V.
Vexed as he was with the woman who had barred the way, he was almost minded, driving back, to acquaint her with his failure.
The inclination was perverse and not in his sanest manner; but her presence had overpowered him that night as an inhaled narcotic; something diffusive in her strong, warm beauty, filling his room, had numbed him as he breathed it.
But his senses came again in the night air, and he kept on, after crossing the river, by the abbey, and his homeward way.
He had left his key behind him, and learned, on entering, that a gentleman awaited him above.
“Who?” he inquired, and was told Lord Veynes.
“Said as ’e couldn’t afford to miss you, sir; so ’e’d wait, and take ’is chance.”
South always faced trouble, but he went more slowly upstairs. The door of his room was ajar, the lamp had been relit upon the table, and soused in its shaded dome of light was the figure of a man, stretched along the big chair before the fire. Veynes did not respond to his host’s hail of welcome; his eyes were staring into the shadowy mirror; and his face reflected there was like a ghostlight on the glass.
Knowing something of his visitor’s moods, South took no notice of his silence, but, drawing a chair beside him, brought his hand down on the other’s fingers with an exclamation of abusive kindliness.
One speaks of words frozen on the lips, but those seemed frozen in the air, ringing with an awful icy vibration in the silent room, as South started back, dumb with horror, for the hand upon which his had fallen was damp with the grip of death.
* * * * *
Of the days which followed, South could never give a complete account. A stranger to sorrow, almost, indeed, to every ruinous emotion, the scenes he witnessed seemed to alter the spacing of the hours so that no two were of a length.
The noise and crush of daily life were suddenly muted, as though death had closed a door and shut them out; and within, behind the bolted silence of despair, were tears, sad talk, mourning darkness, and the melancholy business of the dead, haunted, as with pale marsh lights, by the pitiful inquisition in the dead eyes which he had closed.
His consolation, in that dreary time, was that he bore half the burden of its grief.
The earl knew nothing of his son’s death but what the doctors could tell him, for Lady Veynes, with a curious, but to her a natural, discretion had kept the motive of her movements a secret even from her maid.
So the two chief agents in the tragedy carried the weight of it between them, and alone heard the inquest verdict of “an overstrained heart,” with the desolate knowledge of all it meant—South with dry eyes, so dry that their color seemed faded, and hers so wet that they seemed mixed with their tears.
He had feared once, only once, that she would forget the righteous necessities of her secret, and admit another, with cruel penitence, to its miserable pale.
It was on her first entry to the room where the body was lying, the earl sitting by it, his face almost as gray and sharp as that of the dead. One of his hands was on his son’s, the other crept presently to Rosamond’s golden hair. She had dropped on her knees beside the bed, her eyes buried in the coverlet, her arms flung out across it, moaning an inarticulate torrent of useless tenderness, and penitence, and despair. Her head was shaken by its sorrow like a yellow leaf, but the old man’s grief ran silently, as a stream that dries upon its stones.
That was the one occasion when South had distrusted the charity and shrewdness of her discretion; after that his doubts were at rest. She was everything a woman could be who would not sink her duties in sorrow, and South often wondered what the earl would have done without her.
He had beside ample reason for surprise. Her delicate little performance as a woman of affairs for the benefit of the lawyers, her equally fine and far more difficult personation before the family as lady paramount, were revelations of an ability he had been indisposed to admit.
He called it mummery to himself, but there was a dreary earnestness and effort in it which gave his slight the lie. He would not see the whiteness of her face, or the sorrow in her clouded eyes; and for a curious reason, because her grief left him, and it seemed with deliberate intention, in the cold.
She bore it with a certain stiffness of control as a burden she was too proud to share, yet which bent her into measured steps.
But South, who felt himself almost an accessory to her fate, could better have endured complaint; he would sooner have been hated, so he told himself.
So, since that memorable morning when she had flung a crumb of toast across the table at the gravity on his face, gray as it was with its news, and, afterward, in anguish and self-contempt, laid her sobbing head among the breakfast things, South had doubted everything about her but her charm.
Yet her sorrow proved, as he was finally to discover, exceedingly sincere; it outlasted even his demands upon it; but it lived, as all her clouds, in a windy sky; and broke, and blew over.
Ere that, however, or the lightening of her widow’s crape, a fresh link was welded from her life, which gave the sad earl a joy in his old age, and a despot to Veynes Court.
South used to run down, sometimes, on the summer evenings, to watch Lady Veynes, the earl and his grandson playing like three children in the dappled sunlight on the lawn.
Or, at least, if there were other reasons for his appearance, he was not on thinking terms with them.
Lady Veynes was. She thought, moreover, that his visits were far too few.
THE RIVALS
STRANGE when you passed me with him in the crowd,
That twixt us two the selfsame thought should be:
“So this was she!” your long glance spake aloud;
And I, to my own heart, “So this is she!”
Theodosia Garrison.
CONVERSATIONS WITH EGERIA
The Feminine Temperament
By MRS. WILSON WOODROW
IT is delightful to talk to a bishop,” smiled Egeria; “it immediately becomes a serious duty to be frivolous.”
“And why, pray?” The bishop looked slightly bewildered.
“To afford you the pleasures of contrast. To convince you from the start that one woman does not seek priestly counsel, nor intend to bore you with the vagaries of her soul.”
The bishop smiled benignly, deprecatingly and yet comprehendingly. He even shook his head in paternal and playful admonition.
“Oh, I know us,” Egeria assured him. “A woman, if she is young, is always either occupied with her heart or her soul. When the one absorbs her the other doesn’t. When she’s in love she forgets all about her soul. When she’s out of love she turns to it again. Then she yearns for incense, altar lights and a pale, young priest, who is willing to devote time and prayer to assuaging her spiritual doubts. She doesn’t care in the least to be spiritually directed by any well-fed, commonplace parson with a fat wife and a pack of rosy children. No, no, a wistful young ascetic, with hollows under his eyes—wan and worn with fasting and vigils. She is perfectly aware that he has ultimately not the ghost of a show; but she is entirely willing that he shall have a run for his money. In fact, she hopes that the struggle may be keen and prolonged. To play a game fish which is putting up the fight of its life is infinitely more exciting than to languidly reel in the line and secure a victim which has not made the least resistance.”
The bishop smiled tolerantly, tapping his finger tips together. “Doubtless correct, doubtless correct. Your astuteness and intellectual acumen have always elicited my admiration.”
A sparkle of annoyance brightened Egeria’s eyes.
“Checkmate,” she murmured, with a little bow of deference.
The bishop raised his brows innocently.
“Oh, you know,” continued Egeria, resentfully, “that there is one compliment a woman never forgives, and that is a tribute to her intellect at the expense of her power of attraction. If the lure the serpent taught her is vain, then is her destiny barren, her desire unfulfilled.”
“You deserved it,” laughed the bishop; “but, dear lady, have you ever paused to consider what a debt of gratitude the world owes us? When I listen to the outpourings of overcharged feminine hearts, and read the diaries, confessions and novels of innumerable women, I am forced to the conclusion that the church thoroughly understood one of the first needs of a woman’s heart when it established the confessional. Then man, with his restless, protesting conscience, did his best to estrange you from the consolation, and, in consequence, some eccentric, undisciplined creature now and again voices to the world the disorganized, hysterical feminine emotions which should have been discreetly sobbed into the ecclesiastical ear, decently entombed in the silence of the confessional.”
There was a faint wrinkle of displeasure in Egeria’s brow. “Admitted, admitted”—hastily—“and thank you kindly, dear bishop, for your little criticism of us. It makes it quite possible for me to discuss the clergy if I wish. Now I can ask, without being impertinent, a question which has long puzzled me. Why is it that you prelates and the princes of the church are almost invariably tolerant, delightfully broad-minded and free from bias, while the rank and file are so frequently strenuous and discomposing? For instance, last summer I was thrown, through force of circumstances, with a sallow-faced, stoop-shouldered preacher, who always spoke of himself as ‘a minister of the gospel.’ Whenever his dyspepsia was especially severe he informed his parishioners that he had girded on his armor and was prepared to rebuke evil in high places, and that he would be recalcitrant to his trust if he did not lift up his voice to condemn civic rottenness and social degeneracy. His wife was ‘an estimable lady,’ with the figure of a suburbanite who only wears stays in the evening, and a pronounced taste for the clinging perfume of moth balls. No children having blessed their union, they decided to adopt some definite aim in life. They were talking it over once when I was present.
“‘There are the sick and the poor; I am sure there are plenty of them,’ suggested the lady.
“Her husband looked at her scornfully, and coldly remarked that that field was full of reapers.
“‘Oh, you mean to stand up openly in the pulpit and rebuke the rich men who make their money in queer ways!’ she exclaimed, excitedly.
“‘And offend half my wealthy parishioners by branding them as thieves on insufficient evidence?’ he thundered. ‘Are you insane?’
“Finally, however, being a shrewd creature, he solved the problem and incidentally won for himself a great deal of gratuitous advertising. They organized a society for the suppression of bridge—aware that the public loves sensational details regarding women of position; the insidious cocktail—the public delights to know that the social leaders look too often upon the wine when it’s red; ostracising divorcées—women thus having the sanction of Heaven for attacking their own sex. Oh, it was a holy crusade in a teapot, and made him quite famous; and, bishop, what do you think was the motto of the organization?”
The bishop shook his head. Mild curiosity was in his eyes; but the shake of his head was distinctly reproving.
“The watchword chosen,” chuckled Egeria, “was, ‘Neither do I condemn thee.’ Now, bishop, tell me, please, what makes the difference between his type of man and yours?”
A humorous twinkle shone in the bishop’s eye, then he leaned forward and whispered one word in Egeria’s ear: “Money.”
She laughed, and then returned to her muttons. “But, really, quite under the rose, do you not become fearfully bored sometimes by the various manifestations of the feminine temperament?”
“It may be a trifle self-conscious, a little inclined to regard itself pathologically,” admitted the bishop, with caution.
“It is frequently yellow,” said Egeria. decisively. “Why don’t you clergymen and novelists occasionally tell us the truth?”
“We must fill our churches and sell our books, I suppose,” returned the bishop, half whimsically, half regretfully. “What would you say, Lady Egeria, if we put you in orders, and disregarding St. Paul’s advice, let you occupy the pulpit? Would you thunder denunciations at poor, defenseless women?”
“I’d have a fine time,” cried Egeria her eyes alight. “I would do what you sermonizers and novel writers haven’t the courage to do—just tell them the truth about themselves. Chide them for their frivolities and extravagances and vanities? Not I. They don’t care a straw for that. No, no, I should have a new evangel and a new text. It should be: ‘Play the game gamely, and don’t whine if you lose.’ Now, bishop, confess that you never meet a strange woman that you do not observe a speculative gleam in her eye which long experience has taught you to interpret as: ‘How soon can I tell him my troubles?’”
“Poor ladies! You have so many,” sighed the bishop, sympathetically.
“Of course we have, we multiply them by three. To sedulously observe all tragic and harrowing anniversaries is a part of our religion. ‘It’s just five years ago to-day since Edwin left me for another,’ she says, mournfully, and then, shrouding herself in gloom, lives over each poignant, past moment. If anyone ask the cause of her dejected demeanor, she murmurs, in a sad, sweet voice: ‘It is an anniversary. Would you like to hear of my grief?’
“But what does a man do? He says: ‘Jove! It’s just a year ago to-morrow since Jemima was run down by an automobile. I must keep myself well amused or it may be a depressing occasion.’
“Seriously, bishop, if I were you, I’d have a phonograph in my study, and the moment a woman set foot within the door it should begin that good old hymn: ‘Go bury thy sorrow, the world hath its share.’”
“But what can the poor things do,” asked the bishop, “if they may not turn to their clergyman for consolation and comfort?”
“Twang on Emerson’s iron string: ‘Trust thyself.’ Why always twine about a pole, like a limp pea vine, and flop on the ground the minute the upholding stick is withdrawn? Imagine the emotions of the pole, if it were sentient! At first it would say: ‘Delicate, dainty pea vine, lean on me, the clasp of your myriad tendrils fills me with rapture. How sweet is your adorable dependence!’ But in time: ‘Oh! stifling, smothering pea vine, I am suffocated by your deadening passivity. Would I could tear myself free from your throbbing tendrils.’”
“You evidently believe in the dead burying their dead,” said the bishop, meditatively.
“No sounder philosophy was ever enjoined on a living world. Let the dead—dead pasts, dead lives, dead loves, dead memories—bury their dead. Ah, bishop, the great art of life is the art of forgetting.”
“You, Madame Egeria, are inclined to philosophize.”
“Sir, do not remind me of it! When we offer sacrifices at the altar of laughter, you may look for gray hairs and crows’ feet. Tears and passion belong to youth: that season of fleeting and exquisite joys, of tragic and fugitive griefs, of tempestuous and restless longings. Youth, with the passionate voice of Maurice de Guerin, cries eternally: ‘The road of the wayfarer is a joyous one. Ah, who shall set me adrift upon the waters of the Nile?’”
“And in maturity we learn to fold our hands and stop our ears and take refuge in the commonplace.” The bishop’s tone was tinged with bitterness.
“Ah, no, no!” Egeria was vehement. “We learn that the Nile, with its dream-haunted shores, flows by our door; that wherever a patch of sunlight falls is beauty, wherever a morning-glory blows is art.”
The bishop fell in with her mood. “That is it. Maturity is nothing if it is not expansion.
“’Tis life of which our nerves are scant.
’Tis life, not death, for which we pant,
More life and fuller life.”
He loved to quote.
“Yes,” exclaimed Egeria, “‘more life, fuller life, more work, more play, more experience, more of the dreams that scale the stars, more of the splendid, inexorable life of earth. But”—looking at him doubtfully—“we are getting horribly didactic and prosy, and we are a thousand miles away from the feminine temperament.”
“Is there anything left of it?” inquired the bishop, mildly.
Egeria ignored him. “You have only expressed yourself guardedly, while I have talked and talked,” she complained.
“I shall be equally fluent.” The twinkle shone again in his eye. “But my opinion is given in confidence. I throw myself on your discretion.”
“Assuredly,” murmured Egeria.
“Very well, then”—lowering his voice—“I am like the old Englishman who said: ‘I have always found a most horrid, romantic perverseness in your sex. To do and to love what you should not is meat, drink and vesture to you all.’ And I also know that—
“Every day her dainty hands make life’s soiled temple clean,
And there’s a wake of glory where her spirit pure hath been.
At midnight through the shadow-land her living face doth gleam,
The dying kiss her shadow, and the dead smile in their dream.”
IN THE GARDEN
THE lily lifts her bridal whiteness up,
And leans a list’ning to th’ impassioned rose,
The dewdrop answer trembles in her cup,
Shines on her silver lip and overflows.
They lean and love for all the world to see,
But thou, my love, thou leanest no more to me!
Oh, mocking-bird, that bosomed in the height
Of yon magnolia, warblest all alone
Thy liquid litany of heart-delight,
While the pure moon steps slowly tow’rd her throne.
Lo! Thou hast lured all joy to soar with thee,
And thou, my love, thou sing’st no more to me.
Oh, one white star in all the blue abyss!
Oh, trembling star that lookest on my pain!
So shook my soul beneath his parting kiss,
So waits my heart, alone and all in vain.
Oh, Night, sweet Night, I bare my grief to thee—
Oh, world, far off, give back my love to me!
Margaret Houston.
ELLEN BERWICK
BY ANNE O’HAGAN
BEFORE I went away from Agonquitt I was not, even by the most egotistic stretch of my imagination, a very important or an overwhelmingly popular person in the community. The girls from the village did not swarm out to the farm to see me; they did not hang upon my words with reverent attention. Even during the two years when I was at college, my holidays were not periods of public rejoicing; my clothes were not copied or my style of hairdressing regarded with imitative admiration.
But ever since I went to New York the attitude of my acquaintances has changed. At first I was touched and flattered by the interest which all my old companions took in me when I came home; gradually, however, it glimmered upon my consciousness that it was not myself, but the glamour of the great city, which drew them—as though the atmosphere of New York were a tangible thing, and shreds of it clung to me through the long journey down into this remote country. I think I was a little more touched, though not so flattered, when I learned this; there is something pathetic to the initiated in the eager wonderment and awe of the neophyte.
Sometimes the girls have asked my advice, confiding to me their yearnings to leave home, to make “careers” for themselves in the world. And when I try—as perhaps I too often do—to discourage them, they look at me reproachfully, mutely accusing me of a selfish refusal to share with them pleasures and glories. They talk of the theaters, the opera, books, pictures, the glittering press of life, as though a ticket to New York insured one these things. I talk of loneliness and discomfort, of the pinch of poverty. They speak of enlarged horizons; and I of the hall bedrooms which would bound the outlook of most of them. They glow with the thought of new friendships; and I dash their ardor with tales of isolation, of snubs in the effort to escape isolation, of tawdry relationships begun for the sake of mere companionship. But their eyes are always full of incredulity. And sometimes, remembering the delights which were no less a part of my life in the big city than the depression, remembering the wholesome joy of work, the natural pride of feeling oneself an integral part of the great onward-pressing stream of life; yes, and remembering the sweet and the bitter-sweet that came to me there, I wonder if my prohibitive wisdom is not a little hypocritical. Would I myself forego any of my New York experiences?
Sometimes it has seemed to me that my own adventures—or lack of adventures—set down as plainly and truthfully as I can recall them, might be of more illuminating, perhaps—perhaps—of more deterrent, effect than all my spoken generalizations. For though my existence had its peculiar features, rose to its individual climaxes, yet in the main it was typical—the duplicate in most essentials of that of thousands and thousands of young women, not greatly gifted, who come to New York to seek their fortunes.
I shall never forget how the whole thing came about. I was in the poultry yard, doctoring some of my chickens for the pip, when I heard a great puffing and chugging in the road. It was the Hennens’ automobile, and instead of dashing past the house, scattering terror before it, it snorted itself to a standstill before our old carriage block. I knew that mother’s annual ordeal was before her, and I half laughed as I went on forcing the broilers’ throats open.
Mother hated the yearly visitation of Mrs. Hennen with all the intensity of her very gentle, very proud nature. Thirty-five years before she and Letitia Bland had been the rival belles of the Agonquitt region, and the legend was that Letty Bland had taken to her bed for three days when mother’s engagement to father was made known, and that she went to visit relatives in Eastport at the time of the marriage. After a triumph like that, no wonder mother hated the magnificent summer descent upon her of Mrs. Letitia Hennen, widow of the oil-field king, mother of George Hennen, the banker, broker, yachtsman and what not; of Mrs. Letitia Hennen, owner of the feudal castle on the shore three miles from the village, whose splendors put to utter rout the modest opulence of all the rest of Agonquitt’s summer colony. I was always sorry for mother at the season of her recurrent Nemesis, and yet I was always amused at the thought of time’s revenges.
To-day, when I had finished doctoring the broilers, I strolled into the house and greeted the great lady. She was a kind, stout, motherly soul—very gorgeous in raiment, very imposing in a white pompadour; her good-natured, round face always looked forth half bewilderedly between the effort of her dressmaker and that of her hairdresser. This time her eyes were frankly wet as she took my hand and patted it.
“And so you’ve lost your dear father,” she said. “And you’ve come home from college—what a pity, my dear! And you’ve been down to Bangor and learned stenography—what a brave girl you are, your father’s own daughter—and you’re selling broilers to the hotel; why not to me, my child?”
Mother’s cheeks were pink with badly suppressed mortification, her eyes sparkled, her lips were on the quivering point.
“Thank you ever so much, Mrs. Hennen,” I interposed, hastily, before mother could say anything, “but the Agonquitt House contracted for them all. Next year——”
“But I must do something for you,” the dear, kind lady blundered on. “It’s all too sad; it’s too like your dear father’s own case. You’ve heard how he had to come back from college to take charge of the farm when his father had the stroke, and he—your father, I mean, dear, not your grandfather—had so wanted to be——”
“Of course Ellen knows all about that,” interrupted mother, icily. “And I would have done anything to spare her the sacrifice”—her voice grew human again—“but——”
“I’m sure she knows everything there is to know already”—Mrs. Hennen beamed, benignly. “And stenography! My, my! Doesn’t it make you feel ignorant, Marietta? And so you’re going to get a position in Bangor or Portland, your mother says, in the fall?”
I nodded. Mrs. Hennen looked at me with an air of silly, puzzled admiration. Suddenly she clapped her hands—the fingers were like little bleached sausages in the tight, white gloves.
“The very thing!” she cried. “You shall be George’s private secretary. His Miss O’Dowd is going to be married in October. The very thing! I’ll speak to him to-night.”
She puffed up, the kind lady, and kept saying, “Not a word, not a word; I won’t hear a word against it; not a word, Marietta, not one, Ellen, my dear.” And she panted off, leaving mother on the verge of tears, and me quivering with excitement.
“A favor from Letty Bland I will not endure!” mother proclaimed. “I will not endure her patronage.” Then she broke down entirely and sobbed: “Oh, I can’t stand in your way, my poor little girl, and I can’t bear to let you go so far from me.”
The end of the whole matter was that the close of September found me on the way to New York, warmly clad in the clothes over which mother had reddened her pretty eyes and pricked her pretty fingers, an emergency fund of a hundred and twenty-five dollars—those blessed broilers!—in a chamois bag between my excellent woolens and my stout muslins, a room in the Margaret Louisa Home engaged for me for any period up to a month. Our clergyman’s wife had recommended that refuge, and mother’s premonitions of battle, murder and sudden death for me grew a little less insistent when she had been finally convinced that I could go almost without change of cars from the safety of Agonquitt to that most evangelical of shelters.
Oh, the tremors, the breathlessness, the excitement, of that journey! Oh, the fairly dizzy rapture and pain of it! I had a vision of streets brilliant with lights, of a press of carriages, of shops, flowers, buildings; of unknown faces, each one the possibility of interest, the invitation to adventure, and I exulted. Then I saw the big, square house where I had been born, shabbily in need of paint; the lonely fields sloping away from it, the woods of yellow birch and pine, the lonely blue reaches of our Northern bays, and my mother sitting in her poor black frock alone by the fire in the early evening. Then I strangled sobs behind my clinched teeth.
My journey from Agonquitt had been broken by one night’s stay in Portland with our second cousins. Mother regarded a sleeping car as an unpermissible atrocity—and wider experience compels me to share her views—and I made the trip by daylight stages. No one had paid any particular attention to me; no adventure had paused by my chair in the car. Nothing happened until I emerged from the train into the murky, glittering evening at the Grand Central Station. Then for a few minutes I was really dazed.
I had spurned the assistance of porters, being forewarned of tips, and I carried my bag through the yard toward the street. There I gasped and nearly reeled. Never had I heard such a clamor, or seen such a whirl and tangle of lights, such recklessness of darting figures, such insistent greed of beckoning fingers and whips.
“Keb, keb, keb, keb!” The maddening din rang in my ears. “Keb, keb, keb, keb!” The arms, the eyes, all echoed the cry. “Keb, keb, keb, keb——” Beyond the barricade of that shout there was tempest, turmoil, clatter; I turned and fled backward toward the train yard, which seemed to me calm and sane now, though a few minutes before it had been a smoking, roaring understudy for Purgatory. Never could I breast that tumultuous tide of madness without.
Another train was unloading. I was jostled by a great many persons who had evidently determined to reach the bedlam on the sidewalk in less than half a second. I dodged. I looked for a uniform which might remain stationary long enough for me to reach it. I saw one—baggage man, carriage starter, train announcer, I didn’t know or care what—I made a sidewise dash for him and collided violently with a dress-suit case, whose owner towered several feet above. He muttered an apology, I muttered an excuse, and then we both stopped, to the damming of the torrential haste behind us.
