Truesdale airily waved the remaining coin from the plate to the waiter's
pocket and rose to go. He never omitted the giving of a _pour-boire_; "it
helps so much to increase the illusion," he said. The waiters,
accordingly, bestowed an exaggerated attention upon his hat and coat, and
had developed an almost clinging affection for his stick. They also
insisted upon passing things that he could very well reach for himself,
and their "bon soir, m'sieu'" was quite unfailing in its regularity.
"This shaggy town may have a silver lining, after all," he would think;
"but you've got to turn things inside out to find it."
Near the exit Truesdale noticed Theodore Brower sitting with a
_demi-tasse_ before him. "Hallo!" he called to Brower, "I didn't know you
came here."
"Once in a while," returned Brower. "I shop around. I'm a tramp. I eat
anywhere. And I'm getting tired of it, too." He rose. "Give me a lift
with this coat and I'll go along with you."
Brower was too incorruptibly native to give a fee; usually therefore, he
put on his coat for himself. "Well, what's the programme?" he asked,
feeling for his inside sleeves.
"Nothing," said Truesdale; "or anything. Only, I bar law, and
philanthropy, and the _Complete Letter-writer_. What have you got in
mind yourself?
"I though of going up to the Consolation Club; this is their night."
"Sounds sort of soothing," observed Truesdale. "Well, what do _they_
do?--nothing like the pow-wow at the Crepuscular, I hope. Are strangers
admitted?"
"What do they do? They try to show that the world isn't so bad as it
seems. They'll let you in all right."
"Because I'm not so bad as I seem? Thanks. They don't have a dinner, I
hope."
"No dinner."
"But they give you a bite later on, don't they? I was almost famished at
the Simplicity. What will they talk about?"
"Almost anything; you never can tell. Come along." Truesdale, as an
individual, interested Brower but moderately; Truesdale, as Jane's
brother, interested him extremely. "You state your case--that's the idea;
and the worse you make it, the better the face they try to put on it."
"Do I? Well, I don't know that I've _got_ a case. And if I had, I might
prefer to keep it to myself. However...."
The Consolation Club met in an upper chamber on Erie Street, and carried
on their deliberations under a large plaster bust of the prince of
optimists. The patient Emerson listened to the discussion of many a
burning question, and witnessed the application of many an alleviating
salve. Sometimes the question was personal; they soothed the book-keeper
who had been cut on the street by his employer's daughter. Sometimes it
was national; they commiserated the citizen who had been intimidated
at the polling-booth. Sometimes it was a question of right--like a
uniform divorce law; sometimes merely a question of expediency--like the
tariff. But principally they discussed the affairs of a vast and sudden
municipality; they bade one another not to despair, after all, either of
the city or of the republic. And towards eleven o'clock the priests of
the cult saw an offering of cheese-sandwiches and beer set before their
idol, and presently, in true sacerdotal fashion, they fell upon these
viands on their own account.
"Oh, come," said Truesdale, shrugging his shoulders, as he cast on Brower
and his circle a look half of expostulation and half of embarrassment,
"I'm not entitled to annoy your friends with any such filthy trifle as
_that_. Besides, I don't claim it as any grievance of _mine_." He
thought, privately, that his mother's disposition to dicker with the
populace was no more creditable than necessary; he could take no great
pleasure in dwelling upon it too lingeringly.
"Oh, go ahead," urged Brower; "our fellows here are interested in just
that sort of thing. If you should want to come in, we'll take it as your
initiation."
"Do," added another member. "I believe that for every one man who leaves
the polling-place with a waning confidence in the present and a clouded
hope for the future, there are scores who thus leave the lower courts of
justice."
"Oh, very well," replied Truesdale, throwing out his hands in his light
French fashion. And he recounted the whole chain of circumstances which
had so exasperated his father and baffled his brother, from the first
panting appearance of frowzy old Mother Van Horn on his own mother's
door-step down to the forfeiture of the fictitious bail-bond by her two
grandnephews. He gave his narrative in a series of light, graphic,
delicate touches. He almost saw it print itself before his very eyes,
like a page from one of those beautiful little volumes made by Hachette
or by Lemerre--those sprightly, broken pages, where a paragraph consists
of a line or even a word, where brief exclamatory phrases abound, and
where short rows of dots leave the reader to complete the meaning at his
own pleasure. He even gesticulated a tiny illustration or two into the
edge of the text. Seldom had these earnest and intent young men heard
such a theme presented with so many nods and becks and wreathèd smiles;
it seemed like the stirring of a cesspool with a silver soup-ladle.
