Part 13

Frothingham watched Barney’s movements attentively, surprised that any of the American upper classes condescended to eat in such simplicity. He was almost startled when a bottle of wine was brought, for he had not forgotten Barney’s denunciation of drink and drinkers. He had seen so many concessions of real or reputed principle for his benefit since he had been moving about in American “high life” that he was somewhat cynical as to principle in America. But he had not expected to find this degree, or even kind, of weakness in Barney. “He told me he wouldn’t permit the stuff to come into his house,” he thought, laughing to himself. Then he noticed that none of the family drank it. One taste was enough for him--“No wonder he’s opposed to wine,” he said to himself. Then aloud: “If you don’t mind, I’ll just take whiskey--a little Scotch.”

Barney showed amused embarrassment; Nelly and Wickham laughed. “We don’t have anything to drink,” she explained. “Father doesn’t approve. But he told us you’d been brought up differently--that you must have wine. So we’ve got wine, but there isn’t any whiskey.”

Frothingham looked vague--he was relieved to find that his friend Barney was not quite so weak as he had feared. “It doesn’t in the least matter,” he replied. “I shall get on famously with this.”

“I’ll take you down to the club after a while,” said Wickham, “and you can have all you want. And to-morrow--eh, father?”

“Yes--yes--of course,” answered Barney. “I never do try to put on style that I don’t get left.”

He winked at one of the maids significantly, and when she drew near and bent her head whispered to her. She left the dining room; in about five minutes she reappeared with a decanter of Scotch whiskey, a tall glass, a bowl of ice, and a bottle of imported soda on her tray.

“Why, father!” exclaimed Nelly, “where did that come from?”

Barney beamed, triumphant. “We’ve got neighbours, haven’t we?”

“But what _will_ they think of you?” she asked, pretending to be shocked.

“I don’t know--and I don’t care,” he answered. “I never did spend much time in worrying about what my neighbours thought of me. Probably that’s why we’re here, and not in the poorhouse.”

After dinner Frothingham stayed with Nelly in the parlour instead of going to the club with Wickham. He had found many girls in America who thought they were natural or who affected naturalness as a pose: but here was the first girl, it so happened, who was really natural, without thinking anything about it. She had all the charm of the girls of his own country for him--he liked ingenuousness; and in addition she had the charm of knowledge. She knew the world, but she looked at it with ingenuous eyes--and he would not have believed this a possible combination. “How do these Americans manage it?” he said to himself. “Her father comes from well down in the lower classes, yet he has all the assurance of an aristocrat. And as for the girl, she reminds me of Evelyn--and Gwen.”

“Do you know,” he said to her, “you don’t suggest an American girl at all--that is, you do and you don’t. You women over here are cleverer than ours, but a good many of ’em lack a certain something--a--I don’t know just what to call it. It seems to me that--well, they are ladies, of course. But many of ’em--not all--but a great many of those I’ve chanced to meet--make me feel as if they were not exactly sure of themselves, as if they were trying to live up to something they’d read about or seen somewhere. I don’t know that I make myself clear.”

“Perfectly,” replied Nelly. “You mean that they act as if they weren’t satisfied with being the kind of lady they were born, and are trying to be some other kind--and don’t succeed at it especially well.”

“Exactly,” said Frothingham. “I feel like saying to them, ‘Oh, come now, chuck it, won’t you, and let’s see what you’re really like.’ But you--you remind me of our women, except that they’re so ghastly dull--the most of ’em. Gad, they sit about in the country until they’re feeble-minded. After a certain age, about all there is left of ’em is the match-making instinct. You’d understand if you’d been over there.”

“I have been there,” answered Nelly. “I spent more than a year in Europe--nearly half of it in your country. I liked it, but--well, one likes one’s own country best, of course.”

“I thought you American women preferred the other side.”

“Oh, a few of us do--those who aren’t happy unless they have somebody bowing and scraping to them or are bowing and scraping to somebody. You know, the poor we have always with us--the poor in spirit as well as the other kind of poor.”

