THE UNATTAINEDA gem apartIn the unreached heartOf a shy and secret place;Swift-winged in flightAs a meteor’s lightIn the far-off field of space.More sweet and clearTo the spirit’s earThan a wave-song on the beach;Like the baffling blueOf a mountain view,Or a dream just out of reach.Like light withdrawnBy a rain-swept dawn,When the clouds are wild and gray;Like a wind that blowsThrough the orchard closeEver and ever away.William Hamilton Hayne.
A gem apartIn the unreached heartOf a shy and secret place;Swift-winged in flightAs a meteor’s lightIn the far-off field of space.More sweet and clearTo the spirit’s earThan a wave-song on the beach;Like the baffling blueOf a mountain view,Or a dream just out of reach.Like light withdrawnBy a rain-swept dawn,When the clouds are wild and gray;Like a wind that blowsThrough the orchard closeEver and ever away.
A gem apartIn the unreached heartOf a shy and secret place;Swift-winged in flightAs a meteor’s lightIn the far-off field of space.
A gem apart
In the unreached heart
Of a shy and secret place;
Swift-winged in flight
As a meteor’s light
In the far-off field of space.
More sweet and clearTo the spirit’s earThan a wave-song on the beach;Like the baffling blueOf a mountain view,Or a dream just out of reach.
More sweet and clear
To the spirit’s ear
Than a wave-song on the beach;
Like the baffling blue
Of a mountain view,
Or a dream just out of reach.
Like light withdrawnBy a rain-swept dawn,When the clouds are wild and gray;Like a wind that blowsThrough the orchard closeEver and ever away.
Like light withdrawn
By a rain-swept dawn,
When the clouds are wild and gray;
Like a wind that blows
Through the orchard close
Ever and ever away.
William Hamilton Hayne.
THE FLATTERERBy George HibbardMMiss Miriam Whitinglanguidly descended the broad terrace steps. If her slow progress suggested bodily weariness, her whole bearing was not less indicative of spiritual lassitude. She allowed her hand to stray indolently along the balustrade, as with the other she held the lace-covered sunshade at a careless angle over her shoulder.On the lawn the guests from outside were gathered. Collected in groups or wandering in pairs, they dotted the grounds. As one of those staying in the house, she appeared as a semi-official hostess with a modified duty of seeing that all went as well as possible. Her head ached slightly, as she began to discover. Even the light of the late afternoon was trying. The dress which she expected to wear had proved too dilapidated, and she had been obliged to put on one she wished to save for more important occasions. The invitation which she needed for the satisfactory conduct of her modish itineracy from country house to country house had not come in the early mail as she expected.The band, hidden in a small, thick boscage of the wide gardens, broke into a mockingly cheerful air. At intervals some distant laugh taunted her. She was late, she knew. The shadows had begun to lengthen across the open spaces by the fountain, and she could almost see Mrs. Gunnison’s tart and ominous frown of displeasure. Why was she there, except to be seen; so that the world should know that one who had just come from the Kingsmills’ place on the Hudson had paused beneath the broad roofs of “Highlands” before, presumably, going to the Van Velsors, in Newport?As with pinched lips she reflected, she quickened her pace carefully.“Ah, senator!” she cried, as she held out her hand with regulated effusion. “I am so charmed. I did not know that you were to be here. You great ones of the earth are so busy and so much in demand——”Senator Grayson bowed and beamed. He shifted in uneasy gratification from one foot to the other, and a rosier red showed in his round face.“I did not think that you young ladies noticed us old politicians——”“Every one should be given the benefit of a doubt. Of course, in our silly lives there is not very much chance to know about anything really worth while, but when a thing is really great even we cannot help hearing about it. Your last speech—the broad, far-reaching views——”The senator stood in agreeable embarrassment.“I read it,” Miriam continued. “I could not go to sleep, because I wanted to finish it. Of course, I could not understand all, but I was entranced. Even I could feel the force and eloquence. I have heard of nothing else.”“Really?” cried the enchanted statesman. “Do you know I thought it had fallen flat? You are good to tell me. These side-lights are of the utmost value, and, indeed, I esteem your opinion. Would you let me get out a cup of tea? And—and—Mrs. Grayson was only saying the other day that she wanted to ask you to come to Washington for a visit this winter.”As the senator stumbled away, Miss Whiting felt a light touch at her elbow.“In your most popular and successful manner, Miriam,” said a slight, slim woman, whom she found standing beside her.“He’s a dear, if he is an old goose,” said Miriam, defiantly. “And, of course, any shading would be lost on him.”“I know,” continued the other, the sharp brown eyes in her lean brown faceregarding the girl critically. “There are degrees of flattery even in your flattering. You have reduced it—or elevated it—to the proud position of an exact science.”Before Miriam could reply, a young man who had discovered her from afar advanced with what was evidently an unusual degree of precipitancy.“Miss Whiting, I am delighted,” he puffed. “I have been looking for you everywhere. I was in town, and I went to that bric-a-brac shop. The fan is undoubtedly a real Jacques Callot.”“I was sure,” she murmured, “with your knowledge and taste, that you could decide at once. Of course, I did not know.”“And—and——” hesitated the youth, “I hope that you will not be offended. I told them to send it to you here. If you will accept it?”“How terrible—and how kind of you!” Miriam cried, holding out both hands, as if led by an irresistible impulse. “But you are so generous. All your friends have discovered that. I always think of St. Francis sharing his cloak with the blind beggar.”“So good of you,” he stuttered. “It’s nothing. You must be tired. Can’t I bring a chair for you? I am going to get one.”As the young man turned hurriedly away, Miriam grasped her companion’s arm.“I never thought that he would give it to me. Never, Janet—honestly,” she exclaimed, with earnestness.“The way of the transgressor is likely to be strewn—with surprises.”“I only thought of saying something pleasant at a dinner.”“I’d taken Bengy Wade’s opinion without a moment’s hesitation on the length of a fox terrier’s tail, but a fan——”“He wants to be considered artistic,” pleaded Miriam.“And the last touch about St. Francis, wasn’t that a trifle overdone? Somewhat too thickly laid on? What used to be called by painters in a pre-impressionistic age—too greatimpasto. I am afraid that you are a little deteriorating.”“Miriam!”Both turned, and found a tall lady calling with as great animation as a due regard for the requirements of a statuesque pose permitted.“I want to speak to you,” she exclaimed, as soon as words were possible. “I want you to come to my house to-morrow morning. I am going to have a little music. Emmeline is going to sing.”“Oh!” cried Miriam.“Don’t you like her singing?” the other inquired, earnestly.“Oh,verymuch,” assured Miriam. “Only—the truth is, I once heard her sing Brunnhilde’s ‘Awakening,’ and she murdered it so horribly.”“Emmeline is often too ambitious,” the other commented, with visible content.“Lighter things she can do charmingly, and she should hold to them,” Miriam announced, with decision.“I arranged the program,” said the lady, “and, for her own sake, I shall not let her attempt anything to which she is unequal. Of course, I shall not sing myself.”“Oh, Mrs. Ogden!”“You know I never sing anything but Wagner, and then only when there are a few—when my hearers are in full sympathy. You will be sure to come,” she added, as she turned to give another invitation. “By the way, you will be at Westbrook this autumn. I want you to ride Persiflage in the hunt as often as you like.”“Much better,” commented Miriam’s companion, as they strayed on. “Of course, nothing would please her—as a bitter rival—more than to hear her sister-in-law’s singing abused. That touch about lighter things was masterly when she herself only sings Wagner for a few. But how do you manage with Emmeline?”“I tell her that no one can conduct, an automobile as she does.”“My dear!”“It’s an amusing game,” the girl answered.“But is it a safe one?”“Why not?” she exclaimed, challengingly.The two advanced toward the spreading marquee which appeared to be the center of the mild social maelstrom. A greater ebullition perceptibly marked the spot. The conflict of voices arose more audibly. Many were constantly drawn inward, while by some counter-current others were, frequently cast outward to continue in drifting circles until again brought back to the gently agitated center. On the very edge of this vortex—the heart of which was the long table beneath the tent—sat a goodly sized lady. Her appearance might have been offered by a necromancer as the proof of a successfully accomplished trick, for the small camp stool on which she rested was so thoroughly concealed from sight that she might have been considered to rest upon air. Catching sight of Miriam, she beckoned to her with a vigor that threatened disruption of her gloves.“Where have you been?” she cried, as Miriam and her friend approached. “I have been waiting for you. So many have been asking for you. I expected you to be here.”“My dear Mrs. Gunnison,” cooed the girl, “you must forgive me. Absolutely, I could not help myself. I was all ready on time—but I have been admiring again your wonderful house. And I have been wondering at the perfect way in which it is kept up—the faultless manner in which everything is managed. I can only think of Lord Wantham’s place. Though, of course, there is not the brilliancy there——”“I like to have things nice about me,” said Mrs. Gunnison, complacently. “Sit down here, my dear. I want to have you near me. And you, too, Mrs. Brough.”“I may be a little to blame for keeping Miriam,” said the elder woman. “I have been so much interested in what she was saying.”“Every one is,” responded Mrs. Gunnison, warmly. “Miriam is so popular—quite celebrated, for it. Indeed, there are numbers of people here who want to meet her. One young man in particular—Mr. Leeds——”“Did he say he wished to know me?” the girl asked, quickly.“Well, no,” admitted Mrs. Gunnison, “But then I want you to know each other. I’m quite bent on it. Nothing could be better. I’d like to see it come out the way I’d have it. You know how rich he is. And they say he is going to be somebody. Mr. Leeds! Mr. Leeds!”A tall young man looked and advanced. While his gait did not indicate reluctance, there was nothing that seemed to reveal eagerness. He came forward deliberately and stopped before the party.“Idon’t think, Mr. Leeds, that you know Miss Whiting,” Mrs. Gunnison announced. “A dear friend of mine—and a dear. Mrs. Brough and you are old friends. You see her so often that I feel that I can take her away. Come, I want to show you something.”With her customary smile of unconcerned intelligence, Mrs. Brough allowed herself to be drawn off. The young man slowly settled himself in the chair which Mrs. Gunnison had left.“Oh, you shall not escape,” declared Miriam. “Mr. Leeds, I am so glad to be able to speak to you at last. I have so much to say to you. They told me that you would be here this afternoon. I wondered if I should see you.”Leeds had not spoken, but looked at the girl with a steadiness which for a moment caused her to cast down her animated eyes.“I missed you everywhere last winter,” she went on, more slowly. “And, of course, heard of you always.”Leeds continued to inspect the girl with amusement in his glance.“Oh, how splendid accomplishing something must be—standing for something!”“Don’t you think that you are rather overvaluing my modest achievements?”“Of course, you speak that way, but others do not,” she hurried on. “You are known from one end of the country to the other.”“Really——” he began.“To be such an inspiring influence in local politics——”“Because,” he laughed, “having a minor public position—because, by a fluke, having found myself in the place of a common councilman, I have got some things done and kept others from being done.”“Public life has always been so absorbing for me. I can think of nothing nobler for a man.”“Than being a common councilman,” he interrupted.“You laugh,” she said. “But I grew so interested, I followed in the newspapers, from day to day, what you were doing.”“You were very good,” he answered, gravely. “Or you are very good to say so.”“Don’t you believe me?” she asked, suddenly arrested by his tone.“I have heard a good deal of you, Miss Whiting.”Miriam flushed slightly, but she looked at him steadily.“What have you heard?”“I have heard that you have ways of making the worse appear the better reason—that you flatter.”The glow deepened in her face and her eyes flashed.“And,” he went on, lightly, “why should not one try to make the world pleasanter by making it more satisfied with itself? Isn’t that the part of a public benefactor?”“You are laughing at me,” she cried. “You—are—despising me.”“No, indeed,” he answered, with real earnestness. “You misunderstand me. Isn’t it only fair to give back in pleasant speeches the admiration and adulation that the world gives you? There would be a certain dishonesty in taking all and giving nothing.”“You—you—are mocking me,” she gasped, rising, as if to fly, and then sinking back.“No,” he answered, “only I object to being mocked myself. I’d rather not be included with all the others to be given pleasant words, as you can so easily give them out of a large supply. I’d prefer to have you think better of me than to believe that I am to be treated in that way.”“Mr. Leeds, you are abominable and rude—and I cannot listen to you.”“I am sorry. Honestly, when you began to make such—civil speeches to me I was disappointed. It was so exactly what I had been told to expect.”Miriam bit her lips—and her hand trembled a little on the handle of the sunshade.“I may have lost my temper a little,” he said, “which one should never do—but I can’t take anything back.”That afternoon Miss Whiting was strangely silent. Held at the opening of the tent by her hostess, people passed before her unseen. What she said she hardly knew. What her words meant she could not have told. She was only aware that her voice sounded unnatural, and that her laugh—when laugh she must—struck discordantly and strangely on her ears. She felt that the time would never come when she could be alone—to think.II.Mrs. Gunnison’s dinners, like all else of the establishment, were always large. The classic limits authoritatively imposed she would have scorned—if she had ever heard of them. If she could have timed it, the greater the number of minutes required by the procession to the dining room in passing a given point, the better she would have been satisfied. She only felt that she “entertained” when she beheld serried ranks of guests stretching away from her on either hand. Therefore, when Miriam turned and discovered Leeds at her right, they found themselves in such semi-isolation as only exists at a very large dinner table.