Chapter 2. In The Best Society

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_ CHAPTER II. IN THE BEST SOCIETY

Grant's electric had swung in at the end of the long line of carriages of all kinds, from coach of ambassador and costly limousine of multi-millionaire to humble herdic wherein poor, official grandee's wife and daughter were feeling almost as common as if they had come in a street car or afoot. Josh Craig, leaning from the open window, could see the grand entrance under the wide and lofty porte-cochere--the women, swathed in silk and fur, descending from the carriages and entering the wide-flung doors of the vestibule; liveries, flowers, lights, sounds of stringed instruments, intoxicating glimpses of magnificence at windows, high and low. And now the electric was at the door. He and Arkwright sprang out, hastened up the broad steps. His expression amused Arkwright; it was intensely self-conscious, resolutely indifferent--the kind of look that betrays tempestuous inward perturbations and misgivings. "Josh is a good deal of a snob, for all his brave talk," thought he. "But," he went on to reflect, "that's only human. We're all impressed by externals, no matter what we may pretend to ourselves and to others. I've been used to this sort of thing all my life and I know how little there is in it, yet I'm in much the same state of bedazzlement as Josh."

Josh had a way of answering people's thoughts direct which Arkwright sometimes suspected was not altogether accidental. He now said: "But there's a difference between your point of view and mine. You take this seriously through and through. I laugh at it in the bottom of my heart, and size it up at its true value. I'm like a child that don't really believe in goblins, yet likes the shivery effects of goblin stories."

"I don't believe in goblins, either," said Arkwright.

"You don't believe in anything else," said Josh.

Arkwright steered him through the throng, and up to the hostess-- Mrs. Burke, stout, honest, with sympathy in her eyes and humor in the lines round her sweet mouth. "Well, Josh," she said in a slow, pleasant monotone, "you HAVE done a lot of growing since I saw you. I always knew you'd come to some bad end. And here you are-- in politics and in society. Gus!"

A tall, haughty-looking young woman, standing next her, turned and fixed upon Craig a pair of deep, deep eyes that somehow flustered him. Mrs. Burke presented him, and he discovered that it was her daughter-in-law. While she was talking with Arkwright, he examined her toilette. He thought it startling--audacious in its display of shoulders and back--until he got over his dazed, dazzled feeling, and noted the other women about. Wild horses could not have dragged it from him, but he felt that this physical display was extremely immodest; and at the same time that he eagerly looked his face burned. "If I do pick one of these," said he to himself, "I'm jiggered if I let her appear in public dressed this way. Why, out home women have been white-capped for less."

Arkwright had drifted away from him; he let the crowd gently push him toward the wall, into the shelter of a clump of palms and ferns. There, with his hands in his pockets, and upon his face what he thought an excellent imitation of Arkwright's easy, bored expression of thinly-veiled cynicism, he surveyed the scene and tried to judge it from the standpoint of the "common people." His verdict was that it was vain, frivolous, unworthy, beneath the serious consideration of a man of affairs such as he. But he felt that he was not quite frank, in fact was dishonest, with himself in this lofty disdain. It represented what he ought to feel, not what he actually was feeling. "At least," said he to himself, "I'll never confess to any one that I'm weak enough to be impressed by this sort of thing. Anyhow, to confess a weakness is to encourage it... No wonder society is able to suck in and destroy so many fellows of my sort! If _I_ am tempted what must it mean to the ordinary man?" He noted with angry shame that he felt a swelling of pride because he, of so lowly an origin, born no better than the machine-like lackeys, had been able to push himself in upon--yes, up among--these people on terms of equality. And it was, for the moment, in vain that he reminded himself that most of them were of full as lowly origin as he; that few indeed could claim to be more than one generation removed from jack-boots and jeans; that the most elegant had more relations among the "vulgar herd" than they had among the "high folks."

"What are you looking so glum and sour about?" asked Arkwright.

He startled guiltily. So, his mean and vulgar thoughts had been reflected in his face. "I was thinking of the case I have to try before the Supreme Court next week," said he.