Before they had talked an hour Frothingham felt that the outlook for his campaign in the Barney house was not promising. Nelly was frank and friendly, and he saw that she liked him. But there was something in her atmosphere which made him know that she cared little for the things which were everything to him and which must be everything to the woman he might hope to win. He feared that she was not for him. “She ain’t in my class--or perhaps I’d better say, I ain’t in hers.”

When Wickham came, at half-past ten, she left them. After suppressing yawns for fifteen minutes he said: “I’m off to bed. I was at a dance last night and owe myself five hours sleep. You see, father and I get up at half-past six. We have to be at the store at eight.”

At the store! At eight! “And he hasn’t in the least the look of that sort of chap,” thought Frothingham. As for rising at half-past six, one might do it to hunt or shoot. But to do it morning after morning “merely to set a lot of bounders to selling a lot of cloth”--preposterous!

XVII

After a few days of Chicago Frothingham felt utterly out of place. There were no idlers, no idling places. To idle meant to sit in lonely boredom.

Barney and his son were busy all day--they grudged the half-hour of that precious time of theirs which they spent at luncheon. Nelly, too, had her work--some sort of a school she was running, away off somewhere in the poorer part of the town. He was sensitive enough soon to discover, in spite of her courtesy, that he was interrupting her routine seriously and was in the way to becoming a burden. He saw as much of her as he dared--she had for him a charm that became the more difficult to resist as his hope of winning her decreased. He relieved her of himself during her busy hours so tactfully that she did not suspect him of penetrating what she honestly tried to conceal.

He betook himself to the club. It was usually deserted; if a man did enter, he raced through and away as if pursued by demons; at luncheon all ate as if struggling for a prize offered to him who should chew the least, swallow the fastest, and finish the soonest. He called on the women he met--they were out or just going out, or just coming in to busy themselves at home.

In New York, Boston, Washington he had thought the leisure class a lame imitation of the European class of industrious, experienced idlers, had found it small and peculiarly unsatisfactory because its men were inferior to its women in numbers and especially in brains. But here--there wasn’t a pretence of a leisure class except the loungers in the parks; and they were threatening, so it was said, to organize and do all sorts of dreadful things if they weren’t given something to do. “This is a howling wilderness,” he said to himself. “I should be better off in a desert. These lunatics make my head swim.”

Wherever he went, all seemed possessed of and pursued by fever-demons. If it was a dinner, the diners were eager to despatch it. The courses were served swiftly, the waiters snatching one’s plate if he for a second ceased the machine-like lifting of food; the conversation was nervous and in the shrill tones of acute mental excitement. Words were cut short and slapped together almost incoherently. Sentences were left unfinished, the speaker leaping on to another sentence or submerged by the breaking of the flimsy speech-dam of the person he was addressing. Often all were talking at the same time. “Surely you can listen as you talk,” said a woman to whom he complained. “Think how much time it saves!”

If it was a dance, the orchestra detonated the notes like cartridges from a Maxim gun; the dancers whirled or raced furiously. “Why this hurry?” he gasped to a handsome, powerful girl, who had dragged him round a ballroom twice, had flung him into a chair, and was dashing away with another man to finish the waltz.

“I’ve got to catch the train for the millennium,” she screamed back over her shoulder and disappeared in the maelstrom.

Even at the play the audience shuffled uneasily while the players sped through their lines or the orchestra rattled off the between-the-acts music; and afterward all rushed from the theatre as if it were afire. The blank expression habitual to Frothingham’s face was now less a disguise than a reflection of his internal state.

“I must get out of this,” he said to himself at the end of two weeks. “The disease may be catching. Now I understand that fellow who went from here to tear London up by the roots and put in his tuppenny tubes. A Chicagoan should be barred from a country like any other plague.” And he wrote his sister that he was “beginning to twitch with the Chicago disease.”

Evelyn had written him regularly--a letter by each Wednesday’s steamer. She had put a brave face upon their affairs, had tried to make him picture life at Beauvais House as smooth, almost happy. But he had more than suspected that a far different story ran between the lines; and when she wrote that she had engaged herself to Charley Sidney he understood.

