"Fred said I was a traitor to my country for being sorry that John Brown was hanged!" Selby complained to his mother. He was a fat, bright twelve, with long dank blond hair and staring green eyes. Fred, fifteen, was darker and thinner. It was probable that he might one day be handsome.
"And he called me a Southern pig!" Fred snarled.
"Boys, must you be always fighting?" Rosalie protested. "Where did you hear it, anyway? I've only just seen it in the paper."
"We heard the newsboy in the street," Fred explained. He faced his father. "Wasn't it simple justice? He was a rebel, wasn't he?"
"Of course he was a rebel." Dexter turned to his younger son. "He took up arms against the government, Selby. Some of his men were killed. That makes it murder as well as treason."
"But that doesn't mean that Selby can't be sorry!" Rosalie exclaimed, flaring. "I too am sorry. I think every decent-minded man and woman must be sorry. Brown was expressing his outrage at intolerable injustice. He may have gone too far, but some of our early Christian martyrs went pretty far, too!"
"I have a friend at school who has an uncle in the Underground Railroad," Selby offered, sensing his immunity in the division between his parents. "Don't you think that's brave?" There was a silence around the table. "Well, I think it's brave!"
"Your friend's uncle had better watch out," Fred sneered. "He'll find himself being brave in jail one of these days. Runaway slaves are private property, and the law says they've got to be returned to their owners. Isn't that so, Dad?"
"That is so, Fred."
"Oh, Dexter, is that the sort of law you're teaching the boys?"
"It isn't a sort of law, my dear. It's the law. Don't blame me, I didn't make it. Blame the United States Supreme Court if you want."
"I do want. That court was packed by pro-slavery presidents."
"It's still the Supreme Court. And its law is still the law of the land."
"What about God's law?" Rosalie exclaimed fervently. "Surely it's not God's law. that one man can own another? And sell him and beat him!"
"There are a great many Christians living south of the Mason-Dixon line who would dispute that."
"And I would dispute that they're Christians! I would say that their society is rotten to the very core!"
"But didn't we consent to slavery, Dad?" Fred demanded.
"Never!" his mother cried fiercely.
Dexter raised a hand in mild protest. "I'm afraid Fred is right, dear. We have to face facts. Slavery was the price we paid for our union. We wrote it, by implication anyway, into the Constitution. You can argue that we paid too heavy a price for union, but we paid it, and with our eyes open. How can we go back on our word now?"
"Oh, Dexter, there you go again with your sacred union! Why not let the slave states go? Certainly I don't wish to be associated with them. Why can't we simply say, 'Sorry, we thought we could stand the stench of your "peculiar institution," and we've tried, but we find it's too much for our nostrils! So can't we agree to disagree? Let us part company in peace.' And then we'd see how long they could stand alone as the only nation in western civilization that permits such barbarities!"
Dexter had become very grave during this speech. "I'm sorry, my dear. I cannot allow disunion to be advocated in my house. The federal principle is more important to me than any question of slavery. Whatever our destiny, North or South, it must be an American one. And that is a principle, boys, for which I should willingly lay down my life!"
He knew that he risked seeming pompous and stagy, but it had to be worth it. Both boys remained silent, fixing their eyes, whether in awe or embarrassment, on the surface of the table. Rosalie said nothing and gave no indication of dissent, as was her custom when he took this tone with the family, but it was perfectly clear that her concession could go no further than that.
The short rest of breakfast passed in the same silence. Rosalie and Dexter read the newspaper, and the boys departed for school. Their father was about to rise to leave for his daily walk to Wall Street when Bridey hurried in with the unexpected news that Mr. Charles Fairchild was waiting to see him in his study.
2
"CHARLEY?" Rosalie asked in surprise. "Tell him to come in here."
"Please, mum, he said he wanted to see Mr. Fairchild alone."
"I hope there's no trouble with Annie or little Kate!"
"I'll let you know at once if there is," Dexter assured her.
