To be idle and lavish of money, twenty-five years old, with the appetites keen and the need for action always pressing; then to have loved a girl with quick, strong, youthful ardour, and to have had the ideal smirched by gossip, then shattered before his amazed eyes,—this is a situation in which the male animal is apt to behave inequably. In the language of the estimable Herr Doctor von Herzlich, he will seek those avenues of modification in which the least struggle is required. In the simpler phrasing of Uncle Peter Bines, he will "cut loose."
During the winter that now followed Percival Bines behaved according to either formula, as the reader may prefer. He early ascertained his limitations with respect to New York and its people.
"Say, old man," he asked Herbert Delancey Livingston one night, across the table at their college club, "are all the people in New York society impecunious?"
Livingston had been with him at Harvard, and Livingston's family was so notoriously not impecunious that the question was devoid of any personal element. Livingston, moreover, had dined just unwisely enough to be truthful.
"Well, to be candid with you, Bines," the young man had replied, in a burst of alcoholic confidence, "about all that you are likely to meet are broke—else you wouldn't meet 'em, you know," he explained cheerfully. "You know, old chap, a few of you Western people have got into the right set here; there's the Nesbits, for instance. On my word the good wife and mother hasn't the kinks out of her fingers yet, nor the callouses from her hands, by Jove! She worked so hard cooking and washing woollen shirts for miners before Nesbit made his strike. As for him—well caviare, I'm afraid, will always be caviare to Jimmy Nesbit. And now the son's married a girl that had everything but money—my boy, Nellie Wemple has fairly got that family of Nesbits awestricken since she married into it, just by the way she can spend money—but what was I saying, old chap? Oh, yes, about getting in—it takes time, you know; on my word, I think they were as much as eight years, and had to start in abroad at that. At first, you know, you can only expect to meet a crowd that can't afford to be exclusive any longer."
From which friendly counsel, and from certain confirming observations of his own, Percival had concluded that his lot in New York was to spend money. This he began to do with a large Western carelessness that speedily earned him fame of a sort. Along upper Broadway, his advent was a golden joy. Tradesmen learned to love him; florists, jewelers, and tailors hailed his coming with honest fervour; waiters told moving tales of his tips; cabmen fought for the privilege of transporting him; and the hangers-on of rich young men picked pieces of lint assiduously and solicitously from his coat.
One of his favourite resorts was the sumptuous gambling-house in Forty-fourth Street. The man who slides back the panel of the stout oaken door early learned to welcome him through the slit, barred by its grill of wrought iron. The attendant who took his coat and hat, the waiter who took his order for food, and the croupier who took his money, were all gladdened by his coming; for his gratuities were as large when he lost as when he won Even the reserved proprietor, accustomed as he was to a wealthy and careless clientele, treated Percival with marked consideration after a night when the young man persuaded him to withdraw the limit at roulette, and spent a large sum in testing a system for breaking the wheel, given to him by a friend lately returned from Monte Carlo.
"I think, really the fellow who gave me that system is an ass," he said, lighting a cigarette when the play was done. "Now I'm going down and demolish eight dollars' worth of food and drink—you won't be all to the good on that, you know."
His host decided that a young man who was hungry, after losing a hundred thousand dollars in five hours' play, was a person to be not lightly considered.
And, though he loved the rhythmic whir and the ensuing rattle of the little ivory ball at the roulette wheel, he did not disdain the quieter faro, playing that dignified game exclusively with the chocolate-coloured chips, which cost a thousand dollars a stack. Sometimes he won; but not often enough to disturb his host's belief that there is less of chance in his business than in any other known to the captains of industry.
There were, too, sociable games of poker, played with Garmer, of the Lead Trust, Burman, the intrepid young wheat operator from Chicago, and half a dozen other well-moneyed spirits; games in which the limit, to use the Chicagoan's phrase, was "the beautiful but lofty North Star." At these games he lost even more regularly than at those where, with the exception of a trifling percentage, he was solely at the mercy of chance. But he was a joyous loser, endearing himself to the other players; to Garmer, whom Burman habitually accused of being "closer than a warm night," as well as to the open-handed son of the chewing-gum magnate, who had been raised abroad and who protested nightly that there was an element of beastly American commercialism in the game. When Percival was by some chance absent from a sitting, the others calculated the precise sum he probably would have lost and humourously acquainted him with the amount by telegraph next morning,—it was apt to be nine hundred and some odd dollars,—requesting that he cover by check at his early convenience.
Yet the diversion was not all gambling. There were Jong sessions at all-night restaurants where the element of chance in his favour, inconspicuous elsewhere, was wholly eliminated; suppers for hungry Thespians and thirsty parasites, protracted with song and talk until the gas-flames grew pale yellow, and the cabmen, when the party went out into the wan light, would be low-voiced, confidential, and suggestive in their approaches.
Broadway would be weirdly quiet at such times, save for the occasional frenzied clatter of a hurrying milk-wagon. Even the cars seemed to move with less sound than by day, and the early-rising workers inside, holding dinner-pails and lunch-baskets, were subdued and silent, yet strangely observing, as if the hour were one in which the vision was made clear to appraise the values of life justly. To the north, whence the cars bulked silently, would be an awakening sky of such tender beauty that the revellers often paid it the tribute of a moment's notice.
"Pure turquoise," one would declare.
"With just a dash of orange bitters in it," another might add.
And then perhaps they burst into song under the spell, blending their voices into what the professional gentlemen termed "barber-shop harmonies," until a policeman would saunter across the street, pretending, however, that he was not aware of them.
Then perhaps a ride toward the beautiful northern sky would be proposed, whereupon three or four hansom or coupe loads would begin a journey that wound up through Central Park toward the northern light, but which never attained a point remoter than some suburban road-house, where sleepy cooks and bartenders would have to be routed out to collaborate toward breakfast.
Oftener the party fell away into straggling groups with notions for sleep, chanting at last, perhaps:
"While beer brings gladness, don't forget That water only makes you wet!"
