Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905

In those very hours when I was obeying the great imperative law of self-preservation, was clutching at every log that floated by me regardless of whether it was my property or not so long as it would help me keep my head above water – what was going on all around me? In every office of the downtown district – merchant, banker, broker, lawyer, man of commerce or finance – was not every busy brain plotting not self-preservation but pillage and sack – plotting to increase the cost of living for the masses of men by slipping a little tax here and a little tax there onto the cost of everything by which men live? All along the line between the farm or mine or shop and the market, at every one of the tollgates for the collection of just charges, these big financiers, backed up by the big lawyers and the rascally public officials, had an agent in charge to collect on each passing article a little more than was honestly due. A thousand subtle ways of levying, all combining to pour in upon the few the torrents of unjust wealth. I always laugh when I read of laboring men striking for higher wages. Poor, ignorant fools – they almost deserve their fate. They had better be concerning themselves with a huge, universal strike at the polls for lower prices. What will it avail them to get higher wages, so long as their masters control and can and will recoup on, the prices of all the things for which those wages must be spent?

However, as I was saying, I lived in Wall Street, in its atmosphere of the practical morality of “finance.” On every side swindling operations, great and small; operations regarded as right through long-established custom, dishonest or doubtful; operations on the way to becoming established by custom as “respectable.” No man’s title to anything conceded unless he had the brains to defend it. There was a time when it would have been regarded as wildly preposterous and viciously immoral to deny property rights in human beings. There may come a time – who knows? – when “high finance’s” denial of a moral right to property of any kind may cease to be regarded as wicked. However, I attempt no excuses for myself; I need them no more than a judge in the Dark Ages needed to apologize for ordering a witch to the stake. I could no more have done differently than a fish could breathe on land or a man under water. I did as all the others did – and I had the justification of necessity. Right of might being the code, when men set upon me with pistols, I meet them with pistols, not with the discarded and antiquated weapons of sermon and prayer and the law.

And I thought extremely well of myself and of my pistols that June afternoon, as I was hurrying uptown the moment the day’s settlement on ‘Change was finished. I had sent out my daily letter to investors, and its tone of confidence was genuine – I knew that hundreds of customers of a better class would soon be flocking in to take the places of those I had been compelled to teach a lesson in the vicissitudes of gambling. With a light heart and the physical feeling of a football player in training, I sped toward home. Home! For the first time since I was a squat little slip of a shaver the word had a personal meaning for me. Perhaps, if the only other home of mine had been less uninviting, I should not have looked forward with such high beating of the heart to that cold home Anita was making for me. No, I withdraw that. It is fellows like me, to whom kindly looks and unbought attentions are as unfamiliar as flowers to the Arctic – it is men like me that appreciate and treasure and warm up under the faintest show or shadowy suggestion of the sunshine of sentiment. I’d be a little ashamed to say how much money I handed out to servants and beggars and street gamins that day. I had a home to go to!

As my electric drew up at the Willoughby, a carriage backed to make room for it. I recognized the horses and the driver and the crests. “How long has Mrs. Ellersly been with my wife?” I asked the elevator boy, as he was taking me up.

“About half an hour, sir,” he answered. “But Mr. Ellersly – I took up his card before lunch, and he’s still there.”

Instead of using my key, I rang the bell, and when Sanders opened, I said: “Is Mrs. Blacklock in?” in a voice loud enough to penetrate to the drawing room.

As I had hoped, Anita appeared. Her dress told me that her trunks had come – she had sent for her trunks! “Mother and father are here,” said she, without looking at me.

I followed her into the drawing room and, for the benefit of the servants, Mr. and Mrs. Ellersly and I greeted each other courteously, though Mrs. Ellersly’s eyes and mine met in a glance like the flash of steel on steel. “We were just going,” said she, and then I felt that I had arrived in the midst of a tempest of uncommon fury.

“You must stop and make me a visit,” protested I, with elaborate politeness. To myself I was assuming that they had come to “make up and be friends” – and resume their places at the trough.

