"Who does? However, I'll show you what I can before I sail--I'm going
to Russia next week, you know--and by way of a beginning I've brought
you a ready-made engagement for to-night. We'll dine at my club, and
see the Follies, and after that--well, I've got you a card to Mrs.
Ruysdael's dance."
"This doesn't sound like preparation for work," chuckled Luke; "but,
thank you--and who is Mrs. Ruysdael?"
"Who is Mrs. Ruysdael?" Porcellis repeated. He was stroking the spot
where his blond mustache had been a year ago, but where, because
mustaches had since become unfashionable, it no longer grew. "Why, the
Mrs. Ruysdael, of course: Mrs. Cornelius Ruysdael."
When he heard it in full, Luke remembered the name. Of Mrs. Ruysdael he
knew only that she was a woman of fashion; but her husband was
everywhere known as the worthy representative of a Dutch New York name
long eminent in the country's history. The family had been rich for
several generations, but they had proved themselves surprisingly able to
wear the cloak of wealth with dignity.
"I remember now," said Luke. "They're said to be among the heaviest
real-estate owners in New York, aren't they?"
Porcellis laughed.
"Well, yes, they are," he conceded: "but none of us ever think of that.
I doubt if even they do. They leave their estate to their agents to
manage, and we leave the story of it to the yellow press to talk about."
"I never knew there was any story connected with it."
"No? Well, for my part, I don't believe there is. Some labor-agitator
searched the records and tried to prove they made their first fortune
buying condemned muskets from the British garrisons just before the
Revolution and selling them as good arms to the Continental Congress.
He said they invested the profits in New York land as soon as prices
fell after the Declaration of Independence was signed."
"Was it true?" asked Luke.
Porcellis shrugged.
"It was all a long time ago, at any rate," he said, "and the Ruysdaels
are very nice people now: you would never guess they were worth more
than a million. Besides, Charley--that's my Wall Street cousin--says
they've somehow funded their landholdings with one of Old Nap's
concerns. I don't know. I don't pretend to understand finance."
Luke felt extremely ignorant.
"Old Nap?" he wondered. "Who's he?"
In reply, Porcellis mentioned the name of the man of whom Luke's father
had spoken so highly that morning at the railway station in Americus.
Huber pushed forward a chair.
"Sit down," he said, "and have a cigarette. I want to ask you one
question more. You've been all over the map. You've got the
cosmopolitan point of view. What do you think of this man?"
"I think," said Porcellis, accepting both the chair and the cigarette,
"that it doesn't make any difference what I think of him." He lit the
cigarette. "But I'm quite sure," he presently added, "he is the sort of
man nobody can help thinking _something_, about. Why do you ask?"
"Because----" Luke was not certain why he did ask. He could not
politely inquire of Porcellis whether he believed that his
brother-in-law had accepted, to aid his election, money from a power
that could not but be interested in the official actions of a
District-Attorney of New York. "Because," he compromised, "my father
was speaking to me about him only this morning."
"So were a lot of other fathers. So are a lot of other fathers every
morning. That's greatness. What I think is that Old Napoleon is the
greatest man this country has ever produced."
"You think so well of him as that!" Luke was amazed.
"I didn't say I thought he was good," Porcellis defined; "I said I
thought he was great. Greatness hasn't anything to do with good or bad,
or only accidentally. The greatest national figure a country produces
is the figure that most intensely and--well, and powerfully--expresses
that country. That's why Shakespeare was the greatest man produced by
Elizabethan England."
"Oh--Shakespeare!" laughed Luke.
"Why not?" asked Porcellis. "Shakespeare lived in a country and time of
expanding intellectual conceptions, and he expressed them the way I've
said. We live in a country and time of tremendous financial combination
and expansion; we're not working in the material of intellectual
conceptions, except as we conceive finance intellectually; we're working
with figures and dollar-marks and differentials and compound interest
and dividends as complicated as an astronomer's calculations. Well,
this little old man in Wall Street can see those figures before they
happen; he can make them come to life out of nothing--make them happen,
give them life just the way Shakespeare gave life to another sort of
ideas. These ideas are the ideas of our country; they are our country.
Here is a genius that most fully and powerfully, most intensely and
perfectly expresses them, and so I say he is the American Shakespeare."
Luke writhed in his chair opposite Porcellis. He could withhold the
question no longer.