“Ellen Berwick!”
“Bob Mathews!”
Never had human face seemed to me so friendly as this one. Never had words sounded so honey-sweet as my name ejaculated by a voice which, if not lately familiar, was at least friendly and recognizable. The Agonquitt stamp was already the hall mark of worth, of excellence, in my mind. And Robert Mathews was Dr. Mathews’ son; no amount of Beaux-Arts-ing it, no amount of rising-young-architect-ing it, could alter that blessed fact.
“Where are you going? Why are you here? Where is your mother? Oh, you are, are you? To the Maggie Lou! Why do I call it that? It’s a pet name for an excellent institution given by its intimate admirers. The George Hennens—you——”
Questioning, answering, tossing information back and forth as a Japanese juggler might balls, he somehow managed at the same time to deposit me and my bag in a cab. I breathed a sigh of relief to think that it was the driver’s problem and not mine safely to cross the noisy flood in front of the station.
Sometimes since then I have marveled at the chance which caused me, just down from Maine, to collide with Bob Mathews, just in from New Rochelle. But I have learned that it is a miracle of frequent occurrence that newcomers to Babylon should run upon acquaintances. It is only the old residents who go abroad day after day and see no familiar face.
Should I have gone back to Agonquitt in despair of Forty-second Street if I had not met Bob? I suppose not. But how meeting him simplified the problem of reaching the Margaret Louisa!
“I’ve a dinner engagement with a fellow at the club to-night, or I should carry you off to dine with me,” said Bob, as the cab drew up in front of the brownstone building between the home-rushing roar of Broadway and the early evening glitter of Fifth Avenue. “But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do: I’ll cut away early and see you before bedtime. I know some girls who keep bachelor’s hall in a Harlem flat, but they used to live in boarding houses, and I’ll telephone them for a list of addresses and bring it around to you.”
The door of the evangelical shelter swung open before me. I am not a timid person, but a chill crept up my backbone. There was something depressing in the air of prim rectitude that pervaded the hall. But Bob was gone, and my bag—by the way, it had looked old-fashioned and shabby beside his in the cab—stood within the portals.
I don’t know why I should have expected the woman at the desk to beam upon me, or to have a brass band ready with a pæan announcing that Ellen Berwick had come to town to conquer fortune. But her politeness was so impersonal, her civility so thinly cloaked her ennui, that I had difficulty in controlling the quiver of my lips. How friendly and dear the Agonquitt station suddenly seemed, with the neighbors clustered on the platform with their little last gifts!
“Oh, yes,” said the lady at the desk—“Berwick. Your pastor and Mrs. Hennen recommended you.” I felt that I was being weighed for a housemaid’s position, and the blood tingled behind my ears, but she went on indifferently: “Your trunk must be sent to the trunk room within twenty-four hours.”
“It—it can’t have reached here yet,” I murmured.
“Within twenty-four hours from the time when it does come.” I felt that I had been guilty of levity.
“I thought,” I faltered, “since this is only a temporary—er—stopping place, that I wouldn’t entirely unpack——”
“Within twenty-four hours. You need not unpack entirely. If it is ever necessary for you to get anything out of your trunk while you are here, you may be admitted to the trunk room. Jenkins, 44.”
“When is dinner?” My question trailed between the desk and Jenkins, the elevator man, who miraculously preserved an air of jauntiness as he lounged at the door of his wire cage. I made up my mind to ask him how he did it.
“Going on now.” The elevator slammed upon me, and I was borne aloft to a room of exquisite order and freshness. But either I saw double or there were two white beds, two oak bureaus, two oak wardrobes, two——
“This can’t be my room,” I protested.
“Oh, yes, miss,” declared the maid to whom I had now been delivered. “No more single rooms left. A lovely lady has this one with you. You’ll like her.”
“But I don’t want——”
The chambermaid passed lightly over the question of my desires. The door closed firmly upon my protests, and I proceeded to remove the marks of travel from my clothes and person.
Oh, the Olympian indifference of the lady at the desk to my plea for a room by myself! In two seconds it reduced me from a state of angry protest to one of humble gratitude that I had obtained any shelter at all. Oh, the big dining rooms, with the narrow tables, and women, women, women, packed along them! Oh, the hum of feminine voices, the shrill of feminine laughter, the weariness of feminine faces! Never shall I forget how dreary my own sex seemed to me when I had my first sight of it, massed, unindividualized, hard working, poor, tired. I was suddenly appalled at the number of us in New York—homeless, laboring, impoverished; for to dine at the Maggie Lou was tacit proclamation of all these things.
The food was excellent—plain, homely, plentiful. It was handed dexterously over one’s shoulders and planted firmly and noisily on the table. There was danger in unexpected movements while the waitresses scurried up and down the narrow aisles between the tables, as a young woman opposite me discovered. She leaned forward at a critical moment in her discourse to emphasize the statement that “the fleece-lined cotton were quite as warm as the woolen”; and she jarred the waitress’ busy arm by her vivacity, receiving a stream of yellow squash down her back as penalty.
At a desk, commanding an excellent view of both exits from the dining room, a lady sat with the same somewhat morose expression of countenance which I was beginning to believe the universal New York badge. (Later I corrected this opinion. It is only the women doomed to constant dealing with their sisters in the mass who acquire it.) This particular woman had the presumably pleasant task of receiving the money of the diners. In return she gave them cards, without which egress would have been impossible, for other disillusioned persons guarded the doors, and only the surrender of the oily piece of pasteboard enabled one to escape. During the whole period of my incarceration—I was about to say—in the Margaret Louisa I used to linger about the dining room hoping that some day some reckless, abandoned soul would attempt to flee without the delivery of her card. But it never happened. Meekly, automatically, we all paid, received the token of payment, and slipped out into the wide halls.
The parlor was a most inviting room, mellow in tint, comfortable in the cut of the chairs and sofas, and inviting with magazines and pictures. I wandered into it after my first dinner in New York. I turned the pages of the magazines, I looked at the pictures on the walls, and I wondered with all my powers of bewilderment why every other woman who entered the apartment should immediately sit stiffly down, clasp her hands in her lap or against her stomach, and gaze at me reprovingly. As the number of these women grew, I became convicted in my mind of indecorous conduct, though I was only turning the pages of the North American Review. The rustle of the leaves sounded noisy, blatant even, in the ominous stillness. Suddenly I understood why.
A stout lady in widow’s weeds cleared her throat twice, warningly, and the after-dinner prayer meeting was upon us. The North American Review slid from my guilty fingers, and I almost lost my balance as I stooped to recover the magazine. Then I composed my features, folded my own hands and listened to the leader of the meeting. Once I raised my eyes, and through the door that led into the hall I saw Bob Mathews standing. He was staring into the parlor with an expression of arrested protest and strangled mirth upon his nice, homely face. At that precise moment the worthy leader was besieging the throne of grace with intercessions for “the one new come among us,” and I felt vulgarly prominent.
It did not last long, that prayer meeting, and when it was over there was a little gentle conversation. The leader had just advanced to me with a smile of professional kindness when Bob bore down upon me. She withdrew, disapproval squaring her shoulders. My unfortunate caller and I retired to the remotest corner of the room and conversed in guilty whispers, alternated with sudden trumpet blasts of sound as we realized that our subdued manner was unnecessary and open to suspicion. All the others sat around and looked at us. They were all quite sure, I think, that the list of boarding houses with which Bob furnished me on departing was a document of very sinister import.
The next morning, armed with this list and with one furnished by the uninterested lady at the office, I set out in search of a permanent abode. In Agonquitt I had seemed to myself a person of the furthest reaching prudence because I had left for New York a whole fortnight earlier than my engagement as Mr. Hennen’s stenographer required. The two weeks were to be devoted to “settling comfortably” and to “learning the city thoroughly.” By the end of the first forenoon I asked myself bitterly if a year—if a lifetime—would suffice for either of these results.
I had told six landladies that the hall bedroom I sought was for myself alone, and I had been banished at once, without further parley, from their presences. I was discouraged to learn that spinsterhood, which we in Agonquitt regard as a state normal, admirable and even a little high-minded, was frowned upon here. The number of front doors that closed upon me because I could lay claim to no husband!
I have never satisfactorily solved the problem of the average landlady’s dislike for the single woman. Is the married boarder less addicted to bathroom laundry work? Does she consume less gas in the front hall and the parlor? Is she not so apt to keep the wearied purveyor of her meals and lodgings from the folding bed which adorns the front drawing room with a pretense of being a curio cabinet during the day? Or is it merely that even in these strenuous days of wage-earning women, a husband seems to the mediæval-minded landlady a guarantee of payment securer than any number of salaried positions? I don’t know. I only know that my first forenoon’s search for a habitation was rendered uncommonly difficult because I could not assure six gimleteyed landladies in rusty black that I was “wooed an’ married an’ all.”
There were other ladies—a considerable number of them, too—who gave one look at my cloth turban, made by Miss Milly, our Agonquitt milliner; and at my reefer, which Miss Keziah, who goes out by the day, had helped mother to make; and smilingly shook their heads. These informed me, interposing their plump persons between me and their stairways, as though they feared a forcible entrance on my part, that they had nothing which would suit me—nothing under twenty dollars a week. At first this abashed me, for ten dollars was the utmost which I could allow for lodgings and meals; and I departed, gurgling apologetically in my throat. Later, anger began to stir my pulses, and I gave these haughty ones level glance of scorn for level glance of scorn, and said: “Ah, I am looking for a suite of two rooms and bath; breakfast upstairs, of course; you have nothing of that sort?” And we separated in mutual incredulity and respect.
During that day and the soul-racking, foot-blistering days that followed, I gained a fairly clear idea of what I might hope for in a boarding house for the small sum which I was prepared to spend. The cheaper places were, of course, the least attractive; the halls seemed dingier, the odor of dreary, bygone dinners more pervasive in them; the servants were more slatternly, the landladies themselves more rusty, dusty and depressing. There were innumerable parlors furnished in upholstery that made up in accumulated dust and aroma for what it had lost in freshness of color during the years of its service; there were folding beds of every sort; there were lace curtains, and there were pier glasses between the long front windows. Then, somewhere up on the top floor, there was a hall bedroom without a closet, without heat; but “the last lady”—marvelously adaptable female!—had always found the hooks under the cambric curtain on the door an ample refuge for her gowns, and as for the temperature, she had been compelled to keep her window open during most of the winter before, so intense was the heat from the hall. She had moved, apparently, in search of a harder spiritual discipline than she could obtain among such comfortable surroundings. Certainly there was no other reason for her leaving.
Sometimes, departing from the lists furnished me, I stumbled upon wonderful places where “cozy corners” greatly prevailed, and where the landladies wore trailing negligées of soiled pink or blue instead of the tight-fitting black uniform of the other houses. Whenever such a meeting inadvertently occurred, the gorgeous landlady and I were always as eager as civility would permit to see the last of each other.
Then there were other places—airy, clean and bright, with parlors guiltless of any suggestion of the folding bed, with graceful furnishings, efficient servants, cheerful landladies. But these were always either “full”—I don’t wonder—or what they had left was far beyond my humble means.
I wandered through the unhomelike splendors of the woman’s hotel, by and by. Here at least there would be no question of boarding house parlor etiquette—there were successions of charming, big, airy, handsomely fitted-out parlors; there were tea rooms, there were libraries and writing rooms. The bedrooms themselves—simple, sunny, clean—- were charming, with their chintz-frilled cots and their substantially made wooden pieces. Here I could live, by a pretty rigid system of economy, for nine dollars a week—four for my tiny bedroom, five for my breakfasts and dinners. I would have to share the sparkling white and nickel bathroom with only two others.
I was not one of those haughty souls who revolted at the rule forbidding masculine callers above the parlor floors; in the first place, I had not been long enough in New York to know that young women ever did receive callers save in drawing rooms of some description, and in the second, I didn’t expect any callers for a long time. Once Robert Matthews saw me safely settled, I knew that his neighborly kindness would dwindle; and he was my only possible visitor at present. No, one might be very comfortable at the woman’s hotel, I was sure—if one could overcome a prejudice against being one of a mass. I had been long enough at the Margaret Louisa to know that I abhorred whatever savored of an institution, and all women in bulk, so to speak. Even a dingy hall room in a dreary boarding house, with the fumes of old dinners wrought into the very web of the carpets, and a lackadaisically suspicious landlady, seemed better and more homelike to me than the comforts and luxuries of a big feminized institution. At least, in the boarding house, one could be an individual, something more than a number.
However, though I had made up my mind to the boarding house, I did not come to it. And that was because of the unwelcome other occupant of the room at the Margaret Louisa. She had proved to be a wholesome, graceful, rather tall woman of thirty-three or so. She had none of my rustic air of sullen doubt when she met strangers. She was polite, uninquisitive, even uninterested. Her attitude was the perfection of civil indifference; she would have been an ideal woman to occupy the opposite section on a transcontinental train, or the other berth in a transatlantic stateroom, for she was perfectly considerate, unfamiliar and impersonal. She told me that she had just come from a summer abroad—she was a teacher of some handicraft in a trade school for girls—and that she was staying at the Margaret Louisa until “the doctor was through redecorating the house.”
“Of course everyone makes fun of the Maggie Lou,” she said, “but I find it an admirable refuge. It is in the center of the town; it’s clean, cheap and respectable; it charges a fair price for the accommodations it offers, so that there’s no taint of philanthropy about it—though sometimes the managers seem to forget that. One doesn’t come here for society. Once one knows its little red-tape rules, and how to keep them from interfering with one’s personal liberty, it’s a very comfortable place.”
It developed that a woman physician of Miss Putnam’s acquaintance had a small house on West Eleventh Street, the upper floors of which she let to women lodgers.
“Of course she knows us all,” said Miss Putnam. “It’s really very convenient. There aren’t more than six of us; we are absolutely independent, without being brutally isolated. Dr. Lyons serves us all with breakfast in our rooms, and leaves us to solve the luncheon-dinner problem for ourselves. It’s a charming, old-fashioned house, and she has furnished it in character.”
I sighed bitterly. Dr. Lyons’ six lodgers paid her five dollars and a half a week for their rooms and their simple breakfasts—as little as I should have to pay at the huge caravansary which I was even then considering—and they had a home! I could have wept over the inequalities of life.
Later I wept in very truth. Robert had sent me a note inviting me to a glee-club concert. I had accepted the invitation. Then I had rubbed my aching body with witch hazel—it’s no small athletic feat to climb to the top of twenty-seven New York houses in one day—and I had lain down to rest. A little before seven I bethought me of clothes. The black silk which mother had made for me, with its pretty chemisette and cuffs of real Val and Indian mull, and my black net hat with white roses, lay in the trunk in the trunk room. I made up my mind to swallow a hasty dinner, invade the cellar and carry my poor little finery upstairs after dinner, so as to be ready for Bob at eight. At seven-fifteen, having eaten all that I could in the banging, crowded, steaming dining room, I approached the office and made known my wish to go to the trunk room.
“Trunk room closes at seven,” snapped the waitress of destiny.
Nor could any tale of my needs, any indignation concerning the high-handed retention of my property, move her from that statement. I went to my room and wept with rage. Bob impressed me nowadays as a stylish youth. How would he like taking me to a musicale in a short black skirt, a reefer and that dumpy turban?
Upon my fit of pettishness in came Miss Putnam. She was politely absorbed in her own chiffonier for a while. Then she turned to me with a comical air of balancing the fear of intrusiveness against a friendly desire to help.
“Is it—can I do anything for you?” she asked finally.
“You can tell that wretched martinet downstairs what I think of her, if you have sufficient command of language,” I rejoined, wiping my eyes furiously. Then I told her my tale of woe. She laughed. Then she hesitated and blushed.
“I’m just home from Paris, as I told you,” she said. “I’m not going out tonight. And I knew the Margaret Louisa well enough to unpack for an emergency. We’re about of a height—would you think me desperately impertinent if—if——”
And she actually offered to lend me some clothes. And I—I, Ellen Berwick, of Agonquitt, where all borrowing is regarded as criminally unthrifty, and where the borrowing of finery would seem degenerately frivolous as well—I went to that musicale at the Waldorf in an absolute confection of heavy black lace over white silk, and a hat all white tulle and roses and jet! Robert whistled rudely as he saw me.
“Is this the way they do things in Agonquitt now?” he asked.
And from something I overheard him saying to a lovely young matron-patroness in a peach-colored crêpe, I gathered that he had somewhat apologetically prepared her to be kind to a nice little rustic from his old home. Thus clothes, as adornments and not merely coverings, made their first distinct appeal to me; it was the voice of New York, if I had only known it.
I blessed Theresa Putnam that evening, but how much more did I bless her when toward the end of the fortnight she burst into our joint abode with something less than her usual calm of manner, and cried:
“Clorinda Dorset isn’t coming back to the Medical School this year. Do you want to meet Dr. Lyons? For if you do, and you like her and she likes you——”
I did not let her finish.
“Do you mean that there’s a chance for me in the Eleventh Street house?” I demanded. I had been to seven boarding houses in furthest Harlem that day and had heard seven boarding house keepers declare that the time from One Hundred and Eighteenth Street to Wall was twenty minutes!
By the next morning my trunk had been rescued from the cave of the trunks, and stood, unstrapped and unlocked, in my sloping-roofed, attic room in the old-fashioned house of Dr. Lyons. The sunlight poured in through two dormer windows. There were dimity curtains at them. There was a blue-and-white, hit-or-miss rag rug on the floor. There was a fireplace; there were old-fashioned chairs that might have come out of an Agonquitt attic; there was a plain table, with blotters on it and bookshelves above; there was a cot covered with an old homespun blue-and-white cover. There were potted geraniums and primroses on the wide window shelves. I sat down and fairly rocked in my delight.
“An attic!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I didn’t believe there was one in all New York. And a rag carpet——”
But the language of jubilation failed.
Well, my fortnight of grace was ended. I was housed, by a kindly miracle and no skill of my own, comfortably, charmingly, not expensively. I was a lucky young woman!
I polished my boots to the highest pitch of brilliancy, I set my stock on at the most accurate angle, and I proceeded to Mr. George Hennen’s office to gladden his heart with the information that I had arrived.
He received me with some embarrassment—a good-looking, slender, boyish man with an inattentive manner.
“I had meant to write,” he murmured. “Really, it has been unpardonable. But I didn’t know until last week, and—it is really unpardonable.”
A cold chill gripped me. Was I not to have the position, after all? I sat very rigid, my fingers frozen in their stiff calfskin gloves.
“What is it, Mr. Hennen?” I asked. “Please tell me quickly.”
“Oh, of course it can be arranged. I had meant to ask you to defer coming until the first of December. Miss O’Dowd’s wedding has been postponed until Christmas. But——”
Returning waves of warmth lapped me. After all, I was not to go penniless and positionless back to Agonquitt.
“Oh, is that all?” I cried, in relief. “I think I can put in the two months to excellent advantage, Mr. Hennen.”
“Do you, really?” He brightened. “Are you—er—prepared—er——”
“Oh, quite,” I said, stiffly, though the emergency fund on my chest no longer seemed the oppressive weight it once had.
“If not——” he floundered, evidently groping with some idea for my relief.
I felt the color tingle in my cheeks. My mother’s hatred of “Letitia Bland’s” favors seemed to stiffen my neck.
“Oh, but I am,” I declared. Then the door opened simultaneously with a rap. From the Axminster and rosewood splendors of the outer office a man entered—tall, broad, lithe. His eyes, even in that first flash of them upon me, I knew to be gay, and his smooth-shaven lips had lines of laughter about them. He glanced at me with a momentary pause in his entrance.
“Beg pardon, George. Ferritt said you were alone.”
“It’s all right. Don’t go, Archie. I want you to meet Miss Berwick. Miss Berwick, Mr. Charter—the other member of the firm. Miss Berwick’s going to take Miss O’Dowd’s place, you remember, Archie?”
“Very much more than that, I think,” said Mr. Charter, smiling. And though there was something in the cool appraisal of his manner, in the implied familiar compliment and criticism of his words, which made me flush with displeasure, yet when I met his mirthful, amused regard, I could not but smile in answer.
There was a little more talk, and I went out, leaving my address with Mr. Hennen. There was an agreeable sense of buoyancy and exhilaration in the air. I could not fix my mind upon the gloomy fact that I was to be without employment and without salary for two months; I was only very sure that I should like the work in the office of Hennen & Charter, when I was admitted to it. Meantime, I had a hazy recollection of all sorts of tempting advertisements which I had seen in the papers, asking for the services of just such able-bodied, well-educated young women as myself. To be an adventurer in industry for two months might be amusing; it might be profitable. And at the end of it there was the office of Hennen & Charter glowing like a comfortable beacon for me.
It was fortunate for my peace of mind that I could not forecast the future, and had no premonition of my initial experience as a laboring person. I was profoundly convinced of my ability to “take care of myself”; I had a high respect for my own judgment. Had anyone suggested to me that my arrogant self-confidence would nearly land me in court and almost cover me with notoriety, I should have dismissed the suggestion with a laugh.
THE TWO RAPTURES
TWO raptures are there; one is of the spring;
Life leaps down all her sources and is glad
With gladness that enfolds each humblest thing.
Furrows teem fragrant, trees with buds go mad;
Music and color and a sunbright glee
Turn sullen earth into sweet Arcady.
The autumn’s rapture is a soberer wight,
But deep in tender dreams and rich in rare
Designs, and mellow harmonies of light.
The hills lie steeped in memories most fair,
The forests blaze with visions, and the year,
Two-minded, mingles elegies of dearth
With hopeful hymns of yet triumphant birth,
When May returns, when Spring again is here.
Richard Burton.
THE MARE AND THE MOTOR
BY JOSEPH C. LINCOLN
IN order to understand this story there are a few points of information concerning “Lonesome Huckleberries” with which you ought to be acquainted. First, his nationality: Captain Jonadab Wixon used to say that Lonesome was “a little of everything, like a picked-up dinner; principally Eyetalian and Portygee, I cal’late, with a streak of Gay Head Injun.” Second, his name: To quote from the captain again, “His reel name’s long enough to touch bottom in the ship channel at high tide, so folks nater’lly got to callin’ him ‘Huckleberries,’ ’cause he peddles them kind of fruit in summer. Then he mopes round so, with nary a smile on his face, that it seemed jest right to tack on the ‘Lonesome.’ So ‘Lonesome Huckleberries’ he’s been for the past ten year.” Add to these items the fact that he lived in a patchwork shanty on the end of a sandspit six miles from Wellmouth Port, that he was deaf and dumb, that he drove a liver-colored, balky mare that no one but himself and his daughter “Becky” could handle, that he had a fondness for bad rum, and a wicked temper that had twice landed him in the village lockup, and you have a fair idea of the personality of Lonesome Huckleberries. And, oh, yes! his decoy ducks. He was a great gunner alongshore, and owned a flock of live decoys for which he had refused bids as high as fifteen dollars each. There, now I think you are in position to appreciate the yarn that Mr. Barzilla Wingate told me as we sat in the “Lovers’ Nest,” the summerhouse on the bluff by the Old Home House, and watched the Greased Lightning, Peter Brown’s smart little motor launch, swinging at her moorings below.
“Them Todds,” observed Barzilla, “had got on my nerves. ’Twas Peter’s ad that brought ’em down here. You see, ’twas ’long toward the end of the season at the Old Home House, and Brown had been advertisin’ in the New York and Boston papers to ‘bag the leftovers,’ as he called it. Besides the reg’lar hogwash about the ‘breath of old ocean’ and the ‘simple, cleanly livin’ of the bygone days we dream about,’ there was some new froth concernin’ huntin’ and fishin’. You’d think the wild geese roosted on the flagpole nights, and the bluefish clogged up the bay so’s you could walk on their back fins without wettin’ your feet—that is, if you wore rubbers and trod light.
