Kitabı oku: «Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, October, 1905», sayfa 12

“Oh, yes,” answered his companion; “I think I know whom you mean. We have such a man. It saves us all the trouble of detail. He is Holland, the colored caterer. He is out in the supper room now.”

Mr. McAllister was more fortunate in getting into the Assemblies than some other people who come from New York’s most distinguished families. An incident illustrates the extreme indifference to any rules outside of their own that the managers of the Assemblies have.

A beautiful Philadelphia girl was about to be married to the son of one of New York’s social leaders. The mother of the bride-elect was one of the most exclusive and aristocratic social figures in Philadelphia. Three days before the ball was given she was in New York at some of the pre-nuptial festivities, and when her prospective son-in-law’s family became interested in her stories of the Assemblies and expressed a desire to see such a ball, she cordially invited them over.

Eight of them came, with maids, valets and trunks of finery. The Philadelphia hostess wrote a note to one of the managers, asking for invitations, as these courtesies are extended to a few strangers each year who are the guests of a subscriber. The lady’s request was politely but firmly declined. She and her husband were amazed, indignant and puzzled. In all her experience as an exclusive society leader, she had never been “turned down” before. For generations, on both her own and her husband’s side, members of their families had served as managers of the Assemblies. Her husband went at once to his intimate friends on the committee and explained the situation. It was not necessary to explain who the New Yorkers were, for they also were among the exclusive families in America.

Nothing had any effect. Persuasion won over four of the managers by nightfall, but one remained obdurate, and one black ball is sufficient to veto anything.

The eight New Yorkers repacked their finery and returned home, absolutely turned down like the merest social adventurers by men who wouldn’t break a rule in order to be courteous.

And the sole reason of it all was this: The list of guests had closed on a fixed date, and no emergency could reopen it. The request was presented too late.

It is not against the rules to invite strangers, but they can’t be invited offhand. It would be like bestowing the Order of the Knight of the Garter casually. Each name presented by a subscriber must be investigated by the five managers, and then voted upon. The subscriber must guarantee to the committee that the stranger is not living in Philadelphia, or, if so, that the period of residence has not extended over two years. Philadelphians who are born and have lived here for generations, who go intimately with the smartest set, are declined admission while they are here, because their ancestors were not subscribers, but all they have to do is to move away for a year to any other city, and their friends here can get them invitations at once as “strangers.”

A woman who is not a subscriber may become one if she marries a subscriber. If she is a subscriber when unmarried and weds a man who is not a subscriber, she must forfeit the privilege of going, and not one of her children can be admitted, except a daughter who remarries into the subscribing set.

An outsider who can prove direct descent from an original subscriber and then has a “pull” with the managers can be admitted for membership. In the old days a man who married a woman subscriber could share her honors and go with her. The custom prevailed until one of the most popular girls in the Assembly married a man who, while personally liked, belonged to an ordinary family, whose financial ways had not been approved by Philadelphians for decades. The bridegroom came to the ball with his bride, because a rule was a rule; so the managers met and abolished the rule, but not the man. The groom, however, was not one of the strugglers who want to kick down other climbers. He is a man of humor as well as good sense, and he convulsed those who laugh at the pretensions of the Assemblies by his response to a discussion regarding the admission of another man who was not of the elect.

“Why can’t he get in?” said the groom. “I’m in.”

Unfortunately for the managers, this new rule, which seemed so satisfactory, gave them a bad quarter of an hour for the next ball. The daughter of the chief and most distinguished manager married a man who was not a subscriber. The couple were at once refused an invitation for the next Assembly. This was quite too much for the father, who was willing to turn down some one else, but one of his own family – why – such a thing was never heard of. And so, in confusion and dismay, the managers had to secretly break their new rule, and invite this bride and groom, who have been going ever since.

When a male scion of one of the really great families married the daughter of an all-too-well-known sporting man, he and his wife were refused a subscription to the following balls.

“If he can’t go, neither can we,” wrote one hundred members of his family. This was too much for the managers again, and they meekly consented to let him enter.

