Among the effects and symptoms of love, there is an involuntary action
of the mind which, since the days of Stendhal, has been known as
crystallization. When a man becomes interested in a woman, when he
pictures her not as she really is, but as she seems to him--as she ought
to be, in fact--he experiences, first, admiration; second, desire;
third, hope; and, behold, love or its counterfeit is born.
This crystallization affects the individual according to his nature. If
that nature be inexperienced, unworn--in a word, if it be virginal, its
earliest effects are those of a malady. On the other hand, if the nature
on which it operates has received the baptism of fire, its effect is
that of a tonic. To the one it is a fever, to the other a bugle-call. In
the first instance, admiration is pursued by self-depreciation, desire
is pinioned before conventional obstacles, and hope falters beneath a
weight of doubt. In the second, admiration, desire, and hope are fused
into one sentiment, the charm of the chase, the delight of the
prospective quarry. As an example, there is Werther, and there is also
Don Juan.
Now Tristrem Varick had never known a mother, sisters he had none, the
feminine had been absent from his life, but in his nature there was an
untarnishable refinement. During his student-days at Harvard, and
throughout his residence abroad, there had been nothing of that which
the French have agreed to denominate as _bonnes fortunes_. Such things
may have been in his path, waiting only to be gathered, but, in that
case, certain it is that he had passed them by unheeded. To use the
figurative phrase, he was incapable of stretching his hand to any woman
who had not the power of awakening a lasting affection; and during his
wanderings, and despite, too, the example and easy morals of his
comrades, no such woman having crossed his horizon, he had been innocent
of even the most fugitive liaison. Nevertheless, the morning after the
dinner in Gramercy Park, crystallization had done its work. He awoke
with the surprise and wonder of an inexperienced sensation; he awoke
with the consciousness of being in love, wholly, turbulently, absurdly
in love with a girl to whom he had not addressed a single word.
The general opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, there are, after
all, very few people who know what love really is. And among those that
know, fewer there are that tell. A lexicographer, deservedly forgotten,
has defined it as an exchange of fancies, the contact of two epiderms.
Another, wiser if less epigrammatic, announced it as a something that no
one knew what, coming no one knew whence, and ending no one knew how.
But in whatever fashion it may be described, one thing is certain, it
has been largely over-rated.
In the case of Tristrem Varick it appeared in its most perfect form. The
superlative is used advisedly. Love has a hundred aspects, a thousand
toilets. It may come at first sight, in which event, if it be enduring,
it is, as Balzac has put it, a resultant of that prescience which is
known as second sight. Or, it may come of the gradual fusion of two
natures. It may come of propinquity, of curiosity, of sympathy, of
hatred. It may come of the tremors of adolescence, the mutual attraction
of one sex for the other; and, again, it may come of natural selection,
of the discernment which leads a man through mazes of women to one in
particular, to the woman who to him is the one woman in the world and
manacles him at her feet. If Tristrem Varick had not met Miss Raritan,
it is more than probable that he never would have known the meaning of
the word.
When the first surprise at the discovery waned, delight took its place.
He saw her amber eyes, he recalled as she had crossed the room the
indolent undulation of her hips, he breathed the atmosphere of health
which she exhaled, and in his ears her voice still rang. The _Non più
mesta_ of her song seemed almost a promise, and the _O Magali_ an
invitation. He recalled the movement of her lips, and fell to wondering
what her name might be. At first he fancied that it might be Stella; but
that, for some occult reason which only a lover would understand, he
abandoned for Thyra, a name which pleasured him awhile and which he
repeated aloud until it became sonorous as were it set in titles. But
presently some defect presented itself, it sounded less apt, more suited
to a blue-eyed daughter of a viking than to one so _brune_ as she.
Decidedly, Thyra did not suit her. And yet her name might be something
utterly commonplace, such as Fanny, for instance, or Agnes, or Gertrude.
But that was a possibility which he declined to entertain. When a girl
is baptized, the mother, in choosing the name, should, he told himself,
think of the lover who will one day pronounce it. And what had her
mother chosen? It would be forethought indeed if she had selected Undine
or even Iseult; but what mother was ever clairvoyant enough for that?
He thought this over awhile and was about to give the query up, when
suddenly, without an effort on his part, he was visited by a name that
announced her as the perfume announces the rose, a name that pictured
and painted her, a name that suited her as did her gown of canary, a
name that crowned her beauty and explained the melancholy of her lips.
"It is Madeleine," he said, "it can be nothing else."
And into the syllables he threw the waving inflection of the French.
"It is Madeleine," he continued, "and when I see her I will tell in what
way I divined it."
The possibility that she might be indifferent to such homage did not,
for the moment, occur to him. He was loitering in the enchanted gardens
of the imagination, which have been visited by us all. It was the
improbable that fluttered his pulse.
Hitherto the life of Tristrem Varick had been that of a dilettante.
