method--on the whole. It was before the days of the Wagner autocracy,
and perhaps his tremolo passed unchallenged as it could not now; but he
was a great artist. He knew his business as well as his advance-agent
knew his. The Remy Concerts were a splendid success. Reserved seats, $5.
For the Series of Six, $25.
* * * * *
On the following Monday, Esther Van Guilder returned her friend's call,
in response to an urgent invitation, despatched by mail. Louise
Latimer's great bare room was incapable of transmutation into a cosy
nest of a boudoir. There was too much of its heavy raw silk
furniture--too much of its vast, sarcophagus-like bed--too much of its
upholsterer's elegance, regardless of cost--and taste. An enlargement
from an ambrotype of the original Latimer, as he arrived in New York
from New Hampshire, and a photograph of a "child subject" by Millais,
were all her works of art. It was not to be doubted that they had
climbed upstairs from a front parlor of an earlier stage of social
development. The farm-house was six generations behind Esther; two
behind Louise.
Esther found her friend in a state of almost feverish excitement. Her
eyes shone; the color burned high on her clear cheeks.
"You never would guess what I've done, dear!" she began, as soon as they
were alone in the big room. "I'm going to see _him_--to speak to
him--_Esther!_" Her voice was solemnly hushed, "to _serve_ him!"
"Oh, Louise! what _do_ you mean?"
"To serve him--with my own hands! To--to--help him on with his coat--I
don't know--to do something that a servant does--anything, so that I can
say that once, once only, just for an hour, I have been near him, been
of use to him, served him in one little thing as loyally as he serves
OUR ART."
Music was THEIR art, and no capitals could tell how much it was theirs
or how much of an art it was.
"Louise," demanded Esther, with a frightened look, "are you crazy?"
"No. Read this!" She handed the other girl a clipping from the
advertising columns of a newspaper.
CHAMBERMAID AND WAITRESS.--WANTED, A NEAT and willing girl, for
light work. Apply to Mme. Remy, The Midlothian, ... Broadway.
"I saw it just by accident, Saturday, after I left you. Papa had left
his paper in the coupe. I was going up to my First Aid to the Injured
Class--it's at four o'clock now, you know. I made up my mind right
off--it came to me like an inspiration. I just waited until it came to
the place where they showed how to tie up arteries, and then I slipped
out. Lots of the girls slip out in the horrid parts, you know. And then,
instead of waiting in the ante-room, I put on my wrap, and pulled the
hood over my head and ran off to the Midlothian--it's just around the
corner, you know. And I saw his wife."
"What was she like?" queried Esther, eagerly.
"Oh, I don't know. Sort of horrid--actressy. She had a pink silk wrapper
with swansdown all over it--at four o'clock, think! I was _awfully_
frightened when I got there; but it wasn't the least trouble. She hardly
looked at me, and she engaged me right off. She just asked me if I was
willing to do a whole lot of things--I forgot what they were--and where
I'd worked before. I said at Mrs. Barcalow's."
"Mrs. Barcalow's?"
"Why, yes--my Aunt Amanda, don't you know--up in Framingham. I always
have to wash the teacups when I go there. Aunty says that everybody has
got to do _something_ in _her_ house."
"Oh, Louise!" cried her friend, in shocked admiration; "how can you
think of such things?"
"Well, I did. And she--his wife, you know--just said: 'Oh, I suppose
you'll do as well as any one--all you girls are alike.'"
"But did she really take you for a--servant?"
"Why, yes, indeed. It was raining. I had that old ulster on, you know.
I'm to go at twelve o'clock next Saturday."
"But, Louise!" cried Esther, aghast, "you don't truly mean to go!"
"I do!" cried Louise, beaming triumphantly.
"_Oh, Louise!_"
"Now, listen, dear," said Miss Latimer, with the decision of an
enthusiastic young lady with New England blood in her veins. "Don't say
a word till I tell you what my plan is. I've thought it all out, and
you've got to help me."
Esther shuddered.
"You foolish child!" cried Louise. Her eyes were sparkling: she was in a
state of ecstatic excitement; she could see no obstacles to the
carrying out of her plan. "You don't think I mean to _stay_ there, do
you? I'm just going at twelve o'clock, and at four he comes back from
the matinee, and at five o'clock I'm going to slip on my things and run
downstairs, and have you waiting for me in the coupe, and off we go. Now
do you see?"
