From the shadowy quietness of his window-seat Hartley looked out on the shifting, bewildering scene before him, a panorama of movement and color and energy that seemed to lose none of its unrest as midnight approached and waned. The young Oxonian felt that it was all a more or less disturbing glimpse of a new world that was opening up before him. He seemed able to catch at no order or meaning in the trend of it. At his Old World university, and in London itself, he had come more or less in touch with many of the great men of his age. About these Old World men there had always seemed to be an atmosphere—an almost repellent atmosphere—of academic calm, of intellectual reserve. When need be, they seemed able to surround themselves with a cuttlefish cloud of austerity. At that late day, a little to his distress, he was learning that eminence was not always august, that now and then even a lion could gambol. He wondered, in his perplexity, if it was some unexpected and belated blossoming of American humor, of that American humor which still so puzzled him. He did not condemn what seemed the eternal facetiousness of the American—he was still too avid of impression and too open-minded for that—but it disquieted him, and made him feel ill at ease.
Yet, disturbed as he was in spirit, Hartley felt not altogether unthankful for being thrown in with Repellier and his friends. As he looked out on them he even forgot, for the time being, how he had first come to Repellier, a forlorn and somewhat shabbily dressed young foreigner—forgot how the two of them had first met in America, by accident, under the maples of Madison Square. It was the very morning that Hartley had lost the Platt interview for the United News Bureau, and after his polite ejection from the crowded committee rooms in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, when he walked hot and indignant up and down the shade of the open square. There the two friends had met, and Hartley had grimly confessed that his first week on a New York newspaper had resulted in prompt dismissal, that his efforts as a literary free-lance had been equally disastrous, and that he had finally drifted into one of those literary syndicates which dispose of news and delectable sensation in copper-plate, by the column, gratuitously typed and boxed for the rural reader. He also dolefully confessed that he had been sent out to pick up interviews—"With any old guy worth while, only put ginger in 'em," were the somewhat disconcerting instructions to the young man to whom New York still stood as a sealed book. Repellier had thought the thing over for a moment. "Why not come and interview me?" he had asked, though Hartley little dreamed the old artist in doing so was breaking a lifelong principle of reticence. It was this interview which, in the words of his managing editor, had saved his scalp.
Hartley had, accordingly, reason to be drawn toward Repellier, and to nurse as well a vicarious affection for the numerous enough friends of the old artist now gathered about him. The humiliating memory, too, of his own ignominy and the meagerness of his own accomplishments prompted the young scholar from Oxford again and again to tell himself that he was a lucky beggar, that he ought to be only too glad to rub elbows with these obviously successful men and women of the world, even though they did chance, at that particular moment, to be frolicking about like a band of undergraduates after a bump-race, and variedly shocking his youthful sense of propriety.
For the old artist's army of friends had brought along with them armfuls of gifts, many of them costly, many of them ingeniously grotesque, and the traditional formality of presenting these tokens, with many cheers and shouts of laughter and much clapping of hands, again left Hartley puzzling over a phase of American humor which is, perhaps, always incomprehensible to the outlander.
The proceedings began when a slip of a girl—who had been pointed out to Hartley as the author of no less than three lugubrious historical romances—timidly approached the old artist, and blushingly thrust her great armful of Jacque roses into his hands. "There's one for every year," she said prettily enough, "and one over, sir, to grow on." Then the white-haired old editor of "The Republic" came marching up with a toy drum, beating a vigorous tattoo thereon, and with even more solemnity bestowed it in turn upon the artist. After him came an attenuated novelist in spectacles, bearing an old horseshoe and a chocolate pig. A stout, florid-looking man, with all the earmarks of the musician, soberly produced a huge tin trumpet, and a demure and quite shy-looking young lady, who had been pointed out as Frohman's new leading woman, tripped over to her host with a bag of pink candies and a jumping-jack. Of the agility of the jumping-jack she gave a sober and conscientious exhibition, after which came a Noah's ark from some one else, with a solemn caution that the paint was not to be sucked off, and then a portrait of Repellier himself, done in yellow and indigo blue, with cotton-wool hair attached to the canvas and eyes that rolled automatically.
Then the entire gathering lined up in a final laughing procession, and the horn was tooted, and the drum was beaten, and the orchestra struck up For he's a Jolly Good Fellow, and Repellier himself was taken possession of, and carried triumphantly off on the shoulders of the men. They hoisted him bodily up into a chair on the studio table, and all joined hands and danced round him, men and women alike, as children dance about a May-pole. Then they crowded in on him and clamored for a speech. It was not a very good speech, and it had many interruptions, but it was delivered in time and agreed to, point by point, and vigorously applauded. The great depleted punch-bowls were brought over to the table, and glasses, cups, vases, and steins were seized on for a final toast, in which the artists themselves led, with up-poised glasses, singing the while the reminiscent lines of a Parisian cabaret song. Then the men filed past, one by one, all wringing his hand, some patting him familiarly and affectionately on his stooping old shoulder. Then a body of women and girls suddenly seized on him, and amid hostile demonstrations and much mockery of envy, fluttered up boldly, one by one, and kissed him fearlessly. Then back behind its bank of azaleas the muffled orchestra once more broke out with Auld Lang Syne, and they sang it together, with joined hands, till there was just the suspicion of a tear or two in Repellier's kindly gray eyes as he turned to the bewildered Hartley and said it was all very, very nearly worth growing old for.
Then somebody discovered a way to the roof, and nothing would do but every one must go climbing and scrambling gaily up a rickety old ladder to the fresh night air, where Hartley noticed that a number of the women were taking advantage of the gloom of the housetop to steal a quiet puff or two at a cigarette. And while he was noting this lamentable lapse from what was fit and proper somewhere in the half light behind him he heard a woman's voice say: "Mr. Repellier, won't you introduce me to that nice, big, clean-looking boy you have here?"
There was a moment's silence, while Repellier seemed to be looking down at her.
"If you promise not to break his heart, Miss Vaughan."
A woman's low, quiet little laugh drifted softly through the night air. Hartley tried to look at the Great Bear, and not listen to more.