"I fancy you have never had the cruelty," said Pauline.
"There would be considerable solid mercy in it," was the firm answer.
"Yes. To those who were both called and chosen. But how about the repulsed candidates for admission?"
"They would deserve their defeat," said Mrs. Dares, with thoughtful deliberation. "Morals and manners properly combined would be their sole passport."
"And ability," amended Pauline.
"Ability? Oh, they all have ability who care to mingle night after night where that qualification is the dominating necessity for mutual enjoyment. Remember, an organized literary and intellectual society would not demand what that other society, of which you have seen so much, imperatively demands. I mean wealth, position, modishness,ton. All these would go for nothing with an aristocracy of talent, of high and true culture, of progress, of fine and wise achievement in all domains where human thought held rule. There, gross egotism, priggishness, raw eccentricity, false assumption of leadership, facile jealousy, dogmatic intolerance—these, and a hundred other faults, would justly exert a debarring influence."
Pauline did not know how her cheeks were glowing and her eyes were sparkling as she now quickly said, after having swept her gaze along the groups of guests not far away.
"And this is what you call making order out of chaos? Ah, yes, I understand. It is very delightful to contemplate. It quite stirs one with ambition. It is like having the merciless and senseless snobbery of mere fashionable life given a reasonable, animating motive. I should like to take upon myself such a task." Here she suddenly frowned in a moderate but rather distressed way. "Not long ago," she went on, "Mr. Kindelon told me that I would find no literary society in New York. But I contested this point. I'm inclined to contest it still, though you have shaken my faith, I admit."
"The word 'literary' is very specializing," said Mrs. Dares. She had drooped her large, musing eyes.
"Do you mean that for an evasion?" asked Pauline with a tart pungency that she at once regretted as almost discourteous. "Allow," she went on, promptly softening her tone, "that the word does cover a multitude of definitions as I use it—that it is usedfaute de mieux, and that no society has ever existed anywhere which one could call strictly literary. Come, then, my dear Mrs. Dares, allowing all this, do you consider that Mr. Kindelon was right? Is it all chaos to-day in New York? Is there no gleam of order?" And here Pauline broke into a furtive tremor of laughter. "Must I begin my good work at the very earliest possible beginning if I am to commence at all?"
Mrs. Dares's dark eyes seemed to smile now, if her lips did not. "Yes," she said. "Mr. Kindelon was right. You are to begin at the very beginning.—In London it is so different," she went on, lapsing into the meditative seriousness from which nothing could permanently distract her. "I spent a happy and memorable month there not many years ago. It was a delicious holiday, taken because of overwork here at home, and a blessed medicine I found it. I had brought with me a few lucky letters. They opened doors to me, and beyond those doors I met faces and voices full of a precious welcome. You would know the names of not a few of those who were gracious to me; they are names that are household words. And there, in London, I saw, strongly established, a dignified, important and influential society. Rarely, once in a while, I met some man or woman with a title, but he or she had always either done something to win the title, or something—if it was inherited—to outshine it. I did not stay long enough to pick flaws, to cavil; I enjoyed and appreciated—and I have never forgotten!"
Just at this point, and somewhat to Pauline's secret annoyance, Kindelon returned with a lady at his side. Pauline was soon told the lady's name, and as she heard it her annoyance was swiftly dissipated by a new curiosity. She at once concluded that Miss Cora Dares bore very slight resemblance to her mother. She was taller, and her figure was of a full if not generous moulding. Her rippled chestnut hair grew low over the forehead; almost too low for beauty, though her calm, straight-featured face, lit by a pair of singularly luminous blue eyes, and ending in a deep-dimpled chin of exquisite symmetry, needed but a glance to make good its attractive claim. Miss Cora Dares was quite profuse in her smiles; she gave Pauline, while taking the latter's hand, a very bright and charming one, which made her look still less like her mother.
"We saw you and mamma talking very earnestly together, Mrs. Varick," she said, with a brief side-glance toward Kindelon, "and so we concluded that it would be safe to leave you undisturbed for at least a little while. But mamma is curiously unsafe as an entertainer." This was said with an extremely sweet and amiable look in Mrs. Dares's direction. "She sometimes loses herself in gentle rhapsodies. My sister Martha and I have to keep watch upon her by turns, out of pity for the unliberated victims."
"I need not tell you how I scorn the injustice of that charge, my dear Mrs. Dares!" here cried Kindelon. "It would be late in the day to inform you of my devoted admiration!"
"I fear it is early in the day for me to speak of mine," said Pauline; but the laugh that went with her words (or was it the words themselves?) rang sincerely, and took from what she said the levity of mere idle compliment.
"But you will surely care to meet some of our friends, Mrs. Varick," now said Cora Dares.
"Oh, by all means, yes!" exclaimed Pauline. The girl's limpid, steadfast eyes fascinated her, and she gazed into their lucent depths longer than she was perhaps aware. It was almost like an abrupt awakening to find that she and Mrs. Dares's youngest daughter were standing alone together, Kindelon and the elder lady having gone. "I want very much to meet many of your friends," Pauline proceeded. She put her head a little on one side, while her lips broke into a smile that her companion appeared to understand perfectly and to answer with mute, gay intelligence. "I suppose you have heard all about me and my grand project, just as your charming mother has heard, Miss Dares?"
"Oh, yes," returned Cora.
"And you think it practicable?"
"I think it praiseworthy."
"Which means that I shall fail."
Cora looked humorously troubled. "If you do, it will not be your fault. I am not doubtful on that point."
"Your mother has by no means encouraged me. She says that I must be careful in my selections, but she gives me very little hope of finding many worthy subjects to select. She seems to think that when the wheat has been taken from the tares, as it were, there will be very little wheat left."
"Yes, I know mamma's opinions. I don't quite share them. My sister Martha does, however, thoroughly.—Ah, here is Martha now. Let me make you acquainted."
Martha Dares proved to be still more unlike her mother than Cora, save as regarded her stature, which was very short. She had a plump person, and a face which was prepossessing solely from its expression of honest good-nature. It was a face whose fat cheeks, merry little black eyes and shapeless nose were all a stout defiance of the classic type. Pauline at once decided that Martha was shrewd, energetic and cheerful, and that she might reveal, under due provocation, a temper of hot flash and acute sting.
"And now you know the whole family, Mrs. Varick," said Cora, when her sister had been presented.
"Yes, I complete the group," said Miss Dares, with a jocund trip of the tongue about her speech, that suggested a person who did all her thinking in the same fleet and impetuous way. "I hope you find it an interesting group, Mrs. Varick?"
"Very," said Pauline. "Its members have so much individuality. They are all three so different."
"True enough," hurried Martha. "We react upon each other, for this reason, in a very salutary way. You've no idea what a corrective agent my practical turn is for this poetic sister of mine, who would be up in the clouds nearly all the time, trying to paint the unpaintable, but for an occasional downward jerk from me, you know, such as a boy will give to a refractory kite. But I'll grant you that Cora has more than partially convinced me that life isn't entirely made up of spelling, arithmetic, geography and the use of the globes—for I'm a school-teacher, please understand, though in a rather humble way. And there's poor dear mamma. Goodness knows what would become ofherif it were not for both of us. She hasn't an idea how to economize her wonderful powers of work. Cora and I have established a kind of military despotism; we have to say 'halt' and 'shoulder your pen,' just as if she were a sort of soldier. But it will never do for me to rattle on like this. I'm as bad, after my own fashion, as our mutual friend, Mr. Kindelon, when I once really get started. By the way, you know Mr. Kindelon very well indeed, don't you?"
