Was life merely an effort at being forever amused?
Almost, it seemed so.
The room was dim with smoke. Through the faint veil that curled incessantly toward the ceiling the pictures on the wall took on a misty haze that heightened rather than spoilt their effect. It was not a large room, but the walls were covered with pictures of every sort. It was impossible to escape observing the artistic carelessness that had prevailed in the arrangement of the furniture. Bookcases lined the lower portion of each wall; then came pictures. There was an original by Blum; a marvelously executed facsimile of a black-and-white by Abbey; a Vierge, and a Myrbach. Not the least remarkable Mature of these ornaments was the manner of their framing, A Parisienne, by Jules Cheret, for instance, all skirts and chic, looked as if she had just burst through the confines of a prison-wall of a daily paper. The carelessly serrated edges, then the white matting, and the brown frame gave a whole that was worth looking at twice. An etching—one of Beardsley's fantasies—was framed all in black; it was more effective than the original.
Over the mantel were scattered photographs of stage divinities in profusion. Many of them had autographs scrawled across the face of the picture. In a niche in the wall a human skull, with a clay pipe stuck jauntily between the teeth, looked out over the smoke.
From the next room, beyond the open portieres, came the sound of a violin and a piano.
The air of Mascagni's "Intermezzo" died away, and for it was substituted a slow dirge-like melody. Belden, in the front room, broke out into an explosive, "Ah, that's the stuff! Everybody sing: 'For they're hangin' Danny Deever in the mohn-nin'.'" The wail of that solemn ballad went echoing through the house, all the men present joining in. Belden, who had been lying at full length on the floor, explaining the beauties of a charcoal drawing by Menzel to a group of three other artists—Marsboro, of theTelegraph, Evans, of theStandard, and a younger man, Stevely, who was still going to the Art School—had jumped to his feet and was slowly waving a pencil in mock leadership of a chorus. Vanstruther, who was stealing an evening from society for Bohemia's sake, was far back in a huge rocking chair; a fantastic work by Octave Uzanne on his knee, and his legs stretched out over the center table; he now held his pipe in his hand and hummed the refrain in a deep bass.
"Go on," urged Belden, as the last notes moaned themselves away in the smoke, "go on, give us something else!" But Stanley laid his violin down on a bookcase and declared that his arm was tired.
Vanstruther pulled at his pipe again, until he was sure he still had fire. Then he declared, oracularly, "Stanley, you look tremendously religious tonight. Been jilted?
"No, shaved. You confirm an impression I have that a man never feels so religious as when he has just been shaved. I assure you that in this way I could really read one of your 'shockers,' Van, and feel that I was doing my duty."
"Oh," Belden cut in, going over to one of the bookcases, "anything to stop Stanley from hearing himself talk. It makes him drunk. Seeing we had a ballad of Kipling's just now, suppose some one reads something of his. Then someone else can sit still, and think of his sins, while the pen-and-ink men make sketches of him. How'll that do, eh?
"All right." It was Vanstruther, whose voice came from over the smoke. "I'll read if you like; and Stanley can get a far-away expression into his countenance, while you other fellows put his ephemeral beauty on paper. What'll it be?"
Stanley, who was rolling himself onto a sofa in the corner, murmured, while he rolled a cigarette with a deft motion of his fingers, "Oh, give us that yarn about the things in a dead man's eye, what's the title again—'At the End of the Passage', isn't it? I'm in the mood for something of that pleasant sort. By the way, aren't we a man shy, Belden?"
"Yes. Young Lancaster hasn't arrived yet. I had a great time getting him to say he would come; he has scruples about Sunday, and all that sort of thing; but he'll turn up pretty soon, I know. Here's the book, Van." He handed the volume across the table. Stanley, after a few chaffing remarks had passed back and forth, was arranged into a position that would give the artists a sharp profile to work from. The artists began sharpening pencils, and pinning paper on drawing boards. And then, for a time, there was nothing but the sounds of pens and pencils going over paper, and Vanstruther's voice reading that story of Indian heat and hopelessness. In the other room McRoy, the man who had been playing Stanley's piano accompaniment, was reading Swinburne to himself.
The bell rang suddenly. Belden threw his sketch down and opened the door. "Lancaster, I suppose," he said. Then they heard his voice in the hall, greeting the newcomer, who was presently ushered in and airily made known to such of the men as he had not yet been introduced to.
"You've just missed a treat, my boy," said Belden, pushing Dick into a chair. "Vanstruther has been reading us a yarn of Kipling's. You're fond of Kip., I suppose?"
While Dick said, "Oh, yes, indeed," Stanley put in.
"It's lucky for you you are, because Belden here swears by the trinity of Kipling, Riley and Henri Murger. He has occasional flirtations with other authors, but he generally comes back to those three. But then, when you get to know Belden better, you will realize that he has what is technically known as 'rats in his garret.' Do you know what he once did, just to illustrate? Walked miles in a bleak country district that he might reach a certain half-disabled bridge and there sit, reading De Quincey's 'Vision of Sudden Death' by moonlight! The man who can do that can do anything that's weird."
"There's only one way to stop your tongue, Stanley," Belden remarked humoredly, "and that is to ask you to play for us again. Lancaster has never heard you yet, you know."
Stanley looked out into the other room. "What do you say, Mac? Shall we tune our harps again?"
"Just as cheap," said the other, without looking up from his book.
They began to play. From Raff's "Cavatina," they strayed into a melody by Rubinstein; then it was a wild gallop through comic operas, popular songs, and Bowery catches. While they played the men in the other room began comparing sketches. Vanstruther ushered Dick into many of the artistic treasure-holds that the room contained. Also, he supplied him with running comments on some of the things they saw all about them. Dick, though he scarcely felt at ease, felt strongly the fascination of all this devil-may-care atmosphere. The haze of smoke; the melodious airs from beyond the portieres; the careless attire and jaunty nonchalance of the men, all drew him with a sort of sensual hypnotism, even while his inner being felt that he himself was a little better than this. He was in the land of Don't-Care; dogmas, creeds, faiths had no place here; everything was "do as you please, and let your neighbor please himself." He said but little; he thought a great deal.
One of the artists called Vanstruther over to the open bookcase, to show him a sketch by Gibson. Dick looked about him, picked up a copy of Omar Khayyam, that had Vedder's illustrations, and buried himself in the gentle philosophy of that classic.
But Belden was again become restless. Mere melody never did anything but irritate him. "Oh, play some nigger music," he asked. Then, when a few merry jingles from "'Way down South" had played themselves in and out of the echoes, Stanley put his violin down with a decisive gesture. "There, I've paid my way, I think!" When the piano had been closed, and the violin laid away in its case, he went on, "'Seems to me it's about time you were bringing along your friend Murger?"
Belden walked toward the shelf where the "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" had its place. As he took it out, however, he said, "Come to think of it, Marsboro's going to commit matrimony pretty soon, I hear. Any objections?" He held the volume in the air, questioningly.
Marsboro laughed, and shook his head. "No, no," he said, "go on!"
"Just as if," Stanley observed, "a man about to be married knew what objections were! Dante Gabriel Belden, in some things you are weirdly primitive."