When a girl who has not been able to go, no matter how charming and attractive she is, marries a subscriber, the one comment that sweeps over the church is: “Well, she can go to the Assemblies now.”

One mother, who all of her life had been ruled by this social law, wept when her daughter told her that she was going to marry a man out of the list. The girl was a healthy, straightforward, American type, who did everything athletic and copied the field and turf when she talked. The man she was to marry had every desirable quality, except his name on the Golden Book.

“You will break my heart by such a marriage,” wailed the mother; “the first of all our family to be denied the Assemblies. You must give this man up.”

“Give up a bully man for a stupid ball? Well, I guess not,” was the final answer of the frank daughter. And she married the man.

One of the momentous questions that cost the managers sleepless nights was a question of ancestors, caused by two débutantes. They were children of a couple who had married the second time. One, the wife’s daughter, was by a former husband, who didn’t belong to the Assemblies. The other was a daughter of the husband by a first wife, both of whom belonged to the Assemblies. The girls had been brought up together from childhood, and when they came out in society, the father asked for their invitations together. This precipitated one of the most momentous emergencies that the managers ever had to meet. This exact question had never come before the Assembly. All kinds of advice, social and legal, were asked, and the question convulsed society. Everyone debated it, and everyone took sides. After many meetings by the managers, the decision was reached that the stepdaughter of the father couldn’t be invited, but that the stepdaughter of the mother could.

And such a hold have the rules of the Assembly on Philadelphians, that nothing about this was considered unusual. Had it been a question of admittance by descent into the House of Peers, it couldn’t have been more important.

But if it were not for the peculiarity of these rules and customs which govern the two oldest balls in the world, it is doubtful if they would have become famous, or if they would have preserved, through the centuries, their unique charm, their peculiar social aroma.

We are a restless, easily wearied, ever-changing people. It is delightful to know that in the hurly-burly these two social affairs live out the traditions of our ancestors.

May they always copy their manners!

COUPLETS

 
’TIS strange that Youth himself the task would set
To learn the very things Age would forget!
 
 
We labor to possess a world of things,
And lose them through the toil their getting brings.
 
 
Who would but hold the earth in sober wit
Must never try to hold too much of it.
 

Lee Fairchild.

FALSE EQUIVALENTS
By H. F. Provost Battersby

I

THE house stood in the corner of a quiet square, a little south and west of the Green Park, and the room in which most of his evenings were spent was on the balcony floor. The balconies had blossomed. They burst in a wreath of color round the grim quadrangle in festal imitation of the spring, when the newer beauties and the May buds were coming out; but before Jim South’s windows were only a few green shrubs, which died hard through the summer. He always admired his neighbors’ decorations, without noticing the deficiencies of his own; yet that garland round the old dark fronts often seemed to him like roses on a faded face; there lurked a sort of shame behind the sweetness; it was almost a trifling with age.

The square was a kind of back eddy to the Palace Road, and held a strained hum from the traffic round it. The silence, which raised the rents, had attracted South; he used more of it, he said, than most of those who paid them, farming it himself.

He meant that he was less often an absentee than those about him, but his phrase suggested an alternative of occupation which did not exist; for never was a man with less of harness on his back. He lived solely for his own amusement; cropping life’s greenness in a slow, easy, ruminant fashion, and on a modest income. A cousin was his nearest relative.

He had a fire this evening, though half May was past, and his book had dropped from his hand, when the man who was owner, factotum and, with his wife, comptroller to that small household of bachelors, announced:

“Miss Rosamond Merlin!”

It was a girl who entered; a girl with a woman’s buoyant movement and pose; a woman with a girl’s footfall. She wore a cloak which was somewhat oppressively magnificent, and held out a hand to South, laughing, as he rose.

“Surprised?”

“Delighted!” he said.

She sighed as she dropped into his seat.

“I don’t suppose you are.”

He pushed a chair to the further side of the fireplace, and watched, while she drew off slowly her long gloves, with the flicker of curiosity which was always lambent on his face. It was like a color there.

