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[Illustration: AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FROM THE PAINTING BY ELLEN EMMET
_Copyright, 1908, by Ellen Emmet_]
McCLURE'S MAGAZINE
VOL. XXXI JUNE, 1908 No. 2
MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA
THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE
PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS
THE CRYSTAL-GAZER
BOB, DEBUTANT
TWO PORTRAITS BY GILBERT STUART
MARY BAKER G. EDDY
HER FRUITS
THE KEY TO THE DOOR
THE WAYFARERS
THE PROBLEMS OF SUICIDE
PRAIRIE DAWN
THE DOINGS OF THE DEVIL
YOUNG HENRY AND THE OLD MAN
EDITORIAL
* * * * *
Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents was
added by the transcriber.
* * * * *
MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA[1]
BY
ELLEN TERRY
The first time that there was any talk of my going to America was, I
think, in 1874, when I was playing in "The Wandering Heir." Dion
Boucicault wanted me to go, and dazzled me with figures, but I expect
the cautious Charles Reade influenced me against accepting the
engagement.
When I did go, in 1883, I was thirty-five and had an assured position in
my profession. It was the first of eight tours, seven of which I went
with Henry Irving. The last was in 1907, after his death. I also went to
America one summer on a pleasure trip. The tours lasted three months at
least, seven months at most. After a rough calculation, I find that I
have spent not quite five years of my life in America. Five out of sixty
is not a large proportion, yet I often feel that I am half American.
This says a good deal for the hospitality of a people who can make a
stranger feel so completely at home in their midst. Perhaps it also says
something for my adaptableness!
"When we do not speak of things with a partiality full of love, what we
say is not worth being repeated." That was the answer of a courteous
Frenchman, who was asked for his impressions of a country. In any case
it is almost imprudent to give one's impressions of America. The country
is so vast and complex that even those who have amassed mountains of
impressions soon find that there still are mountains more. I have lived
in New York, Boston, and Chicago for a month at a time, and have felt
that to know any of these great towns even superficially would take a
year. I have become acquainted with this and that class of Americans,
but I realize that there are thousands of other classes that remain
unknown.
[Illustration: _Copyrighted by Window & Grove From the collections of
Miss Frances Johnson and Mrs. Evelyn Smalley_
ELLEN TERRY OPHELIA, AND HENRIETTA MARIA, THREE PARTS WHICH SHE PLAYED
ON THE FIRST AMERICAN TOUR]
_The Unknown Dangers of America_
I set out in 1883 from Liverpool on board the "Britannic" with the fixed
conviction that I should never, never return. For six weeks before we
started the word America had only to be breathed to me, and I burst into
floods of tears! I was leaving my children, my bullfinch, my parrot, my
"aunt" Boo, whom I never expected to see again alive, just because she
said I never would, and I was going to face the unknown dangers of the
Atlantic and of a strange, barbarous land. Our farewell performances in
London had cheered me up a little--though I wept copiously at every
one--by showing us that we should be missed. Henry Irving's position
seemed to be confirmed and ratified by all that took place before his
departure. The dinners he had to eat, the speeches he had to make and to
listen to, were really terrific! One speech at the Rabelais Club had, it
was said, the longest peroration on record. It was this kind of thing:
"Where is our friend Irving going? He is not going like Nares to face
the perils of the far North. He is not going like A---- to face
something else. He is not going to China," etc.--and so on. After about
the hundredth "he is not going," Lord Houghton, who was one of the
guests, grew very impatient and interrupted the orator with: "Of course
he isn't! He's going to New York by the Cunard Line. It'll take him
about a week!"
_New York Before the "Sky-scrapers"_
My first voyage was a voyage of enchantment to me. The ship was laden
with pig-iron, but she rolled and rolled and rolled. She could never
roll too much for me. I have always been a splendid sailor, and I feel
jolly at sea. The sudden leap from home into the wilderness of waves
does not give me any sensation of melancholy.
What I thought I was going to see when I arrived in America, I hardly
remember. I had a vague idea that all American women wore red flannel
shirts and bowie knives and that I might be sandbagged in the street!
From somewhere or other I had derived an impression that New York was an
ugly, noisy place.
Ugly! When I first saw that marvellous harbour I nearly cried--it was so
beautiful. Whenever I come now to the unequalled approach to New York I
wonder what Americans must think of the approach from the sea to London.
How different are the mean, flat, marshy banks of the Thames, and the
wooden toy light-house at Dungeness, to the vast, spreading harbour,
with its busy multitude of steam boats and ferry boats, its wharf upon
wharf, and its tall statue of Liberty dominating all the racket and
bustle of the sea traffic of the world!
