A HOUSE BUILT WITH HANDS.
Charlie Townley’s ways were not like the ways of other young
stock-brokers. He worked at the most unusual times, and usually made
ostentation of idleness. Many others much delighted him by thinking him
a fool, chiefly because he wore a single eye-glass; and had a drawl,
up-town. He had begun the summer--in the latter part of May, after
Arthur had gone to Mrs. Gower’s--by showing a considerable amount of
attention to no greater a person than Miss Mamie Livingstone; thereby
delighting her (as yet rudimentary) soul. The rest of his mind seemed
given, as usual, to his person, his other equipages, and the various
fashionable meetings of the season. His homage to Miss Mamie had been
of the ostentatious variety, rendered at races and at horse-shows.
He had even invited her to drive out to the Hill-and-Dale Club with
him in his dog-cart; and it had only been as a favor reluctantly
accorded to Gracie that she had not gone. Mamie was convinced that
such an expedition would make her the most talked of débutante of
the coming season; and she knew that in society (as perhaps in other
things to-day) the main element of success is advertisement. When an
article has once attracted notice, a clever person can make that notice
favorable or the reverse almost at will.
But Gracie was gaining a very powerful influence over Mamie--almost as
powerful as all the world outside. Her parents possessed none; they
were not only of a previous generation, but _ex officio_ prejudiced
advisers; the girl of the period holds their evidence almost as cheaply
as the business man holds his minister’s upon theological subjects.
Herein also was she a girl of our age, when men go to Ingersoll and
Tyndall for their theories of the unknown God, and their wives to
faith-cures and esoteric Buddhism for the practice of Christianity,
and leave the outworn Scriptures. Still, a nature like Gracie’s had
its effect, even upon a girl like Mamie. She was too quick not to be
conscious of this, and sought to make it up by chaffing and patronizing
her elder cousin.
When Gracie persuaded Mamie to go with her to Great Barrington,
Charlie was left entirely to his own devices. Some reader may say,
his vices; but Charlie was not more vicious than another. He was
almost alone--always excepting Mr. Phineas Tamms--in the office that
summer. He showed, nevertheless, no desire to get away, but manifested
a very strict attention to business. If Arthur had but known it, he
had only been asked in Charlie’s place upon the coaching party; but
Charlie was one who never made himself the cause of another’s knowing
a disagreeable fact. He had his room permanently taken at Manhattan
Beach; and he divided his leisure between this and divers clubs,
urban and suburban. Occasionally he passed a Sunday on the yacht of an
acquaintance.
Old Mr. Townley still dropped into the office two or three times a
week; he still fancied their reputation unchanged, and the business the
same as in the old concern of Charles Townley & Son, before they had
helped young Tamms out of difficulties and given him a clerkship in the
firm; and he bobbed his gray head sagely over Tamms’s exposition of
his plans. Business was quiet enough. But after the old gentleman had
fairly gone to Newport for the summer, things seemed to take a little
start. Tamms’s family were away, his wife and two showy daughters
travelling in Europe by themselves, and spending a great deal of money.
Tamms himself lived at a small hotel down at Long Branch, where he had
his private wire, and where he would occasionally rest a day in rustic
seclusion, having his mail and stock-reports brought down to him to
read. For Tamms never read books: like Mrs. Gower, he preferred the
realities.
One day early in August Charlie was invited to go down and spend the
night with his master, “the Governor,” as Charlie termed him. He
marvelled much at this, and went with much curiosity, never having
witnessed any of Mr. Tamms’s domestic arrangements. He knew that
Tamms’s womankind were travelling abroad; for he had had frequent
occasion to cash their drafts. He had often speculated at their lack of
social ambition on this side the ocean, and had come to the conclusion
that it was either because they thought it easier “over there,” or
because Tamms deemed the time had not come for that as yet. But if not,
why not?
Charlie took a little leather satchel with him, filled with railway
reports, letters, telegrams, prospectuses, and other business
documents. The boat was crammed with excursionists, clerks and their
female friends, common people, as Charlie would have called them,
evidently going down and back for the sail. Charlie secured a stool
upon the upper deck, lit a cigar, and buried his thoughts in the
stock-report of the afternoon paper; while the steamer made its way
down the teeming harbor, by the base of the statue of Liberty, then
being erected, past a Russian man-of-war, and through the green-shored
Narrows.
