The Living Present Part 21

The most famous social secretary in the United States, if not in the world, is Maria de Barril, and she is secretary not to one rich woman but to New York society itself. Her position, entirely self-made, is unique and secure, and well worth telling.

Pampered for the first twenty years of her life like a princess and with all her blood derived from one of the oldest and most relaxed nations in Europe, she was suddenly forced to choose between sinking out of sight, the mere breath kept in her body, perhaps, on a pittance from distant relatives, or going to work.

She did not hesitate an instant. Being of society she knew its needs, and although she was too young to look far ahead and foresee the structure which was to rise upon these tentative foundations, she shrewdly began by offering her services to certain friends often hopelessly bewildered with the ma.s.s of work they were obliged to leave to incompetent secretaries and housekeepers. One thing led to another, as it always does with brave spirits, and to-day Miss de Barril has a position in life which, with its independence and freedom, she would not exchange for that of any of her patrons. She conducted her economic venture with consummate tact from the first.

Owing to a promise made her mother, the haughtiest of old Spanish dames as I remember her, she never has entered on business the houses of the society that employs her, and has retained her original social position apparently without effort.

She has offices, which she calls her emba.s.sy, and there, with a staff of secretaries, she advises, dictates, revises lists, issues thousands of invitations a week during the season, plans entertainments for practically all of New York society that makes a business of pleasure.

Some years ago a scion of one of those New York families so much written about that they have become almost historical, married after the death of his mother, and wished to introduce his bride at a dinner-dance in the large and ugly mansion whose portals in his mother's day opened only to the indisputably elect.

The bridegroom found his mother's list, but, never having exercised his masculine faculties in this fashion before, and hazy as to whether all on that list were still alive or within the pale, he wrote to the social amba.s.sadress asking her to come to his house on a certain morning and advise him. Miss de Barril replied that not even for a member of his family, devoted as she was to it, would she break her promise to her mother, and he trotted down to her without further parley. Moreover, she was one of the guests at the dinner.

Of course it goes without saying that Miss de Barril has not only brains and energy, but character, a quite remarkably fascinating personality, and a thorough knowledge of the world. Many would have failed where she succeeded. She must have had many diplomatists among her ancestors, for her tact is incredible, although in her case Latin subtlety never has degenerated into hypocrisy. No woman has more devoted friends. Personally I know that I should have thrown them all out of the window the first month and then retired to a cave on a mountain. She must have the social sense in the highest degree, combined with a real love of "the world."

Her personal appearance may have something to do with her success.

Descended on one side from the Incas of Peru, she looks like a Spanish grandee, and is known variously to her friends as "Inca," "Queen," and "Dona Maria"--my own name for her. When I knew her first she found it far too much of an effort to pull on her stockings and was as haughty and arrogant a young girl as was to be found in the then cold and stately city of New York. She looks as haughty as ever because it is difficult for a Spaniard of her blood to look otherwise; but her manners are now as charming as her manner is imposing; and if the bottom suddenly fell out of Society her developed force of character would steer her straight into another lucrative position with no disastrous loss of time.

It remains to be pointed out that she would have failed in this particular sphere if New York Society had been as callous and devoid of loyalty even in those days, as the novel of fashion has won its little success by depicting it. The most socially eminent of her friends were those that helped her from the first, and with them she is as intimate as ever to-day.

II

ALICE BERTA JOSEPHINE KAUSER

Credit must be given to Elisabeth Marbury for inventing the now flourishing and even over-crowded business of play broker; but as she was of a strongly masculine character and as surrounded by friends as Miss de Barril, her success is neither as remarkable nor as interesting as that of Alice Kauser, who has won the top place in this business in a great city to which she came poor and a stranger.

Not that she had; grown up in the idea that she must make her own way in the world. Far from it. It is for that reason I have selected her as another example of what a girl may accomplish if she have character and grit backed up with a thorough intellectual training. For, it must never be forgotten, unless one is a genius it is impossible to enter the first ranks of the world's workers without a good education and some experience of the world. Parents that realize this find no sacrifice too great to give their children the most essential of all starts in life. But the extraordinary thing in the United States of America is how comparatively few parents do realize it. Moreover, how many are weak enough, even when with a reasonable amount of self-sacrifice they could send their children through college, to yield to the natural desire of youth to "get out and hustle."

Miss Kauser was born in Buda Pest, in the United States Consular Agency, for her father, although a Hungarian, was Consular Agent. It was an intellectual family and on her mother's side musically gifted.

Miss Kauser's aunt, Etelka Gerster, when she came to this country as a prima donna had a brief but brilliant career, and the music-loving public prostrated itself. But her wonderful voice was a fragile coloratura, and her first baby demolished it. Berta Gerster, Miss Kauser's mother, was almost equally renowned for a while in Europe.

