II

Everything, as he passed through the place, went on--all the offices of

life, the whole bustle of the market, and withal, surprisingly, scarce

less that of the nursery and the playground; the whole sprawl in

especial of the great gregarious fireside: it was a complete social

scene in itself, on which types might figure and passions rage and plots

thicken and dramas develop, without reference to any other sphere, or

perhaps even to anything at all outside. The signs of this met him at

every turn as he threaded the labyrinth, passing from one extraordinary

masquerade of expensive objects, one portentous “period” of decoration,

one violent phase of publicity, to another: the heavy heat, the

luxuriance, the extravagance, the quantity, the colour, gave the

impression of some wondrous tropical forest, where vociferous,

bright-eyed, and feathered creatures, of every variety of size and hue,

were half smothered between undergrowths of velvet and tapestry and

ramifications of marble and bronze. The fauna and the flora startled him

alike, and among them his bruised spirit drew in and folded its wings.

But he roamed and rested, exploring and in a manner enjoying the vast

rankness--in the depth of which he suddenly encountered Mrs. Folliott,

whom he had last seen, six months before, in London, and who had spoken

to him then, precisely, of Phil Bloodgood, for several years previous

her confidential American agent and factotum too, as she might say, but

at that time so little in her good books, for the extraordinary things

he seemed to be doing, that she was just hurrying home, she had made no

scruple of mentioning, to take everything out of his hands.

Mark remembered how uneasy she had made him--how that very talk with

her had wound him up to fear, as so acute and intent a little person she

affected him; though he had affirmed with all emphasis and flourish his

own confidence and defended, to iteration, his old friend. This passage

had remained with him for a certain pleasant heat of intimacy, his

partner, of the charming appearance, being what she was; he liked to

think how they had fraternised over their difference and called each

other idiots, or almost, without offence. It was always a link to have

scuffled, failing a real scratch, with such a character; and he had at

present the flutter of feeling that something of this would abide. _He_

hadn’t been hurrying home, at the London time, in any case; he was doing

nothing then, and had continued to do it; he would want, before showing

suspicion--that had been his attitude--to have more, after all, to go

upon. Mrs. Folliott also, and with a great actual profession of it,

remembered and rejoiced; and, also staying in the house as she was, sat

with him, under a spreading palm, in a wondrous rococo salon, surrounded

by the pinkest, that is the fleshiest, imitation Boucher panels, and

wanted to know if he _now_ stood up for his swindler. She would herself

have tumbled on a cloud, very passably, in a fleshy Boucher manner,

hadn’t she been over-dressed for such an exercise; but she was quite

realistically aware of what had so naturally happened--she was prompt

about Bloodgood’s “flight.”

She had acted with energy, on getting back--she had saved what she

could; which hadn’t, however, prevented her losing all disgustedly some

ten thousand dollars. She was lovely, lively, friendly, interested, she

connected Monteith perfectly with their discussion that day during the

water-party on the Thames; but, sitting here with him half an hour, she

talked only of her peculiar, her cruel sacrifice--since she should

never get a penny back. He had felt himself, on their meeting, quite

yearningly reach out to her--so decidedly, by the morning’s end,

and that of his scattered sombre stations, had he been sated with

meaningless contacts, with the sense of people all about him intensely,

though harmlessly, animated, yet at the same time raspingly indifferent.

_They_ would have, he and she at least, their common pang--through which

fact, somehow, he should feel less stranded. It wasn’t that he wanted to

be pitied--he fairly didn’t pity himself; he winced, rather, and even

to vicarious anguish, as it rose again, for poor shamed Bloodgood’s

doom-ridden figure. But he wanted, as with a desperate charity, to give

some easier turn to the mere ugliness of the main facts; to work off his

obsession from them by mixing with it some other blame, some other pity,

it scarce mattered what--if it might be some other experience; as an

effect of which larger ventilation it would have, after a fashion and

for a man of free sensibility, a diluted and less poisonous taste.

