* * * * *
"A caller interrupted me yesterday, a most persistent fellow and a dangerous one to the purse of the tyro collector of Americana, though not to me. He was a man of some pretence to classic education, and superficially versed in lore of title, date, and editio princeps. He had half a dozen prints of rarity and value had they not been forgeries, and a book … that I had long sought after in its original form, but the only copy I had seen for many years when put up at auction lacked the title page and fully half a dozen leaves, besides having some other defects. Would you believe it, Dick, this copy was that from the auction, its defects repaired, its missing leaves replaced by careful forgery, and what is more, I know the vender was aware of the deceit. But he will sell it to some young moneyed sprig who will not know.
"I was angry, Dick, very angry, and yet all this is a trivial part of what we have a long time been discussing. The sudden glint of wealth in certain quarters has changed the aspect of even book collecting, that once most individual of occupations, and syndicated it.
"Once a book collection was the natural accumulation, more or less perfect according to purse and opportunity, of one following a certain line of thought, and bore the stamp of individuality; but as these bibliophiles of the old regime pass away, the ranks are recruited by men to whom money is of no account, whose competition forces irrational prices and creates false values. Methinks I see the finish of the small collectors like ourselves. Meanwhile, just so much intellectual pleasure is wrested from the modern scholar of small means who dares not make beginning. I do not like it, Dick, indeed I do not.
"But we were discussing domesticity, I think, when this wretch rang the bell. The restlessness I speak of as born of undisciplined bigness, of moneyed magnitude, is visible everywhere, and more so in the hours of relaxation than those of business.
"We have acquired the knowledge of many arts in these late years, and we needed it; but we have lost one that is irreparable—sociality. There is no longer time to know oneself, how then shall we know our neighbours?
"The verb to entertain has largely driven the verb to enjoy from the social page. It is not too extreme, I think, to say the home and playhouse have changed places. Many conservative people that I know turn to the theatre as the only safe means of relaxation and enjoyment within their reach, the stress and penalty of criticism in entertaining modern company being unbearable to them.
"To the bachelor who, like myself, has a modest hearthstone, yet no hand but his own to stir the fire, the dinner tables of his married friends and his clubs have been supposed to replace, in a measure at least, the need of family ties. Once they did this as far as such things may, but the easy sociality of the family board has almost ceased, and the average club has so expanded that it savours more of hotel freedom than home cosiness.
"I am not a misanthrope or a woman hater, as you know, yet from what I gather I fear that, in the upper middle class at least, it is the women who are responsible for this increased formality that most men naturally would avoid. Led by personal ambition, or that of young daughters, they seek to maintain a standard just enough beyond their easy grasp to feel ill at ease, if not humiliated, to be caught off guard. I remember once when I was a mere boy hearing my father say in a sorrowing tone to my eldest sister, who was giving fugitive reasons for not being able to array herself quickly for some festivity for which the invitation had been delayed, yet to which she longed to go: 'Wherever woman enters socially, then complications begin that are wholly of her own making. I warrant before Eve had finished her fig-leaf petticoat she was bothering Adam to know if he thought there could be another woman anywhere who had a garment of rarer leaves than her own.'
"The clubs do somewhat better, being under male management, but those among them that ranked as so conservative that membership was the hall mark of intellectual acquirements and stamped a man as either author, artist, or amateur of letters and the fine arts, have had their doors pushed open by many of those who wish to wear in public the name of being without good right, and so the little groups of kindred spirits have broken away, the authors in one direction, the followers of the drama to habitations of their own, artists who are too independent to be overborne by money in another, and thus the splitting spirit increases until it vanishes in a maze of cliques and coteries. The names may stand on the lists, the faces are absent, and one must wander through half a dozen clubs to really meet the aggregation of thinkers and workers of the grade who gathered in the snug corners of the Century's old club house in East Fifteenth Street when we were young fellows, and my father secured us cards for an occasional monthly meeting as the greatest favour he could do us.
"Come down if you can, take a holiday, or rather night, and go with me to the January meeting, and we will also stroll among some of our old haunts. You may perhaps realize, what I cannot altogether explain, the reason why I feel almost a stranger though at home."
* * * * *
(To DR. R. R.)
"January 10, 19—.
"Could not get away, you conscientious old Medicus, because of the strange accidents and holiday doings of the Whirlpool Colony at the Bluffs!
"Well, well! I read your last with infinite amusement. You are in a fair way to have enlightenment borne in upon you without leaving your surgery, or at least travelling farther than your substantial gig will take you.
"Meanwhile I have had what should be a crushing blow to my vanity, and in analyzing it I've made an important discovery. One night last week I was sitting quietly in the card room at the Dibdin Club, awaiting my whist mates (for here at least one may be reasonably sure of finding a group with bibliographic interests in common, and the pleasures of a non-commercial game of cards), when I heard a voice, one of a group outside, belonging to a wholesome, smooth-faced young fellow, with good tastes and instincts, say:—
"'I don't know what happened to the old boy when he took that unheard-of vacation of his last fall, or where he went, but one thing's very sure, since his return Cortright's grown pudgy and he's waked bang up. Wonder if he's finished that Colonial History, that's to be his monument, he's been working on all his life, or if he's fallen in love?'
"'If he'd fall in love, he might stand more chance of finishing his history,' replied a graybeard friend in deep didactic tones; 'he has material in plenty, but no vital stimulus for focussing his work.'
"I gave an unpremeditated laugh that dwindled to a chuckle, as if it were produced by a choking process. Two heads appeared a second at the doorway of the room they had thought empty, and then vanished!
"When I came home I sat a long while before my den fireplace thinking. They were right in two things, though not in the falling in love—that was done thirty-five years ago once and for all. I wondered if I had grown pudgy, dreadful word; stout carries a certain dignity, but pudgy suggests bunchy, wabbling flesh. I've noticed my gloves go on lingeringly, clinging at the joints, but I read that to mean rheumatism!
"That night I stood before the mirror and studied my face as I unbuttoned my vest and loosened my shirt band at the neck. Suddenly I experienced great relief. For several months past I have felt a strange asphyxiation and a vertigo sensation when wearing formal clothes of any kind, enjoying complete comfort only in the loose neckcloth and wrapper of my private hours. I had thought of asking medical advice, but having acquired a distrust of general physic in my youth, and hoping you might come down, I put it off.
"Unfasten your own top button, and now prepare to laugh—Martin Cortright is not threatened with apoplexy or heart failure, he's grown pudgy, and his clothes are all too small! Yet but for that boy's good-tempered ridicule he might not have discovered it.
"Think of it, Richard! I, whom my mother considered interesting and of somewhat distinguished mien, owing to my pallor and slim stature! A pudgy worm belongs to chestnuts, not to books. A pudgy antiquarian is a thing unheard of since monastic days, when annal making was not deemed out of place if mingled with the rotund jollity of a Friar Tuck. You must bear half the blame, for it must be the butter habit that your Martha Corkle's fresh churned pats inoculated me with, for I always detested the stuff before.
"Graybeard's stricture, however, struck a deeper chord—'He has material in plenty for his book, but no vital stimulus.' This, too, is deeply true, and I have felt it vaguely so for some time, but no more realized it than I did my pudginess.
