THE MANHATTANERS.

A Story of the Hour

BY EDWARD S. VAN ZILE AUTHOR OF “A MAGNETIC MAN,” “LAST OF THE VAN SLACKS,” ETC., ETC.

NEW YORK LOVELL, CORYELL & COMPANY 1895

Copyright, 1895, By United States Book Company.

5

CHAPTER I.

“I don’t want to discourage you, my boy, but, as our ‘brevier writers’ are so fond of saying, there is ‘food for reflection’ in that historic figure.”

It was half an hour after midnight, and two men were standing at the south-west corner of City Hall park, gazing at the statue of Nathan Hale. The taller of the two was a man who, having passed the portentous age of forty, no longer referred to his birthday when he reached it. He had maintained silence on this subject for several years, and his friends were not certain whether he was forty-one or forty-five; but his face seemed to indicate the latter age. It was a strong face, marked with lines of care, perhaps of dissipation, and about the mouth6 lurked an expression of discontent. That he had grown rather weary of the battle of life was indicated by his dress, which possessed that indefinable characteristic that may be expressed as careless shabbiness. His beard was untrimmed, and a slouch hat covered a head of iron-gray hair that would have been picturesque had it not been constantly neglected.

His companion was a youth of not more than three-and-twenty, slender, carefully attired, and with a delicately-moulded face that was strikingly handsome when he smiled. He was showing his perfect teeth at this moment, as he glanced first at the statue of the martyred hero, and then at the sarcastic countenance of his companion.

“Why do you say that, Fenton? Surely there is inspiration in the sight. Does not the figure prove that the time-worn slur regarding the ingratitude of republics is false?”

“Hardly that, Richard—Richard Cœur de Lion I shall dub you for awhile. It simply shows that somebody, at a very late day, had an attack of spasmodic sentimentality. There7 are other heroes of the Revolution, who were as self-sacrificing and patriotic as Nathan Hale, who are still forgotten by a republic that is grateful only in spots. Immortality, my dear youngster, is, to a great extent, a matter of chance. But, to waive that point, don’t you see how this figure of enthusiastic youth, this doomed martyr—this complete tie-up on Broadway, as a flippant friend of mine once called the statue—illustrates the dangers that beset your path?”

“I must acknowledge,” answered Richard Stoughton good-naturedly, as he placed his arm in Fenton’s and walked westward toward the Sixth Avenue elevated station at Park Place, “I must acknowledge that I have seen nothing in the park that tended to dampen my natural enthusiasm, unless it was the sign, ‘Keep off the grass.’”

“That’s just it,” returned John Fenton in his deep, penetrating voice. “That statue of Nathan Hale is what might be called an emphasis in bronze of the warning,—a warning as old as human tyranny,—to keep off the8 grass. Hale failed to obey it, and went to an early death. Take warning, Richard, by the lesson the statue teaches. Don’t let your dreamy and unpractical enthusiasm carry you into the enemy’s camp. They’ll hang you if you do.”

“Your words are enigmatical,” commented Stoughton, as the two men seated themselves in an elevated train bound up-town. “I had looked to you for comfort and warmth, and you give me a shower-bath.”

“Poor boy!” smiled Fenton, less cynically than was his wont. “When did the youthful warrior ever gain anything of value by consulting the battle-scarred and defeated veteran? I have the decayed root of a conscience somewhere that troubles me now and then. It gave a little twinge just now, and causes me to doubt the wisdom and justice of my effort to open your eyes to the truth.”

“But why,” asked the younger man earnestly, “should there be anything to offend your conscience in telling me the truth?”

“Ah, there, my boy, you ask a question that9 the wisest men have failed to answer. There are certain truths that the universe holds in its secret heart and refuses to divulge. As a microcosm, every man cherishes in his innermost being some bitter certainty that he must defend from the gaze of the curious. If he draws the veil, even by a hair’s-breadth, that exposed nerve known as conscience will throb for an instant, and close his mouth.”

“But,” persisted the younger man, whose clear-cut face looked, in contrast with his companion’s, like a delicate cameo beside a mediæval gargoyle, “I had placed so much value on your advice and sympathy.”

“My sympathy you certainly have,” said Fenton rather harshly; “but giving you my advice would be—to take a liberty with a time-honored illustration—like casting swine among pearls. Is it not some word-juggler, who uses epigrams to conceal the truth, who says that the only vice that does not cling to youth is advice?”

Richard Stoughton’s face flushed, and his dark gray eyes glanced questioningly at his companion.

10

“I sometimes think,” he said rather sadly, “that you are all brains and no heart, John Fenton.”