The girl bent down, and spread out her arms to the glow. She let them fall on the front of her skirt, pressing it back from the little pink and gold slippers on the grate stone.

“What a man you are for fires!” she said.

“I like warmth.”

“In coals,” was her retort.

She looked up at him sideways, smiling.

“Why don’t you ask to see my frock?”

“Because I want to,” he said.

Her eyes brimmed with unbelief.

“You know you don’t care tuppence,” she said; but she threw the cloak at last from her shoulders, and leaned back in the chair, drooping an admiring eye. She was on her way to the great costume ball of the season, and forced from South a hazard at her masquerade.

“Apple blossom?” he ventured, and was complimented.

“Ah, you should see it standing up; but you’re not worth that. Look there!”

She spread out the phantom of a fan, shaped and painted as a tuft of its tinted bloom.

“Veynes gave it me,” she said.

“Oh, did he?”

“Ye-es, he did. Are you sorry for Veynes?”

“I! – why?”

“Oh, do be sensible! – you’re not that much of a fool; – because I’ve got him, or he’s got me, whichever you like. Don’t you think it’s bad for him?”

“It might be worse,” South said.

“Thank you. It might, you know; ’specially with Veynes. Oh, I say, do you mind my coming here?”

“I can mind nothing else for days,” he laughed. “Why?”

“I thought your man looked a sort of piled-up disapproval when he let me in.”

“For us all?”

“Yes; and for himself.”

“For himself! Why?”

“Oh, he’s probably seen my face too often in shop windows to care to see it here. You’re all deadly respectable, aren’t you?”

“The whole square is; we’ve taken life policies in propriety. Money, art and titles, and all of it married.”

She gave a little wince at that, but asked if he would offer her some coffee. South was famous in a small way for making it, and his friends, when out of humor with the world, would come and watch the brown liquid bubble through the valves of some strange machine of copper and nacreous glass he had picked up in the East, and regain their “values” over a cup.

He pushed a hanging kettle across the flame, and knelt down by his visitor to stir the fire.

“Turkish?” he inquired.

“That’s the gritty stuff, isn’t it? No, the other; and black. Why is your hair so long?”

“Is it? I’ve forgotten it. What is this on your shoe?”

“The gold?”

“Yes.”

“Letters.”

“What?”

“R. E. V.”

“A monogram?”

“Yes.”

“Whose?”

“Nobody’s.”

She swept her train across her little feet and laughed at him.

“Are you learning to be inquisitive?” she inquired.

South did not say. He lifted the kettle from its crutch, and set the cafetière in action.

Rosamond screwed her chair round to the table, and spread her arms upon it, resting her cheek on one of them to watch his proceedings.

“Why do you want to know?” she asked, presently.

The bubbles in the dim glass tubes ran to and fro half a minute before he replied.

“To know what?”

“About my slippers.”

“Oh, curiosity,” he shrugged.

She tilted her face further over on her white forearm, and her eyes came round to his.

“I thought you hadn’t any?” she said.

His “Only about trifles” was meant unkindly; but she refused to take offense.

“I suppose that’s a compliment to my number threes,” she smiled; “so I’d explain the letters on them if I could; but they came from Veynes with the fan, so I can only guess – perhaps they stand for the motto of his house.”

“Probably,” he assented, grimly. “Regina ex vulgo, or something of the sort. Are you going to adopt it?”

“To adopt what?”

“The motto of his house.”

She rose without replying, and walked to an antique mirror which covered a corner of the room. She faced it with a sigh of satisfaction, and then turned slowly round upon her toes till her shoulders were reflected. Her head was flung back out of the lamp light which yellowed her breast, and the gold of her coiled hair floated over her in the darkness like a misty moon.

She stood, poised doubtfully for some time, pinching her little waist downward with both hands.

“Do you think it shows too much?” she inquired, presently, without moving.

South looked up from the table.

“For what?” he said.

“For what do you mean?”