“‘There!’ says Peter T., wavin’ the advertisement and crowin’ gladsome; ‘they’ll take to that like your temp’rance aunt to brandy coughdrops. We’ll have to put up barbed wire to keep ’em off.’
“‘Humph!’ grunts Cap’n Jonadab. ‘Anybody but a born fool’ll know there ain’t any shootin’ down here this time of year.’
“Peter looked at him sorrowful. ‘Pop,’ says he, ‘did you ever hear that Solomon answered a summer hotel ad? This ain’t a Chautauqua, this is the Old Home House, and its motto is: “There’s a new sucker born every minute, and there’s twenty-four hours in a day.” You set back and count the clock ticks.’
“Well, that’s ’bout all we had to do. We got boarders enough from that ridic’lous advertisement to fill every spare room we had, includin’ Jonadab’s and mine. Me and the cap’n had to bunk in the barn loft; but there was some satisfaction in that—it give us an excuse to git away from the ‘sports’ in the smokin’ room.
“The Todds was part of the haul. He was a little, dried-up man, single, and a minister. Nigh’s I could find out, he’d given up preachin’ by the request of the doctor and his last congregation. He had a notion that he was a mighty hunter afore the Lord, like Nimrod in the Bible, and he’d come to the Old Home to bag a few gross of geese and ducks.
“His sister was an old maid, and slim, neither of which failin’s was from ch’ice, I cal’late. She wore eyeglasses and a veil to ‘preserve her complexion,’ and her idee seemed to be that native Cape Codders lived in trees and et cocoanuts. She called ’em barbarians, utter barbarians.’ Whenever she piped ‘James!’ her brother had to drop everything and report on deck. She was skipper of the Todd craft.
“Well, them Todds was what Peter T. called ‘the limit, and a chip or two over.’ The other would-be gunners and fishermen were satisfied to slam shot after sandpeeps, or hook a stray sculpin or a hake. But t’wa’n’t so with brother James Todd and sister Clarissa. ‘Ducks’ it was in the advertisin’, and nothin’ but ducks they wanted. Clarissa, she commenced to hint middlin’ p’inted concernin’ fraud.
“Fin’lly we lost patience, and Peter T., he said they’d got to be quieted somehow, or he’d do some shootin’ on his own hook; said too much Toddy was givin’ him the ‘D.T.’s.’ Then I suggested takin’ ’em down the beach somewheres on the chance of seein’ a stray coot or loon or somethin’—anything that could be shot at. Jonadab and Peter agreed ’twas a good plan, and we matched to see who’d be guide. And I got stuck, of course; my luck again.
“So the next mornin’ we started, me and the Reverend James and Clarissa, in the Greased Lightnin’. Fust part of the trip that Todd man done nothin’ but ask questions about the launch; I had to show him how to start it and steer it, and the land knows what all. Clarissa set around doin’ the heavy contemptuous and turnin’ up her nose at creation gin’rally. It must have its drawbacks, this roostin’ so fur above the common flock; seems to me I’d be thinkin’ all the time of the bump that was due me if I got shoved off the perch.
“Well, by and by Lonesome Huckleberries’ shanty hove in sight, and I was glad to see it, although I had to answer a million more questions about Lonesome and his history. When we struck the beach, Clarissa, she took her paint box and umbrella and moskeeter ’intment, and the rest of her cargo, and went off by herself to ‘sketch.’ She was great on ’sketchin’,’ and the way she’d use up good paint and spile nice clean paper was a sinful waste. Afore she went, she give me three fathom of sailin’ orders concernin’ takin’ care of ‘James.’ You’d think he was about four year old; made me feel like a hired nuss.
“Well, James and me went perusin’ up and down that beach in the blazin’ sun lookin’ for somethin’ to shoot. We went ’way beyond Lonesome’s shanty, but there wa’n’t nobody to home. Lonesome himself, it turned out afterward, was up to the village with his horse and wagon, and his daughter Becky was over in the woods on the mainland berryin’. Todd was a cheerful talker, but limited. His favorite remark was: ‘Oh, I say, my deah man.’ That’s what he kept callin’ me, ‘my deah man.’ Now, my name ain’t exactly a Claude de Montmorency for prettiness, but ‘Barzilla’ ’ll fetch me alongside a good deal quicker’n ‘my deah man,’ I’ll tell you that.
“We frogged it up and down all the forenoon, but didn’t git a shot at nothin’ but one stray ‘squawk’ that had come over from the Cedar Swamp. I told James ’twas a canvasback, and he blazed away at it, but missed it by three fathom, as might have been expected.
“Fin’lly my game leg—rheumatiz, you understand—begun to give out. So I flops down in the shade of a sand bank to rest, and the reverend goes pokin’ off by himself.
“I cal’late I must have fell asleep, for when I looked at my watch it was close to one o’clock, and time for us to be gittin’ back to the port. I got up and stretched and took an observation, but further’n Clarissa’s umbrella on the skyline, I didn’t see anything stirrin’. Brother James wa’n’t visible, but I jedged he was within hailin’ distance. You can’t see very fur on that point, there’s too many sand hills and hummocks.
“I started over toward the Greased Lightnin’. I’d gone a little ways, and was down in a gully between two big hummocks, when ‘Bang! bang!’ goes both barrels of a shotgun, and that Todd critter busts out hollerin’ like all possessed.
“‘Hooray!’ he squeals, in that squeaky voice of his. ‘Hooray! I’ve got ’em! I’ve got ’em!’
“Thinks I, ‘What in the nation does that lunatic cal’late he’s shot?’ And I left my own gun layin’ where ’twas and piled up over the edge of that sand bank like a cat over a fence. And then I see a sight.
“There was James, hoppin’ up and down in the beach grass, squealin’ like a Guinea hen with a sore throat, and wavin’ his gun with one wing—arm, I mean—and there in front of him, in the foam at the edge of the surf, was two ducks as dead as Nebuchadnezzar—two of Lonesome Huckleberries’ best decoy ducks—ducks he’d tamed and trained, and thought more of than anything else in this world—except rum, maybe—and the rest of the flock was diggin’ up the beach for home as if they’d been telegraphed for, and squawkin’ ‘Fire!’ and ‘Bloody murder!’
“Well, my mind was in a kind of various state, as you might say, for a minute. ’Course, I’d known about Lonesome’s ownin’ them decoys—told Todd about ’em, too—but I hadn’t seen ’em nowhere alongshore, and I sort of cal’lated they was locked up in Lonesome’s hen house, that bein’ his usual way when he went to town. I s’pose likely they’d been feedin’ among the beach grass somewheres out of sight, but I don’t know for sartin to this day. And I didn’t stop to reason it out then, neither. As Scriptur’ or George Washin’ton or somebody says, ‘’twas a condition, not a theory,’ I was afoul of.
“‘I’ve got ’em!’ hollers Todd, grinnin’ till I thought he’d swaller his own ears. ‘I shot ’em all myself!’
“‘You everlastin’——’ I begun, but I didn’t git any further. There was a rattlin’ noise behind me, and I turned, to see Lonesome Huckleberries himself, settin’ on the seat of his old truck wagon and glarin’ over the hammer head of that balky mare of his straight at brother Todd and the dead decoys.
“For a minute there was a kind of tableau, like them they have at church fairs—all four of us, includin’ the mare, keepin’ still, like we was frozen. But ’twas only for a minute. Then it turned into the liveliest movin’ picture that ever I see. Lonesome couldn’t swear—bein’ a dummy—but if ever a man got profane with his eyes, he did right then. Next thing I knew he tossed both hands into the air, clawed two handfuls out of the atmosphere, reached down into the cart, grabbed a pitchfork and piled out of that wagon and after Todd. There was murder comin’ and I could see it.
“‘Run, you loon!’ I hollers, desp’rate.
“James didn’t wait for any advice. He didn’t know what he’d done, I cal’late, but he jedged ’twas his move. He dropped his gun and putted down the shore like a wild man, with Lonesome after him. I tried to foller, but my rheumatiz was too big a handicap; all I could do was yell.
“You never’d have picked out Todd for a sprinter—not to look at him, you wouldn’t—but if he didn’t beat the record for his class jest then I’ll eat my sou’wester. He fairly flew, but Lonesome split tacks with him every time, and kept to wind’ard, into the bargain. Where they went out sight amongst the sand hills ’twas anybody’s race.
“I was scart. I knew what Lonesome’s temper was, ’specially when it had been iled with some Wellmouth Port no-license rum. He’d been took up once for ha’f killin’ some boys that tormented him, and I figgered if he got within’ pitchfork distance of the Todd critter he’d make him the leakiest divine that ever picked a text. I commenced to hobble back after my gun. It looked bad to me.
“But I’d forgot sister Clarissa. ’Fore I’d limped fur I heard her callin’ to me.
“‘Mr. Wingate,’ says she, ’git in here at once.’
“There she was, settin’ on the seat of Lonesome’s wagon, holdin’ the reins and as cool as a white frost in October.
“‘Git in at once,’ says she. I jedged ’twas good advice, and took it.
“‘Proceed,’ says she to the mare. ‘Git dap!’ says I, and we started. When we rounded the sand hill we see the race in the distance. Lonesome had gained a p’int or two, and Todd wa’n’t more’n four pitchforks in the lead.
“‘Make for the launch!’ I whooped, between my hands.
“The parson heard me and come about and broke for the shore. The Greased Lightnin’ had swung out about the length of her anchor rope, and the water wa’n’t deep. Todd splashed in to his waist and climbed aboard. He cut the rodin’ jest as Lonesome reached tide mark. James, he sees it’s a close call, and he shins back to the engine, reachin’ it exactly at the time when the gent with the pitchfork laid hands on the rail. Then the parson throws over the switch—I’d shown him how, you remember—and gives the startin’ wheel a full turn.
“Well, you know the Greased Lightnin’? She don’t linger to say farewell, not any to speak of, she don’t. And this time she jumped like the cat that lit on the hot stove. Lonesome, bein’ balanced with his knees on the rail, pitches headfust into the cockpit. Todd, jumpin’ out of his way, falls overboard backward. Next thing anybody knew, the launch was scootin’ for blue water like a streak of what she was named for, and the huntin’ chaplain was churnin’ up foam like a mill wheel.
“I yelled more orders than second mate on a coaster. Todd bubbled and bellered. Lonesome hung on to the rail of the cockpit and let his hair stand up to grow. Nobody was cool but Clarissa, and she was an iceberg. She had her good p’ints, that old maid did, drat her!
“‘James,’ she calls, ‘git out of that water this minute and come here! This instant, mind!’
“James minded. He paddled ashore and hopped, drippin’ like a dishcloth, alongside the truck wagon.
“‘Git in!’ orders Skipper Clarissa. He done it. ‘Now,’ says the lady, passin’ the reins over to me, ‘drive us home, Mr. Wingate, before that intoxicated lunatic can catch us.’
“It seemed about the only thing to do. I knew ’twas no use explainin’ to Lonesome for an hour or more yit, even if you can talk finger signs, which part of my college trainin’ has been neglected. ’Twas murder he wanted at the present time. I had some sort of a foggy notion that I’d drive along, pick up the guns and then git the Todds over to the hotel, afterward comin’ back to git the launch and pay damages to Huckleberries. I cal’lated he’d be more reasonable by that time.
“But the mare had made other arrangements. When I slapped her with the end of the reins she took the bit in her teeth and commenced to gallop. I hollered ‘Whoa!’ and ‘Heave to!’ and ‘Belay!’ and everything else I could think of, but she never took in a reef. We bumped over hummocks and ridges, and every time we done it we spilled somethin’ out of that wagon. Fust ’twas a lot of huckleberry pails, then a basket of groceries and such, then a tin pan with some potatoes in it, then a jug done up in a blanket. We was heavin’ cargo overboard like a leaky ship in a typhoon. Out of the tail of my eye I see Lonesome, well out to sea, headin’ the Greased Lightnin’ for the beach.
“Clarissa put in the time soothin’ James, who had a serious case of the scart-to-deaths, and callin’ me an ‘utter barbarian’ for drivin’ so fast. Lucky for all hands, she had to hold on tight to keep from bein’ jounced out, ’long with the rest of movables, so she couldn’t take the reins. As for me, I wa’n’t payin’ much attention to her—’twas the ‘Cut-Through’ that was disturbin’ my mind.
“When you drive down to Lonesome P’int you have to ford the ‘Cut-Through.’ It’s a strip of water between the bay and the ocean, and ’tain’t very wide nor deep at low tide. But the tide was comin’ in now, and, more’n that, the mare wa’n’t headed for the ford. She was cuttin’ cross-lots on her own hook, and wouldn’t answer the helm.
“Well, we struck that ‘Cut-Through’ about a hundred yards east of the ford, and in two shakes we was hub deep in salt water. ’Fore the Todds could do anything but holler the wagon was afloat and the mare was all but swimmin’. But she kept right on. Bless her, you couldn’t stop her!
“We crossed the first channel and come out on a flat where ’twasn’t more’n two foot deep then. I commenced to feel better. There was another channel ahead of us, but I figured we’d navigate that same as we had the first one. And then the most outrageous thing happened.
“If you’ll b’lieve it, that pesky mare balked and wouldn’t stir another step.
“And there we was! I punched and kicked and hollered, but all that stubborn horse would do was lay her ears back flat, and snarl up her lip, and look round at us, much as to say: ‘Now, then, you land sharks, I’ve got you between wind and water!’ And I swan to man if it didn’t look like she had!
“‘Drive on!’ says Clarissa, pretty average vinegary. ‘Haven’t you made trouble enough for us already, you dreadful man? Drive on!’
“Hadn’t I made trouble enough! What do you think of that?
“‘You want to drown us!’ says Miss Todd, continuin’ her chatty remarks. ‘I see it all! It’s a plot between you and that murderer. I give you warnin’; if we reach the hotel, my brother and I will commence suit for damages.’
“My temper’s fairly long-sufferin’, but ’twas ravelin’ some by this time.
“‘Commence suit!’ I says. ‘I don’t care what you commence, if you’ll commence to keep quiet now!’ And then I give her a few p’ints as to what her brother had done, heavin’ in some personal flatteries every once in a while for good measure.
“I’d about got to thirdly when James give a screech and p’inted. And, by time! if there wa’n’t Lonesome in the launch, headed right for us, and comin’ a-b’ilin’! He’d run her along abreast of the beach and turned in at the upper end of the ‘Cut-Through.’
“You never in your life heard such a row as there was in that wagon. Clarissa and me yellin’ to Lonesome to keep off—forgittin’ that he was stone deef and dumb—and James vowin’ that he was goin’ to be slaughtered in cold blood. And the Greased Lightnin’ p’inted jest so she’d split that cart amidships, and comin’—well, you know how she can go.
“She never budged until she was within ten foot of the flat, and then, jest as I was commencin’ the third line of ‘Now I lay me,’ she sheered off and went past in a wide curve, with Lonesome steerin’ with one hand and shakin’ his pitchfork at Todd with t’other. And such faces as he made up! They’d have got him hung in any court in the world.
“He run up the ‘Cut-Through’ a little ways, and then come about, and back he comes again, never slackin’ speed a mite, and runnin’ close to the shoal as he could shave, and all the time goin’ through the bloodiest kind of pantomimes. And past he goes, to wheel ’round and commence all over again.
“Thinks I, ‘Why don’t he ease up and lay us aboard? He’s got all the weapons there is. Is he scart?’
“And then it come to me—the reason why. He didn’t know how to stop her. He could steer fust rate, bein’ used to sailboats, but an electric auto launch was a new deal for him, and he didn’t understand her works. And he dastn’t run her aground at the speed she was makin’; ’twould have finished her and, more’n likely, him, too.
“I don’t s’pose there ever was another mess jest like it afore or sence. Here was us, stranded with a horse we couldn’t make go, bein’ chased by a feller who was run away with in a boat he couldn’t stop!
“Jest as I’d about give up hope, I heard somebody callin’ from the beach behind us. I turned, and there was Becky Huckleberries, Lonesome’s daughter. She had the dead decoys by the legs in one hand.
“‘Hi!’ says she.
“‘Hi!’ says I. ‘How do you git this giraffe of yours under way?’
She held up the decoys.
“‘Who kill-a dem ducks?’ says she.
“I p’inted to the reverend. ‘He did,’ says I. And then I cal’late I must have had one of them things they call an inspiration. ‘And he’s willin’ to pay for ’em,’ I says.
“‘Pay thirty-five dolla?’ says she.
“‘You bet!’ says I.
“But I’d forgot Clarissa. She rose up in that waterlogged cart like a Statue of Liberty. ‘Never!’ says she. ‘We will never submit to such extortion. We’ll drown fust!’
“Becky heard her. She didn’t look disapp’inted nor nothin’. Jest turned and begun to walk up the beach. ‘All right,’ says she; goo’-by.’
“The Todds stood it for a jiffy. Then James give in. ‘I’ll pay it!’ he hollers. ‘I’ll pay it!’
“Even then Becky didn’t smile. She jest came about again and walked back to the shore. Then she took up that tin pan and one of the potaters we’d jounced out of the cart.
“‘Hi, Rosa!’ she hollers. That mare turned her head and looked. And, for the first time sence she hove anchor on that flat, the critter unfurled her ears and histed ’em to the masthead.
“‘Hi, Rosa!’ says Becky again, and begun to pound the pan with the potater. And I give you my word that that mare started up, turned the wagon around nice as could be, and begun to swim ashore. When we got jest where the critter’s legs touched bottom, Becky remarks: ‘Whoa!’
“‘Here!’ I yells, ‘what did you do that for?’
“‘Pay thirty-five dolla now,’ says she. She was bus’ness, that girl.
“Todd got his wallet from under hatches and counted out the thirty-five, keepin’ one eye on Lonesome, who was swoopin’ up and down in the launch lookin’ as if he wanted to cut in, but dastn’t. I tied the bills to my jackknife, to give ’em weight, and tossed the whole thing ashore. Becky, she counted the cash and stowed it away in her apron pocket.
“‘All right,’ says she. ‘Hi, Rosa!’ The potater and pan performance begun again, and Rosa picked up her hoofs and dragged us to dry land. And it sartinly felt good to the feet.
“‘Say,’ I says, ‘Becky, it’s none of my affairs, as I know of, but is that the way you usually start that horse of yours?’
“She said it was. And Rosa et the potater.
“Well, then Becky asked me how to stop the launch, and I told her. She made a lot of finger signs to Lonesome, and inside of five minutes the Greased Lightnin’ was anchored in front of us. Old man Huckleberries was still hankerin’ to interview Todd with the pitchfork, but Becky settled that all right. She jumped in front of him, and her eyes snapped and her feet stamped and her fingers flew. And ’twould have done you good to see her dad shrivel up and git humble. I always had thought that a woman wasn’t much good as a boss of the roost unless she could use her tongue, but Becky showed me my mistake. Well, it’s live and l’arn.
“Then Miss Huckleberries turned to us and smiled.
“‘All right,’ says she; ‘goo’-by.’
“Them Todds took the train for the city next mornin’. I drove ’em to the depot. James was kind of glum, but Clarissa talked for two. Her opinion of the Cape and Capers, ’specially me, was decided. The final blast was jest as she was climbin’ the car steps.
“‘Of all the barbarians,’ says she; ‘utter, uncouth, murderin’ barbarians in——”
“She stopped, thinkin’ for a word, I s’pose. I didn’t feel that I could improve on Becky Huckleberries’ conversation much, so I says:
“‘All right! Goo’-by!’”
The WRECKER
By Lucia Chamberlain
MRS. Gueste looked out from the pink shade of her parasol at the cool green curl of the breakers down the beach with an actual frown between her fine brows. Her eyes were full of queries. Her delicate thumb and forefinger nipped a note. It was from her favorite brother. It had been brought to her that morning half an hour after hers had been sent apprising him of her arrival in Santa Barbara. It ran:
Dear Lil: Great to have you here. Awfully sorry can’t lunch. Another engagement can’t break. See you afternoon.
Wallie.
That was a note to have from one’s favorite brother, her frown said, as she turned to her friend.
“But if her family is so good——” she began, taking up the conversation where they had dropped it. The sentence seemed connected in her mind with the note, at which she looked.
“Oh, but they can’t manage her,” replied Julia Crosby, punching her parasol tip into the sand. “Mr. Remi died when Blanche was a baby. Mrs. Remi is a nervous invalid. Blanche has run wild since she could run at all. If she were a boy—well, she’d be the ‘black sheep.’”
“Is she fast?” said Lillian Gueste, with horrified emphasis.
“Oh, no!” Mrs. Crosby hastened. But she seemed to find it difficult to explain to her friend just what Blanche Remi was. “She’s—well, she’s wild. She does such things—things none of the other girls do. She drives a sulky. She rides in a man’s coat and red gloves. It sounds so silly when you tell it,” she ended, feeling she had failed to properly impress her friend, “but you can always see her coming a mile away, whether it’s golf or a garden party.”
“You mean she’s a tomboy?” said Mrs. Gueste, doubtfully. Her smile said that Walter would never take that sort seriously.
“Oh, if it were only that!” Mrs. Crosby’s gesture was eloquent. “Do you know what they call her here?”
“They?”
“Well, everybody. Some man, I think, started it. They call her ‘the Wrecker.’”
“The Wrecker?” Mrs. Gueste’s inquiring eyes were on her friend.
“Because every man in Santa Barbara,” Julia Crosby went on, “has at one time or another——”
“Run after her? Oh!” Disgust was in the last little word. Mrs. Gueste understood it all in a moment. “She’s that sort. Is she pretty?”
“Stunning! Overwhelming!” said Mrs. Crosby, generously. She herself was little and indefinite.
“M-m-m! So poor Wallie is overwhelmed?” Lillian mused. “Julie, why didn’t you let me know sooner?”
“But, my dear girl, it was all so vague! Even now I don’t know that there’s anything—but there was getting to be such talk!”
“But you think he’s serious?” Mrs. Gueste’s smile was deprecating.
“I don’t know. That’s why I telegraphed. I knew you would.” Her eyes roved anxiously down the beach, and suddenly fixed. “There they are now,” she said, with a small, sharp excitement.
Lillian Gueste started, peered under her pink parasol. Some dozen rods distant the plaza and the beach below it fluttered with the moving colors of a crowd. Between the plaza and the bath houses lay an empty space of beach, and down that glittering white perspective came a horse with a light sulky. They could make out two people in it: a man, holding on his hat; a woman bareheaded, driving—driving so that one wheel of the sulky spun the foam of the receding water. The man was Wallie—Wallie laughing, hugely enjoying it.
Still at a little distance the sulky stopped; the driver gave the reins to her escort, and sprang out with the light, certain leap of a cat. An indifferent Englishman, who had noticed nothing before, put his glass in his eye and stared. It may be he had never seen anything so tawny, so glistening, so magnificent, as the undulant masses of hair gathered up on the crown of the girl’s head. A long tan-colored ulster, the collar turned up around her throat, fell to her feet. She stood pulling off a pair of red gloves, looking up and laughing to Walter Carter, who got out with his habitual lazy lurch.
The two were near the narrow plank that led from the women’s bath houses. Bathers were coming out in bathrobes, which, five steps from the door, they left hanging on the rope, while they hopped, high-shouldered and shivering, down the beach. The girl kicked off her tennis shoes and handed them to Walter, stripped off her ulster, and stood out in a scarlet bathing dress that, covering the knees, left bare legs, slim, brown and dimpled as a child’s. She lingered across the interval of dry sand, calling over her shoulder to Walter something that left him a-grin with amusement; then went joyously down the dip of the beach for the rush of the incoming breakers, and launched into it with the swash of a little, launching ship. The lawlessness of it was beyond any words Lillian knew.