“I am sorry,” he said, pleadingly.“So am I,” she answered. “Very—oh, you think I mean that to be pleasant in that way, too——”She hastily averted her face, and engaged vigorously in conversation with the man on the other side. Leeds stared moodily before him. During the passing of the many courses which Mrs.Gunnison’s idea of fitting ceremony demanded, the lady whom he had taken in found him neither communicative nor responsive. The dinner dragged on. Miss Whiting’s soft right shoulder remained constantly turned on him. Her discourses, which he could not help hearing, continued actively and unceasingly. At last Mrs. Gunnison darted restless glances about. She had already begun to stir uneasily in her chair.Miriam suddenly veered round upon him.“I want to tell you something,” she almost whispered. “What I said—what I tried to say this afternoon was true.”He looked at her with fixed earnestness.“Oh!” she cried, passionately. “I can’t bear to have you study me as if I were a specimen of something—of mendacity, you think. But no matter about that. You must believe me. Don’t you?”“How can I,” he answered, slowly, “with——”“With my reputation,” she caught up, quickly, as he paused. “Do not try to spare me—now. Can’t you hear—can’t you see, now, that I am speaking the truth?”He gazed at her without answering.“Oh, I can read in your eyes that you do not. I want you to believe me. Can’t you believe—even that?”He shook his head half smilingly.“You do not know all that I have heard,” he answered.“Who can have been so unfair—so cruel? I—I never wanted to be believed so before. Oh, you think that is only a part of it; that the habit is so strong with me—that I am only flattering.”“If I have been—warned,” Leeds continued.“As if I were a peril—an evil——”“Perhaps you might be,” he muttered.“I will not bear it. Youshallbelieve me. I am not flattering.”“At least, that you should have been willing to take the trouble to try was in itself a distinction.”“You are hard on me.”“I must protect myself.”Mrs. Gunnison had arisen, and a rustling stir was spreading down the table.“I am not a harpy,” she cried.“A siren was a bird more beautiful, but not less dangerous,” he said.She rose straightly and swiftly.“You feel that you can speak to me like that because you believe I am what you think. Very well. There may be satisfaction for you to know it. I am, then, everything that you have implied. More—more than you have said. I am false. I do flatter people—cajole them—deceive. I do it for my own interest. Now are you satisfied? Could anything be worse? I confess, even, that I have deserved the way you have treated me.”“Believe me——” he began, hastily.But she had swept from him, and, amid the group of retreating women, he found no chance to finish the sentence.III.Miriam Whiting said “good-night” very early. A greater accuracy might demand the statement that the time at which she had “gone upstairs” was relatively not late—for the hours of the house were expansive, and not only had morning a way of extending into afternoon, but midnight into morning. As a general thing, she had only disappeared with her hostess, but on this particular evening she pleaded weariness—sleepiness—had even hinted at a headache, which no one had ever known her to have. Thereupon she departed, followed by the reproaches of the rest. Once in her room, she hurried her maid, and, finally, abruptly dismissed her. When she was alone, she went to the window and threw wide both the shutters. She leaned with her elbows on the sill, gazing out at the moonlit country.Perfectly round, with a burnished sky about it, such as may sometimes be seen when the circle is absolutely full, the white disk hung in the heavens. Below, about the quiet edges of the fountain, the light lay with silken sheen. Only, where the drops fell tremulously, the water was broken into glittering sparks. All was very still. Far off a dogbarked fitfully. That was the one sound which broke the silence, with the exception of the occasional distant laughter of some men on the terrace at the end of the spreading wing. With her fingers buried in her thick hair, carefully gathered for the night, she looked straight before her, although she was wholly unconscious of the scene.A light knock at the door was repeated twice before she heard it and spoke.“It’s I,” the voice said, insistently. “May I come in?”“Of course,” Miriam answered, without moving.The door opened quickly, and a small figure darted into the room.“There was some one coming,” said Mrs. Brough, as she glanced down at the voluminous silken folds in which her little body was lost. “I am not in a condition to be seen—generally.”She came forward slowly.“My room is near yours. I saw your light. I thought that you had not gone to sleep. I wanted to come to speak to you.” She put her hands on Miriam’s shoulder. “You have been crying.”“Yes,” said Miriam, quietly.“I saw at dinner that you were not yourself—and I am troubled, too. I have a confession to make.”Miriam looked at her curiously.“You know that I am your friend—now,” the other went on. “Since we have been here together, we have come to know each other as I never thought that we should. There was a time before, though, when I did not understand so well. I had watched you, and I did not like you. I distrusted you—or, rather, did not trust you——”“I understand. You were clever enough to see through me——”“I thought that with your—insincerities that you were all false. I should have been wise enough to know differently. But what will you?—to assume evil is easy, and always gives one a proud sense of superior perspicacity. I condemned you, Miriam, without a hearing, and I told Arthur Leeds.”“You did it?” the girl murmured, dully.“Yes, I warned him.”“Why?”“Because I like him and admire him, and I thought you—dangerous.”“That is why he has said the things he has.”“He has said something?”“He has told me that I am not worthy of regard or consideration or respect.”“Impossible!”“Perhaps not directly—but he has implied that and more—by word and action. And—and—I love him.”Mrs. Brough sat down quickly in the chair which she had drawn up, and took Miriam’s hands.“I know you so well now,” she said, “that at dinner I saw something was wrong. I did not realize that it was as bad as that.”“I think I loved him even last winter, when I only saw him—heard who he was—and did not know him. I admired and respected and reverenced him. But he seemed different to me. And to-day when I met him I wanted to tell him a little—as much as I could—of what I thought. I wanted him to know something of the feeling that I had. I wanted to please him. I wanted him to be nice to me—because I pleased him. What I said to him was true—true.”She sprang to her feet, and spoke in deep, tragic tones.“True!” she repeated. “And I have lost the power of being thought true. My words can only be considered so many counterfeits. I have so often debased the true metal of sincerity that anything I say must ring false—that anything I may give cannot be taken. What I said sounded fraudulently in my own ears. I could not forget the many, many times when I had spoken so nearly in the same way without meaning or belief, and each speech seemed to me a mockery. Though I longed with all of me to speak simply and sincerely—knowing that I spoke the truth—I hardly seemed to myself to be doing it. All appeared a part, but a repetition of the many times before when I had played a part—when what I did was a comedy—a farce—a tragedy!”She broke off with a sob.“You have cried wolf pretty often,” avowed Mrs. Brough.“I am a Cassandra,” said the girl, instantly. “When I wish to be believed I cannot. When all that is most precious and dearest to me depends on it I cannot be trusted. I may speak, but I shall not be heard—when all my life is in being heard—I know it.”“You see,” said Mrs. Brough, “when I told him I thought of you as you seemed——”“As I was. I don’t blame you,” Miriam cried, bitterly. “What I had become! Let me tell you.” She sat down again, and, with her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands, gazed fixedly at the other. “I think I began innocently enough. I wanted to be liked—and I fell into the way of saying pleasant little things. I tried to make everybody contented and pleased with me. That was when I came out. Indeed, I may say for myself that I had a sympathetic nature. I could not bear to see anyone uncomfortable or doubtful about themselves or anything, without trying to help them. Surely that was not bad?”“No,” said Mrs. Brough, slowly.“I really wished to help every one,” she continued. “And the best way that I found to do it was to say pleasant things. It was easy—too fatally easy. When I discovered how popular this made me I kept on. I continued for myself what I had really begun for others. Insensibly I acquired skill. I was not stupid. I had rather a gift for character—and could say exactly the thing to each one to flatter them the most. I found that I took pleasure in the exercise of such cleverness. There was a feeling of power in it—playing with the foibles and weaknesses of men and women. I did not see that I was often trafficking in unworthiness and baseness.”“I’ve no doubt you did harm,” concluded Mrs. Brough. “People are only too willing to be encouraged in their vanities. I don’t think, Miriam, that you were really very good for a person’s character.”“I was not very good for my own,” Miriam went on, grimly. “I retrograded. I can see it now. In playing on the follies and faults of others, I grew less careful—less critical myself. Then the family lost its money. Oh, I haven’t the poor excuse that I was in want—that what I did was done from any lack of anything essential for myself or others. Ours was just a commonplace, undramatic loss—with only need for saving and retrenchment. Without the deprivation of a single necessity, or comfort, even. Merely the absence of the luxuries. The luxuries, though, in a way, had become necessities to me—and—I found, by exercising my power, I could get much that I wished. I flattered and cajoled to please people, so that they would do things for me, give me things. That is ended——”She pointed dramatically to a table.“There is the fan from Bengy Wade in a package. To-morrow it goes back to him. There is a note to Mrs. Grayson, declining her invitation. If I go to Westbrook I shall not ride Persiflage. I have turned over a new leaf. But the degradation of thinking of the record on the old ones! If I could only tear them out instead of trying to fold them down. I see it all now. He has made me see it all. He has made me despise myself until I see the way I look in his eyes; until I seem the same in my own. Janet, what can I do?”The girl’s head bent on the arm of the chair, as her body was shaken with sobs. The other put out her hand and gently stroked her heavy hair.“Don’t you exaggerate?”“Did you,” Miriam panted, “when you said what you did to Mr. Leeds? Did you make my blackness less black than it should be—did you concede to me any saving light?”“I did not know. If I can do anything now——”“You must not speak to him,” Miriam cried, sitting up abruptly. “There would be no use. When the seeds of distrust have been sown they will grow, even if the weeds crowd out everything else.”“But weeds can be dug up.”“That must be my part,” Miriam answered, more calmly. “Only one course is left. It’s funny,” she smiled, swiftly, through her tears. “There is poetic justice in it. I can do only one thing. It is my retribution.”IV.The announcement which Mrs. Gunnison made on the following morning came as a surprise to Miriam. She had some difficulty in not displaying an undue excitement. The habit of containment, which had come with worldly experience, however, did not fail her. She heard her hostess state that Arthur Leeds was coming to stay in the house without any exhibition of visible emotion. Mrs. Gunnison said that, as the Barlows had other people coming, he was going to transfer himself to “Highlands,” and that he would arrive in time for luncheon. Any fears which Miriam experienced were wholly offset by a devout thankfulness. The event offered such an occasion for the carrying out of her plan as she had not hoped to have given her. In the promise of such an admirable opportunity for the execution of her purpose, she found a melancholy satisfaction. If, as she thought to herself, the iron was to enter her soul, the sooner the affair was accomplished the better. The process of self-sacrifice was not pleasant in the execution, however glorious it might appear in the conception. Self-immolation might be a duty, but, as every martyrdom, it was more satisfactory as an ideal than as a fact.The first opportunity which came to execute what she had laboriously planned was during the aimless inoccupation of after luncheon idleness. The arrangements for the afternoon had not yet been concluded, but were in the careless making. Who should ride; who should drive; who should walk; who should go and who should stay; the what and whither had not been settled: Leeds strolled to her side.“I have been trying to speak to you, but you have avoided me.”“Yes,” she said.“Why?” he asked; “I am going to tell you the truth, now——” she paused, and looked at him.“Why?” he repeated.“Because I think that you are the most detestable man I ever saw,” she answered, gazing squarely at him.He started slightly—glanced at her in surprise, and abruptly sat down on the divan beside her.“You have really come to that conclusion?” he asked.“I have always believed it,” she answered, firmly.“But you said——”“You told me that I was a flatterer. I shall not be withyouany longer. You wish the truth. You shall have it.”“That is what you thought from the first?” he said, slowly.“Yes,” she answered, less clearly. “I have always understood that you were most absurdly self-satisfied. That you are deluded by a pose as to which you are so weak as to deceive yourself. That you take yourself with a seriousness which leads you to believe that you are preaching a crusade when you are only blowing a penny whistle. That you assume that you have made for yourself a position and a reputation which were made for you.”“What do you mean?” he asked, quietly.“You have an old name and a large fortune which rendered you conspicuous and made everything easy. The newspapers have talked of you only as they would anyway. Indeed, they would have given more space to you if you had a liking for conducting an automobile painted like a barber’s pole than they have because you went into politics. They would have preferred the striped automobile, but they had to be content with the ‘reform politics’ as the freak of one in your place.”“Then you think I am—nothing?”“You are a rich young man of assured position—spoiled by the world.”“I thought I had, at least, ordinary common sense.”“Probably—but still you have undulylost your head. You would not know if people were laughing at you——”Leeds flushed slightly. Miriam caught her breath sharply, and reached forward to take up a fan which lay within her reach.“I am altogether a monster?”