_ CHAPTER XV. Some Affairs of the Heart Considered in their Relation to Dollars and Cents
Antonia was sitting in a hammock. Josie and Alice were not far away watching Cecil Barr-Smith, who was wading into the lake to get water-lilies for them, contrary to the ordinances of the city of Lattimore in such cases made and provided. The six were dawdling away our time one fine Sunday in Lynhurst Park. I forgot to say Mr. Elkins and myself were discussing affairs of state with Miss Hinckley.
"He's such a ninny," said Antonia.
"Aren't all people when in his forlorn condition?" asked Jim.
Antonia looked away at the clouds, and did not reply.
"But if he had a morsel of the cynical philosophy he boasts of," said she, "he could see."
"I don't know about that," said Jim lazily, looking over at the other group; "a woman can conceal her feelings in such a case pretty completely."
"I don't know about that," echoed Antonia. "I wish I did; it would simplify things."
"I believe," said I, "that it's a simple enough matter for you to solve and manage as it is."
"But it's so absurd to bother with!" said she; "and what's the use?"
"Doesn't it seem that way?" said Jim. "And yet you know we brought him here for a definite purpose; and in his present state he can't make good. Just read his editorial this morning: it would add gloom to the proceedings, read at a funeral. We want things whooped up, and he wants to whoop 'em; but long screeds on 'The Sacred Right of Self-destruction' hurt things, and bring the paper into disrepute, and crowd out optimistic matter that we desire. And as long as both families want the thing brought about, and there is good reason to think that Laura will not prove eternally immovable, I take it to be an important enough matter, from the standpoint of dollars and cents, for the exercise of our diplomacy."
"Well, then," said Antonia, "get the people together on some social occasion, and we'll try."
"I've thought," said Jim, "of having a house-warming--as soon as the weather gets so that the very name of the function won't keep folks away. My house is practically done, you know."
"Just the thing," said Antonia. "There are cosy nooks and deep retreats enough to make it a sort of labyrinth for the ensnaring of our victims."
"Isn't it a queer thing in language," said Jim, "that these retreats are the places where advances are made!"
"Not when you consider," said Antonia, "that retreats follow repulses."
"We ought to have the Captain and the General here, if this military conversation is to continue," said I. "And here comes Cecil. Stop before he comes, or we shall never get through with the explanation of the jokes."
This remark elicited the laughter which the puns failed to provoke; for Cecil was color-blind in all things relating to the American joke. The humor of
Punch appealed to him, and the wit of Sterne and Dean Swift; but the funny column and the paragrapher's niche of our newspapers he regarded as purely pathological phenomena. I sometimes feel that Cecil was right about this. Can the mind which continues to be charmed by these paragraphic strainings be really sound?--but this is not a dissertation. Cecil reconciled himself to his position as the local exemplification of the traditional Englishman whose trains of ideas run on the freight schedule--and was one of the most popular fellows in Lattimore. He gloried in his slavery to Antonia, and seemed to glean hope from the most sterile circumstances.
It was easy to hope, in Lattimore, then. It was not many days after our talk in the park before I noticed a change for the better in Giddings, even. Just before Jim's house-warming, he came to me with something like optimism in his appearance. I started to cheer him up, and went wrong.
"I'm glad to see by your cheerful looks," said I, "that the philosophy of Iago--"
"Say, now!" cried he, "don't remind me of that, for Heaven's sake!"
"Why, certainly not," said I, "if you object."
"I do object," said he most earnestly; "why, that damned-fool philosophy may have ruined my life, you know."
"Of course I know what you mean," said I; "but I'm convinced, and so are all your friends, that if you fail, it'll be your own lack of nerve, and nothing else, that you'll owe the disaster to. You should--"
"I should have refrained from trampling under foot the dearest ideals of the only girl-- However, I can't talk of these things to any one, Barslow. But I have some hope now. Antonia and Josie have both been very kind lately--and say, Barslow, I see now how little foundation there is for that old gag about the women hating each other!"
"I've always felt," said I, anxious to draw him out so that I might see what the conspirators had been doing, "that there's nothing in
that idea. But what has changed your view?"
"Antonia, and Josie, and even your wife," said he, "have been keeping up a regular lobby in my behalf with Laura. They think they've got the deal plugged up now, so that she'll give me a show again, and--"
"Why, surely," said I; "in my opinion, there never was any need for you to feel downcast."
"Barslow," he said, with the air of a man who has endured to the limit, "you are a good fellow, but you make me tired when you talk like that. Why, four weeks ago I had no more show than a snowball in--in the crater of Vesuvius. But now I'm encouraged. These girls have been doing me good, as I just said, and I'm convinced that my series of editorials on 'The Influence of Christianity on Civilization,' in which I've given the Church the credit of being the whole thing, has helped some."
