Read Ebook: First harvests by Stimson Frederic Jesup

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Ebook has 1026 lines and 88525 words, and 21 pages

"Certainly not."

"I wish you did," said John, half to himself. "I thought you and Miss Holyoke might--might find it pleasant to go together."

"I have no interest in them," said Miss Farnum, as if finally. And she looked as if she thought the world too intolerable to herself to dream of trying to mitigate it for others.

"Excuse me," said Haviland; and the talk drifted off into commonplaces. But Miss Farnum's manners were not lenient, and his call was a short one.

Haviland continued to take his afternoon walks; but he was now more than ever apt to lose himself in the district west of Washington Square. Gracie never came to any trouble, all that winter, on her charitable excursions; but, if you had ever met her there alone, you would have very likely met, just far enough behind her, so that she never saw him, steaming along in his usual wholesome way, our friend John Haviland.

A SOCIAL SUCCESS.

Arthur Holyoke was making his way. Despite Charlie's admonitions to the contrary, he had succeeded in living within his income; and, after a six months' trial at the office, the firm put him upon a salary. It was small, to be sure; but it was a distinct step toward the home that he was hoping to build. He had joined one club, recognizing that after the initiation the expense was trifling; and that he must be put in a way to meet men. Here he spent much of his time; bachelor lodgings are cheerless.

Business was, on the whole, a disillusion. The firm of Townley & Tamms had formerly carried large banking and investment accounts; but these had not increased of late years; and it gradually became evident to Arthur that all this legitimate business would hardly pay their office expenses. Where they really made their money was either in buying large blocks of securities at less than their value, or, more commonly, in selling new issues, after a long course of artificial demand and advertisement, at very much more than they had ever paid for them. Tamms was the light and soul of the firm. He never went up-town into society; he never sought to shine in the fashionable world, and pretended that he did not want to. His largest social orbit did not transcend the society of the Brooklyn church to which he belonged; in the city of churches he lived and had his being; and he was in all respects a most reputable citizen. Old Mr. Townley might come down at eleven or at nine; Arthur might leave at three or at five; but they always met Tamms at the office, or left him there, curled up over his private desk, silent, in his formal black coat, with his restless eyes shining like a spider's; and he seemed to have a spider's capacity for living without fresh air and exercise. The deacons entrusted to him the church funds, and even, occasionally, made a long or short sale of stocks, on private account, at his advice; for Tamms, even by these aspirants for the kingdom of heaven, was reputed a man of remarkable business sagacity on earth. And in these days, when even the church must have its secular foundation and its corner lots, the laying up of treasure on earth is not to be avoided; what we need, therefore, is some really sure preventive of moth and rust, and some wholly efficacious precaution against those thieves that break in and steal. Although there is, I believe, no text telling us that thieves need be always with us.

But the tendency of the times is toward a fiercer battle in the struggle for existence, and weaker laws to keep the rapacious in check. Of the ever smaller surplus that the world's work wins, a larger share is every year being demanded by the laborer, and aggregated capital, organized monopoly, growing hungrier as it has to take less, thirsts each year more greedily for all that is left. And the middle class, which has ruled the world so long, is being ground to pieces by these warring Titans.

Tamms perceived this, not so dithyrambically, but more practically, and he profited by it. No one could turn in and out of corporations more cleverly than he; or turn them more adroitly to private ends, or drop out of them more apropos. Such an ingenious contrivance for clever men are these; more ingenious than the law which governs them. Indeed, the law has now dropped far behind, standing where it stood in the Middle Ages, when corporations were few and simple, and it stares agape at the Frankensteins of its own creation. But these same soulless monsters afford to their masters unlimited power, without interest or responsibility; and Tamms revelled in them. And Tamms was a self-made man, and a smart one; and the public deified him for both attributes, as is its wont; and his church would have canonized him, had his business needed a saintship instead of a seat in the Stock Exchange.

Arthur's head grew dizzy at the corporations, and syndicates, and pools and other unnamed enterprises that Tamms's busy life was wound up in. Head and chief was, of course, the great Allegheny Central Railroad; this was the chief gold-mine that they worked; for in it Tamms could make his own market and buy and sell at his own price. But there were many others. And of these, the stock of the Silas Starbuck Oil Company had grown lately prominent.

The Stock Exchange was no longer a strange sight to Arthur; he had grown familiar with it, with its moods, its dialect, its very battle-cries and interjections. And here he had seen the Allegheny Central bought and sold, and bought again; and of late he had been sent to out-of-the-way holes and corners, auctions, and even to the up-town houses of retired merchants in search of the share certificates of the Starbuck Oil.

