"'When I was a student at Cadiz
I played on the Spanish guitar;
I used to make love to the ladies'--"
This brief snatch of song ended with the obvious and, indeed, inevitable
rhyme for "Cadiz," and the singer completed the stanza by throwing an
arch and rather insinuating glance at the young man who was lounging
negligently on the chair beside her own. She herself leaned back rather
negligently too, with her feet crossed; her elbows were crooked at
varying angles, her fingers pressed imaginary frets or plucked at
imaginary strings, and the spectator was supposed to be viewing an
Andalusian grace and passion abandoned to the soft yet compelling power
of music.
It was thus that Truesdale Marshall was welcomed home by his aunt Lydia.
His aunt Lydia--Mrs. Lydia Rhodes--was a plump and vivacious little
brunette of forty, with a gloss on her black hair and a sparkle in her
black eyes. She still retained a good deal of the superabundant vitality
of youth; in her own house, when the curtains were down and the company
not too miscellaneous, she was sometimes equal to a break-down or a
cake-walk. She was impelled by social aspirations of the highest nature,
and was always lamenting, therefore, that she possessed so little
dignity. She was a warm-hearted, impulsive creature, who believed
in living while on earth, and she was willing enough to believe that
others would live too, so far as opportunity offered. It seemed to
Truesdale, just now, as if she might be engaged in a mental review of his
probable experiences abroad--there, certainly, was an opportunity
offered.
"But now that you are back again we expect you to settle down and be
good--a useful member of society, you know." She threw a coquettish smile
on the young man and banished the imaginary guitar.
"Oh, really--" began Truesdale, with a flush and a frown. He glanced over
his shoulder; his mother and sisters were in animated converse on the
other side of the room.
"Yes," his aunt proceeded; "you are old enough to think about marrying.
You don't know how pleasant it would be to have a nice little home of
your own, and your own little wifey to meet you every evening with a
kiss!"
"Dear, dear!" thought Truesdale to himself; "and now she's singing that
song to _me_!" He remembered these familiar strains; they had been
directed many a time and oft to the ear of his brother Roger. Year by
year their plaintive poignancy had grown more acute, along with Roger's
strengthening determination to remain a bachelor.
Truesdale found himself wondering whether his aunt's intense allegiance
to the idea of married life was the sincere expression of a nature
overflowingly affectionate, or a species of sensitive dissimulation
cloaking a disappointment which, by this time, might well have come to be
numbered among the bygones. For it was now six years since Alfred Rhodes,
the gay, the genial, had died. He had cost his wife many anxious moments
and a few sleepless nights. He had left her a moderate fortune, an ample
freedom, and a boy of eight. She had increased her freedom by sending the
boy off to an Eastern school. He visited Eastern relatives during
vacation time, and was doomed to a longer course of knickerbockers than
it would have pleased him to forecast. His mother's heart still
palpitated youthfully; she showed herself in no haste to take her stand
in the ranks of the elder generation.
"Yes," Mrs. Rhodes proceeded, "you must get into business, and then we
shall have to find some nice girl for you."
"The same thoughtful Aunt Lydia," he observed, ironically. He gave his
mustache an upward screw, then dropped his eyes to his knees and his
fingers to the rungs of his chair. His design seemed to be to figure a
slave shrinking on the auction-block. "Do you mean to say you haven't got
one for me already?" He ignored the business side of her proposal.
"Well, you needn't put it _that_ way," she rejoined. "You know perfectly
well that I am not a match-maker, nor anything like it. And it wouldn't
please me at all to have anybody say so of me or to think of me in that
way." She was quite sincere in all this.
Truesdale, however, held the opposite view, and, considering all the
circumstances, liked his aunt none the less. She _was_ a match-maker--a
very keen and persistent one; but he felt that her excesses in this
direction were to be viewed simply as an acknowledgement to fortune for
having guided her own courses to such advantage. She had come out from
Trenton some eighteen years before with a pretty face, a light wardrobe,
a limited purse, and an invitation (extended by a benevolent aunt) to
remain as long as she liked. She had never gone back. She met Alfred
Rhodes, Eliza Marshall's younger brother; and from the slight foothold
offered by her kindly relative she had advanced to an ample fortune and a
complete freedom. She was grateful for all this, and gratitude took the
form of her extending, in turn, unlimited invitations to other girls with
pretty faces, light purses, and limited wardrobes. She almost always had
some comely niece or younger cousin in the house. She drove with them,
she shopped with them, she gave teas and receptions for them. She
summoned young men in numbers; she had her billiard-table re-covered; she
could always produce sherry and cigars when really put to it; she almost
transformed her home into a club-house. "For," said she, "I can never
forget how kind Aunt Marcia was to _me_!"