"Very well, though I have not known him very long," answered Pauline.
She somehow felt that Martha's question concealed more interest than its framer wished to betray. The little black eyes had taken a new keenness, but the genial face had sobered as well. And for some reason just at this point both Martha and Pauline turned their looks upon Cora.
She had slightly flushed; the change, however, was scarcely noticeable. She at once spoke, as though being thus observed had made her speak.
"He always has something pleasant to say of you," softly declared Cora. Here she turned to her sister. "Will you bring up some people to Mrs. Varick," she asked, "or shall I?"
"Oh, just as you choose," answered Martha. She had fixed her eyes on Pauline again. The next moment Cora had glided off.
"What my sister says is quite true," affirmed Martha.
"You mean—?" Pauline questioned, with a faint start which she could scarcely have explained.
"That Mr. Kindelon admires you very much."
"I am glad to hear it," returned Pauline, thinking how commonplace the sentence sounded, and at the same time feeling her color rise and deepen under the persistent scrutiny of those sharp dark eyes.
"Don't you think him intensely able?" said Martha, much more slowly than usual. "We do."
Pauline bowed assent. "Brilliantly able," she answered. "Tell me, Miss Dares, with which of you is he the more intimate, your sister or yourself?"
Martha gave a laugh that was crisp and curt. She looked away from Pauline as she answered. "Oh, he's more intimate with me than with Cora," she said. "We are stanch friends. He tells me nearly everything. I think he would tell me if he were to fall in love."
"Really?" laughed Pauline. Her face was wreathed in smiles of apparent amusement. She looked, just then, as she had often looked in the fashionable world, when everything around her seemed so artificial that she took the tints of her environment and became as artificial herself.
But it pleased her swiftly to change the subject. "I am quite excited this evening," she went on. "I am beginning a new career; you understand, of course. Tell me, Miss Dares, how doyouthink I shall succeed in it?"
Martha was watching her fixedly. And Martha's reply had a short, odd sound. "I think you are almost clever enough not to fail," she said.
Before Pauline had been an hour longer in the Dares's drawing-room she had become acquainted with many new people. She could not count them all when she afterward tried to do so; the introductions had been very rapid for some little time; one, so to speak, had trodden upon the heel of another. Her meditated project had transpired, and not a few of her recent acquaintances eyed her with a critical estimate of her capability to become their future leader.
She soon found herself an object of such general scrutiny that she was in danger of growing embarrassed to the verge of actual bewilderment. She was now the centre of a little group, and every member of it regarded her with more or less marked attentiveness.
"I've a tragic soul in a comic body, Mrs. Varick," said a fat little spinster, with a round moon of a face and a high color, whose name was Miss Upton. "That is the way I announce myself to all strangers. I should have gone on the stage and playedJulietif it hadn't been for my unpoetic person. But imagine a bouncing, obese Juliet! No; I realized that it would never do. I shall have to die with all my music in me, as it were."
"A great many poets have done that," said a pale young gentleman with very black hair and eyes, and an expression of ironical fatigue which seldom varied. He was Mr. Leander Prawle, and he was known to have written verses for which he himself had unbounded admiration. "Indeed," the young poet continued, lifting one thin, white hand to where his moustache was not yet, "it is hard to sing a pure and noble song with the discords of daily life about one."
"Not if you can make the world stop its discords and listen to you, Mr. Prawle," said Pauline.
"Oh, Prawle can never do that," said a broad-shouldered young blond, with a face full of drowsy reverie and hair rolled back from it in a sort of yellow mane. "He's always writing transcendental verses about Man with a capital M and the grand amelioration of Humanity with a capital H. Prawle has no color. He hates an adjective as if it were a viper. He should have lived with me in theQuartier Latin; he should have read, studied and loved the divine Théophile Gautier—most perfect of all French poets!"
The speaker fixed his sleepy blue eyes upon Leander Prawle while he thus spoke. A slight smile touched his lips, leaving a faint dimple in either smooth oval cheek. He was certainly very handsome, in an unconventional, audacious way. His collar gave a lower glimpse of his firm yet soft throat than usage ordinarily sanctions; the backward wave of his hair was certainly against any conceded form. He had been made known to Pauline as Mr. Arthur Trevor, and she had felt surprised at his name being so English; she had expected to find it French; Mr. Trevor had appeared to her extremely French.
"When you speak of Paris and of Gautier," she now said to him, "you really relieve me, Mr. Trevor. I was so prepared, on first meeting you, to find that you were not an American."
"Oh, Trevor is very French," said Leander Prawle coldly.
Trevor laughed, lifting one hand, on the middle finger of which was the tawny tell-tale mark of the confirmed cigarette-smoker.
"And my friend, Prawle," he said, "is enormously English."
"Not English—American," slowly corrected Leander Prawle.
"It is the same thing!" cried Arthur Trevor. "He is cold-blooded, Mrs. Varick," the young gentleman continued, with emphasis and a certain excitement. "We are always fighting, Prawle and I. I tell Prawle that in his own beloved literature, he should have but one model outside of Shakespeare. That is Keats—the sweet, sensuous, adorable Keats."
"I loathe Keats," said Leander Prawle, as if he were repeating some fragment of a litany. "I think him a word-monger."
"Aha," laughed Arthur Trevor, showing his white, sound teeth, "Keats was an immense genius. He knew the art of expression."
"And he expressed nothing," said Leander Prawle.
"He expressed beauty," declared Trevor. "Poetry is that. There is nothing else. Even the great master, Hugo, would tell you so."
"Hugo is a mere rhapsodist," said Leander Prawle.
Trevor laughed again. He gave a comic, exaggerated shudder while he did so. He now exclusively addressed Pauline. "My dear Mrs. Varick," he said, "are you not horrified?"
Before Pauline could answer, the fat little Miss Upton spoke. "Oh, Mr. Trevor," she said, "you know that though you and Mr. Prawle are always quarrelling about poetry, and belong to two different schools, still, each of you, in his way, is admirable. You are the North and South poles."
"No," said Arthur Trevor, "for the North and South poles never come together, while Prawle and I are continually clashing."
"It looks very much as if chaos were the result," said Pauline.
Arthur Trevor gazed at her reproachfully. "I hope you don't mean that," he said. He put his arm while he spoke, about the neck of a short and fleshy man, with a bald, pink scalp and a pair of dull, uneasy eyes. "Here is our friend, Rufus Corson," he continued. "Rufus has not spoken a word to you since he was presented, Mrs. Varick. But he's a tremendously important fellow. He doesn't look it, but he is the poet of death, decay, and horror."
"Good Heavens!" murmured Pauline playfully.
"It is true," pursued Arthur Trevor. "Rufus, here, is a wonderful fellow, and he has written some verses that will one day make him famous as the American Baudelaire."
"I have not read Baudelaire," said Pauline.
Mr. Corson at once answered her. He spoke in a forced, loitering way. He wore the dress of a man who scorns all edicts of mode, and yet he was very commonplace in appearance.
"The literature of the present age is in a state of decadence," he said. Mr. Corson, himself, looked to be in a state of plump prosperity; even his rosy baldness had a vivid suggestion of youth and of the enjoyments which youth bestows. "I write hopelessly," he continued, "because I live in a hopeless time. My 'Sonnet to a Skull' has been praised, because"—
"It hasnotbeen praised," said Leander Prawle firmly and severely.
