Part 7

Martha Dares proved to be still more unlike her mother than Cora, save as regarded her stature, which was very short. She had a plump person, and a face which was prepossessing solely from its expression of honest good-nature. It was a face whose fat cheeks, merry little black eyes and shapeless nose were all a stout defiance of the classic type. Pauline at once decided that Martha was shrewd, energetic and cheerful, and that she might reveal, under due provocation, a temper of hot flash and acute sting.

"And now you know the whole family, Mrs. Varick," said Cora, when her sister had been presented.

"Yes, I complete the group," said Miss Dares, with a jocund trip of the tongue about her speech, that suggested a person who did all her thinking in the same fleet and impetuous way. "I hope you find it an interesting group, Mrs. Varick?"

"Very," said Pauline. "Its members have so much individuality. They are all three so different."

"True enough," hurried Martha. "We react upon each other, for this reason, in a very salutary way. You've no idea what a corrective agent my practical turn is for this poetic sister of mine, who would be up in the clouds nearly all the time, trying to paint the unpaintable, but for an occasional downward jerk from me, you know, such as a boy will give to a refractory kite. But I'll grant you that Cora has more than partially convinced me that life isn't entirely made up of spelling, arithmetic, geography and the use of the globes--for I'm a school-teacher, please understand, though in a rather humble way. And there's poor dear mamma. Goodness knows what would become of _her_ if it were not for both of us. She hasn't an idea how to economize her wonderful powers of work. Cora and I have established a kind of military despotism; we have to say 'halt' and 'shoulder your pen,' just as if she were a sort of soldier. But it will never do for me to rattle on like this. I'm as bad, after my own fashion, as our mutual friend, Mr. Kindelon, when I once really get started. By the way, you know Mr. Kindelon very well indeed, don't you?"

"Very well, though I have not known him very long," answered Pauline.

She somehow felt that Martha's question concealed more interest than its framer wished to betray. The little black eyes had taken a new keenness, but the genial face had sobered as well. And for some reason just at this point both Martha and Pauline turned their looks upon Cora.

She had slightly flushed; the change, however, was scarcely noticeable. She at once spoke, as though being thus observed had made her speak.

"He always has something pleasant to say of you," softly declared Cora. Here she turned to her sister. "Will you bring up some people to Mrs. Varick," she asked, "or shall I?"

"Oh, just as you choose," answered Martha. She had fixed her eyes on Pauline again. The next moment Cora had glided off.

"What my sister says is quite true," affirmed Martha.

"You mean--?" Pauline questioned, with a faint start which she could scarcely have explained.

"That Mr. Kindelon admires you very much."

"I am glad to hear it," returned Pauline, thinking how commonplace the sentence sounded, and at the same time feeling her color rise and deepen under the persistent scrutiny of those sharp dark eyes.

"Don't you think him intensely able?" said Martha, much more slowly than usual. "We do."

Pauline bowed assent. "Brilliantly able," she answered. "Tell me, Miss Dares, with which of you is he the more intimate, your sister or yourself?"

Martha gave a laugh that was crisp and curt. She looked away from Pauline as she answered. "Oh, he's more intimate with me than with Cora," she said. "We are stanch friends. He tells me nearly everything. I think he would tell me if he were to fall in love."

"Really?" laughed Pauline. Her face was wreathed in smiles of apparent amusement. She looked, just then, as she had often looked in the fashionable world, when everything around her seemed so artificial that she took the tints of her environment and became as artificial herself.

But it pleased her swiftly to change the subject. "I am quite excited this evening," she went on. "I am beginning a new career; you understand, of course. Tell me, Miss Dares, how do _you_ think I shall succeed in it?"

Martha was watching her fixedly. And Martha's reply had a short, odd sound. "I think you are almost clever enough not to fail," she said.

VII.

Before Pauline had been an hour longer in the Dares's drawing-room she had become acquainted with many new people. She could not count them all when she afterward tried to do so; the introductions had been very rapid for some little time; one, so to speak, had trodden upon the heel of another. Her meditated project had transpired, and not a few of her recent acquaintances eyed her with a critical estimate of her capability to become their future leader.

