CHAPTER XXVIII

_Mr. Mudison Sees Mrs. Underbunk at the Opera_

I feel very happy to-day for two reasons. Firstly, as my rector says, I have full particulars about the "delightful lot," being informed that they number but three, two small boys besides the Harvard man, for all of whom Joshua provides liberally. Secondly, I have learned that Mrs. Underbunk was the aggrieved party; that Joshua had the bad temper; that the South Dakota courts forbade him to marry again in that State. Immediately on receipt of this information I sent an armful of American Beauties to the Holland House, and yesterday morning one of her characteristic little notes brought her thanks. Then she expressed her regret that she would miss seeing me that evening, as she understood that I was going to the theatre with the Trimmings, and she had an opera engagement with the Stynes. Where did she get to know those people? They have been long regarded as simply impossible. I understand that they are Episcopalians now, but that they formerly had "berger" at the end of their name, and but recently took to the "y." However, they are enormously rich, having made their money in my favorite breakfast-food, but it will take them a few years to get in. Mrs. Underbunk is entirely too good-natured. She says that they are interesting; but evidently her life abroad has blinded her. She thinks because they hobnobbed with royalty they will be received here at once, and she does not realize that they must first serve a term at Southampton and Bar Harbor, and then have a season of snubbing at Newport. She even went so far as to ask me to do something for them--to call, or drop in at their box at the opera. Of course I had to say that I would, but I had no idea that I should be called on so soon to make a public appearance with these climbers. However, it was my own fault. Her note decided me. I pleaded a headache to the Trimmings, and by nine o'clock had sufficiently recovered to wander over to the opera-house.

In social as well as military operations a reconnaissance is always wise. I dropped in to speak to the Twitters first, and made a few observations. I must admit that to the eye the Styne box was everything that it should be. From the artistic point of view it was without a flaw, for with two lovely women like young Mrs. Morgan Styne and Mrs. Underbunk in the front, and such distinguished-looking men as Styne and Julius Hogginson Fairfield whispering over-shoulder to them, they were really conspicuous. In every way they seemed to have emphasized their good taste and their ignorance of the customs of our society. I saw an oasis. I saw a restful, quiet spot, surrounded by the glare of the desert of jewels. From them my eyes wandered around the horseshoe, wandered along that diamond-fronted row, now and again pausing to rest on some familiar figure where a pathetic effort had been made to secure with money what Nature had not given. I fear that Gladys Underbunk is warping my view of life. Why, I actually found myself admitting that young Mrs. Harry Garish, with her hair done in Merodish fashion and intertwined with pearls to the value of a king's ransom, was hopelessly plain. She poses as clever as well as smart, and so affects Cleopatra costumes. Her elbow almost touched Mrs. Underbunk's over the railing, and the comparison was such that I was simply astonished that for so many years I had been one of her train. Mrs. Garish was probably wondering where Gladys Underbunk had picked up such friends. She would faint when she saw me joining the party. But I was bold.

Without even waiting for the curtain to go up and the lights down, I made my way between acts to the Styne box, and in the great red glare that beats upon the parterre was presented to the ambitious Morgan and his wife, shook hands effusively with Julius Hogginson Fairfield, and sat down to whisper over the shoulders of Gladys Underbunk. It must have made a great stir. I could see a score of glasses turned on us; I could see great excitement among the Twitter clan over the way; I could see Horatio Gastly direct the gaze of old Mrs. Plumstone to the astounding scene. Evelyn Garish gave me a mechanical nod, and then tried to look at the gallery. It was quite amusing. And as for the Stynes, of course they were delighted and most cordial, and I must say I was surprised to find them so decent. Morgan was dressed perfectly, even to his one shirt-stud, and his wife is simply stunning; but when I know them I shall advise her that even though she looks infinitely better without jewels, at the opera, at least, she should decorate herself if she wants to cut anything of a figure. Smart women make their money sparkle, as old Gastly remarked to me at the club. Mrs. Styne will probably be very smart after a few years. She has the means to do it, but she would hurry things a bit if she gave up her ideas on good taste; if she either looked startling or did something startling. Both she and her husband, I found, spoke excellent English, as well as half a dozen other languages, and seemed to know all about music and art. Indeed, instead of being impossible persons, as I had heard, they proved to be very much like other people; but, after all, it takes only a generation and a half to make gentlefolk in this town. The old families like the Mudisons and the Plumstones, who have been prominent for a half-century, are likely to become very narrow. Still, as I remarked to Mrs. Underbunk, society is made up of people who play, and to have time to play you have to have money. If you have only brains, you would probably rather kill time some other way.

Mrs. Underbunk said that I contradicted myself, for I had remarked some time ago that if a man could not be smart he should be famous, to which I replied that a great astronomer was happy in his observatory because he had nothing else, and occasionally discovered a new star and got a paragraph notice in the papers, while with an automobile, and the money to run it properly and to subscribe to a clipping bureau, his vanity would be tickled daily with column-accounts of his breaking records, of his arrests for over-speeding, and his protests against the cruel laws. Yet, I argued on, smartness was an intangible virtue. It was not right to say that only by money could it be won, for there were in society a considerable number of persons who seemed to lack everything, even family, that most easily attained of all social virtues. There, for example, was Horatio Gastly, dancing attendance on old Mrs. Plumstone. He had only a few thousand a year, spent his days stretching ticker-tape, his late afternoons at the Cholmondeley Club, and his evenings in the smartest houses in town. He got into the Cholmondeley simply because nobody had ever heard of him. A counterpart in the fair sex was Sally Bilberry, who almost supported herself playing bridge. She had sailed in on the tail of the Plasters' kite. It seems that they owed her something, as old Mr. Plaster had at one time been her father's gardener, and as she is always ready to make a fourth and knows one or two awfully clever stories, she is quite a favorite.

