So far as the Dryfoos family was concerned, the dinner might as well have
been given at Frescobaldi's rooms. None of the ladies appeared. Mrs.
Dryfoos was glad to escape to her own chamber, where she sat before an
autumnal fire, shaking her head and talking to herself at times, with the
foreboding of evil which old women like her make part of their religion.
The girls stood just out of sight at the head of the stairs, and disputed
which guest it was at each arrival; Mrs. Mandel had gone to her room to
write letters, after beseeching them not to stand there. When Kendricks
came, Christine gave Mela a little pinch, equivalent to a little mocking
shriek; for, on the ground of his long talk with Mela at Mrs. Horn's, in
the absence of any other admirer, they based a superstition of his
interest in her; when Beaton came, Mela returned the pinch, but
awkwardly, so that it hurt, and then Christine involuntarily struck her.
Frescobaldi's men were in possession everywhere they had turned the cook
out of her kitchen and the waitress out of her pantry; the reluctant
Irishman at the door was supplemented by a vivid Italian, who spoke
French with the guests, and said, "Bien, Monsieur," and "toute suite,"
and "Merci!" to all, as he took their hats and coats, and effused a
hospitality that needed no language but the gleam of his eyes and teeth
and the play of his eloquent hands. From his professional dress-coat,
lustrous with the grease spotted on it at former dinners and parties,
they passed to the frocks of the elder and younger Dryfoos in the
drawing-room, which assumed informality for the affair, but did not put
their wearers wholly at their ease. The father's coat was of black
broadcloth, and he wore it unbuttoned; the skirts were long, and the
sleeves came down to his knuckles; he shook hands with his guests, and
the same dryness seemed to be in his palm and throat, as he huskily asked
each to take a chair. Conrad's coat was of modern texture and cut, and
was buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience within its
lapels; he met March with his entreating smile, and he seemed no more
capable of coping with the situation than his father. They both waited
for Fulkerson, who went about and did his best to keep life in the party
during the half-hour that passed before they sat down at dinner. Beaton
stood gloomily aloof, as if waiting to be approached on the right basis
before yielding an inch of his ground; Colonel Woodburn, awaiting the
moment when he could sally out on his hobby, kept himself intrenched
within the dignity of a gentleman, and examined askance the figure of old
Lindau as he stared about the room, with his fine head up, and his empty
sleeve dangling over his wrist. March felt obliged to him for wearing a
new coat in the midst of that hostile luxury, and he was glad to see
Dryfoos make up to him and begin to talk with him, as if he wished to
show him particular respect, though it might have been because he was
less afraid of him than of the others. He heard Lindau saying, "Boat, the
name is Choarman?" and Dryfoos beginning to explain his Pennsylvania
Dutch origin, and he suffered himself, with a sigh of relief, to fall
into talk with Kendricks, who was always pleasant; he was willing to talk
about something besides himself, and had no opinions that he was not
ready to hold in abeyance for the time being out of kindness to others.
In that group of impassioned individualities, March felt him a refuge and
comfort--with his harmless dilettante intention of some day writing a
novel, and his belief that he was meantime collecting material for it.
Fulkerson, while breaking the ice for the whole company, was mainly
engaged in keeping Colonel Woodburn thawed out. He took Kendricks away
from March and presented him to the colonel as a person who, like
himself, was looking into social conditions; he put one hand on
Kendricks's shoulder, and one on the colonel's, and made some flattering
joke, apparently at the expense of the young fellow, and then left them.
March heard Kendricks protest in vain, and the colonel say, gravely: "I
do not wonder, sir, that these things interest you. They constitute a
problem which society must solve or which will dissolve society," and he
knew from that formula, which the colonel had, once used with him, that
he was laying out a road for the exhibition of the hobby's paces later.
