CHAPTER XV.
Some Light With a Few Side-lights
The real spring in New York comes when blundering nature has painted the outer wilderness for autumn. What is called "spring" in the city by unreflecting users of the word is a tame, insipid season yawning into not more than half-wakefulness at best. The trees in the gas-poisoned soil are slow in their greening, the grass has but a pallid city vitality, and the rows of gaudy tulips set out primly about the fountains in the squares are palpably forced and alien.
For the sumptuous blending and flaunt of colour, the spontaneous awakening of warm, throbbing new life, and all those inspiring miracles of regeneration which are performed elsewhere in April and May, the city-pent must wait until mid-October.
This is the spring of the city's year. There be those to hint captiously that they find it an affair of false seeming; that the gorgeous colouring is a mere trick of shop-window cunning; that the time is juiceless and devoid of all but the specious delights of surface. Yet these, perhaps, are unduly imaginative for a world where any satisfaction is held by a tenure precarious at best. And even these carpers, be they never so analytical, can at least find no lack of springtime fervour in the eager throngs that pass entranced before the window show. They, the free-swinging, quick-moving men and women—the best dressed of all throngs in this young world—sun-browned, sun-enlivened, recreated to a fine mettle for enjoyment by their months of mountain or ocean sport—these are, indeed, the ones for whom this afterspring is made to bloom. And, since they find it to be a shifting miracle of perfections, how are they to be quarrelled with?
In the big polished windows waxen effigies of fine ladies, gracefully patient, display the latest dinner-gown from Paris, or the creamiest of be-ribboned tea-gowns. Or they pose in attitudes of polite adieux and greeting, all but smothered in a king's ransom of sable and ermine. Or, to the other extreme, they complacently permit themselves to be observed in the intimate revelations of Parisian lingerie, with its misty froth of embroideries, its fine-spun webs of foamy lace.
In another window, behold a sprightly and enlivening ballet of shapely silken hosiery, fitting its sculptured models to perfection, ranging in tints from the first tender green of spring foliage to the rose-pink of the spring sun's after-glow.
A few steps beyond we may study a window where the waxen ladies have been dismembered. Yet a second glance shows the retained portions to be all that woman herself considers important when she tries on the bird-toque or the picture hat, or the gauze confection for afternoons. The satisfied smiles of these waxen counterfeits show them to have been amply recompensed, with the headgear, for their physical incompleteness.
But if these terraces of colour and grace that line the sides of this narrow spring valley be said to contain only the dry husks of adornment, surely there may be found others more technically springlike.
Here in this broad window, foregathered in a congress of colours designed to appetise, are the ripe fruits of every clime and every season: the Southern pomegranate beside the hardy Northern apple, scarlet and yellow; the early strawberry and the late ruddy peach; figs from the Orient and pines from the Antilles; dates from Tunis and tawny persimmons from Japan; misty sea-green grapes and those from the hothouse—tasteless, it is true, but so lordly in their girth, and royal purple; portly golden oranges and fat plums; pears of mellow blondness and pink-skinned apricots. Here at least is the veritable stuff and essence of spring with all its attending aromas—of more integrity, perhaps, than the same colourings simulated by the confectioner's craft, in the near-by window-display of impossible sweets.
And still more of this belated spring will gladden the eye in the florist's window. In June the florist's shop is a poor place, sedulously to be shunned. Nothing of note blooms there then. The florist himself is patently ashamed of himself. The burden of sustaining his traditions he puts upon a few dejected shrubs called "hardy perennials" that have to labour the year around. All summer it is as if the place feared to compete with nature when colour and grace flower so cheaply on every southern hillside. But now its glories bloom anew, and its superiority over nature becomes again manifest. Now it assembles the blossoms of a whole long year to bewilder and allure. Its windows are shaded glens, vine-embowered, where spring, summer, and autumn blend in all their regal and diverse abundance; and the closing door of the shop fans out odours as from a thousand Persian gardens.
But spring is not all of life, nor what at once chiefly concerns us. There are people to be noted: a little series of more or less related phenomena to be observed.