Percival would walk to the hotel, sobered and perhaps made a little reflective by the unwonted quiet. But they were pleasant, careless folk, he concluded always. They permitted him to spend his money, but he was quite sure they would spend it as freely as he if they had it. More than one appreciative soubrette, met under such circumstances, was subsequently enabled to laud the sureness of his taste in jewels,—he cared little for anything but large diamonds, it transpired. It was a feeling tribute paid to his munificence by one of these in converse with a sister artist, who had yet to meet him:
"Say, Myrtle, on the dead, he spends money just like a young Jew trying to be white!"
Under this more or less happy surface of diversion, however, was an experience decidedly less felicitous. He knew he should not, must not, hold Avice Milbrey in his mind; yet when he tried to put her out it hurt him.
At first he had plumed himself upon his lucky escape that night, when he would have declared his love to her. To have married a girl who cared only for his money; that would have been dire enough. But to marry a girl likethat!He had been lucky indeed!
Yet, as the weeks went by the shock of the scene wore off. The scene itself remained clear, with the grinning grotesquerie of the Jack-o'-lanterns lighting it and mocking his simplicity. But the first sharp physical hurt had healed. He was forced to admit that the girl still had power to trouble him. At times his strained nerves would relax to no other device than the picturing of her as his own. Exactly in the measure that he indulged this would his pride smart. With a budding gift for negation he could imagine her caring for nothing but his money; and there was that other picture, swift and awful, a pantomime in shadow, with the leering yellow faces above it.
In the far night, when he awoke to sudden and hungry aloneness, he would let his arms feel their hunger for her. The vision of her would be flowers and music and sunlight and time and all things perfect to mystify and delight, to satisfy and—greatest of all boons—to unsatisfy. The thought of her became a rest-house for all weariness; a haven where he was free to choose his nook and lie down away from all that was not her, which was all that was not beautiful. He would go back to seek the lost sweetness of their first meeting; to mount the poor dead belief that she would care for him—that he could make her care for him—and endow the thing with artificial life, trying to capture the faint breath of it; but the memory was always fleeting, attenuated, like the spirit of the memory of a perfume that had been elusive at best. And always, to banish what joy even this poor device might bring, came the more vivid vision of the brutal, sordid facts. He forced himself to face them regularly as a penance and a corrective.
They came before him with especial clearness when he met her from time to time during the winter. He watched her in talk with others, noting the contradiction in her that she would at one moment appear knowing and masterful, with depths of reserve that the other people neither fathomed nor knew of; and at another moment frankly girlish, with an appealing feminine helplessness which is woman's greatest strength, coercing every strong masculine instinct.
When the reserve showed in her, he became afraid. What was she not capable of? In the other mood, frankly appealing, she drew him mightily, so that he abandoned himself for the moment, responding to her fresh exulting youth, longing to take her, to give her things, to make her laugh, to enfold and protect her, to tell her secrets, to feather her cheek with the softest kiss, to be the child-mate of her.
Toward him, directly, when they met she would sometimes be glacial and forbidding, sometimes uninterestedly frank, as if they were but the best of commonplace friends. Yet sometimes she made him feel that she, too, threw herself heartily to rest in the thought of their loving, and cheated herself, as he did, with dreams of comradeship. She left him at these times with the feeling that they were deaf, dumb, and blind to each other; that if some means of communication could be devised, something surer than the invisible play of secret longings, all might yet be well. They talked as the people about them talked, words that meant nothing to either, and if there were mute questionings, naked appeals, unuttered declarations, they were only such as language serves to divert attention from. Speech, doubtless, has its uses as well as its abuses. Politics, for example, would be less entertaining without it. But in matters of the heart, certain it is that there would be fewer misunderstandings if it were forbidden between the couple under the penalty of immediate separation. In this affair real meanings are rarely conveyed except by silences. Words are not more than tasteless drapery to obscure their lines. The silence of lovers is the plainest of all speech, warning, disconcerting indeed, by its very bluntness, any but the truly mated. An hour's silence with these two people by themselves might have worked wonders.
Another diversion of Percival's during this somewhat feverish winter was Mrs. Akemit. Not only was she a woman of finished and expert daintiness in dress and manner and surroundings, but she soothed, flattered, and stimulated him. With the wisdom of her thirty-two years, devoted chiefly to a study of his species, she took care never to be exigent. She had the way of referring to herself as "poor little me," yet she never made demands or allowed him to feel that she expected anything from him in the way of allegiance.
Mrs. Akemit was not only like St. Paul, "all things to all men," but she had gone a step beyond that excellent theologue. She could be all things to one man. She was light-heartedly frivolous, soberly reflective, shallow, profound, cynical or naive, ingenuous, or inscrutable. She prized dearly the ecclesiastical background provided by her uncle, the bishop, and had him to dine with the same unerring sense of artistry that led her to select swiftly the becoming shade of sofa-cushion to put her blond head back upon.
The good bishop believed she had jeopardised her soul with divorce. He feared now she meant to lose it irrevocably through remarriage. As a foil to his austerity, therefore, she would be audaciously gay in his presence.
"Hell," she said to him one evening, "is given upsoreluctantly by those who don't expect to go there." And while the bishop frowned into his salad she invited Percival to drink with her in the manner of a woman who is mad to invite perdition. If the good man could have beheld her before a background of frivolity he might have suffered less anxiety. For there her sense of contrast-values led her to be grave and deep, to express distaste for society with its hollowness, and to expose timidly the cruel scars on a soul meant for higher things.
Many afternoons Percival drank tea with her in the little red drawing-room of her dainty apartment up the avenue. Here in the half light which she had preferred since thirty, in a soft corner with which she harmonised faultlessly, and where the blaze from the open fire coloured her animated face just enough, she talked him usually into the glow of a high conceit with himself. When she dwelt upon the shortcomings of man, she did it with the air of frankly presuming him to be different from all others, one who could sympathise with her through knowing the frailties of his sex, yet one immeasurably superior to them. When he was led to talk of himself—of whom, it seemed, she could never learn enough—he at once came to take high views of himself: to gaze, through her tactful prompting, with a gentle, purring appreciation upon the manifest spectacle of his own worth.