Fulkerson came back to March, who had turned toward Conrad Dryfoos, and
said, "If we don't get this thing going pretty soon, it 'll be the death
of me," and just then Frescobaldi's butler came in and announced to
Dryfoos that dinner was served. The old man looked toward Fulkerson with
a troubled glance, as if he did not know what to do; he made a gesture to
touch Lindau's elbow. Fulkerson called out, "Here's Colonel Woodburn, Mr.
Dryfoos," as if Dryfoos were looking for him; and he set the example of
what he was to do by taking Lindau's arm himself. "Mr. Lindau is going to
sit at my end of the table, alongside of March. Stand not upon the order
of your going, gentlemen, but fall in at once." He contrived to get
Dryfoos and the colonel before him, and he let March follow with
Kendricks. Conrad came last with Beaton, who had been turning over the
music at the piano, and chafing inwardly at the whole affair. At the
table Colonel Woodburn was placed on Dryfoos's right, and March on his
left. March sat on Fulkerson's right, with Lindau next him; and the young
men occupied the other seats.
"Put you next to March, Mr. Lindau," said Fulkerson, "so you can begin to
put Apollinaris in his champagne-glass at the right moment; you know his
little weakness of old; sorry to say it's grown on him."
March laughed with kindly acquiescence in Fulkerson's wish to start the
gayety, and Lindau patted him on the shoulder. "I know hiss veakness. If
he liges a class of vine, it iss begause his loaf ingludes efen hiss
enemy, as Shakespeare galled it."
"Ah, but Shakespeare couldn't have been thinking of champagne," said
Kendricks.
"I suppose, sir," Colonel Woodburn interposed, with lofty courtesy,
"champagne could hardly have been known in his day."
"I suppose not, colonel," returned the younger man, deferentially. "He
seemed to think that sack and sugar might be a fault; but he didn't
mention champagne."
"Perhaps he felt there was no question about that," suggested Beaton, who
then felt that he had not done himself justice in the sally.
"I wonder just when champagne did come in," said March.
"I know when it ought to come in," said Fulkerson. "Before the soup!"
They all laughed, and gave themselves the air of drinking champagne out
of tumblers every day, as men like to do. Dryfoos listened uneasily; he
did not quite understand the allusions, though he knew what Shakespeare
was, well enough; Conrad's face expressed a gentle deprecation of joking
on such a subject, but he said nothing.
The talk ran on briskly through the dinner. The young men tossed the ball
back and forth; they made some wild shots, but they kept it going, and
they laughed when they were hit. The wine loosed Colonel Woodburn's
tongue; he became very companionable with the young fellows; with the
feeling that a literary dinner ought to have a didactic scope, he praised
Scott and Addison as the only authors fit to form the minds of gentlemen.
Kendricks agreed with him, but wished to add the name of Flaubert as a
master of style. "Style, you know," he added, "is the man."
"Very true, sir; you are quite right, sir," the colonel assented; he
wondered who Flaubert was.
Beaton praised Baudelaire and Maupassant; he said these were the masters.
He recited some lurid verses from Baudelaire; Lindau pronounced them a
disgrace to human nature, and gave a passage from Victor Hugo on Louis
Napoleon, with his heavy German accent, and then he quoted Schiller.
"Ach, boat that is a peaudifool! Not zo?" he demanded of March.
"Yes, beautiful; but, of course, you know I think there's nobody like
Heine!"
Lindau threw back his great old head and laughed, showing a want of teeth
under his mustache. He put his hand on March's back. "This poy--he was a
poy den--wars so gracy to pekin reading Heine that he gommence with the
tictionary bevore he knows any Grammar, and ve bick it out vort by vort
togeder."
"He was a pretty cay poy in those days, heigh, Lindau?" asked Fulkerson,
burlesquing the old man's accent, with an impudent wink that made Lindau
himself laugh. "But in the dark ages, I mean, there in Indianapolis. Just
how long ago did you old codgers meet there, anyway?" Fulkerson saw the
restiveness in Dryfoos's eye at the purely literary course the talk had
taken; he had intended it to lead up that way to business, to 'Every
Other Week;' but he saw that it was leaving Dryfoos too far out, and he
wished to get it on the personal ground, where everybody is at home.
