All I did was to pull him out by the seat of the trousers. The fat
old thing had gone out in the dark to the end of the yacht's boat-
boom, and was trying to worry in the dinghy with his toe, when
plump he dropped into a six-knot ebb tide. Of course, if I hadn't
happened along in a launch, he might have drowned, but, as for
anything heroic on my part--why, the very notion is preposterous.
The whole affair only lasted half a minute, and in five he was
aboard his yacht and drinking hot Scotch in a plush dressing-gown.
It was natural that his wife and daughter should be frightened,
and natural, too, I suppose, that when they had finished crying
over him they should cry over me. He had taken a chance with the
East River, and it had been the turn of a hair whether he floated
down the current a dead grocer full of brine, or stood in that
cabin, a live one full of grog. Oh, no! I am not saying a word
against THEM. But as for Grossensteck himself, he ought really to
have known better, and it makes me flush even now to recall his
monstrous perversion of the truth. He called me a hero to my face.
He invented details to which my dry clothes gave the lie direct.
He threw fits of gratitude. His family were theatrically commanded
to regard me well, so that my countenance might be forever
imprinted on their hearts; and they, poor devils, in a seventh
heaven to have him back safe and sound in their midst, regarded
and regarded, and imprinted and imprinted, till I felt like a
perfect ass masquerading as a Hobson.
It was all I could do to tear myself away. Grossensteck clung to
me. Mrs. Grossensteck clung to me. Teresa--that was the daughter--
Teresa, too, clung to me. I had to give my address. I had to take
theirs. Medals were spoken of; gold watches with inscriptions; a
common purse, on which I was requested to confer the favour of
drawing for the term of my natural life. I departed in a blaze of
glory, and though I could not but see the ridiculous side of the
affair (I mean as far as I was concerned), I was moved by so
affecting a family scene, and glad, indeed, to think that the old
fellow had been spared to his wife and daughter. I had even a pang
of envy, for I could not but contrast myself with Grossensteck,
and wondered if there were two human beings in the world who would
have cared a snap whether I lived or died. Of course, that was
just a passing mood, for, as a matter of fact, I am a man with
many friends, and I knew some would feel rather miserable were I
to make a hole in saltwater. But, you see, I had just had a story
refused by Schoonmaker's Magazine, a good story, too, and that
always gives me a sinking feeling--to think that after all these
years I am still on the borderland of failure, and can never be
sure of acceptance, even by the second-class periodicals for which
I write. However, in a day or two, I managed to unload "The Case
against Phillpots" on somebody else, and off I started for the New
Jersey coast with a hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket, and no
end of plans for a long autumn holiday.
I never gave another thought to Grossensteck until one morning, as
I was sitting on the veranda of my boarding-house, the postman
appeared and requested me to sign for a registered package. I
opened it with some trepidation, for I had caught that fateful
name written crosswise in the corner and began at once to
apprehend the worst. I think I have as much assurance as any man,
but it took all I had and more, too, when I unwrapped a gold medal
the thickness and shape of an enormous checker, and deciphered the
following inscription:
Presented to Hugo Dundonald Esquire for having
With signal heroism, gallantry and presence of mind
rescued On the night of June third, 1900
the life of Hermann Grossensteck from
The dark and treacherous waters of the East River.
The thing was as thick as two silver dollars, laid the one on the
other, and gold--solid, ringing, massy gold--all the way through;
and it was associated with a blue satin ribbon, besides, which was
to serve for sporting it on my manly bosom. I set it on the rail
and laughed--laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks--while
the other boarders crowded about me; handed it from hand to hand;
grew excited to think that they had a hero in their midst; and put
down my explanation to the proverbial modesty of the brave.
Blended with my amusement were some qualms at the intrinsic value
of the medal, for it could scarcely have cost less than three or
four hundred dollars, and it worried me to think that Grossensteck
must have drawn so lavishly on his savings. It had not occurred to
me, either before or then, that he was rich; somehow, in the bare
cabin of the schooner, I had received no such impression of his
means. I had not even realised that the vessel was his own, taking
it for granted that it had been hired, all standing, for a week or
two with the put-by economies of a year. His home address ought to
have set me right, but I had not taken the trouble to read it,
slipping it into my pocket-book more to oblige him than with any
idea of following up the acquaintance. It was one of the boarders
that enlightened me.
"Grossensteck!" he exclaimed; "why, that's the great cheap grocer
of New York, the Park & Tilford of the lower orders! There are
greenbacks in his rotten tea, you know, and places to leave your
baby while you buy his sanded sugar, and if you save eighty tags
of his syrup you get a silver spoon you wouldn't be found dead
with! Oh, everybody knows Grossensteck!"
"Well, I pulled the great cheap grocer out of the East River," I
said. "There was certainly a greenback in that tea," and I took
another look at my medal, and began to laugh all over again.