It took some time to bring Esther's less venturesome spirit up to the
point of assisting in this undertaking; but she began, after a while, to
feel the delights of vicarious enterprise, and in the end the two girls,
their cheeks flushed, their eyes shining feverishly, their voices
tremulous with childish eagerness, resolved themselves into a committee
of ways and means; for they were two well-guarded young women, and to
engineer five hours of liberty was difficult to the verge of
impossibility. However, there is a financial manoeuvre known as
"kiting checks," whereby A exchanges a check with B and B swaps with A
again, playing an imaginary balance against Time and the Clearing House;
and by a similar scheme, which an acute student of social ethics has
called "kiting calls," the girls found that they could make Saturday
afternoon their own, without one glance from the watchful eyes of
Esther's mother or Louise's aunt--Louise had only an aunt to reckon
with.
"And, oh, Esther!" cried the bolder of the conspirators, "I've thought
of a trunk--of course I've got to have a trunk, or she would ask me
where it was, and I couldn't tell her a fib. Don't you remember the
French maid who died three days after she came here? Her trunk is up in
the store-room still, and I don't believe anybody will ever come for
it--it's been there seven years now. Let's go up and look at it."
The girls romped upstairs to the great unused upper story, where heaps
of household rubbish obscured the dusty half-windows. In a corner,
behind Louise's baby chair and an unfashionable hat-rack of the old
steering-wheel pattern, they found the little brown-painted tin trunk,
corded up with clothesline.
"Louise!" said Esther, hastily, "what did you tell her your name was?"
"I just said 'Louise'."
Esther pointed to the name painted on the trunk,
LOUISE LEVY
"It is the hand of Providence," she said. "Somehow, now, I'm _sure_
you're quite right to go."
And neither of these conscientious young ladies reflected for one minute
on the discomfort which might be occasioned to Madame Remy by the
defection of her new servant a half-hour before dinner-time on Saturday
night.
* * * * *
"Oh, child, it's you, is it?" was Mme. Remy's greeting at twelve o'clock
on Saturday. "Well, you're punctual--and you look clean. Now, are you
going to break my dishes or are you going to steal my rings? Well, we'll
find out soon enough. Your trunk's up in your room. Go up to the
servant's quarters--right at the top of those stairs there. Ask for the
room that belongs to apartment 11. You are to room with their girl."
Louise was glad of a moment's respite. She had taken the plunge; she was
determined to go through to the end. But her heart _would_ beat and her
hands _would_ tremble. She climbed up six flights of winding stairs, and
found herself weak and dizzy when she reached the top and gazed around
her. She was in a great half-story room, eighty feet square. The most of
it was filled with heaps of old furniture and bedding, rolls of carpet,
of canvas, of oilcloth, and odds and ends of discard of unused household
gear--the dust thick over all. A little space had been left around three
sides, to give access to three rows of cell-like rooms, in each of which
the ceiling sloped from the very door to a tiny window at the level of
the floor. In each room was a bed, a bureau that served for wash-stand,
a small looking-glass, and one or two trunks. Women's dresses hung on
the whitewashed walls. She found No. 11, threw off, desperately, her hat
and jacket, and sunk down on the little brown tin trunk, all trembling
from head to foot.
"Hello," called a cheery voice. She looked up and saw a girl in a dirty
calico dress.
"Just come?" inquired this person, with agreeable informality. She was a
good-looking large girl, with red hair and bright cheeks. She leaned
against the door-post and polished her finger-nails with a little brush.
Her hands were shapely.
"Ain't got onto the stair-climbing racket yet, eh? You'll get used to
it. 'Louise Levy,'" she read the name on the trunk. "You don't look like
a sheeny. Can't tell nothin' 'bout names, can you? My name's Slattery.
You'd think I was Irish, wouldn't you? Well, I'm straight Ne' York. I'd
be dead before I was Irish. Born here. Ninth Ward an' next to an engine
house. How's that? There's white Jews, too. I worked for one, pickin'
sealskins down in Prince Street. Most took the lungs out of me. But that
wasn't why I shook the biz. It queered my hands--see? I'm goin' to be
married in the Fall to a German gentleman. He ain't so Dutch when you
know him, though. He's a grocer. Drivin' now; but he buys out the boss
in the Fall. How's that? He's dead stuck on my hooks, an' I have to keep
'em lookin' good. I come here because the work was light. I don't have
to work--only to be doin' somethin', see? Only got five halls and the
lamps. You got a fam'ly job, I s'pose? I wouldn't have that. I don't
mind the Sooprintendent; but I'd be dead before I'd be bossed by a
woman, see? Say, what fam'ly did you say you was with?"