That was one of the few times in America when I did not miss the poetry
of the past. The poetry of the present, gigantic, colossal, and
enormous, made me forget it. The "sky-scrapers," so splendid in the
landscape now, did not exist in 1883; but I find it difficult to divide
my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge,
though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. Between 1883
and 1893 I noticed a great change in New York and other cities. In ten
years they seemed to have grown with the energy of tropical plants. But
between 1893 and 1907 I saw no evidence of such feverish increase. It is
possible that the Americans are arriving at a stage when they can no
longer beat the record! There is a vast difference between one of the
old New York brownstone houses and one of the fourteen-storied buildings
near the river, but between this and the Times Square Building or the
still more amazing Flatiron Building, which is said to oscillate at the
top--it is so far from the ground--there is very little difference. I
hear that they are now beginning to build downwards into the earth, but
this will not change the appearance of New York for a long time.
[Illustration: _From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley_
HENRY IRVING AS MATHIAS IN "THE BELLS"
THE PART IN WHICH IRVING MADE HIS FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA]
I had not to endure the wooden shed in which most people landing in
America have to struggle with the custom-house officials--a struggle as
brutal as a "round in the ring" as Paul Bourget describes it. We were
taken off the "Britannic" in a tug, and Mr. Abbey, Lawrence Barrett, and
many other friends met us--including the much-dreaded reporters.
[Illustration: _Lent by The Century Co._
THE REJECTED DESIGN FOR A COLUMBIAN MEDAL MADE BY AUGUSTUS
SAINT-GAUDENS]
When we landed, I drove to the Hotel Dam, Henry to the Brevoort House.
There was no Diana on the top of the Madison Square Building then--the
building did not exist, to cheer the heart of a new arrival as the first
evidence of _beauty_ in the city. There were horse trams instead of
cable cars; but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly
dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy
sidewalks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets. Had the
elevated railway, the first sign of _power_ that one notices after
leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets? I cannot
remember New York without it.
[Illustration: _Lent by The Century Co._
THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE MODELED BY AUGUSTUS
SAINT-GAUDENS. SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THE PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY]
I missed then, as I miss now, the numberless _hansoms_ of London plying
in the streets for hire. People in New York get about in the cars,
unless they have their own carriages. The hired carriage has no reason
for existing, and when it does, it celebrates its unique position by
charging two dollars for a journey which in London would not cost fifty
cents!
[Illustration: THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON MODELED
BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FOR THE ST. GILES CATHEDRAL, EDINBURGH.
SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THIS PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY'S DAUGHTER,
EDITH CRAIG]
_Irving Brings Shakespeare to America_
There were very few theatres in New York when we first went there. All
that part of the city which is now "up town" did not exist, and what was
then "up" is now more than "down" town. The American stage has changed
almost as much. Even then there was a liking for local plays which
showed the peculiarities of the different States, but they were more
violent and crude than now. The original American genius and the true
dramatic pleasure of the people is, I believe, in such plays, where very
complete observation of certain phases of American life and very real
pictures of manners are combined with comedy almost childlike in its
naivete. The sovereignty of the young girl which is such a marked
feature in social life is reflected in American plays. This is by the
way. What I want to make clear is that in 1883 there was no living
American drama as there is now, that such productions of romantic plays
and Shakespeare as Henry Irving brought over from England, were unknown,
and that the extraordinary success of our first tours would be
impossible now. We were the first, and we were pioneers and we were
_new_. To be new is everything in America. Such palaces as the Hudson
Theatre, New York, were not dreamed of when we were at the Star, which
was, however, quite equal to any theatre in London, in front of the
footlights. The stage itself, the lighting appliances, and the
dressing-rooms were inferior.
[Illustration: HENRY IRVING AS HAMLET
FROM THE STATUE BY E. ONSLOW FORD, R. A., IN THE GUILDHALL OF THE CITY OF
LONDON]
[Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS IMOGEN
DRAWN BY ALMA-TADEMA FOR MISS TERRY'S JUBILEE IN 1906]
[Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS PORTIA
FROM THE PAINTING BY SIR JOHN MILLAIS, R. A.]
_Our First Appearance Before an American Audience_
Henry made his first appearance in America in "The Bells." He was not at
his best on the first night, but he could be pretty good even when he
was not at his best. I watched him from a box. Nervousness made the
company very slow. The audience was a splendid one--discriminating and
appreciative. We felt that the Americans _wanted_ to like us. We felt in
a few days so extraordinarily at home. The first sensation of entering a
foreign city was quickly wiped out.
[Illustration: WILLIAM WINTER--
ONE OF THE FIRST CRITICS TO WELCOME IRVING TO THIS COUNTRY]
On the second night in New York it was my turn. "Command yourself--this
is the time to show you can act!" I said to myself as I went on the
stage of the Star Theatre, dressed as Henrietta Maria. But I could not
command myself. I played badly and cried too much in the last act. But
the people liked me, and they liked the play, perhaps because it was
historical, and of history the Americans are passionately fond. The
audience took many points which had been ignored in London. I had always
thought Henry as Charles I. most moving when he made that involuntary
effort to kneel to his subject, Moray, but the Lyceum audiences never
seemed to notice it. In New York the audience burst out into the most
sympathetic, spontaneous applause that I have ever heard in a theatre.