“No,” she replied, calmly. “A very ordinary young man, I should say.”“I’d be kind to dumb animals and not kick a baby——”“I am quite serious,” she answered. “You objected to any little pleasantness on my part because what I said might not be altogether sincere. Now we are going to have facts. Indeed, you are the type of man I dislike.”“At least, we know where we are now,” he responded.“Yes. And as we are staying in the same house it may be as well.”Miriam rose slowly. She walked decidedly across the room, and ostentatiously placed herself beside Mrs. Gunnison. Leeds, deserted, did not move. He sat staring at the floor, as he softly drummed with his fingers on the couch’s leather arm.As well as in certain other particulars, the life of a country house is microcosmical in this—escape from the requirements of human relationship is impossible. Indeed, the demands are made greater, the bonds more firmly fixed. In fact, the condition of all may be more fitly described as the condition of two united in matrimony—they take each other for better or worse. Constantly through the day they must meet. The terms on which they are thrown together impose intimacy. If latent antipathy exists with the revealing conditions of constant companionship it must be discovered. If inherent sympathy is to be found the two gravitate toward each other with inevitable certainty. As the birthplace of aversion quickly reaching a maturity of detestation and hate; as the hothouse of interest growing speedily into full bloom of liking and love, there is no place like a country house. All existence there, in its condensed form, is a forcing process. Without any awkwardly abrupt transition or disconnecting jolts, those who begin to talk about mutual friends in the morning may easily reach a discussion of their own souls in the afternoon, and be far on the broad and easy path of sentiment by evening. Like or dislike, more or less strong, must surely and quickly follow. There is in the social chemistry a certainty of repulsion or attraction, out of which the most unexpected combinations result—of a surprisingly lasting nature.In the daily routine Miriam saw Leeds constantly. Though she might come down late for breakfast, she always found him. Even if she breakfasted in her room, when she descended he was always smoking in the hall.“I did not expect to stay so long,” he explained to her on one occasion, rising as she paused at the foot of the stairs.“Then why do you?” she asked, coldly.“Don’t you know?” he demanded. “Should you feel it pleasanter if I went away?”“Really—as I have undertaken to be perfectly frank with you—how can your going or staying make the least difference in the world to me?”“Still,” he said, looking at her curiously, “there must be something tiresome in having to be scorning somebody all the time.”“I think,” she said, briefly, “I hear voices in the billiard room. I am going in there.”If at dinner Leeds found himself next to her he discovered that she spoke to him no more than the strict letter of the law governing the conduct of guests in the same house demanded. What she said was of the most indifferent nature. If he sought to reach a more personal basis he found himself checked.“Miss Whiting,” he said, suddenly, on the third evening, “I am going away to-morrow morning.”Miriam swung about swiftly.“To-morrow!” she exclaimed, with a catch in her voice.“Yes, I think I had better go, though there is something I want to tell youbefore I do. I have thought of all that you have said. I have profited by the new light that you have thrown upon myself—my actions—my life.”“What do you mean?” she murmured.“I have realized that very likely I am a prig. I understand the futility of what I am trying to do. I see that I have been mistaken in my power. I’m going to give up.”“Give up?” she replied.“You have shown that I was attempting more than I was able to do. The Donaldsons have asked me to go in their yacht round the world. TheViernastarts on Thursday. I am going away to be lazy and careless, and live the life for which you think I’m fitted.”“You are going to give up everything?” she exclaimed.“Yes,” he answered. “It is your doing. You must take the responsibility of it.”“But what I say—what I think, can make no difference,” she almost entreated. “I am not of enough importance to you—you cannot consider me enough——”“All that is something of which you know nothing,” he answered, gravely. “Something of which I have told you nothing. I am going away—with the Donaldsons.”“People like that!” she interrupted.“People like that. I am going with them to lead their life—to be gone for a year, unless one thing happens. As I said, you are responsible.”“But I can’t be,” she implored. “It isn’t possible. I can’t count for anything.”“Let me assure you that you do.”“Then I can’t take the responsibility. I won’t.”“Unless one thing happens I am going,” he went on, inflexibly. “There are some, I think, who believe in me—who will think I am making a mistake.”“But your future—your career,” she began, and paused abashed, as she saw the way he watched her.“I thought we were to have no—insincerities—no flatteries. Since I know what you really think, such civil implications can mean nothing.”She bit her lips, pale as her cheeks were white.“Oh!” she cried, “how horrible!”Through all of dinner she hardly spoke. If she said nothing to Leeds, neither would she address the man on her other side, only giving such monosyllable answers as were necessary. The evening dragged slowly. Leeds did not approach her. Once or twice she looked toward him, but he did not appear to notice her. Indeed, he only came late from the smoking room and returned after a brief appearance in the big hall.“When,” she asked once, in a timid voice, of Mrs. Gunnison, “does Mr. Leeds go?”“The early train,” the lady answered. “I believe he leaves the house before seven, or at some equally unearthly hour.”The fresh sunlight of the early morning was flooding through the open hall door as Leeds came down the wide, main stairs. He saw, under theporte-cochère, the trap ready to take him to the station, and into which the second man, with the help of the groom, was lifting his trunk. Here and there a housemaid was busy with duster and cloth. The machinery of the establishment was being set in running condition, and there was the accompanying disorder. The place seemed strange and unfamiliar.“Your keys, sir,” the butler said, holding out the bunch.“Yes,” he answered, “I’m ready.”As he spoke he started. Clearly in the stillness of the morning he heard a few soft notes struck on the piano. At that hour the sound was most unusual. He listened. The Flower Music of “Parsifal.” With a swiftness that left the astonished butler staring after him, he darted toward a door. In a moment he had torn the portière aside and had crossed the polished floor of the music room. Miriam was seated at the piano, her fingers resting on the keys.“You are down!” he exclaimed.“Yes,” she answered, neither turning round nor looking up.“You are very early.”“Yes,” she assented. Then she whirled about on the music stool. “I came down to see you.”“Why?”Both spoke with a simple directness—with the manner of those dealing in ultimate moments with the unmistakable facts.“You told me last night that you were doing as you do because of what I have said. I cannot take the responsibility. I’d rather that you thought even worse of me than you do. Oh!” she cried, bending her head down on her hands, which clasped the rack of the piano. “I am, false—false! I cannot be true even in my falsity. All that I have been telling you is not the truth.”“Yes?” he interrupted, eagerly.“When you judged me—when you told me—or showed me what you thought of me—I recognized what I was doing—what I was. I saw I was false. My pride drove me to do something else. It was a punishment for myself—a price I must pay. As falsely as you thought I tried to please you—as falsely,really, I made myself hateful to you. I told you every untrue, miserable thing of which I could think. It seems as if any little remnant of dignity which I had demanded it. But to have you say that you were influenced by my lies—were going to give up so much that was splendid and great—because of them! Oh, you must believe me now. I could not bear it.”“Then you don’t think I am altogether contemptible?”“I think you are the finest and best and strongest man I know,” she said, bravely.On one knee, beside her, he had his arm about her.“Bless you, darling,” he cried. “Then I can tell the truth, too. I think that you are the dearest and sweetest woman, and I love you—love you!”“I—I don’t deserve it,” she sobbed.“I would not,” he said, “let myself believe what you told me at first, but then I would not let myself believe what you said afterward. I hoped——”“Oh, it was so hard for me. Can’t you understand? There was expiation in it. Don’t you think it enough?”“I think we have both been mistaken and unhappy.”“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Since the first I have changed. It taught me a lesson. I am different—really.”“We’ll have everything all right now, and that is all.”“But you are going away,” she exclaimed.“I said I was going away unless one thing happened.”“Yes,” she said, eagerly.“Very well—it has happened.”The sound of the brush striking sharply and with metallic distinctness on a dustpan came from the room beyond.“Perhaps we had better go on the terrace,” he laughed. “Really, you know, we ought to have moonlight and mystery, but——”Together they went out through the open door into the fresh, soft morning air. The warm scent of the garden blew up to them. A large, yellow butterfly fluttered peacefully by. The dew still lay on leaf and flower, glittering in a thousand sparkles.“The night is the time for romance,” he said. “Any well managed proposal should be made under the stars.”“But the morning, such a morning,” she exclaimed, softly, and clasping her hands in ecstasy. “And as this is going to be a beginning for me, I like the morning better.”
THE FLATTERERBy George Hibbard
By George Hibbard
Miss Miriam Whitinglanguidly descended the broad terrace steps. If her slow progress suggested bodily weariness, her whole bearing was not less indicative of spiritual lassitude. She allowed her hand to stray indolently along the balustrade, as with the other she held the lace-covered sunshade at a careless angle over her shoulder.
On the lawn the guests from outside were gathered. Collected in groups or wandering in pairs, they dotted the grounds. As one of those staying in the house, she appeared as a semi-official hostess with a modified duty of seeing that all went as well as possible. Her head ached slightly, as she began to discover. Even the light of the late afternoon was trying. The dress which she expected to wear had proved too dilapidated, and she had been obliged to put on one she wished to save for more important occasions. The invitation which she needed for the satisfactory conduct of her modish itineracy from country house to country house had not come in the early mail as she expected.
The band, hidden in a small, thick boscage of the wide gardens, broke into a mockingly cheerful air. At intervals some distant laugh taunted her. She was late, she knew. The shadows had begun to lengthen across the open spaces by the fountain, and she could almost see Mrs. Gunnison’s tart and ominous frown of displeasure. Why was she there, except to be seen; so that the world should know that one who had just come from the Kingsmills’ place on the Hudson had paused beneath the broad roofs of “Highlands” before, presumably, going to the Van Velsors, in Newport?
As with pinched lips she reflected, she quickened her pace carefully.
“Ah, senator!” she cried, as she held out her hand with regulated effusion. “I am so charmed. I did not know that you were to be here. You great ones of the earth are so busy and so much in demand——”
Senator Grayson bowed and beamed. He shifted in uneasy gratification from one foot to the other, and a rosier red showed in his round face.
“I did not think that you young ladies noticed us old politicians——”
“Every one should be given the benefit of a doubt. Of course, in our silly lives there is not very much chance to know about anything really worth while, but when a thing is really great even we cannot help hearing about it. Your last speech—the broad, far-reaching views——”
The senator stood in agreeable embarrassment.
“I read it,” Miriam continued. “I could not go to sleep, because I wanted to finish it. Of course, I could not understand all, but I was entranced. Even I could feel the force and eloquence. I have heard of nothing else.”
“Really?” cried the enchanted statesman. “Do you know I thought it had fallen flat? You are good to tell me. These side-lights are of the utmost value, and, indeed, I esteem your opinion. Would you let me get out a cup of tea? And—and—Mrs. Grayson was only saying the other day that she wanted to ask you to come to Washington for a visit this winter.”
As the senator stumbled away, Miss Whiting felt a light touch at her elbow.
“In your most popular and successful manner, Miriam,” said a slight, slim woman, whom she found standing beside her.
“He’s a dear, if he is an old goose,” said Miriam, defiantly. “And, of course, any shading would be lost on him.”
“I know,” continued the other, the sharp brown eyes in her lean brown faceregarding the girl critically. “There are degrees of flattery even in your flattering. You have reduced it—or elevated it—to the proud position of an exact science.”
Before Miriam could reply, a young man who had discovered her from afar advanced with what was evidently an unusual degree of precipitancy.
“Miss Whiting, I am delighted,” he puffed. “I have been looking for you everywhere. I was in town, and I went to that bric-a-brac shop. The fan is undoubtedly a real Jacques Callot.”
“I was sure,” she murmured, “with your knowledge and taste, that you could decide at once. Of course, I did not know.”
“And—and——” hesitated the youth, “I hope that you will not be offended. I told them to send it to you here. If you will accept it?”
“How terrible—and how kind of you!” Miriam cried, holding out both hands, as if led by an irresistible impulse. “But you are so generous. All your friends have discovered that. I always think of St. Francis sharing his cloak with the blind beggar.”
“So good of you,” he stuttered. “It’s nothing. You must be tired. Can’t I bring a chair for you? I am going to get one.”
As the young man turned hurriedly away, Miriam grasped her companion’s arm.
“I never thought that he would give it to me. Never, Janet—honestly,” she exclaimed, with earnestness.
“The way of the transgressor is likely to be strewn—with surprises.”
“I only thought of saying something pleasant at a dinner.”
“I’d taken Bengy Wade’s opinion without a moment’s hesitation on the length of a fox terrier’s tail, but a fan——”
“He wants to be considered artistic,” pleaded Miriam.
“And the last touch about St. Francis, wasn’t that a trifle overdone? Somewhat too thickly laid on? What used to be called by painters in a pre-impressionistic age—too greatimpasto. I am afraid that you are a little deteriorating.”
