Frederic Jesup Stimson

“ CAPTAIN DERWENT SEALS HIS FATE.
THE autumn winds began; winds that in the country bring red leaves, and ripening nuts, and smells of cider, and the crisp white frost; and in the city come with clouds of pungent dust of streets, and sticks and straws, and make one’s daily walk and ride a nuisance, not a pleasure. But all the world, or all the world that Arthur saw, was busied with its dresses and with its future entertainments, and with rejoicings over future marriages, and, now and here, perhaps, regrets, and longer days for women, and sterner work for men. ”

“ Left alone, Gracie’s smile, which had reflected Mamie’s, changed to a deeper look, a look that Mamie’s face could never mirror. Yes, it was a puzzle, in a way; people so rarely seemed to care for the essentials of things. Gracie’s notion of a man was enlightened heroism, of a woman perfect bravery and trust, and the light in the lives of both the light of the world that comes from another, like the sun’s. But to these young ladies and gentlemen, the light of the world was the light of a ball-room. ”

“ Humanity is not all alike; it is as a broad plain of grass or weeds; and this is alike. But among it, here and there, there flames a poppy, and above it, here and there, stands up the glorious lily, like a halo on a flower’s stem; and beneath it breathes the sweet and gentle violet. Hard by grow the weeds, and dock and hardy thistles; on one stem perhaps with these, unconscious of them.
So mankind is a great crowd composed of common units, all alike; but with them walking, mostly alone, there journeys the hero, and there the martyr, and the woman with a soul. ”

“ For Gracie loved him—that was clear, both to happy Arthur and the wakeful Judge.
There is a curious timeliness in our modern ailments; [60] a timeliness which would be still more striking if we could know the elements of each man’s life. In older times, men wore out slowly, by labor or by rust; they set about dying deliberately, as they worked their land or managed their daily concernments. But in these days of steam and dynamite, our mode of death is sudden, quick and certain, like an explosion or a railway catastrophe; less like the processes of nature than those of man. ”

“ And all the world seems thirst, and lust, and envy, and desire; the fires of heaven are put out, and all men struggling, trampling, for the colored stones of earth; and yet such blooms do come upon it. But they blossom stilly, like silent lilies born above the meadow-mire. White and pure they shine, and breathe in heaven’s sunlight, and give out heaven’s fragrance, borne each upon its slender stem above the blind, black bog.
The day after this, Gracie had an errand, up in a little town beyond the hills. Arthur asked that he might go there with her; then they both might ride instead of driving. ”

“ Charlie was there early enough, you may be sure; and he is sitting with pretty Mamie Livingstone on a sofa just behind them. And Birmingham, I fear, is cursing Derwent too; such a knack have fanatics of making themselves disagreeable! For every time he makes a pretty compliment to Miss Farnum—and pretty compliments are slow and heavy things for our peer of the realm to struggle with—it seems as if his beautiful companion caught Derwent’s eye. And the beauty is, even to the Briton’s eye, a bit unconscious of his fine speeches; and looks about her as if she too were looking for some other swain. ”

“ How natural to read poetry and lost loves in the light of lovely eyes that look so sweetly now in yours! So good Bishop Berkeley showed us that we mortals see but an image of external things, an inference from the sensation of our own retina; and we silly men, like idolaters, worship but the image we ourselves create. The lily of the field still draws us, not the potato-flower, worthy vegetable. And we fondly assume that the lily cares nothing for its vestment; that it toils not, nor spins, and has its eye upon the stars alone.
Arthur now really felt that he was a friend of Flossie Gower’s. ”

“ Property is unnecessary. But men are like rude children at a public feast: each one fearing that he shall not get enough, they trample one another forward, and the foremost few lay hands upon it all.”
“No one of us who thinks,” said Haviland, “would object to communism if it were practicable. But I must have an overcoat, or a roof, or a horse; is anyone coming along who prefers my coat, my roof, to his, or to none, to take it? And, in the second place, men are not unselfish enough to work, even those few minutes a day, that all humanity may live.”
“They are, if they have souls,” said Derwent. ”

