X
March 1. During my visit I heard much about you from Mrs. Blodgett and Agnes, for your name was constantly on their lips. From them I learned that your birth, wealth, and the influence of your uncle had involved you in a fashionable society for which you cared nothing, and that, aside from the gayety which that circle forced upon you, your time was spent in travel, and in reading, music, and charitable work. Except for themselves, they averred, you had no intimate friends, and their explanation of this fact proved to me that you had taken our separation as seriously as had I.
"After Mr. Walton brought her to America she spent the first few months with us," Mrs. Blodgett told me, "and was the loneliest child I ever saw. Her big eyes used to look so wistfully at times that I could hardly bear it, yet not a word did she ever speak of her sorrow. And all on account of that wretch and his son! I think the worse men are, the more a good woman loves them! When Maizie was old enough to understand, and Mr. Walton told her how she had been robbed, she wouldn't believe him till Mr. Blodgett confirmed the story. She used to be always talking of the two, but she has never spoken of them since that night."
Even more cruel to me was something Agnes related. She worshiped you with the love and admiration a girl of eighteen sometimes feels for a girl of twenty-three, and in singing your praises, – to a most willing listener, – one day, she exclaimed, "Oh, I wish I were a man, so that I could be her lover! I'd make her believe in love." Then seeing my questioning look, Agnes continued: "What with her selfish old uncle, and the men who want to marry her for her money, and those hateful Maitlands, she has been made to distrust all love and friendship. She has the idea that she isn't lovable, – that people don't like her for herself; and I really think she will never marry, just because of it."
Better far than this knowledge of you at second-hand was Mr. Blodgett's telling me that you were to dine with them during my visit. It may seem absurd, but not the least part of my eagerness that night was to see you in evening dress. If I had not loved you already, I should have done so from that meeting; and although you are dear to me for many things besides your beauty, I understand why men love you so deeply who know nothing of your nature. That all men should not love you is my only marvel whenever I recall that first glimpse of you as you entered the Blodgetts' drawing-room.
Before we had finished our greetings Mr. Whitely entered, and though I little realized how vital a part he was to be of my life, I yet regarded him with instant interest, for something in his manner towards you suggested to me that he coveted the hand you offered him.
A lover does not view a rival kindly, but I am compelled to own that he is handsome. If I had the right to cavil, I could criticise only his mouth, which it seems to me has slyness with a certain cruel firmness; but I did not notice this until I knew him better, and perhaps it is only my imagination, born of later knowledge. I am not so blinded by my jealousy as to deny his perfect manner, for one feels the polished surface, touch the outside where one will.
Your demeanor towards him was friendly, yet with all its graciousness it seemed to me to have a quality not so much of aloofness as of limit; conveying in an indefinable way the fact that such relations as then existed between you were the only possible ones. It was a shading so imperceptible that I do not think the Blodgetts realized it, and I should have questioned if Mr. Whitely himself were conscious of it, but for one or two things he said in the course of the evening, which had to me, under the veil of a general topic, individual suggestion.
We were discussing that well-worn question of woman's education, Mrs. Blodgett having introduced the apple of discord by a sweeping disapproval of college education for women, on the ground that it prevented their marrying.
"They get to know too much, eh?" laughed Mr. Blodgett.
"No," cried Mrs. Blodgett, "they get to know too little! While they ought to be out in the world studying life and men, so as to choose wisely, they're shut up in dormitories filling their brains with Greek and mathematics."
"You would limit a woman's arithmetic to the solution of how to make one and one, one?" I asked, smiling.
"Surely, Mrs. Blodgett, you do not mean that an uncultivated woman makes the best wife?" inquired Mr. Whitely.
"I mean," rejoined Mrs. Blodgett, "that women who know much of books know little of men. That's why over-intellectual women always marry fools."
"How many intellectual wives there must be!" you said.
"I shouldn't mind if they only married fools," continued Mrs. Blodgett, "but half the time they don't marry at all."
"Does that prove or disprove their intellect?" you asked.
"It means," replied Mrs. Blodgett, "that they are so puffed up with their imaginary knowledge that they think no man good enough for them."
"I've known one or two college boys graduate with the same large ideas," remarked Mr. Blodgett.
"But a man gets over it after a few years," urged Mrs. Blodgett, "and is none the worse off; but by the time a girl overcomes the idea, she's so old that no man worth having will look at her."
"I rather think, Mrs. Blodgett," said Mr. Whitely, in that charmingly deferential manner he has with women, "that some men do not try to win highly educated women because they are abashed by a sense of their own inferiority."
"Where do those men hide themselves, Whitely?" interrogated Mr. Blodgett.