_American Clothes_
My impression of the way the American women dressed in 1883 was not
favourable. Some of them wore Indian shawls and diamond ear-rings. They
dressed too grandly in the street and too dowdily in the theatre. All
this has changed. The stores in New York are now the most beautiful in
the world, and the women are dressed to perfection. They are as clever
at the _demi-toilette_ as the Parisian, and the extreme neatness and
smartness of their walking gowns is very refreshing after the floppy,
blowsy, trailing dresses, accompanied by the inevitable feather boa, of
which English girls, who used to be so tidy and "tailor-made," now seem
so fond. The universal white "waist" is so pretty and trim on the
American girl. It is one of the distinguishing marks of a land of the
free, a land where "class" hardly exists. The girl in the store wears
the white waist; so does the rich girl on Fifth Avenue. It costs
anything from seventy-five cents to fifty dollars!
London, when I come back from America, always seems at first like an
ill-lighted village, strangely tame, peaceful, and backward. Above all,
I miss the sunlight of America, and the clear blue skies of an evening.
"Are you glad to get back?" said an English friend.
"Very."
"It's a land of vulgarity, isn't it?"
"Oh, yes, if you mean by that a wonderful land--a land of sunshine and
light, of happiness, of faith in the future!" I answered. I saw no
misery or poverty there. Everyone looked happy. What hurts me on coming
back to England is the _hopeless_ look on so many faces; the dejection
and apathy of the people standing about in the streets. Of course there
is poverty in New York, but not among the Americans. The Italians, the
Russians, the Poles--all the host of immigrants washed in daily across
the harbour--these are poor, but you don't see them unless you go Bowery
ways and even then you can't help feeling that in their sufferings there
is always hope. Vulgarity? I saw little of it. I thought that the people
who had amassed large fortunes used their wealth beautifully. When a man
is rich enough to build himself a big, new house, he remembers some old
house which he once admired, and he has it imitated with all the
technical skill and care that can be had in America. This accounts for
the odd jumble of styles in Fifth Avenue, along the lake-side in
Chicago, in the new avenues in St. Louis and elsewhere. One
millionaire's house is modelled on a French chateau, another on an old
Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is
like an Italian _palazzo_. And their imitations are never weak or
pretentious. The architects in America seem to me to be far more able
than ours, or else they have a freer hand and more money.
_The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens_
It is sad to remember that Mr. Stanford White was one of the best of
these splendid architects. It was Stanford White with Saint-Gaudens,
that great sculptor, whose work dignifies nearly all the great cities in
America, who had most to do with the Exhibition buildings of the World's
Fair in Chicago in 1893. It was odd to see that fair dream city rising
out of the lake, so far more beautiful in its fleeting loveliness than
the Chicago of the stock-yards and the pit which had provided the money
for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at
all. They gave their thousands--and stood aside. The result was one of
the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their
work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries
instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down!
The World's Fair recalled to me the story of how Michelangelo carved a
figure in snow which, says the chronicler Vasari who saw it, "was
superb."
Saint-Gaudens gave me a cast of his medallion of Bastien-Lepage, and
wrote to a friend of mine: "Bastien had '_le coeur au metier_.' So has
Miss Terry, and I will place that saying in the frame that is to replace
the present unsatisfactory one." He was very fastidious about this frame
and took such a lot of trouble to get it right.
It must have been very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim
to that extraordinary official Puritanism which sometimes exercises a
petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made
for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a
beautiful little nude figure of a boy--holding an olive
branch--emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath and
some lettering were substituted.
Saint-Gaudens did the fine bas-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson which
was chosen for the monument in St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. He gave
my daughter a medallion cast from this, because he knew that she was a
great lover of Stevenson. The bas-relief was dedicated to his friend,
Joe Evans. I knew Saint-Gaudens first through Joe Evans, an artist who,
while he lived, was to me and to my daughter the dearest of all in
America. His character was so fine and noble--his nature so perfect.
Many were the birthday cards he did for me, original in design,
beautiful in execution. Whatever he did, he put the best of himself
into it. I wrote this in my diary the year he died:
"I heard on Saturday that our dear Joe Evans is dangerously ill.
Yesterday came the worst news. Joe was not happy, but he was just
heroic, and this world wasn't half good enough for him. I wonder if
he has gone to a better. I keep on getting letters about him. He
seems to have been so glad to die. It was like a child's funeral, I
am told, and all his American friends seem to have been
there--Saint-Gaudens, Taber, etc. A poem about the dear fellow by
Mr. Gilder has one very good line in which he says the grave 'might
snatch a brightness from his presence there.' I thought that was
very happy, the love of light and gladness being the most
remarkable thing about him, the dear sad Joe."
_Robert Taber_
Robert Taber, dear, and rather sad too, was a great friend of Joe's.
They both came to me first in the shape of a little book in which was
inscribed: "Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender
it." "Upon this hint I spake," the book began. It was all the work of a
few boys and girls who from the gallery of the Star Theatre, New York,
had watched Irving's productions and learned to love him and me. Joe
Evans had done a lovely picture by way of frontispiece of a group of
eager heads hanging over the gallery's edge, his own and Taber's among
them. Eventually Taber came to England and acted with Henry Irving in
"Peter the Great" and other plays.