"No matter how much material one collects, if the vitalizing spirit is not there, no matter how realistically the stage may be set if the actors are mere dummies. The only use of the past is to illuminate and sustain the present.
"Your own home life and work, the honest questions of little Richard and Ian waken me from a long sleep, I believe, and set me thinking. What is a man remembered by the longest? Brain work, memorial building, or heart touching? Do you recollect once meeting old Moore—Clement Clark Moore—at my father's? He was a profound scholar in Greek and Hebrew lexicology, and gave what was once his country house and garden in old Chelsea Village to the theological seminary of his professorship. How many people remember this, or his scholarship? But before that old rooftree was laid low, he wrote beneath it, quite offhand, a little poem, 'The Night Before Christmas,' that blends with childhood's dreams anew each Christmas Eve—a few short verses holding more vitality than all his learning.
"If my book ever takes body, my friend, it will be under your roof, where you and yours can vitalize it. This is no fishing for invitations—we know each other too frankly well for that. What I wish to do is to come into your neighbourhood next springtime, without encroaching on your hospitality, and work some hours every day in the library, or that corner of her charmed attic that Barbara has shared with me. It is bewitching. Upon my word, I do not wonder that she sees the world rose-colour as she looks upon it from that window. I, too, had long reveries there, in which experience and tradition mixed themselves so cleverly that for the time I could not tell whether it was my father or myself who had sometimes proudly escorted the lovely Carroll sisters upon their afternoon promenade down Broadway, from Prince Street to the Bowling Green, each leading her pet greyhound by a ribbon leash, or which of us it was that, in seeking to recapture an escaping hound, was upset by it in the mud, to the audible delight of some rivals in a 'bus and his own discomfiture, being rendered thereby unseemly for the beauty's further company."
* * * * *
"January 20, 19—.
"Thank you, dear Richard, for your brotherly letter. I make no protestations, for I know your invitation would not be given if you felt my presence would in any way be a drawback or impose care on any member of your household, and the four little hearts that Barbara drew, with her own, Evan's, and the boys' initials in them, are seals upon the invitation.
"Do not deplore, however, the lack of nearness of my haunts in Astor and Lenox libraries. Times are changed, and the new order condemns me to sit here if I read, there if I take out pencil and pad to copy—the red tape distracts me. The old Historical Society alone remains in comfortable confusion, and that is soon to move upward half a day's walk.
"But, as it chances, you have collected many of the volumes that are necessary to me, and I will use them freely, for some day, friend of mine, my books will be joined to yours, and also feel the touch of little Richard's and Ian's fingers, and of their sons, also, I hope.
"I declare, I'm growing childishly expectant and impatient for spring, like Barbara with her packages of flower seeds.
"You ask if I ever remember meeting one Lavinia Dorman. I think I used to see her with a bevy of girls from Miss Black's school, who used sometimes to attend lectures at the Historical Society rooms, and had an unlimited appetite for the chocolate and sandwiches that were served below in the 'tombs' afterward, which appetite I may have helped to appease, for you know father was always a sort of mine host at those functions.
"The girls must have all been eight or ten years my junior, and you know how a fellow of twenty-three or four regards giggling schoolgirls—they seem quite like kittens to him.
"Stop, was she one of the older girls, the special friend of—Barbara's mother? If so, I remember her face, though she did not walk in the school procession with the other 'convicts,' as the boys called them; but I was never presented.
"I'm sending a small birthday token to the boys—a little printing-press.
Richard showed no small skill in setting the letters of my rubber stamp.
It is some days late, but that will separate it from the glut of the
Christmas market. Ask Evan to notify me if he and Barbara go to town.
"Gratefully,
"M. C."
IV
WHEN BARBARA GOES TO TOWN
March 4. I like to go to a plain people's play, where the spectators groan and hiss the villain. It is a wholesome sort of clearing house where one may be freed from pent-up emotion under cover of other people's tears and smiles; the smiles triumphing at the end, which always winds up with a sudden recoil, leaving the nerves in a healthy thrill. I believe that I can only comprehend the primal emotions and what is called in intellectual jargon mental dissipation, and the problem play, in its many phases, appeals to me even less than crude physical dissipation.
We have seen a drama of the people played quite recently, having been to New York to spend part of a "midwinter" week's vacation, which father insisted that Evan should take between two rather complex and eye-straining pieces of work. Speaking by the almanac, it wasn't midwinter at all, but pre-spring, which, in spite of lengthening days, is the only uncompromisingly disagreeable season in the country—the time when measles usually invades the village school, the dogs come slinking in guiltily to the fire, pasted with frozen mud, the boys have snuffle colds, in spite of father's precautions, and I grow desperate and flout the jonquils in my window garden, it seems so very long since summer, and longer yet to real budding spring. We arrived at home last night in the wildest snowstorm of the season, and this morning Evan, having smoothed out his mental wrinkles by means of our mild city diversions, is now filling his lungs and straightening his shoulders by building a wonderful snow fort for the boys. Presently I shall go down to help them bombard him in it, and try to persuade them that it will last longer if they do not squeeze the snowballs too hard, for Evan has prohibited "baking" altogether.
The "baking" of snowballs consists of making up quite a batch at once, then dipping them in water and leaving them out until they are hard as rocks, and really wicked missiles.
The process, unknown in polite circles here, though practised by the factory town "muskrats," was taught my babies by the Vanderveer boy during the Christmas holidays, which, being snowy and bright, drew the colony to the Bluffs for coasting, skating, etc., giving father such a river of senseless accidents to wade through that he threatens to absent himself and take refuge with Martin Cortright in his Irving Place den for holiday week next year. Father has ridden many a night when the roads would not admit of wheeling, without thought of complaint, to the charcoal camp to tend a new mother, a baby, or a woodchopper suddenly stricken with pneumonia, that is so common a disease among men living as these do on poor food, in tiny close cabins, and continually getting checks of perspiration in the variable climate. During the holidays he was called to the Bluffs in the middle of two consecutive nights, first to the Vanderveers, and requested to "drug" the second assistant butler, who was wildly drunk, and being a recent acquisition had been brought to officiate at the house party without due trial, "so that he wouldn't be used up the next day," and then to the Ponsonby's, where the family had evidently not yet gone to bed. Here he found that the patient, a visiting school friend of one of the daughters, from up the state, and evidently not used to the whirl of the pool, had skated all day, and, kept going by unaccustomed stimulants, taken half from ignorance, half from bravado, had danced the evening through at the club house, and then collapsed. Her hostess, careless through familiarity with it, had given her a dose of one of the chloral mixtures "to let her have a good night's sleep"; but instead it had sent her into hysterics, and she was calling wildly for her mother to come and take her home. Father returned from both visits fairly white with rage. Not at the unfortunates themselves, be it said, but at the cool nonchalance of those who summoned him.
The butler's was a common enough case. That of the young girl moved him to pity, and then indignation, as he sifted, out the cause of the attack, in order to treat her intelligently. This questioning Mrs. Ponsonby resented most emphatically, telling him "to attend to his business and not treat ladies as if they were criminals." This to a man of father's professional ability, and one of over sixty years of age in the bargain.
