_The shade of those our days that had no tongue._
I
It was last winter, after a twelve years' absence from New York, that
I saw again, at one of the Jim Cumnors' dinners, my old friend Halston
Merrick.
The Cumnors' house is one of the few where, even after such a lapse
of time, one can be sure of finding familiar faces and picking up old
threads; where for a moment one can abandon one's self to the illusion
that New York humanity is a shade less unstable than its bricks and
mortar. And that evening in particular I remember feeling that there
could be no pleasanter way of re-entering the confused and careless
world to which I was returning than through the quiet softly-lit
diningroom in which Mrs. Cumnor, with a characteristic sense of my
needing to be broken in gradually, had contrived to assemble so many
friendly faces.
I was glad to see them all, including the three or four I did not know,
or failed to recognize, but had no difficulty in passing as in the
tradition and of the group; but I was most of all glad--as I rather
wonderingly found--to set eyes again on Halston Merrick.
He and I had been at Harvard together, for one thing, and had shared
there curiosities and ardours a little outside the current tendencies:
had, on the whole, been more critical than our comrades, and less
amenable to the accepted. Then, for the next following years, Merrick
had been a vivid and promising figure in young American life. Handsome,
careless, and free, he had wandered and tasted and compared. After
leaving Harvard he had spent two years at Oxford; then he had accepted
a private secretaryship to our Ambassador in England, and had come back
from this adventure with a fresh curiosity about public affairs at home,
and the conviction that men of his kind should play a larger part in
them. This led, first, to his running for a State Senatorship which he
failed to get, and ultimately to a few months of intelligent activity in
a municipal office. Soon after being deprived of this post by a change
of party he had published a small volume of delicate verse, and, a year
later, an odd uneven brilliant book on Municipal Government. After that
one hardly knew where to look for his next appearance; but chance rather
disappointingly solved the problem by killing off his father and placing
Halston at the head of the Merrick Iron Foundry at Yonkers.
His friends had gathered that, whenever this regrettable contingency
should occur, he meant to dispose of the business and continue his life
of free experiment. As often happens in just such cases, however, it was
not the moment for a sale, and Merrick had to take over the management
of the foundry. Some two years later he had a chance to free himself;
but when it came he did not choose to take it. This tame sequel to an
inspiriting start was disappointing to some of us, and I was among those
disposed to regret Merrick's drop to the level of the prosperous. Then
I went away to a big engineering job in China, and from there to Africa,
and spent the next twelve years out of sight and sound of New York
doings.
During that long interval I heard of no new phase in Merrick's
evolution, but this did not surprise me, as I had never expected from
him actions resonant enough to cross the globe. All I knew--and this did
surprise me--was that he had not married, and that he was still in the
iron business. All through those years, however, I never ceased to wish,
in certain situations and at certain turns of thought, that Merrick were
in reach, that I could tell this or that to Merrick. I had never, in the
interval, found any one with just his quickness of perception and just
his sureness of response.
After dinner, therefore, we irresistibly drew together. In Mrs. Cumnor's
big easy drawing-room cigars were allowed, and there was no break in the
communion of the sexes; and, this being the case, I ought to have sought
a seat beside one of the ladies among whom we were allowed to remain.
But, as had generally happened of old when Merrick was in sight, I found
myself steering straight for him past all minor ports of call.
There had been no time, before dinner, for more than the barest
expression of satisfaction at meeting, and our seats had been at
opposite ends of the longish table, so that we got our first real look
at each other in the secluded corner to which Mrs. Cumnor's vigilance
now directed us.
Merrick was still handsome in his stooping tawny way: handsomer perhaps,
with thinnish hair and more lines in his face, than in the young excess
of his good looks. He was very glad to see me and conveyed his gladness
by the same charming smile; but as soon as we began to talk I felt
a change. It was not merely the change that years and experience and
altered values bring. There was something more fundamental the matter
with Merrick, something dreadful, unforeseen, unaccountable: Merrick had
grown conventional and dull.
In the glow of his frank pleasure in seeing me I was ashamed to analyze
the nature of the change; but presently our talk began to flag--fancy a
talk with Merrick flagging!--and self-deception became impossible as I
watched myself handing out platitudes with the gesture of the salesman
offering something to a purchaser "equally good." The worst of it was
that Merrick--Merrick, who had once felt everything!--didn't seem to
feel the lack of spontaneity in my remarks, but hung on them with a
harrowing faith in the resuscitating power of our past. It was as if he
hugged the empty vessel of our friendship without perceiving that the
last drop of its essence was dry.
But after all, I am exaggerating. Through my surprise and disappointment
I felt a certain sense of well-being in the mere physical presence of my
old friend. I liked looking at the way his dark hair waved away from
the forehead, at the tautness of his dry brown cheek, the thoughtful
backward tilt of his head, the way his brown eyes mused upon the
scene through lowered lids. All the past was in his way of looking and
sitting, and I wanted to stay near him, and felt that he wanted me
to stay; but the devil of it was that neither of us knew what to talk
about.
It was this difficulty which caused me, after a while, since I could not
follow Merrick's talk, to follow his eyes in their roaming circuit of
the room.
At the moment when our glances joined, his had paused on a lady
seated at some distance from our corner. Immersed, at first, in the
satisfaction of finding myself again with Merrick, I had been only half
aware of this lady, as of one of the few persons present whom I did not
know, or had failed to remember. There was nothing in her appearance to
challenge my attention or to excite my curiosity, and I don't suppose I
should have looked at her again if I had not noticed that my friend was
doing so.
She was a woman of about forty-seven, with fair faded hair and a young
figure. Her gray dress was handsome but ineffective, and her pale and
rather serious face wore a small unvarying smile which might have
been pinned on with her ornaments. She was one of the women in whom
increasing years show rather what they have taken than what they have
bestowed, and only on looking closely did one see that what they had
taken must have been good of its kind.
Phil Cumnor and another man were talking to her, and the very intensity
of the attention she bestowed on them betrayed the straining of
rebellious thoughts. She never let her eyes stray or her smile drop; and
at the proper moment I saw she was ready with the proper sentiment.
The party, like most of those that Mrs. Cumnor gathered about her, was
not composed of exceptional beings. The people of the old vanished
New York set were not exceptional: they were mostly cut on the same
convenient and unobtrusive pattern; but they were often exceedingly
"nice." And this obsolete quality marked every look and gesture of the
lady I was scrutinizing.
While these reflections were passing through my mind I was aware that
Merrick's eyes rested still on her. I took a cross-section of his look
and found in it neither surprise nor absorption, but only a certain
sober pleasure just about at the emotional level of the rest of the
room.
If he continued to look at her, his expression seemed to say, it was
only because, all things considered, there were fewer reasons for
looking at anybody else.
This made me wonder what were the reasons for looking at _her_; and as
a first step toward enlightenment I said:--"I'm sure I've seen the lady
over there in gray--"
Merrick detached his eyes and turned them on me with a wondering look.
"Seen her? You know her." He waited. "_Don't_ you know her? It's Mrs.
Reardon."
I wondered that he should wonder, for I could not remember, in
the Cumnor group or elsewhere, having known any one of the name he
mentioned.
"But perhaps," he continued, "you hadn't heard of her marriage? You knew
her as Mrs. Trant."