"I'll not question the reason," retorted Mrs. Blodgett. "The fact that over-educated girls think themselves above men is all I claim."
"I don't think, Mrs. Blodgett," you corrected, "it is so much a feeling of superiority as it is a change in the aims of marriage. Formerly, woman married to gain a protector, and man to gain a housewife. Now, matrimony is sought far less for service, and far more for companionship."
"But, Miss Walton," questioned Mr. Whitely, "does not the woman ask too much nowadays? She has the leisure to read and study, but a business man cannot spare the time. Is it fair, then, to expect that he shall be as cultivated as she can make herself?"
"That is, I think, the real cause for complaint," you answered. "The business man is so absorbed in money-making that he sacrifices his whole time to it. I can understand a woman falling in love with a lance or a sword, dull companions though they must have been, but it seems to me impossible for any woman to love a minting-machine, even though she might be driven to marry it for its product."
"That's rough on us, Whitely," laughed Mr. Blodgett good-naturedly; but Mr. Whitely reddened, and you, as if to divert the subject from this personal tendency, turned and surmised to me: —
"I suppose that as a German, Dr. Hartzmann, you think a woman should be nothing more than a housekeeper?"
"Why not suggest, Miss Walton," I replied, smiling, "that as an Orientalist I must think the seraglio woman's proper sphere?"
"But, Miss Walton," persisted Mr. Whitely, not accepting your diversion, "a man, to be successful nowadays, must give all his attention to his business.
"I presume that is so," you acceded; "but could he not be content with a little less success in money-making, and strive to acquire a few more amenities?"
"Maizie wants us all to be painters and poets and musicians," asserted Mr. Blodgett.
"Not at all," you denied.
"Oh, Maizie!" cried Agnes. "You know you said the other day that you hoped I wouldn't marry a business man."
"I said 'only a business man,' Agnes," you replied, without a trace of the embarrassment so many women would have shown. "Because men cannot all be clergymen is no reason for their knowing nothing of religion. There would be no painters, poets, or musicians if there were no dilettanti."
"Yet I think," argued Mr. Whitely, still as if he were trying to convince you of something, "that the successful business man has as much brain as most writers or artists."
"I have no doubt that is true," you assented. "So, too, a day laborer may have a good mind. But of what avail is a brain if it has never been trained, or has been trained to know only one thing?"
"But authors and painters are only specialists," urged Mr. Whitely.
"They are specialists of a very different type," you responded, "from the man whose daily thoughts are engrossed with the prices of pig-iron or cotton sheetings. I think one reason why American girls frequently marry Europeans is that the foreign man is so apt to be more broadly cultivated."
"That's what I mean by saying that books unfit women to marry wisely," interjected Mrs. Blodgett. "They marry foreigners because they are more cultivated, without a thought of character."
"Indeed, Mrs. Blodgett," you observed, "has not the day gone by for thinking dullness a sign of honesty? And certainly a business career is far more likely to corrupt and harden men's natures than the higher professions, for its temptations and strifes are so much greater."
Your opinion was so in accord with what my father had often preached that I could not but wonder if his teachings still colored your thoughts. To test this idea as well as to learn your present view, I recurred to another theory of his by saying, "Does not the broader and more sensitive nature of the scholar or artist involve defects fully as serious as the hardness and narrowness of the business man? Some one has said that 'to marry a literary man is to domesticate a bundle of nerves.'"
"A nervous irritability," you replied, "which came from fine mental exertion, would be as nothing compared to my own fretting over enforced companionship with an unsympathetic or sordid nature." Then you laughed, and added, "I must have a very bad temper, for it is the only one which ever really annoys me."
That last speech told me how thoroughly the woman of twenty-three was a development of the child of fourteen, for I remembered how little my mother's anger used to disturb you, but how deeply and strongly your emotions affected you. I suppose it was absurd, but I felt happy to think that you had changed so little in character from the time when I knew you so well. And from that evening I never for an instant believed that you would marry Mr. Whitely, for I was sure that you could never love him. How could I dream that you, with beauty, social position, and wealth, would make a loveless marriage?
Good-night, my love.
XI
March 2. The truth of the difference of quality between the business man and the scholar was quickly brought home to me. On the last evening of my visit, Mr. Blodgett revealed the reason for his latest kindness. "I got you here," he explained, "to look you over and see what you were fit for, thinking I might work you in somewhere. No," he continued, as he saw the questioning hopefulness on my face, "you wouldn't do in business. You've got a sight too much conscience and sympathy, and a sight too little drive. All business is getting the best of somebody else, and you're the kind of chap who'd let a fellow up just because you'd got him down." Seeing the sadness in my face, for I knew too well he had fathomed me, he added kindly, "Don't get chicken-hearted over what I say. It's easy enough to outwit a man; the hard thing is not to do it. I'd go out of the trade to-morrow, if it weren't for the boss and Agnes, for I get tired of the meanness of the whole thing. But they want to cut a figure, and that isn't to be done in this town for nothing. I'll find something for you yet that sha'n't make you sell your heart and your soul as well as your time."
