Edgar Saltus

“ To the west are the multiple atrocities of Union Square, to the east are the nameless shames of Third avenue. Between the two Irving Place lies, a survival of the peace of old New York. At the lower end are the encroaching menaces of trade, but at the upper end, from which you enter Gramercy Park, there is a quiet, pervasive and almost provincial. It was here that Sylvia Waldron lived.
People take a house for six months or an apartment for a year and call it a home. That is a base use for a sacred word. A home is a place in which you are born, in which your people die and your progeny emerge. ”

“ Fanny Price was a remarkably fetching young girl. To a man out of court and consequently out of sorts the companionship of a pocket Venus is tonifying in the extreme. It is not merely that, it is recuperative. It banishes the blues. It establishes a new court, and with it a new code of its own.
The censorious allege that this is all wrong. It may be that they are right. But Nature is not censorious. Nature is not even ethical. She has no standards of right, no canons of wrong. What she does have is her way. A saint may defy her. Annandale was not that by a long shot. ”

“ He was simply a human being, one that had been punished, and, as he thought, unjustly punished, for that which might have been condoned. Injustice humiliates. Saints may welcome humiliation, but human beings resent it.
Over the emptiness which Sylvia had created there brooded therefore two things. One was darkness, the other pique. In the light which Fanny upheld it seemed to Annandale that they might be dispersed. ”

“ The night was black yet full of stars, the hour homicidal and serene. Annandale strode on. Before him was the park, about it a fence of high iron and within phantasmal peace. He did not notice it. He was wondering [152] angrily what he would do, how he should act.
Had he been sober he would have known at once. When in his sphere of life a woman wants to go, it is a man's mere duty to open the doors, open the windows, run ahead, get a divorce and bring it back to her on a salver. Had he been sober he would have realized that. He would have recognized too the propriety of Fanny's frank request. ”

“ Had her daughter been an heiress a duke would hardly have satisfied her. As things were, or more exactly, since the girl began to grow in beauty she had dreamed for her but one dream—a brilliant match. To Mrs. Price there could be no brilliance if the party of the second part had a dollar less than ten million.
"You might have had Loftus," she declared at last. "Where is he, do you know?"
"Abroad, I hear."
"With that creature?"
Mrs. Price in common with many others had heard of Marie Leroy. But though others in hearing had not heeded, Mrs. Price took it as a personal affront. ”

“ Madness is contagious. It seemed particularly catching that night. The hall was filled, the gallery flushed. On a stage, at the end of the ballroom, musicians were tossing out in trailing rhythm the sorcery of "Il Bacio," the invitation of the "Cent Vierges," the muffled riot of "El Capitan."
To these incentives couples turned. Beneath the gallery where Annandale stood there was a vision of white arms, bare necks, slender waists circled by the blackness of men's sleeves. Three hundred girls and men were waltzing together, interchanging partners, clasping hands, gazing into each other's eyes. ”

“ In a moment the summing up began, a summing which, at first passionless as algebra, dealt with technical points.
"Gentlemen," said Peacock turning again to the jury, "the evidence in this case is of the kind known to you perhaps as circumstantial. Evidence of this nature can lead and often does lead to a conclusion more satisfactory than direct evidence can produce. Circumstances cannot lie any more than facts can. Unless we resort to them it is in vain that we attempt to detect and to punish crime. Crime shuns the light of day. It seeks darkness. ”

“ To enter this park you must have a key. By day it is a playground. Nurse-maids come there with little boys and girls, the subdued, undemonstrative, beautifully dressed children of the rich. At night it is empty as a vacant bier.
In a house that fronted the north side Royal Loftus lived with his mother, a proud, arrogant woman socially known to all, but who socially knew but few. Behind her, in the shade of the family tree, was her dead lord, Royal's father and, more impressively still, the latter's relatives, the entire Loftus contingent, a set of people super-respectable, supernally rich. ”

“ Abraham Cohen, who also, like Marie's father, was a tailor.
Marie saw the van, divined the mistake, and, being as full of fun as a kitten, greatly enjoyed the continued humor of it. For still into that sordid street the flowers poured. Every day, to the unhallowed surprise of Mr. Cohen and to the equal bewilderment of his offspring, a box of radiant roses was handed out.
In that surprise and bewilderment the neighborhood joined. Scandalized at the scandal Cohen questioned the groom, questioned the chauffeur. He might have saved himself the trouble. Then he inquired at the florist's. ”

“ Time is a strange emollient. In its mysterious potency it softens without our knowledge. Suddenly a whisper, a breeze that passes, shows that it has done its work. With Sylvia time was having its will. Furtively she had found herself wondering, as Annandale had wondered, how it should fare with her, and how with him, could the past be effaced and the old [102] days renewed. ”

“ It is beyond, in Sixth avenue, that you get a sample of real [38] New York noise. The slam-bang of the trains overhead, the grinding grunt of the surface cars, the demon draymen, the clanging motors, the ceaseless crowds, collaborate in an uproar beside which a bombardment is restful. But though the entire thoroughfare is appalling, Jefferson Market, behind which Gay street squats, is infernal.
Loftus loathed it. Until he pursued the girl into its horrors never before had he been there. ”

