CHAPTER VIII.
“Meeting strangers at a musicale is not always a pleasant experience. If you are musical, the people bore you; if you are sociable, the music bores you.”
So John Fenton had said to Richard Stoughton, when the latter had made his first effort to perform a miracle and obtain the former’s acceptance in advance of Mrs. Percy-Bartlett’s invitation.
“But you owe me this reparation, Fenton,” Richard had urged. “When you gave me those books on the single-tax theory to read, did I hold off and say that if I was indifferent the books would bore me, or, if I became a convert, I would bore my friends? No; I made no excuses, but read the books. Now I claim my reward. You have failed, after a fair trial, to make me an advocate of the immediate establishment of the millennium. Let me now have an equal chance of persuading you that the best thing to do is to take the world as we find it, and enjoy the good the gods provide.”
The two men were spending the hour after dinner in Fenton’s bachelor-apartments. They had fallen into the way of dining together whenever they were both free to do so; and their friendship, having withstood the failure of Fenton’s effort to make the young man an economic radical, had grown warmer as the weeks went by. In several ways Fenton had derived considerable benefit from his close intercourse with Stoughton. It had been remarked in the city room of the Trumpet that Fenton had given up drinking cocktails, and that he had grown particular about his attire. He no longer allowed his hair and beard to show signs of neglect; and the reporters for the paper had said to each other that the assistant editor did not seem to be quite as sarcastic and testy as he had been in former times. But if any one had told Fenton that a youth not long out of college, and of a mental make-up that was dazzling rather than convincing, had been the active cause in begetting certain reforms in his habits of life, the cynical and time-scarred journalist would have considered his informant insane. The strongest men are moulded and remoulded by their friends, but they are seldom willing to acknowledge the fact.
After Richard’s last argument, Fenton had puffed his cigar in silence for a time. But he was not thinking of what his companion had just said. He had grown convinced from several remarks, dropped inadvertently by his friend, that the young man had become very much interested in Mrs. Percy-Bartlett. It was not within the possibilities of their existing friendship for him to question Richard very closely on this point; but he was extremely anxious to know the exact truth of the matter. If he went to the musicale, he thought, he could see for himself just how the affair stood, and would be the better able to guide his own steps in the premises. It had been his passion, when a young man, for a certain married woman, that had ruined John Fenton. He had a well-grounded horror, therefore, of seeing Richard Stoughton wrecking himself on the same rock that had caused his own downfall.
“You have stated your arguments very cleverly, Richard,” he had said, after a time. “You sacrificed yourself on the altar of my books. I will reciprocate by throwing myself under the juggernaut of your musicale. But, understand me, you will be disappointed in the result. Society has no allurements for me. I touched it at all points years ago, when I had much more enthusiasm than I have now; and, I tell you, there is nothing in it as a permanent amusement for a man of sense. What is a gathering of people of fashion, at its best? Nothing more than a dress-parade of more or less well-groomed men and women who revenge themselves for boring each other in public by destroying each other’s characters in private.”
“If you ever have time,” suggested Richard, smiling, “you should write a novel, John. You have a way of scolding the universe with a kind of epigrammatic fervor that might prove popular.”
“You flatter me, Richard, by the implied conviction that I have not yet been flippant enough to produce a work of fiction. I don’t want you to idealize me; so I might as well confess, that, years ago, when I was about your age, I did write a novel.” Fenton looked at Richard with an expression on his face that would have fitted the confession of a crime. Then he stepped to a closet, and, after rumaging around for a while, brought forth a dust-covered roll of manuscript.
“This,” he said, “is one of the little gravestones in my very large cemetery of dead hopes and dreams.”
He brushed the dust off of the roll with almost reverent hand.
“I haven’t looked at this thing for years, Richard. I’d almost forgotten about it, until you made that remark about my writing a novel. I have a sort of indistinct idea that, in the storehouse of your ambitions, you have high literary aspirations, more or less concealed from view. If you have, let this, my boy, be a warning to you not to waste your time on a novel.”
Richard had been looking through the manuscript with an unaffected show of interest.
“You call it ‘Ephemeræ,’” he remarked. “It is a taking title.”