“For my taste, or for yours, or for Veynes’, or for modesty – or what?”

“For yours, if you like.”

“For mine, yes! I don’t mean that I see too much of you, but it’s so tremendously announced; it’s squeezed into one’s eye.”

“And for modesty?”

“Oh, modesty doesn’t depend on clothes, any more than purity did on fig leaves. Eve only began to sew when she had lost hers. Come and drink your coffee.”

She came, after some further observation, and sipped in silence from the cup he handed her. He had a dozen questions on his tongue, but could not or would not put them; the girl seemed too independent. He mentioned finally the current report that they were to see her in the new piece at the Variety.

“Well, you’re not,” she said. “It’s a dancing part, and I’m going to act when I go back to the boards.”

“Why?”

“Because I can.”

“That would seem to be as good a reason the other way.”

“You know,” she scoffed.

“I do; I saw you three times.”

“Three! – some men saw me thirty.”

“I dare say. I couldn’t afford it.”

“The price of a seat?”

“No, the solace of one; the one you’re in; it’s almost a housewife in its economies.”

“Economies?”

“Yes, economies of content. It guarantees that while I stay in its arms. I think I buy it cheap.”

“Content! I wouldn’t take it as a gift; it’s a despair with a trousseau, a sort of bridal and sanctified kind of funk. Oh, content’s a miserable thing.”

South laughed.

“Well,” he said, “it’s not often offered with a ring. Will you take another cup?”

She pushed hers toward him and asked if he had any brandy in the house.

South nodded at a liquor stand, but suggested crème de menthe.

“It’s not for me,” she explained, “but for my driver – he’s got an awful cough; I’ve been listening to it up here all the time. Could you send him a glass?”

South laid his hand on the bell.

“What driver?” he said.

“The man on my hansom; he’s been waiting for me.”

“Why do you keep him?”

“I don’t. Veynes does.”

“Is Veynes in the cab?”

“No, no, silly! – it’s Veynes’ hansom; he sent it round for me. The driver of Veynes’ hansom has a cough, you have some brandy, and I want you to send it down by your man to the driver, that his cough may be stayed. Now do you understand?”

“No, I do not,” he said; but he did as she desired.

“I suppose that is a fresh indiscretion,” she remarked, as the man retired.

“I suppose it is,” he replied, “but the freshness need not count for much among so many. Is Veynes coming here for you?”

“Mercy, no!” she laughed. “He wouldn’t quite understand it; it doesn’t occur to him that a girl who kicks her skirts about at so much a week can ever want anything of a man but flattery and new frocks. A good deal of dullness goes with a title, you know.”

“If by dullness you mean bewilderment, I might be a duke. Will you explain?”

“Why I’m here?”

“Oh, no, I understand that; you’ve tried to make me envy Tantalus before; but why you’ve forgotten your prudence and your promises – I used to believe in both – and what has become of your chaperon; and how deep Lord Veynes is in it.”

She left all but the last question unanswered, and said, looking from him toward the fire:

“He wants me to marry him.”

She missed the quick spring of his eyes to her face, but she met them the next moment.

“Am I to congratulate you?” he inquired.

“You might have said him,” she remarked; “however, it’s good of you not to jump – but you always could sit still. I know you’re saying something nasty inside of you; mayn’t I hear it?”

“I don’t think I am,” he replied. “I was wondering precisely where I came in?”

“You come in here,” she laughed, with halting mirth; “you’re the oracle; you roll out the future in a hollow voice; you say what you think.”

He shook his head.

“No, I forgot,” she ran on, “you never do; you say what you think some one else will think of what you wouldn’t say if you thought it; isn’t that it? You explained it to me once, but it wasn’t clear. Well, say that! Say something! You’ve known Veynes longer than I have; say he’s not good enough for me!”

“Oh, that’s understood,” he murmured.

“By Veynes?”

“By Veynes just at present, probably. I meant by you and me.”

“Oh, you!” she flouted. “You mightn’t think yourself good enough.”

