Alma was left with Beaton near the piano, and he began to talk about the Dryfooses, as he sat down on the piano stool. He said he had been giving Miss Dryfoos a lesson on the banjo; he had borrowed the banjo of Miss Vance. Then he struck the chord he had been trying to teach Christine and played over the air he had sung.
“How do you like that?” he asked, whirling round.
“It seems rather a disrespectful little tune somehow,” said Alma placidly.
Beaton rested his elbow on the corner of the piano, and gazed dreamily at her. “Your perceptions are wonderful. It is disrespectful. I played it, up there, because I felt disrespectful to them.”
“Do you claim that as a merit?”
“No, I state it as a fact. How can you respect such people?”
“You might respect yourself then,” said the girl. “Or perhaps that wouldn’t be so easy either.”
“No; it wouldn’t. I like to have you say these things to me,” said Beaton impartially.
“Well, I like to say them,” Alma returned.
“They do me good.”
“Oh, I don’t know that that was my motive.”
“There is no one like you—no one,” said Beaton, as if apostrophizing her in her absence. “To come from that house, with its assertions of money—you can hear it chink; you can smell the foul old bank notes; it stifles you—into an atmosphere like this, is like coming into another world.”
“Thank you,” said Alma. “I’m glad there isn’t that unpleasant odor here, but I wish there was a little more of the chinking.”
“No, no! Don’t say that!” he implored. “I like to think that there is one soul uncontaminated by the sense of money in this big, brutal, sordid city.”
“You mean two,” said Alma, with modesty. “But if you stifle at the Dryfooses’, why do you go there?”
“Why do I go?” he mused. “Don’t you believe in knowing all the natures, the types, you can? Those girls are a strange study: the young one is a simple, earthly creature, as common as an oat field; and the other a sort of sylvan life, fierce, flashing, feline—”
Alma burst out into a laugh. “What apt alliteration! And do they like being studied? I should think the sylvan life might—scratch.”
“No,” said Beaton, with melancholy absence; “it only—purrs.”
The girl felt a rising indignation. “Well then, Mr. Beaton; I should hope it would scratch, and bite too. I think you’ve no business to go about studying people as you do. It’s abominable.”
“Go on,” said the young man. “That Puritan conscience of yours! It appeals to the old Covenanter strain in me—like a voice of preexistence. Go on—”
“Oh, if I went on I should merely say it was not only abominable, but contemptible.”
“You could be my guardian angel, Alma,” said the young man, making his eyes more and more slumbrous and dreamy.
“Stuff! I hope I have a soul above buttons!”
He smiled as she rose, and followed her across the room.
“Good night, Mr. Beaton,” she said.
Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson came in from the other room. “What! You’re not going, Beaton?”
“Yes; I’m going to a reception. I stopped in on my way.”
“To kill time,” Alma explained.
“Well,” said Fulkerson gallantly, “this is the last place I should like to do it. But I guess I’d better be going too. It has sometimes occurred to me that there is such a thing as staying too late. But with Brother Beaton here just starting in for an evening’s amusement, it does seem a little early yet. Can’t you urge me to stay, somebody?”
The two girls laughed, and Miss Woodburn said, “Mr. Beaton is such a butterfly of fashion! Ah wish Ah was on mah way to a pawty. Ah feel quahte envious.”
“But he didn’t say it to make you,” Alma explained with meek softness.
“Well, we can’t all be swells. Where is your party anyway, Beaton?” asked Fulkerson. “How do you manage to get your invitations to those things? I suppose a fellow has to keep hinting round pretty lively, heigh?”
Beaton took these mockeries serenely and shook hands with Miss Woodburn, with the effect of having already shaken hands with Alma. She stood with hers clasped behind her.
V
BEATON WENT AWAY with the smile on his face which he had kept in listening to Fulkerson and carried it with him to the reception. He believed that Alma was vexed with him for more personal reasons than she had implied; it flattered him that she should have resented what he told her of the Dryfooses. She had scolded him in their behalf apparently, but really because he had made her jealous by his interest, of whatever kind, in some one else. What followed, had followed naturally. Unless she had been quite a simpleton she could not have met his provisional lovemaking on any other terms, and the reason why Beaton chiefly liked Alma Leighton was that she was not a simpleton. Even up in the country, when she was overawed by his acquaintance, at first, she was not very deeply overawed, and at times she was not overawed at all. At such times she astonished him by taking his most solemn histrionics with flippant incredulity, and even burlesquing them. But he could see all the same that he had caught her fancy, and he admired the skill with which she punished his neglect when they met in New York. He had really come very near forgetting the Leightons; the intangible obligations of mutual kindness which hold some men so fast hung loosely upon him; it would not have hurt him to break from them altogether, but when he recognized them at last, he found that it strengthened them indefinitely to have Alma ignore them so completely. If she had been sentimental or softly reproachful, that would have been the end; he could not have stood it; he would have had to drop her. But when she met him on his own ground and obliged him to be sentimental, the game was in her hands. Beaton laughed now when he thought of that, and he said to himself that the girl had grown immensely since she had come to New York; nothing seemed to have been lost upon her; she must have kept her eyes uncommonly wide open. He noticed that especially in their talks over her work; she had profited by everything she had seen and heard; she had all of Wetmore’s ideas pat; it amused Beaton to see how she seized every useful word that he dropped too and turned him to technical account whenever she could. He liked that; she had a great deal of talent; there was no question of that; if she were a man there could be no question of her future. He began to construct a future for her; it included provision for himself too; it was a common future in which their lives and work were united.