I was too full of my love and my purpose, however, for this to discourage me. The moment my determination to remain in New York was taken, I wrote to Jastrow, Humzel, and others of my German friends, telling them that for business reasons I had decided to be known as Rudolph Hartzmann, and asking if they would stretch friendship so far as to give me letters in that name to such American publishers and editors as they knew. Excepting Jastrow, they all responded with introductions so flattering that I was almost ashamed to present them, and he wrote me that he had not offered my books for sale, and begged me to reconsider my refusal of the professorship. He even offered, if I would accept the appointment, to divide with me his tuition fees, and suggested that his own advancing years were a pledge that his position would erelong be vacant for me to step into. It almost broke my heart to have to write him that I could not accept his generous offer. In July I received a second letter from him, most touching in its attempt to keep back the grief he felt, but yielding to my determination. He sent me many good introductions, and submitted a bid for my library from a bookseller; but knowing the books to be worth at least double the offer, I held the sale in abeyance.
My first six months in New York disheartened me greatly, though now I know that I succeeded far better than I could have expected to do, in the dullness of the summer. My work was the proof-reading of my book of travel in its varying polyglots, seeing through the press English versions of my two text-books, and writing a third in both English and German. Furthermore, my letters of introduction had made me known to a number of the professors of Columbia College, and by their influence I received an appointment to deliver a course of lectures on race movements the following winter; so I prepared my notes in this leisure time. But this work was far too little to fill my time, and I wrote all kinds of editorials, essays, and reviews, fairly wearing out the editors of the various magazines and newspapers with my frequent calls and articles. Finally I attempted to sell my books to several libraries; but though the tomes and the price both tempted several, none had the money to spend on such a collection.
My book of travel was published in September, was praised by the reviews, and at once sprang into a good sale for a work of that class; for Europe is interested in whatever bears on her cancer growth, commonly called the Eastern question. Since Europeans approved the book, Americans at once bought and discussed it; to prove, I suppose, that as a nation we are no longer tainted with provincialism, – as if that very subservience to transatlantic opinion were not the best proof that the virus still works within us. It was issued anonymously, through the fear that if I put my pseudonym on the title-page it might lead to inquiry about the author which would reveal his identity with Donald Maitland, for whom I only wished oblivion. As a result the question of authorship was much mooted, some declaring a well-known Oxford professor to be the man, others ascribing the volume to a famous German traveler, and Humzel being named by some; but most of the reviews suggested that it was the work of an Eastern savant, and I presume that my style was tinged with orientalism.
You cannot tell what a delight it was to me to learn, at our first meeting in the autumn, that you had read my book. I went in November to the Lenox Library to verify a date, and found you there. I could not help interrupting your reading for a moment, – I had so longed for a glimpse and a word, – and you took my intrusion in good part. I drew a book and pretended to read, merely to veil my covert watching of you; and when you rose to go, I asked permission to walk with you.
"Your notebook suggests that you are a writer by profession, Dr. Hartzmann?" you surmised.
"Yes."
"And you have to come to America for material?"
"I have come to America permanently."
"How unusual!"
"In what respect?"
"For a European writer to come to New York to do more than lecture about himself, have his vanity and purse fed, and return home to write a book about us that we alone read."
I laughed and said, "You make me very glad that I am the exception to the rule."
"I presume more would make the venture if they found the atmosphere less uncongenial. New York as a whole is so absorbed in the task of trans-shipping the products of the busiest nations of two continents that everything is ranked as secondary that does not subserve that end: and the Muses starve."
"I suppose New York is not the best of places in which to live by art or letters, if compared with London or Paris; yet if a man can do what the world wants done, he can earn a livelihood here."
"But he cannot gain the great prizes that alone are worth the winning, I fear. I have noticed that American writers only reach American audiences, while European authors not merely win attention at home, but have vogue and sale here. The London or Paris label is quite as effective in New York or Chicago in selling books as in selling clothes."
"I suppose cultivated Europe is as heedless of the newer peoples as the peoples of the Orient are of those of the Occident. Yet I think that if as good work were turned out in this country as in the Old World, the place of its production would not seriously militate against its success."
"And have you found it so?"
