise replicas of those in the old Chateau de
Montmorenci which she had visited in her automobile.
But Mrs. Winnie was beautiful, and quite entertaining to talk to, and
so he was respectfully sympathetic while she told him about her
pastoral intentions. And then she told him about Mrs. Caroline Smythe,
who had called a meeting of her friends at one of the big hotels, and
organized a society and founded the “Bide-a-Wee Home” for destitute
cats. After that she switched off into psychic research—somebody had
taken her to a seance, where grave college professors and ladies in
spectacles sat round and waited for ghosts to materialize. It was Mrs.
Winnie’s first experience at this, and she was as excited as a child
who has just found the key to the jam-closet. “I hardly knew whether to
laugh or to be afraid,” she said. “What would you think?”
“You may have the pleasure of giving me my first impressions of it,”
said Montague, with a laugh.
“Well,” said she, “they had table-tipping—and it was the most uncanny
thing to see the table go jumping about the room! And then there were
raps—and one can’t imagine how strange it was to see people who really
believed they were getting messages from ghosts. It positively made my
flesh creep. And then this woman—Madame Somebody-or-other—went into a
trance—ugh! Afterward I talked with one of the men, and he told me
about how his father had appeared to him in the night and told him he
had just been drowned at sea. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
“We have such a tradition in our family,” said he.
“Every family seems to have,” said Mrs. Winnie. “But, dear me, it made
me so uncomfortable—I lay awake all night expecting to see my own
father. He had the asthma, you know; and I kept fancying I heard him
breathing.”
They had risen and were strolling into the conservatory; and she
glanced at the man in armour. “I got to fancying that his ghost might
come to see me,” she said. “I don’t think I shall attend any more
séances. My husband was told that I promised them some money, and he
was furious—he’s afraid it’ll get into the papers.” And Montague shook
with inward laughter, picturing what a time the aristocratic and
stately old banker must have, trying to keep his wife out of the
papers!
Mrs. Winnie turned on the lights in the fountain, and sat by the edge,
gazing at her fish. Montague was half expecting her to inquire whether
he thought that they had ghosts; but she spared him this, going off on
another line.
“I asked Dr. Parry about it,” she said. “Have you met him?”
Dr. Parry was the rector of St. Cecilia’s, the fashionable Fifth Avenue
church which most of Montague’s acquaintances attended. “I haven’t been
in the city over Sunday yet,” he answered. “But Alice has met him.”
“You must go with me some time,” said she. “But about the ghosts—”
“What did he say?”
“He seemed to be shy of them,” laughed Mrs. Winnie. “He said it had a
tendency to lead one into dangerous fields. But oh! I forgot—I asked my
swami also, and it didn’t startle him. They are used to ghosts; they
believe that souls keep coming back to earth, you know. I think if it
was his ghost, I wouldn’t mind seeing it—for he has such beautiful
eyes. He gave me a book of Hindu legends—and there was such a sweet
story about a young princess who loved in vain, and died of grief; and
her soul went into a tigress; and she came in the night-time where her
lover lay sleeping by the firelight, and she carried him off into the
ghost-world. It was a most creepy thing—I sat out here and read it, and
I could imagine the terrible tigress lurking in the shadows, with its
stripes shining in the firelight, and its green eyes gleaming. You know
that poem—we used to read it in school—‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright!’”
It was not very easy for Montague to imagine a tigress in Mrs. Winnie’s
conservatory; unless, indeed, one were willing to take the proposition
in a metaphorical sense. There are wild creatures which sleep in the
heart of man, and which growl now and then, and stir their tawny limbs,
and cause one to start and turn cold. Mrs. Winnie wore a dress of filmy
softness, trimmed with red flowers which paled beside her own intenser
colouring. She had a perfume of her own, with a strange exotic
fragrance which touched the chorus of memory as only an odour can. She
leaned towards him, speaking eagerly, with her soft white arms lying
upon the basin’s rim. So much loveliness could not be gazed at without
pain; and a faint trembling passed through Montague, like a breeze
across a pool. Perhaps it touched Mrs. Winnie also, for she fell
suddenly silent, and her gaze wandered off into the darkness. For a
minute or two there was stillness, save for the pulse of the fountain,
and the heaving of her bosom keeping time with it.
And then in the morning Oliver inquired, “Where were you, last night?”
And when his brother answered, “At Mrs. Winnie’s,” he smiled and said,
“Oh!” Then he added, gravely, “Cultivate Mrs. Winnie—you can’t do
better at present.”