Chapter 5

"I know I'm a fastidious, ungrateful wretch," he said to himself, as he saw his trunk started off to a better neighbourhood and prepared to follow it. "They've been very kind to me, and little Maggie would do almost anything for me"--little Maggie, whom he treated as a mere asexual biped and hectored in the most lordly way, and who yet entertained for him a puzzled, secret admiration;--"but I can't stand it any longer, that's all."

A few days later Bond called at Abner's old address and was referred by a grieved landlady to his new one. "I don't make out Mr. Joyce," said poor, hurt Mrs. Cole.

Bond went down the steps whistling, "They're after me, they're after me!" in a thoughtful undertone.

XVI

"Are you going to dress very much?" grimaced Giles, with a precious little intonation that caused Bond to laugh outright.

Abner, who was lounging under the Turkish canopy, pricked up his ears to catch the reply. Medora tossed aside one of her brother's sketches and turned her eyes on Abner.

"I don't know what _to_ do," replied Bond. "We have had such a glut of Romeos and Mephistos and cowboys. It has occurred to me that I might go as a rough sketch--a _bozzetto_--of a gentleman."

"How would you get yourself up for that?" asked Giles.

"Just as you have often seen me. I should wear that old dress-suit with the shiny seams and the frayed facings, and a shirt-front seen more recently by the world than by the laundry, and a pair of shoes already quite familiar with tweeds and cheviots, and a little black bow--this last as a sort of sign that I am not fully in society, or if I am, only briefly at long, uncertain intervals. And a black Derby hat--or possibly a brown one."

Medora smiled, well pleased. This easy, jocular treatment of a serious and formal subject was just what she wanted. It would help show the listening Abner that the wearing of the social uniform was nothing very formidable after all, and did not necessarily doom one's moral and spiritual fibre to utter blight and ruin.

Abner set his lips. He might indeed go to their wretched "fandango" in the end--they had all been urging him, Stephen, Medora, everybody--but never as a cheap imitation of a swell so long as his own good, neat, well-made, every-day wardrobe existed as it was. He had turned down the wine-glass at Whyland's, and he would turn down the dress-coat here.

Medora, unconscious that her precious little seed had fallen, after all, on stony ground, turned toward Abner with a smile--an intent, observing one. "Did Mrs. Whyland speak to you about her 'evening'?"

"Her evening? What evening?"

"There, I knew she wouldn't dare. You frightened her almost to death."

"What do you mean?"

"Why, she had been thinking of having a few friends come in some night next week for a little reading and some music. But you were so violent in your comments on the behaviour of society that she didn't dare touch upon her plan. She was meaning to ask you to read two or three things from your _Weary World_, but----"

"Why----" began Abner.

"Read," put in Bond. "I'm going to."

"Why," began Abner once more, "I had no notion of offending her. But everything I said was the truth."

"She wasn't offended," said Giles, with a smile; "only 'skeered.' You must have been pretty tart."

"I can't help it. It makes me so hot to have such things happening----"

"I know," said Giles. "We're all made hot, now and then, in one way or another."

"You _will_ read, won't you?" asked Medora, in accents of subdued pleading.

"Well, not _next_ week," replied Abner, in the tone of one who held postponement to be as good as escape. "That tour of mine is coming off, after all. They have arranged a number of dates for me, and I shall go eastward for several readings and possibly a few lectures."

"How far eastward?" asked Medora eagerly. "As far as New York?"

"Maybe so," said Abner guardedly.

"How long shall you be gone?" she asked with great intentness.

"A fortnight or more," purred Abner complacently, under this show of interest. "I guess I can open the eyes of those Easterners to a thing or two."

Medora dropped her glance thoughtfully to the floor. An exchange of instruction seemed impending, and she could only hope that the East might prove a more considerate tutor to Abner than Abner threatened to be to the East.

XVII

The two long winding lines of gaily attired young people joined forces and the procession came marching down the hall by fours, by eights, by sixteens, and Abner sat against the wall next to Edith Whyland and watched the shifting spectacle with a sort of fearful joy. Eudoxia Pence, seated against the opposite wall, glanced across at him, when occasion once offered, and nodded and smiled, as if to say, "Isn't it lovely! Isn't it fascinating!" and Abner, in sudden alarm, recomposed his tell-tale face and frowningly responded with a grave bow.

