Have you had a good time, reader? Here we have been a hundred miles on the outside of a coach, and quite three weeks in the open air, and, I am sure, have had dinners and balls galore. Take your last deep breath of all these joys, for all even of our lines, may not fall in such pleasant places. What—we shall not say we are tired of it—we who have been with the fortunate few? Why, who can make more, who could make more, of life than they? Is it not a pleasant play?
Well, a secret, then: Van Kull and Wemyss too, are bored, and even Tony Duval finds it slow. For Flossie Gower I speak not; she has a great, still fed, self-pride, and when that, too, grows stale—she is too clever to let it bore her—she will leave it first; and Birmingham is saved by his British atmosphere and healthy, dormant brain.
All this is why Charlie Townley—no, Charlie fears rather that he may not always be rich enough to keep it up, and is making up to poor Mamie, in consequence. But that is why, or all these things are why—for those who make of earnest life a play needs must make it stronger as the play goes on—Van Kull walked still with Mrs. Hay, that night; and even Birmingham made overtures to Kitty Farnum; and Charlie did propose to Mamie Livingstone; and Caryl Wemyss propo—told Mrs. Gower that he loved her.
CHAPTER XXV.
KITTY FARNUM TAKES THE PRIZE.
JOHN HAVILAND was in town that summer. Many things kept him there; he had his own business, and he had his schools, and he had his workmen’s clubs. And just now he had, more than all, the new young men’s club he was founding on the Bowery. He would usually dine at his own club; and there the men he most commonly met were Derwent and Lucie Gower. There seemed to be a certain bond of sympathy between these men. Gower also was kept in town by his business; for Gower had his duties in life, and performed them punctiliously, too. Derwent—well, Derwent was kept there by much the same reasons that kept John at home; the reader may know them later. Furthermore, these men, not being pleasure-seekers, were all three unhappy—for the moment, only, let us hope.
Haviland lived most of the time on his little sloop, which he kept moored at Bay Ridge, and he took little cruises in her when the wind served. Derwent was apt to be with him on these; he was an enthusiast in everything, and just now was much interested in John’s work in New York. Then there was politics; the primaries were already beginning, and John was at work over these; a most fascinating subject for Derwent, who was fond of saying that the most noticeable industries in all “property-democracies” had been plied by those who made a trade of patriotism; but John was not a trader. It was Derwent who called ours an age of coal; but “machine civilization” was his favorite term for the nineteenth century, and just now his notion was that property was the pasturage that gave life to the monster that he fought.
Certainly, it had been an evil year for those who thought and hoped. That showed itself even in the primaries, where now the local leaders found it hard to keep their rank and file content. Still less could John get on, with his abstract talk of pure government and simple laws. Sovereign voters were showing a strange tendency to go in directly for abstract benefits, or what they conceived to be such. Even city workers were discontented; and there was said to be much misery in the mining districts. The coal magnates—Tamms, Duval, and Remington—finding that that ichor of our civilization was growing too plentiful, had laid their heads together and were “diminishing the output;” that is, they forbade that more than a certain number of tons should be mined per week. Thus did they not only cut off that draught of life from the general social fabric, but about one-third of the cupbearers thereof were thrown out of work. Upon this, many of the rest had struck. Their places in the mines had promptly been filled by other human energy in the shape of so many head of human beings, male and female, shipped from Poland; while the strikers and even some of the Poles, who had escaped and could read and write, were making trouble. But these themes are too heavy for our slight pen; except such outcome of it as even all the world might see—and Mrs. Flossie Gower may feel.
And, if politics had thus all gone askew, John was just a shade discouraged with his social work as well. Many a talk did he and Derwent have about it, lying becalmed off the sullen Jersey coast, smoking their midnight cigars beneath the sky. “They will come to the club fast enough,” he would say, “and read a newspaper or two, and smoke a pipe—when they have not money enough to pay for drinks at the bar-room. They will listen to what we tell them, politely enough. But what I find is the hardest thing to cope with is a sort of scoffing humor: as if we were all muffs, and they knew it, and only put up with it so long as it suited their convenience.”
“A curious thing this jeering habit in your democracy,” muttered Derwent. “They have caught the trick of Voltaire’s cynicism and turned it upwards. They are incredulous of excellence and of benevolence in high places—even of yours, old fellow, I am afraid,” he added. “I never could see how there could be class-hatred in America; but class-hatred there certainly is.”