"I would sooner be primitive than effete," was Belden's retort.
Stanley turned to Marsboro. "Don't think me curious, old man, but is it any girl I know?"
Before Marsboro could reply, Vanstruther broke in with, "I'll bet money it's not! You don't suppose Marsboro is likely to think of marrying a woman with a past!"
Marsboro flushed a little; and moved uneasily in his chair. Dick, looking up from his Omar Khayam, wondered how the man could endure such verbal pitch and toss with such a subject.
But Stanley turned away from the matter with a sneer. "My dear fellow," he said, "if it will soothe your sweet soul, I am quite willing to admit that in the course of my life I have known some women who had pasts. They are invariably interesting. The only difference between a woman with a past and a man of the same sort is that the man still has a future before him. And a man with a future is as pathetic as a little boy chasing a butterfly: even if he wins the game, there is nothing but a corpse, and some dust on his fingers."
Belden, turning the pages of the Murger, said, deprecatingly, "Don't get Stanley started on moral reflections: in the first place, they are not moral; in the second place they reflect nothing but his own perverted soul. Talking morals with some men is like turning the pages of an edition de luxe with inky fingers."
Stanley laughed. "Good boy! But now go on with Rodolph and his flirtations. Where did you leave off? Hadn't he just written some poetry, spent the proceeds on feasting his friends, and the night in a tree?"
Belden began to read.
In spite of himself, Dick began to feel the fascination of Murger's recital of all those rollicking, roystering episodes in the Latin Quarter. He let the Omar fall idly into his lap, and gave himself up to listening to Belden's reading. The other men smoked and smiled. Dick's sense of humor told him that there was something quaint in the way Belden intentionally fed his own love for Bohemianism with another's description; none the less he admitted that there was no sham, dilettante Bohemianism about this place and the men present. It was not the Bohemianism of claw-hammer coats and high-priced champagne; of little suppers, after the theater, in a black and gold boudoir, where the women tasted some Welsh rarebit and declared that they were afraid it was "awfully Bohemian, don't you know!" It was the Bohemia that recked naught of others, but had as banner, "Do as you please," and as watchword "Don't care." It was the old philosophy of Epicurus brought to modern usage.
The good-humored account that. Henri Murger gave of so many picturesque light-love escapades, that had so much of pathos mingled with their unmorality, began to find in Dick a vein of sympathy. He felt that it was all very pleasant; all was charmingly put; it was interesting.
"There," Belden declared, as he finished reading the episode of the flowers that Musette watered every night, because she had promised to love while those blossoms lived, "I'm dry, that's what I am. I think it's about time we investigated. Come on into the kitchen, people. There's some coffee and cake and fruit. Shouldn't wonder if you could find a bottle or two of beer on the ice, too."
They trooped out, through a room and corridor, to the kitchen. There was a bare, deal table, a cooking range, a gas stove, a refrigerator and several doors leading to closets. Every man brought his own chair. A search was begun for cups, plates, knives and forks. Each man sat down where he pleased. The coffee that was made was hardly such as one gets at Tortoni's, but it was refreshing, nevertheless. The sound of corks drawing from beer-bottles, of knives rattling on plates, and of indiscriminate, lusty chatter filled the place. Belden was the master-spirit. He saw that everyone helped himself; he chaffed and he laughed; he looked after the provender and the cigars. The infection of all this jollity touched Dick; he began to say to himself that to worry himself "with conscientious scruples just because it was on a Sunday instead of a Monday that all this happened, was to be something of a prig." And he had always had a decided aversion to being that particular sort of nuisance. He resigned himself completely to the spirit of the time and place.
McRoy broke into the babel of talk with a plaintive, "Everybody listen for about a minute, will you? I want to ask Belden a solemn question: Belden, have you finished that copy of 'Old-World Idyls' that you were going to illustrate for me in pen-and-ink, on the margins?"
Belden smiled. "Why, to tell you the truth, old man—" he began, but the other interrupted him with, "There! publicly branded! Belden, you're the awfulest breaker of oaths that ever was let live. You've had the book six months, and I'll bet you've never drawn a stroke on it!"
"The mistake you made," put in Stanley, "was to believe that he everwoulddo the thing. He once made a promise of that sort to me, but that was so long ago that I think I'm another person now."
"If the theory of evolution is correct," said Vanstruther, "your late lamented self must have been and abominably corrupt person."
Stanley sighed, "Perhaps so. I am trying, you know, day by day, to approach the sublime pinnacle on which you, my dear Van, tower above the rest of mankind. However—" he reached his arm out over the table—"Any beer left over there?"
Belden handed a mug and a bottle over to him.
"By the way," cut in Marsboro, "ever had any more trouble with the neighbors here? Said you kept them awake Sunday nights with your unholy orgies, didn't they?"
"Yes. But I said if they were going to kick on that score I would get out an injunction against that girl of theirs that is always trying to play 'After the Ball', with one hand. So I fancy our lances are both at rest."
So, with much careless clatter, and exchange of banter, they ate and drank lustily until their hunger was appeased. Then, pushing their plates and mugs into the middle of the table they leaned back to enjoy the pleasures of the god Nicotine. And presently someone hinted that the empty plates and the litter of the late-lamentedness in general was not a cheering sight and they might as well proceed into the studio again. There was a shoving back of chairs, a trooping through the corridor, and they were all assembled once more in the front rooms. McRoy hid himself behind a book. The others grouped themselves around the piano. The plaintiff strains of Chevalier's "The Future Mrs. 'Awkins" filled the room, born aloft on the impetus of five pairs of lungs.
There was a violent ringing at the outer bell. It was some little time before the men at the piano heard the din; it was only at McRoy's muttered "Somebody's pulling your front door bell off the wires, Belden!" that the latter went to open. The men in the room could hear the sound of a man's voice, a quick passage of sentences, then good-nights, all vaguely, over the strains of the coster-ditty.
"What do you think," said Belden, coming in again, "has happened? It was Ditton, of theTelegraph—lives a door or two north—just dropped in to tell me a bit of news that he thought would interest me. Wooton of the 'Torch'? has disappeared, leaving the property deeply in debt. Nobody knows where he is. Jove, come to think of it, that's pretty rough news for you, Lancaster!"
"Yes," said Lancaster, "it is. And yet there is one consolation, he paid me within a week of what was due me."
There was a cessation of all other discussion to make room for the consideration of this bit of news. Everybody agreed that it was too bad that so good a sheet as the "Torch" should go the way of the majority. Concerning Wooton the opinions differed. Belden began to apologize to Lancaster for having led him into this "mess," as he called it, while Stanley sneered at everybody for not having seen through Wooton long ago.
