The Diversions of a Young Multi-millionaire
To be idle and lavish of money, twenty-five years old, with the
appetites keen and the need for action always pressing; then to have
loved a girl with quick, strong, youthful ardour, and to have had the
ideal smirched by gossip, then shattered before his amazed eyes,--this
is a situation in which the male animal is apt to behave inequably. In
the language of the estimable Herr Doctor von Herzlich, he will seek
those avenues of modification in which the least struggle is required.
In the simpler phrasing of Uncle Peter Bines, he will "cut loose."
During the winter that now followed Percival Bines behaved according to
either formula, as the reader may prefer. He early ascertained his
limitations with respect to New York and its people.
"Say, old man," he asked Herbert Delancey Livingston one night, across
the table at their college club, "are all the people in New York
society impecunious?"
Livingston had been with him at Harvard, and Livingston's family was so
notoriously not impecunious that the question was devoid of any
personal element. Livingston, moreover, had dined just unwisely enough
to be truthful.
"Well, to be candid with you, Bines," the young man had replied, in a
burst of alcoholic confidence, "about all that you are likely to meet
are broke--else you wouldn't meet 'em, you know," he explained
cheerfully. "You know, old chap, a few of you Western people have got
into the right set here; there's the Nesbits, for instance. On my word
the good wife and mother hasn't the kinks out of her fingers yet, nor
the callouses from her hands, by Jove! She worked so hard cooking and
washing woollen shirts for miners before Nesbit made his strike. As for
him--well caviare, I'm afraid, will always be caviare to Jimmy Nesbit.
And now the son's married a girl that had everything but money--my boy,
Nellie Wemple has fairly got that family of Nesbits awestricken since
she married into it, just by the way she can spend money--but what was
I saying, old chap? Oh, yes, about getting in--it takes time, you know;
on my word, I think they were as much as eight years, and had to start
in abroad at that. At first, you know, you can only expect to meet a
crowd that can't afford to be exclusive any longer."
From which friendly counsel, and from certain confirming observations
of his own, Percival had concluded that his lot in New York was to
spend money. This he began to do with a large Western carelessness that
speedily earned him fame of a sort. Along upper Broadway, his advent
was a golden joy. Tradesmen learned to love him; florists, jewelers,
and tailors hailed his coming with honest fervour; waiters told moving
tales of his tips; cabmen fought for the privilege of transporting him;
and the hangers-on of rich young men picked pieces of lint assiduously
and solicitously from his coat.
One of his favourite resorts was the sumptuous gambling-house in
Forty-fourth Street. The man who slides back the panel of the stout
oaken door early learned to welcome him through the slit, barred by its
grill of wrought iron. The attendant who took his coat and hat, the
waiter who took his order for food, and the croupier who took his
money, were all gladdened by his coming; for his gratuities were as
large when he lost as when he won Even the reserved proprietor,
accustomed as he was to a wealthy and careless clientele, treated
Percival with marked consideration after a night when the young man
persuaded him to withdraw the limit at roulette, and spent a large sum
in testing a system for breaking the wheel, given to him by a friend
lately returned from Monte Carlo.
"I think, really the fellow who gave me that system is an ass," he
said, lighting a cigarette when the play was done. "Now I'm going down
and demolish eight dollars' worth of food and drink--you won't be all
to the good on that, you know."
His host decided that a young man who was hungry, after losing a
hundred thousand dollars in five hours' play, was a person to be not
lightly considered.
And, though he loved the rhythmic whir and the ensuing rattle of the
little ivory ball at the roulette wheel, he did not disdain the quieter
faro, playing that dignified game exclusively with the chocolate-coloured
chips, which cost a thousand dollars a stack. Sometimes he won; but not
often enough to disturb his host's belief that there is less of chance in
his business than in any other known to the captains of industry.
There were, too, sociable games of poker, played with Garmer, of the
Lead Trust, Burman, the intrepid young wheat operator from Chicago, and
half a dozen other well-moneyed spirits; games in which the limit, to
use the Chicagoan's phrase, was "the beautiful but lofty North Star."
At these games he lost even more regularly than at those where, with
the exception of a trifling percentage, he was solely at the mercy of
chance. But he was a joyous loser, endearing himself to the other
players; to Garmer, whom Burman habitually accused of being "closer
than a warm night," as well as to the open-handed son of the
chewing-gum magnate, who had been raised abroad and who protested
nightly that there was an element of beastly American commercialism in the
game. When Percival was by some chance absent from a sitting, the others
calculated the precise sum he probably would have lost and humourously
acquainted him with the amount by telegraph next morning,--it was apt to
be nine hundred and some odd dollars,--requesting that he cover by check
at his early convenience.