The stream of talk had acted like a nerve-tonic on Louise. She was able
to answer:
"M--Mr. Remy."
"Ramy?--oh, lord! Got the job with His Tonsils? Well, you won't keep it
long. They're meaner'n three balls, see? Rent their room up here and
chip in with eleven. Their girls don't never stay. Well, I got to step,
or the Sooprintendent'll be borin' my ear. Well--so long!"
But Louise had fled down the stairs. "His Tonsils" rang in her ears.
What blasphemy! What sacrilege! She could scarcely pretend to listen to
Mme. Remy's first instructions.
The household _was_ parsimonious. Louise washed the caterer's dishes--he
made a reduction in his price. Thus she learned that a late breakfast
took the place of luncheon. She began to feel what this meant. The beds
had been made; but there was work enough. She helped Mme. Remy to sponge
a heap of faded finery--_her_ dresses. If they had been _his_ coats!
Louise bent her hot face over the tawdry silks and satins, and clasped
her parboiled little finger-tips over the wet sponge. At half-past three
Mme. Remy broke the silence.
"We must get ready for Musseer," she said. An ecstatic joy filled
Louise's being. The hour of her reward was at hand.
Getting ready for "Musseer" proved to be an appalling process. First
they brewed what Mme. Remy called a "teaze Ann." After the _tisane_, a
host of strange foreign drugs and cosmetics were marshalled in order.
Then water was set to heat on a gas-stove. Then a little table was
neatly set.
"Musseer has his dinner at half-past four," Madame explained. "I don't
take mine till he's laid down and I've got him off to the concert.
There, he's coming now. Sometimes he comes home pretty nervous. If he's
nervous, don't you go and make a fuss, do you hear, child?"
The door opened, and Musseer entered, wrapped in a huge frogged
overcoat. There was no doubt that he was nervous. He cast his hat upon
the floor, as if he were Jove dashing a thunderbolt. Fire flashed from
his eyes. He advanced upon his wife and thrust a newspaper in her
face--a little pinky sheet, a notorious blackmailing publication.
"Zees," he cried, "is your work!"
"What _is_ it now, Hipleet?" demanded Mme. Remy.
"Vot it ees?" shrieked the tenor. "It ees ze history of how zey have
heest me at Nice! It ees all zair--how I have been heest--in zis sacre
sheet--in zis handkairchif of infamy! And it ees you zat have told it to
zat devil of a Rastignac--_traitresse!_"
"Now, Hipleet," pleaded his wife, "if I can't learn enough French to
talk with you, how am I going to tell Rastignac about your being
hissed?"
This reasoning silenced Mr. Remy for an instant--an instant only.
"You _vood_ have done it!" he cried, sticking out his chin and thrusting
his face forward.
"Well, I didn't," said Madame, "and nobody reads that thing, any way.
Now, don't mind it, and let me get your things off, or you'll be
catching cold."
Mr. Remy yielded at last to the necessity of self-preservation, and
permitted his wife to remove his frogged overcoat, and to unwind him
from a system of silk wraps to which the Gordian knot was a slip-noose.
This done, he sat down before the dressing-case, and Mme. Remy, after
tying a bib around his neck, proceeded to dress his hair and put
brilliantine on his moustache. Her husband enlivened the operation by
reading from the pinky paper.
"It ees not gen-air-al-lee known--zat zees dees-tin-guished tenor vos
heest on ze pob-lic staidj at Nice--in ze year--"
Louise leaned against the wall, sick, faint and frightened, with a
strange sense of shame and degradation at her heart. At last the tenor's
eye fell on her.
"Anozzair eediot?" he inquired.
"She ain't very bright, Hipleet," replied his wife; "but I guess she'll
do. Louise, open the door--there's the caterer."
Louise placed the dishes upon the table mechanically. The tenor sat
himself at the board, and tucked a napkin in his neck.
"And how did the Benediction Song go this afternoon?" inquired his
wife.
"Ze Benediction? Ah! One _encore_. One on-lee. Zese pigs of Ameericains.
I t'row my pairls biffo' swine. _Chops once more!_ You vant to mordair
me? Vat do zis mean, madame? You ar-r-re in lig wiz my enemies. All ze
vorlt is against ze ar-r-r-teest!"
