First harvests

SUNDAY was a long-looked-for day to Arthur. It was only the second Sunday after his arrival in New York; but it was as if he had been many months in the city already; and on the evening thereof he was to take tea at the Livingstones’.

Tea is not a formal meal; and surely it could do no harm if he went there early? It was almost six o’clock, and well on in the twilight when he arrived at the house; Miss Holyoke was in the parlor, the servant said; the other ladies were up-stairs. The low tones of a piano reached his ear as the man was speaking; and Arthur recognized a soft and serious Bach prelude, very quiet, very tender, very old in melody and simple chords. It was a favorite piece of Gracie’s; and Arthur stood at the door, unseen, and watched her play. Her black dress and slender figure was just visible in the faint light that came in from some other room; but her face, sweet and pale, was clearly outlined against the long window and the last light of the November day; it touched her chin and brow and her parted lips; and the look of these was like the music she was playing. The prelude died away, in minor modulations, like a low amen; and Gracie sat playing idly with the ivory notes, her head drooping, and a dim shining from the firelight in her dark hair.

When the others came down, they found these two sitting together, like brother and sister, and talking in low voices to each other. Arthur knew Mrs. Livingstone; but the others of the family were still strangers to him. Mr. Livingstone was an old man, much bent, with older manners and appearance than his years warranted; then there was an only daughter, Mamie, and a favorite cousin of Mr. Livingstone’s, Miss Brevier. Mamie Livingstone was a pretty young girl, with slightly petulant manners, as if she had been a little spoiled; she had a wonderfully mobile face, and quick intelligent eyes, and was evidently warm-hearted and impulsive, and very fond already of her cousin Grace. She regarded Arthur critically, and with some disapproval; in fact, she snubbed him more completely than that young gentleman had yet been snubbed—thanks to Mrs. Gower—in New York.

“Where is Mr. Townley, mamma?” said she, imperiously. “I want to see Mr. Townley.”

“Hush, Mamie,” said Mrs. Livingstone, slightly shocked; and the old gentleman looked at his daughter with a meek astonishment, as is so often the way with contemporary parents. Charlie had been invited in acknowledgment of his kindness to Arthur.

“Mr. Townley,” said Mr. Livingstone in a quavering voice, “is a very old friend of mine, in whom I have always had the greatest confidence. I have yet to make the acquaintance of his young—connection.”

“They say he waltzes like an angel,” said Mamie the irrepressible; and just then the door-bell rang, and the subject of their conversation appeared, with his usual irreproachable exterior. Arthur had never seen him so subdued; he sat next to Miss Mamie, but treated her quite du haut en bas, talking much to Mr. Livingstone. Arthur could see that he was on his best behavior; and his best behavior was extremely unobjectionable, though he came very near being caught in the middle of some airy personality when Mr. Livingstone inaugurated the meal by saying grace.

After tea was over, Miss Mamie manœuvred Charlie into a remote corner, where he seemed to find her more worthy his attention. The evening was very quiet; Mr. Livingstone gravely reading some review, and addressing from time to time a solitary remark to his wife, who sat with her hands folded, placidly. Gracie talked to Arthur of himself, and our hero told her of all that had happened since he came to New York. Her life had, of course, been a quiet one, divided between books, her music, and charitable occupations. In all these Miss Brevier had encouraged and assisted her; Gracie spoke very warmly of her, her intelligence and character. This was after Miss Brevier, in the other room, had begun reading aloud to the old couple, in a low and sweet, but very clearly modulated voice.

“When can I come next?” said Arthur to Gracie as they rose to go. There was a sweetness in her presence that had won his heart a thousand times again; she seemed a rarer being, in this peopled city; he adored her.

“You must not come often, dear Arthur—my aunt thinks it better for us both. She thinks that we are both too young, and that you must try a year or two in society to make sure that you really care for me—and I for you,” she added, in a tone hardly audible. Arthur’s only answer was to press her hand; and so they parted.

When they got into the street, Townley lit a large cigar, with a slight sigh of relief. “Lively little girl, that Miss Livingstone,” said he; “but I say, old man, what an evening! No wonder she wants to come out.”

“I am sorry you found it slow,” said Arthur, testily.

“Oh, well, I know it’s devilish respectable and all that sort of thing,” said Charlie. “Good middle-class domestic life; they’re just like our grandfathers, and our grandfathers were nothing but bourgeois after all; that little girl will sink all that, or I’m mistaken. Come round by Sixth Avenue a minute, will you?”

