A DINNER AT SEVEN-THIRTY
By five o'clock the next afternoon Ewing had ended his journey in an
upper room of the Stuyvesant Hotel. This hostelry flaunts an outworn
magnificence. Its hangings are dingy, its plenteous gilt is tarnished;
and it seems to live on memories of a past when fashion splendidly
thronged its corridors. But peace lies beyond the gloom of its portals,
and Ewing was glad to be housed from the dazing tumult outside. Nothing
reached him now but the muted rhythm of horses' feet on the asphalt
below, and this but recalled agreeably to him that his solitude was an
artificial thing of four walls. He had no wish to forget that the world
waited beyond his door.
He fell back on the sofa, a once lordly thing of yellow satin, now
frayed and faded, to eye the upper reaches of the room. The high,
blue-tinted ceiling was scarred and cracked. Depending from its center a
huge chandelier dangled glittering prisms of glass. An immense mirror in
a gilt frame, lavishly rococo, rested on the mantel of carved white
marble. Heavy lace curtains, shrouding the two broad windows, made a
restful half light.
He had awakened to hills that morning, wooded hills and well towned.
Then had come veritable cities, rich to him with all romance under their
angular, smoky ugliness. And at last had come the real city--the end of
the world and its center. He discovered it beyond a stretch of
white-flecked water alive with strange craft. Its clean, straight,
myriad-windowed towers glowed under a slanting sun in an air as crystal
clear as that of his own hills. A vista of heart-shaking surprises
unfolded ahead of the great boat they boarded, a boat with a heart
strongly beating in tune with his own. Too soon it nosed its way, with a
sort of clumsy finesse, into a pile-walled pocket. There followed the
keen, quick rattling of a cogged wheel and a rush of people who seemed
insufficiently impressed by the magnitude of the event. Then they
entered a cab, to be driven from a throng of other cabs and jostling
pedestrians through the maze of a dream come true. He tried not to
ignore his companion for glimpses of that strange life through the cab
window.
Very casually she had said at parting, "Thank you so much for all your
care of me--and dine with us at seven-thirty, won't you? I shall try to
have a friend here that I think may help you."
A long time he lay, reviewing that chaotic first hour in the world.
Everything throbbed here, it seemed. One lived more quickly. And how
long could the body endure it? Suddenly he felt his own pulses beating
at a rate to terrify. He caught his breath and listened. He could hear
the monstrous beats--they were actually shaking the sofa on which he
lay. He thought of heart disease. He might be dying there--and they
would wait dinner for him. He sprang up desperately. The sinister
beating ceased. He put his hand to his heart, listened tensely, and
heard again that which had alarmed him, the pulsing beat of a steam pump
somewhere far below. In his relief he laughed aloud.
As he set about opening his trunks he was marveling at clothes lines he
had seen stretched high between the rear walls of houses. How did people
ever hang clothes on lines fifty feet from the ground? Truly it was a
city of wonders.
He took out a suit of evening clothes that had been his father's. He had
found that the suit fitted him, and he and Ben had assured themselves by
reference to the pictured heroes in magazine advertisements that its cut
was nearly enough in the prevailing mode. Ewing had also found some
cards of his father's which would convey his own name to all who might
care to read it.
As he sauntered out at the dinner hour he wished that Ben could be
watching him. The Bartell house was in Ninth Street, less than a long
block from his hotel, a broad, plain-fronted, three-story house of red
brick trimmed with white marble. Caught in a little eddy from the stream
heading in Washington Square and sweeping north, it had kept an old-time
air of dignity and comfort. Ewing observed a cheering glow through the
muslin curtains at the windows as he ascended the three marble steps.
The old white door, crowned with a fanlight and retaining its brass
knocker, had suffered the indignity of an electric bell, but this was
obscurely placed at the side, and he lifted the knocker's lion head. As
no bell rang, he dropped it, and was dismayed by its metallic clamor. He
swiftly meditated flight, thinking to return for a seemlier
demonstration. But the door swung back and a person in evening dress
stood aside to bow him in.