Such wide-spread beneficence as this had not, of course, excluded her
sister-in-law's daughters. It was really to her aunt Lydia that Rosamund
Marshall was indebted for her year at the New York school; her mother had
unquestioningly accepted Mrs. Rhodes's declaration that the institution
was eminently fashionable and desirable, and her father had committed her
with the greatest confidence and good-will to the conductor of the
east-bound Lake Shore express. And it was to her aunt that the girl was
now looking, after an obscure and wistful fashion, for an introduction
into society, in which, according to the belief of the family, Mrs.
Rhodes occupied a secure and brilliant position. Rosamund had been
revolving matters in her pretty and self-willed little head, and in her
proud and self-willed little heart she had decided upon a formal début.
Her mother was completely nonplussed; she would as soon have wrestled
with the differential calculus. "Why, dear me," she stammered, "there's
Alice; she never came out, and I don't see but what she's got along all
right: good home, nice husband, and everything she wants. And Jane,
now--"
"Oh, _Jane_!" said Rosy, in disdain.
Then she sulked, and reproached her mother with the flat and unprofitable
summer that had followed her return from school, and asked pointedly if
the coming winter was to be like it. "Ha!" exclaimed the poor woman to
herself; "Lyddy is to blame for this; I wish she had never mentioned New
York!" But the year at school was only a remoter cause; the more
immediate one was a pink tea which Rosamund had attended (casually, as it
were, and quite informally) a month back. This was the tigress's first
taste of blood--a pale, diluted fluid, it is true, but it worked all the
effect of a fuller and richer draught.
It developed in Rosamund a sixth sense--one which was to lead her to
lengths that none of her kin could have anticipated. And to the rest of
the family, clucking and scratching in their own retired and restricted
barn-yard, there came the day when they discovered that their little
flock contained at least one bird of a different feather--a bird that
could paddle about the social pond with the liveliest, and could quack,
if need be, with the loudest.
Jane--who had even yet no adequate sense of the strength and pungency of
her younger sister's spirit, but who would not in any event have
hesitated to rush on an individual martyrdom that might secure some
consideration for the collective family--threw herself into the
discussion at once.
"No, don't let's have any party or dance or reception or anything at all.
Not even a two-by-four tea. Don't let's try to be anybody or know
anybody, or give anything or be considered anything. Let's go right on
rusting and vegetating; let's just dry up and shake apart and blow away,
with nobody the wiser for our having been here or the sorrier for our
having gone!"
Her mother heard this outburst with some surprise and not a little
resentment. "Well, Jane, you're quite surpassing yourself to-night. What
do you mean by all this?"
Jane exploded again.
"I mean that I'm simply tired of being a nothing and a nobody in a family
of nothings and nobodies. That's what it comes to. I'm tired of being a
bump on a log. I'm tired of sitting on the fence and seeing the
procession go by. Why can't _we_ go by? Why can't _we_ know people? Why
can't _we_ make ourselves felt? Other folks do."
Mrs. Rhodes passed over in silence this imputation of nullity; she was
not so closely related, after all, that she need allow herself to be
disturbed by it. But sister Alice took up the cudgel with all the ardor
of an immediate connection and all the sensitiveness of a suburban
resident. She even forgot the real, essential object of her visit: to
intimate to her father that if he would give her a carriage, her husband
could pay for the keep of a horse.
She was a contentious blonde, with a thin, aquiline nose and a pair of
flashing steel-blue eyes. Several wisps of straw-colored hair blew about
her temples.
"Thank you, Jane," she said, hotly; "I don't know that I feel myself a
nobody, and I don't feel that I'm exactly a social outcast--even if I
_do_ live beyond the city limits." She turned back a floating lock with a
hasty wave. "It might be to your advantage if you moved somewhere or
other yourselves. I don't see how you can expect to see anybody or know
anybody as long as you are buried in such a sepulchre as this."
Alice was the radical, the innovator of the family. She often brought her
conservative mother to the verge of horror. Hers was the hardy, daring,
and unconventional strain of the pioneer. She liked the edge; if the edge
was a little ragged, so much the better.