Seven months before he would have grumbled and cursed, and would have accepted the sacrifice. Now, it roused in him a fierce protest, a feeling of abhorrence of which he would not have been capable before he visited America--and the Barneys. “She sha’n’t sell herself to that creeping cad,” he said, and on impulse he cabled: “Sidney impossible and unnecessary. You must break it. Answer.”

The answer came a few hours later: “Shall do as you wish.”

Instead of being relieved he repented his impulse, wondered where it had come from, fell into a profound depression. Seven months of stalking; nothing to show for it but three ridiculous, sickening misses. And here he was with an empty bag; and what little heart he once had for the game was gone; in its place a disgust for it and for himself. “How Nelly Barney would scorn me if she knew what a creature I am,” he said. He was now thinking a great deal on the subject of Nelly Barney’s standards for men and also on the subject of Nelly Barney as a standard for women. In neither direction did he find any encouragement. He knew her through being in the same house with her day after day, through seeing her at all hours and in all moods--and she never made the slightest attempt to conceal her real self. He felt that such a woman could not be attracted by his title, would not be likely to be attracted by himself; he felt that she was at the same time more worth the winning than any other woman he knew in America--“Yes, or in England,” he confessed at last.

“What a pity, what a beastly, frightful shame,” he thought. “She’s got everything that I must have, and everything that I want, too.”

But he had only twelve hundred dollars left, including the thousand from Wallingford. “I must be gone clean mad,” he exclaimed whenever he wasn’t with her and was alone with his affairs. Finally he was able to goad himself into dashing feverishly about in Chicago society. He sought the set she avoided--it was to him an additional charm in her that she did avoid it, for he had at bottom the extra-prim ideas of women which have never lost their hold upon Englishmen. There was, however, no alternative to seeking this set. He thought it the only one in which he was likely to succeed--those among the fashionable young women of the rich families who carried the “free-and-easy” pose in speech and manner to the point where it looked far worse to a foreigner than it really was, who laughed and talked noisily in public, who wore very loud and very clinging dresses, very big hats and very tight shoes.

The newspapers gave him columns of free advertising and, with the Barneys vouching for him and “Wick” Barney pushing him, he immediately became a figure. Some of the young women of the “lively” set pursued him with an ardour which he would have mistaken when he first landed for evidence of serious attachment or intentions. But he had learned something of the ways of American flirts, married and single, and he had had experience of that American curiosity as to foreigners of rank which he had at first regarded as the frankest kind of title-worship.

Presently he found a girl he thought he could not be mistaken in fancying he could get--Jane or Jenny (Jeanne, she wrote it) Hooper, the daughter of that famous Amzi Hooper whose “Hooper’s High-class Hams” and “Hooper’s Excelsior Dressed Beef and Beef Extract” are trumpeted from newspaper, billboard, and blank wall throughout the land.

Her older sister had married a Papal duke under the impression that he was a noble of ancient and proud family. To her horror, to her family’s humiliation, and to her friends’ hilarity, it came out that the Duke of Valdonomia was the son of a Swiss hog-packer of as humble origin as Amzi Hooper and of less than one-fifth his wealth. The family longed to possess a genuine nobleman, and Jane, a devourer of the English novels which are written by the middle classes for the middle classes about the upper classes--seemed to be in sympathy with her father’s and mother’s ambition and keenly eager to become a “real lady.” It was assumed by her set that Frothingham had come for her--the newspapers hinted as much several times each week.

But Frothingham, grown extraordinarily sensitive, shied at the amazing high heels on which she tottered like a cripple, at the skin-like fit of her clothes, at the suspicious brilliance of her cheeks and blackness of her brows and lashes. Whenever she spoke to him suddenly in her shrill dialect he felt as if a file had been drawn across his pneumogastric nerve. And she constantly used a slang expression which seemed to him--in her--the essence of vulgarity. She could not speak ten sentences without saying that she or somebody or everybody had nearly or quite “thrown a fit.”

