or sympathize. A gentleman's hat blows up in the air; hoots of
laughter explode after it. It rolls under an express van; a dozen
citizens spring to its rescue. Nerves are on edge. Stimulants are
exciting keen brains. It is a trifle savage, this crowd. Look! See
them hustle that masher! His hat's smashed already. The poor child he
was persecuting is crying with fright. A woman, not given to such a
pure embrace, has her arm about her; a big "plain-clothes man" is
drying her eyes with his handkerchief; a couple of young stock brokers
are bargaining with cabby on his box to drive her home. Ah, that is a
pretty sight! I think Mr. Addison would have liked to see it, and Dick
Steele, I know, would have slipped a bank note into her hand. Oh,
burst of sunshine in the darkness! Oh, chivalry and kindness beaming
out on fast Broadway! Oh, reckless, hardened sinners loving innocence
and kneeling to it!
But come; this is still Broadway. A block off they know nothing of all
this. Above us Daly's is closing and its fashionable audience pouring
out on the pavement. In Twenty-ninth Street, the Cairo, the Alhambra,
the Bohemia, are just as brilliant and fascinating as usual.
I remember, one evening, as I was passing the ladies' entrance to the
Gilsey House, on my way home from the club, out comes a visiting
family party--_monsieur et madame et sa fille_. Monsieur stops,
buttoning up that "good frock coat," the uniform of the American
senator, which has proclaimed Squedunk through every capital in
Europe. He stands, the oracle of the post office, the rich man of the
county, the benignant elder of the Congregational church, gazing
across the way at all the flaring signs toward Sixth Avenue.
"Ah," says he, smiling reminiscently, "the Midway. Let's go and look
at 'em, my dears."
I had a wicked impulse to go, too, and see what happened. But I
repressed it, and took the liberty to inform Mr. Smallville that those
places were not especially recommended for ladies. I think miss was
mortally offended with me for upsetting the program.
Are other people secretly disappointed, too, because they can't get a
peep behind those closed doors? It was Madam Eve, I believe, who first
tasted the apple; it was Pandora who lifted the lid of the box of
troubles; propose a slumming party, and be sure it is the ladies who
will applaud loudest. Well, then--those places, dear Miss Smallville
are--very much like the zenanas the foreign missionaryess told you
about last autumn in the church parlors. Now you know all about it.
Ask your brother Tom if I'm not correct. I wager he can tell you if he
chooses.
It is a curious fact, by the way, that all the places which make
Broadway notorious are in the side streets. Just as it is a curious
misnomer to call the toughest section of it the Tenderloin. Broadway
has no slums. Laboring people, even, never make any distinguishable
element in its populace. This is, of course, owing to its geographical
position. But there is one fact which is immensely to its credit, and
is perhaps due to the Irish who govern it, if they do prefer Fifth
Avenue to parade in. For when Brian Boru--from whom every loyal
Irishman is descended--was king, didn't a beauteous damsel, with a
ring of price, stroll unprotected and in safety over his kingdom?
Beauteous damsels with rings of price certainly stroll unprotected
over Broadway, but this is not the fact I emphasize. It is, seriously,
that it is quite possible for young ladies to walk this fastest mile
in the United States, with their papas and mammas, every evening, and
write home to Kate that "it is just like Saturday night on Main
Street, only bigger." No sensible girl could promenade the Strand or
the Bois after theater hours, no matter how chaperoned, and then make
such a comparison. Huzza! I say. Huzza! It is America's compliment to
her women.
Still, however decorously Broadway subdues its hilarity before the
ladies, like a fast young man at a tea party, we all know it is not in
the least like Saturday night on Main Street. Let us saunter along,
like two men of the world, perfectly competent to recognize vice, but
infinitely preferring to smile at honest gayety, and find out what
this crowd really is that is again packing the pavement as the
theaters turn out their audiences.
Principally, so much in the majority as to characterize it, men of
affairs, country merchants, out-of-town visitors, with and without
their womenkind, the New York audience to whom actor and clergyman
alike make their appeal; while circling about in it, embroidered so to
speak on its surface, is that other crowd--high fashion, artists,
actors, distinguished visitors, wardmen, Bohemians, sporting people,
thieves and confidence men--which also produces its effect, and lends
its coloring and vivacity to the picture. The side streets, looking
east at least, are respectable, but they are not brilliant. Fashion,
Bohemia and fast life are, after all, what we have come to watch. And
as fashion mostly cuts Broadway--where it used to live and promenade
when Mr. N. P. Willis' natty boots pattered about Fourteenth
Street--at the first crossing, it is Bohemia and the "wise push" we
will sup with.
In Broadway parlance, Bohemia means newspaper and theatrical people.
And I venture to remind the ladies and gentlemen of the drama in
presenting them in such a company, that I am painting a city nocturne,
and may properly introduce Mr. Morgan, Mr. Beerbohm Tree, Father
Ducey, dear man, in his cape overcoat, Al Smith leaning against the
Gilsey House railing, or any other characteristic and familiar figure
natural to the composition. No picture of Broadway would be complete,
they will acknowledge, without them, and to use a metaphor I have
before employed, they are certainly accustomed to occupy "the center
of the stage" with dignity and elegance.
Anyway, they all come here, and I should think they would all love it.
This part of Broadway is nicknamed the Rialto. Nowhere else are they
taken so cordially and frankly by the hand. They lounge about it by
day and win fame and fortune in its theaters at night. Nat Goodwin and
his wife, Hackett and Mary Mannering--when they can meet--Sir Henry
Irving, De Wolf Hopper, Miss Annie Russell, bowing to Charles Richman
out of a cab, Amelia Bingham, Joseph Jefferson, whose only fault is
that he isn't immortal, and funny, rollicking Fay Templeton, humming a
new coon song--old favorites and new ones, you may see them going to
supper at the Lambs' Club, the Players, the Waldorf, Delmonico's,
Sherry's, any evening they are in town.
Broadway is darker. The theater lights are out. Only bars and
apothecaries, shops and hotels, are brilliant. The opera is over, and
carriages are whirling away toward Fifth Avenue, and tramcars crawling
along in procession, packed to the platforms with gayly dressed
passengers. Across the way from Macy's huge dark store, the _Herald_
presses are rushing off the biography of the day in sight of
everybody, and no philosopher moralizes on that awful, tremendous
record of four-and-twenty hours of a whole world's work, play, crime,
suffering, heroism, love, faith.
Our fast friends must tremble as they pass those windows, and remember
the relentless, watchful eyes forever fixed on them. The ladies and
gentlemen of this society dine at Shanley's and Rector's, and call
supper _lunch_. Except that they are more painstakingly dressed, they
don't look very different from others. I have often thought that such
a congregation might gather in Trinity Chapel, say, and be preached to
by an innocent clergyman with a weary sense of the futility of trying
to make such evidently virtuous persons penitent.
Should you like to really know them? They are thick about you on every
hand. Drama and tragedy and pathos are in rehearsal now; and that old
comedy of "A Fool and His Money." Walk a few blocks with the night
clerk of Wilson's chemist shop. Get to know the bookmaker coming out
of George Considine's Metropole bar, chat with our acquaintance, the
plainclothes man. Join that man-about-town, on his way to the Astoria
Club. Masks will be torn off then, every actor will be seen as he is.
That family coachman is a burglar just out of Auburn. That thin, alert
gentleman in evening clothes is a gambler, getting a breath of air
before taking his place behind Daly's wheel. That pale-faced student
is a reporter on his way to "hit the pipe." That sweet-faced girl will
be screaming drunk by two o'clock--the pale little man in mourning is
the most notorious divekeeper in America. The one with the beautiful
silver beard is a race-track owner over in New Jersey, and they call
the red-headed Jew talking to "Honest John Kelly" the king of the
gold-brick men. This well-dressed gentleman with the large hands is
Corbett, the pugilist; that kindly-faced, handsome one, going into Tom
O'Rourke's, is a famous all-round sport. Notice that beautifully
gowned, superbly handsome brunette who is getting out of a hansom at
Martin's Restaurant. She had a yataghan in her flat she brought from
Paris with her, and she caught it up one night and drove it into her
lover's neck, and was acquitted on the ground that it was done in
self-defense.
Do you want more detailed biographies, or is your acquaintance
sufficiently extended? The owls on the _Herald_ building are staring
knowingly at the moon, who is coquettishly hiding her face behind a
cloud. Mr. Greeley has fallen asleep in his chair, facing Mr. Dodge,
after listening to that eternal long temperance speech which is never
ended. I don't think Broadway is amusing after midnight.
Let's go to Brown's and have some deviled kidneys and a mug of Bass.
GREEN DEVILS AND OLD MAIDS
By EMERSON G. TAYLOR
Miss Herron guided the fat horses into the byroad with the manner of a
navigating officer on the bridge of a liner. Not even after they were
straightened out, and dropped their quickened gait to the usual
comfortable trot, did she unclose her lips or take her gray eyes from
her course.
"Is anything coming behind us, Lucy?" This to the young girl beside
her.
"No, Cousin Agatha. He kept straight on."
"You're sure?"
"Quite sure."
"Well, that's a mercy." For the first time she leaned back a little.
"But I wonder that John Arnold so much as dreamed of trying to pass
me."
"You drive so splendidly," replied the girl, drooping her pretty head
so that the big white hat quite shaded her face. "The way you beat Mr.
Arnold was fine. He looked so silly when we passed him. You're so
brave and--and skillful. It makes one feel so safe to be with you."
"Of course I've driven all my life," Miss Herron admitted. "Your
grand-uncle, the judge, my dear, always insisted that driving was part
of a gentlewoman's education, like household management or a knowledge
of English history. A bit of a race is only amusing, but what with
these automobiles, there's no pleasure in horses at all nowadays."
"They certainly _are_ dangerous."
"Dangerous! They should not be allowed on the roads at all. Any more
than--than drunken men. The comparison somehow pleases me, Lucy. Did
you observe it?"
"Yes, yes, Cousin Agatha." The girl turned to the older lady a face
very young and fair and eyes that shone. "I was laughing at it all the
time."
It was a great pleasure, so Miss Herron assured all her friends, to
feel sure that her little cousin was for a few months at least to be
brought under the influence which had shaped the lives of her New
England forebears. For the child to live in Herron House, to grow in
knowledge of her race, so splendidly patriotic, so consistently rich
and cultivated from the days when Barham was part of a colony, seemed
to the proud old lady a real necessity for Lucy. She must never forget
that she was a New England gentlewoman; she must learn the traditions,
stiffen with the pride of her race. And because these things might
grow dim or be clean forgotten, did she spend all her days in the
noisy, extravagant city or the lazy places abroad.
Miss Herron rejoiced when Lucy's father laughed, and replied to her
request by sending the child to her for a whole long summer.
"She is very dear to me," he had whispered, looking across the room to
where Lucy was chattering as she poured tea. "And very lovely,
Agatha."
"She has the Herron look," she had answered, complacently.
"You'll take ever so good care, of her?"
"I may be trusted, I think, not to abuse any member of my family."
