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The Romance of a Plain Man, a novel by Ellen Glasgow |
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Chapter 11. In Which I Enter Society And Get A Fall |
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_ CHAPTER XI. IN WHICH I ENTER SOCIETY AND GET A FALL
"Hold on and await developments," he replied from his wicker chair over his bandaged foot, "and remember that the successful speculator is the man who always runs in the other direction from the crowd. When you see people sitting still, you'd better get up, and when you see them begin to get up, you'd better sit still. Fortune's a woman, you know; don't try to flirt with her, but at the same time don't throw your boots at her head." Five years before I had left the tobacco factory to go into the General's office, and my days were spent now, absorbed and alert, beside the chair in which he sat, coolly playing his big game of chess, and controlling a railroad. He was in his day the strongest financier in the South, and he taught me my lesson. Tireless, sleepless, throbbing with a fever that was like the fever of love, I studied at his side every movement of the market, I weighed every word he uttered, I watched every stroke of his stout cork-handled pen. An infallible judge of men, my intimate knowledge soon taught me that it was by judging men, not things, he had won his success. "Learn men, learn men, learn men," he would repeat in one of his frequent losses of temper. "Everything rests on a man, and the way to know the thing is to know the man." "That's why I'm learning you, General," I once replied, as he hobbled out of his office on my arm. "Oh, I know, I know," he retorted with his sly chuckle. "You are letting me lean on you now because you think the time will come when you can throw me aside and stand up by yourself. It's age and youth, my boy, age and youth." He sighed wearily, and looking at him I saw for the first time that he was growing old. "Well, you've stood straight enough in your day, sir," I answered. "Oh, I've had my youth, and I shan't begin to put on a long face because I've lost it. I didn't have your stature, Ben, but I had a pretty fair middling-size one of my own. They used to say of me that I had an eye for the big chance, and that's a thing a man's got to be born with. To see big you've got to be big, and that's what I like about you--you ain't busy looking for specks." "If I can only become as big a man as you, General, I shall be content." "No, you won't, no, you won't, don't stop at me. Already they are beginning to call you my 'wonderful boy,' you know. 'I like that wonderful boy of yours, George,' Jessoms said to me only last night at the club. You know Jessoms--don't you? He's president of the Union Bank." "Yes, I talked to him for two solid hours yesterday." "He told me so, and I said to him: 'By Jove, you're right, Jessoms, and that boy's got a future ahead of him if he doesn't swell.' Now that's the Gospel truth, Ben, and all the body you've got ain't going to save you if you don't keep your head. If you ever feel it beginning to swell, you step outside and put it under a pump, that's the best thing I know of. How old are you?" "Twenty-six." "And you've got fifty thousand dollars already?" "Thanks to you, sir." "So you ain't swelled yet. Well, I've given you six years of hard training, and I made it all the blamed harder because I liked you. You've got the look of success about you, I've seen enough of it to know it. They used to say of me in Washington that I could sit in my office chair and overlook a line of men and spot every last one of them that was going to get on. I never went wrong but once, and that was because the poor devil began to swell and thought he was as big as his own shadow. But if the look's there, I see it--it's something in the eye and the jaw, and the grip of the hands that nobody can give you except God Almighty--and by George, it turns me into a downright heathen and makes me believe in fate. When a man has that something in the eye and in the jaw and in the grip of the hand, there ain't enough devils in the universe to keep him from coming out on top at the last. He may go under, but he won't stay under--no, sir, not if they pile all the bu'sted stocks in the market on top his shoulders." "Anyway, you've started me rolling, General, whether I spin on or come to a dead stop." "Then remember," he retorted slyly, as we parted,' "that my earnest advice to a young man starting in business is--don't begin to swell!" There was small danger of that, I thought, as I went on alone with my vision of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. From my childhood I had seen the big road, as I saw it to-day, sweeping in a bright track over the entire South, lengthening, branching, winding away toward the distant horizon, girdling the cotton fields, the rice fields, and the coal fields, like a protecting arm. One by one, I saw now, the small adjunct lines, absorbed by the main system, until in the whole South only the Great South Midland and Atlantic would be left. To dominate that living organism, to control, in my turn, that splendid liberator of a people's resources, this was still the inaccessible hope upon