Chapter 2

Perhaps I should do better to state who our intimates were in those days, and what has become of them. Fulton's most intimate friend was a boy named Lansing, who made a practice of cutting open dead things to see what was inside of them. Today Lansing (of course that's not his real name) is so great a surgeon that even the man in the street knows him by sight. My most intimate friend was Harry Colemain, and we were mixed up in all sorts of deviltries together. To me he has been always a faithful friend and a charming companion, but of his career, what can I say that is really pleasant? Nothing, unless I modify each statement by pages of explanation and reminiscence. As he danced the old dances, so he dances the new, to greater perfection than any man in New York. He is gorgeously built, and has a carriage of the head, an eye and a smile, and a way with him that can shake a man from the water wagon or a woman from her virtue. He smokes like a factory, and drinks like a fish, yet at a moment's notice he is ready for some great feat of endurance--such as playing through the racket championship, or swimming from Newport to Narragansett Pier. He might have been--anything you please. But what can I say definitely that he _is_? Well, at this very moment, he is co-respondent in a divorce suit which is delighting the newspapers, and it looks as if he'd have to marry her in the end. And that's a pity because they were tired of each other before they got found out, and she's not the kind of woman that his friends are going to like.

Fulton's friend Ludlow has just published the best book on the birds of New York, past and present, that was ever written. My friend Pierson died the other day of pneumonia. As a boy he had the constitution of an ox, and ought to have thrown off pneumonia as I would throw off a cold in the head, but the doctors say that he had simply burned up his powers of resistance with overdoses of alcohol. You never saw him drunk or off his balance or merry in any way; he simply and slowly soaked himself till his insides were like sponges dipped in the stuff. And Pierson's not the only man in my circle who has gone out like that; and as they went so will others go; strong and well Saturday to the casual eye, and dead Monday.

This is not the time to take up those great issues which have risen between those who are tempted by drink and fall, and those who are not tempted and don't. But I am very sure of this: that a vast majority of the men who make the world go round drink or have drunk; and that when at last the world comes to be governed by those who don't and haven't, it will be even worse governed, more pettily and meddlesomely, than it is at present. And that is saying a good deal, even for a butterfly.

You mustn't gather that Fulton and his friends were a goody-goody set of boys. They erred and strayed from their ways at times, like the worst of us. There was Browning for instance, a born experimenter, who so experimented with cocktails one fine morning (at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-third Street) that he marched into Madame Castignet's French class, drunk as a lord, full of argument, and was presently expelled from the school. It was commonly said that the disgrace of it would hound him through life. Far from it! Those who at this day pack Carnegie Lyceum to hear him play the violin, and who listen, laughing and crying, and comparing him to the incomparable Kreisler, perceive no disgrace in that youthful episode, rather they see in it an early indication of the divine temperament trying to shake off its fetters and be free.

One boy that I went to school with is on the famous Meadowbrook team; another has played in Davis Cup matches; another brought home a First from the Olympic games. In the pack that I run with there is even one Roper who achieves a large income by writing fiction for the magazines, but even he isn't in the least like that brilliant little circle to which Fulton belonged. For we feel that we are paying him an immense compliment when we say, "Would you ever suspect that he was an author?" Good at games, fond of late hours and laughter, with the easiest and most affectionate good manners, he is quite convinced, if you can get him to talk shop, at all, that art for art's sake is bunk, and that there is more amusement and inspiration to be had on Bailey's Beach and in the Casino at Newport than in the whole of Italy.

I must set Roper off against Fulton's friend Garrick. Poor Garrick slaved and slaved and reached after perfection. Some say that in the thin little volume that he succeeded at last in getting published, and leaving behind for the delight of posterity, he actually touched perfection. Perhaps he did. I don't know. But I do know this: that he had enough talent and energy to make a living, and didn't. That he loved his art more than his wife and family, and that they all starved together. Is it worse to starve your family for love of liquor than for love of art? Roper loves his liquor but he fights against it and makes a handsome income; Garrick gave himself up body and soul to his love for art, and if it wasn't for his friends Mrs. Garrick would be working in a sweatshop.

