The Adventures of a Widow Part 10

"Or in declining to publish Mr. Leander Prawle's buncombe, which sounds somewhat after this fashion:

"'Man shall one day develop to a G.o.d, Though now he walks unwinged, unaureoled....

To-day we moil and mope--to-morrow's dawn Shall bring us pinions to outsoar the stars.'

"That's the sort of the thing this brave trio does. All poets are partially mad, of course. But then _they_ are mad without being poets; it's this that makes their lunacy so tiresome."

"And are they always quarrelling when they meet?"

"Oh, they do it for effect. They are privately very good friends. They are all equally obscure; they've no cause, yet, to hate one another. If one of them should get a book published before either of the other two, they would probably both abominate him in good earnest."

Just then a tall, sallow gentleman, with small, gray eyes and a nose like the beak of a carnivorous bird, laid his hand on Kindelon's sleeve.

"Powers has just asked me to write the Fenimore Cooper article for his new American Cyclopaedia," declared this gentleman, whose name was Barrowe, and whom Pauline had already met.

"Well, you're precisely the man," replied Kindelon. "n.o.body can do it better."

"Precisely the man!" exclaimed Mr. Barrowe. "Perhaps I would be if I were not so overwhelmed with other duties--so unmercifully handicapped."

He turned to Pauline. "I am devoted to literature, madam," he went on, "but I am forced into commerce for the purpose of keeping starvation away from my family and myself. There is the plain, unvarnished truth.

And now, as it is, I return home after hours of hard, uncongenial work, to s.n.a.t.c.h a short interval between dinner-time and bed-time for whatever I can accomplish with my poor tired pen. My case is a peculiar and pathetic one--and this Powers ought to understand it. But, no; he comes to me in the coolest manner, and makes my doing that article for him a question of actual good-nature and friendly support. So, of course, I consent. But it shows a great want of delicacy in Powers. He knows well enough that I am obliged to neglect many social duties--that I should not even be here at this moment--that besides my daily business I am besieged with countless applications from literary people for all sorts of favors. Why, this very week, I have received no less than fourteen requests for my autograph. How are my wife and little ones to live if I am perpetually to oblige inconsiderate and thoughtless friends?"

"Your complaints would indicate," said Kindelon, rather dryly, "that Powers has not offered you the requisite cheque for proposed services."

Mr. Barrowe gave an irritated groan. "Kindelon!" he exclaimed, "do you know you can be a very rude man when you want?"

"You've told me that several times before, Barrowe," said Kindelon, quite jovially, moving on with Pauline.

He did this briskly enough to prevent the indignant Mr. Barrowe from making any further reply.

"I'm afraid you'll have trouble with that man," he said to Pauline, presently, "if you admit him into your _salon_."

"I have read some of his essays," she answered. "They are published abroad, you know. I thought them very clever."

"So they are--amazingly. But Barrowe himself is a sort of monomaniac. He believes that he is the most maltreated of authors. He is forever boring his friends with these egotistic lamentations. Now, the truth of the matter is that he has more to solidly congratulate himself upon than almost any author whom I know. He was sensible enough, years ago, to embark in commercial affairs. I forget just what he does; I think he is a wholesale druggist, or grocer. He writes brilliantly and with extraordinary speed. His neglect of social duties, as he calls them, is the purest nonsense. He goes wherever he is asked, and finds plenty of time for work besides. This request from Powers secretly pleases him.

The new Cyclopaedia is going to be a splendid series of volumes. But Barrowe must have his little elegiac moan over his blighted life."

"And the applications from fellow-authors?" asked Pauline. "The requests for autographs?"

"Pshaw! those are a figment of his fancy, I suspect. He imagines that he is of vast importance in the literary world. His sensitiveness is something ridiculous. He's a far worse monologuist than I am, which is surely saying a great deal; but if you answer him he considers it an interruption, and if you disagree with him he ranks it as impertinence.

I think he rather likes me because I persistently, fearlessly, and relentlessly do both. But with all his faults, Barrowe has a large, warm heart. Still, it's astonishing how a fine and true character can often enshroud itself with repellent mannerisms, just as a firm breadth of sea-rock will become overcrusted with brittle barnacles.... Ah, Whitcomb, good evening."

A corpulent man, with silver-gray hair and a somewhat pensive expression, was the recipient of Kindelon's last cordial sentence of salutation. After he had made the needful introduction, Kindelon said, addressing Pauline while he regarded Mr. Whitcomb,--

"This is the author of no less than five standard histories."

"Kindelon is very good to call them standard, Mrs. Varick," said Mr.

