CHAPTER VIII_Cupid's Middleman

Now that I know Gabrielle Tescheron, I am for giving woman the largest

liberty in all matters; let her have suffrage if she will take it. I am

for giving woman everything--just let her run loose, here, there and

everywhere, and then you'll see the world tidy up. It's time the

worldliness of the world was viewed with fresh eyes. Woman, so long held

in restraint, in many ways is a better observer than conventional man.

She is like a countryman newly arrived in the city. It takes a

countryman to see the real sights of New York; of course, he won't let

on or be surprised at anything, for he wants you to feel that the only

metropolis worth while is the place he calls "down street," up home; he

is taking it all in, however, like an old-fashioned sap-kettle, and if

you have dumped maple juice fresh from the trees into one all day, you'd

think it held the five oceans and the Great Lakes. For years afterward

his views on New York illuminate locally every city scandal reported in

the New York papers; he probably saw it coming when he was down, and can

tell a lot of incidents there was no space for in the crowded papers.

At one of the Oswegatchie County dinners held in a swell New York hotel

I once saw one of these confident, you-can't-surprise-me countrymen take

a drink of water from a goblet with a scalloped edge; it stood fourteen

inches high and six across. The waiter had placed it on the table near

him full of celery, but when the last piece had been taken and only a

few green leaves floated like lily pads on its calm surface, he knew the

proper thing to do. He just blew off the stray leaves, stretched his

mouth around the prongs on the edge, got his paw under it, turned it up

and enjoyed his simple highball. All our strong men come from the

country. They drink and see things straight. They are more particular as

to contents than containers, for they are nearly all prohibitionists or

very high license advocates. When they are "dry," they drink equally

well from a spring-hole, a spigot, a dipper or a pail.

"Rather generous with the water at these dinners, Reuben," I said,

addressing him across the table, as he covered his mouth with his napkin

preparatory to resuming his composure.

"These fashionable glasses always cut my mouth," he replied, wrinkling

his brow to emphasize his dislike for the fads of the aristocracy.

But when an out-and-out city man goes to the country, he can't see

anything; it's all just like Central Park, in that there are no houses

to be seen, only it's not laid out so well nor raked so clean. I have

often seen these chaps when they came up to our place. The city man is

as blind as a cave fish, and all he wants to know is when do they eat

and are there any mosquitoes and poison ivy. The air suits him, only

it's a little too strong; and the dirt is satisfactory--all else is away

below par, and if it weren't for the air and the dirt, which the

country-bred city doctor has told him the kids need, he'd like to be

home, where he can be sociable in his sub-stratum of atmospheric poison,

amid the clatter that consumes his vital forces and keeps him pleasantly

anaemic and tolerably dead.

Did you ever go through the woods with a native New Yorker? There has

been an incessant stream of startling things running before his eyes

since his birth, with plenty of noise, dust and expense, so that when he

is thrown out into the fields or the woods he finds he can't be one of

Nature's Quakers and hold communion with the silent worshippers through

whom the Spirit speaks. His outdoor religion is in the Salvation Army

class, and he can't warm up enough to admire a potted geranium unless he

hears a bass drum or a hand organ to distract him on the side. If the

sweet air and comforting silence of the country were to fall upon New

York, the town would probably drop to even lower levels from the shock.

The country boy, who has been used to concentrating on the wood-pile,

runs the country; or, if it happens to be a city boy who runs it, he is

a fellow who had the wood-pile grafted onto him in time to save his

career. Gabrielle Tescheron, the woman in a new field, saw the world

aright; there was no mystery for her at any time. Her intuitions guided

her unerringly while we who reasoned became entangled.

Shrewdness in the country lad, however, is not commended very highly by

me. It may be that the country boy has been tutored by the most

unscrupulous politicians that ever got out a big vote on a moral

issue--usually the one coined at the mint with unanimous consent and a

cry for more: "In God We Trust." If the country boy has fallen, it may

be that he was blinded by this, so that when he came to the city and

took the prizes he used the same old methods. We find some of these

shrewd country lads with abundant health, close observers, selling their

birthrights here in the sort of deals that were regarded as clever in

up-country politics, and so became legitimate in their eyes.

