Читать книгу The Manhattaners - Edward S. Van Zile - Страница 4

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“The Percy-Bartletts,” as Town Tattle always called them in the weekly paragraph that it devoted to their doings, were dining alone, “en tête-à-tête and en famille,” as the husband sometimes remarked in a mildly sarcastic way. Not that Percy-Bartlett was in the habit of being satirical. Far from it! He considered sarcasm and satire the outward and visible—or, rather, audible—sign of an inward and hereditary tendency toward vulgarity. The use of these weapons of speech implied that one possessed both temper and originality—characteristics that were not approved in the set in which the Percy-Bartletts moved. But Percy-Bartlett had, by inheritance, a rather peppery disposition, and a mind naturally given to creative effort. It was greatly to his credit, therefore, that he had rubbed his manners and speech into an almost angelic smoothness, and had so thoroughly stunted such mental qualities as were not included in the accepted flora-of-the-mind recognized by his set that he passed current as a man in no danger of ever saying or doing anything that would attract special attention to him on the part of the world at large. It is not generally known, but it is nevertheless a fact, that it sometimes requires heroic self-restraint to become a “howling swell”—a vulgar term that cannot be avoided by the writer in his effort to convey to the reader the exact social status of Percy-Bartlett. He was known to the lower orders of society as a “howling swell,” which means, of course, that howling was the very last thing in which he would indulge. There are those, the poet tells us, who never sing, and die with all their music in them. In like manner the modern aristocrat is one who never howls, and dies with all his howling in him.

Let it not be thought for a moment that the perfect self-control exercised by Percy-Bartlett indicated that there was nothing in his life to try the temper of either a saint or a howling swell. In fact, the temptation to give way to his hereditary testiness was with him, practically, at all times. Percy-Bartlett had nobly triumphed over all tendency toward originality. His wife had not. It was Mrs. Percy-Bartlett who constantly tried Percy-Bartlett’s temper. If you are a married man, O reader, you will realize the full significance of the assertion, now made with due solemnity and emphasis, that, in spite of this fact, Mr. Percy-Bartlett had never said an unkind word to her, had never crossed her will, had never shown her, by word or deed, that he was bitterly disappointed at her refusal to walk in the very narrow path that society prescribed for her.

It must be acknowledged that there was something in the face and manner of Mrs. Percy-Bartlett that rendered her husband’s hesitancy about opposing her will seemingly explicable. Her dark-brown eyes, golden-brownish hair, clear-cut nose and mouth, and perfect teeth combined to give her a beauty that won from every man a chivalric reverence—from every man, that is, who is awed by the loving-kindness of the Creator in scattering flowers here and there in a weed-choked earth. Furthermore, there was something in Mrs. Percy-Bartlett’s way of using her hands and moving her head that told of a will-power as highly developed as that which had enabled her husband to suppress every inclination to defy the pattern that had been adopted by his set. Percy-Bartlett had used his self-command to destroy originality. Mrs. Percy-Bartlett had made her will-power an ally of her creative genius. The outlook for a permanent peace between them was not bright, but we find them at dinner at a time when the modus vivendi was still in comfortable operation.

“And who sings for you to-night?” asked Percy-Bartlett, his calm, blue eyes resting on his wife coldly. He was a man of thirty-eight, with pale cheeks, thin lips, and immobile countenance. The fifteen years’ difference in the ages of husband and wife was more than borne out by their faces. She looked younger than her years; he was younger than he looked.

“I think,” she answered, “that it will be a great success. The new boy-soprano who has made such a sensation at St. George’s is coming. So is Gordon Mackey, the tenor—you met him one night, you remember. Then Bryant Stanton is to play the ’cello, and Mlle. de Sarçon has promised to sing some of the ‘Falstaff’ music. Several others of less importance will be here,—Barton, the baritone, Miss Ely, the contralto, and so forth. Barton, you know, has been singing my cradle-song at his concerts.”

Percy-Bartlett looked at his wife in a way that was distinctly unsympathetic. He seemed to be thinking that a cradle-song was something of a tour-de-force for a childless woman; but there are many things about a musical genius that a layman cannot hope to understand. Percy-Bartlett had learned his limitations in this direction long ago, and never asked his wife how or why she wrote vocal music that was slowly but surely gaining popularity. It was a cross he had to bear, and, like a perfect gentleman, he bore it in silence.

“Don’t you think, my dear,” suggested Mrs. Percy-Bartlett sweetly, as they arose from the table, “that you could endure just one evening of really good music?”

“You will have to let me off to-night, Harriet,” answered Percy-Bartlett coldly. “I have a committee meeting at the club. By the way,” he remarked as they entered the library, in the intellectual atmosphere of which he was in the habit of smoking his after-dinner cigar, “I had a letter to-day from a business friend of mine, a distant relative on my mother’s side, Samuel Stoughton of Norwich. He tells me that his son, Richard, who was graduated from Yale last year, has come to the city to take a place on the Morning Trumpet. He asks me to show him a little attention. And, really, I don’t see how I can get out of it.”

“Why should you want to?” asked Mrs. Percy-Bartlett, striking a few chords on the piano, and casting a questioning glance at her husband. “The Stoughtons are very nice people.”

“Oh, yes, of course. But then a newspaper man, don’t you know, may be all very well, but—really I can’t understand why Richard Stoughton, who was left a fortune, if I remember rightly, by his mother, should take up the drudgery of New York newspaper life.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Mrs. Percy-Bartlett, looking down at her white, symmetrical arms and tapering hands, “perhaps the young man wants to see all sides of life. Perhaps he wants to enlarge his horizon.”

“Humph,” exclaimed Percy-Bartlett, showing more of his ancestral testiness than was his wont; “I can’t understand such a motive. If running up and down the city until all hours of the night, making a nuisance of yourself, is enlarging one’s horizon, I should think a man of Stoughton’s position and education would prefer to remain narrow in his vision. But there is no accounting for tastes; and I must acknowledge that, of late years, a good many very nice fellows have gone into newspaper work. Well, we’ll ask Stoughton to dinner some night when we’re dining alone, and see what kind of a boy he is. Perhaps he’ll get over his attack of journalistic enthusiasm as he recovered from the mumps or measles. His father has done me some good turns in business, and has it in his power to do more. I’ll drop a note to Richard to-morrow and have him call at the office.”

Percy-Bartlett threw away his cigar and rose to go. The picture his wife presented was irresistibly attractive. He bent over and kissed her. It was an unusual outbreak of emotion on his part, and Mrs. Percy-Bartlett smiled up at him as he turned to leave the room.

“How late,” he asked as he reached the portière, “will your musical friends be here?”

“Oh, not late,” she answered; “come home by twelve and you will find them gone.”

* * * * *

The hour of midnight was striking.

“It was a great success, my little musicale,” Mrs. Percy-Bartlett, with flushed, triumphant face, was saying to her husband as they stood in the drawing-room on his return. The evening had been a pleasant one to Percy-Bartlett, and the genial influences of his club had made him sociable.

“Come into the library, Harriet,” he said, “while I smoke just one more cigar.”

The smile on her face vanished, and lines of fatigue formed around her mouth.

“Please excuse me,” she murmured in a weary tone. “I am very tired. They encored my cradle-song so many times that—that, really, it wearied me. I fear I can’t stand success. Good-night. I’m very sorry.”

“Good-night,” he said coldly.

Then he went to the library and moodily lighted a “perfecto.” There seemed to be something lacking in his life, something that forever seemed within his grasp and forever escaped him.