"Well, this is therightplace. Mother said to go to 1232. I guess she knows. She's an old customer."
"The Egg-beater! The Egg-beater!" the blithe young novelist to whom Erlcort told the story repeated. He was still happy in his original success as a best-seller, and he had come to the Critical Bookstore to spy out the stock and see whether his last novel was in it; but though it was not, he joyously extended an acquaintance with Erlcort which had begun elsewhere. "The Egg-beater?What a splendid title for a story of adventure! Keep the secret of its applicability to the last word, or perhaps never reveal it at all, and leave the reader worrying. That's one way; makes him go and talk about the book to all the girls he knows and get them guessing. Best ad. in the world.The Egg-beater!Doesn't it suggestdesert islands and penguins' nests in the rocks? Fellow and girl shipwrecked, and girl wants to make an omelette after they've got sick of plain eggs, and can't for want of an egg-beater. Heigh? He invents one—makes it out of some wire that floats off from the wreck. See? When they are rescued, she brings it away, and doesn't let him know it till their Iron Wedding Day. They keep it over his study fireplace always."
This author was the first to stretch his legs before Erlcort's fire from his seat on one of the reproductions. He could not say enough of the beauty of the place, and he asked if he might sit there and watch for the old codger's old customers coming to buy hardware. There might be copy in it.
But the old customers did not come so often as he hoped and Erlcort feared. Instead there camebona fidebook-buyers, who asked some for a book and some for a particular book. The first were not satisfied with the books that Erlcort or his acting saleslady recommended, and went away without buying. The last were indignant at not finding what they wanted in Erlcort's selection.
"Why don't you stock it?" they demanded.
"Because I don't think it's worth reading."
"Oh, indeed!" The sarcastic customers werecommonly ladies. "I thought you let the public judge of that!"
"There are bookstores where they do. This is a critical bookstore. I sell only the books thatIthink worth reading. If you had noticed my sign—"
"Oh!" the customer would say, and she, too, would go away without buying.
There were other ladies who came, links of the endless chain of volunteer readers who had tried to help Erlcort in making his selection, and he could see them slyly looking his stock over for the books they had praised to him. Mostly they went away without comment, but with heads held high in the offense which he felt even more than saw. One, indeed, did ask him why he had not stocked her chosen book, and he had to say, "Well, when I came to go through it carefully, I didn't think it quite—"
"But here isThe Green Bay Tree, andThe Biggest Toad in the Puddle, and—"
"I know. For one reason and another I thought them worth stocking."
Then another head went away high in the air, with its plumes quivering. One afternoon late a lady came flying in with all the marks, whatever they are, of transatlantic travel upon her.
"I'm just through the customs, and I've motoredup here the first thing, even before I went home, to stop you from selling that book I recommended. It's dreadful; and, horrors! horrors! here it is by the hundreds! Oh, Mr. Erlcort! You mustn't sell that dreadful book! You see, I had skipped through it in my berth going out, and posted my letter the first thing; and just now, coming home, I found it in the ship's library and came on that frightful episode. You know! Where— Howcouldyou order it without reading it, on a mere say-so? It's utterly immoral!"
"I don't agree with you," Erlcort answered, dryly. "I consider that passage one of the finest in modern fiction—one of the most ennobling and illumining—"
"Ennobling!" The lady made a gesture of horror. "Very well! Ifthatis your idea of a critical bookstore, all I've got to say is—"
But she had apparently no words to say it in, and she went out banging but failing to latch the door which let through the indignant snort of her car as it whirled her away. She left Erlcort and his assistant to a common silence, but he imagined somehow a resolution in the stenographer not to let the book go unsearched till she had grasped the full iniquity of that episode and felt all its ennobling force. He was not consoled when another lady came in and, after driftingunmolestedly about (it was the primary rule of the place not to follow people up), stopped before the side shelf where the book was ranged in dozens and scores. She took a copy from the neat ranks, and opened it; then she lifted her head by chance and caught sight of her plume in one of the little mirrors. She stealthily lifted herself on tiptoe till she could see her face, and then she turned to the assistant and said, gently, "I believe I should likethisbook, please," and paid for it and went out.
It was now almost on the stroke of six, and Erlcort said to his assistant: "I'll close the store, Miss Pearsall. You needn't stay any longer."
"All right, sir," the girl said, and went into the little closet at the rear for her hat and coat. Did she contrive to get a copy of that book under her coat as she passed the shelf where it lay?