Quiet, sunny days followed. There were hours in the glowing garden,
murmurous with bees, heavy with delicate perfume of box and verbena
and mignonette; hours in the great old house, with its family
treasures of plate and china and mahogany, where ancient Chloe and
Sylvester still served as in the days when they had followed North
that kindly Yankee major they had found helpless after the doings in
the Shenandoah Valley. There were company at dinner, less formal
gatherings on the piazza of a moonlight evening, when accredited
youngsters from the summer colony amused and sometimes scandalized
Miss Herron with their laughter and singing. And now and then Lucy
would be carried off to other houses of Barham; whence she would
return to render a supposedly exact account of all she did and said.
Only twice since the first of June did Miss Herron fail in her promise
to Lucy's father and to herself. And these occasions had been within
the last ten days, when her old neuralgia had laid her low. What her
charge was up to at those times, Miss Herron did not care to inquire.
It was ordered that not even Lucy should come near when cousin Agatha
was in pain, and therefore uncertain in temper as well as a bit
careless as to costume.
"Tell me," the old lady asked, after they had driven some distance
along the shady road, "are you really enjoying your stay here?"
"Yes, indeed. I think Barham's just lovely."
"And what's most lovable in it?"
Lucy stole a look from under her broad hat brim, then retreated. "I
don't believe I know," she said, simply. "It's all----"
"Charming. Of course. I'm glad you think so. We could dispense with
the strangers, however. They don't belong here. They are vulgarly rich
and _parvenu_."
"Some of them are nice, Cousin Agatha," the child protested,
deferentially.
"Who, for instance?"
"All those who come to the house."
"A pack of rascals!" the old lady replied, crisply. "Laughing
like--hyenas, if that's the animal. It's a mercy that the boys and
girls are sent to good schools. They learn some decent behavior,
though of course they haven't had your advantages, my dear. But I
dislike their mothers. They are rich, but they have no poise. Poise,
my dear, and the marks of long descent. But the children may develop.
All but one of them."
Lucy's face grew gently mutinous. "Which is that, cousin?"
"That yellow-haired boy of----" She checked her reply abruptly to
listen. The horses were reined in. "My dear," she asked, resignedly,
"what was that noise I heard?"
There was no mistaking that honk of the goose many times strengthened,
and, following this, the low, steady sputter of a gasoline engine. The
nigh horse's ears pricked up, then were laid back; his honest mate
stopped short to await developments.
"I'm afraid," ventured Lucy, "that it's an automobile."
"The wretches, to choose this road! Are they coming? Go along, there!"
cried Miss Herron to the horses, who sprang forward as she laid the
whip on their fat flanks. "If we can get just beyond the woods I can
turn out for it. But--oh, the _wretches_!"
"Honk-honk!" close behind now.
"Oh!" cried Lucy. She knelt up in the carriage seat, looking back
along the road.
"Wave to him, my child." Miss Herron leaned back on the reins. Her
thin cheeks flushed up, and her gray eyes were like coal fires.
"Signal the creature to slow up."
"I am, Cousin Agatha. I am waving as hard as I can." She was standing
now, meeting with a lithe motion of supple knees and slender hips each
plunge of the hurrying carriage, one little hand on the back of the
seat. And with the other, Lucy, who looked at cousin Agatha and then
laughed--just a little--signaled gayly if vaguely to the driver of the
coming car. This was a young man, whose hair--for he wore no
hat--shone in the sun like crisp gold wire.
"Honk!" spoke the horn, "honk!" and then three times more in quicker
succession.
Lucy laughed aloud. "Isn't he silly?" And then waved once more.
"Honk!"
"Whoa!" commanded Miss Herron, drawing her steeds to the side of the
road. "Stand still, and don't be so foolish. It's only"--she
hesitated, then pronounced the word as though it profaned her
speech--"an automobile."
"May I pass you?" came the driver's voice from behind. The choking
reek of the gas drifted down and enveloped them.
"It's all right," caroled Lucy. "Come ahead!" Then she dropped down to
her seat beside her companion, light as a sparrow.
"Is it coming?"
The horses snorted, swerved, and plunged heavily. There swept by a
vision of dark green and shining brass, the chuck-chuck-chuck of
machinery.
"Oh, do be careful, Arch!" cried Lucy, for the ponderous machine
ground through the soft bank that hemmed in the road on that side, and
canted dangerously for a second or two. Then it whirled up the road,
with the dust thick in its trail, and through the haze the driver's
yellow head shining. The fat horses shivered, and stood fast.
"The wretch! I _knew_ it was young Fraser."
"It wasn't like him," Lucy murmured, and a hint of a smile crossed her
lips, "to have driven by us so fast."
"I'd not expect it of him, certainly."
"Nor I." And Lucy sighed in spite of herself. She was not very old.
"Ha!" Miss Herron bestowed a lightning glance on her unconscious
little passenger, and found it her turn to smile, but with a kind of
grimness. "Indeed!" she remarked, and added, under her breath after a
queer pause: "How _very_ extraordinary!"
They drove along quietly after that for some minutes, for Miss Herron
requested silence that she might compose herself the more readily
after her fright. The road led them up a gentle incline, then turned
sharp to the right, and a couple of hundred yards forked to lead
around both sides of a hill. It was not till the horses approached
this point that their driver opened her lips. She had worn, all the
time that she was quieting her nerves, a look of anxiety into the
midst of which would break every now and then the kindest and briefest
of whimsical smiles.
"Which direction shall we take?"
Lucy started from her reverie. She, too, had said no word. "This is
Steven's Forks, isn't it? Shall we go to the right?"
"Toward home, then?"
"Yes," said Lucy, eagerly, "toward home. To the right, please."
The talk brightened then. And Lucy in particular chattered away at
desperate speed, exclaiming over the rolling landscape, telling her
old hostess how much she had enjoyed Barham.
"That is very pleasant to hear," replied Miss Herron, graciously
enough. "I am only sorry that my indisposition last week prevented
our----"
"Please don't think of it, Cousin Agatha."
"No? My dear, have you ever been visited by neuralgia?"
"I mean," explained the child, eagerly and shyly together, "that it
didn't interfere with my good times at all."
"I understand. Silly girl, why don't they teach you to say things
properly! But I know exactly what you mean."
"Not _really_!" A quick dismay chased away the arch gayety.
"And I'm very glad if you had what you would call a good time."
"Oh, I did! It's all been delightful," Lucy contrived to stammer, and
then fell to scanning the road, which stretched away for a long half
mile ahead of them, white and level.
"A good road for those wretched machines," observed Miss Herron. "I
see one has been along it." And she pointed to the track of broad
tires they were following.
"Wouldn't a farm wagon leave those marks?"
"Possibly, but----" She rose slightly in her seat, and peered ahead.
She laughed aloud as she gathered up her reins and touched the horses
into a brisk trot. "This may be the workings of Providence, my dear."
"Perhaps, Cousin Agatha."
"Is that thing yonder green?"
"There's only one person in it, and--and he's getting out now. It's
stopped."
"Anything more?"
"Oh!" cried Lucy, and now it was hers to stand, "I think----"
"Indeed!" remarked Miss Herron. "I fancied I saw that yellow head of
his."
"The workings of Providence!" Lucy sighed.
"How perfectly absurd! Don't be irreverent, miss."
As they approached the machine, young Fraser was quite invisible; but
when at last Miss Herron had coaxed her horses up to it, and made them
stand, he crawled out from beneath it somewhere, red-faced, dusty and
with black grease on his hands.
"The penalty of recklessness!" observed the old lady, surveying the
boy as though he was inanimate stone. "Broken down."
"How d'ye do, Miss Herron?" said Fraser, apparently much embarrassed.
"Lucy----"
"Is that machine really broken?" The joyful hope in Miss Agatha's
voice was quite unconcealed. "Smashed?"
"There's something wrong, certainly," the boy confessed, ruefully. His
regard sought Lucy's. "But just what's amiss I can't see."
The old lady shook her head warningly. Some outward manifestation she
had to make in order to conceal the joy which, like a warm cordial,
penetrated every fiber of her being as a certain plan shaped itself in
her mind. This was the automobile which had frightened her horses and
set her nerves twittering; and now it reposed by the roadside
helpless. This was the reckless, handsome boy who had set her guests
laughing on an occasion requiring a measure of decorum, since the
bishop honored her house with his presence; who now, with every
appearance of impotent anger, was tinkering with the vitals of a hot
engine, dirty and perspiring. Miss Herron admired the idea which grew
before her imagination as she would have admired a beautiful,
unfolding flower.
"It ought to go now," the boy announced, after some further bungling
examination. What his testing and poking was supposed to accomplish
did not appear. He spoke with an odd ruefulness, and seemed to try to
deepen the impression his tone conveyed by another look at Lucy
eloquent of regret.
"Try it," said Miss Herron.
The boy threw over the balance wheel; there came forth a clank and
some faint clicks from the engine's interior; then cold silence
settled upon it again.
"No go," reported Archibald, and proceeded to explain what by rights
should have come to pass. "But none of these engines are perfected,"
he added.
"So there you must--remain? Two miles from any assistance?"
"Yes, Miss Herron."
"I rather question the willingness of any of our Barham folk to aid a
shipwrecked automobile. You drive them so heedlessly, young gentleman.
I confess," she continued, judiciously, "that I rather enjoy your
plight."
The boy grinned delightfully. "So do I. It isn't often"--how express
the light mockery that danced on his lips!--"that my accidents are so
charmingly compensated as this is."
"I am quite serious, Mr. Fraser."
"I am equally so, Miss Herron."
A moment they regarded one another in silence. "I am inclined to offer
you some assistance, I think," the old lady announced, deliberately.
"Merely out of common humanity. I have read that the drivers of
automobiles often depend on friendly or highly paid wagoners to--to
tow them. Now----"
Archibald drowned the rest in thankful protestations. And----
"It would be awfully kind of you, Cousin Agatha," said little Lucy,
suddenly finding her voice. "I'm sure that Archie----"
"Eh?"
"It would be very nice indeed," the child contrived to say, and tried
to look unconscious.
"If you could help me a little," explained Archibald, and his own
cheeks flamed, though his eyes faltered not a bit. "The break isn't
very serious, I guess."
A second time Miss Herron considered in silence. She turned
deliberately and looked at Lucy, who returned her questioning glance
with a stare of babylike innocence; her gray eyes interrogated the
boy.
"If you can assure me that your machine can't go," said Miss Herron,
"I'll tow you."
For a brief second Archibald hesitated. Then he fumbled among the
levers; raised the hood again; returned to the driver's seat, and
fingered at something the ladies could not see. "She can't be moved,"
the boy reported.
From the fence along the roadside a loosened rail was wrenched; an
honest cow, picketed at pasture, had her tether shortened a dozen feet
in two strokes of the boy's knife. In five minutes more, amid many
warnings from Miss Herron against scratching the varnish, one end of
the rail was made fast to the rear axle of the carriage, and the other
to the automobile.
"Now jump in," ordered Lucy, radiant with smiles; and she pointed to
the back seat.
"Mr. Fraser," her cousin amended, calmly, "will continue in his
automobile. To--to steer, if necessary."
"But----"
"I should prefer it, if you please." The horses strained forward, the
wheels turned; the triumphal procession was under way. "My dear," said
Miss Herron, "will you be good enough to hold your parasol over me?