"He is inordinately vain," said Stanley, "and frightfully extravagant. Clever. Lazy—awfully lazy. He can sit back in his chair and tell you how to run the New YorkHerald, and he has been able to get nothing profitable into or out of his paper from the time he began until now. He theorizes beautifully; the only thing he can really do successfully is to borrow money and talk to women. He used to amuse me just in the way an actor amuses me. Half the time I think he was deceiving even himself. I always thought he would do this very thing, one of these days. He used to have what old women call 'spells' now and again, when he found himself hard up for cash, that were really the most curious performances. He would stay away from his office altogether; genius as he was in warding off collectors, he used to prefer not to face them sometimes. There was—I should say there is—a woman, one of the cleverest, most cultured woman in town, who was fond of him in an elderly-sister sort of way, and he used to go to her and borrow money. Think of it: borrow money from a woman! She saw through him long ago, I know, and yet he used to use such artifice—such tears, and promises of betterment as the men employed!—that she always helped him in the end. Then he gambled to try to make the big stake that would enable him to run a rich man's paper; the only result is that he got deeper and deeper into the hole. All the time he avoided his office; if he scraped up a banknote or two he would send them along, per messenger boy, to the foreman of the composing-room and have the printers paid, at least. You must pay the printers and the pressmen, you know, even if you let a lot of literary devils starve! And then some guardian angel would send along a college chum, or some fellow with more loyality than discretion, and A.B. Wooton would make a big 'borrow' and be once more the genial, cynical man-of-the-world that the rest of you know. This time I presume the angel refused to come. The end had to come; it was simply a huge game of 'bluff.'"
"How is it you know all this?" asked one of the others.
"My dear fellow," was Stanley's answer, "I havegambledwith him. All through one of those periods when he was engaged, ostrich-like, in sticking his head into the sand, I was with him. Besides, I know something of his private affairs. He had sunk all of his own money long ago; for the last year or so theTorchand Wooton have been living on the gullibility of others. It seems strange that this should be possible in this smart American city, but Wooton was not an ordinary bluffer; he was a genius. Owing you hundreds of dollars he could talk to you all day so skilfully on the one especial vanity of your heart that you would feel much more like offering him another hundred than like even so much as mentioning the old debt. I feel sorry for him. He should have a patron, to humor him in all his extravagances; he would be splendid, splendid!"
But Lancaster, whom the news had touched a good deal, declared that it was time he was taking himself off. Belden accompanied him to the door, and spoke to him encouragingly about another position that he thought Dick could easily obtain. Then Lancaster passed out into the night.
Carriages lined the sidewalk for blocks in every direction. There was a slight sprinkle of rain falling, and the shining rubber coats and hats of the coachmen caught the electric light in fantastic streaks. Horses were stamping, and chafing the bit. From every direction came a stream of humanity, all making for the Auditorium. Carriages were arriving every moment; the bystanders and ticket scalpers caught glimpses of light hose and dainty opera shoes and skirts that were lifted for an instant. Men in black capes were hurrying about busily. The cable cars emptied load after load of well-dressed men and women. All the world and his wife was going to the opera.
Dick Lancaster, as he got out of his hansom, looked appreciatively at the picture that all this hurrying throng made, and shaking some of the rain drops off his coat, entered the opera house. As he looked about him at the richly caparisoned human animals all on pleasure bent, at the nonchalance that the mirrors told him he himself was displaying, it came over him with something of amusement that there had been decided changes in Richard Lancaster since that young person first came to town. Impressionable as wax, the town had already cast its fascinations over him; he was in the charmed circle. He had been put up at one of the best of the clubs; he had been made much of, socially, by the select set that allowed the preferences of Mrs. Annie McCallum Stewart to dictate the distinction between the Somebodies and the Nobodies; he had been successful enough, professionally, to enable him to move in the world as befitted his tastes. It is to be confessed that his tastes, now that they had been whetted by the approach of opportunities, were not of the most economical. He was fond of all things that show the intellectual aristocrat; he liked to look well, to dine well, to talk well, and to enjoy good music. He liked the comfort, the remoteness from the mere vagaries of the weather, that this town life afforded. Here was a night such as in the country would be dismal unspeakably; yet nothing but brilliance and enjoyment was evident in his present surroundings.
He threw his shoulders back with something of proud pleasure in his own well-being, as he handed his cape and opera-hat to the caretaker. Yes, life was good! It tasted well, and he was young, and there would yet be many long, delicious draughts of it!
Mrs. Stewart was in her box. Several girls, whose low-cut dresses seemed to be longing for something more worth showing, were seated on the chairs that surrounded the central figure, Mrs. Stewart. In the background of this, as of all other boxes, was a phalanx of white shirt-fronts. It looked like the fore-front of an attacking army; first the flash of bayonets, as they are to be found in woman's eyes, and then the heavier artillery, the stolid force of masculinity. In the wide corridors behind the boxes, in the foyers, and up and down the marble stairways, the stream of people flowed back and forth. Presently the conductor of the orchestra took his seat. There was a hastening toward seats and boxes, and the overture of the "Cavalleria Rusticana" floated out in echoes.
Young Lancaster reached the Stewart box just as the first bars were streaming forth. Mrs. Stewart leaned her head gracefully back over her right shoulder, and smiled up at him. She stretched up a beautifully gloved hand, and whispered a "Glad you came through the rain, after all. Awfully disappointed if you hadn't!" at him. He nodded to the other women, and shook hands with Mr. Stewart and some of the other members of the white-shirted, blank-faced phalanx.
"Ah," whispered Mrs. Stewart with a languid show of interest, and putting her lorgnette up, "there is Calve!"
There was a flutter of hand-clappings that went like a light wave from the stalls to the upper balconies. And then began that exquisite, dramatic exposition of rustic jealousy that Mascagni has so wonderfully set to music. As Santuzza, Calve was magnetic. Actress as much as singer she riveted all attention. Her face was the picture of agony the while she was contemplating: the inner vision of her betrayal by Turiddu. Then, the jealous hatred flashing out at Lola, her rival; and lastly the self-accusing sorrow that covered her when she saw the effect of her tale-bearing against her former lover. In the interval there was the marvellous Intermezzo. Mrs. Stewart leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. When it was over she said, "There is something of the world's joy and something of its pain in that melody. It appeals to me wonderfully."
Lancaster put in, "One of the men at the club declared that it was the only thing that had given him real emotion for—oh, years."
"He must have been a very blasé creature," said one of the other women.
"He is," assented Lancaster.
Their further conversation was interrupted by the rising of the curtain. When it came down again there was a general movement toward the foyers. Some of the tall and pale young men strolled out to smoke cigars and talk of the boxing match that was going to come off at the club in a day or so. With much fluttering of fans and swishing of skirts the angular girls betook themselves from Mrs. Stewart's box to see if they "could see any of the other girls." Mrs. Stewart and Dick Lancaster were left in sole possession. He took a chair beside her and looked over into the stalls.
"Only fair," she said, noting his visual measurement of the size of the audience.
"Yes. These people don't want the New. They want 'Faust' and 'Aida,' and they think 'Tannhäuser' is the very last in music. It will be years before they see the gem-like beauty of this new Italian school."
"And yet—it's a return to the old."
"That is why. The old things are the best, if you only go far enough into the past. We are never really modern, we are merely old in a new way."