“You see, she does things like that,” Mrs. Crosby explained in her friend’s ear.
“Oh, impossible!” Lillian murmured, watching Blanche Remi’s bathing dress glimmer through the green breakers. “Do you suppose Wallie is going in, too?” she added, glancing down the beach.
The young man was sauntering toward them, unconscious of his sister’s scrutiny, his steps directed, probably, toward the men’s bath houses on the left of where the two women sat. He was as lankly dawdling as ever, but Lillian noted, with a vague uneasiness, his usual air of agreeable ennui was supplanted by one of half-wakened interest. The remnant of a smile was on his habitually serious face.
Mrs. Gueste stood up and motioned with her lorgnon. He saw, stared, smiled broadly, delightedly, and hastened toward her.
“I say,” he said, subsiding between them, “this is luck! But why didn’t you let a chap know you were coming a few hours before you landed? What started you, anyway? I thought you had planned for Castle Crag.”
Julia Crosby’s telegram was hot in Lillian’s pocket, and she thought, anxiously, that Julia’s face was conscious enough to give the thing away. But Walter was frankly unsuspicious.
“If I’d known just a day ahead,” he reproached her, “I could have lunched with you as well as not.”
“But your engagement?” Lillian hinted.
“Oh, to bring Miss Remi down for a dip. I was going up for you while she paddled ’round, but now I’ve got you here, too, I won’t have to budge.”
Little as she liked the idea of being thus lumped with Blanche Remi, Lillian made it a point to be lovely.
“Miss Remi?” she wondered, sweetly.
“Why, yes. Didn’t you see us?” He was just a little conscious. “There she is at the raft,” he added. “You must meet her, Lil; mustn’t she, Mrs. Crosby? There’s no one in Santa Barbara like her.”
“Really?” Mrs. Gueste looked through her lorgnon at the glinting speck traveling out on the water.
Wallie frowned. He hated his sister’s lorgnon, and her lorgnon manner was his bête noir.
“I am afraid we shan’t be able to wait until Miss—er”—she searched for the name—“comes out. We must be at the house by three.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll signal her to come back. Where’s something?” His hand fell on his sister’s parasol, and before she could protest he had it at the edge of the beach, waving over his head. It was probably the first conspicuous performance of that very discreet parasol; and as for the punctilious Wallie——!
“Do you suppose he gets that sort of thing from her?” Lillian articulated.
“I suppose so,” Mrs. Crosby agreed, faintly. She felt a wish to escape being present at the approaching introduction. “If you don’t mind, Lily,” she excused herself, “I really ought to run uptown and see Mrs. Herrick for a few moments. You remember I promised her.”
“Why, of course. Wallie will see me home.” Lillian smiled, remembering how in their school days Julia’s conscience had always precipitated the crisis, and dodged the consequences.
She sat composedly alone in the sand, watching the glinting speck drawing landward. Wallie stood awaiting it, his toes in the water, his sister’s pink parasol held like a saber in his hand.
As the girl came splashing through the shallow flow, dripping, glowing, shaking the drops from her hair, Mrs. Gueste saw she carried a little dog, a terrier, in her arms, and this seemed to put the last touch to her conspicuousness. She came up the beach talking, gesticulating vividly, to Walter. Once she nodded to a loose-lipped, pleasant-eyed man who passed them, but she did not give Mrs. Gueste a glance until she was fairly before her—until Walter spoke his sister’s name. Then, when she gave suddenly the full glow of her face, and the strength and light of her hot, hazel eyes, she was, as Mrs. Crosby had said, overwhelming. The touch of her damp hand to Mrs. Gueste’s delicate glove was the touch of compelling physical magnetism that could be looked at safely only through a lorgnon.
But not the lorgnon, nor its accompanying manner, disconcerted Miss Remi. Her own manner was easy, without freeness.
“You do look like your brother, Mrs. Gueste,” she said, seating herself in the sand, and warning the wet terrier away with upraised finger.
“Flattered, Lillian?” Wallie murmured, with cloaked satisfaction.
“Oh, you’re very nice looking, Wallie,” Blanche Remi told him, with a frank, smiling, up-and-down glance.
Mrs. Gueste’s lorgnon rose sharply to this sentence, but her voice was gentle.
“Don’t you find it rather cold going in this morning?” she asked.
The girl’s faint change of expression appreciated the round turn that had been given the conversation.
“Oh, it’s always pretty cold, but I keep moving, so I keep warm,” she said. There was a glint of mischief in her wonderful eyes.
“But don’t you feel cold while you’re out?” Mrs. Gueste persisted.
The girl, sitting unwinking, unfrowning, in the glare, looked like some luxurious creature sunning itself. A faint, fine powdering of freckles gave even her skin a tawny hue. Even down the throat, where Lillian was milk white, she showed a tint like old ivory, with creamy shadows under the square chin. She looked up at Lillian Gueste’s face in the dainty shadow of her parasol.
“Do I look cold?” she laughed. “You must let me show you how to keep warm. Do you swim? Oh, you should! It saves your nine lives. You ride, of course?”
“If I can find a horse that suits me.” Mrs. Gueste’s soft reply suggested she was hard to suit.
“You must try my Swallow. She’s perfect. We must have a saddle party, mustn’t we, Wallie?” the girl appealed to him. “But first you may take me to call on Mrs. Gueste. I know she’ll have too many engagements to risk calling on her hit-or-miss.”
Mrs. Gueste’s reply was a murmur, as she rose, shaking out her soft linen skirts.
Walter Carter felt indefinitely uncomfortable. Blanche Remi stood beside his sister, slightly taller, more vigorously, more carelessly, more brilliantly made. She looked rather commanding, as if she were used to having things her own way; which was precisely what Lillian, little as she looked it, was used to having. But now her manner toward Blanche was almost appealing.
“I am going to beg your escort away from you, Miss Remi, if you will permit it, just to drive me back to Mrs. Crosby’s. I haven’t seen him for three months, you know.” Her voice and eyes somehow made three months seem interminable.
Blanche did not show by the flicker of an eyelash that she appreciated the cleverness of this maneuver. “Why, that’s a dreadful loss of time for Wallie,” she said.
He thanked her with a glance that made his sister wince.
“Then shall I come back for you—Blanche?” The name came out after a moment’s hesitation.
“Oh, no! Blair Hemming will drive me back.”
Lillian felt a vague resentment that the girl should be so sure.
“And don’t forget about to-morrow,” Blanche warned Wallie, bidding good-by, and left him wondering what had been to-morrow. Nothing had, but the words, as Blanche had wickedly foreseen, lingered in Mrs. Gueste’s mind, and vexed her.
“You have so many engagements, I wonder whether I shall see you at all,” she hinted, as he handed her into the runabout.
He flushed slightly. “Well,” he said, genially, as he took the reins, “you know there are mighty few of ’em I wouldn’t break for you, Lil.”
As they spun down the spongy asphalt of the boulevard, between the palms and electric-light poles, she was asking herself why it was that good, unsuspecting fellows like Wallie were always pounced upon by such women. She felt it was horrid to meddle, but this creature was so astonishingly impossible, and yet so overwhelming, that Wallie could hardly be expected to rescue himself. But she was cautious.
“Did you meet Miss Remi here, Wallie?” she asked him.
“Yes, at something at the country club.”
“Does she go there?”
“Why, of course. All the nice people go there.” He looked at her in lazy surprise.
“Oh!” she said, with a falling inflection. It was discouraging to find him so unconscious. “Does she go much?”
“Everywhere. She’s awfully popular. How does she strike you?” He tried to be casual.
“She’s not like anyone else I’ve seen in Santa Barbara,” Lillian replied.
He fairly glowed. She had never seen Wallie so enthusiastic.
“You’re just right, Lil! There is no one like her. She makes every other girl look like a dough doll! It’s not only that she’s beautiful—she isn’t afraid of anything, she don’t care how she looks—she’s just crackling with life.”
“Do you admire her so awfully?” Lillian said, with such an amazed emphasis on the personal pronoun as brought him up short.
“Why—er—of course. Why not? Don’t you?” The color came up under his brown skin.
“Well,” she said, slowly, “of course I’ve only met her once; but really, Wallie, is she quite—fine?”
“Fine? What do you mean?”
She knew that he knew what she meant. The word was not a new one from her. It was her measure, her ruler by which she judged the world. He was not so unconscious, then, as he seemed.
“I mean what you’ve been so accustomed to in women, you dear, that you don’t know they can lack it,” she said, caressingly. “Is she nice? Is she a lady?”
Something threatening looked out of her brother’s eyes. “Well, I introduced her to you.”
“I know. You put me in rather a difficult position, Wallie.”
“See here, Lil”—he dragged out his words with slow emphasis—“I don’t know who you’ve been listening to, but you can take it from me that’s she as fine as silk and as good as gold.”
“Oh, as to her goodness, I haven’t a doubt, of course.” She seemed to set this aside as a trifle. “But as to fineness, now, Wallie, what do you think of a girl driving through town in her bathing suit, with a man, and jumping out of her coat and shoes on the beach before everyone, as she did? She did it to make a sensation; and do you think that fine, Wallie?”
He flushed, but laughed.
“Nonsense. It was a whim—a freak. She thought nothing at all of any effect on the beach. That’s the trouble; she thinks too little of the effect, and so——”
“And so she wears no stockings—and so she’s called ‘the Wrecker,’” his sister added, with inconsequent effect.
His face was grave, even disturbed. “Oh, yes, I’ve heard that. But she’s so beautiful, so happy, you can’t wonder at the attraction; and you know there’s always gossip. And then she’s run wild. She has had no one to take care of her——” he left the sentence hanging.
His sister inwardly shivered. When a man talked about “taking care” in that tone, she seemed to see the end.
They were winding up the wide, wandering Main Street, the rose-covered verandas of the Arlington on their left; on the right an old garden ran back to the white stucco fronts and red tiles of the De la Gera place.
“Wallie,” Lillian asked him, softly, “are you in love with that girl?”
“Me! Oh, what a question, Lil!” He laughed at her—his nice, lazy laugh she loved so much.
“Are you, Wallie?”
He put up his monocle to meet her lorgnon. “My dear girl, do I look pale and sunken?”
“You are dodging the question. But think”—she was light, almost playful, over it—“is she the sort of woman you would care to introduce as your—wife?”
Wallie looked a little startled, but he took her tone. “My dear Lil, I haven’t thought of her in quite that way.” He grew more serious. “I think she’s wonderful. I never saw anyone like her. You must know her better.”
“I don’t see how I can,” Lillian sighed.
“You mean you won’t see her?”
“I suppose I must, since you are going to bring her to call. But I won’t go about with her. I can’t. Couldn’t you see there on the beach—she isn’t our kind?”
“She looks nothing like you, certainly, Lillian,” he replied, coolly, “if you insist on judging people by appearances, but it’s hardly a ‘fine’ way to judge.”
“Now, Wallie——” they had turned into the Crosby drive, between the rose of sharon and syringa bushes.
“Of course,” he went on, “you’re always waving that word around as if it were the only thing worth being, and every virtue hung on it. But what about honor, and generosity, and simplicity, and courage? Are they nothing compared to it?”
The runabout had stopped before the piazza steps, but Lillian sat still a moment, frowning faintly.
“When I said ‘fine,’” she answered, “I didn’t mean fine finish, cultivation, which is a surface thing, but I meant fine fiber, which goes deep and counts in every way with everything. One judges the big things by the small ones,” she said, as Wallie handed her out, “and remembering mother, and the way we were brought up to feel and understand, I think you will presently agree with me that Miss Remi is hardly—fine.”
She gave him a smile with the last word; and her look, the movement of her graceful head in the turn, the poise of her delicate body, the fall of her delicate dress, showed forth every shade of meaning which that word could contain.
The memory of her thus was with him all the afternoon. It buzzed like a bee in his brain that night through the dinner at the Crosbys’, though Lillian, ravishing in daintily blended shades of chiffon, referred by no suggestion to the talk of the afternoon. She and her word, he thought, mutually described one another. Lillian was fine, and fine meant Lillian.
Deep down or on the surface, he knew she was the real thing. And the inevitable, following question was, what was Blanche Remi? She was the real thing, too. He was sure of that. Lil was ’way off, he told himself, when she said the big things showed up in the little. He had been bothered all his life by the petty goodnesses of women, and now that he had found one who had the great goodness he was not going to be disturbed by Lil’s scruples. As for being “in love” with Blanche Remi—Lillian had put it to him as he had never put it to himself.
From the first night her marvelous eyes had flashed into his indolent notice, he had felt an inclination to exterminate every other man who talked to her. And there were so many. The supposition on the tongues of Santa Barbara that all these men made love to her he had not believed—could not have tolerated. Why he had not made love to her himself was not from lack of impulse, but something in the very greatness of the emotions and passions she roused in him, something in her fine, free ignorance of the trifles that make up the virtue of most women, had made any trifling with her impossible to him. But he felt himself brought down to facts. What was he finally intending toward this girl whom he never saw without wanting to kiss, to carry off? His wife?
Well, Lil was right. Blanche did lack the superficial polish. Strange he hadn’t noticed that before. But that was just the use of Lil. She could be a lot of help if she could only be made to like Blanche, and, of course, all that was necessary was that Lil should know her better. He would, he decided, take Blanche to call there to-morrow.
With a little telephoning this was arranged, and Wallie had it all made out just how beautifully he would direct that interview and carry it through. But the direction was reversed at the beginning by so small an incident as a woman’s hat. Not that the hat was, in itself, so slight an affair. Indeed, when Blanche came out to where he waited her, curbing the most impatient horse in Santa Barbara, the hat was the first thing he saw.
It was wide. It was hung about with lace—too much lace. It was covered with pink roses—too many roses. Walter did not quite know what to think of it, but he had a feeling that Lillian would.
As Blanche sprang into the cart with that vigorous, energetic lift of her body in which the muscles seemed always tense with action:
“Where’s that little white, flyaway thing you used to wear?” he ventured.
“Oh, I don’t know—this is a new one. Don’t you like it?”
“Isn’t it a little—large for driving?”
She flushed but smiled. “Not for calling. Now, Wallie, that’s the first time since you met me that you’ve noticed my clothes. I don’t believe you’ve known whether I’ve had any. Is it because you’ve been having ideals put under your nose? Is it”—she laughed, drawing on a pair of extremely long lavender gloves—“because you are afraid your sister won’t approve of my hat, any more than she approved of my legs?”
It was this astonishing freedom of speech, more than the hat, that made him uneasy of the approaching interview. Of course Blanche could say what she liked to him. He understood. But the very idea of her talking that way to Lillian made him shiver.
But Blanche did not talk “that way” to Lillian. There in the Crosby garden, where the magnolias dropped languid petals on the lawn, she was touchingly like a little girl on her good behavior. She tried, with her anxious sweetness, to make Wallie’s sister like her. But Lillian had seen the hat first, and got no further. It was to the hat she talked, and it seemed to Walter that his sister’s costume, so notably discreet, somehow set off all the daring of Blanche Remi’s gown, the telling blacks of which were touched in at the most unexpected intervals. Was Lillian, instead of helping, trying to put Blanche at her worst? He thrust that thought out of sight as disloyal. He sat, wretchedly uncomfortable, trying to remember whether he had ever seen Lillian wear long lavender gloves, hearing Lillian deftly turn and dispose of, unanswered, Blanche Remi’s suggestions for horseback excursions and “plunge parties.”
He expected, with every covert snub, that Blanche would suddenly, diabolically turn tables on her, as he had seen her do with other women. But Blanche, who had always had what she wanted, now, for perhaps the first time in her life, wanted a woman to like her. And it did not occur to her that she should fail in her desire. But what had been her strength was now her failure. Her compelling magnetism alarmed Lillian Gueste. She had been thoroughly convinced at first glance that the girl was “bad form.” But now she felt her force as something terrible and threatening to Wallie. The very sweetness of the smile Blanche gave her in going seemed too rich.
“But the protection,” Lillian reasoned, going over the interview afterward with herself, “is that Wallie is beginning to see.”
Wallie, bitterly irritated, saw, indeed, many trifles that he had failed to see before, perplexing as so many pricks. Things he had thought amusing in Blanche Remi—her red gloves, her white spats, her man’s hunting coat, the terrier she took to receptions—would they do for Mrs. Walter Carter? Suppose he should put it to Blanche that way, would she take it from him? he wondered. He felt he must put it to her some way now—the questions of Mrs. Walter Carter—for in the background, dimly threatening him, was that aggregation, each one a future possibility—the pasts he would not contemplate—and all villainously responsible for the name gossip had fastened upon her, “the Wrecker.” He knew that Santa Barbara accounted her a “dangerous” woman, but to him, even with her fatal fascination, she had always seemed a child. And now it came to him that it was not the help of a woman, but the protection of a man, Blanche Remi required most.
He felt he could not wait a day, a moment, to tell her; but somehow it was very difficult to find that moment; his time was so unostentatiously but so thoroughly permeated and broken with Lillian’s engagements for him. A week escaped in which, without having seen Blanche less, he had seen her under circumstances that admitted no opportunity.
Lillian had not, as she first threatened, ignored Blanche. She had invited her, if not to dine, at least to a beach tea, to a driving party; had talked with her at the country club; had kept her before Wallie, always at arm’s length, as if to give him ample opportunity for comparison.
Walter could find no flaw in his sister’s attitude of disinterested politeness, of pale cordiality toward Blanche Remi, but side lights on it now and then made him suspicious. He was bewildered—as bewildered as a man tangled in a veil. He felt that the first fine intimacy of his fellowship with Blanche was dulled. He was distressed with a sense of being on a more formal footing with her. At the same time others—men who had been very much in the background—seemed to come forward into her notice. He saw her at the country club dances magnetize the men too bored to dance into an interested circle round her. Dismayed, he saw her first with one, then with another, driving, swimming, sitting on the beach under one parasol in the association so intimate, so informal, that, before Lillian came, he had usurped to the exclusion of the many. Finally, out of the crowd, as the one oftenest with her, he saw Blair Hemming, the man of loose lips and good-natured eyes, to whom Blanche had bowed that morning on the beach.
Walter had thought him a decent enough fellow, but now he was suddenly vile. And Blanche? Her behavior was unreasonable and unfair. But perhaps he had let himself drift too much with Lillian’s plans. A little self-accusing, a little self-righteous, he rang up the Remis’s to make an appointment to ride horseback with Blanche that afternoon.
Her voice reached him, nasal, resonant, with a vibrant quality that touched the ear with a fascination deeper than sweetness. She had a luncheon engagement at the club.
He was annoyed that he had not known of this.
“How about to-morrow?”
“Very well,” came back; “but make it a foursome. Get your sister to come.”
“Of course, if you would rather,” he answered, a little stiffly. “What has happened?” he asked himself. He knew he had done nothing. Was Blanche changing? Had he only imagined her attitude toward him differed from her attitude toward half a dozen others? It had seemed different—but how could a man be sure?
Harassed, suspicious, he hesitated over making the proposal to Lillian until the next afternoon at the last moment. He rode over to the Crosbys’ and found his sister, fair and diaphanous in her mousseline gown, crumbling bread to the gold fish in the fountain. The look she gave his proposition, sweet as it was, made him uncomfortable. Any man would do to fill in the fourth place, he had stupidly said.
“Any man for Miss Remi?” she had asked him. And he had fired.
She heard him with a half smile, softly beating the ground with the dried palm leaf she prettily carried as a parasol.
Well, she told him, she did not care particularly for such an expedition. It was such a time since she had seen him alone! Wouldn’t it be much nicer to make it just a tête-à-tête dinner at Estrelda’s?
He replied, with irritation, that if she did not care to make one of the party, it would not prevent him from taking Miss Remi.
“Ah, a previous arrangement,” Lillian said, taking in his whip and his riding boots as if she had just noticed them. “Well, you must realize by this time just what sort of a person she is.”
“I am far from being sure, but I intend to find out this afternoon.”
She turned sharply. “You mean you are going to ask her to marry you?”
“Well, if I am?”
“After the way she’s been running about with this Hemming?”
“Lillian—look out,” he warned. His sister’s smile was tight and fine.
“Oh, well,” she said, with a little shrug, letting her hands drop in a gesture that seemed to make an end of the matter. At the moment her brother appeared to her no less than a monster. But she watched him down the drive with a revulsion of mood. She felt he was leaving her forever, her Wallie, her little brother! He was a year younger than she. She had let her sense of personal injury get in the way of his happiness—and he was going to that woman.
She stood, the palm leaf fallen from her hand. He must be stopped, interrupted somehow. He should not do a thing in a heat to regret forever. Calling his name, she hurried down the drive to the gate, but he had already turned out of the side street, and was beyond both sight and call. She fairly ran across the garden, over lawns and borders, her gown streaming, regardless of dust or wet. Had anyone seen her running, flushed and breathless, across the piazza and up the stairs, he would scarcely have recognized, in her abandon, Mrs. Cornelius Gueste.
She hurried into her habit, trying to remember whether Wallie had said they would go down through Monticito and come back by the beach, or whether it were just the other way about. Where could she hope to catch up with them? It would be a humiliating affair enough for her; but she was not in the least thinking of herself, but only of Wallie, and some way by which she could avert his catastrophe.
Walter had departed with the responsibility of what he was about to do heavily upon him. His sister’s look had not failed to affect him. He felt he was adventuring, risking, going to deal with unknown quantities.
He was to meet Blanche in town, where she had told him she had some shopping to do. Halfway down the wide, wandering Main Street he saw her mare fastened in front of the confectioner’s. Riding up, he could glimpse through the glass door Blanche, a tall habited figure, strolling here and there, sampling the sweets. He sat waiting, scowling in the glare of the afternoon sun on white awnings and sidewalks. He saw Hemming jump out of his cart a few doors down, in front of the saddler’s, with a broken bridle over, his arm.
“Hey, Carter!” He came and leaned on the flank of Walter’s horse, his hand on the back of the saddle.
“Beastly familiar,” Walter thought.
Hemming’s good-natured, sensual face was vivid with animal spirits. “Where were you last night?” he said. “You did miss it!”
“What?” drawled Walter.
“Mrs. Jack Castra’s dinner dance. Great!” Hemming’s eyes narrowed. He shook his head. “I got Blanche Remi a bid. You know she wanted one like the devil. Mrs. Jack is a terrible stickler, but we’re great pals, and she let me have it.”
“Miss Remi went?” Walter’s voice was very lazy.
“Did she go?” Hemming laughed. “I’ll tell you what it is,” he said, “the Wrecker’s a wonder! She’s such a wonder that most of the women say, ‘Hands off.’ But between you and me, she makes every other woman look like a Dutch doll.”
Walter had an impulse to strike Hemming. His own words had been flung back at him, but he failed to recognize them.
“Oh, I had a good time,” Hemming repeated, significantly, but unmalicious. “So long.” He sauntered into the saddler’s.
Walter watched the confectioner’s door opening. So Blanche was under an obligation—such an obligation—to Hemming! He had not thought Hemming such a bad lot, but now—— Things Lillian had said crowded back to him. And Blanche’s attitude lately? The color thickened in his sallow cheeks.
Blanche came out of the door with a swing. She was eating a chocolate. As she stood under the rippling awning, pulling on her red gloves, he saw she was glowing with excitement. The weight of her splendid hair under her man’s hat, the play of color in her eyes, the slight backward fling of her figure as she poised—each detail proclaimed eloquently how fully she was a conscious, vital force, stupendous to reckon with.