He found Charley pacing up and down in his study, obviously in great agitation. Charley was Dexter's first cousin, as well as Rosalie's brother-in-law; he was also a junior partner in the family law firm. Having lost his father early, he had grown up to look upon Dexter, although only six years his senior, as a kind of guardian. Charley was handsome and blond, with soft blue eyes and curly hair, and, when he was not drinking, he seemed younger than his thirty-four years. But his marriage with the beautiful Annie Handy, promoted by Dexter, had not worked out as the guardian had hoped. Annie was spoiled and easily bored, and Charley seemed to be becoming dependent on parties and drinking.
"Will you read that!" he exclaimed shrilly, throwing a piece of note paper at Dexter. "Will you just kindly read that!"
"What is it?"
"Read it! It came by hand for Annie last night. The writer obviously didn't know she'd gone to her father's. I opened it, thinking it might be something important. It was. But not the kind of something important that a husband can handle. Except by kicking his wife's ass the hell out of his home!"
Dexter put the letter down at once and stared coldly at Charley's flushed countenance. "I can imagine nothing that would justify such disgusting language about your wife."
"Well, read the letter, damn it! Judge for yourself."
Dexter continued to eye his cousin fixedly for a moment and then, slowly, took up the letter. He read the following in a flowing, thick script, not devoid of a certain showy distinction:
Darling, what can you mean? You're not going back on your word? If I can't believe in you, what can I believe in? Tell me you're true! Your faithful, tortured Juley.
Dexter's left hand crept slowly up to his heart. Then, seeing Charley's red eyes fixed on him, he drummed on his chest with his fingers as if he were simply preoccupied. But there was an ugly pain there, and he swallowed hard.
"Juley?"
"Jules Bleeker. You know, the journalist? The one who writes society pieces for the Observer?"
When Dexter at last found his voice it was to exclaim, "But that man's the most obvious kind of bounder! We met him at the Van Rensselaers'. He's not even a poor excuse for a gentleman. I told Lily she was going too far."
"Oh, he gets around. Society has no standards anymore. People just want to be amused. And Bleeker, I suppose, can be amusing when he wants to be. I couldn't take the man seriously at first. When Lily's fat old mother-in-law tucked her lorgnette into her big bosom, he actually leaned over and murmured, 'Happy lorgnette!' He and Annie were always giggling together in corners. I never dreamed there was anything serious between them. He looked too much like a ladies' man to he a ladies' man, if you know what I mean. Big and dark and slinky-eyed."
Dexter shuddered. He brought back the image of Bleeker with an effort. Oh, yes, he remembered the man! Bleeker had even rather made up to him. He was intelligent, certainly, and curious, and polite, too polite. He was somehow soft as well as crude, with the affectations of a dandy and the build of a bull.
"And you deduce from this...?" Here Dexter dropped the note on his desk as if it were something alive and venomous. "You deduce from this florid epistle that Annie has actually...?"
"Fallen?" Charley finished with a sneer. "No, I don't go that far, though it's not her morals that would have stopped her. I just don't think they've gotten to that point yet. She's a terrible little prick teaser. She may have given him an assignation and then reneged. But the second time she may be more accommodating."
"And what are you proposing to do about it? What have you come to me for?"
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"I want you to act as my lawyer. I want an instant and final separation!"
"Charley, don't be an ass! One doesn't break up a marriage over a thing like this. Marriage is a sacrament. Do I have to remind you that you have a little daughter?"
"Remind Annie, I suggest."
"I will! And, of course, there can be no idea of my acting as your lawyer against Rosalie's sister. Entirely aside from my own affection for Annie."
"You were always soft on her," Charley retorted peevishly. "But you don't know her, Dexter. You think of her as a sweet, innocent thing."
"She was when she married you!"
