A Little Journey in the World Part 32

XXI

Live not unto yourselves! Can any one deny that this blessed sentiment is extending in modern life? Do we build houses for ourselves or for others? Do we make great entertainments for our own comfort? I do not know that anybody regarded the erection of the Henderson palace as an altruistic performance. The socialistic newspapers said that it was pure ostentation. But had it not been all along in the minds of the builders to ask all the world to see it, to share the delight of it? Is this a selfish spirit? When I stroll in the Park am I not pleased with the equipages, with the display of elegance upon which so much money has been lavished for my enjoyment?

All the world was asked to the Henderson reception. The coming event was the talk of the town. I have now cuttings from the great journals, articles describing the house, more beautifully written than Gibbon's stately periods about the luxury of later Rome. It makes one smile to hear that the day of fine writing is over. Everybody was eager to go; there was some plotting to obtain invitations by those who felt that they could not afford to be omitted from the list that would be printed; by those who did not know the Hendersons, and did not care to know them, but who shared the general curiosity; and everybody vowed that he supposed he must go, but he hated such a crush and jam as it was sure to be. Yet no one would have cared to go if it had not promised to be a crush. I said that all the world was asked, which is our way of saying that a thousand or two had been carefully selected from the million within reach.

Invitations came to Brandon, of course, for old times' sake. The Morgans said that they preferred a private view; Miss Forsythe declared that she hadn't the heart to go; in short, Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild alone went to represent the worldly element.

I am sorry to say that the reader must go to the files of the city press for an account of the night's festivity. The pen that has been used in portraying Margaret's career is entirely inadequate to it. There is a general impression that an American can do anything that he sets his hand to, but it is not true; it is true only that he tries everything.

The reporter is born, as the poet is; it cannot be acquired--that astonishing, irresponsible command of the English language; that warm, lyrical tone; that color, and bewildering metaphorical brilliancy; that picturesqueness; that use of words as the painter uses pigments, in splashes and blotches which are so effective; that touch of raillery and sarcasm and condescension; that gay enjoyment of reveling in the illimitable; that air of superior knowledge and style; that dash of sentiment; that calm and somewhat haughty judgment.

I am always impressed at such an entertainment with the good-humor of the American people, no matter what may be the annoyance and discomfort.

In all the push and thrust and confusion, amid the rending of trains, the tearing of lace, the general crushing of costumes, there was the merriest persiflage, laughter, and chatter, and men and women entered into and drew out of the fashionable wreck in the highest spirits. For even in such a s.p.a.cious mansion there were spots where currents met, and rooms where there was a fight for mere breath. It would have been a tame affair without this struggle. And what an epitome of life it all was!

There were those who gave themselves up to admiration, who gushed with enthusiasm; there were those who had the weary air of surfeit with splendor of this sort; there were the bustling and volatile, who made facetious remarks, and treated the affair like a Fourth of July; and there were also groups dark and haughty, like the Stotts, who held a little aloof, and coldly admitted that it was most successful; it lacked je ne sais quoi, but it was in much better taste than they had expected.

Is there something in the very nature of a crowd to bring out the inherent vulgarity of the best-bred people, so that some have doubted whether the highest civilization will tolerate these crushing and hilarious a.s.semblies?

At any rate, one could enjoy the general effect. There might be vulgar units, and one caught notes of talk that disenchanted, but there were so many women of rare and stately beauty, of exquisite loveliness, of charm in manner and figure--so many men of fine presence, with such an air of power and manly prosperity and self-reliance--I doubt if any other a.s.sembly in the world, undecorated by orders and uniforms, with no blazon of rank, would have a greater air of distinction. Looking over it from a landing in the great stairway that commanded vistas and ranges of the lofty, brilliant apartments, vivified by the throng, which seemed enn.o.bled by the s.p.a.cious splendor in which it moved, one would be pardoned a feeling of national pride in the spectacle. I drew aside to let a stately train of beauty and of fashion descend, and saw it sweep through the hall, and enter the drawing-rooms, until it was lost in a sea of shifting color. It was like a dream.

And the centre of all this charming plutocratic graciousness and beauty was Margaret--Margaret and her handsome husband. Where did the New Hampshire boy learn this simple dignity of bearing, this good-humored cordiality without condescension, this easy air of the man of the world?

