The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner Part 147

So the Catachoobee University had its splendid new building--as great a contrast to the shanties from which its pupils came as is the Capitol at Washington to the huts of a third of its population. If the reader is curious he may read in the local newspapers of the time glowing accounts of its "inaugural dedication"; but universities are so common in this country that it has become a little wearisome to read of ceremonies of this sort. Mr. Henderson made a modest reply to the barefaced eulogy on himself, which the president p.r.o.nounced in the presence of six hundred young men and women of various colors and invited guests--a eulogy which no one more thoroughly enjoyed than Carmen. I am sorry to say that she refused to take the affair seriously.

"I felt for you, Mr. Henderson,"; she said, after the exercises were over. "I blushed for you. I almost felt ashamed, after all the president said, that you had given so little."

"You seem, Miss Esch.e.l.le," remarked Mr. Ponsonby, "to be enthusiastic about the education and elevation of the colored people."

"Yes, I am; I quite share Mr. Henderson's feeling about it. I'm for the elevation of everything."

"There is a capital chance for you," said Henderson; "the university wants some scholarships."

"And I've half a mind to found one--the Esch.e.l.le Scholarship of Washing and Clear-starching. You ought to have seen my clothes that came back to the car. Probably they were not done by your students. The things looked as if they had been dragged through the Cat-a-what-do-you-call-it River, and ironed with a pine chip."

"Could you do them any better, with all your cultivation?" asked Margaret.

"I think I could, if I was obliged to. But I couldn't get through that university, with all its ologies and laboratories and Greek and queer bottles and machines. You have neglected my education, Mr. Henderson."

"It is not too late to begin now; you might see if you could pa.s.s the examination here. It is part of our plan gradually to elevate the whites," said Henderson.

"Yes, I know; and did you see that some of the scholars had red hair and blue eyes, quite in the present style? And how nice the girls looked,"

she rattled on; "and what a lot of intelligent faces, and how they kindled up when the president talked about the children of Israel in the wilderness forty years, and Caesar crossing the Rubicon! And you, sir"

--she turned to the Englishman--"I've heard, were against all this emanc.i.p.ation during the war."

"Bless my soul!" exclaimed Ponsonby, "we never were against emanc.i.p.ation, and wanted the best side to win."

"You had a mighty queer way of showing it, then."

"Well, honestly, Miss Esch.e.l.le, do you think the negroes are any better off?"

"You'd better ask them. My opinion is that everybody should do what he likes in this world."

"Then what are you girding Mr. Henderson for about his university?"

"Because these philanthropists, like Mr. Henderson and Uncle Jerry Hollowell, are all building on top; putting on the frosting before the cake rises."

"Haven't you found out, Mr. Ponsonby," Margaret interrupted, "that if there were eight sides to a question, Miss Esch.e.l.le would be on every one of them?"

"And right, too. There are eight sides to every question, and generally more. I think the negro question has a hundred. But there is only one side to Henderson Hall. It is a n.o.ble inst.i.tution. I like to think about it, and Uncle Caesar Hollowell crossing the Rubicon in his theological seminary. It is all so beautiful!"

"You are a bad child," said Margaret. "We should have left you at home."

"No, not bad, dear; only confused with such a lot of good deeds in a naughty world."

That this junketing party was deeply interested in the cause of education for whites or blacks, no one would have gathered from the conversation.

Margaret felt that Carmen had exactly hit the motives of this sort of philanthropy, and she was both amused and provoked by the girl's mockery.

By force of old habit she defended, as well she might, these schools.

"You must have a high standard," she said. "You cannot have good lower schools without good higher schools. And these colleges, which you think above the colored people, will stimulate them and gradually raise the whole ma.s.s. You cannot do anything until you educate teachers."

"So I have always heard," replied the incorrigible. "I have always been a philanthropist about the negro till I came down here, and I intend to be again when I go back."

Mrs. Laflamme was not a very eager apostle either, and the young ladies devoted themselves to the picturesque aspects of the population, without any concern for the moral problems. They all declared that they liked the negro. But Margaret was not to be moved from her good-humor by any amount of badgering. She liked Henderson Hall; she was proud of the consideration it brought her husband; she had a comfortable sense of doing something that was demanded by her opportunity. It is so difficult to a.n.a.lyze motives, and in Margaret's case so hard to define the change that had taken place in her. That her heart was not enlisted in this affair, as it would have been a few years before, she herself knew.

Insensibly she had come to look at the world, at men and women, through her husband's eyes, to take the worldly view, which is not inconsistent with much good feeling and easy-going charity. She also felt the necessity--a necessity totally unknown to such a nature as Carmen's--of making compensation, of compounding for her pleasures. Gradually she was learning to play her husband's game in life, and to see no harm in it.

What, then, is this thing we call conscience? Is it made of India-rubber?