"Ah, good evening!" exclaimed Ewing cordially. Then, embarrassed, he
felt for a card, recalling that he was in a land where, probably, one
could not be cordial to persons who opened doors.
"For Mrs. Laithe," he said, in grave tones, eying the man's bluntly cut
features with a severity meant to dispel any wrong impression. The
person received the card on a tiny silver plate, relieved him of hat and
coat with what seemed to Ewing an uncanny deftness, bowed him to the
gloom of a large apartment on the left, and vanished. An instant later
he reappeared, drew portieres aside, revealing another warmly lighted
room, and Ewing beheld a white vision of his hostess.
"I'm glad to have a word with you," she began. "Sit here. You're to meet
a friend, Ned Piersoll, who will tell you a lot of things. I telephoned
him directly I came in, and he found he could come, though he must run
when he's eaten--some affair with his mother. But he'll have found out
about you."
"I'm much obliged to you," he stammered, having caught little of her
speech.
"Ned will tell you what to do. He knows everybody. He's on the staff of
the Knickerbocker magazine, and he had a novel out last spring, 'The
Promotion of Fools,' that you must have seen advertised everywhere, like
a medicine."
"Yes, I've read that book."
"You must tell him if you liked it--they all care to hear that--and
he'll see that you meet men of your own kind." For looking at her he had
been able to give her words little attention. She had revealed herself
anew in the dull white of a gown that brought out the elusive glow of
her face. Her eyes were deep wells, shaded but luminous, under the
lusterless dark of her hair, and her smile flashed a girlish benignity
upon him. Acutely alive was he to the line of neck and shoulder and
arm, a slender, supple neck, set on shoulders superbly but lightly
modeled, the small collarbone exquisitely muffled but not lost, and the
little hollow at the base of her throat prettily definite. And all was
white and lusterless save the warning dusk of her eyes and the flash
from her parting lips.
With such cold passion for line did his artist's eye wreak its joy upon
her that, as she talked, she found herself thinking him curiously dull
to the prospect she opened. It was the impersonal look she had come to
know; and his replies were languid, as if he thought of other matters.
It might have passed for the bored ease of a man of the world had she
not known him to be amid novel surroundings.
Feeling a slight discomfort under his look, she at length diverted his
eyes to the room in which they sat.
"It's the room I like best in all the house," she said. "That big
drawing room you came through is inhuman. It terrified me as a child,
and still refuses to make friends with me, but this library--don't you
feel that I've humanized it?"
He became aware that he had felt its easing charm of dark-toned wood and
dull-red walls. There were low book-shelves, low seats that invited, a
broad table with its array of magazines, and a lazy fire in the open
grate.
"It's a fine room to be in," he said, bringing his eyes back to her.
"There's not a chair in it," she continued, "that wasn't meant to be sat
in--most chairs nowadays are mere spectacles, you know--and no glass
doors before the books. Nothing enrages me like having to open a door
to get at books."
"It's the room you need," he replied. "You draw all the light to
yourself. It gives you color, turns your hair to black, and makes your
eyes look like----"
"Mr. Piersoll!" announced the man.
His look still engaged her as she floated forward to greet the tall,
pleasant-faced, alert young man with tumbled yellow hair who now
entered. Not until he heard his own name did he relinquish her to
acknowledge the word of introduction.
A moment later the father of Mrs. Laithe strolled in and Ewing was again
introduced, this time to a stoutish man with a placid, pink face, scanty
hair going from yellow to white--arranged over his brow with scrupulous
economy--and a closely cut mustache of the same ambiguous hue. He was a
man who gracefully confessed fifty years to all but the better informed.
Ewing felt himself under the scrutiny of a pair of very light gray eyes
as Bartell took his hand, tentatively at first, then with a grip of
entire cordiality. One may suspect that this gentleman had looked
forward with mild apprehension to a dinner meeting with the latest
protege of his impulsive daughter. The youth's demeanor, however, so
quickly caused his barbaric past to be forgotten that, by the time they
were at table, his host had said to him, prefacing one of his best
anecdotes, "Of course you know that corner table on the Cafe de la Paix
terrace...."