"Well, I'll introduce you to one of the Justices--old Towler. He comes of the 'common people,' like you. But he dearly loves fashionable society--makes himself ridiculous going to balls and trying to flirt. It'll do you no end of good to meet these people socially. You'll be surprised to see how respectful and eager they'll all be if you become a recognized social favorite. For real snobbishness give me your friends, the common people, when they get up where they can afford to put on airs. Why, even the President has a sneaking hankering after fashionable people. I tell you, in Washington EVERYTHING goes by social favor, just as it does in London--and would in Paris if fashionable society would deign to notice the Republic."

"Introduce me to old Towler," said Craig, curt and bitter. He was beginning to feel that Arkwright was at least in part right; and it angered him for the sake of the people from whom he had sprung, and to whom he had pledged his public career. "Then," he went on, "I'm going home. And you'll see me among these butterflies and hoptoads no more."

"Can't trust yourself, eh?" suggested Arkwright.

Craig flashed exaggerated scorn that was confession.

"I'll do better than introduce you to Towler," proceeded Arkwright. "I'll present you to his daughter--a dyed and padded old horror, but very influential with her father and all the older crowd. Sit up to her, Josh. You can lay the flattery on as thick as her paint and as high as her topknot of false hair. If she takes to you your fortune's made."

"I tell you, my fortune is not dependent on--" began Craig vehemently.

"Cut it out, old man," interrupted Arkwright. "No stump speeches here. They don't go. They bore people and create an impression that you're both ridiculous and hypocritical."

Arkwright left Josh with Towler's daughter, Mrs. Raymond, who was by no means the horror Arkwright's language of fashionable exaggeration had pictured, and who endured Craig's sophomoric eulogies of "your great and revered father," because the eulogist was young and handsome, and obviously anxious to please her. As Arkwright passed along the edge of the dancers a fan reached out and touched him on the arm. He halted, faced the double line of women, mostly elderly, seated on the palm-roofed dais extending the length of that end of the ballroom.

"Hel-LO!" called he. "Just the person I was looking for. How is Margaret this evening?"

"As you see," replied the girl, unfurling the long fan of eagle plumes with which she had tapped him. "Sit down.... Jackie"--this to a rosy, eager-faced youth beside her--"run away and amuse yourself. I want to talk seriously to this elderly person."

"I'm only seven years older than you," said Arkwright, as he seated himself where Jackie had been vainly endeavoring to induce Miss Severence to take him seriously.

"And I am twenty-eight, and have to admit to twenty-four," said Margaret.

"Don't frown that way. It makes wrinkles; and what's more unsightly than a wrinkled brow in a woman?"

"I don't in the least care," replied the girl. "I've made up my mind to stop fooling and marry."

"Jackie?"

"If I can't do better." She laughed a low, sweet laugh, like her voice; and her voice suggested a leisurely brook flitting among mossy stones. "You see, I've lost that first bloom of youth the wife-pickers prize so highly. I'm not unsophisticated enough to please them. And I haven't money enough to make them overlook such defects as maturity and intelligence--in fact, I've no money at all."

"You were never so good-looking in your life," said Grant. "I recall you were rather homely as a child and merely nice and fresh-looking when you came out. You're one of those that improve with time."

"Thanks," said the girl dryly. She was in no mood for the barren blossom of non-marrying men's compliments.

"The trouble with you is the same as with me," pursued he. "We've both spent our time with the young married set, where marriage is regarded as a rather stupid joke. You ought to have stuck to the market-place until your business was settled."

She nodded a thoughtful assent. "Yes, that was my sad mistake," said she. "However, I'm going to do my best to repair it."

He reflected. "You must marry money," he declared, as if it were a verdict.

"Either some one who's got it or some one who can get it."

"Some one who's got it, I'd advise."

"Bad advice," commented the girl, her hazel eyes gazing dreamily, languorously into the distance. She looked a woman on romance bent, a woman without a mercenary thought in her head. "Very bad advice," she went on. "Men who've got money may lose it and be unable to make any more. What a helpless thing YOU'D be but for what you have inherited and will inherit. Yet you're above the average of our sort."

"Humph!" said Arkwright, with an irritated laugh. Humor at his expense was a severe strain upon him. It always is to those whose sense of humor is keen; for they best appreciate the sting that lies in the pleasantest jest.

"It would be wiser--if one dared be wise," pursued the girl, "to marry a man who could get money. That kind of man is safest. Only death or insanity can make him a disappointment."

