CHAPTER VIII
Now that I know Gabrielle Tescheron, I am for giving woman the largest liberty in all matters; let her have suffrage if she will take it. I am for giving woman everything—just let her run loose, here, there and everywhere, and then you'll see the world tidy up. It's time the worldliness of the world was viewed with fresh eyes. Woman, so long held in restraint, in many ways is a better observer than conventional man. She is like a countryman newly arrived in the city. It takes a countryman to see the real sights of New York; of course, he won't let on or be surprised at anything, for he wants you to feel that the only metropolis worth while is the place he calls "down street," up home; he is taking it all in, however, like an old-fashioned sap-kettle, and if you have dumped maple juice fresh from the trees into one all day, you'd think it held the five oceans and the Great Lakes. For years afterward his views on New York illuminate locally every city scandal reported in the New York papers; he probably saw it coming when he was down, and can tell a lot of incidents there was no space for in the crowded papers.
At one of the Oswegatchie County dinners held in a swell New York hotel I once saw one of these confident, you-can't-surprise-me countrymen take a drink of water from a goblet with a scalloped edge; it stood fourteen inches high and six across. The waiter had placed it on the table near him full of celery, but when the last piece had been taken and only a few green leaves floated like lily pads on its calm surface, he knew the proper thing to do. He just blew off the stray leaves, stretched his mouth around the prongs on the edge, got his paw under it, turned it up and enjoyed his simple highball. All our strong men come from the country. They drink and see things straight. They are more particular as to contents than containers, for they are nearly all prohibitionists or very high license advocates. When they are "dry," they drink equally well from a spring-hole, a spigot, a dipper or a pail.
"Rather generous with the water at these dinners, Reuben," I said, addressing him across the table, as he covered his mouth with his napkin preparatory to resuming his composure.
"These fashionable glasses always cut my mouth," he replied, wrinkling his brow to emphasize his dislike for the fads of the aristocracy.
But when an out-and-out city man goes to the country, he can't see anything; it's all just like Central Park, in that there are no houses to be seen, only it's not laid out so well nor raked so clean. I have often seen these chaps when they came up to our place. The city man is as blind as a cave fish, and all he wants to know is when do they eat and are there any mosquitoes and poison ivy. The air suits him, only it's a little too strong; and the dirt is satisfactory—all else is away below par, and if it weren't for the air and the dirt, which the country-bred city doctor has told him the kids need, he'd like to be home, where he can be sociable in his sub-stratum of atmospheric poison, amid the clatter that consumes his vital forces and keeps him pleasantly anæmic and tolerably dead.
Did you ever go through the woods with a native New Yorker? There has been an incessant stream of startling things running before his eyes since his birth, with plenty of noise, dust and expense, so that when he is thrown out into the fields or the woods he finds he can't be one of Nature's Quakers and hold communion with the silent worshippers through whom the Spirit speaks. His outdoor religion is in the Salvation Army class, and he can't warm up enough to admire a potted geranium unless he hears a bass drum or a hand organ to distract him on the side. If the sweet air and comforting silence of the country were to fall upon New York, the town would probably drop to even lower levels from the shock. The country boy, who has been used to concentrating on the wood-pile, runs the country; or, if it happens to be a city boy who runs it, he is a fellow who had the wood-pile grafted onto him in time to save his career. Gabrielle Tescheron, the woman in a new field, saw the world aright; there was no mystery for her at any time. Her intuitions guided her unerringly while we who reasoned became entangled.
Shrewdness in the country lad, however, is not commended very highly by me. It may be that the country boy has been tutored by the most unscrupulous politicians that ever got out a big vote on a moral issue—usually the one coined at the mint with unanimous consent and a cry for more: "In God We Trust." If the country boy has fallen, it may be that he was blinded by this, so that when he came to the city and took the prizes he used the same old methods. We find some of these shrewd country lads with abundant health, close observers, selling their birthrights here in the sort of deals that were regarded as clever in up-country politics, and so became legitimate in their eyes.
There's more politics in the country than they can dilute in their sermons, although they absorb about thirty times as many of these as the city man. Some day all the country fathers will reform, even if they have to change their politics and half of them die because of it. They will think it more worth while to save their sons than to save the country.
What about the morality of the city man? It isn't a factor because he isn't.