"There's no reason why you should ever have another grocery bill,"
said the boarder. "That is, if flavour cuts no figure with you,
and you'd rather eat condemned army stores than not!"
I sat down and wrote a letter of thanks. It was rather a nice
letter, for I could not but feel pleased at the old fellow's
gratitude, even if it were a trifle overdone, and, when all's
said, it was undoubtedly a fault on the right side. I disclaimed
the heroism, and bantered him good-naturedly about the medal,
which, of course, I said I would value tremendously and wear on
appropriate occasions. I wondered at the time what occasion could
be appropriate to decorate one's self with a gold saucer covered
with lies--but, naturally, I didn't go into that to HIM. When you
accept a solid chunk of gold you might as well be handsome about
it, and I piled it on about his being long spared to his family
and to a world that wouldn't know how to get along without him.
Yes, it was a stunning letter, and I've often had the pleasure of
reading it since in a splendid frame below my photograph.
I had been a month or more in New York, and December was already
well advanced before I looked up my Grossenstecks, which I did one
late afternoon as I happened to be passing in their direction. It
was a house of forbidding splendour, on the Fifth Avenue side of
Central Park, and, as I trod its marble halls, I could not but
repeat to myself: "Behold, the grocer's dream!" But I could make
no criticism of my reception by Mrs. Grossensteck and Teresa, whom
I found at home and delighted to see me. Mrs. Grossensteck was a
stout, jolly, motherly woman, common, of course,--but, if you can
understand what I mean,--common in a nice way, and honest and
unpretentious and likable. Teresa, whom I had scarcely noticed on
the night of the accident, was a charmingly pretty girl of
eighteen, very chic and gay, with pleasant manners and a
contagious laugh. She had arrived at obviously the turn of the
Grossensteck fortunes, and might, in refinement and everything
else, have belonged to another clay. How often one sees that in
America, the land above others of social contrast, where, in the
same family, there are often three separate degrees of caste.
Well, to get along with my visit. I liked them and they liked me,
and I returned later the same evening to dine and meet papa. I
found him as impassionedly grateful as before, and with a tale
that trespassed even further on the incredible, and after dinner
we all sat around a log fire and talked ourselves into a sort of
intimacy. They were wonderfully good people, and though we hadn't
a word in common, nor an idea, we somehow managed to hit it off,
as one often can with those who are unaffectedly frank and simple.
I had to cry over the death of little Hermann in the steerage
(when they had first come to America twenty years ago), and how
Grossensteck had sneaked gingersnaps from the slop-baskets of the
saloon.
"The little teffil never knew where they come from," said
Grossensteck, "and so what matters it?"
"That's Papa's name in the slums," said Teresa. "Uncle
Gingersnaps, because at all his stores they give away so many for
nothing."
"By Jove!" I said, "there are some nick-names that are patents of
nobility."
What impressed me as much as anything with these people was their
loneliness. Parvenus are not always pushing and self-seeking, nor
do they invariably throw down the ladder by which they have
climbed. The Grossenstecks would have been so well content to keep
their old friends, but poverty hides its head from the glare of
wealth and takes fright at altered conditions.
"They come--yes," said Mrs. Grossensteck, "but they are scared of
the fine house, of the high-toned help, of everything being gold,
you know, and fashionable. And when Papa sends their son to
college, or gives the girl a little stocking against her marriage
day, they slink away ashamed. Oh, Mr. Dundonald, but it's hard to
thank and be thanked, especially when the favours are all of one
side!"
"The rich have efferyting," said Grossensteck, "but friends--
Nein!"
New ones had apparently never come to take the places of the old;
and the old had melted away. Theirs was a life of solitary
grandeur, varied with dinner parties to their managers and
salesmen. Socially speaking, their house was a desert island, and
they themselves three castaways on a golden rock, scanning the
empty seas for a sail. To carry on a metaphor, I might say I was
the sail and welcomed accordingly. I was everything that they were
not; I was poor; I mixed with people whose names filled them with
awe; my own was often given at first nights and things of that
sort. In New York, the least snobbish of great cities, a man need
have but a dress suit and car-fare--if he be the right kind of a
man, of course--to go anywhere and hold up his head with the best.
In a place so universally rich, there is even a certain piquancy
in being a pauper. The Grossenstecks were overcome to think I
shined my own shoes, and had to calculate my shirts, and the fact
that I was no longer young (that's the modern formula for forty),
and next-door to a failure in the art I had followed for so many
years, served to whet their pity and their regard. My little
trashy love-stories seemed to them the fruits of genius, and they
were convinced, the poor simpletons, that the big magazines were
banded in a conspiracy to block my way to fame.
