"Why, that's mighty good of you, Jerry--" I began, struggling to my feet.
"Oh, rot!" he exclaimed. "I shouldn't ask you if I didn't want you."
There was no denying the truth of this, and after he had gone I sat for a
long time with my pen in my mouth, reflecting as to whether or not I
should go. For I had the instinct that here was another cross-roads, that
more depended on my decision than I cared to admit. But even then I knew
what I should do. Ridiculous not to--I told myself. How could a week or
ten days with Jerry possibly affect my newborn, resolve?
Yet the prospect, now, of a visit to the Kymes' was by no means so
glowing as it once would have been. For I had seen visions, I had dreamed
dreams, beheld a delectable country of my very own. A year ago--nay, even
a month ago--how such an invitation would have glittered!... I returned
at length to my theme, over which, before Jerry's arrival, I had been
working feverishly. But now the glamour had gone from it.
Presently Tom came in.
"Anyone been here?" he demanded.
"Jerry," I told him.
"What did he want?"
"He wanted me to go home with him at Easter."
"You're going, of course."
"I don't know. I haven't decided."
"You'd be a fool not to," was Tom's comment. It voiced, succinctly, a
prevailing opinion.
It was the conclusion I arrived at in my own mind. But just why I had
been chosen for the honour, especially at such a time, was a riddle.
Jerry's invitations were charily given, and valued accordingly; and more
than once, at our table, I had felt a twinge of envy when Conybear or
someone else had remarked, with the proper nonchalance, in answer to a
question, that they were going to Weathersfield. Such was the name of the
Kyme place....
I shall never forget the impression made on me by the decorous luxury of
that big house, standing amidst its old trees, halfway up the gentle
slope that rose steadily from the historic highway where poor Andre was
captured. I can see now the heavy stone pillars of its portico vignetted
in a flush of tenderest green, the tulips just beginning to flame forth
their Easter colours in the well-kept beds, the stately, well-groomed
evergreens, the vivid lawns, the clipped hedges. And like an overwhelming
wave of emotion that swept all before it, the impressiveness of wealth
took possession of me. For here was a kind of wealth I had never known,
that did not exist in the West, nor even in the still Puritan environs of
Boston where I had visited. It took itself for granted, proclaimed itself
complacently to have solved all problems. By ignoring them, perhaps. But
I was too young to guess this. It was order personified, gaining effect
at every turn by a multitude of details too trivial to mention were it
not for the fact that they entered deeply into my consciousness, until
they came to represent, collectively, the very flower of achievement. It
was a wealth that accepted tribute calmly, as of inherent right. Law and
tradition defended its sanctity more effectively than troops. Literature
descended from her high altar to lend it dignity; and the long, silent
library displayed row upon row of the masters, appropriately clad in
morocco or calf,--Smollett, Macaulay, Gibbon, Richardson, Fielding,
Scott, Dickens, Irving and Thackeray, as though each had striven for a
tablet here. Art had denied herself that her canvases might be hung on
these walls; and even the Church, on that first Sunday of my visit,
forgot the blood of her martyrs that she might adorn an appropriate niche
in the setting. The clergyman, at one of the dinner parties, gravely
asked a blessing as upon an Institution that included and absorbed all
other institutions in its being....
The note of that house was a tempered gaiety. Guests arrived from New
York, spent the night and departed again without disturbing the even
tenor of its ways. Unobtrusive servants ministered to their wants,--and
to mine....
Conybear was there, and two classmates from Boston, and we were treated
with the amiable tolerance accorded to college youths and intimates of
the son of the house. One night there was a dance in our honour. Nor have
I forgotten Jerry's sister, Nathalie, whom I had met at Class Days, a
slim and willowy, exotic young lady of the Botticelli type, with a crown
of burnished hair, yet more suggestive of a hothouse than of spring. She
spoke English with a French accent. Capricious, impulsive, she captured
my interest because she put a high value on her favour; she drove me over
the hills, informing me at length that I was sympathique--different from
the rest; in short, she emphasized and intensified what I may call the
Weathersfield environment, stirred up in me new and vague aspirations
that troubled yet excited me.