There was a certain incongruity in Charlie’s words, as it seemed to Arthur; it might have been Wemyss who was speaking, instead of this careless young Epicurean, who usually troubled himself little with abstractions and general categories, but occupied his understanding with perceiving the most practical sort of causes and effects. The fact was that Townley had used the current slang of his set, word-counters for thought, and his mind was already far from the subject, and his lips framed to the whistle of an air from “Iolanthe.” They turned into Sixth Avenue (which is a strange, conglomerate street—insolently disreputable at times, elsewhere commercially prosperous, or even given to small tradesmen and other healthy citizenship, but always, in its earlier days, at least, rakishly indifferent to brown-stone-front respectability) and stopped at a little shop in a tiny two-story brick block. On the left was a little glass door, with the simple legend Rose Marie upon the panel; and in front of them a toy staircase, leading to the imminent upper regions. Through the glass of the door Arthur could see one or two bonnets on pegs in the window, and he divined that the shop was a milliner’s. “Is Miss Starbuck in?” said Charlie to a child who appeared with a candle. The child (who was either deformed or very old-looking for her age) looked keenly at Arthur, whose eyes fell helplessly before her searching gaze.

“She has gone to a concert at the Garden,” said the child. As they spoke, there was a murmur of men’s voices from an adjoining room, and a rough clatter of applause, with knocking of heels and sticks.

“All right,” said Townley. “Good-night.” And after this somewhat inexplicable call the two young men went back to their Fifth Avenue lodgings. Here they found John Haviland, largely reposing himself on two chairs before Arthur’s hospitable hearth.

Haviland and Arthur had met many times since the Farnum ball; and Arthur was more pleased than surprised at finding him in his rooms to-night. “I’m so glad you waited—I’ve just come from the Livingstones,” said he. “Charlie, let me introduce my friend Mr. Haviland—Mr. Townley. Have a cigar—oh, you’ve got a pipe, have you?”

The others already had cigars; and disposing themselves in attitudes of permanent equilibrium, all plunged into the divine cloud of vapor until such times as the genius of the place should move them to speech.

“Is the Miss Holyoke who is staying at the Livingstones’ your cousin?” asked Haviland, finally.

“Yes,” said Arthur. “Don’t you know her?”

“What a queer old thing that Miss Brevier is,” said Charlie. “Can you believe it, she used to be a bosom-friend of Mrs. Levison G.!”

“Pity Miss Brevier dropped her,” said Haviland, dryly.

“Miss Brevier drop her?” said Charlie, whose sense of humor was sometimes, at a critical moment, deficient. “You are chaffing.”

“Mrs. Gower,” said Haviland, gravely, “does more harm than any woman in New York.”

“She is a person of European reputation,” suggested Townley.

“She is unquestionably proficient in the latest and silliest vices of the aristocracies we came over here to escape from,” retorted John.

Townley laughed a little, while Haviland puffed vigorously at his pipe.

“I say, Arthur?” said the former, “speaking of Mrs. G., have they asked you to join the Four-in-Hand Club?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a club organized for the purpose of driving twice a year up to Yonkers with string teams and liveries, and showing your most esteemed young ladies in flaring light-colored dresses to all the sidewalk population of New York,” broke in Haviland, “and paying four thousand a year for the privilege!”

“What rot,” laughed Charlie. “In the first place, it needn’t cost you one thousand a year, for one wheel apiece. Four fellows can own a drag together, you know. And it’s great fun. Mrs. Gower got it up, and all the boys belong. Why, old Mosenthal came to me the other day with tears in his eyes, and offered to keep two full-rigged drags, if we’d only let him come in—and lend me one of ’em, he meant,” added Charlie with a grin.

“How cheap for him,” growled the other, “if he could buy the envy and consideration of the society of this great republic for the price of a few horses!”

Townley’s good-nature never forsook him; but he looked at Haviland as if puzzled; and the latter rose to go. “I called on the Livingstones last week,” said he to Arthur, “and met your cousin. Good-night, Mr. Townley.”

“What a prig he is,” said Charlie, with a sigh of relief when Haviland had gone. “I always supposed it, from his looks. I knew that he refused to join the Four-in-Hand Club; and you hardly ever meet him in society—except at some queer place like the Farnums’ for instance. He mugs down-town at his office all the day, and improves his mind in the evening, I suppose, or reads goody-goody stories to little Italian children, down on Baxter Street! He’s good as gold, you know.”

“Don’t you ever mean to work yourself?” asked Arthur.