Sometimes, away from her, he wondered how she did it. Sometimes, in her very presence, his sense of humour became alert and suspicious. Part of the time he decided her to be a charming woman, with a depth and quality of sweetness unguessed by the world. The rest of the time he remembered a saying about alfalfa made by Uncle Peter: "It's an innocent lookin', triflin' vegetable, but its roots go right down into the ground a hundred feet."
"My dear," Mrs. Akemit had once confided to an intimate in an hour ofnegligee, "to meet a man, any man, from a red-cheeked butcher boy to a bloodless monk, and not make him feel something new for you—something he never before felt for any other woman—really it's as criminal as a wrinkled stocking, or for blondes to wear shiny things. Every woman can do it, if she'll study a little how to reduce them to their least common denominator—how to make them primitive."
Of another member of Mrs. Akemit's household Percival acknowledged the sway with never a misgiving. He had been the devoted lover of Baby Akemit from the afternoon when he had first cajoled her into autobiography—a vivid, fire-tipped little thing with her mother's piquancy. He gleaned that day that she was "a quarter to four years old;" that she was mamma's girl, but papa was a friend of Santa Claus; that she went to "ball-dances" every day clad in "dest a stirt 'cause big ladies don't ever wear waist-es at night;" that she had once ridden in a merry-go-round and it made her "all homesick right here," patting her stomach; and that "elephants are horrid, but you mustn't be cruel to them and cut their eyes out. Oh, no!"
Her Percival courted with results that left nothing to be desired. She fell to the floor in helpless, shrieking laughter when he came. In his honour she composed and sang songs to an improvised and spirited accompaniment upon her toy piano. His favourites among these were "'Cause Why I Love You" and "Darling, Ask Myself to Come to You." She rendered them with much feeling. If he were present when her bed-time came she refused to sleep until he had consented to an interview.
Avice Milbrey had the fortune to witness one of these bed-timecauseries. One late afternoon the young man's summons came while he was one of a group that lingered late about Mrs. Akemit's little tea-table, Miss Milbrey being of the number.
He followed the maid dutifully out through the hall to the door of the bedroom, and entered on all-fours with what they two had agreed was the growl of a famished bear.
The familiar performance was viewed by the mother and by Miss Milbrey, whom the mother had urged to follow. Baby Akemit in her crib, modestly arrayed in blue pajamas, after simulating the extreme terror required by the situation, fell to chatting, while her mother and Miss Milbrey looked on from the doorway.
Miss Akemit had once been out in the woods, it appeared, and a "biting-wolf" chased her, and she ran and ran until she came to a river all full of pigs and fishes and berries, so she jumped in and had supper, and it wasn't a "biting-wolf" at all—and then—
But the narrative was cut short by her mother.
"Come, Pet! Mr. Bines wishes to go now."
Miss Akemit, it appeared, was bent upon relating the adventures of Goldie Locks, subsequent to her leap from the window of the bears' house. She had, it seemed, been compelled to ride nine-twenty miles on a trolley, and, reaching home too late for luncheon, had been obliged to eat in the kitchen with the cook.
"Mr. Bines can't stay, darling!"
Baby Akemit calculated briefly, and consented to his departure if Mr. Bines would bring her something next time.
Mr. Bines promised, and moved away after the customary embrace, but she was not through:
"Oh! oh! go out like a bear! dere's a bear come in here!"
And so, having brought the bear in, he was forced to drop again and growl the beast out, whereupon, appeased by this strict observance of the unities, the child sat up and demanded:
"You sure you'll bring me somefin next time?"
"Yes, sure, Lady Grenville St. Clare." "Well, you sure you'recomin'next time?"
Being reassured on this point, and satisfied that no more bears were at large, she lay down once more while Percival and the two observers returned to the drawing-room.
"You love children so!" Miss Milbrey said. And never had she been so girlishly appealing to all that was strong in him as a man. The frolic with the child seemed to have blown away a fog from between them. Yet never had the other scene been more vivid to him, and never had the pain of her heartlessness been more poignant.
When he "played" with Baby Akemit thereafter, the pretence was not all with the child. For while she might "play" at giving a vexatiously large dinner, for which she was obliged to do the cooking because she had discharged all the servants, or when they "played" that the big couch was a splendid ferry-boat in which they were sailing to Chicago where Uncle David lived—with many stern threats to tell the janitor of the boat if the captain didn't behave himself and sail faster—Percival "played" that his companion's name was Baby Bines, and that her mother, who watched them with loving eyes, was a sweet and gracious young woman named Avice. And when he told Baby Akemit that she was "the only original sweetheart" he meant it of some one else than her.
When the play was over he always conducted himself back to sane reality by viewing this some one else in the cold light of truth.
The fame of the Bines family for despising money was not fed wholly by Percival's unremitting activities. Miss Psyche Bines, during the winter, achieved wide and enviable renown as a player of bridge whist. Not for the excellence of her play; rather for the inveteracy and size of her losses and the unconcerned cheerfulness with which she defrayed them. She paid the considerable sums with an air of gratitude for having been permitted to lose them. Especially did she seem grateful for the zealous tutelage and chaperonage of Mrs. Drelmer.
"Everybody in New York plays bridge, my dear, and of course you must learn," that capable lady had said in the beginning.
"But I never was bright at cards," the girl confessed, "and I'm afraid I couldn't learn bridge well enough to interest you good players."
"Nonsense!" was Mrs. Drelmer's assurance. "Bridge is easy to learn and easy to play. I'll teach you, and I promise you the people you play with shall never complain."
Mrs. Drelmer, it soon appeared, knew what she was talking about.
Indeed, that well-informed woman was always likely to. Her husband was an intellectual delinquent whom she spoke of largely as being "in Wall Street," and in that feat of jugglery known as "keeping up appearances," his wife had long been the more dexterous performer.
