A CHANGE OF BASE
February, the gayest winter month on the East Coast, found the winter
resorts already overcrowded. Relays and consignments of fashion arrived
and departed on every train; the permanent winter colony, composed of
those who owned or rented villas and those who remained for the three
months at either of the great hotels, had started the season vigorously.
Dances, dinners, lawn fêtes, entertainments for local churches and
charities left little time for anything except the routine of the
bathing-hour, the noon gathering at "The Breakers," and tea during the
concert.
Every day beach, pier, and swimming-pool were thronged; every day the
white motor-cars rushed southward to Miami, and the swift power-boats
sped northward to the Inlet; and the house-boat rendezvous rang with the
gay laughter of pretty women, and the restaurant of the Beach Club
flashed with their jewels.
Dozens of villas had begun their series of house-parties; attractive
girls held court everywhere--under coco-palm and hibiscus, along the
beach, on the snowy decks of yachts; agreeable girls fished from the
pier, pervaded bazaars for charity, sauntered, bare of elbow and throat,
across the sandy links; adorable girls appeared everywhere, on veranda,
in canoes, in wheel-chairs, in the surf and out of it--everywhere youth
and beauty decorated the sun-drenched landscape. And Hamil thought that
he had never before beheld so many ornamental women together in any one
place except in his native city; certainly, nowhere had he ever
encountered such a heterogeneous mixture of all the shades, nuances,
tints, hues, and grades which enter into the warp and weft of the
American social fabric; and he noticed some colours that do not enter
into that fabric at all.
East, West, North, and South sent types of those worthy citizens who
upheld local social structures; the brilliant migrants were there
also--samples of the gay, wealthy, over-accented floating population of
great cities--the rich and homeless and restless--those who lived and
had their social being in the gorgeous and expensive hotels; who had
neither firesides nor taxes nor fixed social obligations to worry them,
nor any of the trying civic or routine duties devolving upon permanent
inhabitants--the jewelled throngers of the horse-shows and motor-shows,
and theatres, and night restaurants--the people, in fact, who make
ocean-liners, high prices, and the metropolis possible, and the name of
their country blinked at abroad. For it is not your native New Yorker
who supports the continual fête from the Bronx to the sea and carries it
over-seas for a Parisian summer.
Then, too, the truly good were there--the sturdy, respectable, and
sometimes dowdy good; also the intellectuals--for ten expensive days at
a time--for it is a deplorable fact that the unworthy frivolous
monopolise all the money in the world! And there, too, were
excursionists from East and West and North and South, tired,
leaden-eyed, uncomfortable, eating luncheons on private lawns, trooping
to see some trained alligators in a muddy pool, resting by roadsides
and dunes in the apathy of repletion, the sucked orange suspended to
follow with narrowing eyes the progress of some imported hat or gown.
And the bad were there; not the very, very bad perhaps; but the
doubtful; over-jewelled, over-tinted of lip and brow and cheek, with
shoes too shapely and waists too small and hair too bright and wavy,
and--but dusty alpaca and false front cannot do absolute justice to a
pearl collar and a gown of lace; and tired, toil-dimmed eyes may make
mistakes, especially as it is already a tradition that America goes to
Palm Beach to cut up shindies, or watch others do it.
So they were all there, the irreproachable, the amusing, the inevitable,
the intellectual, the good, and the bad, the onduléd, and the scant of
hair.
And, belonging to one or more of these divisions, Portlaw, Wayward, and
Malcourt were there--had been there, now, for several weeks, the latter
as a guest at the Cardross villa. For the demon of caprice had seized on
Wayward, and half-way to Miami he had turned back for no reason under
the sun apparently--though Constance Palliser had been very glad to see
him after so many years.
The month had made a new man of Hamil. For one thing he had become more
or less acclimated; he no longer desired to sleep several times a day,
he could now assimilate guavas without disaster, and walk about without
acquiring headaches or deluging himself in perspiration. For another he
was enchanted with his work and with Shiela Cardross, and with the
entire Cardross family.
The month had been a busy one for him. When he was not in the saddle
with Neville Cardross the work in the new office and draughting-room
required his close attention. Already affairs were moving briskly; he
had leased a cottage for his office work; draughtsmen had arrived and
were fully occupied, half a dozen contractors appeared on the spot, also
a forester and assistants, and a surveyor and staff. And the energetic
Mr. Cardross, also, was enjoying every minute of his life.