Fulton and I discussed him once (when I was going to the Fulton house a good deal), but we had to give it up as a topic. Fulton saw something fine and generous in the man, and could not speak of him without emotion, while I found it impossible to speak of him without contempt.

Fulton himself fell away from his friends in later years, not spiritually but physically. Lucy Fulton simply had to go on living among the people with whom she had been brought up, and in the manner to which she was accustomed; and Fulton seeing her pine and grow sorrowful in other conditions, and bored and fretful, gradually fell into her ways and wishes, as a gentleman shouldn't (but does always), and made his new friends among those who are born to be amused. Her love and happiness were far more important to him than changed ways and the injured feelings of old friends. Once he talked to me about this (for we grew quite intimate). I remember he said:

"Somehow I don't seem to see my old friends any more or keep up with them. If anything happened to Lucy, I'd be absolutely alone in the world, except for the babies. A man does wrong to drift away from those who he knows by a thousand proofs care for him, on any pretext or for any cause."

And yet he had come to wear the hallmarks of the pack, and to talk the language of the world that only asks to be happy and amused. He took to games seriously and played them well, and you couldn't point to him as one of those cautious persons who never by any chance drank even one cocktail too many. Indeed, he often became hilarious and witty, and added no end to the gayety of occasions, and was afterward privately reproached by Lucy. Coming from another, the hilarity and wit would have rejoiced her, but, coming from her nearest and dearest, her mind narrowed, and the cold fear that women have of liquor possessed her.

To me it has always been comical, even when I didn't feel well myself, to see the husbands come into the club after a big night; each wearing upon his face, as plainly as if they had been physical scratches, the marks of the wifely tears which he had been forced to witness, and of the reproaches which he had been forced to hear, and yet each trying to look as if he was the master of his own house and his own destiny. No well-born woman, however cold and calculating, can silently put up with her husband's drinking, yet how easily she overlooks it in any other man! How many excuses she will find for him:

"Why, he's quite wonderful! Of course I knew at once that he was tipsy, but he was perfectly sensible--perfectly."

If men didn't drink, women wouldn't have so many parties to go to or so much money to spend. How many teetotalers let their wives spend them into ruin and disgrace? It is the drinking American who indulges his wife and lets her make a fool of herself and him. It's his unconfessed, and perhaps unadmitted, remorse seeking a short cut to forgiveness.

It seems that I played too much pool and billiards for a small boy; and got into too much city mischief, for I learned at the end of a delightful Newport summer that I was to finish my schooling, not at Mr. Cutter's, but at Groton.

IV

In those Groton days I let matches strictly alone; I neither played with them, nor used them to light cigarettes with. I was vaguely ambitious to be great and splendid, and I was down on purposeless boys who didn't behave themselves.

Lucy's brother was in my form. She used to come to visit him, with her parents, in their car. Even for Groton parents the Ludlows were enormously rich, or if they weren't enormously rich, they were enormous spenders.

Lucy was seven years our junior, but even in those baby days she had the laughing mouth and the praying eyes that were to play such havoc later on. She was a child of the world; natural, straightforward, and easy-going.

Lucy at nine was so pretty, so engaging, and had so much charm and magnetism that I remember having regretted, very solemnly, and with youthful finality, that we did not belong to the same generation. I was sorry that she was not fifteen or sixteen like myself; so that I could be in love with her and she with me!

Once Lucy was so sick that they thought she was going to die, and Schuyler was called home from school. The whole school was affected, so strong and vivid was its memory of an engaging and fearless child. I remember being sorrier than ever that I had been confirmed into a system which makes disease contagious instead of health, and asking one of the masters how he reconciled the death of a kid like that, whom everybody loved, with his conception of an all-wise and all-merciful God. He answered, it has always seemed to me very lamely, that if we didn't believe that all was for the best, in this best of all worlds, we should never get anywhere.