Like his friend Joe, he too was heroic. His health was bad and his life
none too happy--but he struggled on. His career was cut short by
consumption and he died in the Adirondacks in 1904.
I cannot speak of all my friends in America, or anywhere, for the matter
of that, _individually_. My personal friends are so many, and they are
_all_ wonderful--wonderfully staunch to me! I have "tried" them so, and
they have never given me up as a bad job.
_Dramatic Criticism in America_
William Winter, poet, critic, and exquisite man, was one of the first to
write of Henry with whole-hearted appreciation. But all the criticism in
America, favourable and unfavourable, surprised us by the scholarly
knowledge it displayed. In Chicago the notices were worthy of the
_Temps_ or the _Journal des Debats_. There was no attempt to force the
personality of the writer into the foreground nor to write a style that
would attract attention to the critic and leave the thing criticised to
take care of itself. William Winter and, of late years, Alan Dale have
had their personalities associated with their criticisms, but they are
exceptions. Curiously enough, the art of acting appears to bore most
dramatic critics, the very people who might be expected to be interested
in it. The American critics, however, at the time of our early visits,
were keenly interested, and showed it by their observation of many
points which our English critics had passed over. For instance, writing
of "Much Ado about Nothing," one of the Americans said of Henry in the
Church Scene that "something of him as a subtle interpreter of doubtful
situations was exquisitely shown in the early part of this fine scene by
his suspicion of Don John--felt by him alone, and expressed only by a
quick covert look, but a look so full of intelligence as to proclaim him
a sharer in the secret with his audience."
"Wherein does the superiority lie?" wrote another critic in comparing
our productions with those which had been seen in America up to 1884.
"Not in the amount of money expended, but in the amount of brains; in
the artistic intelligence and careful and earnest pains with which every
detail is studied and worked out. Nor is there any reason why Mr. Irving
or any other foreigner should have a monopoly of either intelligence or
pains. They are common property and one man's money can buy them as well
as another's. The defect in the American manager's policy heretofore has
been that he has squandered his money upon high salaries for a few of
his actors; and in costly, because unintelligent, expenditure for mere
dazzle and show."
_William Winter and His Children_
William Winter soon became a great personal friend of ours, and visited
us in England. He was one of the few _sad_ people I met in America. He
could have sat upon the ground and "told sad stories of the deaths of
kings" with the best. In England he loved going to see graveyards, and
knew where every poet was buried. He was very familiar with the poetry
of the _immediate_ past--Cowper, Coleridge, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley,
Keats, and the rest. He _liked_ us, so everything we did was right to
him. He could not help being guided entirely by his feelings. If he
disliked a thing, he had no use for it. Some men can say, "I hate this
play, but of its kind it is admirable." Willie Winter could never take
that unemotional point of view.
His children came to stay with me in London. When we were all coming
home from the theatre one night after Faust (the year must have been
1886), I said to little Willie:
"Well, what do you think of the play?"
"Oh my!" said he, "it takes the cake."
"Takes the _cake_," said his little sister scornfully. "It takes the
ice-cream!"
"Won't you give me a kiss?" said Henry to the same little girl one
night.
"No, I _won't_, with all that blue stuff on your face." (He was made up
for Mephistopheles.) Then, after a pause, "But why--why don't you _take_
it!" She was only five years old at the time!
_Discovering the Southern Darkey_
For quite a while during the first tour I stayed in Washington with my
friend, Miss Olive Seward, and all the servants of that delightful
household were coloured. This was my first introduction to the negroes,
whose presence in the country makes America seem more foreign than
anything to European eyes. They are more sharply divided into high and
low types than white people, and are not in the least alike in their
types. It is safe to call any coloured man "George." They all love it,
perhaps because of George Washington; and most of them are really named
George. I never met with such perfect service as they can give. _Some_
of them are delightful. The beautiful, full voice of the "darkey" is so
attractive--so soothing, and they are so deft and gentle. Some of the
women are beautiful, and all the young appeared to me to be well-formed.
As for the babies! I washed two or three little piccaninnies when I was
in the South, and the way they rolled their gorgeous eyes at me was "too
cute," which means, in British-English, "fascinating."
At the Washington house, the servants danced a cake-walk for me--the
coloured cook, a magnificent type, who "took the cake," saying, "That
was because I chose a good handsome boy to dance with, Missie." They
sang, too. Their voices were beautiful--with such illimitable power, yet
as sweet as treacle.
The little page boy had a pet of a woolly head--Henry once gave him a
tip, a "fee," in American-English, and said: "There, that's for a new
wig when this one is worn out," gently pulling the astrakhan-like hair.
The tip would have bought him many wigs, I think!
"Why, Uncle Tom, how your face shines to-night!" said my hostess to one
of the very old servants.
"Yes, Missie, glycerine and rose-water, Missie!"