“Where’s Mrs. Gueste?” was the first question she tossed at him, with a straight, studying look.
“Er—she had a headache—and—er, another engagement,” he added, lamely.
Blanche laughed. “One would have been enough,” she said; but the curve of her lip quivered. She stopped his reply with a second question.
“Who ran away as I came out?” she asked, settling in her saddle.
“Blair Hemming.” He looked at her sharply, but she showed no consciousness; only a smile, as though Hemming were something funny.
“Did you have an amusing time last night?” he asked her.
Some vague reminder of Lillian Gueste’s voice startled her. The color deepened in her cheeks. “Oh, lovely! Hemming”—she never gave a title to a name—“took me to the Castras’.”
“Did he get you the invitation?”
She looked at him in surprise.
“I didn’t ask him for it. He offered it.”
“But you took it?”
“Why not? Everyone does it.”
Walter looked at her uneasily. He knew well enough that everyone didn’t. He said stiffly: “I don’t like the idea of your being under obligations to a man like Hemming.”
She looked at him with a quick flush. It might have been anger or pleasure. But then her lashes lowered over her eyes to cover the secret.
“You don’t!” she said. “And how do you suppose Hemming likes my being under obligations to you?”
He was aghast. “What has he got to say about it?”
“What have you?” She let it fall gently.
“Good heavens!” he burst out. “Do you lump us? I thought that you and I were—were——”
“Friends?” she filled in without a quaver. “We were. But you’ve changed, Wallie.”
“Since——”
“Your sister came.”
“What nonsense——” he began, eagerly.
“No”—her eyes were somber, smoldering—“she hates me!” Blanche emphasized the word with her whip on the mare’s flank. “She thinks I’m awful! Hasn’t she said that to you?”
“She has said nothing of the sort. She has nothing to do with it.”
“She has everything!” Blanche said, suddenly, passionately. She jerked the mare’s head fiercely.
They had turned out of the dazzling street into a softly sprinkled side way, where the pepper trees wept their tassels in the dust. Blanche kept her eyes on the bit of blue sky that seemed to close the end of the street like a jewel in a setting.
“Before she came you took me for just what I was. You believed in me, Walter. But ever since she said things, I feel—oh, I don’t know! As if you were a long way off, watching me, and wondering about everything I say and do.”
He broke in: “Because once or twice I criticised some trifle!”
“Oh,” she cried, “don’t think I wouldn’t take criticism from you! I’d take a lot. I’d even wear the sort of hats your sister does!”
“Oh, confound the sort of hats! You know that’s not it. It’s—I—love you, Blanche.”
He brought out the little isolated sentence breathlessly, with a jerk. His sallow face was flushed.
Blanche was very pale. The horses took five steps while there was silence. Then:
“It’s sweet of you to say that.” The girl’s voice was shaken. “But you know, Walter, as she does, I’m not her kind.”
“But I don’t want you to be!”
“Don’t you, Walter?” She looked at him earnestly. “And I’m not your kind, either. I mean, I’m not like the women you’ve known. She’s made me feel that—your sister. It’s one reason why I hate her. Oh, I do!” She nodded at him. “You may as well know that. She makes me see what I’ve missed—little things I thought didn’t matter. But now——”
“But, child,” he interrupted, exasperated, manlike, with her self-depreciations, “those little things don’t count! It isn’t that. But if you loved me——”
“If I loved you?” She turned large, astonished eyes on him.
“Well, you wouldn’t take things from Blair Hemming. I won’t stand it,” he broke out. “He was talking about you, Blanche.”
“What did he say?”
“That makes no difference. A woman can’t afford to be talked about in any way. She can’t know a man in such a way.”
“In what way?” The girl was breathless.
He seemed to see long perspectives of pasts: the crowds around her at the dances; the men at dinners, talking to her across the disapproval of the other women; the looks following her down the beach. “Well, you know what I mean,” he answered, sullenly.
“Oh, Walter!” Her arms fell at her sides with a gesture of eloquent despair. She seemed to divine his retrospection. “But I can’t help it! I don’t do it on purpose—though I know people say I do. You don’t—don’t think I’m ‘the Wrecker’?” She aimed the word at him like a blow, and while he sought an answer: “You don’t believe me. You don’t trust me. You’re wondering now whether I let Hemming make love to me. Hemming!”—she leaned toward him with a savage head shake. “I may not know a good hat when I see one, but I know a good man!”
The spur pricked. The mare bounded. She was rods away before Walter realized he was deserted. Then he followed. The girl turned and motioned him back.
“Go away, go away!” she cried. There was something at once so imperious and so entreating in voice and gesture that he involuntarily halted, and she wheeled and spurred on at a gallop.
If she had not ridden so headlong she must have shrieked. The tempest in her was too much for expression. She saw, subconsciously, a gray blur of olive trees streaming past, with here and there the richer note of orange orchards, and always the road before her, an intense white line over and around the smooth-topped hills. She did not slacken pace at the passing phaëtons, though these may have contained people whom she knew. She dared not look behind her, through a stifling hope and doubt that Walter had followed. She breasted the last hill crest, where the road lifts out of the gardens and orchards of Monticito to the high, wind-raked bluff above the sea.
Here she reined in and turned and looked back down the long, straight stretch of road she had come. Empty, far as eye could see. She listened, breathlessly, but the interminable whisper of the eucalyptus leaves above her head was the only sound. And she had thought so surely he would follow!
She covered her face with her hands and sobbed—crying like a man, with deep chest respirations that shook her whole body. The mare, feeling a relaxed rein, moved a few steps. The girl’s hands fell from her face. She looked seaward through the slim, swaying eucalyptus trees. The tears rolled down her cheeks to the corners of her twitching mouth. Mechanically she wiped them away with the wrist of her red glove. It left odd, bloodlike streaks on her tawny skin. They gave a menacing look to her despair. She was not thinking of how she looked, but of whom she had left, of how she loved him! She was feeling, with her blind forsakenness, that if Walter gave her up she was lost. If he only knew how little the other people mattered! How good, how awfully, abjectly good, she could be if she had him—the only man who had never made love to her! She remembered, with a stir of pure pleasure, how at first she had been piqued and puzzled that he did not. Afterward, how she had loved him for it! But since this woman, his sister, had come, Blanche did not know how it had been brought about, but she knew that she and Walter, who had been so close, so understanding, were apart and at odds. He had trusted her, and now he suspected her.
She saw Lillian Gueste’s hand in it. Blanche did not reason; she only felt, and hated the subtle and delicate treason. Did Lillian Gueste suppose, she asked herself, that because a woman wore large hats and loud gloves she had no right to the man she loved?
She rode along the cliff edge at a foot pace, her eyes abstractedly on the dancing shadows of eucalyptus leaves the sun painted in the dust. She wondered was this the close of what had been opening out before her as her life? She thought, with her primitive reasoning, were Lillian only out of the way—her mind did not get further than that. But Blanche had felt from the first that Lillian Gueste had come to Santa Barbara for no other reason than rescuing her brother, and that she did not intend to go until she took Wallie with her. “Could she do that?” Blanche wondered in a panic. Had an opportunity offered, she would have pushed Lillian Gueste out of her way as she would have thrust a pebble from her path.
The sun, falling low in the western sky, made towers of tree shadows, and spread an iridescence over the in creeping fog, as she followed the descending road downward toward the arroya, where a bridle path slipped seaward under willows. She had taken that path often before. It met the beach below what was the usual limit for riders, but she loved the long, exciting gallop, the scramble among the rocks, the spice of danger at the narrow turns about the two points when the tide was coming in.
The salt smell of the sea met her, strong with reek of kelp, as she approached its thunder through the willows. The range of sea and sky, the free wind blowing between, gave her release from thought and scope to act. The tide was running in high and full. Where the first bold bluff jutted out, a distance of some six yards, the sliding foam already lapped the rock. Once around the turn of the bluff, the beach lay before her—a long white, empty sweep under black cliffs.
She rode at an easy canter, breathing in the stinging salt air, looking out upon the water, where the dark “seaward line” swung with the swell a mile out in “the channel.” She had lost the choking tears, the despair of her first rush down the Monticito road. She felt not happy, but wildly at liberty. The wind took her hat, and she laughed, seeing it spin down the beach. The tingling breeze in her hair whipped out the short, springy curls. The high animal spirits that had helped her over situations where a less vital woman would have been overwhelmed had begun to reassert themselves in the exercise and open air. She scanned the empty beach perspective. What a gallop to the far point! She touched the mare, then pulled her up sharply in the first bound. The beach was not empty. Some one was riding—perhaps a quarter of a mile in front of her—imperfectly to be distinguished among the scattered rocks.
Her first thought was “Walter!” Trembling with eagerness, she peered under a sheltering hand. The rider was a woman. In the revulsion of her feeling, Blanche’s disappointment was an inarticulate sound. All her misery was back upon her. Who it was, riding slowly down the beach in a direction similar to her own, did not matter. She only wanted to avoid being seen—hatless, red-eyed, wild—by this woman, who, being a woman, was her natural enemy. She rode slowly, cautiously, hoping the other would quicken her pace, and put the next point between them. The sun had fallen into the fog, from under which the ocean thundered sullen, gray, up the shore.
Blanche wanted to get around the next point before dusk. She saw the horse in front—bright sorrel on the yellowish-white sand—drawing slowly near the black shoulder of rock; finally, fairly at the turn of it. In an instant it would be out of sight. No, it had stopped; stood motionless a full minute; then, to the girl’s intense amazement, wheeled and came back down the beach at a quick lope. There seemed something of vexation in the sharp turn-about.
Had the woman seen, and come back to speak with her? Blanche wondered. There was no avoiding the meeting. Shaking her hair over her eyes, she rode forward. As the rider drew nearer, with a contraction of heart she recognized Lillian Gueste. At the same instant she knew that Lillian had not seen her.
Mrs. Gueste’s face wore a preoccupied, a vexed, a vaguely anxious, look. The sand half quenched the sound of the horse’s coming. They were almost abreast before she saw Blanche Remi, and then it was with a start, a stare of keen surprise, of interrogation, that effaced the first expression.
Blanche knew whom the questioning eyes missed. There was about them a subtle, tantalizing suggestion of Walter, and she felt the blood run in her temples as she bent her head in faint recognition.
Mrs. Gueste stopped.
“Where is my brother?” she said. She fairly challenged the other with it. That she did not name him Mr. Carter was a mark of her extreme surprise, alarm; for Blanche Remi, with discolored eyes, disheveled hair, and the red stains across her face, looked wild enough to have thrust a displeasing lover into the sea.
Blanche looked at and realized how she hated this woman, this unruffled perfection. The strength of her feeling frightened herself. But her voice was as cool as Mrs. Gueste’s.
“I have no idea,” she said, politely insolent, and made to go on.
Lillian Gueste’s sharp scrutiny had taken in all the girl’s misery, and supposed a scene. Her idea of what had been Walter’s part in it made her, with a revulsion of relief, almost amiable.
“You can’t get around that way,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the point. The vexation was back on her face. “The tide is in.”
The girl’s eye ranged back along the beach. The black cliffs seemed suddenly to have marched seaward.
“Well, you can’t get back that way,” she said. “The water was up to the second point when I came through an hour ago—it’s over the quicksand.”
“Quicksand?” Lillian looked at her blankly. “Then what can we do?”
“Get around there,” said Blanche, waving back to the near point.
“We can’t.” Irritation and unbelief were in Mrs. Gueste’s voice.
“I’ve done it before. It’s easy. Come on.” Blanche was nonchalant in the face of the encroaching sea. The gulls were screaming above their heads, the sound of shattering water was in their ears, as they rode forward.
At the shoulder of the point the wind met them, and the inrush of the ocean. Here the beach sloped suddenly. The cliffs came out in a convex sweep of several rods, with a sharp jut of rock thrust out from the midst of it, like a fish’s fin. Over it, up to the cliff face, the water fawned and leaped, and in its sucking recoil left bare for an instant a narrow neck of sand.
Blanche looked at the bulging bluff, the sharp rock. That made it bad. One could not make a straight dash—would have to make an angle—out and then back; and a moment’s hesitation at the turn—well, it wouldn’t do to meet the ebb there. Blanche knew the strength of the undertow.
With her eyes on the rising and receding water, she made a rapid calculation for the best moment to go in. She was excited, eager for the enterprise. She was surprised at the other woman’s pallor.
“We can’t get through there,” Lillian Gueste said, half angrily. She looked small, pale, impotent, among the severities of waves and sky.
“Then where?” Blanche slid lightly from her saddle.
“If we should shout——” Lillian began.
Blanche almost laughed at her. Did this woman expect to be rescued? Blanche’s experience had been that people in bad places had to get themselves out.
“Up on the cliff you couldn’t hear a cannon fired down here,” she said. “We can get through, only you must not be afraid.” She began loosening the lower hooks of her habit bodice.
“What are you going to do?” Lillian asked, nervously. She felt fearful of what might happen next in these strange, perilous conditions.
“Take off my skirt. Better do the same. Then if a wave gets you you can use your legs.”
Lillian looked at her in horror. “Oh, no!” she said, feeling somehow insulted.
“It’s dangerous,” said Blanche, swinging into her saddle man-fashion. In her boots and spurs, with her wide shoulders and narrow hips, she looked a beautiful boy. “You’d better be astride, anyway,” she said.
“I can keep my saddle.” Lillian’s mouth twitched nervously. “Shall I go first?” she said. Blanche saw her hand on the rein tremble. In her excitement at the trick of the sea she had merged her personal attitude toward Lillian.
“No, follow me, and do as I do. Wait until the wave breaks, and go out with it. Then when you turn at the rock you won’t have the ebb against you. You’ll go up with the flow. It’s perfectly safe. But you must not hesitate a minute. When I shout, dash!”
The breakers were coming in high and quick. The neck of sand next the cliff was seen only momently. The nose of rock was perpetually in a boil of water.
Blanche waited, let the great seventh wave go by, and in the midst of the surge of its recoil dashed in. She felt the mare stagger as the tow took her. A swift, terrible force seized and snatched her seaward. She was swept along like a drift. Then, almost touching the point of rock, she was relinquished. With the roar of the next breaker sounding fairly upon her, she spurred savagely. The mare plunged with a boil of water to her knees, with a wake of white behind her. She went up the beach with the spray of the driving ocean in her hair. She wheeled and waved to the woman on the other side.
Through flying foam she could see Lillian Gueste’s face, a little white, a little strained in its composure. Blanche had felt no fear for herself, but now she had a thrill through her body, a withering sensation in her throat, to see Lillian Gueste waiting there, hanging on her word to make the rush. And the haunting semblance of Walter in the fixed eyes——
“Don’t look at the water!” Blanche shouted. “Look at me! Now!” she screamed, to make herself heard above the breaking wave. But the horse and rider hesitated before the recoil of it; came on, seemed to hover on the brink of it.
“Go back!” Blanche shouted, with frantic gesticulation. The ebb was racing out. Lillian wavered, now fairly in; then the sorrel floundered out, belly deep in the surge. Now the girl saw him close upon the point of rock—now suddenly dragged out from it. A yard of fretted water heaved between. Blanche sat as if hypnotized, with the sight of a struggling horse and rider black etched on the green water. It rushed over her all at once who it was the ebb was taking out, and she was motionless. She saw the rider’s face turned landward with the stark stare of the drowning appealing to her with Walter’s eyes. The next moment she was in deep water. She breasted the current with a rush. She saw a horse, with empty saddle, struggling, swimming, drifting out; saw a swash of black tumble in the twisting tides that sucked it seaward. She made a plunge and seized a skirt. Her fingers held a flow of hair. Threshing hands caught at her stirrup. A body sprang tense to her lift. Then the sea had them again.
Eyes, ears, lungs, full of it. Blanche felt the mare gallantly struggling to keep footing; the steep sand seemed slipping away from under them. Then, with a roar, the dark parted. She gasped in the air. She saw Lillian’s face wax white at her knee. She had not strength to lift more than the head and shoulders as she trailed the limp figure up the beach.
Her knees tottered as she slid from the saddle. Her ears were ringing. Or was some one, somewhere, really calling to her? A cart was plunging and bouncing down the grassy tussocks that dip from the coast road to the beach.
“Oh, Blair!” She cried the driver’s name in a burst of relief.
“That you, Blanche?” He had jumped out of the cart and was running toward her. He saw the drenched figure on the sand.
“My Lord! Mrs. Gueste!”
Blanche’s clutch on his arm hurt him. “Oh, is she dead?” she entreated him.
“Not by a good deal.” He gave his flask to Blanche, and rolled his carriage robe around Lillian. Then he stripped off his mackintosh. “Here, girl,” he said, and Blanche thrust her arms into the sleeves.
“Saw you down there,” he said, lifting the unconscious woman’s dead weight into the cart. His voice was matter-of-course, but his look said she was magnificent.
“Hurry, hurry!” Blanche implored. “Take her over to the Crosbys’, Blair! Oh, quick!”
“Well, come on, then. I’ll whirl you over in a jiffy.”
“Oh, I’m going home—I’ll ride. I’m all right,” she said, through chattering teeth. “But she might—and Mr. Carter——”
“But, girl——”
“Oh, go, go!” She lifted herself into the saddle. Weak as she was, her nervous excitement carried her up.
“And mind, Blair, don’t say anything—if you love me!” She almost laughed the last words at him. Then she was off.
She chose not to take the boulevard, but cut through the town by lanes and side streets, where in the dusk of gathering night and inclosing fog her dripping horse, her drenched habit, would escape observation. She shook with nervous excitement, but the fast riding kept the blood pounding in her veins. She had no power to think coherently of what had happened. She had seen Blair Hemming lift Lillian Gueste into his cart, but the idea possessed her that Lillian had gone out in the tide, and drowned with that terrible face looking back to land, with Walter’s eyes.
She urged the exhausted horse cruelly because the face seemed to stare at her out of the dark street ends. She seemed to look from the surface of things into an abyss of possibility. She felt afraid of herself as something horrible.
But as she turned into the drive between the ghostly acacias returned the little, concrete fear lest she be seen by anyone, most of all her mother. There were lights in the drawing-room windows that looked out on the drive oval, and Blanche cautiously took the far side, to be screened by the feathery palms.
Leaving the mare at the stable, and money in the stableman’s hand, she stole tiptoe up the side stair. Once in her room, she stripped, bathed, rubbed her damp hair dry, tossed it up gleaming on the crown of her head, and, still in her glow and shiver of excitement, hooked herself into a black lace dinner gown glittering with jet, fastened a diamond crescent over her bosom, and swept in upon her mother and maiden aunt, who were patiently, resignedly, dining without the belated equestrienne.
“Why, darling!” her mother murmured, in gratified amazement. Blanche seldom bothered to dress for dinner, and to-night she seemed almost too dazzling to be real. She was surprised herself at the extent to which her bravado covered what had happened. Inwardly she was quaking. Her ears were alert for every sound.
“Did you have a nice time?” her mother asked her.
“Oh, lovely!” said Blanche, with a shiver.
“Where did you go?”
“Down the beach.” Blanche started. Her hand poised halfway to an olive. She heard what her ears had been pricking for—horses’ feet on the gravel drive.
With an effort she held herself quiet.
The Spanish maid opened the dining-room door. “Some one to see you, señora.”
Blanche, who had half risen, sank back in her chair.
“Why, who can it be?” Mrs. Remi was murmuring as she went into the hall.
Blanche sat listening, lips apart. She heard her mother exclaim; then a man’s voice exclaimed; she knew the voice; she rose. Her heart seemed beating in her throat. She heard her mother’s voice, perplexed, emphatic: “But she’s all right; she’s very well. There’s some mistake!”
Then Walter Carter’s, insisting: “But they were both in the water. Hemming saw her bring Lillian out. He drove my sister home. How could Blanche——” When she burst upon them.
“Walter!” The sight of him, wild-haired, pale, his mackintosh over his evening clothes, his general look of catastrophe, struck her with only one significance.
“Mrs. Gueste?” she gasped. “How is she?”
For a moment Walter could only stare at her, dazed. He had seen his sister—drenched, disheveled, white, unconscious—carried into the house. And here stood Blanche, vital, vigorous, self-possessed, groomed for a function.
“My God, no—it was you!” he stammered. “But—but is there any mistake?”
The soft sound of the dining-room door closing left them alone face to face. He came toward her. She stepped back.
“There’s no mistake. At least, we were in the water, and she was afraid.”
“But Hemming said she was washed out of the saddle—and the tow took her out, and you went after her and got her!” He still came toward her. It was hard to look him in the face, for the bewildered eyes reminded her of Lillian Gueste’s look when the tide took her out from the rocks. Blanche felt her bravado running out at her finger ends.
“But I didn’t—— I—I—oh, Walter, you don’t know what I did!” She faltered and sobbed. She leaned against the hatrack and buried her face in the folds of a coat.
“Why, child, you simply saved her!” His arms were around her, and he tried to pull the cloak from her face. “She wants to see you to-morrow. She wants to tell you——”
“Oh, no; I can’t. She wouldn’t if she knew——” Blanche’s voice was muffled on his shoulder.
“Well, what?” he muttered, his lips against her cheek.
The answer reached him, a half smothered, almost contented whisper:
“How I hated her!”
THE BLIND
IN empty days now left behind,
I asked why Love was counted blind.
No answer came until I learned
What every lover has discerned:
The blind—my answer ran—are reft
Of one thing, but how much is left!
Touch, hearing, every quickened sense
Thrills with an impulse thrice intense.
And so when Love has filled the heart,
Dull man awakes in every part;
Undreamed-of potencies are rife
Within him, crying “Sweet is life!”
And if half-blindness be his lot,
What matter—since he knows it not?
M. A. DeWolfe Howe.
SOCIETY AND RACING
A PERUSAL of the daily papers would lead one to the belief that racing, socially speaking, had just been discovered in New York. No account whatsoever is taken by the cheerful metropolitan of the rest of the country, though racing is going on from California to Washington, from Chicago to New Orleans—indeed, it is to the South that we go for both our hunters and our thoroughbreds. All through the Southern States there are little sporting communities hunting a pack of hounds, whose runs, if they took place in the neighborhood of New York, would be reported in all our papers by the society, not the sporting, editor.
For our thoroughbreds we still go to Kentucky. It was only the other day that I heard the owner of one of the great stock farms there complaining of the ignorance and extravagance of one of our younger Northern racing men, who sent his trainer South to buy, at any figure that he chose.
Washington, though now more cosmopolitan than Southern, gives, from the social standpoint, warm encouragement to racing. In all our cities now there seems to be growing up a young married coterie—parallel to the fashionable circle in New York. Such a characteristic little group is to be found in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in Baltimore and in Washington. This coterie, which is neither of diplomacy nor yet of old-time Washington, gives special attention to the Bennings track. Not but what the younger diplomats are to be found there, on Saturdays, when they are able to get away from their embassies and legations. Miss Roosevelt is an enthusiastic spectator. Oddly enough, in contrast to our Northern tracks, it seems to be permissible for two girls to go alone together to Bennings without escort. Maidens of careful upbringing may be seen stepping from the trolley at the race track as coolly as if it were a county fair.
If the New York papers take no account, socially speaking, of all these tracks, it is scarcely to be expected that their memories should go back as far as Jerome Park. It was a poor course, I am told, with bad turns and obscure corners, but prettier to look at than any we have had since. The lawn in front of the clubhouse—which was separated from the grand stand by the whole width of the track—was crowded by the members of a society smaller but more complete than Morris Park or Sheepshead has ever seen.