“Miriam!”
Both turned, and found a tall lady calling with as great animation as a due regard for the requirements of a statuesque pose permitted.
“I want to speak to you,” she exclaimed, as soon as words were possible. “I want you to come to my house to-morrow morning. I am going to have a little music. Emmeline is going to sing.”
“Oh!” cried Miriam.
“Don’t you like her singing?” the other inquired, earnestly.
“Oh,verymuch,” assured Miriam. “Only—the truth is, I once heard her sing Brunnhilde’s ‘Awakening,’ and she murdered it so horribly.”
“Emmeline is often too ambitious,” the other commented, with visible content.
“Lighter things she can do charmingly, and she should hold to them,” Miriam announced, with decision.
“I arranged the program,” said the lady, “and, for her own sake, I shall not let her attempt anything to which she is unequal. Of course, I shall not sing myself.”
“Oh, Mrs. Ogden!”
“You know I never sing anything but Wagner, and then only when there are a few—when my hearers are in full sympathy. You will be sure to come,” she added, as she turned to give another invitation. “By the way, you will be at Westbrook this autumn. I want you to ride Persiflage in the hunt as often as you like.”
“Much better,” commented Miriam’s companion, as they strayed on. “Of course, nothing would please her—as a bitter rival—more than to hear her sister-in-law’s singing abused. That touch about lighter things was masterly when she herself only sings Wagner for a few. But how do you manage with Emmeline?”
“I tell her that no one can conduct, an automobile as she does.”
“My dear!”
“It’s an amusing game,” the girl answered.
“But is it a safe one?”
“Why not?” she exclaimed, challengingly.
The two advanced toward the spreading marquee which appeared to be the center of the mild social maelstrom. A greater ebullition perceptibly marked the spot. The conflict of voices arose more audibly. Many were constantly drawn inward, while by some counter-current others were, frequently cast outward to continue in drifting circles until again brought back to the gently agitated center. On the very edge of this vortex—the heart of which was the long table beneath the tent—sat a goodly sized lady. Her appearance might have been offered by a necromancer as the proof of a successfully accomplished trick, for the small camp stool on which she rested was so thoroughly concealed from sight that she might have been considered to rest upon air. Catching sight of Miriam, she beckoned to her with a vigor that threatened disruption of her gloves.
“Where have you been?” she cried, as Miriam and her friend approached. “I have been waiting for you. So many have been asking for you. I expected you to be here.”
“My dear Mrs. Gunnison,” cooed the girl, “you must forgive me. Absolutely, I could not help myself. I was all ready on time—but I have been admiring again your wonderful house. And I have been wondering at the perfect way in which it is kept up—the faultless manner in which everything is managed. I can only think of Lord Wantham’s place. Though, of course, there is not the brilliancy there——”
“I like to have things nice about me,” said Mrs. Gunnison, complacently. “Sit down here, my dear. I want to have you near me. And you, too, Mrs. Brough.”
“I may be a little to blame for keeping Miriam,” said the elder woman. “I have been so much interested in what she was saying.”
“Every one is,” responded Mrs. Gunnison, warmly. “Miriam is so popular—quite celebrated, for it. Indeed, there are numbers of people here who want to meet her. One young man in particular—Mr. Leeds——”
“Did he say he wished to know me?” the girl asked, quickly.
“Well, no,” admitted Mrs. Gunnison, “But then I want you to know each other. I’m quite bent on it. Nothing could be better. I’d like to see it come out the way I’d have it. You know how rich he is. And they say he is going to be somebody. Mr. Leeds! Mr. Leeds!”
A tall young man looked and advanced. While his gait did not indicate reluctance, there was nothing that seemed to reveal eagerness. He came forward deliberately and stopped before the party.
“Idon’t think, Mr. Leeds, that you know Miss Whiting,” Mrs. Gunnison announced. “A dear friend of mine—and a dear. Mrs. Brough and you are old friends. You see her so often that I feel that I can take her away. Come, I want to show you something.”
With her customary smile of unconcerned intelligence, Mrs. Brough allowed herself to be drawn off. The young man slowly settled himself in the chair which Mrs. Gunnison had left.
“Oh, you shall not escape,” declared Miriam. “Mr. Leeds, I am so glad to be able to speak to you at last. I have so much to say to you. They told me that you would be here this afternoon. I wondered if I should see you.”
Leeds had not spoken, but looked at the girl with a steadiness which for a moment caused her to cast down her animated eyes.
“I missed you everywhere last winter,” she went on, more slowly. “And, of course, heard of you always.”
Leeds continued to inspect the girl with amusement in his glance.
“Oh, how splendid accomplishing something must be—standing for something!”
“Don’t you think that you are rather overvaluing my modest achievements?”
“Of course, you speak that way, but others do not,” she hurried on. “You are known from one end of the country to the other.”
“Really——” he began.
“To be such an inspiring influence in local politics——”
“Because,” he laughed, “having a minor public position—because, by a fluke, having found myself in the place of a common councilman, I have got some things done and kept others from being done.”
“Public life has always been so absorbing for me. I can think of nothing nobler for a man.”
“Than being a common councilman,” he interrupted.
“You laugh,” she said. “But I grew so interested, I followed in the newspapers, from day to day, what you were doing.”
“You were very good,” he answered, gravely. “Or you are very good to say so.”
“Don’t you believe me?” she asked, suddenly arrested by his tone.
“I have heard a good deal of you, Miss Whiting.”
Miriam flushed slightly, but she looked at him steadily.
“What have you heard?”
“I have heard that you have ways of making the worse appear the better reason—that you flatter.”
The glow deepened in her face and her eyes flashed.
“And,” he went on, lightly, “why should not one try to make the world pleasanter by making it more satisfied with itself? Isn’t that the part of a public benefactor?”
“You are laughing at me,” she cried. “You—are—despising me.”
“No, indeed,” he answered, with real earnestness. “You misunderstand me. Isn’t it only fair to give back in pleasant speeches the admiration and adulation that the world gives you? There would be a certain dishonesty in taking all and giving nothing.”
“You—you—are mocking me,” she gasped, rising, as if to fly, and then sinking back.
“No,” he answered, “only I object to being mocked myself. I’d rather not be included with all the others to be given pleasant words, as you can so easily give them out of a large supply. I’d prefer to have you think better of me than to believe that I am to be treated in that way.”
“Mr. Leeds, you are abominable and rude—and I cannot listen to you.”
“I am sorry. Honestly, when you began to make such—civil speeches to me I was disappointed. It was so exactly what I had been told to expect.”
Miriam bit her lips—and her hand trembled a little on the handle of the sunshade.
“I may have lost my temper a little,” he said, “which one should never do—but I can’t take anything back.”
That afternoon Miss Whiting was strangely silent. Held at the opening of the tent by her hostess, people passed before her unseen. What she said she hardly knew. What her words meant she could not have told. She was only aware that her voice sounded unnatural, and that her laugh—when laugh she must—struck discordantly and strangely on her ears. She felt that the time would never come when she could be alone—to think.
Mrs. Gunnison’s dinners, like all else of the establishment, were always large. The classic limits authoritatively imposed she would have scorned—if she had ever heard of them. If she could have timed it, the greater the number of minutes required by the procession to the dining room in passing a given point, the better she would have been satisfied. She only felt that she “entertained” when she beheld serried ranks of guests stretching away from her on either hand. Therefore, when Miriam turned and discovered Leeds at her right, they found themselves in such semi-isolation as only exists at a very large dinner table.
“I am sorry,” he said, pleadingly.
“So am I,” she answered. “Very—oh, you think I mean that to be pleasant in that way, too——”
She hastily averted her face, and engaged vigorously in conversation with the man on the other side. Leeds stared moodily before him. During the passing of the many courses which Mrs.Gunnison’s idea of fitting ceremony demanded, the lady whom he had taken in found him neither communicative nor responsive. The dinner dragged on. Miss Whiting’s soft right shoulder remained constantly turned on him. Her discourses, which he could not help hearing, continued actively and unceasingly. At last Mrs. Gunnison darted restless glances about. She had already begun to stir uneasily in her chair.
Miriam suddenly veered round upon him.
“I want to tell you something,” she almost whispered. “What I said—what I tried to say this afternoon was true.”
He looked at her with fixed earnestness.
“Oh!” she cried, passionately. “I can’t bear to have you study me as if I were a specimen of something—of mendacity, you think. But no matter about that. You must believe me. Don’t you?”
“How can I,” he answered, slowly, “with——”
“With my reputation,” she caught up, quickly, as he paused. “Do not try to spare me—now. Can’t you hear—can’t you see, now, that I am speaking the truth?”
He gazed at her without answering.
“Oh, I can read in your eyes that you do not. I want you to believe me. Can’t you believe—even that?”
He shook his head half smilingly.
“You do not know all that I have heard,” he answered.
“Who can have been so unfair—so cruel? I—I never wanted to be believed so before. Oh, you think that is only a part of it; that the habit is so strong with me—that I am only flattering.”
“If I have been—warned,” Leeds continued.
“As if I were a peril—an evil——”
“Perhaps you might be,” he muttered.
“I will not bear it. Youshallbelieve me. I am not flattering.”
“At least, that you should have been willing to take the trouble to try was in itself a distinction.”
“You are hard on me.”
“I must protect myself.”
Mrs. Gunnison had arisen, and a rustling stir was spreading down the table.
“I am not a harpy,” she cried.
“A siren was a bird more beautiful, but not less dangerous,” he said.
She rose straightly and swiftly.
“You feel that you can speak to me like that because you believe I am what you think. Very well. There may be satisfaction for you to know it. I am, then, everything that you have implied. More—more than you have said. I am false. I do flatter people—cajole them—deceive. I do it for my own interest. Now are you satisfied? Could anything be worse? I confess, even, that I have deserved the way you have treated me.”
“Believe me——” he began, hastily.
But she had swept from him, and, amid the group of retreating women, he found no chance to finish the sentence.
Miriam Whiting said “good-night” very early. A greater accuracy might demand the statement that the time at which she had “gone upstairs” was relatively not late—for the hours of the house were expansive, and not only had morning a way of extending into afternoon, but midnight into morning. As a general thing, she had only disappeared with her hostess, but on this particular evening she pleaded weariness—sleepiness—had even hinted at a headache, which no one had ever known her to have. Thereupon she departed, followed by the reproaches of the rest. Once in her room, she hurried her maid, and, finally, abruptly dismissed her. When she was alone, she went to the window and threw wide both the shutters. She leaned with her elbows on the sill, gazing out at the moonlit country.
Perfectly round, with a burnished sky about it, such as may sometimes be seen when the circle is absolutely full, the white disk hung in the heavens. Below, about the quiet edges of the fountain, the light lay with silken sheen. Only, where the drops fell tremulously, the water was broken into glittering sparks. All was very still. Far off a dogbarked fitfully. That was the one sound which broke the silence, with the exception of the occasional distant laughter of some men on the terrace at the end of the spreading wing. With her fingers buried in her thick hair, carefully gathered for the night, she looked straight before her, although she was wholly unconscious of the scene.
A light knock at the door was repeated twice before she heard it and spoke.
“It’s I,” the voice said, insistently. “May I come in?”
“Of course,” Miriam answered, without moving.
The door opened quickly, and a small figure darted into the room.
“There was some one coming,” said Mrs. Brough, as she glanced down at the voluminous silken folds in which her little body was lost. “I am not in a condition to be seen—generally.”
She came forward slowly.
“My room is near yours. I saw your light. I thought that you had not gone to sleep. I wanted to come to speak to you.” She put her hands on Miriam’s shoulder. “You have been crying.”
“Yes,” said Miriam, quietly.
“I saw at dinner that you were not yourself—and I am troubled, too. I have a confession to make.”
Miriam looked at her curiously.
“You know that I am your friend—now,” the other went on. “Since we have been here together, we have come to know each other as I never thought that we should. There was a time before, though, when I did not understand so well. I had watched you, and I did not like you. I distrusted you—or, rather, did not trust you——”
“I understand. You were clever enough to see through me——”
“I thought that with your—insincerities that you were all false. I should have been wise enough to know differently. But what will you?—to assume evil is easy, and always gives one a proud sense of superior perspicacity. I condemned you, Miriam, without a hearing, and I told Arthur Leeds.”
“You did it?” the girl murmured, dully.
“Yes, I warned him.”
“Why?”
“Because I like him and admire him, and I thought you—dangerous.”
“That is why he has said the things he has.”
“He has said something?”
“He has told me that I am not worthy of regard or consideration or respect.”
“Impossible!”
“Perhaps not directly—but he has implied that and more—by word and action. And—and—I love him.”
Mrs. Brough sat down quickly in the chair which she had drawn up, and took Miriam’s hands.