“I wish we could,” she answered, in her best manner. And she was moving toward the door, the old man in her wake. Neither of them offered to shake hands with me; neither made pretense of saying good-by to Anita, standing by the window like a pillar of ice. I had closed the drawing-room door behind me, as I entered. I was about to open it for them when I was restrained by what I saw working in the old woman’s face. She had set her will on escaping from my loathed presence without a “scene”; but her rage at having been outgeneraled was too fractious for her will.

“You scoundrel!” she hissed, her whole body shaking and her carefully cultivated appearance of the gracious evening of youth swallowed up in a black cyclone of hate. “You gutter plant! God will punish you for the shame you have brought upon us.”

I opened the door and bowed, without a word, without even the desire to return insult for insult – had not Anita again and finally rejected them and chosen me? As they passed into the private hall I rang for Sanders to come and let them out. When I turned back into the drawing room, Anita was seated, was reading a book. I waited until I saw she was not going to speak. Then I said: “What time will you have dinner?” But my face must have been expressing some of the joy and gratitude that filled me. “She has chosen me!” I was saying to myself over and over.

“Whenever you usually have it,” she replied, without looking up.

“At seven o’clock, then. You had better tell Sanders.” And I rang for him and went into my little smoking room. She had resisted her parents’ final appeal to her to return to them. She had cast in her lot with me. “The rest can be left to time,” said I to myself. And, reviewing all that had happened, I let a wild hope thrust tenacious roots deep into me – the hope that she did not quite understand her own mind as to me. How often ignorance is a blessing; how often knowledge would make the step falter and the heart quail. Who would have the courage, not to speak of the desire, to live his life, if he knew his own future?

XV

During dinner I bore the whole burden of conversation – though burden I did not find it. Like most of the most reticent men, I am extremely talkative. Silence sets people to wondering and prying; he hides his secrets best who hides them at the bottom of a river of words. If my spirits are high, I often talk aloud to myself when there is no one convenient. And how could my spirits be anything but high, with her sitting there opposite me, mine, mine for better or for worse, through good and evil report – my wife!

She was only formally responsive, reluctant and brief in answers, volunteering nothing. The servants waiting on us no doubt laid her manner to shyness; I understood it, or thought I did – but I was not troubled. It is as natural for me to hope as to breathe; and with my knowledge of character, how could I take seriously the moods and impulses of one whom I regarded as a childlike girl, trained in false pride and false ideals? “She has chosen to stay with me,” said I to myself. “Actions count, not words or manner. A few days or weeks, and she will be herself, and mine.” And I went gayly on with my efforts to interest her, to make her smile and forget the rôle she had commanded herself to play. Nor was I wholly unsuccessful. Again and again I thought I saw a gleam of interest in her eyes or the beginnings of a smile about that sweet mouth of hers. I was careful not to overdo my part. As soon as we finished dessert I said: “You loathe cigar smoke, so I’ll hide myself in my den. Sanders will bring you the cigarettes.” I had myself telephoned for a supply of her kind early in the day.

She made a polite protest for the benefit of the servants; but I was firm, and she was free to think things over alone in the drawing room – “your sitting room,” I called it now. I had not finished a small cigar when there came a timid knock at my door. I threw away the cigar and opened. “I thought it was you,” said I. “I’m familiar with the knocks of all the others. And this was new – like a summer wind tapping with a flower for admission at a closed window.” And I laughed with a little raillery, and she smiled, colored, tried to seem cold and hostile again.

“Shall I go with you to your sitting room?” I went on. “Perhaps the cigar smoke here – ”

“No, no,” she interrupted; “I don’t really mind cigars – and the windows are wide open. Besides, I came for only a moment – just to say – ”

As she cast about for words to carry her on, I drew up a chair for her. She looked at it uncertainly, seated herself. “When mamma was here – this afternoon,” she went on, “she was urging me to – to do what she wished. And after she had used several arguments, without changing me – she said something I – I’ve been thinking it over, and it seemed I ought in fairness to tell you.”