The sun is very uncomfortable."
All the way home, the length of Barham Street, where the people stared
and laughed, young Fraser repeated all the maledictions he could
remember or invent. For the dust choked him, and the view of Lucy's
back as she sat holding the parasol over her cousin did not cheer.
"I'll get even--oh, more than even!--with you, dear lady," he
promised, releasing his tiller to shake his fist at Miss Herron's
unconscious and unbending figure, "if it takes all summer. I wonder if
she could have guessed. And it was planned so perfectly."
Barham laughed over the story, laughed again when at the Richmonds'
dance Lucy came back into the glare of the lights with the Fraser boy,
dazzled and bright-cheeked, after half an hour's absence in the
darkness of the great garden. And how many of the gossips would have
given their ears to have heard the long talk between Miss Agatha and
Lucy's father on the night of his arrival? So the slow summer drifted
by.
If the Revolutionary Daughters had not arranged their September
meeting on the day that a freight wreck made the trains from Barham
westward very late and irregular; if Miss Herron had not been waiting
a fretful half hour in the dusty station for the means of reaching the
meeting before it was over, when Archie Fraser drove his car thither
in a search for an express package, the latter part of this story
would have been very different. But as the boy stopped his panting,
throbbing machine at the edge of the platform, Miss Herron looked out
the window.
"I am waiting for a train," she remarked, on the heels of her stiff
little greeting, "for Oldport."
Archie glanced at the old lady's delicate dress and at the badge of
gold and enamel she wore on her breast. "The R. D.'s?" he asked,
respectfully.
"Exactly. I am one of the charter members, as you probably are aware.
And to miss the meeting is distinctly vexatious."
"I'm so sorry." He turned to the station agent. "How late's the
train?"
"Half an hour or so. She won't make up much comin' this far. And she's
got to let the express pass her."
Out by the platform the car murmured its steady, quiet song of power,
and quivered with its singing. Archibald started, stung by a sudden
hope. If only----
"That will bring you to Oldport very late, I'm afraid," he ventured,
feeling his way toward a compassing of his plan. The express package
could wait. "I'm very sorry. I wish----" Here he broke off his speech
to gaze pensively at the automobile.
"It's very annoying," said Miss Herron.
The station agent winced, as though she had laid a lash across his
shoulders, and in his awkward fashion endeavored to apologize for his
road's remissness. Like a tradesman reproved by his best customer, he
promised Miss Herron that "it shouldn't happen again." It was quite in
keeping with her character that she was graciously pleased to accept
the man's excuses. And then the agent, fired into an expansive
cheerfulness by her kindness, said that which won him the mysterious
present he received the following Christmas.
"Why can't _you_ take Miss Herron over, Mr. Fraser--hey? I guess that
there autobile----"
"That----"
"Autobile," repeated the agent, sturdily. "She'll beat most o' the
trains on _this_ road."
"The very thing!" He made a mental promise never to forget this man's
kindness and tact. "Oldport! It wouldn't take us an hour; and it's the
best piece of road in the State."
"The idea!" exclaimed Miss Herron, gently scornful. "In
an--automobile!"
"Please come," he begged. "It would be such an honor, and a pleasure,
too."
"I should _prefer_ the train." But the very fact that she let a note
of argument and protest come into her voice gave Archibald instant
encouragement.
The station agent, warned by a furious wink, came nobly to the fore.
"I'm afraid the train ain't goin' to do ye much good, ma'am. Not for
some time, anyway. I never see such a road's this."
"I'll go very carefully," Archie went on, recklessly promising.
"Of course, you know, I dislike those machines, but," Miss Herron
confessed, with a fair show of sincerity, "I am rather eager to be
present at this meeting." She surveyed with critical eye the
deep-cushioned seats, the heavy springs, then the tiller and the
various start-and-stop levers. "You think there'll be no danger?"
"Not the least. I'm sure you'd not be afraid, Miss Herron."
"I am afraid," she replied, tartly, "of nothing that man can devise.
Be so good as to lend me your arm, Mr. Fraser."
He charmed her by his deferential escort across the platform; he
protected the rustling silk of her skirt from any possible fleck of
dirt as she mounted to her place; he was solicitous, as a gentleman
should be, concerning the dust cloth, and deft as a footman in
arranging it. Clearly, as Miss Herron perceived, the boy appreciated
the honor she was doing him, and so far earned her approval. Nor were
his manners wholly uncouth.
Archie drew on his gauntlets and settled himself, hands on tiller and
throttle. "Are you quite ready?" He could not hide his smile. A sweet
hour was to follow.
"I am waiting," she answered.
"Go, then."
The ponderous machine leaped forward as if released from a spring,
gathering power and speed each half second. Miss Herron laid her hand
on the driver's arm.
"Not too fast--all at once," she said. "I----"
"She'll do better when we strike the good road," the driver replied.
"This sand checks her badly."
It was so lovely a revenge that lay now in his hand to inflict. This
old lady had towed him home once, the laughingstock of the village;
she had brought to naught at the same time the scheme which had cost
Lucy and himself such a deal of planning. The machine was to be
abandoned, they had arranged in that runaway afternoon when Miss
Herron kept her room; the carriage was to overtake him in his
distress; he was to drive home with the two ladies, holding Lucy's
hand on the back seat, and convincing Miss Herron of his superior
qualifications to marry into her family. But all this had in the
sequel come to less than nothing. It was Miss Herron also who, Archie
was convinced, had been at the bottom of his father's sudden
determination to attach him to the Paris branch of the Fraser
business, and so banish him from all that was dearest and best in the
world.
Now, by blessed good luck, Miss Herron was quite in his power to
frighten soundly and to land at the gathering of the elect, blown,
dusty and disheveled. If he had been more than twenty, he would have
thought and acted otherwise than he did; but the likely outcome of his
plan never troubled the boy, if indeed it entered his honest head at
all. "I'll scare her," remarked Archie, grinning silently, "good and
hard."
But, even as he plotted, he wooed her with his politest phrases;
laughed, but not too loudly, at the little sparkles of wit, accepted
with naive delight her comments on the skill in driving that a boy of
his age could show. For five minutes or so they ran quietly and
steadily along a featureless road through barren pastures. There was
time enough for his plan to blossom, for Oldport was nearly thirty
miles away, and there intervened a village through which to drive at
illegal speed.
But by slow degrees, without at all perceiving how it came about,
Archie found that somehow his passenger was a very delightful old
lady. What had become of the absurd starchiness, which before had so
maddened him, of the stiff pride, which had condescended to him as
though Fraser & Co. were creatures far beneath the regard of a New
England old maid? She asked him questions, she was as interested as
could be in his father's plans for him.
"Where will you live in Paris?" asked Miss Herron.
"Oh, over in the Quarter, I hope. It'd be more fun there than in the
other house."
"The other house?"
"Ours, you know. Father likes to have his own place when he's over."
"Indeed?"
"We only lease it," Archie explained, ingenuously. "It's up near the
Arch."
"Indeed! That should be extremely pleasant."
"I hate the idea of going," the boy blurted out. He looked straight
ahead; a slow flush darkened his fair skin.
"Yes?"
"Unless," he murmured, suddenly inspired to madness, "unless----"
Miss Herron readjusted the dust cloth. The boy felt a quick irritation
at her apparent inattention; but the purpose, born of her apparent
readiness to hear and approve him, held. "I want Lucy to go, too, Miss
Herron," he announced, bluntly enough.
"Indeed!"
"Lucy!" he cried. "I do love her so! Please say that I can have her.
Please say----"
"Do I understand," she asked, and the boy could not comprehend why her
old voice shook so, "that you are making a formal proposal for the
hand of Miss Lucy Herron?"
"Yes," he cried, jubilantly. "Oh, say I may ask her."
"If you had intended so far to honor us," the old lady replied, icily,
"I should have thought that you would have approached the subject with
_some_ degree of formality."
"Miss Herron!"
"To speak of such matters in an--automobile is to treat them very
unbecomingly. It is not," she continued, and all her unbending
rigidity of demeanor was behind her words, "dignified."
"Being dignified," cried Archie, hotly, "hasn't anything to do with
being in love." Was it a smile that lighted up her craggy features,
like sunshine on granite. "You don't understand."
"Apparently not. I am quite unused to the ways of modern youth. The
world's moved very fast in recent years. In an--automobile--as it
were."
"But Lucy----"
"Well, Mr. Fraser?"
"I----"
"Let us not refer to her, I beg."
"Not ever again?" he asked, but with no hint of disappointment.
"I am surprised that you so much as dreamed of it under the present
circumstances," she replied, tartly.
Archie laughed shortly. "Please forget that I so far forgot myself,"
he begged. "It _was_ wrong, under the present circumstances." All the
boy's sunny malice shone from his clear eyes. "I ought to have
remembered my real duty and pleasure."
"And that," Miss Herron asked, for once caught unawares, as it
appeared, "is what?"
"Watch!" said Archie, briefly.
They had come by now to the beginning of the solid macadam road that
runs across the county, to the joy of the chauffeur as to the
corresponding dismay of the truck farmers for whom it was constructed.
There was nothing ahead to break the long, hard track. Archie reached
down beside him, though his eyes never left his course or one hand the
steering wheel, and set his hand to some lever. The song of the great
machine was for a second broken; then a new song of the road began,
louder and fiercer than the first and in quicker measure. Miss Herron
felt as she did the first time she descended in the express elevator
of a high office building. She was conscious that her hat was tugging
at its pins. She settled herself back deeper in the seat and braced
her feet stiffly, only to bounce up as they ran over some stick.
"Oh!" she gasped. "Ahem!"
"Sit tight," counseled Archie, suavely. "We'll get there in time, all
right, if nothing happens."
"If anything breaks," she remarked, "you can usually get somebody to
tow the machine home."
"People are very charitable. Yes, Miss Herron."
"Up to a point."
And to that Archie had no rejoinder. It was perhaps as well that he
did not see the smile that his passenger wore. It might have taken the
edge off his revenge.
The houses commenced to appear at more frequent intervals now, and
took on a character a little different from the old weather-grayed
dwellings of the open country. There showed a white, slim church spire
above the trees.
"Scarborough," said Archie, and made the horn speak.
"You'll be careful?" she asked. "Through the village----"
"Honk! honk!" This for a couple of children, who, starting to run
across the road, doubled back like rabbits. Miss Herron caught just a
glimpse of their white faces, and the end of their father's torrent of
imprecation. Now it was the horse of a baker's wagon that climbed the
bank by the roadside in two leaps and pranced shiveringly. Some boys
cheered and then flung stones.
"Dear me!" ejaculated Miss Herron. "I rather hope we'll meet nobody I
know."
"The sheriff himself couldn't stop us now."
"But----"
"Honk! honk!"
"Oh, Mr. Fraser!" They missed by a foot a carriage that was beginning
slowly to turn around, and was nearly straight across the road when
Archie twitched the automobile aside as if it was a polo pony.
"The stupid creatures!" cried Miss Herron, indignantly, when her heart
commenced to beat again, "to block the way!"
"That _was_ a close shave," commented Archie.
"Not too recklessly, Mr. Fraser."
