Black Oxen

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

That she possessed sex magnetism in a superlative degree in spite of her deliberate aloofness, Clavering had, of course, been conscious from the first. Had not every male first-nighter been conscious of it? There was a surfeit of beauty in New York. A stranger, even if invested with mystery, must possess the one irresistible magnet, combined with some unusual quality of looks, to capture and hold the interest of weary New Yorkers as she had done. Even the dramatic critics, who looked as if they hated everybody, had been seen to gaze upon her with rare approval.

But tonight Clavering had a glimpse of something more than a magnetism for which she was not responsible and to which she had seemed singularly indifferent. It was quite evident that he was watching charm in action. She was sparkling and exerting herself, talking brilliantly and illuminatingly upon the chaos still known as Europe, and it was patent that her knowledge was not derived from newspapers or drawing-room gossip. Her personal acquaintance of public men had evidently been extensive before the war, and she had as manifestly continued to see those in and out of office in Vienna and Buda Pesth throughout all the later fluctuations. Her detestation of the old German militaristic party was unmitigated and she spoke of the late ruler of the Dual Empire and of his yearning heir with no respect whatever. With other intelligent people she believed Bolshevism to be an inevitable phase in a country as backward and ignorant as Russia, but, to his surprise, she regarded the Republican ideal of government as the highest that had yet been evolved from finite minds, still far from their last and highest stages of development. She believed that the only hope of the present civilization was to avert at any cost the successful rise of the proletariat to power until the governing and employing classes had learned sufficient wisdom to conciliate it and treat it with the same impartial justice they now reserved for themselves. ("And to educate themselves along the lines laid down in 'The Mind in the Making,'" interpolated Clavering.) Otherwise any victory the masses might achieve would be followed by the same hideous results as in Russia—in other words, the same results that had followed all servile uprisings since the dawn of history. When the underdog, who has never felt anything but an underdog, with all the misery and black injustice the word implies, finds himself on top he will inevitably torture and murder his former oppressors. He hasn't the intelligence to foresee the ultimate folly of his acts, or that the only hope of the world is equal justice for all classes; he merely gratifies his primitive instinct for vengeance—precisely the same today, as during the first servile uprising of Rome—he butchers and slaughters and wrecks, and then sinks with his own weight, while what brains are left reconstruct civilization out of the ruins. "The trouble is that the reconstructing brains are never quite good enough, and after a time it is all to do over again.…"

This was by no means a monologue, but evoked in the give and take of argument with Mr. Osborne, who believed in never yielding an inch to the demands of labor, and with Mr. Dinwiddie, who, since his association with the Sophisticates, was looking forward vaguely toward some idealistic regeneration of the social order, although Socialism was rather out of date among them, and Bolshevism long since relegated to the attic.

But Clavering was not particularly interested in her political views, sound as they were. Foreign women of her class, if not as liberal, always talked intelligently of politics. What interested him keenly was her deliberate, her quite conscious attempt to enslave the two men beside her, and her complete success. Occasionally she threw him a word, and once he fancied she favored him with a glance of secret amused understanding, but he was thankful to be on the outer edge of that glamorous crescent. It was enough to watch at a comparatively safe distance. Would his turn come next, or was she merely bent on so befuddling these old chaps that there would be no place left in their enraptured minds for suspicion or criticism? No doubt he was too rank an outsider.… She shot him another glance.… Was his to be the rôle of the sympathetic friend?

Then she began to draw Dinwiddie and Osborne out, and it struck him that her attitude was not merely that of the accomplished hostess. They both talked well, they were intelligent and well-informed, and he was himself interested in what they had to say on the subject of national politics. (The Judge, who had an unimpaired digestion, was attending strictly to his champagne and his dinner.) There was something of anxiety, almost of wistfulness, in her expression as she listened to one or the other doing his admirable best to entertain her. They had the charm of crisp well-modulated voices, these two men of her own class; she had met no better-bred men in Europe; and their air was as gallant as it had been in their youth. He had a fleeting vision of what gay dogs they must have been. Neither had married, but they had been ardent lovers once and aging women still spoke of them with tender amusement. And yet only the shell had changed. They had led decent enough lives and no doubt could fall honestly and romantically in love today. In fact, they appeared to be demonstrating the possibility, with the eternal ingenuousness of the male. And yet nature had played them this scurvy trick. The young heart in the old shell. Grown-up boys with a foot in the grave. Dependent upon mind and address alone to win a woman's regard, while the woman dreamed of the man with a thick thatch over his brains and the responsive magnetism of her own years. Poor old fighting-cocks! What a jade nature was … or was it merely the tyranny of an Idea, carefully inculcated at the nativity of the social group, with other arbitrary laws, in behalf of the race? The fetish of the body. Stark materialism.… However, it was not as hard on them as on women outgrown their primary function. Theirs at least the privilege of approach; and their deathless masculine conceit—when all was said, Nature's supreme gift of compensation—never faltered.

It crossed Clavering's mind that she was experimenting on her own account, not merely bewildering and enthralling these estimable gentlemen of her mother's generation. But why? Joining casually in the conversation, or quite withdrawn, he watched her with increasing and now quite impersonal interest. He almost fancied she was making an effort to be something more than the polite and amiable hostess, that she was deliberately striving to see them as men who had a perfect right to fascinate a woman of her age and loveliness. Well, it had happened before. Elderly men of charm and character had won and kept women fully thirty years their junior. Possibly she belonged to that distinguished minority who refused to be enslaved by the Ancient Idea, that iron code devised by fore-thinking men when Earth was young and scantily peopled.… Still—why this curious eagerness, this—it was indecipherable … no doubt his lively imagination was playing him tricks. Probably she was merely sympathetic.… And then, toward the end of the dinner, her manner changed, although too subtly for any but the detached observer to notice it. To Clavering she seemed to go dead under her still animated face. He saw her eyes wander from Dinwiddie's bald head to Osborne's flattened cheek … her lip curled, a look of fierce contempt flashed in her eyes before she hastily lowered the lids.… He fancied she was glad to rise from the table.

X

"Well?" he asked, as he and Dinwiddie were walking away from the house; Osborne had driven off with Judge Trent. "Do you still think her a base impostor?"

"Don't know what I think and don't much care. She can pack me in her trunk, as we boys used to say. She's a great lady and a charming woman; as little doubt about the first as the last. She's like Mary Ogden and she isn't. I suppose she might be merely a member of the same family—with several thousand ancestors where types must have reappeared again and again. If she wants New York Society, especially if she wants money for those starving children, I'll go the limit. But I'm going to find out about her all the same. I'll hunt up Harry Thornhill tomorrow—he's a recluse but he'll see me—and I'll get on the track of some Hungarian refugee. She can't be the usual rank impostor, that's positive. She has the same blood as Mary in her veins, and if she's Mary's daughter and wishes to keep it dark, that's her business. I'll never give her away."