One of the people, a young man, stands conveniently before this same florist's window, at that hour when the sun briefly flushes this narrow canon of Broadway from wall to wall.
He had loitered along the lively highway an hour or more, his nerves tingling responsively to all its stimuli. And now he mused as he stared at the tangled tracery of ferns against the high bank of wine-red autumn foliage, the royal cluster of white chrysanthemums and the big jar of American Beauties.
He had looked forward to this moment, too—when he should enter that same door and order at least an armful of those same haughty roses sent to an address his memory cherished. Yet now, the time having come, the zest for the feat was gone. It would be done; it were ungraceful not to do it, after certain expressions; but it would be done with no heart because of the certain knowledge that no one—at least no one to be desired—could possibly care for him, or consider him even with interest for anything but his money—the same kind of money Higbee made by purveying hams—"and she wouldn't care in the least whether it was mine or Higbee's, so there was a lot of it."
Yet he stepped in and ordered the roses, nor did the florist once suspect that so lavish a buyer of flowers could be a prey to emotions of corroding cynicism toward the person for whom they were meant.
From the florist's he returned directly to the hotel to find his mother and Psyche making homelike the suite to which they had been assigned. A maid was unpacking trunks under his sister's supervision. Mrs. Bines was in converse with a person of authoritative manner regarding the service to be supplied them. Two maids would be required, and madame would of course wish a butler—
Mrs. Bines looked helplessly at her son who had just entered.
"I think—we've—we've always did our own buttling," she faltered.
The person was politely interested.
"I'll attend to these things, ma," said Percival, rather suddenly. "Yes, we'll want a butler and the two maids, and see that the butler knows his business, please, and—here—take this, and see that we're properly looked after, will you?"
As the bill bore a large "C" on its face, and the person was rather a gentleman anyway, this unfortunate essay at irregular conjugation never fell into a certain class of anecdotes which Mrs. Bines's best friends could now and then bring themselves to relate of her.
But other matters are forward. We may next overtake two people who loiter on this bracing October day down a leaf-strewn aisle in Central Park.
"You," said the girl of the pair, "least of all men can accuse me of lacking heart."
"You are cold to me now."
"But look, think—what did I offer—you've had my trust,—everything I could bring myself to give you. Look what I would have sacrificed at your call. Think how I waited and longed for that call."
"You know how helpless I was."
"Yes, if you wanted more than my bare self. I should have been helpless, too, if I had wanted more than—than you."
"It would have been folly—madness—that way."
"Folly—madness? Do you remember the 'Sonnet of Revolt' you sent me? Sit on this bench; I wish to say it over to you, very slowly; I want you to hear it while you keep your later attitude in mind.
"Life—what is life? To do without avail The decent ordered tasks of every day: Talk with the sober: join the solemn play: Tell for the hundredth time the self-same tale Told by our grandsires in the self-same vale Where the sun sets with even, level ray, And nights, eternally the same, make way For hueless dawns, intolerably pale—'"
"But I know the verse."
"No; hear it out;—hear what you sent me:
"'And this is life? Nay, I would rather see
The man who sells his soul in some wild cause:
The fool who spurns, for momentary bliss,
All that he was and all he thought to be:
The rebel stark against his country's laws:
God's own mad lover, dying on a kiss.'"
She had completed the verse with the hint of a sneer in her tones.
"Yes, truly, I remember it; but some day you'll thank me for saving you; of course it would have been regular in a way, but people here never really forget those things—and we'd have been helpless—some day you'll thank me for thinking for you."
"Why do you believe I'm not thanking you already?"
"Hang it all! that's what you made me think yesterday when I met you." "And so you called me heartless? Now tell me just what you expect a woman in my position to do. I offered to go to you when you were ready. Surely that showed my spirit—and you haven't known me these years without knowing it would have to be that or nothing."
"Well, hang it, it wasn't like the last time, and you know it; you're not kind any longer. You can be kind, can't you?"
Her lip showed faintly the curl of scorn.
"No, I can't be kind any longer. Oh, I see you've known your own mind so little; there's been so little depth to it all; you couldn't dare. It was foolish to think I could show you my mind."