Then there was Mrs. Kyme, a pretty, light-hearted lady, still young, who
seemed to have no intention of growing older, who romped and played songs
for us on the piano. The daughter of an old but now impecunious
Westchester family, she had been born to adorn the position she held, she
was adapted by nature to wring from it the utmost of the joys it offered.
From her, rather than from her husband, both of the children seemed to
have inherited. I used to watch Mr. Grosvenor Kyme as he sat at the end
of the dinner-table, dark, preoccupied, taciturn, symbolical of a wealth
new to my experience, and which had about it a certain fabulous quality.
It toiled not, neither did it spin, but grew as if by magic, day and
night, until the very conception of it was overpowering. What must it be
to have had ancestors who had been clever enough to sit still until a
congested and discontented Europe had begun to pour its thousands and
hundreds of thousands into the gateway of the western world, until that
gateway had become a metropolis? ancestors, of course, possessing what
now suddenly appeared to me as the most desirable of gifts--since it
reaped so dazzling a harvest-business foresight. From time to time these
ancestors had continued to buy desirable corners, which no amount of
persuasion had availed to make them relinquish. Lease them, yes; sell
them, never! By virtue of such a system wealth was as inevitable as human
necessity; and the thought of human necessity did not greatly bother me.
Mr. Kyme's problem of life was not one of making money, but of investing
it. One became automatically a personage....
It was due to one of those singular coincidences--so interesting a
subject for speculation--that the man who revealed to me this golden
romance of the Kyme family was none other than a resident of my own city,
Mr. Theodore Watling, now become one of our most important and
influential citizens; a corporation lawyer, new and stimulating
qualification, suggesting as it did, a deus ex machina of great affairs.
That he, of all men, should come to Weathersfield astonished me, since I
was as yet to make the connection between that finished, decorous,
secluded existence and the source of its being. The evening before my
departure he arrived in company with two other gentlemen, a Mr. Talbot
and a Mr. Saxes, whose names were spoken with respect in a sphere of
which I had hitherto taken but little cognizance-Wall Street. Conybear
informed me that they were "magnates,"... We were sitting in the
drawing-room at tea, when they entered with Mr. Watling, and no sooner
had he spoken to Mrs. Kyme than his quick eye singled me out of the
group.
"Why, Hugh!" he exclaimed, taking my hand. "I had no idea I should meet
you here--I saw your father only last week, the day I left home." And he
added, turning to Mrs. Kyme, "Hugh is the son of Mr. Matthew Paret, who
has been the leader of our bar for many years."
The recognition and the tribute to my father were so graciously given
that I warmed with gratitude and pride, while Mr. Kyme smiled a little,
remarking that I was a friend of Jerry's. Theodore Watling, for being
here, had suddenly assumed in my eyes a considerable consequence, though
the note he struck in that house was a strange one. It was, however, his
own note, and had a certain distinction, a ring of independence, of the
knowledge of self-worth. Dinner at Weathersfield we youngsters had
usually found rather an oppressive ceremony, with its shaded lights and
precise ritual over which Mr. Kyme presided like a high priest;
conversation had been restrained. That night, as Johnnie Laurens
afterwards expressed it, "things loosened up," and Mr. Watling was
responsible for the loosening. Taking command of the Kyme dinner table
appeared to me to be no mean achievement, but this is just what he did,
without being vulgar or noisy or assertive. Suavitar in modo, forbiter in
re. If, as I watched him there with a newborn pride and loyalty, I had
paused to reconstruct the idea that the mention of his name would
formerly have evoked, I suppose I should have found him falling short of
my notion of a gentleman; it had been my father's opinion; but Mr.