By the end of five minutes of Mrs. Folliott, however, he felt his dry

lips seal themselves to a makeshift simper. She could _take_ nothing--no

better, no broader perception of anything than fitted her own small

faculty; so that though she must have recalled or imagined that he had

still, up to lately, had interests at stake, the rapid result of her

egotistical little chatter was to make him wish he might rather have

conversed with the French waiter dangling in the long vista that showed

the oriental café as a climax, or with the policeman, outside, the top

of whose helmet peeped above the ledge of a window. She bewailed her

wretched money to excess--she who, he was sure, had quantities more; she

pawed and tossed her bare bone, with her little extraordinarily gemmed

and manicured hands, till it acted on his nerves; she rang all the

changes on the story, the dire fatality, of her having wavered and

muddled, thought of this and but done that, of her stupid failure to

have pounced, when she had first meant to, in season. She abused the

author of their wrongs--recognising thus too Monteith’s right to loathe

him--for the desperado he assuredly had proved, but with a vulgarity

of analysis and an incapacity for the higher criticism, as her listener

felt it to be, which made him determine resentfully, almost grimly,

that she shouldn’t have the benefit of a grain of _his_ vision or _his_

version of what had befallen them, and of how, in particular, it had

come; and should never dream thereby (though much would she suffer from

that!) of how interesting he might have been. She had, in a finer sense,

no manners, and to be concerned with her in any retrospect was--since

their discourse was of losses--to feel the dignity of history incur

the very gravest. It was true that such fantasies, or that any shade

of inward irony, would be Greek to Mrs. Folliott. It was also true,

however, and not much more strange, when she had presently the

comparatively happy thought of “Lunch with _us_, you poor dear!” and

mentioned three or four of her “crowd”--a new crowd, rather, for her,

all great Sunday lunchers there and immense fun, who would in a moment

be turning up--that this seemed to him as easy as anything else; so that

after a little, deeper in the jungle and while, under the temperature

as of high noon, with the crowd complete and “ordering,” he wiped the

perspiration from his brow, he felt he was letting himself go. He did

that certainly to the extent of leaving far behind any question of Mrs.

Folliott’s manners. They didn’t matter there--nobody’s did; and if she

ceased to lament her ten thousand it was only because, among higher

voices, she couldn’t make herself heard. Poor Blood-good didn’t have

a show, as they might have said, didn’t get through at any point; the

crowd was so new that--there either having been no hue and cry for

him, or having been too many others, for other absconders, in the

intervals--they had never so much as heard of him and would have no more

of Mrs. Folliott’s true inwardness, on that subject at least, than she

had lately cared to have of Monteith’s.

There was nothing like a crowd, this unfortunate knew, for making one

feel lonely, and he felt so increasingly during the meal; but he got

thus at least in a measure away from the terrible little lady; after

which, and before the end of the hour, he wanted still more to get away

from every one else. He was in fact about to perform this manoeuvre when

he was checked by the jolly young woman he had been having on his left

and who had more to say about the Hotels, up and down the town, than he

had ever known a young woman to have to say on any subject at all;

she expressed herself in hotel terms exclusively, the names of those

establishments playing through her speech as the _leit-motif_ might have

recurrently flashed and romped through a piece of profane modern music.

She wanted to present him to the pretty girl she had brought with her,

and who had apparently signified to her that she must do so.

“I think you know my brother-in-law, Mr. Newton Winch,” the pretty girl

had immediately said; she moved her head and shoulders together, as by

a common spring, the effect of a stiff neck or of something loosened in

her back hair; but becoming, queerly enough, all the prettier for

doing so. He had seen in the papers, her brother-in-law, Mr. Monteith’s

arrival--Mr. Mark P. Monteith, wasn’t it?--and where he was, and she

had been with him, three days before, at the time; whereupon he had

said “Hullo, what can have brought old Mark back?” He seemed to have

believed--Newton had seemed--that that shirker, as he called him, never

_would_ come; and she guessed that if she had known she was going to

meet such a former friend (“Which he claims you are, sir,” said the

pretty girl) he would have asked her to find out what the trouble could

be. But the real satisfaction would just be, she went on, if his former

friend would himself go and see him and tell him; he had appeared of

late so down.

“Oh, I remember him”--Mark didn’t repudiate the friendship, placing him

easily; only then he wasn’t married and the pretty girl’s sister must

have come in later: which showed, his not knowing such things, how they

had lost touch. The pretty girl was sorry to have to say in return to

this that her sister wasn’t living--had died two years after marrying;

so that Newton was up there in Fiftieth Street alone; where (in

explanation of his being “down”) he had been shut up for days with bad

_grippe_; though now on the mend, or she wouldn’t have gone to him, not

she, who had had it nineteen times and didn’t want to have it again. But

the horrid poison just seemed to have entered into poor Newton’s soul.

“That’s the way it _can_ take you, don’t you know?” And then as, with

her single twist, she just charmingly hunched her eyes at our friend,

“Don’t you want to go to see him?”

Mark bethought himself: “Well, I’m going to see a lady-----”

She took the words from his mouth. “Of course you’re going to see a

lady--every man in New York is. But Newton isn’t a lady, unfortunately

for him, to-day; and Sunday afternoon in this place, in this weather,

alone-----!”

“Yes, isn’t it awful?”--he was quite drawn to her.

“Oh, _you’ve_ got your lady!”

“Yes, I’ve got my lady, thank goodness!” The fervour of which was his

sincere tribute to the note he had had on Friday morning from Mrs. Ash,

the only thing that had a little tempered his gloom.

“Well then, feel for others. Fit him in. Tell him why!”

“Why I’ve come back? I’m glad I _have_--since it was to see _you_!”

Monteith made brave enough answer, promising to do what he could.

He liked the pretty girl, with her straight attack and her free

awkwardness--also with her difference from the others through something

of a sense and a distinction given her by so clearly having Newton on

her mind. Yet it was odd to him, and it showed the lapse of the years,

that Winch--as he had known him of old--could _be_ to that degree on any

one’s mind.