When she was gone, he turned the key in the door and went back and sat down before the fire dying on the hearth of the Franklin stove. It was not a very cheerful moment with him, but he could not have said that the day had been unprofitable, either spiritually or pecuniarily. In its experiences it had been a varied day, and he had really sold a good many books. More people than he could have expected had taken him seriously and even intelligently. It is true that he had been somewhat vexed by the sort of authoritythe president of the Intellectual Club had shown in the way she swelled into the store and patronized him and it, as if she had invented them both, and blamed him in a high, sweet voice for having so manyoldbooks. "My idea was that it would be a place where one could come for the best of thenewbooks. But here! Why, half of them I saw in June before I sailed!" She chided him merrily, and she acted as if it were quite part of the joke when he said that he did not think a good book could age much in four months. She laughed patronizingly at his conceit of getting in the fall books by Thanksgiving; but even for the humor of it she could not let him say he should not do anything in holiday books. "I had expected to getallmy Christmas books of you, Mr. Erlcort," she crowed, but for the present she bought nothing. In compensation he recalled the gratitude, almost humble gratitude, of a lady (she was a lady!) who had come that day, bringing her daughter to get a book, any book in his stock, and to thank him for his enterprise, which she had found worked perfectly in the case of the book she had got the week before; the book had been an unalloyed delight, and had left a sense of heightened self-respect with her: that book of the dreadful episode.
He wished Margaret Green had been there;but she had been there only once since his opening; he could not think why. He heard a rattling at the door-latch, and he said before he turned to look, "What if it should be shenow?" But when he went to peer through the door-curtain it was only an old fellow who had spent the better part of the afternoon in the best chair, reading a book. Erlcort went back to the fire and let him rattle, which he did rather a long time, and then went away, Erlcort hoped, in dudgeon. He was one of a number of customers who had acted on the half of his motto asking them to sit down and rest them, after acting on the other half to look round all they wanted. Most of them did not read, even; they seemed to know one another, and they talked comfortably together. Erlcort recognized a companionship of four whom he had noticed in the Park formerly; they were clean-enough-looking elderly men, but occupied nearly all the chairs and settles, so that lady customers did not like to bring books and look over them in the few places left, and Erlcort foresaw the time when he should have to ask the old fellows to look around more and rest them less. In resuming his own place before the fire he felt the fleeting ache of a desire to ask Margaret Green whether it would not be a good plan to remove the motto from the chimneypiece. He would not have liked to do it without askingher; it had been her notion to put it there, and her other notion of the immoral mirrors had certainly worked well. The thoughtful expression they had reflected on the faces of lady customers had sold a good many books; not that Erlcort wished to sell books that way, though he argued with himself that his responsibility ought strictly to end with the provision of books which he had critically approved before offering them for sale.
His conscience was not wholly at peace as to his stock, not only the books which he had included, but also those he had excluded. Some of these tacitly pleaded against his severity; in one case an author came and personally protested. This was the case of a book by the ex-best-seller, who held that his last book was so much better than his first that it ought certainly to be found in any critical bookstore. The proceeds of his best-seller had enabled him to buy an electric runabout, and he purred up to Erlcort's door in it to argue the matter with him. He sat down in a reproduction and proved, gaily, that Erlcort was quite wrong about it. He had the book with him, and read passages from it; then he read passages from some of the books on sale and defied Erlcort to say that his passages were not just as good, or, as he put it merrily, the same as. He held that his marked improvement entitled himto the favor of a critical bookstore; without this, what motive had he in keeping from a reversion to the errors which had won him the vicious prosperity of his first venture? Hadn't Erlcort a duty to perform in preventing his going back to the bad? Refuse this markedly improved fiction, and you drove him to writing nothing but best-sellers from now on. He urged Erlcort to reflect.
They had a jolly time, and the ex-best-seller went away in high spirits, prophesying that Erlcort would come to his fiction yet.
There were authors who did not leave Erlcort so cheerful when they failed to see their books on his shelves or tables. Some of them were young authors who had written their worthless books with a devout faith in their worth, and they went away more in sorrow than in anger, and yet more in bewilderment. Some were old authors who had been all their lives acceptably writing second-rate books and trying to make them unacceptably first-rate. If he knew them he kept out of their way, but the dejection of their looks was not less a pang to him if he saw them searching his stock for their books in vain.
He had his own moments of dejection. The interest of the press in his enterprise had flashed through the Sunday issues of a single week, and then flashed out in lasting darkness. He wonderedvaguely if he had counted without the counting-house in hoping for their continued favor; he could not realize that nothing is so stale as old news, and that no excess of advertising would have relumed those fitful fires.
