That same evening, his crisp brown mustache hiding the meaning of his
mouth, and his drooping lids concealing the purpose of his steel-gray
eyes, Wesley Dyker, from the rooms he had rented in an East Side
Assembly district, took a cab northwestward through the rain to
Riverside Drive. He was dressed precisely as he dressed to go to the
house of Rose Légère, but he was bound for the house of Joshua Lennox.
There he had plainly been expected. The liveried, tight-lipped
servant, who opened the iron grill-work door for him, showed him
deferentially down a long tiled hall and into, not the formal white
and gilt reception-room, but a comfortable, dimly-lighted apartment,
a smoking-room, hung with fading mediæval tapestries, the floor
covered with deep rugs of the Orient, and the chairs wide,
broad-armed, and upholstered in soft leather.
"Miss Lennox will be down in a moment, sir," said the servant. "May
I bring you anything, Mr. Dyker?"
Wesley shook his well-shaped head.
"No, thank you, Charles," he answered, and then, nodding to a
decanter that, under a wide, soft-shaded lamp, stood upon a corner
table: "Irish?" he asked.
Charles bowed, brought a tray, and, when Dyker had poured the
whiskey, added some seltzer, and lighted the cigarette that the guest
had taken from a wrought silver box on a nearby tabouret.
"That is all, Charles," said Dyker, and the servant silently left him
alone.
Wesley sank back in his chair with a sigh of comfort. He liked the
house of the philanthropic merchant so well that he could have wished
its master liked him better, and when, within a few minutes, the
master himself chanced into the room, Dyker was prepared to be
diplomatic.
Joshua N. Lennox was the explanation of that Mr. Porter who held so
much power under him. The latter was tall and thin, the former short
and compact, but there all physical differences ended: Mr. Porter had
found his model in his employer. Here was the source of the
seneschal's gray hair and side-whiskers, his trap mouth tortured to
the line of benevolence, his calm gaze and his manner that combined
the precision of the surgeon with the gravity of the head of a
Sunday-school. Mr. Lennox, in fact, conducted the second largest
Bible Class in New York. He knew its textbook from the first chapter
of Genesis to the twenty-second chapter of the Revelation, and he
believed in the literal inspiration of every verse of the original
and of every syllable of the English translation.
It was in the voice in which he habitually addressed his Bible Class,
the voice of one uttering a benediction, that he said:
"Good-evening, Mr. Dyker."
Wesley put down his glass and rose to his feet.
The man before him was the perfection of that noble work of Heaven, a
Prominent Citizen. Joshua Lennox endowed Bowery chapels with organs
and meat-supplies; he contributed heavily to missions among the
benighted Japanese; he assisted in arbitrating strikes wherein his
fellow-employers were concerned; he always served on memorial
committees; and he regularly subscribed to the campaign funds of all
movements toward municipal political reform.
If his climbing wife insisted upon having liquor in the house, Mr.
Lennox never touched it. If she served tobacco, he did not smoke.
If she took in a Sunday paper, written and printed on Saturday, he
would read no news until the appearance of the Monday journal merely
written and printed on Sunday. And if his mercantile establishment
sold poker-chips under the pseudonym of "counters," he was aware only
that it did not sell playing-cards. The business he considered as
his creation had grown beyond the limits of his power, and though, a
good man and sincere, he might have done something by keeping a
closer eye upon his work, he was in reality as much the creature of
conditions as his worst-paid cash-boy. The great Frederick
complained that a monarch could not know all the evil done in his
kingdom: Joshua Lennox was so busy benefiting mankind that he had no
leisure to observe in his own shop the state of affairs that made his
philanthropy financially possible.
"I hope you are going with us to the opera, Mr. Lennox," said Dyker.
The old man shook his silvered head.
"No," said he in the slow, deliberate utterance that he had acquired
with his first million of dollars; "I am on my way farther down town
than that."
"But you had better come," urged Wesley, knowing that refusal was
certain. "This is the last performance of the season."
"On the contrary," the merchant chuckled kindly, "I think you had
better let Marian go to the opera alone and come along with me. I am
going to the first performance of a new season."
"Where's that?"
"To the Municipal Improvement Mass Meeting at Cooper Union."
That made it Dyker's turn to smile.
"Oh, but I couldn't do that," he said. "I'm on the other side, you
know."
"Against good government?" The elder man manifestly enjoyed this
mild thrust.
