The Champagne Standard Part 2

"Then, for goodness' sake, why have her come out at all?"

Maria shuddered and looked cautiously about. Nancy had vanished.

"I'd die of mortification if she didn't marry. I won't have her turn on me and say I hadn't given her a chance."

"But, Maria, you married your good and prosperous Samuel without coming out. That didn't frighten him away! The highest standard your parents ever aspired to was cider, and that only on state occasions."

"That is all changed," said my unhappy friend. "We have got to--"

"Pretend; that's just it, Maria! But why don't you give up pretending and be happy? Did our parents ever pretend? They didn't. Think of your father's simple home and his big bank account, and then think of your Samuel with all his expenses and his cares."

But Maria was not to be convinced by argument--she was completely crushed by the Perkinses not having come, and she declared obstinately that her supreme duty in life was to get Nancy married--well if possible, but at any rate married.

Maria is only a type, but she stands for aspirations in the wrong place, and she is worn out with it. She has many virtues--that is, she has no vices. Her whole soul is wrapped up in Nancy. Nancy is her religion. She believes in Nancy, though she never took her Samuel seriously. She married him in the simple period of her existence, and by the time she began to aspire she had other ideals, and Samuel was more of a bore to her than an ideal. Samuel did not take to her new aspirations as readily as she. Men never do. Nancy const.i.tuted her romance; and yet she was an impartial mother, for mothers can be divided in two cla.s.ses, those who are too partial and those who are impartial. Her mission in life was to marry off Nancy.

"I'd rather she'd be married unhappily than not at all," she said to me one day when I saw her again. "A real unhappiness is more healthy to bear than an imaginary one."

Nancy herself furnished the particulars of her own private creed.

"I'd rather be married even if I were unhappy. It's my own unhappiness, and I want my own whatever it is."

I suggested that there were other aims in life than getting married.

"Perhaps," she said, "but I haven't any. I've been brought up to that.

Most girls are, only they don't tell. I haven't to earn my living and I haven't any talent for anything. If I don't marry, Ma'll be mortified to death and she'll show it and that'll make me mad. Father won't care and he won't notice that I'm growing older, though we girls don't grow old prettily. We get pinched, and our little hands--for we have little hands--grow clawy, and our hair gets thin at the temples, and we have too much gold in our front teeth. Of course we are real pretty when we are happy. But think of spending life seeing father go to sleep after dinner, and mother playing patience--ugh! I've told mother if she doesn't take me abroad I'll go slumming. There's no chance here. Half the men are too busy making money to get married and the others are afraid."

"So this is your education," I said later on to Maria; "I am glad you have only one child."

"So am I," said Maria wearily, "for two would kill me."

Then in a burst of confidence: "She hangs fire. She isn't strikingly plain nor strikingly beautiful, one's about as good as the other. She has no accomplishments, and her golf is only so so. She isn't fast, nor loud, nor smart. She is just an average girl and," Maria cried in vexation, "there are such heaps of them. The luncheons and dinners and theatre parties I have given without result! It is so tiresome for her always to be bridesmaid. So we're going abroad. Father is willing to live at the Club. Our men are too comfortable to get married. It's simply wicked!"

"Maria," I said from my inmost conviction, "you have manoeuvred, with the result that you have frightened off the eligibles--struggling eligibles, and those are sometimes the best. But what struggler would dare to ask a champagne-standard girl to keep his "flat"? It's flats these days. He wouldn't think of dragging a white-tulled angel from a palatial residence to a flat and a joint! You have frightened off the young men. Marriage is getting out of fashion, and so are the comforts of a home. It's all your fault, you champagne-standard mothers!"

Such was the coming-out of Nancy.

Now in my young days there was certainly no formal coming-out. All I remember is that one day I still wore my hair in two pigtails, and the next day old Mrs. Barnett Pendexter called. She was a fumbly old woman with her fingers, and by accident--my sisters always declared--she left two cards instead of one. The fatal result was that my pigtails were pinned up and I was dragged out by my mother when she made calls, for she declared, being socially learned, that now I was undoubtedly out. It was also a little surgical operation in a minor way, but compared to these days how simple and how inexpensive.

If one were asked which of the pa.s.sions is the greatest force in modern Society, one could safely reply "jealousy." Jealousy makes the world go round. Don't we want what all our neighbours have, and don't we want it with all our might and main? If we want it badly enough crime will not stand in the way of getting it. Is it not at the bottom of most of our defalcations, embezzlements, and commercial dishonesty in general? The bank president who borrows the bank funds for his private use, the cashier who falsifies the books, the little clerk who embezzles as the result of expensive tastes,--are they not all the results of the falsity and extravagance of modern life? Compared to the judicious business man who keeps just within the border line that saves him from the criminal law, and who lays traps for his credulous fellow-creatures in the shape of alluring companies, the pickpocket, who runs some little risk, is a blameless and worthy character. The champagne standard is the whole world's measure, and even justice bows to it when it interprets its laws for the rich and the poor. A company promoter, who in the course of his career has wrecked thousands of lives, can, if he is only rich enough, consort with the n.o.blest and most virtuous of the land; but of course he must be rich enough. Deny it who can? Be rich enough and you are forgiven all crimes. O Champagne Standard!

