FIRST HARVESTS
WORKS OF FICTION
BY
F. J. STIMSON
(_J. S. of Dale_)
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By the Major
The Bells of Avalon
Mr. Pillian Wraye
The Seven Lights of Asia
A First Love Letter
Bill Shelby
Two Passions and a Cardinal Virtue
Gloriana; a Fairy Story
In a Garret
Our Consul at Carlsruhe
A Tale Unfolded
Mrs. Knollys
Passages from the Diary of a Hong Kong Merchant
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FIRST HARVESTS
_An Episode in the Life of Mrs. Levison Gower_
A Satire Without a Moral
BY
F. J. STIMSON
(J. S. OF DALE)
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1888
COPYRIGHT, 1888, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
TROW’S
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
NEW YORK.
TO THE READER.
_I have called this book a satire; yet have sought within that key an
overtone of hope and faith. Our early generation of writers could be
all optimists: for they wrote of virgin soil. But since their day has
passed, our country’s first-fruits were garnered. With these we have to
deal._
_F. J. S._
Boston, November 6, 1888.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE SILAS STARBUCK OIL COMPANY, 1
CHAPTER II.
FLOSSIE STARBUCK ASPIRES, 15
CHAPTER III.
FLOSSIE STARBUCK ATTAINS, 24
CHAPTER IV.
ARTHUR HOLYOKE’S DREAMS, 34
CHAPTER V.
OF GRACIE HOLYOKE AND OF HER HEART, 43
CHAPTER VI.
THE JUDGE SUMS UP HIS CASE, 52
CHAPTER VII.
ARTHUR SEES THE WORLD, 61
CHAPTER VIII.
ARTHUR SEES MORE OF THE WORLD, 75
CHAPTER IX.
ARTHUR GETS ON IN THE WORLD, 88
CHAPTER X.
IN WHICH ARTHUR MEETS A WEARIED SOUL, 98
CHAPTER XI.
THE STORY OF A QUIET SUNDAY EVENING, 112
CHAPTER XII.
A COMMUNIST AND HIS SISTER, 123
CHAPTER XIII.
UNA AND THE LION, 137
CHAPTER XIV.
A SOCIAL SUCCESS, 146
CHAPTER XV.
THE DIVERSIONS OF FINE LADIES, 156
CHAPTER XVI.
IN MAIDEN MEDITATION, 164
CHAPTER XVII.
A CULTIVATOR OF THISTLES, 171
CHAPTER XVIII.
A DAY’S PLEASURE, 190
CHAPTER XIX.
A COACH AND FOUR COUPLES, 215
CHAPTER XX.
THE CHARIOT OF THE CARELESS GODS, 227
CHAPTER XXI.
ARTHUR GOES HOME, 244
CHAPTER XXII.
A HOUSE BUILT WITH HANDS, 259
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE SLAVES OF THE LAMP, 273
CHAPTER XXIV.
MAMIE GOES TO THE SHOW, 298
CHAPTER XXV.
KITTY FARNUM TAKES THE PRIZE, 308
CHAPTER XXVI.
FLOSSIE ENJOYS HERSELF, 319
CHAPTER XXVII.
JEM STARBUCK AMUSES HIMSELF, 329
CHAPTER XXVIII.
ARTHUR HAS A LITTLE DINNER, 349
CHAPTER XXIX.
CAPTAIN DERWENT SEALS HIS FATE, 360
CHAPTER XXX.
ARTHUR IS MADE HAPPY, 370
CHAPTER XXXI.
A FINANCIER’S DINNER, 376
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE DEACON’S VENGEANCE, 384
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE DUVAL BALL, 395
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE DUVAL BALL, Concluded, 402
CHAPTER XXXV.
SORTIE DU BAL, 415
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE NIGHT AT THE WORKS, 421
CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE OLDEST MEMBER, 435
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE END OF THE EPISODE, 445
CHAPTER XXXIX.
FLOSSIE DECLINES, 458
CHAPTER XL.
THE FLOWERS IN THE HARVEST, 466
FIRST HARVESTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE SILAS STARBUCK OIL COMPANY.