I once knew a clever Southern woman, who said that New England women seemed to her all conscience--Southern women all soul and impulse. If it were possible to generalize in this way, we might say that Carmen had neither conscience nor soul, simply very clever reason. Uncle Jerry had no more conscience than Carmen, but he had a great deal of natural affection. Henderson, with an abundance of good-nature, was simply a man of his time, troubled with no scruples that stood in the way of his success. Margaret, with a finer nature than either of them, stifling her scruples in an atmosphere of worldly-mindedness, was likely to go further than either of them. Even such a worldling as Carmen understood this. "I do things," she said to Mrs. Laflamme--she made anybody her confidant when the fit was on her--"I do things because I don't care. Mrs.

Henderson does the same, but she does care."

Margaret would be a sadder woman, but not a better woman, when the time came that she did not care. She had come to the point of accepting Henderson's methods of overreaching the world, and was tempering the result with private liberality. Those were hypocrites who criticised him; those were envious who disparaged him; the sufficient ethics of the world she lived in was to be successful and be agreeable. And it is difficult to condemn a person who goes with the general opinion of his generation.

Carmen was under no illusions about Henderson, or the methods and manners of which she was a part. "Why pretend?" she said. "We are all bad together, and I like it. Uncle Jerry is the easiest person to get on with." I remember a delightful, wicked old baroness whom I met in my youth stranded in Geneva on short allowance--European resorts are full of such characters. "My dear," she said, "why shouldn't I renege? Why shouldn't men cheat at cards? It's all in the game. Don't we all know we are trying to deceive each other and get the best of each other? I stopped pretending after Waterloo. Fighting for the peace of Europe! Bah!

We are all fighting for what we can get."

So the Catachoobee Henderson Hall was dedicated, and Mr. Henderson got great credit out of it.

"It's a n.o.ble deed, Mr. Henderson," Carmen remarked, when they were at dinner on the car the day of their departure. "But"--in an aside to her host--"I advise the lambs in Wall Street to look alive at your next deal."

XX

We can get used to anything. Morgan says that even the New England summer is endurable when you learn to dress warmly enough. We come to endure pain and loss with equanimity; one thing and another drops out of our lives-youth, for instance, and sometimes enthusiasm--and still we go on with a good degree of enjoyment. I do not say that Miss Forsythe was quite the same, or that a certain zest of life and spring had not gone out of the little Brandon neighborhood.

As the months and the years went by we saw less and less of Margaret --less and less, that is, in the old way. Her rare visits were perfunctory, and gave little satisfaction to any of us; not that she was ungracious or unkindly, but simply because the things we valued in life were not the same. There was no doubt that any of us were welcome at the Hendersons' when they were in the city, genuinely, though in an exterior way, but gradually we almost ceased to keep up an intercourse which was a little effort on both sides. Miss Forsythe came back from her infrequent city visits weary and sad.

Was Margaret content? I suppose so. She was gay; she was admired; she was always on view in that semi-public world in which Henderson moved; she attained a newspaper notoriety which many people envied. If she journeyed anywhere, if she tarried anywhere, if she had a slight illness, the fact was a matter of public concern. We knew where she worshiped; we knew the houses she frequented, the charities she patronized, the fetes she adorned, every new costume that her wearing made the fashion. Was she content? She could perhaps express no desire that an attempt was not made to gratify it. But it seems impossible to get enough things enough money, enough pleasure. They had a magnificent place in Newport; it was not large enough; they were always adding to it--awning, a ballroom, some architectural whim or another. Margaret had a fancy for a cottage at Bar Harbor, but they rarely went there. They had an interest in Tuxedo; they belonged to an exclusive club on Jekyl Island. They pa.s.sed one winter yachting among the islands in the eastern Mediterranean; a part of another sailing from one tropical paradise to another in the West Indies.

If there was anything that money could not obtain, it seemed to be a place where they could rest in serene peace with themselves.

I used to wonder whether Margaret was satisfied with her husband's reputation. Perhaps she mistook the newspaper homage, the notoriety, for public respect. She saw his influence and his power. She saw that he was feared, and of course hated, by some--the unsuccessful--but she saw the terms he was on with his intimates, due to the fact that everybody admitted that whatever Henderson was in "a deal," privately he was a deuced good fellow.

Was this an ideal married life? Henderson's selfishness was fully developed, and I could see that he was growing more and more hard. Would Margaret not have felt it, if she also had not been growing hard, and accustomed to regard the world in his unbelieving way? No, there was sharpness occasionally between them, tiffs and disagreements. He was a great deal away from home, and she plunged into a life of her own, which had all the external signs of enjoyment. I doubt if he was ever very selfish where she was concerned, and love can forgive almost any conduct where there is personal indulgence. I had a glimpse of the real state of things in a roundabout way. Henderson loved his wife and was proud of her, and he was not unkind, but he might have been a brute and tied her up to the bedpost, and she never would have shown by the least sign to the world that she was not the most happy of wives.