Yet the diversion was not all gambling. There were Jong sessions at
all-night restaurants where the element of chance in his favour,
inconspicuous elsewhere, was wholly eliminated; suppers for hungry
Thespians and thirsty parasites, protracted with song and talk until
the gas-flames grew pale yellow, and the cabmen, when the party went
out into the wan light, would be low-voiced, confidential, and
suggestive in their approaches.
Broadway would be weirdly quiet at such times, save for the occasional
frenzied clatter of a hurrying milk-wagon. Even the cars seemed to move
with less sound than by day, and the early-rising workers inside,
holding dinner-pails and lunch-baskets, were subdued and silent, yet
strangely observing, as if the hour were one in which the vision was
made clear to appraise the values of life justly. To the north, whence
the cars bulked silently, would be an awakening sky of such tender
beauty that the revellers often paid it the tribute of a moment's
notice.
"Pure turquoise," one would declare.
"With just a dash of orange bitters in it," another might add.
And then perhaps they burst into song under the spell, blending their
voices into what the professional gentlemen termed "barber-shop
harmonies," until a policeman would saunter across the street,
pretending, however, that he was not aware of them.
Then perhaps a ride toward the beautiful northern sky would be
proposed, whereupon three or four hansom or coupe loads would begin a
journey that wound up through Central Park toward the northern light,
but which never attained a point remoter than some suburban road-house,
where sleepy cooks and bartenders would have to be routed out to
collaborate toward breakfast.
Oftener the party fell away into straggling groups with notions for
sleep, chanting at last, perhaps:
"While beer brings gladness, don't forget That water only makes you
wet!"
Percival would walk to the hotel, sobered and perhaps made a little
reflective by the unwonted quiet. But they were pleasant, careless
folk, he concluded always. They permitted him to spend his money, but
he was quite sure they would spend it as freely as he if they had it.
More than one appreciative soubrette, met under such circumstances, was
subsequently enabled to laud the sureness of his taste in jewels,--he
cared little for anything but large diamonds, it transpired. It was a
feeling tribute paid to his munificence by one of these in converse
with a sister artist, who had yet to meet him:
"Say, Myrtle, on the dead, he spends money just like a young Jew trying
to be white!"
Under this more or less happy surface of diversion, however, was an
experience decidedly less felicitous. He knew he should not, must not,
hold Avice Milbrey in his mind; yet when he tried to put her out it
hurt him.
At first he had plumed himself upon his lucky escape that night, when
he would have declared his love to her. To have married a girl who
cared only for his money; that would have been dire enough. But to
marry a girl like _that!_ He had been lucky indeed!
Yet, as the weeks went by the shock of the scene wore off. The scene
itself remained clear, with the grinning grotesquerie of the
Jack-o'-lanterns lighting it and mocking his simplicity. But the first
sharp physical hurt had healed. He was forced to admit that the girl
still had power to trouble him. At times his strained nerves would
relax to no other device than the picturing of her as his own. Exactly
in the measure that he indulged this would his pride smart. With a
budding gift for negation he could imagine her caring for nothing but
his money; and there was that other picture, swift and awful, a
pantomime in shadow, with the leering yellow faces above it.
In the far night, when he awoke to sudden and hungry aloneness, he
would let his arms feel their hunger for her. The vision of her would
be flowers and music and sunlight and time and all things perfect to
mystify and delight, to satisfy and--greatest of all boons--to
unsatisfy. The thought of her became a rest-house for all weariness; a
haven where he was free to choose his nook and lie down away from all
that was not her, which was all that was not beautiful. He would go
back to seek the lost sweetness of their first meeting; to mount the
poor dead belief that she would care for him--that he could make her
care for him--and endow the thing with artificial life, trying to
capture the faint breath of it; but the memory was always fleeting,
attenuated, like the spirit of the memory of a perfume that had been
elusive at best. And always, to banish what joy even this poor device
might bring, came the more vivid vision of the brutal, sordid facts. He
forced himself to face them regularly as a penance and a corrective.
