Lancaster said goodbye on the following morning, and by noon he was in
Edinboro'. At the Travelers' club he found a letter from the firm of
publishers, at home, that had lately been using a great many of his
sketches. They took the liberty of informing him that owing to the
popularity of his work they had thought proper to open an exhibition of
his original sketches in the Museum Art Galleries. While they were aware
that possession of these originals was entirely vested in themselves,
they had decided to lay aside a share of the receipts from the
exhibition and sale for him, as a courtesy royalty. Lancaster folded the
letter up, drummed on the table for a second or two, and then went out
to get a paper. It had occurred to him that, if he sailed for home at
once, he could reach there before the exhibition closed. It would be a
grim bit of humor to appear there in person, and listen to the comments
of the very people who, a year ago, would have considered him and his
work beneath their notice. Now, with a European reputation, his stock,
so to put it, had gone far beyond par in his native country.
Besides,--the memory of the things that Mrs. Stewart had said to him
refused to pass from him--there was Dorothy! He would see her again; he
would put his fate to the touch once more.
It had been a white night that had passed between his conversation with
Mrs. Stewart and his departure from St. Andrews. He had lain awake
listening to the hissing of the sea over the rocks, and recounting the
arguments that affected his feelings toward Miss Ware. Now, it had
seemed to him that she represented for him the one chance of happiness;
that the touch of sadness that had come to her would make her but the
more merciful to his own past. Then, again, the old bitterness, the old
distaste came; he could not escape the thought that the old conventions
teach, that one step aside means, for the woman, eternal disgrace. Well,
and even if the old conventions said so a thousand times, were they to
bind him now, when they had so long been thrust away by him in scorn? At
any rate, the torment of these conflicting thoughts was to be avoided.
He must decide upon one attempt or another--the return home and the
repetition of a certain question, or the effort to continue more
steadfast than ever in the philosophy of laughter.
He decided for the return to America.
No boat left Liverpool for two days. In the interval he roamed about the
most beautiful city in Scotland, enjoying the memories and pictures of
the past that Holyrood, the old Castle, and John Knox's house brought
up. The autumn sun turned Prince's Street Gardens, and the Scott
Monument into a green and gold and flowered picture that he remembered
no equal to, in his wanderings through the capitals of Europe, Prince's
Street, he maintained, was the prettiest thoroughfare in the world. He
left it with regret.
His voyage across the Atlantic merely gave him material for a study of
the gowns adopted by the fair ocean travelers, and several chances for
cynical representations of the humors of upper-deck flirtations.
Otherwise his journey was as monotonous as the luxuriance of the modern
travel could make it.
It was morning, when after another fatiguing journey by rail, he reached
the metropolis that held so many mixed memories for him. He went
straight to the Philistine club, and took some rooms there. The servants
hardly knew him. He had, it was true, changed a great deal. He was
browner, thinner; there were deep lines about his eyes and mouth.
The first man he met in the smoking-room, after he had refreshed himself
with a bath and a lunch, was Vanstruther.
"Why," said that gentleman, after a long, puzzled look, "dashed if it
isn't Dick Lancaster!" "Come into the light, most noble genius, and let
me gaze upon you. You--you put bright crimson tints on all the effete
European cities, didn't you? I declare it's good to see you again!
You've seemed a good deal like a myth lately, you know; no one ever
seemed to know just where you were, or whether you were alive at all."
They walked up and down the room, asking and answering such pleasant
questions as come between two familiars after a long absence.
"Oh, there's not much change," Vanstruther was explaining, "except in
yourself. You'll be no end of a lion, I'm afraid. Have to do a couple of
paragraphs about you myself, just to scoop the other fellows. Give me a
text or two. Oh, but you have hit the fad in the exact centre, somehow!
I'm not saying a thing against the real value of your stuff, but the
fact remains that this whole blessed nation is fad-mad just now, and it
simply has got to have a fad or quit. Your European reputation came
along just about the time the fad for the newest English novel was
dying. You went, so to say, with a whoop. One can't pick up a Sunday
paper now but what one finds weird, impossible interviews with you;
descriptions of your favorite models, or reproductions of your newest
sketch. You are depicted as the founder of a new style; they talk of
women as being "Lancaster-like," and you are a pest generally. In print,
I mean, of course, only in print. You are about to furnish my own dear
self with material for about a column, so I shouldn't call you a pest;
but from the standpoint of the reader, rather than the penny-a-liner, I
abhor you!" He made a gesture of aversion, laughingly.