She was apt not only to know what she talked about, but she was a woman of resource, unafraid of action. She drilled Miss Bines in the rudiments of bridge. If the teacher became subsequently much the largest winner of the pupil's losings, it was, perhaps, not more than her fit recompense. For Miss Bines enjoyed not only the sport of the game, but her manner of playing it, combined with the social prestige of her amiable sponsor, procured her a circle of acquaintances that would otherwise have remained considerably narrower. An enthusiastic player of bridge, of passable exterior, mediocre skill, and unlimited resources, need never want in New York for very excellent society. Not only was the Western girl received by Mrs. Drelmer's immediate circle, but more than one member of what the lady called "that snubby set" would now and then make a place for her at the card-table. A few of Mrs. Drelmer's intimates were so wanting in good taste as to intimate that she exploited Miss Bines even to the degree of an understanding expressed in bald percentage, with certain of those to whom she secured the girl's society at cards. Whether this ill-natured gossip was true or false, it is certain that the exigencies of life on next to nothing a year, with a husband who could boast of next to nothing but Family, had developed an unerring business sense in Mrs. Drelmer; and certain it also is that this winter was one when the appearances with which she had to strive were unwontedly buoyant.
Miss Bines tirelessly memorised rules. She would disclose to her placid mother that the lead of a trump to the third hand's go-over of hearts is of doubtful expediency; or that one must "follow suit with the smallest, except when you have only two, neither of them better than the Jack. Then play the higher first, so that when the lower falls your partner may know you are out of the suit, and ruff it."
Mrs. Bines declared that it did seem to her very much like out-and-out gambling. But Percival, looking over the stubs of his sister's check-book, warmly protested her innocence of this charge.
"Heaven knows sis has her shortcomings," he observed, patronisingly, in that young woman's presence, "but she's no gambler; don't say it, ma, I beg of you! She only knows five rules of the game, and I judge it's cost her about three thousand dollars each to learn those. And the only one she never forgets is, 'When in doubt, lead your highest check.' But don't ever accuse her of gambling. Poor girl, if she keeps on playing bridge she'll have writer's cramp; that's all I'm afraid of. I see there's a new rapid-fire check-book on the market, and an improved fountain pen that doesn't slobber. I'll have to get her one of each."
Yet Psyche Bines's experience, like her brother's, was not without a proper leaven of sentiment. There was Fred Milbrey, handsome, clever, amusing, knowing every one, and giving her a pleasant sense of intimacy with all that was worth while in New York. Him she felt very friendly to.
Then there was Mauburn, presently to be Lord Casselthorpe, with his lazy, high-pitched drawl; good-natured, frank, carrying an atmosphere of high-class British worldliness, and delicately awakening within her while she was with him a sense of her own latent superiority to the institutions of her native land. She liked Mauburn, too.
More impressive than either of these, however, was the Baron Ronault de Palliac. Tall, swarthy, saturnine, a polished man of all the world, of manners finished, elaborate, and ceremonious, she found herself feeling foreign and distinguished in his presence, quite as if she were the heroine of a romantic novel, and might at any instant be called upon to assist in royalist intrigues. The baron, to her intuition, nursed secret sorrows. For these she secretly worshipped him. It is true that when he dined with her and her mother, which he was frequently gracious enough to do, he ate with a heartiness that belied this secret sorrow she had imagined. But he was fascinating at all times, with a grace at table not less finished than that with which he bowed at their meetings and partings. It was not unpleasant to think of basking daily in the shine of that grand manner, even if she did feel friendlier with Milbrey, and more at ease with Mauburn.
If the truth must be told, Miss Bines was less impressionable than either of the three would have wished. Her heart seemed not easy to reach; her impulses were not inflammable. Young Milbrey early confided to his family a suspicion that she was singularly hard-headed, and the definite information that she had "a hob-nailed Western way" of treating her admirers.
Mauburn, too, was shrewd enough to see that, while she frankly liked him, he was for some reason less a favourite than the Baron de Palliac.
"It'll be no easy matter marrying that girl," he told Mrs. Drelmer. "She's really a dear, and awfully good fun, but she's not a bit silly, and I dare say she'll marry some chap because she likes him, and not because he's anybody, you know."
"Make her like you," insisted his adviser.
"On my word, I wish she did. And I'm not so sure, you know, she doesn't fancy that Frenchman, or even young Milbrey."
"I'll keep you before her," promised Mrs. Drelmer, "and I wish you'd not think you can't win her. 'Tisn't like you."
Miss Bines accordingly heard that it was such a pity young Milbrey drank so, because his only salvation lay in making a rich marriage, and a young man, nowadays, had to keep fairly sober to accomplish that. Really, Mrs. Drelmer felt sorry for the poor weak fellow. "Good-hearted chap, but he has no character, my dear, so I'm afraid there's no hope for him. He has the soul of a merchant tailor, actually, but not the tailor's manhood. Otherwise he'd be above marrying some unsuspecting girl for her money and breaking her heart after marriage. Now, Mauburn is a type so different; honest, unaffected, healthy, really he's a man for any girl to be proud of, even if he were not heir to a title—one of the best in all England, and an ornament of the most exclusively correct set; of a line, my dear, that is truly great—not like that shoddy French nobility, discredited in France, that sends so many of its comic-opera barons here looking for large dowries to pay their gambling debts and put furniture in their rattle-trap old chateaux, and keep them in absinthe and their other peculiar diversions. And Mauburn, you lucky minx, simply adores you—he's quite mad about you, really!"
In spite of Mrs. Drelmer's two-edged sword, Miss Bines continued rather more favourable to the line of De Palliac. The baron was so splendid, so gloomy, so deferential. He had the air of laying at her feet, as a rug, the whole glorious history of France. And he appeared so well in the victoria when they drove in the park.
It is true that the heart of Miss Bines was as yet quite untouched; and it was not more than a cool, dim, aesthetic light in which she surveyed the three suitors impartially, to behold the impressive figure of the baron towering above the others. Had the baron proposed for her hand, it is not impossible that, facing the question directly, she would have parried or evaded.
But certain events befell unpropitiously at a time when the baron was most certain of his conquest; at the very time, indeed, when he had determined to open his suit definitely by extending a proposal to the young lady through the orthodox medium of her nearest male relative.
