THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
It was Saturday morning, but Honora had forgotten the fact. Not until she
was on the bottom step did the odour of cigarettes reach her and turn her
faint; and she clutched suddenly at the banisters. Thus she stood for a
while, motionless, and then went quietly into the drawing-room. The
French windows looking out on the porch were, as usual, open.
It was an odd sensation thus to be regarding one's husband objectively.
For the first time he appeared to her definitely as a stranger; as much a
stranger as the man who came once a week to wind Mrs. Forsythe's clocks.
Nay, more. There was a sense of intrusion in this visit, of invasion of a
life with which he had nothing to do. She examined him ruthlessly, very
much as one might examine a burglar taken unawares. There was the
inevitable shirt with the wide pink stripes, of the abolishment or even
of the effective toning down of which she had long since despaired. On
the contrary, like his complexion, they evinced a continual tendency
towards a more aggressive colour. There was also the jewelled ring, now
conspicuously held aloft on a fat little finger. The stripes appeared
that morning as the banner of a hated suzerain, the ring as the emblem of
his overlordship. He did not belong in that house; everything in it cried
out for his removal; and yet it was, in the eyes of the law at least,
his. By grace of that fact she was here, enjoying it. At that instant, as
though in evidence of this, he laid down a burning cigarette on a
mahogany stand he had had brought out to him. Honora seized an ash tray,
hurried to the porch, and picked up the cigarette in the tips of her
fingers.
"Howard, I wish you would be more careful of Mrs. Forsythe's furniture,"
she exclaimed.
"Hello, Honora," he said, without looking up. "I see by the Newport paper
that old Maitland is back from Europe. Things are skyrocketing in Wall
Street." He glanced at the ash tray, which she had pushed towards him.
"What's the difference about the table? If the old lady makes a row, I'll
pay for it."
"Some things are priceless," she replied; "you do not seem to realize
that."
"Not this rubbish," said Howard. "Judging by the fuss she made over the
inventory, you'd think it might be worth something."
"She has trusted us with it," said Honora. Her voice shook.
He stared at her.
"I never saw you look like that," he declared.
"It's because you never look at me closely," she answered.
He laughed, and resumed his reading. She stood awhile by the railing.
Across the way, beyond the wall, she heard Mr. Chamberlin's shrill voice
berating a gardener.
"Howard," she asked presently, "why do you come to Newport at all?"
"Why do I come to Newport?" he repeated. "I don't understand you."
"Why do you come up here every week?"
"Well," he said, "it isn't a bad trip on the boat, and I get a change
from New York; and see men I shouldn't probably see otherwise." He paused
and looked at her again, doubtfully. "Why do you ask such a question?"
"I wished to be sure," said Honora.
"Sure of what?"
"That the-arrangement suited you perfectly. You do not feel--the lack of
anything, do you?"
"What do you mean?"
"You wouldn't care to stay in Newport all the time?"
"Not if I know myself," he replied. "I leave that part of it to you."
"What part of it?" she demanded.
"You ought to know. You do it pretty well," he laughed. "By the way,
Honora, I've got to have a conference with Mr. Wing to-day, and I may not
be home to lunch."
"We're dining there to-night," she told him, in a listless voice.
Upon Ethel Wing had descended the dominating characteristics of the elder
James, who, whatever the power he might wield in Wall Street, was little
more than a visitor in Newport. It was Ethel's house, from the hour she
had swept the Reel and Carter plans (which her father had brought home)
from the table and sent for Mr. Farwell. The forehanded Reginald arrived
with a sketch, and the result, as every one knows, is one of the chief
monuments to his reputation. So exquisitely proportioned is its simple,
two-storied marble front as seen through the trees left standing on the
old estate, that tourists, having beheld the Chamberlin and other
mansions, are apt to think this niggardly for a palace. Two infolding
wings, stretching towards the water, enclose a court, and through the
slender white pillars of the peristyle one beholds in fancy the summer
seas of Greece.
Looking out on the court, and sustaining this classic illusion, is a
marble-paved dining room, with hangings of Pompeiian red, and frescoes of
nymphs and satyrs and piping shepherds, framed between fluted pilasters,
dimly discernible in the soft lights.
In the midst of these surroundings, at the head of his table, sat the
great financier whose story but faintly concerns this chronicle; the man
who, every day that he had spent down town in New York in the past thirty
years, had eaten the same meal in the same little restaurant under the
street. This he told Honora, on his left, as though it were not history.
He preferred apple pie to the greatest of artistic triumphs of his
daughter's chef, and had it; a glorified apple pie, with frills and
furbelows, and whipped cream which he angrily swept to one side with
contempt.
"That isn't apple pie," he said. "I'd like to take that Frenchman to the
little New England hilltown where I went to school and show him what
apple pie is."
Such were the autobiographical snatches--by no means so crude as they
sound that reached her intelligence from time to time. Mr. Wing was too
subtle to be crude; and he had married a Playfair, a family noted for
good living. Honora did not know that he was fond of talking of that
apple pie and the New England school at public banquets; nor did Mr. Wing
suspect that the young woman whom he was apparently addressing, and who
seemed to be hanging on his words, was not present.
It was not until she had put her napkin on the table that she awoke with
a start and gazed into his face and saw written there still another
history than the one he had been telling her. The face was hidden,
indeed, by the red beard. What she read was in the little eyes that swept
her with a look of possession: possession in a large sense, let it be
emphasized, that an exact justice be done Mr. James Wing,--she was one of
the many chattels over which his ownership extended; bought and paid for
with her husband. A hot resentment ran through her at the thought.