"Madam," said he, "you are a criminal; for to my thinking all preventable illness, such as this, is a crime. Leave the room, and when I have soothed this poor child I will go home; and remember, do not send for me again; it will be useless."
Never a word did he say of the matter at home, though I read part in his face; but the Ponsonby's housekeeper, a countrywoman of Martha Corkle's, took the news to her, adding "and the missus stepped lively too, she did; only, law's sakes, by next mornin' she'd forgot all about it, and, we being short-handed, wanted me to go down with James and get the Doctor up to spray her throat for a hoarseness, and I remindin' her what he'd said, she laughed and answered, 'He had a bear's manners,' but to go tell him she'd pay him city prices, and she bet that would mend him and them!"
I took good care not to repeat this to father, for he would be wounded. He is beginning to see that they use him as a sort of ambulance surgeon, but he does not yet understand the absolute money insolence of these people to those not of their "set," whom they consider socially or financially beneath them, and I hope he never may. He is so full of good will to all men, so pitiful toward weakness and sin, and has kept his faith in human nature through thirty-five years' practice in a factory town, hospital wards, charcoal camp, and among the odd characters of the scattering hillsides, that it would be an undying shame to have it shattered by the very people that the others regard with hopeless envy.
Shame on you, Barbara, but you are growing bitter. Yes, I know you do not yourself mind left-handed snubs and remarks about your being "comfortably poor," but you won't have that splendid old father of yours put upon and sneezed at, with cigarette sneezes, too. You should realize that they don't know any better, also that presently they may become dreadfully bored after the manner of degenerates and move away from the Bluffs, and then companionable, commuting, or summer resident people will have a chance to buy their houses.
Shrewd Martha Corkle foresaw the probable outcome the day that the foundation-stone for the first cottage was laid, even before our prettiest flower-hedged lane was shorn and torn up to make it into a macadam road, in order to shorten the time, for motor vehicles, between the Bluffs and the station by possibly three minutes. Not that the people were obliged to be on time for early trains, for they are mostly the reapers of other people's sowing; but to men of a certain calibre, born for activity, the feeling that, simply for the pleasure of it, they can wait until the very latest moment and still get there, is an amusement savouring of both chance and power.
"Yes, Mrs. Evan," said Martha, with as much of a sniff as she felt compatible with her dignity, "I knows colernies of folks not born to or loving the soil, but just trying to get something temporary out o' it in the way o' pleasure, as rabbits, or mayhap bad smelling water for the rheumatics. (It was the waters Lunnon swells came for down on the old estate.) To my thinkin' these pleasure colernies is bad things; they settles as senseless as a swarm of bees, just because their leader's lit there first; and when they've buzzed themselves out and moved on, like as not some sillies as has come gapin' too close is bit fatal or poisoned for life."
Well-a-day! Evan says that I take things to heart that belong to the head alone, while father says that, to his mind, feeling is much more of a need to-day than logic; so what can I do but still stumble along according to feeling.
A shout from beneath the window, then a soft snowball on it, the signal that the fort is finished,—yes, and the old Christmas tree stuck up top as a standard. Richard has built a queer-looking snow man with red knobs all over his chest and stomach, while Ian has achieved several most curious looking things with carrot horns,—whatever are they? Father has just driven in, and is laughing heartily, and Evan is waving to me.
* * * * *
Calm reigns again. The fort has surrendered, the final charge having been led by Corney Delaney. We've had hot milk all around, father has retired to the study to decipher a complicated letter from Aunt Lot, Evan has taken the boys into the den for a drawing lesson, and the mystery of the snow man is solved.
We do not intend to have the boys learn any regular lessons before another fall, but for the last two years I have managed that they should sit still and be occupied with something every morning, so that they may learn how to keep quiet without its being a strain,—shelling peas, cutting papers for jelly pots, stringing popcorn for the hospital Christmas tree, seeding raisins with a dozen for pay at the end—this latter is an heroic feat when it is accomplished without drawing the pay on the instalment plan—and many other little tasks, varied according to season.
Ian has a quick eye and comprehension, and he is extremely colour sensitive, but healthily ignorant of book learning, while Richard, how we do not know, has learned to read in a fashion of his own, not seeming yet to separate letters or words, but "swallowing the sense in lumps," as Martha puts it.
Yesterday, before our return, the weather being threatening, and the boys, keyed for mischief, clamouring and uneasy, very much as birds and animals are before a storm, father invited them to spend the afternoon with him in the study, and Martha Corkle, who mounts guard during my brief holidays, saw that their paws were scrubbed, and then relaxed her vigilance, joining Evan in the sewing room.
After many three-cornered discussions as to what liberty was to be allowed the boys in study and den, we decided that when they learned to respect books in the handling they should be free to browse as they pleased; the curiosities, rarities, and special professional literature, being behind glass doors, could easily be protected by lock and key. Father's theory is that if you want children to love books, no barriers must be interposed from the beginning, and that being so much with us the boys will only understand what is suited to their age, and therefore the harmful will pass them by. I was never shut from the library shelves, or mysteries made about the plain-spoken literature of other days, in spite of Aunt Lot's fuming. I did not understand it, so it did not tempt, and as I look back, I realize that the book of life was spread before me wisely and gradually, father turning page after page, then passing the task to Evan, so that I never had a shock or disillusionment.
I wonder if mother had lived if I should think differently, and be more apprehensive about the boys, womanwise? I think not; for I am a sun-loving Pagan all through, really born far back in an overlooked corner of Eden, and I prefer the forceful father influence that teaches one to overcome rather than the mother cult which is to bear, for so much is cumbrously borne in self-glorified martyrdom by women of their own volition.
I know that I am very primitive in my instincts and emotions; so are the boys, and that keeps us close, or so close, together.
Of course illustrated books are now the chief attraction to them in the library, and yesterday, when father went there with the boys, he supplied Ian, as usual, with "The Uncivilized Races of Man," which always opens of itself at the Mumbo Jumbo picture, and as a great treat for Richard, took down the three quarto volumes of Audubon's "Quadrupeds," and ranged them on a low stand with a stool in front of it. Then, being tired after a hard morning's work, he drew his big leather chair near the, fire, put on an extra log, and proceeded to—meditate. You will doubtless notice that when father or husband close their eyes, sitting in comfortable chairs by the fire, they are always meditating, and never sleeping, little nosey protestations to the contrary.
Father's meditations must have been long and deep, for when he was startled from them by the breaking in two of the hickory log, a gory spectacle met his eyes.
Richard was sitting on the hearth rug, which he had carefully covered with newspapers; these, as well as his hands and face, were stained a deep crimson, while with a stout silver fruit-knife he was hacking pieces from a great pulpy red mass before him.
Checking an exclamation of horror father started forward, to meet Richard's cheerful, frank gaze and the request, as he dug away persistently, to "Please wait one minute more, dranpa. I've got the heart all done, that big floppy piece is lungs, an' I've most made the liver. Not the good kind that goes wif curly bacon, but a nasty one like what we wear inside."
Then spying a medical chart with coloured pictures that was propped up against the wood box, father found the clew, and comprehended that Richard was giving himself a practical lesson in anatomy by trying to carve these organs from a huge mangel wurzel beet that he had rolled in from the root cellar. Did father scold him for mess-making, or laugh at his attempt that had little shape except in his own baby brain?