"I must get you to the meeting, ma'am."
"But the risk----"
"If I can't have Lucy," the boy declared, sullenly, "_I don't_ care
what happens."
"Assure me," demanded his passenger, after a brief moment, during
which with no slackening of speed the great machine tore down
Scarborough's main street like a green tornado, "that you retain
entire control of the thing."
"Oh, yes."
Another pause. "I suggested that you make no mention of Miss Lucy."
"I can't have her?"
"How fast _can_ the automobile go?" asked Miss Herron, ignoring the
boy's question.
"Some faster than this. But Lucy can----"
"Let us not discuss the matter, please."
"I can't have her?"
"I beg, Mr. Fraser, I _beg_ you to center your attention on driving
your machine."
"Well, I will, then. I'll drive her," said the boy, grimly, "good and
fast." They came again to the open, but the road continued hard and
broad, with only long curves around the base of a hill now and then.
The wind blew the old lady's hair into disarray, her dress was gray
with dust, her eyes smarted terribly; she gave from time to time a
little gasp--or was it a laugh?--and clutched at Archie's arm, which
held so rigid and strong to the tiller wheel. "This'll be her finish,
all right," he thought. "Cross old cat. Scared?" he asked of her.
"I beg pardon?"
"You're not scared, I suppose?" he said, mockingly.
"I have been accustomed to fast driving, Mr. Fraser, all my life."
It was because she made that reply that Archie, quite desperate by
now, dared what finally did occur. And this was occasioned by his
spying in the distance another big car headed as he was, but moving
less rapidly. In a minute he was alongside, and jammed on the brakes.
The other driver, who was heavily mustached, red-faced and had three
airy young damsels stowed in the tonneau, looked up in surprise.
"Hello, Isidore!"
"Hello! Hello, Mr. Fraser!"
"I'll race you to the bridge."
"Go on, now! Watcher think I got here?" But the girls chorused
delightedly, and teased their driver--all but one, and she leaned
forward to whisper confidingly, with her arms around his fat neck.
Miss Herron surveyed the landscape.
"'Fraid cat!" giggled the girl. "You're afraid, Mr. Mayer."
"I ain't, only----"
"One!" cried Archie, releasing his steed again. "Two!"
"Leggo, May!" grunted the other.
"And----"
"Three!" yelled Mayer. "To the bridge!"
By mere good luck the highway was empty, for to think that any cart or
carriage could be passed was absurd. Side by side the huge machines,
scarlet, green, alive with shining brass, tore along with the roar of
express trains between the ditch and the bank. The slightest swerve at
such speed meant death. The chatter of the careless girls dwindled,
the faces of the rival drivers grew pale and tense.
"Oh, be careful!" murmured Miss Herron. "It's very dangerous."
"Very," replied Archie. "Promise me Lucy and I'll slow up."
A sudden little shriek of joy and some handclapping from Mayer's
tonneau interrupted what the old lady might have answered. Glancing
over, Miss Herron perceived that their rival had drawn ahead a yard or
more, that the girls were crying taunts at her. Not far away now there
showed a gleam of the river. And then Archie encountered the greatest
surprise of his life.
"Saucy things!" remarked his passenger, and fell silent again.
"Come on!" called the prettiest of the three, through her hollowed
hands. "Old freight car!"
"Archie!"
"Yes, Miss Herron?"
"Can't you---- Oh!"
"What, ma'am?" From the tail of his eye he was aware that Miss Agatha
was wringing her hands.
"Archie, they _mustn't_ beat us!"
"I guess I'll crowd him."
"Oh!"
The time was ripe, he thought. "Give me Lucy," he repeated, doggedly,
"or I'll foul him."
He had expected to frighten her. He had told himself what fun it would
be to hear her give her agitated assent, with the fear of death on her
if she refused. It was to be a fine revenge. But Miss Herron only
raised a warning forefinger.
"Archie Fraser," she said, in trembling tones, "if--if you take the
dust from those common young women and that vulgar man, I'll never
forgive you."
"Great heavens, Miss Herron! I--I----"
"_Beat 'em!_" she ordered truculently.
He stuck blindly to his point: "Lucy?"
"_Beat 'em!_ Show me," she declaimed, in trumpet tones, "that the man
who wants to marry a Herron has some courage in him. Now!"
The road narrowed just ahead, where it led through a cut in the hill
and then down to the bridge. On either side the banks rose eight or
ten feet, and very steep, and beyond was a sharp curve. Archie made
his horn speak angrily, as once more he came abreast of his rival,
favored by the fact that Mayer had struck a strip of newly repaired
and soft roadway some yards long. A second later he was leading.
"Pull up!" he bellowed hoarsely, crouching forward over his tiller
still lower. He dropped his hand to the emergency brake. The cut was
not six rods off. Once more the girls cried out, but this time in
shrill fear. Miss Herron remained calm as the Sphinx.
"Honk!" from Mayer, and the click of levers. His machine slid along in
a cloud of dust. "You win!"
It was ten minutes before the victors exchanged a single word. They
rattled over the long bridge, steered up the streets of Oldport to the
place where the Daughters were in session. Then Archie lay back with a
sigh.
"You weren't scared a bit!" he exclaimed, frankly doleful.
The old lady straightened her hat, lightly brushed off the top layer
of dust from the front of her dress, then gave the briefest of queer
little laughs. "It is one of the traits of my family," she said,
"never to be surprised at anything. And another," she added,
descending majestically from the automobile, "is to make the best of
circumstances which appear to be inevitable."
The boy blinked. "I don't understand," he stammered.
Miss Herron touched him on the arm. "I trust, then, that Lucy will
express herself to you more clearly. In case--if you should venture to
ask her a question."
And with that the old lady minced her way up the steps of the house to
disappear within doors.
"Good Lord!" exclaimed Archie, as the light began to break.
TWO SORROWS
Before Love came my eyes were dim with tears,
Because I had not known her gentle face;
Softly I said: "But when across the years
Her smile illumes the darkness of my place,
All grief from my poor heart she will efface."
Now Love is mine--she walks with me for aye
Down paths of primrose and blue violet;
But on my heart at every close of day
A grief more keen than my old grief is set,--
I weep for those who have not found Love yet!
CHARLES HANSON TOWNE.
LOVE AND MUSHROOMS
By FRANCES WILSON
Van Mater, out on the coast for the melancholy purpose of witnessing
what he conceived to be Corny Graham's crowning indiscretion--that is
to say, his marriage--found himself lingering for the purpose of
basking in California's smiles. The writing instinct, which in the
little old town on Manhattan would keep his hand traveling back and
forth across the paper for days at a stretch, here languished and
drowsed like some heavy-eyed, faintly smiling lotus eater.
He had, to be sure--in a spurt of energy that subsided almost as
quickly as it came--begun a song to that sybaritic state, in which it
was represented as a lady around whose neck hung
A chain ablaze with diamond days
All on the seasons strung,
which he thought sounded rather well.
Then, unfortunately, the rains set in and the result was a mental
washout that carried the last vestige of his poetical idea out into
the vasty deep where individual ideas become world-thought, though
there was a moment when he had an inspiration--something about keeping
Lent, which should typify the rains. But this, too, drifted off like a
chip on an ocean, and the song became mere literary junk.
Probably the law of compensation is responsible for the fact that,
while the coast's dazzling summer is flawed by trade winds, its rainy
season is tempered by mushrooms. At least, so thought Van Mater.
Connoisseur that he was in the joys of living, he confessed to a new
sensation when, for the first time, he found himself plodding over the
seared, round-shouldered hills, spongy with the supererogatory wetness
of a three days' downpour. The rain had ceased temporarily, but the
sky wore a look of ineffable gloom, and the feathery mist trailed
along the earth like an uneasy ghost.
Some swarthy, dark-eyed Portuguese children, met on the road the day
before, had proffered him their pail of spoil, and as he examined its
contents he understood, for the first time, what a mushroom really
ought to be. Their dank odor--the odor of germinating things--seemed
to come from down in the earth where the gnomes are supposed to
foregather; and Van Mater's thoughts reverted with withering scorn to
certain woodeny, tan objects that had been foisted upon him from time
to time as mushrooms--always, he now triumphantly recalled, to his own
inward amazement.
Why, when and where mushrooms had won their vogue with epicures, he
had often dumbly wondered, though he had remained silent lest he
expose a too abysmal ignorance. Now he chuckled hilariously. It was
his acceptance of those frauds--those mere shells from which the souls
had fled--that displayed ignorance! In future he would know better,
and he tossed the children a quarter and went his way, in a pleasant
anticipation of the manner in which he would carelessly throw off to
certain admiring friends:
"But I never eat mushrooms, save they come straight to the table from
the soil, picked within an hour of the time when the rain ceases.
Those things? Why, my dear fellow, you might as well eat so much
gristle. Talk about the bouquet of wine! Why, the bouquet of the
mushroom is as delicate and elusive as--as----" The simile failed to
materialize, but he went on eloquently: "You can no more preserve it
than you can the dew upon a plum." All of which sounded so well that
he speculated anxiously upon the probability of any of the said
fellows divining how very little he knew about the matter, after all.
They were so deuced knowing, some of them; but it seemed a pity to let
an idea like that, what had actually leaped from his brain
full-fledged, go to waste. Decidedly, it was worth the risk.
His mind again reverted to the subject with pleasant anticipation
when, the next afternoon, clad in knickers and a Norfolk, with a cap
pulled rakishly over his eyes, he trudged over the hills to which the
children had directed him. Soon, however, everything was blotted from
his consciousness save a section of brown hill, over which his eyes
roved eagerly in search of the small, Japanese-looking fungi.
"Mushroom or toadstool?" was his stern inward query, as the pert
little parasols became more and more numerous; and he did not realize
that he had spoken aloud until a gush of laughter caused him to raise
his eyes hastily.
She was not three steps away, and from the trim leather leggings,
above which her kilted skirt swirled, to the thick sweater and Tam
that she wore, she seemed to Van Mater the most dashingly correct
damsel he had ever seen. The foggy air had brought a delicious color
to her cheeks and brightness to her eye which made her seem a very
creature of the out-of-doors, and Van Mater stared, charmed and
arrested.
"Evidently you don't recognize me," she suggested. "I was the third
bridesmaid--the one in pink--the homely one, you know."
She eyed him with a wicked satisfaction while the color rose to his
face. He had a disagreeable recollection, since she identified herself
so minutely, that he had rather passed that particular bridesmaid over
with scant attention, amazing as it now seemed. Then he recovered
himself, and with that gallant movement of the arm which seems the
perfect expression of deference, removed his soft cap and bowed low,
as he said:
"Of course--I remember you perfectly now, Miss--ah."
He tried, as he took her extended hand, to mumble something
unintelligible enough to pass for her name, looking at her with an
admiration purposely open in the hope of distracting her attention,
but the ruse was of no avail. She only smiled into his face with
impish delight.
"You people from the East are so dreadfully disingenuous," she
complained. "Why not confess frankly that, so far as you are
concerned, I belong to the 'no name' series?"
Her eyes were dancing, and suddenly Van Mater felt as if he had known
her always--eons before he had known himself in his present
incarnation.