“ But what is good for everybody is bad for you. Don't drink, Annandale. It will get you into mischief."
[68] "As if it had not? Look at the box I am in. But could you not get Sylvia to reconsider the matter? If she will, I pledge my word never to touch another drop. Of course, I apologize for everything I did. I am only too anxious to. You must understand that I am profoundly humiliated at the idea that I could have done anything she did not like. Certainly I did not intend to. Won't you say that to her?"
"Oh, I appreciate your position," said Orr. "To me the essence of crime is the intent. ”

“ But among those who beheld the particular spectacle was Fanny's husband.
Annandale was in a hansom with Mr. Skitt, the broker in whose office he looked over the tape. As Fanny drove by, Annandale raised his hat, then, with a mimic which he meant to be humorously indignant, he shook his stick at Loftus much as though he were saying, "Aha! making up to my wife!"
Loftus entering into the spirit of the jest, ducked his head in feigned alarm.
"That's a deuced pretty woman," remarked Mr. Skitt when the carriage had passed.
"It is Mrs. Annandale," his client returned with some hauteur. ”

“ It is a mistake that many make.
Presently it surprised him to find how laborious is the task of putting people out of your life. If you have cared for them they will come back. In the pages of a book, in the pauses of speech, suddenly you behold them. In sleep they will not let you be. When [72] you awake, there they are. However detestable their behavior may have been, in dream they visit and caress you. It takes time and vigilance; it takes more, it takes other faces to disperse them.
In spite of the Finis, Sylvia Waldron declined to be dismissed. She haunted Annandale. ”

“ Annandale was to have married a Miss Waldron, but she threw him over and he married somebody else."
To Marie all this was inexplicable. She did not understand how a man thrown over by one girl could so speedily marry another. She did not understand, either, what Loftus could be doing with her. To her mind driving presupposed an intimacy which acquaintance might explain but did not excuse. The matter perplexed her, and not unnaturally. It is only through our own heart that it is possible to attempt to read the heart of another. ”

“ Fanny proudly and promptly replied. As she spoke she got from her seat, approached the casement, gazed out and away.
"I do not believe you are," Annandale announced to her slender waist. "But if I am wrong, it is hardly disloyalty to him to say that he is not good enough for you."
Beneath the tower was a tennis court. Fanny made a face at it. But the face must have been insufficient. Looking over her shoulder at Annandale, she showed her teeth.
[85] "Do you fancy a girl cares for a man because he is or is not good enough? When a girl cares she cares because she cannot help herself." ”

“ It will be difficult to make twelve imbeciles [182] in a pen believe that when Annandale shot Loftus——"
"He never shot him," Sylvia cried.
"My dear cousin," Orr with the same unruffleable calm pursued, "the beauty of your faith is wonderful. You must come to court and inject it among the jury. Faith that used to move mountains may yet move men. But I doubt it. I doubt that it could make them credit the incredible, the fact patent to me as it should be to you, that though Annandale shot Loftus he was, and for that matter still is, totally unconscious of it." ”

“ Peacock rubbed his eyes. "What this confession means, Orr, you as well as I appreciate." Instinctively his voice had sunk into that undertone which Death, when it comes, exacts. "Yes," he continued, "Annandale is not merely acquitted, he is cleared. For that, believe me, I am glad. As for Loftus, he got from that dead father only what he deserved."
To this Orr, about whom the marvel of it all still also clung, assented. "Justice," he replied, "is rarely human, but sometimes it is divine." ”

“ But it is wrong to believe everything we hear. When New York decides to be hot, the temperature of the Persian port must be agreeable by comparison.
One fetid noon Annandale fled. When he stopped it was at Narragansett.
Before August comes and with it the mob, Narragansett is charming. There is a mile of empty hotels, a stretch of sand fine as face powder, a heaving, [73] heavenly desert of blue and an atmosphere charged with ozone and desire.
In August the hotels are packed. The stretch of sand is a stage. Every day a ballet is given there. ”

“ It can no more desert the heavens of political economy than the stars can deviate from their course. It is not here yet, the bull is very lively, he is tossing everything sky high, but just when he is at his best and fiercest, just when you are shouting yourselves hoarse, the great espada, whose name is Time, with one swift thrust will transfix him. ”

“ Then on the heels of that communication there had followed one from Orr, indorsing what Annandale said, declaring that it was all quite possible, adding that, in certain temperaments, memory when influenced by toxics will play tricks stranger than the average mind can comfortably credit.
These letters she had not answered. Logically she could not admit the validity of the statements which they contained. But the heart has logic which logic does not know. Then, too, is there not that within us that prompts us to believe less what we should than what we wish? ”

“ What is more, he would have realized that what Fanny had said was true. They were not suited for each other. When people are not so suited it is best that they should separate. But people that have bowed when they met might just as well bow when they part. In the life known as polite big words and little threats have long since gone out of fashion.
All of which ordinarily Annandale would have known. He was essentially urbane, of a nature far more inclined to inaction than anger. ”

“ That is the fate of bulls."
"We are to be transfixed, are we?" said Annandale.
Marie looked over at Loftus. "Had I not better sell?"
Orr turned to her. "No; hold on and lose. A loss, particularly a fist loss, is always a good investment. Besides, if you will permit me to say, you should have no heed of such things. No, Miss Leroy. You should content yourself with continuing to be. A woman who does only that acquires a charm almost supernatural. ”