They came before him with especial clearness when he met her from time
to time during the winter. He watched her in talk with others, noting
the contradiction in her that she would at one moment appear knowing
and masterful, with depths of reserve that the other people neither
fathomed nor knew of; and at another moment frankly girlish, with an
appealing feminine helplessness which is woman's greatest strength,
coercing every strong masculine instinct.
When the reserve showed in her, he became afraid. What was she not
capable of? In the other mood, frankly appealing, she drew him
mightily, so that he abandoned himself for the moment, responding to
her fresh exulting youth, longing to take her, to give her things, to
make her laugh, to enfold and protect her, to tell her secrets, to
feather her cheek with the softest kiss, to be the child-mate of her.
Toward him, directly, when they met she would sometimes be glacial and
forbidding, sometimes uninterestedly frank, as if they were but the
best of commonplace friends. Yet sometimes she made him feel that she,
too, threw herself heartily to rest in the thought of their loving, and
cheated herself, as he did, with dreams of comradeship. She left him at
these times with the feeling that they were deaf, dumb, and blind to
each other; that if some means of communication could be devised,
something surer than the invisible play of secret longings, all might
yet be well. They talked as the people about them talked, words that
meant nothing to either, and if there were mute questionings, naked
appeals, unuttered declarations, they were only such as language serves
to divert attention from. Speech, doubtless, has its uses as well as
its abuses. Politics, for example, would be less entertaining without
it. But in matters of the heart, certain it is that there would be
fewer misunderstandings if it were forbidden between the couple under
the penalty of immediate separation. In this affair real meanings are
rarely conveyed except by silences. Words are not more than tasteless
drapery to obscure their lines. The silence of lovers is the plainest
of all speech, warning, disconcerting indeed, by its very bluntness,
any but the truly mated. An hour's silence with these two people by
themselves might have worked wonders.
Another diversion of Percival's during this somewhat feverish winter
was Mrs. Akemit. Not only was she a woman of finished and expert
daintiness in dress and manner and surroundings, but she soothed,
flattered, and stimulated him. With the wisdom of her thirty-two years,
devoted chiefly to a study of his species, she took care never to be
exigent. She had the way of referring to herself as "poor little me,"
yet she never made demands or allowed him to feel that she expected
anything from him in the way of allegiance.
Mrs. Akemit was not only like St. Paul, "all things to all men," but
she had gone a step beyond that excellent theologue. She could be all
things to one man. She was light-heartedly frivolous, soberly
reflective, shallow, profound, cynical or naive, ingenuous, or
inscrutable. She prized dearly the ecclesiastical background provided
by her uncle, the bishop, and had him to dine with the same unerring
sense of artistry that led her to select swiftly the becoming shade of
sofa-cushion to put her blond head back upon.
The good bishop believed she had jeopardised her soul with divorce. He
feared now she meant to lose it irrevocably through remarriage. As a
foil to his austerity, therefore, she would be audaciously gay in his
presence.
"Hell," she said to him one evening, "is given up _so_ reluctantly by
those who don't expect to go there." And while the bishop frowned into
his salad she invited Percival to drink with her in the manner of a
woman who is mad to invite perdition. If the good man could have beheld
her before a background of frivolity he might have suffered less
anxiety. For there her sense of contrast-values led her to be grave and
deep, to express distaste for society with its hollowness, and to
expose timidly the cruel scars on a soul meant for higher things.
Many afternoons Percival drank tea with her in the little red
drawing-room of her dainty apartment up the avenue. Here in the half
light which she had preferred since thirty, in a soft corner with which
she harmonised faultlessly, and where the blaze from the open fire
coloured her animated face just enough, she talked him usually into the
glow of a high conceit with himself. When she dwelt upon the
shortcomings of man, she did it with the air of frankly presuming him
to be different from all others, one who could sympathise with her
through knowing the frailties of his sex, yet one immeasurably superior
to them. When he was led to talk of himself--of whom, it seemed, she
could never learn enough--he at once came to take high views of
himself: to gaze, through her tactful prompting, with a gentle, purring
appreciation upon the manifest spectacle of his own worth.
Sometimes, away from her, he wondered how she did it. Sometimes, in her
very presence, his sense of humour became alert and suspicious. Part of
the time he decided her to be a charming woman, with a depth and
quality of sweetness unguessed by the world. The rest of the time he
remembered a saying about alfalfa made by Uncle Peter: "It's an
innocent lookin', triflin' vegetable, but its roots go right down into
the ground a hundred feet."