He would have liked to talk the case over with Margaret Green. After his first revolt from the easy publicity the reporters had first given him, he was aware of having enjoyed it—perhaps vulgarly enjoyed it. But he hoped not quite that; he hoped that in his fleeting celebrity he had cared for his scheme rather than himself. He had really believed in it, and he liked having it recognized as a feature of modern civilization, an innovation which did his city and his country credit. Now and then an essayist of those who wrote thoughtful articles in the Sunday or Saturday-evening editions had dropped in, and he had opened his heart to them in a way he would not have minded their taking advantage of. Secretly he hoped they would see a topic in his enterprise and his philosophy of it. But they never did, and he was left to the shame of hopes which had held nothing to support defeat. He would have liked to confess his shame and own the justice of his punishment to Margaret Green, but she seemed the only friend who never came near. Other friends came, and many strangers, the friends tolook and the strangers to buy. He had no reason to complain of his sales; the fame of his critical bookstore might have ceased in New York, because it had gone abroad to Chicago and St. Louis and Pittsburg; people who were clearly from these commercial capitals and others came and bought copiously of his criticized stock, and they praised the notion of it in telling him that he ought to open branches in their several cities.
They were all women, and it was nearly all women who frequented the Critical Bookstore, but in their multitude Margaret Green was not. He thought it the greater pity because she would have enjoyed many of them with him, and would have divined such as hoped the culture implicated by a critical bookstore would come off on them without great effort of their own; she would have known the sincere spirits, too, and could have helped direct their choice of the best where all was so good. He smiled to find that he was invoking her help, which he had no right to.
His longing had no effect upon her till deep in January, when the weather was engaged late one afternoon in keeping the promise of a January thaw in the form of the worst snow-storm of the winter. Then she came thumping with her umbrella-handle at his door as if, he divined, she were too stiff-handed or too package-laden to press thelatch and let herself in, and she almost fell in, but saved herself by spilling on the floor some canvases and other things which she had been getting at the artist's-materials store near by. "Don't bother about them," she said, "but take me to the fire as fast as you can," and when she had turned from snow to rain and had dripped partially dry before the Franklin stove, she asked, "Where have you been all the time?"
"Waiting here for you," he answered.
"Well, you needn't. I wasn't going to come—or at least not till you sent for me, or said you wanted my advice."
"I don't want your advice now."
"I didn't come to give it. I just dropped in because if I hadn't I should have just dropped outside. How have you been getting along with your ridiculous critical bookstore?"
"Well, things are rather quiet with us just now, as the publishers say to the authors when they don't want to publish their books."
"Yes, I know that saying. Why didn't you go in for the holiday books?"
"How did you know I didn't?"
"Lots of people told me."
"Well, then, I'll tell you why. I would have had to read them first, and no human being could do that—not even a volunteer link in an endless chain."
"I see. But since Christmas?"
"You know very well that after Christmas the book market drops dead."
"Yes, so I've been told." She had flung her wet veil back over her shoulders, and he thought she had never looked so adorably plain before; if she could have seen herself in a glass she would have found her whole face out of drawing. It seemed as if his thinking had put her in mind of them, and she said, "Those immoral mirrors are shameful."
"They've sold more of the best books than anything else."
"No matter. As soon as I get a little drier I shall take them down."
"Very well.Ididn't put them up." He laid a log of hickory on the fire. "I'm not doing it to dry you quicker."
"Oh, I know. I'll tell you one thing. You ought to keep the magazines, or at least the Big Four. You could keep them with a good conscience, and you could sell them without reading; they're always good."
"There's an idea in that. I believe I'll try it."
Margaret Green was now dry enough, and she rose and removed the mirrors. In doing this she noticed that Erlcort had apparently sold a good many of his best books, and she said: "Well! I don't see whyyoushould be discouraged."
"Who said I was? I'm exultant."
"Then you were exulting with the corners of your mouth down just now. Well, I must be going. Will you get a taxi to flounder over to the Subway with me?" While Erlcort was telephoning she was talking to him. "I believe the magazines will revive public interest in your scheme. Put them in your window. Try to get advance copies for it."
"You have a commercial genius, Margaret Green."
"When it comes to selling literature, I have. Selling art is where I fall down."
"That's because you always try to sell your own art. I should fall down, too, if I tried to sell my own literature."
They got quite back to their old friendliness; the coming of the taxi gave them plenty of time. The electric lights were turned brilliantly on, but there, at the far end of the store, before the Franklin stove, they had a cozy privacy. At the moment of parting she said:
"If I were you I should take out these settles. They simply invite loafing."
"I've noticed that they seem to do that."
"And better paint out that motto."
"I've sometimes fancied I'd better.Thatinvites loafing, too; though some nice people like it."
"Nice people? Why haven't some of them bought a picture?" He perceived that she had taken in the persistent presence of the sketches when removing the mirrors, and he shared the indignation she expressed: "Shabby things!"
She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and he asked what she was going to do with them, as he followed her to the door with her other things.
"Put them around the studio. But you needn't come to see the effect."