No, neither; he carefully closed the door against Martha's possible entrance, seriously and respectfully put the precious objects on a plate, to which he gave a place of honour on the mantel shelf, and after removing as far as possible all traces of beet from face and hands in his sacred office lavatory, he took Richard with him into the depths of the great chair and told the happy child his favourite rigmarole, all about the "three gentlemen of high degree," who do our housework for us. How the lungs, who are Siamese twins, called to the heart to pump them up some blood to air, because they were almost out of work, and how the big lazy liver lay on one side and groaned because he had drunk too much coffee for breakfast, and had a headache,—until Richard really felt that he had achieved something. So the first thing this morning he set about making a snow man, that he might put the beet vitals in their proper places, nearly convulsing father by their location. Though, as he told me, they were accurate, compared to the ideas of many trained nurses with whom he had come in contact.
But where was Ian during the beet carving? Father quite forgot him until, Richard falling asleep in his arms, he arose to tuck him up on the sofa. A sound of the slow turning of large pages guided him to the corner by the bay window where some bookcases, standing back to back, made a sort of alcove. There was Ian, flat upon his stomach, while before him the "Wandering Jew" legend, with the Doré pictures, lay open at the final scene—The Last Judgment—where the Jew, his journey over, looks up at the angels coming to greet him, while little devils pull vainly at his tattered boots. It was not the Jew or the angels, however, that held Ian's attention, and whose outlines he was tracing with his forefinger, but the devils, one big fellow with cows' horns and wings drooping like those of a moulting crow, and a bevy of imps with young horns and curly tails who were pulling a half-buried body toward the fiery pit by its hair.
Father explained the pictures in brief, and closed the book as quickly as possible, thinking the boy might be frightened in his dreams by the demons. But no, Ian was fascinated, not frightened. He would have liked the pygmies to come and play with him, and he turned to father with a sigh, saying, "They're bully pullers, dranpop. I guess if they and me pulled against Corney Delaney we could get him over the line all right," one of the boys' favourite pastimes being to play tug-of-war with the goat, the rope being fastened to its horns, but Corney was always conqueror.
Neither did Ian forget the imps quickly, as some children do their impressions, but strove to model them this morning, making round snow bodies, carrot horns, corncob legs, and funny celery tails; the result being positively startling and "overmuch like witch brats," as Effie declared, with bulging eyes.
They unfortunately did not perish with the fort, for Richard doesn't like them; but are now huddled in a group under the old Christmas tree, where Lark is barking at them.
* * * * *
I started to record our visit to Lavinia Dorman, but my "human documents," printed on vellum, came between, and I would not miss a word they have to say for the "Mechlinia Albertus Magnus," which father says is the rarest book in the world, though Evan disputes his preference, and Martin Cortright would doubtless prefer the first edition of Denton's "New York."
In past times, when we have visited Miss Lavinia, we have been fairly meek and decorous guests, following the programme that she planned with such infinite attention to detail that free will was impossible, and we often felt like paper dolls.
We had read her lament on the death of sociability and back yards with many a smile, and a sigh also, for to one born in the pool, every ripple that stirs it must be of importance, and it is impossible for outsiders to urge her to step out of the eddies altogether and begin anew, for New Yorkitis seems to be not only a rarely curable disease to those who have it, but an hereditary one as well.
As usual, Evan came to the rescue, as we sat in the den the night before our departure. "Let us turn tables on Miss Lavinia this time and take her to see our New York," he said, "since we are all quite tired of hers. Do you remember the time when we went to town to buy the trappings for the boys' first tree and were detained until Christmas morning by the delay of a cable I had to wait for? After dinner Christmas Eve we coaxed Miss Lavinia out with us and bought half a bushel of jolly little toys from street fakirs to take home, and then boarded an elevated train and rode about the city until after midnight, in and out the downtown streets and along the outskirts, to see all the poor people's Christmas trees in the second stories of tenements, cheap flats, and over little shops. How she enjoyed it, and said that she never dreamed that tenement people could be so happy; and she finally waxed so enthusiastic that she gave a silver half dollar each to four little newsboys crouching over the steam on a grating in Twenty-third Street, and when they cheered her and a policeman came along, we told the dear old soul that he evidently thought her a suspicious character, a counterfeiter at the very least. And she always spoke afterward with bated breath on the dangers of the streets late at night, and her narrow escape from arrest. We came to New York unsated and without responsibilities to push us, and looked from the outside in.
"No, Barbara, you did better than you knew that day six years ago, when we sat in the Somerset garden, and you persuaded me to become a commuter and let you plant a garden, promising never to talk about servants, and you've kept your word. I was dubious then, but now—if you only knew the tragedies I've seen among men of my means and aims these last few years, the struggle to be in the swim, or rather the backwater of it. The disappointment, the debt and despair, the pink teas and blue dinners given in cramped flats, the good fellows afraid to say no to wives whose hearts are set on being thought 'in it,' and the wives, haggard and hollow-eyed because the husbands wish to keep the pace by joining clubs that are supposedly the hall-marks of the millionnaire. New York is the best place for doing everything in but three—to be born in, to live in, and to die in."
"So you wish us to play bachelor girl and man for a few days, and herd Miss Lavinia about, which I suppose is the pith of these heroics of yours," I said, rather astonished, for Evan seldom preaches. "I never knew that you were such an anti-whirlpooler before, and I've at times felt selfish about keeping you at the old home, though not since the boys came, it's so healthy for them, bless them. Now I feel quite relieved," and I arranged a little crisp curl that will break loose in spite of persistent wetting, for men always seem to discourage curly hair, father keeping his shorn like a prize-fighter. This curl softens the rigour of Evan's horseshoe scowl, and when I fix it gives him a chance to put his arm around my waist, which is the only satisfactory way of discussing plans for a pleasure trip.
We arrived in town duly a little before dinner time. It is one of Evan's comfortable travelling habits, this always arriving at a new place at the end of day, so as to get the bearings and be adjusted when we awake next morning. To arrive in the morning, when paying a visit especially, is reversing the natural order of things; you are absent-minded until lunch, sleepy all the afternoon, dyspeptic at dinner, when, like as not, some one you have wholly forgotten or hoped to is asked to meet you. If the theatre follows, you recuperate, but if it is cards (of which I must have a prenatal hatred, it is so intense) with the apology, "I thought you might be tired and prefer a cosey game of whist to going out," you trump your partner's tricks, lead the short suits and mix clubs and spades with equal oblivion, and, finally, going to bed, leave a bad impression behind that causes your hostess to say, strictly to herself, if she is charitable, "How Barbara has deteriorated; she used to be a good talker, but then, poor dear, living in the country is so narrowing."
Of course if you merely go away to spend the day it is different; you generally keep on the move and go home to recover from it. And how men usually hate staying in other people's houses, no matter how wide they keep their doors open or how hospitably inclined they may be themselves. They seem to be self-conscious, and are constrained to alter their ordinary habits, which makes them miserable and feel as if they had given up their free will and identity. There are only two places that I ever dream of taking Evan, and Lavinia Dorman's is one of them.