"I admit," wrote the baron to his expectant father, "that it is what one calls 'very chances' in the English, but one must venture in this country, and your son is not without much hope. And if not, there is still Mlle. Higbee."
The baron shuddered as he wrote it. He preferred not to recognise even the existence of this alternative, for the reason that the father of Mlle. Higbee distressed him by an incompleteness of suavity.
"He conducts himself like a pork," the baron would declare to himself, by way of perfecting his English.
The secret cause of his subsequent determination not to propose for the hand of Miss Bines lay in the hopelessly middle-class leanings of the lady who might have incurred the supreme honour of becoming his mother-in-law. Had Mrs. Bines been above talking to low people, a catastrophe might have been averted. But Mrs. Bines was not above it. She was quite unable to repress a vulgar interest in the menials that served her.
She knew the butler's life history two days after she had ceased to be afraid of him. She knew the distressing family affairs of the maids; how many were the ignoble progeny of the elevator-man, and what his plebeian wife did for their croup; how much rent the hall-boy's low-born father paid for his mean two-story dwelling in Jersey City; and how many hours a day or night the debased scrub-women devoted to their unrefining toil.
Brazenly, too, she held converse with Philippe, the active and voluble Alsatian who served her when she chose to dine in the public restaurant instead of at her own private table. Philippe acquainted her with the joys and griefs of his difficult profession. There were fourteen thousand waiters in New York, if, by waiters, you meant any one. Of course there were not so many like Philippe, men of the world who had served their time as assistants and their three years as sub-waiters; men who spoke English, French, and German, who knew something of cooking, how to dress a salad, and how to carve. Only such, it appeared, could be members of the exclusive Geneva Club that procured a place for you when you were idle, and paid you eight dollars a week when you were sick.
Having the qualifications, one could earn twenty-five dollars a month in salary and three or four times as much in gratuities. Philippe's income was never less than one hundred and twenty dollars a month; for was he not one who had come from Europe as a master, after two seasons at Paris where a man acquires his polish—his perfection of manner, his finish, his grace? Philippe could never enough prize that post-graduate course at theMaison d'Or, where he had personally known—madame might not believe it—the incomparable Casmir, achefwho served two generations of epicures, princes, kings, statesmen, travelling Americans,—all the truly great.
With his own lips Casmir had told him, Philippe, of the occasion when Dumas,pere, had invited him to dinner that they might discuss the esoterics of salad dressing and sauces; also of the time when the Marquis de St. Georges embraced Casmir for inventing the precious soup that afterwards became famous asPotage Germine. And now the skilled and puissant Casmir had retired. It was a calamity. TheMaison d'Or—Paris—would no longer be what they had been.
For that matter, since one must live, Philippe preferred it to be in America, for in no other country could an adept acquire so much money. And Philippe knew the whole dining world. With Celine and the baby, Paul, Philippe dwelt in an apartment that would really amaze madame by its appointments of luxury, in East 38th Street, and only the four flights to climb. And Paul was three, the largest for his age, quite the largest, that either Philippe or Celine had ever beheld. Even the brother of Celine and his wife, who had a restaurant of their own—serving thetable d'hoteat two and one-half francs the plate, with wine—even these swore they had never seen an infant so big, for his years, as Paul.
And so Mrs. Bines grew actually to feel an interest in the creature and his wretched affairs, and even fell into the deplorable habit of saying, "I must come to see you and your wife and Paul some pleasant day, Philippe," and Philippe, being a man of the world, thought none the less of her for believing that she did not mean it.
Yet it befell on an afternoon that Mrs. Bines found herself in a populous side-street, driving home from a visit to the rheumatic scrub-woman who had now to be supported by the papers her miserable offspring sold. Mrs. Bines had never seen so many children as flooded this street. She wondered if an orphan asylum were in the neighbourhood. And though the day was pleasantly warm, she decided that there were about her at least a thousand cases of incipient pneumonia, for not one child in five had on a hat. They raged and dashed and rippled from curb to curb so that they might have made her think of a swift mountain torrent at the bottom of a gloomy canyon, but that the worthy woman was too literal-minded for such fancies. She only warned the man to drive slowly.
And then by a street sign she saw that she was near the home of Philippe. It was three o'clock, and he would be resting from his work. The man found the number. The waves parted and piled themselves on either side in hushed wonder as she entered the hallway and searched for the name on the little cards under the bells. She had never known the surname, and on two of the cards "Ph." appeared. She rang one of the bells, the door mysteriously opened with a repeated double click, and she began the toilsome climb. The waves of children fell together behind her in turbulent play again.
At the top she breathed a moment and then knocked at a door before her. A voice within called:
"Entres!" and Mrs. Bines opened the door.
It was the tiny kitchen of Philippe. Philippe, himself, in shirt-sleeves, sat in a chair tilted back close to the gas-range, theCourier des Etats Unisin his hands and Paul on his lap. Celine ironed the bosom of a gentleman's white shirt on an ironing board supported by the backs of two chairs.
Hemmed in the corner by this board and by the gas-range, seated at a table covered by the oilcloth that simulates the marble of Italy's most famous quarry, sat, undoubtedly, the Baron Ronault de Palliac. A steaming plate of spaghettia la Italienwas before him, to his left a large bowl of salad, to his right a bottle of red wine.
For a space of three seconds the entire party behaved as if it were being photographed under time-exposure. Philippe and the baby stared, motionless. Celine stared, resting no slight weight on the hot flat-iron. The Baron Ronault de Palliac stared, his fork poised in mid-air and festooned with gay little streamers of spaghetti.
Then came smoke, the smell of scorching linen, and a cry of horror from Celine.
"Ah, la seule chemise blanche de Monsieur le Baron!"
The spell was broken. Philippe was on his feet, bowing effusively.
"Ah! it is Madame Bines.Je suis tres honore—I am very honoured to welcome you, madame. It is madame,ma femme, Celine,—and—Monsieur le Baron de Palliac—"
Philippe had turned with evident distress toward the latter. But Philippe was only a waiter, and had not behind him the centuries of schooling that enable a gentleman to remain a gentleman under adverse conditions.