“I know you so well now,” she said, “that at dinner I saw something was wrong. I did not realize that it was as bad as that.”
“I think I loved him even last winter, when I only saw him—heard who he was—and did not know him. I admired and respected and reverenced him. But he seemed different to me. And to-day when I met him I wanted to tell him a little—as much as I could—of what I thought. I wanted him to know something of the feeling that I had. I wanted to please him. I wanted him to be nice to me—because I pleased him. What I said to him was true—true.”
She sprang to her feet, and spoke in deep, tragic tones.
“True!” she repeated. “And I have lost the power of being thought true. My words can only be considered so many counterfeits. I have so often debased the true metal of sincerity that anything I say must ring false—that anything I may give cannot be taken. What I said sounded fraudulently in my own ears. I could not forget the many, many times when I had spoken so nearly in the same way without meaning or belief, and each speech seemed to me a mockery. Though I longed with all of me to speak simply and sincerely—knowing that I spoke the truth—I hardly seemed to myself to be doing it. All appeared a part, but a repetition of the many times before when I had played a part—when what I did was a comedy—a farce—a tragedy!”
She broke off with a sob.
“You have cried wolf pretty often,” avowed Mrs. Brough.
“I am a Cassandra,” said the girl, instantly. “When I wish to be believed I cannot. When all that is most precious and dearest to me depends on it I cannot be trusted. I may speak, but I shall not be heard—when all my life is in being heard—I know it.”
“You see,” said Mrs. Brough, “when I told him I thought of you as you seemed——”
“As I was. I don’t blame you,” Miriam cried, bitterly. “What I had become! Let me tell you.” She sat down again, and, with her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands, gazed fixedly at the other. “I think I began innocently enough. I wanted to be liked—and I fell into the way of saying pleasant little things. I tried to make everybody contented and pleased with me. That was when I came out. Indeed, I may say for myself that I had a sympathetic nature. I could not bear to see anyone uncomfortable or doubtful about themselves or anything, without trying to help them. Surely that was not bad?”
“No,” said Mrs. Brough, slowly.
“I really wished to help every one,” she continued. “And the best way that I found to do it was to say pleasant things. It was easy—too fatally easy. When I discovered how popular this made me I kept on. I continued for myself what I had really begun for others. Insensibly I acquired skill. I was not stupid. I had rather a gift for character—and could say exactly the thing to each one to flatter them the most. I found that I took pleasure in the exercise of such cleverness. There was a feeling of power in it—playing with the foibles and weaknesses of men and women. I did not see that I was often trafficking in unworthiness and baseness.”
“I’ve no doubt you did harm,” concluded Mrs. Brough. “People are only too willing to be encouraged in their vanities. I don’t think, Miriam, that you were really very good for a person’s character.”
“I was not very good for my own,” Miriam went on, grimly. “I retrograded. I can see it now. In playing on the follies and faults of others, I grew less careful—less critical myself. Then the family lost its money. Oh, I haven’t the poor excuse that I was in want—that what I did was done from any lack of anything essential for myself or others. Ours was just a commonplace, undramatic loss—with only need for saving and retrenchment. Without the deprivation of a single necessity, or comfort, even. Merely the absence of the luxuries. The luxuries, though, in a way, had become necessities to me—and—I found, by exercising my power, I could get much that I wished. I flattered and cajoled to please people, so that they would do things for me, give me things. That is ended——”
She pointed dramatically to a table.
“There is the fan from Bengy Wade in a package. To-morrow it goes back to him. There is a note to Mrs. Grayson, declining her invitation. If I go to Westbrook I shall not ride Persiflage. I have turned over a new leaf. But the degradation of thinking of the record on the old ones! If I could only tear them out instead of trying to fold them down. I see it all now. He has made me see it all. He has made me despise myself until I see the way I look in his eyes; until I seem the same in my own. Janet, what can I do?”
The girl’s head bent on the arm of the chair, as her body was shaken with sobs. The other put out her hand and gently stroked her heavy hair.
“Don’t you exaggerate?”
“Did you,” Miriam panted, “when you said what you did to Mr. Leeds? Did you make my blackness less black than it should be—did you concede to me any saving light?”
“I did not know. If I can do anything now——”
“You must not speak to him,” Miriam cried, sitting up abruptly. “There would be no use. When the seeds of distrust have been sown they will grow, even if the weeds crowd out everything else.”
“But weeds can be dug up.”
“That must be my part,” Miriam answered, more calmly. “Only one course is left. It’s funny,” she smiled, swiftly, through her tears. “There is poetic justice in it. I can do only one thing. It is my retribution.”
The announcement which Mrs. Gunnison made on the following morning came as a surprise to Miriam. She had some difficulty in not displaying an undue excitement. The habit of containment, which had come with worldly experience, however, did not fail her. She heard her hostess state that Arthur Leeds was coming to stay in the house without any exhibition of visible emotion. Mrs. Gunnison said that, as the Barlows had other people coming, he was going to transfer himself to “Highlands,” and that he would arrive in time for luncheon. Any fears which Miriam experienced were wholly offset by a devout thankfulness. The event offered such an occasion for the carrying out of her plan as she had not hoped to have given her. In the promise of such an admirable opportunity for the execution of her purpose, she found a melancholy satisfaction. If, as she thought to herself, the iron was to enter her soul, the sooner the affair was accomplished the better. The process of self-sacrifice was not pleasant in the execution, however glorious it might appear in the conception. Self-immolation might be a duty, but, as every martyrdom, it was more satisfactory as an ideal than as a fact.
The first opportunity which came to execute what she had laboriously planned was during the aimless inoccupation of after luncheon idleness. The arrangements for the afternoon had not yet been concluded, but were in the careless making. Who should ride; who should drive; who should walk; who should go and who should stay; the what and whither had not been settled: Leeds strolled to her side.
“I have been trying to speak to you, but you have avoided me.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Why?” he asked; “I am going to tell you the truth, now——” she paused, and looked at him.
“Why?” he repeated.
“Because I think that you are the most detestable man I ever saw,” she answered, gazing squarely at him.
He started slightly—glanced at her in surprise, and abruptly sat down on the divan beside her.
“You have really come to that conclusion?” he asked.
“I have always believed it,” she answered, firmly.
“But you said——”
“You told me that I was a flatterer. I shall not be withyouany longer. You wish the truth. You shall have it.”
“That is what you thought from the first?” he said, slowly.
“Yes,” she answered, less clearly. “I have always understood that you were most absurdly self-satisfied. That you are deluded by a pose as to which you are so weak as to deceive yourself. That you take yourself with a seriousness which leads you to believe that you are preaching a crusade when you are only blowing a penny whistle. That you assume that you have made for yourself a position and a reputation which were made for you.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, quietly.
“You have an old name and a large fortune which rendered you conspicuous and made everything easy. The newspapers have talked of you only as they would anyway. Indeed, they would have given more space to you if you had a liking for conducting an automobile painted like a barber’s pole than they have because you went into politics. They would have preferred the striped automobile, but they had to be content with the ‘reform politics’ as the freak of one in your place.”
“Then you think I am—nothing?”
“You are a rich young man of assured position—spoiled by the world.”
“I thought I had, at least, ordinary common sense.”
“Probably—but still you have undulylost your head. You would not know if people were laughing at you——”
Leeds flushed slightly. Miriam caught her breath sharply, and reached forward to take up a fan which lay within her reach.
“I am altogether a monster?”
“No,” she replied, calmly. “A very ordinary young man, I should say.”
“I’d be kind to dumb animals and not kick a baby——”
“I am quite serious,” she answered. “You objected to any little pleasantness on my part because what I said might not be altogether sincere. Now we are going to have facts. Indeed, you are the type of man I dislike.”
“At least, we know where we are now,” he responded.
“Yes. And as we are staying in the same house it may be as well.”
Miriam rose slowly. She walked decidedly across the room, and ostentatiously placed herself beside Mrs. Gunnison. Leeds, deserted, did not move. He sat staring at the floor, as he softly drummed with his fingers on the couch’s leather arm.
As well as in certain other particulars, the life of a country house is microcosmical in this—escape from the requirements of human relationship is impossible. Indeed, the demands are made greater, the bonds more firmly fixed. In fact, the condition of all may be more fitly described as the condition of two united in matrimony—they take each other for better or worse. Constantly through the day they must meet. The terms on which they are thrown together impose intimacy. If latent antipathy exists with the revealing conditions of constant companionship it must be discovered. If inherent sympathy is to be found the two gravitate toward each other with inevitable certainty. As the birthplace of aversion quickly reaching a maturity of detestation and hate; as the hothouse of interest growing speedily into full bloom of liking and love, there is no place like a country house. All existence there, in its condensed form, is a forcing process. Without any awkwardly abrupt transition or disconnecting jolts, those who begin to talk about mutual friends in the morning may easily reach a discussion of their own souls in the afternoon, and be far on the broad and easy path of sentiment by evening. Like or dislike, more or less strong, must surely and quickly follow. There is in the social chemistry a certainty of repulsion or attraction, out of which the most unexpected combinations result—of a surprisingly lasting nature.
In the daily routine Miriam saw Leeds constantly. Though she might come down late for breakfast, she always found him. Even if she breakfasted in her room, when she descended he was always smoking in the hall.
“I did not expect to stay so long,” he explained to her on one occasion, rising as she paused at the foot of the stairs.
“Then why do you?” she asked, coldly.
“Don’t you know?” he demanded. “Should you feel it pleasanter if I went away?”
“Really—as I have undertaken to be perfectly frank with you—how can your going or staying make the least difference in the world to me?”
“Still,” he said, looking at her curiously, “there must be something tiresome in having to be scorning somebody all the time.”
“I think,” she said, briefly, “I hear voices in the billiard room. I am going in there.”
If at dinner Leeds found himself next to her he discovered that she spoke to him no more than the strict letter of the law governing the conduct of guests in the same house demanded. What she said was of the most indifferent nature. If he sought to reach a more personal basis he found himself checked.
“Miss Whiting,” he said, suddenly, on the third evening, “I am going away to-morrow morning.”
Miriam swung about swiftly.
“To-morrow!” she exclaimed, with a catch in her voice.
“Yes, I think I had better go, though there is something I want to tell youbefore I do. I have thought of all that you have said. I have profited by the new light that you have thrown upon myself—my actions—my life.”
“What do you mean?” she murmured.
“I have realized that very likely I am a prig. I understand the futility of what I am trying to do. I see that I have been mistaken in my power. I’m going to give up.”
“Give up?” she replied.
“You have shown that I was attempting more than I was able to do. The Donaldsons have asked me to go in their yacht round the world. TheViernastarts on Thursday. I am going away to be lazy and careless, and live the life for which you think I’m fitted.”
“You are going to give up everything?” she exclaimed.
“Yes,” he answered. “It is your doing. You must take the responsibility of it.”
“But what I say—what I think, can make no difference,” she almost entreated. “I am not of enough importance to you—you cannot consider me enough——”
“All that is something of which you know nothing,” he answered, gravely. “Something of which I have told you nothing. I am going away—with the Donaldsons.”
“People like that!” she interrupted.
“People like that. I am going with them to lead their life—to be gone for a year, unless one thing happens. As I said, you are responsible.”
“But I can’t be,” she implored. “It isn’t possible. I can’t count for anything.”
“Let me assure you that you do.”
“Then I can’t take the responsibility. I won’t.”
“Unless one thing happens I am going,” he went on, inflexibly. “There are some, I think, who believe in me—who will think I am making a mistake.”
“But your future—your career,” she began, and paused abashed, as she saw the way he watched her.
“I thought we were to have no—insincerities—no flatteries. Since I know what you really think, such civil implications can mean nothing.”
She bit her lips, pale as her cheeks were white.
“Oh!” she cried, “how horrible!”
Through all of dinner she hardly spoke. If she said nothing to Leeds, neither would she address the man on her other side, only giving such monosyllable answers as were necessary. The evening dragged slowly. Leeds did not approach her. Once or twice she looked toward him, but he did not appear to notice her. Indeed, he only came late from the smoking room and returned after a brief appearance in the big hall.
“When,” she asked once, in a timid voice, of Mrs. Gunnison, “does Mr. Leeds go?”
“The early train,” the lady answered. “I believe he leaves the house before seven, or at some equally unearthly hour.”
The fresh sunlight of the early morning was flooding through the open hall door as Leeds came down the wide, main stairs. He saw, under theporte-cochère, the trap ready to take him to the station, and into which the second man, with the help of the groom, was lifting his trunk. Here and there a housemaid was busy with duster and cloth. The machinery of the establishment was being set in running condition, and there was the accompanying disorder. The place seemed strange and unfamiliar.
“Your keys, sir,” the butler said, holding out the bunch.
“Yes,” he answered, “I’m ready.”