"Nothing I have yet written in this country merits Continental attention."
"I hope you have succeeded to your own satisfaction?"
"It may amuse you to know that though I had many good letters of introduction to editors in this country, I could not get a single article accepted till some friends of mine in Asia came to my aid."
"You speak in riddles."
"Perhaps you remember reading, last August, of an outbreak of some tribes in the Hindoo Kush? Those hill peoples are in a state of perennial ferment, and usually Europe pays no attention to their bellicose proceedings; but luckily for me, the English premier, at that particular moment, was holding his unwilling Parliament together in an attempt to pass something, and finding it intractable in that matter, he cleverly used this outbreak to divert attention and excite enthusiasm. Rising in the House of Commons, he virtually charged the outbreak to Russian machination against the beloved Emir, and pledged the nation to support that civilized humanitarian against the barbaric despot of Russia. At once the papers were full of unintelligible cablegrams telling of the doings in those far-away mountains; and my hurriedly written editorials and articles, which nevertheless showed some comprehension of the geography and people, were snapped up avidly, and from that time I have found papers or periodicals glad to print what I write."
You laughed, and said, "How strangely the world is tied together in these days, that the speech of an English prime minister about some Asian septs should give a German author entrée to New York editorial sanctums!"
"The cables have done more in aid of the brotherhood of man than all the efforts of the missionaries."
"I thought you were a conservative, and disapproved of modern innovations," you suggested archly.
"With innovators, yes."
"Then the Levantine does not entirely disapprove of our Hesperian city?"
"My knowledge of New York is about as deep," I answered, smiling, "as my Eastern blood."
"Only skin-deep," you said.
"Just sufficient for a disguise."
"As long as you are silent, yes."
"Is my English so unmistakable?"
"Not your tongue, but your thought. Of course your vicinage, costume, and complexion made me for a moment accept your joke of nationality, at that first meeting, but before you had uttered half your defense of the older races I felt sure that you were not a product of one of them."
"Why was that?"
"Because it is only Christians who recognize and speak for the rights of other peoples."
"You forget that the religion of Buddha is toleration. We Christians preach the doctrine, but practice extermination, forgiving our enemies after killing them," I corrected. "I do not think we differ much in works from even El Mahdi."
"Would El Mahdi ever have spoken for other races?"
"You know the weak spot in my armor, Miss Walton," I was obliged to confess.
"That is due to you, Dr. Hartzmann. What you stated that night interested me so deeply that I have been reading up about the Eastern races and problems. I wonder if you have seen this new book of travel, The Debatable Lands between the East and West?"
"Yes," I assented, thinking that twenty over-lookings of it in manuscript and proof entitled me to make the claim.
"You will be amused to hear that, when reading it, I thought of you as the probable writer, not merely because it begins in the Altai range and ends at Tangier, but as well because some of the ideas resemble yours. Mr. Whitely, however, tells me he has private information that Professor Humzel is the author. Do you know him?"
"He was my professor of history at Leipzig."
"That accounts for the agreement in thought. You admire the book?"
"I think it is a conscientious attempt to describe what the author saw."
"Ah, it is much more than that!" you exclaimed. "At a dinner in London, this autumn, I sat next the Earl – next a member of the Indian Council, and he told me he considered it a far more brilliant book than Kinglake's Eothen."
I knew I had no right to continue this subject, but I could not help asking, "You liked it?"
"Very much. It seems to me a deep and philosophic study of present and future problems, besides being a vivid picture of most interesting countries and peoples. It made me long to be a nomad myself, and wander as the author did. The thought of three years of such life, of such freedom, seems to stir in me all the inherited tendency to prowl that we women supposedly get from Mother Sphinx."
"Civilization steals nature from us and compounds the theft with art."
"Tell me about Professor Humzel," you went on, "for I know I should like him, merely from the way he writes. One always pictures the German professor as a dried-up mind in a dried-up body, but in this book one is conscious of real flesh and blood. He is a young man, I'm sure."
"Sixty-two."
"He has a young heart, then," you asserted. "Is he as interesting to talk with as he makes himself in his book?"
"Professor Humzel is very silent."
"The people who have something to say are usually so," you sighed.
"A drum must be empty to make a noise," I said, smiling, "and perhaps the converse is true."
I cannot say what there was in that walk which cheered me so, except your praise of my book, – sweeter far though that was than the world's kindly opinion; yet over and above that, in our brief interchange of words, I was made conscious that there was sympathy between us, – a sympathy so positive that something like our old-time friendship seemed beginning. And the thought made me so happy that for a time my troubles were almost forgotten.
Good-night, Maizie.