When we had made ourselves smart for dinner and joined Miss Lavinia by the fire in her tiny library, we read by her hair that she was evidently intending to stay at home that evening, for her head has its nodes like the moon. She has naturally pretty, soft wavy hair, with now and then a silver streak running through it. I have often seen Lucy when she brushes it out at night. But because there is a dash of white in the front as if a powder puff had rested there a moment by accident, it is screwed into a little knob and covered with skilfully made yet perfectly apparent frontlets to represent the different styles of hair-dressing affected by women of abundant locks.
No. 1, worn at breakfast, is the most reasonable. It is quite plain, slightly waved, and has a few stray hairs carelessly curved where it joins the forehead. No. 2 is for rainy weather; the curls are fuzzy and evidently baked in; it requires a durable veil to keep it in countenance. Evan calls it the "rasher of bacon front." No. 3 is for calling and all entertainments where the bonnet stays on; it has a baby bang edge a trifle curled and a substantial cushion atop to hold the hat pins; while No. 4, the one she wore on our arrival, is an elaborate evening toupie with a pompadour rolling over on itself and drooping slightly over one eye while it melts into a butterfly bow and handful of puffs on the crown that in turn end in a single curl behind.
We had a dainty little dinner, grape fruit, clear soup, smelts, wild duck, salad, fruit, and coffee, and it was daintily served, for Miss Lavinia always keeps a good cook and remembers our dislike of the various forms of hash known as entrées.
The coffee was placed on a low mahogany stand by the library fire, and Miss Lavinia herself handed Evan a quaint little silver lamp by which to light his cigar, for she has all the cosmopolitan instincts of a woman who not only knows the world but had heard her father discuss tobacco, and really enjoyed the soothing fragrance of a good cigar.
As soon as we were settled and poor singed Josephus had tiptoed in by the fire, evidently trying to make up for his shabby coat by the profundity of his purr, Evan set forth his scheme to our hostess. We were to lodge and breakfast with her, but after that she was to play our way, and be at our disposal morning, afternoon, and evening, at luncheon, dinner, and supper, and the game was to be the old-fashioned one of "follow the leader!"
At first Miss Lavinia hesitated regretfully, it seemed so inhospitable,—she had thought to take us to several parlour concerts. Mrs. Vanderdonk, she that was a De Leyster, was going to throw open her picture gallery for charity, which would give us an opportunity to see her new house. In fact the undertow of the Whirlpool was still pulling at her ankles, even though she had freed her head, and it seemed impossible to her that there could be any New York other than the one she knew.
Finally her almost girlish vitality asserted itself, and bargaining that we should allow her one evening to have Sylvia Latham to dinner, she surrendered.
"Then we will begin at once by going to the theatre," said Evan, jumping up and looking at the clock, which pointed at a few minutes of eight.
"Have you tickets? Isn't this a little sudden?" asked Miss Lavinia with a little gasp, evidently remembering that her hair was arranged for the house only.
"No, I have no tickets, but Barbara and I always go in this way, and if we cannot get in at one place we try another, for usually some good seats are returned from the outside ticket offices a few minutes before the play begins. The downtown theatres open the earliest, so we can start near by and work our way upward, if necessary."
To my surprise in five minutes Miss Lavinia was ready, and we sallied forth, Evan sandwiched between us. As the old Dorman house is in the northeastern corner of what was far away Greenwich Village,—at the time-the Bouerie was a blooming orchard, and is meshed in by a curious jumble of thoroughfares, that must have originally either followed the tracks of wandering cattle or worthy citizens who had lost their bearings, for Waverley Place comes to an untimely end in West Eleventh Street, and Fourth Street collides with Horatio and is headed off by Thirteenth Street before it has a chance even to catch a glimpse of the river,—a few steps brought us into Fourteenth Street, where naming gas-jets announced that the play of "Jim Bludso" might be seen.
"Dear me!" ejaculated Miss Lavinia, "do people still go to this theatre?
The last time I came here it was in the seventies to see Mrs. Rousby as
Rosalind."
When we took our seats the play, founded, as the bill informed us, upon one of the Pike County Ballads, had begun, and Miss Lavinia soon became absorbed.
It is a great deal to be surrounded by an audience all thoroughly in the mood to be swayed by the emotion of the piece, plain people, perhaps, but solidly honest. Directly in front sat a young couple; the girl, in a fresh white silk waist, wore so fat and new a wedding ring upon her ungloved hand, which the man held in a tight grip, that I surmised that this trip into stageland was perhaps their humble wedding journey, from which they would return to "rooms" made ready by jubilant relatives, eat a wonderful supper, and begin life.
The next couple were not so entirely en rapport. The girl, who wore a gorgeous garnet engagement ring, also very new, merely rested her hand on her lover's coat sleeve where she could see the light play upon the stones.
When, after the first act, in answer to hearty rounds of applause, varied with whistles and shouts from the gallery, the characters stepped forward, not in the unnatural string usual in more genteel play-houses, where victor and vanquished join hands and bow, but one by one, each being greeted by cheers, hisses, or groans, according to the part, and when the villain appeared I found myself groaning with the rest, and though Evan laughed, I know he understood.
After it was over, as we went out into the night, Evan headed toward
Sixth Avenue instead of homeward.
"May I ask where we are going now?" said Miss Lavinia, meekly. She had really enjoyed the play, and I know I heard her sniff once or twice at the proper time, though of course I pretended not to.
"Going?" echoed Evan. "Only around the corner to get three fries in a box, with the usual pickle and cracker trimmings, there being no restaurant close by that you would care for; then we will carry them home and have a little supper in the pantry, if your Lucy has not locked up the forks and taken the key to bed. If she has, we can use wooden toothpicks."
At first Miss Lavinia seemed to feel guilty at the idea of disturbing Lucy's immaculate pantry at such an hour; but liberty is highly infectious. She had spent the evening out without previous intent; the next step was to feel that her soul was her own on her return. She unlocked the forks, Evan unpacked the upstairs ice-chest for the dog's head bass that wise women always have when they expect visiting Englishmen, even though they are transplanted and acclimated ones, and she ate the oysters, still steaming from their original package, with great satisfaction. After we had finished Miss Lavinia bravely declared her independence of Lucy. The happy don't-care feeling produced by broiled oysters and bass on a cold night is a perfect revelation to people used to after-theatre suppers composed of complications, sticky sweets, and champagne.
When we had finished I thought for a moment that she showed a desire to conceal the invasion by washing the dishes, but she put it aside, and we all went upstairs together.
A little shopping being in order, Evan took himself off in the morning, leaving Miss Lavinia and me to prowl, after we had promised to meet him at a downtown restaurant at one.
Little boys are delightful things to shop for,—there is no matching this and that, no getting a yard too much or too little, everything is substantial and straight away, and all you have to do when the bundles are sent home by express is to strengthen the sewing on of buttons and reinforce the seats and knees of everyday pantikins from the inside.