"Ah, Mr. Mudison," said Mrs. Underbunk, "I fear you are a sad cynic."

"Not a cynic," said I. "On the contrary, I am rising as a defender. Those who attack us most are those who have tried to get in and cannot."

"The bee scorns the butterfly," said she.

"Yet the butterfly's brain is as big as the bee's," said I, as quick as a flash. Sometimes I quite surprise myself.

For a few moments Mrs. Underbunk was silent and seemed to be listening to the music or the whispering in the next box. Roardika was making a great hit in the scene in _Isolde's_ garden, and for a time even I was content to listen silently. I have never been a devotee of Wagner, but I must admit that there are spots in "Tristan" where the singing is music, and I can lean back and enjoy it, with eyes closed to shut out the absurd sight of the princess and her clandestine caller awakening with melody the forest in which her husband is hunting. Gladys Underbunk and I thoroughly agree. When Dumple began to make coins disappear in the air to an accompaniment of "michs" and "dichs" and "sichs," she turned to me and whispered, "Do you know, Mr. Mudison, I sometimes wonder why a man of your lovable nature has never married."

"My bachelor vows have been strangely shaken of late," I whispered back.

Thereupon she chastised my knee delicately with her fan.

"Seriously?" she said.

"Seriously," said I. "I have often thought of marriage, but, you know, I am one of those unfortunates who have been born to high place. In me you see the apotheosis of the Mudison ambition for centuries. My brothers all married for love, and have been forgotten. To me it was left to uphold the family name, and to do it I have an income sufficient to pay for my apartment in town and my visits to my friends at Newport; to allow me a few luxuries like a horse or two and a car. But I have to economize. Suppose I married? I see the decline of the Mudisons. I see my fortune divided, say into three, and my children compelled by our straitened circumstances to move in the dancing-class set, their children going to the upper West Side, and our name plastered beneath the speaking-tubes of the Ophelia and the Clarissa. We owe something to posterity, so I had vowed that I should be the last of the Mudisons."

By this time, _King Mark_, aroused by the singing, had reached the garden, and _Sir Melot_ had mortally wounded _Tristan_ between the right side and the arm. The curtain was down. The house was in ecstasies, and Roardika and Dumple were seesawing to and fro across the stage, showing their teeth in thanks.

"You notice that I said I had vowed," I whispered to Mrs. Underbunk.

"Ah," she cried, "fortunate Miss Twitter!" It is very clever the way women have of seeming to try to sidetrack you when they want you to keep on the main line.

But I am an old campaigner myself. The trout is never so beautiful as when he is running away from the hook. "You flatter me," said I. "Miss Twitter may be fortunate, but I know that at present I am the most forlorn of mortals. Don't you notice how interested she seems in Winthrop Jumpkin?"

Mrs. Underbunk raised her glasses and inspected Constance eagerly.

"She has a little color to-night," she said.

"That is one of her charms," said I, refusing her proffered glasses. "It does enhance her beauty. Ordinarily, you know, she is rather of the marble-statuesque style."

"A style men admire very much when it's fixed on a gold pedestal," said Mrs. Underbunk. She had recovered her temper, and was smiling.

My heart was beating outrageously fast, and for my own preservation I had about determined not to punish her further.

"I said that I had vowed," I began. But she suddenly became interested in her glasses.

"Who are those people in the third box from that absurd-looking person in red with a diamond coronet in her hair?" she said. "Everybody is staring at them. You see the sad-looking little man sitting beside a very tall, thin girl? That other, I suppose, is her mother--looks like the old woman who went to market, only her gown has been snipped off from the top."

"It's Mrs. Very," I answered, a bit nettled that Mrs. Underbunk had become interested in others; but women are generally more than a match for us. "The little man is the Earl of Less--the Verys have just bought him. But I said I had vowed----"

She was most exasperating. Of course I knew that she was only playing a game, but it angered me to be wasting these precious minutes between the acts telling her who everybody was. By and by, however, she did dismount from her high horse, and inquired sweetly, "You said you had once vowed?"

Then that Julius Hogginson Fairfield had to switch from Mrs. Styne to our side, and break in with a lot of nonsense about motifs, timbre, and orchestration, none of which was of the slightest interest. Mrs. Underbunk did manage to get rid of him by sending him over to tell Constance Twitter that she would take luncheon with her to-day, but from bad, things went to worse, and Horatio Gastly came bobbing in, with Winthrop Jumpkin, 7th, at his heels. I seemed to have taken down the yellow flag that had fluttered so long above the Styne box. The intruders, in the confusion following their entrance, secured the chairs by Mrs. Underbunk, and left me talking to Mrs. Styne, who started in to make me commit myself to spend a week-end with them at Westbury. By the time I had filled my Sundays for a month with previous engagements I found myself getting rather entangled, and deemed it wise to abandon the field to Gastly and Jumpkin. I have heard _Tristan_ die so often that there was no inducement to stay longer. But Gladys Underbunk smiled as I made my flight, and whispered that she was terribly jealous of Constance Twitter.

From the opera I went to the Flusters' small dance.

* * * * *

Mr. Mudison's papers for some days after this are taken up almost entirely with denunciations of Winthrop Jumpkin, 7th, whom he considers he has made, only to have him turn, hire a car, and take Mrs. Underbunk for a spin to Exudo. This treachery Mr. Mudison discovered while on one of his own wild rides, and for a week he abjured the world and kept to his club sanctuary. A long-standing promise to lead the cotillon at Mrs. Jack Twitter's small dance for her youngest daughter, Susanna, compelled him to give up a monastic life, and it is with this important event that the next part of his edited memoirs has to do.