Last year a certain deceased millionaire was tried in London for gigantic frauds, and all the newspapers described how pleasantly he greeted his friends when he entered the court and took his seat behind his counsel. Positively not a bit proud. There was also a sympathetic description of his clothes! The moral is, be a scoundrel on a magnificent scale and you are still respected; indeed, you even become a hero in some people's eyes. Justice being blindfolded cannot see, which is a great convenience. Besides, are we not taught that G.o.d helps those who help themselves?

In America there is no aristocracy yet, but G.o.d help it when the time arrives, for it will be an aristocracy based on the most unworthy of foundations--money. As for romantic traditions, well, it will take several centuries to weave a halo of romance around a pork-packer, a petroleum magnate, a railroad wrecker, or the company promoters who flourish as the green bay tree. In centuries they may arrive at the dignity of being ancestors--at present they are just what they are, and are to be judged accordingly.

There is a growing mania in America these days for ancestors. It is a luxury which can be indulged in only after people have acc.u.mulated money. If you are grubbing for your daily bread it is a matter of profound indifference to you where you came from, seeing what you have reached is so unsatisfactory. But when your bank-book bursts with deposits and your greed for money is partly satisfied, it is natural that you should look out for new fields for your aspirations. So wealthy Americans are just now very busy unearthing ancestors, in spite of not becoming parents, and getting their genealogical tree planted, and rummaging in the dust of the past for possible forefathers, and buying family portraits. Yes, there is a great trade in family portraits--the dingier the better. At any rate it keeps the pot boiling for many a worthy painter, and that is something. Not that one has a rooted aversion to ancestors--they are not to be despised if they leave you an honourable name, a nice old estate, and cash and some brains, but there are ancestors of whom the less said the better, and whose only legacy would appear to be a slanting forehead, a weak chin, and a tendency to unlimited viciousness.

The Herald's College could tell many a queer story of our st.u.r.dy republicans in search of their forbears. An English woman told me that a New York family had annexed a crusading forefather of her own, as well as one who had had his head chopped off, and to whom they had no more right than the grocer round the corner. She acknowledged that they were a pretty bad lot (the ancestors), but she objected to have strangers meddle with them. "You are funny republicans," she added genially, "coming over here and grabbing our ancestors."

Now there is nothing so frank as a frank Englishwoman. "What is the use of celebrated ancestors," she added, "if your whole present family are as dull as ditch-water and bore you to distraction? I'd swap off my crusading ancestor and my chopped-off-head one any time for a cousin with brains. But mind you, I don't want your American millionaires grabbing 'em without leave."

There are the Bedfords of New York. Susan and I went to school together.

Hitherto she has put on no airs with me, for I know the family traditions, and that her excellent father began life as a cobbler. Then he forsook cobbling and started a corset manufactory, which was a distinguished success because he had invented a bone so like the whale's that even that clever fish could not have proved it wasn't his; and the deception made the old man's fortune. Thereupon he rose superior and soared from corsets to real estate, and in real estate he made what was briefly described as "mints." It was in the corset period that Susan married Joe Bedford who was a drummer in the business, and though he retired from corsets and went into real estate along with his father-in-law, Susan was always conscious that he could never accommodate himself to the grandeur of his new life. She had to do all the aspiring, and it was she who pa.s.sed a sponge over their previous existence, and every time I saw them in New York she had added a new l.u.s.tre to their glory. The last time the door was opened to me by a footman, brooded over, as it were, by the very n.o.blest kind of English butler. I saw at once that the whole family were afraid to death of him.

But in spite of her grandeur, Susan herself saw me downstairs to the front door, in the American fashion, though conscious of the profound and stony disapproval of the English butler. As I came opposite the hat rack I caught sight of a satin banner covered with cabalistic characters floating gently over Joe's modest bowler that swung from a peg.

"Our coat of arms," Susan explained by way of introduction. "Just come home. It cost a great deal; everything costs so much. We have the same arms as the Duke of Bedford. It is pleasant to have a duke in the family."

"Since when?" I asked, and stared in astonishment.

"I found them in the dictionary six months ago. I had it done at Tiffany's. It looks so stylish on the plates and the writing paper."

"Come in here, Susan," and I led her into her own parlour, for I did not wish to lower her in the estimation of that n.o.ble being who was preparing his mighty mind to show me out. "Listen to me; you and Joe haven't any more to do with the Duke of Bedford than the cat's foot.

Besides, his name isn't Bedford but Russell. For goodness' sake don't make such an idiot of yourself."

"I guess," and Susan was deeply offended, "I guess the young man at Tiffany's knows more about it than you do. He engraves for the first families, and he said it was all right."

It was quite recently, too, that I crossed from Boston with three gentle female pilgrims in search of an ancestor. The youngest was nearly seventy, and we were barely out of sight of that famous tail of land called "Cape Cod" when they told me their simple story. They came from Cape Cod and their homestead stood on a sandhill and faced the sea. A long straggling street up a sand bank culminated in a meeting-house with a steeple as sharp as a toothpick. They were innocent and graphic old ladies and they had only two vivid interests in life; one was a Devonshire ancestor supposed to have died three hundred years before, and the other, two cats called respectively Priscilla and John Alden.