"And do you know something about that?" Charley started charging up and down the carpet even more furiously. "We make a great mistake, bringing up girls as we do. We shield them from the world, but we don't shield them from their own filthy fantasies. It would be better to tell them what sex is about than to leave it to their imaginations. It makes things too hard for the poor bridegroom. He suddenly discovers he's got to be everything an ignorant girl has concocted out of dirty talk behind locked doors. Give me a professional from Mercer Street any night in the week! At least she knows what a man is. But these innocent debutantes! They smile and simper behind their fans. They blush crimson at the least impropriety. And then—bango—after a big society wedding, which hasn't tired them in the least little bit, they turn into fiends. 'All right, big boy! Show me life!'"
Dexter, during this harangue, was almost beside himself. He remembered Charley's wedding, only six years before, at Trinity, and Annie, dark, pale and beautiful, on the arm of her splendid old father. Now he couldn't avoid the horrid vision of her stripping off her veil and dress and pursuing, half-naked, her half-tipsy bridegroom about the nuptial chamber. At that moment he actually hated Charley. With a shudder he drew a hand over his eyes. Hated Charley?
"Let us get back to the point."
"By all means. I want a separation. If you won't get it for me, I'll go to someone else."
"Do you wish to advertise your shame to all New York?" Dexter cried sharply. "Do you wish to proclaim the fact that you couldn't satisfy your bride? For that's what everyone will say. Make no mistake about it, Charley!"
He saw that his point had hit home. As Charley turned away with a muffled "Damn you, Dexter!" he followed up his advantage. "A husband always comes out badly in these cases. Especially when he's been married only a few years. Annie has no reputation for philandering. People will say she must have had some cause..."
"Oh, everyone knows you've always had a thing about Annie!" Charley interrupted brusquely. "You should hear Rosalie on that subject."
"I have cherished and respected her as my sister-in-law and as the wife of my partner and cousin. I don't know what you imply beyond that. And I certainly conceive it to be my bounden duty to stand behind any member of the family who is resisting, and not advocating, a rift in the marriage bond. I think you will find both the Fairchilds and the Handys united against you in this."
"Despite that letter?"
"It is a letter to Annie, may I remind you? It is not a letter from her. If you can produce such an epistle penned by her hand ... well, then, I'll listen to you."
"She's much too cunning for that."
"Charley, you malign her! I'll wager anything you like there was nothing more between them than a silly flirt which this bounder is trying to take advantage of."
Dexter observed Charley closely as he made this last remark. Could it be disappointment that he made out in that pouting countenance? Was it possible that Charley, nostalgic for the freedom of bachelor days, had been ready to pounce on any excuse for a rupture? And that he now resented the preceptor figure of his older cousin who was, as always, intervening between him and his pleasures? The idea only confirmed Dexter in his resolution.
"I'll tell you what, Charley. Leave this thing to me. I'll send this letter over to Annie at her father's this morning with a note explaining how I happened to get hold of it. I shall also propose that I go there this afternoon to discuss the steps to be taken to put Mr. Bleeker in his place."
"Which is where?"
"Anywhere that he will not see Annie or bother you again. Don't worry. There are ways and means of handling cads like Bleeker."
"Suppose she refuses to give him up?"
"Give him up? Don't be ridiculous, Charley. She hasn't got him."
Charley at this muttered something about being treated like a child, and then strode abruptly out of the room. Still, he left the letter behind. Dexter looked at it balefully for a moment but did not touch it. Then he sat down to write his note to Annie.
3
WHEN DEXTER had been sixteen, an event had occurred that was to darken his life. His father, the Reverend Alexander Fairchild, rector of Saint Andrew's Church in Gramercy Park and, after the rector of Trinity, the most esteemed and influential Episcopal priest in the city, a preacher famed for his silver tongue and acclaimed for his charity and largeness of heart, had abandoned his wife and parish, his young son and daughter, his many relations and multitudinous friends, and decamped for the south of Italy on board the S.S. Persia in the company of Mrs. John Pettit, the neither strikingly young nor strikingly pretty wife of his oldest friend. New York and Brooklyn had shuddered with the shock at first, then cried to the heavens and, ultimately, chuckled. But something died in the heart of young Dexter that never quite came to life again.