"To think that I shouldn't have recognized you in the pink gown," he
murmured, with well-feigned surprise. "And to think that I'm no more
surprised than I am to have you suddenly bob up here in the wet, after
your wanderings of perhaps a hundred lifetimes! I can't seem to recall
the date and planet upon which we last met," he continued,
apologetically, "but I fancy that we picked mushrooms in those old
times--that the earth and air were all sopping, just as they are now."
"You write books--you know you do!"
"Well--it's a decent enough occupation!"
"Yes," uncertainly. "Still, writers aren't usually very sincere; they
don't mean what they say. They spin copy as a spider does a web!"
"Writers not sincere--don't mean what they say!" he echoed. "Why, my
dear young lady, you're all wrong. They usually mean so much that they
can't begin to say it--and as for sincerity, they're the sincerest
people in the world!"
"That is, while it lasts!" he added to himself, but his listener, who
had stooped to the ground and was now holding up a particularly large
and luscious mushroom, was all unconscious of his reservation.
"Look out! You're stepping on them!" she cried, excitedly, and for the
next ten minutes they wandered about with eyes bent on the earth in
fascinated absorption. Van Mater at last straightened up with such a
thrill of satisfaction as he had not experienced since boyhood.
"My pail's full," he called, seating himself on one of the projecting
bowlders. "So come and show me where to pick the beefsteaks."
She pointed upward. Where the hill humped itself against the sky the
blurred figure of a cow was visible. Van Mater tried again.
"You might come and rest," he coaxed, pointing to another bowlder that
cropped out in friendly nearness to his own. With a last lingering
scrutiny of the ground about, she came, seating herself beside him.
Then, with her chin resting on her hands, she surveyed him with a sort
of boyish _sang-froid_.
"We're right cozy for acquaintances of a half hour's standing," she
remarked, at last. "But, then, I've heard about you for so long. You
see, Corny told Beth, and she has--well--mentioned you to me."
"Pooh--that's nothing! I tell you, I've known you for centuries. I
remember that when I heard of one of those theosophist fellows
marrying a girl he'd known for a thousand years or so, I roared. Now I
understand it!" (Very solemnly.)
She did not speak, and he began again with increased seriousness:
"Really, I'm in earnest, you know. I've the most curious sense
of--well, of companionship with you--as if we'd known each other
indefinitely, as if----"
She interrupted rather hastily.
"Honestly?"
Tersely--"Upon my soul."
She rose somewhat hurriedly. "It's going to rain!"
"Never mind. I have a conundrum. Why is love like a mushroom?"
She wrinkled her brow. "Because it's easily crushed, I suppose, and
you're never quite sure of it."
"Wrong. Because it springs up in a night--that is, in an hour," he
answered, impressively.
The drops began to fall softly, swiftly, easily, as if they would
never more be stanched.
"Come," she said, but her cheeks were more richly colored than before.
"Isn't this heavenly?" he murmured, as they vanished down the road in
a blur of rain. She did not answer, but her eyes were shining.
SOME FEMININE STARS
By ALAN DALE
Advertised personalities. Enormous sums squandered on theatrical
impossibilities. Amelia Bingham's pluck and restlessness. "Nancy
Stair" rather tiresome. Lesser lights in star-dom.
Three thin, anaemic, bedraggled plays, each with a heralded, exultant
feminine "star" skewered to its bloodless pulp, dropped into this
metropolis just ahead of the reluctant crocus. Three highly advertised
"personalities" tried to weather out a veritable emaciation of drama,
and the result was, of course, a foregone conclusion. Slowly but
surely is knowledge being forced upon the deluded manager, and he is
learning to appreciate the vital truth of the much battered
Shakespearian quotation, "The play's the thing." No trumped-up
interest in one particular puppet will take the place of the drama
itself. This is a pity. It is easier to create a marionette than it is
to construct a play.
The three highly advertised "personalities" that reached us at crocus
time were owned and engineered by Miss Amelia Bingham, Miss Mary
Mannering and Miss Virginia Harned. I mention them in the order in
which they appeared, which is not necessarily that of superior merit.
They came in at the fag end of a tired season, dragging a load of
pitiful dramatic bones. Hope ran high, but fell in sheer despondency.
In spite of the fact that the poet prefers to picture hope as
springing, I think that in this case it may be better portrayed as
running. There is a sensation of panic in the race.
Miss Bingham came to town with a very swollen "comedy-drama," called
"Mademoiselle Marni," from the pen of a "monsoor," programmed as Henri
Dumay--said to be an American "monsoor" at that. This actress affects
French plays for reasons that have never been explained, and that
certainly do not appear. As a "star," she is of course entitled to
treat herself to any luxury that may seem to tempt her histrionic
appetite, and the Gallic siren evidently appeals to her. It is not
likely that there will be international complications, although the
provocation must at times be keen.
"Mademoiselle Marni" was one of those impossible chromos that might
have been designed for the mere purpose of giving one's sense of humor
a chance to ventilate itself. In the serious theater-goer--and one is
bound to consider him--it awoke amazement. How is it that at rehearsal
a dozen presumably sane people can "pass" such an effort, he must have
asked himself? Why is it that in a theatrical venture that costs a
great deal of money, there are no misgivings? The serious theater-goer
is never able to answer these questions.
It is almost proverbial that the most hopeless sort of theatrical
enterprise--if conventional--never languishes for lack of funds. Try
and start a solid business scheme, in which you can calculate results
in black and white, and the difficulties and discouragements will be
almost insuperable. Endeavor to obtain money for an invention or
innovation that has success written across it in luminous letters, and
you will "strike a snag," as the rude phrase goes, with marvelous
celerity. But a bad play--one that to the unsophisticated
theater-usher or to the manager's scrubwoman must perforce appear as
such--experiences no such fate. This is one of the marvels of
theaterdom.
In the case of "Mademoiselle Marni" Miss Bingham herself must have
spent an enormous sum that she would probably have hesitated to invest
in some enterprise sane or possible. The play was a turgid coagulation
of illogical episodes lacking in all plausibility. This particular
actress is generally happy when she can select for herself a character
that is beloved by all the masculine members of the cast. Apparently,
she "sees" herself in this role. She likes to appear as the
personification of all the virtues, self-sacrificing and otherwise,
and this idiosyncrasy is, of course, frequently fatal to sustained
interest. We do not care for these sensational paragons.
In "Mademoiselle Marni" Miss Bingham played the part of a very
beautiful French actress, of whom everybody said: "Oh, what a woman!"
(Perhaps the audience also echoed that phrase, but with quite a
different significance.) She was exquisitely in love with _Comte Raoul
de Saverne_, who was engaged to another, and was "ordered" away from
her by the father of that other. This parent was a very wicked baron,
and just as _Mlle. Marni_ in an ecstasy of rage was about to strike
him, somebody called out: "Do not hit him; he is your father."
We discovered that _Mlle. Marni_ was the wicked baron's illegitimate
child. As he had been saying extremely pretty things to her--for she
was so bee-yoo-ti-ful!--you will readily perceive that fastidious
people might find this "situation" what some critics love to call
"unpleasant." Wicked barons, viewed in the process of admiring their
own daughters, are not exactly long-felt wants upon the New York
stage. However, this episode was scarcely offensive, for it was so
exuberantly silly that nobody could take it seriously.
Later on, _Mlle. Marni_ gambled on the stock exchange, and made two
million dollars in a few minutes, so that she could get even with the
wicked baron, and force him to recall _Raoul_. In this act the actress
wore black velvet, and looked every inch French--Bleecker Street
French. It was the "big" scene, and was considered very strenuous by
those acting in it. To those in the audience, it merely accentuated
the cheap vulgarity of the play, that had no redeeming point, either
literary or dramatic. It was, in fact, a forlorn hope.
Perhaps if Miss Amelia Bingham would not select her own plays, she
would fare better. She is by no means lacking in histrionic ability.
She has done many good things in her day. But the temptation of the
self-made "star" to see nothing but her own part in the drama that she
buys, is very acute. A satisfactory _ensemble_, a logical story, a set
of plausible characters and a motive are all overlooked. Her own
"personality" is her sole anxiety, and--well, it is not enough. Miss
Bingham was assisted by Frederic de Belleville, Frazer Coulter and
others less known to fortune and to fame, but "Mademoiselle Marni" was
not accepted. It was staged "regardless," but even that fact did not
count in its favor. Miss Bingham's pluck and recklessness were alone
in evidence.
Scarcely more felicitous was Miss Mary Mannering with "Nancy Stair."
Miss Mannering is not as good an actress as Miss Bingham. She is one
of the "be-stars-quickly." A year or two more in some good company
would have been of inestimable advantage to her, but the lower rungs
of the ladder are not in great demand to-day. That ladder is
top-heavy. The upper rungs are worn by the futile grasp of the too
ambitious; the lower ones are neglected.
It was Paul M. Potter who tapped on the book cover of Elinor Macartney
Lane's novel, with his not very magic wand, and tried to coax forth a
play. Exactly why he did this was not made clear, for the day of the
book play is over, and there was nothing in "Nancy Stair" that
overtopped the gently commonplace. Mr. Potter's play was by no means
lacking in interest, but we are exceedingly tired of the ubiquitous
heroine of tawdry "romance" who does unsubtle things, in an unsubtle
way, to help out certain unsubtle "complications." If I mistake not,
these very novels are beginning to pall, as such stupid, meaningless
vaporings should do. One cannot resist the belief that one-half of
them are written with an eye upon the gullible playwright, for a play
means larger remuneration than any novel could ever hope to secure.
It is not necessary to rehearse the story of "Nancy Stair." I can
assume that you have read it, though if you are like me, you haven't.
I look upon Mr. Julius Cahn's "Official Theatrical Guide" as rich and
racy literature compared with these fatiguing attempts to invent
impossible people, and drag them through a jungle of impossible
happenings--simply because Mr. Anthony Hope, a few years ago, achieved
success by similar means, which at that time had a semblance of
novelty. I may be "prejudiced," but then I have at least the courage
of my own prejudices. In "Nancy Stair" Mr. Potter even seemed to
belittle opportunities that might have raised his play from the dull
level of conventionality.
One episode in which _Nancy_, afraid that her lover has murdered the
_Duke of Borthwicke_, enters the presence of the corpse, and there
forges a letter in the interests of _Danvers_, might have been made
into something strongly emotional, creepy and Sarah Bernhardtian. This
incident in itself was so striking, and it seemed to be so new--though
I believe that Mr. Potter himself repudiates the notion that there can
be anything new in the drama--that it was almost criminal to slight
it. Nothing was made of it. It almost escaped attention. Instead, we
got a crew of comic opera Scotchmen singing songs, and an absurd
picture of _Robert Burns_, who was injected pell-mell into the
"romance." It was disheartening.
Those who had read the book complained bitterly of the "liberties"
that Mr. Potter had taken with it. Those who had not read the book
complained equally bitterly that Mr. Potter had not taken more of
those "liberties" and made it better worth his while. To me, the book
drama is a conundrum. It always has been, and now that it has nearly
died out, I am still unable to solve it. When you read a book, you
form mental pictures of its characters, and are generally discontented
with those that confront you on the stage. And when you don't read a
book, the play made therefrom lacks lucidity, and you experience the
need of a "key." I should imagine that the dramatization of a novel
killed its sale. Who, after viewing "Nancy Stair" as a play, would
tackle it as a novel? Of course, when a book is dramatized after it
has had a stupendous sale, the author cannot complain. He has no
excuse for protesting. This is a somewhat interesting topic.
