The talkers

The daily grind down town was beginning to wear on young Sutton. It was not the routine of business, not the new responsibility that dragged him; it was the constant depression, the interminable whining. Gloom possessed the cañons of the district like a dirty fog from the bay. Nobody did anything except snivel about the rottenness exposed by the several investigating committees, Civil, State, and Federal.

The interminable jeremiad set men’s nerves on edge; nothing was to be looked for from the moribund Administration and only mischief came from it—the last spiteful and convulsive clawing at the people who had done it to death.

Pygmy wrath, miserable bunkum, sullen inertia—these were to be endured until March. Then the rat-pit would be empty and ready for fumigation.

Meanwhile, those joyless bacteria which feed and propagate on gloom became noisier in their bigoted zeal, boasting of their ability to blackmail a cowardly Congress. Paul Pry was at the keyhole; Mrs. Grundy at her window; Torquemada junior, an itinerant advance-agent, notifying a half-educated people from the Gulf to the Lakes that the incredibly cruel and stupid old god of Sabbath had come back to burn all heretics.

“Believe as I believe or I’ll roast you,” bawled Torquemada junior. “It pleases me to twiddle my thumbs on Sunday; and you’d better twiddle yours or I’ll know the reason why!”

Time’s great pendulum was being swung by fools too violently and too far forward. The backward swing was nearly due. A patient people, mostly ignorant or semi-educated, looked on, confused by the din of the fools and the Talkers.

But they were the people who had suddenly arisen in spite of the Administration and battered the face of Destiny out of all recognition.

The people who had burned for a space, transfigured in the blazing beauty of their Flaming Sword. And had dulled to a cinder, and returned to their millions of wallows, grunting of grandeur—the wonder, laughter, and sorrow of the world they saved for the sake of Jesus Christ.

The lumber business, in common with all affairs, remained in the doldrums.

Financing anything through old and accustomed channels was now the idlest of dreams.

Also an open winter in the Northland did not help. There was little snow. Logs were difficult to move. And when, late in January, arctic cold settled over a naked North, it was not good for forests.

Stuart Sutton worried a great deal. He worried about logs; he feared for the new plantations unprotected by snow. They sent him reports of depredations by deer—miles of browse—balsam, hemlock, Norway spruce cleaned out.

Slashings and danger of fire in reforested regions were ever in his mind; the weevil was a nightmare, too. But most terrifying of all to him was the white-pine blight—that dreadful, leprous thing out of the Orient. And he turned the ledger pages devoted to extirpation of wild and cultivated currant and gooseberry, and figured out the cost of saving from extinction the noblest tree that ever grew in North America.

Only less noble was the chestnut, now, from another leprous blight, almost extinct. And upon the lumber-men of the land lay the responsibility for the survival of the white pine.

Letters from his father and mother in California were a trifle disturbing, too. They had heard that their son and heir infrequently decorated those social circles wherein, since Colonial days, the Hudson River Suttons were accustomed to gyrate. They confidently laid it to the exactions of business, fatigue from overwork. And cautioned him against it.

Which tender admonition hurt his Sutton conscience; in a rush of remorse he accepted a number of invitations; reappeared among his kind for a few weeks, bored and impatient at losing all that time away from Gilda; and then dropped out again—Gilda and the lumber business being all he could possibly attend to in life.

Suspecting this state of affairs, the girl chided him.

“You mustn’t give up your family’s friends,” she said. “Such ties are generations in making. They are worth something, mean something. If one has an undisputed place in the social fabric, one should not vacate it without a reason. I know how that is,” she added with a light, unconscious sigh.

They were seated before the fire in her living room. He reached over and rested one hand on hers.

“Do you care to tell me a little, dear?” he asked.

She did not misunderstand him, though not prepared for a demand of confidence so intimate.

After a short silence, and absently caressing his hand where it lay on her lap:

“There was domestic unhappiness when I was a child. My parents separated. Mortification made my father a recluse. My mother spent the remainder of her life in Europe—until the tragic end.”

She took his hand between both of hers, pressed it, clung a little:

“The courts,” she said, “left me under joint control.... I understand, now, that my father’s attitude toward me was not aversion; it was that the sight of me made his shame and grief unendurable.

“My mother was much younger. She cared for gaiety and the brightness of things. She was very pretty; she had ample means, friends ... a position, once.... And still a position on the Continent.... It was obvious that my place was in boarding school. Under the court’s ruling I could not remain more than a fortnight with my mother. I could have gone home to father, but he did not want me.

“So—you see what position in the world we had was vacated. There was no longer any circle; no longer a family; nor family friends.