All for the best! If we are to forgive the Power that sets him on, why not the murderer himself who does the real dirty work? If _all_ is for the best, so then must the component parts of all (each and every) be for the best. In short we can do no wrong in this best of worlds. Oh, what grim, weak-minded nonsense they prate and preach!

There was hand-clapping when the Rector told us that Schuyler Ludlow's little sister was going to get well, and presently Schuyler returned to school somewhat self-important, as becomes one who has sat at meat with famous doctors, and talked of them _in extremis_.

The first rime I rode with Lucy through the Aiken woods, I recalled this famous illness of hers, and I think it had something to do with all that happened afterward.

We had lost ourselves, a little, as you do at Aiken, among the infinity of sand trails beyond the Whitney drive. We knew where we were, of course, and we knew where Aiken was, but every trail that started toward it fetched up short with a wrong turning. It was one of those bright hot days in late February, when a few jasmine flowers have opened, and you are pretty sure that there won't be any more long spells of rain or freezing cold. Even Lucy, who loved riding, was content to sit a walking horse, and bask in the sunshine.

I mentioned her famous illness, and she remembered nothing about It. "I'm always too busy," she said, "with what's going on right now to remember things."

"Why," I said, "Schuyler was sent for, and you were given up half a dozen times. Don't you really remember at all?"

"They wouldn't have told me I was being given up right and left, would they? Probably it didn't hurt much, and I was given a great many presents. It seems to me I do remember one particularly great time of presents, when lots of old gentlemen came to see me."

"I hoped you'd remember better," I said; "because at the time it seemed to me one of the most important things that had ever happened in the world."

Lucy listened eagerly. She didn't in the least mind a conversation that was all about herself.

"The whole school," I said, "was touched with solemnity. Now you wouldn't take me for a praying man, would you?"

"I don't know. Wouldn't I?"

"Whether I am or not," I said, "doesn't matter now, because I have so little to pray for. But at that time I went down on my knees and prayed that you'd get well."

"You were very fond of Schuyler, weren't you?"

"And am. But that wasn't the reason. I don't know just what the reason was. Maybe I was looking forward to this ride, and didn't want to miss it! I was ashamed to be seen praying, so I prayed in bed. But I was afraid that wouldn't do any good, so when my roommate had gone to sleep I got up in the dark and went down on my marrowbones on the bare icy floor, and I prayed like a good 'un."

Lucy's mouth laughed, but her eyes prayed.

"Then, maybe," she said, "if it hadn't been for you, I wouldn't be here now."

"I'd like to think that," I said; "but there must have been lots of others who prayed. I should like nothing better than a Carnegie hero medal, with the attached pension, but the jury require proofs."

"It's funny," she said, "to think of you kneeling on the icy floor and praying for me."

"For your _recovery_!" I corrected her.

"I think it would have been nicer if you had prayed for me. Didn't you--even a little?"

"If I had realized that I could be seven years older than you and still belong to the same generation, my prayers would have been altogether different, and there would have been more of them."

"Where do you think _this_ road goes?"

She turned into it without waiting for an answer, and urged her pony into a gentle amble.

I caught up with her and said: "I know this trail. It will take us straight to the Whitney drive. Then we can go right up over the hill and come out by Sand River."

"It's fun," she said, "to find somebody that likes riding. Everybody's mad about golf. John rides whenever I ask him, but it's cruel to separate him from the new mid-iron that Jimmie made for him. And he won't let me ride alone."

Poor John Fulton showed little worldly wisdom in making that prohibition.

"I'd rather ride than eat," I said. "Will you ride again tomorrow?"

She quoted the Aiken story of the lonely bachelor in the boarding-house. He is called to the telephone, hears a hospitable voice that says, "Will you come to lunch tomorrow at one-thirty?" and answers promptly, "You _bet_ I will! . . . Who is it?"