On the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-second Street,
just where the long rise of the avenue begins, and vanishes in higher
perspective like the stage of a theatre, its long slope always dotted
with a multitude of yellow carriages, cabs, and dark-green private
broughams, there stands a large brown-stone house of irreproachable
respectability. The steps in front of the door are also of brown-stone;
and the columns on either side terminate in the hollow globes of iron,
painted green, common to a thousand other houses in New York. Upon the
first floor above the basement are three windows and a door; in the
second story are four windows, one above the door; and in the third,
four others again. The windows are all of the same size; but those of
the second and third stories are plain, while the lowest have above
them an oval design with flowery, curved ornaments. What the original
designer of these windows sought to express in them is not clear; but
subsequent builders, not seeing the need of expressing anything in
window-caps, but supposing some adornment proper in that place, have
copied them without deviation, much as a lady ties a bow-knot on her
lapdog’s tail.
Yet, such as it is, this square brown box contains a flower of
American civilization. And flowers are gay, conspicuous, noteworthy
in themselves; but the more noteworthy as bearing the seeds that
shall be multiplied in next year’s crop. No one would perhaps think
that this house, standing unadorned and unnoteworthy on the corner
of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-second Street, was so rare a possession,
or contained in itself so much; that this square box, valued solely
because of its proximity to other similar square boxes, represented
the American social apotheosis--the pure spheres of perfect democratic
joy, the acme, in this republic of terrestrial success. Yet of the
fact there can be no question. That little vertebral ridge named Fifth
Avenue, with its one or two similar ridges, its few timid excursions
and venturings in by-streets to the east and west, represents the
flower and the crown of things; only those there live who can command
at least wealth or power at will; neither blood nor brains nor breeding
can maintain themselves upon that vantage-coin unaided and alone. So
have we seen some bed of oysters, planted at just the proper level
of the shoal, look down with superiority and scorn upon those below,
cumbered with the sea-weed, and those above, left awash at low spring
tides. Merely to own this house, and not to live in it; to own it
only as some miser owns a picture or a rare gem, for the pleasure of
possession--would cost, in interest and taxes, the labor of some score
of able-bodied men each year. To live in it, with servants trained to
feudal manners and address, with the necessary wines and equipage and
flowers and feathers that attend so rare a gem, would cost the earnings
of an army. Has the fortunate possessor of the house such an army at
his call? Surely; else how could he keep it? We shall see them shortly.
And what of the inside of the house?--is it suited to the high position
of the inmates? Softly, my good madam; a stranger can hardly know how
difficult it is to gain access to this mansion, and how exclusive is
the set which Mrs. Gower leads.
For the pedestrians on the pavement look up to No. 2002 with an air of
respect. Few of them but know the house as Mrs. Levison Gower’s. And
even the pedestrians on the pavement, in this select spot, are of a
picked and chosen class. Many of them are young girls, robed for this
winter (it is the fashion) in trailing gowns of deep-blue velvet; many
more are young men, carrying their arms bow-leggedly, as it were, as if
not satisfied with the natural stiffness of their starch and buckram,
but adding the conscious poise of art, to make you note that they are
dressed, not clothed alone. And not one of them that passes but knows
and values at its due the house in which you take so little interest.
This is the respectable quarter; and the great, ugly house stands
insolently, as of social position assured.
But our great city is too great, too human, to show us much of this.
Like most fecund mothers, like nature herself, her luxuriance is
somewhat slatternly, her exuberance has burst its stays. Here and there
our manners, our conventions, trim a hedge or two; but everywhere the
forests, and even at our feet, the weeds, grow wild. Fifth Avenue,
and its short purlieus, is the home of society; but elsewhere in the
island of Manhattan humanity lives, unkempt, full of sap--that great
humanity which has made Mrs. Gower, and which she so studiously avoids.
For she lives _in_ society; and perhaps has never thought that it is
on humanity she lives. Let us walk from her great house down the side
street in search of it.