"They ought to do good somewhere," said I, "they certainly haven't boomed Lattimore any."
"Damn Lattimore!" said he bitterly. "When a man's very life--But see here, Barslow, I know you're not in earnest about this. And I'll be all right in a day or two, or I'll be eternally wrong. I'm going to make one final cast of the die. I may go down to bottomless perdition, or I may be caught up to the battlements of heaven; but such a mass of doubts and miseries as I've been lately, I'll no longer be! Pray for me, Barslow, pray for me!"
This despairing condition of Giddings's was a sort of continuing sensation with us at that time. We discussed it quite freely in all its aspects, humorous and tragic. It was so unexpected a development in the young man's character, and, with all due respect to the discretion and resisting powers of Miss Addison, so entirely gratuitous and factitious.
"He has ability as a writer," said the Captain; "but in such a mattah anybody but a fool ought to see that the thing to do is to chahge the intrenchments. I trust that I may not be misunde'stood when I say that, in my opinion, a good rattling chahge would not be a fo'lo'n hope!"
"It bothers," said Jim; "and if it weren't for that, I'd feel conscience-stricken at doing anything to rob the idiot of a most delicious grief."
The coolness of early autumn was in the air the night of Jim's house-warming. To describe his dwelling, in these days when fortunes are spent on the details of a stairway, and a king's ransom for the tapestries of a salon, all of which luxuries are spread before the eyes of the public in the columns of Sunday papers and magazines, would be to court an anticlimax. But this was before the multimillionaire had made the need for an augmentative of the word "luxury"; and Jim's house was noteworthy for its beauty: its cunningly wrought iron and wood; and columned halls and stairways; and wide-throated fireplaces, each a picture in tile, wood, and metalwork; and vistas like little fairylands through silken portieres; and carven chairs and couches, reminiscent of royal palaces; and chambers where lovely color-schemes were worked out in rug, and bed, and canopy. There were decorations made by men whose names were known in London and Paris. From out-of-the-way places Mr. Elkins had brought collections of queer and interesting and pretty things which, all his life, he had been accumulating; and in his library were broad areas of well-worn book-backs. Somehow, people looked upon the Mr. Elkins who was master of all these as a more important man than the Elkins who had blown into the town on some chance breeze of speculation, and taken rooms at the Centropolis.
It was all light and color, that night. Even the formal flower-beds of the grounds and the fountain spouting on the lawn were like scenery in the lime-light. Only, back in the shrubbery there were darker nooks in summer-houses and arbors for those who loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds, to the common mind, were likely to seem foolish. I remember thinking that if Mr. Giddings really wanted a chance to take the high dive of which he had spoken to me, the opportunity was before him.
His Laura was there, her devotee-like expression striving with an exceedingly low-cut dress to sound the distinguishing note of her personality. Giddings was at the punch-bowl as on their arrival she swept past with the General. When he saw the nun-like glance over the swelling bosom, the poor stricken cynic blushed, turned pale, and wheeled to flee. But Cecil, as if following orders, arrested him and began plying him with the punch--from which Giddings seemed to draw courage: for I saw him, soon, gravitate to her whom he loved and so mysteriously dreaded.
"It's a pe'fect jewel-case of a house!" said the Captain, as he moved with the trooping company through the mansion.
"Indeed, indeed it is," said Mrs. Tolliver to Alice; "the jewel, whoever it may be, is to be envied."
"I hope," said Jim to Josie, "that you agree with Mrs. Tolliver?"
"Oh, yes," said Josie, "but you attach far too much importance to my judgment. If it is any comfort to you, however, I want to praise--everything--unreservedly."
"I won't know, for a while," said Jim, "whether it is to be my house only, or home in the full sense of the word."
"One doesn't know about that, I fancy," said Cecil; "for a long time--"
"I mean to know soon," said Jim.
Josie was looking intently at the carving on one of the chairs, and paid no heed, though the remark seemed to be addressed to her.
"What I mean, you know," said Cecil, "is that, no matter how well the house may be built and furnished, it's the associations, the history of the place, the things that are in the air, that makes 'Ome!"
There was in the manner of his capitalizing the word as he uttered it, and in the unwonted elision of the H, that tribute to his dear island which the exiled Briton (even when soothed by the consolation offered by street-car systems to superintend, and rose-pink blondes to serve), always pays when he speaks of Home.
"Associations," said Jim, "may be historical or prophetic. In the former case, we have to take them on trust; but as to those of the future, we are sure of them."