"My dear," Mrs. Akemit had once confided to an intimate in an hour of
_negligee_, "to meet a man, any man, from a red-cheeked butcher boy to
a bloodless monk, and not make him feel something new for
you--something he never before felt for any other woman--really it's as
criminal as a wrinkled stocking, or for blondes to wear shiny things.
Every woman can do it, if she'll study a little how to reduce them to
their least common denominator--how to make them primitive."
Of another member of Mrs. Akemit's household Percival acknowledged the
sway with never a misgiving. He had been the devoted lover of Baby
Akemit from the afternoon when he had first cajoled her into
autobiography--a vivid, fire-tipped little thing with her mother's
piquancy. He gleaned that day that she was "a quarter to four years
old;" that she was mamma's girl, but papa was a friend of Santa Claus;
that she went to "ball-dances" every day clad in "dest a stirt 'cause
big ladies don't ever wear waist-es at night;" that she had once ridden
in a merry-go-round and it made her "all homesick right here," patting
her stomach; and that "elephants are horrid, but you mustn't be cruel
to them and cut their eyes out. Oh, no!"
Her Percival courted with results that left nothing to be desired. She
fell to the floor in helpless, shrieking laughter when he came. In his
honour she composed and sang songs to an improvised and spirited
accompaniment upon her toy piano. His favourites among these were
"'Cause Why I Love You" and "Darling, Ask Myself to Come to You." She
rendered them with much feeling. If he were present when her bed-time
came she refused to sleep until he had consented to an interview.
Avice Milbrey had the fortune to witness one of these bed-time
_causeries_. One late afternoon the young man's summons came while he
was one of a group that lingered late about Mrs. Akemit's little
tea-table, Miss Milbrey being of the number.
He followed the maid dutifully out through the hall to the door of the
bedroom, and entered on all-fours with what they two had agreed was the
growl of a famished bear.
The familiar performance was viewed by the mother and by Miss Milbrey,
whom the mother had urged to follow. Baby Akemit in her crib, modestly
arrayed in blue pajamas, after simulating the extreme terror required
by the situation, fell to chatting, while her mother and Miss Milbrey
looked on from the doorway.
Miss Akemit had once been out in the woods, it appeared, and a
"biting-wolf" chased her, and she ran and ran until she came to a river
all full of pigs and fishes and berries, so she jumped in and had
supper, and it wasn't a "biting-wolf" at all--and then--
But the narrative was cut short by her mother.
"Come, Pet! Mr. Bines wishes to go now."
Miss Akemit, it appeared, was bent upon relating the adventures of
Goldie Locks, subsequent to her leap from the window of the bears'
house. She had, it seemed, been compelled to ride nine-twenty miles on
a trolley, and, reaching home too late for luncheon, had been obliged
to eat in the kitchen with the cook.
"Mr. Bines can't stay, darling!"
Baby Akemit calculated briefly, and consented to his departure if Mr.
Bines would bring her something next time.
Mr. Bines promised, and moved away after the customary embrace, but she
was not through:
"Oh! oh! go out like a bear! dere's a bear come in here!"
And so, having brought the bear in, he was forced to drop again and
growl the beast out, whereupon, appeased by this strict observance of
the unities, the child sat up and demanded:
"You sure you'll bring me somefin next time?"
"Yes, sure, Lady Grenville St. Clare." "Well, you sure you're _comin'_
next time?"
Being reassured on this point, and satisfied that no more bears were at
large, she lay down once more while Percival and the two observers
returned to the drawing-room.
"You love children so!" Miss Milbrey said. And never had she been so
girlishly appealing to all that was strong in him as a man. The frolic
with the child seemed to have blown away a fog from between them. Yet
never had the other scene been more vivid to him, and never had the
pain of her heartlessness been more poignant.
When he "played" with Baby Akemit thereafter, the pretence was not all
with the child. For while she might "play" at giving a vexatiously
large dinner, for which she was obliged to do the cooking because she
had discharged all the servants, or when they "played" that the big
couch was a splendid ferry-boat in which they were sailing to Chicago
where Uncle David lived--with many stern threats to tell the janitor of
the boat if the captain didn't behave himself and sail faster--Percival
"played" that his companion's name was Baby Bines, and that her mother,
who watched them with loving eyes, was a sweet and gracious young woman
named Avice. And when he told Baby Akemit that she was "the only
original sweetheart" he meant it of some one else than her.
When the play was over he always conducted himself back to sane reality
by viewing this some one else in the cold light of truth.