Mr. Cuthbert, who was many kinds of a barometer, sought her out later in
the courtyard.
"Your husband's feeling tiptop, isn't he?" said he.
"He's been locked up with old Wing all day. Something's in the wind, and
I'd give a good deal to know what it is."
"I'm afraid I can't inform you," replied Honora.
Mr. Cuthbert apologized.
"Oh, I didn't mean to ask you far a tip," he declared, quite confused. "I
didn't suppose you knew. The old man is getting ready to make another
killing, that's all. You don't mind my telling you you look stunning
tonight, do you?"
Honora smiled.
"No, I don't mind," she said.
Mr. Cuthbert appeared to be ransacking the corners of his brain for
words.
"I was watching you to-night at the table while Mr. Wing was talking to
you. I don't believe you heard a thing he said."
"Such astuteness," she answered, smiling at him, "astounds me."
He laughed nervously.
"You're different than you've ever been since I've known you," he went
on, undismayed. "I hope you won't think I'm making love to you. Not that
I shouldn't like to, but I've got sense enough to see it's no use."
Her reply was unexpected.
"What makes you think that?" she asked curiously.
"Oh, I'm not a fool," said Mr. Cuthbert. "But if I were a poet, or that
fellow Dewing, I might be able to tell you what your eyes were like
to-night."
"I'm glad you're not," said Honora.
As they were going in, she turned for a lingering look at the sea. A
strong young moon rode serenely in the sky and struck a path of light
across the restless waters. Along this shimmering way the eyes of her
companion followed hers.
"I can tell you what that colour is, at least. Do you remember the blue,
transparent substance that used to be on favours at children's parties?"
he asked. "There were caps inside of them, and crackers."
"I believe you are a poet, after all," she said.
A shadow fell across the flags. Honora did not move.
"Hello, Chiltern," said Cuthbert. "I thought you were playing bridge..."
"You haven't looked at me once to-night," he said, when Cuthbert had gone
in.
She was silent.
"Are you angry?"
"Yes, a little," she answered. "Do you blame me?"
The vibration of his voice in the moonlit court awoke an answering chord
in her; and a note of supplication from him touched her strangely. Logic
in his presence was a little difficult--there can be no doubt of that.
"I must go in," she said unsteadily, "my carriage is waiting."
But he stood in front of her.
"I should have thought you would have gone," she said.
"I wanted to see you again."
"And now?"
"I can't leave while you feel this way," he pleaded. "I can't abandon
what I have of you--what you will let me take. If I told you I would be
reasonable--"
"I don't believe in miracles," she said, recovering a little; "at least
in modern ones. The question is, could you become reasonable?"
"As a last resort," he replied, with a flash of humour and a touch of
hope. "If you would--commute my sentence."
She passed him, and picking up her skirts, paused in the window.
"I will give you one more chance," she said.
This was the conversation that, by repeating itself, filled the interval
of her drive home. So oblivious was she to Howard's presence, that he
called her twice from her corner of the carriage after the vehicle had
stopped; and he halted her by seizing her arm as she was about to go up
the stairs. She followed him mechanically into the drawing-room.
He closed the door behind them, and the other door into the darkened
dining room. He even took a precautionary glance out of the window of the
porch. And these movements, which ordinarily might have aroused her
curiosity, if not her alarm, she watched with a profound indifference. He
took a stand before the Japanese screen in front of the fireplace, thrust
his hands in his pockets, cleared his throat, and surveyed her from her
white shoulders to the gold-embroidered tips of her slippers.
"I'm leaving for the West in the morning, Honora. If you've made any
arrangements for me on Sunday, you'll have to cancel them. I may be gone
two weeks, I may be gone a month. I don't know."
"Yes," she said.
"I'm going to tell you something those fellows in the smoking room
to-night did their best to screw out of me. If you say anything about it,
all's up between me and Wing. The fact that he picked me out to engineer
the thing, and that he's going to let me in if I push it through, is a
pretty good sign that he thinks something of my business ability, eh?"
"You'd better not tell me, Howard," she said.
"You're too clever to let it out," he assured her; and added with a
chuckle: "If it goes through, order what you like. Rent a house on
Bellevue Avenue--any thing in reason."
"What is it?" she asked, with a sudden premonition that the thing had a
vital significance for her.
"It's the greatest scheme extant," he answered with elation. "I won't go
into details--you wouldn't understand'em. Mr. Wing and some others have
tried the thing before, nearer home, and it worked like a charm. Street
railways. We buy up the little lines for nothing, and get an interest in
the big ones, and sell the little lines for fifty times what they cost
us, and guarantee big dividends for the big lines."
"It sounds to me," said Honora, slowly, "as though some one would get
cheated."
"Some one get cheated!" he exclaimed, laughing. "Every one gets cheated,
as you call it, if they haven't enough sense to know what their
property's worth, and how to use it to the best advantage. It's a case,"
he announced, "of the survival of the fittest. Which reminds me that if
I'm going to be fit to-morrow I'd better go to bed. Mr. Wing's to take me
to New York on his yacht, and you've got to have your wits about you when
you talk to the old man."
End of Project Gutenberg's A Modern Chronicle, Volume 5, by Winston Churchill