"But you still care for me?"
"No; no, I don't. You should have no reason to think so if I did. When I heard you'd made it up I hated you, and I think I hate you now. Let us go back. No, no, please don't touch me—ever again."
Farther down-town in the cosy drawing-room of a house in a side street east of the Avenue, two other persons were talking. A florid and profusely freckled young Englishman spoke protestingly from the hearth-rug to a woman who had the air of knowing emphatically better.
"But, my dear Mrs. Drelmer, you know, really, I can't take a curate with me, you know, and send up word won't she be good enough to come downstairs and marry me directly—not when I've not seen her, you know!" "Nonsense!" replied the lady, unimpressed. "You can do it nearly that way, if you'll listen to me. Those Westerners perform quite in that manner, I assure you. They call it 'hustling.'"
"Dear me!"
"Yes, indeed, 'dear you.' And another thing, I want you to forestall that Milbrey youth, and you may be sure he's no farther away than Tuxedo or Meadowbrook. Now, they arrived yesterday; they'll be unpacking to-day and settling to-morrow; I'll call the day after, and you shall be with me."
"And you forget that—that devil—suppose she's as good as her threat?"
"Absurd! how could she be?"
"You don't know her, you know, nor the old beggar either, by Jove!"
"All the more reason for haste. We'll call to-morrow. Wait. Better still, perhaps I can enlist the Gwilt-Athelston; I'm to meet her to-morrow. I'll let you know. Now I must get into my teaharness, so run along."
We are next constrained to glance at a strong man bowed in the hurt of a great grief. Horace Milbrey sits alone in his gloomy, high-ceilinged library. His attire is immaculate. His slender, delicate hands are beautifully white. The sensitive lines of his fine face tell of the strain under which he labours. What dire tragedies are those we must face wholly alone—where we must hide the wound, perforce, because no comprehending sympathy flows out to us; because instinct warns that no help may come save from the soul's own well of divine fortitude. Some hope, tenderly, almost fearfully, held and guarded, had perished on the day that should have seen its triumphant fruition. He raised his handsome head from the antique, claw-footed desk, sat up in his chair, and stared tensely before him. His emotion was not to be suppressed. Do tears tremble in the eyes of the strong man? Let us not inquire too curiously. If they tremble down the fine-skinned cheek, let us avert our gaze. For grief in men is no thing to make a show of.
A servant passed the open door bearing an immense pasteboard box with one end cut out to accommodate the long stems of many roses.
"Jarvis!"
"Yes, sir!"
"What is it?"
"Flowers, sir, for Miss Avice."
"Let me see—and the card?"
He took the card from the florist's envelope and glanced at the name.
"Take them away."
The stricken man was once more alone; yet now it was as if the tender beauty of the flowers had balmed his hurt—taught him to hope anew. Let us in all sympathy and hope retire.
For cheerfuller sights we might observe Launton Oldaker in a musty curio-shop, delighted over a pair of silver candlesticks with square bases and fluted columns, fabricated in the reign of that fortuitous monarch, Charles the Second; or we might glance in upon the Higbees in their section of a French chateau, reproduced up on the stately Riverside Drive, where they complete the details of a dinner to be given on the morrow.
Or perhaps it were better to be concerned with a matter more weighty than dinners and antique candlesticks. The search need never be vain, even in this world of persistent frivolity. As, for example:
"Tell Mrs. Van Geist if she can't come down, I'll run up to her."
"Yes, Miss Milbrey."
Mrs. Van Geist entered a moment later.
"Why, Avice, child, you're glowing, aren't you?"
"I must be, I suppose—I've just walked down from 59th Street, and before that I walked in the Park. Feel how cold my cheeks are,—Mütterchen."
"It's good for you. Now we shall have some tea, and talk."
"Yes—I'm hungry for both, and some of those funny little cakes."
"Come back where the fire is, dear; the tea has just been brought. There, take the big chair."
"It always feels like you—like your arms, Mütterchen—and I am tired."
"And throw off that coat. There's the lemon, if you're afraid of cream."
"I wish I weren't afraid of anything but cream."