"Ho!" cried Jane, sarcastically. "To see anybody or to know anybody we
ought to be out at Riverdale Park, perhaps. Riverdale Park!" she
repeated, with scornful emphasis. "There isn't any river; there isn't any
dale; there isn't any park. Nothing but a lot of wooden houses scattered
over a flat prairie, and a few trees no bigger than a broomstick, and no
more leaves on them either. In the morning the men all rush for the
train, and the rest of the day the nurse-girls trundle the babies along
the plank walks, while 'society' amuses itself. Society consists of Mrs.
Smith, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs. Alice Robinson. On Wednesday,
Mrs. Smith gives a lunch to Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs. Robinson. On
Thursday, Mrs. Brown gives a tea to Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs.
Robinson. On Friday, Mrs. Rob--(no, Mrs. Jones--I'm losing the place)
gives a card-party to Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Robinson--in the
daytime, too, mind you. And on Saturday, Mrs. Robinson designs giving a
breakfast to Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Jones, but finds that the
cook is packing up her things to leave. Quiet in the suburb for a week.
Then Mrs. Smith's sister comes out from town to spend a fortnight. Well,
everybody is anxious to see Mrs. Smith's sister--a new face, you know.
So, after Mrs. Smith has started the second round with another lunch,
Mrs. Brown follows with a tea, as before, for Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Jones,
Mrs. Robinson--_and_ Mrs. Smith's sister. Then Mrs. Jones--but you've all
played the game: for breakfast I had this and that and the other. That is
society in Riverdale Park. It would be too rich for _me_!"
Alice flushed with vexation. Truesdale (who had not come home to treat
local society with too great a degree of seriousness, and who, indeed,
was like enough to take his pleasures beyond any bounds that society
might set) looked on and listened with a kind of indulgent
curiosity--like an explorer listening to the excited pow-wow of some
flock of natives in some remote African jungle.
"Yes," retorted Alice, "according to your own confession more happens
with us in a week than happens with you in a year. And you might as well
acknowledge, at the same time, that there are a few houses in the Park
where the carpets are a little less than fifteen years old, and where
they don't have hideous old what-nots loaded down with all the stuff
accumulated since the year one."
She lifted the corner of a rug with her toe, so as to disclose the
threadbare breadth that it concealed, and she threw an ironical eye upon
a sort of massive and convoluted buffet which displayed a number of
antique Dresden figurines and a pair of old candelabra compounded of
tarnished gilt and broken prisms. "And in the Park," she added, "we
always have new wall-paper at the beginning of every century--it's a
local ordinance!"
"Alice," called her mother, tartly, "take your foot away from that rug.
And don't annoy me about that worn breadth; you know very well I've tried
everywhere to match it. And don't imagine, either, that I'm going to
bundle my wedding presents out of sight for you or anybody else."
"Match it!" cried Alice, unabashed. "Match it? They used the last to
carpet the ark." She trod down the corner of the rug with a firm step.
Then, with her scornful nostrils and sharply critical eyes, she seemed to
be lifting it again.
"Well, then," said her mother. "And now leave it alone." The old lady had
not the slightest idea of replacing her time-accustomed patterns by
anything more current. Nor was her husband, apparently, of a different
mind as concerned the wallpaper. He had followed Jane in from the other
room, and he now sat there, sending a careful eye slowly along the
old-fashioned border, and finding it impossible to believe that any
one could seriously judge it to be grotesquely out of date.
"The carpet's all right, as far as I can see," declared Jane. "What if it
_is_ fifteen years old? Have you got one at Riverdale that is even
fifteen months old? You know you haven't; if you had you'd start a museum
of antiques with it. And as for our budging from this dear old place,
don't you look for it; we're attached to it, even if you're not. Besides,
to move would be to throw away the one advantage that we really have.
Why, think of it!" she continued with a gesticulating and wide-eyed
eloquence. "We have lived right here in this one house over thirty
years. How many families in this town have lived in one house thirty
years? Or twenty? Or even ten? We've always had the same door-plate on
the same door. We've always had the same number in the directory. We
started in a good neighborhood, and we've always stayed here--the only
one in all the town that has anything like an old-time flavor and an
atmosphere of its own--the only one where nice people have always lived
and do live yet. Isn't that better than a course of flats up one street
and down another? Isn't that better than a grand chain through a lot of
shingle-shangled cottages in the suburbs? I should say so. What are they
doing in the East now? They're going back to their old neighborhoods, and
the people who haven't left them at all are the ones who are right on the
top of the pile. We might have some new furniture or something of the
sort, perhaps; but that's different from asking the moving-wagons to come
and cart us out on to the prairie."
