The Call of the Cumberlands Part 22

"'Test of the man, if his worth be, "'In accord with the ultimate plan, "'That he be not, to his marring, "'Always and utterly man; "'That he bring out of the battle "'Fitter and undefiled, "'To woman the heart of a woman, "'To children the heart of a child.'"

Samson South offered no criticism. He had known life from the stoic's view-point. He had heard the seductive call of artistic yearnings. Now, it dawned on him in an intensely personal fashion, as it had begun already to dawn in theory, that the warrior and the artist may meet on common and compatible ground, where the fighting spirit is touched and knighted with the gentleness of chivalry. He seemed to be looking from a new and higher plane, from which he could see a mellow softness on angles that had hitherto been only stern and unrelieved.

CHAPTER XVII

"I have come, not to quarrel with you, but to try to dissuade you."

The Honorable Mr. Wickliffe bit savagely at his cigar, and gave a despairing spread to his well-manicured hands. "You stand in danger of becoming the most cordially hated man in New York--hated by the most powerful combinations in New York."

Wilfred Horton leaned back in a swivel chair, and put his feet up on his desk. For a while, he seemed interested in his own silk socks.

"It's very kind of you to warn me," he said, quietly.

The Honorable Mr. Wickliffe rose in exasperation, and paced the floor.

The smoke from his black cigar went before him in vicious puffs.

Finally, he stopped, and leaned glaring on the table.

"Your family has always been conservative. When you succeeded to the fortune, you showed no symptoms of this mania. In G.o.d's name, what has changed you?"

"I hope I have grown up," explained the young man, with an unruffled smile. "One can't wear swaddling clothes forever, you know."

The attorney for an instant softened his manner as he looked into the straight-gazing, unafraid eyes of his client.

"I've known you from your babyhood. I advised your father before you were born. You have, by the chance of birth, come into the control of great wealth. The world of finance is of delicate balance. Squabbles in certain directorates may throw the Street into panic. Suddenly, you emerge from decent quiet, and run amuck in the china-shop, bellowing and tossing your horns. You make war on those whose interests are your own. You seem bent on hari-kari. You have toys enough to amuse you. Why couldn't you stay put?"

"They weren't the right things. They were, as you say, toys." The smile faded and Horton's chin set itself for a moment, as he added:

"If you don't think I'm going to stay put--watch me."

"Why do you have to make war--to be chronically insurgent?"

"Because"--the young man, who had waked up, spoke slowly--"I am reading a certain writing on the wall. The time is not far off when, unless we regulate a number of matters from within, we shall be regulated from without. Then, instead of giving the financial body a little griping in its gold-lined tummy, which is only the salutary effect of purging, a surgical operation will be required. It will be something like one they performed on the body politic of France not so long ago. Old Dr. Guillotine officiated. It was quite a successful operation, though the patient failed to rally."

"Take for instance this newspaper war you've inaugurated on the police," grumbled the corporation lawyer. "It's less dangerous to the public than these financial crusades, but decidedly more so for yourself. You are regarded as a dangerous agitator, a marplot! I tell you, Wilfred, aside from all other considerations the thing is perilous to yourself. You are riding for a fall. These men whom you are whipping out of public life will turn on you."

"So I hear. Here's a letter I got this morning--unsigned. That is, I thought it was here. Well, no matter. It warns me that I have less than three months to live unless I call off my dogs."

The Honorable Mr. Wickliffe's face mirrored alarm.

"Let me have it," he demanded. "You shouldn't treat such matters lightly. Men are a.s.sa.s.sinated in New York. I'll refer it to the police."

Horton laughed.

"That would be in the nature of referring back, wouldn't it? I fancy it came from some one not so remote from police sympathy."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to stay put. If I can convict certain corrupt members of the department, I'm going to nail bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned hides all over the front of the city hall."

"Have you had any other threats?"

"No, not exactly, but I've had more touching recognition than that.

I've been asked to resign from several very good clubs."

The attorney groaned.

"You will be a Pariah. So will your allies."

It is said that the new convert is ever the most extreme fanatic.

Wilfred Horton had promised to put on his working clothes, and he had done it with reckless disregard for consequences. At first, he was simply obeying Adrienne's orders; but soon he found himself playing the game for the game's sake. Men at the clubs and women whom he took into dinner chaffed him over his sudden disposition to try his wings. He was a man riding a hobby, they said. In time, it began to dawn that he, with others, whom he had drawn to his standards, meant serious war on certain complacent evils in the world of finance and politics. Sleeping dogs of custom began to stir and growl. Political overlords, a.s.sailed as unfaithful servants, showed their teeth. From some hidden, but unfailing, source terribly sure and direct evidence of guilt was being gathered. For Wilfred Horton, who was demanding a day of reckoning and spending great sums of money to get it, there was a prospect of things doing.