There had been no reason why he should work. His education had unfitted
him for labor, and his tastes, if artistic, were not sufficiently
pronounced to act as incentives. He handled the brush well enough to
know that he could never be a painter; he had a natural understanding of
music, its value was clear to him, yet its composition was barred. The
one talent that he possessed--a talent that grows rarer with the
days--was that of appreciation, he could admire the masterpieces of
others, but creation was not his. A few centuries ago he would have made
an admirable knight-errant. In a material age like our own, his _raison
a'être_ was not obvious. In a word, he was just such an one as his
father had intended he should be, one whose normal condition was that of
chronic pluperfect subjunctive, and who, if thrown on his own resources,
would be helpless indeed.
In some dim way he had been conscious of this before, and hitherto he
had accepted it, as he had accepted his father's attitude, as one
accepts the inevitable, and put it aside again as something against
which, like death, or like life, it is useless to rebel. After all,
there was nothing particularly dreadful about it. An inability to be
Somebody was not a matter of which the District Attorney is obliged to
take cognizance. At least he need do no harm, and he would have wealth
enough to do much good. It was in thoughts like these that hitherto he
had found consolation. But on this particular morning he looked for them
anew, and the search was fruitless. Not one of the old consolations
disclosed the slightest worth. He stood before himself naked in his
nothingness. The true knowledge of his incompetence had never come home
to him before--but now it closed round him in serried arguments, and in
the closing shut out all hope of her. Who was he, indeed, to pretend to
such a girl?
To win her, he told himself, one must needs be a conqueror, one who has
coped with dangers and could flaunt new triumphs as his lady's due. Some
soldier bearing a marshal's baton back from war, some hero that had
liberated an empire or stolen a republic for himself, some prince of
literature or satrap of song, someone, in fact, who, booted and spurred,
had entered the Temple of Fame, and claimed the dome as his. But he!
What had he to offer? His name, however historical and respected, was an
accident of birth. Of the wealth which he would one day possess he had
not earned a groat. And, were it lost, the quadrature of the circle
would not be more difficult than its restoration. And yet, and
yet--though any man she could meet might be better and wiser and
stronger than he, not one would care for her more. At least there was
something in that, a tangible value, if ever there were one. There was
every reason why she should turn her back, and that one reason, and that
one only, why she should not. But that one reason, he told himself, was
a force in itself. The resuscitation of hope was so sudden that the
blood mounted to his temples and pulsated through his veins.
He left the bed in which his meditations had been passed. "They say
everything comes to him who waits," he muttered, and then proceeded to
dress. He took a tub and got himself, absent-mindedly, into a morning
suit. "I don't believe it," he exclaimed, at last, "the world belongs to
the impatient, and I am impatient of her."
Tristrem was in no sense a diplomatist. In his ways there was a candor
that was as unusual as it is delightful; yet such is the power of love
that, in its first assault, the victim is transformed. The miser turns
prodigal, the coward brave, the genius becomes a simpleton, and in the
simpleton there awakes a Machiavelli. Tristrem passed a forenoon in
trying to unravel as cruel a problem as has ever been given a lover to
solve--how, in a city like New York, to meet a girl of whom he knew
absolutely nothing, and who was probably unaware of his own existence.
He might have waited, it is true--chance holds many an odd trick--but he
had decided to be impatient, and in his impatience he went to Gramercy
Park and drank tea there, not once, but four afternoons in succession,
an excess of civility which surprised Mrs. Weldon not a little.
That he should make an early visit of digestion was quite in the order
of things, but when that visit was repeated again and again, Mrs.
Weldon, with a commingling of complacency and alarm, told herself that,
in her quality of married woman, such persistence should be discouraged.
But the opportunity for such discouragement did not present itself, or
rather, when it did the need of discouragement had passed. Tristrem
drank tea with her several times, and then disappeared abruptly. "He
must have known it was hopeless," she reflected, when a week went by
unmarked by further enterprise on his part. And then, the intended
discouragement notwithstanding, she felt vaguely vexed.
In the tea-drinking Tristrem's object, if not apparent to Mrs. Weldon,
was perfectly clear to himself. He desired to learn something of Miss
Raritan, and he knew, if the tea-drinking was continued with sufficient
endurance, not only would he acquire, from a talkative lady like his
hostess, information of the amplest kind, which after all was secondary,
but that in the course of a week the girl herself must put in an
appearance. A dinner call, if not obligatory to him, was obligatory to
her, and on that obligation he counted.
To those who agree to be bound by what the Western press calls
etiquette, there is nothing more inexorable than a social debt. A woman
may contest her mantua-maker's bill with impunity, her antenuptial
promises may go to protest and she remain unestopped; but let her leave
a dinner-call overdue and unpaid, then is she shameless indeed. In this
code Tristrem was necessarily learned. On returning to Fifth Avenue he
had marvelled somewhat at noting that laws which applied to one sex did
not always extend to the other, that civility was not exacted of men,
that politeness was relegated to the tape-counter and out of place in a
drawing-room; in a word, that it was not good form to be courteous, and
not ill-bred to be rude.
