The sudden hush which fell on the group when the lights were restored at once displayed the awfulness of Furniss’s depravity, as viewed by the Fitchly Country Club, in riot assembled. Had any other man been caught in the same act, with any other woman, there would have been merely a triumphant outcry of self-acknowledged devilishness. The man would have bought at the bar below, and the women would have screamed themselves to their motors; but, by some unusual instinct that was positively primitive, every man and woman in the room realized that Furniss was a professional and his act took a much more vital aspect. By the same perfect precision of instinct not a single iota of blame was attached to the lady in question, for the accurate conception of Furniss on the part of the Country Club demonstrated also that she was only an instrument in a tragedy of the elements. One does not accuse a person of being an accessory to a cyclone.
At the vivid and not wholly beautiful picture thus presented by the electrics, the whole room foolishly and utterly unsuccessfully attempted to give an imitation of a gathering which knows that nothing has happened. After the awful hush of the first moment, the women began quietly conversing in tones unusually subdued; the men began skylarking and shouting on subjects unusually hollow. The object of instructing the engineer to turn on the lights again, after midnight, had been to allow the dance to continue until two in the morning. At one there was not a single person left in the ball-room, and the waiters were already sweeping up the fragments. Some fragments, however, they could not sweep, and these make the following prelude:
Ten years before, at the age of twenty-five, Furniss had had one chance in a million of being decent; that is to say, he had nearly married a good woman, and that woman, needless to explain, was the one whom by sheer accident he kissed just ten years later. Furthermore, it was the nearest that he had ever come to marrying anybody, or ever would come, and it was a hollow victory for the law of chances.
Furniss was a devil because he came of that stock. It bred true to type, merely with refinements in each succeeding generation. His father was a stout, red-faced man of the kind that, thirty years ago, drove trotting-horses to a red-wheeled run-about, with wooden knobs on the reins, and loops to hold to—a true example of the days when it took absolute defiance to be a sporting-man. Furniss himself drove the best-looking motor-car in Fitchly, and his effect was esthetically better than his father’s, for, owing to the rigidity of the thing, it is much easier to have a good taste in motor-cars than in horses. His mother was a blonde, expensively-dressed woman of the type which goes through life in the hideous belief that tight-lacing will make feminine obesity anything but revolting.
Yet at twenty-five Furniss had had his chances. He went to college and played foot-ball. He played it well. It is frequently the noblest thing that men of his stamp ever do, except one. They sometimes get into the army, and into the cavalry; less frequently into the infantry, but never, absolutely never, into the engineers. It was, moreover, the heyday of the college athlete, those golden years of the nineties when men wore huge white Y’s and H’s on high-necked sweaters at mountain resorts all summer, and when reputations lasted more than a year. With one of these reputations Furniss had come out of college, and tentatively, against its judgment, Fitchly had received him. It was one of those inconceivable cases when reason and instinct battle. Everybody knew old man Furniss and had not the slightest illusions about him; yet here was young Furniss a half-back at Yale! Time has helped us to understand these things nowadays, but they troubled us then.
In Furniss’s case reason won over instinct, and Fitchly received him with open arms which wavered slightly. The only return he made was to fall mildly in love with Helen Witherspoon. It would be nice to think that something in the sweet, old-fashioned manner of this dainty, refined girl, whose ancestors had been immigrants two hundred years before Furniss’s, appealed to the brute and barbaric in the foot-ball hero, and perhaps it did, but a more plausible reason for his falling in love with her was that every one else was doing it. It was the temptation of the desired, the invitation of a contest, and of all things this appealed most to Furniss. Every one was doing it; but in a very short time it narrowed down to Furniss and Butley Smith, of the well-known legal firm of Smith, Smith & Smith, which drew up the city charter and refused to accept criminal practice. She married Smith. You could hardly call it a disappointed love-affair. It was rather precision by elimination, and Furniss was eliminated. Furnisses were all right as half-backs, but we didn’t marry them in Fitchly; at least Father and Mother Witherspoon didn’t marry them, and in Fitchly they did the marrying.
From Furniss’s point of view it was unfortunate, but it was natural. As an economic system, marriage did not wholly persuade him, anyway.
So Furniss reverted to type, and did well at it. He lost little of his athletic good looks, and he was certainly invaluable as a club-man. Thirty-five found him stocky, but not fat, with a face rather round, but not repellent; a tiny, trim mustache; the inevitable blue serge and that almost offensively white linen which one associates with the broker type—that whiteness which threatens to, but does not quite, suggest scented soap. It would have been extremely difficult to say whether or not he had brains. His achievements rather pointed to the fact that he had, and his tastes to the fact that he had not; but, in any case, he made money, and whatever might be his misdeeds, he never bothered any one by telling about them. He manufactured in quantity the best off-set drill in America, and furthermore, as he held the patents, the wholesale jobbers who bought the drill troubled not one whit with his morals. The society of Fitchly shook its head occasionally, but on the whole kept him along. It would be extremely difficult to drop a man who had nowhere to drop to; and as he asked nothing of Fitchly, there was nothing to refuse. This occasion at the Country Club, then, was the first real instance in which the elements had come in conflict.
Of the many mixed emotions which accompanied the premature withdrawal from the Country Club that night, only two will suffice for illustration, as they marked the extremes—those of Furniss himself and of Butley Smith, the Menelaus of the ravished Helen. Those of Furniss, indeed, were no doubt very similar to the emotions of the son of Priam himself on the occasion of the original Hellenic uprising—an amusing incident and an unfortunate one, but why this unseemly outcry? His kissing some one when the lights went out had been a perfectly consistent act. It was not an emotional impulse; it was, in a way, a duty to the conventions, and how was he to know that the recipient was a former sweetheart? He had no desire to repeat the crime. The attitude of the Country Club had made osculation rather nauseous. It would seem better breeding not to notice it; and yet, and yet, it was rather funny that it should have been Helen. It was the first personal illustration which Furniss had ever had of the dramatic, and he began to ponder. If you ever wish to reclaim a devil, just try him on the dramatic. It is the only uplifting influence which sleeps in the souls of most of them.
The emotions of Butley Smith were less happily chosen. He also felt the impulse of the drama, but his was the stiff and unnatural drama of the classic schools, for his cue directed him to punch in the face of the offending Furniss. It was a glowing idea, but it wasn’t practical, as associates of Butley brutally pointed out when they drew attention to the fact that the face of the ex-half-back, and the present associate of half the prize-fighters in the East, would be an extremely hard one to pummel, and their logic suggests an admirable course of action for one who would play a dramatic part in such histories. If you must be an outraged husband, be one in a novel or a play, where you will always be able to thrash or horsewhip or shoot the villain within an inch of his life. The physical incapacity of villains in these circles is admirable. In real life, unfortunately, they are quite apt to be fully the equals of the outraged husband, or otherwise the husbands would be less frequently outraged.