To a patriot turned pessimist, there is something typical in the Jersey
shore, the first American coast one sees in coming from the other
world. Think of the last coast you leave--Cornwall, for instance--with
its bold rocks, its glorious cliffs, its lofty castles that have been
strongholds, at least, of courage and of faith; fit selvage for a land
which sometime felt the nobility and the sacrifice of life. And then
look at the long, low, monotonous strip of sand, the ragged, mean bank
of crumbling clay, where the continent merely seems, as it were, sawed
off, and ends with as little majesty as some new railway embankment.
On the little bluff a gaudy row of cheap, undurable houses and hotels;
even the sea seems but an anti-climax, a necessary but uninspiring end
of things, devoid of dignity if not of danger. But the Jersey shore is
not the coast of all the continent, nor is the city of New York America.
Charlie was not troubled by these things; they seemed as natural to
him as the pink strip that marks the boundary of an atlas map. New
York was an excellent place to make money in; and these things go well
with materialism. The boat made its landing, and Charlie walked up the
long pier through the crowd--a crowd of summer boarders, seeking rest,
and who, finding rest a bore, had come down to see the evening steamer
land, for the sake of excitement. The great rollers foamed in beneath
the pier, lashing the piles indignantly; and the sea on either side was
speckled with bathers--children, men, and women, the last looking their
unloveliest in bathing-gowns.
The avenue at the pier-head was crammed with carriages--ladies, bored
with the long day, who had come there for the last faint simulacrum
of pleasure that the being seen in their own equipages still afforded
them; other ladies waiting for their tired husbands from the city. In
a handsome victoria with two long-tailed horses Charlie made out his
host; and throwing up his overcoat and satchel, took his seat beside
him.
“Hot in town?” said Tamms, laconically.
“Beastly,” answered Charlie.
“We might as well take a drive, I suppose; there’s nothing else to do
before dinner.”
Charlie silently assented; and they took their way along the red-clay
road; on the left the wooden walk and railing above the gullied bank
that met the sea, on the right a long succession of eating-houses and
candy stores; then huge barracks of hotels, then fantastic wooden
villas, which wildest fantasies of paint and stained shingles had
sought to torture into architecture. Not a tree was to be seen; and the
vast assemblage of human habitations in the sandy plain resembled more
a village of prairie dogs than anything else a traveller’s mind could
have suggested.
“Land is immensely valuable here,” said Tamms. “That’s Deacon
Thompson’s place; he paid thirty thousand for it two years ago,
and he says he’s been offered fifty since.” Charlie looked at the
red-and-green structure, with its little paddock of lawn, and felt that
it would not satisfy him; and yet he possessed not even thirty thousand
dollars. “Pretty place,” said Tamms.
Charlie assented. “Now what does a man like that want money for?” he
argued to himself. But Tamms, having paid this tribute to the æsthetic
side of life, proceeded to open his telegrams, and cast a hasty eye
on the stock-reports in Charlie’s paper; then they both conversed of
stocks and bonds. And after driving some three miles above the water
(which made continual murmur at their feet) they drove back the way
they came. At Elberon, Tamms pointed out the cottage where Garfield
died.
“I see the Starbuck Oil has declared its usual dividend,” said Charlie,
watching his chief closely. “The boys say it wasn’t earned.”
“I don’t suppose the directors would have paid it if they hadn’t
earned it,” said Tamms, sharply. Now Tamms, since they had purchased
the control, was one of the directors.
“I suppose not,” said Charlie. “I was merely saying what the boys say.”
“Humph!” was all the reply his host vouchsafed to this; and by this
time they were driving into the carefully pebbled avenue of “The
Mistletoe,” which was Mr. Tamms’s abode. It was a small hotel, partly
surrounded by glass galleries, in one of which three young men were
sitting at a lunch-table, over claret and seltzer and liqueurs, though
it was after six o’clock. The house was most ornately furnished; a
little yellow-haired girl of twelve, dressed in pale lilac silk, with
a short skirt, and mauve silk stockings on her long little legs, was
standing at the counter talking to the clerk. All the servants were in
livery, and Charlie made a mental note that the place was unexpectedly
“swell.”
