The question has been very much discussed whether the devil, in temperate
latitudes, is busier in the summer or in the winter. When Congress and
the various State legislatures are in session, and the stock and grain
exchanges are most active, and society is gayest, and the churches and
benevolent and reformatory associations are most aggressive--at this
season, which is the cool season, he seems to be most animated and
powerful.
But is not this because he is then most opposed? The stream may not flow
any faster because it is dammed, but it exhibits at the obstructed points
greater appearance of agitation. Many people are under the impression
that when they stop fighting there is a general truce: There is reason to
believe that the arch enemy is pleased with this impression, that he
likes a truce, and that it is his best opportunity, just as the weeds in
the garden, after a tempest, welcome the sun and the placidity of the
elements. It is well known that in summer virtue suffers from inertia,
and that it is difficult to assemble the members of any vigilant
organization, especially in cities, where the flag of the enemy is never
lowered. But wherever the devil is there is always a quorum present for
business. It is not his plan to seek an open fight, and many observers
say that he gains more ground in summer than in any other season, and
this notwithstanding people are more apt to lose their tempers, and even
become profane, in the aggravations of what is known as spring than at
any other time. The subject cannot be pursued here, but there is ground
for supposing that the devil prefers a country where the temperature is
high and pretty uniform.
At any rate, it is true that the development of character is not arrested
by any geniality or languor of nature. By midsummer the Hendersons were
settled in Lenox, where the Blunts had long been, and Miss Tavish and her
party of friends were at Bar Harbor. Henderson was compelled to be in
the city most of the time, and Jack Delancy fancied that business
required his presence there also; but he had bought a yacht, and
contemplated a voyage, with several of the club men, up the Maine coast.
"No, I thank you," Major Fairfax had said; "I know an easier way to get
to Bar Harbor."
Jack was irritable and restless, to be sure, in the absence of the sort
of female society he had become accustomed to; but there were many
compensations in his free-and-easy bachelor life, in his pretense of
business, which consisted in watching the ticker, as it is called,
in an occasional interview with Henderson, and in the floating summer
amusements of the relaxed city. There was nothing unusual in this life
except that he needed a little more stimulation, but this was not strange
in the summer, and that he devoted more time to poker--but everybody
knows that a person comes out about even in the game of poker if he keeps
at it long enough--there was nothing unusual in this, only it was giving
Jack a distaste for the quiet and it seemed to him the restraint of the
Golden House down by the sea. And he was more irritable there than
elsewhere. It is so difficult to estimate an interior deterioration of
this sort, for Jack was just as popular with his comrades as ever, and
apparently more prosperous.
It is true that Jack had had other ideas when he was courting Edith
Fletcher, and at moments, at any rate, different aspirations from any he
had now. With her at that time there had been nobler aspirations about
life. But now she was his wife. That was settled. And not only that,
but she was the best woman he knew; and if she were not his wife, he
would spare no effort to win her. He felt sure of that. He did not put
it to himself in the way an Oriental would do, "That is finished"; but it
was an act done--a good act--and here was his world again, with a hundred
interests, and there were people besides Edith to be thought of, other
women and men, and affairs. Because a man was married, was he to be shut
up to one little narrow career, that of husband? Probably it did not
occur to him that women take a different view of this in the singleness
of their purpose and faith. Edith, for instance, knew or guessed that
Jack had no purpose in life that was twenty-four hours old; but she had
faith--and no amount of observation destroys this faith in women--that
marriage would inspire him with energy and ambition to take a man's place
in the world.
With most men marriage is un fait accompli. Jack had been lucky, but
there was, no doubt, truth in an observation of Mavick's. One night as
they sat at the club Jack had asked him a leading question, apropos of
Henderson's successful career: "Mavick, why don't you get married?"
"I have never," he replied, with his usual cynical deliberation, "been
obliged to. The fact is, marriage is a curb-bit. Some horses show off
better with it, and some are enraged and kick over the traces. I cannot
decide which I would be."
"That's true enough," said Jack, "from a bachelor's point of view of
independence, but it's really a question of matching."
"The most difficult thing in the world--in horses. Just about impossible
in temperament and movement, let alone looks. Most men are lucky if they
get, like Henderson, a running mate."
"I see," said Jack, who knew something about the Henderson household,
"your idea of a pair is that they should go single."
Mavick laughed, and said something about the ideas of women changing so
much lately that nobody could tell what the relation of marriage would
become, and Jack, who began to feel that he was disloyal, changed the
subject. To do him justice, he would have been ashamed for Edith to hear
this sort of flippant and shallow talk, which wouldn't have been at all
out of place with Carmen or Miss Tavish.
"I wanted to ask you, Mavick, as a friend, do you think Henderson is
square?"
"How square?"
"Well, safe?"
"Nobody is safe. Henderson is as safe as anybody. You can rely on what
he says. But there's a good deal he doesn't say. Anything wrong?"