Was this the railway wrecker, the insurance manipulator, the familiar of Uncle Jerry, the king of the lobby, the pride and the bugaboo of Wall Street? Margaret was regnant. And how charmingly she received her guests! How well I knew that half-imperious toss of the head, and the glance of those level, large gray eyes, softened instantly, on recognition, into the sweetest smile of welcome playing about the dimple and the expressive mouth! What woman would not feel a little thrill of triumph? The world was at her feet. Why was it, I wonder, as I stood there watching the throng which saluted this queenly woman of the world, in an hour of supreme social triumph, while the notes of the distant orchestra came softly on the air, and the overpowering perfume of banks of flowers and tropical plants--why was it that I thought of a fair, simple girl, stirred with n.o.ble ideals, eager for the intellectual life, tender, sympathetic, courageous? It was Margaret Debree--how often I had seen her thus!--sitting on her little veranda, swinging her chip hat by the string, glowing from some errand in which her heart had played a much more important part than her purse. I caught the odor of the honeysuckle that climbed on the porch, and I heard the note of the robin that nested there.

"You seem to be in a brown study," said Carmen, who came up, leaning on the arm of the Earl of Chisholm.

"I'm lost in admiration. You must make allowance, Miss Esch.e.l.le, for a person from the country."

"Oh, we are all from the country. That is the beauty of it. There is Mr.

Hollowell, used to drive a peddler's cart, or something of that sort, up in Maine, talking with Mr. Stott, whose father came in on the towpath of the Erie Ca.n.a.l. You don't dance? The earl has just been giving me a whirl in the ballroom, and I've been trying to make him understand about democracy."

"Yes," the earl rejoined; "Miss Esch.e.l.le has been interpreting to me republican simplicity."

"And he cannot point out, Mr. Fairchild, why this is not as good as a reception at St. James. I suppose it's his politeness."

"Indeed, it is all very charming. It must be a great thing to be the architect of your own fortune."

"Yes; we are all self-made," Carmen confessed.

"I am, and I get dreadfully tired of it sometimes. I have to read over the Declaration and look at the map of the Western country at such times. A body has to have something to hold on to."

"Why, this seems pretty substantial," I said, wondering what the girl was driving at.

"Oh, yes; I suppose the world looks solid from a balloon. I heard one man say to another just now, 'How long do you suppose Henderson will last?' Probably we shall all come down by the run together by-and-by."

"You seem to be on a high plane," I suggested.

"I guess it's the influence of the earl. But I am the most misunderstood of women. What I really like is simplicity. Can you have that without the social traditions," she appealed to the earl, "such as you have in England?"

"I really cannot say," the earl replied, laughing. "I fancied there was simplicity in Brandon; perhaps that was traditional."

"Oh, Brandon!" Carmen cried, "see what Brandon does when it gets a chance. I a.s.sure your lordship that we used to be very simple people in New York. Come, let us go and tell Mrs. Henderson how delightful it all is. I'm so sorry for her."

As I moved about afterwards with my wife we heard not many comments, a word here and there about Henderson's wonderful success, a remark about Margaret's beauty, some sympathy for her in such a wearisome ordeal--the world is full of kindness--the house duly admired, and the ordinary compliments paid; the people a.s.sembled were, as usual, absorbed in their own affairs. From all we could gather, all those present were used to living in a palace, and took all the splendor quite as a matter of course. Was there no envy? Was there nothing said about the airs of a country school-ma'am, the aplomb of an adventurer? Were there no criticisms afterwards as the guests rolled home in their carriages, surfeited and exhausted? What would you have? Do you expect the millennium to begin in New York?

The newspapers said that it was the most brilliant affair the metropolis had ever seen. I have no doubt it was. And I do not judge, either, by the newspaper estimates of the expense. I take the simple words addressed by the earl to Margaret, when he said good-night, at their full value. She flushed with pleasure at his modest commendation.

Perhaps it was to her the seal of her night's triumph.

The house was opened. The world had seen it. The world had gone. If sleep did not come that night to her tired head on the pillow, what wonder? She had a position in the great world. In imagination it opened wider and wider. Could not the infinite possibilities of it fill the hunger of any soul?

The echoes of the Henderson reception continued long in the country press. Items multiplied as to the cost. It was said that the sum expended in flowers alone, which withered in a night, would have endowed a ward in a charity hospital. Some wag said that the price of the supper would have changed the result of the Presidential election. Views of the mansion were given in the ill.u.s.trated papers, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Henderson. In country villages, in remote farmhouses, this great social event was talked of, Henderson's wealth was the subject of conjecture, Margaret's toilet was an object of interest. It was a shining example of success. Preachers, whose sensational sermons are as widely read as descriptions of great crimes, moralized on Henderson's career and Henderson's palace, and raised up everywhere an envied image of worldly prosperity. When he first arrived in New York, with only fifty cents in his pocket--so the story ran-and walked up Broadway and Fifth Avenue, he had nearly been run over at the corner of Twenty-sixth Street by a carriage, the occupants of which, a lady and gentleman, had stared insolently at the country youth. Never mind, said the lad to himself, the day will come when you will cringe to me. And the day did come when the gentleman begged Henderson to spare him in Wall Street, and his wife intrigued for an invitation to Mrs. Henderson's ball.

