15a The Prince and Betty

by Unknown

  Mrs. Oakley was one of two children, a son and a daughter, of a Vermont farmer. Of her early life no records remain. Her public history begins when she was twenty-two and came to New York. After two years’ struggling, she found a position in the firm of one Redgrave. Those who knew her then speak of her as a tall, handsome girl, hard and intensely ambitious. From contemporary accounts she seems to have out-Nietzsched Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s vision stopped short at the superman. Jane Scobell was a superwoman. She had all the titanic selfishness and indifference to the comfort of others which marks the superman, and, in addition, undeniable good looks and a knowledge of the weaknesses of men. Poor Mr. Redgrave had not had a chance from the start. She married him within a year. Two years later, catching the bulls in an unguarded moment, Mr. Redgrave despoiled them of a trifle over three million dollars, and died the same day of an apoplectic stroke caused by the excitement of victory. His widow, after a tour in Europe, returned to the United States and visited Pittsburg. Any sociologist will support the statement that it is difficult, almost impossible, for an attractive widow, visiting Pittsburg, not to marry a millionaire, even if she is not particularly anxious to do so. If such an act is the primary object of her visit, the thing becomes a certainty. Groping through the smoke, Jane Redgrave seized and carried off no less a quarry than Alexander Baynes Oakley, a widower, whose income was one of the seven wonders of the world. In the fullness of time he, too, died, and Jane Oakley was left with the sole control of two vast fortunes.

  She did not marry again, though it was rumored that it took three secretaries, working nine hours a day, to cope with the written proposals, and that butler after butler contracted clergyman’s sore throat through denying admittance to amorous callers. In the ten years after Alexander Baynes’ death, every impecunious aristocrat in the civilized world must have made his dash for the matrimonial pole. But her pale eyes looked them over, and dismissed them.

  During those early years she was tempted once or twice to speculation. A failure in a cotton deal not only cured her of this taste, but seems to have marked the point in her career when her thoughts began to turn to parsimony. Until then she had lived in some state, but now, gradually at first, then swiftly, she began to cut down her expenses. Now we find her in an apartment in West Central Park, next in a Washington Square hotel, then in a Harlem flat, and finally—her last, fixed abiding-place—in a small cottage on Staten Island.

  It was a curious life that she led, this woman who could have bought kingdoms if she had willed it. A Swedish maid-of-all-work was her only companion. By day she would walk in her little garden, or dust, arrange and wind up her clocks. At night, she would knit, or read one of the frequent reports that arrived at the cottage from charity workers on the East Side. Those were her two hobbies, and her only extravagances—clocks and charity.

  Her charity had its limitations. In actual money she expended little. She was a theoretical philanthropist. She lent her influence, her time, and her advice, but seldom her bank balance. Arrange an entertainment for the delectation of the poor, and you would find her on the platform, but her name would not be on the list of subscribers to the funds. She would deliver a lecture on thrift to an audience of factory girls, and she would give them a practical example of what she preached.

  Yet, with all its limitations, her charity was partly genuine. Her mind was like a country in the grip of civil war. One-half of her sincerely pitied the poor, burned at any story of oppression, and cried “Give!” but the other cried “Halt!” and held her back, and between the two she fell.

  It was to this somewhat unpromising haven of refuge that Betty’s mind now turned in her trouble. She did not expect great things. She could not have said exactly what she did expect. But, at least, the cottage on Staten Island offered a resting-place on her journey, even if it could not be the journey’s end. Her mad dash from Mervo ceased to be objectless. It led somewhere.

  CHAPTER XI

  A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION

  New York, revisited, had much the same effect on Betty as it had had on John during his first morning of independence. As the liner came up the bay, and the great buildings stood out against the clear blue of the sky, she felt afraid and lonely. That terror which is said to attack immigrants on their first sight of the New York sky-line came to her, as she leaned on the rail, and with it a feeling of utter misery. By a continual effort during the voyage she had kept her thoughts from turning to John, but now he rose up insistently before her, and she realized all that had gone out of her life.