David Marshall followed his daughter's harangue with an indulgent
interest and a sympathy by no means scant. He had no profound
apprehension of social values, and no clear-cut conception of a social
career; but he appreciated her loyalty to her lifelong home and to all
its belongings and surroundings. He had reason for supposing that this
loyalty would extend to himself; but Jane was wound up to go, and had no
idea of allowing anything to stand in the way of her disposal of the
question in all its bearings.
"I suppose," she went on, inexorably, "that we imagine ourselves to be
'prominent citizens.' Well, we make a mistake if we do. We may have been
ten years ago, but not now. We've just been falling, falling, falling
behind--that's the amount of it. Now, honest, pa, dear, do the papers
ever come to you nowadays to know what you think about political
prospects or to ask your opinion on the last new street-car route
proposed? Or do they send men around for trade statistics who jubilate in
the issue of Jan. one because we sold five thousand more barrels of flour
this year than last? Now, do they?"
Marshall could not escape the justness of this pointed presentation of
new conditions. "We have enough to bother us," he said, with a slow
reluctance, "without reporters coming round."
"There it is," continued Jane. "Yes, and who cares nowadays about the
volume of the lumber trade or the mortality at the stock-yards? Why, just
those people themselves. The fact is, the town has moved to a higher
plane, and we've got to move with it, or else get left. Why, dear me, if
it wasn't for an intellectual daughter who had the gift of language and
who wrote papers and read them at the club, this family would have
scarcely a connection with latter-day society."
"Good for you, Jane," called her brother. "Give me some of them to read."
"They're pretty good," said their father, unruffledly judicial. Jane was
in the habit of reading him passages that she considered particularly
effective. In listening to her perorations he sometimes felt himself as
assisting at the liquidation of the universe.
"Now, here we are," proceeded Jane, with unabated exegetical energy, "an
old family, with position and plenty of means and everything to make an
impression. Why can't we do it? Why can't we manage to assert ourselves?
I'm not speaking for myself, of course; I'm a back number"--this half
hysterically, between a gulp and a giggle--"I'm 'gone beyond recall,' and
nobody knows that better than I myself. No; I'm speaking for all of us.
Besides, here's Rosy, just coming up, and--"
"Thank you, Jane," remarked Rosamund, with some acerbity. "You needn't
mind me. I can look after myself."
"--and it seems to me," went on Jane, ardently, "that people who have
succeeded might just as well give some outer token of it. I declare, when
I called on Mrs. Bates and went over the place and compared their house
and their way of living with ours--"
Her aunt looked up suddenly. "Mrs. Bates? What Mrs. Bates? Mrs. Granger
Bates?"
"Yes. When I saw what magnificent style she lived in, and how she had
about everything that--"
"So you know Mrs. Bates, too," her aunt again interrupted. "Pleasant
woman, isn't she? Have I ever told you how she and I used to play
backgammon together at St. Augustine?"
"_Have_ you?" muttered Jane. "I should think you had--a dozen times
over!"
"And what were you doing at _her_ house, may I ask?" her aunt queried
further. The geniality of this interrogation hardly concealed its
crudity; Jane felt herself accused of an incongruous and inexplicable
intrusion into a region of unaccustomed splendor and distinction.
"Oh, she was collecting money for her working-girls' lunchroom,"
volunteered Rosy, with a cruel bluntness.
Jane threw an air of outraged dignity upon her younger sister. "So I was.
And I spent a very pleasant hour with her," she said, with some
stateliness. "And I am going there next Wednesday to lunch," she added.
Her aunt looked at her with increasing consideration. She herself had
never been honored with an invitation to the house of Mrs. Granger
Bates--though rather than fail to respond to such an invitation she would
have crawled there (a trifle of some fourteen squares) on her hands and
knees. "Have you known her long?"
"Since ten this morning," contributed Rosy.
"Always," corrected Jane, with a whimsical brevity.
"And how do you find her?" persisted Mrs. Rhodes, with a curious
intentness. "Dear me!" she laughed, self-consciously, "how she did hate
to be beaten! How vexed she always was when I began throwing off first!
How she would bang her dice-box! How she would--"
"She's perfectly grand!" declared Jane, with the loud enthusiasm of a new
and fervent loyalty. "She's the finest woman I ever met. She's the best
woman in the world!" The poor girl attested her earnestness by a tremble
in her voice and a tear in each eye. "And she spoke so nicely of you,
poppy," Jane went on, turning to her father.