Just before you reach the Whitney drive there is a right angle turn from the trail which we were following; it back-tracks a little, errs and strays through some fine jasmine "bowers," and comes out at the old race track.

"It's early," I said; "let's go this way."

She wheeled her pony instantly.

"Do you always do what you're told?"

She bowed her head very humbly, and meekly, through a mischievous mouth, said: "Yes, sir!" And added: "Except when awfully long."

"What do you mean by that?"

"That the most fun is beginning something, and then beginning something else before you get all tired out and tangled up. Never say no until you are sure that what's been proposed isn't any good. _Then_ back out!"

"Don't you ever say no?"

"I 'spect I was very badly brought up. Nobody ever said no to me."

We wound up a hot hillside among tangled masses of jasmine, in which here and there were set star-like golden flowers, whose gardenia-like perfume mixed with the resinous aromatic smell of the long-needle pines. I rode a little behind, on purpose, for I love to see a pretty woman turn her head and look backward across her shoulder. She has no pose more charming, unless it be when she stands before the "laughing mirror" and lifts her hands to her hair.

"I have often wondered," I said, "how you happened to marry Fulton. But now I understand. It was because you couldn't say no to anybody, and yet he couldn't by any possible chance have been the first to ask. What has become of the first poor fellow to whom you were unable to say no? . . . And all the others?"

She looked back at me over her shoulder, her eyebrows lifted in an effort of memory, which, with a mischievous laugh, she presently abandoned.

"Why," she said, "as far as I know: 'One flew east and one flew west and one flew over the cuckoo's nest.'" I wish I could convey by words the lilt of her clear, fearless, boyish voice, the sparkle of mischief and daring in her eyes, and deep beneath, like treasures in the sea, that look of steadfastness, of praying, that made you wonder if she was really as happy and as carefree as she seemed to be, and not some loyal martyr upon the altar of matrimony.

To look at, she was but a child in her teens, slender and virginal, and yet I had it from Fulton himself that her babies had weighed nine pounds apiece and that she had nursed them both. "She looks down," he said, "with contempt, on bottle babies."

He was just coming in from golf, with the smug smile of one who has played a good round, on his face. His buggy boy, Cornelius Twombly, a black imp of twelve, who carried a razor in his hip pocket, wore also the smug look of one who has caddied to victory, and won certain nickels and dimes from another caddie upon the main and minor issues of the match.

As Fulton climbed out of his rickety, clattering runabout, Mrs. Fulton slipped from her smart pony, and they met with an honest kiss, like lovers long parted, and at once each began to tell the other all about everything.

"If they love each other like that," I thought, "why doesn't he always ride with her, or why doesn't she always play golf with him?"

I heard such expressions as "And the new mid-iron" . . . "The jasmine will be in full bloom in a week." "As we were going to Black Jack" (this is the eighth hole at Aiken, where the holes are all so good that they are spoken of by name instead of by number). "Mr. Mannering is the _nicest_ person to ride with," etc., etc.

Then Fulton remembered my existence. "You'll not go without a drink!" he said.

Mrs. Fulton's eyes confirmed the invitation, so I chucked the reins over my pony's head to make him think that he was tied to a hitching-post, and went into the house with them. But I did not stay long. Fulton wanted to talk golf; Mrs. Fulton wanted to bathe and change into skirts, and I wanted to go away by myself and think. I wanted to study out why it was that toward the end of our ride together, whenever Mrs. Fulton spoke to me or looked back at me over her shoulder, my pulses seemed to quicken--and my breathing.

V

We were at the beginning of those parlous times when the Democrats, having come into power upon a wave of impassioned idiocy and jealousy, were beginning to make us poor at home and despised abroad. A schoolmaster president, with three cabinet officers plucked by the hair from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, had put a temporary end to all our best qualities as a nation, with the possible exception of the power to laugh at jokes.