Mr. Corson regarded Prawle with an amused pity. "It has been praised by people whom you don't know," he said, "and who don't want to know you."
"It is horrible," enunciated Leander Prawle, while he appealingly rolled toward Pauline his dark eyes, which the confirmed pallor of his face made still darker. "Mrs. Varick," he went on, "I am sure that you will agree with me in asserting that skulls and skeletons and disease are not fit subjects for poetical treatment."
"Yes," answered Pauline, "I think that they are not beautiful—and for this reason I should condemn them."
"Then you will make a great mistake, Mrs. Varick," now quickly interposed Arthur Trevor. He passed one hand backward along the yellow mane of his hair while he thus spoke. But he still kept an arm about the neck of his friend, Corson. "I maintain," he continued, "that Corson has a perfect right to sing of autumnal things. A corpse is as legitimate a subject as a sunset. They are both morbid; they both mean what is moribund."
"Oh, but they are so different!" exclaimed the fat Miss Upton. "One is the work of Gawd, to delight man, and the other is—oh, dear! the other is—well, it's only a mere dead body! None of the great poets have ever written in that dreadful style, Mr. Trevor. Of course, I know that Mr. Corson has done somepowerfulwork, but is it right to give people the shudders and horrors, as he does? Why not have sunshine in poetry, instead of gloom and misery?"
"Sunshine is commonplace," said Arthur Trevor.
"Very," said Mr. Corson.
"Sunshine means hope," declared Leander Prawle. "It means evolution, development, progress."
"Art is art!" cried Trevor. "Sing of what you please, so long as yourtechniqueis good, so long as you have the rightchic, the rightfaçon, the right way of putting things!"
"True," said Corson. "I write of skulls and corpses because you can get new effects out of them. They haven't been done to death, like faith, and philanthropy, and freedom. Optimism is so tiresome, nowadays. All the Greeks are dead. Nôtre Dame stands intact, but the Parthenon is a ruin."
Leander Prawle shivered. "You can make clever rhymes about charnel-houses," he said, "but that is not poetry. You can deplore the allurements of women with green eyes and stony hearts, but you degrade womanhood while you do so. You"—
"Are you not bored?" whispered Kindelon, in his mellow Irish brogue to Pauline, as he just then stole to her side. "If so, let us walk away together."
Pauline slipped her hand into his proffered arm. "I was not bored," she said, as they moved off, "but I was just beginning to be. Are there nothing but belligerent poets here to-night?"
"Oh, you will find other sorts of people."
"But, who are these three wranglers, Mr. Trevor, Mr. Prawle, and Mr. Corson?"
Kindelon laughed. "They are fanatics," he said. "Each one believes himself a Milton in ability."
"Are they successful?"
"They send poems (with stamps inclosed) to the magazines, and have them rejected. They make believe to despise the magazines, but secretly they would give worlds to see their names in print. Heaven knows, the magazines print rubbish enough. But they are sensible in rejecting Arthur Trevor's poems, which are something in this style—I quote from memory:—
"'The hot, fierce tiger-lily madly yearnsTo kill with passionate poison the wild mothThat reels in drunken ecstasy aboveIts gorgeous bosom....'
"'The hot, fierce tiger-lily madly yearnsTo kill with passionate poison the wild mothThat reels in drunken ecstasy aboveIts gorgeous bosom....'
"Or in rejecting that bald-pated posing Corson's trash, which runs like this:—
"'Death is far better than the loathsome lotOf kissing lips that soon must pale and rot,Of clasping forms that soon must cease their breathWithin the black embrace of haughty death!'
"'Death is far better than the loathsome lotOf kissing lips that soon must pale and rot,Of clasping forms that soon must cease their breathWithin the black embrace of haughty death!'
"Or in declining to publish Mr. Leander Prawle's buncombe, which sounds somewhat after this fashion:
"'Man shall one day develop to a god,Though now he walks unwinged, unaureoled....To-day we moil and mope—to-morrow's dawnShall bring us pinions to outsoar the stars.'
"'Man shall one day develop to a god,Though now he walks unwinged, unaureoled....To-day we moil and mope—to-morrow's dawnShall bring us pinions to outsoar the stars.'
"That's the sort of the thing this brave trio does. All poets are partially mad, of course. But thentheyare mad without being poets; it's this that makes their lunacy so tiresome."
"And are they always quarrelling when they meet?"
"Oh, they do it for effect. They are privately very good friends. They are all equally obscure; they've no cause, yet, to hate one another. If one of them should get a book published before either of the other two, they would probably both abominate him in good earnest."
Just then a tall, sallow gentleman, with small, gray eyes and a nose like the beak of a carnivorous bird, laid his hand on Kindelon's sleeve.
"Powers has just asked me to write the Fenimore Cooper article for his new American Cyclopædia," declared this gentleman, whose name was Barrowe, and whom Pauline had already met.
"Well, you're precisely the man," replied Kindelon. "Nobody can do it better."
"Precisely the man!" exclaimed Mr. Barrowe. "Perhaps I would be if I were not so overwhelmed with other duties—so unmercifully handicapped." He turned to Pauline. "I am devoted to literature, madam," he went on, "but I am forced into commerce for the purpose of keeping starvation away from my family and myself. There is the plain, unvarnished truth. And now, as it is, I return home after hours of hard, uncongenial work, to snatch a short interval between dinner-time and bed-time for whatever I can accomplish with my poor tired pen. My case is a peculiar and pathetic one—and this Powers ought to understand it. But, no; he comes to me in the coolest manner, and makes my doing that article for him a question of actual good-nature and friendly support. So, of course, I consent. But it shows a great want of delicacy in Powers. He knows well enough that I am obliged to neglect many social duties—that I should not even be here at this moment—that besides my daily business I am besieged with countless applications from literary people for all sorts of favors. Why, this very week, I have received no less than fourteen requests for my autograph. How are my wife and little ones to live if I am perpetually to oblige inconsiderate and thoughtless friends?"
"Your complaints would indicate," said Kindelon, rather dryly, "that Powers has not offered you the requisite cheque for proposed services."
Mr. Barrowe gave an irritated groan. "Kindelon!" he exclaimed, "do you know you can be a very rude man when you want?"
"You've told me that several times before, Barrowe," said Kindelon, quite jovially, moving on with Pauline.
He did this briskly enough to prevent the indignant Mr. Barrowe from making any further reply.
"I'm afraid you'll have trouble with that man," he said to Pauline, presently, "if you admit him into yoursalon."
"I have read some of his essays," she answered. "They are published abroad, you know. I thought them very clever."
"So they are—amazingly. But Barrowe himself is a sort of monomaniac. He believes that he is the most maltreated of authors. He is forever boring his friends with these egotistic lamentations. Now, the truth of the matter is that he has more to solidly congratulate himself upon than almost any author whom I know. He was sensible enough, years ago, to embark in commercial affairs. I forget just what he does; I think he is a wholesale druggist, or grocer. He writes brilliantly and with extraordinary speed. His neglect of social duties, as he calls them, is the purest nonsense. He goes wherever he is asked, and finds plenty of time for work besides. This request from Powers secretly pleases him. The new Cyclopædia is going to be a splendid series of volumes. But Barrowe must have his little elegiac moan over his blighted life."
"And the applications from fellow-authors?" asked Pauline. "The requests for autographs?"