“You are mistaken, my boy,” answered Fenton quickly. “In that case I would have been a millionnaire long ago. I was afflicted with just enough heart to hamper my brain. The result is that I’m an assistant city editor in the prime of life, with a very short hill to roll down to the grave. But never mind what I am, or what I might have been. You are the only interesting personage present. You have come, like Nathan Hale, out of the ‘Down East,’ so to speak, to New York, to offer your youthful enthusiasm to a world that has too little of that sort of thing; so little, in fact, that it immortalizes Hale’s sacrifice, and forgets his mission.”

Fenton was silent for a moment.

“Just what do you mean by that last remark?” asked Richard gently.

“I mean that this great metropolitan community is suffering from a tyranny greater than that against which Hale and his contemporaries11 protested. I mean that we erect statues to-day to lovers of liberty, to martyrs in the cause of freedom, while we blindly and submissively bow our heads to a yoke more tyrannical than that which the House of Hanover held over our forefathers. I mean that Nathan Hale died in vain, unless his example shall inspire a generation yet to come to rise against an oppression more unjust, more pervasive, and more impregnable than any the world has ever seen.”

Richard Stoughton looked at his companion in amazement. Fenton’s face was flushed, a baleful light gleamed in his large, heavy eyes, and he seemed to be talking more to himself than to his companion. As they left the train at Twenty-third Street and strolled eastward, the elder of the two continued in a calmer tone,—

“You haven’t seen much of life, Stoughton. You will find it necessary to repair, as rapidly as possible, the intellectual ravages of a college education. The tendency of Yale life is to convince you at graduation that you know12 everything. The experience of a few years in metropolitan newspaper life will convince you that you know nothing.”

“And the last state of this man is happier than the first?” interrogated Richard lightly.

“Alas, my boy, I fear not. But perhaps that may be a local issue, a personal equation. I was more contented when I measured the circumference of knowledge by the diameter of my own experience than I am at present when I realize that what I know is so insignificant that it has no mathematical value at all. But my experience has no significance in connection with yours. The chances are that your career will be very different from mine. I certainly hope that it will be. At all events, you have the game to play, and the stakes are on the board. I drew to good cards, but somebody else won the pot. But what of it? There would be no fun in the game if everybody won and nobody lost.”

Fenton smiled as he stopped in front of a brilliantly lighted saloon, and held out his hand to Richard Stoughton.

13

“Good-night, my boy, and good luck. I’ll do what I can for you on the paper—and let me give you a word of advice, don’t believe all I say. Somehow—and of course I’m sorry for it—I’ve got just a little romance left in my composition, the ruins of a magnificent air-castle I once built. It is sufficient for me to take an interest in the structure you’re going to build on the firm foundation of youth, education, enthusiasm, and natural cleverness. I’ll do what I can to add a stone now and then to your castle, my boy. And so, good-night.”

The two men shook hands cordially, and Richard turned to hurry up-town to his rooms in Twenty-eighth Street, when Fenton called him back.

“You understand, Richard Cœur de Lion, that it was not rudeness that prevented my asking you to join me in a drink. I was thinking of your castle, my boy. It’ll tumble about your head if you put alcohol in the cellar. Good-night, old fellow. I must have some whiskey. Good-night.”

14

CHAPTER II.

“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, and15 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 howling16 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—from17 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.

18

“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.

19

“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 newspaper20 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 get21 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.

22

“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.

23

CHAPTER III.

“Yes, Richard,” remarked Fenton, as the two strangely-assorted newspaper men turned into a down-town side-street to take a table d’hôte dinner at a restaurant well known to the semi-Bohemians of the city,—real Bohemians we have none, though another generation will beget them,—“yes, my boy, this is the most interesting metropolis in the world.”

He hesitated a moment, and taking Richard by the arm, stood still and looked about him at the passing throng.

“Within a radius of half a mile, Richard, not only every nation, but nearly every tribe, religion, sect, family, and name that the world has ever known has its representation. See, there’s an Italian barber-shop across the street kept by a man named Cæsar. We are to dine at a French restaurant whose proprietor bears the historic family-name of Valois. I remember24 a few lines of an after-dinner poem one of the men in the office read last year at a journalistic banquet. It began:—

“It is, in a certain sense, the fact you have just touched upon that brought me here,” said Richard, as they seated themselves at a small table in a dining-room curiously decorated in black and white. Around them, seated in small groups, were men whose faces bore the European stamp. Here and there a young woman could be seen, smiling over her claret at her vis-à-vis, her white teeth making her dark eyes more striking by contrast. There was nothing distinctly American in the scene, excepting a small, active, little newsboy, who rushed from table to table selling the evening edition of the Trumpet, and requesting patronage25 in a voice that indicated an ancestral brogue. Fenton, however, soon added one more native feature to the picture by ordering a Manhattan cocktail from a waiter who looked as though he might be a pretender to the throne of France, and sipping it slowly as he waited for Stoughton to explain himself.