“But it didn’t take the publishers,” returned Fenton, whose face had grown unusually animated by the unexpected revival of long-buried emotions. He had put a good deal of the energy, enthusiasm, and vigor of early manhood into the rejected novel, and it had received the minute polish that his life of leisure at that time had enabled him to give it. How bitterly disappointed he had been at its refusal by a leading publishing house he had long forgotten; but the present moment had brought back to him a multitude of conflicting emotions, changed by time into a general feeling of regret and self-pity.
“My writing is rather blind,” he remarked, taking the manuscript from his friend. “Let me read you the prologue; not for publication, but as an evidence of good faith.”
For the first time in their acquaintanceship, Fenton’s unsymmetrical face appeared actually handsome in Richard’s eyes. The spirit of the past that lurks in the relics of by-gone years had gently spoken from the dust-stained manuscript, and had bidden John Fenton’s lost youth to gleam again in his eyes, and to add a note of enthusiasm to his voice.
“It was a strangely pessimistic piece of work for a man as young as I was at that time to write,” he said musingly. “But, as I can say now, after years have strengthened my judgment, this novel is strong and artistic. At the time when it was sent to the publishers, there was little chance for the acceptance of anything written by an American that was not strictly moral and what the good old fossils of that day were so fond of calling ‘wholesome.’ This is the prologue, Richard. It gives the keynote to the story.”
Fenton leaned back in his chair, and read aloud the opening words of his novel:—
“It was not a pretty fly, but it loved the sun. It rejoiced in the power of its wings, the length of its antennæ, the pulsing health of its little body. It was summer, and the fly flitted about in the warm and caressing atmosphere, as though God smiled for its especial pleasure.
“Oh, the glory of the day! No shadow saw the fly, for it soared so high that nought but the golden glory of a smiling universe met its gaze.
“But when the day was done, the little fly was dead.
“It never knew, the joyous trifler, that it was only one of a group of neuropterous insects, belonging to the genus Ephemeræ, that live in the adult or winged state for a single day, and die when the darkness falls.”
There was silence for a moment. Then Richard said:—
“I feel sure, John, that if I had picked up a novel containing that prologue my curiosity would have been piqued; that I would have been anxious to read on to see how the author had made his story harmonize with his melancholy text.”
“I remember,” said Fenton, lighting a fresh cigar, and rambling on musingly, “that when I conceived the story I was actuated by the feeling that men take themselves and their affairs too seriously. There seemed to me to be something grimly ludicrous about the vast majority of men, who fuss around for a few years on an insignificant planet in an out-of-the-way corner of space, as if they had been placed here for eternity, and were individually of tremendous significance to the universe at large. I worked out the story on lines intended to show, in a comparatively small compass, that we are as powerless and unimportant in the infinite realm of existence as the foolish little flies that buzz so loud on a summer’s day. If I should rewrite the story to-day, I am not quite sure that I should take so hopeless a view of the significance of human life. As I have grown older, I have become more inclined to think that no man has a right to consider himself of no importance in the tout ensemble of the universe; not, at least, until it is proved conclusively that there is no such thing as a soul possessing eternal life. At all events, if we are ephemeræ, I am sure that one fly has as much right as another to the sunshine of the noonday. And so I make of an economic theory a religion,—for want of a better.” Fenton’s sarcastic smile played across his mouth again as he ceased speaking.
Richard had put on his overcoat, and was holding out his hand for the manuscript of Fenton’s novel.
“Let me take the story with me, John,” he said. “I want to read it. I am rather inclined to think, from what I know of the present literary market, that now is the appointed time for you to win fame in the realm of letters.”
Fenton, after a moment’s hesitancy, handed the scroll to his friend.
“I am not ambitious in that line,” he said firmly; “but it will do no harm to have you read the book.”
“And you will go to Mrs. Percy-Bartlett’s with me?” Richard exclaimed smilingly. “I am very glad, John, I assure you. I’m sure that our hostess will feel that you have paid her a great compliment.”
Fenton smiled, almost bitterly; and, as if memory had sharpened his tongue, he said, as he held Richard’s hand a moment,—
“I gave that up long ago, my boy. Paying a compliment to a woman is like giving sugar-plums to a child. It establishes a precedent, and begets an appetite. Never tell a woman a thing you don’t mean, Richard; especially a married woman.”