Arkwright eyed her curiously. "What a good head you've got on you, Rita," said he. "Like your grandmother."

The girl shivered slightly. "Don't SPEAK of her!" she exclaimed with an uneasy glance around. And Grant knew he was correct in his suspicion as to who was goading and lashing her to hasten into matrimony.

"Well--have you selected your--"

As Arkwright hesitated she supplied, "Victim." They laughed, she less enthusiastically than he. "Though," she added, "I assure you, I'll make him happy. It takes intelligence to make a man happy, even if he wants the most unintelligent kind of happiness. And you've just admitted I'm not stupid."

Arkwright was studying her. He had a sly instinct that there was a reason deeper than their old and intimate friendship for her reposing this extreme of confidence in him. No doubt she was not without a vague hope that possibly this talk might set him to thinking of her as a wife for himself. Well, why not? He ought to marry, and he could afford it. Where would he find a more ladylike person--or where one who was at the same time so attractive? He studied, with a certain personal interest, her delicate face, her figure, slim and gracefully curved, as her evening dress fully revealed it. Yes, a charming, most ladylike figure. And the skin of her face, of neck and shoulders, was beautifully white, and of the texture suggesting that it will rub if too impetuously caressed. Yes, a man would hesitate to kiss her unless he were well shaved. At the very thought of kissing her Grant felt a thrill and a glow she had never before roused in him. She had an abundance of blue-black hair, and it and her slender black brows and long lashes gave her hazel eyes a peculiar charm of mingled passion and languor. She had a thin nose, well shaped, its nostrils very sensitive; slightly, charmingly-puckered lips; a small, strong chin. Certainly she had improved greatly in the two years since he had seen her in evening dress. "Though, perhaps," reflected he, "I only think so because I used to see her too much, really to appreciate her."

"Well, why didn't you?" she was saying, idly waving her fan and gazing vaguely around the room.

"Why didn't I--what?"

"You were trying to decide why you never fell in love with me."

"So I was," admitted Arkwright.

"Now if I had had lots of cash," mocked she.

He reddened, winced. She had hit the exact reason. Having a great deal of money, he wanted more--enough to make the grandest kind of splurge in a puddle where splurge was everything. "Rather, because you are too intelligent," drawled he. "I want somebody who'd fit into my melting moods, not a woman who'd make me ashamed by seeming to sit in judgment on my folly."

"A man mustn't have too much respect for a woman if he's to fall utterly in love with her--must he?"

Arkwright smiled constrainedly. He liked cynical candor in men, but only pretended to like it in women because bald frankness in women was now the fashion. "See," said he, "how ridiculous I'd feel trying to say sentimental things to you. Besides, it's not easy to fall in love with a girl one has known since she was born, and with whom he's always been on terms of brotherly, quite unsentimental intimacy."

Rita gave him a look that put this suggestion out of countenance by setting him to thrilling again. He felt that her look was artful, was deliberate, but he could not help responding to it. He began to be a little afraid of her, a little nervous about her; but he managed to say indifferently, "And why haven't YOU fallen in love with ME?"

She smiled. "It isn't proper for a well-brought-up girl to love until she is loved, is it?" Her expression gave Grant a faint suggestion of a chill of apprehension lest she should be about to take advantage of their friendship by making a dead set for him. But she speedily tranquilized him by saying: "No, my reason was that I didn't want to spoil my one friendship. Even a business person craves the luxury of a friend--and marrying has been my business," this with a slight curl of her pretty, somewhat cruel mouth. "To be quite frank, I gave you up as a possibility years ago. I saw I wasn't your style. Your tastes in women are rather-- coarse."

Arkwright flushed. "I do like 'em a bit noisy and silly," he admitted. "That sort is so--so gemuthlich, as the Germans say."

"Who's the man you delivered over to old Patsy Raymond? I see he's still fast to her."

"Handsome, isn't he?"

"Of a sort."

"It's Craig--the Honorable Joshua Craig--Assistant TO the Attorney-General. He's from Minnesota. He's the real thing. But you'd not like him."

"He looks quite--tame, compared to what he was two years or so ago," said Rita, her voice as indolent as her slowly-moving eagle feathers.

"Oh, you've met him?"