"Do you know—" she leaned her white elbow on the cushioned chair-back and placed her forefinger just under her ear, so that from the elbow up her arm formed a white, beautiful rest for the attractive face, and looking young Lancaster smilingly in the eyes, tapped her foot caressingly to the floor—"do you know that I think I shall have to cut you off my list very soon? You have—h'm—changed a great deal in the few months I have known you. You occasionally make speeches that sound almost cynical. You were always clever; you always talked brightly, but you never used to believe some of the sharp things you said; now I think you are beginning to. I liked you because you were different; you are not different any more, at least not different in the same way. You will never be as stupid as most of the others; but I am afraid, too, that you will never be quite as genuine as you were."
He sighed as he looked at her. He smiled very faintly as he answered, "Yes, I am afraid you are right. I am not as I was." His gaze swept out over the stalls, the crowded foyer, the brilliance everywhere. "But how could I have done anything else than let all this affect me a little? I am pliable, I suppose, and I bend easily to the wind. I came here to taste life. As soon as I began to sip the cup I found that I was going to like it immensely. I trod the way of the world that I might see what manner of men walk there, and what sort of a road it was. Presently, I found that I liked that path so much that I preferred it to the bypaths of solitude and asceticism. And what has it mattered as long as I have not neglected the work there is for me to do? No one can say I have changed in that respect. I work harder than ever. It's not fair of you to upbraid me. A great deal of it is your own doing."
"Yes?"
"Of course it is. You have been my pilot out of the land of the Narrows. When I came up here I was narrow. I thought about things dogmatically, and applied hard and fast rules to every sort of conduct. Now I am broader. I know that where the world moves at lightning speed you cannot apply the same tenets that hold good in a village where life is lived at a cripple's gait and where routine is the reigning deity."
"You would not have called it a 'cripple's gait' a little while ago," interposed Mrs. Stewart.
He flushed slightly but went on: "I realize now that since we have but one life to live, we should live it as fully as we may. I could not have seen the life that all of you here are living without realizing that it was a fuller life than the one the country afforded me. So, cost what it may, I must needs live it also."
She looked at him curiously. "Yes," she repeated, half to him and half to herself, "cost what it may."
"Besides," he went on, looking away from her, and with something of regret in his voice, "I have grown worldly because I loved a worldly woman. You—you have made me love you."
She lifted her eyebrows a trifle, turned her head, with the eyelids drawn down over her eyes, toward him, and opened the lids slowly, with a smile on her lips. Then she looked past him to where her husband was leaning over a chair in one of the other boxes.
"Don't you think John is looking very handsome tonight?" she asked softly.
Lancaster, who had gone red and pale in waves, answered, through set lips, "Very."
Then the curtain went up on "Pagliacci."
It was the first time that Lancaster had heard Leoncavallo's opera. In its novel charm his shame and mortification—shame at having spoken those words to Mrs. Stewart and mortification at the rebuff they had only naturally brought him—were for the time being swallowed up. With eager eyes and attentive ears he watched and listened to the play within the play. First the arrival of the mountebanks. Amid the laughs and rejoicings of the villagers the theater-tent is set. Then the effort of the clown to make love to Canio's wife; the slash of the whip from her, the muttered curses from him. But the woman is fickle, after all; the villager, Silvio, is more successful than the clown was. The sudden approach of Canio, the husband, led hither by the vengeful clown, still smarting under the whip; the escape of Silvio, and the woman's refusal to tell the name of her lover. And so, to the wonderful second act, where tragedy is so dexterously woven into comedy; where, under the guise of a drama that the mountebanks proffer the villagers on their little stage, the greater drama of Canio's jealousy is spun out to its tragic ending. In between the lines of the dialogue intended for the village audience come lines wrung from Canio's heart that sear their way into his wife's breast, spite of her stage-smiles and graces. And when, at the last, Canio, in his baffled rage, would strike her, and Silvio, her lover, rushes from the audience in rescue, only to be stabbed by the finally exultant husband, young Lancaster involuntarily shuddered. There was something griping in the wonderful display of human rage and jealousy that this young tenor gave in Canio; in the final words, full of tragic, double, ironical meaning, "La comedie e finita!" there was something of a sentence of death. And somehow, in Silvio there seemed to be something of himself: that lover's terrible fate was fraught for him, in the conscience-stricken state he found himself in, with warning and protest. While the applause, reaching curtain-call after curtain-call, surged all about him, young Lancaster was lost in rêverie. He was changed, yes. He had adapted himself to the manners of the town; but he still had a most nervous conscience, sharp, unblunted. He sat still, with his chin hiding his upper shirt stud.
Mrs. Stewart's voice roused him. Her husband was already engaged in putting her cloak about her shoulders. "Wonderful, wasn't it?" she said sweetly. "We shall see you Wednesday, shall we not?"
He bowed and stammered something, he hardly knew what.
The opera was over.
That night, before he took off his dress' clothes, Dick sat down and wrote to his mother. It was a thing he had not been so steadfast in of late as once he had been.
In one place he wrote: "You ask me, mother mine, how I like the town now that it is no longer strange to me. Oh, I like it only too well. The old place, the old friends, the sweet gentle tenor of all the old life out there in Lincolnville, all seem like some far-off dream to me. My ears and eyes are full of the many sounds and sights of the town; the multifarious vistas, and the ever-changing face of the street. I like the town and yet I fear it. Sometimes its might oppresses me, and I feel as if I wanted to get out in the woods near our home and lie down at full length on the mossy bank, where the creek sings soothingly and the sun hangs like a golden ball in a clear sky. I want to hear the crickets, and the deep silence of the nights, and the echoes of detached laughter floating over the meadows. I want to watch the sun-light as it comes through the leaves and plays hide-and-seek on the lawn; I want to watch the hawk circling in the air, the chickens scurrying fearfully at the sight of him. And then again the feverish itch to be in the very middle of this maelstrom, the town, seizes me. I long for the very thick and foremost of the struggle, and the picture of Lincolnville fades away. At this present time of the year, though, I can really prefer the town without seeming a slave to it.
"It is in the winter, or in the early spring, when country places are chiefly seas of mud and slush that one most deeply realizes the delights of dwelling in town. Modern invention has put the town dweller beyond the weather's jealous bites. We step into a hansom, we drive to the club, we have dinner; behind club doors, and in club comfort we are above all the slings and arrows of the elements; we drive to the theatre, and the black-and-white splendor of our men, as well as the fur-decked rosiness of our women, is only enhanced by contrast against the frowny murkings of the sky. I have noticed that the finale, the curtain-fall of any important public event, such as a dinner, a dance, or an opera, is always a more picturesque thing when the carriages have to drive away through the sleet. Whereas, the country! The weather is the world and all that therein is; you can't get away from it. Mud is king!
"I am doing something in paint now, just to feed this terrible ambition of mine. The pen-and-ink work is all very-well, and it does bring the bread and butter, but it is not what I want for ever and ever. And I think I am going to have for my subject just such a scene as I wrote of a moment ago: the moment before the carriages drive away through the rain, with everybody in gala attire and scintillant with brightness and insincerity. For the town is insincere, mother, and cruel. Some day, perhaps I, too, will become insincere. I do not know. I pray it may not be so. But I am alarming you causelessly. I am only a little tired and unnerved tonight. I have been to the opera, and it was just a little affecting. So don't mind what I said just now. * * * * I am getting rather tired and will say good-night. * * *"
In the early dawn there had been a slight shower of rain, but by the time the sun was high enough to shine over the town's highest buildings, the clouds parted, and presently drifted away altogether, leaving the golden disc full freedom in giving a brilliant look to the clean-washed streets. By noon everything was as bright as a newly-scoured kitchen.