She soon found herself an object of such general scrutiny that she was in danger of growing embarrassed to the verge of actual bewilderment. She was now the centre of a little group, and every member of it regarded her with more or less marked attentiveness.

"I've a tragic soul in a comic body, Mrs. Varick," said a fat little spinster, with a round moon of a face and a high color, whose name was Miss Upton. "That is the way I announce myself to all strangers. I should have gone on the stage and played _Juliet_ if it hadn't been for my unpoetic person. But imagine a bouncing, obese Juliet! No; I realized that it would never do. I shall have to die with all my music in me, as it were."

"A great many poets have done that," said a pale young gentleman with very black hair and eyes, and an expression of ironical fatigue which seldom varied. He was Mr. Leander Prawle, and he was known to have written verses for which he himself had unbounded admiration. "Indeed," the young poet continued, lifting one thin, white hand to where his moustache was not yet, "it is hard to sing a pure and noble song with the discords of daily life about one."

"Not if you can make the world stop its discords and listen to you, Mr. Prawle," said Pauline.

"Oh, Prawle can never do that," said a broad-shouldered young blond, with a face full of drowsy reverie and hair rolled back from it in a sort of yellow mane. "He's always writing transcendental verses about Man with a capital M and the grand amelioration of Humanity with a capital H. Prawle has no color. He hates an adjective as if it were a viper. He should have lived with me in the _Quartier Latin_; he should have read, studied and loved the divine Theophile Gautier--most perfect of all French poets!"

The speaker fixed his sleepy blue eyes upon Leander Prawle while he thus spoke. A slight smile touched his lips, leaving a faint dimple in either smooth oval cheek. He was certainly very handsome, in an unconventional, audacious way. His collar gave a lower glimpse of his firm yet soft throat than usage ordinarily sanctions; the backward wave of his hair was certainly against any conceded form. He had been made known to Pauline as Mr. Arthur Trevor, and she had felt surprised at his name being so English; she had expected to find it French; Mr. Trevor had appeared to her extremely French.

"When you speak of Paris and of Gautier," she now said to him, "you really relieve me, Mr. Trevor. I was so prepared, on first meeting you, to find that you were not an American."

"Oh, Trevor is very French," said Leander Prawle coldly.

Trevor laughed, lifting one hand, on the middle finger of which was the tawny tell-tale mark of the confirmed cigarette-smoker.

"And my friend, Prawle," he said, "is enormously English."

"Not English--American," slowly corrected Leander Prawle.

"It is the same thing!" cried Arthur Trevor. "He is cold-blooded, Mrs. Varick," the young gentleman continued, with emphasis and a certain excitement. "We are always fighting, Prawle and I. I tell Prawle that in his own beloved literature, he should have but one model outside of Shakespeare. That is Keats--the sweet, sensuous, adorable Keats."

"I loathe Keats," said Leander Prawle, as if he were repeating some fragment of a litany. "I think him a word-monger."

"Aha," laughed Arthur Trevor, showing his white, sound teeth, "Keats was an immense genius. He knew the art of expression."

"And he expressed nothing," said Leander Prawle.

"He expressed beauty," declared Trevor. "Poetry is that. There is nothing else. Even the great master, Hugo, would tell you so."

"Hugo is a mere rhapsodist," said Leander Prawle.

Trevor laughed again. He gave a comic, exaggerated shudder while he did so. He now exclusively addressed Pauline. "My dear Mrs. Varick," he said, "are you not horrified?"

Before Pauline could answer, the fat little Miss Upton spoke. "Oh, Mr. Trevor," she said, "you know that though you and Mr. Prawle are always quarrelling about poetry, and belong to two different schools, still, each of you, in his way, is admirable. You are the North and South poles."

"No," said Arthur Trevor, "for the North and South poles never come together, while Prawle and I are continually clashing."

"It looks very much as if chaos were the result," said Pauline.