"Then"--he almost blurted it out at last--"those campaign
contributions----"
But Porcellis was scandal-proof.
"Those!" he said lightly. "You'll have to ask Brouwer Leighton about
them."
Sec.3. After they left the theater, the two young men were driven,
again in the motor belonging to Mrs. Porcellis, up the noisy river of
yellow light that was Broadway, where their vehicle joined a long
procession, until they reached a cross-street in the early Fifties.
Then their car darted from the parade and plunged through a dark
thoroughfare to Fifth Avenue. They drew up before a house where Luke
could at first see little save that from its doorway, high above the
pavement, a long and narrow tent of white canvas striped with red ran to
the curb. Several other motors were ahead of theirs, so theirs had to
wait its turn.
"Is this the place?" asked Luke.
Porcellis nodded.
"It does look rather like a barn from the outside," he said, guessing
his companion's thought and agreeing with it. "That's a Ruysdael way:
they maintain the old tradition of severe exteriors; they don't believe
in flaunting their wealth in the face of the public; they believe in
keeping the best for their friends."
Luke leaned shamelessly forward. Whenever he had gone to dances
heretofore, the houses of his hostesses had shown lights in every window
and dispensed a glow of festivity to the streets; but this house,
essentially forbidding, stood dark and silent, its windows masked.
Except for the faint illumination of a street-lamp that sputtered bluely
at the corner, the only scintillations visible were two thin lines of
radiance, one along the pavement, at the bottom of the entrance-tent,
and a corresponding one above, between the walls of the tent and the
loose overhang of its roof: these and a glowing spot at the end of the
tent upon the curb where, between rows of ragged night figures watching
the scene, dismounting guests appeared and disappeared--white
shirt-fronts, and opera-cloaks, and the glint of jewels--like pictures
in dissolving views.
With each arrival, motors swung away from the entrance, turned to the
other side of the street, and proceeded to the farther corner there to
await their recall, while their drivers gossiped in the darkness or
drank beer at a convenient bar. Thus, with starts and stops like those
of an American railway train leaving a station, the Porcellis car slowly
approached the canvas mouth.
When that mouth yawned directly before them, Luke and Porcellis, the
door of their automobile held open by a servant in livery, descended
into the tent. A string of incandescent lamps had been hung in this
corridor--it was the light from these lamps which crept from above and
below the walls--and a thick carpet covered the pavement. Along it they
walked to the house-steps, where two turbaned East Indians stood ready
to relieve them of their hats and top-coats and show them to a room
prepared for incoming men-guests.
"Now," said Porcellis, "you see what I was talking about."
A greater contrast between the outside and the inside of the Ruysdael
house it would, indeed, have been hard to find. The reception hall was
of white marble and of a height generally seen only in public buildings.
Pillars held the distant ceiling; the staircase rose in a pentagonal
tower, a copy, Porcellis explained, of that in the Francis First wing of
the Chateau of Blois; the light, although its sources were hidden, was
almost blinding to eyes fresh from the darkness of the street; there was
music heard lightly from a distance, and the air was faint with the
scent of American Beauty roses.
Porcellis and Luke went up the carved staircase in the tower, which was
open at each landing so as to command a view of the hall, and were
directed to the men's room, where three valets were in attendance.
Against the walls of this room were several dressing-tables, each with a
strong lamp before it and each covered with toilet articles.
"I'm not sure," said Luke, in a whisper that was both amazed and amused,
"whether I'm in a belle's boudoir or a musical comedy star's
dressing-room."
"It's a judicious combination," said Porcellis in a conversational tone
that disregarded the fluttering attendants. He picked up a gold-backed
buffer and polished his always coruscating finger-nails.
Luke contented himself with a touch to his hair, which had a way of
standing upright, and a tug at his tie, which was forever straining
toward independence.
"What's this?" he asked as he lifted a glass case. He removed its lid
and sniffed at the contents. "It looks like rouge," he added.
"It is," said Porcellis.
"But I thought this room was for men," said Luke.
Porcellis drew down the corners of his sensitive mouth.
"It is," he said again.
They went toward the ballroom.
A man-servant with those brief side-whiskers which, twenty years before,
were used to proclaim the millionaire, stood splendidly against the
crush about the doorway. He bent to each newcomer and secured a name,
which, turning his head, but not moving his body, he then shouted, from
an impassive face, into the ballroom.