The Metropolis Part 34

And from New York, the centre of the wealth and culture of the country, these vices spread to every corner of it. Theatrical companies and travelling salesmen carried them; visiting merchants and sightseers acquired them. Pack-pedlers sold vile pictures and books--the manufacturing or importing of which was now quite an industry; one might read catalogues printed abroad in English, the contents of which would make one's flesh creep. There were cheap weeklies, costing ten cents a year, which were thrust into area-windows for servant-girls; there were yellow-covered French novels of unbelievable depravity for the mistress of the house. It was a curious commentary upon the morals of Society that upon the trains running to a certain suburban community frequented by the ultra-fashionable, the newsboys did a thriving business in such literature; and when the pastor of the fashionable church eloped with a Society girl, the bishop publicly laid the blame to the morals of his parishioners!

The theory was that there were two worlds, and that they were kept rigidly separate. There were two sets of women; one to be toyed with and flung aside, and the other to be protected and esteemed. Such things as prost.i.tutes and kept women might exist, but people of refinement did not talk about them, and were not concerned with them.

But Montague was familiar with the saying, that if you follow the chain of the slave, you will find the other end about the wrist of the master; and he discovered that the Tenderloin was wreaking its vengeance upon Fifth Avenue. It was not merely that the men of wealth were carrying to their wives and children the diseases of vice; they were carrying also the manners and the ideals.

Montague had been amazed by the things he had found in New York Society; the smoking and drinking and gambling of women, their hard and cynical views of life, their continual telling of coa.r.s.e stories. And here, in this under-world, he had come upon the fountain head of the corruption. It was something which came to him in a sudden flash of intuition;--the barriers between the two worlds were breaking down!

He could picture the process in a hundred different forms. There was Betty Wyman. His brother had meant to take her to the theatre, to let her see Rosalie, by way of a joke! So, of course, Betty knew of his escapades, and of those of his set; she and her girl friends were whispering and jesting about them. Here sat Oliver, smiling and cynical, toying with Rosalie as a cat might toy with a mouse; and to-morrow he would be with Betty--and could anyone doubt any longer whence Betty had derived her att.i.tude towards life? And the habits of mind that Oliver had taught her as a girl she would not forget as a wife; he might be anxious to keep her to himself, but there would be others whose interest was different.

And Montague recalled other things that he had seen or heard in Society, that he could put his finger upon, as having come out of this under-world. The more he thought of the explanation, the more it seemed to explain. This "Society," which had perplexed him--now he could describe it: its manners and ideals of life were those which he would have expected to find in the "fast" side of stage life.

It was, of course, the women who made Society, and gave it its tone; and the women of Society were actresses. They were actresses in their love of notoriety and display; in their taste in clothes and jewels, their fondness for cigarettes and champagne. They made up like actresses; they talked and thought like actresses. The only obvious difference was that the women of the stage were carefully selected--were at least up to a certain standard of physical excellence; whereas the women of Society were not selected at all, and some were lean, and some were stout, and some were painfully homely.

Montague recalled cases where the two sets had met as at some of the private entertainments. It was getting to be the fashion to hobn.o.b with the stage people on such occasions; and he recalled how naturally the younger people took to this. Only the older women held aloof; looking down upon the women of the stage from an ineffable height, as belonging to a lower caste--because they were obliged to work for their livings.

But it seemed to Montague, as he sat and talked with this poor chorus-girl, who had sold herself for a little pleasure, that it was easier to pardon her than the woman who had been born to luxury, and scorned those who produced her wealth.

But most of all, one's sympathies went out to a person who was not to be met in either of these sets; to the girl who had not sold herself, but was struggling for a living in the midst of this ravening corruption. There were thousands of self-respecting women, even on the stage; Toodles herself had been among them, she told Montague. "I kept straight for a long time," she said, laughing cheerfully--"and on ten dollars a week! I used to go out on the road, and then they paid me sixteen; and think of trying to live on one-night stands--to board yourself and stop at hotels and dress for the theatre--on sixteen a week, and no job half the year! And all that time--do you know Cyril Chambers, the famous church painter?"

"I've heard of him," said Montague.