Arthur Trevor gazed at her reproachfully. "I hope you don't mean that," he said. He put his arm while he spoke, about the neck of a short and fleshy man, with a bald, pink scalp and a pair of dull, uneasy eyes. "Here is our friend, Rufus Corson," he continued. "Rufus has not spoken a word to you since he was presented, Mrs. Varick. But he's a tremendously important fellow. He doesn't look it, but he is the poet of death, decay, and horror."

"Good Heavens!" murmured Pauline playfully.

"It is true," pursued Arthur Trevor. "Rufus, here, is a wonderful fellow, and he has written some verses that will one day make him famous as the American Baudelaire."

"I have not read Baudelaire," said Pauline.

Mr. Corson at once answered her. He spoke in a forced, loitering way. He wore the dress of a man who scorns all edicts of mode, and yet he was very commonplace in appearance.

"The literature of the present age is in a state of decadence," he said. Mr. Corson, himself, looked to be in a state of plump prosperity; even his rosy baldness had a vivid suggestion of youth and of the enjoyments which youth bestows. "I write hopelessly," he continued, "because I live in a hopeless time. My 'Sonnet to a Skull' has been praised, because"--

"It has _not_ been praised," said Leander Prawle firmly and severely.

Mr. Corson regarded Prawle with an amused pity. "It has been praised by people whom you don't know," he said, "and who don't want to know you."

"It is horrible," enunciated Leander Prawle, while he appealingly rolled toward Pauline his dark eyes, which the confirmed pallor of his face made still darker. "Mrs. Varick," he went on, "I am sure that you will agree with me in asserting that skulls and skeletons and disease are not fit subjects for poetical treatment."

"Yes," answered Pauline, "I think that they are not beautiful--and for this reason I should condemn them."

"Then you will make a great mistake, Mrs. Varick," now quickly interposed Arthur Trevor. He passed one hand backward along the yellow mane of his hair while he thus spoke. But he still kept an arm about the neck of his friend, Corson. "I maintain," he continued, "that Corson has a perfect right to sing of autumnal things. A corpse is as legitimate a subject as a sunset. They are both morbid; they both mean what is moribund."

"Oh, but they are so different!" exclaimed the fat Miss Upton. "One is the work of Gawd, to delight man, and the other is--oh, dear! the other is--well, it's only a mere dead body! None of the great poets have ever written in that dreadful style, Mr. Trevor. Of course, I know that Mr. Corson has done some _powerful_ work, but is it right to give people the shudders and horrors, as he does? Why not have sunshine in poetry, instead of gloom and misery?"

"Sunshine is commonplace," said Arthur Trevor.

"Very," said Mr. Corson.

"Sunshine means hope," declared Leander Prawle. "It means evolution, development, progress."

"Art is art!" cried Trevor. "Sing of what you please, so long as your _technique_ is good, so long as you have the right _chic_, the right _facon_, the right way of putting things!"

"True," said Corson. "I write of skulls and corpses because you can get new effects out of them. They haven't been done to death, like faith, and philanthropy, and freedom. Optimism is so tiresome, nowadays. All the Greeks are dead. Notre Dame stands intact, but the Parthenon is a ruin."

Leander Prawle shivered. "You can make clever rhymes about charnel-houses," he said, "but that is not poetry. You can deplore the allurements of women with green eyes and stony hearts, but you degrade womanhood while you do so. You"--

"Are you not bored?" whispered Kindelon, in his mellow Irish brogue to Pauline, as he just then stole to her side. "If so, let us walk away together."

Pauline slipped her hand into his proffered arm. "I was not bored," she said, as they moved off, "but I was just beginning to be. Are there nothing but belligerent poets here to-night?"

"Oh, you will find other sorts of people."

"But, who are these three wranglers, Mr. Trevor, Mr. Prawle, and Mr. Corson?"

Kindelon laughed. "They are fanatics," he said. "Each one believes himself a Milton in ability."

"Are they successful?"