"Pshaw! those are a figment of his fancy, I suspect. He imagines that he is of vast importance in the literary world. His sensitiveness is something ridiculous. He's a far worse monologuist than I am, which is surely saying a great deal; but if you answer him he considers it an interruption, and if you disagree with him he ranks it as impertinence. I think he rather likes me because I persistently, fearlessly, and relentlessly do both. But with all his faults, Barrowe has a large, warm heart. Still, it's astonishing how a fine and true character can often enshroud itself with repellent mannerisms, just as a firm breadth of sea-rock will become overcrusted with brittle barnacles.... Ah, Whitcomb, good evening."
A corpulent man, with silver-gray hair and a somewhat pensive expression, was the recipient of Kindelon's last cordial sentence of salutation. After he had made the needful introduction, Kindelon said, addressing Pauline while he regarded Mr. Whitcomb,—
"This is the author of no less than five standard histories."
"Kindelon is very good to call them standard, Mrs. Varick," said Mr. Whitcomb, in a voice quite as pensive as his face. "I wish that a few thousands more would only share his opinion."
"Oh, but they are gradually getting to do it, my dear Whitcomb!" declared Kindelon. "Don't make any mistake on that point. A few days ago I chanced to meet your publisher, Sours. Now, an author must stand pretty sure of success when his publisher pays him a round compliment."
"What did Sours say?" asked Mr. Whitcomb, with an almost boyish eagerness.
"He said," exclaimed Kindelon, "that Whitcomb was our coming American historian. There, my dear sir, what do you think of that?"
Mr. Whitcomb sadly shook his silver-gray head. "I've been coming," he murmured, "ever since I was twenty-eight, and I shall be fifty-seven next May. I can't say that I think Sours's compliment meant much. It's got to be a sort of set phrase about me, that I'm coming. It never occurs to anybody to say that I've come, and I suppose it will not if I live to be eighty and totter round with white hair. No, I shall always be coming, coming...."
As the gentleman repeated this final word he smiled with a kind of weary amiability, still shaking his gray head; and a moment later he had passed from sight.
"Mrs. Varick," now said a cold, rasping voice to Pauline, "have you managed to enjoy yourself, thus far? If you recollect, we were introduced a little while ago ... Miss Cragge, you know."
"Oh, yes, I remember, Miss Cragge," said Pauline. "And I find it very pleasant here, I assure you."
Miss Cragge had given Kindelon a short nod, which he returned somewhat faintly. She was a lady of masculine height, with a square-jawed face, a rather mottled complexion, and a pair of slaty-blue eyes that looked at you very directly indeed from beneath a broad, flat forehead. She was dressed in a habit of some shabby gray stuff, and wore at her throat a large antique cameo pin, which might have been unearthed from an ancestral chest near the lavendered laces and faded love-letters of a long-dead grandmother. She was by no means an agreeable-looking lady; she was so ungentle in her quick, snapping speech and so unfeminine in her gaunt, bony, and almost towering figure, that she promptly impressed you with an idea of Nature having maliciously blended the harsher traits of both sexes in one austere personality, and at the same time leaving the result sarcastically feminine. She seldom addressed you without appearing to be bent on something which she thought you might have to tell her, or which she would like you very much to reveal. Her affirmations often had the sound of interrogatories. She had none of the tact, the grace, thefinesseof the ordinary "interviewer;" she went to her task rough-handed and undexterous.
"I'm glad you like it," she at once said to Pauline. "I know you've moved a good deal in fashionable society, and I should be gratified to learn how this change affects you."
"Quite refreshingly," returned Pauline.
"You don't feel like a fish out of water, then?" said Miss Cragge, with a sombre little laugh. "Or like a cat in a strange garret?... I saw you at the opera the other evening. You were with Mrs. Poughkeepsie and her daughter; I was down stairs in the orchestra. I go a good deal to places of amusement—in a professional way, you know; I'm a dead-head, as the managers call it—I help to paper the house."
"You are rather too idiomatic, I fear," now said Kindelon, with a chilly ring in his tones, "for Mrs. Varick to understand you."
"Idiomatic is very good—excellent, in fact," replied Miss Cragge, with a pleasantry that barely missed being morose. "I suppose you mean that I am slangy. You're always trying to snub me, Kindelon, but I don't mind you. You can't snub me—nobody can. I'm too thick-skinned." Here the strangely self-poised lady laughed again, if the grim little sound that left her mirthless lips could really be called a laugh. "I know the Poughkeepsies by sight," she continued, re-addressing Pauline, "because it's my business as a newspaper correspondent to get all the fashionable items that I can collect, and whenever I'm at any public place of amusement where there's a chance of meeting those upper-ten people, I always keep my eyes and ears open as wide as possible. I'm correspondent for eight weekly papers outside of New York, besides doing work for two of the city dailies. I never saw anything like the craze for society gossip nowadays. One good story from high life, with a moderate spice of scandal in it, will pay me six times as well as anything else. They say I'm always hunting about for material, and no wonder that I am. The thing is bread and butter to me—and not much butter, either. You see, the rich classes here are getting to represent so large a body; so many people are trying to push themselves into society. And when they can't elbow their way into the swell balls and parties, why, the next best thing is to read about who were there, and what they had on, and who led the German, and what they ate and drank, and how the house was decorated. It seemed a queer enough business for me, at first; I started with grand ideas, but I've had to come down a good many pegs; I've had to pull in my horns. And now I don't mind it a bit; I suppose Kindelon would say that I enjoyed it ... eh, Kindelon? Why, Mrs. Varick, I used to write book-reviews for the New York 'Daily Criterion,' and my pay kept growing less and less. One day I wrote a very careful review of a book that I admired greatly—it was George Eliot's 'Middlemarch,' in fact. The editor-in-chief sent for me. He named the article, and then said, 'I hear that you wrote it. It's a very fine piece of work.' 'Thank you, sir,' I replied, with a tingle of gratification. 'Yes, a very fine piece of work, indeed,' continued the editor; 'I read it with much pleasure. But don't do that sort of thing again, Miss Cragge—we've no use for it on the 'Criterion.' After that I became less ambitious and more mercenary. There's no use pounding against stone walls. The reading public will have what it wants, and if I don't give it to them, somebody else will be only too glad to take my place.... By the way, Mrs. Varick, do you think that Miss Poughkeepsie is going to marry that Scotch earl—Lord Glenartney?"
"I can't tell you, really," said Pauline. She had made up her mind to dislike Miss Cragge very much indeed. At the same time she felt a certain pity for her.
Kindelon began to press quietly forward, and Pauline, who still had his arm, by no means resisted this measure.
"I've been very candid," called Miss Cragge, while the two were slipping away from her. She spoke with even more than her usual blunt, curt manner. "It was because I knew Kindelon would be apt to say hard things of me, and I wanted to spike a few of his guns. But I hope I haven't shocked you, Mrs. Varick."
"Oh, not at all," said Pauline, as blandly as her feelings would permit....
"You were a good deal disgusted, no doubt," said Kindelon, when they were beyond Miss Cragge's hearing.
"She isn't the most charming person I have ever met," replied Pauline. "I will grant you that."
"How amiably you denounce her! But I forget," he added. "Such a little time ago you were prepared to be exhilarated and ... what was the other word?... to fraternize with most of the company here."
She chose not to heed the last stroke of light irony.
"Are you and Miss Cragge enemies?" she asked.