There's more politics in the country than they can dilute in their

sermons, although they absorb about thirty times as many of these as the

city man. Some day all the country fathers will reform, even if they

have to change their politics and half of them die because of it. They

will think it more worth while to save their sons than to save the

country.

What about the morality of the city man? It isn't a factor because he

isn't.

If the management of our affairs had been entrusted to Gabrielle

Tescheron there would have been no trouble. Had her father been a wise

man and allowed this only child to have her way--to have noted the whole

situation from her fresh view-point, he would have found peace where he

found an abundance of perplexing conditions and ample expense closely

adhering to every bramble bush into which the tactics of Smith hurled

him. Gabrielle could not save him and she did not try. Where the cause

of the trouble is idiocy of the Tescheron quality, it has to go through

a long course of pulverization, maceration and cure; if you hurry the

process, the goods will be sour and hurt the business, if the lot gets

out under the trade-mark. The best thing to do with it is to send it to

the coal heap, for if you try to get your money back at a Front Street

auction room, some hand-cart syndicate will nab it and cut your price.

They'll undersell the direct trade, and when you have finished writing

an explanation to the men on the road, you'd wish you had eaten the

whole carload yourself.

It was part of the wisdom of this remarkably prudent young woman to

thoroughly comprehend--by some of those fresh intuitions, probably--that

her truly repentant father would plead for her forgiveness and ask her

blessing upon his prodigal return only after a long, long wrestle with

the wholesalers in blasted reputations, who so showily presented designs

for a disgraced suitor that pleased him greatly. He had placed an order

with these architects of infamous character to build one according to

the plans and specifications presented, and as the construction work

progressed there were extras, extras, extras! Gabrielle knew of these

and never murmured. To her father's urgings, she guardedly replied:

"My dear father, I know my heart and I know yours. Some day you, too,

will reach the truth and we shall again be happy."

There was no mystery in this situation for Gabrielle Tescheron, as I

have stated. She would not tolerate it. At the time her father and

myself were confused, she was sure of herself. He thought of his family,

and I of my reputation, whose spots had never been advertised. Gabrielle

thought only of Jim.

Gabrielle could not be swayed from her devotion to the man whose simple

ways and sturdy honor made their silent appeal to her. He was nobody's

ideal man but hers, perhaps, and people who knew them wondered what she

saw in him to match her ambitions. Well, there was her wisdom coming to

the surface again in a way to confuse those who would have managed her

affairs differently. Gabrielle had a firm faith in herself. Jim was the

complementary type of man; he approached her with qualifications that

met all the practical conditions the careful father had a right to

demand, prompted by his love for his child--at least, this was true

according to her conception--and beyond that the father could not enter

to live her life for her. She was at once convinced of her father's

folly and paid no further heed to his objections. She gave full liberty

to others, and firmly but not excitedly demanded it for herself. This

was a manifestation of love's controlling power in the stress of storm

that I, as a theorist, knew not, but having gained the wisdom through

the course it prescribes in the school--I might say the _Correspondence_

School of Hard Knocks, I think I am now qualified to have my name in the

catalogue, if not as a member of the faculty, then as janitor--for no

man was ever more ready than I to eat humble pie.

Gabrielle Tescheron was a graduate of Vassar. When only twenty she had

her degree and an ambition to progress farther in knowledge by direct

contact with the world of business. The opportunity came on her

Commencement Day, when John MacDonald, an old friend of her father,

playfully suggested that she come into his law office and be a Portia.

"Your black gown," he said, "makes me think you are a Justice of the

Court of Appeals."

He smiled, and she became very happy with this thought to carry home.

Even then I believe she had the good sense not to feel badly because he

had not praised her essay on "Constitutional Provisions Bearing Upon Our

Federal Control of Inter-State Commerce."