  She rebelled against the mad cruelty of the fate which had brought them together again. It seemed to her now that she must always have loved him, but it had been such a vague, gentle thing, this love, before that last meeting—hardly more than a pleasant accompaniment to her life, something to think about in idle moments, a help and a support when things were running crosswise. She had been so satisfied with it, so content to keep him a mere memory. It seemed so needless and wanton to destroy her illusion.

  Of love as a wild-beast passion, tearing and torturing quite ordinary persons like herself, she had always been a little sceptical. The great love poems of the world, when she read them, had always left her with the feeling that their authors were of different clay from herself and had no common meeting ground with her. She had seen her friends fall in love, as they called it, and it had been very pretty and charming, but as far removed from the frenzies of the poets as an amateur’s snapshot of Niagara from the cataract itself. Elsa Keith, for instance, was obviously very fond and proud of Marvin, but she seemed perfectly placid about it. She loved, but she could still spare half an hour for the discussion of a new frock. Her soul did not appear to have been revolutionized in any way.

  Gradually Betty had come to the conclusion that love, in the full sense of the word, was one of the things that did not happen. And now, as if to punish her presumption, it had leaped from hiding and seized her.

  There was nothing exaggerated or unintelligible in the poets now. They ceased to be inhabitants of another world, swayed by curiously complex emotions. They were her brothers—ordinary men with ordinary feelings and a strange gift for expressing them. She knew now that it was possible to hate the man you loved and to love the man you hated, to ache for the sight of someone even while you fled from him.

  It did not take her long to pass the Customs. A small grip constituted her entire baggage. Having left this in the keeping of the amiable proprietor of a near-by delicatessen store, she made her way to the ferry.

  Her first enquiry brought her to the cottage. Mrs. Oakley was a celebrity on Staten Island.

  At the door she paused for a moment, then knocked.

  The Swede servant, she who had been there at her former visit, twelve years ago, received her stolidly. Mrs. Oakley was dusting her clocks.

  “Ask her if she can see me,” said Betty. “I’m—” great step-niece sounded too ridiculous—”I’m her niece,” she said.

  The handmaid went and returned, stolid as ever. “Ay tal her vat yu say about niece, and she say she not knowing any niece,” she announced.

  Betty amended the description, and presently the Swede returned once more, and motioned her to enter.

  Like so many scenes of childhood, the room of the clocks was sharply stamped on Betty’s memory, and, as she came into it now, it seemed to her that nothing had changed. There were the clocks, all round the walls, of every shape and size, the big clocks with the human faces and the small, perky clocks. There was the dingy, medium-sized clock that held the trumpeter. And there, looking at her with just the old sandy-cat expression in her pale eyes, was Mrs. Oakley.

  Even the possession of an income of eighteen million dollars and a unique collection of clocks cannot place a woman above the making of the obvious remark.

  “How you have grown!” said Mrs. Oakley.

  The words seemed to melt the chill that had gathered around Betty’s heart. She had been prepared to enter into long explanations, and
the knowledge that these would not be required was very comforting.

  “Do you remember me?” she exclaimed.

  “You are the little girl who clapped her hands at the trumpeter, but you are not little now.”

  “I’m not so very big,” said Betty, smiling. She felt curiously at home, and pity for the loneliness of this strange old woman caused her to forget her own troubles.

  “You look pretty when you smile,” said Mrs. Oakley thoughtfully. She continued to look closely at her. “You are in trouble,” she said.

  Betty met her eyes frankly.

  “Yes,” she said.

  The old woman bent her head over a Sevres china clock, and stroked it tenderly with her feather duster.

  “Why did you run away?” she asked without looking up.

  Betty had a feeling that the ground was being cut from beneath her feet. She had expected to have to explain who she was and why she had come, and behold, both were unnecessary. It was uncanny. And then the obvious explanation occurred to her.

  “Did my stepfather cable?” she asked.