Miss Mannering coped with _Nancy_ as she would cope with _Camille_ or
_Juliet_, or any character quite outside of her range of ability. In
light comedy episodes, she is quite acceptable. She is a very pretty,
graceful, distinguished young woman, but her "emotion" is absurd. Her
dramatic fervor is such an exceedingly stereotyped affair that you can
watch it in a detached mood. You can pursue your own thoughts while
she is "fervoring," and she will not interrupt them. Miss Mannering is
emotional in a conventional stage way, and she knows a few tricks. But
the subtlety that comes from experience, the quality that nothing but
a long and arduous apprenticeship can produce, are leagues beyond her
ken. It is a pity, but the "be-stars-quickly" all suffer in this
identical way and there is no remedy.
Robert Loraine as the "hero" gave a far better performance. It was
theatrical, but satisfactory. The late _Robert Burns_ was played by T.
D. Frawley in a deliciously Hibernian way. Poor Bobbie would have had
a fit if he could have seen his nationality juggled with in this
manner. If Mr. Frawley had warbled "The Wearing o' the Green" the
illusion would have been complete. Mr. Andrew Mack could have done
nothing better--for Ireland.
"The Lady Shore" was the title of Miss Virginia Harned's massive
production at the Hudson Theater. Jane Shore was dragged, willy-nilly,
from history almost as though she were the heroine of a so-called
popular novel, and two ladies, Mrs. Vance Thompson and Lena R. Smith,
propelled her toward 1905. While, on moral grounds, we may inveigh
against the courtesan, when we meet her in everyday life, the fact
remains that for the stage there is no character in greater demand by
"star" actresses and "romantic" playwrights. They seem to find a
peculiar interest in a woman who has "lived"--no matter how. If, in
ransacking history, they are lucky enough to discover a courtesan who
can be billed as a "king's favorite," they appear to smack their lips
exultantly. One is almost inclined to believe that dead-and-gone kings
must have chosen "favorites" merely for the sake of to-day's stage.
As soon as the playwright has excavated a courtesan, he begins to
think of the best way of whitewashing her. For she must be offered up
as more sinned against than sinning. Of course. The playwright wastes
his substance thinking up excuses for her. He is quite willing--nay,
anxious--that she shall go wrong, but he prefers that she shall be
driven to it by untoward circumstances. He is desirous that we shall
sympathize with her, to the point of tears, in the last act. It is
very kind of him to do such charitable deeds in history's name, and we
realize how exceedingly unselfish he is. Just the same, this mania for
resurrecting defunct courtesans seems a trifle neurasthenic. It
appears to indicate a hysterical sympathy, on the part of the
playwright, with dead characters whom, in life, he would hesitate at
asking to dinner _en famille_.
The two women who built up "The Lady Shore" smashed history into
smithereens in their rabid and frenzied effort to make her an
exquisite impersonation of nearly all the virtues. It was, in fact,
grotesque and ludicrous. With any old history book staring them in the
face, they treated Jane Shore precisely as though she were the heroine
of a dime novel. They had no qualms. They lopped great wads from her
past, and huge excrescences from her present, and by the time that she
had reached the last act, the audience sat dazed at the delicate
beauty of her character. No masculine playwright could have done as
much. Possibly if the purifiers of Lady Jane Shore elected to
dramatize the career of Messalina, they would make of her a
combination of Joan of Arc and Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.
The _Jane Shore_ at the Hudson Theater was married to a brute of a
husband, but she left him simply because she was driven to it, poor
girl! She became the mistress of _Edward IV._, apparently because she
yearned to be a mother to his children. She was always rescuing the
little princes from the _Duke of Gloucester_. She sat beside _Edward
IV._, in the council chamber of Westminster Palace, so that she could
beseech him to pardon delinquents who were brought before him in a
procession of fifteenth century "drunk and disorderly."
There never was a more perfect lady. The playwrights unfortunately
omitted to picture her teaching a Sunday school, and I can only
imagine that they must have forgotten to do so. _Jane Shore's_ love
for _Edward IV._ was depicted in such lily tints that you simply hated
the memory of your history book that said such rude things about her
life after the sovereign's death. The historical "penance" that on the
stage seemed so effective was, as we know, really unavailing. Dramatic
license is a great thing, and it is pardonable when it is used with
discrimination. But made to do duty as a daub, it is unjustifiable.
What is the use of going down into history as one thing, if you are to
be bobbed up on the stage, after the passage of centuries, as another?
To the feminine playwright, the line that separates saints from
sinners is an invisible boundary.
As a play, "The Lady Shore" was mere melodrama, of a somewhat
incoherent nature. Perhaps if the central character had been
imaginary--and it was nearly that--the melodrama would have been all
the better for it. Why not invent a good new character, instead of
revamping a bad old one? Why not exercise the imagination upon some
original creation, instead of straining it around a type that lurks in
the libraries? The authors of "The Lady Shore" might have used their
labors more advantageously. It is always a futile task to rewrite
history. History is cold, and unbudgingly accurate. Why trifle with
it?
Miss Virginia Harned, however, escaped from her play. She is an
emotional actress of considerable force, as she showed us in her
production of "The Lady of the Camelias." She has the power of
repression. She is artistic, sincere and graceful. Her work in this
diffuse play proved that beyond the peradventure of a doubt, so that
her engagement at the Hudson Theater need not be unduly deplored. The
_Gloucester_ of John Blair was extremely amusing. Such a _Richard_,
the most imaginative imaginer could never have dreamed of! He played
the part as though the _Duke of Gloucester_ were an Ibsen gentleman,
battling with a dark green matinee. Mr. Loraine came from "Nancy
Stair" to "The Lady Shore," and was _Edward IV._ It would be
interesting to know which "heroine" he really preferred. The little
princes in the tower seemed to deserve their fate. They were arguments
in favor of race suicide.
Two other celestial bodies of the feminine gender, fixed for one brief
week apiece on the theatrical "concave," moved quickly in the
direction of "the road." These more or less heavenly lights were Miss
Odette Tyler and Miss Eugenie Blair, who appeared at those
kaleidoscopic theaters called "combination houses." Miss Tyler used to
be something of a Broadway "favorite"--a term that has lost a good
deal of its significance. She appeared in the little Yorkville Theater
on the highroad to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, in a play of
her own, called "The Red Carnation."
No purpose would be served in analyzing this uncanny, chaotic mass,
even were it possible to do so. Miss Tyler placed herself amid French
revolutionary surroundings, and was seen as a remarkable "romantic"
French woman, with a strong American accent and an emphatic New York
manner. She fluttered through Paris in 1793, evidently convinced that
it was just as "easy" as New York in 1905. She had a caramel demeanor
and ice-cream allurements. She kittened and frivoled through the Reign
of Terror with an archness that was commendable, though somewhat
misplaced, and she let loose a lay figure labeled _Marie Antoinette_
that was designed to frame her own accomplishments.
Familiar as we are with the French revolution, used as a stage motive,
"The Red Carnation" threw such a new light upon it all, that we were a
trifle dumfounded. Miss Tyler gracefully revised it for us, and made
it appear as a somewhat gay and frolicsome time. Moreover, it had all
the modern improvements. It seemed to be steam-heated and
electric-lighted, and although _Marie Antoinette_ did not make her
entrance in an automobile, you felt that it was waiting outside.
Historians, interested in the French revolution, might get some
valuable sidelights from Miss Odette Tyler's idea of it. The actress
herself has an agreeable personality and considerable ability.
The other "star" to whom I have fitfully alluded--Miss Eugenie
Blair--has much vogue outside of New York. She came to the Murray Hill
Theater with a version of Wilkie Collins' much-abused "New Magdalen,"
which was called "Her Second Life." This being her life number two,
you felt a distinct sensation of relief that you were spared a glimpse
at lives numbers one and three. It was such a very crude performance
that I should not have dragged it into this record had it not been for
the fact that Miss Blair was part of the singular display of celestial
bodies that I have tried to indicate in this article. She is a weighty
actress corporeally, if not artistically, and poor _Mercy Merrick_
fared rather badly. This Wilkie Collins heroine has been neglected of
late, in favor of such base subterfuges as figures of the _Nancy
Stair_ caliber, but certain signs point to revivals of "The New
Magdalen," which as an emotional story has seldom been surpassed.
Compared with the pitiful puppet "romances" of to-day, this genuine
piece of throbbing fiction seems to be in distinctly another class.
Mr. Frank Keenan, with whose praiseworthy effort to emulate the
tactics of M. Antoine in Paris my readers are familiar, gave up the
Berkeley Lyceum ghost, unable to weather the storm and stress of
experiment. While admiring Mr. Keenan's energy, and appreciating the
little one-act bills that he offered with such rapid-transit celerity,
it is impossible to avoid deprecating the lack of logical foresight
that he manifested.
He trifled with our young affections, aroused our enthusiasm and
inspired in us the belief that a permanent institution was inevitable,
and then--quietly dropped out. In other walks of life, people who make
experiments have generally supplied themselves with the wherewithal to
wait while their schemes approach fruition. Rome was not built in a
day, but if the builders thereof had been actors, Rome never would
have been built at all! The actor, who is usually a singularly
unbalanced person, looks for immediate success, and can endure nothing
else.
Why Mr. Keenan should have expected to jump into a whirlwind of
instantaneous applause is an enigma. Nothing that is out of the
conventional rut succeeds at the start. There must be patience,
perseverance and a struggle. Otherwise life would be very easy, which
it is not. The rosy little scheme at the Berkeley Lyceum had attracted
considerable attention. Critics paid homage to every change of bill,
anxious to chronicle success, and looking with glad eyes at the
possible advent of a new impetus to the jaded theatrical machine. They
had worked themselves into the most appreciative state of mind. Lo,
and behold! After a few weeks, M. Antoine's American imitator
evaporated. Lack of funds!
What a dismal lack of those funds there must have been when the
enterprise started! Who but an actor would embark upon a scheme, and
project such radiant promises in the interests of those who are tired
of wallowing in the trough of vulgar "popularity," when it was
apparent that, without that popularity, the thing couldn't last more
than a month? Mr. Keenan should apologize to M. Antoine, of Paris. He
took his name in vain. People with new ideas, opposed to the
conventionality of the old ones, expect naturally to bide their time
before the public unhesitatingly accepts them. If Mr. Keenan had
engaged in his alluring pursuit, willing and even anxious to "lose
money" before he made it, a very different story would have been told.
People ask why dramatic chroniclers grow cynical. The answer is
simple. They feel that they are persistently "jollied" along, and they
assuredly are. It was so in the case of the Berkeley Lyceum plan that
fell through simply because money failed to pour into the box office,
and M. Antoine, of Paris, lacked the vitality of Barnum & Bailey's
circus! It was so last year when Mr. Sydney Rosenfeld tried to
"elevate" the stage with the Century Players. This is an age of
get-rich-quickly, and there is no other object. Actors talk of art,
and of unconventionality; they inveigh against commercialism and pose
most picturesquely. But they are in such a hurry to spear the florid,
bloated body of easy success that they cannot wait. Mr. Frank Keenan
went direct from M. Antoine's Parisian plan to vaudeville!
