communication that if Constance had not been very intimate at the
British Embassy Mrs. Hill-Smith would have made her displeasure felt.
But she was constitutionally timid, like all social new-comers--timid
in admitting people into her circle, and timid in turning them out--so
she merely smiled brightly and said as they drove off:
“You’ll come like a dear, and be as revolutionary as you please.
Good-bye.”
Constance, with her two men, lingered a minute, and then Crane left
her. He yearned for his stenographer, and set out to seek him. Cathcart
walked home with Constance and left her at the door. She was malicious
enough to describe to him some of Mrs. Hill-Smith’s charities, at which
Cathcart was in an ecstasy of amusement.
Meanwhile Mrs. Hill-Smith went home with Eleanor Baldwin to what they
called breakfast, but most Americans call luncheon. On the way the two
women had discussed Constance Maitland cautiously--each afraid to let
on to the other what she really thought--because, after all, Constance
was intimate at the British Embassy.
Arrived at the Baldwin house--an imposing white stone mansion, with
twenty-five bedrooms for a family of four, of whom one was a boy at
school, a family which never had a visitor overnight--Eleanor led the
way to the library, where her father sat.
It was a great, high-ceiled, cool room, dark, in spite of many windows
and a glass door opening on a balcony. At a library table near the
glass door sat Mr. James Brentwood Baldwin, alias Jim Baldwin, and on
the balcony outside, under the awning, sat Mrs. James Baldwin, née
Hogan.
It was easy to see whence Eleanor Baldwin had got her beauty. Jim
Baldwin was handsome, Nora Hogan Baldwin was handsomer.
From the days when Jim Baldwin had carried home parcels of tea and
buckets of butter in his father-in-law’s corner grocery, he had
cherished an honourable ambition to have a great big library full
of books. In the course of time, through the operations of the
shoe-stitching machine, he had been able to gratify this ambition and
taste. He had all of those books which Charles Lamb declares “are no
books--that is, all the books which no gentleman’s library should be
without.” They were all bound sumptuously in calf, and éditions de luxe
were as common as flies in a baker’s shop. The four vast walls were
lined with these treasures, and from them Baldwin derived an excess
of pleasure. This was not by reading them--he had never read a book in
his life. Two Chicago newspapers, one from New York, and the Washington
morning and evening papers satisfied his cravings for knowledge.
But he got from the outside of his books all the pleasure that most
people get from the inside. He justly felt that to be seen surrounded
by the glorious company of the living who died a thousand years ago,
and the conspicuous dead who live to-day, was to give him dignity and
poise. Nobody but himself knew that he never read. His days were spent
in his library--he always spoke of himself as “among my books”--and
shrewd, sharp, and keen as he was and ever must remain, he had actually
succeeded in bamboozling himself into the notion that he was a person
of “literary tastes.”
Mrs. Baldwin was one of the handsomest women in Washington, and
considered quite the proudest. Her abundant grey hair, setting off
a face of Grecian beauty, gave her a look as of a queen in the days
of powder and patches. She had a rarity of speech, a way of looking
straight ahead of her, which was regal. But this exterior of pride was
really a result of the sincerest bashfulness and reserve. When Nora
Hogan, the grocer’s daughter, had married Jim Baldwin, the contractor’s
son, Fortune was already smiling on Jim. Then suddenly she opened
her apron and deluged him with gold. Mrs. Baldwin was frightened
and stunned. She was afraid to say much for fear she might make
mistakes--so she gradually came to saying nothing at all. She dreaded
to look from side to side for fear she might find some one laughing
at her. So she always looked straight ahead of her. By degrees she
acquired a degree of coldness, of stiffness, that was perfectly well
suited to the mother of Lady Clara Vere de Vere. She was, of course,
an unhappy woman, being a misjudged one. Her chief solace lay in the
practice of secret acts of charity among the poorest of the poor, not
letting her left hand know what her right hand did. The promoters of
fashionable charities complained that Mrs. Baldwin was so stately and
so unsympathetic that they could not get on with her in charitable
work. True it is, that at the meetings for fashionable charities Mrs.