“You want to go up to your room before dinner, I suppose,” said Tamms,
as if making a concession to Charlie’s juvenile weaknesses. Charlie
found his room a small apartment, with a rather expensive carpet and
a most overpowering wall-paper; and it had the unusual luxury of a
dressing-room attached. The sea was quite out of sight; but his room
looked out upon the dusty street, and a printed placard on the wall
informed him that its cost was twelve dollars a day. There was neither
view, nor hills, nor country, nor even trees (save a line of petted
young oaks that gave the place its name), in sight; but in every
direction the eye was met by scores upon scores of wooden houses; and
on the clipped grass that struggled with the red-clay plain the sun’s
rays still beat mercilessly.
They dined sumptuously; and had champagne, which was, with Tamms, the
only alternative for water. A score or so of richly dressed ladies,
with their husbands, were at the tables, including the little girl
in lilac silk, who drank champagne also. The mother of the little
girl--a magnificent woman, with black hair, carefully dressed, like
a salad--sat opposite them; and her husband leaned his elbow on the
table and his beard upon the palm of his hand, and talked to Tamms,
between the courses. Charlie was introduced as “a young man in my
office,” and was treated by the lady with undissembled scorn; indeed,
she condescended even to Tamms. And Charlie felt all the delight
of some explorer landed among savages, who prefer colored beads to
diamonds. “Positively,” thought Charlie, “she does not even know that
I am Charlie Townley!” Mrs. Haberman certainly did not, and would have
refused him her daughter’s hand in marriage, that evening, had he
asked for it. And again it occurred to Charlie that wealth was the one
universal good, after all.
Tamms certainly thought so; and when they got out on the piazza, began
to talk about it. “Mr. Townley,” said he, “I think I have observed
that while you are not over-attentive to the business, you can keep a
secret.”
“You are very kind, sir,” said Charlie.
“The fact is, the Starbuck Oil Company has proved a very bad investment
indeed for the Allegheny Central Railroad Company.”
“Dear me!” said Charlie, sympathetically, but as if inviting further
confidence. Tamms looked at him for a moment, and then went on:
“The oil works showed the usual profit, but upon closing the accounts
of the first year of the new terminal enterprise, we find that the
property has failed to pay even its running expenses. In fact the
company will probably default on the next coupon of the Terminal
bonds.--How many of them have we left?”
Charlie was silent a moment, as if to count.
“Only a little over a hundred thousand,” said Charlie, “not counting
those we are carrying for our customers.”
“You will of course have to look after their margins,” said Tamms,
absent-mindedly. “Sell at once if they do not respond.”
(“The old Shylock!”) thought Charlie. “Certainly, sir,” he said. “Shall
I sell the hundred thousand we have left of our own?”
Tamms looked at our young friend sternly. “And profit by our official
knowledge of the coming default? Certainly not, sir. We will bear
our loss with the rest.” And Tamms drew himself up and placed his
right hand in the breast of his black frock-coat, much as if he were
addressing posterity--or a newspaper reporter, as Charlie reflected.
This sudden high moral attitude was admirable, if inexplicable.
“But,” said Charlie, “the bonds being guaranteed by the Allegheny
Central Railroad----”
“Guaranteed by the Allegheny Central?” interrupted Tamms, in
astonishment, his whity-blue eyes opened to their fullest extent.
“That was certainly my impression, sir,” faltered Charlie. For he
remembered that he himself had composed a newspaper item to that effect.
“Here is the original circular under which the bonds were issued,”
said Tamms, with dignity; and Charlie cast his eye over it timorously.
There was certainly nothing in it about a guaranty, though Charlie had
a distinct impression that when the bonds were “listed” on the Stock
Exchange this had been the general understanding. “You must be thinking
of some mere newspaper rumor,” added Tamms.
“Very possibly, sir,” Charlie replied, meekly; and just then an
elaborately dressed woman of rather flamboyant appearance passed
through the glass-covered piazza in which they were sitting, and Mr.
Tamms scrambled hastily upon his feet and bowed. Charlie followed
suit, though surprised at this unusual demonstration of his impassive
principal; and as he looked at him, he fancied that he saw the faintest
trace of some embarrassment.
“She is not a guest of the hotel,” said Tamms. “Her name is Beaumont, I
believe; she owns an adjoining cottage.”
“Dear me!” said Charlie. “That is very bad for people who own the
stock.”
“Own what stock?” said Tamms.
“The Starbuck Oil,” said Charlie, in a tone as if adding “of course.”
“Oh, ah, yes,” said Tamms. “It is most unfortunate. Still, they should
have exchanged it for Allegheny Central when we gave them the chance.”
Charlie suddenly remembered that all the stock had not been exchanged.