"Well, I was with a show here on Broadway the next winter; and every night for six months he sent me a bunch of orchids that couldn't have cost less than seventy-five dollars! And he told me he'd open accounts for me in all the stores I chose, if I'd spend the next summer in Europe with him. He said I could take my mother or my sister with me--and I was so green in those days, I thought that must mean he didn't intend anything wrong!"

Toodles smiled at the memory. "Did you go?" asked the man.

"No," she answered. "I stayed here with a roof-garden show that failed.

And I went to my old manager for a job, and he said to me, 'I can only pay you ten a week. But why are you so foolish?' 'How do you mean?' I asked; and he answered, 'Why don't you get a rich sweetheart? Then I could pay you sixty.' That's what a girl hears on the stage!"

"I don't understand," said Montague, perplexed. "Did he mean he could get money out of the man?"

"Not directly," said Toodles; "but tickets--and advertising. Why, men will hire front-row seats for a whole season, if they're interested in a girl in the show. And they'll take all their friends to see her, and she'll be talked about--she'll be somebody, instead of just n.o.body, as I was."

"Then it actually helps her on the stage!" said Montague.

"Helps her!" exclaimed Toodles. "My G.o.d! I've known a girl who'd been abroad with a tip-top swell--and had the gowns and the jewels to prove it--to come home and get into the front row of a chorus at a hundred dollars a week."

Toodles was cheerful and all unaware; and that only made the tragedy of it all one shade more black to Montague. He sat lost in sombre reverie, forgetting his companions, and the blare and glare of the place.

In the centre of this dining-room was a great cone-shaped stand, containing a display of food; and as they strolled out, Montague stopped to look at it. There were platters garnished with flowers and herbs, and containing roast turkeys and baked hams, jellied meats and game in aspic, puddings and tarts and frosted cakes--every kind of food-fantasticality imaginable. One might have spent an hour in studying it, and from top to bottom he would have found nothing simple, nothing natural. The turkeys had paper curls and rosettes stuck over them; the hams were covered with a white gelatine, the devilled crabs with a yellow mayonnaise-and all painted over in pink and green and black with landscapes and marine views--with "ships and shoes and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings." The jellied meats and the puddings were in the shape of fruits and flowers; and there were elaborate works of art in pink and white confectionery--a barn-yard, for instance, with horses and cows, and a pump, and a dairymaid--and one or two alligators.

And all this was changed every day! Each morning you might see a procession of a score of waiters bearing aloft a new supply. Montague remembered Betty Wyman's remark at their first interview, apropos of the whipped cream made into little curleques; how his brother had said, "If Allan were here, he'd be thinking about the man who fixed that cream, and how long it took him, and how he might have been reading 'The Simple Life'!"

He thought of that now; he stood here and gazed, and wondered about all the slaves of the lamp who served in this huge temple of luxury. He looked at the waiters--pale, hollow-chested, harried-looking men: he imagined the hordes of servants of yet lower kinds, who never emerged into the light of day; the men who washed the dishes, the men who carried the garbage, the men who shovelled the coal into the furnaces, and made the heat and light and power. Pent up in dim cellars, many stories under ground, and bound for ever to the service of sensuality--how terrible must be their fate, how unimaginable their corruption! And they were foreigners; they had come here seeking liberty. And the masters of the new country had seized them and pent them here!

From this as a starting-point his thought went on, to the hordes of toilers in every part of the world, whose fate it was to create the things which these blind revellers destroyed; the women and children in countless mills and sweatshops, who spun the cloth, and cut and sewed it; the girls who made the artificial flowers, who rolled the cigarettes, who gathered the grapes from the vines; the miners who dug the coal and the precious metals out of the earth; the men who watched in ten thousand signal-towers and engines, who fought the elements from the decks of ten thousand ships--to bring all these things here to be destroyed. Step by step, as the flood of extravagance rose, and the energies of the men were turned to the creation of futility and corruption--so, step by step, increased the misery and degradation of all these slaves of Mammon. And who could imagine what they would think about it--if ever they came to think?

And then, in a sudden flash, there came back to Montague that speech he had heard upon the street-corner, the first evening he had been in New York! He could hear again the pounding of the elevated trains, and the shrill voice of the orator; he could see his haggard and hungry face, and the dense crowd gazing up at him. And there came to him the words of Major Thorne:

"It means another civil war!"