He had taken some from her dressing-table to shine up his face in honour
of me! A shiny complexion is considered to be a great beauty among the
blacks. The dear old man! He was very bent and very old; and looked like
one of the logs that he used to bring in for the fire--a log from some
hoary, lichened tree whose life was long since past. He would produce
pins from his head when you wanted one; he had them stuck in his pad of
white woolly hair. "Always handy then, Missie," he would say.
"Ask them to sing 'Sweet Violets,' Uncle Tom."
He was acting as a sort of master of the ceremonies at the entertainment
the servants were giving me.
"Don't think they know dat, Miss Olly."
"Why I heard them singing it the other night!" And she hummed the tune.
"Oh, dat was 'Sweet Vio-_letts_,' Miss Olly!"
_American Women_
Washington was the first city I had seen in America where the people did
not hurry, and where the social life did not seem entirely the work of
women. The men asserted themselves here as something more than machines
in the background, untiringly turning out the dollars while their wives
and daughters give luncheons and teas at which only women are present.
Beautifully as the women dress, they talk very little about clothes. I
was much struck by their culture--by the evidence that they had read far
more and developed a more fastidious taste than most young Englishwomen.
Yet it is all mixed up with extraordinary naivete. Their vivacity, the
appearance, at least, of _reality_, the animation, the energy of
American women, delighted me. They are very sympathetic, too, in spite
of a certain callousness which comes of regarding everything in life,
even love, as "lots of fun." I did not think that they, or the men
either, had much natural sense of beauty. They admire beauty in a
curious way through their intellect. Nearly every American girl has a
cast of the winged Victory of the Louvre in her room. She makes it a
point of her _education_ to admire it.
There! I am beginning to generalize--the very thing I was resolute to
avoid. How silly to generalize about a country which embraces such
extremes of climate as the sharp winters of Boston and New York, and the
warm winds of Florida which blow through palms and orange groves!
THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE
BY MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR G. DOVE
James Tapster was eating his solitary, well-cooked dinner in his
comfortable and handsome house, a house situated in one of the half-moon
terraces which line and frame the more aristocratic side of Regent's
Park, and which may, indeed, be said to have private grounds of their
own, for each resident enjoys the use of a key to a portion of the Park
entitled locally the "Inclosure."
Very early in his life Mr. Tapster had made up his mind that he would
like to live in Cumberland Crescent, and now he was living there; very
early in his life he had decided that no one could order a plain yet
palatable meal as well as he could himself, and now for some months past
Mr. Tapster had given his own orders, each morning, to the cook.
To-night Mr. Tapster had already eaten his fried sole, and was about to
cut himself off a generous portion of the grilled undercut before him,
when he heard the postman's steps hurrying around the Crescent. He rose
with a certain quick deliberateness, and, going out into the hall,
opened the front door just in time to avoid the rat-tat-tat. Then, the
one letter he had expected duly in his hand, he waited till he had sat
down again in front of his still empty plate before he broke the seal
and glanced over the type-written sheet of note-paper:
SHORTERS COURT,
THROGMORTON ST.
November 4, 190-.
DEAR JAMES:
In reply to your letter of yesterday's date, I have been to Bedford
Row and seen Greenfield, and he thinks it probable that the Decree
will be made Absolute to-day; in that case you will have received a
wire before this letter reaches you.
Your affect' brother,
WM. A. TAPSTER.
In the same handwriting as the signature were added two holograph lines:
"Glad you have the children home again. Maud will be round to see them
soon."
Mr. Tapster read over once again the body of the letter, and there came
upon him an instinctive feeling of intense relief; then, with a not less
instinctive feeling of impatience, his eyes traveled down again to the
postscript: "Maud will be round to see them soon." Well, he would see
about that! But he did not exclaim, even mentally, as most men feeling
as he then felt would have done, "I'll be damned if she will!" knowing
the while that Maud certainly would.
His brother's letter, though most satisfactory as regarded its main
point, put Mr. Tapster out of conceit with the rest of his dinner; so he
rang twice and had the table cleared, frowning at the parlor-maid as she
hurried through her duties, and yet not daring to rebuke her for having
neglected to answer the bell the first time he rang. After a pause, he
rose and turned toward the door--but no, he could not face the large,
cheerless drawing-room up-stairs; instead, he sat down by the fire, and
set himself to consider his future and, in a more hazy sense, that of
his now motherless children.
But very soon, as generally happens to those who devote any time to that
least profitable of occupations, Mr. Tapster found that his thoughts
drifted aimlessly, not to the future where he would have them be, but to
the past--that past which he desired to forget, to obliterate from his
memory.
Till rather more than a year ago few men of his age--he had then been
sixty, he was now sixty-one--enjoyed a pleasanter and, from his own
point of view, a better filled life than James Tapster. How he had
scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer--in a word, all
those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had
always been self-respecting and conscientious--not a prig, mind you, but
inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and,
so inclining, he had found contentment and great material prosperity.