As he spoke he started. Clearly in the stillness of the morning he heard a few soft notes struck on the piano. At that hour the sound was most unusual. He listened. The Flower Music of “Parsifal.” With a swiftness that left the astonished butler staring after him, he darted toward a door. In a moment he had torn the portière aside and had crossed the polished floor of the music room. Miriam was seated at the piano, her fingers resting on the keys.
“You are down!” he exclaimed.
“Yes,” she answered, neither turning round nor looking up.
“You are very early.”
“Yes,” she assented. Then she whirled about on the music stool. “I came down to see you.”
“Why?”
Both spoke with a simple directness—with the manner of those dealing in ultimate moments with the unmistakable facts.
“You told me last night that you were doing as you do because of what I have said. I cannot take the responsibility. I’d rather that you thought even worse of me than you do. Oh!” she cried, bending her head down on her hands, which clasped the rack of the piano. “I am, false—false! I cannot be true even in my falsity. All that I have been telling you is not the truth.”
“Yes?” he interrupted, eagerly.
“When you judged me—when you told me—or showed me what you thought of me—I recognized what I was doing—what I was. I saw I was false. My pride drove me to do something else. It was a punishment for myself—a price I must pay. As falsely as you thought I tried to please you—as falsely,really, I made myself hateful to you. I told you every untrue, miserable thing of which I could think. It seems as if any little remnant of dignity which I had demanded it. But to have you say that you were influenced by my lies—were going to give up so much that was splendid and great—because of them! Oh, you must believe me now. I could not bear it.”
“Then you don’t think I am altogether contemptible?”
“I think you are the finest and best and strongest man I know,” she said, bravely.
On one knee, beside her, he had his arm about her.
“Bless you, darling,” he cried. “Then I can tell the truth, too. I think that you are the dearest and sweetest woman, and I love you—love you!”
“I—I don’t deserve it,” she sobbed.
“I would not,” he said, “let myself believe what you told me at first, but then I would not let myself believe what you said afterward. I hoped——”
“Oh, it was so hard for me. Can’t you understand? There was expiation in it. Don’t you think it enough?”
“I think we have both been mistaken and unhappy.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Since the first I have changed. It taught me a lesson. I am different—really.”
“We’ll have everything all right now, and that is all.”
“But you are going away,” she exclaimed.
“I said I was going away unless one thing happened.”
“Yes,” she said, eagerly.
“Very well—it has happened.”
The sound of the brush striking sharply and with metallic distinctness on a dustpan came from the room beyond.
“Perhaps we had better go on the terrace,” he laughed. “Really, you know, we ought to have moonlight and mystery, but——”
Together they went out through the open door into the fresh, soft morning air. The warm scent of the garden blew up to them. A large, yellow butterfly fluttered peacefully by. The dew still lay on leaf and flower, glittering in a thousand sparkles.
“The night is the time for romance,” he said. “Any well managed proposal should be made under the stars.”
“But the morning, such a morning,” she exclaimed, softly, and clasping her hands in ecstasy. “And as this is going to be a beginning for me, I like the morning better.”
THE MIRACLE OF DAWNBy Madison CaweinWhat it would mean for you and meIf dawn should come no more!Think of its gold along the sea,Its rose above the shore!That rose of awful mystery,Our souls bow down before.What wonder that the Inca kneeled,The Aztec prayed and pledAnd sacrificed to it, and sealed,With rites that long are dead,The marvels that it once revealedTo them it comforted!What wonder, yea! what awe, behold!What rapture and what tearsWere ours, if wild its rivered gold—That now each day appears—Burst on the world, in darkness rolled,Once every thousand years!Think what it means to me and youTo see it even as GodEvolved it when the world was new!When Light rose, earthquake shod,And slow its gradual splendor grewO’er deeps the whirlwind trod.What shoutings then and cymbalingsArose from depth and height!What worship-solemn trumpetings,And thunders, burning white,Of winds and waves, and anthemingsOf Earth received the Light!Think what it means to see the dawn!The dawn, that comes each day!What if the East should ne’er grow wan,Should never more grow gray!That line of rose no more be drawnAbove the ocean’s spray!
By Madison Cawein
What it would mean for you and meIf dawn should come no more!Think of its gold along the sea,Its rose above the shore!That rose of awful mystery,Our souls bow down before.What wonder that the Inca kneeled,The Aztec prayed and pledAnd sacrificed to it, and sealed,With rites that long are dead,The marvels that it once revealedTo them it comforted!What wonder, yea! what awe, behold!What rapture and what tearsWere ours, if wild its rivered gold—That now each day appears—Burst on the world, in darkness rolled,Once every thousand years!Think what it means to me and youTo see it even as GodEvolved it when the world was new!When Light rose, earthquake shod,And slow its gradual splendor grewO’er deeps the whirlwind trod.What shoutings then and cymbalingsArose from depth and height!What worship-solemn trumpetings,And thunders, burning white,Of winds and waves, and anthemingsOf Earth received the Light!Think what it means to see the dawn!The dawn, that comes each day!What if the East should ne’er grow wan,Should never more grow gray!That line of rose no more be drawnAbove the ocean’s spray!
What it would mean for you and meIf dawn should come no more!Think of its gold along the sea,Its rose above the shore!That rose of awful mystery,Our souls bow down before.
What it would mean for you and me
If dawn should come no more!
Think of its gold along the sea,
Its rose above the shore!
That rose of awful mystery,
Our souls bow down before.
What wonder that the Inca kneeled,The Aztec prayed and pledAnd sacrificed to it, and sealed,With rites that long are dead,The marvels that it once revealedTo them it comforted!
What wonder that the Inca kneeled,
The Aztec prayed and pled
And sacrificed to it, and sealed,
With rites that long are dead,
The marvels that it once revealed
To them it comforted!
What wonder, yea! what awe, behold!What rapture and what tearsWere ours, if wild its rivered gold—That now each day appears—Burst on the world, in darkness rolled,Once every thousand years!
What wonder, yea! what awe, behold!
What rapture and what tears
Were ours, if wild its rivered gold—
That now each day appears—
Burst on the world, in darkness rolled,
Once every thousand years!
Think what it means to me and youTo see it even as GodEvolved it when the world was new!When Light rose, earthquake shod,And slow its gradual splendor grewO’er deeps the whirlwind trod.
Think what it means to me and you
To see it even as God
Evolved it when the world was new!
When Light rose, earthquake shod,
And slow its gradual splendor grew
O’er deeps the whirlwind trod.
What shoutings then and cymbalingsArose from depth and height!What worship-solemn trumpetings,And thunders, burning white,Of winds and waves, and anthemingsOf Earth received the Light!
What shoutings then and cymbalings
Arose from depth and height!
What worship-solemn trumpetings,
And thunders, burning white,
Of winds and waves, and anthemings
Of Earth received the Light!
Think what it means to see the dawn!The dawn, that comes each day!What if the East should ne’er grow wan,Should never more grow gray!That line of rose no more be drawnAbove the ocean’s spray!
Think what it means to see the dawn!
The dawn, that comes each day!
What if the East should ne’er grow wan,
Should never more grow gray!
That line of rose no more be drawn
Above the ocean’s spray!
THE SONG OF BROADWAYBy Robert StewartAA certainclub of good fellows of both sexes, journalists, authors, illustrators, actors, men of pleasure, and Bohemians generally, used to gather on Sunday evenings, a merry decade ago, round the hospitable table of an Italian lady who had acquired her culinary accomplishments under the distinguished eye of M. Martin—late chef to M. de Lesseps, and present proprietor of Martin’s Restaurant—before she attempted to practice on her own account, so to speak, in the basement of a dingy brick house in West Twelfth Street.Signora Maria was a trusting soul in those days, and many a hungry poor devil has hung up his hat, coat and dinner there, and blessed his kind hostess as he quaffed her red ink. We didn’t say claret; we called out: “Where’s my red ink bottle, Maria?” And Maria would put down the soup tureen she was going from table to table with, and fetch us a pint of herordinaire. It was sour stuff certainly, which even Maria’s radiant smile couldn’t sweeten, but budding genius is careless of the morrow, and on Sunday evenings, especially, when Maria held her salon in the boarded back room, built out over the yard, vast quantities of it were gayly consumed, along with cigarettes, and coffee, and flamingpousse-cafés.In one sense, at least, our function was appropriate to the night. Everybody “came prepared”—women and men both—like a country Experience Meeting. Jokes cracked like lightning through the tobacco clouds; songs of love and war trembled and roared above our heads; humor and pathos, those twin slaves of the lamp, sported and wept at our bidding; in a word, no end of youthful bombast, and kind laughter, and harmless, gratified vanity, was exhibited there. It was really more like a Montmartrecabaretthan any place I ever saw in New York. Only, with humblest apologies for disparaging their worldliness, the ladies were so evidently good, sincere, faithful friends, wives, mothers, sweethearts, that some of us watched their happy gayety with grateful, pleased eyes.A Judas came to that kindly board, and betrayed to a newspaper these merry, honest folk at their simple feast. Stupid, prosperous commercial persons pushed their way in and stared at them. They fled away, scared at last, to more inaccessible haunts.But on one particularly jolly evening, to return to a text memories of tried friends and happy hours have beguiled me from, among a number of notable guests one who “favored,” Mr. Wilton Lackaye, then appearing as that white-eyed, hairy, awfulSvengalieverybody so loathed and applauded, dramatically recited a remarkable and original poem called the “Song of Broadway.” Many a time since have I remembered the scene, the song, the company; the long, wine-stained tables, the eddying cigarette smoke, the acute, lively faces. In one way or another, everyone there was a trained observer, and knew his Broadway.It is rather a bold thing to say you know your Broadway. As I, too, sing my song about it, if I sound a note once or twice you have never heard, oh, thank Heaven, and turn away! With us, I trust, it will be but a minor chord. So every stroller there recognized the world he lives in, and the child, the mother, the cabby, gambler, pickpocket,doctor, parson, each carries off his or her own bundle of impressions.Leaving it, then, to graver historians to trace the financial, commercial and social evolution of this tremendous street, which was a forest trail once, within whose sylvan solitudes red men roamed and wild beasts prowled, let us from our humble station, as men of the world and social philosophers, describe merely that stretch of it which begins at Madison Square and ends at Forty-fifth Street; where it is high noon at eight o’clock at night, and bedtime when the gray dawn comes shivering cold and ghastly into hotel corridors where the washerwomen are scrubbing the marble floors. “Little old Broadway,” as it is affectionately toasted in the vernacular of itshabitués, wherever rye whisky is drunk, and faithful homesick hearts recall its lights, its pleasures and its crowds.Broadway, I say, at eight o’clock at night, is the most fascinating street on earth. It isen fêteevery evening; and you have only to walk that mile often enough, and the whole town will display itself at leisure and at its ease, perfectly unconscious and natural and selfish. It is not the lights; it is not the brilliant hotels, and theaters, and restaurants, and shops, and tramcars, and hurrying cabs; it is not the music that floats out to you on the rippling surface of the town’s deep voice; it is not that voice itself, vibrating as it is with every emotion of the human heart, of pleasure, excitement, careless gayety, shame that has ceased to care, lust whispering its appeal, modesty’s shocked sigh, innocence’s happy prattle, kind laughter, friendly chat, unexpected hearty greetings; it is the vast, shifting, jostling, loitering, idle crowd, the multitude of a huge cosmopolitan city that is the spectacle, and that to a man who knows his town is more dramatic, and humorous, and pathetic, and fascinating than all the plays to which young ladies, and their papas, too, are hurrying, to thrill, and laugh, and cry over.Think of a mile of street, brilliant like a drawing room almost, and swarming with all kinds of men and women from all over the world, each seeking his or her particular amusement and finding it. Pleasure is the commodity on sale here, and one can obtain it at any of those glittering signs blazing out over the crush, or traffic in it with the venders of the pavement.Isn’t it marvelous? Isn’t it wonderful? as the conjurer says when he cuts your watch out of an onion. Mr. Conjurer returns your watch in safety, but it retains that delicate perfume which only the time it chronicles can wear away. Many an ingenious traveler has stepped out of his hotel to watch this magic spectacle for a little, and brought back with him bitter remembrances that all the tears shed secretly won’t ever wash out.Tant pis!You are not a preacher, monsieur. There is only one church on your Broadway, and that is dark and shut and sold to a syndicate. The only religion one gets here is the Bibles in the hotel bedrooms, and at Jerry McAuley’s Cremorne Mission, round the corner in Thirty-second Street. What, then? Nobody claims Broadway to be a domestic scene, and children and nursemaids don’t constitute its charm.Look north, from where we have turned into it, after lighting our cigars at Van Valkenburg’s, under the Albemarle Hotel, and those dazzling signs will tell you what most people come here for: Martin’s, Weber’s Music Hall, the Imperial Hotel, the Knickerbocker Theater, with Mr. Sothern in “Hamlet,” Hoster’s, Kid McCoy’s