It was a hectic winter in Aiken. Some of the richest members of the Aiken Club were in trouble. There was some talk of making two and a half cents a point bridge standard instead of five. Even my own father asked me to go a little light, if I could, and not be led into any foolishness. "I've not been hit yet," he said, "but you can't tell what the fools will do next." You heard very few bets made. There was less drinking. It was as if certain men were going into training in order to be at their very best when the worst times should come.

Fulton's Cartridge Company, with its headquarters in New York and its mills in Bridgeport, Connecticut, had not paid a dividend in some time. He had only his salary as president (twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, I believe), and it was with the drastic intention of cutting that salary in two, and otherwise paring the company's expenses to the quick, that he went north the first week in March.

I dined with them the night before he left. There were only four of us: the Fultons, myself, and one of those charming Southampton girls, with sea-blue eyes, and sunburned hair, who swim like seals, play tennis like men, and fear nothing. Evelyn Gray was the name of this particular one. I liked her immensely, and was not altogether sorry to learn that she was to keep Lucy Fulton company until Fulton returned.

But it was a somewhat depressing dinner. There was an atmosphere in the cheerful blue and white dining-room, the white panels of the doors and wainscoting had a narrow border of blue, like impending fate. Fulton, it seemed, had never yet been away from home over night. And this was a record of devotion which he was very loath to break. Even more loath to see it broken was Lucy Fulton.

"I tell him," she said, "that if he goes it will be the beginning of the end." She spoke in jest, and although Fulton laughed back at her you could see that what she had said troubled him and hurt him. "As a matter of fact," she went on, "he's been looking for an excuse for some time. And now he thinks he's found one, but it wouldn't pass in a court of chivalry. He could _write_ to his old directors just as well as not. Oh, you needn't think you're the only one who's going to have a gay time. You needn't be surprised to hear that I, too, have left home in the company of a dark and fascinating foreigner. And anyway I shall give a dance and open all the champagne in the cellar."

"There are only two quarts and a pint," said Fulton, and he turned to me. "_You've_ never been married, have you? So you don't know what the modern woman can spend when she gets going, do you?"

I had a pretty good idea, but did not make the admission and continued to look interrogative.

"Well," he said, smiling, "she just has to spend so much, she says so herself. Then her poor husband's dividends are passed, and still she has to spend so much; she just has to, she says so herself. Then her poor husband's poor salary has to be cut in half, and she speaks calmly of giving dances and opening wine. Evelyn, I count on you as an old and tried friend. If necessary you will interpose your dead body between Lucy and this dance of hers."

Superficially he was very tolerant and good-natured, but you could see that beneath the surface, nerves were jumping, and that he was in that condition of financial and perhaps mental embarrassment which causes molehills to look like mountains. And it was here, and now, that I learned something new about Lucy; that even in jest she did not enjoy having economy preached to her. She looked a little sullen for a moment and bored.

"What's the matter with my giving a dance?" I asked.

"Oh, will you?" cried Lucy, the sullen look vanishing beneath a radiant flash of child-like joy and enthusiasm. "Where will you give it? At Wilcox's?"

"Anywhere you say."

Fulton tossed his hands in a merry gesture of despair.

"Now _you're_ stung!" he said, and then to Lucy, with a swift change of voice and manner: "I was only joking, you know that. If you want to give a dance, give it."

It was as if a child had cried to be taken up, and in the face of all the tenets of modern training, had been taken up. And you knew that with the lightest heart in the world Mrs. Fulton was going to spend money, which her husband could ill afford.

Shortly after dinner a loud yelling arose in the nursery, and the Fultons hurried off to investigate and give comfort, leaving the manipulation of a fearful and wonderful glass coffee machine to Evelyn Gray and me.

"Lucy," said Evelyn, "has as much idea of money as an alcohol lamp has. She ought to be well shaken. I don't believe John has been able to lay by a cent for a rainy day."