Not even in those days to which he was now looking back so regretfully
had Mr. Tapster always been perfectly content; but now the poor man,
sitting alone by his dining-room fire, remembered only what had been
good and pleasant in his former state. He was aware that his brother
William and William's wife, Maud, both thought that even now he had much
to be thankful for. His line of business was brisk, scarcely touched by
foreign competition, his income increasing at a steady rate of
progression, and his children were exceptionally healthy. But, alas! now
that, in place of there being a pretty little Mrs. Tapster on whom to
spend easily earned money, his substance was being squandered by a crowd
of unmanageable and yet indispensable thieves,--for so Mr. Tapster
voicelessly described the five servants whose loud talk and laughter
were even now floating up from the basement below,--he did not feel his
financial stability so comfortable a thing as he had once done. His very
children, who should now be, as he told himself complainingly, his
greatest comfort, had degenerated from two sturdy, well-behaved little
boys and a charming baby girl into three unruly, fretful imps, setting
him at defiance, and terrorizing their two attendants, who, though
carefully chosen by their Aunt Maud, did not seem to manage them as well
as the old nurse who had been an ally of the ex-Mrs. Tapster.
Looking back at the whole horrible affair--for so, in his own mind, Mr.
Tapster justly designated the divorce case in which he had figured as
the successful petitioner--he wondered uneasily if he had done quite
wisely--wisely, that is, for his own repute and comfort.
He knew very well that had it not been for William, or rather, for Maud,
he would never have found out the dreadful truth. Nay, more, he was
dimly aware that but for them, and for their insistence on it as the
only proper course open to him, he would never have taken action. All
would have been forgiven and forgotten, had not William, and more
especially Maud, said he must divorce Flossy, if not for his own
sake,--ah, what irony!--then for that of his children.
Of course, he felt grateful to his brother William and to his brother's
wife for all they had done for him since that sad time. Still, in the
depths of his heart, Mr. Tapster felt entitled to blame and sometimes
almost to hate his kind brother and sister. To them both, or rather, to
Maud, he really owed the break-up of his life; for, when all was said
and done, it had to be admitted (though Maud did not like him to remind
her of it), that Flossy had met the villain while staying with the
William Tapsters at Boulogne. Respectable London people should have
known better than to take a furnished house at a disreputable French
watering-place, a place full of low English!
Sometimes it was only by a great exercise of self-control that he, James
Tapster, could refrain from telling Maud what he thought of her conduct
in this matter, the more so that she never seemed to understand how
greatly she--and William--had been to blame. On one occasion Maud had
even said how surprised she had been that James had cared to go away to
America, leaving his pretty young wife alone for as long as three
months. Why hadn't she said so at the time, then? Of course, he had
thought that he could leave Flossy to be looked after and kept out of
mischief by Maud and William. But he had been, in more than one sense,
alas! bitterly deceived.
Still, it's never any use crying over spilt milk, so Mr. Tapster got up
from his chair and walked around the room, looking absently, as he did
so, at the large Landseer engravings, of which he was naturally proud.
If only he could forget, put out of his mind forever, the whole affair!
Well, perhaps with the Decree being made Absolute would come oblivion.
He sat down again before the fire. Staring at the hot embers, he
reminded himself that Flossy, wicked, ungrateful Flossy, had disappeared
out of his life. This being so, why think of her? The very children had
at last left off asking inconvenient questions about their mama.
By the way, would Flossy still be their mama after the Decree had been
made Absolute? So Mr. Tapster now suddenly asked himself. He hesitated,
perplexed. But, yes, the Decree being made Absolute would not undo, or
even efface, that fact. The more so--though surely here James Tapster
showed himself less logical than usual--the more so that Flossy, in
spite of what Maud had always said about her, had been a loving and, in
her own light-hearted way, a careful mother. But, though Flossy would
remain the mother of his children,--odd that the Law hadn't provided for
that contingency--she would soon be absolutely nothing, and less than
nothing, to him, the father of those children. Mr. Tapster was a great
believer in the infallibility of the Law, and he subscribed
whole-heartedly to the new reading, "What Law has put asunder, let no
man join together."
To-night Mr. Tapster could not help looking back with a certain
complacency to his one legal adventure. Nothing could have been better
done or more admirably conducted than the way the whole matter had been
carried through. His brother William, and William's solicitor, Mr.
Greenfield, had managed it all so very nicely. True, there had been a
few uncomfortable moments in the witness-box, but every one, including
the judge, had been most kind. As for his counsel, the leading man who
makes a specialty of these sad affairs, not even James Tapster himself
could have put his own case in a more delicate and moving fashion. "A
gentleman possessed of considerable fortune--" so had he justly been
described; and counsel, without undue insistence on irrelevant detail,
had drawn a touching and a true picture of Mr. Tapster's one romance,
his marriage eight years before to the twenty-year-old daughter of an
undischarged bankrupt. Even the Petitioner had scarcely seen Flossy's
dreadful ingratitude in its true colors till he had heard his counsel's
moderate comments on the case.