"You want to know about the old guard, do you? Well, Stanley is still
the same dismal distiller of cynicisms that he ever was; his trip abroad
only seems to have made him worse. Belden? Oh, he plods along in the
same old way, drawing bloody battles for the dailies, and making all
creation look like the prize-ring 'toughs.' We have the same old Sunday
evenings up at his house, too; his wife's turned out well, as far as one
can see. He certainly doesn't look unhappy. We were all up there not
long ago, Marsboro, Stanley and myself. Mind you, I never take Mrs. Van.
I'm about the same as ever, too. I've got a blood-curdling dime-novel on
the stocks just now, and the 'season' is beginning for the winter, so
I'm not likely to have much time for idle trifling for a while. Oh,--did
you see Mrs. Stewart while you were abroad? Thanks! That'll be another
scoop on the rest of the society editors. Hallo! three o'clock,--got to
be off to the office--see you again!" He rushed off, leaving Lancaster
smiling at his frank, jerky sentences.
Lancaster sat down and took up the morning paper. Before long the
advertisement of his exhibition at the museum met his eyes. It occurred
to him that if what Vanstruther had said was only in part true, it would
be wise for him to go and take a peep at the show this very afternoon,
before people knew he was in town.
The place was crowded with well-dressed men and women. They flowed in
and out in a constant stream. They held catalogues in their hands, and
chatted volubly. In front of one picture, whereon was depicted a London
music-hall scene, there was an especially large gathering.
"He's so dreadfully cynical, don't you think so?" one man was saying to
the girl that was with him. "I really think he ought to be called a
caricaturist."
"Oh, but, after all, it's nearly all true, you know. Look at the
expression on that gallery-god's face, will you!"
"Wonder what sort of a chap he is personally?"
"Oh--impossible, I suppose. Although I ought not to say that; nothing is
impossible nowadays, there never was such a run on intellect. I never
saw anything like it! It positively seems as if society was
intellect-mad. Singers, actors, painters, writers--all sorts of queer
people go everywhere now, and that isn't the worst of it! The society
people won't be content with just playing at 'society' as they used to:
they want to sing, and paint, and write, too! It's awful! I'll have to
go on the stage, or something of that sort, myself, if I want to keep up
with the procession."
Lancaster moved away from that corner. It was amusing, certainly; but it
was also painful. What pleased him more than the overheard conversations
were the little labels, displaying the word "SOLD" that decorated many
of his sketches. It was balm to him to think that these moneybags, these
puppets mumbling set phrases, were being despoiled of some of their
wealth for his sake.
Walking over to the wall whereon hung the sketch for which Wooton had
been the unconscious model, Lancaster heard a voice that seemed
familiar.
"It certainly looks like him," the voice was saying. "That would be a
wanton brutality."
It was Miss Tremont. Lancaster flushed angrily. What had she to judge
by? It was Mrs. Tremont who was accompanying her daughter; the elder
lady moved away, that moment, to speak to an acquaintance. Miss Tremont
remained in front of the picture of the drunkard, her brows moving
nervously.
Lancaster stepped close up to her.
"If I were you," he said quietly, but distinctly, "I should go and look
after him. He needs it."
The girl started quickly, turned momentarily pale, and then, seeing who
it was, nerved herself to stony calmness. "How dare you?" she said
twisting her catalogue into shapelessness.
"Oh," he laughed, "I really mean it for the best. As you see--" he
looked sneeringly at the sketch--"he's not the pink of sobriety. And
when he drinks, he talks a good deal. He sometimes talks about--you, for
instance." He paused and seemed engrossed in nothing save the smoothing
out of the wrinkles in his gloves.
"You coward!" If intention could have killed, Miss Tremont's eyes
committed murder.