Abner wore his double-breasted frock-coat and his white lawn tie; and Edith Whyland, who had come in a plain dark reception costume to stand in a row near the door with the wives of the professors at the Art Academy, now sat with him and brought him as far into drawing as might be with the abounding masculine figures in evening dress. Many of these appeared in the march itself, along with the sailors, the Indian chiefs and the young blades out of Perugino. Giles passed by as a Florentine noble of the late Quattrocento, in a black silk robe that muffled his slight indifference to a function familiar from many repetitions. Little O'Grady wore his plaster-flecked blue blouse over his shabby brown suit and hardily announced himself as Phidias. Medora walked with a languid grace as a Druid priestess, and Miss Wilbur, the miniaturist, showed forth as Madame Le Brun, without whose presence no fancy-dress ball could be regarded as complete.

High above the marching host rose dozens of the tall conical head-dresses of mediaeval France with their dependent veils. A great Parisian painter had just been exhibiting some mural decorations in the galleries of the Academy, and half the girls, from the life class down, wore candle-extinguishers on their heads and trailed full robes of startlingly figured chintz--a material that was expected to effect to the charitable eye and the friendly imagination the richness of brocade. Many of the younger men too had succumbed to the same influence and appeared in long skin-tight hose and bobby little doublets edged with fur.

"How can they? How can they?" wondered Abner.

The music abruptly changed its tempo and the march broke up into a waltz. Through the swirling dancers a single figure, clad in violet and green, zigzagged across to Eudoxia Pence and bowed over her for a word or two. Eudoxia moved her lips and spread out her plump hands deprecatingly and shook her head with a smile.

"I should hope she _wouldn't_," thought Abner;--"not with a little squirt like that."

The figure immediately zigzagged back, with the same effect of eager, inquiring haste. It paused before Abner and Mrs. Whyland and suddenly sidled up. Abner recognised Adrian Bond.

"Clytie?" said Bond. "Has anybody seen or heard anything of Clytie Summers?"

"Well, well," said Mrs. Whyland, looking him over; "you are enrolled among the Boutet de Monvel boys too, are you?"

Bond ran his eye down his slim legs with fatuous complacency and fingered the fur fringe of his doublet and pushed his steep flat-topped cap over to a different angle. Abner looked at him with contemptuous amazement and would not even speak.

"Her aunt hasn't heard a word from her for a week," said Bond. "That settlement has claimed her, body and soul. All she does is to write home for more clothes. I expect she has completely forgotten all about our little affair to-night. I thought of course she was going to march with me, but----"

And he darted away to resume his quest.

"She will come," said Mrs. Whyland. "And her cap will be higher and her veil longer and the pattern of her brocade bigger and more startling than anybody else can show."

Little O'Grady moved past with a Maid of Astolat, who wore white cloth-of-gold and carried a big lily above each ear and dropped a long full-flowered stalk over her partner's shoulder. Medora drifted by in company with a Mexican vaquero. Her white garments fluttered famously against the other's costume of yellow and black. She had let down her abundant dark hair and then carelessly caught it up again and woven into it a garland of mistletoe. She smiled on Abner with a plaintive, weary lifting of her eyebrows; she appeared to be "creating atmosphere" again, just as on the afternoon when he had first seen her pouring tea. She seemed a long way off. The occasion itself removed her one stage from him, and her costume another, and her bearing a third. Was this the same girl who had so dexterously snatched open the stove door in that farm-house kitchen and had been so active, as revealed by glimpses from the corridor, in beating up pillows and in casting sheets and coverlets to the morning air?

The waltz suddenly ended and the Mexican renounced Medora only a few steps beyond Abner. She came along and took a vacant chair next to Edith Whyland.

"Are you enjoying it?" she asked Abner.

"It is very instructive; it is most typical," he replied.

The orchestra presently began again, but Medora remained in her place.

"Aren't you dancing this time?" asked Mrs. Whyland.

"Yes," replied Medora deliberately; "I'm dancing with Mr. Joyce."

She handed Edith her card. Abner looked across to her with a startled, puzzled expression.

"So you are," said Mrs. Whyland. "J-o-y-c-e," she read, and handed the card back.