"Well, I abominate her, and she knows it. I rarely abominate anybody, and I think she knows that also. To my mind she is a conscienceless, hybrid creature. She is a result of a terrible modern license—the license of the Press. There is a frank confession, for a newspaper man like myself. But, between ourselves, I don't know where modern journalism, in some of its ferocious phases, is going to stop, unless it stops at a legislative veto. Miss Cragge would sacrifice her best friend (if she had any friends—which she hasn't) to the requirements of what she calls 'an item.' She thinks no more of assailing a reputation, in her quest for so-termed 'material,' than a rat would think of carrying off a lump of cheese. She knows very well that I will never forgive her for having printed a lot of libellous folly about a certain friend of mine. He had written a rather harmless and weak novel of New York society, New York manners. Miss Cragge had some old grudge against him; I think it was on account of an adverse criticism which she believed him to have written regarding some dreary, amateurish poems for whose author she had conceived a liking. This was quite enough for Miss Cragge. She filled a column of the Rochester "Rocket," or the Topeka "Trumpet," or some such sheet, with irate fictions about poor Charley Erskine. He had no redress, poor fellow; she declared that he had slandered a pure, high-minded lady in society here by caricaturing her in his novel. She parodied some of poor Charley's rather fragile verses; she accused him of habitually talking fatuous stuff at a certain Bohemian sort of beer-garden which he had visited scarcely five times within that same year. Oh, well, the whole thing was so atrocious that I offered my friend the New York "Asteroid" in which to hurl back any epistolary thunderbolt he should care to manufacture. But Charley wouldn't; he might have written a bad novel and worse poems, but he had sense enough to know that his best scorn lay in severe silence. Still, apart from all this, I have excellent reasons for shunning Miss Cragge, and I have told you some of them. She is the most aggravated form of the American newspaper correspondent, prowling about and seeking whom she may devour. I consider her a dangerous person, and I advise you not to allow her within yoursalon."
"Oh, I shan't," quickly answered Pauline. "You need not have counselled me on that point. It was quite unnecessary. I intend to pick and choose." She gave a long, worried sigh, now, which Kindelon just heard above the conversational hum surrounding them. "I am afraid it all comes to picking and choosing, everywhere," she went on. "Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie is perpetually doing it inherworld, and I begin to think that there is none other where it must not be done."
Kindelon leaned his handsome crisp-curled head nearer to her own; he fixed his light-blue eyes, in which lay so warm and liquid a sparkle, intently upon the lifted gaze of Pauline.
"You are right," he said. "You will learn that, among other lessons, before you are much older. There is no such thing as not picking and choosing. Whatever the grade of life, it is always done by those who have any sort of social impulse. I believe it is done in Eighth Avenue and Avenue A, when they give parties in little rooms of tenement houses and hire a fiddler to speed the dance. There is always some Michael or Fritz who has been ostracized. The O'Haras and the Schneiders follow the universal law. Wherever three are gathered together, the third is pretty sure to be of questionable welcome. This isn't an ideal planet, my dear lady, and 'liberty' and 'fraternity' are good enough watchwords, but 'equality' never yet was one;—if I didn't remember my Buckle, my Spencer, my Huxley, and my dear old Whig Macaulay, I should add that it neverwouldbe one."
Just at this point Kindelon and Pauline found themselves face to face with two gentlemen who were both in a seemingly excited frame of mind. Pauline remembered that they had both been presented to her not long ago. She recollected their names, too; her memory had been nerved to meet all retentive exigencies. The large, florid man, with the bush of sorrel beard, was Mr. Bedlowe, and the smaller, smooth-shaven man, with the consumptive stoop and the professorial blue spectacles, was Mr. Howe.
Mr. Howe and Mr. Bedlowe were two novelists of very opposite repute. Kindelon had already caught a few words from the latter, querulously spoken.
"Ah, so you think modern novel-writing a sham, my dear Howe?" he said, pausing with his companion, while either gentleman bowed recognition to Pauline. "Isn't that rank heresy from the author of a book that has just been storming the town?"
"My book didn't storm the town, Kindelon," retorted Mr. Howe, lifting a hand of scholarly slimness and pallor toward his opaque goggles. "I wish it had," he proceeded, somewhat wearily. "No; Bedlowe and I were having one of our old quarrels. I say that we novelists of the Anglo-Saxon tongue are altogether too limited. That is what I mean by declaring that modern novel-writing is a sham."
"He means a great deal more, I'm sorry to say," here cried Mr. Bedlowe, who had a habit of grasping his sorrel beard in one hand and thrusting its end toward his hirsute lips as though they were about to be allured by some edible mouthful.
"He means, Kindelon, that because we haven't the shocking immoral latitude of the French race, we can't properly express ourselves in fiction. And he goes still further—Howe is always going still further every fresh time that I meet him. He says that if the modern novelist dared to express himself on religious subjects, he would be an agnostic."
"Precisely!" cried Mr. Howe, with the pale hand wavering downward from the eerie glasses. "But he doesn't dare! If he did, his publisher wouldn't publish him!"
"My publisher publishesme!" frowned Mr. Bedlowe.
"Oh, you're a pietist," was the excited answer. "At least, you go in for that when you write your novels. It pays, and you do it. I don't say that you do itbecauseit pays, but ..."
"You infer it," grumbled Mr. Bedlowe, "and that's almost the same as saying it." He visibly bristled here. "I've got a wholesome faith," he proceeded, with hostility. "That's why I wrote 'The Christian Knight in Armor' and 'The Doubtful Soul Satisfied.' Each of them sold seventy thousand copies apiece. There's a proof that the public wanted them—that they filled a need."
"So does the 'Weekly Wake-Me-Up,'" said Mr. Howe, with mild disdain. "My dear Bedlowe, you have two qualities as a modern novel-writer which are simply atrocious—I mean, plot and piety. The natural result of these is popularity. But your popularity means nothing. You utterly neglect analysis"—
"I despise analysis!"
"You entirely ignore style"—
"I express my thoughts without affectation."
"Your characters are wholly devoid of subtlety"—
"I abhor subtlety!"
"You preach sermons"—
"Which thousands listen to!"
"You fail completely to represent your time"—
"My readers, who represent my time, don't agree with you."
"You end your books with marriages and christenings in the most absurdly old-fashioned way"—
"I end a story as every storyshouldend. Sensible people have a sensible curiosity to know what becomes of hero and heroine."
"Curiosity is the vice of the vulgar novel-reader. Psychological interest is the one sole interest that should concern the more cultured mind. And though you may sell your seventy thousand copies, I beg to assure you that ..."
"Had we not heard quite enough of that hot squabble?" said Kindelon to Pauline, after he had pressed with her into other conversational regions, beyond the assault and defence of these two inimical novelists.
"I rather enjoyed it," said Pauline.
"They would have presently dragged us into their argument," returned Kindelon. "It was just as well that we retired without committing ourselves by an opinion. I should have sided with Howe, though I think him an extremist."
"I know some of Mr. Bedlowe's novels," said Pauline. "They are very popular in England. I thought them simply dire."
"And Howe is a real artist. He has a sort of cult here, though not a large one. What he says is true enough, in the main. The modern novelist dares not express his religious views, unless they be of the most conventional and tame sort. And how few fine minds are there to-day which are not rationalistic, unorthodox? A man like Bedlowe coins money from his milk-and-water platitudes, while Howe must content himself with the recognition of a small though devout circle.... Did you meet the great American dramatist, by the way? I mean Mr. Osgood Paiseley. He is standing over yonder near the mantel ... that slender little man with the abnormally massive head."
"Yes, I met him," returned Pauline. "He is coming this way."