"No. I shall come to see you."
But when he came in a lull of February, and he could walk part of the way up through the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said:
"I suppose you've come to pour out some more of your griefs. Well, pour away! Has the magazine project failed?"
"On the contrary, it has been asuccès fou. But I don't feel altogether easy in my mind about it. The fact is, they seem to print much more rubbish than I supposed."
"Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their nostrils."
She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut and getting very close to her picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her mouth hang open. He wondered why she was so charming; but when she stepped back rhythmically,tilting her pretty head this way and that, he saw why: it was her unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her mouth and shut it to say, "Well?"
"Well, some people have come back at me. They've said, What a rotten number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What's to be done about it? I can't ask people to buy truck or read truck because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the first quality."
"No. You can't. Why," she asked, drifting up to her picture again, "don't you tear the bad out, and sell the good?"
Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot be spelled in English. "Do you know how defiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the magazines? They're wired together, and you could no more tear out the bad and leave the good than you could part vice from virtue in human nature."
"I see," Margaret Green said, but she saw no further, and she had to let him go disconsolate. After waiting a decent time she went to find him in his critical bookstore. It was late in an afternoon of the days that were getting longer, and only one electric was lighted in the rear of theroom, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Franklin stove, so busy at something that he scarcely seemed aware of her.
"What in the world are you doing?" she demanded.
He looked up. "Who? I? Oh, it's you! Why, I'm merely censoring the truck in the May number of this magazine." He held up a little roller, as long as the magazine was wide, blacked with printer's ink, which he had been applying to the open periodical. "I've taken a hint from the way the Russian censorship blots out seditious literature before it lets it go to the public."
"Andwhata mess you're making!"
"Of course it will have to dry before it's put on sale."
"I should think so. Listen to me, Frederick Erlcort: you're going crazy."
"I've sometimes thought so: crazy with conceit and vanity and arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast, benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him? Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is it universal suffrage?"
"Now," Margaret Green said, "you are talkingsense. Why didn't you think of this in the beginning?"
"Is it a world, a whole earth," he went on, "where the weeds mostly outflourish the flowers, or is it a wretched little florist's conservatory where the watering-pot assumes to better the instruction of the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust? What is all the worthy family of asses to do if there are no thistles to feed them? Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the finer organisms, are the coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made a mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural selection become to certain of them. But let there be no artificial selection, no survival of the fittest by main force—the force of the spectator, who thinks he knows better than the creator of the ugly and the beautiful, the fair and foul, the evil and good."
"Oh,nowif the Intellectual Club could hear you!" Margaret Green said, with a long, deep,admiring suspiration. "And what are you going to do with your critical bookstore?"
"I'm going to sell it. I've had an offer from the author of that best-seller—I've told you about him. I was just trying to censor that magazine while I was thinking it over. He's got an idea. He's going to keep it a critical bookstore, but the criticism is to be made by universal suffrage and the will of the majority. The latest books will be put to a vote; and the one getting the greatest number of votes will be the first offered for sale, and the author will receive a free passage to Europe by the southern route."
"The southern route!" Margaret mused. "I've never been that way. It must be delightful."
"Then come withme!I'mgoing."
"But how can I?"
"By marrying me!"
"I never thought of that," she said. Then, with the conscientious resolution of an elderly girl who puts her fate to the touch of any risk the truth compels, she added: "Or, yes! Ihave. But I never supposed you would ask me." She stared at him, and she was aware she was letting her mouth hang open. While she was trying for some word to close it with he closed it for her.
Florindo and Lindora had come to the end of another winter in town, and had packed up for another summer in the country. They were sitting together over their last breakfast until the taxi should arrive to whirl them away to the station, and were brooding in a joint gloom from the effect of the dinner they had eaten at the house of a friend the night before, and, "Well, thank goodness," she said, "there is an end to that sort of thing foronewhile."
"An end tothatthing," he partially assented, "but not thatsortof thing."
"What do you mean?" she demanded excitedly, almost resentfully.
"I mean that the lunch is of the nature of the dinner, and that in the country we shall begin lunching where we left off dining."
"Not instantly," she protested shrilly. "There will be nobody there for a while—not for a whole month, nearly."
"They will be there before you can turn round, almost; and then you women will begin feeding one another there before you have well left off here."
"We women!" she protested.
"Yes, you—you women. You give the dinners. Can you deny it?"
"It's because we can't get you to the lunches."
"In the country you can; and so you will give the lunches."
"We would give dinners if it were not for the distance, and the darkness on those bad roads."
"I don't see where your reasoning is carrying you."
"No," she despaired, "there is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time before it is all going on again."
