Miss Miller, to relieve the strain upon the nerves of those present,
which was becoming unbearably tense--and, in fact, poor Maisie had burst
into tears with the sheer terror of the climax, and had been taken off
to be put to bed by Mrs. Brookenham, who, in spite of many other
qualities, was still a womanly woman at heart, and not wholly deficient
in those little tendernesses, those trifling but ineffable softnesses of
nature, which are at once the chief source of woman's strength and of
her weakness, a fact she was constantly manifesting to us during our
stay at Lord Ormont's, and which we all remarked and in some cases
commented upon, since the discovery had in it some of the qualities of a
revelation--began to sing one of those extraordinary popular songs that
one hears at the music-halls in London, and in the politer and more
refined circles of American society, if indeed there may be said to be
such a thing in a land so new as to be as yet mostly veneer, with little
that is solid in its social substructure, beginning as its constituent
factors do at the top and working downward, rather than choosing the
more natural course of beginning at the bottom and working upward, and
which must materially, one may think, affect the social solidarity of
the nation by retarding its growth and in otherwise interfering with its
healthy, not to say normal development, and which, as the words and
import of it come back to me, was known by the rather vulgar and
vernacular title of "All Coons Look Alike to Me," thus indicating that
the life treated of in the melody, which was not altogether unmusical,
and was indeed as a matter of fact quite fetching in its quality,
running in one's ears for days and nights long after its first hearing,
was that of the negro, and his personal likeness to his other black
brethren in the eyes even of one who was supposed to have been at one
time, prior to the action of the song if not coincidently with it, the
object of his affections.
[Had Jones not been wholly absorbed in the reading of this
wonderful story, he might at this moment have heard a slight but
unmistakable rumbling sound, and have looked up and seen much that
would have interested him. But, as this kind of a story requires
for its complete comprehension a complete concentration of mind,
he did not hear, and so, continuing, did not see.]
[Illustration: HE DID NOT SEE]
Diana was the first to mitigate the silence with comment [he read] a
silence whose depth had only been rendered the more depressing by Miss
Miller's uncalled-for intrusion upon our mood of something that smacked
of a society towards which most of us, in so far as we were able to do
so, had always cultivated a strenuous aloofness, prompted not by any
whelmful sense of our own perfection, latent or obvious, but rather by a
realization on our part that it lacked the essentials that could make of
it an interesting part of the lives of a group given over wholly, or
at least as nearly wholly as the exiguities of existence would permit of
a persistent and continuous devotion, to the contemplation of the
beautiful in art, letters, or any other phase of human endeavor.
"And did his soul never thaw?" Diana asked.
"Never," replied Vanderbank, "It is frozen yet."
* * * * *
Here the rumbling sound grew to such volume that, absorbed as he was in
his reading, Jones could no longer fail to hear it. Lowering his
manuscript, he looked sternly upon the company. The rumbling sound was a
chorus, not unmusical, of snores.
_The Dreamers slept._
"Well, I'll be hanged!" cried Jones, angrily, and then he walked over
and looked behind the screen where the stenographer was seated. "I'll
finish it if it takes all night," he muttered. "Just take this down,"
he added to the stenographer; but that worthy never stirred or made
reply. _He too was sleeping._
Jones muttered angrily to himself.
"Very well," he said. "I'll read it to myself, then," and he began
again. For ten minutes he continued, and then on a sudden his voice
faltered; his head fell forward upon his chest, his knees collapsed
beneath him, and he slid inert, and snoring himself, into his chair. The
MS. fluttered to the floor, and an hour later the waiters entering the
room found the club unanimously engaged in dreaming once more.
The Involvular Club was too much for them, even for the author of it,
but whether this was because of the lateness of the hour or because of
the intricacies of the author's style I have never been able to
ascertain, for Mr. Jones is very sore on the point, and therefore
reticent, and as for the others, I cannot find that any of them remember
enough about it to be able to speak intelligently on the subject.
[Illustration: THE STENOGRAPHER SLEPT]
All I do know is what the landlord tells me, and that is that at 5 A.M.
thirteen cabs containing thirteen sleeping souls pursued their thirteen
devious ways to thirteen different houses, thus indicating that the
Dreamers were ultimately adjourned, and, as they have not met since, I
presume the adjournment was, as usual, _sine die_.