CHAPTER V
Thenight of the musicale Erard arrived at the Wilbur’s very late. He had driven from his hotel, after a comfortable dinner and a cigar, without taking the trouble to ascertain the distance. When he entered the hall, he could hear the music from an inner room,—a bit from a new Russian symphony, more intricate than melodious. Through the doors opening broadly into the hall, he could see the people, the women seated in irregular bunches fanning themselves and furtively looking about, to inventory the guests and the rooms. As he continued to peep, he was surprised at the brilliancy of the dress. He had vaguely fancied the inhabitants as costumed in something between the conventional blanket of the frontier and the plush absurdities of our grandmothers. Yet these women, many of them so portly that they could carry magnificence, appeared more richly dressed than anything he remembered in London or Paris.
The men were standing about the doors in various uncomfortable attitudes, seemingly unhabituated to this difficult part of the full-dress parade. Erard noticed, as he glanced about, that they were generally middle-aged, solid men, with here and there a bony, wiry specimen. To his European eye, the faces appeared individual, yet curiously undistinguished; “rudimentary types,” hemurmured. Every one was silent and serious, as if living up to the decorum of the occasion.
One of the footmen, who had taken his coat and hat, followed him and motioned to a room on the right, away from the music. Erard took the hint, thinking to find a chair where he might make himself comfortable until the music arrived at an intermission. He found himself in a dimly lighted room, which had evidently been planned for a library. He perceived indifferently half-a-dozen other occupants of the room. As his eyes began to wander about, he saw Mrs. Wilbur, who was watching him from the other end. The first thing he noticed about her was the dress: he had painted something like that once, with its delightful folds of white lace and cream-coloured satin. And the face, too, he had painted that. Mrs. Wilbur caught his eyes, and they looked for an instant at each other, examining. Then he noticed Mrs. Anthon, planted firmly in another corner of the room. She seemed a bit dumpier than three years before, and more complex in dress.
The music ceased with an awakening bang. A servant turned on the electric lights. Erard crossed the room to greet his hostess.
“Where is the original?” he asked meaningly. “I wish to compare it with—the portrait.”
Mrs. Wilbur flushed with annoyance.
“So it is! the great red divan and the same dress and the house. I couldn’t have arranged it more expressly for you! The portrait is in here,” she turned to an inner room, designed for her den, and touched an electricknob. Erard looked at his hostess critically, while she threw herself, wilfully, into the pose.
“Not quite,” he announced, glancing at the portrait that faced them; “not the final thing. Perhaps another year or two. The stone is harder than I thought, and perhaps you have complicated the problem.”
Mrs. Wilbur refrained from pushing him to an explanation.
“And you have changed also: prosperity has alteredyou.”
“Yes, we take less tragedy in our portions as we go on. The pinnacle doesn’t seem quite so distinguished, nor the abyss so awful, as it did once. It is the middle light of life.”
“And your work? the painting?” she suggested eagerly.
“I paint less,” he replied uneasily. “Each season I mean to get at it again, but the penalty of success in one effort is that you are expected to repeat yourself. I am repeating myself.”
“Oh, youmustn’tdo that,” she replied pleadingly, understanding that he referred to the success of his writing. She would have carried protest further, but Mrs. Anthon intervened with a tardy guest who had been hunting for her hostess.
“Ady, here is Mrs. Stevans. She’s been looking for you. Why are you hid off here? You mustn’t flirt in the corners when you have friends to look after.”
Mrs. Stevans was one of the most distinguished guests; Mrs. Wilbur introduced Erard to her.
“TheMr. Erard?” Mrs. Stevans beamed at him from the entrenchment of her broad, uncovered shoulders and bosom. He looked positively dapper and slim in comparison. “You are coming to tell us all about pictures.”
“Not so bad as that,” Erard protested.
“Why, it’s the Mr. Erard who painted your picture, Ady!” Mrs. Anthon exclaimed.
“You must meet some ofthemand talk with them,” Mrs. Wilbur said quickly, to extricate him, and she led the group back to the large rooms.
“I shall have you to dinner, and you must tell me all about my naughty friend, Mrs. Warmister,” Mrs. Stevans shot at Erard as he moved away. Then he found himself navigated about, presented to this important person and that. The men received him with graveempressement. They took it for granted that “he was a leading light in his line,” and though they were not familiar with that line, they were propitious to any prophet who had achieved success in it. In a remote corner Erard bumped against Mr. Sebastian Anthon.
“So you’re back in America at last.” The old man greeted him cordially, holding out a thin, trembling hand. “For long?”
“A few months,” Erard replied patronizingly; “to get an idea what it is like. A vacation, you know, after my book.”
“Ah, yes,” the old man murmured thoughtfully. “It’s mostly books now, isn’t it? instead of pictures.”