They computed the number of dinners they had given during the winter; that was not hard, and the sum was not great: six or seven at the most, large and small. When it came to the dinners they had received, it was another thing; but still she considered, "Were they really so few? It's nothing to what the English do. They never dine alone at home, and they never dine alone abroad—of course not! I wonder they can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-acceptkind, is always loathsome: the everlasting soup, if there aren't oysters first, or grape-fruit, or melon, and the fish, and the entrée, and the roast and salad, and the ice-cream and the fruit nobody touches, and the coffee and cigarettes and cigars—how I hate it all!"
Lindora sank back in her chair and toyed desperately with the fragment of bacon on her plate.
"And yet," Florindo said, "there is a charm about the first dinner of autumn, after you've got back."
"Oh, yes," she assented; "it's like a part of our lost youth. We think all the dinners of the winter will be like that, and we come away beaming."
"But when it keeps on and there's more and more of our lost youth, till it comes to being the whole—"
"Florindo!" she stopped him. He pretended that he was not going to have said it, and she resumed, dreamily, "I wonder what it is makes it so detestable as the winter goes on."
"All customs are detestable, the best of them," he suggested, "and I should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner, that the society dinner was an unlovely rite. You try to carry if off with china and glass, and silver and linen, and if people could fix their minds on these, or even on thedishes of the dinner as they come successively on, it would be all very well; but the diners, the diners!"
"Yes," she said, "the old men are hideous, certainly; and the young ones—I try not to look at them, poking things into the hollows of their faces with spoons and forks—"
"Better than when it was done with knives! Still, it's a horror! A veteran diner-out in full action is certainly a hideous spectacle. Often he has few teeth of his own, and the dentists don't serve him perfectly. He is in danger of dropping things out of his mouth, both liquids and solids: better not look! His eyes bulge and roll in his head in the stress of mastication and deglutition; his color rises and spreads to his gray hair or over his baldness; his person seems to swell vividly in his chair, and when he laughs—"
"Don't, Florindo! Itisawful."
"Well, perhaps no worse than the sight of a middle-aged matron tending to overweight and bulking above her plate—"
"Yes, yes! That's dreadful, too. But when people are young—"
"Oh, when people are young!" He said this in despair. Then he went on in an audible muse. "When people are young they are not only in their own youth; they are in the youth of theworld, the race. They dine, but they don't think of the dinner or the unpleasantness of the diners, and the grotesqueness of feeding in common. They think—" he broke off in defect of other ideas, and concluded with a laugh, "they think of themselves. And they don't think of how they are looking."
"They needn't; they are looking very well. Don't keep harping on that! I remember when we first began going to dinners, I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world. I don't mean when I was a girl; a girl only goes to a dinner because it comes before a dance. I mean when we were young married people; and I pinned up my dress and we went in the horse-cars, or even walked. I enjoyed every instant of it: the finding who was going to take me in and who you were; and the going in; and the hovering round the table to find our places from the cards; and the seeing how you looked next some one else, and wondering how you thought I looked; and the beads sparkling up through the champagne and getting into one's nose; and the laughing and joking and talking! Oh, the talking! What's become of it? The talking, last night, it bored me to death! And what good stories people used to tell, women as well as men! You can't deny it was beautiful."
"I don't; and I don't deny that the forms of dining are still charming. It's the dining itself that I object to."
"That's because your digestion is bad."
"Isn't yours?"
"Of course it is. What has that got to do with it?"
"It seems to me that we have arrived at what is called animpassein French." He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she gave a little jump in her chair. "Oh, there's plenty of time. The taxi won't be here for half an hour yet. Is there any heat left in that coffee?"
"There will be," she said, and she lighted the lamp under the pot. "But I don't like being scared out of half a year's growth."
"I'm sorry. I won't look at the clock any more; I don't care if we're left. Where were we? Oh, I remember—the objection to dining itself. If we could have the forms without the facts, dining would be all right. Our superstition is that we can't be gay without gorging; that society can't be run without meat and drink. But don't you remember when we first went to Italy there was no supper at Italian houses where we thought it such a favor to be asked?"
"I remember that the young Italian swells wouldn't go to the American and English houseswhere they weren't sure of supper. They didn't give supper at the Italian houses because they couldn't afford it."
"I know that. I believe they do, now. But—
'Sweet are the uses of adversity,'
'Sweet are the uses of adversity,'
and the fasting made for beauty then more than the feasting does now. It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed—the sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out to supper."
"I wonder," Lindora said, "whether the same sort of thing goes on at evening parties still—it's so long since I've been at one. It was awful standing jammed up in a corner or behind a door and eatingvis-à-viswith a man who brought you a plate; and it wasn't much better when you sat down and he stood over you gabbling and gobbling, with his plate in one hand and his fork in the other. I was always afraid of his dropping things into my lap; and the sight of his jaws champing as you looked up at them from below!"