"True; I fear for you both. And I take such an interest in you! But I
believe he will make an excellent husband--for you!" He lifted his hat,
with a fleeting mockery of a smile, and left her before the picture,
staring, trembling.
"That," he told himself, "was wanton brutality number two. But she
should not have judged me!"
He left the galleries, taking with him a feeling of scorn for himself,
that he should have put himself on the level of the praise or blame of
the fadists in such a public way. Yet, he reflected, it had been not of
his own seeking.
The afternoon was already touched with the darkening shadow of evening.
The town roared and hissed and seethed in all it's wonted fervor; the
chill-hardness of its material manners were painfully evident to
Lancaster as he came from the comparative quiet of the
picture-galleries. He contrasted the grim roar of the place with the
smiling, careless, jovial glitter of those other towns he had lately
enjoyed; for the bright cheer of the boulevards and the gardens and the
open-air café's he found the skypiercing buildings that shut out the
sun-light, hemmed in masses of money-mad humanity, and extended
apparently to all the horizons. For the strolling gayety he had grown to
love so; for the ever-changing current of picturesque triflers, idlers
and dandies,--he had received in exchange a breathless surge of anxious,
nervous, straining men and women, plunging wildly down the slopes to an
imaginary sea of gold. Something of the old repulsion made itself felt
in him; he foresaw that it would never again be possible for him to
endure life here. That other glittering, careless, joyous
maelstrom,--perhaps; this one, never! He realized that while for future
generations it was possible, for himself the hope of finding an American
metropolis tinged with aught but the feverish strivings after riches was
utterly vain. He tried to argue with himself about it; to persuade
himself that it was a nobler sign, this one of the masses all honest in
labor and in pursuit of it's fruits, than the evidences of inherited
wealth, or quiet content with small means, that were the prevailing
notes of older countries. But he failed. His temperament rebelled; he
loved the smooth, the finished sides of life; the artist in him rebelled
against the commercialism of his native haunts. If it should be the
decree of fate that he continue to seek out life's most distracting
enchantments, he would certainly have to bid his native land farewell
again. If there were anything else in store for him; if it happened that
he be required by Dame Chance to do something more serious than to
laugh, to laugh, and laugh--well, that consideration would bear
postponement.
It seemed to him, as he walked through the streets that were now
beginning to glitter with the white and yellow lights born of
electricity and gas, that these faces were the same faces always, that
there was never any change, from year to year, in the puppets that
paraded on this urban stage. A thousand differing types, to be sure; but
always the same in their hard, tense, sinister look of restraint; all
wore the same tiring eyes, the same rounded shoulders. The same fierce
passion for excitement swam in the eyes of the women. In his morbidness
he fancied that it was as if all these city-dwellers were
life-prisoners, condemned forever to walk, and mumble and laugh shrilly.
"The metropolis," he told himself, "is a maelstrom that never gives up
it's human prisoners: it merely changes their cells occasionally." At
which reflection he presently laughed. The old text came to him: "The
thing to do is to laugh!"
"Yes," he thought, "but it's harder here than anywhere else. Much
harder."
Arrived at the club, he ordered dinner, and in the short interval, set
down to write a letter to his mother. For the many months of his absence
abroad he had contented himself with sending her occasional newspapers,
the briefest of notes, and illustrated magazines. In none of these
missives had there ever been the real personal, familiar note. He had
given merely the scantest news of his whereabouts and his well-being. In
the life and the philosophy he had chosen there was little room for
comradeships, even with his own mother. Now, however, with the distance
between them so vastly less, he felt again some of the old affections
that he had thought to have slain with laughter. In any event, he wrote,
whether he decided to remain on this or that continent, he would pay
Lincolnville a visit presently. They would have that dear, delightful
talk that the months had despoiled them of.
As he stepped into the dining-room, Vanstruther nailed him. "Saw a
friend of yours just now, Dick," he said, "Miss Ware!"
"Ah," was the reply, given in apparent abstraction, "they still live
here then?"
"Yes. Dick did it ever occur to you that she's a devilish pretty girl?"
"Oh, look here, Van," said Dick, laughingly, "I came to feed on solids,
not the lilies of your imagination. The prettiest thing in the world to
me, at this date, is a good dinner."