“There were—and are—relatives. They write to me, still. They are very kind.... But I prefer liberty—the liberty of reserving my parents’ affairs for my own private attention. Kinship can be a burden.... I could never endure being accounted for, explained ... at the expense of family privacy ... and the domestic misfortune of two dead people who gave me birth ... and whose sorrow is no concern of strangers.”

Presently he said: “It is for you to decide, of course. And yet, presentable relatives mean almost anything to a girl alone.”

The Hudson River Suttons who spoke out of his mouth were right. Perhaps Gilda Greenway was righter.

“I can’t, Stuart. I am not very discreet, not even cautious. You know that. I’m not fastidious. You know how we met. But whatever else I do—whatever I condescend to, unworthy perhaps—I can’t go back and let my relatives account for me at the expense of my father and mother.”

He made no attempt to discuss the matter. Perhaps he felt that, when the time came, it would smooth their way with his own relatives and friends if Gilda had somebody presentable to account for her.

However, he said nothing further on the subject, nor did she.

Also, it was time to change her gown, for she had persuaded him to go to a reception at the Creative Arts Association with her—the girl refusing to neglect any opportunity to enlarge the pathetically small and badly mixed circle wherein she had her only social exercise.

It was a tea in aid of a drive to provide the starving inhabitants of Roumelia with fezzes.

Stuart usually lent himself to this sort of thing when she asked him, speculating uneasily at times upon his own future and unaided ability to lead her into a duller, more respectable circle—the sacred water-hole, trodden deep, hatched up, and trampled by generations of social pachyderms and gazelles.

“Or we’ll make our own wallow,” he concluded. But the alternative caused him a slight pang when he remembered the family corral on the Hudson, the old-time gardens, the ancient domain, tradition, tenantry, dirty window-panes and all.

They arrived at the Creative Arts Association in Sutton’s car.

The function was in full blast; the Talkers were talking; big lions, little lions, fat lions, meagre lions, mangy lions, all were roaring. Potential pup-lions, pathetic, lovable adolescents, yapped shyly when noticed and patronised. There was the Fifth Avenue matron with a home on the Hudson and stringy hair, who condescended for charity’s sake. Other fashionables were there, gracious, profusely democratic, patiently ready to endure, for the sake of Roumelia and half a million red fezzes.

The Creative Arts were there, physically hungry, mentally ravenous to filch material, but mostly bursting with necessity for vocal self expression.

Listeners were few, Talkers dominated. Here an intimidated world was told where it got off sixty times every minute.

On the edge of this milling mess of mouths Gilda stood, unconsciously holding tight to Stuart, who good humouredly identified for her the fauna:

Mrs. Marmot de Grasse, prominent at Newport and in Greenwich Village. Her Article in The Post, “Should an Art Student Pay $10,000 for a Studio?” was shaking Fourth Street to its profoundest cabarets.

Miss Smith-Durian, the wealthiest maiden lady in Tuxedo, had offered a prize of $300 annually for the best novel by a New Yorker. The novel to remain the property of Miss Smith-Durian.

Harry Stayr came up grinning like Silenus, and shook hands with Gilda.

“Heavens,” he said, “what food. All squashy; and a fake punch to add the classic insult.”

“It’s so interesting,” said Gilda, “——and one doesn’t think of food.”

“One does!” retorted Stayr with a grimace. “Mrs. Bazelius Grandcourt swindled me into coming, promising booze. I gave up ten bones. You’re stung, too, I suppose.”

“Mr. Derring sent me tickets,” said Gilda. “Who is that preparing to sing, Harry?”

It proved to be the lovely Farrar, immortally young, always generous in charity.

The Talkers ceased for a while: Heaven opened; then the celestial transformation faded, drowned by the “noise of the storks.”

Julian Fairless presented himself, saluted Gilda’s hand, turned to interpret and identify at her eager request:

“They’re all there. That’s the new novelist, Theodore Howard Belper—small-town stuff, you know—wrote ‘The Town Pump’—the last word in rube stuff.”

“Why do you suppose he wrote it?” she asked with a distressed smile.

“Small towns want small-town stuff.”

“But New York reads it.”

“New York’s the smallest of ’em all, only it doesn’t know it,” sneered Stayr. “That solemn guy, Gilda, is Horatio McPhoon, the sculptor. He has submitted a plan to make a bronze statue of the President a mile high, and erect it on top of Pikers Peak.”

“Oh, dear,” she said unhappily.

Fairless pointed out to her in rapid succession the bald, wide-eared editor of the Daily Pillar; Montgomery Skippy, the great publisher and platitudinarian; young Rawmore, the romantic actor, idol of the metropolis; Fitz-William Paunder, patron, director, founder, life-member of everything corporate in Gotham; Mrs. Charles Gilderling, a beauty once, socially formidable, and mother of several already notorious young Gilderlings.