We strolled about slowly, and at half past one were quite ready to sit still and not only eat our lunch but watch business mankind eat his. If any one wishes to feel the clutch and motive power of the Whirlpool let him go to the Mazarin any time between twelve-thirty and two o'clock. The streets themselves are surging with men, all hurrying first in one direction, then another, until it seems as if there either must be a fire somewhere, or else a riot afoot. The doors of the restaurant open and shut incessantly, corks pop, knives and forks rattle, everything is being served from a sandwich and a glass of beer to an elaborate repast with a wine to every course, while through and above it all the stress of business is felt. Of course the great financiers usually have luncheon served in their offices, to save them from the crowd; besides, it might give common humanity a chance to scrutinize their countenances, and perchance read what they thought upon some question of moment, for it sometimes seems as if the eye of the New York journalist has X-ray power. On the other hand, the humbler grade, with less of either time or money to spare, go to the "quick lunch" counters and "dime-in-the-slot" sandwich concerns; yet Evan says that the gathering at the Mazarin is fairly representative.
Miss Lavinia was bewildered. Her downtown visits to her broker's office were always made in a cab, with Lucy to stay in it as a preventative of the driver's taking a sly glass or a thief snatching her lap-robe—she never uses public carriage rugs. She clung to the obsolete idea that Wall Street was no place for women, and saw, as in a dream, the daintily dressed stenographers, bookkeepers, and confidential clerks mingling with the trousered ranks in the street, not to mention the damsels in tidy shirtwaists, with carefully undulated hair and pointed, polished finger nails, who were lunching at near-by tables, sometimes seemingly with their employers as well as with other male or female friends.
"I wonder how much of all this is bad for uptown home life?" Miss Lavinia queried, gazing around the room; but as she did not address either of us in particular, we did not answer, as we did not know,—who does?
A spare half-hour before closing time we gave to the Stock Exchange, and it was quite enough, for some one was short on something, and pandemonium reigned. As we stood on the corner of Rector Street and Broadway, hesitating whether to take surface or elevated cars, faint strains of organ music from Trinity attracted us.
"Service or choir practice; let us go in a few moments," said Evan, to whom the organ is a voice that never fails to draw. We took seats far back, and lost ourselves among the shadows. A special service was in progress, the music half Gregorian, and the congregation was too scattered to mar the feeling that we had slipped suddenly out of the material world. The shadows of the sparrows outside flitted upward on the stained glass windows, until it seemed as if the great chords had broken free and taking form were trying to escape.
Now and then the door would open softly and unaccustomed figures slip in and linger in the open space behind the pews. Aliens, newly landed and wandering about in the vicinity of their water-front lodging-houses, music and a church appealed to their loneliness. Some stood, heads bowed, and some knelt in prayer and crossed themselves on leaving; one woman, lugging a great bundle tied in a blue cloth, a baby on her arm and another clinging to her skirts, put down her load, bedded the baby upon it, and began to tell her beads.
The service ended, and the people scattered, but the organist played on, and the boy choir regathered, but less formally.
"What is it?" we asked of the verger, who was preparing to close the doors.
"There will be a funeral of one of the oldest members of the congregation to-morrow, and they are about to go through the music of the office."
Suddenly a rich bass voice, strong in conviction, trumpeted forth—"I am the resurrection and the life!" And only a stone's throw away jingled the money market of the western world. The temple and the table of the money changers keep step as of old. Ah, wonderful New York!
* * * * *
The afternoon was clear staccato and mild withal, and the sun, almost at setting, lingered above orange and dim cloud banks at the end of the vista Broadway made.
"Are you tired? Can you walk half a dozen blocks?" asked Evan of Miss
Lavinia, as we came out.
"No, quite the reverse; I think that I am electrified," she replied briskly.
"Then we will go to Battery Park," he said, turning south.
"Battery Park, where all the immigrants and roughs congregate! What an idea! We shall catch smallpox or have our pockets picked!"
"Have you ever been there?" persisted Evan.
"Yes, once, I think, when steamship passengers lathed at the barge office, and of course I've seen it often in going to Staten Island to visit Cousin Lucretia."
Evan's only reply was to keep on walking. We did not cross the "bowling green," but swung to the right toward Pier I, and took the path between old Castle Garden and the sea wall at the point where one of the fire patrol boats was resting, steam up and hose nozzles pointed, lance couchant wise.
Ah, what a picture! No wonder Miss Lavinia adjusted her glasses quickly (she is blindly nearsighted), caught her breath, and clung to Evan's arm as the fresh sea breeze coming up from the Narrows wheeled her about. Before us Staten Island divided the water left and right, while between it and the Long Island shore, just leaving quarantine and dwarfing the smaller craft, an ocean liner, glistening with ice, was coming on in majestic haste. All about little tugs puffed and snorted, and freighters passed crosswise, parting the floating ice and churning it with their paddles, scarcely disturbing the gulls, that flew so close above the water that their wings touched, or floated at leisure.
The sun that had been gilding everything from masthead to floating spar gathered in its forces, and for one moment seemed to rest upon Liberty's torch, throwing the statue into clear relief, and then dropped rapidly behind the river's night-cloud bank, and presently lights began to glimmer far and near, the night breath rose from the water, and the wave-cradled gulls slept.
"Do you like our New York?" asked Evan, turning to go.
"Don't speak," whispered Miss Lavinia, hanging back.
But we were no sooner on the elevated train than she found use for her tongue, for whose feet should I stumble over on entering, quite big feet too, or rather shoes, for the size of the man, but Martin Cortright's, and of course he was duly presented to Miss Lavinia.
V
FEBRUARY VIOLETS
That night Miss Lavinia was forced to ask "for time for 'forty winks'" before she could even think of dinner, and Evan and I sat them out in the deep, hospitable chairs by the library fire. We were not tired, simply held in check; country vitality shut off from certain ways for six months is not quickly exhausted, but, on the other hand, when it is spent, it takes several months to recuperate.
The first night that I leave home for these little excursions I have a sense of virtue and simmering self-congratulation. I feel that I am doing a sensible thing in making a break from what the theorists call "the narrowing evenness of domestic existence." Of course it is a good thing for me to leave father and the boys, and see and hear something new to take back report of to them; it is better for them to be taught appreciation of me by absence; change is beneficial to every one, etc., etc., and all that jargon.
The second night I am still true to the theory, but am convinced that to the highly imaginative, a city day and its doings may appear like the Biblical idea of eternity—reversed—"a thousand years." The third night I am painfully sure of this, and if I remain away over a fourth, which is very rare, I cast the whole theory out to the winds of scepticism, and am so restless and disagreeable that Evan usually suggests that I take a morning train home and do not wait for him, which is exactly the responsibility that I wish him to assume, thus saving me from absolute surrender.
We always have a good time on our outings, and yet after each the pleasure of return grows keener, so that occasionally Evan remonstrates and says: "Sometimes I cannot understand your attitude; you appear to enjoy every moment keenly, and yet when you go home you act as if you had mercifully escaped from a prison that necessitated going through a sort of thanksgiving ceremony. It seems very irrational."
But when I ask him if it would be more rational to be sorry to come home, he does not answer,—at least not in words.
"Where do we dine to-night?" I asked Evan, as he was giving unmistakable signs of "meditation," and I heard by the footsteps overhead that Miss Lavinia was stirring.
"At the Art and Nature Club. You can dress as much or as little as you please, and we can get a table in a cosey corner, and afterward sit about upstairs for an hour, for there will be music to-night. I have asked Martin Cortright to join us. It has its interesting side, this—a transplanted Englishman married to a country girl introducing old bred-in-the-bone New Yorkers to New Manhattan."