"My dear poy," said Grossensteck, "you know as much of peeziness
as a child unporne, and I tell you it's the same efferywhere--in
groceries, in hardware, in the alkali trade, in effery branch of
industry, the pig operators stand shoulder to shoulder to
spiflicate the little fellers like you. You must combine with the
other producers; you must line up and break through the ring; you
must scare them out of their poots, and, by Gott, I'll help you do
it!"
In their naive interest in my fortunes, the Grossenstecks rejoiced
at an acceptance, and were correspondingly depressed at my
failures. A fifteen-dollar poem would make them happy for a week;
and when some of my editors were slow to pay-on the literary
frontiers there is a great deal of this sort of procrastination--
Uncle Gingersnaps was always hot to put the matter into the hands
of his collectors, and commence legal proceedings in default.
Little by little I drifted into a curious intimacy with the
Grossenstecks. Their house by degrees became my refuge. I was
given my own suite of rooms, my own latch-key; I came and went
unremarked; and what I valued most of all was that my privacy was
respected, and no one thought to intrude upon me when I closed my
door. In time I managed to alter the whole house to my liking, and
spent their money like water in the process. Gorgeousness gave way
to taste; I won't be so fatuous as to say my taste; but mine was
in conjunction with the best decorators in New York. One was no
longer blinded by magnificence, but found rest and peace and
beauty. Teresa and I bought the pictures. She was a wonderfully
clever girl, full of latent appreciation and understanding which
until then had lain dormant in her breast. I quickened those
unsuspected fires, and, though I do not vaunt my own judgment as
anything extraordinary, it represented at least the conventional
standard and was founded on years of observation and training. We
let the old masters go as something too smudgy and recondite for
any but experts, learning our lesson over one Correggio which
nearly carried us into the courts, and bought modern American
instead, amongst them some fine examples of our best men. We had a
glorious time doing it, too, and showered the studios with golden
rain--in some where it was evidently enough needed.
There was something childlike in the Grossenstecks' confidence in
me; I mean the old people; for it was otherwise with Teresa, with
whom I often quarrelled over my artistic reforms, and who took any
conflict in taste to heart. There were whole days when she would
not speak to me at all, while I, on my side, was equally
obstinate, and all this, if you please, about some miserable
tapestry or a Louise Seize chair or the right light for a picture
of Will Low's. But she was such a sweet girl and so pretty that
one could not be angry with her long, and what with our fights and
our makings up I dare say we made it more interesting to each
other than if we had always agreed. It was only once that our
friendship was put in real jeopardy, and that was when her parents
decided they could not die happy unless we made a match of it.
This was embarrassing for both of us, and for a while she treated
me very coldly. But we had it out together one evening in the
library and decided to let the matter make no difference to us,
going on as before the best of friends. I was the last person to
expect a girl of eighteen to care for a man of forty, particularly
one like myself, ugly and grey-haired, who had long before outworn
the love of women. In fact I had to laugh, one of those sad laughs
that come to us with the years, at the thought of anything so
absurd; and I soon got her to give up her tragic pose and see the
humour of it all as I did. So we treated it as a joke, rallied the
old folks on their sentimental folly, and let it pass.
It set me thinking, however, a great deal about the girl and her
future, and I managed to make interest with several of my friends
and get her invited to some good houses. Of course it was
impossible to carry the old people into this galere. They were
frankly impossible, but fortunately so meek and humble that it
never occurred to them to assert themselves or resent their
daughter going to places where they would have been refused. Uncle
Gingersnaps would have paid money to stay at home, and Mrs.
Grossensteck had too much homely pride to put herself in a false
position. They saw indeed only another reason to be grateful to
me, and another example of my surpassing kindness. Pretty, by no
means a fool, and gowned by the best coutourieres of Paris, Teresa
made quite a hit, and blossomed as girls do in the social
sunshine. The following year, in the whirl of a gay New York
winter, one would scarcely have recognised her as the same person.
She had "made good," as boys say, and had used my stepping-stones
to carry her far beyond my ken. In her widening interests, broader
range, and increased worldly knowledge we became naturally better
friends than ever and met on the common ground of those who led
similar lives. What man would not value the intimacy of a young,
beautiful, and clever woman? in some ways it is better than love
itself, for love is a duel, with wounds given and taken, and its
pleasures dearly paid for. Between Teresa and myself there was no
such disturbing bond, and we were at liberty to be altogether
frank in our intercourse.
One evening when I happened to be dining at the house, the absence
of her father and the indisposition of her mother left us tete-a-
tete in the smoking-room, whither she came to keep me company with
my cigar. I saw that she was restless and with something on her
mind to tell me, but I was too old a stager to force a confidence,
least of all a woman's, and so I waited, said nothing, and blew
smoke rings.
"Hugo," she said, "there is something I wish to speak to you
about."
"I've known that for the last hour, Teresa," I said.
"This is something serious," she said, looking at me strangely.
"Blaze away," I said.
"Hugo," she broke out, "you have been borrowing money from my
father."