The reader knows there is not a word of truth in this. Alas! said the preacher, if he had only devoted his great talents to the service of the Good and the True! Behold how vain are all the triumphs of this world! see the result of the worship of Mammon! My friends, the age is materialized, a spirit of worldliness is abroad; be vigilant, lest the deceitfulness of riches send your souls to perdition. And the plain country people thanked G.o.d for such a warning, and the country girl dreamed of Margaret's career, and the country boy studied the ways of Henderson's success, and resolved that he, too, would seek his fortune in this bad metropolis.

The Hendersons were important people. It was impossible that a knowledge of their importance should not have a reflex influence upon Margaret.

Could it be otherwise than that gradually the fineness of her discrimination should be dulled by the almost universal public consent in the methods by which Henderson had achieved his position, and that in time she should come to regard adverse judgment as the result of envy?

Henderson himself was under less illusion; the world was about what he had taken it for, only a little worse--more gullible, and with less principle. Carmen had mocked at Margaret's belief in Henderson. It is certainly a pitiful outcome that Margaret, with her naturally believing nature, should in the end have had a less clear perception of what was right and wrong than Henderson himself. Yet Henderson would not have shrunk, any more than Carmen would, from any course necessary to his ends, while Margaret would have shrunk from many things; but in absolute worldliness, in devotion to it, the time had come when Henderson felt that his Puritan wife was no restraint upon him. It was this that broke gentle Miss Forsythe's heart when she came fully to realize it.

I said that the world was at Margaret's feet. Was it? How many worlds are there, and does one ever, except by birth (in a republic), conquer them all? Truth to say, there were penetralia in New York society concerning which this successful woman was uneasy in her heart. There were people who had accepted her invitations, to whose houses she had been, who had a dozen ways of making her feel that she was not of them.

These people--I suppose that if two castaways landed naked on a desert island, one of them would instantly be the ancien regime--had spoken of Mrs. Henderson and her ambition to the Earl of Chisholm in a way that pained him. They graciously a.s.sumed that he, as one of the elect, would understand them. It was therefore with a heavy heart that he came to say good-by to Margaret before his return.

I cannot imagine anything more uncomfortable for an old lover than a meeting of this sort; but I suppose the honest fellow could not resist the inclination to see Margaret once more. I dare say she had a little flutter of pride in receiving him, in her consciousness of the change in herself into a wider experience of the world. And she may have been a little chagrined that he was not apparently more impressed by her surroundings, nor noticed the change in herself, but met her upon the ground of simple sincerity where they had once stood. What he tried to see, what she felt he was trying to see, was not the beautiful woman about whose charm and hospitality the town talked, but the girl he had loved in the old days.

He talked a little, a very little, about himself and his work in England, and a great deal about what had interested him here on his second visit, the social drift, the politics, the organized charities; and as he talked, Margaret was conscious how little the world in which she lived seemed to interest him; how little importance he attached to it. And she saw, as in a momentary vision of herself, that the things that once absorbed her and stirred her sympathies were now measurably indifferent to her. Book after book which he casually mentioned, as showing the drift of the age, and profoundly affecting modern thought, she knew only by name. "I guess," said Carmen, afterwards, when Margaret spoke of the earl's conversation, "that he is one of those who are trying to live in the spirit--what do they call it?--care for things of the mind."

"You are doing a n.o.ble work," he said, "in your Palace of Industry."

"Yes, it is very well managed," Margaret replied; "but it is uphill work, the poor are so ungrateful for charity."

"Perhaps n.o.body, Mrs. Henderson, likes to be treated as an object of charity."

"Well, work isn't what they want when we give it, and they'd rather live in the dirt than in clean apartments."

"Many of them don't know any better, and a good many of our poor resent condescension."

"Yes," said Margaret, with warmth; "they are getting to demand things as their right, and they are insolent. The last time I drove down in that quarter I was insulted by their manner. What are you going to do with such people? One big fellow who was leaning against a lamp-post growled, 'You'd better stay in your own palace, miss, and not come prying round here.' And a brazen girl cried out: 'Shut yer mouth, d.i.c.k; the lady's got to have some pleasure. Don't yer see, she's a-slummin'?'"

"It's very hard, I know," said the earl; "perhaps we are all on the wrong track."

"Maybe. Mr. Henderson says that the world would get on better if everybody minded his own business."

"I wish it were possible," the earl remarked, with an air of finishing the topic. "I have just been up to Brandon, Mrs. Henderson. I fear that I have seen the dear place for the last time."

"You don't mean that you are tired of America?"

"Not that. I shall never, even in thought, tire of Brandon."

"Yes, they are dear, good people."

"I thought Miss Forsythe--what a sweet, brave woman she is!--was looking sad and weary."