"Yes, ridiculous. But there was an element of the grotesque in a bird's-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and trying to smile and lookspirituellebetween the shots."
Lindora as she laughed bowed her forehead onthe back of her hand in the way Florindo thought so pretty when they were both young. "Yes," she said, "awful, awful! Whyshouldpeople want to flock together when they feed? Do you suppose it's a survival of the primitive hospitality when those who had something to eat hurried to share it with those who had nothing?"
"Possibly," Florindo said, flattered into consequence by her momentary deference, or show of it. "But the people who mostly meet to feed together now are not hungry; they are already so stuffed that they loathe the sight of the things. Some of them shirk the consequences by frankly dining at home first, and then openly or covertly dodging the courses."
"Yes, and you hear that praised as a mark of high civilization, or social wisdom. I call it wicked, and an insult to the very genius of hospitality."
"Well, I don't know. It must give the faster a good chance of seeing how funny the feeders all look."
"I wonder, Idowonder, how the feeding in common came to be the custom," she said, thoughtfully. "Of course where it's done for convenience, like hotels or in boarding-houses—but to do it wantonly, as people do in society, it ought to be stopped."
"We might call art to our aid—have a large tableful of people kodaked in the moments of ingulfing, chewing, or swallowing, as the act varied from guest to guest; might be reproduced as picture postals, or from films for the movies. That would give the ten and twenty cent audiences a chance to see what life in the exclusive circles was."
She listened in dreamy inattention. "It was a step in the right direction when people began to have afternoon teas. To be sure, there was the biting and chewing sandwiches, but you needn't takethem, and most women could manage their teacups gracefully."
"Or hide their faces in them when they couldn't."
"Only," she continued, "the men wouldn't come after the first go off. It was as bad as lunches. Now that the English way of serving tea to callers has come in, it's better. You really get the men, and it keeps them from taking cocktails so much."
"They're rather glad of that. But still, still, there's the guttling and guzzling."
"It's reduced to a minimum."
"But it's there. And the first thing you know you've loaded yourself up with cake or bread-and-butter and spoiled your appetite for dinner.No, afternoon tea must go with the rest of it, if we're going to be truly civilized. If people could come to one another's tables with full minds instead of stomachs, there would be some excuse for hospitality. Perhaps if we reversed the practice of the professional diner-out, and read up at home as he now eats at home, and— No, I don't see how it could be done. But we might take a leaf from the book of people who are not in society. They never ask anybody to meals if they can possibly help it; if some one happens in at meal-times they tell him to pull up a chair—if they have to, or he shows no signs first of going. But even among these people the instinct of hospitality—the feeding form of it—lurks somewhere. In our farm-boarding days—"
"Don't speak of them!" she implored.
"We once went to an evening party," he pursued, "where raw apples and cold water were served."
"I thought I should die of hunger. And when we got home to our own farmer's we ravaged the pantry for everything left from supper. It wasn't much. There!" Lindora screamed. "Thereisthe taxi!" And the shuddering sound of the clock making time at their expense penetrated from the street. "Come!"
"How the instinct of economy lingers in us,too, long after the use of it is outgrown. It's as bad as the instinct of hospitality. We could easily afford to pay extra for the comfort of sitting here over these broken victuals—"
"I tell you we shall be left," she retorted; and in the thirty-five minutes they had at the station before their train started she outlined a scheme of social reform which she meant to put in force as soon as people began to gather in summer force at Lobster Cove.
He derided the notion; but she said, "You will see!" and in rather more time than it takes to tell it they were settled in their cottage, where, after some unavoidable changes of cook and laundress, they were soon in perfect running order.
By this time Lobster Cove was in the full tide of lunching and being lunched. The lunches were almost exclusively ladies' lunches, and the ladies came to them with appetites sharpened by the incomparable air of those real Lobster Cove days which were all cloudless skies and west winds, and by the vigorous automobile exercise of getting to one another's cottages. They seized every pretext for giving these feasts, marked each by some vivid touch of invention within the limits of the graceful convention which all felt bound not to transcend. It was some surprising flavor in thesalad, or some touch of color appealing to the eye only; or it was some touch in the ice-cream, or some daring substitution of a native dish for it, as strawberry or peach shortcake; or some bold transposition in the order of the courses; or some capricious arrangement of the decoration, or the use of wild flowers, or even weeds (as meadow-rue or field-lilies), for the local florist's flowers, which set the ladies screaming at the moment and talking of it till the next lunch. This would follow perhaps the next day, or the next but one, according as a new cottager's claims insisted or a lady had a change of guests, or three days at the latest, for no reason.