"Did she?" said her father, in return. And a quiet smile of reminiscence
played round his lips for full five minutes.
"And she inquired about all of us," Jane proceeded. "She wants to renew
the acquaintance, I think. And she asked about Rosy, too--whether she was
pretty and bright; and I said she was. I expect she's inclined to take an
interest in you," said Jane, in conclusion, turning towards her sister
and dropping these few coals of fire upon her head.
Rosamund caught the proper tone from her aunt and bowed in unaccustomed
meekness to this shower. Alice, however, as a confirmed and condemned
suburbanite, had no idea of exhibiting any great interest in one of the
acknowledged leaders of urban society--an interest which, from the very
nature of things, could have been but futile and unproductive. She
accordingly toyed carelessly and absently with the evening paper, as it
lay on the centre-table.
"H'm," she observed, presently, "those game-dinners at the Pacific are
still going on, aren't they? To-night's the thirty-eighth. Nice things,
too, as I remember them. That's the way I learned to like venison. Here
are some of the people to be there--your Mrs. Bates among them." She
looked across to her father. "Why didn't _you_ go?"
"Give me that paper, Alice," her mother called, with a sharp and sudden
cry. She ran her eye down its column and then turned to her husband.
"Why, David, how did you happen to forget? You know I wouldn't have
missed this for anything."
Marshall checked his lingering smile. He looked at his wife with an
embarrassed pain, and then dropped his eyes to the carpet. "There must
have been some misunderstanding," he stammered. "The invitation was
delayed--or it miscarried. Perhaps it went to the store and got mixed up
with the mail there," he ventured; any improbability would do to soften
the shock.
"Delayed! Miscarried!" cried Jane, in an acute access of anger and
indignation. "Don't believe it! We're dropped, that's all! Well, what
else can we expect? How are we going to hold our own against all these
thousands and thousands of newcomers if we don't do anything? That's what
I've been telling you all along. We've got to wake up and make an effort.
Give me that paper." She snatched it from her mother. "Yes, they'll all
be there--the Hubbards, the Gages, and the whole crowd of Parmelees, and
Kittie Corwith and her father, and all the rest, and--and the Beldens!
The Beldens--there!" She turned fiercely on her mother. "What do you
think of that?"
Eliza Marshall was cut to the quick. For twenty years and more she had
attended this annual dinner; she had attached herself there to former
friends and neighbors, who listened indulgently to her narrow little
dribble of reminiscent gossip--the gossip and reminiscences of the
smaller town and the earlier day. This dinner was her sole remaining
connection (little as she had realized it) with the great and complex
city of the present day, just as it was the sole reason for her
plum-colored silk and for her husband's dress-coat; and the cutting of
this last cable set her completely adrift on the wide and forlorn
sea of utter social neglect. And the Beldens!--that was the last straw of
all. She seemed to see her husband crowded from his seat at that cheery
board by a man whom he himself had taken up and made--a man who was
trying to push him from the social world, just as he was trying to push
him out of the control of the business which he had founded and
developed. It was all more than she could bear.
Jane rushed headlong into another mood. "Oh, well, the end of the world
hasn't come if we _are_ frozen out. And perhaps we're not, anyway; the
invite may get round to-morrow--who knows? So don't let's order our
sackcloth and ashes quite yet awhile. Life is still worth living, and we
have got several other strings to our bow.
"This one, for instance," nodding in the direction of Rosy, towards whom
she seemed inexhaustibly forgiving. "I have the honor to present to the
waiting world Miss Rosamund Marshall, the bud of the season and the
success of the century. Also her brother, Mr. Truesdale Marshall, who has
come home stuffed full of accomplishments, and who will now proceed to
show them. He sings--"
She stepped across to her brother, slipped her arm through his, and drew
him towards the rug in the middle of the room.
Her height was within an inch of his own. She bowed him over the edge of
the rug as over a row of footlights, crooked his other arm so that his
hand was placed over his heart, put her own hand sprawlingly in a like
position, threw back her head, and abandoned herself to a shrill
succession of scales and roulades.
"Why don't you begin?" she presently broke off to inquire.
"What a girl you are!" he said. He looked a bit sheepishly in the
direction of his father; then he stepped behind his sister, laid a hand
on each of her imperceptible biceps, and turned her face round to the
wall.