When I go to town my costuming consists merely in change of waists, as street and public conveyances alike are a perpetual menace to one's best petticoats, so in a few moments we were on our way uptown.
We did not tell Miss Lavinia where we were going until we were almost there, and she was quite upset, as dining at the two or three hotels and other places affected by the Whirlpoolers implies a careful and special toilet to run the gantlet of society reporters, for every one is somebody in one sense, though in another "nobody is really any one."
She was reassured, however, the moment that she drew her high-backed oak chair up to the table that Evan had reserved in a little alcove near the fireplace. Before the oysters arrived, and Martin Cortright appeared to fill the fourth seat, she had completely relaxed, and was beaming at the brass jugs and pottery beakers ranged along a shelf above the dark wainscot, and at the general company, while the warmth from the fire logs gave her really a very pretty colour, and she began to question Martin as to who all these people, indicating the rapidly filling-up tables, were. But Martin gazed serenely about and confessed he did not know.
The people came singly, or in twos and threes, men and women together or alone, a fact at which Miss Lavinia greatly marvelled. Greetings were exchanged, and there was much visiting from table to table, as if the footing was that of a private house.
"Nice-looking people," said Miss Lavinia, meditatively scrutinizing the room through her lorgnette without a trace of snobbery in her voice or attitude, yet I was aware that she was mentally drawing herself apart. "Some of them quite unusual, but there is not a face here that I ever saw in society. Are they members of the Club? Where do they come from? Where do they live?"
Evan's lips shut together a moment before he answered, and I saw a certain steely gleam in his eye that I always regarded as a danger signal.
"Perhaps they might ask the same questions about you," he answered; "though they are not likely to, their world is so much broader. They are men and women chiefly having an inspiration, an art or craft, or some vital reason for living besides the mere fact that it has become a habit. They are none of them rich enough to be disagreeable or feel that they own the right to trample on their fellows. They all live either in or near New York, as best suits their means, vocations, and temperaments. Men and women together, they represent, as well as a gathering can, the hopeful spirit of our New York of New Manhattan that does not grovel to mere money power."
Miss Lavinia seemed a little abashed, but Martin Cortright, who had been a silent observer until now, said: "It surprises me to see fraternity of this sort in the midst of so many institutions of specialized exclusiveness and the decadence of clubs, that used to be veritable brotherhoods, by unwise expansion. I like the general atmosphere, it seems cheerful and, if one may blend the terms, conservatively Bohemian."
"Come upstairs before the music begins, so that we can get comfortably settled in the background, that I may tell you who some of these 'unknown-to-Whirlpool-society' people are. You may be surprised," said Evan to Miss Lavinia, who had by this time finished her coffee.
The rooms were cheerful with artistic simplicity. The piano had been moved from the lounging room into the picture gallery opposite to where a fine stained glass window was exhibited, backed by electric lights.
We stowed ourselves away in a deep seat, shaped something like an old-fashioned school form, backed and cushioned with leather, to watch the audience gather. Every phase of dress was present, from the ball gown to the rainy weather skirt, and enough of each grade to keep one another in countenance. About half the men wore evening suits, but those who did not were completely at their ease.
There was no regular ushering to seats, but every one was placed easily and naturally. Evan, who had Miss Lavinia in charge, was alert, and rather, it seemed to me, on the defensive; but though Martin asked questions, he was comfortably soothing, and seemed to take in much at a glance.
That short man with the fine head, white hair and beard, aquiline nose, and intense eyes is not only a poet, but the first American critic of pure literature. He lives out of town, but comes to the city daily for a certain stimulus. The petite woman with the pretty colour who has crossed the room to speak to him is the best known writer of New England romance. That shy-looking fellow standing against the curtain at your right, with the brown mustache and broad forehead, is the New England sculptor whose forcible creations are known everywhere, yet he is almost shrinkingly modest, and he never, it seems, even in thought, has broken the injunction of "Let another praise thee, not thine own lips."
Half a dozen promising painters are standing in the doorway talking to a young woman who, beginning with newspaper work, has stepped suddenly into a niche of fiction. The tall, loose-jointed man at the left of the group, the editor of a conservative monthly, has for his vis-à-vis the artist who has had so much to do with the redemption of American architecture and decoration from the mongrel period of the middle century. Another night you may not see a single one of these faces, but another set, yet equally interesting.
Meanwhile Martin Cortright had discovered a man, a financier and also a book collector of prominence, who was reputed to have a complete set of some early records that he had long wished to consult; he had never found a suitable time for meeting him, as the man, owing to having been oftentime the prey of both unscrupulous dealers and parasitic friends, was esteemed difficult.
Infected by the freedom of his surroundings, Martin plucked up courage and spoke to him, the result being an interchange of cards, book talk, and an invitation to visit the library.
Then the music began, and lasted not above an hour, with breathing and chatting intervals, followed by claret cup and lemonade. A pleasant evening's recreation, with no opportunity of accumulating the material for either mental or physical headache.
The night air was very soft, but of that delusive quality that in February portends snow, and not the return of bluebirds, as the uninitiated might expect. Miss Lavinia was fascinated by the lights and motion of Herald Square, and at her suggestion, it being but a little past ten, we strolled homeward down Broadway instead of taking a car. Her delight at the crowd of promenaders, the picturesque florists' shops, and the general buzz of night life was almost pathetic. Her after-dark experience having been to get to and from specified places as quickly as possible with Lucy for escort, solicitous when in a street car lest they should pass their destination, and trembling even more when in a cab lest the driver should have committed the variable and expansive crime of "taking something." She bought a "ten o'clock edition" of the Telegram, some of "Match Mary's" wares, that perennially middle-aged woman who haunts the theatre region, and suggested that we have ice-cream soda at a particularly glittering drug store, but this desire was switched into hot bouillon by Evan, who retains the Englishman's dislike of chilling his internals.
New York is really a fine city by night, that is, in parts at least, and yet it is very strange how comparatively few of the rank and file of its inhabitants walk abroad to see the spectacle.
By lamplight the scars and wounds of subways appear less vivid, and the perpetual skeleton of the skyscraper merges in its background. The occasional good bit of architecture steps out boldly from the surrounding shadows of daylight discouragement. City life does not seem to be such an exhausting struggle, and even the "misery wagons," as I always call ambulances to myself, look less dreary with the blinking light fore and aft, for you cannot go far in New York without feeling the pitying thrill of their gongs.
After the brightness of Broadway the side streets seemed cavernous. As we turned westward and crossed Sixth Avenue a dark figure, outlined full length against the blazing window of a corner liquor saloon, lined with mirrors, in some way fixed my attention. It was a woman's figure, slight, and a little crouching. The hat was gay and set on puffy hair, the jacket brave with lace, but the skirt was frayed where it lapped the pavement, and the boot that was pushed from beneath it, as if to steady a swaying frame, was thin and broken. I do not know why I looked back after I had passed, but as I did so, I saw the girl, for she was little more, pull a scrap of chamois from a little bag she carried and quickly rub rouge upon her hollow cheeks, using the saloon mirror for a toilet glass. But when I saw the face itself I stopped short, giving Evan's arm such a tug that he also turned.