The Baron Ronault de Palliac arose with unruffled aplomb and favoured the caller with his stateliest bow. He was at the moment a graceful and silencing rebuke to those who aver that manner and attire be interdependent. The baron's manner was ideal, undiminished in volume, faultless as to decorative qualities. One fitted to savour its exquisite finish would scarce have noted that above his waist the noble gentleman was clad in a single woollen undergarment of revolutionary red.
Or, if such a one had observed this trifling circumstance, he would, assuredly, have treated it as of no value to the moment; something to note, perhaps, and then gracefully to forget.
The baron's own behaviour would have served as a model. One swift glance had shown him there was no way of instant retreat. That being impossible, none other was graceful; hence none other was to be considered. He permitted himself not even a glance at the shirt upon whose fair, defenceless bosom the iron of the overcome Celine had burned its cruel brown imprimature. Mrs. Bines had greeted him as he would have wished, unconscious, apparently, that there could be cause for embarrassment.
'the Spell Was Broken.'
"Ah! madame," he said, handsomely, "you see me, I unfast with the fork. You see me here, I have envy of the simple life. I am content of to do it—comme ca—as that, see you," waving in the direction of his unfinished repast. "All that magnificence of your grand hotel, there is not the why of it, the most big of the world, and suchly stupefying, with its 'infernil rackit' as you say. And of more—what droll of idea, enough curious, by example! to dwell with the good Philippe and hisfemme aimable. Their hotel is of the most littles, but I rest here very volunteerly since longtime. Is it that one can to comprehend liking the vast hotel American?"
"Monsieur le Baron lodges with us; we have so much of the chambers," ventured Celine.
"Monsieur le Baron wishes to retire to his apartment," said Philippe, raising the ironing-board. "Will madame be so good to enter ourpetit salonat the front,n'est-ce-pas?"
The baron stepped forth from his corner and bowed himself graciously out.
"Madame, my compliments—and to the adorable Mademoiselle Bines!Au revoir, madame—to the soontime—avant peu—before little!"
On the farther side of his closed door the Baron Ronault de Palliac swore—once. But the oath was one of the most awful that a Frenchman may utter in his native tongue: "Sacred Name of a Name!"
"But the baron wasn't done eating," protested Mrs. Bines.
"Ah, yes, madame!" replied Philippe. "Monsieur le Baron has consumed enough for now.Paul, mon enfant, ne touche pas la robe de madame!He is large, is he not, madame, as I have told you? A monster, yes?"
Mrs. Bines, stooping, took the limp and wide-eyed Paul up in her arms. Whereupon he began to talk so fast to her in French that she set him quickly down again, with the slightly helpless air of one who has picked up an innocent-looking clock only to have the clanging alarm go suddenly off.
"Madame will honour our little salon," urged Philippe, opening the door and bowing low.
"Quel dommage!" sighed Celine, moving after them; "la seule chemise blanche de Monsieur le Baron. Eh bien! il faut lui en acheter une autre!"
At dinner that evening Mrs. Bines related her adventure, to the unfeigned delight of her graceless son, and to the somewhat troubled amazement of her daughter.
"And, do you know," she ventured, "maybe he isn't a regular baron, after all!"
"Oh, I guess he's a regular one all right," said Percival; "only perhaps he hasn't worked at it much lately."
"But his sitting there eating in that—that shirt—" said his sister.
"My dear young woman, even the nobility are prey to climatic rigours; they are obliged, like the wretched low-born such as ourselves, to wear—pardon me—undergarments. Again, I understand from Mrs. Cadwallader here that the article in question was satisfactory and fit—red, I believe you say, Mrs. Terwilliger?"
"Awful red!" replied his mother—"and they call their parlour a saloon."
"And of necessity, even the noble have their moments ofdeshabille."
"They needn't eat their lunch that way," declared his sister.
"IsdeshabilleFrench for underclothes?" asked Mrs. Bines, struck by the word.
"Partly," answered her son.
"And the way that child of Philippe's jabbered French! It's wonderful how they can learn so young."
"They begin early, you know," Percival explained. "And as to our friend the baron, I'm ready to make book that sis doesn't see him again, except at a distance."
Sometime afterwards he computed the round sum he might have won if any such bets had been made; for his sister's list of suitors, to adopt his own lucent phrase, was thereafter "shy a baron."
Winter waned and spring charmed the land into blossom. The city-pent, as we have intimated, must take this season largely on faith. If one can find a patch of ground naked of stone or asphalt one may feel the heart of the earth beat. But even now the shop-windows are more inspiring. At least they copy the outer show. Tender-hued shirt-waists first push up their sprouts of arms through the winter furs and woollens, quite as the first violets out in the woodland thrust themselves up through the brown carpet of leaves. Then every window becomes a summery glade of lawn, tulle, and chiffon, more lavish of tints, shades, and combinations, indeed, than ever nature dared to be.
Outside, where the unspoiled earth begins, the blossoms are clouding the trees with a mist of pink and white, and the city-dweller knows it from the bloom and foliage of these same windows.
Then it is that the spring "get away" urge is felt by each prisoner, by those able to obey it, and by those, alike, who must wear it down in the groomed and sophisticated wildness of the city parks.
On a morning late in May Mrs. Bines and her daughter were at breakfast.
"Isn't Percival coming?" asked his mother. "Everything will be cold."
"Can't say," Psyche answered. "I don't even know if he came in last night. But don't worry about cold things. You can't get them too cold for Perce at breakfast, nowadays. He takes a lot of ice-water and a little something out of the decanter, and maybe some black coffee."
"Yes, and I'm sure it's bad for him. He doesn't look a bit healthy and hasn't since he quit eating breakfast. He used to be such a hearty eater at breakfast, steaks and bacon and chops and eggs and waffles. It was a sight to see him eat; and since he's quit taking anything but that cold stuff he's lost his colour and his eyes don't look right. I know what he's got hold of—it's that 'no-breakfast' fad. I heard about it from Mrs. Balldridge when we came here last fall. I never did believe in it, either."