In their rapid succession people scarcely noticed that Lindora had not given a lunch, and she had so far abandoned herself to the enjoyment of the others' lunches that she had half forgotten her high purposes of reform, when she was sharply recalled to them by a lunch which had not at all agreed with her; she had, in fact, had to have the doctor, and many people had asked one another whether they had heard how she was. Then she took her good resolution in both hands and gave an afternoon, asking people by note or 'phone simply whether they would not come in at four sharp. People were a good deal mystified, but for this very reason everybody came. Someof them came from somebody's lunch, which had been so nice that they lingered over it till four, and then walked, partly to fill in the time and partly to walk off the lunch, as there would be sure to be something at Lindora's later on.
It would be invidious to say what the nature of Lindora's entertainment was. It was certainly to the last degree original, and those who said the worst of it could say no worse than that it was queer. It quite filled the time till six o'clock, and may be perhaps best described as a negative rather than a positive triumph, though what Lindora had aimed at she had undoubtedly achieved. Whatever it was, whether original or queer, it was certainly novel.
A good many men had come, one at least to every five ladies, but as the time passed and a certain blankness began to gather over the spirits of all, they fell into different attitudes of the despair which the ladies did their best to pass off for rapture. At each unscheduled noise they started in a vain expectation, and when the end came, it came so without accent, so without anything but the clock to mark it as the close, that they could hardly get themselves together for going away. They did what was nice and right, of course, in thanking Lindora for her fascinating afternoon, but when they were well beyond hearingone said to another: "Well, I shall certainly have an appetite for my dinnerto-night! Why, if there had only been a cup of the weakest kind of tea, or even of cold water!"
Then those who had come in autos gathered as many pedestrians into them as they would hold in leaving the house, or caught them up fainting by the way.
Lindora and Florindo watched them from their veranda.
"Well, my dear," he said, "it's been a wonderful afternoon; an immense stride forward in the cause of anti-eating—or—"
"Don'tspeakto me!" she cried.
"But it leaves one rather hungry, doesn't it?"
"Hungry!" she hurled back at him. "I could eat a—I don't know what!"
Morrison.Hello! Hello! Is that you, Wetherbee?Wetherbee.Yes. Who are you? What do you want with me?Morrison.Oh, nothing much. It's Morrison, you know;Morrison—down at Clamhurst Shortsands.Wetherbee.Oh!Why, Morrison, of course! Of course, I know!How are you, Morrison? And, by the way,Whereare you? What! You never mean to sayYou are down thereyet? Well, by the Holy Poker!What are you doing there, you ancient joker?Morrison.Sticking it out over Thanksgiving Day.I said I would. I tell you, it is gayDown here. You ought to see the Hunter's Moon,These silver nights, prinking in our lagoon.You ought to see our sunsets, glassy red,Shading to pink and violet overhead.You ought to see our mornings, still and clear,White silence, far as you can look and hear.You ought to see the leaves—our oaks and ashesCrimson and yellow, with those gorgeous splashes,Purple and orange, against the bluish greenOf the pine woods; and scattered in betweenThe scarlet of the maples; and the blazeOf blackberry-vines, along the dusty waysAnd on the old stone walls; the air just balm,And the crows cawing through the perfect calmOf afternoons all gold and turquoise. Say,You ought to have been with wife and me to-day,A drive we took—it would have made you sick:The pigeons and the partridges so thick;And on the hill just beyond Barkin's lane,Before you reach the barn of Widow Payne,Showing right up against the sky, as clearAnd motionless as sculpture, stood a deer!Say, does that jar you just a little? Say,How have you found things up there, anyway,Since you got back? Air like a cotton stringTo breathe? The same old dust on everything,And in your teeth, and in your eyes? The smokeFrom the soft coal, got long beyond a joke?The trolleys rather more upon your curves,And all the roar and clatter in your nerves?Don't you wish you had stayed here, too?Wetherbee.Well, yes,I do at certain times, I must confess.I swear it is enough at times to make you swearYou would almost rather be anywhereThan here. The building up and pulling down,The getting to and fro about the town,The turmoil underfoot and overhead,Certainly make you wish that you were dead,At first; and all the mean vulgarityOf city life, the filth and miseryYou see around you, make you want to putBack to the country anywhere, hot-foot.Yet—there are compensations.Morrison.Such as?Wetherbee.Why,There is the club.Morrison.The club I can't deny.Many o' the fellows back there?Wetherbee.Nearly all.Over the twilight cocktails there are tallStories and talk. But you would hardly care;You have the natives to talk