"And what consolation have you to offer me for that?" smiled Truesdale,
as he finished.
He himself appeared to share but slightly the indignation that his
recital aroused; after all, these doings were alien to him--like the
domestic difficulties that might be distracting some ant-hill in
mid-Africa. But on the others it produced the effect that the recital of
specific injuries always does--and should.
"This, for example," answered a sardonic young man, whose close-shaven
black beard showed through his drawn and sallow skin: "that we are at
last playing the game with all the pieces on the board, with all the
cards in the pack; with all the elements, in other words, of a vast and
diversified human nature. The simple hopes and ideals of this Western
world of fifty years ago--even of twenty years ago--where are they now?
What the country really celebrated at Philadelphia in 1876, however
unconsciously, as the ending of its minority and the assumption of full
manhood with all its perplexities and cares. The broad life of the real
world began for us the very next year--"
"You mean with the railroad riots?" asked Brower.
--"and has been going on more fiercely ever since. Take a man who was
born in 1860, and who is to die with the century--what would be _his_
idea of life? Contention, bickering, discontent, chronic irritation--a
régime of hair-cloth tempered by finger-nails."
"Yes," said another, "as you say, we have all the elements at last. And
the elements of human nature are unchanging--like the elements of
chemistry; and they combine in the same unchanging fashions. Imagine a
reconstructed universe without sulphur or nitrogen; or imagine elements
that combine to one purpose in this corner of the laboratory combining to
another purpose in that. The same human compounds are produced through
the ages, and the elements that follow one formula in the old world will
follow the same formula in the new--even if they break the crucible. A
generation ago we thought--poor pathetic creatures--that our pacific
processes showed social science in its fullest development. But to-day we
have all the elements possessed by the old world itself, and we must take
whatever they develop, as the old world does. We have the full working
apparatus finally, with all its resultant noise, waste, stenches, stains,
dangers, explosions."
"Um," said Truesdale, to whom these observations sounded disagreeably
like oratory; "how does all this bear on my case? I _call_ it mine,
to observe the forms," he added, with a smile to which no one responded.
"I can tell you that myself," broke in Brower. "The last twenty years
have brought us elements that have never been in our national life
before: a heavy immigration from southeastern Europe, for example. The
populations of Italy and Poland and Hungary--what view, now, do _they_
take of the government--their government, all government? Isn't it an
implacable and immemorial enemy--a great and cruel and dreadful monster
to be evaded, hoodwinked, combated, stabbed in the dark if occasion
offers?"
"Quite right," acknowledged Truesdale. "Why, to-day, when the peasants
come into Rome from the Campagna, they always bring their pitchforks with
them--you can see them any Sunday behind the Capitol. They're going to be
murdered or robbed or imprisoned or something."
"And when these people have been out of the government from generation to
generation, and opposed to it and mistrustful of it, is it an easy
matter, on their coming over here, to make them feel themselves a part of
it, and to imbue them with a loyalty to it?"
"One thing more," broke in the first speaker. "There is another element;
it is imported from the nearer half of Europe, and is a more dangerous
element still. I mean the element of feudality."
"Oh," said Truesdale, "now I begin to see."
"The essence of feudality is the idea of personal loyalty. Now, loyalty
to another individual is a good thing in its way and in its own field and
in a certain measure and at a certain juncture.
"But it is not the right prop for a great republic. That requires not the
idea of personal loyalty to some chief, but the idea of personal
responsibility to a cause above all chiefs. This takes a breadth of view
and a loftiness of ideal that only one race in the world has ever
possessed--our own. The great man, politically, is the man who can
eliminate the personal element from a great cause. The little man is
the--well," turning to Truesdale, "there are the general data; make your
own application of them."
"I see," said Truesdale; "my people are naturally against the governing
powers anyway, from instinct and heredity; even when one of them does
attain official position, it is only the position of the worm in the
apple. And they think, too, that it is a more sane and practical thing to
help one another out of a tangible difficulty than to sacrifice one
another to an intangible cause. I never contended they were not human!"