It was at that time of the year when spring is kissing a greeting to summer. There was not too much heat. Growth and activity were not yet subdued by the later lassitude of midsummer. In the parks the trees were full of blossoms, the flowers were spelling out the runes that the gardners had contrived for the Sunday sight-seers, and the roadways were alive with well-equipped traps of every sort. The avenue was colorful and kaleidoscopic. Dog-carts, driven by smartly-gowned, square-sitting girls, bowled along noiselessly, the footmen looking as stolid as if carved in wood. Landaus, with elderly women leaning far back into the cushions, and shading their complexions under lace-decked parasols, went by with an occasional rattling of chains. The careful observer might have noticed that the number of smart vehicles was a trifle larger than usual; there were more coaches out, and the air resounded more often to the various military and hunting-calls that the English grooms were executing on their horns.
It was Derby Day.
Dick was walking along the avenue watching, with his artist eyes open for all the picturesque effect of the whole—the yellow haze of the sun that filled the atmosphere in and out of which all these rapid color-effects flashed swiftly, the thin strip of sky-reflecting water to the east, the line of grass and the sky-touching horizon of huge buildings—when he heard someone calling out his name.
"Lancaster!" It was Stanley, driving a dog-cart and a neat bay cob. "The very man! Jump in, won't you? Going down to the Derby. Thing you shouldn't miss; lots of color and all that sort of thing! Asked Vanstruther to go down with me, but one of his dime-novel heroes is ill or something of that sort, and he's off the list. That's good of you. Look how you're stepping. This brute has been eating his head off all week, and isn't really fit for a Christian to drive. That's it! Now." They went spinning along the avenue.
In the instant or two before he climbed into the dog-cart, Dick had reflected that while he was not over-fond of Stanley in a good many ways, the man was undeniably a clever fellow, always to be depended on for bright talk; besides he did feel very much like studying the scene of a Derby Day with its many-colored facets.
Watching the rapid, shifting beauties of the boulevard, Dick burst into a little sigh of admiration. "Ah," he said, "this is good! This is living!"
"Youthful enthusiasm," muttered the other man. "Delightful thing—youthful enthusiasm—to get over."
"Oh, no! I hope I never shall! What is life worth if one is not to show that one enjoys it? How can you look at a day like this—a splendid, champagnelike day—and yet—"
"My dear fellow," interrupted Stanley, with a queer smile, "when a man gets to my time of life there is always something melancholy to him in the picture of a spring day. It reminds him of his own youth: all tears and sunshine. Today there are neither tears or sunshine; it is all just contemplation. I don't seem to belong to the play at ail, any more, myself; I'm merely a spectator. To the spectator there is always something pathetic about joy."
"Your lunch was indigestable, that's all that is the matter with you," laughed Dick. "It's a dogma of mine that pessimism is merely another word for indigestion."
"Dogma!" sighed Stanley, "Don't you know that all dogmas are obsolete? Don't you know that in this rapid age we believe everything, accept everything and yet doubt everything?"
"Isn't that a trifle paradoxical?"
"No; only modern! We believe everything that inventors or scientists may tell us; but in the world spiritual we believe nothing. Is that a paradox?"
"But indigestion is surely, h'm, material rather than spiritual?" Dick enjoyed the verbal parries that he was always sure of with Stanley. He was always trying to get at the secret man's cynicism, a cynicism that was the essence of what many other men of the world he lived in seemed to feel, but were not all, perhaps, so well able to express.
"Oh well," was Stanley's answer, "after all, it doesn't matter. Nothing makes any difference." He looked blankly ahead as if all the world was contained in the space occupied between the cob's ears. Then he went on, in his minor monotone, "No, nothing, except—"
Dick, thinking to be cheery, put in "Except marriage?"
"No!" came from Stanley, with a sudden flick of the whip over the cob's flanks, "that only makes differences."
Dick laughed somewhat impatiently. "Oh!" he urged, "why sit there and be dismal? Why not wake up and live? Surely the air is full of it, of this fair Life? Enjoy it, brace up, be young!"
"Ah, if I only could again, if I only could! Oh, to be young again! He is the Autocrat of today, the young man." He lapsed into his sneer once more. "The young man of today thinks he has the experience of the centuries at his fingertips, whereas he really has only the gloves that were made yesterday and will split tomorrow."
"You are not only unjust," protested Dick, "you are flippant."
"Of course I am! The keynote of this end of the century is lightness. The modern declares that life is but a joke, and a bad one at best. How to live without ever allowing oneself to suspect that life is more than a game in which the odds are heads, Death wins; tails, Man loses: that is the great problem of the decade. The universal solution of the difficulty is the practice of superficiality. Skim! Be light! Never penetrate below the surfaces! Never search the deep! Make love as if it were a tourney of jests; die as if it were a riddle well guessed! Be scintillantly versatile, rather than thorough; hide your ignorance with bland blasédom; treat tragedy as an intruder, comedy as a chum, and as a reward you will be called 'up-to-date.' Nay, more: your fashionable friends may even mispronounce French in your behalf and dub youfin de siècle!"
Dick shuddered laughingly. "A horrible philosophy," he said. And yet he was glad of the other's bitterness; it showed, through all its veil of sneers and scorn, something of the point of view of the foremost in that race toward Death that some of the town-dwellers are wont to call Life.
Yet he could not keep his thoughts long on the serious import of the other's scornful flippancy. How shall two-and-twenty years, and health, and sunshine, and a spirit susceptible to enjoyments that the very atmosphere seemed redolent of, allow a young man to brood on the progress of the world's cancer? No; there were too many distractions! Tandems whirling by with horsy young men handling the ribbons; brakes full of laughing girls and straw-hatted young men; hackney carriages with four occupants unmistakably of the bookmaker guild.
Just before they rolled into sight of the grand-stand, Stanley said, "Oh, who do you suppose I had a letter from yesterday?"
"No idea."
"The most noble A.B. Wooton, of the late lamented 'Torch'."
"You don't say so. His nerve never dies, eh?"
"As I said before, his is not a case of 'nerve'; it is genius. He has the prettiest story you ever read, swears his advertising man deceived him and got the paper into all manner of tight places; found himself forced to get away from the ruins so that he could the better repay his creditors, which he states he has instructed his lawyers to do, and all the rest of it! I don't believe a word of it; but he has got grit!"
"That is a national fault," said Dick soberly, "the admiration of 'grit' in scoundrels. For that is all that Wooton is, after all!"
"Oh, well, why split hairs? He never did you any harm, did he? However, about his letter. He writes from Dresden. Says he has just met some Americans—name of Ware, I think. Enjoying himself immensely—girl in the party—moonlight rides and all that sort of thing. Wonder how long he'll last over there?"