which I had fixed my heart. In my room I found young George Bolingbroke, who had been waiting, as he at once informed me, "a good half an hour." "I say, Ben," he broke out the next minute, "why don't you get the housemaid to tie your cravats? She'd do it a long sight better. Are your fingers all thumbs?" "They must be," I replied with a humility I had never assumed before the General, "I can't do the thing properly to save my life." "I wonder it doesn't give you a common look," he remarked dispassionately, while I winced at the word, "but somehow it only makes you appear superior to such trifles, like a giant gazing over molehills at a mountain. It's your size, I reckon, but you're the kind of chap who can put on a turned-down collar with your evening clothes, or a tie that's been twisted through a wringer, and not look ridiculous. It's the rest of us that seem fops because we're properly dressed." "I'd prefer to wear the right thing, you know," I returned, crestfallen. "You never will. Anybody might as well expect a mountain to put forth rose-bushes instead of pine. It suits you, somehow, like your hair, which would make the rest of us look a regular guy. But I'm forgetting my mission. I've brought you an invitation to a party." "What on earth should I do at a party?" "Look pleasant. Did I take you to Miss Lessie Bell's dancing class for nothing? and were you put through the steps of the Highland Fling in vain?" "I wasn't put through, I never learned." "Well, you kicked at it anyway. I say, is all your pirouetting to be done with stocks? Are you going to pass away in ignorance of polite society and the manners of the ladies?" "When I make a fortune, perhaps--" "Perhaps is always too late. To-morrow is better." "Where is the party?" "The Blands are giving it. Uncle George was puffing and blowing about you when we dined there last Sunday, and Sally Mickleborough told me to bring you to her party on Wednesday night." Rising hurriedly I walked away from young George to the fireplace. A mist was before my eyes, I smelt again the scent of wallflowers, and I saw in a dream the old grey house, with its delicate lace curtains parted from the small square window-panes as if a face looked out on the crooked pavement. "I'll go, George," I said, wheeling about, "if you'll pledge yourself that I go properly dressed." "Done," he responded, with his unfailing amiability. "I'll tie your cravat myself; and thank your stars, Ben, that whatever you are, you can't be little, for that's the unforgivable sin in Sally's eyes." On Wednesday night he proved as good as his promise, and when nine o'clock struck, it found me, in irreproachable evening clothes, following him down Franklin Street, to the old house, where a softly coloured light streamed through the windows and lay in a rosy pool under the sycamores. All day I had been very nervous. At the moment when I was reading telegrams for the General, I had suddenly remembered that I possessed no gloves suitable to be worn at my first party, and I had committed so many blunders that the great man had roared the word "Swelled!" in a furious tone. Now, however, when the sound of a waltz, played softly on stringed instruments, fell on my ears, my nervousness departed as quickly as it had come. The big mahogany doors swung open before us, and as I passed with George, into the brilliantly lighted hall, where the perfume of roses filled the air, I managed to move, if not with grace, at least with the necessary dignity of an invited guest. The lamps, placed here and there amid feathery palm branches, glowed under pink shades like enormous roses in full bloom, and up and down the wide staircase, carpeted in white, a number of pretty girls tripped under trailing garlands of Southern smilax. As we entered the door on the right, I saw Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca, standing very erect in their black brocades and old lace, with outstretched hands and constantly smiling lips. George presented me, with the slightly formal manner which seemed appropriate to the occasion. I had held the little hand of each lady for a minute in my own, and had looked once into each pair of brightly shining eyes, when my glance, dropping from theirs, flew straight as a bird to Sally Mickleborough, who stood talking animatedly to an elderly gentleman with grey side-whiskers and a pleasant laugh. She was dressed all in white, and her pale brown hair, which I had last seen flying like the wing of a bird, was now braided and wound in a wreath about her head. As the elderly gentleman bowed and passed on, she lifted her eyes, and her starry, expectant gaze rested full on my face. Between us there stretched an expanse of polished floor, in which the pink-shaded lamps and the nodding roses were mirrored as in a pool. Around us there was the music of stringed instruments, playing a waltz softly; the sound, too, of many voices, now laughing, now whispering; of Miss Mitty's repeated "It was so good of you to come"; of Miss Matoaca's gently murmured "We are _so_ glad to have you with us"; of Dr. Theophilus's "You grow younger every day, ladies. Will you dance to-night?"; of General Bolingbroke's "I never missed an opportunity of coming to you in my life, ma'am"; of a confused