The storm that followed made the first seem a zephyr. The tenor
exhausted his execratory vocabulary in French and English. At last, by
way of a dramatic finale, he seized the plate of chops and flung it from
him. He aimed at the wall; but Frenchmen do not pitch well. With a ring
and a crash, plate and chops went through the broad window-pane. In the
moment of stricken speechlessness that followed, the sound of the final
smash came softly up from the sidewalk.
"Ah-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ah!"
The tenor rose to his feet with the howl of an anguished hyena.
"Oh, good gracious!" cried his wife; "he's going to have one of his
creezes--his creezes de nare!"
He did have a _crise de nerfs_. "Ten dollair!" he yelled, "for ten
dollair of glass!" He tore his pomaded hair; he tore off his bib and his
neck-tie, and for three minutes without cessation he shrieked wildly and
unintelligibly. It was possible to make out, however, that "arteest" and
"ten dollair" were the themes of the improvisation. Finally he sank
exhausted into the chair, and his white-faced wife rushed to his side.
"Louise!" she cried, "get the foot-tub out of the closet while I spray
his throat, or he can't sing a note. Fill it up with warm water--102
degrees--there's the thermometer--and bathe his feet."
Trembling from head to foot, Louise obeyed her orders, and brought the
foot-tub, full of steaming water. Then she knelt down and began to serve
the maestro for the first time. She took off his shoes. Then she looked
at his socks. Could she do it?
"Eediot!" gasped the sufferer, "make haste! I die!"
"Hold your mouth open, dear," said Madame, "I haven't half sprayed you."
"Ah! _you!_" cried the tenor. "Cat! Devil! It ees you zat have killed
me!" And moved by an access of blind rage, he extended his arm, and
thrust his wife violently from him.
Louise rose to her feet, with a hard set, good old New England look on
her face. She lifted the tub of water to the level of her breast, and
then she inverted it on the tenor's head. For one instant she gazed at
the deluge, and at the bath-tub balanced on the maestro's skull like a
helmet several sizes too large--then she fled like the wind.
Once in the servant's quarters, she snatched her hat and jacket. From
below came mad yells of rage.
"I kill hare! give me my knife--give me my rivvolvare! Au secours!
Assassin!"
Miss Slattery appeared in the doorway, still polishing her nails.
"What have you done to His Tonsils?" she inquired. "He's pretty hot,
this trip."
"How can I get away from here?" cried Louise.
Miss Slattery pointed to a small door. Louise rushed down a long
stairway--another--and yet others--through a great room where there was
a smell of cooking and a noise of fires--past white-capped cooks and
scullions--through a long stone corridor, and out into the street. She
cried aloud as she saw Esther's face at the window of the coupe.
She drove home--cured.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] From "Stories of H. C. Bunner," copyright, 1890, 1896, by Alice L.
Bunner; published by Charles Scribner's Sons. By permission of the
publishers.
H. C. BUNNER
Henry Cuyler Bunner was his full name, H. C. Bunner was the way he
always signed his writings, and "Bunner" was his name to his friends,
and even to his wife. He was born in Oswego, New York, August 3, 1855.
His parents soon moved to New York City, and Bunner was educated in the
public schools there. Then he became a clerk in a business house, but
this did not satisfy him, and he began to write for newspapers, finally
getting a position on the _Arcadian_, a short-lived journal. In 1877 the
publishers of _Puck_, a humorous weekly printed in the German language,
decided to issue an edition in English, and made Bunner assistant
editor. It was a happy choice. He soon became editor-in-chief, and under
his direction the paper became not only the best humorous journal of its
time, but a powerful influence in politics as well. Bunner wrote not
only editorials, humorous verse, short stories, and titles for pictures,
but often suggested the cartoons, which were an important feature of the
paper.
Outside the office he was a delightful conversationalist. His friends
Brander Matthews, Lawrence Hutton and others speak of his ready wit, his
kindness of heart, and his wonderfully varied store of information. He
was a constant reader, and a good memory enabled him to retain what he
read. It is said that one could hardly name a poem that he had not read,
and it was odds but that he could quote its best lines. Next to reading,
his chief pleasure was in wandering about odd corners of the city,
especially the foreign quarters. He knew all the queer little
restaurants and queer little shops in these places.