"Against irregularity, Mr. Lennox. There never has been and there
never can be any lasting reform from the outside. We must clean our
own houses. That is why I have moved to my present address. I
believe in reform from within the party, and I believe that to effect
this we want men of your sort to help us indoors and not to attack us
from the street."
The merchant's cold eye looked hard at the speaker, but Dyker's
lowered lids betrayed nothing.
"Yes," replied Lennox, dryly; "I heard that when Tammany Hall first
came into power, but I have never seen any trace of reform from the
inside. What I have seen is the spectacle of most of these inside
reformers developing into leaders of the machine. If you will take
an older man's advice, you will withdraw while there is yet time."
Wesley's reply sprang ready to his lips, but, before he could utter
it, Marian Lennox came into the room.
Something of herself the girl received, no doubt, from her climbing
mother; something, probably, from her satisfied father, and more than
she guessed from a narrow environment. Nevertheless, four years at
college had cultivated in her what seemed to be a spirit of
independence, and a brief life in the city had confirmed in her what
she was certain were opinions of her own.
She was tall and moved with assurance. Her full throat rose above
the ermine of her cloak, supporting a delicately carved head, the
head of a Greek cameo, held rigidly erect. The hair was a rich
chestnut, the eyes large and brown, and the mouth at once firm and
kindly. Her skin was very fair and her gloved hands long and slender.
She caught her father's concluding words.
"While there is yet time," she paraphrased, "Mr. Dyker will withdraw
from this room and get me to the opera-house before the overture has
ended. I am so unfashionable as to want my music entire."
She was used to commanding her parents in their own house, and she
thought that she was used to commanding Wesley everywhere, so that
she dismissed Lennox and secured Dyker's entrance into her waiting
limousine with almost no delay whatever.
"There," she remarked as she settled herself comfortably for their
drive; "I rather fancy that I rescued you from a sermon."
Dyker laughed shortly.
"Oh, I don't know," he said. "I esteem your father so much that I
should like him to like me."
"But you think that he doesn't like you?"
"I think that he is slow to see that two persons may differ on a
question of political tactics and yet remain, both of them, honest
men."
"And may they?" bantered Marian.
"Well," he lightly accepted the challenge, "I shall take the specific
case. There is no doubting your father's sincerity; there is no
doubting the sincerity of nearly all the men that will, with him,
to-night try to launch another of these municipal-reform parties
which, if they ever get started at all, are sure to run on the rocks
at last."
"And on the other hand," said the girl, "I suppose I must generously
refuse to doubt the sincerity of Tammany Hall?"
"On the other hand you must justly refuse to doubt the sincerity of a
few young men who have seen that reform-parties always end in violent
reaction within the city and, if briefly successful, weaken the party
in the next national campaign. You must refuse to doubt the
sincerity of these young men when they go into the heart of the East
Side to live and work among the people that make up the
organization's fighting-strength. You must believe in them when they
try to get nominated for even the smallest offices on the
machine-ticket. And you must have faith that, if they can work
themselves at last into places of power, they will reform the party
in the only way that will keep it reformed."
"Dear me," sighed Marian, "it seems that it was father that I rescued
from a sermon."
"Well," said Dyker, "you asked me why your father and I should not
mistrust each other, and there you have the reason. You know what I
am trying to do; I have told you my plans as I haven't told them to
another human being--and you should know that I am not to be
suspected."
There was a ring in his voice that touched her.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I beg you'll forgive me. Only really, you
know, you can't expect father to be with you: he would have to break
the habit of a lifetime."
"I don't ask him to be with me; I only ask him to believe that a man
can work with the organization and yet have pure principles."
"He can't even go so far as that; he says that every system is the
reflection of the men that make it, and he says that the system you
support battens on horrors."
"But it can't be the system. The horrors existed long before the
system. Is he such a conservative as not to be able to see that?"
"He isn't a conservative; he is the one unprogressive thing in
nature: the liberal of a preceding generation. Only the other day I
mentioned something I have been thinking about doing--something that
several of my most conventional friends have been doing for ever so
long--and he was so dreadfully shocked that, though I'm now resolved
upon my course, I can't guess how he'll take it."
Dyker's curiosity was easily piqued.
"If you proposed it," he said, "I can't imagine that it was such a
very terrible thing."
"Oh, no; it was merely that I want to be of some use in the world and
so have made up my mind to go in for settlement-work."