The opening of Belmont Park is destined, probably, to make a difference, to emphasize again the social side of the sport. The country club on the grounds—the club within a club, as it were—will draw a different set of people from those whom a mere jockey club can attract. It will be used quite independently of any question of racing by all the little communities of Long Island. If Hempstead and Westbury and Roslyn and Cedarhurst will come there to dine, and use it as the object of an automobile trip or a drive, there will be a well-established social life connected with it before the next race meeting opens.
I do not believe that any nation derives, as a whole, quite the delight from a race track that we do—with our Puritan traditions. To the English it is the national sport; to the French the extravagance of the smartest people; but to us, though both these elements may enter in, it is an intense excitement, which many of us have been brought up to think wicked. The mere word “horse-racing” would have struck terror to the hearts of our grandmothers, and thus a sport perfectly harmless to most of us has acquired a most alluring flavor of naughtiness. It is this feeling, this common sense of emancipation, that holds together a race-going crowd with a general sense of gayety. For as a nation we are not conspicuous for gayety. If we do not take our amusements solemnly, like the English, we at least take them strenuously. In this respect, racing has changed a good deal in the last twenty years. We are a little more serious about it than we used to be. In my recollection of the old days at Jerome Park, the clubhouse—certainly the feminine portion of it—took the sport itself much more lightly. The drive out in somebody’s coach, and the wonderful clothes one could wear and see, were the most important features of the day. You did not find the ladies in the paddock, as you see them now. Nor did they as openly transfer crisp bills from their own pretty purses to the bookies. Mild “pools,” in which one drew for one’s number quite irrespective of tips and inside information, were the only ladylike form of betting. There was something quite casual and social in the way in which everybody sat about on the lawn, under, I verily believe, the most brilliant parasols that the world has ever seen; the clubhouse behind us, and on the side a long line of coaches. It was a very long line, yet we could all tell them at a glance.
But this has changed now. Automobiles have driven out coaches. Not but what one still sees them, beautifully appointed, at any track; but instead of being the chosen means of locomotion for the fortunate, they are merely a picturesque way of wasting time. The consequence is that at Belmont Park one notices a distinct modification in the gorgeousness of the women’s clothes. In this country we have never gone the lengths of English women, whose clothes at Ascot and Epsom seemed to me quite as suitable to a ballroom. Still, our best dressed women have always felt hitherto that the races afforded a unique opportunity—especially when approached on the top of a smart coach. At Jerome and even at Morris Park, where New York could pour out in electric hansoms, this was still the rule, but to Belmont Park the trip in an automobile over dusty Long Island roads, or even on the Long Island Railroad, will not permit the same elaborate dressing.
It is not, however, only the chance to see and wear good clothes that gives races their charm to feminine eyes. Perhaps their chief attraction is the flavor of the great world. The penalty of leading a sheltered life is having a limited outlook, and the obverse of being select is being narrow. Women are beginning to see this. Society is unquestionably growing more and more friendly to the successful outsider, the people who are, as the phrase is, “doing something.” So far literary stars have had the main share of notice, but great actresses, great artists, even great scientists, have nowadays much more attention paid to them than the merely well-bred and socially available can hope for. Even the most exclusive of our great ladies no longer take pride in never having heard the name of anyone outside their own circle. We have not become such lion hunters as the Londoners, but we enjoy very much having pointed out to us, here a great plunger from Chicago, there a dancer never before seen but from across the footlights. The race track is an excellent field for such experiences. Not, of course, that these experiences must be carried too far. It is one thing to see the celebrities of the stage, but quite another to hear them calling our husbands and brothers by their first names. A recent instance of this kind has been brought to the attention, so it is said, of the governors of Belmont Park, with the result that box holders have been implored to be more circumspect in their choice of guests.
But of all our tracks, Saratoga offers the most amusing phases to the observer of things social. Smart New York appears to think that Saratoga ceased to exist from the time when it was no longer the Newport of our grandmothers, until rediscovered in the interests of racing by the late Mr. William C. Whitney. The true situation is infinitely more amusing.
Saratoga, with its enormous hotels, teeming with a society busy and well entertained, has been perfectly satisfied with itself in spite of the fact that smart New York knew it not. The United States Hotel has represented all that was socially delightful to many people who never heard of the “Four Hundred.” And now suddenly into this community comes the smartest of New York’s racing section—the Whitneys, the Mackays, the Wilsons and the young Vanderbilts, and several more of like sort. And not only do they come, but they come under circumstances that render almost impossible the exclusiveness that has been regarded as essential. This year, I believe, the Mackays and a few others are renting separate houses, but hitherto it has been hotel life for everybody. Hotel life, which New Yorkers so scorn! A “cottage”—i. e., a suite of connecting rooms in a great caravansary—was the utmost seclusion possible. After the publicity of the race track, this was the only refuge. Then to meet the crowd again at dinner at Canfield’s (the ladies penetrated no further than the dining room even in the palmy days), and later, perhaps, to listen to the band at the Grand Union. This is a life in contrast to the seclusion of the cliffs at Newport. Verily racing makes strange companions.
There is something particularly gay in the atmosphere of the place. Any serious business other than racing is so plainly lacking. As the meeting is in summer, a great many men choose their holiday so as to take it in. The result is that we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a class of idle men—at leisure and eager to be amused, almost like a foreign community. No one who has been to Saratoga will ever repeat the worn platitude that American men do not know how to enjoy a holiday.
We must remember, too, that for the feminine element racing is one of the few opportunities for—can we use so ferocious a term as “gambling” for the risking of a mild fiver on a “sure thing”? People are fond of saying that women are born gamblers; meaning, I suppose, that they love it better than men do. But it seems to me that this is only half the truth. The element of chance has charms for all of us, and women have so few opportunities to indulge it. They do not usually speculate in Wall Street; their daily occupation is not a gamble, as so many businesses are; the private wager is almost unknown to them. Until bridge swept over us, women could not, while spending as much money as they pleased, have any of the fun of losing it. Perhaps, in spite of all the talk about the intellectual stimulation of bridge, it owes some of its popularity to the same causes that the races do.
Not but what I believe that the interest of many women is a truly sporting one. Feminine love and knowledge of horses have increased wonderfully in the last twenty-five years. Our mothers and grandmothers rode, but took it as an elegant relaxation, or even as a mere means of locomotion. In this country the true sportswoman—the woman who hunts and drives four-in-hand and tandem—is a fairly recent development. In England we have only to go back to the novels of Whyte Melville to see that even in the middle of the last century she was a known type. It is not at all uncommon for women over there to know quite as much about horses as their brothers, to understand the horses and the cattle and the pigs. For Englishwomen to own a racing stable is no novelty, while here the joint experiment of two of our best known ladies was very much talked about, and endured but a short time.
The sport is essentially a sport for men. Women are merely onlookers; and in so far as it has a social side, even that side is controlled by men, serving thus as the great exception to things social.
Naturally we assume that the majority of men who go into racing go into it for the love of the sport itself. Yet we cannot look about us and see the men who have not only no knowledge of racing, but no knowledge of horses, even their own, without asking what is the inducement that has led them to take it up.
There are a good many answers. In the first place, there is the prestige. You buy a racing stable, and your name is known not only to your equals—the other owners, the members of the jockey clubs—but to every office boy who “plays the ponies,” to every great lady who wants a competent guide to the paddock. Mr. Belmont may build subways and conduct gigantic banking operations, but it is as the man who named Belmont Park that he is known to a majority of his fellow countrymen. The racegoing community is an epitome of all society, from the “tout” and the beggar to the multi-millionaire. A real aristocracy can be built on so well organized a foundation, and the owner of a great stable has the flattery of all classes in his little world.
Then, too, it is the sign and symbol of great wealth. Some men prefer to tell you how rich they are; others load their wives with jewels, or endow universities. Others, again, set up a racing stable. It is a process that sets them in a small class apart.
But even in a society as materialistic as ours, the outward symbol is not everything. A house on the east side of the park, a perfectly appointed carriage, a steam yacht—these are valuable instruments to those destined to “get on,” but can by themselves affect very little for those who are not so destined. Cold-blooded as the inter-relations of society seem to be, they are, nevertheless, human relations, and can never be achieved by mere things, however much we may hear to the contrary. Knowing this, women who desire social advancement always seek it through the means of friendships.
But men! The spectacle of a man struggling for social success was rare a few years ago. It was always supposed to be the wives and daughters of our self-made men who waged the combat. But nowadays, as society and business are growing closer and closer, as more of our great financiers take prominent social positions, as prominent social positions become a more and more valuable asset, we find, as we are bound to, that men desire such positions more and more.
This is the damaging suspicion that clings to men who go into racing after a past ignorant of horseflesh—the suspicion that they are using the sport as a means of social advancement. Many people who ought to know will tell you that no such advantage is offered by racing, and will point to the veterans of the turf whose names have never been heard socially. But the answer to this is that such men had no ulterior motive, and would not have wanted social honors, even if they had come.
Even in countries where the sport is more seriously taken than here, this social element mingles with it. In France racing is the special amusement of the fastest set—not of the vieille noblesse, but of Monsieur Blanc of dry goods fame, of that set who has imported its clothes and its slang from England, the set whose men cannot be told from well-bred Englishmen, the set who has invented “le sport.” To penetrate this set is almost impossible for a foreigner. Indeed, the only representative of the Vanderbilt family who has gone into racing at all has done so in France. Perhaps even for him some little aid was necessary in that difficult circle.
In England, again, the situation is different. The turf is the serious and respected sport of all classes. London is literally empty the day of the Derby. Many of the most honored names in England have been, or are, connected with a great racing stable. It is bound to have also an important social aspect. The winning of the Derby has always been so eagerly desired by Americans that one is justified in suspecting that the social prominence attracts them. Yet here the very seriousness of the English attitude toward their favorite sport is clearly to be seen. The Englishman is quick to detect an unsportsmanlike attitude; and to use the “sport of kings” for social purposes is a thing he finds it hard to forgive.
Over there it is most literally the “sport of kings,” for it must, if successfully followed, bring you sooner or later into contact with the king himself. This apparently is not always the most agreeable of experiences, if the story is true that one of our most conspicuous expatriates, who has been racing over there, has been almost forced out of it on account of a breach of etiquette. It seems he bid against the king for the possession of a certain horse, and bid higher than his majesty cared to go. The gentleman who was representing the king was immensely incensed, and has taken steps to prevent such audacious competition. Yet to republican eyes it seems rather hard that the king’s bid should of itself preclude all others.
Here the position of racing is so much more ambiguous. It has not the respect of the country at large. It does not make one beloved or even celebrated in the world outside the track. No political capital could be made out of it. As to its social uses, I think it is fair to say that, while no social advantage necessarily follows, it offers an immense opportunity to those clever enough to take advantage of it.
For the main difficulty in the way of the social aspirant is the first step—is in getting to know two or three of the right people—two or three are often sufficient. A large yacht may be a powerful recommendation, but let her owner once fill her with the wrong people, and he were better without her. To make yourself conspicuous is fatal unless your companions are those whom the world envies. To advertise yourself is, alas! too often to advertise your undesirable friendships. Many men seem to think that a coach is the safe road to success, and will drive round and round the park secure in the knowledge that their appointments are perfect and their horses the best, not knowing that the effect is being ruined by their guests, who are evidently unknown to the world of fashion. The idea seems to be that it is quite safe to begin with “frumps,” that they are better than no one. But this is a great mistake. Solitude has its dignity. Common friends have none at all. It is not easy to progress from them to the more exclusive. Once you have identified yourself with the wrong people, the right ones insist on believing that that is the kind you really prefer.
For the rich bachelor there are just two avenues of social ambition. He may become attentive to a smart girl not so accustomed to attention as to be overcritical, or if he is above this sort of thing, I know of nothing so hopeful as racing. Here is a sport in which he may become known without forming undesirable social ties, without proclaiming his acquaintance with undesirable people. There is a chance for him to meet men of the best position in an atmosphere congenial to friendship—a mutual interest in a great sport. At the same time there is no role in which a man may appear better than in that of a straightforward and generous sportsman.
OUR LADY OF SUCCOR
BY GRACE MACGOWAN COOKE
SHE looked up from the fire she was kindling in the small wood heater; a stout, rosy-faced old woman, the sole occupant of the humble little eating house at Socorro Junction. The Spanish name means succor, and probably marks the place where some man or party in dire need was rescued. The man who entered had a muffled feminine figure clinging to his arm, and he glanced about suspiciously as he asked, in a voice which held a sharp note of anxiety: “Is this an eating house—a hotel?”
“This here’s the Wagon Tire House,” returned its proprietor, rising and shaking the piñon slivers from her checked apron.
“Have you rooms—a parlor—some place where this lady can be alone?”
Without awaiting an answer, he turned and whispered to the veiled woman, who shuddered and shrank; but whether from his touch or with fear of publicity was not apparent. “Take off your things—put back that infernal veil,” he muttered, angrily. “There’s nothing here to hurt you.”
The removal of the wraps showed a round, innocent face, with its own pretensions to beauty. Such prettiness as it held, however, was just now stricken out of it by the blanched terror which dominated every curve and line.
“No, sir,” said the old woman, surveying them both. “This ain’t rightly a hotel. I’ve——”
“Why do you call it one, then?” interrupted the man, angrily. He placed his companion in a chair, and stood between her and the proprietor of the eating house. “Who are you, anyhow?” he asked, as he removed his shining silk hat, and mopped his brow with a snowy handkerchief.
“I’m Huldy Sarvice. Most folks calls me Aunt Huldy,” she returned, looking her guest up and down.
The man did not volunteer any return information; but Huldah, who was given to communing with herself in regard to her patrons and summing them up instantly, supplied the deficiency with the muttered statement: “And you’re a gambler. Everything about you jest hollers ‘Gambler.’” Her eye fell upon the little figure behind the tall, black-clad one. It rested a moment on the crude, pathetically approbative countenance which should have been rosy and smiling, “You’re——” she halted in her unspoken sentence. “I’m blessed if I know what you are. You don’t look like no sport’s wife. You sure don’t look like anything worse. I guess you’re just a fool. Poor little soul! I see mighty deep waters in front of your feet.”
Even while these things were flitting through Aunt Huldah’s mind, she had been automatically answering “yes” and “no” to the somewhat heated inquiries of her would-be guest. Now, with a quick patter of little running feet, a small Mexican boy, with half a pie, burst in from the kitchen, followed closely by the irate cook, who was also his mother. Huldah held her plump sides and shook with mirth as the little rascal doubled and turned among the chairs and table legs, snatching a hasty bite now and again from his stolen pie. Nobody knew better than the proprietor of the Wagon Tire House—kind, motherly soul—that the threats the Mexican woman hurled after her offspring were threats only.
At last, when the final morsel was bolted, Jose permitted himself to be caught, and burst into loud conventional sobs as his mother berated him. The slim, pale little woman crouching in her chair, her great furred cloak—painfully new, as was all the rest of her expensive wear—drawn tight around her, watching this scene with wide, horrified eyes, sprang up and, in spite of the man’s restraining hand, ran to the child.
“Oh! Don’t strike him!” she cried, kneeling before the boy, her face bathed in tears. “You’ll be sorry—sorry—if you do! I had a little boy—a baby—and I used to—to forget sometimes and—and be harsh——”
The man caught her shoulder and attempted to raise her. She shook him off almost as though she had not noticed it.
“Louise! Louise!” he said. “This is ridiculous. Sit down. She isn’t going to hurt the child.”
But the kneeling woman went on exactly as though she had not heard. “You mustn’t strike him. If anything should happen——” she hesitated. “My little boy——”
She stole a look over her shoulder at the angry man.
The Mexican woman’s doubled fist came down, unclinched and became fingers, which fumbled at her kitchen apron. “Is your young son dead, señora?” she asked, in an awed voice.
“Louise!” remonstrated the man.
The girl whom he addressed shivered, caught the boy in her arms, and sobbed wildly: “No, no—not dead, I wish he were. I wish I were dead!”
The man leaned down and lifted her bodily to her feet. “Here,” he said, pushing her not overgently back into the chair, “you sit down and get your nerves quiet.” He turned almost savagely to Huldah Sarvice, demanding: “There is surely some place you can give us where my wife can be alone. You see how it is here.”
Huldah nodded, looking at her visitor with shrewd, kindly eyes. “I ’spect your wife”—she put a little stress on the two words, and the girl winced, her pale face reddening—“I jest think she’s better off here among people.”
The man made a muttered objection, but Huldah went serenely on: “My lodgin’ rooms is acrost the street, and I don’t know’s I’ve got a vacant one. They’s a man with a broken leg in one of ’em, an’ a feller that’s been drinkin’ a little too much is in another. Two more of ’em is locked up by the men that rents ’em. Best sit here till I can git you a little supper; mebby that’ll cheer her up some.”
All the time she talked, Aunt Huldah had been watching the little woman’s face and behavior, which were those of a creature under some desperate pressure; and as she concluded and turned back to her fire building, she made her decision. “That man—husband or not—has done something that she’s knownst to. He’s a gambler; mebby he’s knifed some feller acrost the cards; mebby he’s gone further. But my guess is that she knows of some crime he’s done, an’ he’s hangin’ onto her for fear she’ll tell.”
She rose from the now kindled fire for another covert survey of her guests, who were deep in a whispered conference. “Yes, and she’d jest about do it, too. She wants to give him away.” Again, after a moment of keen observation on her way to the kitchen, she added: “An’ he knows it.”
As she went on with her supper, aided by the Mexican woman, who was used to her habit of arguing with herself aloud, she muttered: “What next, then?” and answered her own question: “Why, her life ain’t safe with him—not a minit!”
Having come to which conclusion, she gave her helper a few hasty directions, wiped her hands on her apron and marched back to the front room, where all day long the dining table stood set out with its pink mosquito-net covering. “I’ve got a room of my own,” she began, abruptly. “’Tain’t much of a place, but there’s a bed in it, where your wife could lay down.”
The two were on their feet in a moment. Huldah laid hold of the cringing little shoulder nearest her, and turned to the door. “It’ll be nigh to three hours,” she observed, “till the south-bound comes through. I shan’t be usin’ the room, and she might as well git a little rest there.”
“I’ll take her over, and stay with her,” agreed the man, reaching for his hat.
“No—no, sir, that was not my offer,” objected the old woman. “My room and my bed she can have—because she needs ’em. But it ain’t fixed up, and I’ll jest have to ask you to let her go by herself.”
The man’s pale countenance went a shade whiter; a peculiar trick he had of showing his teeth without smiling became suddenly apparent. It rendered his handsome face repulsive for the moment, as he grasped the arm which was not clinging to Aunt Huldah. “Come back here. Sit down. What do you mean by pretending that you—that I——”
He jerked the girl toward him with such force that she cried out faintly, and Huldah’s gray eyes, the one beautiful feature of her homely countenance, narrowed and sparkled. “You go and get us something to eat,” he blustered. “Food is what she needs. She isn’t well enough to be alone; and you won’t let me take her over and stay with her.”
“Please go away,” begged the sobbing girl, looking pleadingly at Huldah. “You—it only makes it worse. I—I’m all right here. Please go away.”
And Huldah went, glancing back to see that the man had seated himself once more in front of the huddled figure, looming above her, bending toward her; and that urgent whispered parley had begun again.
The proprietor of the Wagon Tire House was just turning her sizzling steak in its skillet when the door behind her opened a crack, and the gambler, as she had mentally dubbed him, put his head through.
“Come here,” he said.
Huldah grunted. “I am here,” she returned. “What is it you want?”
“I want to speak to you”—impatiently.
“Speak,” suggested the old woman.
“But I’ve got something to say that I don’t care to yell to every fool on the street.” He stared malevolently at the broad, blue calico back and half turned to retrace his steps; but no, he needed a woman’s help—he must have it; and he finally began, in an anxious, reluctant half whisper: “What do you think of her? Is she really sick?”
“I think she’ll die, all right,” answered the old woman, without turning her head or glancing up from her cooking.
“You do!” sneered the man, with a sudden loudness of tone. “You think she’ll die! You women are always using that word. I never saw a woman in a tight place yet but what she began whining that she believed it would kill her—that she’d die.”
“Well, and they die, too, sometimes—don’t they?”
A little sound or movement in the room behind him brought the man’s glance around with such a malignant scowl that Huldah, noting it, deemed her time to speak out had come. “See here, sir,” she began, turning away from the stove—“Manuelita, tend to that steak, and don’t let it burn, for goodness’ sake—see here, sir, you know a lot more’n I do about what ails that woman in there. But I know enough to know that she’s goin’ to die if she’s driv’ like you’ve been drivin’ her.”
“Like I’ve been driving her!” echoed the man, angrily. “She’s the one that’s making it hot for me. There’s nothing the matter with her.”
“All right,” returned Huldah, applying herself once more to the cooking. “If there’s nothing the matter of her, what did you come out here to ask me about it for?” Sudden rage mastered her as she worked over the steak gravy. She whirled and shook a finger at her interlocutor so sharply that he drew back. “I tell you that little creatur’ in the room behind you is a-goin’ to die if she ain’t let up on,” she finished, impressively.
Fear, indecision and rage contended upon the man’s face. “Oh, Lord!” he ejaculated, “if one woman can’t raise enough row, there’s always another to help her. Well, come in here. You can take her over. To your own room, mind—nowhere else. And let nobody else see her or talk to her. You’ll come right back, and not stay with her.” He looked at Huldah Sarvice’s strong, benevolent face, which smiled upon him inscrutably. “I expect I’m a fool to risk it,” he muttered. “But—well, come in.”
“Stay with her!” echoed Huldah, tossing up her head with a peculiar, free motion which belonged to her in times of excitement. “Stay with her? I don’t want to stay with your wife. I’ve got my work to do. I don’t spy on nobody—no matter how bad things looks for ’em.”
She had spoken the latter words in an undertone, as she gathered the drooping girl and her belongings upon a capable arm. Now, as a heavy, drumming roar became audible, she added, in excitement: “Land sakes! There’s a train. No, it can’t be no train; but for sure them’s engines out on the Magdalena Branch! I’ve got to fly ’round and git supper for them train crews. All the boys o’ the Magdalena Branch eats with me.” She made as though to release her charge, saying sharply: “I guess I ain’t hardly time to take your wife acrost—let alone hangin’ ’round to chat with her.”
“Hi, colonel! That big trunk of yours bu’st open when we tried to get it off the freight,” announced a man’s voice in the doorway. “Want to come over and see to it?”
This was the help that Huldah could have asked for. The man addressed as “colonel” turned from one to the other with a worried look. “I guess I’ve got to,” he replied to the brakeman. “How bad is it?”
“I didn’t see it,” returned the other, “but Billy said it was plumb bu’st, and the things fallin’ out. It’ll have to be roped, I guess.”
As the men hurried away in the direction of the station, Huldah turned briskly and tightened her arm about the girl. “Now, honey,” she whispered. And they hastened across the straggling red mud road in the face of a shower whose large drops were beginning to pelt down like hail. Aunt Huldah gathered up her petticoats and ran. “I’ll have to git them winders shut,” she panted. “I hope to gracious Manuelita’s got the sense to shut ’em in the other house.”
The roaring of engines which Huldah had mentioned as on the Magdalena Branch came more distinctly now. “Looks like there must be three or four of ’em—engines—one right behind t’other,” the old woman muttered. “I’ll jest git you fixed comfortable over here, honey, and shut them winders, an’ then I must run back.”
But when she would have done so, the girl clung to her with shaking hands. “Oh, don’t leave me!” she sobbed. “Don’t let that man know where I am. Hide me.”
“He ain’t your husband, then?” hazarded Huldah.
“No—no—no!” moaned the girl. “My husband’s a freight conductor on this road—Billy Gaines. You’ve seen him. He told me about you and the Wagon Tire House—about your having a wagon tire in front of it to beat on to call to meals. I expect he’s eaten many a meal here. He might come now; and then if he saw me—and that man—and—oh, hide me!”