"Not that I know. I've been pretty lucky. But the fact is, I've gone in
rather deep."
"Well, it's a game. Henderson plays it, as everybody does, for himself.
I like Henderson. He plays to win, and generally does. But, you know,
if one man wins, somebody else has got to lose in this kind of industry."
"But Henderson looks out for his friends?"
"Yes--when it doesn't cost too much. Times may come when a man has to
look out for himself. Wealth isn't made out of nothing. There must be
streams into the reservoir. These great accumulations of one--you can
see that--must be made up of countless other men's small savings.
There's Uncle Jerry. He operates a good deal with Henderson, and they'd
incline to help each other out. But Uncle Jerry says he's got a small
pond of his own, and he's careful not to connect it with Henderson's
reservoir."
"What do you think of Missouri?"
"What do I think of the Milky Way? It doesn't much matter to me what
becomes of Missouri, unless Henderson should happen to get smashed in it,
and that isn't what he is there for. But when you look at the
combinations, and the dropping-off of roads that have been drained,
and the scaling down in refunding, and the rearranging, and the strikes,
how much chance do you think the small fry stand? I don't doubt that
Henderson will make a big thing out of it, and there will be lots of
howling by those who were not so smart, and the newspapers will say that
Henderson was too strong for them. What we respect nowadays are
adroitness and strength."
"It's an exciting game," Mavick continued, after a moment's pause.
"Let me know if you get uneasy. But I'll tell you what it is, Jack;
if I had a comfortable income, I wouldn't risk it in any speculation.
There is a good deal that is interesting going on in this world, and I
like to be in it; but the best plan for a man who has anything is, as
Uncle Jerry says, to sail close and salt down."
The fact was that Mavick's connection with Henderson was an appreciable
addition to his income, and it was not a bad thing for Henderson.
Mavick's reputation for knowing the inside of everything and being
close-mouthed actually brought him confidences; that which at first was a
clever assumption became a reality, and his reputation was so established
for being behind the scenes that he was not believed when he honestly
professed ignorance of anything. His modest disclaimer merely increased
the impression that he was deep. Henderson himself had something of the
Bismarck trait of brutal, contemptuous frankness. Mavick was never
brutal and never contemptuous, but he had a cynical sort of frankness,
which is a good deal more effectual in a business way than the oily,
plausible manner which on 'Change, as well as in politics, is distrusted
as hypocrisy. Now Uncle Jerry Hollowell was neither oily nor frank; he
was long-headed and cautious, and had a reputation for shrewdness and
just enough of plasticity of conscience to remove him out of the list of
the impracticable and over-scrupulous. This reputation that business men
and politicians acquire would be a very curious study. The world is very
complacent, and apparently worships success and votes for smartness,
but it would surprise some of our most successful men to know what a real
respect there is in the community, after all, for downright integrity.
Even Jack, who fell into the current notion of his generation of young
men that the Henderson sort of morality was best adapted to quick
success, evinced a consciousness of want of nobility in the course he was
pursuing by not making Edith his confidante. He would have said, of
course, that she knew nothing about business, but what he meant was that
she had a very clear conception of what was honest. All the evidences of
his prosperity, shown in his greater freedom of living, were sore trials
to her. She belonged to that old class of New-Yorkers who made trade
honorable, like the merchants of Holland and Venice, and she knew also
that Jack's little fortune had come out of honest toil and strict
business integrity. Could there be any happiness in life in any other
course?
It seemed cruel to put such a problem as this upon a young woman hardly
yet out of girlhood, in the first flush of a new life, which she had
dreamed should be so noble and high and so happy, in the period which is
consecrated by the sweetest and loveliest visions and hopes that ever
come into a woman's life.
As the summer wore on to its maximum of heat and discomfort in the city,
Edith, who never forgot to measure the hardships of others by her own
more fortunate circumstances, urged Dr. Leigh to come away from her
labors and rest a few days by the sea. The reply was a refusal, but
there was no complaint in the brief business-like note. One might have
supposed that it was the harvest-time of the doctor, if he had not known
that she gathered nothing for herself. There had never been so much
sickness, she wrote, and such an opportunity for her. She was learning a
great deal, especially about some disputed contagious diseases. She
would like to see Mrs. Delancy, and she wouldn't mind a breath of air
that was more easily to be analyzed than that she existed in, but nothing
could induce her to give up her cases. All that appeared in her letter
was her interest in her profession.
Father Damon, who had been persuaded by Edith's urgency to go down with
Jack for a few days to the Golden House, seemed uncommonly interested in
the reasons of Dr. Leigh's refusal to come.
"I never saw her," he said, "so cheerful. The more sickness there is,
the more radiant she is. I don't mean," he added, laughing, "in apparel.
Apparently she never thinks of herself, and positively she seems to take
no time to eat or sleep. I encounter her everywhere. I doubt if she
ever sits down, except when she drops in at the mission chapel now and
then, and sits quite unmoved on a bench by the door during vespers."