"That isn't all, by any means," said Brower, determinedly. "There's just
as bad behind." He resettled himself in his chair, as he claimed the
attention of the room. He seemed to Truesdale as if seating himself in a
saddle--a saddle on the back of some well-ridden hobby. Truesdale already
heard the steed pant and champ.
"This town of ours labors under one peculiar disadvantage: it is the only
great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the one
common, avowed object of making money. There you have its genesis, its
growth, its end and object; and there are but few of us who are not
attending to that object very strictly. In this Garden City of ours every
man cultivates his own little bed and his neighbor his; but who looks
after the paths between? They have become a kind of No Man's Land,
and the weeds of a rank iniquity are fast choking them up. The thing to
teach the public is this: that the general good is a different thing from
the sum of the individual goods. Over in the Settlement we are trying to
make those new-comers realize that they are a part of the body politic;
perhaps we need another settlement to remind some of the original
charter-members of the same fact!"
"H'm," thought Truesdale, "I believe Brower is an awfully fine fellow;
but if he keeps up this kind of talk all the time with Jane...."
Then, as they passed out into the street a few minutes later: "I don't
just see where my consolation comes in, after all."
"Perhaps they thought," responded Brower, "that you wouldn't appreciate
the beauty of consolation until you had first appreciated the gravity of
your case. I think their idea was less consolation than instruction."
"Ouf!" said Truesdale, who disdained instruction from whatever source.
"Do you know," said Brower, at the first crossing, "I'm going to talk to
your father about this justice business."
"Well," rejoined Truesdale, "he'll listen to you if he'll listen to
anybody; but he's awfully sore about it."
"So are other people sore about it--hundreds of people much poorer and
humbler than any of us, people to whom the miscarriage of justice is not
a mere matter of exasperation and annoyance, but a real matter of life
and death. They want care and attention--as the doctors say; they need a
law-dispensary--that's about it. There are institutions that look after
people's minds and bodies gratis; I want to see an institution started up
that will do as much for their estates. I want to see a building for it,
with an endowment and a library and a force of practitioners. To think of
all the things that a man with money and ideas and sympathies might
do--and should do--in a town like this!"
"You might try him," said Truesdale, doubtfully; "but I think Jane has
got the inside track. You've heard about her Home, I suppose, and seen
the plans for it. I should _want_ to put up an architectural monument in
such a ghastly town as this; I should as soon think of ramming an angel
into a coal-hole."
Yes, Brower knew all about Jane's Home--much more than Truesdale did, in
fact; but this did not prevent him from asking for all manner of
information about the project. He did this purely for the pleasure of
talking about Jane herself; and he wondered time and time again whether
he had not betrayed to Jane's brother the particular kind of interest he
was developing in her. He felt that his beard offered but a slight
concealment to the nervous twitching of his mouth, and that, despite the
muffling of his heavy overcoat, the throbbings of his heart must be as
perceptible to Truesdale as to himself. And when Truesdale presently made
the ungrudging avowal that Jane was a pretty good sort of girl, after
all--the _ne plus ultra_ of a brother's praise--Brower was driven to
thrust a trembling hand inside his coat to reduce his thumping organ to
something like subjection.
His admiration for Jane had been based originally on her essential
qualities; certainly he had received no quickening impulse, at the
beginning, from a contemplation of her mere exterior. He had looked upon
her as a valuable text put at a disadvantage by an unprepossessing
binding. But now there came the issue of a new edition, in a tastefully
designed cover, with additions and corrections, with extra illustrations,
too--illustrations of a startling social aptitude; and with even a hint
of illumination--the illumination that comes from the consciousness
of a noble purpose. Brower now began to feel, with a rising pride and
pleasure, that Jane was at last doing herself the fullest justice.
Jane, in the meanwhile, with no thought of a possible competition between
rival collectors for a certain rare old volume, was helping Tom Bingham
to build the new house. She went out southward two or three times a week,
and carried a tape-line with her. As she once explained it to Bingham:
"You can't be too sure of having things right at the start." So she
measured the foundations with her tape-line when the distances were
short, and paced them off when they were long. She kept a close eye on
the work through each advancing stage, and saw that it was good.