It was a curious challenge for a man’s matrimonial amen. The woman thirsting for love and eager to drink it; the man thirsty and afraid. She did not see the sudden change in his eyes, as though a flame went through them. She was looking the other way. But she heard the parry of his low “I should not” to her thrust. It pierced like the white pinch of frost, it ran cold even into her voice.

“Ah, you’re too modest,” she rallied, so briskly that he did not notice the shiver in her throat. “Besides, you’re rather cowed by my frock; but how about the family?”

“Veynes’?”

“Yes.”

“There’s only Lord Egham.”

“Only Lord Egham! No sisters, mothers, aunts – nothing? Oh, come, that’s better. And what is he like?”

“He’s a dear old gentleman who dotes on his son.”

“Then he’d take me badly?”

“I fancy so.”

“Why?”

“Ah, that’s a big question. Perhaps his education was defective.”

“I dare say. He’s an earl, isn’t he?”

“Yes, the Earl of Egham, sits as Viscount Alderly.”

“I see; and some day I might be a countess?”

“You might.”

“That’s a bribe; I like the word awfully; it sounds good; it’s like a stare to say it – the countess! – but I fancy it would be rather dreadful being one – that is, if you weren’t born to it – in the cast all along, don’t you know. Of course, then you could do what you liked; but if you’d only been made one, and made from a dancing girl, you’d have to be proper, just to show how easy it came! And I think it would be dull,” she drawled. “What do you say?”

“Nothing,” he affirmed.

“Not even to save poor Veynes from his fate? You could save him.”

He looked slowly across at her face, which lay back idly under the yellow light, and she held her eyes squarely to his, as a maid holds a mirror to her mistress. He might search them for reflections, but he would see nothing more. In point of fact, he looked for some time without troubling their surface.

“Marry him,” he said.

“And the earl?”

“Oh, you must treat him kindly, and show him what an excellent countess you can make.”

“Shall I?”

“I fancy not. You’re too human, you see; this warm, kind world is too near your heart. The great lady has nothing there but her corset; and the world – her little cold world – at her fingers’ ends, in a descending scale of chilliness. Besides, you’re too pretty.”

“To be a countess?”

“No, to be made one. You can’t melt beauty for new molds without breaking the old, you know; something goes.”

“And yet you say – marry him.”

“Well, I won’t say it,” he replied.

She had turned her head away, and was stretching over her shoulders for her wrap.

“I’m going,” she said.

He rose to put it round her, and caught the reflection in the glass of her averted eyes. They were shining with tears.

She held out her hand, shook his shortly, and went toward the door.

“You needn’t come down,” she said, as he followed her.

“No, but I will.”

“No, you won’t; I don’t want you.”

There was something more imperative in her decree than its tone – a sob; that stopped him at the open door.

The sound of her feet ceased from the stair, the front door slammed, and he walked across to the window, waiting there till the noisy motion of her hansom ebbed into the dull roar of the streets.

He stayed even longer, and the May sky had lost its last memory of the day ere he sat down again before his dying fire.

The girl’s gay audacity seemed to linger like an odor in the room; made pungent, as it were, by that sob. He had not noticed it before. Conscious audacity it was not; for she wore her beauty as a sort of decoration, the star of some regal order, which sanctioned the fine animal magnificence with which she had set the obligations of nobility behind those of good looks, and doubted if the charmed circle of coronets might not prove too dull for her endurance; putting, without a tinge of affectation, nature’s creations before those of dead kings.

But it was not of her vivid exuberance that South was thinking; he had inhaled that before, and the intoxication of it was dissolved. But those sly touches of humility, too faint to be felt through the written record of her words, dropped lids, and looks, and pauses, so unlike her, pressed still as a hand upon his lifted arm. Yet he told himself he had understood them, without the compulsion of her tears.

At least he understood this: that she had thrown the weight of her beauty without avail against the ease and freedom of his unwedded days. Yet it left him with a pricking sense – not of repentance – but that repentance might confront, might even confound, him.