While the tea-drinking was in progress he managed without much
difficulty to get Mrs. Weldon on the desired topic. There were spacious
digressions in her information and abrupt excursions into irrelevant
matter, and there were also interruptions by other visitors, and the
consequent and tedious exchange of platitude and small-talk. But after
the fourth visit Tristrem found himself in possession of a store of
knowledge, the sum and substance of which amounted to this: Miss Raritan
lived with her mother in the shady part of the Thirties, near Madison
Avenue. Her father was dead. It had been rumored, but with what truth
Mrs. Weldon was not prepared to affirm, that the girl had some intention
of appearing on the lyric stage, which, if she carried out, would of
course be the end of her socially. She had been very much ruin after on
account of her voice, and at the Wainwarings the President had said that
he had never heard anything like it, and asked her to come to Washington
and be present at one of the diplomatic dinners. Personally Mrs. Weldon
knew her very slightly, but she intimated that, inasmuch as the
government had once sent Raritan _père_ abroad as minister--in order
probably to be rid of him--his daughter was inclined to look down on
those whose fathers held less exalted positions--on Mrs. Weldon herself,
for example.
It was with this little store of information that Tristrem left her on
the Thursday succeeding the dinner. It was meagre indeed, and yet ample
enough to afford him food for reflection. During the gleaning many
people had come and gone, but of Miss Raritan he had as yet seen
nothing. The next afternoon, however, as he was about to ascend Mrs.
Weldon's stoop for the fifth time in five days, the door opened and the
girl on whom his thoughts were centred was before him.
Throughout the week he had lived in the expectation of meeting her, it
was the one thing that had brought zest to the day and dreams to the
night; there was even a little speech which he had rehearsed, but for
the moment he was dumb. He plucked absently at his cuff, to the palms of
his hands there came a sudden moisture. In the vestibule above, a
servant stood waiting for Miss Raritan to reach the pavement before
closing the door, and abruptly, from a barrel-organ at the corner, a
waltz was thrown out in jolts.
The girl descended the steps before Tristrem was able to master his
emotion.
"Miss Raritan," he began, hastily, "I don't suppose you remember me. I
am Mr. Varick. I heard you sing the other night. I have come here every
day since in the hope of----; you see, I wanted to ask if I might not
have the privilege of hearing you sing again?"
"If you consider it a privilege, certainly. On Sunday evening, though, I
thought you seemed rather bored." She made this answer very graciously,
with her head held like a bird's, a trifle to one side.
Tristrem gazed at her in a manner that would have mollified a tigress.
"I was not bored. I had never heard anyone sing before."
"Yet your friend, Mr. Weldon, tells me that you are very fond of music."
"That is exactly what I mean."
At this speech of his she looked at him, musingly. "I wish I deserved
that," she said.
Tristrem began again with new courage. "It is like anything else, I
fancy. I doubt if anyone, ignorant of difficulties overcome, ever
appreciates a masterpiece. A sonnet, if perfect, is only perfect to a
sonneteer. The gallery may applaud a drama, it is the playwright who
judges it at its worth. It is the sculptor that appreciates a
Canova----"
They had reached the corner where the barrel-organ was in ambush. A
woman dragging a child with Italy and dirt in its face followed them,
her hand outstretched. Tristrem had an artful way of being rid of a
beggar, and after the fumble of a moment he gave her some coin.
"--And the artist who appreciates rags," added Miss Raritan.
"Perhaps. I am not fond of rags myself, but I have often caught myself
envying the simplicity which they sometimes conceal. That woman, now,
she may be as pleased with my little gift as I am to be walking with
you."
"I thought it was my voice you liked," Miss Raritan answered, demurely.
Tristrem experienced a mental start. A suspicion entered his mind which
he chased indignantly. There was about the girl an aroma that was
incompatible with coquetry.
"You would not, I am sure, have me think of you in the _vox et præterea
nihil_ style," he replied. "To be candid, I thought that very matter
over the other night." He hesitated, as though waiting for some
question, but she did not so much as look at him, and he continued
unassisted. "I thought of a flower and its perfume, I wondered which was
the more admirable, and--and--I decided that I did not care for tulips."
"But that you did care for me, I suppose?"
"Yes, I decided that."
Miss Raritan threw back her head with a movement indicative of
impatience.
"I didn't mean to tell you," he added--"that is, not yet."
They had crossed Broadway and were entering Fifth Avenue. There the
stream of carriages kept them a moment on the curb.
"I hope," Tristrem began again, "I hope you are not vexed."
"Vexed at what? No, I am not vexed. I am tired; every other man I
meet--There, we can cross now. Besides, I am married. Don't get run
over. I am going in that shop."
"You are _not_ married!"
"Yes, I am; if I were a Harvard graduate I would say to Euterpe. As it
is, Scales is more definite." She had led him to the door of a milliner,
a portal which Tristrem knew was closed to him. "If you care to come and
see me," she added, by way of _congé_, "my husband will probably be at
home." And with that she opened the door and passed into the shop.
"I can imagine a husband," thought Tristrem, with a glimmer of that
spirit of belated repartee which Thackeray called cab-wit, the
brilliancy which comes to us when we are going home, "I can imagine a
husband whose greatest merit is his wife."