Ewing floated dreamily on the stream of talk; laughing, chatty talk,
spiced with suggestive strange names; blithe gossip of random
happenings. He was content to feel its flow beneath him and rather
resented the efforts to involve him in it, preferring to listen and to
look. But he was courteously groped for by the others and compelled to
response as the dinner progressed.
Piersoll mentioned his drawings pleasantly and engaged him for dinner at
a club the following evening. "I'll call for you at the Stuyvesant about
six," he said, when Ewing had accepted. "I must have a look at your
stuff. Don't dress; we dine in our working clothes at the Monastery."
The father of Mrs. Laithe warned Ewing to beware of worry in his new
surroundings.
"Let life carry you, my boy. That's my physiology in a nutshell. Don't
try to lug the world about. The people who tell you that life in New
York is a strain haven't learned rational living. Worry kills, but I
never worry, and I find town idyllic. Clarence was born to worry:
result, dyspepsia and nervous breakdown. My daughter worries. She goes
into side streets looking for trouble, and when she finds it she keeps
it. That's wrong. Life is whatever we see it to be. Eleanor sees too
much of the black side, poverty, starvation, hard luck--all kinds of
deviltry, and it reacts on her. I look only on the cheerful side, and
that reacts on me. A good dinner, a glass of burgundy--there's an answer
to all that socialistic pessimism."
"Suppose one hasn't the answer at hand?" his daughter broke in.
"Keep smiling, my dear," retorted her father with Spartan grimness.
"Skipping a dinner or two can't overturn real philosophy. Down on the
Chesapeake last fall, duck shooting one day, we lost the luncheon hamper
overboard, and hadn't so much as a biscuit from four in the morning till
after nine at night, shooting from a chilly, wet blind all day. _There_
was a test! But I give you my word I never worried. I took it as so much
discipline. My dear, if I had fretted over tenement houses the way you
have, I should be a broken man. Thank the gods that be, I've had the wit
to let my agent do all that!"
His daughter received this with a shrug of despair. "But confess,
daddy--you _have_ a worry."
"'Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!'" quoted Piersoll,
divining her mark.
"I admit, my dear, that legitimate worry has its uses. I only warn
against the too common abuse of it. I maintain," he went on, turning to
Ewing, "that a man with the feelings of a boy should, if there's any
moral balance in the world, retain the waistline of a boy; yet I've not
done it. I go to doctors--they all talk the same ballyrot about exercise
or they harangue you about diet. Why, I've heard them gibber of things
one mustn't eat till I writhed in anguish. Some day I know I shall chuck
it all and let Nature take her course." He glared defiantly about the
table.
"She's not waiting for you to let her, dear," observed his daughter
maliciously.
"It's my temperament, I suppose"--he sighed ruefully into his plate of
sweet stuff--"just as it's Randy Teevan's temperament to keep slender,
though I suspect Randy of stays."
Mrs. Laithe had glanced swiftly toward Ewing at the mention of this
name. She again looked at him alertly a moment later when the man
announced "Mr. Teevan and Mr. Alden Teevan."
"Alden told me this afternoon at the club, my dear, that he and his
father might stop for a moment on their way up town, just to say
'How-de-do.' We can have coffee in the library."
His daughter received this with a meditative under lip. Then she
brightened.
"I'm sure you men would rather sit here and smoke while I run in and see
them. They'll stay only a minute."
"Nonsense, child! I can't lose sight of you so soon again. We can smoke
in there as well."
"Coffee in the library, Harris." She gave the order with a submissive
shrug and led the way out.
Ewing saw two men come to greet her, alike enough of feature to reveal
their relationship at first glance. He detected, however, a curious
contrast they presented. The father, slight and short of stature, was a
very young-looking old man, while the son was an old-looking young man.