If the management of our affairs had been entrusted to Gabrielle Tescheron there would have been no trouble. Had her father been a wise man and allowed this only child to have her way—to have noted the whole situation from her fresh view-point, he would have found peace where he found an abundance of perplexing conditions and ample expense closely adhering to every bramble bush into which the tactics of Smith hurled him. Gabrielle could not save him and she did not try. Where the cause of the trouble is idiocy of the Tescheron quality, it has to go through a long course of pulverization, maceration and cure; if you hurry the process, the goods will be sour and hurt the business, if the lot gets out under the trade-mark. The best thing to do with it is to send it to the coal heap, for if you try to get your money back at a Front Street auction room, some hand-cart syndicate will nab it and cut your price. They'll undersell the direct trade, and when you have finished writing an explanation to the men on the road, you'd wish you had eaten the whole carload yourself.
It was part of the wisdom of this remarkably prudent young woman to thoroughly comprehend—by some of those fresh intuitions, probably—that her truly repentant father would plead for her forgiveness and ask her blessing upon his prodigal return only after a long, long wrestle with the wholesalers in blasted reputations, who so showily presented designs for a disgraced suitor that pleased him greatly. He had placed an order with these architects of infamous character to build one according to the plans and specifications presented, and as the construction work progressed there were extras, extras, extras! Gabrielle knew of these and never murmured. To her father's urgings, she guardedly replied:
"My dear father, I know my heart and I know yours. Some day you, too, will reach the truth and we shall again be happy."
There was no mystery in this situation for Gabrielle Tescheron, as I have stated. She would not tolerate it. At the time her father and myself were confused, she was sure of herself. He thought of his family, and I of my reputation, whose spots had never been advertised. Gabrielle thought only of Jim.
Gabrielle could not be swayed from her devotion to the man whose simple ways and sturdy honor made their silent appeal to her. He was nobody's ideal man but hers, perhaps, and people who knew them wondered what she saw in him to match her ambitions. Well, there was her wisdom coming to the surface again in a way to confuse those who would have managed her affairs differently. Gabrielle had a firm faith in herself. Jim was the complementary type of man; he approached her with qualifications that met all the practical conditions the careful father had a right to demand, prompted by his love for his child—at least, this was true according to her conception—and beyond that the father could not enter to live her life for her. She was at once convinced of her father's folly and paid no further heed to his objections. She gave full liberty to others, and firmly but not excitedly demanded it for herself. This was a manifestation of love's controlling power in the stress of storm that I, as a theorist, knew not, but having gained the wisdom through the course it prescribes in the school—I might say the Correspondence School of Hard Knocks, I think I am now qualified to have my name in the catalogue, if not as a member of the faculty, then as janitor—for no man was ever more ready than I to eat humble pie.
Gabrielle Tescheron was a graduate of Vassar. When only twenty she had her degree and an ambition to progress farther in knowledge by direct contact with the world of business. The opportunity came on her Commencement Day, when John MacDonald, an old friend of her father, playfully suggested that she come into his law office and be a Portia.
"Your black gown," he said, "makes me think you are a Justice of the Court of Appeals."
He smiled, and she became very happy with this thought to carry home. Even then I believe she had the good sense not to feel badly because he had not praised her essay on "Constitutional Provisions Bearing Upon Our Federal Control of Inter-State Commerce."
"Ten years from now, I'll tell you what I think about it," was all he had to say.
John MacDonald was getting well along in years, but was at the height of his active professional career when Gabrielle induced him to seriously confirm his suggestion made a few months before. This persistence of hers in the matter pleased him. He liked her self-confidence and that quiet manner which told him she would win by taking the sure road of steady, earnest endeavor to grasp the whole by taking each part, day by day. She began, he saw, with scientific methods and abundant enthusiasm. The plan was for her to master stenography and typewriting, become John MacDonald's confidante in the office, and at the same time take a law course at one of the down-town schools. The mechanical aids afforded by stenographic note-taking and the typewriter's rapidity gave her the short cuts to mastering the details and routine of the business—the shop-work of a law office. Mr. MacDonald, a kind, mild-mannered man, but an exact and careful lawyer, who demanded the utmost thoroughness from his subordinates, had known this girl from childhood and took a fatherly interest in her. She, in turn, admired him for his justice, and she felt that the progress she was able to make in her work by keeping busy and taking pains, might not have been so marked under his tutorship were he not a man whose sympathy never ran to coddling and spoiling. He was in sympathy with her, that she knew; but he never went out of his way to tell her how well she was doing. He incorporated much of her original work in his own, and let her infer his opinion of her from this. This man was, I believe, the source of the girl's wisdom in the events which drove her father and me into the most unusual forms of insane conclusion. We assumed that we understood human nature. This girl assumed nothing. She walked with sure feet after she had gone over the case with some of the old-fashioned common sense that hovered around John MacDonald's law office. How fine it was for her to attach herself to some of the real problems of the world rather than bury her talents in the shallow social activities she might have entered into and come to regard as her limited sphere, when in reality she had the widest liberty for the mere seeking and deserving!
