III

It is not easy for me to keep away from Lucy Fulton either on paper or

in real life. The latter I have to do, for I think that I am able to

keep a promise, and I ought to do the former as much as I can, if I am

to tell her story and her husband's and my own in their true

proportions. Otherwise we should but appear as one of those "eternal

triangles" to which so much of French dramatic genius has been devoted;

whereas it appears to me, though not, I am afraid, to Fulton, that if

our relations to each other could be symbolized by a figure, that

figure would not be a triangle; but a cross, let us say, between a

triangle and a square.

Fulton and I are the same age. We were in the same class at Mr.

Cutter's school for a year or two, and were quite friendly at times.

But except that we both collected postage stamps, we had no tastes in

common. It is almost enough to say that he was full of character and

reserve, and that I was unstable and kept the whole of my goods

displayed in the shop window. I cannot imagine thirteen-year-old

Fulton in love with fifteen-year-old Nell or Nancy, but I was

frequently in love with both at the same time, or so fancied myself,

and, almost consciously, as it seems, he was conserving his powers of

loving for the one great passion of his life, when he should give all

that a man may have in him of purity and faith and purpose. But when

my time for a great passion came, though I gave all that I had to give,

it is true, still that _all_ was not the whole that I might have had;

it was only all that was left, all that had not already been given.

But there was enough at that to hurt and do harm.

Fulton was studious and enamored of knowledge for its own sake. I was

lazy and only interested in such pieces of knowledge as I felt might be

of use to me. But we both stood well in our classes; he because he had

brains and knew how to use them, and I because the Lord had gifted me

with a capital sight memory.

Perhaps I should do better to state who our intimates were in those

days, and what has become of them. Fulton's most intimate friend was a

boy named Lansing, who made a practice of cutting open dead things to

see what was inside of them. Today Lansing (of course that's not his

real name) is so great a surgeon that even the man in the street knows

him by sight. My most intimate friend was Harry Colemain, and we were

mixed up in all sorts of deviltries together. To me he has been always

a faithful friend and a charming companion, but of his career, what can

I say that is really pleasant? Nothing, unless I modify each statement

by pages of explanation and reminiscence. As he danced the old dances,

so he dances the new, to greater perfection than any man in New York.

He is gorgeously built, and has a carriage of the head, an eye and a

smile, and a way with him that can shake a man from the water wagon or

a woman from her virtue. He smokes like a factory, and drinks like a

fish, yet at a moment's notice he is ready for some great feat of

endurance--such as playing through the racket championship, or swimming

from Newport to Narragansett Pier. He might have been--anything you

please. But what can I say definitely that he _is_? Well, at this

very moment, he is co-respondent in a divorce suit which is delighting

the newspapers, and it looks as if he'd have to marry her in the end.

And that's a pity because they were tired of each other before they got

found out, and she's not the kind of woman that his friends are going

to like.

Fulton's friend Ludlow has just published the best book on the birds of

New York, past and present, that was ever written. My friend Pierson

died the other day of pneumonia. As a boy he had the constitution of

an ox, and ought to have thrown off pneumonia as I would throw off a

cold in the head, but the doctors say that he had simply burned up his

powers of resistance with overdoses of alcohol. You never saw him

drunk or off his balance or merry in any way; he simply and slowly

soaked himself till his insides were like sponges dipped in the stuff.

And Pierson's not the only man in my circle who has gone out like that;

and as they went so will others go; strong and well Saturday to the

casual eye, and dead Monday.

This is not the time to take up those great issues which have risen

between those who are tempted by drink and fall, and those who are not

tempted and don't. But I am very sure of this: that a vast majority of

the men who make the world go round drink or have drunk; and that when

at last the world comes to be governed by those who don't and haven't,

it will be even worse governed, more pettily and meddlesomely, than it

is at present. And that is saying a good deal, even for a butterfly.

You mustn't gather that Fulton and his friends were a goody-goody set

of boys. They erred and strayed from their ways at times, like the

worst of us. There was Browning for instance, a born experimenter, who

so experimented with cocktails one fine morning (at the corner of Sixth

Avenue and Forty-third Street) that he marched into Madame Castignet's

French class, drunk as a lord, full of argument, and was presently

expelled from the school. It was commonly said that the disgrace of it

would hound him through life. Far from it! Those who at this day pack

Carnegie Lyceum to hear him play the violin, and who listen, laughing

and crying, and comparing him to the incomparable Kreisler, perceive no

disgrace in that youthful episode, rather they see in it an early

indication of the divine temperament trying to shake off its fetters

and be free.