And there were the Talkers, Leopold Pouncing, the critic; old Hunkerson, book-reviewer, brilliant as a spitting cat in the dark; his confrère, the ponderous gabbler on the Daily Forum, Seth Hawver; Scratchowsky, the Polish etcher; Sir Daniel Brunderby of the Embassy, worn and perplexed by Yankee and Sinn Fein alike, but talking hands-across, God bless him!—the only Talker of them all who had a word to say worth hearing.

Mrs. Gillately Gray fluttered up, always bright and birdish: and “How d’you do, Mr. Stayr, Mr. Fairless, Mr. Sutton—isn’t it too wonderful for poor Roumelia?—How d’you do, Miss Greenway!——” fluttering to the presentation, toujours oiseau, preening the nearest feather, her own or another’s—vrai tête de linotte.

After migration, Stayr said: “Oiseau de flamme et bec de gaz! Brrr! What a humming-bird!”

Fairless said to Gilda: “She has the social importance conferred by the social column. Her opera box drips diamonds. There’s nothing else to her.”

“Oh, come,” said Sutton; “she’s civil and anxious to please. Why the devil do you knock everybody, Julian?”

“You don’t have to,” retorted Fairless. “But your boosting is as snobbish as my knocking. I don’t know which is the more sickening, after all——”

The greatest of living pianists began to play. It was an artistic mistake; the place was unsuitable; but it was a charitable success. Roumelia could be proud of her fezzes.

“If you’ll shake this and come around to my place I’ll shake something in a shaker that would shake a Shaker to——”

Julian’s elbow in his stomach silenced him.

The most famous of string-quartettes was deliciously beginning.

But this, too, like all happiness, came to its own enchanting end. Again the place was clamorous with the talk of the Talkers.

Sutton whispered in Gilda’s ear: “Who would you care to meet, darling?”

She ventured a preference or two, shyly. The men he went after, rounded up, and fetched. To the women he took Gilda, casually secure in his own self assurance.

And Gilda was too lovely to suspect—until she had gone—when the inevitable feminine reaction occurs, and any man is under suspicion who presents one woman to another.

She had enjoyed every moment. She said so to Stuart.

“I know where you belong,” he said glumly. “And you’re going there some day.”

He meant, of course, the sacred water-hole.

Gilda surmised it, looked at him tenderly, humorously, inclined to laugh, wholly inclined to adore him and his funny social instincts.

To certain English people there are no particular social distinctions to be expected in America. The only difference they notice is between those who are amusing and those who are not.

Perhaps Gilda’s parents might have entertained some such idea—if they ever had troubled their heads about it at all.

They were going to the theatre that evening.

He took her home, went back to dress, returned to take her to dinner at the Ritz. And found her in her black evening gown, flushed, feverish from weeping.

But when, surprised and troubled, he took her to his breast, she wound her arms around him, strained him to her, kissed him, sobbing, stammering, warning him to beware. And gazing intently into her tear-wet eyes he saw the dark change coming, mirrored there in peril, trembling on her reddening lips, fragrant in her breath.

She turned, covering her quivering face with both desperate hands, sank down on the sofa.

He laid aside his overcoat and hat, seated himself near, and turned his altered face to watch her, grimly determined to see it through.

Freda had gone. But there was food in the refrigerator—a cold pheasant, salad, a bottle of claret.

When she heard him in the kitchen she rose and went out.

“I’ll do all that,” she said humbly.... “Do you really mean to stay with me?”

“Do you think I want you to call up Sadoul?” he said bitterly.

She had laid the cloth; she stood now, with a handful of silver, gazing at him. The Other One was rapidly possessing her. She gave him a lovely, flushed look.

“It is always one kind of hell for Sadoul,” she said. “It will be another kind for you if you stay.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, reddening with anger at the maddening hopelessness of it all.

She laid the knives and forks on the cloth and came close to him.

“You had better let me call up Sadoul,” she said. “I am safe with him.”

“You are safe with me,” he said with an oath.

They both reddened painfully. He caught her hand, asking pardon—but released the burning palm.

“It is destruction for you to stay.... I still know what I’m saying.”

“I’m going to stay. We’ll have to win out together, Gilda.... Do you understand?”

She made no reply. And, looking at her, he realised that she no longer understood.

Toward morning the girl had cried herself to sleep, lying flung across the bed, face buried in her dishevelled hair, and one little hand so convulsively linked in his that the boy could scarcely manage to release himself.

He sat on the chair beside the bed for a while, gazing at her out of haggard eyes. Then, when he saw the dark change fading from her burning cheeks he got up, took his hat and coat and went out into the grey light of a foggy morning.