"Governor's up to something," said Charlie. "Don't believe anybody knows what--not even the old man." The "governor" was Mr. Tamms; Mr. Townley was the "old man." And it was true the latter had little to do with the business of the firm. He had been a conservative, prominent banker in his day; and still carried much weight with the multitude; but, though he bore his gray head with much dignity behind his white choker, there was little in it--as Townley might have said. Little remained of the once active spirit behind it but a fixed belief in Allegheny Central and a strong taste for landscape paintings of the French school. However, no one had found this out but Tamms, not even Mr. Townley himself, though Charlie, as we have seen, suspected it. And Mr. Townley was a merchant of the old school, whom all the world delighted to make trustee for its posterity. He had a great box in the Safety Deposit Vaults, crammed with the stocks and bonds upon which others lived; and these he administered carefully and well.

But one great day there was a "corner" in Starbuck Oil stock; for some mysterious reason the once common certificates had disappeared, like partridges on the first of September. Madder and more extravagant grew the demand for it at the board; scantier still the supply offering; one per cent. a day was bid, even for its temporary possession, so highly were the shares suddenly prized. There were vague rumors of "plums," "melons," and consolidations; meantime the Starbuck Oil stock had disappeared from human vision. Then, one morning, came the news; the Allegheny Central had absorbed the Silas Starbuck Oil Company; two shares were to be given for one, and in addition, to cover terminal facilities, connection, etc., five millions of six per cent. bonds were to be issued. Townley & Tamms, it was announced, had taken them all, and offered them to the eager public for 105 and interest. "Thought the governor was up to something," said Charlie. "What do you suppose we paid for them?--the bonds, I mean," said he to Arthur; and he put his tongue in his cheek and looked very knowing.

Arthur was kept busy, writing personal letters to the more valued clients of the firm, calling attention to the merits of the bonds in question; and preferred not thinking of the matter at all. He solaced himself with human sympathy; that is to say, the delights of society as offered in balls and dinners; and soon grew so accustomed to the stimulant as to take much pleasure in it.

For do we not see every day, gentle reader--that is to say, fashionable, fascinating, admired reader--how great and potent is the charm of this life? Do we not see men ruining themselves, girls giving themselves, for this alone? How dull, how short-sighted must our forefathers have been, who flattered themselves that we, their clever children, would content ourselves with the rights of man! What we desire is the envy of mankind.

Humanity has indeed labored over a thousand years for these simpler things, ever since that crowd of uncultivated Dutchmen came down on Rome, and the feudal system adopted Christianity unto itself and strangled it, or sought to do so. We have tried with brain and sinew, through blood and fire, to get this boon, that our lives may be respected, and our liberty of person not constrained. And now, in the nineteenth century, we have got it; and lo! society is bored. Languid and dull--too dull to hear, in its liberal mass, that low and distant murmur, too skeptical, indifferent, to see the dark low cloud, just forming, now, to the West and East--is it a mighty swarm of locusts, or is it merely storm and rain? Here and there a tory sees it, dreading it; here and there a radical, dreaming of it; their imagination aiding both. And the multitude, who are not indifferent, and who are never bored, have little time to look at the weather, still less to read and think; or, if they read, it is no longer now the Bible, which, they are told, is but a feudal book, a handy tool of bishops and of premiers. Moreover, modern enlightenment teaches that it is a lie; there never were twelve basketfuls of fragments left from loaves and fishes on the Mountain; therefore what words were spoken on the Mountain cannot be true.

Arthur went in this sleigh many times, and enjoyed it, and said pretty things to Mrs. Gower in exchange. He had a poet's delight in rich and beautiful things, in show and speed and glitter. Shine, not light, attracts your women, says Goethe; and the old courtier-poet might have said the same of men, himself included. And Mrs. Gower lolled back, beautiful, her yellow hair shining strangely through the snow; so Helen in the Greek sunlight; so Faustina in the streets of noble Rome; so Gutrune, by whose wiles twelve thousand heroes and the gods went down to darkling death. All these were blondes, and smiled and charmed and had their adoration and their joy of life. What call had Flossie to trouble herself with the eternal verities, or man's past or future? She was not eternal. She was, furthermore, a skeptic and a cynic--if a butterfly can be said to be skeptic of eternal life. She had no real knowledge of the things she won. She would have liked the sword of Siegfried for a panoply, to put the Grail in her cabinet of rare china. She would have liked to possess these things, and money and fans and dresses, and have other women know that she possessed them. She would have liked to possess men's hearts.

Not that she was wicked. She was no tragedy queen, no evil heroine of romance; she had no desire, so far as she knew, to injure anyone. She would have paid a fortune for a picture that other people admired; but she would have exchanged it for a ball-dress, had there been but one ball-dress in the world; and she simply did not believe in the Holy Grail, or the sword of Siegfried, or men's hearts. So a rude conqueror thirsts for the great King's talisman, and barters it for an ounce of colored glass, and wears the latter on a ring in his nose. But yet this glass is not the ultimate reality, despite its wearer's pride.