One boy that I went to school with is on the famous Meadowbrook team;

another has played in Davis Cup matches; another brought home a First

from the Olympic games. In the pack that I run with there is even one

Roper who achieves a large income by writing fiction for the magazines,

but even he isn't in the least like that brilliant little circle to

which Fulton belonged. For we feel that we are paying him an immense

compliment when we say, "Would you ever suspect that he was an author?"

Good at games, fond of late hours and laughter, with the easiest and

most affectionate good manners, he is quite convinced, if you can get

him to talk shop, at all, that art for art's sake is bunk, and that

there is more amusement and inspiration to be had on Bailey's Beach and

in the Casino at Newport than in the whole of Italy.

I must set Roper off against Fulton's friend Garrick. Poor Garrick

slaved and slaved and reached after perfection. Some say that in the

thin little volume that he succeeded at last in getting published, and

leaving behind for the delight of posterity, he actually touched

perfection. Perhaps he did. I don't know. But I do know this: that

he had enough talent and energy to make a living, and didn't. That he

loved his art more than his wife and family, and that they all starved

together. Is it worse to starve your family for love of liquor than

for love of art? Roper loves his liquor but he fights against it and

makes a handsome income; Garrick gave himself up body and soul to his

love for art, and if it wasn't for his friends Mrs. Garrick would be

working in a sweatshop.

Fulton and I discussed him once (when I was going to the Fulton house a

good deal), but we had to give it up as a topic. Fulton saw something

fine and generous in the man, and could not speak of him without

emotion, while I found it impossible to speak of him without contempt.

Fulton himself fell away from his friends in later years, not

spiritually but physically. Lucy Fulton simply had to go on living

among the people with whom she had been brought up, and in the manner

to which she was accustomed; and Fulton seeing her pine and grow

sorrowful in other conditions, and bored and fretful, gradually fell

into her ways and wishes, as a gentleman shouldn't (but does always),

and made his new friends among those who are born to be amused. Her

love and happiness were far more important to him than changed ways and

the injured feelings of old friends. Once he talked to me about this

(for we grew quite intimate). I remember he said:

"Somehow I don't seem to see my old friends any more or keep up with

them. If anything happened to Lucy, I'd be absolutely alone in the

world, except for the babies. A man does wrong to drift away from

those who he knows by a thousand proofs care for him, on any pretext or

for any cause."

And yet he had come to wear the hallmarks of the pack, and to talk the

language of the world that only asks to be happy and amused. He took

to games seriously and played them well, and you couldn't point to him

as one of those cautious persons who never by any chance drank even one

cocktail too many. Indeed, he often became hilarious and witty, and

added no end to the gayety of occasions, and was afterward privately

reproached by Lucy. Coming from another, the hilarity and wit would

have rejoiced her, but, coming from her nearest and dearest, her mind

narrowed, and the cold fear that women have of liquor possessed her.

To me it has always been comical, even when I didn't feel well myself,

to see the husbands come into the club after a big night; each wearing

upon his face, as plainly as if they had been physical scratches, the

marks of the wifely tears which he had been forced to witness, and of

the reproaches which he had been forced to hear, and yet each trying to

look as if he was the master of his own house and his own destiny. No

well-born woman, however cold and calculating, can silently put up with

her husband's drinking, yet how easily she overlooks it in any other

man! How many excuses she will find for him:

"Why, he's quite wonderful! Of course I knew at once that he was

tipsy, but he was perfectly sensible--perfectly."

If men didn't drink, women wouldn't have so many parties to go to or so

much money to spend. How many teetotalers let their wives spend them

into ruin and disgrace? It is the drinking American who indulges his

wife and lets her make a fool of herself and him. It's his

unconfessed, and perhaps unadmitted, remorse seeking a short cut to

forgiveness.

It seems that I played too much pool and billiards for a small boy; and

got into too much city mischief, for I learned at the end of a

delightful Newport summer that I was to finish my schooling, not at Mr.

Cutter's, but at Groton.