His father, whom he was never more to see, he had simply worshipped. He had dreamed of following his example and of taking holy orders after graduating from Columbia. But now he turned away resolutely from all thoughts of an ecclesiastical career. He considered himself disqualified, contaminated. He knew that his reasons were emotional and not logical. He was bound to bear the stain quietly in his heart and to make his life a long reparation. He chose the law for his profession, as he was determined to preserve, and to help others preserve, what his father had broken. If he could not act within the church, he would act outside it.
His mother, a brisk, kindly woman of the world, took full advantage of the sympathy meted out by her rich friends and neighbors to secure favors for her little family without ever losing sight of the truth that if she allowed herself to become too much an object of pity she would become also an object of contempt. She was scrupulously careful to dress well and to live decently by judicious expenditure of her small means and by making herself useful to the leaders of Manhattan society. It was soon known that Millie Fairchild could be depended on to read to an old grandfather, chaperone a visiting niece, preside at a mission meeting, enliven a dull party or fill a box at the Academy of Music for the dullest opera. If her heart was broken, nobody was ever going to hear the jangling of the pieces. Dexter learned from her the quagmire danger of self-pity and the vital importance of concealing ill temper. He learned that it was more essential to be punctual and cheerful than to be witty or profound, and that society would not permit an impecunious young man even the appearance of dejection.
His sister Jane conned her lesson with a difference. She made what both her mother and brother considered the basic error of becoming a cynic. She decided that society cared for nothing but money and looks and that it should be her concern to be beautiful and marry a fortune. Dexter and Mrs. Fairchild never lost their faith in the fundamental good will of the small world they cultivated. Indeed, they'regarded it as "vulgar" to lose faith. When Jane, who was two years older than Dexter, argued that the hollowness of the social world was manifest in the timidity of the more eligible bachelors towards her, that there could be neither valor nor truth in a community whose strong young men were put off by the mere sniff of a bygone scandal, Mrs. Fairchild would counter roundly that it was not the scandal that put them off so much as Jane's unladylike openness of speech and boldness of manner. And when Jane purported to solve her problems by marrying David Ullman, a rich, middle-aged Jewish banker who collected exotic art and anti-Semitic friends, her mother considered her daughter a failure, but, i
n her usual fashion, made the best of it. The Ullmans were not seen at the Peter Rhinelanders' or at the Peter Jays', but they were included in Lily Van Rensselaer's New Year's Day. As Mrs. Fairchild put it sourly, they were firmly attached—to the fringe.
Dexter, taking a different course, found his content, and ultimately a kind of happiness, in the study and practice of law. He subscribed fervently to the platonic theory of his Columbia dean: that judges "found" law by a kind of mystic deduction; that the principles of our jurisprudence resembled their divine counterparts as the earthly shapes of natural things resembled their ideal forms in eternity. Thus it had to be possible for each succeeding generation of lawyers to come closer to the absolute truth of an ideal system of law and equity. Feeling this almost made up to him for the memory of the priestly robe that he had missed, and he came in time to believe that if he should end his career on the bench, it might be almost as good for himself and his fellow mortals as if he had become their bishop.
After taking his degree he joined the firm of his uncle, a brother of the former rector, and made himself an expert in wills and trusts. When the elder Fairchild died, only five years later, Dexter was already prepared to succeed to his practice, and he repaid some of his debt to his uncle by training the latter's son, Charley, and by taking him in as a partner to the small but now prosperous Wall Street firm of Fairchild & Fairchild. At the age of only twenty-five, Dexter felt that he had every right to consider himself firmly launched on the road to success.
His profession might occupy half, or even three-quarters of his life, but no more. Dexter was determined that his marriage should replace in the eyes of New York society the image of his father's shattered one. His choice of just the right bride would be made equally by heart and head. He had no desire to repeat the vulgar error of his sister, who had married for money alone; beauty, character, social position, health and fortune were all factors to be considered. Happily there were plenty of young women in his world to meet all these qualifications. As Dexter's mother used to say, why have second-class friends when it's just as easy to have first?
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