chorus of girlish murmurs, of youthful merriment. For one delirious instant it seemed to me that if I stepped on the shining floor, I should go down as on a frozen pool. Then her look summoned me, and as I drew nearer she held out her hand and stood waiting. There was a white rose in her wreath of plaits, and when I bent to speak to her the fragrance floated about me. "Do you still remember me because of the blue-eyed collie?" I asked, for it was all I could think of. Her firm square chin was tilted a little upward, and as she smiled at me, her thick black eyebrows were raised in the old childish expression of charming archness. It was the face of an idea rather than the face of a woman, and the power, the humour, the radiant energy in her look, appeared to divide her, as by an immeasurable distance, from the pretty girls of her own age among whom she stood. She seemed at once older and younger than her companions--older by some deeper and sadder knowledge of life, younger because of the peculiar buoyancy with which she moved and spoke. As I looked at her mouth, very full, of an almost violent red, and tremulous with expression, I remembered Miss Hatty's "delicate bow" with an odd feeling of anger. "It has been a long time, but I haven't forgotten you, Ben Starr," she said. "Do you remember the night of the storm and the cup of milk you wouldn't drink?" "How horrid I was! And the geranium you gave me?" "And the churchyard and the red shoes and Samuel?" "Poor Samuel. I can't have any dogs now. Aunt Mitty doesn't like them--" Some one came up to speak to her, and while I bowed awkwardly and turned away, I saw her gaze looking back at me from the roses and the pink-shaded lamps. A touch on my arm brought the face of young George between me and my ecstatic visions. "I say, Ben, there's an awfully pretty girl over there I want you to waltz with--Bessy Dandridge." In spite of my protest he led me the next instant to a slim figure in pink tarlatan, with a crown of azaleas, who sat in one corner between two very stout ladies. As I approached, the stout ladies smiled at me benignly, hiding suppressed yawns behind feather fans. Miss Dandridge was, as George said, "awfully pretty," with large shallow eyes of pale blue, an insipid mouth, and a shy little smile that looked as if she had put it on with her crown of azaleas and would take it off again and lay it away in her bureau drawer when the party was over. "Get up and dance, dear," urged one of the stout ladies sleepily, "we ought to have come earlier." "The girls look very well," remarked the other, suddenly alert and interested, "but I don't like this new fashion of wearing the hair. Sally Mickleborough is handsome, though it's a pity she takes so much after her father." My arm was already around the pink tarlatan waist of my partner, the crown of azaleas had brushed my shoulder like a gentle caress, and I had whirled halfway down the room in triumphant agony, when a floating phrase uttered in a girlish voice entered my ears and carried confusion into my brain. "Get out of the way. Doesn't Bessy look for all the world like a rose-bush uprooted by a whirlwind?" I caught the words as I went, and they proved too much for the trembling balance of my self-confidence. My strained gaze, fixed on the glassy surface beneath my feet, plunged suddenly downward amid the reflected roses and lamps. The music went wild and out of tune on the air. My blood beat violently in my pulses, I made a single false step, tripped over a flounce of pink tarlatan, which seemed to shriek as I went down, and the next instant my partner and I were flat on the polished floor, clutching desperately for support at the mirrored roses beneath. The wreck lasted only a minute. A single suppressed titter fell on my ears, and was instantly checked. I looked up in time to see a smile freeze on Miss Mitty's face, and melt immediately into an expression of sympathy. The pretty girl, with the crown of azalea hanging awry on her flaxen tresses, and her flounce of pink tarlatan held disconsolately in her hand, looked for one dreadful instant as if she were about to burst into tears. A few dancers had stopped and gathered sympathetically around us, but the rest were happily whirling on, while the music, after a piercing crescendo, came breathlessly to a pause amid a silence that I felt to be far louder than sound. The perspiration, forced out by inward agony, stood in drops on my forehead, and as I wiped it away, I said almost defiantly:-- "It was the fault of George Bolingbroke. I told him I didn't know how to dance." "I think I'd better go home," murmured the heroine of the disaster, catching her lower lip in her teeth to bite back a sob, "I wonder where mamma can be?" "Here, dear," responded a commiserating voice, and I was about to turn away in disgrace without a further apology, when the little circle around us divided with a flutter, and Sally appeared, leaning on the arm of a youth with bulging eyes and a lantern jaw. "Go home, Bessy? Why, how silly!" she exclaimed, and her energetic voice seemed suddenly to dominate the situation. "It wasn't so many years ago, I'm sure, that you used to tumble for the pleasure of it. Here, let me pin on your crown, and then run straight upstairs