Perch of the Devil

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

Ora glanced up quickly, then, thankful that her husband was intent upon his carving, dropped her eyes. It was the first time he had ever hinted at the differences of class. In his boyhood there had been a mighty gulf between his mother and the haughty Mrs. Stratton who employed her in what was then the finest house in Butte. But he was too thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the West, in which he had spent his life, to recognise any difference in class save that which was determined by income. As soon as his own abilities, industry, and the turn of Fortune’s wheel, placed him in a position to offer support to the two dainty women that had been his ideals from boyhood, he knew himself to be their equal, without exhausting himself in analysis.

As for Ora, the West was quick in her blood, in spite of her heritage and education. Her father had assumed the virtue of democracy when he settled in Montana. In the course of a few years a genuine liking and enthusiasm for his adopted state, as well as daily associations, transformed him into as typical a Westerner as the West ever turned out of her ruthless crucible. He even wore a Stetson hat when he visited New York. His wife’s “airs” had inspired him with an increasing disgust which was one of the most honest emotions of his life, and the text of his repeated warnings to his daughter, whom he was forced to leave to the daily guidance of his legal wife (Ora’s continued presence in Butte, would, in truth, have caused him much embarrassment), had been to cherish her Western birthright as the most precious of her possessions.

“Remember this is the twentieth century,” he had written to her not long before his death. “There is no society in the world today that cannot be invaded by a combination of money, brains, and a certain social talent—common enough. The modern man, particularly in the United States, makes himself. His ancestors count for nothing, if he doesn’t. If he does they may be a good asset, for they (possibly) have given him breeding ready-made, moral fibre, and a brain of better composition than the average man of the people can expect. But that is only by the way. The two most potent factors in the world today are money and the waxing, rising, imperishable democratic spirit. That was reborn out here in the West, and the West is invading and absorbing the East. The old un-American social standards of the East are expiring in the present generation, which resort to every absurdity to maintain them; its self-consciousness betraying its recognition of the inevitable. Twenty years hence this class will be, if still clinging to its spar, as much of a national joke as the Western women were when they first flashed their diamonds in Peacock Alley. That phase, you may notice, is so dead that the comic papers have forgotten it. The phase was inevitable, but our women are now so accustomed to their money that they are not to be distinguished from wealthy women anywhere except that their natural hospitality and independence make them seem more sure of themselves. Of course the innately vulgar are to be found everywhere, and nowhere more abundantly than in New York.

“Twenty years from now, the West will have overrun the East; it will have helped itself with both hands to all the older civilisation has to give, and it will have made New York as democratic as Butte—or London! So don’t let yourself grow up with any old-fashioned nonsense in your head. I want you to start out in life modern to the core, unhampered by any of the obsolete notions that make your mother and most of our relations a sort of premature has-beens. When your time comes to marry, select a Western man who either has made his own fortune or has the ability to make it. Don’t give a thought to his origin if his education is good, and his manners good enough. You can supply the frills. I wouldn’t have you marry a man that lacked the fundamentals of education at least, but better that than one whose brain is so full of old-fashioned ideas that it has no room for those that are born every minute. And I hope you will settle here in this state and do something for it, either through the abilities of the man you marry or with your own. It isn’t only the men that build up a new state. And if you marry a foreigner never let me see nor hear from you again. They are all very well in their way, but it is not our way.”

Ora, who had worshipped her father and admired him above all men, never forgot a word he uttered, and knew his letters by heart. Possibly it was the memory of this last of his admonitions which had enabled her to sustain the shock of a proposal from the son of her mother’s old seamstress and of a miner who had died in his overalls underground. It is doubtful if she would have been conscious of the shock had it not been for Mrs. Stratton’s lamentations. That lady from her sofa in one of the humbler Blocks, had sent wail after wail in the direction of the impertinent aspirant. Ora, during the brief period in which she made her decision, heard so much about the “bluest blood of the South,” and the titled foreigners whom she apparently could have had for the accepting when she was supposed to belong to the Millionaire Sisterhood, that she began to ponder upon the violent contrasts embodied in Mark with something like rapture. After the marriage was accomplished, Mrs. Stratton had the grace to wail in solitude, and shortly after moved on to a world where only the archangels are titled and never have been known to marry. Ora had not given the matter another thought. Mark had been carefully brought up by a refined little woman, his vicious tendencies had been negligible, and he was too keen to graduate from the High School and make his start in life to waste time in even the milder forms of dissipation. When he married he adapted himself imperceptibly to the new social world he entered; if not a Beau Brummel, nor an Admirable Crichton, he never would disgrace his aristocratic wife; and, unlike Judge Stratton, he wore a silk hat in New York.

His last remark apparently had been a mere vapour from his subconscious mind, for he went on as soon as he had taken the edge from his appetite, “Perhaps Ida Hook can be made into one. I’ve seen waitresses and chambermaids metamorphosed by a million or two so that their own husbands wouldn’t recognise them if they stayed away too long. But it takes time, and Ida has an opinion of herself that would make an English duchess feel like a slag dump. Say—do you know it was through me Greg met her? It was that week you were out on the Kelley ranch. I met two or three of the old crowd on the street and nothing would do but that I should go to their picnic for the sake of old times. Greg was in town and I persuaded him to come along. Didn’t want to, but I talked him over. Guess there’s no escaping our fate. Possibly I couldn’t have corralled him if it hadn’t been for reaction—he’d been whooping it up on The Flat. Well, I wished afterward that I’d left him to play the wheel and all the rest of it for a while longer. Greg never loses his head—that is to say he never did till he met Ida Hook. The sporting life never took a hold on him, for while he went in for it with the deep deliberation that was born in him, it’s just that deliberation that saves him from going too far. He cuts loose the minute he figured out beforehand to cut loose, and all the king’s horses—or all the other attractions—couldn’t make him put in another second. A girl shot herself one night out at the Five Mile House because he suddenly said good-bye and turned on his heel. She knew he meant it. He never even turned round when he heard her drop——”

“What a brute!”

“Greg? Not he. I’ve known him to sit up all night with a sick dog——”

“I hate people that are kind to animals and cruel to one another.”

“Greg isn’t cruel. He said he was going and he went; that’s all. It’s his way. Girls of that kind are trash, anyhow, and when a woman goes into the sporting life she knows enough to take sporting chances.”