  Mrs. Oakley laid down the feather duster and, opening a drawer, produced some sheets of paper—to the initiated eye plainly one of Mr. Scobell’s lengthy messages.

  “A wickedly extravagant cable,” she said, frowning at it. “He could have expressed himself perfectly well at a quarter of the expense.”

  Betty began to read. The dimple on her chin appeared for a moment as she did so. The tone of the message was so obsequious. There was no trace of the old peremptory note in it. The words “dearest aunt” occurred no fewer than six times in the course of the essay, its author being apparently reckless of the fact that it was costing him half a dollar a time. Mrs. Oakley had been quite right in her criticism. The gist of the cable was, “Betty has run away to America dearest aunt ridiculous is sure to visit you please dearest aunt do not encourage her.” The rest was pure padding.

  Mrs. Oakley watched her with a glowering eye. “If Bennie Scobell,” she soliloquized, “imagines that he can dictate to me—” She ceased, leaving an impressive hiatus. Unhappy Mr. Scobell, convicted of dictation even after three dollars’ worth of “dearest aunt!”

  Betty handed back the cable. Her chin, emblem of war, was tilted and advanced.

  “I’ll tell you why I ran away, Aunt,” she said.

  Mrs. Oakley listened to her story in silence. Betty did not relate it at great length, for with every word she spoke, the thought of John stabbed her afresh. She omitted much that has been told in this chronicle. But she disclosed the essential fact, that Napoleonic Mr. Scobell had tried to force her into a marriage with a man she did not—she hesitated at the word—did not respect, she concluded.

  Mrs. Oakley regarded her inscrutably for a while before replying.

  “Respect!” she said at last. “I have never met a man in my life whom I could respect. Harpies! Every one of them! Every one of them! Every one of them!”

  She was muttering to herself. It is possible that her thoughts were back with those persevering young aristocrats of her second widowhood. Certainly, if she had sometimes displayed a touch of the pirate in her dealings with man, man, it must be said in fairness, had not always shown his best side to her.

  “Respect!” she muttered again. “Did you like him, this Prince of yours?”

  Betty’s eyes filled. She made no reply.

  “Well, never mind,” said Mrs. Oakley. “Don’t cry, child! I’m not going to press you. You must have hated him or else loved him very much, or you would never have run away…. Dictate to me!” she broke off, half-aloud, her mind evidently once more on Mr. Scobell’s unfortunate cable.

  Betty could bear it no longer.

  “I loved him!” she cried. “I loved him!”

  She was shaking with dry sobs. She felt the old woman’s eyes upon her, but she could not stop.

  A sudden whirr cut through the silence. One of the large clocks near the door was beginning to strike the hour. Instantly the rest began to do the same, till the room was full of the noise. And above the din there sounded sharp and clear the note of the little trumpet.

  The noise died away with metallic echoings.

  “Honey!”

  It was a changed voice that spoke. Betty looked up, and saw that the eyes that met hers were very soft. She moved quickly to the old woman’s side.

  “Honey, I’m going to tell you something about myself that nobody dreams of. Betty, when I was your age, I ran away from a man because I loved him. It was just a little village tragedy, my dear. I think he was fond of me, but father was poor and her folks were the great people of the place, and he married her. And I ran away, like you, and went to New York.”

  Betty pressed her hand. It was trembling.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  “I went to New York because I wanted to kill my heart. And I killed it. There’s only one way. Work! Work! Work!” She was sitting bolt upright, and the soft look had gone out of her eyes. They were hard and fiery under the drawn brows. “Work! Ah, I worked! I never rested. For two years. Two whole years. It fought back at me. It tore me to bits. But I wouldn’t stop. I worked on, I killed it.”

  She stopped, quivering. Betty was cold with a nameless dismay. She felt as if she were standing in the dark on the brink of an abyss.

  The old woman began to speak again.

  “Child, it’s the same with you. Your heart’s tearing you. Don’t let it! It will get worse and worse if you are afraid of it. Fight it! Kill it! Work!”