Aunt Huldah let the head rest upon her shoulder, the shamed face hidden. “Who is this feller they call colonel, child?” she asked, gently.
“He owned—the house we lived in—in El Paso,” came the muffled explanation. “He’s rich, and—and very refined.”
“I know a place that’s full of jest such refined fellers,” muttered Huldah, angrily.
“Billy didn’t seem to love the baby as he—as—and Colonel Emerson is very fond of children—he’s devoted to my baby—or I thought he was. And he said that it was cause enough for me to leave Billy. And if I should leave him—if I should leave Billy—if I should get a divorce from him—he said—Colonel Emerson said——”
“Don’t tell me what he said, honey child,” urged Huldah. “What’d he do? Where’s your baby?”
Oh, then the poor little mother clung with strangling sobs to the stronger, older woman. “I’m so scared,” she whispered. “He got me all these nice things—ain’t my clothes awfully pretty?—and he promised we’d bring the baby with us. He says he’s taking me to his mother, and that I can stay there until I get my divorce—because, you know, Billy has treated me awfully mean, and he don’t care—Billy—he don’t care a thing on earth about me nor the baby any more.”
She reiterated these last words with a piteous look of entreaty into the kind gray eyes bent upon her, repeated them as a little child repeats a lesson which has been laboriously taught to it. Huldah looked at her with infinite pity. “Where’s your baby?” she repeated.
“That’s what scares me!” cried the wife of Billy Gaines. “He said—Colonel Emerson said—when he met me at the station, and he hadn’t sent for the baby like he promised to—that he was going to have some man that he knew go and get the boy and take it to his mother’s house, but that it wouldn’t do for it to travel with us, because we could be traced by it. I”—the pretty lips trembled—“I never was away from my baby a night in my life. I don’t know if anybody knows where to get his little night drawers. He always wears a little sack, extra, at night, because he’s a great one for throwing his arms out and getting the covers off them——”
She was running on like a crazed thing, with these little fond details, when Huldah Sarvice’s strong voice interrupted her. “Thank God!” said the old woman, heaving a mighty sigh of relief. “If you’re a good mother, you’re worth savin’. I’m goin’ right over now an’ telegraft to your husband.”
“Oh, no! Don’t do that!” cried the other. “He’ll be killed. You mustn’t. Don’t. He’ll be killed!”
“Killed!” snorted Huldah. Hers was the rough-and-ready code of the West. “Killed—and serve him right!”
“I don’t mean Colonel Emerson,” remonstrated the frantic girl. “Sometimes I think he’s a bad man—an awful man—anyhow, he’ll just have to stand it if anything happens. It’s Billy I’m thinking about. The colonel has shot three or four men—he’ll kill my poor Billy——”
Huldah smiled to herself in the gathering darkness. The problem was becoming easier and easier. But the girl’s strangled, sobbing voice went on: “And I couldn’t bear to see Billy. I don’t dare to have him see me when he knows about this. I can’t face him. If you say you’re going to telegraph to him, I’ll run right straight to Colonel Emerson and get him to take me away somewhere.”
Huldah puckered her lips—had she been a man she would have whistled. She saw no way but to go with the girl and fight it out with her tempter. “Come,” she said, a little roughly for Huldah. “I’ll go back with you.”
She whom the old woman would have saved turned like a hunted thing, as to elude her benefactress. Huldah clung to her arm, and they struggled thus to the doorway. Here the thunder of engines toward Magdalena once more arrested the attention of the proprietor of the Wagon Tire House. It had increased to a deafening uproar; the rain fell like bullets; and even as they drew back, frightened, there was no street to be seen—only a flood of swirling yellow water, running like a tail race between the lodging rooms and the little eating house. “My Lord!” groaned Huldah. “I might ’a’ knowed ’twa’n’t engines. Hit’s a cloudburst, above—the big arroyo’s up.”
It was true. The red gash which through nine-tenths of the year lay dry and yawning beside the tracks of the little Magdalena Branch railway was brimmed with the same tide which swept the street. And down it, as they looked, came a wall of writhing, tormented water, nearly five feet high.
There had been a cloudburst in the mountains above, whence came such trickle as fed the arroyo in the dry season. Twice before had this thing happened, and the little eating house stood upon stilts of cottonwood logs to be above the flood line, while the lodging house was on higher ground.
The watching women saw the flood reach the railway track, beat upon its embankment with upraised, clinched hands, tear at it with outspread fingers in an access of fury, wrench up the rails yet bolted to the ties, and fling them forward on its crest as it plunged on. The two little houses, standing isolated from the town and nearer to the railroad tracks than any other, were now in an open waste of water, the current sweeping swiftly between them, an eddy lapping in their back yards.
As Huldah saw Manuelita’s frightened face at a window of the Wagon Tire House, she made a trumpet of her plump hands and shouted: “Don’t you be scared, Manuelita—hear? Keep up the fire, and make a b’iler of coffee. I’ll be over soon’s I can git thar!”
Billy Gaines’ wife looked down at the water with relief. “He can’t come across that,” she murmured.
“No, he can’t,” agreed Aunt Huldah. “An’ you come an’ lay down on my bed. Slip off your shoes, an’ loosen your clothes, but don’t undress. This house is safe, I reckon; but no knowin’ what might happen.”
All that night Huldah Sarvice worked, with the strength of a man and the knowledge of a seasoned frontiers-woman. The injured were brought to the lodging house or the eating house, just as it happened. When a hastily improvised boat came to their aid, she went in it over to see that some refreshment was prepared for the workers; and later, when the sullen flood receded to a languid swell, she paddled back and forth on foot, her petticoats gathered in one sweep of her arm, and whatever was necessary to carry held fast with the other.
“You’ll get your death, Aunt Huldah,” remonstrated the agent, when she had struggled across to the station to send a telegram to Billy Gaines.
“I reckon not,” she returned, with twinkling eye. “Seems like you can’t drown me. I’ve been flooded out six times; twict at El Captain, once at Blowout and now three times here; and I ain’t drownded yet. This is a good long telegraft that I’m a-sendin’; but I reckon the railroad won’t grudge it to me.”
“You bet they won’t,” returned the boy, heartily, as he addressed himself to his key. “I’ll add a message of my own to a fellow I know at El Paso, and get him to hunt Billy up if he’s on duty to-night.”
Huldah beamed. “That’s awful good of you,” she returned; “but if you had seen that little woman over there a runnin’ from one window to another, a wringin’ her hands and carryin’ on so that I’m ’most afraid to leave her alone, you’d be glad to do it.”
As she splashed back to her tired helpers and the injured at the Wagon Tire House, the old woman muttered to herself: “He’s a good boy. It’s better to have good friends than to be rich;” and never reflected for an instant that no personal benefit had been conferred upon herself in the matter.
With the simple wisdom of a good woman who knows well the human heart, Huldah set poor Louise Gaines to attending upon the worst injured of the flood sufferers, and took her promptly in to see the one corpse which so far had been found floating in an eddy after the waters receded a little. It was that of a young Mexican girl from the village above. The little fair woman went down on her knees beside the stretcher. “Oh, I wish it was me!” she cried. “Why couldn’t it have been me? She’s young, and I expect she wanted to live—why didn’t God take me?”
“Now, now,” remonstrated Aunt Huldah, with a touch of wholesome sternness. “I didn’t bring you in here to carry on about your own troubles—that’s selfish. I brung you to make this poor girl look fit to be laid away. You can do it better’n I can, and there’s nobody else for to do it. Likely her folks is all drownded, too.”
And Billy Gaines’ wife rose up and wiped her eyes, and went to work in something of the spirit that Huldah had hoped.
It was five o’clock in the gray of the morning when the wrecking train from El Paso came through; and Billy Gaines was aboard it. The poor little wife had had attacks of hysteric terror all night long at the thought of his coming; and now she lay exhausted and half sleeping upon the lounge in the dining room. Huldah herself felt a little qualm of fear as she opened the kitchen door to the tall figure buttoned in the big ulster. For the first time, she wondered where the man Emerson was, and hoped that he had taken the one train which left Socorro going northward, just before the flood struck them. But the hope was a faint one; more likely he was up in the town, cut off from them temporarily by the water which still ran between; and when he and Billy Gaines met, she doubted not that there would be another bloody reckoning such as the West knows well.
If she had doubted, her questions would have been answered when she looked into the frank gray eyes of the man who met her, a trifle stern and very resolute. “I’ve come for my wife,” he said, breathing a little short, “and if Jim Emerson’s in the house, I want to see him.”
“Come in here,” said the old woman, drawing the newcomer into a small section of chaos which was generally known as the pantry. “I remember you now, an’ I guess you’re a decenter man than the run of ’em; but I want to have a word with you before you go in to that poor girl. You see, I want to be sure that you’ve looked on both sides of it. You pass all right among the men—I hear you well spoke of—but how many things can you ricollect that you’ve done that are jest as bad as what she’s done?”
“Plenty,” said Billy Games, almost with impatience. “I understand, Aunt Huldah.”
“Mebby you do,” said the old woman; “but I want to be sure. Where was you when this poor little soul was left to herself—and that scoundrel?”
“I was over in Mexico on a six weeks’ hunting trip.”
“You was! Well, then, after all, who done this thing—who’s really to blame?”
“I am—you bet,” came the deep-voiced answer. “I don’t hold it against you a bit, Aunt Huldah; but you’re working on the wrong trail. You think you’ve got a great big job ahead of you trying to make me see this thing right. But I’ll remind you that it’s eight hours from El Paso here—eight night hours—and your telegram was pretty complete. You left the man out; and so will I—until I meet him.” The firm jaw squared itself heavily; and Huldah sighed as she realized that the law of blood for honor must be met.
The man had carried one arm almost as though it were injured; and she now glanced down at it as he moved it and fumbled in the folds of his big overcoat. His voice softened beautifully. “I’ve got something here,” he said, “that ought to show you that I know and understand, and am going to behave myself.”
He opened his great cloak and showed, lying upon his breast asleep, a baby of about two years old, who stirred, put up a wandering little hand and murmured: “Daddy,” as he settled himself for a longer nap.
“Bless his heart!” murmured Huldah, in the richest tones of her strong, heartsome voice. She wiped the tears from her eyes on a corner of the check apron. “I guess you’ll do, Billy. You seem to have the makin’s of a tol’able decent feller in you. You’ve got the only medicine right there that your poor little, half crazy wife needs.” And she pushed him toward the door of the deserted dining room.
There was a long, agonized cry: “O—o—oh, Billy!” Then the big voice talked brokenly and gently for a time, choking sobs interrupting it; and Huldah could hear, at first, the thin, shrill terror of the woman’s tones, very sharp and pleading; finally an eloquent silence.
She glanced in to see Billy Gaines sitting with what she called “both of his children—for the little woman’s ’most as much of a baby as her boy”—asleep; the mother with her head upon his shoulder, while the child lay in the laps of both of them.
“Lord, but that’s a sight for sore eyes!” she ruminated, as she lifted the coffee boiler from the stove and sent Manuelita to lie down and get a rest.
“But there’s the colonel,” she pursued. “There’s goin’ to be awful times when him and Billy Gaines meets.” Then she smiled at herself and went on: “Jest listen to a old woman like me tryin’ to tell how it ort to come out. We’re all God’s children. I reckon the colonel’s His child”—she seemed to have a little doubt upon this point—“an’ I reckon God’ll take care of him.”
As if in answer to her half-spoken thought, there came the tramp of stumbling feet, somebody beat upon the door, and a voice called: “Mrs. Sarvice! Aunt Huldah! We’ve just found another body over by the railroad tracks. Can we bring him in here, or shall we take it over to the other house?”
Huldah hurried out, to turn down the blanket they had drawn over the stark form and look upon the dead gambler’s face. “Carry him to the lodgin’ house, pore feller,” she said, gently.
God had taken care of the colonel.
ELUSION
CLEAVAGE of sea and sky,
Ever elusive line,
Though I follow it far,
Far as the Ultimate Isles,
Never it seems more nigh,—
Shifting shadow and shine,—
Dim as a distant star
That beckons and beguiles
Dawn-dream of my heart,
Dusk-dream of my soul,
Though I follow thee long
Into the night’s deep shades,
Never attained thou art,
Never I gain the goal;
Thou art like a song
That ever and ever evades.
Clinton Scollard.
LONDON’S STAGNANT THEATRICAL SEASON
BY ALAN DALE
London has begun to howl sensationally about the American Theatrical Syndicate, and to discuss the possibilities of its invasion of London.
Of course this is the warm season, when snake stories and sea-serpent legends are distinctly in order. Therefore the machinations of the American Theatrical Syndicate have made good reading, and plenty of space has been given to the subject. One journalist has suggested that the playwrights of England and the United States form a league, destined to break up the trust, very much after the style of the Authors’ Society in France. “Why should they not form themselves into a society,” asks this writer, “for the protection not only of their own interests, but of the interests of the theater, of the interests of the actors, and of the interests of the public? As the trust snaps up an actor when once his reputation is established, so it deals with dramatists. Once a dramatist has made a mark, the trust practically buys him up; that is to say, it makes him an offer outright for all his work to come. That is part of the infernal system.”
All of which is quite good, and true, and logical. It reads remarkably well, with just the spice of wholesome plaint that one loves to excavate. After a month of continuous theater-going in London, however—from the Strand to Piccadilly Circus, and from Piccadilly Circus to Shaftesbury Avenue—I can’t help reflecting that if the syndicate or any syndicate had been let loose in London this year, with the option of cornering everything in sight, the fact remains that there is scarcely a production in London worth transplanting. Furthermore, the fear that an American invasion would deal a death-blow to London art seems absurd. I haven’t found any art to death-blow.
Nearly everything that London writers have said of the syndicate is true, and, perhaps, not stringent enough, but—with an accent on the “but”—how it could possibly harm London goodness only knows. Never has theatrical entertainment in the English metropolis been at a lower ebb. A few of its features will be done in New York this year, and they will prove exactly what I have said. English playwrights seem to be suffering from too much money, for they apparently lack the stimulus to struggle. That money may, of course, have been contributed by American managers, who buy “pig-in-a-poke” fashion, but if that be so, there are not enough “independent” playwrights to form a society. As for leaguing themselves with American playwrights—well, puzzle: find the American playwrights.
The saddest case of perverted humor I have sampled in a very long time is that of J. M. Barrie’s play—or whatever it chooses to call itself—entitled “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire,” at the Duke of York’s Theater. Barrie must, indeed, be very “comfortably fixed,” for no other condition could conceivably call forth such a miserable guy on the theater-going public as this “three-act page from a daughter’s diary.” Naturally it has attracted a good deal of attention, for Barrie has done noble things in his day, and “The Little Minister” still lives as a monumentally delightful achievement. But “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire” is a “satire” built on such a weak and irritating foundation that it is difficult to consider it except with contempt—which is a cruel way of looking at Barrie.
The heroine, or central figure, or point of attack, in “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire” is a romantic young girl, who has been to so many “matinées” that she has grown to look upon life as a theatrical performance. At first you think that Amy Grey is going to be extremely amusing, as she chats satirically of her life, with her boon companion—another matinée fiend. Amy’s father and mother return from India after an absence of a good many years, and Barrie plunges into a plot.
The stagestruck girl has always heard that when a woman visits a man’s rooms at midnight there are illicit relations that should be immediately broken up. She hears her mother promise to call upon Stephen Rollo at midnight, and assumes, with much girlish glee, that her mother needs rescuing. The entire motive of “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire” lurks in Barrie’s effort to be funny around this cruelly topsy-turvy, and rather nauseating, idea.
The principal act occurs in the “man’s rooms”—with the girl, the mother and the man. Barrie, in a positive ecstasy of ghoulish “humor,” allows the mother to understand the girl’s idea. She clamors for her daughter’s love, and believes that the best way to secure it will be to feign guilt, so that the girl can “rescue” her. This she does. Amy believes that she has saved her mamma from a horrible fate—mamma caters diligently to that suggestion—and the play ends with Amy’s betrothal to the man in the case.
In this play Barrie has violated sheer decency of sentiment. It is all very well to shower satire upon the matinée girl—she can stand it, and has stood it full many a time and oft—but to mix her up in the imaginary adultery of her own mother—and as a joke, saving the mark!—gives one such a disagreeable shock, that recovery from its effects is quite out of the question. To be even more delicately humorous, Barrie might have introduced the grandmother under similarly suspicious circumstances.
It is all very well to write caviare, but the caviare must be fresh and not putrid. Barrie’s “humor” in “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire” has the taint of decay—as it had the germ of acute dyspepsia in that atrocity produced in New York under the title of “Little Mary.” Real humor attacks hereditary sentiment with delicacy, and a certain amount of timidity. To completely realize this you have but to study George Bernard Shaw, who, while he flouts a thousand traditions, and is rarely amusing unless he is flouting, does so with a keen appreciation of what he is doing. The redoubtable George may even scoff occasionally at filial sentiment, but he would never dredge humor from the imaginary sin of a mother, used as a joke to please her own stagestruck daughter. At the close of “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire” one wondered what Amy, after her marriage to the man in the case, would think of the maudlin situation. And this, please your grace, has been announced as Barrie’s crowning fantasy! Fortunately, we have “Peter Pan” to hear from in New York. Not having seen that, I pin my faith to it, for I want to hold on to Barrie a bit longer, in spite of “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire.”
This “page from a daughter’s diary” was preceded by a sketch, also by Barrie, entitled “Pantaloon,” and programed as “a plea for an ancient family.” There is no need to discuss this one-act trifle, with its pathos and bathos, in extraordinary blend, and no single salient idea to carry it through. The elopement of Harlequin and Columbine, with the jilting of Clown, and the distress of Pantaloon may perchance be a “plea for an ancient family,” and as there are all sorts of pleas, you are possibly allowed to pay your money and take your choice.
It was Ellen Terry who played Alice, in the “Sit-by-the-Fire” affair. Poor Ellen Terry! To my mind it was sad and disheartening. Why should an actress who has had such a joyous career as that which fell to Miss Terry’s lot, elect, in her ultra maturity, to play a bad part in a bad play—and not too well? There is tragedy in this continued, and—I should say—unnecessary service. Probably there are still roles that Miss Terry might acceptably play, but as the forty-year-old mother in this wretched piece one could but feel sorry for her—and sorry for those who saw her. I have heard that Miss Ethel Barrymore plays the part in the United States. I can’t believe it until I see it.
Miss Irene Vanbrugh—you remember her in “The Gay Lord Quex”—was the matinée girl, with much force. There are flashes of humor in the part, and Miss Vanbrugh made the most of them. For the benefit of those who may see “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire” on the American side of the pond, the rest of the cast was made up of Aubrey Smith, A. E. Mathews, Kenneth Douglas, Lettice Fairfax—who was once in Augustin Daly’s New York company—Dora Hole, Edith Craig and Hilda Trevelyan.
Always at this time of year there is an influx of foreign actresses into London. They come; they are seen; but they never conquer. They must be awfully tired of it, for history has such a sad way of repeating itself. This year, however, one French actress has made a good deal of a stir, but under such distinctly new conditions that the stir is quite intelligible. This young woman, Madame Simone Le Bargy, of whom I wrote you last year when I reviewed “Le Retour de Jerusalem” from Paris, was brought to London by George Alexander, the actor-manager of the St. James Theater, not for a season “on her own,” but as his leading lady, and in English, too!
A French actress in English! Could anything be more unusual? Sarah Bernhardt, who has been cavorting around the English-speaking world for portentous yet vulgar fractions of a century, never managed to acquire even a suspicion of English; Rêjane, who has done London and New York pretty thoroughly, would have an artistic fit at the idea of juggling with English, at her time of life; Jane Hading, Jeanne Granier and others are quite willing to play anywhere, but it must be in French.
Madame Simone Le Bargy played the leading rôle in “The Man of the Moment,” at the St. James Theater, and was duly and unselfishly boomed by Mr. George Alexander, as “of the Gymnase Théâtre, Paris. Her first appearance in England.” The piece was an adaptation, by Harry Melvill, of “L’Adversaire,” by Alfred Capus and Emmanuel Arène. The English actor-manager was a wise man in his London generation. He had a weak play, most indifferently adapted, but he had Le Bargy, and for a while she caught the town.
While English leading ladies must have fumed at Alexander’s neglect of “home talent,” Madame Le Bargy showed that it is quite possible not only to play with grace and facility in a foreign language, but actually to prove more intelligible than a good many London actresses who flatter themselves that they speak good English. Madame Le Bargy’s English was an absolute revelation. Naturally it had an accent—a delightful one—and Paris was stamped on everything she said, but compared with Mrs. Fiske in New York, or Miss Ashwell in London, Madame Le Bargy’s diction was wonderful. Every word she uttered was intelligible. She rattled off various speeches almost as quickly as she might have done in French, but never once did their meaning miscarry. I’ve seen all sorts of foreign actresses waylay the English language—Modjeska and Janauschek being in the list—but seldom have such results as those given by this little, thin, nervous Frenchwoman been attained.
Oddly enough, it is said that Madame Le Bargy had never been in London before, and that she had acquired English in France. In which case, I would suggest that half a dozen popular New York actresses—I won’t mention names—should sail for France at an early date, and see if they could learn English there. It is as difficult to acquire in London as it is in New York.
“The Man of the Moment” was saved from rapid extinction by the little Gymnase actress. It had four acts, through two of which you could have slept comfortably while various alleged French characters sat round drawing rooms and talked endlessly about nothing whatsoever. Then, in the third act, you learned that Marianne Darlay, the wife of Maurice, had been lured to infidelity by a dark gentleman named Langlade. As she still loved her husband, and didn’t love Langlade, this little escapade failed entirely to interest. The “great scene” occurred when the wife gave herself away to the husband, and the play ended with a vista of divorce. Divorce, in real life, may be a serenely satisfactory settlement of domestic wrangles, but on the stage its unromantic practicality has not yet succeeded in appealing, except in farce. “The Man of the Moment” had no dramatic action, and no movement of any sort. You were unable to sympathize with the woman, or to feel much interest in the man. In fact, “The Man of the Moment” must have been so-called because he had none.
Capus in French is always exhilarating. The “chatter” is refreshing and genuinely amusing, but translated into English, it seemed extremely dull. Mr. Melvill did poor Capus into the sort of language that is encountered in burlesque at little Mr. Weber’s music hall. The result was fatal. Yet, in addition to Madame Le Bargy’s very excellent work, there was George Alexander, whose efforts were most praiseworthy. He seemed perfectly satisfied to take what was assuredly second place in the cast. “The Man of the Moment” was beautifully put on, as is every production at the St. James Theater. George Alexander is one of the few London actors who have not been to the United States within the last decade—in fact, he has never been, except as a member of Irving’s forces, many years ago—and the abstinence seems to agree with him. He does more, and he does it more luxuriously, than the traveling English actor whom we have seen so often. Perhaps it is true, after all, that a rolling stone gathers no moss—though I should hate to believe that there could possibly be anything in a popular proverb.
While one little foreign actress was capturing London by her clever manipulation of London’s language, others were not as happy. Eleanora Duse’s season at the Messrs. Shubert’s new Waldorf Theater, in the new street called Aldwych, on the Strand, must have been very discouraging to the haughty lady herself. In fact, it is asserted that she will never again appear in England. Half-filled houses are something that must be distressing to the “artistic temperament,” and Duse played to a most elongated series of them. Few people seemed to know that she was in London. In New York we, in our occasionally provincial appreciation of an actress whom we are unable to understand—and probably because we can’t understand her—go into ecstasies over Duse, and pack the theater to overflowing. London is too sophisticated. Duse made no stir at all this time. Even the critics gave her but merely polite attention. Possibly in English she could charm the English-speaking world. But, save in the case of Madame Simone Le Bargy, nobody seems to think that worth while. Perhaps it isn’t.