"Yahs," said Cecil, using the locution which he always adopted when something subtle was said to him, "I dare say! I dare say!"
"Well, then," Jim went on, "I have this matter of the atmosphere or associations under my own control."
"Just so," said Cecil. "Clever conceit, Miss Trescott, isn't it, now?"
But Miss Trescott had apparently heard nothing of Jim's speech, and begged pardon; and wouldn't they go and show her the bronzes in the library?
"This mansion, General," said the Captain, "takes one back, suh, to the halcyon days of American history. I refeh, suh, to those times when the plantahs of the black prairie belt of Alabama lived like princes, in the heart of an enchanted empire!"
"A very interesting period, Captain," said the General. "It is a pity that the industrial basis was one which could not endure!"
"In the midst of fo'ests, suh," went on the Captain, "we had ouah mansions, not inferio' to this--each a little kingdom with its complete wo'ld of amusements, its cote, and its happy populace, goin' singin' to the wo'k which supported the estate!"
"Yes," said the General, "I thought, when we were striking down that state of things, that we were doing a great thing for that populace. But I now see that I was only helping the black into a new slavery, the fruits of which we see here, around us, to-night."
"I hahdly get youah meaning, suh--"
"Well," said the General, looking about at the little audience. (It was in the smoking-room, and those present were smokers only.) "Well, now, take my case. I have some pretty valuable grounds down there where I live. When I got them, they were worthless. I could build as good a mansion as this or any of your ante-bellum Alabama houses for what I can get out of that little tract. What is that value? Merely the expression in terms of money of the power of excluding the rest of mankind from that little piece of ground. I make people give me the fruits of their labor, myself doing nothing. That's what builds this house and all these great houses, and breeds the luxury we are beginning to see around us; and the consciousness that this slavery exists, and is increasing, and bids fair to grow greatly, is what is making men crazy over these little spots of ground out here in the West! It is this slavery--"
"Suh," exclaimed the Captain, rising and grasping the General's hand, "you have done me the favo' of making me wisah! I nevah saw so cleahly the divine decree which has fo'eo'dained us to this opulence. Nothing so satisfactory, suh, as a basis and reason foh investment, has been advanced in my hearing since I have been in the real-estate business! Let us wo'k this out a little mo' in detail, if you please, suh--"
"Let us escape while there is yet time!" said Cornish; and we fled.
After supper there was a cotillion. The spacious ballroom, with its roof so high that the lights up there were as stars, was a sight which could scarcely be reconciled with the village community which he had found and changed. The palms, and flowers, and lights which decorated the room; the orchestra's river of dance-music; the men, all in the black livery which--on the surface--marks the final conquest of civilization over barbarism; the beautiful gowns, the sparkling jewels, and the white shoulders and arms of the ladies--all these made me wonder if I had not been transported to some Mayfair or Newport, so pictorial, so decorative, so charged with art, it seemed to be. The young people, carrying on their courtships in these unfamiliar halls, their disappearances into the more remote and tenebrous outskirts of the assembly--all seemed to me to be taking place on the stage, or in some romance.
I told Alice about this as we walked home--it was only across the street--to our own new house.
"Don't tell any one about this feeling of yours," said she. "It betrays your provincialism, my dear. You should feel, for the first time in your life, perfectly at home. 'Armor, rusting on his walls, On the blood of Clifford calls,' you know."
"Mine didn't hear the call," said I; "I'm probably the first of my race to wear this--But I enjoyed it."
"Well, I am too full of something that took place to discuss the matter," said she, as we sat down at home. "I am perplexed. You know about Mr. Cornish and Josie, don't you?"
She startled me, for I had never told her a word.
"Know about them!" I cried, a little dramatically. "What do you mean? No, I don't!"
"Why, what's the matter, Albert?" she queried. "I haven't charged them with midnight assassination, or anything like that! Only, it seems that he has been making love to her, for some time, in his cool and self-contained way. I've known it, and she's been perfectly conscious, that I knew; but never said anything to me of it, and seemed unwilling even to approach the subject. But to-night Cecil and I found her out in the canopied seat by the fountain, and I knew something was the matter, and sent Cecil away. Something told me that Mr. Cornish was concerned in it, and I asked her at once where he went.
"'He is gone!' said she. 'I don't know where he is, and I don't care! I wish I might never see him any more!'
"You may imagine my surprise. When a young woman uses such language about a man, it is a certainty that she isn't voicing her true feelings, or that it isn't a normal love affair. So I wormed out of her that he had made her an offer."
"'Well,' said I, 'if, as I infer from your conversation, you have refused him, there's an end of the matter; and you need not worry about seeing him any more.'
"'But,' said she, 'Alice, I haven't refused him!'