"No--only saw him. When I went West with the Burkes, Gus and the husband took me to a political meeting--one of those silly, stuffy gatherings where some blatant politician bellows out a lot of lies, and a crowd of badly-dressed people listen and swallow and yelp. Your friend was one of the speakers. What he said sounded--" Rita paused for a word.

"Sounded true," suggested Grant.

"Not at all. Nobody really cares anything about the people, not even themselves. No, it sounded as if he had at least half- convinced himself, while the others showed they were lying outright. We rather liked him--at the safe distance of half the hall. He's the kind of man that suggests--menageries--lions-- danger if the bars break."

"How women do like that in a man!"

"Do you know him?"

"Through and through. He's a fraud, of course, like all politicians. But beneath the fraud there's a man--I think--a great, big man, strong and sure of himself--which is what can't be said of many of us who wear trousers and pose as lords of creation."

The girl seemed to have ceased to listen, was apparently watching the dancers, Arkwright continued to gaze at his friend, to admire the impressive, if obviously posed, effect of his handsome head and shoulders. He smiled with a tender expression, as one smiles at the weakness of those one loves. Suddenly he said: "By Jove, Rita--just the thing!"

"What?" asked the girl, resuming the languid waving of her eagle fan.

"Marry him--marry Josh Craig. He'll not make much money out of politics. I doubt if even a woman could corrupt him that far. But you could take him out of politics and put him in the law. He could roll it up there. The good lawyers sell themselves dear nowadays, and he'd make a killing."

"This sounds interesting."

"It's a wonder I hadn't thought of it before."

The girl gave a curious, quiet smile. "I had," said she.

"YOU had!" exclaimed Arkwright.

"A woman always keeps a careful list of eligibles," explained she. "As Lucy Burke told me he was headed for Washington, I put him on my list that very night--well down toward the bottom, but, still, on it. I had quite forgotten him until to-night."

Arkwright was staring at her. Her perfect frankness, absolute naturalness with him, unreserved trust of him, gave him a guilty feeling for the bitter judgment on her character which he had secretly formed as the result of her confidences. "Yet, really," thought he, "she's quite the nicest girl I know, and the cleverest. If she had hid herself from me, as the rest do, I'd never for one instant have suspected her of having so much--so much--calm, good sense--for that's all it amounts to." He decided it was a mistake for any human being in any circumstances to be absolutely natural and unconcealingly candid. "We're such shallow fakers," reflected he, "that if any one confesses to us things not a tenth part as bad as what we privately think and do, why, we set him--or her--especially her--down as a living, breathing atrocity in pants or petticoats."

Margaret was of the women who seem never to think of what they are really absorbed in, and never to look at what they are really scrutinizing. She disconcerted him by interrupting his reflections with: "Your private opinion of me is of small consequence to me, Grant, beside the relief and the joy of being able to say my secret self aloud. Also"--here she grew dizzy at her own audacity in the frankness that fools--"Also, if I wished to get you, Grant, or any man, I'd not be silly enough to fancy my character or lack of it would affect him. That isn't what wins men--is it?"

"You and Josh Craig have a most uncomfortable way of answering people's thoughts," said Arkwright. "Now, how did you guess I was thinking mean things about you?"

"For the same reason that Mr. Craig is able to guess what's going on in your head."

"And that reason is--"

She laughed mockingly. "Because I know you, Grant Arkwright--you, the meanest-generous man, and the most generous-mean man the Lord ever permitted. The way to make you generous is to give you a mean impulse; the way to make you mean is to set you to fearing you're in danger of being generous."

"There's a bouquet with an asp coiled in it," said Arkwright, pleased; for with truly human vanity he had accepted the compliment and had thrown away the criticism. "I'll go bring Josh Craig." "No, not to-night," said Miss Severence, with a sudden compression of the lips and a stern, almost stormy contraction of the brows.

"Please don't do that, Rita," cried Arkwright. "It reminds me of your grandmother."

The girl's face cleared instantly, and all overt signs of strength of character vanished in her usual expression of sweet, reserved femininity. "Bring him to-morrow," said she. "A little late, please. I want others to be there, so that I can study him unobserved." She laughed. "This is a serious matter for me. My time is short, and my list of possible eligibles less extended than I could wish." And with a satiric smile and a long, languorous, coquettish glance, she waved him away and waved the waiting Jackie into his place.