The father was dapper, effusive, sprightly, quick with smiling gestures;
the son restrained, deliberate, low-toned with a slow, half-cynical
smile of waiting. He gave the effect of subduing what his father almost
elfishly expressed.
Father and son greeted the men over the shoulders of Mrs. Laithe, and
Ewing was presented. There was an inclination of the son's head, and a
careless glance of his waiting eyes; from the father, a jerky, absent
"How-d'you do--How-d'you do!"
They moved by chatting stages to the library. The elder Teevan,
carefully pointing the ends of his small, dark mustache, stood with his
back to the dying fire, a coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the
other, twittering gallantly of a town's desolation wrought by the going
away of Mrs. Laithe; and of a town renewed by her great-hearted return.
"A preciously timed relenting," he called it, with a challenging sigh
toward the lady, as he gracefully flicked back a ringlet of the lustrous
brown hair that had fallen low on his brow. Ewing thought it wonderful
hair on a man whose face, though ruddy in hue, showed signs of age.
There were deep lines at the corners of those gallantly flashing eyes,
and their under lids drooped. The skin was shrunk tightly over the high,
thin nose, the cheeks were less than plump, and the neck revealed some
unhappy wrinkles. Sadly, too, his voice failed at supreme moments. It
was tragic, Ewing thought, to listen to a sentence valiantly begun, only
to hear the voice crack on a crucial word.
Mrs. Laithe received the little man's tribute with a practiced
indifference, chatting absently, meanwhile, with the son. Presently she
led Ewing and the younger Teevan to the drawing room to admire a huge
jar of roses for which she thanked Teevan.
Back in the library Piersoll was listening to a salmon-fishing story of
Bartell's. The elder Teevan genially overlooked the scene, humming
lightly to himself the catch air from a late musical comedy. He turned
to study a bit of Japanese bronze on the mantel behind him, screwing a
single glass into an eye. When he had scanned the bronze with a fine
little air of appreciation he replaced it, resumed his jaunty humming,
and idly picked up a card that had been thrown beside it. Carelessly
under the still fixed monocle he brought the words "Mr. Gilbert Denham
Ewing." A moment he held it so in fingers that suddenly trembled. His
head went sharply back, the glass dropped from his eye, dangling on its
silken ribbon, and his little song died. He glanced about him, observing
the two groups to be still inattentive. Placing a supporting hand on
the mantel he set the glass firmly again and studied the card a second
time. Another glance through the rooms, and he resumed his song,
crumpling the card in his hand. Then, turning, he stood once more before
the fire, his hands comfortably at his back. One of them tossed the card
into the grate, and his song again ceased.
Bartell looked up, having, after incredible finesse, slain and weighed
his giant salmon. Piersoll, recalling that the anecdotist had killed
other salmon in his time, made a hasty adieu and went to his hostess,
who lingered in the drawing room with the younger men. Teevan, before
the fire, breathed in smoke, emitted it from pursed lips, studied the
ash at the end of his cigarette from under raised, speculative brows,
and flashed search-light eyes upon his host.
"Who's the young chap, Chris?"
Bartell took up a liqueur glass and turned to his questioner.
"Name's Ewing, I believe. Some chap Eleanor picked up in the far West.
Painter, I believe, or means to be."
"Painter, yes, to be sure--quite right; painter...." He waited
pointedly.
"Paints cowboys and Indians, I fancy--the usual thing. Seems a decent
sort; rather a gentleman. You're looking a bit off. Randy."
"Am I, though? Queer! Never felt fitter. Walked to Fifty-ninth Street
and back to-day. Might have overdone a bit. That chap staying in town
long?"
"Have to ask Eleanor. It's her affair. By Jove, old boy, you _are_ a
wonder. I wish I could keep it off around here the way you do."
The little man drew himself up, expanded his chest, and bravely
flourished a smile of acknowledgment. This faded into a look of hostile
curiosity, discreetly veiled, as Mrs. Laithe and the two young men came
in from the drawing room.