Hamil's plan for the great main park with its terraces, miles of shell
and marl drives, its lakes, bridges, arbours, pools, shelters, canals,
fully satisfied Cardross. Hamil's engineers were still occupied with the
drainage problem, but a happy solution was now in sight. Woodcutters had
already begun work on the great central forest avenue stretching
straight away for four miles between green jungles topped by giant oaks,
magnolias, and palmettos; lesser drives and chair trails were being
planned, blazed, and traced out; sample coquina concrete blocks had been
delivered, and a rickety narrow-gauge railroad was now being installed
with spidery branches reaching out through the monotonous flat woods and
creeping around the boundaries where a nine-foot game-proof fence of
woven buffalo wire was being erected on cypress posts by hundreds of
negroes. Around this went a telephone and telegraph wire connected with
the house and the gamekeeper's lodges.
Beyond the vast park lay an unbroken wilderness. This had already been
surveyed and there remained nothing to do except to pierce it with a
wide main trail and erect a few patrol camps of palmetto logs within
convenient reach of the duck-haunted lagoons.
And now toward the end of the month, as contractor after contractor
arrived with gangs of negroes and were swallowed up in the distant
woodlands, the interest in the Cardross household became acute. From
the front entrance of the house guests and family could see the great
avenue which was being cleared through the forest--could see the vista
growing hour by hour as the huge trees swayed, bent, and came crashing
earthward. Far away the noise of the felling sounded, softened by
distance; snowy jets of steam puffed up above the trees, the panting of
a toy locomotive came on the breeze, the mean, crescendo whine of a
saw-mill.
"It's the only way to do things," said Cardross again and again; "make
up your mind quickly that you want to do them, then do them quickly. I
have no patience with a man who'll dawdle about a bit of property for
years and finally start to improve it with a pot of geraniums after he's
too old to enjoy anything except gruel. When I plant a tree I don't
plant a sapling; I get a machine and four horses and a dozen men and I
put in a full-grown tree so that I can sit under it next day if I wish
to and not spend thirty years waiting for it to grow. Isn't that the way
to do things, Hamil?"
Hamil said yes. It was certainly the way to accomplish things--the
modern millionaire's way; but the majority of people had to do a little
waiting before they could enjoy their vine and fig-tree.
Cardross sat down beside his wife, who was reading in a hammock chair,
and gazed at the new vista through a pair of field-glasses.
"Gad, Hamil!" he said with considerable feeling, "I hate to see a noble
tree go down; it's like murder to me. But it's the only thing to do,
isn't it? The French understand the value of magnificent distances. What
a glorious vista that will make, four miles straight away walled in by
deathless green, and the blue lagoon sparkling at the end of the
perspective! I love it, I tell you. I love it!"
"It will be very fine," said Hamil. His voice sounded a trifle tired. He
had ridden many miles since sunrise. There was marl on his
riding-breeches.
Cardross continued to examine the work in progress through his
binoculars. Presently he said:
"You've been overdoing it, haven't you, Hamil? My wife says so."
"Overdoing it?" repeated the young man, not understanding. "Overdoing
what?"
"I mean you've a touch of malaria; you've been working a little too
hard."
"He has indeed," drawled Mrs. Cardross, laying aside her novel; and,
placidly ignoring Hamil's protests: "Neville, you drag him about through
those dreadful swamps before he is acclimated, and you keep him up half
the night talking plans and making sketches. He is too young to work
like that."
Hamil turned red; but it was impossible to resent or mistake the kindly
solicitude of this very large and leisurely lady whose steadily
increasing motherly interest in him had at times tried his dignity in
that very lively family.
That he was already a successful young man with a metropolitan
reputation made little or no impression upon her. He was young, alone,
and she liked him better and better every day until that liking arrived
at the point where his physical welfare began to preoccupy her. So she
sent maids to his room with nourishing broths at odd and unexpected
moments, and she presented him with so many boxes of quinine that their
disposal became a problem until Shiela took them off his hands and
replaced them in her mother's medicine chest, whence, in due time, they
returned again as gifts to Hamil.
"Dear Mrs. Cardross," he said, taking a vacant chair beside her hammock,
"I really am perfectly well and perfectly acclimated, and I enjoy every
moment of the day whether here as your guest or in the saddle with your
husband or in the office over the plans--"
"But you are always at work!" she drawled; "we never see you."
"But that's why I am here," he insisted, smiling.
"Neville," she interrupted calmly; "no boy of his age ought to kill
himself. Listen to me; when Neville and I were married we had very
little, and he began by laying his plans to work every moment. But we
had an understanding," she added blandly; "I explained that I did not
intend to grow old with a wreck of a man. Now you may see the result of
our understanding," nodding toward her amazingly youthful husband.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" observed Cardross, still looking through his
field-glasses. "There's a baby-show next week and I'll enter if you
like, my dear."
Mrs. Cardross smiled and took Hamil's hand flat between her fair, pudgy
palms.