Baldwin would be more silent, more queenly than ever, but her heart
would be crying aloud for the poor who are born to suffer and to
die, and to have helped them she would cheerfully have given the very
clothes off her back. But cowardice kept her silent, as it kept her
silent in the presence of her servants, whom she feared inexpressibly.
If Mrs. Baldwin was constitutionally timid, not so Eleanor. All
the courage of her father had gone into his willowy, beautiful,
well-groomed daughter. Her first recollections were of the inland
town where they lived secluded in their big house, because nobody was
good enough for them to associate with after their fortune was made.
Then she was taken to Europe and returned a finished product, with no
more notion of what the word “American” meant than if she had been a
daughter of the Hapsburgs. As a compromise between Europe and America,
Baldwin had pitched upon Washington as a place of residence. His social
status had been agreeably fixed by a lucky accident--he had been asked
to be pall-bearer for a foreign Minister who died in Washington.
Baldwin rightly considered the dead diplomat worth, to him, all the
live ones going; for, having assisted in carrying the dead man from
the Legation to the hearse, Baldwin was, in consequence, elected to
the swell club, asked to the smart cotillion, and made more headway in
a month in the smart set than he could have made otherwise in a year.
He repaid his debt to the dead diplomat by buying some very ordinary
pictures at the sale of the Minister’s effects, and paying the most
extravagant price ever heard of for them.
To Eleanor their social rise was nothing surprising. She expected it,
having been bred like a young princess, only with less of democracy
than real princesses are bred. When she entered the room with Mrs.
Hill-Smith, Baldwin rose and responded smilingly to Mrs. Hill-Smith’s
remark:
“Here you are, as usual, among your books.”
“Yes--as usual, among my books. I daresay your father, the Secretary,
spends a good deal of time among _his_ books.”
“Oh, yes,” replied Mrs. Hill-Smith, airily, “but he has been dreadfully
put out of late. Congress has been so troublesome. I don’t know exactly
_how_, but it has annoyed papa extremely.”
“Very reprehensible,” said Baldwin, earnestly, who had the opinion
of the average commercial man that Congress is a machine to create
prosperity, or its reverse, and if prosperity is not created,
Congressmen are blamed fools.
“I _hate_ Congressmen--except a few from New York,” said Eleanor,
drawing off her gloves daintily. “There was one talking to Miss
Maitland when we stopped her on the street just now. The creature was
introduced to me at one of those queer Southern houses where they
introduce people without asking permission first, and ever since then
the man has tried to talk to me whenever we meet. But I really couldn’t
stand him. This morning I cut him dead. His name is Crane, and he’s
from somewhere in the West.”
Now it happened that there was another Crane in the House from the
West, and Baldwin had a business motive for wishing to cultivate this
particular Crane--and business was business still with Jim Baldwin. So,
at Eleanor’s words, he turned on her. His air of scholar-and-gentleman,
man-of-the-world, and person-of-inherited-leisure suddenly dropped from
him; he was once more Jim Baldwin, the shoe-stitching-machine man.
“Then let me tell you,” he said, authoritatively, “you made a big
mistake. That man Crane is on the Committee on Manufactures, and we
have been arguing with him, and sending the most expensive men we have
to prove to him that we are entitled to the same rebate on the platinum
used in our machines as the Oshkosh Shoe-Stitching-Machine people
get--and I have reason to know that Crane is the man standing in the
way. I wish you had snuggled right up to him.”
Eleanor surveyed her father with cold displeasure. Mrs. Hill-Smith was
politely oblivious, especially of the word “snuggled.” Coming, as she
did, of a very old family which dated back to 1860, she felt a certain
degree of commiseration for brand-new people like the Baldwins, who had
not appeared above the social horizon until 1880--twenty years later.
But she really liked them, and with a diplomatic instinct inherited
from her father she relieved the situation by rising and saying:
“I see dear Mrs. Baldwin on the balcony and must go and speak to her.”
And as she flitted through the glass door a deep masculine voice just
behind Eleanor said:
“Good morning, Miss Baldwin.”