"Have you any new dramatic work in preparation, Paiseley?" asked Kindelon, as the gentleman who had just been mentioned now drew near himself and Pauline.
"Yes," was Mr. Paiseley's reply. He spoke with a nasal tone and without much grammatical punctilio. "I've got a piece on hand that I'm doing for Mattie Molloy. Do you know her at all? She does the song-and-dance business with comedy variations. I think the piece'll be a go; it'll just suit her, I guess."
"Your last melodrama, 'The Brand of Cain,' was very successful, was it not?" pursued Kindelon.
"Well," said Mr. Paiseley, as he threw back an errant lock or two from his great width of swollen-looking forehead, "I'm afraid it isn't going to catch on so very well, after all. The piece is all right, but the company can't play it. Cooke guys his part because he don't like it, and doesn't get a hand on some of the strongest lines that have been put into any actor's mouth for the past twenty years—fact! as sure as you're born! Moore makes up horribly, and Kitty Vane is so over-weighted that Miss Cowes, in a straight little part of only a few lengths, gets away with her for two scenes; and Sanders is awfully preachy. If I could have had my own say about casting the piece, we'd have turned away money for six weeks and made it a sure thing for the road. I mean for the big towns, not the one-night places; it's got too many utility-people to make it pay there. But I shan't offer anything more to the stock-theatres; after this, I'm going to fit stars."
Pauline turned a covertly puzzled look upon her companion. She seemed to be hearing a new language. And yet, although the words were all familiar enough, their collocation mystified her.
"You think there is more profit, then, in fitting stars," said Kindelon, "if there is less fame?"
Mr. Paiseley laughed, with not a little bitterness. "Oh, fame," he said, "is the infirmity of the young American dramatist. I've outgrown it. I used to have it. But what's the use of fighting against France and England in the stock-theatres? Give me a fair show there, and I can draw bigger money than Dennery or Sardou—don't you make any mistake! But those foreign fellows are always crowding us natives out of New York. The managers hem and smirk over our pieces, and say they're good enough, but they've got something that's running well at the Porte Sang Martang or the Odeun in Paris. The best we can do is to have our plays done by a scratch company at some second-rate house, or, if it's a first-class house, they give us bad time. No, I fit travelling stars at so much cash down, and so much royalty afterward—that is, when I can't get a percentage on the gross. I don't work any more for fame; I want my dinner...."
"Your friend takes a rather commercial view of the American stage," said Pauline to Kindelon, after they had again moved onward.
"I am sorry to say that it is almost the only view taken by any of our dramatists. Paiseley is thoroughly representative of his class. They would all like to write a fine play, but they nearly all make the getting of money their primary object. Now, I do not believe that the lust of gain has ever been a foremost incentive in the production of any great mental achievement. Our novels and poems are to-day better than our plays, I think, because they are written with a more artistic and a less monetary stimulus. The rewards of the successful playwright may mean a fortune to him; he always remembers that when he begins, and he usually begins for the reason that he does remember it...."
Pauline had glimpses of not a few more individualities, that evening, before she at length took her leave.
"Well, how have you enjoyed it?" asked Kindelon, as they were being driven home together.
"I have not entirely enjoyed it," was the slow answer.
"You have been disappointed?"
"Yes."
"But your purpose of thesalonstill remains good?"
"Indeed it does!" she exclaimed with eagerness. "I shall begin my work—I shall issue my invitations in a few days. Mrs. Dares will no doubt supply me with a full list of names and addresses."
"And you will invite everybody?"
"Oh, by no means. I shall pick and choose."
"Beware of calamity!" said Kindelon. And his voice was so odd a blending of the jocose and serious that she could ill guess whether he were in earnest or not.
Pauline now began in excellent earnest the preparations for embarking upon her somewhat quaint enterprise. During the next three or four days she saw a good deal of Kindelon. They visited together the little editorial sanctum in Spruce Street, where Mrs. Dares sat dictating some of her inexhaustible "copy" to a pale and rather jaded-looking female amanuensis. The lady received her visitors with a most courteous hospitality. Pauline had a sense of shocking idleness as she looked at the great cumbrous writing-desk covered with ink-stains, files or clippings of newspapers, and long ribbon-like rolls of "proof." Her own fine garments seemed to crackle ostentatiously beside the noiseless folds of Mrs. Dares's work-day cashmere.
"We shall not take up much of your valuable time," she said to the large-eyed, serious little lady. "We have called principally to ask a favor of you, and I hope you will not think it a presumptuous request."
"I hope it is presumptuous," said Mrs. Dares, "for that, provided I can grant it at all, will make it so much pleasanter to grant."
"You may be sure," cried Kindelon gayly to Pauline, "that you have made a complete conquest of Mrs. Dares. She is usually quite miserly with her compliments. She puts me on the wretched allowance of one a year."
"Perhaps you don't deserve a more liberal income," said Pauline. Then she re-addressed Mrs. Dares. "I want to ask you," she proceeded, with a shy kind of venture in her tone, "if you will kindly loan me your visiting-book for a little while."
"My visiting-book?" murmured Mrs. Dares. Then she slowly shook her head, while the pale girl at the desk knitted her brows perplexedly, as though she had encountered some tantalizing foreign word. "I would gladly lend it if I had one," Mrs. Dares went on; "but I possess no such article."
"Good gracious!" exclaimed Pauline, with an involuntary surprise that instantly afterward she regretted as uncivil. "Youhavenone!"
But Mrs. Dares did not seem to detect the least incivility in Pauline's amazement.
"No, my dear Mrs. Varick, I have no need of a visiting-book, for I have no time to visit."
"But you surely have some sort of list, have you not?" now inquired Kindelon.
Mrs. Dares lightly touched her forehead. "Only here in my memory," she said, "and that is decidedly an imperfect list. My guests understand that to be invited to one of my evenings is to be invited to all. I suppose that in the fashionable world," she proceeded, fixing her great dark eyes on Pauline, "it is wholly different. There, matters of this sort are managed with much ceremony, no doubt."
"With much trivial ceremony," said Pauline. "A little scrap of pasteboard there represents an individuality—and in just as efficient manner as if it were truly the person represented. To be in society, as it is called, is to receive a perpetual shower of cards. I strongly doubt if many people ever care to meet in a truly social way those whose company they pretend to solicit. There are few more perfect mockeries in that most false and mocking life, than the ordinary visit of etiquette." Pauline here gave a little meaning smile as she briefly paused. "But I suppose you will understand, Mrs. Dares," she continued, "that I regret your having no regular list. I wanted to borrow it—and with what purpose I am sure you can readily imagine."
"Yes," was the reply. "My daughter Cora shall prepare you one, however. She has an admirable memory. If she fails in the matter of addresses, there is the directory as a help, you know. And so your idea about thesalonis unchanged?"
"It is unalterable," said Pauline, with a laugh. "But I hate so to trouble your daughter."
"She will not think it any trouble," said Kindelon quickly.
Pauline looked at him with a slight elevation of the brows. "You speak confidently for Miss Cora," she said.
Kindelon lifted one hand, and waved it a trifle embarrassedly. "Oh, I have always found her so accommodating," he answered.
"Yes, Cora is always glad to please those whom she likes," said Mrs. Dares....
A little later Pauline and Kindelon took leave of their hostess. They had been driven to Spruce Street in the carriage of the former, and as they quitted the huge building in which Mrs. Dares's tiny sanctum was situated, Kindelon said to his companion: "You shall return home at once?"