“Not that way,” laughed Charlie. “It’s not in my line. Books and things are played out, I tell you.” But the full account of his plans of life Charlie was too canny to impart, perhaps even to admit to himself.

For Charlie had not always been thus. There was a time when he was fresh from Princeton College, and he used to fill his table with English and foreign reviews, and could talk intelligently of their contents. He had begun his business life with enthusiasm, and was only known as a promising athlete outside of it. He showed great industry at the office, and some ability, and had been referred to by his elders as a well-informed young man.

But Charlie was a smart fellow, wide awake, and it did not take him long to get, as he fancied, désorienté. Suddenly, the second or third autumn of his business career, he had given up his reading, dropped his industry and early hours, and, for reasons well known to himself, he became the Charlie Townley known to us and the world. He had almost abandoned Wall Street for the Piccadilly Club and the Park; he dropped out of sight, on ’Change, and reappeared smiling in “society.” And so well did he play his cards, that he, a poor and almost friendless stranger, without money or influence, with but one solitary advantage, that of a name not unknown in New York, had become—it would be premature to say what he had become, or why he did it; like all great generals, he had his strategy, not to be fathomed by the enemy, still less by emulous friends. Let us stick to the what, nor pry into the why or wherefore.

What he did, then, was to become the most ineffable dandy in all New York. With perfect clothing and fine linen, the exactly new thing in sticks and hats, and a single eye-glass decorously veiling his intellect and dangerously wide-awake eye, Charlie had become that thing of which the name may change from dandy to lion, from buck to swell, from blood to dude, but the nature endureth forever. But this was but dressing the part, it was merely the transformation of the exterior, the travesti; it was here that Charlie’s career began. He only spoke to those whom others spoke to, and said only those things that others thought; he preferred married women to the society of maidens, even to the charm of blushing buds; though he selected one or two virgin beauties every season to whom he royally threw an occasional sunbeam of his society. These were always faultless either in family, or in beauty, or in fashion—for Charlie was catholic in his recognition of merit—and they appreciated the word or look he grudgingly accorded them and were duly grateful. Soon, his approval would give a cachet to almost any girl; but careless Charlie was all unconscious; girls were slow, he said. Mrs. Gower, Mrs. Malgam, Mrs. Jacob Einstein, formed his court. With these he reigned; by them he was taken up and formed, and later, by them adored, as the heathen worship the brass or wooden idol they themselves have made. This was at the time when Mrs. G. had gone in for belles-lettres; she and Townley read de Musset and Balzac together, and Theophile Gautier’s poems. Who would have supposed that Charlie had ever read de Musset! It was at the same period that Levison Gower, Senior, died, and Mrs. G. adopted the hyphen; there was an English titled family of that name, and she fancied the difference of one vowel would only lend a vraisemblance to the descent; but society saw the joke and called her Lady Levison for all one season. There never had been any Levison in the Gower family; Gower senior’s father had come from Connecticut, and his first name was John Lewis. The family estate consisted of an old farm-house and a few acres near Windsor Locks; the house is now burned down, and upon the ancestral acres grows rank tobacco.

What precious humbug is all this! Well, well, let us not despise humbug; nihil humani alienum. Let us rather see this humbug; let us put it on a pin, and examine this insect. You may be sure Charlie found his account therein. Frivolity is a word for dullards; I wish the ministers could enforce their precepts half as well as the dressmakers. Fashion is a marvellous potency, the public opinion of small things; in a democracy who can despise it? As I write, fashion tells our womankind, Put birds upon thy bonnet; and lo! four hundred thousand women in New York alone wear fowls. How many years ago was it, now, that someone said, Sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor? And four hundred thousand in the world have done it, not yet.

As for Charlie—in Mrs. Edgeworth, or in “Sandford and Merton,” or other book of our childhood I once read a fable: how Honesty, Industry, and Ability formed a partnership for the acquirement of ambergris from whales. And Ability caught a hundred whales in the first year, and Industry carefully separated from all these whales a few ounces of ambergris, and Honesty sold this ambergris for a large sum of money. And Rapacity, who had been lying by, laughing, all this time, signed the check and took the ambergris; and lo! the check was worthless. And Society looked on and laughed, and said Rapacity was a smart fellow; and in the next year there were many worthless checks, but no ambergris.

Now Charlie was not Rapacity; but he was a clever fellow and could see this and other fables as they were enacted before his eyes. And he would not steal; nor would he go to the North Pole and search for whales. But he was in search of les moyens de parvenir.