[Illustration: "HE REMINDED HIMSELF THAT FLOSSY, WICKED, UNGRATEFUL
FLOSSY, HAD DISAPPEARED OUT OF HIS LIFE"]
This evening Mr. Tapster saw Flossy's dreadful ingratitude terribly
clearly, and he wondered, not for the first time, how his wife could
have had the heart to break up his happy home. Why, but for him and his
offer of marriage, Flossy Ball--that had been his wife's maiden
name--would have had to earn her own living! And as she had been very
pretty, very "fetching," she would probably have married some
good-for-nothing young fellow of her own age, lacking the means to
support a wife in decent comfort,--such a fellow, for instance, as the
wretched "co" in the case; while with Mr. Tapster--why, she had had
everything the heart of woman could wish for--a good home, beautiful
clothes, and the being waited on hand and foot. A strange choking
feeling came into his throat as he thought of how good he had been to
Flossy, and how very bad had been her return for that kindness.
But this--this was dreadful! He was actually thinking of her again, and
not, as he had meant to do, of himself and his poor motherless children!
Time enough to think of Flossy when he had news of her again. If her
lover did not marry her--and, from what Mr. Greenfield had discovered
about him, it was most improbable that he would ever be in a position to
do so--she would certainly reappear on the Tapster horizon: Mr.
Greenfield said "they" always did. In that case, it was arranged that
William should pay her a weekly allowance. Mr. Tapster, always, as he
now reminded himself sadly, ready to do the generous thing, had fixed
that allowance at three pounds a week, a sum which had astonished, in
fact quite staggered, Mr. Greenfield's head clerk, a very decent fellow,
by the way.
"Of course, it shall be as you wish, Mr. Tapster, but you should think
of the future and of your children. A hundred and fifty pounds a year is
a large sum; you may feel it a tax, sir, as years go on----"
"That is enough," Mr. Tapster had answered, kindly but firmly; "you have
done your duty in laying that side of the case before me. I have,
however, decided on the amount named; should I see reason to alter my
mind, our arrangement leaves it open to me at any time to lower the
allowance."
But, though this conversation had taken place some months ago, and
though Mr. Tapster still held true to his generous resolve, as yet
Flossy had not reappeared. Mr. Tapster sometimes told himself that if he
only knew where she was, what she was doing,--whether she was still with
that young fellow, for instance,--he would think much less about her
than he did now. Only last night, going for a moment into the night
nursery,--poor Mr. Tapster now enjoyed his children's company only when
he was quite sure that they were asleep,--he had had an extraordinary,
almost a physical impression of Flossy's presence; he certainly had felt
a faint whiff of her favorite perfume. Flossy had been fond of scent,
and, though Maud always said that the use of scent was most unladylike,
he, James, did not dislike it.
With sudden soreness, Mr. Tapster now recalled the one letter Flossy had
written to him just before the actual hearing of the divorce suit. It
had been a wild, oddly worded appeal to him to take her back, not--as
Maud had at once perceived on reading the letter--because she was sorry
for the terrible thing she had done, but simply because she was
beginning to hanker after her children. Maud had described the letter as
shameless and unwomanly in the extreme, and even William, who had never
judged his pretty young sister-in-law as severely as his wife had always
done, had observed sadly that Flossy seemed quite unaware of the
magnitude of her offense against God and man.
* * * * *
Mr. Tapster, who prided himself on his sharp ears, suddenly heard a
curious little sound. He knew it for that of the front door being first
opened, and then shut again, extremely quietly. He half rose from his
chair by the fire, then sat down again heavily.
By Maud's advice, he always locked the area gate himself when he came
home each evening. But how foolish of Maud--such a sensible woman,
too--to think that servants and their evil ways could be circumvented so
easily. Of course, the maids went in and out by the front door in the
evening, and the policeman--a most respectable officer standing at point
duty a few yards lower down the road--must be well aware of these
disgraceful "goings on".
For the first two or three months of his widowerhood (how else could he
term his present peculiar wifeless condition?) there had been a constant
coming and going of servants, first chosen, and then dismissed, by Maud.
At last she suggested that her brother-in-law should engage a lady
housekeeper, and the luckless James Tapster had even interviewed several
applicants for the post after they had been chosen--sifted out, as it
were--by Maud. Unfortunately, they had all been more or less of his own
age, and plain, very plain; while he, naturally enough, would have
preferred to see something young and pretty about him again.
It was over this housekeeper question that he had at last escaped from
Maud's domestic thraldom; for his sister-in-law, offended by his
rejection of each of her candidates, had declared that she would take no
more trouble about his household affairs! Nay, more, she had reminded
him with a smile that she had honestly tried to make pleasant, that
there is, after all, no fool like an old fool--about women. This
insinuation had made Mr. Tapster very angry, and straightway he had
engaged a respectable cook-housekeeper, and, although he had soon become
aware that the woman was feathering her own nest,--James Tapster, as you
will have divined ere now, was fond of good workaday phrases,--yet she
had a pleasant, respectful manner, and kept rough order among the
younger servants.
Mr. Tapster's sister-in-law now interfered only where his children were
concerned. Never having been herself a mother, she had, of course, been
able to form a clear and unprejudiced judgment as to how children, and
especially as to how little boys, should be physically and mentally
trained. As yet, however, Maud had not been very successful with her two
nephews and infant niece, but this was doubtless owing to the fact that
there had been something gravely amiss with each of the five nurses who
had been successively engaged by her during the last year.