It struck him as a biting irony of fate that the woman whom of all he knew well in America he least approved should be the one who was frankly throwing herself at his head in his hour of desperation. When he learned that her father was an Englishman born and bred in the “lower middle class,” he felt that he had solved the problem of the family’s over-eagerness to get him. “That’s why the old beggar almost cringes as he talks to me,” he said to himself.

“D----n their impudence!” And the next time he met Hooper he treated him not as an American and an equal, but as an Englishman and an inferior. And Amzi at once fell into his “place,” just as a car horse, though elevated to be a coach horse, will halt at one ring of a bell. “It’s in the blood,” thought Frothingham. “It can’t be hid or got out.” But--he didn’t venture the experiment with the daughter.

The climax came one morning when he met her by chance in the Lake Park Drive. She was perched high on a red and black dog-cart in which she was driving a bay and a gray tandem. Her hat was the biggest he had seen her wear, and she was swathed in a silver-grey dust-coat with a red embroidered collar. She stopped and invited him to join her.

“I needed you to complete my turnout,” she said, when they were under way. Her dazzling smile took part of the edge off her unconscious insolence--or was it conscious? He found her a puzzle, with her flashes of good taste and flashes of good sense, with her wit that seemed accidental and her folly that seemed her real self.

He set his teeth and tried to think only of how much “I need her to complete _my_ turnout,” and of how pretty she was--for there was no denying her beauty, or her style for that matter, in spite of its efflorescence. He saw that everyone was looking at them, but he did not appreciate that his own striking costume and his eyeglass were as magnetic as were her hat, her bright skin, and her dust-coat with its gaudy collar. She was supremely happy. The most conspicuous girl in Chicago, driving with the most conspicuous man, in the most conspicuous trap and on the most conspicuous highway--what more could a young woman ask?

“Wonder why everyone stares so?” she said with deliberate intent to provide an opening for compliment. She wished to hear him say the flattering things she was thinking about herself.

“I fancy they’re staring at what I can’t take my eyes off of,” he replied. “You _do_ look swift this morning.”

“Swift! I don’t like that.” She was frowning. “You Englishmen come over here and think you can say what you please.”

“I can’t see where’s the harm in telling a girl she’s pretty and well got up, and looks a stunner.”

“That isn’t what ‘swift’ means in Chicago.”

“Really! You don’t say! That’s what it means in London.”

“But you’re not in London.”

“No.” His tone strongly suggested a wish that he were.

“Wouldn’t it be jolly if this were Hyde Park!” she exclaimed.

He did not show enthusiasm at this--but then his face was made to suppress, not to express, emotion.

“I simply adore London,” she went on.

“It ain’t bad--for a while, now and then.”

“There’s so much atmosphere about London--I don’t mean the fog and soot. Here, they’re all crazy about making money and working and all those kind of things. Whereas, over there, everybody’s for having a good time and--all those kind of things. Sometimes I think I’ll throw a fit if I don’t get away from here.”

He looked gloom, then brightened--yes, she was tremendously pretty, and her mouth was like a red-ripe cherry; yes, she might be toned down into a fairly decent countess. “They’re quick to adapt themselves, these American girls. The minute she sees Evelyn she’ll begin to learn.”

“I don’t see how you stand it,” she continued. “When are you going away? Not that I sha’n’t be sorry--you’ve been awfully nice to me, and I like to see a really well-dressed man once in a while.”

“Ah, I don’t mind it here.” He paused for fully a minute, then said: “And I’d like it, you know, if I could take you with me when I go.” He followed this speech with a slow turning of the head until his eyeglass was full upon her. “By Jove, her colour’s genuine,” he said to himself.

She had been happy a few minutes before; now she was all thrills and palings and flushings of ecstacy. She glanced at her conquest with sparkling eyes and laughing lips. She made him forget what “bad form” he had been thinking her. “Is that a joke?” she asked, as if she were assuming that it was.

“We don’t go in for joking about that sort of thing where I come from,” he drawled.

“But you oughtn’t to have said it here.” She was radiant, but her hands were trembling--it seemed most romantic to her, quite like a chapter out of a novel. Nobility and titles and genuine aristocracy, that not only recognised itself, but also was recognised as aristocracy by everybody, seemed to her as dream-like as fairyland. “And he does so look the part!” she said to herself. “Anyone could see that he is the real thing.”