CHAPTER XXI

Alice had been gone for a couple of weeks, and the day was drawing near when the Hasbrook case came up for trial. The Sat.u.r.day before that being the date of the Mi-careme dance of the Long Island Hunt Club, Siegfried Harvey was to have a house-party for the week-end, and Montague accepted his invitation. He had been working hard, putting the finishing touches to his brief, and he thought that a rest would be good for him.

He and his brother went down upon Friday afternoon, and the first person he met was Betty Wyman, whom he had not seen for quite a while.

Betty had much to say, and said it. As Montague had not been seen with Mrs. Winnie since the episode in her house, people had begun to notice the break, and there was no end of gossip; and Mistress Betty wanted to know all about it, and how things stood between them.

But he would not tell her, and so she saucily refused to tell him what she had heard. All the while they talked she was eyeing him quizzically, and it was evident that she took the worst for granted; also that he had become a much more interesting person to her because of it. Montague had the strangest sensations when he was talking with Betty Wyman; she was delicious and appealing, almost irresistible; and yet her views of life were so old! "I told you you wouldn't do for a tame cat!" she said to him.

Then she went on to talk to him about his case, and to tease him about the disturbance he had made.

"You know," she said, "Ollie and I were in terror--we thought that grandfather would be furious, and that we'd be ruined. But somehow, it didn't work out that way. Don't you say anything about it, but I've had a sort of a fancy that he must be on your side of the fence."

"I'd be glad to know it," said Montague, with a laugh--"I've been trying for a long time to find out who is on my side of the fence."

"He was talking about it the other day," said Betty, "and I heard him tell a man that he'd read your argument, and thought it was good."

"I'm glad to hear that," said Montague.

"So was I," replied she. "And I said to him afterward, 'I suppose you don't know that Allan Montague is my Ollie's brother.' And he did you the honour to say that he hadn't supposed any member of Ollie's family could have as much sense!"

Betty was staying with an aunt near by, and she went back before dinner. In the automobile which came for her was old Wyman himself, on his way home from the city; and as a snowstorm had begun, he came in and stood by the fire while his car was exchanged for a closed one from Harvey's stables. Montague did not meet him, but stood and watched him from the shadows-a mite of a man, with a keen and eager face, full of wrinkles. It was hard to realize that this little body held one of the great driving minds of the country. He was an intensely nervous and irritable man, bitter and implacable--by all odds the most hated and feared man in Wall Street. He was swift, imperious, savage as a hornet.

"Directors at meetings that I attend vote first and discuss afterward,"

was one of his sayings that Montague had heard quoted. Watching him here by the fireside, rubbing his hands and chatting pleasantly, Montague had a sudden sense of being behind the scenes, of being admitted to a privilege denied to ordinary mortals--the beholding of royalty in everyday attire!

After dinner that evening Montague had a chat in the smoking-room with his host; and he brought up the subject of the Hasbrook case, and told about his trip to Washington, and his interview with Judge Ellis.

Harvey also had something to communicate. "I had a talk with Freddie Vandam about it," said he.

"What did he say?" asked Montague.

"Well," replied the other, with a laugh, "he's indignant, needless to say. You know, Freddie was brought up by his father to regard the Fidelity as his property, in a way. He always refers to it as 'my company.' And he's very high and mighty about it--it's a personal affront if anyone attacks it. But it was evident to me that he doesn't know who's behind this case."

"Did he know about Ellis?" asked Montague.

"Yes," said the other, "he had found out that much. It was he who told me that originally. He says that Ellis has been sponging off the company for years--he has a big salary that he never earns, and has borrowed something like a quarter of a million dollars on worthless securities."

Montague gave a gasp.

"Yes," laughed Harvey. "But after all, that's a little matter. The trouble with Freddie Vandam is that that sort of thing is all he sees; and so he'll never be able to make out the mystery. He knows that this clique or that in the company is plotting to get some advantage, or to use him for their purposes--but he never realizes how the big men are pulling the wires behind the scenes. Some day they'll throw him overboard altogether, and then he'll realize how they've played with him. That's what this Hasbrook case means, you know--they simply want to frighten him with a threat of getting the company's affairs into the courts and the newspapers."

Montague sat for a while in deep thought.

"What would you think would be Wyman's relation to the matter?" he asked, at last.

"I wouldn't know," said Harvey. "He's supposed to be Freddie's backer--but what can you tell in such a tangle?"