Pauline gave a careless laugh. She looked about her at all the commercial hurry and bustle of the placarded, vehicle-thronged street. "I have nowhere else to go just at present," she said. "Not that I should not like to stay down town, as you call it, a little longer. The noise and activity please me.... Oh, by the way," she added, "did you not say that you must repair to your office?"
"The 'Asteroid' imperatively claims me," said Kindelon, taking out his watch. "Only twelve o'clock," he proceeded; "I thought it later. Well, I have at least an hour at your service still. Have you any commands?"
"Where on earth could we pass your hour of leisure?" said Pauline. "It would probably not be proper if I accompanied you into the office of the 'Asteroid.'"
"It would be sadly dull."
"Then I will drive up town after I have left you there."
"Why not remaindowntown, since the change pleases you?"
"Driving aimlessly about for a whole hour?"
"By no means. I have an idea of what we might do. I think you might not find the idea at all disagreeable. If you will permit, I will give your footman an order, and plan for you a little surprise."
"Do so, by all means," said Pauline lightsomely, entering the carriage. "I throw myself upon your mercy and your protection."
Kindelon soon afterward seated himself at her side, and the carriage was immediately borne into the clamorous region of what we term lower Broadway.
"I hope I shall like your surprise," said Pauline, as she leaned back against the cushions, not knowing how pretty she looked in her patrician elegance of garb and person. "But we will not talk of it; I might guess what it is if we did, and that would spoil all. My faith in you shall be blind and unquestioning, and I shall expect a proportionately rich reward.... What gulfs of difference lie between that interesting little Mrs. Dares and most of the women whom I have met! People tell us that we must travel to see life. I begin to think that one great city like New York can give us the most majestic experience, if only we know how to receive it. Take my Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie, for example, and compare her with Mrs. Dares! A whole continent seems to lie between them, and yet they are continually living at scarcely a stone's-throw apart."
Kindelon gave a brisk, acquiescent nod.
"True enough," he said. "Travel shows us only the outsides of men and women. We go abroad to discover better what profits of observation lie at home...."
The carriage at length stopped.
"Is my surprise all ready to burst upon me?" asked Pauline, at this point.
"Yes. Its explosion is now imminent," said Kindelon, with dry solemnity of accent.
Pauline, after she had alighted, surveyed her surroundings for a moment, and then said,—
"I knew we were approaching the Battery, but I did not suppose you meant to stop there. And whyhaveyou stopped, pray?"
Kindelon pointed toward a distant flash of water glimpsed between the nude black boughs of many high trees. "You can't think what a delightful stroll we could take over yonder," he said, "along the esplanade. The carriage could wait here for us, you know."
"Certainly," acceded Pauline.
They soon entered the noble park lying on their right. It was a day of unusual warmth for that wintry season, but the air freshened and sharpened as they drew further seaward. There are many New Yorkers to whom our beautiful Battery is but a name, and Pauline was one of them. As she neared the rotund wooden building of Castle Garden, a wholly novel and unexpected sight awaited her. Not long ago one of the great ocean-steamers had discharged here many German immigrants, and some of these had come forth from the big sea-fronting structure beyond, to meet the stares of that dingy, unkempt rabble which always collects, on such occasions, about its doorways. Pauline and Kindelon paused to watch the poor dazed-looking creatures, with their pinched, vacuous faces, their timid miens, their coarse, dirty bundles. The women mostly had blond braids of hair matted in close coils against the backs of their heads; they wore no bonnets, and one or two of them led a bewildered, dull-eyed child by the hand, while one or two more clasped infants to their breasts, wrapped in soiled shawls. The men had a spare, haggard, slavish demeanor; the liberal air and sun, the very amplitude and brilliancy of sky and water, seemed to cow and depress them; they slunk instead of walking; there was something in their visages of an animal suggestion; they did not appear entirely human, and made you recall the mythic combinations of man and beast.
"They are Germans, I suppose," said Kindelon to Pauline; "or perhaps they hail from some of the Austrian provinces. Many of my own country people, the Irish, are not much less shocking to behold when they first land here."
"These do not shock me," said Pauline; "they sadden me. They look as if they had not wit enough to understand whither they had come, but quite enough to feel alarmed and distrustful of their present environment."
"This drama of immigration is constantly unfolding itself here, day after day," answered Kindelon. "It surely has its mournful side, but you, as an American, ought by all means to discern its bright one. These poor souls are the social refuse of Europe; they are the pathetic fugitives from vile and time-honored abuses; they are the dreary consequences of kingdoms and empires. Their state is almost brutish, as you see; they don't think themselves half as far above the brute as you think them, depend upon it. They have had manhood and womanhood crushed into the dust for generations. It is as much their hereditary instinct to fawn and crawl as it is for a dog to bark or a cat to lap milk. They represent the enlightened and thrifty peasantry over-sea. Bah! how it sickens a man to consider that because a few insolent kings must have their hands kissed and their pride of rule glutted, millions of their people are degraded into such doltish satires upon humanity! But I mentioned the bright side of this question, from the American standpoint."
"Yes," said Pauline quickly, lifting her face to his. "I hope it is really a bright side."
"It is—very. America receives these pitiful wretches, and after a few short months they are regenerated, transformed. There has never, in the history of the world, been a nation of the same magnificent hospitality as this. Before such droves of deplorable beings any other nation would shut her ports or arm her barriers, in strong affright. But America (which I have always thought a much more terse and expressive name than the United States) does nothing of the sort. With a superb kindness, which has behind it a sense of unexampled power, she bids them all welcome. And in a little while they breathe her vitalizing air with a new and splendid result. They forget the soldiers who kicked them, the tyrants who made them shoulder muskets in defence of thrones, the taxes wrung from their scant wages that princes might dance and feast. They forget all this gross despotism; they begin to live; their very frames and features change; their miserable past is like a broken fetter flung gladly away. And America does all this for them—this, which no other country has done or can do!"
He spoke with a fine heat, an impressive enthusiasm. Pauline, standing beside him, had earnestly fixed her look upon his handsome, virile face, noting the spark that pierced his light-blue eyes, between the black gloss of their lashes, and the little sensitive tremor that disturbed his nostril. She had never felt more swayed by his force of personality than now. She had never felt more keenly than now that his manful countenance and shape were both fit accompaniments of an important and robust nature.
"And what does America really do with these poor, maltreated creatures, after having greeted and domesticated them?" came her next words, filled with an appealing sincerity of utterance.
Something appeared suddenly to have changed Kindelon's mood. He laughed shortly and half turned away.
"Oh," he said, in wholly altered voice, "if they are Irish she sometimes makes Tammany politicians of them, and if they are Germans she sometimes turns them into howling socialists."
"Do you mean what you say?" exclaimed Pauline almost indignantly.
He bent his head and looked at her intently, for a moment, with a covert play of mirth under the crisp, dark flow of his mustache.
"I am afraid that I do," he replied, with another laugh.
"Then you think this grand American hospitality of which you have just spoken to be a failure—a sham?"
"No, no—far from that," he said rapidly, and with recurring seriousness. "I was only going back to the dark side of the question—that is all. You know, I told you it had both its dark and its bright side.... Come, let us leave this rabble. You have not really seen the Battery yet. Its true splendors lie just beyond...."