“Criticism absorbs me the more I think,” Erard admitted.
“A pity, it’s a pity, you know. Talk doesn’t amount to much—in the end—all the talk in the world. I have a nephew over there in London—Walter, a pretty boy. He does a lot of talking, clever boy. But the thing, the main thing, is to feel.” He looked at Erard as if from a distance, examining his shambling form and thin face to see whether this fellow had it in him to feel.
Suddenly the music began once more, a fugue resurrected from some German manuscript and given to the modern world for the first time by the able young conductor. Erard took the opportunity to slide away from Sebastian Anthon. He seemed to hear as an accompaniment to the grave fugue the old man repeating, “A pity, it’s a pity!” Soon he was beyond his tormentor, very near to the booming music. Mrs. Wilbur had arranged the musical part of the evening, he concluded; she had shown positive genius in knowing what would impress the public and make her “function” remembered through the season. And the credentials of every selection were printed out on a little programme.
Then came the food and drink, to which the guests devoted themselves assiduously, earnestly, with what seemed to Erard an enormous reserve force. Wilbur had looked out for the supper, and he also had calculated well. In the billiard-room, where the men left their wraps, were liquors and cigars, towards which from time to time the younger males disappeared. This private-bar, in addition to the profuse champagne served publicly, aroused Erard’s curiosity.
He tiptoed about, sniffing the new atmosphere. He came across Molly Parker seated in a recess of the hall, enjoying equally her ice and a sleepy, affable young man who was telling a long story. She looked very attractive in a black gown, with long black gloves; the sombre colour deepened the fairness of her skin and emphasized the great eyes that were falling out in her excitement over the story and the ice. She reached Erard her left hand, in a casual fashion.
“Don’t disturb yourself, Mr. Wren,” she said sweetly to the flabby companion. “It’s only the new Parisian genius Mrs. Wilbur has imported, Mr. Simeon Erard. He won’t spend more than two minutes on me, if he does that.”
The young man rose pompously.
“Happy to meet you, Mr.Erard,—Erard, is it? And how do you find Chicago?”
“Very good place as long as it likes him,” Miss Parker interposed maliciously. “We will give you a lot of new sensations,” she went on, “but they won’t always be pleasant.”
“There are some very fine things here in your line, I believe,” the old young man continued ponderously.
At that moment Thornton Jennings appeared. Miss Parker promptly introduced him to Erard. The younger man towered commandingly over Erard’s head, while they shook hands without words, as if measuring one another, and recognizing the valour that each possessed. At last Jennings spoke, with a comprehensive, winning smile on his face.
“I am glad to have had this chance. I read your articles in theBeaux Arts, and I have your new book. I have heard of you through a lot of people over there. And there is another link between us,” he added less spontaneously, “your brother has told me such a lot about your plans, and your father—”
But Erard received these cordialities with a stony impassivity. He was not in a mood to be reminded of his antecedents. Miss Parker had been right in saying that all his sensations in Chicago would not be pleasant ones.
At last the crowded rooms began to thin out. Supper disposed of, conversation did not have sufficient excitements to hold one after midnight with a prospective drive of perhaps six or eight miles. Erard stood in the hall, one of the last to say good-night.
“They are so nice,” he remarked to his hostess, “especially the ladies; they seem like such good mothers, so homely and unpretentious. I want to sit right down with them, and talk over Mary and Jack, and the new bay-window, and the clergyman riding a bicycle.”
“You had better not assume too much,” his hostess laughed. “You will find that they can talk over the last salon, the new book on Rembrandt, even your own articles. Don’t think you have measured their horizon quite so easily.”
“Well, I hope they won’t open up often by asking me which is the ‘sacred’ and which the ‘profane’ love in Titian’s picture, as one young woman did to-night,” Erard replied sulkily. “I had rather talk babies.”
“Have a cigar or something, Erard?” Wilbur asked,weary of this prolonged tête-à-tête, and willing to patronize the young man of talent who had no great house, no good champagne, no successful feasts to give. Said young man of talent could come and admire the other kind of talent that owned houses, horses, and champagne, and now and then, if he were discreet in his views, he might be called upon for dinner to enliven a party of lethargic good folk.
Erard looked at Wilbur coolly, as if weighing the chances of being bored against the comforts of a cigar and a glass of hot whiskey.
“No, thanks,” he concluded indifferently. “I think I shall walk back some thousand blocks to the hotel. I must be off to arrive before breakfast.”
The family party lingered in the library while Wilbur finished his cigar. Mrs. Wilbur flung herself wearily against the wall on the long, red divan where she had been seated when Erard entered. If he had seen her now with her restless hands roaming over the large bunch of drooping roses, her eyes tired, not with physical exhaustion, but with the perpetual play of half-thoughts that sap vitality like dreams, the languor of the face at the time of triumph, he would not have said,—“Wait two years.”