"They send poems (with stamps inclosed) to the magazines, and have them rejected. They make believe to despise the magazines, but secretly they would give worlds to see their names in print. Heaven knows, the magazines print rubbish enough. But they are sensible in rejecting Arthur Trevor's poems, which are something in this style--I quote from memory:--

"'The hot, fierce tiger-lily madly yearns To kill with passionate poison the wild moth That reels in drunken ecstasy above Its gorgeous bosom....'

"Or in rejecting that bald-pated posing Corson's trash, which runs like this:--

"'Death is far better than the loathsome lot Of kissing lips that soon must pale and rot, Of clasping forms that soon must cease their breath Within the black embrace of haughty death!'

"Or in declining to publish Mr. Leander Prawle's buncombe, which sounds somewhat after this fashion:

"'Man shall one day develop to a god, Though now he walks unwinged, unaureoled.... To-day we moil and mope--to-morrow's dawn Shall bring us pinions to outsoar the stars.'

"That's the sort of the thing this brave trio does. All poets are partially mad, of course. But then _they_ are mad without being poets; it's this that makes their lunacy so tiresome."

"And are they always quarrelling when they meet?"

"Oh, they do it for effect. They are privately very good friends. They are all equally obscure; they've no cause, yet, to hate one another. If one of them should get a book published before either of the other two, they would probably both abominate him in good earnest."

Just then a tall, sallow gentleman, with small, gray eyes and a nose like the beak of a carnivorous bird, laid his hand on Kindelon's sleeve.

"Powers has just asked me to write the Fenimore Cooper article for his new American Cyclopaedia," declared this gentleman, whose name was Barrowe, and whom Pauline had already met.

"Well, you're precisely the man," replied Kindelon. "Nobody can do it better."

"Precisely the man!" exclaimed Mr. Barrowe. "Perhaps I would be if I were not so overwhelmed with other duties--so unmercifully handicapped." He turned to Pauline. "I am devoted to literature, madam," he went on, "but I am forced into commerce for the purpose of keeping starvation away from my family and myself. There is the plain, unvarnished truth. And now, as it is, I return home after hours of hard, uncongenial work, to snatch a short interval between dinner-time and bed-time for whatever I can accomplish with my poor tired pen. My case is a peculiar and pathetic one--and this Powers ought to understand it. But, no; he comes to me in the coolest manner, and makes my doing that article for him a question of actual good-nature and friendly support. So, of course, I consent. But it shows a great want of delicacy in Powers. He knows well enough that I am obliged to neglect many social duties--that I should not even be here at this moment--that besides my daily business I am besieged with countless applications from literary people for all sorts of favors. Why, this very week, I have received no less than fourteen requests for my autograph. How are my wife and little ones to live if I am perpetually to oblige inconsiderate and thoughtless friends?"

"Your complaints would indicate," said Kindelon, rather dryly, "that Powers has not offered you the requisite cheque for proposed services."

Mr. Barrowe gave an irritated groan. "Kindelon!" he exclaimed, "do you know you can be a very rude man when you want?"

"You've told me that several times before, Barrowe," said Kindelon, quite jovially, moving on with Pauline.

He did this briskly enough to prevent the indignant Mr. Barrowe from making any further reply.

"I'm afraid you'll have trouble with that man," he said to Pauline, presently, "if you admit him into your _salon_."

"I have read some of his essays," she answered. "They are published abroad, you know. I thought them very clever."

"So they are--amazingly. But Barrowe himself is a sort of monomaniac. He believes that he is the most maltreated of authors. He is forever boring his friends with these egotistic lamentations. Now, the truth of the matter is that he has more to solidly congratulate himself upon than almost any author whom I know. He was sensible enough, years ago, to embark in commercial affairs. I forget just what he does; I think he is a wholesale druggist, or grocer. He writes brilliantly and with extraordinary speed. His neglect of social duties, as he calls them, is the purest nonsense. He goes wherever he is asked, and finds plenty of time for work besides. This request from Powers secretly pleases him. The new Cyclopaedia is going to be a splendid series of volumes. But Barrowe must have his little elegiac moan over his blighted life."

"And the applications from fellow-authors?" asked Pauline. "The requests for autographs?"