“ So she sat there, looking northward over the roofs and steeples, to the bright sky-line; and perhaps, if an eye were at the other end of that ray of light that slanted through space to meet her own, it saw a human soul. But to the telegraph wires and brick chimneys, to Mamie and the men near by on the roofs, it was a girl with a pretty face like another.
Human nature, they tell us; and another says, people are all alike when it comes to the point; and the motives of mankind have ever been the same, says a third. ”

“ Arthur could not have had a better cicerone than Charlie Townley. He knew his New York like the inside of his pocket; its streets, its ways, its women, its wiles, its heroes and its favorites; its eating places, drinking places, breathing places; its getting up and its lying down. When they passed Fourteenth Street, his manner changed very apparently; the æsthetic overcame the practical; the hard shine of millions was displaced by the softer radiance of women’s eyes. ”

“ IX. All beauty is the visible evidence of the love of God; nature is a divine manifestation; and literature, art, and music are the language in which humanity may reply. Thus, in particular, all highest poetry is but this—the discovery of the love of God.
Such were his tenets, the standard of Arthur’s exalted moments, as he supposed them then to be of others. In trying to live by them, he knew that he was weak, as all men are. Of all the people whom he knew, Gracie Holyoke alone seemed always to observe them. ”

“ And then, as if her conscience were safely in Flossie’s charge, she inaugurated a most audacious and ostentatious love-affair with the peer; that is, she caused him to inaugurate it. Baby Malgam never inaugurated anything; she only looked as if she understood it. A pan of cream, indeed; not milk and water; opaque, unfathomable to the eye, and yet, perhaps, not deep. Wemyss talked with Arthur about it. “You are the only fellow left whom one can talk to,” said he. “Birmingham’s too dull, and Derwent’s not a man of the world.” Arthur’s heart warmed to him at once. ”

“ In the hall were two or three pretty girls, overdressed in white tulle dresses, low-necked, with their cavaliers who served for the nonce and their noisy younger brothers. This bright company crowded to the porch, curious, when the carriages drove up; and Arthur heard one of the pretty girls say to another, “It’s the coaching party—from New York.”
They went out and wandered on the cliffs above the river; the beautiful moon-washed mountains stood about them, and below them slept the Hudson with its salt flood, deeper, nobler than any Rhine. ”

“ James Starbuck has not been heard of since; not yet, at least. John Haviland and Gracie have been married, and Mamie still lives with them. They live in a smaller house than Mrs. Gower’s, to be sure, but they manage to be happy; and their sons will be strong-souled, large-hearted, to meet the Jem Starbucks that are to come; and Gracie’s daughters will be like to her, and bear from her the vestal fire, each one to her own household; not advertised, perhaps, to thousands, but yet a kindly warmth to the few that stand within its circle of light. ”

“ Mamie has been in, from time to time, and had close talks with her; and she has promised Gracie she will keep her word with Derwent, and wait, although she is sure she cannot care for him. But now she is gone, to dress for Arthur’s dinner, and Gracie sits alone.
The house is silent; and she knows the old people are down below, and she must go and read to them. But the vault of heaven has been unfathomably blue, that day; and she has been looking into it, over the crowded city walls. She knows that Arthur is not thinking of it, or of her. ”

“ Her phaeton and her ponies replaced the antiquated family rockaways; her style made up for breeding, and largely it was Flossie’s work that money in New York became the all-in-all, and blood an antiquated prejudice to jest at. And all the Einsteins and the Malgams and Duvals made haste to cluster under Flossie’s standard, wanting such a leader; and we Americans throw up our hats and cry how nice and democratic is the change—do we not? How proud was simple Lucie Gower to find him husband to a goddess! How natural for Caryl Wemyss to worship her, the spirit of his favorite decadence! ”