“Well,” Wilbur broke the silence as his wife offered no remark, “I think our racket was an A 1 success. The house looked fine. The music was unusual, and the food was stunning.”
“Yes,” his wife assented. “They seemed to enjoy themselves.”
“Old Bailey and Fernald were here with their wives. I didn’t expect that,” he reflected complacently. “But the judge didn’t come. Mrs. Linton was here, and that married daughter of hers. The judge didn’t come, though!”
“Judge Linton’s rheumatism confines him to the house,” Mrs. Wilbur replied comfortingly.
“Did you notice Mrs. Stevans’s diamonds? She is a fine-looking, well-set-up woman. I had a long talk with her. She may be a little gay, but she has a first-rate head. She was asking about the Bad Lands Company.”
Sebastian Anthon sat near the fire smoking a long cigarette, a habit he had maintained in spite of the brick interests, and eyeing Wilbur keenly.
“I suppose,” he spoke languidly, “this is the top of the hill. You are pretty young to have got there already. You’ll have to spend the rest of your life trying not to roll off.”
“It’s a big success, Ady. I am proud of you.” Mrs. Anthon crossed the room and kissed her daughter effusively. “You have done everything just as I would have had you do,—married well, and had a family”—here she prophesied, except for little Sebastian, unless he could be called a “family,”—“and have this elegant house, and—”
“Let me show you your room, uncle!” Mrs. Wilbur followed the old man, who seemed to be fleeing from the volubility of his sister-in-law.
“It’s so large I lose myself,” he explained as his niece put her arm under his. “What do you do when you wantto be at home and not in a hotel? Well, Adela, I didn’t think the explosion would end in this!”
She looked at him wistfully. “Nor I, Uncle Seb!”
“Not that it isn’t quite what you should do. But it doesn’t seem to suit you. Most things don’t suit in this world, Adela. We are a lot of misfits, a lot of misfits.”
She put her arms around his neck affectionately. “You should have married me, Uncle Seb! We would have exploded together.”
“Yes, that would have been fun. How splendid you are!” he exclaimed wearily as she turned on the electric lights in his suite of rooms. “Do you think of water-hoister and brick-stock and Bad Lands and all your other investments when you lie in those beds?” He noticed her sad eyes, and added, “You are splendid too, little girl.”
“No. I see Wrightington on the walls.”
“Who the devil is Wrightington?”
But she had hastily left the room. When she returned to the library, Mrs. Anthon went yawningly to her chamber, leaving husband and wife alone. Suddenly Mrs. Wilbur asked him, “Are you content with it?”
“Why, of course. Who would have thought four years ago in Paris that we should be sitting here!” He continued rather fatuously on the theme of their success. He was thirty-three, and he had done better than very well. To be sure, he had had his wife’s little capital as well as his own push in the Hoister Company, and he always paid full recognition to her share in their fortune. To-night he had demonstrated publicly what hecould do. As he finished his cigar and rose to put out the lights, he observed casually,—
“Adela, I thought you toted that Erard round a good deal. Why can’t you let him do his own pushing? If he were a first-rate gun, a Whistler or a Sargent, or what is that fellow Mrs. Stevans had, Raf—Raffelly—it would be worth while. But we can’t shovehimon our shoulders all the time. And I think you ought to drop supporting him. It would not be a very fine thing to have known around.”
The last remark revealed one of Wilbur’s new social anxieties which were puzzling to his wife.
“It is a curious convention,” she observed bitterly, “that a woman may be intimate with her husband’s friends, but must not even pretend to know her own unless the husband has indorsed them. The four hundred pounds I have paid to Erard’s bankers has always come from my private fortune.”
“If you put it on that ground,” Wilbur answered airily, and then indulgently, “you have always had your own way, and if you don’t mind the false position—”
Mrs. Wilbur looked at him. Men like Wilbur, endowed with the best intentions and the invaluable qualities which perpetuate a democracy, should know when to refrain in handling women.
“This talk about Mr. Erard is—too vulgar. I shall ask him to luncheon here to-morrow to arrange for his lectures. And I will find an opportunity to withdraw my—my assistance in his work.”
She turned away into the hall. The house was alldark now save for the glimmer of a gas-jet in the lower hall. The warm air, scented by the profuse hot-house flowers, made a peculiar odour that permeated even to the bedchambers. The place seemed tomb-like in its dark expanse of vacant rooms. The suggestion of the tomb made the mistress smile grimly: a tomb that had to be carried on and lived in by the ghosts of the living. And what made the gates of this modern tomb so intangible, so strong to enclose? Nothing, yet everything.