The object of her solicitude entered in dressing-gown and slippers.
"I'm just telling Psyche that this no-breakfast fad is hurting your health, my son. Now do come and eat like you used to. You began to look bad as soon as you left off your breakfast. It's a silly fad, that's what it is. You can't tellme!"
The young man stared at his mother until he had mastered her meaning. Then he put both hands to his head and turned to the sideboard as if to conceal his emotion.
"That's it," he said, as he busied himself with a tall glass and the cracked ice. "It's that 'no-breakfast' fad. I didn't think you knew about it. The fact is," he continued, pouring out a measure of brandy, and directing the butler to open a bottle of soda, "we all eat too much. After a night of sound sleep we awaken refreshed and buoyant, all our forces replenished; thirsty, of course, but not hungry"—he sat down to the table and placed both hands again to his head—"and we have no need of food. Yet such is the force of custom that we deaden ourselves for the day by tanking up on coarse, loathsome stuff like bacon. Ugh! Any one would think, the way you two eat so early in the day, that you were a couple of cave-dwellers,—the kind that always loaded up when they had a chance because it might be a week before they got another."
He drained his glass and brightened visibly.
"Now, why not be reasonable?" he continued, pleadingly. "You know there is plenty of food. I have observed it being brought into town in huge wagon-loads in the early morning on many occasions. Why do you want to eat it all at one sitting? No one's going to starve you. Why stupefy yourselves when, by a little nervy self-denial, you can remain as fresh and bright and clear-headed as I am at this moment? Why doesn't a fire make its own escape, Mrs. Carstep-Jamwuddle?"
"I don't believe you feel right, either. I just know you've got an awful headache right now. Do let the man give you a nice piece of this steak."
"Don't, I beg of you, Lady Ashmorton! The suggestion is extremely repugnant to me. Besides, I'm behaving this way because I arose with the purely humourous fancy that my head was a fine large accordeon, and that some meddler had drawn it out too far. I'm sportively pretending that I can press it back into shape. Now you and sis never get up with any such light poetic notion as that. You know you don't—don't attempt to deceive me." He glanced over the table with swift disapproval.
"Strawberries, oatmeal, rolls, steak three inches thick, bacon, omelette—oh, that I should live to see this day! It's disgraceful! And at your age—before your own innocent woman-child, and leading her into the same excesses. Do you know what that breakfast is? No; I'll tell you. That breakfast is No. 78 in that book of Mrs. Rorer's, and she expressly warns everybody that it can be eaten safely only by steeple-climbers, piano-movers, and sea-captains. Really, Mrs. Wrangleberry, I blush for you."
"I don't care how you go on. You ain't looked well for months."
"But think of my great big heart—a heart like an ox,"—he seemed on the verge of tears—"and to think that you, a woman I have never treated with anything but respect since we met in Honduras in the fall of '93—to thinkyoushould throw it up to my own face that I'm not beautiful. Others there are, thank God, who can look into a man's heart and prize him for what he is—not condemn him for his mere superficial blemishes."
"And I just know you've got in with a fast set. I met Mr. Milbrey yesterday in the corridor—"
"Did he tell you how to make a lovely asparagus short-cake or something?"
"He told me those men you go with so much are dreadful gamblers, and that when you all went to Palm Beach last February you played poker for money night and day, and you told me you went for your health!"
"Oh, he did, did he? Well, I didn't get anything else. He's a dear old soul, if you've got the copper handy. If that man was a woman he'd be a warm neighbourhood gossip. He'd be the nice kind old lady thatstartsthings, that's what Hoddy Milbrey would be."
"And you said yourself you played poker most of the time when you went to Aiken on the car last month."
"To be honest with you, ma, we did play poker. Say, they took it off of me so fast I could feel myself catching cold."
"There, you see—and you really ought to wear one of those chamois-skin chest protectors in this damp climate."
"Well, we'll see. If I can find one that an ace-full won't go through I'll snatch it so quick the man'll think he's being robbed. Now I'll join you ladies to the extent of some coffee, and then I want to know what you two would rather do this summerthan."
"Of course," said Psyche, "no one stays in town in summer."
"Exactly. And I've chartered a steam yacht as big as this hotel—all but—But what I want to know is whether you two care to bunk on it or whether you'd rather stay quietly at some place, Newport perhaps, and maybe take a cruise with me now and then."
"Oh, that would be good fun. But here's ma getting so I can't do a thing with her, on account of all those beggars and horrid people down in the slums."
Mrs. Bines looked guilty and feebly deprecating. It was quite true that in her own way she had achieved a reputation for prodigality not inferior to that acquired by her children in ways of their own.
"You know it's so, ma," the daughter went on, accusingly. "One night last winter when you were away we dined at the Balldridge's, in Eighty-sixth Street, and the pavements were so sleety the horses couldn't stand, so Colonel Balldridge brought us home in the Elevated, about eleven o'clock. Well, at one of the stations a big policeman got on with a little baby all wrapped up in red flannel. He'd found it in an area-way, nearly covered with snow—where some one had left it, and he was taking it down to police-headquarters, he said. Well, ma went crazy right away. She made him undo it, and then she insisted on holding it all the way down to Thirty-third Street. One man said it might be President of the United States, some day; and Colonel Balldridge said, 'Yes, it has unknown possibilities—it may even be a President's wife'—just like that. But I thought ma would be demented. It was all fat and so warm and sleepy it could hardly hold its eyes open, and I believe she'd have kept it then and there if the policeman would have let her. She made him promise to get it a bottle of warm milk the first thing, and borrowed twenty dollars of the colonel to give to the policeman to get it things with, and then all the way down she talked against the authorities for allowing such things—as if they could help it—and when we got home she cried—youknowyou did, ma—and you pretended it was toothache—and ever since then she's been perfectly daft about babies. Why, whenever she sees a woman going along with one she thinks the poor thing is going to leave it some place; and now she's in with those charity workers and says she won't leave New York at all this summer."