I was not present at the reception held at the home of mutual friends, Mr. and Mrs. Gibson, some three years prior to these events narrated here, when Gabrielle Tescheron and James Hosley first met. I was out of town that New Year's eve, and so missed the jolly party at the Gibsons', although I had been present usually on these anniversary occasions in bygone years, for the Gibsons were kind friends of ours and pitied our lonely lot. They lived in the cutest little home in all the great city—in the most romantic spot you could find when the waning hours of the old year were danced away by merry feet and jolly hearts sang the New Year in. Mr. Gibson was a mechanical engineer (not from Stevens', but from Cooper Union), and he was the superintendent in charge of the big Produce Exchange building, whose tall, red tower is one of the landmarks of New York. Their home was a conveniently arranged and tastefully furnished apartment high up in the tower just beneath the clock, where, perhaps, you have seen those round windows that look out upon the world of surrounding harbor and soaring skyscrapers, like tiny portholes. Those windows of the Gibson home are larger than you imagine when viewing them from the street. What a spot to meet a charming girl! Why, I used to lose my heart there every New Year's night as regularly as the big clock marked the minutes, but it always came back to me with a bounce six weeks later; the dense atmosphere of romance hovering there made competition extremely keen. Who would not fall in love in that clock tower!—far up among the stars, separated from the dull routine below by encircling fairy lights of harbor, misty outlines of buildings and busily moving craft—all seemingly in mid-air, flashing the scenery of a joyland, while mellow chimes of the neighboring Trinity pealed their glad welcome to the New Year. At that magic moment, when you pressed far out of the window to hear the bells—she and you—suspended above that vast expanse of earth, sea and air shrinking away, as if you two together were flying aloft with arms entwined, you passed very close to heaven. The shouts from the street were heard but faintly, and awoke sighing echoes in your heart, like the minor chord accenting the ecstatic movement which seemed to hold the world in rhythm. How lustily you caroled the chorus to hide your tender feelings! Some of those round windows have such dear memories clinging to them—aye! clinging is the word—that I dare not look up at them any more from Broadway.
My story tells of Trinity bells,
When chimes ring clear
And harbor lights are flashing,
Beneath the starry bower,
Where a dying year brings not a tear
To young hearts in the tower.
How sweetly swells—how merrily bells!
The song of youth,
To lift the soul enraptured—
A glance may tell the story,
Prompted by Cupid, now shyly hid—
Anon he'll claim the glory.
Remember that Gabrielle Tescheron was enjoying herself like all the other girls that night—that New Year's eve, a little more than three years before the opening of our tale, and Jim Hosley was deep in all the fun. On the floor above the Gibson apartment, the young folks danced around the works of the clock to the music of a violin and harp, and from early evening till late—or early, as you please—they had the best kind of a time—the mothers, fathers, sons and daughters—for it was a family party. All the Gibson relatives and their friends were there, for it would not seem like New Year's to them to celebrate the coming of the year away from that romantic nest. Don't ask me to analyze the hearts of Gabrielle and Jim to the whys and wherefores, for the potencies of love are beyond the analysis even of the purists, although they give us many words of explanation which get around at last to the old formula: "They fell in love." And it was as if they had dropped from one of the round windows as they leaned far out together to catch the sound of the chimes, so sudden and so deep was the fall.
Education and training in modern business methods had left Gabrielle just a simple girl, aside from all her accomplishments. Her laugh was the loudest and her zeal for a good time the strongest. She entered into the revels with zest, prompted Nellie Gibson to exhibitions of mimicry, recited, cleverly told anecdotes evolved from her own experiences, played, sang, danced and cheered for the host and hostess. It was well there were no neighbors to complain.
Jim, I have been told, was completely fascinated early in the evening, and his devotions became marked by nine o'clock; by ten o'clock he was lost to all the rest of the company in beholding her. Early the following year he was happy only when dancing with her, singing so that his top notes blended with hers at short range, or helping her to hear the chimes at one of the round windows. At 3 o'clock he started for Ninety-sixth Street with Gabrielle—her mother and father were not present—and there is no record of the time he reached our flat.
That was the beginning of a courtship which was carried on without the assistance of the middleman of former years, until the unexpected interference of the father-in-law threw the case into my expert hands.