“I suppose our people hold a majority, of course,” said Charlie. And
again he looked at Tamms.
But to this Mr. Tamms vouchsafed no answer; he apparently did not hear
it, for he was already rising and putting on his gloves. “Shall we take
a stroll?”
“I should like nothing better,” said Charlie, heartily; and Tamms
having sent for two cigars (for which, as Charlie noted, he paid fifty
cents apiece), they took their way across the close-cropped lawn.
“That, I am told,” said Mr. Tamms, pointing to a gayly lighted pagoda
opposite, “which they call the Maryland Club, is in reality nothing
better than a gambling house.”
“Dear me!” said Charlie.
“It is an outrage upon our civilization that such social plague-spots
are openly tolerated;” a sentiment from which Charlie could not
withhold his assent, though he was glad the darkness prevented Mr.
Tamms from seeing the smile which accompanied it. Nothing more was said
between them for some time; Mr. Tamms was evidently wrapped in thoughts
of business, and Charlie for his part was considering that previous
state of her existence, in which he had known Mrs. Beaumont before.
So musing, they came to the plank-walk above the sea; it was almost
deserted of promenaders, and below it, from the darkness of the night,
came in the long ocean rollers, shining whitely on the shallow beach,
as if gifted with some radiance of their own. They leaned some time
over a railing by a bath-pavilion, and watched the breakers in silence;
some women were in the sea--it was the servants from the hotel, bathing
in the only hour that was allowed to them. And from the great hotel
behind them came some vulgar music from a band.
“They are having a ball at the Beau-Monde to-night, I believe,” said
Tamms, at last. “Would you like to look in?”
Charlie professed his willingness; and they walked across the dusty
street to the huge caravanserai, its hundred windows flaming with
light. They found the veranda crowded with perhaps a thousand people,
sitting in groups, the ladies in white or low-necked dresses, their
diamond ear-rings flashing thick as fire-flies above a summer swamp.
Among them were numerous Jews and Jewesses; the latter, at least, a
splendid, full-blooded, earth-compelling race, though their males more
wizened. In the great ball-room some score or more of children were
dancing to a waltz, but no grown people as yet. These were as elegantly
attired as their parents, only that they did not wear low-necked gowns,
but in lieu of this had short skirts and gay silk stockings reaching
well above the knee. Among them was the twelve-year-old miss in lilac
from the Mistletoe; and many of these had already diamond solitaires
and more than the airs and graces of a woman of the world. Their cheeks
were flushed, and their long hair tossing about them; some few were
romping frankly, but most were too Dignified for this; and as their
silk sashes fluttered and their silk stockings twinkled in the dance,
they were undeniably a pretty sight, and might have been a pleasant
one, to their mothers. But I think a country hay-mow had been better
for them.
But these same mothers were sitting on the piazza outside, not yet
too old to flirt, and taking more pleasure in showing off their
dresses than perhaps their children did, as yet. And those who were
too ill-favored by Heaven for this could at least talk about spending
money, and about each other. Tamms soon found a congenial group, a
group consisting of Mrs. Beaumont and himself; and Charlie was left
to his own devices. He drifted into the bar-room and took a drink,
by way of killing time; and thereabout he found the husbands mostly
congregated. And, as their wives had been talking of spending money,
they were talking about making it; and Charlie listened some time and
then went home alone.
When he got to the Mistletoe, he called for a telegraph blank and wrote
a telegram to Mrs. Levison Gower. It ran as follows:
“I think you had better sell your Starbuck Oil. Who is attending to
your affairs in town? C. T.”
Surely, with all his faults, our friend thus proved himself a knight
faithful and loyal, _à la mode_. But having written it, Charlie
remembered that he did not know where to send it; for Mrs. Gower was
off in a chariot which bore no freight of worldly care. Was she not
mistress of Aladdin’s lamp? She had but to rub a finger, and all things
were heaped at her feet. Aye; but the slaves of the lamp, who were
they? Suppose they were not faithful; suppose they proved unruly and
rose up in revolt? Did not even an Aladdin’s slave turn out to be one
of the Genii?
Townley liked Mrs. Gower, and did not wish her to be humbled. Socially,
she helped him still. Should he say Lenox? He thought a moment; and the
upshot of his deliberations was a resolve to do nothing for a day at
least. Whereupon he went to bed, and, let us hope, to pleasant dreams.
For he could not quite account for Tamms’s virtuous refusal to sell
their own bonds before the coming default.