They were presently strolling along the stone-paved esplanade, with its granite posts connected by loops of one continuous iron chainwork. To the south they had a partial view of Brooklyn, that city which is a sort of reflective and imitative New York, with masts bristling from her distant wharves and more than a single remote church-spire telling of the large religious impulse which has given her a quaint ecclesiastical fame. But westward your eye could traverse the spacious bay until it met the dull-red semicircle of Fort Columbus, planted low and stout upon the shore of Governor's Island, and the soft, swelling, purplish hills of Staten Island, where they loomed still further beyond. Boats of all shapes and kinds were passing over the luminous waters, from the squat, ugly tug, with its hoarse whistle, to the huge black bulk of an Atlantic steamer, bound for transpontine shores and soon to move majestically oceanward through the fair sea-gate of the Narrows. A few loiterers leaned against the stone posts, and a few more lounged upon the seats ranged further inland along this salubrious marine promenade. Back among the turfy levels that stretched broadly between the flagged pathways, you saw the timorous green of hardy grass, where an occasional pale wreath of unmelted snow yet lingered. People were passing to and fro, with steps that rang hollow on the hard pavement. If you listened intently you could catch a kind of dreamy hum from the vast city, which might almost be said to begin its busy, tumultuous life here in this very spot, thence pushing through many a life-crowded street and avenue, sheer on to the rocky fields and goat-haunted gutters of dreary Harlem.
"What a glorious bay it is!" exclaimed Kindelon, while he and Pauline stood on the breezy esplanade. "There never was a city with more royal approaches than New York."
"That fort yonder," said Pauline, "will perhaps thunder broadsides, one day, at the fleet of an invading enemy. This is still such a young city compared with those of other lands.... I suppose these waters, centuries later, will see grand sights, as civilization augments."
"Perhaps they may see very mournful ones," objected Kindelon.
"But you are an evolutionist," declared Pauline, with a priggish little pursing of the lips that he found secretly very amusing. "You believe that everything is working toward nobler conditions, though you laughed at Leander Prawle, the optimistic poet, the other evening, for his roseate prophecies about the human race."
"Oh, I'm an evolutionist," answered Kindelon. "I believe it will all come right by-and-by, like the gigantic unravelling of a gigantic skein.... But such views don't prevent me from feeling the probability of New York being reduced to ashes more than once in the coming centuries."
"Oh, yes, I remember," said Pauline. "There are often the apparent retrogressions—rhythmic variations of movement which temporarily retard all progress in societies."
Kindelon burst into one of his mellowest and heartiest laughs. "You are delicious," he said, "when you try to recollect your Herbert Spencer. You make me think of a flower that has been dropped among the leaves of an Algebra."
"I am not at all sure that I like your simile," said Pauline, tossing her head somewhat. "It is pleasant to be likened to a flower, but in this case it is rather belittling. And if it comes to recollecting my Herbert Spencer, perhaps the process is not one of very violenteffort, either."
"Oh," said Kindelon ruefully, "I have offended you."
A sunny smile broke from her lips the next moment. "I can't be offended," she replied, "when I think how you rebuked my absurd outburst of pedantry. Ah! truly a little knowledgeisa dangerous thing, and I am afraid I have very little.... How lovely it all is, here," she proceeded, changing the subject, as they now began to move onward, while they still kept close to the edge of the smooth-paven terrace. "And what a pity that our dwelling-houses should all be away from the water! My grandparents—or my great-grandparents, I forget which—once lived close to the Battery. I recollect poor mamma telling me that I had an ancestress whom they used to call the belle of Bowling Green."
"That was certainly in the days before commerce had seized every yard of these unrivalled water-fronts," laughed Kindelon. "Babylon on its Euphrates, or Nineveh on its Tigris, could not eclipse New York in stately beauty if mansions were built along its North and East rivers. But trade is a tyrant, as you see. She concedes to you Fifth Avenue, but she denies you anything more poetic."
"I wonder who is the belle of Bowling Green now?" said Pauline, looking up at her companion with a serio-comic smile.
He shook his head. "I am afraid your favored progenitress was the last of the dynasty."
"Oh, no," dissented Pauline, appearing to muse a trifle. "I fancy there is still a belle. Perhaps she has a German or an Irish name."
"It may be Kindelon," he suggested.
"No—it is something more usual than that. If she is not a Schmitt I suspect that she is an O'Brien. I picture her as pretty, but somewhat delicate; she works in some dreadful factory, you know, not far away, all through the week. But on Sunday she emerges from her narrow little room in a tenement-house, brave and smart as you please. The beaux fight for her smiles as they join her, and she knows just how to distribute them; she is a most astute little coquette, in her way."
"And the beaux? Are they worthy of her coquetries?"
"Oh, well, she thinks them so. I fear that most of them have soiled finger-nails, and that their Sunday coats fit them very ill.... But now let me pursue my little romance. The poor creature is terribly fond of one of them. There is always one, you know, dearer than the rest."
"Is there?" said Kindelon oddly. "You're quite elucidating. I didn't know that."
"Don't be sarcastic," reproved Pauline with mock grimness. "Sarcasm is always the death of romance. I have an idea that the secretly-adored one is more of a convert than all his fellows to the beautifying influences of soap. His Sunday face is bright and fresh; it looks conscientiously washed."
"And his finger-nails? Does your imagination also include those, or do they transcend its limits?"
"I have a vague perception of their relative superiority.... Pray let me continue without your prosaic interruptions. Poor little Mary.... Did I not say that her first name was Mary, by-the-by?"
"I have been under the impression for several seconds that you called her Bridget."
"Very well. I will call her so, if you insist. Poor little Bridget, who steals forth,endimanchéeand expectant, fails for an hour or two to catch a glimpse of her beloved. She is beginning to be sadly bored by the society of her present three, four, or five admirers, when suddenly she sees the Beloved approaching. Then she brightens and becomes quite sparklingly animated. And when her Ideal draws near, twirling a licorice cane—I insist upon having her Ideal twirl a licorice cane—she receives him with an air of the most unconcerned indifference. It is exquisite to observe the calm, careless way in which she asks him...."
"Pardon me," interrupted Kindelon, with a short and almost brusque tone, "but is not this gentleman coming toward us your cousin?"
"My cousin?" faltered Pauline.
"Yes—Mr. Courtlandt Beekman."
Pauline did not answer, for she had already caught sight of Courtlandt, advancing in her own direction from that of the South Ferry, which she and Kindelon were now rather near. She stopped abruptly in her walk, and perceptibly colored.
A moment afterward Courtlandt saw both herself and her escort. He showed great surprise, and then quickly conquered it. As he came forward, Pauline gave a shrill, nervous laugh. "I suppose you feel like asking me what on earth I am doing here," she said, in by no means her natural voice, and with a good deal of fluttered insecurity about her demeanor.
"I shouldn't think that necessary," replied Courtlandt. His sallow face had not quite its usual hue, but nothing could be steadier than the cool light of his eye. "It's very evident that you are taking a stroll with Mr. Kindelon." He then extended his hand, cased in a yellow dogskin glove, to Kindelon. "How are you?" he said to the man whom he entirely disliked, in a tone of neutral civility.
"Very well, this pleasant day," returned Kindelon, jovially imperturbable. "And you, Mr. Beekman?"
"Quite well, thanks." He spoke as if he were stating a series of brief commercial facts. "I had some business with a man over in Brooklyn, and took this way back to my office, which is only a street or two beyond." He turned toward the brilliant expanse of the bay, lifting a big silver-knobbed stick which he carried, waving it right and left. "Very nice down here, isn't it?" he went on. His look now dwelt in the most casual way upon Pauline. "Well, I must be off," he continued. "I've a lot of business to-day."