First harvests

THERE should never be more than six at a dinner, unless there are fourteen. You can have your dinner either a parlor comedy or a spectacular play: but you must choose which you will have. Mrs. Gower was well aware of this; and hers consisted of a leading lady, a first young lady, a soubrette, a virtuous hero, a heavy villain, and a lover. With these ingredients, you may have a very pleasant dinner; but you must be a sufficiently skilful observer of humanity to detect the rôle. For people say that there are not such rôles any more, and that we are all indifferent and good-natured, and none of us heavy villains.

Arthur was too inexperienced for this; for, like all young men, he also supposed that all these characters were conventional fictions of the stage. He did not believe in villains. Perhaps it would repay us to formulate Arthur’s views, as those of a respectable young New Englander of good education and bringing-up, with whose fortunes in life our book is largely concerned. Roughly expressed, they might be put in canons, much as follows:

I. The world is in the main desirous of realizing the greatest good of the greatest number.

II. Unfortunate necessities—the primal curse of labor, or what not—occupy the greater part of the time of the greater number with sustaining life; so the leisure of the fortunate few is doubly pledged to the discovery and attainment of the object before mentioned.

III. Money is a regrettable necessity; but its acquirement, even from the selfish point of view, is but a means to an end. That end, where personal, is the enjoyment of the pleasures of life—i.e., literature, art, refined society, travel, and health. The larger end is intelligent charity, or public work.

IV. Vice exists, like vermin, as a repulsive vulgarity.

V. Crime exists pathologically—i.e., it is either an abnormal disease, or the consequence of a pitiable weakness.

VI. Honesty is the first virtue of the greater number; honor, which is honesty with a flower added, is the peculiar virtue of a gentleman.

VII. Gentlemen are honorable and brave; ladies are like Shelley’s heroines, or the ladies in the Idylls of the King.

VIII. The chiefest quality of humanity is love; and the object of all human endeavor is to observe and avail itself of the love of that being which is not humanity.

So much for his ethics; and, as we have said Arthur was a poet, it may not come amiss to add an approximation of his theory of æsthetics. This was, in brief:

IX. All beauty is the visible evidence of the love of God; nature is a divine manifestation; and literature, art, and music are the language in which humanity may reply. Thus, in particular, all highest poetry is but this—the discovery of the love of God.

Such were his tenets, the standard of Arthur’s exalted moments, as he supposed them then to be of others. In trying to live by them, he knew that he was weak, as all men are. Of all the people whom he knew, Gracie Holyoke alone seemed always to observe them.

So it may well be that Arthur did not, on that night, justly estimate the worth of those about him. He had, simply, a very enjoyable dinner; he was innocently pleased with the glitter of the glass, the sparkle of the diamonds, the richness of the china, the beauty of the women, the finish of their talk; it was a venial sin for him to like the food and wines,—but there was perhaps one other ingredient in his pleasure, the subtilest of all, which escaped him. Leaving this, for his account, let us speak of the others.

And here we may save space and the wearied reader’s attention, for they had no ethics and no æsthetics; and their philosophy of life was simple. Probably their sensual sin was not so great as Arthur’s—for terrapin and duck were a weariness to most of them—but in the summum bonum they all agreed. To be not as others are, and have those others know it—such was their simple creed. Jimmy De Witt was on the whole the most innocent; his being yearned for horses and yachts, even if they were not all the fastest; and he was not a bad fellow, a great friend of Lucie Gower himself, and so sitting in loco conjugis, for the husband of the hostess was absent. To him came next Mrs. Malgam, who was—but all the world, yea, even to the uttermost bounds thereof where the society newspapers do permeate, knows all about Mrs. Malgam. Upon De Witt’s other side, convenient, Miss Duval—“Pussie” Duval, grand-daughter of Antoine of that ilk who had kept the little barber shop down on Chambers Street; then Arthur, on Mrs. Gower’s right; and on her left Caryl Wemyss again, a modern Boston Faust, son of the great poet who was afterwards minister to Austria; his son, thus born to the purple of diplomacy, had lived in Paris, London, and Vienna, executed plays, poems, criticisms, music, and painting, and, at thirty-five, had discovered the hollowness of things, having himself become perfect in all of them. So he became a critic of civilization—and this is how he was not as other men—for it was the era of the decadence, and he the Cassandra who foresaw it. Mrs. Gower, our leading lady, made the sixth.

From being the lonely Cinderella of an unexplored fireside, Flossie had grown to be one of the most famed and accomplished hostesses in all New York. She had the tact of knowing what topics would touch the souls of the men and move the women’s hearts, and of leading the conversation up to these without apparent effort or insolent dictation. She could make Strephon talk to Chloe, or Marguerite to Faust, without taking the awkward pair by the elbows and knocking their heads together. And all this sweetly, simply, while reserving the preferred rôle to herself, as a carver justly sets aside for his own use his favorite bit of venison. Ordinarily, these six people—four of them, surely—would have talked about other people and their possessions; but Mrs. Flossie rightly fancied that Arthur, knowing little of the world, could only talk about books, or at most, about the world in the abstract. Taking up the talk where it was left at the opera, an early speech from Arthur to the effect that he did not mean to go much into society gave her the necessary opening.

“You must not do so,” said she. “Society is as important to a young man as work. Is it not, Mr. Wemyss?” (One of the charms of this woman’s cleverness was that indefinable quality of humor which consists in the relish of incongruities; her reference to Wemyss for the uses of work, for instance.)