So some air-dwelling German has told us, long time the world slumbered unconscious, wrapped in a dreamless sleep. And the gold of the Rhine still slumbered in its waters, and the gods kept guard. Then all things broke to consciousness, after a myriad of cycles of years; and their first awakening was a joy; and men arose, and lived in the light of the earth. But shortly, after some few centuries, this consciousness became a blight; and they turned, and knew themselves. And the gold was wrested from the deep waters by an evil race of men, forswearing love forever; and the love of the world turned to avarice, and the love of man to the love of self, and the love divine was forgotten and whelmed in the dusk of the gods. And so the pessimists of the day must follow out the old myth, and tell us that the end and cure of all is this darkness of the gods, the death of all things, the black waters that well again from earth, the rising waves of the dreamless sea.

But behind Zeus and Prometheus and Hera lay Fate, a power not themselves, to whom both gods and men must bow. And beneath Wotan and Loge sits Erda, in the heart of Earth, silent; and the web of things to come is spun, slowly, by the silent Norns.

THE DIVERSIONS OF FINE LADIES.

Paris had palled upon Mr. Caryl Wemyss, and in February he returned to New York. Paris, he found, had deteriorated since the Empire. Moreover, his social position there was not wholly satisfactory. In London it was better; but even there they did not sufficiently distinguish between him and other Americans; between him, son of the famous poet-dramatist, minister to England and man of letters, when there were no other American men of letters, and, for instance, the present minister, whom Wemyss did not consider a gentleman at all. So his friend, the young Earl of Birmingham, wishing to visit America, Wemyss had returned with him; and was now piloting that nobleman through the maze of New York society.

But this proved a more difficult task than Wemyss anticipated; for the Earl was quite unable to recognize any distinctions, and evinced a most catholic taste for all beauty, unadorned by birth, and pretty faces without pedigree. And now the Farnums had presumed to give a ball in his honor; and Birmingham was there, and Wemyss, of course, had had to go there with him, and Flossie Gower had come to keep him company.

A man may be a peer of England and wear a coronet; but a man's a man for a' that. And as the pudgy, little, sandy-haired Englishman, with his scrap of whisker, his red eyes and his white eyebrows, stood beside Miss Farnum, it was easy, at least for Wemyss and Flossie Gower, to see that he was much impressed.

If one had to name the potent quality of Miss Farnum's presence, I should call it majesty; you, perhaps, might call it scorn. Her walk was that of Juno, over clouds; beneath her coronal of red-brown hair her eyes were great and gray, now looking out beyond you, over all things, sphinx-like--now introspective, but disdainful still.

Mrs. Gower could see that she treated Birmingham as a high-priestess might some too importunate worshipper; and the noble Englishman was, for once, embarrassed of his person--and by hers.

"Who is that girl?" asked Mrs. Gower of Wemyss. "The daughter of our host?"

"A fine piece of flesh and blood," said he.

"She'd be charmed to go, I've no doubt," said Wemyss, with the gesture of a yawn. "But come, you surely don't expect me to talk to one pretty woman of another? Tell me of yourself."

"What is there to tell? Look at Baby Malgam's violets--they are lovely."

"The loveliness of violets," said Wemyss, "is a fact established some years since, and which I am ready at all times and seasons to admit. Your own loveliness is a more inspiring subject."

But perhaps we shall see more, if we go with Jenny Starbuck. For he had asked her, too; and she was going, masked, upon the floor. She had hesitated much; and refused an invitation from Mr. Dave St. Clair. Probably it would have given her more moral courage had she known that Mrs. Levison Gower was going too.

Her brother James she had not seen for months; not since that night when she had turned him into the street. She did not care; he was but a common fellow, and she meant to be a lady. For some time she had taken lessons for the stage, as being the quickest path to elegance of life; but she was a stupid woman, intellectually, and had not mind for this. In mind she was not like her unknown cousin, Flossie; but she could only imitate her in what she saw. Her quilted satin cloak was very like Flossie's; and she too could get into a coup? and tell the coachman to drive to the Academy.

An immense board floor had been laid over the entire theatre; scattered about this were orange and lemon trees in green tubs; and among them walked perhaps a couple of hundred people--nearly all in fancy-dress and many with false noses or fantastic wigs. They looked like the chorus of an opera just dismissed, except that they appeared more low-spirited and ill at ease. Many of the women were in men's costumes--Magyar uniforms, Cossack, Austrian; some even were in jocose dresses, making a burlesque of themselves; and Jenny, dressed like a lady, looked on these with scorn. Here and there a quadrille was being danced, and among these were a few paid dancers whose kicks and gyrations were supposed to indicate spontaneous gayety and exuberance of joy. Taken all-in-all, it did not so well imitate Paris, even, as Flossie Gower and her following, London.