Adrienne Lescott was in Europe. Soon, she would return, and Horton meant to show that he had not buried his talent.

For eight months Samson's life had run in the steady ascent of gradual climbing, but, in the four months from the first of August to the first of December, the pace of his existence suddenly quickened. He left off drawing from plaster casts, and went into a life cla.s.s. His shyness secretly haunted him. The nudity of the woman posing on the model throne, the sense of his own almost as naked ignorance, and the dread of the criticism to come, were all keen embarra.s.sments upon him.

In this period, Samson had his first acquaintanceship with women, except those he had known from childhood--and his first acquaintanceship with the men who were not of his own art world. Of the women, he saw several sorts. There were the ap.r.o.ned and frowsy students, of uncertain age, who seemed to have no life except that which existed under studio skylights. There were, also, a few younger girls, who took their art life with less painful solemnity; and, of course, the models in the "partially draped" and the "altogether."

Tony Colla.s.so was an Italian ill.u.s.trator, who lodged and painted in studio-apartments in Washington Square, South. He had studied in the Julian School and the Beaux Arts, and wore a shock of dark curls, a Satanic black mustache, and an expression of Byronic melancholy. The melancholy, he explained to Samson, sprang from the necessity of commercializing his divine gift. His companions were various, numbering among them a group of those pygmy celebrities of whom one has never heard until by chance he meets them, and of whom their intimates speak as of immortals.

To Colla.s.so's studio, Samson was called one night by telephone. He had sometimes gone there before to sit for an hour, chiefly as a listener, while the man from Sorrento bewailed fate with his coterie, and denounced all forms of government, over insipid Chianti. Sometimes, an equally melancholy friend in soiled linen and frayed clothes took up his violin, and, as he improvised, the noisy group would fall silent.

At such moments, Samson would ride out on the waves of melody, and see again the velvet softness of the mountain night, with stars hanging intimately close, and hear the ripple of Misery and a voice for which he longed.

But, to-night, he entered the door to find himself in the midst of a gay and boisterous party. The room was already thickly fogged with smoke, and a dozen men and women, singing s.n.a.t.c.hes of current airs, were interesting themselves over a chafing dish. The studio of Tony Colla.s.so was of fair size, and adorned with many unframed paintings, chiefly his own, and a few good tapestries and bits of bric-a-brac variously jettisoned from the sea of life in which he had drifted. The crowd itself was typical. A few very minor writers and artists, a model or two, and several women who had thinking parts in current Broadway productions.

At eleven o'clock the guests of honor arrived in a taxicab. They were Mr. William Farbish and Miss Winifred Starr. Having come, as they explained, direct from the theater where Miss Starr danced in the first row, they were in evening dress. Samson mentally acknowledged, though, with instinctive disfavor for the pair, that both were, in a way, handsome. Colla.s.so drew him aside to whisper importantly:

"Make yourself agreeable to Farbish. He is received in the most exclusive society, and is a connoisseur of art. He is a connoisseur in all things," added the Italian, with a meaning glance at the girl.

"Farbish has lived everywhere," he ran on, "and, if he takes a fancy to you, he will put you up at the best clubs. I think I shall sell him a landscape."

The girl was talking rapidly and loudly. She had at once taken the center of the room, and her laughter rang in free and egotistical peals above the other voices.

"Come," said the host, "I shall present you."

The boy shook hands, gazing with his usual directness into the show -girl's large and deeply-penciled eyes. Farbish, standing at one side with his hands in his pockets, looked on with an air of slightly bored detachment.

His dress, his mannerisms, his bearing, were all those of the man who has overstudied his part. They were too perfect, too obviously rehea.r.s.ed through years of social climbing, but that was a defect Samson was not yet prepared to recognize.

Some one had navely complimented Miss Starr on the leopard-skin cloak she had just thrown from her shapely shoulders, and she turned promptly and vivaciously to the flatterer.

"It is nice, isn't it?" she prattled. "It may look a little up-stage for a girl who hasn't got a line to read in the piece, but these days one must get the spot-light, or be a dead one. It reminds me of a little run-in I had with Graddy--he's our stage-director, you know."

She paused, awaiting the invitation to proceed, and, having received it, went gaily forward. "I was ten minutes late, one day, for rehearsal, and Graddy came up with that sarcastic manner of his, and said: 'Miss Starr, I don't doubt you are a perfectly nice girl, and all that, but it rather gets my goat to figure out how, on a salary of fifteen dollars a week, you come to rehearsals in a million dollars'

worth of clothes, riding in a limousine--_and_ ten minutes late!'"

She broke off with the eager little expression of awaiting applause, and, having been satisfied, she added: "I was afraid that wasn't going to get a laugh, after all."