"I don't care," protested the guilty mother, "it would have frozen to death in just a little while, and it's done so often. Why, up at the Catholic Protectory they put out a basket at the side door, so a body can leave their baby in it and ring the bell and run away; and they get one twice a week sometimes; and this was such a sweet, fat little baby with big blue eyes, and its forehead wrinkled, and it was all puckered up around its little nose—"
"And that isn't the worst of it," the relentless daughter broke in. "She gets begging letters by the score and gives money to all sorts of people, and a man from the Charities Organisation, who had heard about it, came and warned her that they were impostors—only she doesn't care. Do you know, there was a poor old blind woman with a dismal, wheezy organ down at Broadway and Twenty-third Street—the organ would hardly play at all, and just one wretched tune—only the woman wasn't blind at all we found out—and ma bought her a nice new organ that cost seventy-five dollars and had it taken up to her. Well, she found out through this man from the Organisation that the woman had pawned the new organ for twenty dollars and was still playing on the old one. She didn't want a new one because it was too cheerful; it didn't make people sad when they heard it, like her old one did. And yesterday ma bought an Indian—"
"A what?" asked her brother, in amazement.
"An Indian—a tobacco sign."
"You don't mean it? One of those lads that stand out in front and peer under their hands to see what palefaces are moving into the house across the street? Say, ma, what you going to do with him? There isn't much room here, you know."
"I didn't buy him for myself," replied Mrs. Bines, with dignity; "I wouldn't want such an object."
"She bought it," explained his sister, "for an Italian woman who keeps a little tobacco-shop down in Rivington Street. A man goes around to repaint them, you know, but hers was so battered that this man told her it wasn't worth painting again, and she'd better get another, and the woman said she didn't know what to do because they cost twenty-five dollars and one doesn't last very long. The bad boys whittle him and throw him down, and the people going along the street put their shoes up to tie them and step on his feet, and they scratch matches on his face, and when she goes out and says that isn't right they tell her she's too fresh. And so ma gave her twenty-five dollars for a new one."
"But she has to support five children, and her husband hasn't been able to work for three years, since he fell through a fire-escape where he was sleeping one hot night," pleaded Mrs. Bines, "and I think I'd rather stay here this summer. Just think of all those poor babies when the weather gets hot. I never thought there were so many babies in the world."
"Well, have your own way," said her son. "If you've started out to look after all the babies in New York you won't have any time left to play the races, I'll promise you that."
"Why, my son, I never—"
"But sis here would probably rather do other things."
"I think," said Psyche, "I'd like Newport—Mrs. Drelmer says I shouldn't think of going any place else. Only, of course, I can't go there alone. She says she would be glad to chaperone me, but her husband hasn't had a very good year in Wall Street, and she's afraid she won't be able to go herself."
"Maybe," began Mrs. Bines, "if you'd offer—"
"Oh! she'd be offended," exclaimed Psyche.
"I'm not so sure of that," said her brother, "not if you suggest it in the right way—put it on the ground that you'll be quite helpless without her, and that she'd oblige you world without end and all that. The more I see of people here the more I think they're quite reasonable in little matters like that. They look at them in the right light. Just lead up to it delicately with Mrs. Drelmer and see. Then if she's willing to go with you, your summer will be provided for; except that we shall both have to look in upon Mrs. Juzzlebraggin here now and then to see that she doesn't overplay the game and get sick herself, and make sure that they don't get her vaccination mark away from her. And, ma, you'll have to come off on the yacht once or twice, just to give it tone."
It appeared that Percival had been right in supposing that Mrs. Drelmer might be led to regard Psyche's proposal in a light entirely rational. She was reluctant, at first, it is true.
"It's awfully dear of you to ask me, child, but really, I'm afraid it will be quite impossible. Oh!—for reasons which you, of course, with your endless bank-account, cannot at all comprehend. You see we old New York families have a secure positionhereby right of birth; and even when we are forced to practice little economies in dress and household management it doesn't count against us—so long as westayhere. Now, Newport is different. One cannot economise gracefully there—not even one ofus. There are quiet and very decent places for those of us that must. But at Newport one must not fall behind in display. A sense of loyalty to the others, anoblesse oblige, compels one to be as lavish as those flamboyant outsiders who go there. One doesn't want them to report, you know, that such and such families of our smart set are falling behind for lack of means. So, while we of the real stock are chummy enough here, where there is onlyusin a position to observe ourselves, there is a sort of tacit agreement that only those shall go to Newport who are able to keep up the pace. One need not, for one season or so, be a cottager; but, for example, in the matter of dress, one must be sinfully lavish. Really, child, I could spend three months in the Engadine for the price of one decent month at Newport; the parasols, gloves, fans, shoes, 'frillies'—enough to stock the Rue de la Paix, to say nothing of gowns—but why do I run on? Here am I with a few little simple summer things, fit enough indeed for the quiet place we shall reach for July and August, but ab-so-lute-ly impossible for Newport—so say no more about it, dear. You're a sweet—but it's madness to think of it."
"And I had," reported Psyche to her mother that night, "such a time getting her to agree. At first she wouldn't listen at all. Then, after I'd just fairly begged her, she admitted she might because she's taken such a fancy to me and hates to leave me—but she was sensitive about what people might say. I told her they'd never have a chance to say a word; and she was anxious Perce shouldn't know, because she says he's so cynical about New York people since that Milbrey girl made such a set for him; and at last she called me a dear and consented, though she'd been looking forward to a quiet summer. To-morrow early we start out for the shops."
So it came that the three members of the Bines family pursued during the summer their respective careers of diversion under conditions most satisfactory to each.
The steam yachtViluca, chartered by Percival, was put into commission early in June. Her first cruise of ten days was a signal triumph. His eight guests were the men with whom he had played poker so tirelessly during the winter. Perhaps the most illuminating log of that cruise may be found in the reply of one of them whom Percival invited for another early in July.
"Much obliged, old man, but I haven't touched a drop now in over three weeks. My doctor says I must let it be for at least two months, and I mean to stick by him. Awfully kind of you, though!"