But Jenny stood waiting at the dressing-room door, and did not venture on the floor alone. It was still more than half empty, and though the great orchestra rang out in most exciting rhythm, the crowd seemed cold. But above, in the tiers of boxes, every box was full; here the women all were dressed like Jenny, and a few were even masked.

She waited there, in vain; till, finally, Mr. St. Clair saw her and offered himself as escort, magnanimously. Jenny was glad enough to take his arm, and they made the tour of the floor. He laughed at her for wearing her mask, but she insisted still. The band broke into a waltz--fiery, intoxicating; the floor filled with dancers, glancing by them in gay colors, fancifully dressed; but there were more diamonds in the boxes, and bare necks, and men in ordinary evening dress. In front of her was a large box, with three or four ladies, masked; one, her breast all covered with a diamond rain. The box was just above the place where Jenny stood; and she looked at the necklace enviously. Its owner gave a little scream, and Jenny heard the words, how shocking! Jenny followed her glance; beside her on the floor were two girls in satin tights. Then as she looked back to the box, she saw Mr. Townley bend down and speak to her; Jenny lifted her own mask a moment and tossed her head at him and smiled, then leaned heavier on the arm of Dave St. Clair.

"You're welcome to all I know," said Townley, coolly. "She's a dress-maker on Sixth Avenue, and makes dresses for my aunt." Tony only laughed the more at this, and good-natured Lucie Gower led Charlie out of the box. "Come," said he, "you must introduce me to her; I'm sure she does business with my uncle." In the back of the box a little, red-haired Englishman was talking to a younger lady, sitting in the shadow; and she was glad, when everybody's attention was drawn to a masked figure in the box opposite--a lady whose green tulle dress and very low corsage bespoke her also fashionable. "What superb emeralds!" cried the black-haired lady, in front.

"What! you don't say its Mrs. Wilton Hay? Where did she get them? I asked Jack for a set not half so fine, and they cost a fortune. Who gave them to her?"

"Mr. Hay, of course," laughed the other.

"You did not know diplomacy had been so profitable?" said Tony Duval. "See, there goes your husband--he has just been introduced to the blonde beauty."

"Positively, Mr. Wemyss, there is nothing new under the sun," answered the blonde in front. "After all, the flowery paths seem quite as stupid as the straight and narrow way."

"It's very slow," answered he addressed. "They've too much conscience for it still."

"Perhaps," suggested another, "we could give them lessons."

It was Van Kull who spoke; and in the pause that ensued came the point of Duval's story, accentuated by the silence; and Wemyss tactfully called attention to an adjoining box, where the ladies were sitting with their feet upon the railing, smoking cigarettes.

"Come," said she of the diamonds, rising; "we have had our moral lesson; it is time to go."

From the floor, Jenny Starbuck had watched this box, until she saw them rise as if to go. She stayed at the ball many hours later. But Arthur, in the back of the box, was witness of a little scene that she could not see.

The elder ladies went out first, passing the Earl, who seemed busied with his companion's opera-cloak. She was standing, leaning upon the back of an armchair, with her weight upon one round, bare arm; and as Arthur went out of the door he was almost certain that he saw their noble guest lay his hand upon her arm, familiarly.

A second after, and Arthur had dropped his opera-glass; it rolled back into the box, and he went back for it. There was no change in Kitty Farnum's attitude; she was still leaning on the chair, but looking at Lord Birmingham: her face cold and fixed, like some scornful face of stone. She gave her arm to Arthur and walked out.

IN MAIDEN MEDITATION.

Gracie was sitting alone in her own room; she had been reading--the "Faery Queene" the book--but it had slipped from her hand--and now she was thinking. Not of herself, but of others; Arthur, perhaps, principally. For she had given her heart to him; and in a perfect maidenly love there is always some foretaste of the maternal, a fond solicitude as of a mother for her child. Perhaps even Arthur did not know how much she thought of him: and Mrs. Livingstone was too much bound up in Mamie, and Mamie too much in herself, to notice it; Miss Brevier alone had seen it, and had held her peace. Gracie fancied that no one knew it, save Arthur himself; though for her and Arthur it had changed the world. The world itself she did not understand; all things did not look clear to her that winter; the people of her acquaintance puzzled her. It almost seemed as if she would not have their sympathy in all ways; but this could not be proven, for Gracie never made a confidante. Now Mamie Livingstone, on the other hand, confided everything to her; and then, apparently, forgot it all, much as a Parisian lady may be supposed to forget the substance of her last auricular confession; for Gracie noted a certain repugnancy or incoherence in this young woman's heart history of which the heart's possessor was unaware entirely.

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