His first literary work of note was a volume of poems, happily entitled
_Airs from Arcady_. It contains verses both grave and gay: one of the
cleverest is called "Home, Sweet Home, with Variations." He writes the
poem first in the style of Swinburne, then of Bret Harte, then of Austin
Dobson, then of Oliver Goldsmith and finally of Walt Whitman. The book
also showed his skill in the use of French forms of verse, as in this
dainty triolet:
A PITCHER OF MIGNONETTE
A pitcher of mignonette
In a tenement's highest casement:
Queer sort of flower-pot--yet
That pitcher of mignonette
Is a garden in heaven set,
To the little sick child in the basement--
The pitcher of mignonette
In the tenement's highest casement.
The last poem in the book, called "To Her," was addressed to Miss Alice
Learned, whom he married soon after, and to whom, as "A. L. B." all his
later books were dedicated. Soon after his marriage he moved to Nutley,
New Jersey. Here he was not only the editor and man of letters but the
neighbor who could always be called on in time of need, and the citizen
who took an active part in the community life, helping to organize the
Village Improvement Society, one of the first of its kind.
He followed up his first volume by two short novels, _The Midge_ and
_The Story of a New York House_. Then he undertook the writing of the
short story, his first book being _Zadoc Pine and other Stories_. The
title story of this book contains a very humorous and faithful
delineation of a New Englander who is transplanted to a New Jersey
suburb. Soon after writing this he began to read the short stories of
Guy de Maupassant. He admired them so much that he half translated, half
adapted a number of them, and published them under the title _Made in
France_. Then he tried writing stories of his own, in the manner of de
Maupassant, and produced in _Short Sixes_ a group of stories which are
models of concise narrative, crisply told, artistic in form, and often
with a touch of surprise at the end. Other volumes of short stories are
_More Short Sixes_, and _Love in Old Cloathes_. _Jersey Street and
Jersey Lane_ was a book which grew out of his Nutley life. He also wrote
a play, _The Tower of Babel_, which was produced by Marie Wainwright in
1883. He died at Nutley, May 11, 1896. He was one of the first American
authors to develop the short story as we know it to-day, and few of his
successors have surpassed him in the light, sure style and the firmness
of construction which are characteristic of his later work.
SOCIETY IN OUR TOWN
_Life in a small town, which means any place of less than a hundred
thousand people, is more interesting than life in a big city. Both
places have their notables, but in the small town you know these people,
in the city you only read about them in the papers._ IN OUR TOWN _is a
series of portraits of the people of a typical small city of the Middle
West, seen through the keen eyes of a newspaper editor. This story tells
how the question of the social leadership of the town was finally
settled._
THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP
BY
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
What a dreary waste life in our office must have been before Miss
Larrabee came to us to edit a society page for the paper! To be sure we
had known in a vague way that there were lines of social cleavage in the
town; that there were whist clubs, and dancing clubs and women's clubs,
and in a general way that the women who composed these clubs made up our
best society, and that those benighted souls beyond the pale of these
clubs were out of the caste. We knew that certain persons whose names
were always handed in on the lists of guests at parties were what we
called "howling swells," but it remained for Miss Larrabee to sort out
ten or a dozen of these "howling swells," who belonged to the strictest
social caste in town, and call them "howling dervishes." Incidentally it
may be said that both Miss Larrabee and her mother were dervishes, but
that did not prevent her from making sport of them. From Miss Larrabee
we learned that the high priestess of the howling dervishes of our
society was Mrs. Mortimer Conklin, known by the sisterhood of the mosque
as Priscilla Winthrop. We in our office had never heard her called by
that name, but Miss Larrabee explained, rather elaborately, that unless
one was permitted to speak of Mrs. Conklin thus, one was quite beyond
the hope of a social heaven.
In the first place, Priscilla Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin's maiden name;
in the second place, it links her with the Colonial Puritan stock of
which she is so justly proud--being scornful of mere Daughters of the
Revolution--and finally, though Mrs. Conklin is a grandmother, her
maiden name seems to preserve the sweet, vague illusion of girlhood
which Mrs. Conklin always carries about her like the shadow of a dream.
And Miss Larrabee punctuated this with a wink which we took to be a
quotation mark, and she went on with her work. So we knew we had been
listening to the language used in the temple.
Our town was organized fifty years ago by Abolitionists from New
England, and twenty years ago, when Alphabetical Morrison was getting
out one of the numerous boom editions of his real estate circular, he
printed an historical article therein in which he said that Priscilla
Winthrop was the first white child born on the town site. Her father was
territorial judge, afterward member of the State Senate, and after ten
years spent in mining in the far West, died in the seventies, the
richest man in the State. It was known that he left Priscilla, his only
child, half a million dollars in government bonds.