  She stopped again, clenching and unclenching her fingers, as if she were strangling some living thing. There was silence for a long moment.

  “What can you do?” she asked suddenly.

  Her voice was calm and unemotional again. The abruptness of the transition from passion to the practical took Betty aback. She could not speak.

  “There must be something,” continued Mrs. Oakley. “When I was your age I had taught myself bookkeeping, shorthand, and typewriting. What can you do? Can you use a typewriter?”

  Blessed word!

  “Yes,” said Betty promptly.

  “Well?”

  “Not very well?”

  “H’m. Well, I expect you will do it well enough for Mr. Renshaw—on my recommendation. I’ll give you a letter to him. He is the editor of a small weekly paper. I don’t know how much he will offer you, but take it and work! You’ll find him pleasant. I have met him at charity organization meetings on the East Side. He’s useful at the entertainments—does conjuring tricks—stupid, but they seem to amuse people. You’ll find him pleasant. There.”

  She had been writing the letter of introduction during the course of these remarks. At the last word she blotted it, and placed it in an envelope.

  “That’s the address,” she said. “J. Brabazon Renshaw, Office of Peaceful Moments. Take it to him now. Good-by.”

  It was as if she were ashamed of her late display of emotion. She spoke abruptly, and her pale eyes were expressionless. Betty thanked her and turned to go.

  “Tell me how you get on,” said Mrs. Oakley.

  “Yes,” said Betty.

  “And work. Keep on working!”

  There was a momentary return of her former manner as she spoke the words, and Betty wavered. She longed to say something comforting, something that would show that she understood.

  Mrs. Oakley had taken up the feather duster again.

  “Steena will show you out,” she said curtly. And Betty was aware of the stolid Swede in the doorway. The interview was plainly at an end.

  “Good-by, Aunt,” she said, “and thank you ever so much—for everything.”

  CHAPTER XII

  “PEACEFUL MOMENTS”

  The man in the street did not appear to know it, but a great crisis was imminent in New York journalism.

  Everything seemed much as usual in the city. The cars ran blithely on Broadway. Newsboys shouted their mystic slogan, “Wuxtry!” with undiminished vim. Societ
y thronged Fifth Avenue without a furrow on its brow. At a thousand street corners a thousand policemen preserved their air of massive superiority to the things of this world. Of all the four million not one showed the least sign of perturbation.

  Nevertheless, the crisis was at hand. Mr. J. Brabazon Renshaw, Editor-in-chief of Peaceful Moments, was about to leave his post and start on a three-months’ vacation.

  Peaceful Moments, as its name (an inspiration of Mr. Renshaw’s own) was designed to imply, was a journal of the home. It was the sort of paper which the father of the family is expected to take back with him from the office and read aloud to the chicks before bedtime under the shade of the rubber plant.

  Circumstances had left the development of the paper almost entirely to Mr. Renshaw. Its contents were varied. There was a “Moments in the Nursery” page, conducted by Luella Granville Waterman and devoted mainly to anecdotes of the family canary, by Jane (aged six), and similar works of the younger set. There was a “Moments of Meditation” page, conducted by the Reverend Edwin T. Philpotts; a “Moments among the Masters” page, consisting of assorted chunks looted from the literature of the past, when foreheads were bulged and thoughts profound, by Mr. Renshaw himself; one or two other special pages; a short story; answers to correspondents on domestic matters; and a “Moments of Mirth” page, conducted by one B. Henderson Asher—a very painful affair.

  The proprietor of this admirable journal was that Napoleon of finance, Mr. Benjamin Scobell.

  That this should have been so is but one proof of the many-sidedness of that great man.

  Mr. Scobell had founded Peaceful Moments at an early stage in his career, and it was only at very rare intervals nowadays that he recollected that he still owned it. He had so many irons in the fire now that he had no time to waste his brain tissues thinking about a paper like Peaceful Moments. It was one of his failures. It certainly paid its way and brought him a small sum each year, but to him it was a failure, a bombshell that had fizzled.