"Pshaw! those are a figment of his fancy, I suspect. He imagines that he is of vast importance in the literary world. His sensitiveness is something ridiculous. He's a far worse monologuist than I am, which is surely saying a great deal; but if you answer him he considers it an interruption, and if you disagree with him he ranks it as impertinence. I think he rather likes me because I persistently, fearlessly, and relentlessly do both. But with all his faults, Barrowe has a large, warm heart. Still, it's astonishing how a fine and true character can often enshroud itself with repellent mannerisms, just as a firm breadth of sea-rock will become overcrusted with brittle barnacles.... Ah, Whitcomb, good evening."

A corpulent man, with silver-gray hair and a somewhat pensive expression, was the recipient of Kindelon's last cordial sentence of salutation. After he had made the needful introduction, Kindelon said, addressing Pauline while he regarded Mr. Whitcomb,--

"This is the author of no less than five standard histories."

"Kindelon is very good to call them standard, Mrs. Varick," said Mr. Whitcomb, in a voice quite as pensive as his face. "I wish that a few thousands more would only share his opinion."

"Oh, but they are gradually getting to do it, my dear Whitcomb!" declared Kindelon. "Don't make any mistake on that point. A few days ago I chanced to meet your publisher, Sours. Now, an author must stand pretty sure of success when his publisher pays him a round compliment."

"What did Sours say?" asked Mr. Whitcomb, with an almost boyish eagerness.

"He said," exclaimed Kindelon, "that Whitcomb was our coming American historian. There, my dear sir, what do you think of that?"

Mr. Whitcomb sadly shook his silver-gray head. "I've been coming," he murmured, "ever since I was twenty-eight, and I shall be fifty-seven next May. I can't say that I think Sours's compliment meant much. It's got to be a sort of set phrase about me, that I'm coming. It never occurs to anybody to say that I've come, and I suppose it will not if I live to be eighty and totter round with white hair. No, I shall always be coming, coming...."

As the gentleman repeated this final word he smiled with a kind of weary amiability, still shaking his gray head; and a moment later he had passed from sight.

"Mrs. Varick," now said a cold, rasping voice to Pauline, "have you managed to enjoy yourself, thus far? If you recollect, we were introduced a little while ago ... Miss Cragge, you know."

"Oh, yes, I remember, Miss Cragge," said Pauline. "And I find it very pleasant here, I assure you."

Miss Cragge had given Kindelon a short nod, which he returned somewhat faintly. She was a lady of masculine height, with a square-jawed face, a rather mottled complexion, and a pair of slaty-blue eyes that looked at you very directly indeed from beneath a broad, flat forehead. She was dressed in a habit of some shabby gray stuff, and wore at her throat a large antique cameo pin, which might have been unearthed from an ancestral chest near the lavendered laces and faded love-letters of a long-dead grandmother. She was by no means an agreeable-looking lady; she was so ungentle in her quick, snapping speech and so unfeminine in her gaunt, bony, and almost towering figure, that she promptly impressed you with an idea of Nature having maliciously blended the harsher traits of both sexes in one austere personality, and at the same time leaving the result sarcastically feminine. She seldom addressed you without appearing to be bent on something which she thought you might have to tell her, or which she would like you very much to reveal. Her affirmations often had the sound of interrogatories. She had none of the tact, the grace, the _finesse_ of the ordinary "interviewer;" she went to her task rough-handed and undexterous.

"I'm glad you like it," she at once said to Pauline. "I know you've moved a good deal in fashionable society, and I should be gratified to learn how this change affects you."

"Quite refreshingly," returned Pauline.

"You don't feel like a fish out of water, then?" said Miss Cragge, with a sombre little laugh. "Or like a cat in a strange garret?... I saw you at the opera the other evening. You were with Mrs. Poughkeepsie and her daughter; I was down stairs in the orchestra. I go a good deal to places of amusement--in a professional way, you know; I'm a dead-head, as the managers call it--I help to paper the house."

"You are rather too idiomatic, I fear," now said Kindelon, with a chilly ring in his tones, "for Mrs. Varick to understand you."