For a block or two the houses will stand shoulder to shoulder like
a well-drilled rank, well kept, well swept, and uniformed in the
same non-committal, smug, respectable brown-stone, a very broadcloth
of building. Then the houses begin to grow narrower, with thinner
walls, though still they keep their facing on the street. Soon you
pass stables, city stables; their stale, sour odor, puffing from the
rarely opened windows, is very different from the sweet, healthy
smells of a country farm-yard. Now the street is lined with long, low,
blank-windowed warehouses, built cheaply of brick and studded with
star-shaped iron clamps; you wonder what may be their use, for the
windows, even when not curtained with blue paper, are impenetrable and
do not avow their vocation; nor, usually, is there any sign, though
the ugly walls are covered with advertisements of patent medicines,
powders for making bread, powders for washing clothes, powders for
feeding children, Giant Destroyers of moths, and the like. But soon
this limbo is passed, and you come to the populated districts of
humanity. Here the windows are no longer blank; the houses overflow
with children; stout mothers sit nursing them in the doorways and
gossip with their neighbors in the second story across the way; things
in general are used too much, to keep their varnish from the shop. I am
afraid Mrs. Gower would call it squalor.
The retail shops do a driving business in the avenue around the corner;
on the curb, under a ragged locust-tree, is a canvas shed for horses,
too busy to take their feed respectably in a stable; the brick police
station is the only building having pretension to respectability. An
ice-cream vender sells his wares openly on the street, in front of a
hospitable barber’s--the processes of human life are open and avowed;
great iron gas-retorts are seen above the roofs of the houses. There
is a row of huge smelting-furnaces, with straight lines of stunted
willow-trees shading them; and the air is full of the crash of hammered
iron. The pedestrians on the sidewalks walk with the same bent arms
as on Fifth Avenue; but the arms are bent with labor, and the hands
are half clenched, with the curl of being but just released from some
accustomed tool. Piles of Spanish-cedar logs on the street denote our
approach to the wharves; and now the river, fretted with the traffic of
a continent, lies before us.
But our business--Mrs. Gower’s business--lies not among the wharves,
but across the river and beyond. If the wind lies in the east, you may
set your nose toward it and sniff the air--is there not already a faint
smell perceptible, a smell other than that of the salt water, a smell
artificial and complex? As we cross the river it increases. We thread
our way among the tug-boats, the scows, the flat-ended ferry-boats
and other land-lubber craft; passing all the great steamers of the
lower town, and the lumber-wharves and water-gardens of the upper, and
you may see ahead of you a series of long wharves, jutting far out
into the stream. Behind them are many acres of long, low buildings,
platforms, piles of barrels, and many huge and lofty towers of plated
iron; the wharves themselves surrounded with attendant ships--fine
ships, three-masted, with the natural beauty and symmetry that comes
from adaptation to the free winds of heaven, and not to steam and man’s
contrivance. There are no steam-boats at the wharves, and you will
wonder why; but, by this time, the rich and unctuous smell from the
wharves proceeding will demand your whole attention.
You will perhaps read the long sign, painted in letters, as it were,
life-size, displayed in long procession athwart the wharf’s end, in
square, plain, proper characters of black on white--
THE SILAS STARBUCK OIL COMPANY
--but the reading will be superfluous; for the pleasureless,
painless perception of the eye but feebly supplements the pungent,
will-arousing sensation of the other sense. It is the old battle of the
idea and the will; and the will, as always, wins. And all the world is
smell.
Many things grow clear to us as the smell grows stronger. While we
mildly wonder that a sense so little cultivated in æsthetics can bring
so strong a pain, we also perceive the reason for the absence of
steamers; for petroleum is a dangerous blessing, fond of fire, and it
takes fire to make water do its work--a lazy element, much like the
human soul.
Is there a perfume called _mille fleurs_? A thousand odors woo our
preference as we land among the great ships; but there is a certain
agreeableness in some of them, as we get used to the worst and begin
to discriminate. We can even understand the workmen growing fond of
them, as they tell us that they do; that they are also conducive to
long life seems more doubtful. All over the oil-yards are smells; as
many in variety as the colors of aniline dye, from the first rather
pleasant smell, like a cellar full of cider, barrels of cider with the
bung-holes open, to the more fetid varieties. Many places have the
sickening, capitive odor of ether, from the volatile surface-naphtha;
this, being dangerous, has a peculiar fascination of its own. For
naphtha is light, volatile, inflammable, impulsive, the aristocrat of
oils; and its odor intoxicates.
But come--we must not dally with this naphtha, this _crême de la crême_
of the upper crust--come to the receiving-tanks upon the hill. There is
a lesson in the making of oil, as in most things. I make no doubt Mr.