"I know some Wares," said Dick quietly; "but I hardly think it could be the same ones. Though they are in Europe just now, that's true." His thoughts tried to hark back to Lincolnville, to his parting with Dorothy Ware, and to her return; but the present was too strong for him. They were driving across the course at this moment, and over into the field, which was already a motly, colored mass of vehicles, white dresses, parasols and stamping horses. The tops of coaches were made over into sitting room for summer-dressed girls, of whose faces one caught only the white under-half—the chin and the mouth, in high sun relief—while the eyes were in shade of the huge parasols. One caught glimpses of light shoes and hose; of young men walking, in earnest converse over betting tickets held in hand; of wicker lunch-baskets being brought from the inner chambers of the coaches and prepared for a future hunger; and, beyond, in the grand stand, of a black, indistinguishable mass of spectators, noisy, tremendous.
As soon as they had found a place for the dog-cart, from which they would be able to see the finish with tolerable comfort and completeness, Stanley said, with a noticeable alacrity succeeding the languid pessimism that had distinguished him all during the drive down.
"Now then, Lancaster, let's hurry over to the betting-shed!"
For a moment only Dick hesitated. "Going to bet, or just to look on?" he asked.
"Bet, of course, you innocent infant! But, Scotland, you don't have to! You can just soak in the—what do you call it—the impressionistic view of it. But hurry up, whatever you are going to do, I don't want the odds to tumble down too far before I get there!"
Not so long ago Dick would have cavilled, hesitated, perhaps refused. Now he caught his half-uttered objections being met by a whisper in his own mind of 'Don't be a prig!' and he followed Stanley silently. It occurred to him, presently, that to warn oneself of becoming a prig was in itself evidence of priggishness. Impatiently he shook his head, as if to get all analytical reflections out of his head altogether. He looked at the scene around him, and forgot everything else.
The scene in the betting-shed was, just as is the stock exchange floor, the boiling-point of the kettle of froth called metropolitan life. Around the bookmakers' stands was a seething, struggling mass of humanity. Each member of this mob was pushing, striving, perspiring for —what?—the chance to get something for nothing! The bookmakers themselves were straining every nerve to keep pace with the public's feverish desire to get rid of it's money. On their little stands, their heads on a level with the black-board that furnished the names of the horses and the odds against, they stood; one hand busy taking in money that was handed in to the inner part of the stand, the other grasping the piece of chalk that ever and again touched the black-board to effect some change in the odds. One man inside was busy with pencil and paper, registering each ticket as it was handed out; another covered the face of the ticket with the hasty hieroglyphics that stood for the horse chosen and the amount wagered and the amount that might be won. Here and there a bookmaker encouraged the "plunge" on some horse that he professed to scorn by shouting forth his odds and the horse's name. The blind struggle of the majority was an amusing spectacle; it certainly seemed to vouch for the truth of the saying that man is a gambling animal. Like serpents, the "touts," professional vendors of spurious stable information, went winding in and out through the throng, sometimes displaying judgment in the would-be bettors they approached, but as often as not displaying most lamentable indiscretion. Dick watched, with an amused smile, how one of these fellows sided up to a quiet man, who, program in hand, was leaning against a pillar watching the boards and the changes in odds. The quiet man listened to the tout's hoarse whisperings, and then threw his coat back showing an "owner's" badge. The tout slunk sheepishly into the crowd.
"If you take my advice," said Stanley who was fighting his way towards some remote goal or other, "you'll take a little flyer on Dr. Rice. That's what I'm going to do. There's a fellow on the other side of the ring has him a point higher than anyone else."
Dick, without having made up his mind as to his own betting or not betting, helped his companion in his struggle to get through the crowd. Desperate energy was necessary. There was never any time for apologies; elbows were pushed into sides, toes were trodden on, scarfs twisted and sleeve-links broken; no matter, there was money to be won and there was no time either to consider passing annoyances or the possibility of loss.
"Ah," said Stanley, finally, as they found themselves in front of a black-board that had a figure "7" chalked to the left of the name Dr. Rice and a "3" to the right. "Here we are! Now then, what are you going to do?" He whipped out a twenty dollar bill and crumpled it carefully into the palm of his hand.
Dick thought quickly. After all, it was merely the foregoing of some luxury or another; he would postpone joining that polo club, perhaps, or go without that new edition of Menzel's drawing's that he had been promising himself. He took a bill out of his card-case and handed it, without a word, to Stanley.
The ticket that Stanley presently handed him had "Rice" almost illigibly scrawled across it, and the figures "70" and "10." Dick stood to lose ten or to win seventy dollars.
By the time they had got comfortably ensconsed in their seats in the dog-cart once more, the horses were at the post for the great event of the day, the American Derby. Dick had begun to feel something of the torment of expectation and fear and hope that makes the gambler's nerves either like a sheet of reeds in the wind or like a tightly-drawn wire. If he won it would be, as he heard some men in the betting-shed remark, "just like finding money." He could allow himself all sorts of extravagances. He observed the horses making false start after false start without even a suspicion of qualmishness as to the moral aspect of the case coming over him. He had grown, to use his own phase, broader.
Down beyond the turn into the stretch was the bunch of restless horses, the vari-colored jackets, the starter's carriage, and the assistant starter's flag. There was the sky-blue jacket that showed where the favorite, The Ghost, was pirouetting on his hind legs; the black and yellow bars of Ætna's jockey, and many others. But Dick's eyes were focused on Dr. Rice; the horse's jockey was in all-black.
"Ah—h!" The vast crowd roars and cheers as a start is made. All together, like a herd of cattle, they sweep on toward the grand-stand. It is not racing yet. Favorite and second favorite are back in the centre of the bunch. In front of the grand-stand one jockey sends his horse out a length in front. It is an outsider, but there are plenty of backers of outsiders, and a cheer goes up. "He'll walk away from them!" "The others are standing still!" and such-like shouts go up. The pace begins to get killing. At the half Ætna is seen to move up to the leader, finally to pass him. The favorite is also creeping from out the ruck. Slowly, surely he forges past all the leaders but Ætna; the latter shoots ahead again for the distance of a length and The Ghost drops back to fourth place. It was evidently merely a feeler to find out whether Ætna was going too fast or whether there was still time to get up when the stretch was reached.
Round the turn they sweep into the stretch. It is a dangerous picture, with so many horses so close together, with such speed, and such possibility of collisions. But the turn is made in a second; now they are in the straight road for home. The Ghost is creeping up again, wearing down horse after horse, finally reaching Ætna's throatlatch. Neck and neck these two race up the last furlong; then a sudden, surprised roar breaks out from the mob of onlookers; another horse has cut loose from the bunch that has now become a straggling, attenuated string of tired horses. The shout goes up: "Look at Dr. Rice!" "Dr. Rice!"
Now he is up to Ætna's flanks and going under a pull; his jockey has never yet touched spur to him. The whip comes down on Ætna; it is no use; he is raced out. Now Dr. Rice has reached The Ghost, and the latter's jockey begins using the whip. In the grand-stand there is an inferno of cheering; men are shouting themselves hoarse, and jumping up and down in nervous paroxysms. Dr. Rice's jockey never moves a muscle to all appearances. The cries go up from the mob: "Come Rice!" "Come Ghost!" The judges begin to strain their their attention to the viewing of a very close finish. Then with a final mighty lift, Dr. Rice, in the very last stride, snoots forward under the wire a neck in front of The Ghost.