I waited.

“She said: ‘In a few days more he’ – that meant you – ‘he will be ruined. He imagines the worst is over for him, when in fact they’ve only begun.’”

“They!” I repeated. “Who are ‘they’? The Langdons?”

“I think so,” she replied, with an effort. “She did not say – I’ve told you her exact words – as far as I can.”

“Well,” said I, “and why didn’t you go?”

She pressed her lips firmly together. Finally, with a straight look into my eyes, she replied: “I shall not discuss that. You probably misunderstand, but that is your own affair.”

“You believed what she said about me, of course,” said I.

“I neither believed nor disbelieved,” she answered, indifferently, as she rose to go. “It does not interest me.”

“Come here,” said I. And I waited until she reluctantly joined me at the window. I pointed to the steeple of the church across the way. “You could as easily throw down that steeple by pushing against it with your bare hands,” I said to her, “as ‘they,’ whoever they are, could put me down. They might take away my money. But if they did, they would only be giving me a lesson that would teach me how more easily to get it back again. I am not a bundle of stock certificates or a bag of money. I am – here,” and I tapped my forehead.

She forced a faint, scornful smile. She did not wish me to see her belief of what I said.

“You think that is vanity,” I went on. “But you will learn, sooner or later, the difference between boasting and simple statement of fact. You will learn that I do not boast. What I said is no more a boast than for a man with legs to say, ‘I can walk.’ Because you have known only legless men, you exaggerate the difficulty of walking. It’s as easy for me to make money as it is for some people to spend it.”

It is hardly necessary for me to say I was not insinuating anything against her people. But she was just then supersensitive on the subject, though I did not suspect it. She flushed hotly. “You will not have any cause to sneer at my people on that account hereafter,” she said. “I settled that to-day.”

“I was not sneering at them,” I protested. “I wasn’t even thinking of them. And – you must know that it’s a favor to me for anybody to ask me to do anything that will please you.”

She made a gesture of impatience. “I see I’d better tell you why – part of the reason why – I did not go with them to-day. I insisted that they give back all they have taken from you. And when they refused, I refused to go.”

“I don’t care why you refused,” said I. “I am content with the fact that you are here.”

“But you misunderstand it,” she said, coldly.

“I don’t understand it, I don’t misunderstand it,” was my reply. “I accept it.”

She looked depressed, discouraged. She turned away from the window, drifted out of the room. While the surface of my mind was taken up with her, I must have been thinking, underneath, of the warning she had brought; for, perhaps half or three-quarters of an hour after she left, I was suddenly whirled out of my reverie at the window by a thought like a pistol thrust into my face. “What if ‘they’ should include Roebuck!” And just as a man begins to defend himself from a sudden danger before he clearly sees what the danger is, so I began to act before I even questioned whether my suspicion was plausible or absurd. I went into the hall, rang the bell, slipped a lightweight coat over my evening dress and put on a hat. When Sanders appeared, I said: “I’m going out for a few minutes – perhaps an hour – if anyone should ask.” A moment later I was in a hansom and on the way to Roebuck’s.

TO BE CONTINUED

THE WINDOW

This is the window where, one day,I watched him as he came,When all the world was white with May,And vibrant with his name.His eyes to mine, my eyes to his —Oh lad, how glad were we,What time I leaned to catch the kissYour fingers tossed to me!This is the window where, one day,I crouched to see him go,When all the world with wrath was grayAnd desolate with snow.Oh, this the glass where prophet-wiseMy fate I needs must spell;Through this I looked on Paradise,Through this I looked on Hell.Theodosia Garrison.

AMERICANS IN LONDON

By Lady Willshire

The author of the following essay on “Americans in London” is one of the most distinguished of the leaders of English Society. She is the daughter of Sir Sanford Freeling, who was for a time military secretary at Gibraltar. Her husband, Sir Arthur Willshire, was an officer in the Guards. Lady Willshire, in addition to her social activities, is, without ostentation, a woman whose charities occupy a large part of her time. In appearance she is over middle height, rather fragile, with great charm of manner. She is an accomplished musician and linguist. Her favorite recreations are riding, driving and bicycling, and she is looked upon as the best dancer in London Society.