The woman was Jennie, the Oakland baker's only daughter, who had no lack of country beaus, but was flattered by the attentions of one of the Jenks-Smith's butlers, whose irreproachable manners of the count-in-disguise variety made the native youths appear indeed uncouth. She grew discontented, thought it beneath her social position to help her mother in the shop, and went to town to work in a store, it was said until her wedding, which was to be that autumn. Father worried over her and tried to advise, but to no purpose. This was more than two years ago. The butler left the Jenks-Smith's, and we heard that he was a married man, with a family who had come to look him up.
Jennie's mother said she had a fine place in a store, and showed us, from time to time, presents the girl had sent her, so thus to find the truth was a shock indeed. Not but what all women who are grown must bear upon them the weight of the general knowledge of evil, but it is none the less awful to come face to face on a street corner with one who was the pretty village girl, whom you last saw standing behind the neat counter with a pitcher of honeysuckles at her elbow as she filled a bag with sugar cookies for your clamouring babies.
* * * * *
I suppose that I must have exclaimed aloud, for Jennie started back and saw us, then dropped her bag and began to grope about for it as if she was in a dream.
"Can't we do something?" I whispered to Evan, but he only gravely shook his head.
"Give her this for the boys' sake," I begged, fumbling in his change pocket and finding a bill there. "Tell her it's home money from the Doctor's daughter—and—to go home—or—buy—a—pair of shoes."
At first I thought she was not going to take it; but having found her bag she straightened herself a moment, and without looking at Evan gave me a glance, half defiant, half beseeching, grasped the money almost fiercely, and scuttled away in the darkness, and I found that I was crying. But Evan understood,—he always does,—and I hope that if the boys read this little book fifteen or twenty years hence, that they will also.
[Illustration: FEBRUARY VIOLETS.]
As we reached the door the first snowflakes fell. Poor Jennie!
* * * * *
The third day of our stay began in country quiet. In fact we did not wake up until eight; everything was snowbound, and even the occasional horse cars that pass the front of the house had ceased their primitive tinkling. The milkman did not come, neither did the long crispy French rolls, a New York breakfast institution for which the commuters confessedly have no substitute, and it was after nine before breakfast was served.
Evan, who had disappeared, returned at the right moment with his newspaper and two bulky tissue paper bundles all powdered with snow, one of which he gave to Miss Lavinia, the other to me. I knew their contents the moment I set eyes on them, and yet it was none the less a heart-warming surprise.
Down in a near-by market is a little florist's shop, so small that one might pass twenty times without noticing it; the man, a local authority, who has kept it for years, makes a specialty of the great long-stemmed single violets, whose fleeting fragrance no words may express. They call them Californias now, but they are evidently the opulent kin of those sturdy, dark-eyed Russian violets of my mother's garden, and as they mean more than any other flower to me, Evan always brings them to me when I come to town. This morning he trudged out in the snow, hardly thinking this man would have any, but by mere chance the grower, suspecting snow, brought in his crop the night before, and in spite of the storm I had the first morning breath of these flowers of a day.
Miss Lavinia sniffed and sighed, and then buried her aristocratic, but rather chilly, nose in the mass. "I feel like a young girl with her first bouquet," she said presently.
"Ah, how good it is to be given something with a meaning. Most people think that to be able to buy what they wish, within reason, is perfect happiness, but it isn't. Barbara, you and this man of yours quite unsettle me and shake my pet theories. You show sides of things in my own birthplace that I never dreamed of looking up, and you convince me, when I am on the wane, that married friendship is the only thing worth living for. It's too bad of you, but fortunately for me the notion passes off after you have gone away," and Miss Lavinia, after loving her violets a bit longer, put them in a chubby jug of richly chased old silver. After breakfast we tried to coax her to bundle up and come with us to Washington Square to see the crystal trees in all their beauty; but that was too unorthodox a feat. To plough through snow in rubber boots in the very heart of the city was entirely too radical a move. She knew people about the square, and I suppose did not wish to be seen by them, so she was obliged to content herself with sight of the snow draperies and ice jewels that decked the trees and shrubs of the doomed back yard.
Even though the storm called a halt in our plans for Miss Lavinia, Evan and I had a little errand of our own, our annual pilgrimage to see the auction room where we first met that February afternoon. The room is not there now, to be sure, but we go to see it all the same, and have our little thrill and buy something near the place to take home to the boys, and we shall continue to come each year unless public improvement causes the thoroughfare itself to be hung up in the sky, which is quite possible.
Then Evan went down town, and I returned to lunch with Miss Lavinia, for, if possible, we were to call on Sylvia Latham and ask her to dinner on the morrow, the last day of our stay. Miss Lavinia proposed to invite Sylvia to spend the night also, that we might become acquainted upon a basis less formal than a mere dinner.
Shortly after three o'clock we started in a coupé with two stout horses driven by a man above suspicion of having "taken anything," at least at the start. It is a curious fact that eight or ten inches of damp snow can so nearly paralyze the transportation facilities of a city like New York, but such is the case. The elevated rails become slippery, the wheels will not grip, and the entire wheel traffic of the streets betakes itself to the tracks of the surface lines, where trolley, truck, and private carriage all move along solemnly in a strange procession, like a funeral I once saw outside of Paris, where the hearse was followed by two finely draped carriages, then by the business wagon of the deceased, filled with employees, the draperies on this arranged so as not to disturb the sign,—he kept a pâtisserie,—while a donkey cart, belonging to the market garden that supplied the deceased with vegetables, brought up the rear.
In the middle and lower parts of New York the streets and their life dominate the houses; on the east side of the park the houses dominate the streets, and the flunkies, whose duty it is either to let you in or preferably to keep you out of these houses, control the entire situation. I may in the course of time come to respect or even like some of these mariners of the Whirlpool, but as a class their servants are wholly and unendurably objectionable, and the sum of all that is most aggravating.
The house faced the park. A carpet was spread down the steps, but we could not conjecture if it was an ordinary custom in bad weather, or if some function was afoot. Evidently the latter, as I had barely touched the bell when the door flew open. Two liveried attendants were within, one turned the door knob and the other presented his tray for the cards, while in the distance a third, wearing the dress of a butler or majordomo, stood by closed portières.
We had asked for Mrs. and Miss Latham, and evidently the combination caused confusion. No. 1 remained by the front door, No. 2, after a moment's hesitation, motioned us to seats near the fireplace in the great reception hall, a room by itself, wainscoted with carved oak, that also formed the banisters and the railing of a sort of balcony above, while the walls were hung with rich-hued tapestries, whose colours were revealed by quaint shield-shaped electroliers of gilded glass. Man No. 3 disappeared within the portières bearing our cards. In a moment he reappeared, drew them apart, and stood aside as his mistress swept out, the same cold blond woman I had seen in the market, but now most exquisitely clad in a pale gray gown of crêpe embroidered with silver fern fronds and held at the neck by a deep collar of splendid pearls, pearl rings alone upon her hands, in her hair a spray of silver mistletoe with pearls for berries. She made an exquisite picture as she advanced swiftly to meet us, a half smile on her lips and one pink-tipped hand extended. I love to look at beautiful women, yet the sight of her gave me a sort of Undine shiver.