Tyndall would find the process quite of a piece with the evolution of
the soul. Here you see the crude oil as it came from its native earth,
in the pipe-lines from the wells; it looks like greenish molasses, and
smells of the devil. Natural depravity, we must suppose. But see it
in the tail-house; or, rather, let us first look at the stills, those
broad, black towers, under which the fire rages, like those in the
city of Dis. Here is the burning and the broiling that throws off the
grosser atoms from the pure oil of light; first, alas! first of all,
our pleasant naphtha, our cream of oils; a short hour or two is enough
for that, and it is gone. Here you see it, through the glass cover
to the iron trough in the tail-house, the first “run” of all. What a
strange liquid, as it breaks and dances in its flow--light, shining,
mobile, broken into sharp facets and flashes like cut glass; a spirit,
not an oil.
Flossie Starbuck used to fancy this was the water of the streams of
hell. A great poet had had the same idea before, which is surely to the
credit of Flossie’s imagination; for she knew nothing of great poets,
as a child.
This tail-house, or receiving-house, was a favorite haunt of hers, on
half-holidays when her father would take her to the works, for a treat.
It was pleasant, on a warm day, to stand at the window of the iron
blower-house and watch the great fan whirl its four hundred revolutions
in a minute, and feel the rush of cool air in through the open windows;
but it was more interesting to sit in the tail-house and admire the
“runs” of oil--the quick naphtha, dry and shining, with its etherous,
heady fragrance, and then the duller, yellower oils, under which the
flow of mixed water went in globules of a dirty blue. Florence could
have told you as well as any workman when the naphtha-run had passed
and it was time to turn the oil into the tanks, and whether it were
Standard, Regular, or Water-White--the same discrimination that now
she exercises upon humanity. Then, when the black, pitchy residuum
began to show, she would get the superintendent to talk to her of the
aniline, and of the lovely colors which the nasty, black stuff would
make; and how the foul-smelling paraffine was made into chewing-gum
“for young misses.” Flossie never used chewing-gum; but later in life,
when standing before Transatlantic Titians, it had come over her with a
pang that she had once admired aniline dyes; cards of which, magentas,
sea-greens, mauves, the superintendent used to give to her, and she to
place upon her bureau.
Have you had enough of oil? There is no beauty, you say, not much
of truth, and many bad smells. One moment; before we turn away
let us glance into the spraying-house. This was always Flossie’s
_bonne-bouche_, and it shall be ours.
The spraying-tank is another great, round iron tower, rusted and dingy
like the rest; but inside--have you seen the Alhambra? When Flossie
first went into the Court of the Lions, passing in through the low gate
in the ugly brick tower, to the green pool and the plashing fountain,
and the sunlight streaming in from above upon the snowy columns of
rosy marble and the rainbow-hued arabesques of those fairy vistas, the
grouped columns changing, as she walked, like clusters of fair women
holding converse in a garden--her first thought was of this. A fathom
deep the oil lies in the central pool; and as we come in from the dark
passage the spraying-fountain bursts upon us like a vision of glory.
The great room would be dark, for there are no windows, but that an
iron slide, high up above, is drawn back a quadrant of the circle of
the wall; and through this a mighty shaft of sunlight pours downward
into the whirl of golden spray. Here is the fountain of gold of the
Arabian Nights.
Cool and still lies the oil in the amber pool, clear as some golden
air; while above, the fountain whirls it in a million golden beads,
spraying into spray as fine as water, falling a golden rain, but
silent, without a splash, into the liquid rest of the basin, where it,
fine as water, foams. Thence it is ever drawn back again, and forced
through the fountain in the sun, until all commoner atoms are lost and
the pure oil is sprayed to test. And the yellow drops run in steady
curves and arches light as any lintel of the Moorish palace, and chase
each other with a merry music till they fall in the amber pool; and
there the full sun shines fair upon its surface in a gorgeous purple,
green, and iridescent sheen. And so pure and beautiful the oil lies
when the fountain is still, so clear, with the steam-pipes in the
bottom keeping it warm lest it should grow cloudy! Here Flossie would
sit and dream for hours, before she waked to the world and its real
joys, watching the oil as it was sprayed to test.
And how do they know when it is pure enough to stand the test? The
process is simple. An electric spark is applied, at the various degrees
of heat, until the oil takes fire and flashes in the pan. Temptation is
the test of all things in this world.