Watling's marriage to Gene Hollister's aunt had given him a standing with
us at home. He possessed virility, vitality in a remarkable degree, yet
some elusive quality that was neither tact nor delicacy--though related
to these differentiated him from the commonplace, self-made man of
ability. He was just off the type. To liken him to a clothing store model
of a well-built, broad-shouldered man with a firm neck, a handsome,
rather square face not lacking in colour and a conventional, drooping
moustache would be slanderous; yet he did suggest it. Suggesting it, he
redeemed it: and the middle western burr in his voice was rather
attractive than otherwise. He had not so much the air of belonging there,
as of belonging anywhere--one of those anomalistic American citizens of
the world who go abroad and make intimates of princes. Before the meal
was over he had inspired me with loyalty and pride, enlisted the
admiration of Jerry and Conybear and Johnnie Laurens; we followed him
into the smoking-room, sitting down in a row on a leather lounge behind
our elders.
Here, now that the gentlemen were alone, there was an inspiring largeness
in their talk that fired the imagination. The subject was investments, at
first those of coal and iron in my own state, for Mr. Watling, it
appeared, was counsel for the Boyne Iron Works.
"It will pay you to keep an eye on that company, Mr. Kyme," he said,
knocking the ashes from his cigar. "Now that old Mr. Durrett's gone--"
"You don't mean to say Nathaniel Durrett's dead!" said Mr. Kyme.
The lawyer nodded.
"The old regime passed with him. Adolf Scherer succeeds him, and you may
take my word for it, he's a coming man. Mr. Durrett, who was a judge of
men, recognized that. Scherer was an emigrant, he had ideas, and rose to
be a foreman. For the last few years Mr. Durrett threw everything on his
shoulders...."
Little by little the scope of the discussion was enlarged until it ranged
over a continent, touching lightly upon lines of railroad, built or
projected, across the great west our pioneers had so lately succeeded in
wresting from the savages, upon mines of copper and gold hidden away
among the mountains, and millions of acres of forest and grazing lands
which a complacent government would relinquish provided certain
technicalities were met: touching lightly, too, very lightly,--upon
senators and congressmen at Washington. And for the first time I learned
that not the least of the functions of these representatives of the
people was to act as the medium between capital and investment, to
facilitate the handing over of the Republic's resources to those in a
position to develop them. The emphasis was laid on development, or rather
on the resulting prosperity for the country: that was the justification,
and it was taken for granted as supreme. Nor was it new to me; this cult
of prosperity. I recalled the torch-light processions of the tariff
enthusiasts of my childhood days, my father's championship of the
Republican Party. He had not idealized politicians, either. For the
American, politics and ethics were strangers.
Thus I listened with increasing fascination to these gentlemen in evening
clothes calmly treating the United States as a melon patch that existed
largely for the purpose of being divided up amongst a limited and favored
number of persons. I had a feeling of being among the initiated. Where,
it may be asked, were my ideals? Let it not be supposed that I believed
myself to have lost them. If so, the impression I have given of myself
has been wholly inadequate. No, they had been transmuted, that is all,
transmuted by the alchemy of Weathersfield, by the personality of
Theodore Watling into brighter visions. My eyes rarely left his face; I
hung on his talk, which was interspersed with native humour, though he
did not always join in the laughter, sometimes gazing at the fire, as
though his keen mind were grappling with a problem suggested. I noted the
respect in which his opinions were held, and my imagination was fired by
an impression of the power to be achieved by successful men of his
profession, by the evidence of their indispensability to capital
itself.... At last when the gentlemen rose and were leaving the room, Mr.
Watling lingered, with his hand on my arm.
"Of course you're going through the Law School, Hugh," he said.
"Yes, sir," I replied.
"Good!" he exclaimed emphatically. "The law, to-day, is more of a career
than ever, especially for a young man with your antecedents and
advantages, and I know of no city in the United States where I would
rather start practice, if I were a young man, than ours. In the next
twenty years we shall see a tremendous growth. Of course you'll be going
into your father's office. You couldn't do better. But I'll keep an eye
on you, and perhaps I'll be able to help you a little, too."