Anson was the eldest of six children who would some day divide a fortune
of fifteen million dollars, and he reached the age of reason--is it
seven?--at the beginning of the century when daring young women were
already gliding along Fifth Avenue in electric "mobiles." In those days
he and his brother had an English governess who spoke the language very
clearly and crisply and well, so that the two boys grew to speak as she
did--their words and sentences were all crisp and clear and not run
together as ours are. They didn't talk exactly like English children but
acquired an accent that is peculiar to fashionable people in the city of
New York.
In the summer the six children were moved from the house on 71st Street
to a big estate in northern Connecticut. It was not a fashionable
locality--Anson's father wanted to delay as long as possible his
children's knowledge of that side of life. He was a man somewhat
superior to his class, which composed New York society, and to his
period, which was the snobbish and formalized vulgarity of the Gilded
Age, and he wanted his sons to learn habits of concentration and have
sound constitutions and grow up into right-living and successful men. He
and his wife kept an eye on them as well as they were able until the two
older boys went away to school, but in huge establishments this is
difficult--it was much simpler in the series of small and medium-sized
houses in which my own youth was spent--I was never far out of the reach
of my mother's voice, of the sense of her presence, her approval or
disapproval.
Anson's first sense of his superiority came to him when he realized the
half-grudging American deference that was paid to him in the Connecticut
village. The parents of the boys he played with always inquired after
his father and mother, and were vaguely excited when their own children
were asked to the Hunters' house. He accepted this as the natural state
of things, and a sort of impatience with all groups of which he was not
the centre--in money, in position, in authority--remained with him for
the rest of his life. He disdained to struggle with other boys for
precedence--he expected it to be given him freely, and when it wasn't he
withdrew into his family. His family was sufficient, for in the East
money is still a I somewhat feudal thing, a clan-forming thing. In the
snobbish West, money separates families to form "sets."
At eighteen, when he went to New Haven, Anson was tall and thick-set,
with a clear complexion and a healthy color from the ordered life he had
led in school. His hair was yellow and grew in a funny way on his head,
his nose was beaked--these two things kept him from being handsome--but
he had a confident charm and a certain brusque style, and the
upper-class men who passed him on the street knew without being told
that he was a rich boy and had gone to one of the best schools.
Nevertheless, his very superiority kept him from being a success in
college--the independence was mistaken for egotism, and the refusal to
accept Yale standards with the proper awe seemed to belittle all those
who had. So, long before he graduated, he began to shift the centre of
his life to New York.
He was at home in New York--there was his own house with "the kind of
servants you can't get any more"--and his own family, of which, because
of his good humor and a certain ability to make things go, he was
rapidly becoming the centre, and the débutante parties, and the correct
manly world of the men's clubs, and the occasional wild spree with the
gallant girls whom New Haven only knew from the fifth row. His
aspirations were conventional enough--they included even the
irreproachable shadow he would some day marry, but they differed from
the aspirations of the majority of young men in that there was no mist
over them, none of that quality which is variously known as "idealism"
or "illusion." Anson accepted without reservation the world of high
finance and high extravagance, of divorce and dissipation, of snobbery
and of privilege. Most of our lives end as a compromise--it was as a
compromise that his life began.
He and I first met in the late summer of 1917 when he was just out of
Yale, and, like the rest of us, was swept up into the systematized
hysteria of the war. In the blue-green uniform of the naval aviation he
came down to Pensacola, where the hotel orchestras played "I'm sorry,
dear," and we young officers danced with the girls. Every one liked him,
and though he ran with the drinkers and wasn't an especially good pilot,
even the instructors treated him with a certain respect. He was always
having long talks with them in his confident, logical voice--talks which
ended by his getting himself, or, more frequently, another officer, out
of some impending trouble. He was convivial, bawdy, robustly avid for
pleasure, and we were all surprised when he fell in love with a
conservative and rather proper girl.
Her name was Paula Legendre, a dark, serious beauty from somewhere in
California. Her family kept a winter residence just outside of town, and
in spite of her primness she was enormously popular; there is a large
class of men whose egotism can't endure humor in a woman. But Anson
wasn't that sort, and I couldn't understand the attraction of her
"sincerity"--that was the thing to say about her--for his keen and
somewhat sardonic mind.
Nevertheless, they fell in love--and on her terms. He no longer joined
the twilight gathering at the De Sota bar, and whenever they were seen
together they were engaged in a long, serious dialogue, which must have
gone on several weeks. Long afterward he told me that it was not about
anything in particular but was composed on both sides of immature and
even meaningless statements--the emotional content that gradually came
to fill it grew up not out of the words but out of its enormous
seriousness. It was a sort of hypnosis. Often it was interrupted, giving
way to that emasculated humor we call fun; when they were alone it was
resumed again, solemn, low-keyed, and pitched so as to give each other a
sense of unity in feeling and thought. They came to resent any
interruptions of it, to be unresponsive to facetiousness about life,
even to the mild cynicism of their contemporaries. They were only happy
when the dialogue was going on, and its seriousness bathed them like the
amber glow of an open fire. Toward the end there came an interruption
they did not resent--it began to be interrupted by passion.
Oddly enough, Anson was as engrossed in the dialogue as she was and as
profoundly affected by it, yet at the same time aware that on his side
much was insincere, and on hers much was merely simple. At first, too,
he despised her emotional simplicity as well, but with his love her
nature deepened and blossomed, and he could despise it no longer. He
felt that if he could enter into Paula's warm safe life he would be
happy. The long preparation of the dialogue removed any constraint--he
taught her some of what he had learned from more adventurous women, and
she responded with a rapt holy intensity. One evening after a dance they
agreed to marry, and he wrote a long letter about her to his mother. The
next day Paula told him that she was rich, that she had a personal
fortune of nearly a million dollars.