The ancestor was the one romance of their placid lives, and it became a question of going to find him, now or never; so here they were. They had turned the key in the lock of their Cape Cod homestead and bidden a long farewell to Priscilla and John Alden, and as they described their grief I saw their three pairs of benevolent eyes fill with tears.

"The sweetest cats that ever breathed," said the oldest, with a face like a benediction.

"What did you do with them?" I asked after a sympathetic pause.

"We chloroformed them," said the dear old thing whose face was like a benediction.

I offered up an involuntary smile to the manes of these deceased martyrs, Priscilla and John Alden, and I am absolutely sure the ancestor wasn't worth the sacrifice.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the champagne standard, like hotel cooking, has no nationality. It is everywhere, and one studies it according to one's experience, but it is undoubtedly the curse of an age that only judges of success by material results. It is above everything a menace to character.

Modern life is the apotheosis of trivialities, and perhaps there is nothing more curious and melancholy than to observe their exaggerated importance to the world in general. One asks what is the use of such childish fretting to people confronted by tragic realities. What is the use of snubbing any one as if we were immortal? The truth is, each, in his own estimation, is immortal. Who thinks of dying? Why, if we expected to die at once, we certainly would not snub any one, and, in the face of so tragic a probability, we would not notice being snubbed.

And yet there is absolutely nothing so absolutely certain as death, before which every pretence, every ign.o.ble aspiration, every sordid ambition, stands naked and futile and, in some other world possibly, ashamed.

But one cannot help wondering what kind of a blissful place the world would be without the champagne standard. How good and honest we should be if we didn't pretend--how easy it would be to live! Are not most of the trials of life, apart from its tragedies, its results? Most of our harrowing anxieties usually have their rise in aiming at what is beyond our reach. And yet what, in the name of common sense, what is it all for? What is the use of pretending? What is the use of doing things badly when it is so much easier not to do them at all?

Yes, indeed, the greatest heroism in these days is to have the courage of one's income. It is possibly a little awkward at first, but what a relief to be able to say simply, "I can't afford it," and not lose caste! But Modern Society is ruled over by "Appearances." Appearances are a kind of Juggernaut which requires our happiness and peace and contentment as a daily sacrifice--but not the wise and honourable appearances, but the little, mean, false ones, and those are the most common.

One is inclined to think, however, that even the champagne standard may yet find its Nemesis. For if the world goes on at its present rate all its wealth will in time be swallowed up by the Trusts, and the Trusts will in turn be swallowed up by the mighty maws of the few whom G.o.d, in his righteous wrath, permits to plunder the earth, just as He once permitted a deluge for the regeneration of the world. And the blessed result will be that the whole wide world, being as poor as the traditional church mouse, will come to its senses, and the first thing that will happen will be the abolishing of the champagne standard. So herein lies the world's salvation, to be saved it must be ruined; and for the first time Trusts may be looked upon in the light of the benevolent saviours of mankind. When we are all as poor as the most plausible of them can make us, and that is saying a good deal, behold we shall then finally cease to pretend.

Of course each of us has his own ideal of the millennium, but with multi-millionaires setting the pace, and all the rest of the world racing after, it must be agreed that the millennium is not yet. But when it does come, there will be no more champagne standard, and each person will be judged after his honest value and not his purse. If he has a n.o.ble soul n.o.body will mind if he is a bit shabby, and if he is a man of brains he may even live at the wrong end of the town. In that happy day everybody will have the courage of his income, no matter how small, and when one is shown hospitality it will not be according to the champagne standard, but according to a standard of honest kindness; and no matter how simple it is, if it is only a crust of bread, no one will criticise, and no one will apologise. If in that blissful time Jones dines in a cut-away, why not? And yet is it not true in these days that Jones's fine character is often enough overlooked in a disapproving contemplation of his coat?

However, the millennium has not arrived, and the simpler life, though the fashion as a subject for sermons, is certainly not practised--as yet.

Recently a king of finance gave a great musical function--the gambols of the rich and great are always called functions. There were so many billionaires present that a modest millionaire was quite out of it.

Everything was of the costliest, the lighting was entirely by radium, and the music provided was of an expense supremely worthy of even the consideration of billionaires. The very greatest violinist had been induced, by the offer of a small fortune, to play, and indeed, while he played, the host and another billionaire intimate amused themselves calculating the money value of each tone at the rate the great artist demanded for playing. Just as they finished, and he finished, and a languid murmur signified the approval of the glittering audience, the young daughter of the billionaire host, who had, apparently, not received the last polish in the school of unutterable wealth, put an entreating hand on her father's arm:

"Do please introduce me," and she mentioned a very famous name, "he does play so divinely."

"My child," and the magnate, who had started life peddling tripe, spoke with haughty disfavour and drew his eyebrows together in a frown, "we pay such people, but we don't know them."