As for the tireless Sarah—she gets on one’s nerves. After a brief season at the Coronet Theater, in Notting Hill, where she produced her own version of “Adrienne Lecouvreur,” and Victor Hugo’s “Angelo”—which fell flat as a pancake—Sarah rushed through the English provinces with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in their freak performance of “Pelleas and Melisande.” In a manufacturing town, like Birmingham, for instance, Maeterlinck, at advanced prices, seemed like some ghastly joke! Sarah visits England annually, in a veritable desperation of energy, but it is very seldom worth her while. This year she was less interesting than Madame Le Bargy; and the same may be said of Réjane.
I had not been in London very long before I found myself battling with the musical comedy whirlpool. It hedged me in; panic-stricken, I tried to get myself free. A dreadful sensation of helplessness overcame me. In a condition of numbed protest, I was carried along with the torrent, and it was a long time before I finally emerged. My system being impoverished and quite run down by a strenuous musical-comedy dose in New York, I was not in the state of mind to render the continued ordeal endurable.
Yet a very estimable gentleman, Max Beerbohm, who is supposed to write fantasy, whimsicality or oddity, has undertaken to champion musical comedy. The championship of “Max,” however, is a sort of “swan song” for musical comedy. He says: “Were musical comedy other than it is, the highest intellects in the land would be deprived of an incomparable safety valve. And what would become of that ‘fifty millions—mostly fools’—who find in musical comedy an art-form conducted precisely on the level of their understanding? I have no sympathy at all with the growls so constantly emitted by professional critics of this art-form. Of course musical comedy might be made a vehicle for keen satire, for delicate humor, for gracious lyricism, and what not. But I prefer that it should remain as it is. Let us continue to cry aloud for a serious drama, by all means, but long live mere silliness in mere entertainment.”
One could almost regret that this writer had no “job” in New York City as a “press agent.” He writes with such verve on topics of which he is avowedly ignorant, for at the beginning of his defense, he says: “Nor do I ever see a musical comedy of my own accord.” That is it. That is precisely it. It is so easy to speak of an “art-form,” or an “incomparable safety valve,” when you’d run a mile or jump into anything to avoid it.
There are four musical-comedy productions in London that a sheer sense of duty compelled me to see. Such a list! It was unescapable. No self-deception or hypocrisy could possibly excuse a traveling critic from sampling this quartet. One can always elude a solitary performance, for it proves nothing and makes no point. But four of a kind at one fell swoop! Surely, if four West End theaters can devote themselves irrevocably to this “art-form,” one has no right to balk, or to look the other way. The four affairs in question are “The Little Michus,” at Daly’s, “Lady Madcap,” at the Prince of Wales’, “The Spring-Chicken,” at the Gaiety, and “The Catch of the Season,” at the Vaudeville. Three of them are scheduled for production in New York, but I should say that one only has a fighting chance, and that “The Catch of the Season.”
It had the usual array of sponsor-meddlers—two for the pieces, one for the lyrics, two for the music; and its aim is higher than that of the conventional brand, for it is a modernization of the Cinderella story—a story that has never shown any sign of age, and probably never will. Nobody has tried to do anything clever with Cinderella. There is no satire, very little humor and nothing in the least skittish. It is just pretty, and at this Vaudeville Theater it is Miss Ellaline Terriss, London’s sample Christmas card beauty, who does the Cinderella act. It is not necessary to say very much more about “The Catch of the Season.” Its music is trivial, and its book is worse. But its specialties please, and one can sit through this little entertainment without that sense of degradation that the brand sometimes induces. That is a good deal. For New York many alterations will be made—I write in the future tense, though when these lines are read, they can be translated into the past—and I hope a happy one—new music will be introduced, and Miss Edna May placed in Ellaline Terriss’ dainty shoes.
Of “The Little Michus,” at Daly’s, and “The Spring Chicken,” at the Gaiety, I am scarcely able to write. Two weeks have elapsed since I saw them, and not a single impression of consequence remains. I remember that I was unutterably bored, but I can’t quite recall which was the duller performance of the two. At the time I compared them both with “The Cingalee,” the New York failure of which I correctly prophesied last summer. I should like to suggest that even in the musical-comedy line I am still able to scent novelty, whenever the slightest aroma occurs. It is the expectation of this that keeps me alive during a performance. Without that expectation I should honestly stay away, for I have arrived at a stage when I am not courting martyrdom.
The George Edwardes shows have of late displayed a marked tendency to a sort of stupefying monotony. Either the fear of risking a new idea, or the hope that the old ones have not become too abjectly ancient, has kept them in the one groove. It is quite remarkable when you come to think of it. Even the supply of people has comparatively failed. The Gaiety girls have married—some of them have even taken unto themselves peers—and a new stock has neglected to materialize. In “The Little Michus,” which is supposed to detail the experiences of two young girls who look precisely alike, but who have been changed at birth, these two prominent rôles were intrusted to Adrienne Augarde and Mabel Green—the latter absolutely unknown. In “The Spring Chicken,” which, I may add, is just as calamitous as its title, it was Miss Gertie Millar who had to uphold the traditions of the Gaiety. A pretty girl, a bright little actress and a fairly melodious warbler is Miss Millar, but George Edwardes used to do better than this.
“Lady Madcap” was the best of the three George Edwardes shows in London. Probably that is why it has been left untouched by the American manager. I do not say that any of these entertainments are worth exporting. To trot such drivel across the Atlantic Ocean, while the United States still has its lunatic asylums with numbers of patients ready and willing to do just such work, seems to me like the sorriest sort of jest. Yet “The Catch of the Season” and “Lady Madcap” have their good points.
What is possibly the best song in London this season occurs in “Lady Madcap.” It is sung by Maurice Farkoa, and is called “I Love You in Velvet.” It has pretty music, clever words and much “catchiness,” and it is so admirably and artistically sung that it redeemed the musical comedy itself, and made it quite endurable.
The star of the performance is J. P. Huntley, a prime London favorite and one who has been very well received in New York. Huntley, like a good many other comedians, is far more useful for flavoring purposes than for a steady diet. There was such a dose of him in “Lady Madcap” that he grew to be a terrible bore. This young actor is to leave the George Edwardes forces and go to the Shubert Brothers, and I can’t help wondering which of the two parties will get tired first. I have my own ideas on the subject, but perhaps it would be advisable not to express them.
So barren is this London season that I have not been able to formulate my plan of dealing with it—you may have guessed as much! There is nothing to wax enthusiastic over, and no one performance that remains, luminous, in the mind. At the New Theater—and isn’t that an absurd title for a playhouse, that, with its actors and audiences, is aging daily?—they are playing “Leah Kleschna,” which Mr. Frohman advertises in the New York manner by a catchline from Mr. Walkley’s criticism in the London Times: “It hits you bang in the eye”—or something equally pretty and graphic. I am not at all sure that it does anything of the sort. It is not looked upon as an epoch-maker, and it lacks the charm of oddity and mystery that was given to it in New York by Mrs. Fiske herself.
We all thought when we saw “Leah Kleschna” at the Manhattan Theater that Mrs. Fiske played a non-star part, and subordinated herself to the others. Let me tell you, however, most emphatically, after having seen “Leah Kleschna” twice in New York and once in London, that Mrs. Fiske herself is its mainstay. She is absolutely its very backbone. Without her, at the New Theater, the piece is but a gloomy melodrama, and as such it is received by the London public. Be quite sure of that. Of course the play itself is cheap, but it masquerades somewhat successfully under the guise of a study in criminology—and all that sort of thing. In New York Mrs. Fiske, by her eccentricities, and various little intellectualities that you recall when you see Miss Lena Ashwell’s tame and bloodless performance in London, helped the illusion. She never quite allowed you to believe that “Leah Kleschna” was outside of her own répertoire of peculiarities.
The play is extremely well acted in London by everybody but Miss Ashwell. She is a weak imitation of Mrs. Fiske’s many bad points—notably her indistinctness of diction. Probably Miss Ashwell never saw Mrs. Fiske in all her life, but Mr. Dion Boucicault, who staged the play in London, must have watched Mrs. Fiske attentively, and have given Miss Ashwell full particulars. At times it was quite ludicrous to listen to the English actress positively affecting the American actress’ most lamentable demerit. She bit up her words, emitted the fragments in a frenzied torrent, sank her voice at critical moments, and did all that Mrs. Fiske has been implored not to do.
Charles Warner, who played the father, threw himself successfully at the part, but forced us to recall his long continuous service in “Drink.” Occasionally Kleschna seemed to have “jim-jams,” and one could not dissociate Mr. Warner from his well-known, world-played performance. Herbert Waring played Raoul extremely well, but the Schram of William Devereaux is not to be compared with the capital interpretation given to the part by William B. Mack in New York. All that Mr. Frohman could do for “Leah Kleschna” he did, but the piece needed Mrs. Fiske. Without her it is of little importance—a sort of old Adelphi play in kid gloves.
A piece that seems to have eluded the “American invasion” is “Mr. Hopkinson,” which has been running for months at Wyndham’s Theater. It is the work of Mr. R. C. Carton, who was responsible, as you may remember, for “The Rich Mrs. Repton,” which ran for three nights or so in New York last season. Perhaps the “American invasion” remembered that, for if nothing succeeds like success, certainly nothing fails like failure.
“Mr. Hopkinson,” however, would scarcely be possible for American consumption. Its hero is a cockney cad, who would hardly be intelligible in New York. New York has its own brand of cad—a highly accentuated kind—and should not be blamed for shirking the notion of fathoming the motives of the English style of blackguard. Then the part of Hopkinson is played by Mr. James Welch, for whom it might have been built. I can imagine no other actor playing it, with the possible exception of Francis Wilson. The piece has simply hung onto the coat tails of little Mr. James Welch.
It is a farce filled with nasty types—all titled, of course. People who nauseate, if taken seriously, are used as the excuse for various farcical situations. Hopkinson himself, who is a rich “bounder,” becomes engaged to a pretty society girl, and on the eve of the wedding she elopes. The “hero” then marries a woman whom he has jilted, and who, in her turn, has blackmailed him. Nearly all the characters in the piece are of the decadent order. They are the sort that occur seriously in “The Walls of Jericho,” at the Garrick Theater. They are, perhaps, better there, but quite unnecessary anywhere, and even improper.
“Mr. Hopkinson” has puzzled a good many people who saw it. They have wondered why it ran so long, and what there was in the piece that held it up, so to speak. Its success was simply due to James Welch, a quaint, freakish little actor—a sort of Louie Freear in trousers. Many plays of the same slight artistic value have succeeded because one actor has seemed to give a new wrinkle in comedy to the public. “Mr. Hopkinson” without James Welch would be a singularly risky proposition—worse than “Leah Kleschna” without Mrs. Fiske. Evidently the “American invasion” agreed with me—which makes it pleasant for me, don’t you think?
FOR BOOK LOVERS
Archibald Lowery Sessions
Literary preferences of well known people. How characters and doings in real life are reflected in fiction. Robert Grant’s “The Orchid,” William J. Locke’s “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne.” The twenty-five best selling books of the month
THE public has passed a few pleasant summer hours in discussing, through the medium of various journals, what people like to read. Very interesting information comes to light regarding the sort of fiction preferred by different personalities, female chiefly, in days past and present. There seems to be no difficulty in getting hold of facts; indeed, it becomes apparently a sort of mania with some successful people to explain their own results by hunting up their early literary likes and dislikes. Perhaps stories have molded some of us more or less—in all conscience let us hope so—since we wander in such a wilderness of them.
But, really, the serious thing to be considered just now is not so much what we like to read as what we have to, if we want to be amused. For that which we write depends upon that which we are, of course, and we reap in fiction what we sow in society. Therefore, being rather commercial, rather frivolous and rather in search of new sensations, we get all our business, and small talk, and scandal back again, faithfully reproduced, from the book sellers’ counters, and must go all over it once more with as good a grace as may be.
If taste and idealism are to prevail over hard facts, somebody must see pretty strenuously to it, ere long. In the meantime we may as well settle down to a thoroughly American literary atmosphere, relieved here and there by bits of nebulous romancing which pass for idealistic production. We really don’t object. We love ourselves too well to want company. Anthony Trolloppe, and Miss Yonge, and Mrs. Oliphant, William Black and Thomas Hardy could introduce us to scores of pleasant English people, but their heroes and heroines belong to a different world altogether, and are laid on the shelf nowadays, probably never to be taken up by the mass of readers except as refreshing antiquities when American repetition finally palls on us. The best we can do for an occasional let-up is to hunt up odd people or places, now and then, and write them up. Let us hope the supply will remain inexhaustible, and that the batch of novels for this season may give us a view of life outside of prescribed limits.
“The Orchid,” by Robert Grant, Scribner’s, might be an authentic biography of a twentieth-century society woman, including a faithful delineation of her environment. It is not, strictly speaking, a study of character or society, but rather a photographic reproduction of people and conditions. In this fact is to be found the book’s only defect as a literary work. There is no weighing of motives or analysis of character; nothing but a plain recital of facts as they are found to exist.
Lydia Arnold, who marries for money, is divorced, and remarries for love, is cold-blooded and unscrupulous as many a social queen in real life; and her device for securing the means to support her position as the wife of her lover, revolting as it is to sensitive people, is not entirely unprecedented. It may be that the type to which she belongs is an extreme one, but the fact that she shocked her friends and associates indicates that they had not entirely outgrown their natural impulses rather than that her enormities are absolutely unknown.
We can understand the pessimism of Mrs. Andrew Cunningham when she exclaimed: “The only unpardonable sin in this country is to lose one’s money. Nothing else counts,” but the facts thus far do not justify it; there are some former leaders of society who may be supposed to wish that the generalization were true. They have not found it so.
“Wall Street” has a significance, not merely as the name of a famous thoroughfare, but as epitomizing the forces which produce the profoundest effects upon the industrial and even political and social life of America. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that the activities which it represents should be resorted to for a supply of material for interesting stories.
The latest fiction on this subject is Edwin Lefevre’s book, “The Golden Flood,” published by McClure, Phillips & Co. The author, who has to his credit quite a list of short Wall Street stories, is thoroughly familiar with his ground, and possesses, besides, a genuine gift of story-telling. “The Golden Flood” may possibly be criticised as dealing with a somewhat impossible theme—an attempt to corner the gold supply; but the description of the manner in which it affects “the richest man in the world” is so absorbingly interesting that probabilities are forgotten. The mixture of innocence and guile in young Mr. Grinnell, assumed for the purpose of mystifying Mellen and Dawson, is a good bit of character drawing. But, though these men in the story were worked up to the point of believing that Grinnell practised alchemy, it is doubtful if their prototypes in real life could be so affected. The explanation, however, turns out to be a practical one, and it is so timed as to sustain the interest to the end.
Unquestionably the best short stories of American politics so far published are those by Elliott Flower in a volume entitled “Slaves of Success,” L. C. Page & Co. There are eight of them, a connected series in which John Wade and Ben Carroll are the chief actors.
Wade and Carroll represent two types of the political boss. The former is described as “politically unscrupulous, but personally honest”—a combination sometimes found; “Carroll, on the other hand, used politics for his pecuniary advantage;” he worked for his pocket all the time.
The two men personally had little love for each other, but as each controlled a part of the political machine, they were obliged to work together in order to produce results. Their methods of manipulating the machine, however, were not essentially different; if Wade had scruples about offering a man money, yet he would, for a political advantage, let him steal from others or from the State; and his willingness to practise blackmail to compass his own election to the Senate was what finally put an end to his career.
Carroll was disposed of at last also, but his downfall was due to a grossly covetous disposition.
The stories give a very convincing series of pictures of municipal and State politics; the incidents are all of them more or less familiar, but they are all of them extremely interesting, and the narrative is considerably enlivened by the introduction into it of a rather original character for a State legislature, Azro Craig, a man who is not only scrupulously honest, but has not the slightest hesitation in voting and speaking as he thinks.
A somewhat striking story, though one which, it is to be feared, is unlikely to attain a very wide popularity, is Evelyn Underhill’s “The Gray World,” Century Company. It is, to all intents and purposes, a study in spiritual development, the experiences of a soul in search of the beautiful, and disguised—unconsciously, of course—in minor respects, it is substantially indentical with Hawthorne’s “Artist of the Beautiful.”
There is in both the consciousness, vague at first, of a spiritual end to be achieved, and the struggle toward it, the depression and hopeless sense of defeat after each encounter with the material, and finally the successful climax of endeavor which sees, with a cheerful appreciation of true values, the obliteration of the physical means by which it has been reached. The spirit of the slum child after its plunge into the gray world, and its reincarnation in Willie Hopkinson, traveled the same road as that trod by Owen Warland. Both had to undergo this same pitying contempt on the part of their sensible friends and acquaintances, by whom they were mourned as men of promise who wasted their opportunities.
But if Owen Warland was isolated from human companionship, Willie Hopkinson had at least one comprehending friend in Hester Waring, who helped toward his final enlightenment. “She knew very well that he was one of her company; made for quiet journeyings, not for that frenzied rush to catch a hypothetical train, which is called the strenuous life.”
Because the company is so small, the story will probably be understood and enjoyed by but few; and that it is made the means of teaching a lesson, hard to learn, will be another reason for its lack of popularity. Nevertheless, it is a book that ought to be read.
What is essentially characteristic of George Barr McCutcheon’s stories, is his disregard of conventional methods in his selection of material for his plots. This is true of his Graustark stories—though some captious critics profess to see in them a similarity to Anthony Hope’s work—and the same quality is found in “The Day of the Dog.”
His latest book is “The Purple Parasol,” Dodd, Mead & Co., and it furnishes the same sort of more or less fantastic entertainment that distinguishes the author’s other stories. Few people, we imagine, would be likely to select, a purple parasol as a clew by means of which to track an eloping wife; it seems a little incongruous that a woman, in arranging an elopement, should include such an article among her effects. A purple parasol is not a necessity on such a trip, and, besides, it is apt to be conspicuous.
But Mrs. Wharton did take one, and, as luck would have it, Helen Dering also had one; therefore it is not to be wondered at that Sam Rossiter made the mistake that he did. Though his blunder was the cause of considerable unhappiness to him and some humiliation for Miss Dering, the explanations, when they came, were of the most satisfying kind.
The book is handsomely illustrated in colors by Harrison Fisher, and decorated by Charles B. Falls.
Alaska is a region of which much has been written in the last six or eight years, since the opening of the Klondike, but the literature on the subject, having been confined mostly to newspaper accounts of gold discoveries and the stories of Mr. Jack London and Mr. Rex E. Beach, has not been such as to impart a very wide variety of information upon important points.
A book which the publishers announce as the first “to deal in any adequate way with our great Arctic possession,” is John S. McLain’s “Alaska and the Klondike,” McClure, Phillips & Co. Mr. McLain accompanied the sub-committee of the Senate Committee on Territories on their visit to Alaska in 1903, and, of course, had unusual opportunities to gather interesting facts.
The trip was a comprehensive one, and the result, now embodied in this book, shows that its author lost no chances to observe and record important and more or less unfamiliar matters that will entertain as well as instruct his readers.
The book is written in a natural, unpretentious, flowing style, and the material is skillfully handled so as to concentrate the attention and stimulate the imagination. Besides this, there are a great many half-tone reproductions of photographs, which help to make the narrative more graphic.
“Miss Bellard’s Inspiration,” Harper’s, is William D. Howells’ latest story. It is one which, if it could be subjected to the right kind of adaptation, would make a successful and refreshing little comedy. For, in spite of the shadow which Mrs. Mevison casts over the tale, the very human qualities of Mr. and Mrs. Crombie and the self-communings of Miss Bellard, the results of which neutralize the British directness of Edmund Craybourne, make a delicious combination with Mr. Howells’ good-natured cynicism, which, indeed, is so good-natured as to be humor rather that cynicism.
The story is rather a slight one, too slight, in fact, to be called a novel; it is one which can be read in the course of a couple of hours and with fully sustained interest to the end, when Miss Bellard explains and acts upon her inspiration. She supplies all the novelty in the story; she is by no means a commonplace character. Her manner of falling in love, her reasons for breaking her engagement with Craybourne, and the inspiration which led to its reinstatement are not what might be expected by the veteran novel reader. But she is vindicated in the end by the fact that she is a woman, and a beautiful woman.
Mrs. Crombie plays her part with a good deal of sprightliness and adds not a little to the humor of the story. Her rather fierce rebellion at the idea of being imposed upon by her niece and her subsequent abject surrender are all very funny, the more so because she has no idea of being funny.
It seems a long time—possibly it isn’t really—- since a story of adventure, so thoroughly good as “Terence O’Rourke, Gentleman Adventurer,” has appeared. It is written by Louis Joseph Vance and published by A. Wessells Company.
It is, of course, crammed full of action, one episode following the other in quick succession without tiresome descriptions or unnecessarily prolonged introductions; episodes that are fresh, vivid and full of color as different as possible from the hackneyed type that has been familiar for years. But the love interest has not been neglected. It is a very pretty story of the loyalty of the light-hearted Irishman, the thread of which runs through the whole book, its climax being reserved as the hero’s reward at the end.
As the central figure in the series of adventures described is O’Rourke, so the most conspicuously meritorious piece of literary work is the delineation of his character. It cannot, of course, be called a character study, inasmuch as the author’s obvious intention in writing the tale, was to create complications for his hero to overcome rather than to solve questions of psychology. But he has, nevertheless, presented in the person of “the O’Rourke of Castle O’Rourke,” a clean, generous, whole-souled Irish gentleman, one of a type that is always lovable.
The title of William J. Locke’s novel, “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” John Lane, is somewhat misleading, for there is nothing in the book to show that the character of Sir Marcus could be made the subject of serious criticism. His aunt’s grim disapproval and ready suspicion of him may fairly be attributed to causes quite foreign to the question of his thorough respectability. It may be, however, that the reference in the title is, not to his personal morals, but to his “History of Renaissance Morals,” upon which he was engaged.
He was considered by his superiors steady enough to be a good schoolmaster, and his accession to the family title does not seem to have marked any material change in his personal habits, although the sudden appearance of Carlotta was a disturbing influence in his life, as it might be in that of the most sedate among us. Carlotta’s introduction is somewhat unusual, if not improbable, but it is to be remembered that a bright, attractive English girl, most of whose life has been spent in a Turkish harem, cannot be expected to conform, all at once, to English standards of conventionality.
Ordeyne’s tribulations, growing out of his enforced guardianship of this extraordinary young woman, may be easily understood, but will hardly be considered a reason for condoling or sympathizing with him.
The end of his “extravagant adventure” is obvious enough. It is, in fact, the only logical conclusion under the circumstances. Naturally Judith and Aunt Jessica disapproved, though for widely different reasons.
Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith has done us all a service in his volume of short stories to which he has given the name “At Close Range,” published by Scribner’s. One of the principal charms of these stories lies in the unpretentiousness of them; they are modest little tales about modest people; people who sometimes seem to have little tenderness or generosity about them, but who, after all, confirm the author’s theory “that at the bottom of every heart crucible choked with life’s cinders there can almost always be found a drop of gold.”
Each one of the stories has just the one touch of nature that always makes its appeal irresistible. Steve Dodd, Sam Makin, Jack Stirling and Captain Shortrode are common enough characters, and of a type from which not much is usually looked for except the energetic pursuit of business, but under the proper stimulus they show traits and impulses similar to those of the Dear Old Lady.