Café, Brown’s Chop House, Grand Opera, Rector’s Restaurant—to dine, to drink, to smoke, to stroll, to see the play, to watch each other. Did you ever see so much light, so much life? Halt where sedate business halts, too, at the St. James Building, frowning darkly down on gay, hoydenish Martin’s, whose roguish, Parisian eyes twinkle mischievously up at it, as if they know the tall, somber old hypocrite has a score of wicked theatrical agencies hidden away in its locked heart, and justsee!Straight ahead of you, within ten minutes’ brisk walk, are twenty theaters, sixteen hotels, six expensive restaurants,two huge department stores, theHeraldnewspaper palace, with the elevated road cutting across its face, several tall apartment houses thrusting up their lighted windows into the night, telegraph offices, bars, apothecaries, florists, confectioners, tobacconists, jewelry shops galore, all signed with electricity, and producing that wonderful glitter and glare that is both so bizarre and so enchanting. A street, do we call this? It is a scene, most theatrical and gorgeous, and set for the great human comedy which is even now being displayed upon it.In this theater you perceive audience and actor alike occupy the stage, as they used to do in the old London playhouses; and poor little flower girls are pushing their way through our throng, also offering the roses that fade so fast after they are plucked. Anything makes an interest, an excitement; a fire engine tearing across Thirty-sixth Street, a policeman marching a thief to the precinct house, an ambulance clanging down Sixth Avenue, a newsboy asleep on the Dime Savings Bank steps, the bronze hammers striking nine on theHeraldclock, a Corean embassy driving up to Wallack’s Theater in their soft felt hats and gorgeous robes.Never were a lot of people more easy to be amused, more eager to laugh or sympathize. A gentleman’s hat blows up in the air; hoots of laughter explode after it. It rolls under an express van; a dozen citizens spring to its rescue. Nerves are on edge. Stimulants are exciting keen brains. It is a trifle savage, this crowd. Look! See them hustle that masher! His hat’s smashed already. The poor child he was persecuting is crying with fright. A woman, not given to such a pure embrace, has her arm about her; a big “plain-clothes man” is drying her eyes with his handkerchief; a couple of young stock brokers are bargaining with cabby on his box to drive her home. Ah, that is a pretty sight! I think Mr. Addison would have liked to see it, and Dick Steele, I know, would have slipped a bank note into her hand. Oh, burst of sunshine in the darkness! Oh, chivalry and kindness beaming out on fast Broadway! Oh, reckless, hardened sinners loving innocence and kneeling to it!But come; this is still Broadway. A block off they know nothing of all this. Above us Daly’s is closing and its fashionable audience pouring out on the pavement. In Twenty-ninth Street, the Cairo, the Alhambra, the Bohemia, are just as brilliant and fascinating as usual.I remember, one evening, as I was passing the ladies’ entrance to the Gilsey House, on my way home from the club, out comes a visiting family party—monsieur et madame et sa fille. Monsieur stops, buttoning up that “good frock coat,” the uniform of the American senator, which has proclaimed Squedunk through every capital in Europe. He stands, the oracle of the post office, the rich man of the county, the benignant elder of the Congregational church, gazing across the way at all the flaring signs toward Sixth Avenue.“Ah,” says he, smiling reminiscently, “the Midway. Let’s go and look at ’em, my dears.”I had a wicked impulse to go, too, and see what happened. But I repressed it, and took the liberty to inform Mr. Smallville that those places were not especially recommended for ladies. I think miss was mortally offended with me for upsetting the program.Are other people secretly disappointed, too, because they can’t get a peep behind those closed doors? It was Madam Eve, I believe, who first tasted the apple; it was Pandora who lifted the lid of the box of troubles; propose a slumming party, and be sure it is the ladies who will applaud loudest. Well, then—those places, dear Miss Smallville are—very much like the zenanas the foreign missionaryess told you about last autumn in the church parlors. Now you know all about it. Ask your brother Tom if I’m not correct. I wager he can tell you if he chooses.It is a curious fact, by the way, that all the places which make Broadwaynotorious are in the side streets. Just as it is a curious misnomer to call the toughest section of it the Tenderloin. Broadway has no slums. Laboring people, even, never make any distinguishable element in its populace. This is, of course, owing to its geographical position. But there is one fact which is immensely to its credit, and is perhaps due to the Irish who govern it, if they do prefer Fifth Avenue to parade in. For when Brian Boru—from whom every loyal Irishman is descended—was king, didn’t a beauteous damsel, with a ring of price, stroll unprotected and in safety over his kingdom? Beauteous damsels with rings of price certainly stroll unprotected over Broadway, but this is not the fact I emphasize. It is, seriously, that it is quite possible for young ladies to walk this fastest mile in the United States, with their papas and mammas, every evening, and write home to Kate that “it is just like Saturday night on Main Street, only bigger.” No sensible girl could promenade the Strand or the Bois after theater hours, no matter how chaperoned, and then make such a comparison. Huzza! I say. Huzza! It is America’s compliment to her women.Still, however decorously Broadway subdues its hilarity before the ladies, like a fast young man at a tea party, we all know it is not in the least like Saturday night on Main Street. Let us saunter along, like two men of the world, perfectly competent to recognize vice, but infinitely preferring to smile at honest gayety, and find out what this crowd really is that is again packing the pavement as the theaters turn out their audiences.Principally, so much in the majority as to characterize it, men of affairs, country merchants, out-of-town visitors, with and without their womenkind, the New York audience to whom actor and clergyman alike make their appeal; while circling about in it, embroidered so to speak on its surface, is that other crowd—high fashion, artists, actors, distinguished visitors, wardmen, Bohemians, sporting people, thieves and confidence men—which also produces its effect, and lends its coloring and vivacity to the picture. The side streets, looking east at least, are respectable, but they are not brilliant. Fashion, Bohemia and fast life are, after all, what we have come to watch. And as fashion mostly cuts Broadway—where it used to live and promenade when Mr. N. P. Willis’ natty boots pattered about Fourteenth Street—at the first crossing, it is Bohemia and the “wise push” we will sup with.In Broadway parlance, Bohemia means newspaper and theatrical people. And I venture to remind the ladies and gentlemen of the drama in presenting them in such a company, that I am painting a city nocturne, and may properly introduce Mr. Morgan, Mr. Beerbohm Tree, Father Ducey, dear man, in his cape overcoat, Al Smith leaning against the Gilsey House railing, or any other characteristic and familiar figure natural to the composition. No picture of Broadway would be complete, they will acknowledge, without them, and to use a metaphor I have before employed, they are certainly accustomed to occupy “the center of the stage” with dignity and elegance.Anyway, they all come here, and I should think they would all love it. This part of Broadway is nicknamed the Rialto. Nowhere else are they taken so cordially and frankly by the hand. They lounge about it by day and win fame and fortune in its theaters at night. Nat Goodwin and his wife, Hackett and Mary Mannering—when they can meet—Sir Henry Irving, De Wolf Hopper, Miss Annie Russell, bowing to Charles Richman out of a cab, Amelia Bingham, Joseph Jefferson, whose only fault is that he isn’t immortal, and funny, rollicking Fay Templeton, humming a new coon song—old favorites and new ones, you may see them going to supper at the Lambs’ Club, the Players, the Waldorf, Delmonico’s, Sherry’s, any evening they are in town.Broadway is darker. The theater lights are out. Only bars and apothecaries, shops and hotels, are brilliant. The opera is over, and carriages arewhirling away toward Fifth Avenue, and tramcars crawling along in procession, packed to the platforms with gayly dressed passengers. Across the way from Macy’s huge dark store, theHeraldpresses are rushing off the biography of the day in sight of everybody, and no philosopher moralizes on that awful, tremendous record of four-and-twenty hours of a whole world’s work, play, crime, suffering, heroism, love, faith.Our fast friends must tremble as they pass those windows, and remember the relentless, watchful eyes forever fixed on them. The ladies and gentlemen of this society dine at Shanley’s and Rector’s, and call supperlunch. Except that they are more painstakingly dressed, they don’t look very different from others. I have often thought that such a congregation might gather in Trinity Chapel, say, and be preached to by an innocent clergyman with a weary sense of the futility of trying to make such evidently virtuous persons penitent.Should you like to really know them? They are thick about you on every hand. Drama and tragedy and pathos are in rehearsal now; and that old comedy of “A Fool and His Money.” Walk a few blocks with the night clerk of Wilson’s chemist shop. Get to know the bookmaker coming out of George Considine’s Metropole bar, chat with our acquaintance, the plainclothes man. Join that man-about-town, on his way to the Astoria Club. Masks will be torn off then, every actor will be seen as he is. That family coachman is a burglar just out of Auburn. That thin, alert gentleman in evening clothes is a gambler, getting a breath of air before taking his place behind Daly’s wheel. That pale-faced student is a reporter on his way to “hit the pipe.” That sweet-faced girl will be screaming drunk by two o’clock—the pale little man in mourning is the most notorious divekeeper in America. The one with the beautiful silver beard is a race-track owner over in New Jersey, and they call the red-headed Jew talking to “Honest John Kelly” the king of the gold-brick men. This well-dressed gentleman with the large hands is Corbett, the pugilist; that kindly-faced, handsome one, going into Tom O’Rourke’s, is a famous all-round sport. Notice that beautifully gowned, superbly handsome brunette who is getting out of a hansom at Martin’s Restaurant. She had a yataghan in her flat she brought from Paris with her, and she caught it up one night and drove it into her lover’s neck, and was acquitted on the ground that it was done in self-defense.Do you want more detailed biographies, or is your acquaintance sufficiently extended? The owls on theHeraldbuilding are staring knowingly at the moon, who is coquettishly hiding her face behind a cloud. Mr. Greeley has fallen asleep in his chair, facing Mr. Dodge, after listening to that eternal long temperance speech which is never ended. I don’t think Broadway is amusing after midnight.Let’s go to Brown’s and have some deviled kidneys and a mug of Bass.
THE SONG OF BROADWAYBy Robert Stewart
By Robert Stewart
A certainclub of good fellows of both sexes, journalists, authors, illustrators, actors, men of pleasure, and Bohemians generally, used to gather on Sunday evenings, a merry decade ago, round the hospitable table of an Italian lady who had acquired her culinary accomplishments under the distinguished eye of M. Martin—late chef to M. de Lesseps, and present proprietor of Martin’s Restaurant—before she attempted to practice on her own account, so to speak, in the basement of a dingy brick house in West Twelfth Street.
Signora Maria was a trusting soul in those days, and many a hungry poor devil has hung up his hat, coat and dinner there, and blessed his kind hostess as he quaffed her red ink. We didn’t say claret; we called out: “Where’s my red ink bottle, Maria?” And Maria would put down the soup tureen she was going from table to table with, and fetch us a pint of herordinaire. It was sour stuff certainly, which even Maria’s radiant smile couldn’t sweeten, but budding genius is careless of the morrow, and on Sunday evenings, especially, when Maria held her salon in the boarded back room, built out over the yard, vast quantities of it were gayly consumed, along with cigarettes, and coffee, and flamingpousse-cafés.
In one sense, at least, our function was appropriate to the night. Everybody “came prepared”—women and men both—like a country Experience Meeting. Jokes cracked like lightning through the tobacco clouds; songs of love and war trembled and roared above our heads; humor and pathos, those twin slaves of the lamp, sported and wept at our bidding; in a word, no end of youthful bombast, and kind laughter, and harmless, gratified vanity, was exhibited there. It was really more like a Montmartrecabaretthan any place I ever saw in New York. Only, with humblest apologies for disparaging their worldliness, the ladies were so evidently good, sincere, faithful friends, wives, mothers, sweethearts, that some of us watched their happy gayety with grateful, pleased eyes.
A Judas came to that kindly board, and betrayed to a newspaper these merry, honest folk at their simple feast. Stupid, prosperous commercial persons pushed their way in and stared at them. They fled away, scared at last, to more inaccessible haunts.
But on one particularly jolly evening, to return to a text memories of tried friends and happy hours have beguiled me from, among a number of notable guests one who “favored,” Mr. Wilton Lackaye, then appearing as that white-eyed, hairy, awfulSvengalieverybody so loathed and applauded, dramatically recited a remarkable and original poem called the “Song of Broadway.” Many a time since have I remembered the scene, the song, the company; the long, wine-stained tables, the eddying cigarette smoke, the acute, lively faces. In one way or another, everyone there was a trained observer, and knew his Broadway.
It is rather a bold thing to say you know your Broadway. As I, too, sing my song about it, if I sound a note once or twice you have never heard, oh, thank Heaven, and turn away! With us, I trust, it will be but a minor chord. So every stroller there recognized the world he lives in, and the child, the mother, the cabby, gambler, pickpocket,doctor, parson, each carries off his or her own bundle of impressions.