"I don't care for the redowa, anyway," Medora explained; "and I didn't want to dance with the man that was moving along in my direction to ask me. It was the only vacant line. What could I do? I looked about and saw you"--to Abner--"standing by the door----"

"I suppose I was tall enough to see," said Abner, feeling very huge and uncomfortable.

"A tower of strength, a city of refuge," suggested Mrs. Whyland.

"Precisely," said Medora. "So I snatched a pencil out of Adrian Bond's hand--he had just put himself down four times----"

"What impudence!" thought Abner savagely.

"--and scribbled this,"--dropping her eye on the card. "I hope you don't mind my having taken your name?" she concluded.

A sudden gust of gallantry swept over Abner. "Let me have the card," he said. "I have given my autograph a good many times"--looking at the faint pencilling--"but I don't recognise this." He drew out a lead-pencil and rewrote the name big and black above the other. "There," he said,--"a souvenir of the occasion." He handed the card back with the authentic autograph of a distinguished author. His name there wiped out not merely one scribble but all, even to the impertinent four traced by insignificant Bond. A man who could pen such a signature need have no regret for not being a carpet-knight besides.

Medora took back her card, highly gratified; her cavalier had made a long stride ahead. Abner himself rejoiced at his dexterity in asserting the man--almost the man of gallantry, at that--under the shield of the writer. Mrs. Whyland kindly refrained from entering upon an analysis to determine just what percentage of egotism was to be detected in Abner's act, and felt emboldened by such unlooked-for graciousness and by the sustaining presence of Medora to ask a favour for herself--that "evening" was still in her mind.

"You _will_ read, won't you?" pleaded Medora.

"After my return from the East," acquiesced Abner.

The two women looked at each other, well pleased.

XVIII

Presently Leverett Whyland came along. The cares of the urban property-owner and of the gentleman farmer were alike cast aside; Abner had never known him to appear so natty, so buoyant, so juvenile. Another man accompanied him, a man older, larger, heavier, graver, with a close-clipped gray beard. This newcomer bowed to Mrs. Whyland with a repression that indicated but a distant acquaintance; and just as Medora was whisked away by a new partner--it was Bond, claiming the first of his four--Whyland introduced him to Abner: "Mr. Joyce, Mr. M'm----" Abner, occupied by Bond's appropriation of Medora, lost the name.

"And where is Clytie?" asked Whyland, looking about. "Has anybody seen or heard anything of little Clytie Summers?"

"No doubt she will appear presently," said his wife drily.

"And meanwhile----?" he suggested, motioning toward the floor.

"It might not look amiss," replied his wife, rising. They joined the dancers.

Abner was left alone with his new acquaintance, who, arriving at an instant apprehension of our young man's bulk, seriousness and essential alienation from the spirit of the affair, seized him as a spent and bewildered swimmer in strange waters lays hold upon some massive beam that happens to be drifting past. Abner clung in turn, glad to recognise a kindred spirit in the midst of this gaudy, frivolous throng. The two quickly found the common ground of serious interests. The circling, swinging dancers retired into the background; their place was quietly taken by the Balance of Trade, by the Condition of the Country, by Aggregations of Capital, by Land and Labour; and presently Abner was leading forth, all saddled and bridled, the Readjusted Tax.

"This is something like," he thought.

The other made observations and comments in a slow, grave, subdued tone. "Who is he?" wondered Abner. "What can he be connected with? Anyway, he's a fine, solid fellow--the kind Whyland might come to be with a little trying."

Stephen Giles passed by, guiding the billowy undulations of Eudoxia Pence. Eudoxia had a buoyancy that more than counteracted her bulk, and she wafted about, a substantial vision in lemon-coloured silk, for all to see. She looked at Abner's companion over Giles's shoulder.

"Enjoying yourself, dear?" she asked. Then she nodded to Abner and floated away.

Abner, instantly chilled, looked sidewise at his companion with a dawning censoriousness in his eyes. He had probably been talking, for a good ten minutes and in full view of the entire hall, to that arch-magnate of the trusts, Palmer Pence. He began to cast about for means to break up this calamitous situation. He welcomed the return of Leverett Whyland with his wife.

"Well, Pence," said Whyland, "how has the Amalgamated Association of Non-Dancers been doing?"