"Then she does go there?" said Edith.
"That is a queer thing. She would promptly repudiate any religious
interest. But I tell her she is a bit of a humbug. When I speak about
her philanthropic zeal, she says her interest is purely scientific."
"Anyway, I believe," Jack put in, "that women doctors are less mercenary
than men. I dare say they will get over that when the novelty of coming
into the profession has worn off."
"That is possible," said Father Damon; "but that which drives women into
professions now is the desire to do something rather than the desire to
make something. Besides, it is seldom, in their minds, a finality;
marriage is always a possibility."
"Yes," replied Edith, "and the probability of having to support a husband
and family; then they may be as mercenary as men are."
"Still, the enthusiasm of women," Father Damon insisted, "in hospital and
outdoor practice, the singleness of their devotion to it, is in contrast
to that of the young men-doctors. And I notice another thing in the
city: they take more interest in philanthropic movements, in the
condition of the poor, in the labor questions; they dive eagerly into
philosophic speculations, and they are more aggressively agnostics.
And they are not afraid of any social theories. I have one friend,
a skillful practitioner they tell me, a linguist, and a metaphysician,
a most agreeable and accomplished woman, who is in theory an extreme
nihilist, and looks to see the present social and political order upset."
"I don't see," Jack remarked, "what women especially are to gain by such
a revolution."
"Perhaps independence, Jack," replied Edith. "You should hear my club of
working-girls, who read and think much on these topics, talk of these
things."
"Yes," said Father Damon, "you toss these topics about, and discuss them
in the magazines, and fancy you are interested in socialistic movements.
But you have no idea how real and vital they are, and how the dumb
discontent of the working classes is being formulated into ideas.
It is time we tried to understand each other."
Not all the talk was of this sort at the Golden House. There were three
worlds here--that of Jack, to which Edith belonged by birth and tradition
and habit; that of which we have spoken, to which she belonged by
profound sympathy; and that of Father Damon, to which she belonged by
undefined aspiration. In him was the spiritual element asserting itself
in a mediaeval form, in a struggle to mortify and deny the flesh and yet
take part in modern life. Imagine a celibate and ascetic of the
fifteenth century, who knew that Paradise must be gained through poverty
and privation and suffering, interesting himself in the tenement-house
question, in labor leagues, and the single tax.
Yet, hour after hour, in those idle summer days, when nature was in a
mood that suggested grace and peace, when the waves lapsed along the
shore and the cicada sang in the hedge, did Father Damon unfold to Edith
his ideas of the spiritualization of modern life through a conviction of
its pettiness and transitoriness. How much more content there would be
if the poor could only believe that it matters little what happens here
if the heart is only pure and fixed on the endless life.
"Oh, Father Damon," replied Edith, with a grave smile, "I think your
mission ought to be to the rich."
"Yes," he replied, for he also knew his world, "if I wanted to make my
ideas fashionable; but I want to make them operative. By-and-by," he
added, also with a smile, "we will organize some fishermen and carpenters
and tailors on a mission to the rich."
Father Damon's visit was necessarily short, for his work called him back
to town, and perhaps his conscience smote him a little for indulging in
this sort of retreat. By the middle of August Jack's yacht was ready,
and he went with Mavick and the Van Dams and some other men of the club
on a cruise up the coast. Edith was left alone with her Baltimore
friend.
And yet not alone. As she lay in her hammock in those dreamy days a new
world opened to her. It was not described in the chance romance she took
up, nor in the volume of poems she sometimes held in her hand, with a
finger inserted in the leaves. Of this world she felt herself the centre
and the creator, and as she mused upon its mysteries, life took a new,
strange meaning to her. It was apt to be a little hazy off there in the
watery horizon, and out of the mist would glide occasionally a boat,
and the sun would silver its sails, and it would dip and toss for half an
hour in the blue, laughing sea, and then disappear through the mysterious
curtain. Whence did it come? Whither had it gone? Was life like that?
Was she on the shore of such a sea, and was this new world into which she
was drifting only a dream? By her smile, by the momentary illumination
that her sweet thoughts made in her lovely, hopeful face, you knew that
it was not. Who can guess the thoughts of a woman at such a time? Are
the trees glad in the spring, when the sap leaps in their trunks, and the
buds begin to swell, and the leaves unfold in soft response to the
creative impulse? The miracle is never old nor commonplace to them, nor
to any of the human family. The anticipation of life is eternal. The
singing of the birds, the blowing of the south wind, the sparkle of the
waves, all found a response in Edith's heart, which leaped with joy. And
yet there was a touch of melancholy in it all, the horizon was so vast,
and the mist of uncertainty lay along it. Literature, society,
charities, all that she had read and experienced and thought, was nothing
to this, this great unknown anxiety and bliss, this saddest and sweetest
of all human experiences. She prayed that she might be worthy of this
great distinction, this responsibility and blessing.
And Jack, dear Jack, would he love her more?