I can well remember the time when I could easily reckon up the whole list of my American acquaintances resident in London on the fingers of one hand, and most of those were the wives of English husbands.

That was certainly not more than ten years ago, and then the majority of Americans that one chanced to meet in England were travelers, who knew very little of, and cared less apparently to see or take part in, the doings of our London society.

In ten years, however, amazing changes can and do take place, especially where the natives of the States are concerned, and nowadays I find that not only does it require a great many leaves in my capacious address book to hold the names of the Americans – and the women most particularly – who live and move and have a large part of their social being in London, but that a very impressive majority of these attractive and prominent ladies are not the life partners of voting, title-holding British subjects at all.

The good work accomplished both ways by the international marriage goes merrily on. At the present moment we can claim not less than twenty-five peeresses of transatlantic birth, while we don’t pretend to keep anything like an exact record of the ever-increasing acquisitions, from American sources, to our gentry class; but, for all that, the present big average of American women who come across the ocean to conduct a successful siege of London no longer regard the English husband as a sort of necessary preliminary and essential ally to the business of getting on in our smart metropolitan society.

The fair and welcome invader from the land of the free and the home of the brave can, and does, “arrive” astonishingly well without masculine assistance and encouragement.

She may appear as maid, wife or widow; sometimes as divorcee; but, personally, she conducts her own campaign. Furthermore, she comes fully equipped to carry everything before her – she has wit, wealth and good looks at her command, and she works along approved and sensible lines of action.

If she has a thoroughgoing conquest of London planned out, she does not put up at a fashionable hotel and spread her fine plumage and wait for notice.

She usually begins by taking a house; she furnishes it with original but discreet good taste; she wears startlingly pretty gowns – quite the best, as a rule, that Paris can supply; she gives the most taking sorts of entertainments, and the ordinary result is that in one season she is not only launched and talked about, but securely placed and greatly admired.

And if you want to know why she does this thing, the answer you can get, as I did, from her own mouth; she simply “likes London and London society.”

As an amiable, broad-minded woman, she does not love her own country so much that she cannot find a place in her heart for London, too, and that which chiefly appeals to her in our elderly, sprawling, sooty, amusing and splendid old capital is the fact that she finds it interesting.

There you have one explanation, at least, of the apparent phenomenon of the ever-growing circle of American women in the very heart of our biggest city. But it becomes a Londoner to confess that another good reason why she is so familiar and conspicuous a figure among us is because we reciprocate her liking with the strongest possible warmth of admiration.

Not only do we regard our American colony with genuine enthusiasm, and take pride and pleasure in the fact that it is the largest of its kind in any European capital, but social London pleasantly feels its influence.

Now, influence is one of those qualities that the American woman carries about with her just as naturally as she carries her pretty airs of independence, or her capacity for easy and amusing speech, and it is a sad mistake for anyone to take it for granted that on her wealth or her pulchritude alone all her claim to success and popularity in England rests.

In no way that I know of has her influence been more sensibly and beneficially felt among us than in the introduction of a quick, vivacious tone to conversation.

Her gift for light, easy, semi-humorous talk, her gay, self-confident way of telling a good story, constitute her a leading and most lasting attraction in English estimation. From her the English woman has learned, first, that which it seems every transatlantic sister is aware by intuition, that one supreme duty of the sex, as it is represented in society, is to know how to talk a little to everybody, to talk always in sprightly fashion, and never to adopt the English woman’s depressing method of answering all conversational efforts and overtures with chilling monosyllables.

It is no exaggeration to say that since the tremendous enlargement of the American colony, the whole pace of London drawing-room talk has enormously improved. We British are not by nature a sprightly and speechful race, with the gift of gay gab, but under the American woman’s cheerful influence we are enjoying a sort of reformation.