The elder of Mr. Tapster's sons was six, and the second four; the
youngest child, a little girl named, unfortunately, Flora, after her
mother, was three years old. There had been a fourth, Flossy's second
baby, also a girl, who had only lived one day. All this being so, was it
not strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of
the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and
domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have
been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful
love?--Maud's striking thought and phrase, this.
[Illustration: "THERE STOOD CLOSE TO HIM, SO CLOSE THAT HE COULD ALMOST
HAVE TOUCHED HER, FLOSSY, HIS WIFE"]
And yet, Flossy, in spite of her frivolity, had somehow managed the
children far better than Maud was now able to do. At the present time,
so Mr. Tapster admitted to himself with something very like an inward
groan, his two sons possessed every vice of which masculine infancy is
capable. They had become, so he was told by their indignant nurses, the
terror of the well-behaved children who shared with them the pleasures
of the Park Inclosure, where they took their daily exercise; and Baby,
once so sweet and good, was now very fretful and peevish.
* * * * *
Again the train of Mr. Tapster's mournful thoughts was disturbed by a
curious little sound--that of some one creeping softly down the
staircase leading from the upper floors. Once more he half rose from his
chair, only to fall heavily back again, with a look of impotent
annoyance on his round, whiskered face. Where was the use of his going
out into the hall and catching Nurse on her way to the kitchen? Maud had
declared, very early in the day, that there should be as little
communication as possible between the kitchen and the nursery, but Mr.
Tapster sometimes found himself in secret sympathy with the two women
whose disagreeable duty it was to be always with his three turbulent
children.
Mr. Tapster frowned and stared gloomily into the fire; then he suddenly
pulled himself together rather sharply, for the door behind him had
slowly swung open. This was intolerable! The parlor-maid had again and
again been told that, whatever might have been the case in her former
places, no door in Mr. Tapster's house was to be opened without the
preliminary of a respectful knock.
Fortified by the memory of what had been a positive order, he turned
round, nerving himself to deliver the necessary rebuke. But instead of
the shifty-eyed, impudent-looking woman he had thought to see, there
stood close to him, so close that he could almost have touched her,
Flossy, his wife, or rather the woman who, though no longer his wife,
had still, as he had been informed to his discomfiture, the right to
bear his name.
A very strange feeling, and one so complicated that it sat uneasily upon
him, took instant possession of Mr. Tapster: anger, surprise, and relief
warred with one another in his heart.
Then he began to think that his eyes must be playing him some curious
trick, for the figure at which he was staring remained strangely still
and motionless. Was it possible that his mind, dwelling constantly on
Flossy, had evoked her wraith? But, no, looking up in startled silence
at the still figure standing before him, he realized that not so would
memory have conjured up the pretty, bright little woman of whom he had
once been proud. Flossy still looked pretty, but she was thin and pale,
and there were dark rings round her eyes; also, her dress was worn, her
hat curiously shabby.
As Mr. Tapster stared up at her, noting these things, one of her hands
began playing nervously with the fringe of the dining-table cover, and
the other sought the back of what had once been one of her dining-room
chairs. As he watched her making these slight movements, nature so far
reasserted itself that a feeling of poignant regret, of pity for her, as
well as, of course, a much larger share of pity for himself, came over
James Tapster.
Had Flossy spoken then,--had she possessed the intuitive knowledge of
men which is the gift of so many otherwise unintelligent women,--the
whole of Mr. Tapster's future, to say nothing of her own, might have
been different and, it may be suggested, happier.
But the moment of softening and mansuetude slipped quickly by, and was
succeeded by a burst of anger; for Mr. Tapster suddenly became aware
that Flossy's left hand, the little thin hand resting on the back of the
chair, was holding two keys which he recognized at once as his property.
The one was a replica of the latch-key which always hung on his
watch-chain, while the other and larger key, to which was attached a
brass tag bearing the name of Tapster and the address of the house, gave
access to the Inclosure Garden opposite Cumberland Crescent!
Avoiding her eager, pitiful look, Mr. Tapster set himself to realize,
with a shrewdness for which William and Maud would never have given him
credit, what Flossy's possession of those two keys had meant during the
last few months.
This woman, who both was and was not Mrs. Tapster, had retained the
power to come freely in and out of _his_ house! She had been able to
make her way, with or without the connivance of the servants, into _his_
children's nursery at any hour of the day or night convenient to
herself! With the aid of that Inclosure key, she had no doubt often seen
the children during their daily walk! In a word, Flossy had been able to
enjoy all the privileges of motherhood while having forfeited all those
of happy wifehood!
His mind hastened heavily on. What a fool he must have looked before
his servants! How they must have laughed to think that he was being so
deceived and taken in! Why, even the policeman who stood at point duty
outside must have known all about it!
Small wonder that Mr. Tapster felt extremely incensed; small wonder that
his heart, hardening, solidifying, expelled any feeling of pity provoked
by Flossy's sad and downcast appearance.