When the Earl of Chisholm was in this country it was four years after Margaret's marriage--we naturally saw a great deal of him. The young fellow whom we liked so much had become a man, with a graver demeanor, and I thought a trace of permanent sadness in his face; perhaps it was only the responsibility of his position, or, as Morgan said, the modern weight that must press upon an earl who is conscientious. He was still unmarried. The friendship between him and Miss Forsythe, which had been kept alive by occasional correspondence, became more cordial and confidential. In New York he had seen much of Margaret, not at all to his peace of mind in many ways, though the generous fellow would have been less hurt if he had not estimated at its real value the life she was leading. It did not need Margaret's introduction for the earl to be sought for by the novelty and pleasure loving society of the city; but he got, as he confessed, small satisfaction out of the whirl of it, although we knew that he met Mrs. Henderson everywhere, and in a manner a.s.sisted in her social triumphs. But he renewed his acquaintance with Miss Esch.e.l.le, and it was the prattle of this ingenuous creature that made him more heavy-hearted than anything else.

"How nice it is of you, Mr. Lyon--may I call you so, to bring back the old relations?--to come here and revive the memory of the dear old days when we were all innocent and happy! Dear me, I used to think I could patronize that little country girl from Brandon! I was so worldly--don't you remember?--and she was so good. And now she is such a splendid woman, it is difficult for the rest of us to keep pace with her. The nerve she has, and the things she will do! I just envy her. I sometimes think she will drive me into a convent. And don't you think she is more beautiful than ever? Of course her face is a little careworn, but n.o.body makes up as she does; she was just ravishing the other night. Do you know, I think she takes her husband too seriously."

"I trust she is happy," the earl had said.

"Why shouldn't she be?" Carmen asked in return. "She has everything she wants. They both have a little temper; life would be flat without that; she is a little irritable sometimes; she didn't use to be; and when they don't agree they let each other alone for a little. I think she is as happy as anybody can be who is married. Now you are shocked! Well, I don't know any one who is more in love than she is, and that may be happiness. She is becoming exactly like Mr. Henderson. You couldn't ask anything more than that."

If Margaret were really happy, the earl told Miss Forsythe, he was glad, but it was scarcely the career he would have thought would have suited her.

Meantime, the great house was approaching completion. Henderson's palace, in the upper part of the city, had long been a topic for the correspondents of the country press. It occupied half a square. Many critics were discontented with it because it did not occupy the whole square. Everybody was interested in having it the finest residence on the continent. Why didn't Henderson take the whole block of ground, build his palace on three sides, with the offices and stables on the fourth, throw a gla.s.s roof over the vast interior court, plant it with tropical trees and plants, adorn it with flower-beds and fountains, and make a veritable winter-garden, giving the inhabitants a temperate climate all the cold months? He might easily have summer in the centre of the city from November to April. These rich people never know what to do with their money. Such a place would give distinction to the city, and compel foreigners to recognize the high civilization of America. A great deal of fault was found with Henderson privately for his parsimony in such a splendid opportunity.

Nevertheless it was already one of the sights of the town. Strangers were taken to see it, as it rose in its simple grandeur. Local reporters made articles on the progress of the interior whenever they could get an entrance. It was not ornate enough to please, generally, but those who admired the old Louvre liked the simplicity of its lines and the dignity of the elevations. They discovered the domestic note in its quiet character, and said that the architect had avoided the look of an "inst.i.tution" in such a great ma.s.s. He was not afraid of dignified wall s.p.a.ce, and there was no nervous anxiety manifested, which would have belittled it with trivial ornamentation.

Perhaps it was not an American structure, although one could find in it all the rare woods and stones of the continent. Great numbers of foreign workmen were employed in its finishing and decoration. One could wander in it from Pompeii to j.a.pan, from India to Versailles, from Greece to the England of the Tudors, from the Alhambra to colonial Salem. It was so cosmopolitan that a representative of almost any nationality, ancient or modern, could have been suited in it with an apartment to his taste, and if the interior lacked unity it did not lack a display of variety that appealed to the imagination. From time to time paragraphs appeared in English, French, and Italian journals, regarding the work of this and that famous artist who was designing a set of furniture or furnishing the drawings of a room, or carving the paneling and statuary, or painting the ceiling of an apartment in the great Palazzo Henderson in New York --Washington. The United American Workers (who were half foreigners by birth) pa.s.sed resolutions denouncing Henderson for employing foreign pauper labor, and organized more than one strike while the house was building. It was very unpatriotic and un-American to have anything done that could not be done by a member of the Union. There was a firm of excellent stone-cutters which offered to make all the statuary needed in the house, and set it up in good shape, and when the offer was declined, it memorialized Congress for protection.

Although Henderson gave what time he could spare to the design and erection of the building, it pleased him to call it Margaret's house, and to see the eagerness with which she entered into its embellishment. There was something humorous in the enlargement of her ideas since the days when she had wondered at the magnificence of the Washington Square home, and modestly protested against its luxury. Her own boudoir was a cheap affair compared with that in the new house.

"Don't you think, dear," she said, puzzling over the drawings, "that it would better be all sandalwood? I hate mosaics. It looks so cheap to have little bits of precious woods stuck about."