Leaving it, then, to graver historians to trace the financial, commercial and social evolution of this tremendous street, which was a forest trail once, within whose sylvan solitudes red men roamed and wild beasts prowled, let us from our humble station, as men of the world and social philosophers, describe merely that stretch of it which begins at Madison Square and ends at Forty-fifth Street; where it is high noon at eight o’clock at night, and bedtime when the gray dawn comes shivering cold and ghastly into hotel corridors where the washerwomen are scrubbing the marble floors. “Little old Broadway,” as it is affectionately toasted in the vernacular of itshabitués, wherever rye whisky is drunk, and faithful homesick hearts recall its lights, its pleasures and its crowds.
Broadway, I say, at eight o’clock at night, is the most fascinating street on earth. It isen fêteevery evening; and you have only to walk that mile often enough, and the whole town will display itself at leisure and at its ease, perfectly unconscious and natural and selfish. It is not the lights; it is not the brilliant hotels, and theaters, and restaurants, and shops, and tramcars, and hurrying cabs; it is not the music that floats out to you on the rippling surface of the town’s deep voice; it is not that voice itself, vibrating as it is with every emotion of the human heart, of pleasure, excitement, careless gayety, shame that has ceased to care, lust whispering its appeal, modesty’s shocked sigh, innocence’s happy prattle, kind laughter, friendly chat, unexpected hearty greetings; it is the vast, shifting, jostling, loitering, idle crowd, the multitude of a huge cosmopolitan city that is the spectacle, and that to a man who knows his town is more dramatic, and humorous, and pathetic, and fascinating than all the plays to which young ladies, and their papas, too, are hurrying, to thrill, and laugh, and cry over.
Think of a mile of street, brilliant like a drawing room almost, and swarming with all kinds of men and women from all over the world, each seeking his or her particular amusement and finding it. Pleasure is the commodity on sale here, and one can obtain it at any of those glittering signs blazing out over the crush, or traffic in it with the venders of the pavement.
Isn’t it marvelous? Isn’t it wonderful? as the conjurer says when he cuts your watch out of an onion. Mr. Conjurer returns your watch in safety, but it retains that delicate perfume which only the time it chronicles can wear away. Many an ingenious traveler has stepped out of his hotel to watch this magic spectacle for a little, and brought back with him bitter remembrances that all the tears shed secretly won’t ever wash out.
Tant pis!You are not a preacher, monsieur. There is only one church on your Broadway, and that is dark and shut and sold to a syndicate. The only religion one gets here is the Bibles in the hotel bedrooms, and at Jerry McAuley’s Cremorne Mission, round the corner in Thirty-second Street. What, then? Nobody claims Broadway to be a domestic scene, and children and nursemaids don’t constitute its charm.
Look north, from where we have turned into it, after lighting our cigars at Van Valkenburg’s, under the Albemarle Hotel, and those dazzling signs will tell you what most people come here for: Martin’s, Weber’s Music Hall, the Imperial Hotel, the Knickerbocker Theater, with Mr. Sothern in “Hamlet,” Hoster’s, Kid McCoy’s Café, Brown’s Chop House, Grand Opera, Rector’s Restaurant—to dine, to drink, to smoke, to stroll, to see the play, to watch each other. Did you ever see so much light, so much life? Halt where sedate business halts, too, at the St. James Building, frowning darkly down on gay, hoydenish Martin’s, whose roguish, Parisian eyes twinkle mischievously up at it, as if they know the tall, somber old hypocrite has a score of wicked theatrical agencies hidden away in its locked heart, and justsee!
Straight ahead of you, within ten minutes’ brisk walk, are twenty theaters, sixteen hotels, six expensive restaurants,two huge department stores, theHeraldnewspaper palace, with the elevated road cutting across its face, several tall apartment houses thrusting up their lighted windows into the night, telegraph offices, bars, apothecaries, florists, confectioners, tobacconists, jewelry shops galore, all signed with electricity, and producing that wonderful glitter and glare that is both so bizarre and so enchanting. A street, do we call this? It is a scene, most theatrical and gorgeous, and set for the great human comedy which is even now being displayed upon it.
In this theater you perceive audience and actor alike occupy the stage, as they used to do in the old London playhouses; and poor little flower girls are pushing their way through our throng, also offering the roses that fade so fast after they are plucked. Anything makes an interest, an excitement; a fire engine tearing across Thirty-sixth Street, a policeman marching a thief to the precinct house, an ambulance clanging down Sixth Avenue, a newsboy asleep on the Dime Savings Bank steps, the bronze hammers striking nine on theHeraldclock, a Corean embassy driving up to Wallack’s Theater in their soft felt hats and gorgeous robes.
Never were a lot of people more easy to be amused, more eager to laugh or sympathize. A gentleman’s hat blows up in the air; hoots of laughter explode after it. It rolls under an express van; a dozen citizens spring to its rescue. Nerves are on edge. Stimulants are exciting keen brains. It is a trifle savage, this crowd. Look! See them hustle that masher! His hat’s smashed already. The poor child he was persecuting is crying with fright. A woman, not given to such a pure embrace, has her arm about her; a big “plain-clothes man” is drying her eyes with his handkerchief; a couple of young stock brokers are bargaining with cabby on his box to drive her home. Ah, that is a pretty sight! I think Mr. Addison would have liked to see it, and Dick Steele, I know, would have slipped a bank note into her hand. Oh, burst of sunshine in the darkness! Oh, chivalry and kindness beaming out on fast Broadway! Oh, reckless, hardened sinners loving innocence and kneeling to it!
But come; this is still Broadway. A block off they know nothing of all this. Above us Daly’s is closing and its fashionable audience pouring out on the pavement. In Twenty-ninth Street, the Cairo, the Alhambra, the Bohemia, are just as brilliant and fascinating as usual.
I remember, one evening, as I was passing the ladies’ entrance to the Gilsey House, on my way home from the club, out comes a visiting family party—monsieur et madame et sa fille. Monsieur stops, buttoning up that “good frock coat,” the uniform of the American senator, which has proclaimed Squedunk through every capital in Europe. He stands, the oracle of the post office, the rich man of the county, the benignant elder of the Congregational church, gazing across the way at all the flaring signs toward Sixth Avenue.
“Ah,” says he, smiling reminiscently, “the Midway. Let’s go and look at ’em, my dears.”
I had a wicked impulse to go, too, and see what happened. But I repressed it, and took the liberty to inform Mr. Smallville that those places were not especially recommended for ladies. I think miss was mortally offended with me for upsetting the program.
Are other people secretly disappointed, too, because they can’t get a peep behind those closed doors? It was Madam Eve, I believe, who first tasted the apple; it was Pandora who lifted the lid of the box of troubles; propose a slumming party, and be sure it is the ladies who will applaud loudest. Well, then—those places, dear Miss Smallville are—very much like the zenanas the foreign missionaryess told you about last autumn in the church parlors. Now you know all about it. Ask your brother Tom if I’m not correct. I wager he can tell you if he chooses.
It is a curious fact, by the way, that all the places which make Broadwaynotorious are in the side streets. Just as it is a curious misnomer to call the toughest section of it the Tenderloin. Broadway has no slums. Laboring people, even, never make any distinguishable element in its populace. This is, of course, owing to its geographical position. But there is one fact which is immensely to its credit, and is perhaps due to the Irish who govern it, if they do prefer Fifth Avenue to parade in. For when Brian Boru—from whom every loyal Irishman is descended—was king, didn’t a beauteous damsel, with a ring of price, stroll unprotected and in safety over his kingdom? Beauteous damsels with rings of price certainly stroll unprotected over Broadway, but this is not the fact I emphasize. It is, seriously, that it is quite possible for young ladies to walk this fastest mile in the United States, with their papas and mammas, every evening, and write home to Kate that “it is just like Saturday night on Main Street, only bigger.” No sensible girl could promenade the Strand or the Bois after theater hours, no matter how chaperoned, and then make such a comparison. Huzza! I say. Huzza! It is America’s compliment to her women.
Still, however decorously Broadway subdues its hilarity before the ladies, like a fast young man at a tea party, we all know it is not in the least like Saturday night on Main Street. Let us saunter along, like two men of the world, perfectly competent to recognize vice, but infinitely preferring to smile at honest gayety, and find out what this crowd really is that is again packing the pavement as the theaters turn out their audiences.
Principally, so much in the majority as to characterize it, men of affairs, country merchants, out-of-town visitors, with and without their womenkind, the New York audience to whom actor and clergyman alike make their appeal; while circling about in it, embroidered so to speak on its surface, is that other crowd—high fashion, artists, actors, distinguished visitors, wardmen, Bohemians, sporting people, thieves and confidence men—which also produces its effect, and lends its coloring and vivacity to the picture. The side streets, looking east at least, are respectable, but they are not brilliant. Fashion, Bohemia and fast life are, after all, what we have come to watch. And as fashion mostly cuts Broadway—where it used to live and promenade when Mr. N. P. Willis’ natty boots pattered about Fourteenth Street—at the first crossing, it is Bohemia and the “wise push” we will sup with.
In Broadway parlance, Bohemia means newspaper and theatrical people. And I venture to remind the ladies and gentlemen of the drama in presenting them in such a company, that I am painting a city nocturne, and may properly introduce Mr. Morgan, Mr. Beerbohm Tree, Father Ducey, dear man, in his cape overcoat, Al Smith leaning against the Gilsey House railing, or any other characteristic and familiar figure natural to the composition. No picture of Broadway would be complete, they will acknowledge, without them, and to use a metaphor I have before employed, they are certainly accustomed to occupy “the center of the stage” with dignity and elegance.
Anyway, they all come here, and I should think they would all love it. This part of Broadway is nicknamed the Rialto. Nowhere else are they taken so cordially and frankly by the hand. They lounge about it by day and win fame and fortune in its theaters at night. Nat Goodwin and his wife, Hackett and Mary Mannering—when they can meet—Sir Henry Irving, De Wolf Hopper, Miss Annie Russell, bowing to Charles Richman out of a cab, Amelia Bingham, Joseph Jefferson, whose only fault is that he isn’t immortal, and funny, rollicking Fay Templeton, humming a new coon song—old favorites and new ones, you may see them going to supper at the Lambs’ Club, the Players, the Waldorf, Delmonico’s, Sherry’s, any evening they are in town.
Broadway is darker. The theater lights are out. Only bars and apothecaries, shops and hotels, are brilliant. The opera is over, and carriages arewhirling away toward Fifth Avenue, and tramcars crawling along in procession, packed to the platforms with gayly dressed passengers. Across the way from Macy’s huge dark store, theHeraldpresses are rushing off the biography of the day in sight of everybody, and no philosopher moralizes on that awful, tremendous record of four-and-twenty hours of a whole world’s work, play, crime, suffering, heroism, love, faith.
Our fast friends must tremble as they pass those windows, and remember the relentless, watchful eyes forever fixed on them. The ladies and gentlemen of this society dine at Shanley’s and Rector’s, and call supperlunch. Except that they are more painstakingly dressed, they don’t look very different from others. I have often thought that such a congregation might gather in Trinity Chapel, say, and be preached to by an innocent clergyman with a weary sense of the futility of trying to make such evidently virtuous persons penitent.
Should you like to really know them? They are thick about you on every hand. Drama and tragedy and pathos are in rehearsal now; and that old comedy of “A Fool and His Money.” Walk a few blocks with the night clerk of Wilson’s chemist shop. Get to know the bookmaker coming out of George Considine’s Metropole bar, chat with our acquaintance, the plainclothes man. Join that man-about-town, on his way to the Astoria Club. Masks will be torn off then, every actor will be seen as he is. That family coachman is a burglar just out of Auburn. That thin, alert gentleman in evening clothes is a gambler, getting a breath of air before taking his place behind Daly’s wheel. That pale-faced student is a reporter on his way to “hit the pipe.” That sweet-faced girl will be screaming drunk by two o’clock—the pale little man in mourning is the most notorious divekeeper in America. The one with the beautiful silver beard is a race-track owner over in New Jersey, and they call the red-headed Jew talking to “Honest John Kelly” the king of the gold-brick men. This well-dressed gentleman with the large hands is Corbett, the pugilist; that kindly-faced, handsome one, going into Tom O’Rourke’s, is a famous all-round sport. Notice that beautifully gowned, superbly handsome brunette who is getting out of a hansom at Martin’s Restaurant. She had a yataghan in her flat she brought from Paris with her, and she caught it up one night and drove it into her lover’s neck, and was acquitted on the ground that it was done in self-defense.
Do you want more detailed biographies, or is your acquaintance sufficiently extended? The owls on theHeraldbuilding are staring knowingly at the moon, who is coquettishly hiding her face behind a cloud. Mr. Greeley has fallen asleep in his chair, facing Mr. Dodge, after listening to that eternal long temperance speech which is never ended. I don’t think Broadway is amusing after midnight.
Let’s go to Brown’s and have some deviled kidneys and a mug of Bass.