"Ten years from now, I'll tell you what I think about it," was all he

had to say.

John MacDonald was getting well along in years, but was at the height of

his active professional career when Gabrielle induced him to seriously

confirm his suggestion made a few months before. This persistence of

hers in the matter pleased him. He liked her self-confidence and that

quiet manner which told him she would win by taking the sure road of

steady, earnest endeavor to grasp the whole by taking each part, day by

day. She began, he saw, with scientific methods and abundant enthusiasm.

The plan was for her to master stenography and typewriting, become John

MacDonald's confidante in the office, and at the same time take a law

course at one of the down-town schools. The mechanical aids afforded by

stenographic note-taking and the typewriter's rapidity gave her the

short cuts to mastering the details and routine of the business--the

shop-work of a law office. Mr. MacDonald, a kind, mild-mannered man, but

an exact and careful lawyer, who demanded the utmost thoroughness from

his subordinates, had known this girl from childhood and took a fatherly

interest in her. She, in turn, admired him for his justice, and she felt

that the progress she was able to make in her work by keeping busy and

taking pains, might not have been so marked under his tutorship were he

not a man whose sympathy never ran to coddling and spoiling. He was in

sympathy with her, that she knew; but he never went out of his way to

tell her how well she was doing. He incorporated much of her original

work in his own, and let her infer his opinion of her from this. This

man was, I believe, the source of the girl's wisdom in the events which

drove her father and me into the most unusual forms of insane

conclusion. We assumed that we understood human nature. This girl

assumed nothing. She walked with sure feet after she had gone over the

case with some of the old-fashioned common sense that hovered around

John MacDonald's law office. How fine it was for her to attach herself

to some of the real problems of the world rather than bury her talents

in the shallow social activities she might have entered into and come to

regard as her limited sphere, when in reality she had the widest liberty

for the mere seeking and deserving!

I was not present at the reception held at the home of mutual friends,

Mr. and Mrs. Gibson, some three years prior to these events narrated

here, when Gabrielle Tescheron and James Hosley first met. I was out of

town that New Year's eve, and so missed the jolly party at the Gibsons',

although I had been present usually on these anniversary occasions in

bygone years, for the Gibsons were kind friends of ours and pitied our

lonely lot. They lived in the cutest little home in all the great

city--in the most romantic spot you could find when the waning hours of

the old year were danced away by merry feet and jolly hearts sang the

New Year in. Mr. Gibson was a mechanical engineer (not from Stevens',

but from Cooper Union), and he was the superintendent in charge of the

big Produce Exchange building, whose tall, red tower is one of the

landmarks of New York. Their home was a conveniently arranged and

tastefully furnished apartment high up in the tower just beneath the

clock, where, perhaps, you have seen those round windows that look out

upon the world of surrounding harbor and soaring skyscrapers, like tiny

portholes. Those windows of the Gibson home are larger than you imagine

when viewing them from the street. What a spot to meet a charming girl!

Why, I used to lose my heart there every New Year's night as regularly

as the big clock marked the minutes, but it always came back to me with

a bounce six weeks later; the dense atmosphere of romance hovering

there made competition extremely keen. Who would not fall in love in

that clock tower!--far up among the stars, separated from the dull

routine below by encircling fairy lights of harbor, misty outlines of

buildings and busily moving craft--all seemingly in mid-air, flashing

the scenery of a joyland, while mellow chimes of the neighboring Trinity

pealed their glad welcome to the New Year. At that magic moment, when

you pressed far out of the window to hear the bells--she and

you--suspended above that vast expanse of earth, sea and air shrinking

away, as if you two together were flying aloft with arms entwined, you

passed very close to heaven. The shouts from the street were heard but

faintly, and awoke sighing echoes in your heart, like the minor chord

accenting the ecstatic movement which seemed to hold the world in

rhythm. How lustily you caroled the chorus to hide your tender feelings!

Some of those round windows have such dear memories clinging to

them--aye! clinging is the word--that I dare not look up at them any