Whitcomb, in a voice quite as pensive as his face. "I wish that a few thousands more would only share his opinion."

"Oh, but they are gradually getting to do it, my dear Whitcomb!"

declared Kindelon. "Don't make any mistake on that point. A few days ago I chanced to meet your publisher, Sours. Now, an author must stand pretty sure of success when his publisher pays him a round compliment."

"What did Sours say?" asked Mr. Whitcomb, with an almost boyish eagerness.

"He said," exclaimed Kindelon, "that Whitcomb was our coming American historian. There, my dear sir, what do you think of that?"

Mr. Whitcomb sadly shook his silver-gray head. "I've been coming," he murmured, "ever since I was twenty-eight, and I shall be fifty-seven next May. I can't say that I think Sours's compliment meant much. It's got to be a sort of set phrase about me, that I'm coming. It never occurs to anybody to say that I've come, and I suppose it will not if I live to be eighty and totter round with white hair. No, I shall always be coming, coming...."

As the gentleman repeated this final word he smiled with a kind of weary amiability, still shaking his gray head; and a moment later he had pa.s.sed from sight.

"Mrs. Varick," now said a cold, rasping voice to Pauline, "have you managed to enjoy yourself, thus far? If you recollect, we were introduced a little while ago ... Miss Cragge, you know."

"Oh, yes, I remember, Miss Cragge," said Pauline. "And I find it very pleasant here, I a.s.sure you."

Miss Cragge had given Kindelon a short nod, which he returned somewhat faintly. She was a lady of masculine height, with a square-jawed face, a rather mottled complexion, and a pair of slaty-blue eyes that looked at you very directly indeed from beneath a broad, flat forehead. She was dressed in a habit of some shabby gray stuff, and wore at her throat a large antique cameo pin, which might have been unearthed from an ancestral chest near the lavendered laces and faded love-letters of a long-dead grandmother. She was by no means an agreeable-looking lady; she was so ungentle in her quick, snapping speech and so unfeminine in her gaunt, bony, and almost towering figure, that she promptly impressed you with an idea of Nature having maliciously blended the harsher traits of both s.e.xes in one austere personality, and at the same time leaving the result sarcastically feminine. She seldom addressed you without appearing to be bent on something which she thought you might have to tell her, or which she would like you very much to reveal. Her affirmations often had the sound of interrogatories. She had none of the tact, the grace, the _finesse_ of the ordinary "interviewer;" she went to her task rough-handed and undexterous.

"I'm glad you like it," she at once said to Pauline. "I know you've moved a good deal in fashionable society, and I should be gratified to learn how this change affects you."

"Quite refreshingly," returned Pauline.

"You don't feel like a fish out of water, then?" said Miss Cragge, with a sombre little laugh. "Or like a cat in a strange garret?... I saw you at the opera the other evening. You were with Mrs. Poughkeepsie and her daughter; I was down stairs in the orchestra. I go a good deal to places of amus.e.m.e.nt--in a professional way, you know; I'm a dead-head, as the managers call it--I help to paper the house."

"You are rather too idiomatic, I fear," now said Kindelon, with a chilly ring in his tones, "for Mrs. Varick to understand you."

"Idiomatic is very good--excellent, in fact," replied Miss Cragge, with a pleasantry that barely missed being morose. "I suppose you mean that I am slangy. You're always trying to snub me, Kindelon, but I don't mind you. You can't snub me--n.o.body can. I'm too thick-skinned." Here the strangely self-poised lady laughed again, if the grim little sound that left her mirthless lips could really be called a laugh. "I know the Poughkeepsies by sight," she continued, re-addressing Pauline, "because it's my business as a newspaper correspondent to get all the fashionable items that I can collect, and whenever I'm at any public place of amus.e.m.e.nt where there's a chance of meeting those upper-ten people, I always keep my eyes and ears open as wide as possible. I'm correspondent for eight weekly papers outside of New York, besides doing work for two of the city dailies. I never saw anything like the craze for society gossip nowadays. One good story from high life, with a moderate spice of scandal in it, will pay me six times as well as anything else. They say I'm always hunting about for material, and no wonder that I am. The thing is bread and b.u.t.ter to me--and not much b.u.t.ter, either. You see, the rich cla.s.ses here are getting to represent so large a body; so many people are trying to push themselves into society. And when they can't elbow their way into the swell b.a.l.l.s and parties, why, the next best thing is to read about who were there, and what they had on, and who led the German, and what they ate and drank, and how the house was decorated. It seemed a queer enough business for me, at first; I started with grand ideas, but I've had to come down a good many pegs; I've had to pull in my horns. And now I don't mind it a bit; I suppose Kindelon would say that I enjoyed it ... eh, Kindelon? Why, Mrs. Varick, I used to write book-reviews for the New York 'Daily Criterion,' and my pay kept growing less and less. One day I wrote a very careful review of a book that I admired greatly--it was George Eliot's 'Middlemarch,' in fact. The editor-in-chief sent for me. He named the article, and then said, 'I hear that you wrote it. It's a very fine piece of work.'