"Ledt me zee," mused Lindau. "Wass it in fifty-nine or zixty, Passil? Idt
wass a year or dwo pefore the war proke oudt, anyway."
"Those were exciting times," said Dryfoos, making his first entry into
the general talk. "I went down to Indianapolis with the first company
from our place, and I saw the red-shirts pouring in everywhere. They had
a song,
"Oh, never mind the weather, but git over double trouble,
For we're bound for the land of Canaan."
The fellows locked arms and went singin' it up and down four or five
abreast in the moonlight; crowded everybody else off the sidewalk."
"I remember, I remember," said Lindau, nodding his head slowly up and
down. "A coodt many off them nefer gome pack from that landt of Ganaan,
Mr. Dryfoos?"
"You're right, Mr. Lindau. But I reckon it was worth it--the country
we've got now. Here, young man!" He caught the arm of the waiter who was
going round with the champagne bottle. "Fill up Mr. Lindau's glass,
there. I want to drink the health of those old times with him. Here's to
your empty sleeve, Mr. Lindau. God bless it! No offence to you, Colonel
Woodburn," said Dryfoos, turning to him before he drank.
"Not at all, sir, not at all," said the colonel. "I will drink with you,
if you will permit me."
"We'll all drink--standing!" cried Fulkerson. "Help March to get up,
somebody! Fill high the bowl with Samian Apollinaris for Coonrod! Now,
then, hurrah for Lindau!"
They cheered, and hammered on the table with the butts of their
knife-handles. Lindau remained seated. The tears came into his eyes; he
said, "I thank you, chendlemen," and hiccoughed.
"I'd 'a' went into the war myself," said Dryfoos, "but I was raisin' a
family of young children, and I didn't see how I could leave my farm. But
I helped to fill up the quota at every call, and when the volunteering
stopped I went round with the subscription paper myself; and we offered
as good bounties as any in the State. My substitute was killed in one of
the last skirmishes--in fact, after Lee's surrender--and I've took care
of his family, more or less, ever since."
"By-the-way, March," said Fulkerson, "what sort of an idea would it be to
have a good war story--might be a serial--in the magazine? The war has
never fully panned out in fiction yet. It was used a good deal just after
it was over, and then it was dropped. I think it's time to take it up
again. I believe it would be a card."
It was running in March's mind that Dryfoos had an old rankling shame in
his heart for not having gone into the war, and that he had often made
that explanation of his course without having ever been satisfied with
it. He felt sorry for him; the fact seemed pathetic; it suggested a
dormant nobleness in the man.
Beaton was saying to Fulkerson: "You might get a series of sketches by
substitutes; the substitutes haven't been much heard from in the war
literature. How would 'The Autobiography of a Substitute' do? You might
follow him up to the moment he was killed in the other man's place, and
inquire whether he had any right to the feelings of a hero when he was
only hired in the place of one. Might call it 'The Career of a Deputy
Hero.'"
"I fancy," said March, "that there was a great deal of mixed motive in
the men who went into the war as well as in those who kept out of it. We
canonized all that died or suffered in it, but some of them must have
been self-seeking and low-minded, like men in other vocations." He found
himself saying this in Dryfoos's behalf; the old man looked at him
gratefully at first, he thought, and then suspiciously.
Lindau turned his head toward him and said: "You are righdt, Passil; you
are righdt. I haf zeen on the fieldt of pattle the voarst eggsipitions of
human paseness--chelousy, fanity, ecodistic bridte. I haf zeen men in the
face off death itself gofferned by motifes as low as--as pusiness
motifes."
"Well," said Fulkerson, "it would be a grand thing for 'Every Other Week'
if we could get some of those ideas worked up into a series. It would
make a lot of talk."