"Time to be moving on, Governor," young Teevan remarked.
"I'm not going, my boy," the little man answered in crisp tones, with
the hint of a side look at Ewing and Mrs. Laithe. "Run on like a good
chap and make my excuses to the dear grandmother. Needn't lie, you
know. Say I chucked her theater party at the last moment because the
places are stuffy. Say that I loathe plush and those crumpy little
boxes where one sees nothing but the gas fellow in a gingham jumper
yawning in the wings. Say I'm whimsical, capricious, fickle as April
zephyrs--in all but my love for her. If you're quite honest she'll
disbelieve you and guess that I'd a reason for stopping away. Run,
like a good lad, while I quench a craving for tales of adventure from
the most charming of her sex and from our young friend here--will you
pardon my oversight--Ewing?--Ah, to be sure, from Mr. Ewing---Ewing. I
must remember that. I'm a silly ass about names."
But when his son had gone the little man appeared to forget the craving
that had prompted his stay. From his stand on the hearth rug he jauntily
usurped the talk, winging his way down the world stream of gossip from
capital to capital. Circuitous, indeed, was his approach to art; an
anecdote of studio life in Paris; a criticism of Rodin, "Whitman in
marble;" the vigor of our native art impulse, only now learning to
withdraw a slavish deference from the French schools. "And you--Mr.--Ah,
yes--Ewing, to be sure--our amiable and rotund host tells me that you
are to be a warrior in this fray of brush and chisel. Bravo! You shall
show me work."
Ewing had listened to his recondite discourse chiefly with a morbid
expectancy of that recurrent break in the voice, straining until it came
and relaxing until it quavered back to the hazardous masculine level.
Finding himself thus noticed he stammered, "Oh, I--I've done some work
in black and white. I hope--Mrs. Laithe has encouraged me."
"A charming modesty, yours; by no means the besetting sin of your craft,
but is Mrs. Laithe an ideal promoter of genius? I fancy you'll need a
sterner guide, one to be harsh as well as kind. Women can't be that,
least of all the charming specimen who has honored you with her
patronage. I shall be proud to supplement her deficiencies as
critic--her glorious, her fascinating deficiencies. Women, audacious
souls, are recklessly kind. They incur perils to chill the blood of
brave enough men, meaning monstrously well all the time"--his narrowed
eyes sought to read the face of Mrs. Laithe--"but I've yet to see one
worth a second look who had divined that there exists a certain
arbitrary relation between cause and effect. Need I word the
inference?... No?..." Relieved by his scrutiny of her face he broke off,
his heart leaping to the thought, "She doesn't know--doesn't know ...
the _fool_!"
"I'll be glad to show you what I have," Ewing answered, rejoicing at
this solicitude in a critic so obviously eminent. "I've been afraid all
along that Mrs. Laithe might be too kind."
"Kinder than she knew--kindness is no word for her excess. Women lack
fiber where their sympathies are involved. They'll not inflict pain
within scope of their imaginations--beyond that rather narrow field of
course they're merciless, bless them! But trust me to score your work if
it deserves that, and trust me to praise if it merits praise. You shall
exhibit to me. By the way"--he consulted a small enameled watch--"I've a
bit of time to spare. If you're stepping along I'll not mind looking at
your things this evening."
Ewing arose, glowing with pleasure. He felt drawn to this wonderful
little man who knew everything, and who was visibly kind--just, at any
rate--under that fantastic cloak of severity.
"You're very good," he said. "I'm staying close by, at the Stuyvesant."
"Drop in often, Ewing," urged Bartell as they shook hands. "And don't
let Teevan put you down. I dare say you'll come on, you know, if you
chuck worry."
As he parted from Mrs. Laithe he was aware of a new look in her eyes. He
had learned to read them. They sought now to tell him ... what? There
was a warning in them, and her glance seemed to enfold him almost
protectingly. But her words were not more than those of formal parting,
with a suggestion that he drop in for tea some afternoon soon.