Dr. Rice has won.
On the way home Stanley was another man. He talked as if such a thing as a regret for a lost youth had never entered his head; he was young again. He recounted his impression of the race, asked Dick what he had thought of it all, was full of amusing anecdotes about men who had tried to get him to back the favorite, and was fertile in suggestions for what they should do that evening. Of course it was understood they must celebrate in some way. Surely! Surely!
"Oh," he said, finally, "I know what we'll do. We'll go along to the Imperial Theatre. I know some of the girls in the burlesque there. I'll introduce you. We'll enjoy ourselves."
Dick began to demur.
"Don't be a d——-d idiot," said the other man, half smiling, half frowning.
No one that has ever been in Dresden is likely to forget the beauties of the Bruehlsche Terrasse. The cool plash of waters from the Elbe come up invitingly; the green of the neighboring gardens is luscious, and there are nearly always strains of music in the air. Especially pleasing is the picture on a summer's evening.
In one of the concert gardens they give out on the Terrasse, there sat at a small round table, one dreamy midsummer evening, Mrs. Ware and her daughter, Dorothy. In front of them were small cups of coffee, and such appetising rolls as only the Conditors of the continent can make. The garden was in no wise different from a thousand others to be found in German cities; save only that it was especially happy in its location. There was a light, gravelly soil; a multitude of round tables; chairs occupied by a cosmopolitan crew of both sexes; at one end, in the shadow of huge lime trees, was theCapelle. Over all was the star-gemmed sky. The air was sweet with the song of the violins, and the cheery laughter of the many family parties came echoing along from time to time in musical accompaniment. There were German students, with the vari-colored caps and occasional sword-wounds on their faces; officers with clanking swords and clothes fitting in lines that suggested stays; English tourists, easily distinguishable by costumes they would not have dared to startle Hyde Park with; Americans with high pitched voices; and a few Russians, excessively polite of manner and cruel of eye.
Miss Dorothy Ware was engaged in munching at a roll that had been steeping in the strong coffee, when she suddenly turned to her mother with an eager exclamation.
"I declare, mamma," she said, "if there isn't Mr. Wooton coming this way. The idea of meeting him again at all. I'm sure I never thought we would; there are so many people away traveling about this time of the year, and there are so many places. He has just seen us, mamma, and he's coming over here. See he's lifting his hat. I'm glad we've got this vacant chair."
Wooton shook hands with them. "The old platitude about the world being a very small place seems to strike true," he said. "Do you know, it's a positive relief to talk to people of my own sort once more." He had sat down beside Dorothy, and placed his stick and gloves on the gravel beside him. He looked decidedly handsome; his small mouth seemed smaller than ever, and his face was paler than when he dictated the fortunes of theTorch. He was scrupulously dressed; every detail was so nicely adjusted that he would have successfully run the gauntlet of all the comment of Piccadilly and Broadway.
"I've just come from Berlin," he went on, "it was like an oven there. Nearly everybody was away; some of them in Heringsdorf, some in Switzerland, some down in this district. My compartment in the train was filled with a lot of officers on leave, and they talked army slang until my head swam, and I would have given gold for the sound of an American voice."
"You seem to rush about a good deal," ventured Mrs. Ware. "Didn't we meet you in Schwalbach?"
"Mamma forgets so," put in Dorothy, "she's been meeting so many people, I begin to think she jumbles them all up. But it was in Schwalbach, mamma; you're right. Don't you remember? We were sitting near the Stahlbrunnen, with the Tremonts—we used to set next to them at the Hotel d'Europe—when Mr. Wooton came up and said how-d'ye-do to the Tremonts, and they presented him to us. When Mrs. Tremont was at boarding-school, you know," she went on, turning to Wooton, "she and mamma were great chums. She was a Miss Alexander." She put her hand up to her hat and gave it a mysterious pressure, presumably to rectify some invisible displacement. She turned and looked out into the darkness whence came the sullen swish of the river. "It was delightful in Schwalbach," she said finally.
"It was horribly expensive," commented Mrs. Ware, sipping her coffee.
"But the waters did you good, I hope?" inquired Wooton, suavely solicitous.
"Oh, I guess so. But I don't seem to improve right along, as I should? But I shouldn't complain. I'm a good deal stouter than when I left home. Besides, Dorothy is having a right good time."
"Ah," smiled Wooton, to the girl, "you like it—the life here?"
"Yes; I like it. I don't say that I like it better than other things. But who could help liking that?" She swept her parasol around so that it pointed out toward the river. There was complete darkness there, lit up occasionally by the lights of passing steamers. Fog-whistles sounded occasionally; on the opposite shore there was a dim glow of yellow lights. The water sobbed ceaselessly; there was a mist rising, and the steamer lights began to seem hazier than ever, mere golden circles hanging in the dense darkness. The violins were playing something of Waldteufel's.
It was true; not even the most patriotic of Americans could have helped granting that all this was very pleasant. Dorothy Ware had certainly given up being half-hearted in her enthusiasm for European things; they had met so many people and had rubbed up against so much of cosmopolitanism that unconsciously she had come to see that to apply the narrow Lincolnville view to all the people she saw now was a trifle absurd. She gave herself candidly over to enjoy it all. That was what she had come for. And it must be confessed that, during this process of enjoyment, her memories of her former self became ghosts of ever-increasing vagueness. When she caught herself thinking of Dick Lancaster it was usually to wonder what sort of a girl he had married. She smiled when she thought of the things he had said to her before they parted. It didn't seem to touch her at all now, and she seemed sure that a man slips out of that sort of thing much earlier than the woman.
They met Wooton a good deal after that. He spent a good deal of time among the pictures, and when they visited theGruene Gwoeblethey found him there. He was invariably bright and amusing; he offered to pilot them and smooth things for them generally; Mrs. Ware began to think he was tremendously nice. She remembered that Miss Alexander—now Mrs. Tremont—had always been one of the most aristocratic of girls; she recalled with something of a shudder, her own awe at her school-mate's lengthy dissertation upon blood and family and kindred subjects. So, she argued, if Wooton was in Mrs. Tremont's set in town, there was certainly not the vestige of a doubt concerning his being eminently the correct thing. She had lived in the country so long herself that she admitted she was no longer able to note the difference between good coin and bad; but she had infinite faith in Mrs. Tremont. Dorothy, too, got to feel that he was very charming; he was so handsome, and dressed so well. It was very pleasant to have him in the party; he added distinction. Wooton had admitted that he knew young Lancaster; he divined that she had liked the boy; he was wise enough to tell her only pleasant things about Dick. The only thing Dorothy objected to was that Wooton went about a good deal with the Tremonts. It seemed to her that he was quite devoted to Miss Eugenie.
"I don't like her a bit," she told him rather tactlessly, speaking of Miss Tremont, "she's so supercilious. I never know when she's laughing at me and when she's not listening to me. I suppose she thinks I'm a country chit and don't know anything. But I wouldn't be clever the way she's clever for anything in the world. Why does she have to sneer at innocence and goodness? Nobody ever accused her of either, did they?"