The little play upon which he relied to turn the tide of dollars in
his direction was called "A Passion in a Suburb," and was described as
"a psychological study of madness," by Algernon Boyesen. It was horror
for the sake of horror, which is always distressing, and it was a
failure. It was food neither for the elect nor for the mob. Both
classes demand a plausible excuse for stage happenings. The picture of
an insane husband strangling his wife and child might be accepted as
the logical sequence of some startling train of events. But to enter a
playhouse and watch a couple of murders for no other reason than that
the murderer was a madman, is not enlivening. It is ghoulish.
I have devoted much space to Mr. Frank Keenan and his plan. I was
sorry for him until I thought it all over. Then I couldn't help
feeling a bit sore. It was all very foolish. The bubble was pricked so
quickly! It is a consolation to reflect that the New York critics did
everything in their power to push along a project that would have been
of great value to this metropolis. It was foredoomed to failure,
because it depended upon the iniquity known as "quick returns." _De
mortuis nil nisi bonum._ (I think I have, though!)
That a one-act play is fully able to create a veritable sensation, as
keen as any that a five-act drama might evoke, was instanced at the
Manhattan Theater, when Mrs. Fiske produced a little drama, written by
herself, and called "A Light from St. Agnes." I think I may say that
it was the finest and most artistic one-act play that I have ever
seen--and I've seen a few in my day. It aroused a matinee audience, on
a warm afternoon, to an ecstasy of enthusiastic approval, because it
appealed directly to the artistic fiber.
It was not a case for cold analytic judgment. It was not an occasion
when long-haired critics could draw a diagram, and prate learnedly of
"technique" and other topics that often make critics such insensate
bores. "A Light from St. Agnes" was recognized intuitively as great.
The soul of an audience never makes a mistake, though the brain
frequently errs. A brain might perhaps prove that this play was
artistically admirable, but the soul reached that conclusion instantly
and unreasoningly. The effect was marvelous.
I wonder if you quite grasp my meaning. You know there are some things
that refuse to be reduced to diagram form. They decline to answer to
the call of a, b and c. They won't be x'd and y'd algebraically. Very
material people of course rebel at this. They want everything cut and
dried. They would dissect the soul with a scalpel, and reduce psychic
effects to the medium of pounds and ounces. That is what certain
reviewers tried to do with "A Light from St. Agnes."
Their material eyes saw that the end of the little play was murder;
that its motive was a sacrilegious robbery--the theft of a diamond
cross from the body of a woman lying dead in a church; that the man
was a drink-besotted ruffian; that the woman was his illicit partner;
that the atmosphere was assuredly brutal. Material eyes saw all this.
Material senses reasoned that, given all these qualities, such a play
must be horrible, and unduly strenuous. But intuition set all this
reasoning awry. You see, intuition doesn't reason; it _knows_. It is
better to know than to reason. Get a dozen people to prove to you that
"A Light from St. Agnes" was a dismal and unnecessary tragedy. Oh,
they might be able to do it. Then go and see it, and you will
understand precisely what I am driving at.
Plays that appeal to intuition are the most wonderful offerings that
the theater can make. Nothing can stay their effect; nobody can
successfully argue against them. Rare indeed they are. When some
playwright, as the result of a genuine emotion, makes a drama, in the
sheer delight of that emotion, and with a disregard for
conventionality, and no hope of box-office approval--then you get a
work of art. Incidentally, I may remark that such a work of art is so
irresistible that it literally forces the box office to tinkle. It
would be a pity if it didn't.
The scene of "A Light from St. Agnes" is laid in a Louisiana village
called Bon Hilaire. _Michel_ and _Toinette_ occupy a rude hut, in the
vicinity of St. Agnes' Church. The light from the church sometimes
irradiates the sordid, loathsome room. In fact, _Toinette_ places her
couch in such a position that the light may shine upon her eyes, and
awaken her in time to call _Michel_, her befuddled partner.
A woman who has tried to reform the lawless life of this section of
Louisiana has died. Her body lies in the church. _Toinette_ and
_Michel_ have both been cynically amused, in their reckless way, at
her efforts, unavailing, to reform them. And she is dead! _Father
Bertrand_ visits _Toinette_, and tells her this. The peasant laughs.
The priest gives her a crucifix that the woman left for her, and its
influence--though the playwright is far too subtle even to suggest
this--is the "moral" of the little play for those who want their i's
dotted and their t's crossed.
The drama moves quickly. The drama is tragedy. _Michel_ returns, more
hopelessly intoxicated than ever. She lies on the rude couch, seeking
sleep. He talks, as he plies himself with drink. The subject is the
dead woman in the church of St. Agnes. Some one had placed a lily in
her hand. He hopes that nobody will ever dare to place a lily in his!
There are long silences; significant pauses. Through the open window
he looks into the church. He sees the dead woman, laid out on a
gold-embroidered cloth. On her breast is a cross of diamonds.
More long silences; more significant pauses. He must possess that
diamond cross. Why not? He hated the dead woman. He would steal into
the church and rob the body; nay, more, he would hurl insults at it.
_Toinette_ has the crucifix. Perhaps it is that; perhaps it is the
awakening of some forgotten instinct within her. The horror of the
man's intention convulses her. There is a terrible conflict between
the two. It is the very intensity of drama. The audience, wrought up,
holds its breath. Then _Toinette_, by a ruse, escapes from the man,
and, rushing from the dwelling, gives an alarm. The bells ring, in
wildest chime. _Michel_ realizes that he is trapped; that the woman
has undone him. He goes after her, finds her, brings her back. He
wrestles with her, forces her back upon the rude couch, and plunges
his knife into her throat.
The stage is in darkness. Yet you can dimly see him hovering over the
body; you watch him in a sort of fascination, as he washes the blood
from his hands, and then furtively, in the silence, steals away.
_Toinette_ lies, extended on the couch, motionless--dead. From the
window the light from St. Agnes creeps into the room. It is cast
tenderly over _Toinette's_ body, which it irradiates strangely as the
curtain falls slowly.
One must "describe" plays, even when in so doing one runs the risk of
doing them an injustice. My recital of the story of "A Light from St.
Agnes" sounds bald, as I recall the effect that the play produced. I
insist that never for one moment was it "morbid" or unnecessarily
horrible. It rang true, without one hysterical intonation. It was
sincere, dignified, artistic, beautiful. It was admirably staged; it
was acted by John Mason, William B. Mack and Fernanda Eliscu with
exquisite appeal.
Mrs. Fiske scored heavily as a playwright. There were two other
one-act dramas from her pen--"The Rose" and "The Eyes of the Heart."
The latter made an excellent impression, but it was in "A Light from
St. Agnes" that she stamped herself indelibly upon the season.
FOR BOOK LOVERS
Archibald Lowery Sessions
Practical purposes served by stories of trade and commerce.
Something more than entertainment. Among the interesting new
books are "The Common Lot," by Robert Herrick; "The Master
Word," by L. H. Hammond; "The Plum Tree," by David Graham
Phillips.
Spring has brought with it a multitude of gay volumes. American
bookbinding has at last reached such a point that, whatever the nature
of its contents, a novel may at least make an impression by its good
clothes.
Trade stories almost overcrowd this brilliant assemblage. Of course,
it is what might be expected of American commercialism, that our
literature should open its doors to all phases of business and
manufacture. Most of us feel particularly at home and in our element,
as it were, when finding amusement for a leisure hour among mills or
stock markets.
And these tales, like the Rollo books, impart much valuable
information to the uninitiated. We can remember feeling a slight
degree of impatience some years ago, when Mr. Hopkinson Smith gave us
his careful demonstration of the building of stone piers in the pages
of "Caleb West." But in the end we recognized thriftily that he had
given us, for the small price of the book, enough points to be
available for carrying on an intelligent conversation with a stone
mason; a decided addition to one's accomplishments in those days of
social misunderstanding.
That book came with the first advances of the tide. Now hundreds of
such volumes are washed up at our feet, out of which we may accumulate
regular trade libraries if we like, from which a young student can
learn the ins and outs of all professions and commercial ventures, their
temptations or advantages, and their relation, as well, to the mysterious
workings of love. What a possession for a would-be-well-equipped
worldling!
The only difficulty is, what are we going to do when these resources
are used up?
However, there is no real need to worry. We can still encourage the
unsuccessful author, who has been befogged by romance and idealism, to
peg away for a year or two at some, if possible, unique form of
manufacture, going into it from the bottom and learning its tricks and
its manners. He will have at least the opportunity of becoming a good
mechanic, and probably some chance of getting up a paying novel in the
hereafter--with a seductive cover.
* * * * *
There can be no doubt that "The Common Lot," by Robert Herrick,
Macmillan Company, is among the strongest of this year's books, and
one which should take high rank as a thoroughly representative
American novel.
From beginning to end it absorbs attention, is virile in the depiction
of character, and most of all notable in its absolute fidelity to
human nature and the modern point of view, even where it points an
overwhelming moral. The story of Jackson Powers' career, his promising
beginning, the natural temptation to overlook a bit of dishonesty, and
his equally natural response to it, followed by his deterioration as
an architect who sacrifices his ideals to commercial interests, is a
fine piece of work; so is the portrait of his strong wife, and her
slow but crushing realization of his weakness.
The delightful little doctor in the slums, and the defiant product of
conventionality, Venetia Phillips, supply plenty of humor, and for
sensation, one need not look further than the thrilling description of
the Glenmore fire, which, in its awful tragedy, reveals Powers to
himself as a criminal.
Not the least powerful scene is that in which his confession and
attempts to atone are received by the contemptuous man of the world,
who sees in them only weakness and cowardice, despite his scorn of the
crime.
No reader will put down the book without having experienced some
stirrings of heart and some reminders of personal experience, or
without a keen interest in the story.
* * * * *
As "The Cost" dealt with finance on a big scale, so David Graham
Phillips' latest book, "The Plum Tree," Bobbs-Merrill Company, deals
with politics on a big scale.
In these two stories, Mr. Phillips depends for the success of his
narrative rather upon theme and plot than upon style and
characterization; not that these two elements are slighted, or that
they are not skillfully and masterfully handled, but that one feels
that they are purposely subordinated to the subject-matter and to
interest in the development of the tale.
That it is an intensely interesting book cannot be denied; it is so
because it is near enough to the facts of politics to make the
stirring and dramatic episodes it describes seem like the account of a
phase of vital human life.
The story is that of young Sayler's development from a green,
inexperienced and impecunious young lawyer, to the seasoned man who
controls the politics of the country through his unerring manipulation
of both party machines; the maker of Presidents, the master of
Congress, the terror of the financial world. The methods by which he
achieves these results make up the action of the story; they are such
as we are all familiar with, except, perhaps, in the combination which
Mr. Phillips makes of them.