"Pence," Whyland had said. Yes, this was the Trust man, after all.

"First-rate," returned the other briefly, rising to go. "That's a fine, serious young fellow," he added, for Whyland's ear alone. "There's stuff in him."

"Been getting on with him, eh?" said Whyland ruefully. "Well, you're in luck."

Abner glowered gloomily across the thinning floor. Another dance had just ended and Whyland had skimmed away once again. Abner, forgetful of the presence of Edith Whyland, made indignant moan to himself over the perverse fate that had led him on toward friendliness with a man whose principles and whose public influence he could not approve.

There was a sudden stir about the distant doorway. Abner heard the clapping of hands and a few hearty, jubilant yaps frankly emitted by young barytone voices. "What now?" he wondered, with a sidelong glance at Edith Whyland.

Mrs. Whyland, herself half-risen, was looking toward the door, like everybody else. "Finally!" she said, with a pleased smile, and sank back into her place.

A tall, stalwart figure came through the crowd amidst a storm of hand-clapping and of cheers. The maids of mediaeval France fluttered their long veils, and their young male contemporaries waved their velvet caps.

It was a gentleman of sixty with a bunch of white whiskers on either jaw and a pair of flashing steel-gray eyes. He nodded brusquely here and there and looked about with a tight, fierce smile. "Hurrah! hurrah!" cried all the students, from the life class down to the cubes and cones.

"Who is he?" asked Abner.

"Why, that's Dr. Gowdy," replied his companion. "The ball would hardly _be_ a ball without him here. He has led the grand march more than once----"

"A man of his age and dignity!" mumbled Abner.

"--but he is late to-night, for some reason. He is one of the Academy trustees," she added.

"Perhaps his patients kept him." Abner's tone implied that professional duties would set much more gracefully on such a figure than social diversions.

"His patients?"

"Yes. You said he was a doctor."

"But not a doctor of medicine. A doctor of theology."

"A minister?--a minister of the gospel?"

"He is, indeed. And I----"

"And you?"

"I am one of his parishioners. I sit under him every Sunday."

Abner was dumb. This professing Christian, this pattern of evangelicalism, could witness such things without pronouncing a single word of protest. "Is he going to dance?" he asked finally.

"I think not. He is coming over here presently to sit with me, just as you have been doing. You shall meet him."

Abner was dazed. Palmer Pence, doubtless, was here under protest; but this man, his superior in age, credit and renown, had apparently come of his own free will. He sat there staring at the smiling progress of the Rev. William S. Gowdy through the throng of jubilant students. He felt stunned, dislocated. It was all too much.

"Well, well," he heard Mrs. Whyland say. He looked about at her and then out upon the clearing floor.

"Well, well," said Mrs. Whyland once again. The wide, empty space before them was lending itself to a second grand entree, by a party of one. Clytie Summers had finally arrived.

XIX

Clytie came on with the brisk and confident walk that she had cultivated along the pavements of the shopping district, and she was dressed precisely as if about to enter upon one of her frequent excursions in that quarter on some crisp, late-autumn afternoon. She wore a very trig and jaunty tailor-made suit and a stunning little garnet-velvet toque. She tripped ahead in a solid but elegant pair of walking-shoes and was drawing on a tan glove with mannish stitchings over the back. The Boutet de Monvel girls, the contemporaries of Jeanne d'Arc, were immediately obliterated; Clytie became the most conspicuous figure in the whole big place.

She advanced tapping her heels, smoothing her gloves, and looking every shirt-front full in the face. Her forehead gathered in a soft little frown; he whom she sought was not in sight. She got a glimpse of Mrs. Pence and Medora Giles seated side by side in a far corner, and of Little O'Grady hovering near, with a covetous eye upon her aunt's profile; and she took the remaining space in a quick little walk that was almost a run.

"Adrian Bond?" she asked. "Tell me; has anybody seen or heard anything of Adrian Bond?"

"Well, Clytie child!" exclaimed her aunt, looking her over; "what's all this?"

Clytie passed her hand down the side of her thick fawn-coloured skirt and readjusted her toque. "These things were in that box you sent me day before yesterday."

"That box from London?"