to the red room and get mammy to mend your flounce. It won't take her a minute. There, now, you're all the prettier for a high colour." When she had pushed Bessy across the threshold with her small, strong hands, she turned to me, laughing a little, and slipped her arm into mine with the air of a young queen bestowing a favour. "It's just as well, Ben Starr," she said, "that you're engaged to me for this dance, and not to a timid lady." It wasn't my dance, I knew; in fact, I had not had sufficient boldness to ask her for one, and I discovered the next minute, when she sent away rather impatiently a youth who approached, that she had taken such glorious possession merely from some indomitable instinct to give people pleasure. "Shall we sit down and talk a little over there under the smilax?" she asked, "or would you rather dance? If you'd like to dance," she added with a sparkle in her face, "I am not afraid." "Well, I am," I retorted, "I shall never dance again." "How serious that sounds--but since you've made the resolution I hope you'll keep it. I like things to be kept." "There's no chance of my breaking it. I never made but one other solemn vow in my life." "And you've kept that?" "I am keeping it now." She sat down, arranging her white draperies under the festoons of smilax, her left hand, from which a big feather fan drooped, resting on her knees, her small, white-slippered foot moving to the sound of the waltz. "Was it a vow not to grow any more?" she asked with a soft laugh. "It was," I leaned toward her and the fragrance of the white rose, drooping a little in her wreath of plaits, filled my nostrils, "that I would not stay common." Her lashes, which had been lowered, were raised suddenly, and I met her eyes. "O Ben Starr, Ben Starr," she said, "how well you have kept it!" "Do you remember the stormy night when you would not let me take your wet cap because I was a common boy?". "How hateful I must have been!" "On that night I determined that I would not grow up to be a common man. That was why I ran away, that was why I went into the tobacco factory, that was why I started to learn Johnson's Dictionary by heart--why I drudged over my Latin, why I went into stocks, why--" Her eyes had not left my face, but unfurling the big feather fan, she waved it slowly between us. I, who had, in the words of Dr. Theophilus, "no small wits in my head," who could stand, dumb and a clown, in a ballroom, who could even trip up my partner, had found words that could arrest the gaze of the woman before me. To talk at all I must talk of big things, and it was of big things that I now spoke--of poverty, of struggle, of failure, of aspiration. My mind, like my body, was not rounded to the lighter graces, the rippling surface, that society requires. In my everyday clothes, among men, I was at no loss for words, but the high collar and the correctly tied cravat I wore seemed to strangle my throat, until those starry eyes, seeking big things also, had looked into mine. Then I forgot my fruitless efforts at conversation, I forgot the height of my collar, the stiffness of my shirt, the size of my hands and my feet. I forgot that I was a plain man, and remembered only that I was a man. The merely social, the trivial, the commonplace, dropped from my thoughts. My dignity,--the dignity that George Bolingbroke had called that of size,--was restored to me; and beyond the rosy lights and the disturbing music, we stood a man and a woman together. Our consciousness had left the surface of life. We had become acutely aware of each other and aware, too, of the silence in which our eyes wavered and met. "That was why I starved and sweated and drudged and longed," I added, while her fan waved with its large, slow movement between us, "that was why--" Her lips parted, she leaned slightly forward, and I saw in her face what I had never seen in the face of a woman before--the bloom of a soul. "And you've done this all your life?" "Since that stormy evening." "You have won--already you have won--" "Not yet. I am beginning and I may win in the end if I keep steady, if I don't lose my head. I shall win in the end--perhaps--" "You will win what?" "A fortune it may be, or it may be even the thing that has made the fortune seem worth the having." "And that is?" she asked simply. "It is too long a story. Some day, if you will listen, I may tell you, but not now--" The dance stopped, she rose to her feet, and George Bolingbroke, rushing excitedly to where we stood, claimed the coming Virginia reel as his own. "Some day you shall tell me the long story, Ben Starr," she said, as she gave me her hand. I watched her take her place in the Virginia reel, watched the dance begin, watched her full, womanly figure, in its soft white draperies, glide between the lines, with her head held high, her hand in George Bolingbroke's, her white slippers skimming the polished floor. Then turning away, I walked slowly down the length of the two drawing-rooms, and said "Good-night" to Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca near the door. As I passed into the hall, I heard a woman's voice murmur distinctly:-- "Yes, he is a magnificent animal, but he has no social manner." _ |
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