"We want you here," she said kindly, "_not_ because it is a matter of
convenience, but because we like you. Be a little more amiable, Mr.
Hamil; you never give us a moment during the day or after dinner. You
haven't been to a dance yet; you never go to the beach, you never motor
or sail or golf. Don't you like my children?"
"Like them! I adore them," he said, laughing, "but how can--"
"I'm going to take him camping," observed Cardross, interrupting. "I
want some duck-shooting; don't you, Hamil?"
"Of course I do, but--"
"Then we start this week for the woods--"
"I won't let you," interposed his wife; "you'll talk that boy to death
with your plans and surveys!"
"No, I'll promise to talk shooting every moment, and do a little of it,
too. What do you say, Hamil? Gray will go with us. Are you game?"
"I'd love to, but I promised Malcourt that--"
"Oh, nonsense! Louis can wait for you to go North and lay out Mr.
Portlaw's park. I've the first call on you; I've got you for the winter
here--"
"But Portlaw says--"
"Oh, bother Mr. Portlaw! We'll take him along, too, if he can tear
himself away from the Beach Club long enough to try less dangerous
game."
Since Malcourt's arrival he and Portlaw had joyously waded into whatever
gaiety offered, neck-deep; Portlaw had attached himself to the Club with
all the deliberation of a born gourmet and a hopeless gambler; Malcourt
roamed society and its suburbs, drifting from set to set and from
coterie to coterie, always an opportunist, catholic in his tastes,
tolerant of anything where pretty women were inclined to be amiable. And
they often were so inclined.
For his own curiosity he even asked to be presented to the redoubtable
Mrs. Van Dieman, and he returned at intervals to that austere
conservatory of current gossip and colonial tradition partly because it
was policy, socially, partly because, curiously enough, the somewhat
transparent charms of Virginia Suydam, whom he usually met there,
interested him--enough to make him remember a provocative glance from
her slow eyes--very slow, deeply lidded eyes, washed with the tint of
the sea when it is less blue than green. And the curious side of it was
that Malcourt and Virginia had met before, and he had completely
forgotten. It was difficult to tell whether she had.
He usually remembered women who looked at him like that, tucking them
away in his mental list to be investigated later. He had quite a little
list in his mental archives of women, wedded and otherwise, who
interested him agreeably or otherwise. Neither Mrs. Carrick nor Cecile
was on that list. Shiela Cardross was--and had been for two years.
* * * * *
Hamil, sitting on the terrace beside Mrs. Cardross, became very busy
with his note-book as soon as that languid lady resumed her book.
"If you're going to import wild boar from Germany," he said to Cardross,
"you'll have to fence in some ten miles square--a hundred square
miles!--or they'll take to the Everglades."
"I'm going to," returned that gentleman calmly. "I wish you'd ask
McKenna to figure it out. I'll supply the cypress of course."
Hamil leaned forward, a little thrilled with the colossal scheme. He
never could become quite accustomed to the vast scale on which Cardross
undertook things.
"That will make a corking preserve," he said. "What do you suppose is in
there now?"
"Some bears and deer, a few lynx, perhaps one or two panthers. The boar
will hold their own--if they can stand the summer--and I'm sure they
can. The alligators, no doubt, will get some of their young when they
breed. I shall start with a hundred couple when you're ready for them.
What are you going to do this afternoon?"
"Office work," replied Hamil, rising and looking at his marl-stained
puttees and spurs. Then he straightened up and smiled at Mrs. Cardross,
who was gently shaking her head, saying:
"The young people are at the bathing-beach; I wish you'd take a chair
and go down there--to please me, Mr. Hamil."
"Come, Hamil," added Cardross airily, "take a few days off--on yourself.
You've one thing yet to learn: it's only the unsuccessful who are too
busy to play."
"But what I'm doing is play," remonstrated the young man
good-humouredly. "Well--I'll go to the beach, then." He looked at the
steam-jets above the forest, fumbled with his note-book, caught the eye
of Mrs. Cardross, put away the book, and took his leave laughingly.
"We go duck-shooting to-morrow," called out Cardross after him.
Hamil halted in the doorway to protest, but the elder man waved him
away; and he went to his room to change riding-clothes for flannels and
sponge the reek of horse and leather from his person.
* * * * *
The beach was all ablaze with the brilliant colours of sunshades, hats,
and bathing-skirts. Hamil lost no time in getting into his
swimming-suit; and, as he emerged, tall, cleanly built, his compact
figure deeply tanned where exposed, Portlaw, waddling briskly toward the
ocean, greeted him with the traditional: "Come on! it's fine!" and
informed him furthermore that "everybody" was there.