It was the Honourable Edward George Francis Castlestuart-Stuart, third
secretary of the British Embassy, whom Eleanor had asked to breakfast
that morning. She grew pale as she rose to greet him--suppose--suppose
he had heard that remark about the shoe-stitching machine? And what was
more likely? The shoe-stitching machine was the family skeleton, and
was usually kept under lock and key. By some occult and malign impulse
her father had hauled it out and rattled it in Mrs. Hill-Smith’s face,
and perhaps it might be known at the British Embassy!
Baldwin himself realised the impropriety of his conduct, and tried to
rectify it by saying, with great cordiality, to the Honourable Mr.
Castlestuart-Stuart:
“Good morning--good morning. Very pleased to see you. You find me, as
usual, among my books--my best and oldest friends.”
To this Castlestuart-Stuart replied simply, like the honest Briton that
he was:
“I hate books.”
Baldwin was nearly paralysed at this, and still more so when the
honest Briton quite eagerly went out on the balcony to speak to Mrs.
Baldwin. Only the day before, in one of his rambles about town, he
had come upon her getting out of a cab before a poor lodging-house in
Southeast Washington, her arms loaded with bundles. A swarm of poor
children had run forward to greet her--they evidently knew her well.
Her usually cold, statuesque face had been warmed with the sweet light
of charity, and a heavenly joy shone in her eyes in the process of
feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick.
As Castlestuart-Stuart went out on the balcony and took Mrs. Baldwin’s
hand cordially, she blushed, but not painfully. She, too, had seen
him yesterday, and he had managed to convey with that peculiar art
of a simple and candid nature that he admired her for what she was
doing. Again did she feel this sincere and admiring approval, and was
profoundly grateful for it. Castlestuart-Stuart knew the history of
the family--all the diplomats in Washington know the family history of
those who race and chase after them. He remembered hearing Constance
Maitland say “Mrs. Baldwin redeems the whole family.” Goodness such
as hers could redeem much worse people than the Baldwins, thought
Castlestuart-Stuart, and he proceeded to be bored by Mrs. Hill-Smith
and Eleanor with the best grace in the world. His chief had told him
to take what was set before him in a social way, asking no questions
for conscience’ sake. In the performance of his duty he had dined,
breakfasted, and lunched with pork, dry-goods, whiskey, shoes,
sewing-machines, and every other form of good, honest trade. But the
word trade was never so much as mentioned among them--certainly not at
the breakfast which was now served.
_Chapter Eight_
A NEW SENATOR--A RAILWAY JOURNEY--THE ROSE OF THE FIELD AND THE ROSES
OF THE GARDEN
Crane was in nowise disappointed at the sensation his published letter
made. The justice of his position was at once apparent. But it was
equally apparent that he was making a serious break in the political
dykes which held the party together in his State against the ocean of
the party opposed to it. Under Senator Bicknell’s rule, insubordination
had gradually crept in. The late landslide, which had elected a
Congress in opposition to the party in power, increased the importance
of States like Crane’s, where the balance of power shifted about every
ten years between the two parties. Senator Bicknell, in the seclusion
of his boudoir--for such was his luxurious den in reality--tore his
hair and used all of the expletives permissible in polite society.
In a week or two Governor Sanders, without any further newspaper
controversy, appointed to the vacant senatorship Mr. Michael Patrick
Mulligan, a gentleman of Hibernian descent, who had made a vast fortune
out of manufacturing pies by the wholesale, and who cherished an
honourable ambition to legislate for the hated Saxon. Senator Bicknell,
Crane, and everybody in the State knew of Mr. Michael Patrick Mulligan,
who was commonly called Mince Pie Mulligan. He was a ward politician
of the sort peculiarly unhampered by prejudices or principles, and who
bought and sold votes by wholesale, very much as he bought and sold
pies. He was totally without education, but by no means without brains,
and proposed to himself a seat in the Senate as an agreeable diversion,
without the least idea of doing anything beyond voting as directed by
“the boss”--for so he designated the Senator who was chairman of the
National Committee of Mr. Mulligan’s party. It was, on the whole, about
as harmless an appointment as could be made. Mulligan’s private life
was perfectly clean, and he was known to have an open hand for charity,
and never to have forgotten a friend. It gave both Senator Bicknell
and Crane a breathing-spell, and they were willing enough to put up
with Mince Pie Mulligan until the first of January.