Arkwright found Craig clear of "Patsy" Raymond and against the wall near the door. He was obviously unconscious of himself, of the possibility that he might be observed. His eyes were pouncing from blaze of jewels to white neck, to laughing, sensuous face, to jewels again or to lithe, young form, scantily clad and swaying in masculine arm in rhythm with the waltz. It gave Arkwright a qualm of something very like terror to note the contrast between his passive figure and his roving eyes with their wolfish gleam--like Blucher, when he looked out over London and said: "God! What a city to sack!"

Arkwright thought Josh was too absorbed to be aware of his approach; but as soon as he was beside him Josh said: "You were right about that apartment of mine. It's a squalid hole. Six months ago, when I got my seventy-five hundred a year, I thought I was rich. Rich? Why, that woman there has ten years' salary on her hair. All the money I and my whole family ever saw wouldn't pay for the rings on any one of a hundred hands here. It makes me mad and it makes me greedy."

"'I warned you," said Arkwright.

Craig wheeled on him. "You don't--can't--understand. You're like all these people. Money is your god. But I don't want money, I want power--to make all these snobs with their wealth, these millionaires, these women with fine skins and beautiful bodies, bow down before me--that's what I want!"

Arkwright laughed. "Well, it's up to you, Joshua."

Craig tossed his Viking head. "Yes, it's up to me, and I'll get what I want--the people and I.... Who's THAT frightful person?"

Into the room, only a few feet from them, advanced an old woman-- very old, but straight as a projectile. She carried her head high, and her masses of gray-white hair, coiled like a crown, gave her the seeming of royalty in full panoply. There was white lace over her black velvet at the shoulders; her train swept yards behind her. She was bearing a cane, or rather a staff, of ebony; but it suggested, not decrepitude, but power--perhaps even a weapon that might be used to enforce authority should occasion demand. In her face, in her eyes, however, there was that which forbade the supposition of any revolt being never so remotely possible.

As she advanced across the ballroom, dancing ceased before her and around her, and but for the noise of the orchestra there would have been an awed and painful silence. Mrs. Burke's haughty daughter-in-law, with an expression of eager desire to conciliate and to please, hastened forward and conducted the old lady to a gilt armchair in the center of the dais, across the end of the ballroom. It was several minutes before the gayety was resumed, and then it seemed to have lost the abandon which the freely- flowing champagne had put into it.

"WHO is that frightful person?" repeated Craig. He was scowling like a king angered and insulted by the advent of an eclipsing rival.

"Grandma,"' replied Arkwright, his flippancy carefully keyed low.

"I've never seen a more dreadful person!" exclaimed Craig angrily. "And a woman, too! She's the exact reverse of everything a woman should be--no sweetness, no gentleness. I can't believe she ever brought a child into the world."

"She probably doubts it herself," said Arkwright.

"Why does everybody cringe before her?"

"That's what everybody asks. She hasn't any huge wealth--or birth, either, for that matter. It's just the custom. We defer to her here precisely as we wear claw-hammer coats and low-neck dresses. Nobody thinks of changing the custom."

Josh's lip curled. "Introduce me to her," he said commandingly.

Arkwright looked amused and alarmed. "Not tonight. All in good time. She's the grandmother of a young woman I want you to meet. She's Madam Bowker, and the girl's name is Severence."

"I want to meet that old woman," persisted Josh. Never before had he seen a human being who gave him a sense of doubt as to the superiority of his own will.

"Don't be in too big a hurry for Waterloo," jested Arkwright. "It's coming toward you fast enough. That old lady will put you in your place. After ten minutes of her, you'll feel like a schoolboy who has 'got his' for sassing the teacher."

"I want to meet her," repeated Craig. And he watched her every movement; watched the men and women bowing deferentially about her chair; watched her truly royal dignity, as she was graciously pleased to relax now and then.

"Every society has its mumbo-jumbo to keep it in order," said Arkwright. "She's ours.... I'm dead tired. You've done enough for one night. It's a bad idea to stay too long; it creates an impression of frivolity. Come along!"

Craig went, reluctantly, with several halts and backward glances at the old lady of the ebon staff. _

Read next: Chapter 3. A Desperate Young Woman

Read previous: Chapter 1. Mr. Craig Arrays Himself

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