We send our daughters even to a fashionable school in fashionable Kensington, which is kept by a long-headed American woman, who will very nearly guarantee to bid a door post discourse freely and be obeyed. And the women to whom first honors are due for having inspired London with a wholesome respect for what I may justly call the very superior American parts of speech, are Mrs. George Cornwallis-West – perhaps better known on both sides of the ocean as Lady Randolph Churchill – and Consuelo, the Dowager Duchess of Manchester.

It would be a superfluous and ungrateful task to try to recall the number of years that have flown since these two women, unusually attractive as they are, even for Americans, came over to literally take London by storm.

Suffice it to say that, as Shakespeare wrote of Cleopatra, “age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite variety;” and in spite of the amazing influx of their young and lovely and accomplished countrywomen into London since their day of arrival, these two ladies still stand, as they have stood for years, at the very top of the entire American set abroad.

Both of them, by marriage or through years of long association, have become thoroughly identified with English society, but, unlike Lady Vernon-Harcourt, widow of the great leader of the Liberal party, and daughter of the famous historian Motley, they have never lost their strong American individuality.

Lady Vernon-Harcourt, to sight and hearing, seems almost a typical and thoroughgoing English woman, but Mrs. George Cornwallis-West and the Duchess Consuelo are, to all intents and purposes, as distinctly American as the day on which they were presented as brides and beauties at one of Queen Victoria’s drawing-rooms.

Then, as well as now, they were both fair to look upon, but they were also something more – they were the cleverest of talkers, and the beautiful Consuelo, in her soft, Southern voice, possessed a faculty for quaint and witty turns of phrase that made her an instant favorite.

At the time of her début, London had yet to meet the American woman who could not only chatter along cheerfully and intelligently, but who could artfully and unembarrassedly tell an amusing story before the big and critical audience that the average dinner table supplies. Our fair Creole and the fair New Yorker were, however, more than equal to all and any such emergencies and occasions.

It was with their capable tongues, quite as much as with their charming faces, that they scored their social triumphs in England, and it was mainly through their beguiling conversational powers that they both caught the attention of the present king and queen – at that time Prince and Princess of Wales – and aroused royalty’s prompt and lasting admiration.

Until that time no American could boast the fact that she was the friend of the queen, prince or princess, but the young duchess and Lady Randolph Churchill changed all that. They were the first of their nation to be asked to the Sandringham house parties, to be included in the lists of guests invited to meet royal folk at dinners, etc., and to inspire in the present king and queen the thoroughgoing liking they now cherish for American things in general and the American woman in particular.

A good deal of brown Thames water has flowed under London Bridge, it is true, since these exponents of two entirely different types of American womanhood came over to astonish even our blasé society, but no two of their sex and nation have succeeded in making a more deep and lasting impression upon London than these, or have done more to insure the social success of their countrywomen who followed in their footsteps.

Consuelo, the duchess, is a grandmother to-day, but she is almost as prominent a figure in the gay world as she ever was; unlike Mrs. George Cornwallis-West, she never went in, so to speak, for political prestige. She has cared for social gayety pure and simple, preserved much of her beauty, maintained her reputation as the most delightful house-party guest in England, and is noted nowadays as being, as well, the most skillful, tactful and serenely polite bridge-whist partner in the United Kingdom.

When, a few months ago, a house-party for royalty was given at Chatsworth by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, it was at the urgent request of both the king and queen that the Dowager Duchess of Manchester came over from Paris to spend a few days under the same roof with their majesties, whose affection for this low-voiced, sweet-tempered, witty American woman has never wavered. Every now and then one hears anew in London drawing rooms of some amusing saying of hers, for she is as gracious and graceful a conversationalist as of yore, and with three young and blooming American duchesses to rival her, still stands well apart from and ahead of them all, at least so far as the homage of our smart and titled society can be accepted as proof of a woman’s position.