Wesley Dyker was one of those rare animals, a human being whose
parents, though they could have arranged it otherwise, permitted him
to be born in New York. He had been reared, at least during the
winters of his earlier life, within the Borough of Manhattan, and his
views were, like those of most of his even less acclimated neighbors,
just as wide as that narrow island, and no wider. Indeed, so far as
were concerned his views of the proper sphere of his own womankind,
he limited them entirely to an extremely small portion of the city.
"Of course you're joking," he said.
"I am in cold earnest," she assured him.
"But that's absurd. You've--why you don't know what settlement-work
means!"
"I know quite well what it means," said Marian. "I have friends
engaged in it, as I told you, and I've been visiting them and seeing
their life at close quarters."
"And you really mean----"
"I really mean that here we are at the Metropolitan, and that we
can't talk on our way upstairs, and we won't talk while there is
music to listen to."
Slowly their car had taken its grudged place in a long procession of
its fellows, one by one unloading the human freight before the
brilliantly lighted doorway. The pavement and the steps were a
tossing sea of silk hats, colored scarfs, and glittering headdresses.
Into this they plunged, hurried to the crowded elevator, traversed a
lighted corridor, passed through a short, dark passage and came out
to the Lennox box in the great, glaring horseshoe of the opera-house.
Dyker, baffled by the sudden stop that had been put to his protests,
looked moodily upon the familiar picture. Below them, climbing to
the rail behind which was massed the orchestra, was the pit, white
bosoms and bare shoulders, too distant to present, to the unassisted
eye, any hint of individuality. Above rose the teeming galleries,
line above line of peering faces. And to right and left swept the
great curve of the boxes splendid with lace and feathers and jewels.
He saw no more than that during the entire performance and, as
Marian, even in the _entr'actes_, would talk of nothing but the music
to which he had refused to listen, he heard less. The opera was
"Lucia," and as Wesley, with a taste worthy of a more discerning
critic, considered that work nothing but a display of vocal
gymnastics devised for a throat abnormally developed, he would
probably have been, in any case, bored.
His father, who had what his friends called "family," had married
what everybody called "money," but had managed to invest that
commodity with a talent for choosing failures, and, when both parents
had died, Wesley, fresh from the Columbia Law School, had amazedly
found himself in a position where he would actually have to turn his
education to practical account. For five years he held a thankless,
underpaid and unmentioned partnership in a well-known firm of
corporation-lawyers. He drew their briefs, and developed a genuine
talent for the task, but he was never given a chance to plead. The
worm of necessity spun its cocoon in his brain, but the emerging
butterfly of ambition could find no way to liberty.
One day, however, he was commissioned to prepare the case in defense
of a large contractor, quite justly accused of fraud. It happened
that, when the young lawyer brought the results of his week's work to
his chief, the client in whose interests the work had been done was
closeted with the head of the firm, and, Dyker being presented, that
contractor learned of Wesley's service. At the ensuing trial the
client was acquitted, and remembered the service. He lived on the
East Side and made most of his money from political jobs. The rest
followed simply enough. Dyker was introduced to the powers of his
patron's district, and, thinking that he saw here the opportunity of
which he had begun to despair, he had left his former employers and
was already shouldering his way forward among his new friends. His
former acquaintances mildly wondered what the devil he was after; his
latter ones began to regard him as a clever fellow, and the
newspapers printed stories of him as a young society man that
gratuitously gave his legal talents to the help of the poor.
For his own part, Dyker was quite certain of what he was and of what
he would be. He had seen, beneath his lowered lids, that a clever
man could gain both fortune and power through political prestige, and
he meant to use that means to his end. He had also, while still with
the firm of corporation-lawyers, been presented to Marian Lennox by
her opportunely-met, socially-aspiring mother, and was, whatever his
relation with other members of her sex, quite as much in love with
her as he could be with anybody. Realizing the power of her father's
fortune and the beauty of the girl herself, he had determined to
marry her with as little delay as possible.
Until to-night he had delayed all open pursuit, because there had not
been lacking signs to free him from fear of all male rivals; but that
Marian should thus suddenly develop a purpose in life meant that he
was to have a rival of a far more formidable sort. He set his teeth
under his crisp mustache, folded his arms across his heart, and sat
stolidly through the interminable opera: as soon as it was over, he
meant to play his first lead.
He did play it--played it as soon as their car had crept up in answer
to its electric-call and whisked them away into the night. As they
shot up the flaming street, her clean-cut profile was almost as
distinct as it had been in the box, and the girl, still thrilling
with the memory of the music she so passionately loved, was close to
the mood best suited to his own.