“ But was James Starbuck a cousin of clever, fashionable, refined Flossie? Starbuck did not know it. What, in active, progressive America, in the migrating America of the last fifty years, need a man know of his antecedents? They go for little in his life. Starbuck remembered his father well enough; and how he had struggled from pillar to post, from one frowzy city street to another, with the jaded, tawdry woman who was his wife; until one day, from a new and prosperous little city in the oil regions of Pennsylvania, he had gone, never to be seen or heard of after, by wife or child. ”

“ Property and marriage and personal liberty—they go together. There is no argument for freedom but the inner light of the mind; none for monogamy but that it seems farther from the beasts; none for property but that man creates it for himself. And the age of reason, which denies a divine sanction, will yet require a divine sanction for all that it does not destroy.”
“Man does not create the air, nor the ocean, nor the surface of the earth,” said Derwent.
“No; and man does not hold the surface of the earth for himself, but for all humanity. ”

“ New York was an excellent place to make money in; and these things go well with materialism. The boat made its landing, and Charlie walked up the long pier through the crowd—a crowd of summer boarders, seeking rest, and who, finding rest a bore, had come down to see the evening steamer land, for the sake of excitement. The great rollers foamed in beneath the pier, lashing the piles indignantly; and the sea on either side was speckled with bathers—children, men, and women, the last looking their unloveliest in bathing-gowns. ”

“ How dare I speak of John’s life, day by day? How he goes to his office, and reads his review, and writes his speech, and looks to his other labors, and walks home alone and late? Such humdrum coloring, and so same throughout; it would be a deadly thing to read about; and as for living—is it their horror of such [371] a life as his that set Kill Van Kull and Townley to life’s pleasures and Flossie Gower and Caryl Wemyss to seek life’s vanities? ”

“ When Flossie first went into the Court of the Lions, passing in through the low gate in the ugly brick tower, to the green pool and the plashing fountain, and the sunlight streaming in from above upon the snowy columns of [10] rosy marble and the rainbow-hued arabesques of those fairy vistas, the grouped columns changing, as she walked, like clusters of fair women holding converse in a garden—her first thought was of this. A fathom deep the oil lies in the central pool; and as we come in from the dark passage the spraying-fountain bursts upon us like a vision of glory. ”

“ But the grand stand was packed with humanity; poor people from his own neighborhood, dingy men, fat mothers of families, gasping for breath, young men with their girls, in soiled white dresses and gay ribbons, many wearing the colors of their favorite jockey. He could see that they were all intensely eager about the race; often they had even little betting-books, or cards upon which they marked the winners. James had never been at a race before, and was amazed at all the crowd, at the money they spent for this, at the amount of betting, at the interest they showed in all the horses. ”

“ How dull, how short-sighted must our forefathers have been, who flattered themselves that we, their clever children, would content ourselves with the rights of man! What we desire is the envy of mankind.
Humanity has indeed labored over a thousand years for these simpler things, ever since that crowd of uncultivated Dutchmen came down on Rome, and the feudal system adopted Christianity unto itself and strangled it, or sought to do so. We have tried with brain and sinew, through blood and fire, to get this boon, that our lives may be respected, and our liberty of person not constrained. ”

“ For the will of the world comes out in this—that all that has to do with life, new life, charms and attracts us; that all that speaks of over-thought, of over-soul, if you will, is wan and weird—either positively uncanny, or laughable, like the chorus of old men in Faust! Instinctively, we all turn to the flower, to the fresh looks of the young girl, to the rosy lips, full of the promise of future life. ”

“ Like most fecund mothers, like nature herself, her luxuriance is somewhat slatternly, her exuberance has burst its stays. Here and there our manners, our conventions, trim a hedge or two; but everywhere the forests, and even at our feet, the weeds, grow wild. Fifth Avenue, and its short purlieus, is the home of society; but elsewhere in the island of Manhattan humanity lives, unkempt, full of sap—that great humanity which has made Mrs. Gower, and which she so studiously avoids. For she lives in society; and perhaps has never thought that it is on humanity she lives. ”