"You told me you weren't afraid of that—that cad—any more."
"I'm not—I just told him so. But I'm afraid of it all; I'm tired trying not to drift—tired trying not to try, and tired trying to try—Oh, dear—sounds like a nonsense verse, doesn't it? Have you any one to-night? No? I think I must stay with you till morning. Send some one home to say I'll be here. I can always think so much better here—and you, dear old thing, to mother me!"
"Do, child; I'll send Sandon directly."
"He will go to the house of mourning."
"What's the latest?"
"Papa was on the verge of collapse this morning, and yet he was striving so bravely and nobly to bear up. No one knows what that man suffers; it makes him gloomy all the time about everything. Just before I left, he was saying that, when one considers the number of American homes in which a green salad is never served, one must be appalled. Are you appalled, auntie? But that isn't it."
"Nothing has happened?"
"Well, there'll be no sensation about it in the papers to-morrow, but a very dreadful thing has happened. Papa has suffered one of the cruellest blows of his life. I fancy he didn't sleep at all last night, and he looked thoroughly bowled over this morning."
"But what is it?"
"Well—oh, it's awful!—first of all there were six dozen of early-bottled, 1875 Château Lafitte—that was the bitterest—but he had to see the rest go, too—Château Margeaux of '80—some terribly ancient port and Madeira—the dryest kind of sherry—a lot of fine, full clarets of '77 and '78—oh, you can't know how agonising it was to him—I've heard them so often I know them all myself."
"But what on earth about them?"
"Nothing, only the Cosmopolitan Club's wine cellar—auctioned off, you know. For over a year papa has looked forward to it. He knew every bottle of wine in it. He could recite the list without looking at it. Sometimes he sounded like a French lesson—and he's been under a fearful strain ever since the announcement was made. Well, the great day came yesterday, and poor pater simply couldn't bid in a single drop. It needed ready money, you know. And he had hoped so cheerfully all the time to do something. It broke his heart, I'm sure, to see that Château Lafitte go—and only imagine, it was bid in by the butler of that odious Higbee. You should have heard papa rail about the vulgar nouveaux riches when he came home—he talked quite like an anarchist. But by to-night he'll be blaming me for his misfortunes. That's why I chose to stay here with you."
"Poor Horace. Whatever are you going to do?"
"Well, dearie, as for me, it doesn't look as if I could do anything but one thing. And here is my ardent young Croesus coming out of the West."
"You called him your 'athletic Bayard' once."
"The other's more to the point at present. And what else can I do? Oh, if some one would just be brave enough to live the raw, quivering life with me, I could do it, I give you my word. I could let everything go by the board—but I am so alone and so helpless and no man is equal to it, nowadays. All of us here seem to be content to order a 'half portion' of life."
"Child, those dreams are beautiful, but they're like those flying-machines that are constantly being tested by the credulous inventors. A wheel or a pinion goes wrong and down the silly things come tumbling."
"Very well; then I shall be wise—I suppose I shall be—and I'll do it quickly. This fortune of good gold shall propose marriage to me at once, and be accepted—so that I shall be able to look my dear old father in the face again—and then, after I'm married—well, don't blame me for anything that happens."
"I'm sure you'll be happy with him—it's only your silly notions. He's in love with you."
"That makes me hesitate. He really is a man—I like him—see this letter—a long review from the Arcady Lyre of the 'poem' he wrote, a poem consisting of 'Avice Milbrey.' The reviewer has been quite enthusiastic over it, too,—written from some awful place in Montana."
"What more could you ask? He'll be kind."
"You don't understand, Mütterchen. He seems too decent to marry that way—and yet it's the only way I could marry him. And after he found me out—oh, think of what marriage is—he'd have to find it out—I couldn't act long—doubtless he wouldn't even be kind to me then."
"You are morbid, child."
"But I will do it; I shall; I will be a credit to my training—and I shall learn to hate him and he will have to learn—well, a great deal that he doesn't know about women."
She stared into the fire and added, after a moment's silence:
"Oh, if a man only could live up to the verses he cuts out of magazines!"