* * * * *
Yet many a fortune has been made in this place; and chief among them
was, and still is, the fortune of Mr. Silas Starbuck, late of New York
City, now of parts unknown, refiner of whale and sperm oils, deceased
in 1872; half the income of which fortune, the corpus being vested in
three testamentary trustees of prominence in the Presbyterian Church,
and immense wealth of their own, is annually paid by said trustees
(after deducting all necessary expenses of repairs, insurance, taxes,
care and management of the property, their own commissions, and an
annuity of $1,000 each to the American Bible Society and the Board of
Foreign Missions) to the only daughter of the said testator--Florence,
now wife of T. Levison Gower, Esq., whose “elegant residence” at No.
2002 Fifth Avenue we have already admired.
The question, how a man made his fortune, has in our days not only a
commercial but a psychological interest. Society has never had any
objection to the sale by gentlefolk of themselves; but it is only of
late years that it has permitted them the sale of anything else. You
could formerly predicate with much certainty that a gentleman who had
money had either inherited it or married it; now the problem has
become more complex. Society to-day graciously permits a man to make
money; it is even not over-critical as to the means; and we may almost
look forward to the time when a man who has gone down-town to make it
will be able to go up-town and spend it himself, and not vicariously,
by his grandchildren. This was not quite the case, however, when Silas
Starbuck was alive; and this fact had a very important bearing on Mrs.
Gower’s life. Old Starbuck, as you know, made his money, not only by
the refinement of oil, but also by selling his oil when refined--a fact
society could hardly overlook.
Si Starbuck was generally thought the weakest, as he was the youngest,
of the four sons of old Captain Starbuck, who commanded for many years
the brig _Loan_, and then the ship _Fair Helen_, both clearing from
Old Town in the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Thaddeus, Obed, and Seth
were all older brothers, who lived and grew to be captains in their
day. Si was a lazy fellow in his youth, and unadventurous; he usually
kept snug to the ship, and if he ever went aloft willingly, it was
to get the five-dollar reward that the owners paid the man who first
discovered a blow. Si was quick enough at seeing things, and was much
cuffed by his brothers--perhaps more for this one excellence than for
his many shortcomings. Silas commonly had to act as cook and general
swabber-out; all the same, he managed to keep a sound skin to his body,
and had more time for reading than the rest. At home, when the Starbuck
family got together about the fire with the older men, _emeriti_, who
stayed at home and swapped stories, Silas was the cynical listener
to their yarns of risk of life and capital. Even when they told the
history of the great three-thousand-barrel sperm take of ’38, from
Fairhaven, his eyes glistened more over the balance-sheet than at the
stories of their doings in the Pacific when the whales were killed. So,
naturally enough, when Silas got his time, he left the ship and drifted
over to the continent, going first to New Bedford, where he began
refining the materials which his brothers found.
The event justified his sagacity. None of his brothers made fortunes;
Thaddeus was killed by a black-fish in the Northern Pacific, and
Seth died of the scurvy in Hudson’s Bay. When Silas began to be
really successful in New York, he kept up little intercourse with his
brothers. Mrs. Gower does not remember them at all; so, at all events,
she tries to think, though she had one great scare. In ’64, just as she
was beginning to think of her coming out in society, her uncle Obed,
then a hale, grizzled old fellow of sixty winters (most of which were
Arctic ones), made himself very prominent by resisting a Confederate
cruiser with harpoons and a couple of bomb-lance guns. This was a
terrible event for pretty Miss Flossie, as it got into all the papers,
making quite a hero of poor old uncle Obed; and several of her father’s
friends had no more _savoir faire_ than to speak of the old whaleman
as her father’s brother at a dinner-party. However, uncle Obed never
troubled them in New York; and shortly after her marriage (to which
he had been invited by cards accidentally mailed only two days before
the wedding) he died, to her inexpressible relief; whether childless or
not, she never troubled herself to inquire. Now, however, Mrs. Gower
speaks with much pride of her brave old seafaring ancestors.
Thus it came about that all the virtue of the race, as well as all
their wealth, is now vested in Mrs. Gower and her brother, Howland
Starbuck. The wealth has but gilded the wings on which she soared; her
virtues were her own.