Which, Wooton thought to himself, was not half bad. As a matter of fact he enjoyed being with Eugene Tremont immensely. She was one of those intensely modern girls that the world is so unhappily rich in just now. She would talk about any subject under the sun. She declared that she had always cared more for male society anyway; she despised her own sex and said spiteful things about it. She pretended to be completely cognizant of all the wickedness there was in the world; and she went on the presumption that man was a sort of infernal machine that there was unlimited fun—the fun of danger—in handling. Men liked her at first invariably; there was something refreshing and stimulating in the nonchalance with which she tabooed no subject from her conversation; they said to themselves that this was a person, thank goodness, whom one did not eternally have to consider in the light of a sex, but rather of a sexless cleverness. But, somehow or other, her cleverness wearied presently; she palled as all surfaces must inevitably pall. Wooton, however, turned to her because she was of his own special calibre—all cleverness, and no apparent sharply defined system of conduct. With the Wares he was so perpetually on a grid-iron; he was afraid of saying something that would startle them. They amused him, these people, with their simplicity, their taking virtue for granted and vice for an abhorent mystery! To talk to them it was necessary to keep a constant check on his cynical; while with Eugene Tremont it was sword to sword, a sharp continuous fencing with verbal weapons.
So, when Dorothy Ware made the cutting little speech about Miss Tremont, Wooton told himself that there was something more than mere dislike for the Boston girl at the bottom of it. Considering the matter, he broke into a laugh. Was it possible, h'm. That would really be too rich.
He began to be seen with the Tremonts oftener than ever. He went with them to the opera, he took a seat in their landau. He went to Teplitz with them.
"They're more in the same set, I suppose," said Mrs. Ware, when Dorothy spoke of it. "He was at college with her brother, too; I guess they talk about him a good deal."
Dorothy guessed that she knew better; but she said nothing. Somehow, Dresden began to seem fearfully dreary. She began importuning her mother to pack up and go to Munich; they had some friends there. Dorothy declared Dresden made her homesick; she said it was all so small and pretty, anyway; it wasn't a metropolis, yet it tried to ape the real article. And then there were so many Americans—you couldn't talk English anywhere without having people understand you, which was distinctly annoying, because occasionally one likes to make personal asides about costumes and hats and complexions—and, well, what was the use of staying there any longer anyhow? But Mrs. Ware declared the climate agreed with her. She said she hadn't felt so well for ever so long, she wasn't going to try any other place as this one agreed with her. Did Dorothy want to see her die? No; Dorothy did not. She submitted, and went about looking dismal.
And then, one day, the sunshine came back into here face once more. It was not that the good fairies had remodeled the town of Dresden; it was not that all English-speaking people had suddenly deserted the place; in fact, it was hard to say just what made the difference. It was just possible that Wooton's return from Teplitz had something to do with the good humor in which Dorothy came back to her mother that noon, after a walk down to the Conditorei. She had almost cannoned into him, rounding a corner; they had shaken hands; he had avowed the pleasure he felt at seeing her again. It is just possible that the sight of this young man was a talisman for Miss Ware's temper; it is at least certain that her melancholia was gone.
He called on them, in a day or so, at their apartments in the Hotel Bellevue. Mrs. Ware was very glad to see him; she was more vivacious than she had yet shown herself. She proposed that they take their coffee out in the garden, on the river front, under the trees. They sat watching the boats, and the little boys paddling about barefooted; it was in the cool of sunset, and there were red bars slanting across the western horizon. It was very pleasant. The waiter moved about noiselessly; there were some children making merry in the swing set up at the far end of the garden.
"Is Teplitz very full?" asked Mrs. Ware.
"Yes; more people than usual, I believe. I should think the hot baths would do you good, too, Mrs. Ware?"
"Oh, I guess I'll stay here awhile yet. I'm getting to feel quite spry again. You left the Tremonts there?"
"Yes?"
Dorothy turned away from the river and looked at him a trifle reproachfully. "You must be awfully fond of those people," she said, trying to smile.
Wooton shrugged his shoulders carelessly.
"No," he replied, "I can't say that exactly. But Mrs. Tremont really insisted on my going; she said she had never been there before, and thought that as I knew the ropes of the place, it would be a small thing for me to play pilot for them for a while. What was I to do?" He looked at Dorothy appealingly.
Mrs. Ware was pushing a stray wisp of hair from her cheek.
"In Boston, Dorothy," she said, "I guess Mrs. Tremont is quite a society leader." She said it as if that was an assertion of crushing significance, intended to quiet any possible questionings as to why any young man should think it necessary to comply with the wishes of so great a personage.
"What if she is?" was Dorothy's quick reply; "that doesn't make her any better, does it? I don't see how you can go around with them so much, that's all, Mr. Wooton."
"Oh," he laughed, "I assure you I don't like them so very much myself; but I don't dislike them. And I hate to offend people. They asked me to go!"
They drank their coffee, and watched the twilight settling down. They talked lightly, and laughed a good deal.
"Miss Ware," Wooton asked presently, "you've never been down to Schandau, have you?"
"No. Is it worth while?"
"Immensely! You ought to make the trip."
"Oh, I simply can't begin to get mamma to move from this town. She's perfectly enchanted with it, somehow." She looked at her mother, and patted her on the arm. Mrs. Ware said nothing, only smiled back at her daughter, who went on, "but I'd like it mightily."
"I wish you'd let me show you the place," Wooton persevered. He looked over at Mrs. Ware in a hesitating way. "Perhaps—if Mrs. Ware would rather not stir from the hotel—there would be no objection to Miss Ware making the trip with me? The place is really pretty; the royal residence there is one of the sights. It's only half an hour or so by the steamer. You'd hardly notice our absence; I think she'd enjoy it." He wondered a little whether they would look at him in frigid horror, or take it as a proposition quite in accord with the conventions they were accustomed to. He knew perfectly well that most of the people he knew in the East would have considered him insane if he had ventured such a proposal; but, in regard to these people, and this girl in particular, he remembered that a friend of his had once used a phrase that had struck him at the time as rather good, and that was, perhaps, applicable. The man had declared, half in a spirit of banter, half in chivalrous defense, that the girl of the West paraphrased the old motto to read: "Sans peur, sans reproche et sans chaperon."
To his relief, Mrs. Ware's answer was merely a smile at her daughter, and a "You'll have to see what Dorothy thinks about it, I guess. It's her picnic. If she wares to go—." She left the sentence unfinished, as if to convey the impression that under the circumstances mentioned her own preference would be allowed lapse.
"I think," said Dorothy, with a little clasping together of her hands, "that it would be simply delightful! You wouldn't worry, would you, mamma? There are always so many waiters around and—dear, dear, I talk just as if we were going this very minute!" She looked gratefully at Wooton. Somehow or other, he felt himself blushing. He caught himself regretting the fact that he was no longer as genuine as this girl was. "I think it's simply perfect of you to ask me," she went on, "I'm sure I'll enjoy it ever so much."
"Then," he said, airily, "we'll consider that settled. It's very good of you to say you'll go, I'm sure. Suppose we say Wednesday?"