'Thank you, sir,' I replied, with a tingle of gratification. 'Yes, a very fine piece of work, indeed,' continued the editor; 'I read it with much pleasure. But don't do that sort of thing again, Miss Cragge--we've no use for it on the 'Criterion.' After that I became less ambitious and more mercenary. There's no use pounding against stone walls. The reading public will have what it wants, and if I don't give it to them, somebody else will be only too glad to take my place.... By the way, Mrs. Varick, do you think that Miss Poughkeepsie is going to marry that Scotch earl--Lord Glenartney?"

"I can't tell you, really," said Pauline. She had made up her mind to dislike Miss Cragge very much indeed. At the same time she felt a certain pity for her.

Kindelon began to press quietly forward, and Pauline, who still had his arm, by no means resisted this measure.

"I've been very candid," called Miss Cragge, while the two were slipping away from her. She spoke with even more than her usual blunt, curt manner. "It was because I knew Kindelon would be apt to say hard things of me, and I wanted to spike a few of his guns. But I hope I haven't shocked you, Mrs. Varick."

"Oh, not at all," said Pauline, as blandly as her feelings would permit....

"You were a good deal disgusted, no doubt," said Kindelon, when they were beyond Miss Cragge's hearing.

"She isn't the most charming person I have ever met," replied Pauline.

"I will grant you that."

"How amiably you denounce her! But I forget," he added. "Such a little time ago you were prepared to be exhilarated and ... what was the other word?... to fraternize with most of the company here."

She chose not to heed the last stroke of light irony.

"Are you and Miss Cragge enemies?" she asked.

"Well, I abominate her, and she knows it. I rarely abominate anybody, and I think she knows that also. To my mind she is a conscienceless, hybrid creature. She is a result of a terrible modern license--the license of the Press. There is a frank confession, for a newspaper man like myself. But, between ourselves, I don't know where modern journalism, in some of its ferocious phases, is going to stop, unless it stops at a legislative veto. Miss Cragge would sacrifice her best friend (if she had any friends--which she hasn't) to the requirements of what she calls 'an item.' She thinks no more of a.s.sailing a reputation, in her quest for so-termed 'material,' than a rat would think of carrying off a lump of cheese. She knows very well that I will never forgive her for having printed a lot of libellous folly about a certain friend of mine. He had written a rather harmless and weak novel of New York society, New York manners. Miss Cragge had some old grudge against him; I think it was on account of an adverse criticism which she believed him to have written regarding some dreary, amateurish poems for whose author she had conceived a liking. This was quite enough for Miss Cragge. She filled a column of the Rochester "Rocket," or the Topeka "Trumpet," or some such sheet, with irate fictions about poor Charley Erskine. He had no redress, poor fellow; she declared that he had slandered a pure, high-minded lady in society here by caricaturing her in his novel. She parodied some of poor Charley's rather fragile verses; she accused him of habitually talking fatuous stuff at a certain Bohemian sort of beer-garden which he had visited scarcely five times within that same year. Oh, well, the whole thing was so atrocious that I offered my friend the New York "Asteroid" in which to hurl back any epistolary thunderbolt he should care to manufacture. But Charley wouldn't; he might have written a bad novel and worse poems, but he had sense enough to know that his best scorn lay in severe silence. Still, apart from all this, I have excellent reasons for shunning Miss Cragge, and I have told you some of them. She is the most aggravated form of the American newspaper correspondent, prowling about and seeking whom she may devour. I consider her a dangerous person, and I advise you not to allow her within your _salon_."

"Oh, I shan't," quickly answered Pauline. "You need not have counselled me on that point. It was quite unnecessary. I intend to pick and choose." She gave a long, worried sigh, now, which Kindelon just heard above the conversational hum surrounding them. "I am afraid it all comes to picking and choosing, everywhere," she went on. "Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie is perpetually doing it in _her_ world, and I begin to think that there is none other where it must not be done."

Kindelon leaned his handsome crisp-curled head nearer to her own; he fixed his light-blue eyes, in which lay so warm and liquid a sparkle, intently upon the lifted gaze of Pauline.