He was full of the glow of its prosperity when he met Margaret Vance at the reception.
The house was one where people might chat a long time together without publicly committing themselves to an interest in each other except such as grew out of each other’s ideas. Miss Vance was there because she united in her catholic sympathies or ambitions the objects of the fashionable people and of the aesthetic people who met there on common ground. It was almost the only house in New York where this happened often, and it did not happen very often there. It was a literary house primarily, with artistic qualifications, and the frequenters of it were mostly authors and artists; Wetmore, who was always trying to fit everything with a phrase, said it was the unfrequenters who were fashionable. There was great ease there, and simplicity; and if there was not distinction, it was not for want of distinguished people, but because there seems to be some solvent in New York life that reduces all men to a common level, that touches everybody with its potent magic and brings to the surface the deeply underlying nobody. The effect for some temperaments, for consciousness, for egotism, is admirable; for curiosity, for hero worship, it is rather baffling. It is the spirit of the street transferred to the drawing room; indiscriminating, leveling, but doubtless finally wholesome, and witnessing the immensity of the place, if not consenting to the grandeur of reputations or presences.
Beaton now denied that this house represented a salon at all, in the old sense; and he held that the salon was impossible, even undesirable, with us, when Mi
ss Vance sighed for it. At any rate he said that this turmoil of coming and going, this bubble and babble, this cackling and hissing of conversation, was not the expression of any such civilization as had created the salon. Here, he owned, were the elements of intellectual delightfulness, but he said their assemblage in such quantity alone denied the salon; there was too much of a good thing. The French word implied a long evening of general talk among the guests, crowned with a little chicken at supper, ending at cockcrow. Here was tea, with milk or with lemon—baths of It—and claret cup for the hardier spirits throughout the evening. It was very nice, very pleasant, but it was not the little chicken—not the salon. In fact, he affirmed, the salon descended from above, out of the great world, and included the aesthetic world in it. But our great world, the rich people, were stupid, with no wish to be otherwise; they were not even curious about authors and artists. Beaton fancied himself speaking impartially, and so he allowed himself to speak bitterly; he said that in no other city in the world, except Vienna perhaps, were such people so little a part of society.
“It isn’t altogether the rich people’s fault,” said Margaret; and she spoke impartially too. “I don’t believe that the literary men and the artists would like a salon that descended to them. Madame Geoffrin, you know, was very plebeian; her husband was a businessman of some sort.”
“He would have been a howling swell in New York,” said Beaton, still impartially.
Wetmore came up to their corner with a scroll of bread and butter in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. Large and fat and clean shaven, he looked like a monk in evening dress.
“We were talking about salons,” said Margaret.
“Why don’t you open a saloon yourself?” asked Wetmore, breathing thickly from the anxiety of getting through the crowd without spilling his tea.
“Like poor Lady Barberina Lemon?” said the girl, with a laugh. “What a good story! That idea of a woman who couldn’t be interested in any of the arts because she was socially and traditionally the material of them! We can never reach that height of nonchalance in this country.”
“Not if we tried seriously?” suggested the painter. “I’ve an idea that if the Americans ever gave their minds to that sort of thing, they could take the palm—or the cake, as Beaton here would say—just as they do in everything else. When we do have an aristocracy, it will be an aristocracy that will go ahead of anything the world has ever seen. Why don’t somebody make a beginning and go in openly for an ancestry, and a lower-middle class, and an hereditary legislature, and all the rest? We’ve got liveries, and crests, and palaces, and caste feeling. We’re all right as far as we’ve gone, and we’ve got the money to go any length.”
“Like your natural-gas man, Mr. Beaton,” said the girl, with a smiling glance round at him.
“Ah!” said Wetmore, stirring his tea. “Has Beaton got a natural-gas man?”
“My natural-gas man,” said Beaton, ignoring Wetmore’s question, “doesn’t know how to live in his palace yet, and I doubt if he has any caste feeling. I fancy his family believe themselves victims of it. They say—one of the young ladies does—that she never saw such an unsociable place as New York; nobody calls.”
“That’s good!” said Wetmore. “I suppose they’re all ready for company too: good cook, furniture, servants, carriages?”
“Galore,” said Beaton.
“Well, that’s too bad. There’s a chance for you, Miss Vance. Doesn’t your philanthropy embrace the socially destitute as well as the financially? Just think of a family like that, without a friend in a great city! I should think common charity had a duty there—not to mention the uncommon.”