Mr. Kauser himself was a pupil of Abel Blouet at the Beaux Arts, but he fought in the Revolution of 1848 in Hungary, and later with Garibaldi in the Hungarian Legion in Italy.

Miss Kauser, who must have been born well after these stirring events, was educated by French governesses and Polish tutors. Her friends tell the story of her that she grew up with the determination to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and when she realized that, although handsome and imposing, she was not a great beauty according to accepted standards, she philosophically buried this callow ambition and announced, "Very well; I shall be the most intellectual woman in the world."

There are no scales by which to make tests of these delicate degrees of the human mind, even in the case of authors who put forth four books a year, but there is no question that Miss Kauser is a highly accomplished woman, with a deep knowledge of the literature of many lands, a pa.s.sionate feeling for style, and a fine judgment that is the result of years of hard intellectual work and an equally profound study of the world. And who shall say that the wild ambitions of her extreme youth did not play their part in making her what she is to-day? I have heard "ambition" sneered at all my life, but never by any one who possessed the attribute itself, or the imaginative power to appreciate what ambition has meant in the progress of the world.

Miss Kauser studied for two years at the ecole Monceau in Paris, although she had been her father's housekeeper and a mother to the younger children since the age of twelve. Both in Paris and Buda Pest she was in constant a.s.sociation with friends of her father, who developed her intellectual breadth.

Financial reverses brought the family to America and they settled in Pensacola, Florida. Here Miss Kauser thought it was high time to put her accomplishments to some use and help out the family exchequer.

She began almost at once to teach French and music. When her brothers were older she made up her mind to seek her fortune in New York and arrived with, a letter or two. For several months she taught music and literature in private families. Then Mary Bisland introduced her to Miss Marbury, where she attended to the French correspondence of the office for a year.

But these means of livelihood were mere makeshifts. Ambitious, imperious, and able, it was not in her to work for others for any great length of time. As soon as she felt that she "knew the ropes" in New York she told certain friends she had made that she wished to go into the play brokerage business for herself. As she inspires confidence--this is one of her a.s.sets--her friends staked her, and she opened her office with the intention of promoting American plays only.

Her trained mind rapidly adapted itself to business and in the course of a few years she was handling the plays of many of the leading dramatists for a proportionate number of leading producers. When the war broke out, so successful was she that she had a house of her own in the East Thirties, furnished with the beautiful things she had collected during her yearly visits to Europe--for long since she had opened offices in Paris and London, her business outgrowing its first local standard.

The war hit her very hard. She had but recently left the hospital after a severe operation, which had followed several years of precarious health. She was quite a year reestablishing her former strength and full capacity for work. One of the most exuberantly vital persons I had ever met, she looked as frail as a reed during that first terrible year of the war, but now seems to have recovered her former energies.

There was more than the common results of an operation to exasperate her nerves and keep her vitality at a low ebb. Some thirty of her male relatives were at the Front, and the whole world of the theater was smitten with a series of disastrous blows. Sixteen plays on the road failed in one day, expensive plays ran a week in New York. Managers went into bankruptcy. It was a time of strain and uncertainty and depression, and n.o.body suffered more than the play brokers. Miss Kauser as soon as the war broke out rented her house and went into rooms that she might send to Hungary all the money she could make over expenses, and for a year this money was increasingly difficult to collect, or even to make. But if she despaired no one heard of it. She hung on. By and by the financial tide turned for the country at large and she was one of the first to ride on the crest. Her business is now greater than ever, and her interest in life as keen.

III

BELLE DA COSTA GREENE

This "live wire," one of the outstanding personalities in New York, despite her youth, is the ant.i.thesis of the two previous examples of successful women in business, inasmuch as no judge on the bench nor surgeon at the Front ever had a severer training for his profession than she. People who meet for the first time the young tutelar genius of Mr. Morgan's Library, take for granted that any girl so fond of society, so fashionable in dress and appointments, and with such a comet's tail of admirers, must owe her position with its large salary to "pull," and that it is probably a sinecure anyway.

Little they know.

Belle Greene, who arrests even the casual if astute observer with her overflowing _joie de vivre_ and impresses him as having the best of times in this best of all possible worlds, is perhaps the "keenest on her job" of any girl in the city of New York. Let any of these superficial admirers attempt to obtain entrance, if he can, to the Library, during the long hours of work, and with the natural masculine intention of clinching the favorable impression he made on the young lady the evening before, and he will depart in haste, moved to a higher admiration or cursing the well-known caprice of woman, according to his own equipment.