One Sunday morning in mid-May, Jane took the street-car--one of those
leisurely green ones that run to the Old People's Home--and went out to
satisfy herself that the first courses of dressed stone were going into
place as they should. May was speaking truly in the mildness and
freshness of the air, in the slow passing of the light and expansive
cumuli across the wide blueness of the sky, in the grasses and dandelions
springing up among the stark weeds of last year that swayed and rustled
on every vacant lot. From her stand-point among the heaps of brick and
sand and yellow lumber that surrounded the site of the new house, Jane
saw the fronts or sides or backs of other new houses placed dispersedly
round about: their towers and turrets and porches and oriels and the
myriad other massive manifestations proper to the new Stone Age. Between
them and beyond them her eye took transversely the unkempt prairie as it
lay cut up by sketchy streets and alleys, and traversed by street-car
tracks and rows of lamp-posts and long lines of telegraph poles and the
gaunt framework of an elevated road. In one direction she saw above the
dead crop of rustling weeds the heads of a long line of people on their
way to church; in the other direction, the distant clang of a passing
gong drew her eye to the vast advertisement which glared in the sun from
the four-story flank of an outlying shoe-store. "I hope the next man who
builds will shut _that_ out," she thought.
Presently a light buggy drove up to the curbstone, and a large, stout man
within it squeezed his way out carefully between its muddy wheels. Then
with a jerk he landed his hitching-weight in the roadway, clicked the
catch in the end of its strap to the ring at his horse's bit, and
advanced towards the house. It was Bingham.
"So you have concluded to give us a little attention, finally?" was
Jane's greeting. Her tone was slightly hectoring; this was to punish him
for having lately taken more of her thought than she felt him entitled
to.
As a matter of fact, Jane was uncomfortably mindful that more than once
within the past month she had opened the morning paper to Building Notes
before giving due heed to Insurance News. She had been distinctly pleased
to read that the Bingham Construction Company had just got one big
building ready for tenancy, or had just been awarded the contract for
another; and once, for a week, she had followed the head of it through a
particularly stubborn bricklayers' strike with the most avid interest.
Indeed, she had only been brought back to herself by a fire which had
damaged one of Brower's companies to the extent of five thousand dollars
and another to the extent of ten. After that she chained her wandering
attention to such matters as short rates and unearned premiums, the
organization of new companies and the bankruptcies of old ones, the
upward climbing of sub-solicitors and assistant managers, the losses
suffered by the companies represented by the agency of Brower & Brand,
and, above all, the closest scrutiny for the name of Theodore L. Brower
himself. Nothing pleased her more than to read a paragraph announcing
that he had gone East to attend a general conference--except, of course,
his return.
Sometimes, as she sat alone in her room, mending her stockings or taking
timely stitches in the fingers of her gloves, she would further fortify
herself by humming a scrap from the refrain of a song she had once heard
at a concert. "_Toujours fidèle_," she would moan in a deep contralto
voice, as she drew her needle slowly in and out; "_toujours fidèle_." She
paused lingeringly on the second syllable of _toujours_ and on the
middle syllable of _fidèle_, and repeated the phrase over and over again
at short intervals--that was all of the song that she knew. And after she
had chanted it a dozen times or so, her heart would soften and her eyes
would overflow, and she would have to pause in her work. Then she would
look at her brimming eyes in the glass, and wonder how she could ever
have had a thought for any other man than Theodore.
While poor Brower would sit at his desk and bemoan the fate that
compelled him to insure houses instead of building them. He had waited
until thirty-five for his first affair, and he was foredoomed to take it
has hard as a man may.
"Yes," pursued Jane, "you thought you would come and see whether they
were building us upside down or hindside before, I suppose."
"Everything looks all right," said Bingham, serenely. "The foreman can be
trusted, I imagine. What's that you've got in your hand?"
Jane held out a battered horseshoe, to which a few twisted nails were
still clinging. "I picked it up a minute ago. I was thinking about laying
a corner-stone--or relaying it."
"Good!" said Bingham; "the better the day, the better the deed. Do you
want to put that horseshoe under it?"
"Um, h'm," replied Jane. She walked along the top of the foundation, and
Bingham followed her.
Jane moved on until she found a practicable stone in a suitable angle.
"About here, I think," she said, tapping the stone with her toe.
"Do you want me to pry it out?"
"If you can. There's a sort of sharp stick over on that sand-pile."
Bingham removed the stone, and imbedded the horseshoe among the
sharp-edged fragments which had been worked into the course beneath.
"I want it to stay, too," declared Jane, as her eye roamed towards the
half-dried mortar-bed just beyond the foundation trench. "Wait a second."