with down there,And always find them meaty.Morrison.Well, so-so.Their words outlast their ideas at times, you know,And they havestayingpowers. The theatersAll open now?Wetherbee.Yes, all. And it occursTo me: there's one among the things that youWould have enjoyed; an opera with the new—Or at least the last—music by Sullivan,And words, though not Gilbertian, that ranTrippingly with it. Oh, I tell you what,I'd rather that you had been there than not.Morrison.Thanks ever so!Wetherbee.Oh, there is nothing meanAbout your early friend. That deer and autumn sceneWere kind of you! And, say, I think you likeAfternoon teas when good. I have chanced to strikeSome of the best of late, where people saidThey had sent you cards, but thought you must be dead.I told them I left you down there by the sea,And then they sort of looked askance at me,As if it were a joke, and bade me getMyself some bouillon or some chocolate,And turned the subject—did not even giveMe time to prove it is not life to liveIn town as long as you can keep from freezingBeside the autumn sea. A little sneezing,At Clamhurst Shortsands, since the frosts set in?Morrison.Well, not enough to make a true friend grin.Slight colds, mere nothings. With our open firesWe've all the warmth and cheer that heart desires.Next year we'll have a furnace in, and stayNot till Thanksgiving, but till Christmas Day.It's glorious in these roomy autumn nightsTo sit between the firelight and the lightsOf our big lamps, and read aloud by turnsAs long as kerosene or hickory burns.We hate to go to bed.Wetherbee.Of course you do!And hate to get up in the morning, too—To pull the coverlet from your frost-bit nose,And touch the glary matting with your toes!Are you beginning yet to break the iceIn your wash-pitchers? No? Well, that is nice.I always hate to do it—seems as ifSummer was going; but when your hand is stiffWith cold, it can be done. Still, I preferTo wash and dress beside my register,When summer gets a little on, like this.But some folks find the other thing pure bliss—Lusty young chaps, like you.Morrison.And some folks findA sizzling radiator to their mind.What else have you, there, you could recommendTo the attention of a country friend?Wetherbee.Well, you know how it is in Madison Square,Late afternoons, now, if the day's been fair—How all the western sidewalk ebbs and flowsWith pretty women in their pretty clo'es:I've never seen them prettier than this year.Of course, I know a dear is not a deer,But still, I think that if I had to meetOne or the other in the road, or street,All by myself, I am not sure but thatI'd choose the dear that wears the fetching hat.Morrison.Get out! What else?Wetherbee.Well, it is not so bad,If you are feeling a little down, or sad,To walk along Fifth Avenue to the Park,When the day thinks perhaps of getting dark,And meet that mighty flood of vehiclesLaden with all the different kinds of swells,Homing to dinner, in their carriages—Victorias, landaus, chariots, coupés—There's nothing like it to lift up the heartAnd make you realize yourself a part,Sure, of the greatest show on earth.Morrison.Oh, yes,I know. I've felt that rapture more or less.But I would rather put it off as longAs possible. I suppose you like the songOf the sweet car-gongs better than the cryOf jays and yellowhammers when the skyBegins to redden these October mornings,And the loons sound their melancholy warnings;Or honk of the wild-geese that write their AAlong the horizon in the evening's gray.Or when the squirrels look down on you and barkFrom the nut trees—Wetherbee.We have them in the ParkPlenty enough. But, say, you aged sinner,Have you been out much recently at dinner?Morrison.What do you mean? You know there's no one hereThat dines except ourselves now.Wetherbee.Well, that's queer!I thought the natives— But I recollect!It was not reasonable to expect—Morrison.What are you driving at?Wetherbee.Oh, nothing much.But I was thinking how you come in touchWith life at the first dinner in the fall,When you get back, first, as you can't at allLater along. But you, of course, won't careWith your idyllic pleasures.Morrison.Who was there?Wetherbee.Oh—ha, ha! What d'you mean bythere?Morrison.Come off!Wetherbee.What! you remain to pray that came to scoff!Morrison.You know what I am after.Wetherbee.Yes, that dinner.Just a round dozen: Ferguson and BinnerFor the fine arts; Bowyer the novelist;Dr. Le Martin; the psychologistFletcher; the English actor Philipson;The two newspaper Witkins, Bob and John;A nice Bostonian, Bane the archæologer,And a queer Russian amateur astrologer;And Father Gray, the jolly ritualist priest,And last your humble servant, but not least.The food was not so filthy, and the wineWas not so poison. We made out to dineFrom eight till oneA.M.One could endureThe dinner. But, oh say!The talk was poor!Your natives down at Clamhurst—Morrison.Look ye here!What date does Thanksgiving come on this year?Wetherbee.Why, I suppose—although I don't rememberCertainly—the usual 28th November.Morrison.Novem—You should have waited to get sober!It comes on the 11th of October!And that's to-morrow; and if you happen downLater, you'd better look for us in town.