The love element is of minor importance, and doubtless, to some minds,
it will be considered unattractive. But no one can deny that the
story, as a whole, is one of more than ordinary power.
* * * * *
The Harpers publish another new story by Warwick Deeping, "The
Slanderers." It is a novel which, in style, so suggests George
Meredith as to make one suspect that the author is a pupil of the
older writer.
A pair of idealists, quite realistic, nevertheless, in their
introduction to one another, and in the attachment which follows, are
the chief actors in the plot. Gabriel Strong, the dreamy son of a
prosperous English squire, falls in love with Joan Gildersledge, the
equally dreamy daughter of a bestial and intemperate miser. Gabriel
marries an unsatisfactory young woman in the vicinity, Ophelia Gusset,
and retains Joan as his consoler and friend in a virtuous but
high-strung companionship, out of which the country gossips, who hear
of it through a spying servant, develop a slander.
Gabriel's wife, meantime, is amusing herself with a military man at a
watering place. The clearing up of this situation, and the pairing off
of congenial couples with various striking episodes, among them the
death of Zeus Gildersledge, and his denunciation of his daughter, and
the final reconciliation of Gabriel with his father, by whom he has
been disinherited, make up a tale in which interest is sustained to
the very end. The book is full of dainty descriptions of landscape,
and the few leading personalities are well and strongly drawn.
* * * * *
"The Master Word," by L. H. Hammond, Macmillan, is described upon the
title-page as "a story of the South of to-day." Its background is
placed in the phosphate region of Tennessee, and the author assures us
that many of the incidents described, "especially those more or less
sensational in their nature," actually occurred within her own
experience. The purpose of the story, she says, furthermore, is "in
full accord with Southern thoughts and hopes."
It is hardly necessary to say that it would not be a story of the
South if it did not deal in some way with the race question; but it
would be premature to conclude from this that it is essentially a
problem novel.
The opening chapters introduce this question, growing out of the
distressing circumstances of a wife's discovery of her husband's
infidelity, and the problem is interwoven closely with the plot in the
presence of the latter's illegitimate mulatto daughter. Her career and
end are the more unpleasant to the reader because of the conviction
that they are detailed with facts as they exist in the South. The
pathetic interest of Viry's story, though properly subordinate to the
main plot, forces itself on the reader's attention.
In other respects, also, the truth of the conditions described is
impressed upon one, even though he may be unfamiliar with the facts.
It is a very strong tale, full of color, with a consistently developed
plot, constructed with a fine sense of proportion and vivid
characterization, except in one respect, which constitutes the weak
point of the story--that is to say, the character of Dick Lawton, who
is somewhat priggish and altogether disappointing.
* * * * *
Miss Geraldine Bonner has very wisely selected a theme for her story,
"The Pioneer," Bobbs-Merrill Company, with which she is thoroughly at
home. Its subtitle is "A Tale of Two States"--viz.: California and
Nevada, and, therefore, as may be correctly inferred, it is a mining
story, or at least a story in which this element plays an important
part.
The action takes place during the years almost immediately following
the Civil War, and leads up to the period of the Bonanza discoveries
in Nevada, in the early seventies. With such material as this
afforded, it is easy to see that an extremely interesting tale can be
constructed by so experienced an author as Miss Bonner.
The story involves, of course, the consecutive gain and loss of
fortunes many times repeated; it pictures the social life of San
Francisco and the rough life of Nevada mining camps, and gives
attractive glimpses of the valleys of California, all with a degree of
descriptive power that is a little unexpected.
The character of the old pioneer, Colonel Parrish, and the two
sisters, June and Rosamund Allen, and the reciprocal affection of the
three, furnish the large element of human interest in the story, for
they are very attractive and lovable people. The relations of the two
girls with "Uncle Jim" arrest the attention and stimulate the
sympathies of the reader even more than the love affairs of the
former.
The narrative flows on pretty evenly, with no strikingly dramatic
situations and no overwhelming climax, but interest is held
tenaciously all through.
* * * * *
Another of the late Guy Wetmore Carryl's posthumous books is "Far From
the Maddening Girls," published by McClure, Phillips & Co.
It is altogether a delicious piece of nonsense, serious neither in
style nor intention, filled with puns so atrocious as to make the
reader admire the author's audacity, the recklessness of which adds
much to his entertainment.
A bachelor, hopelessly cynical, as he thinks, on the subject of women,
who deludes himself into the conviction that he can successfully and
permanently escape from them, is not only a fair mark for any sort of
ridicule, but also a fruitful theme for a farce. The particular
bachelor who figures in this narrative devised a means of effecting
this end by building himself a country house--of all things! The
result is, of course, obvious; as, indeed, the result of a farce ought
to be.
Doubtless some critical souls will call the story flat, but to such
people we can only say that there is a lot of harmless fun in the book
that will act as an efficient corrective for jaundiced views of life.
* * * * *
A very charming story is "The Princess Passes," by C. N. and A. M.
Williamson, the authors of "The Lightning Conductor," which will be
recalled with a great deal of pleasure by a multitude of novel
readers. The new book is published by Henry Holt & Co.
Like "The Lightning Conductor," the new book has for its theme a
European tour, partly by automobile and partly on foot, undertaken by
the hero, Lord Montagu Lane, at the urgent solicitation of his
friends, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Winston, to cure a serious case of
disappointed love.
That he should find ample consolation for the loss of Helen Blantock,
and in the end lose interest in her and her titled grocery man, will
not surprise the reader. The manner in which it is effected, however,
involves some rather unconventional details, worked out, of course,
through the agency of a delightful American girl. Anyone who has read
"The Heavenly Twins" will doubtless find something to stir
reminiscence in the intercourse between Lord Lane and the Boy. In this
the chief interest in the plot centers.
It is altogether a charming narrative, full of pretty descriptive
passages, and colored by the evident satisfaction the authors took in
writing it.
* * * * *
"The Secret Woman," by Eden Phillpotts, Macmillan Company, is a little
tale of English farm life, with a picturesque setting, great intensity
of action and passion, and some indefiniteness as to what code of
morals the rather unpleasant performances of its characters should be
judged by.
As adultery, usury, murder and suicide are among these little
eccentricities, offset against superstition, religion and rationalism,
the reader may take his choice of theories. Interest is sustained
without question, and the two women--an older and a younger one--who
as heroines and wrongdoers enlist our sympathy, are attractive and
painted in clearer colors than the men. One or two minor
personalities, however, are clearly drawn, and the dramatic element
forcefully developed.
* * * * *
It would be difficult to hit upon a novelist who shows wider
divergences in his work than Booth Tarkington, not because he gives in
it any special evidence of versatility--a word which implies something
like genius, or at least talent. This peculiarity is due rather to an
arbitrary method in the choice of themes.
In his latest book, "In the Arena," published by McClure, Phillips &
Co., he has given a striking demonstration of this. It is a collection
of six short stories, dealing with the subject of State and municipal
politics. The question of cause and effect here is comparatively
unimportant; whether Mr. Tarkington went to the Indiana legislature to
get material for short stories, or whether he has written these
because of his experience as an assemblyman, is not a matter of
literary interest.
The narrations are not particularly convincing. Those who are familiar
with the practical politician, and his followers and their modern
methods, will find few parallels in the characters and descriptions in
these tales. Political bosses nowadays seldom resort to the crude
device of ballot-box stuffing and threatened blackmail to defeat
reformers, and reformers are unlikely to be so easily frightened as
Farwell was. The game is much more complex than it used to be,
principally because the reformers have learned to play it more
intelligently, and those who fail to give them credit for astuteness
know little about the rules; the politicians themselves have ceased to
make the mistake of underrating their antagonists.
The female lobbyist is a character that "once-upon-a-time" flourished
at the national and in State capitals, but modern methods have made
her, to a large degree, superfluous, and now the high-priced lawyer,
representing the Trust, deals directly with the party boss instead of
the individual lawmaker. It is cheaper and quicker.
Mr. Tarkington's friends, Boss Gorgett and Mrs. Protheroe, belong to a
species that is extinct--at any rate, outside of Indiana.
* * * * *
"The Chronicles of Don Q," by K. and Hesketh Prichard, J. B.
Lippincott Company, is a picturesque tale of adventure, told, however,
with a restraint that lends dignity and a fair degree of plausibility.
Being the story of a Spanish bandit, there is, of course, an abundance
of murder and sudden deaths; but as the right persons survive, and a
majority of the villains die, with more or less violence, the
sensibilities of the reader are not much shocked.
In spite of Don Q's profession and associates, and a temperament
somewhat pessimistic for a highwayman, he is not really a bad sort of
fellow. His idiosyncrasies are due, doubtless, to an early
disappointment in love, on account of which allowances are to be made,
particularly as he retains his courtly manners, a careful regard for
the misfortunes of others, so far as his occupation permits, a very
efficient sympathy with the weak and a devotion to the Church
manifested in many practical ways--his piety being of the kind
imitated, with more or less success in America, by persons said to
belong to the same class as Don Q.
Though apparently absolutely isolated from the rest of the world in
his mountain retreat in southern Spain, he keeps in touch with affairs
outside so far as they affect him, and is able, in mysterious ways, to
anticipate, and so defeat, all attempts to ensnare him. Surprise is
impossible for him, as it was for Sherlock Holmes.
If his portrait, by Stanley Wood, is a faithful likeness, the
influence of his presence is not to be wondered at.
* * * * *
"Constance Trescott," by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, Century Company, stands
out among the stronger books of the season. He takes for his heroine a
not unfamiliar type of woman, reared by an old uncle whose antipathy
to religion has made her, as she describes it: "Neither religious nor
non-religious--open-minded."
She is, however, docile because of her deep love for her husband,
under the latter's attempts to interest her in the faith which he
holds dear. Trescott, who compels admiration by his fine,
straightforward course, takes his wife to a small Missouri town, where
Southern prejudice is still rife and laws are lax, and where feeling
is bitter against the uncle of Constance, the absentee landowner, who
has sent Trescott to represent him in enforcing evictions from a tract
of land to which he claims ownership.
Greyhurst is Trescott's opponent in a consequent lawsuit, a
picturesque and passionate character, with a mixture of Creole and
Indian blood. While he admires Constance, he hates her husband, whom
he labors unscrupulously to defeat.
The court scene, where Constance is called to give certain testimony,
and does it to the confusion of Greyhurst, is interesting; and still
more dramatic is the murder of Trescott by Greyhurst, after the
decision against the latter.
The rest of the book turns upon the revenge which Constance,
undisciplined as she is by nobler inspirations, devotes her life and
fortune to wreaking upon Greyhurst, and its sensational consummation.
The story is one of Dr. Mitchell's most characteristic efforts, and,
like all he writes, is well worth reading.
Transcriber's Notes
The Contents list was added.
Cold [changed to Could] hold all he could chew.
Dena [changed to Deena] turned and came slowly
dressed in loose-fitting mantles of guano [changed to guanaco] skins
secretary at Gibralter [changed to Gibraltar]
among notaable [changed to notable] men
The Wickcliffe [changed to Wickliffe] boy, Billy
divorcees [changed to divorcees]--hitherto Bentnor's
particularly large and lusscious [changed to luscious] mushroom
End of Project Gutenberg's Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905, by Various