“If you’ll drive home I’ll ask you again there,” he continued.

And he did, and she accepted him; and he was halfway to Barney’s before he came from the spell of her fresh young beauty and her frank admiration of him, and began to think of Nelly and to see Jeanne from Nelly’s standpoint again. At that moment Jeanne was busily telephoning her engagement to her intimates, her head full of castles and coronets and crests and peeresses’ robes. It seemed to her that she could not wait to begin her triumph--the congratulations of friends, the receptions, dinners, dances in honour of her and her fiancé, the flare of newspaper brasses, the big wedding, and the crescendo of her gorgeous entry into English society as Countess of Frothingham. Cinderella was no more enraptured when the prince lifted her from the ashes than was Jenny Hooper with her ill-fed and exuberant imagination, her ill-directed and energetic ambition, her ill-informed and earnest conception of “being somebody.”

“And he’s coming to see you to-morrow, pa,” she said to Amzi Hooper, after delighting his ears with the great news. “He says your consent is necessary before the engagement’s announced.”

“I guess he and I won’t quarrel over it, Jenny,” replied her father. “If he suits you, I can stand him.”

Frothingham came the next afternoon and made his formal request. Mr. Hooper shook hands with him cordially. “I guess my girl knows what she’s about,” said he. “I’m pleased to have you as a son.”

“Thanks,” replied Frothingham--he could not altogether banish from his manner the instinctive haughtiness of English upper class toward English lower class. “When could you receive my representative? Or shall I send him to someone who represents you?”

Mr. Hooper looked embarrassed and rubbed his jawbone vigorously with his thumb and forefinger. “Yes--yes--certainly--any time you say. I’ll talk to him, myself. Can he come to-morrow? I don’t think it’ll take him long to satisfy me you’re all right.”

Frothingham stared, thinking “D----n his impudence!” He said only, “To-morrow, at eleven, then,” shook hands as warmly as he thought wise, and went back to the parlour where Jeanne was waiting for him.

* * * * *

Frothingham’s “representative” was Lawrence, attorney to the British Consulate at Chicago, a brother of Gerald Boughton’s mother. He had come to America thirty years before because he could make a living here and could not make a living at home. He had renounced allegiance to the British throne because by doing so his income was doubled. But at heart he regarded himself as a British subject and, while he pretended to be an American, was so savagely critical of things American that everyone disliked him. He wore the long, slim side-whiskers which were the fashion when he left home; he talked with the lisp then affected as the “hall mark” of a gentleman. He disliked Americans; he despised Anglo-Americans of the Hooper type; Hooper himself he loathed as an intolerable upstart, successful where he, of the “upper class,” was barely able to keep chin above water.

When he came into Hooper’s study at the hour fixed by Frothingham he was an accurate representation of the supercilious, frozen-faced “swell” of the Piccadilly district a quarter of a century before. Hooper knew that he was of the “upper class,” but had not the faintest deference for him. Hooper had been Americanised to the extent of caring nothing for mere family. It took a title to stir his dormant instincts of servility; the untitled Lawrence was a man to be judged by American standards, as he understood them. Lawrence was not a millionaire and not on the way toward that goal of every rational ambition; Hooper, therefore, had no more respect for him than he had for any other “failure.”

“You’ve come to explain about the Earl of Frothingham,” began Hooper in the arrogant voice he used at business. “But it’s not necessary. I’m well informed as to Lord Frothingham’s family and am satisfied he’s what he represents himself to be.”

Lawrence combed his long lean “Dundrearys” with his slim white fingers. The joy of battle gleamed in his eyes. “I can’t imagine,” he replied--he had a broad accent and drawl, said “cawn’t” and “fawncy”--“why you should fancy I came here to insult Lord Frothingham, whose representative I have the honour to be.”

“Insult? What do you mean, Mr. Lawrence?” demanded Hooper, his voice courageous, but not his eyes.