Light-Fingered Gentry

by David Graham Phillips

"Do as you like," he said wearily, not lifting his eyes from the sheet of paper on which he had been making aimless markings, when she interrupted him.

"You wouldn't object if I married—soon?"

"Don't bother me," he flamed out. "Do as you please. Only, don't fret me. And, no splurge! I'm sick. I want quiet."

Thus it came about that on the Thursday following the engagement, a week almost to the hour from Fosdick's tumble into his own carefully and deeply dug pit, Amy married Alois Siersdorf, "with only the two families present, because of Mr. Fosdick's age and illness"; and at noon they sailed away on the almost empty Deutschland.

Alois did not let his perplexity before Amy's astounding docility interfere with his happiness. He saw that, whatever the cause, she was in love with him, so deeply in love that she had descended from the pedestal, had lifted him from his knees, had set him upon it, and had fallen down meekly to worship. There were a few of "our people" on the steamer—half a dozen families or parts of families, of "the push," who were on their way to freeze and sneeze in the "warm" Riviera for the sake of fashion. Alois was delighted that Amy was so absorbed in him that she would have nothing to do with them—this for the first three days. He had not believed her capable of the passion and the tenderness she was lavishing upon him. She made him hold her in his arms hours at a time; she developed amazing skill at those coquetries of intimacy so much more difficult than the enticements that serve to make the period of the engagement attractive. And he found her more beautiful, too, than he had thought. She was one of those women who are not at their best when on public or semipublic view, but reserve for intimacy a charm which explains the otherwise inexplicable hold they get upon the man to whom they fully reveal and abandon themselves.

And Alois, in love with the woman herself now rather than with what she represented to his rather material imagination, surprised her in turn. She had thought him somewhat stilted, a distinctly professional man, with too little lightness of mind—interesting, satisfactory beyond the prosy and commonplace and patterned run of men she knew; but still with a tendency to be wearisome if taken in too large doses. She had to confess that she had misjudged him. He was no longer under the nervous strain of trying to win her, was no longer handicapped by a vague but potent notion that he would get more than he gave in a marriage with her. He revealed his real self—light-hearted, varied, most adaptable; thoroughgoing masculine, yet with a femininity, a knowledge of and interest in matters purely feminine, that made companionship as easy as it was delightful.

They were in the full rapture of these agreeable surprises each about the other when the representatives of "our set" began to insist upon associating with them. Amy shrank from the first advances; this only made the bored fashionables the more determined. Even in her morbidness about the lost reputation and the menace of prison, she could not deceive herself as to the meaning of their persistent friendliness. And soon she was delighted by a third surprise. She found that Hugo had been right, and she absurdly wrong, about public opinion. There might be, probably was, a public opinion that misunderstood her father and judged him by provincial, old-fashioned standards. But it was not her public opinion. All the people of her set were more or less involved, directly or through their relations by blood and marriage, in enterprises that necessitated what in the masses—the "lower classes" and the "criminal classes"—would be called lying, swindling, and stealing; they, therefore, had no fault to find with Fosdick. Had he not his fortune still? And was he not impregnable against the mob howling that he be treated as a common malefactor? Where, then, was the occasion for Phariseeism? Was it not the plain duty of respectable people to stand firmly by the Fosdicks and show the mob that respectability was solidly against demagogism, against attempts to judge the upper class by lower class standards? Yes; that was the wise course, and the safe course. Why, even the public prosecutor, a suspiciously demagogical shouter for "equal justice"—respectability appreciated that he had to get the suffrages of the mob, but thought he went a little too far in demagogic speech—why, even he had shown that the gentleman was stronger in him than the politician. Had he not, after a few days of silence, come out boldly rebuking "the attempt to defame and persecute one of the country's most public-spirited and useful citizens, in advance of judicial inquiry"?

Amy was amazed that she had been so preposterously unnerved by what she now saw was literally nothing at all, a mere morbid phantasy. But at the same time, she was devoutly thankful that she had been deluded. "But for that," said she to herself, "I might not have married 'Lois, might have stifled the best, the most beautiful emotion of my life, might have missed happiness entirely." This thought so moved her that she rose—it was in the dead of night—and went into his room and bent over him, asleep, and kissed him softly. And she stood, admiring in the dim light the manliness and the beauty of his head, his waving hair, his small, becoming blond beard.

"I love you," she murmured passionately. "No price would have been too dear to pay for you."

Meanwhile Fosdick was settling to the new conditions with a facility that admirably illustrated the infinite adaptability of the human animal. The inevitable, however cruel, is usually easy to accept. It is always mitigated by such reflections as that it could not have been avoided and that it might have been worse. The more intelligent the victim, the shorter his idle bewailings and the quicker his readjustment—and Fosdick was certainly intelligent. Also, among "practical" men, as youth with its ardent courage and its enthusiasms retreats and old age advances, there is a steady decay of self-respect, a rapid decline of belief that in life, so brief, so unsatisfactory at best, so fundamentally sordid, anything which interferes with comfort, personal comfort, is worth fighting for; where a young man will challenge an almost fanciful infringement of his self-respect, an old man will accept with a resigned and cynical shrug the most degrading conditions, if only they leave him material comfort and peace.