For Miss Greene's determination to be one of the great librarians of the world took form within her precocious brain at the age of thirteen and it has never fluctuated since. Special studies during both school and recreation hours were pursued to the end in view: Latin, Greek, French, German, history--the rise and spread of civilization in particular, and as demonstrated by the Arts, Sciences, and Literature of the world. When she had absorbed all the schools could give her, she took an apprenticeship in the Public Library system in order thoroughly to ground herself in the clerical and routine phases of the work.

She took a special course in bibliography at the Amherst Summer Library School, and then entered the Princeton University Library on nominal pay at the foot of the ladder, and worked up through every department in order to perfect herself for the position of University Librarian.

While at Princeton she decided to specialize in early printing, rare books, and historical and illuminated ma.n.u.scripts. She studied the history of printing from its inception in 1445 to the present day. It was after she had taken up the study of ma.n.u.scripts from the standpoint of their contents that she found that it was next to impossible to progress further along that line in this country, as at that time we had neither the material nor the scholars. She has often expressed the wish that there had been in her day a Morgan Library for consultation.

When she had finished the course at Princeton she went abroad and studied with the recognized authorities in England and Italy. Ten years, in fact, were spent in unceasing application, what the college boy calls "grind," without which Miss Greene is convinced it is impossible for any one to succeed in any vocation or attain a distinguished position. To all demands for advice her answer is, "Work, work, and more work."

She took hold of the Morgan Library in its raw state, when the valuable books and MSS. Mr. Morgan had bought at sales in Europe were still packed in cases; and out of that initial disorder Belle Greene, almost unaided, has built up one of the greatest libraries in the world. Soon after her installation she began a systematic course in Art research. She visited the various museums and private collections of this country, and got in touch with the heads of the different departments and their curators. She followed their methods until it was borne in upon her that most of them were antiquated and befogging, whereupon she began another course in Europe during the summer months in order to study under the experts in the various fields of art; comparing the works of artists and artisans of successive periods, applying herself to the actual technique of painting in its many phases, studying the influence of the various masters upon their contemporaries and future disciples.

By attending auction sales, visiting dealers constantly and all exhibitions, reading all art periodicals, she soon learned the commercial value of art objects.

Thus in time she was able and with authority to a.s.sist Mr. Morgan in the purchase of his vast collections which embraced art in all its forms. With the exception of that foundation of the library which caused Mr. Morgan to engage her services, she has purchased nearly every book and ma.n.u.script it contains.

Another branch of the collectors' art that engaged Miss Greene's attention was the clever forgery, a business in itself. She even went so far as to buy more than one specimen, thus learning by actual handling and examination to distinguish the spurious from the real.

Now she knows the difference at a glance. She maintains there is even a difference in the smell Mr. Morgan bought nothing himself without consulting her; if they were on opposite sides of the world he used the cable.

Naturally Miss Greene to-day enjoys the entree to that select and jealously guarded inner circle of authorities, who despise the amateur, but who recognize this American girl, who has worked as hard as a day laborer, as "one of them." But she maintains that if she had not thoroughly equipped herself in the first place not even the great advantages she enjoyed as Mr. Morgan's librarian could have given her the peculiar position she now enjoys, a position that is known to few of the people she plays about with in her leisure hours.

She has adopted the mottoes of the two contemporaries she has most admired: Mr. Morgan's "Onward and Upward" and Sarah Bernhardt's "Quand Meme."

IV

HONORe WILLSIE

Honore Willsie, who comes of fine old New England stock, although she looks like a Burne-Jones and would have made a furore in London in the Eighties, was brought up in the idea that an American woman should fit herself for self-support no matter what her birth and conditions.

Her mother, although the daughter of a rich man, was brought up on the same principles, and taught school until she married. All her friends, no matter how well-off, made themselves useful and earned money.

Therefore, Mrs. Willsie was thoroughly imbued while a very young girl with the economic ideal, although her mother had planted with equal thoroughness the principle that it was every woman's primary duty to marry and have a family.

Mrs. Willsie was educated at Madison, Wisconsin, beginning with the public schools and graduating from the University. She married immediately after leaving college, and, encouraged by her husband, a scientist, and as hard a student as herself, she began to write. Her first story followed the usual course; it was refused by every magazine to which she sent it; but, undiscouraged, she rewrote it for a syndicate. For a year after this she used the newspapers as a sort of apprenticeship to literature and wrote story after story until she had learned the craft of "plotting." When she felt free in her new medium she began writing for the better magazines; and, compared with most authors, she has had little hard climbing in her upward course.

Naturally, there were obstacles and setbacks, but she is not of the stuff that ten times the number could discourage.

Then came the third stage. She wrote a novel. It was refused by many publishers in New York, but finally accepted as a serial in the first magazine that had rejected it.