Senator Bicknell, although easy enough in his mind about Mulligan, was
far from easy about Crane, who had gone up like a rocket, but showed
no disposition to come down like a stick. The Senator got into the way
of stealing over to the House, “just to see how things are going”--in
reality to see how Crane was going--and it scared him to observe how
Crane was making good his footing everywhere. His first triumph, even
after subtracting Thorndyke’s assistance, had been a real triumph.
Following hard on this came his controversy with the Governor, in which
he clearly had the best of it. The shrewd men in his party saw that in
the readjustment of allegiances Crane must be counted, and the chairman
of the National Committee said as much to Senator Bicknell when the two
discussed the war between the Governor and Representative Crane. When
the chairman said that, Senator Bicknell felt as Henry IV. of England
felt when he saw the Prince of Wales trying on the crown before the
looking-glass.
Meanwhile, Thorndyke was speeding West, as he had said, and after a
week’s absence he turned eastward again, escorting Annette Crane and
her two children to Washington, as he had suggested to Crane.
For the purpose of acquiring knowledge of others and of one’s self,
there is nothing like a long railway journey. Marriage itself is
scarcely more of an eye-opener. The old Greeks, who reasoned so closely
on the nature of man, would have been vastly informed could they
have taken a few long journeys. Locke could have known more of the
human understanding had he taken the Chicago Limited, with a party,
from Chicago to Washington. In that journey Annette Crane found out
all about Geoffrey Thorndyke, and Geoffrey Thorndyke found out all
about Annette Crane. Their mutual discoveries changed the natural
sympathy which had been established between them to a deep and lasting
friendship.
Those five years of seclusion at Circleville had been developing years
for Annette Crane. In appearance she had gained in dignity and had not
lost in youthfulness. She had fair hair and a wild-rose complexion,
and a pair of the sweetest, most limpid hazel eyes in the world.
Everything about her bore the impress of a gentle sincerity--her frank
gaze, her pretty smile, her soft voice, in which the Western burr was
almost obliterated. Those five years represented a cycle to her. In
that time all of her relations to life seemed to have changed--and
especially were her relations with her husband curiously altered.
In their early married life Crane’s intensity of love and excess of
devotion had frightened her a little. But in time other passions
had come to take the place of this one in his wife, and it had been
shouldered out of place. He was a fairly good husband, but after the
microbe has once lodged in a man’s brain that he is very superior
to his wife, he may still be called a good husband, but scarcely an
agreeable one.
At this stage of the proceedings--which was at the time she first came
to Washington--Annette discovered that she adored her husband. As he
had always accused her of coldness and reserve, she determined to show
him all the treasures of her love. It was the common mistake of youth
and ignorance; but Annette, whose secret pride was great, suffered a
horrible mortification in finding that the display of her affection did
not bring forth the response on which she had confidently relied. She
had made no moan, and had deceived the whole world, including Crane
himself, into believing that she was a satisfied wife; but her misery
had been extreme. Her pride, informed by common-sense, had helped her
over the crisis. She had herself proposed to spend the winters in
Circleville, instead of Washington, thus forestalling any possibility
of the proposal coming from Crane; and in Circleville she had set
herself the task of making the most and best of herself, not only for
her husband, but for her children. She had learned a good deal in that
brief and unpleasant experience in Washington. Among others was a
just appreciation of herself. She realised that she had certain great
advantages, and she no longer had the self-deprecatory tone of mind
which had made her feel that Crane had perhaps condescended in marrying
her. She was as passionately attached to him as ever, but her eyes were
opened and she saw.
She had taken to reading as a solace, and as a duty, and not because
she was strongly attracted to books. The result, however, was good,
and she found it enabled her to meet men like Thorndyke on a common
ground. In training her children, she had performed the inevitable
function of training herself. Under her system, her children had become
quieter and sweeter than American children usually are. The American
women in general can more than hold their own with the women of other
countries, except in two trifling particulars--the arts of housekeeping
and of bringing up children. In these two things they generally fail
egregiously, and the more money they have the more conspicuous is their
failure. To paraphrase the Scripture--“See you the house of the rich
American man? Behold therein a tribe of undisciplined and impudent
servants and children.” The newness of the rich in America may account
for the undisciplined servants, of whom their mistresses are in mortal
terror. But American women have been bringing up children ever since
the settlement at Jamestown and the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, and
every year they seem to know less about it.