He distinguished that kind as Margaret’s by a glance of ironical deference. She had a repute for good works which was out of proportion to the works, as it always is, but she was really active in that way, under the vague obligation, which we now all feel, to be helpful. She was of the church which seems to have found a reversion to the imposing ritual of the past the way back to the early ideals of Christian brotherhood.
“Oh, they seem to have Mr. Beaton,” Margaret answered, and Beaton felt obscurely flattered by her reference to his patronage of the Dryfooses.
He explained to Wetmore, “They have me because they partly own me. Dryfoos is Fulkerson’s financial backer in Every Other Week.”
“Is that so? Well, that’s interesting too. Aren’t you rather astonished, Miss Vance, to see what a pretty thing Beaton is making of that magazine of his?”
“Oh,” said Margaret, “it’s so very nice, every way; it makes you feel as if you did have a country after all. It’s as chic—that detestable little word—as those new French books.”
“Beaton modeled it on them. But you mustn’t suppose he does everything about Every Other Week; he’d like you to. Beaton, you haven’t come up to that cover of your first number since. That was the design of one of my pupils, Miss Vance—a little girl that Beaton discovered down in New Hampshire last summer.”
“Oh yes. And have you great hopes of her, Mr. Wetmore?” “She seems to have more love of it and knack for it than anyone of her sex I’ve seen yet. It really looks like a case of art for art’s sake, at times. But you can’t tell. They’re liable to get married at any moment, you know. Look here, Beaton, when your natural-gas man gets to the picture-buying stage in his development, just remember your old friends, will you? You know, Miss Vance, those new fellows have their regular stages. They never know what to do with their money, but they find out that people buy pictures at one point. They shut your things up in their houses where nobody comes; and after a while they overeat themselves—they don’t know what else to do—and die of apoplexy, and leave your pictures to a gallery, and then they see the light. It’s slow, but it’s pretty sure. Well, I see Beaton isn’t going to move on, as he ought to do; and so I must. He always was an unconventional creature.”
Wetmore went away, but Beaton remained, and he out-stayed several other people who came up to speak to Miss Vance. She was interested in everybody, and she liked the talk of these clever literary, artistic, clerical, even theatrical people, and she liked the sort of court with which they recognized her fashion as well as her cleverness; it was very pleasant to be treated intellectually as if she were one of themselves, and socially as if she were not habitually the same, but a sort of guest in Bohemia, a distinguished stranger. If it was Arcadia rather than Bohemia, still she felt her quality of distinguished stranger. The flattery of it touched her fancy and not her vanity; she had very little vanity. Beaton’s devotion made the same sort of appeal; it was not so much that she liked him as she liked being the object of his admiration. She was a girl of genuine sympathies, intellectual rather than sentimental. In fact she was an intellectual person, whom qualities of the heart saved from being disagreeable, as they saved her on the other hand from being wordly or cruel in her fashionableness. She had read a great many books and had ideas about them, quite courageous and original ideas; she knew about pictures—she had been in Wetmore’s class; she was fond of music; she was willing to understand even politics; in Boston she might have been agnostic, but in New York she was sincerely religious; she was very accomplished, and perhaps it was her goodness that prevented her feeling what was not best in Beaton.
“Do you think,” she said after the retreat of one of the comers and goers left her alone with him again, “that these young ladies would like me to call on them?”
“Those young ladies?” Beaton echoed. “Miss Leighton and—”
“No; I have been there with my aunt’s cards already.”
“Oh yes,” said Beaton, as if he had known of it; he admired the pluck and pride with which Alma had refrained from ever mentioning the fact to him and had kept her mother from mentioning it, which must have been difficult.
“I mean the Miss Dryfooses. It seems really barbarous, if nobody goes near them. We do all kinds of things and help all kinds of people in some ways, but we let strangers remain strangers unle
ss they know how to make their way among us.”
“The Dryfooses certainly wouldn’t know how to make their way among you,” said Beaton, with a sort of dreamy absence in his tone.
Miss Vance went on, speaking out the process of reasoning in her mind, rather than any conclusions she had reached. “We defend ourselves by trying to believe that they must have friends of their own or that they would think us patronizing and wouldn’t like being made the objects of social charity, but they needn’t really suppose anything of the kind.”
“I don’t imagine they would,” said Beaton. “I think they’d be only too happy to have you come. But you wouldn’t know what to do with each other indeed, Miss Vance.”
“Perhaps we shall like each other,” said the girl bravely, “and then we shall know. What church are they of?”
“I don’t believe they’re of any,” said Beaton. “The mother was brought up a Dunkard.”
“A Dunkard?”
Beaton told what he knew of the primitive sect, with its early Christian polity, its literal interpretation of Christ’s ethics, and its quaint ceremonial of foot-washing; he made something picturesque of that. “The father is a Mammon-worshiper, pure and simple. I suppose the young ladies go to church, but I don’t know where. They haven’t tried to convert me.”
A Hazard of New Fortunes Page 27