“Society is sour grapes to those beyond its pale,” said Wemyss, “but those who can value it press from it the wine of life.” (Wemyss gave a little laugh, to indicate that he did not mean to be taken as a prig.) “Seriously,” he added, “no person of wide intelligence can afford to ignore the best society of a nation, whatever it be, for it represents its essence and its tendency. It is the liquid glass of champagne left in the frozen bottle, and has more flavor than all the rest, it is the flower, which is at once the present’s culmination and the future’s seed.”

“Oh, that is so true!” cried Pussie Duval. Miss Duval would have made the same remark had Mr. Wemyss asserted that abuse of stimulants was the secret of Hegel. The others stared rather blankly. Arthur had never considered it quite so seriously; and to Mrs. Malgam and Jimmy De Witt, interpreting it esoterically, society needed no more explanation than the Ding an Sich.

“Then again,” said Wemyss, “did you ever go to a party of the people? I don’t mean at Washington—there they get a little rubbed off—but at home. Well, I went to one, once—some people who had lived for many years in the house next to mine on Beacon Street—and I do assure you, it was triste à faire peur; they thought you were flippant if you even smiled, and took offence, like awkward boys and girls, at the least informality. One longed for a Lovelace, si ce n’était que pour les chiffonner. Now, in the world, one’s manners are simple, easy; you have some liberty; people don’t take offence—il n’y a jamais de mal en bonne compagnie. But the trouble with society in this country is,” he continued, “that it has no meaning. Now it must have a meaning to be interesting; it must mean either love or politics. In France, if not in England, it has both. But here, all the meaning of it stops when one is married.”

“Thank you,” said Flossie.

“Madame,” said Wemyss, “you are one of the three sirens, singing in the twilight of the world. But in this dark night about you, society exists only to make all young men get married. In the old time, it had a more serious reason for being. In courts where there was a more social element in politics, intrigues were always quasi-political; parties were made at evening parties; and ministries were entered from boudoirs; you met the Opposition in his salon, and embraced the minister’s principles with—”

“Look out, Mr. Wemyss,” said Mrs. Gower, playfully.

—“when you paid a compliment to his wife. But here, society and politics are worlds mutually exclusive; how would the Governor of the State appear at a dinner-party? Politically, the best people are laid on the shelf, like rare china. Society’s only recognized function is to bring young people together; when brought together, they are supposed to join hands and step aside; it is a marriage-brokerage board, and its aim is merely matrimony.”

“What a social failure you must be, Mr. Wemyss,” said Flossie.

“In America,” retorted Wemyss. “But even a man who has not married has some social rights. I like a society of men and women—not of Jacks and Gills. But if I tell Mrs. Grundy her gown is becoming, likely as not she’ll call for the police, in this country.”

“I think she’ll take a bit more than that without bolting,” laughed Jimmy De Witt.

“The fact is,” said Wemyss, who felt that he was becoming epigrammatic, “all worldly pleasures, from the original apple, rest on the taste of the forbidden fruit. The joys of war, the delights of business, the pleasures of gossip, the satisfaction of swearing,—they’re all the fun of breaking some commandment. Voltaire never would have put pen to paper but for the first; the pleasure of art is to worship graven images; the spice of newspapers is the false witness that they bear against your neighbor. And what becomes of fashionable life without the tenth, or a faint and ever-present memory of the seventh? Now all Americans covet their neighbor’s bank-account; but they are far too practical to covet their neighbor’s wife. Positively, we are too virtuous to be happy: for this Arcadian state of things makes society necessarily dull. Like most of the devil’s institutions, it requires considerable red pepper.”

Arthur stared at Wemyss, much astonished; but all three ladies seemed to take it as very excellent fooling indeed. Even Jimmy looked as if he didn’t wholly understand it, but knew it must be very good.

“But it’s the paradise of girls. It offers every opportunity to ardent youth. It shows its prizes in a glamour of light and dress-making, just as a Parisian shopkeeper puts gas-reflectors before his window. Bright eyes and white shoulders are garnished in extraordinary silks and satins; a blare of fiddles and trumpets fills up vacancies in their intellect; and thus, with all their charms enhanced, they are dangled before the masculine eye when his discernment has been previously befuddled with champagne?”

“Positively,” laughed Mrs. Gower, “we must leave you to your cigars. There’s no knowing what you’ll be saying next—and before an unmarried lady, too. Pussie, my dear, go out first, and deliver Mr. Wemyss from temptation.”

The three ladies rose, and the men drew back their chairs.

“You must really look out, Mr. Wemyss,” said Mrs. Malgam; “in one of your lyric moments you’ll forget that some girl isn’t married, and be engaged before you know it.”

Wemyss shuddered. “Ah, my dear lady, I wish I could forget that you were married——”

“Hush, hush,” cried Mrs. Gower, rapping Wemyss’s knuckles with her fan, “and soyez sage, when we are gone.”

But when left to themselves, Mr. Wemyss said little besides a word or two about literature and art. His conversation might have been a model to a governess fresh from boarding-school. Jimmy De Witt told a few stories, and Arthur had great difficulty in talking at all. Mr. Wemyss snubbed them both, as was his habit with intellectual inferiors; and after a very short cigar, they all repaired to the drawing-room, where little happened that Arthur saw; for, as all the company save Mrs. Gower seemed to regard him as an interloping hobbledehoy, to be tolerated only as a fantasy of Mrs. Gower’s, he shortly and not over-gracefully took his leave.

He walked to the club, and smoked, somewhat nettled with things in general, and full of much desire to punch Mr. Caryl Wemyss’s elegant head. Others had had that mood before Arthur; but you see our hero is by no means an exceptional personage. Being, however, the best we have got, we feel bound to see him through. Still, no Loyola would have chosen that dinner to be the time and place to reply to Wemyss with the propositions we have stated for Arthur at the beginning of this chapter; and the young idealist had wisely held his peace.