"May I talk now?" he asked ruefully.
She smiled.
"You mean to ask if you may argue," she answered. "No, you may not
argue against my determination, and I am a good deal surprised that a
man of your sort should want to."
"I don't intend to argue," he protested, leaning the merest trifle
toward her. "I mean only to ask you if your determination is quite
fixed."
She bowed her splendid head.
"Quite fixed," she said.
"So that argument would not shake it?"
"So that no argument could shake it."
"Nor any persuasion?"
His voice had sunk only a semi-tone, but her feminine ear noted the
change.
"Nor any persuasion," she replied.
"Then suppose I presented to you neither argument nor persuasion, but
a condition?"
"But there is no conceivable condition that could arise to change me.
You refuse to understand that I see this thing as a duty."
A lamp stronger than its fellows threw a quick ray full upon her
face; her brown eyes were charmingly serious, her lips dangerously
sweet.
"What I understand," responded Dyker, "is that there is one situation
in which a woman may find herself where there arises a duty that
crowds all others from the board."
His hand, in the semi-darkness, sought and found her own, its glove
withdrawn, cool and firm and unretreating.
"You know the situation I mean," he said. "I love you. I love you
so much, Marian, that I am jealous of any work that would take you
from me; I want so much of your love that I can spare none of
it--none even for the poor and suffering."
In that tight grasp her hand fluttered a little, but she did not
answer: she could not answer, because, while her brain was telling
her that a love so rapacious was necessarily niggardly, her heart was
crying out that this was the love it wanted most of all.
"Marian"--his voice shook now with the emotion that was tugging at
its leash--"you've known for some months that I loved you; all last
winter you must have seen this coming; you can't be unprepared to
answer me!"
He possessed himself of her other hand, and pressed her inert palms
between his own.
But the girl's determination loomed large to her. Through her entire
life she had been shut away from the real world, behind rich curtains
and amid soft lights, until, fired with the unrest of a partial
education, she had chanced upon a glimpse of classmates working in
what they called the slums, and now, with all the enthusiasm of
youth, she had resolved to join them. A maturer woman would not have
taken so seriously a sudden impulse to engage in work for which she
had no training, but Marian was young.
"I am not unprepared," she answered. "I did know. But I know too
that there are things that can make even love a finer, a better
emotion."
The words reminded her of some speech she had once heard in a play,
and, entirely in earnest as she was, the sound of them from her own
lips strengthened her. She was in love with Wesley Dyker, but she
was more in love with renunciation.
The man, however, shook his head.
"No," he said, "love is something ultimate. You can't paint the
lily; you can't part it and share it; you must either cherish it or
kill it. Which do you mean to do?"
The car had turned into the smoother way of Riverside Drive, where
the lights are far fewer and less bright than Broadway's. He could
not see her face, but he could not doubt the resolve that was in her
voice as she answered:
"I mean to take up the work that I have told you of."
"But that's folly, Marian!"
He had chosen the wrong term of description, and, the moment he
uttered it, he knew that he had erred. "Folly" is the word that
youth most resents.
Marian withdrew her hands.
"It is strange," she said, "to hear you, of all men, laugh at an
attempt to help the poor."
"I am not laughing; I'm too serious to laugh. I am so serious that I
can't pick and choose phrases. I meant only that you can't help
these people without training----"
"I can get training."
"Without knowing them?"
"The only way to know them is to go to them."
"But even then, you can do so little. These settlements accomplish
practically nothing. They are fads for the people that run them and
playthings for the people they are intended to help. I can speak
with authority, and I tell you that the young men and women, the boys
and girls, that go to them, drop in only when they have nothing else
to do, and all the rest of the time go their own ways."
He forgot that he had said he would not argue. He used all his power
to convince and to persuade; but if there is one human being that
cannot be moved from a purpose, it is a young girl with a romantic
ideal, smarting under what she conceives to be ridicule, and for the
first time tasting what she believes to be the bitter-sweets of
sacrifice. Even when the verbal war had been carried into her own
house, he could bring no concession from her. If he was helping his
neighbors, then he should be all the more anxious that she, as the
woman he wanted to be his wife, should have precisely the experience
that the settlement would supply her.
"Then you mean," he asked, "that you do care--that you care at least
a little?"
He put out his hands, but she did not seem to see them.
"I mean," she answered, "that we must wait."