She skipped across the small chasm which intervened between the
foundation-wall and solid ground. She scooped up some water from a hallow
puddle with a battered tin can, and began the formation of an oozy little
pocket in the middle of the mortar-bed. "Now if I only had a shingle,"
she said, after she had reduced the mortar to the consistency of slime.
"No shingle would hold that," said Bingham, jumping across after her.
"Here, give me that can."
He poured a quart or two of mortar on top of the horseshoe and reset the
stone "There!" said Jane, bringing her whole weight upon it.
"Good-luck to this house and household!" said Bingham. He raised his hat;
she could not tell whether he were in jest or in earnest.
"It needs all the luck it can have," said Jane. "It may be a nice house,
but it will never be home."
"Oh yes, it will," said Bingham, soothingly.
"Oh no, it won't," returned Jane, permitting herself the luxury of a
little woe. "Even if we _do_ have wreaths of flowers in all the
washbowls, and transoms that you can open and shut without getting on to
chairs, and a what-you-may-call-it to regulate the furnace heat without
going down cellar--all the same, it won't be our dear old home."
"No; a better one."
"Well," said Jane, resignedly. She lifted her eyes and pointed her finger
aloft. "I suppose I shall be up there, somewhere."
"Oh, not yet," replied Bingham, bringing his eyes back from the clouds.
"You look very well fitted for your present sphere."
"I didn't mean all the way up," said Jane, smilingly dismal. "I only
meant the next floor--yet awhile."
"That's better. Don't be an angel just yet; you're too useful here."
"If not ornamental."
"Too ornamental, too."
"I never claimed to be that," observed Jane, dropping her eyes. "Do you
think I'm--improving?"
Jane stood there on the foundations, clad in the ample and voluminous
fashion of the day and topped off with a distinctly stylish hat. She had
had a long regimen of fencing and dumbbells, and her self-imposed
superintendence of the new house had led to many hours spent in the open
air. Her hair was blowing airily about her face, and on her cheek there
was a slight flush--produced, perhaps, by her own question.
"Decidedly," replied Bingham, promptly.
"Thanks. There's always room for improvement. It's the biggest room in
the world, somebody says."
She gave another look at her corner-stone. "Well, what do they do after
the last sad rites? They go home, don't they? Yes; let's go home."
"Suppose I drive you down? I'm going your way."
"I _have_ got a nickel, somewhere," said Jane, "and I was going back on
the elevated, for a change; but--well, all right."
And she let him help her into the buggy.
"Monstrous big house, isn't it?" she commented, as she overlooked the
foundations from this loftier point. "I don't know how we are ever going
to fill it."
"Oh yes, you will," said Bingham, gathering up the lines. "Your father
and mother, and your brother and Rosy..."
"I don't know as to Truesdale; he's such a fly-about. You can't depend
very much on him. And I don't feel any too sure about Rosy, either," she
added, inwardly.
Her state of uncertainty about Rosy was shared, in fact, by all the rest
of the family; it looked decidedly as if the youngest daughter were to
leave the shelter of her father's roof before the completion of her first
year in the world. She was a maiden choosing, and the absorbing question
was--which? On the side of William Bates there was his position, his
ability, his certain future, and the sentimental resumption of old family
relations. On the side of Paston there was an entertaining personality
and the paragraph in Debrett. The two met occasionally in the Marshalls'
front parlor, and sat each other out with much civility and
pertinacity--Bates somewhat firm and severe, Paston extremely gay and
diverting. Jane and her mother lingered in the _coulisses_ and even
ventured a word now and then with the _ingénue_ after she had left the
boards. But the more the family found to say directly and indirectly on
behalf of William Bates, the more resolutely Rosamund turned her face in
the opposite direction.
"You can't influence Rosy," said Jane; "she'll have her own way--that's a
point there needn't be any doubt on. And that boudoir of hers in the new
house may come around to me, after all, unless I--"
Jane flushed vividly as she thus cast her own horoscope. Bingham at this
moment drew the buggy up alongside the curb in front of the old house. A
young man on the sidewalk was just approaching the front gate. "Dear me!"
gasped Jane, inwardly, "what a miserable sinner I am!" Her heart sank and
her appetite left her. The young man was Theodore Brower; she had invited
him to dinner and had forgotten all about it.