However, Annette Crane’s children were more quiet, more simply dressed
than most American children. They had escaped, to a great degree, the
demoralising influences of children’s magazines, “The Children’s Page”
in newspapers, and children’s plays, and they had not been amused to
death. Annette, it is true, had not mastered the science of managing
servants, but in that she was at one with the women of other parts of
the country, except the South--for, as Senator Hoar once remarked on
the floor of the Senate, as a preliminary to a ferocious attack on the
South, it is the Southerners alone, in this country, who have the habit
of command. Annette Crane, however, although she could no more manage
her household staff of one maid-of-all-work than Mrs. James Brentwood
Baldwin or Mrs. Hill-Smith could manage her retinue of English flunkeys
and French maids, yet, by tact and judgment, succeeded in keeping
the maid-of-all-work within bounds--which is more than the Brentwood
Baldwins and the Hill-Smiths could do with their maids and flunkeys.
On the journey with Thorndyke, not one word had passed Annette’s
lips to indicate any rift between her husband and herself. She spoke
of him frankly and affectionately. But the two children showed
none of that happy eagerness to meet their father which the average
American child shows to meet a dutiful and obedient parent. This did
not escape Thorndyke, and amazed him. He had the usual bachelor’s
fear and dread of children, but two days and nights of travel with
little Roger and Elizabeth Crane had placed him upon terms of perfect
intimacy with them. Roger had climbed all over him, and Thorndyke,
instead of resenting it, had been secretly pleased at it. He had wrung
permission from Annette to take the boy into the smoking-car with him
occasionally, and Roger emerged with many mannish airs for his eight
years. Thorndyke’s berth was at the other end of the sleeper from
Annette’s and her children, and on the second night, when Thorndyke
turned in, he found the youngster had eluded his mother’s vigilant
eye, and had crawled into Thorndyke’s berth for a talk about Indians.
Thorndyke not only submitted to this, but permitted Roger to send word
to his mother by the porter that he would sleep in Mr. Thorndyke’s
berth, because Mr. Thorndyke had asked him--and the two of them managed
to defy Annette in the matter. Little Elizabeth took an extreme fancy
to Thorndyke, and inquired if she might ask Mr. Thorndyke to be her
uncle Thorndyke.
Annette, being acute, as most women are, in affairs of the heart,
knew, the very first time that Thorndyke casually mentioned Constance
Maitland, that he was in love with her. When he said that he had known
her long ago, at Lake Como, and proceeded to describe the beauty of
those Italian days and nights, Annette Crane was convinced that it
was in those sweet hours that Thorndyke had first loved Constance
Maitland. Women have no conscience in probing the love-affairs of men,
reckoning them the common property of the sex--and while Thorndyke was
blithely unconscious that he had revealed anything, Annette was in full
possession of all the essential facts. Also, Thorndyke let out that
Crane knew Constance Maitland. Crane had never mentioned Constance’s
name to his wife. That, was in itself enough to give Annette a painful
interest in this woman who, as Thorndyke said, could charm the birds
off the bushes.
When the train came bumping into Washington on a pleasant May
afternoon, Crane was waiting at the station. He seemed delighted
to meet his family again, and indeed, on seeing them, a kind of
tenderness came over him. He kissed his children affectionately, to
which they submitted. Just behind them was a shabby, one-armed man,
whom a girl of ten or twelve was hugging and kissing with little
gurgles of delight. Crane wished that his children had met him like
that.
He thanked Thorndyke warmly for taking care of Annette, who said a
few words of earnest thanks, and gave him a smile from her dewy lips
and eyes that meant much more. The children bade him good-bye with
outspoken regret, and would not be comforted until Thorndyke promised
to take them to the Zoo the next Sunday to see the baby elephant.