"That box from London. I thought they were never coming. I wrote; I cabled; I implored friends to go to Regent Street every single day till they should be done. And here they are, finally--a month late; but I'm wearing them, all the same."

"Well, they're worth waiting for," said Medora. "I suppose they are just about the last word."

"Just about," replied Clytie complacently. "Meanwhile, where is Adrian Bond?"

"Here he comes now," said Medora.

Clytie turned. She beheld the mediaeval greens and violets. "Why, Adrian," she protested; "you told me you were coming disguised as a gentleman."

"I thought better of it," said Bond.

"But," she proceeded, "I--I----" She spun round on one heel. "This is all for you. I thought that if you were coming disguised as a gentleman, it would be nice for me to come disguised as a lady. No use," she said regretfully. "Everybody knew me in a minute," she added.

Bond laughed. "I thought you weren't coming at all."

"But you got my note?"

"Not a word."

"Why, I wrote you how we were having a ball of our own, and how I couldn't come to this one till I had started off that one."

"What kind of a ball?" asked Mrs. Pence.

"One given by our Telephone Girls. I led the grand march with a lovely young bartender. I struck him all in a heap--can you wonder?--and he told me just what he thought of me. There wasn't much time to lead up to it. He was very direct; he took a short cut. Oh, I love the _people_! Why are the men in our set so shy----!"

"What did he say?" asked Bond sharply.

"Oh, never mind! It was one of those cannon-ball compliments that leave you stunned and breathless, but willing to be stunned again. What do you think of my togs?" she asked, generally.

"Look at this jacket while it's a novelty," she went on without waiting for any response. "The girls were all tremendously taken by it; I noticed a dozen of them trying to see how it was made.--Oh, how do?" she said airily to Abner, who came up just then. Having perceived Medora in her remote corner, he had finally summoned enough resolution to make his first movement of the evening: leaving Edith Whyland in the company of Dr. Gowdy, he had succeeded in crossing the intervening leagues alone and unaided.

Abner frowned to find this pert little piece cutting in ahead of him in such a fashion. "How do you do?" he responded stiffly.

"They'll all be making ones like it," Clytie rattled on. "By next Sunday every street from Poplar Alley to Flat-iron Park will swarm with them, and not a milliner's window along the length of Green-gage Road but will have three or four of these toques on display. Yes, sir; I'm a power in the Ward already, let me tell you."

Bond placed his small hand on Abner's broad shoulder. "Isn't she a winner?" he murmured ecstatically. "If Medora, now, could only have done something as spirited and unconventional----"

"I have no fault to find with Miss Giles," retorted Abner in a stern undertone. "To me she is perfectly satisfactory. She will always do the right thing in the right way, and always be a lady."

Bond withdrew his hand. "Oh, come, I say," he began protestingly.

Abner ignored this. "How about the basket-weaving?" he asked Clytie.

"Well," Clytie responded hardily, "I found plenty teaching that already. I have chosen for my department instruction in tact, taste, dress and manners. Such instruction is badly needed, in more quarters than one."

Medora flushed. "Clytie Summers," she said, the first moment that the two were alone, "if ever you speak to Mr. Joyce like that again you need never come to our studio nor count me any longer among your acquaintances."

"Why, dear me----" began Clytie, with an affectation of puzzled innocence.

"I mean it," said Medora, with an angry tear starting in her eye. "Mr. Joyce is too much of a man to be treated so by a child like you."

XX

Abner lingered on. He had meant to leave early, but it was as easy to stay as to go; besides, he felt the stirring of a curiosity to see what the closing hour of such an occasion might be like. Everything, thus far, had been most seemly, most decorous, full of a pleasant informality and a friendly, trustful goodwill; but the crucial point, he had read, always came about supper-time, after which the rout turned into an orgy.

Dr. Gowdy came across and launched himself upon Abner, just as he had done before, when Mrs. Whyland had first made them acquainted. He frankly admired the strength and the stature of the only man in the room who was taller and more robust than himself, as well as the intent sobriety of his glance and the laconic gravity of his speech.

"An admirable young fellow!" he had exclaimed to Edith Whyland, upon Abner's leaving them to cross over to Medora.

"Oh yes, yes!" she had returned with conviction.

"So serious."

"Oh yes,"--with less emphasis. She knew Abner was serious because he was puzzled.

"So grave."