"That took me aback a little," went on Alice, "for I had other plans for her; so I said: 'You haven't accepted the fellow, have you?'
"'Oh, no, no!' said she, in a sort of quivery way, 'but what right have you to speak of him in that way?' And that is all I could get out of her. She was so unreasonable and disconnected in her talk, and the others came out, and I tell you what, Albert Barslow, that man Cornish will do evil yet, among us! I have always thought so!"
"I don't see any ground for any such prediction," said I, "in anything you have told me. Her inability to make up her mind--"
"Means that there's something wrong," said my wife dogmatically. "It means that he has some sinister influence over her, as he has over almost everybody, with those coal-black eyes of his and his satanic ways. And worse than all else, it means that he'll finally get her, in spite of herself!"
"Pshaw!" said I.
"Go away, Albert!" said she, "or we shall quarrel. Go back and find my fan--I left it on the mantel in the library. The house is lighted yet; and I was going to send you back anyhow. Kiss me, and go, please."
I felt that if Alice had had in her memory my vision of the supper at Auriccio's, she would have been confirmed in her fears; but to me, in spite of the memory, they seemed absurd. My only apprehension was that she might be right as to the final outcome, to the wreck of Jim's hopes. I did not take the matter at all seriously, in fact. I think we men must usually have such an affair worked out to some conclusion, for weal or woe, before we regard it otherwise than lightly. That was the reason that Giddings's distraught condition was only a matter of laughter to all of us. And as something like this passed through my mind, Giddings himself collared me as I crossed the street.
"Old man!" said he, "congratulate me! It's all right, Barslow, it's all right."
"Up on the battlements, are you?" said I. "Well, I congratulate you, Giddings; and don't make such an ass of yourself, please, any more. I never noticed until this evening what a fine girl Laura is. You're really a very fortunate fellow indeed!"
"You never noticed it!" said he with utter scorn. "Well, if--"
"It's late," said I. "Come and see me in the morning! Good-night."
I went in at the front door of the house. It stood wide open, as if the current of guests passing out had removed its tendency to swing shut. It seemed lonely now, inside, with all the decorations of the assembly still in place in the empty hall. I passed into the library, and found Jim sitting idly in a great leather chair. He seemed not to see me; or if he did, he paid no attention. I went to the mantel, picked up Alice's fan, and turned to Jim.
"Sit down," said he.
"Having a sort of 'oft in the stilly night' experience, Jim, or a case of William the Conqueror on the Field of Hastings?"
"Yes," said he. "Something like that."
"Well, your house-warming has been a success, Jim," said I, "though a fellow wouldn't think so to look at you. And the house is faultless. I envy you the house, but the ability to plan and furnish it still more. I didn't think it was in you, old man! Where did you learn it all?"
"You may have the house, if you want it, Al," said he. "I don't think it's going to be of any use to me."
"Why, Jim," said I, seeing that it was something more than a mere mood with him, "what is it? Has anything gone wrong?"
"Nothing that I've any right to complain of," said he. "Of course, no man puts as much of his life into such a thing as I have into this--without thinking of more than living in it--alone. I've never had what you can really call a home--not since I was a little chap, when it was home wherever there were trees and mother. I've filled this--with those associations I spoke to Barr-Smith about--to-night--a little more than I seem to have had any warrant to do. I tried to make sure about the jewel for the jewel-case to-night, and it went wrong, Al; and that's all there is of it. I don't think I shall need the house, and if you like it you can have it."
"Do you mean that Josie has refused you?" said I.
"She didn't put it that way," said he, "but it amounts to that."
"Nothing that isn't a refusal," said I, "ought to be accepted as such. What did she say?"
"Nothing definite," he answered wearily, "only that it couldn't be 'yes,' and when I urged her to make it 'yes' or 'no,' she refused to say either; and asked me to forget that I had ever said anything to her about the matter. There have been some things which--led me to hope--for a different answer; and I'm a good deal taken down, Al ... I wouldn't like to talk this way--with any one else."
There seemed to be no reason for abandonment of hope, I urged upon him, and after a cigar or so I left him, evidently impressed with this view of the case, but nevertheless bitterly disappointed. It meant delay and danger to his hopes; and Jim was not a man to brook delay, or suffer danger to go unchallenged. I dared not tell him of Cornish's offer, and of its fate, so similar to his.
"I wonder if it is coquetry on her part," thought I, as I went back with the fan. "I wonder if it will cause things to go wrong in our business affairs. I wonder if it is possible for her to be sincerely unable to make up her mind, or if there is anything in Alice's malign-influence theory. Anyhow, in the department of Cupid business certainly is picking up!" _