"It is not unreasonable to ask you women to delay the issue for a bit. You have not suffered as the negroes have. You have not endured the ultimate indignity of slavery."
"Have black women not suffered it? And have not all women, of every color, been denied their elementary rights from the very dawn of what you men call civilization? Before slavery ever existed?"
Cranberry began to show his ire. "We fought the war to abolish slavery! Not to give women the vote!"
"I had hoped we had fought the war to abolish the exploitation of one human being by another. Why do you wish to give the vote to some black man who cannot sign his name, who very possibily cannot distinguish between New York and China, and deny it to me?"
"Because he doesn't talk me to death!"
There were cries of "Shame," and Rosalie saw Dexter leap to his feet.
"I say, Cranberry, that won't do!"
"All right, all right, I apologize. But really and truly, are we to have the fruits of our victory snatched from our hands by women who invent new aims that the war was fought for? Suppose Mrs. Fairchild were now to suggest that the war had been fought for unwed mothers, could those unfortunates muscle in on the black man's struggle for the ballot?"
"Mr. Cranberry has no concern with how the black man votes," Rosalie exclaimed, addressing herself now to the room. "He knows that those votes will be cast in states where he does no business. But he cares a great deal how women may vote, should they be enfranchised. Because he knows that his hundreds of peons, his half-starved female clerks, would soon be voting for a minimum wage!"
At this there was an uproar. Half the audience jumped to their feet, mostly declaiming against Rosalie, but several women began shouting in her favor.
"There is a motion on the floor!" a woman cried at last over the din.
"But not seconded," retorted Cranberry.
"I second it!" The voice was Jo's.
"All those in favor raise their right hand."
Barely a quarter of those attending complied, and the motion was lost. Rosalie noted with bitterness that Dexter sat grimly in his seat, both hands in his pockets.
"I resign from this association!" she announced, rising again to her feet. "And I hope that every woman in this room will follow me out!"
Going to the doorway she turned to face the chamber. Jo was already at her side. Dexter was with them, but she noted that he was concerned only with retrieving his coat from the butler. Of the thirty women present, some dozen moved to join the sisters. Rosalie solemnly embraced each one of them.
***
Dexter took Rosalie home in his coupé, Jo having taken her father's carriage. He did not say a word all the way up Broadway. As they passed Grace Church, she broke the silence at last.
"Oh, go ahead and say it, Dexter! That you're horrified."
He looked with pained surprise at Rosalie's angry profile. Had she lost all sense of a husband's prerogative? Because he had leaned so far backwards to go along with her activities, was he now "estopped," as one might say in law, from making any protest at the prospect of his home being turned into a permanent club for noisy women? He had been disgusted by the scene he had just witnessed, appalled by the clamoring females and half-sympathetic even with the loathsome Cranberry, who, in his opinion, had been unreasonably hounded into losing his temper.
"You planned this whole thing in advance," he protested. "Don't you think you might have warned me what I was going to face today?"
"What would have been the use? I knew you'd be opposed to it. And, I'd already made up my mind."
"Let me get it straight, Rosalie. Is it your position that I should accept the almost certain loss of one of my biggest clients and the conversion of my domestic peace into a hideous uproar, without a murmur?"
"It's my position that in the biggest decision of my life you might have supported me!"
"I didn't vote against you." He was too appalled at her identification of the "biggest" decision to comment on the lesser one that it uncovered.
"You abstained. It amounted to the same thing."
"But, Rosalie, you know I back you in everything you do! That doesn't mean I have to agree with you, does it? I haven't yet made up my own mind how I stand on votes for women. Am I to be stampeded into it?"
"I suppose I'm showing the weakness of my sex," she replied bitterly. "But, yes, I did want you to vote with me. Regardless of your convictions. I wanted you to stand with me in my moment of crisis. I gave up my hospital ship for you! Oh, I know you never asked me to, but I did. And I forgave you your affair with Annie. I suppose it's unworthy of me to mention that, but I did. And I've entertained your clients and raised your children. I've been a good brownstone wife. And now that at fifty I begin to see at last how to work for a cause in which I passionately believe, now that I want this one thing for Rosalie Fairchild, all you can talk about is your domestic peace!"
"You know I love you."
"But what will you do for me?" she demanded passionately. "I guess I'm sentimental enough to have wanted you to make one gesture for me! Regardless of your prejudices!"
Dexter looked out the window at the dripping iron portals of a store front in the gas light of a street lamp. It was raining. He felt the old urge to surrender to her, the old need to comfort and console her, to protect her from the pain that seemed to throb in every pore of her large sensitive body. But now the image of those shouting women intervened. Was a man to be left with nothing—stripped, castrated, flung out in the dark wet street? He closed his eyes and almost groaned with the difficulty of not giving in.
"I'm sorry, dear," he murmured. "I do not see how I could have behaved differently. You ask too much."
"Well, I shall ask for nothing more," she retorted, turning to show him eyes filled with tears. "And I warn you, Dexter, nothing is going to stop me now! I'm going to speak out for women's votes at every street corner of this town. I'm going to campaign throughout the state. Who knows? Maybe throughout the nation. I may be hissed and booed. I may be tarred and feathered. I may even be jailed! But I know now what I am and what I shall be!"
"Rosalie," he begged her, "even if you don't care what you do to me, can't you think of the boys?"
"Fred won't give a hoot. He's completely obsessed with his sordid Erie battle. And Selby approves of me!"
Silence fell between them, and he found it in him, even now, to wonder if it wouldn't be more fun to be on her and Selby's side. But staring down, fascinated, into the black, eddying gulf of his self-pity, he knew that he was not going to resist the impulse to plunge.
29
SELBY FAIRCHILD, on a clear, cold Sunday afternoon, paused in Madison Square to contemplate the house at which he proposed to call. It was spandy new, midway between a standard brownstone and a mansion, an oblong standing clear of other edifices, yet designed so as to fit as neatly as a brick into a box, should the owner be required one day to sell its yard to a builder. Yankee foresight, Selby reflected. The front that faced the square was of brownstone with four tiers of windows, three to a floor, and a grilled doorway, but the long side that presented itself to his view was painted pleasantly red with the same number of windows and several bricked-up frames. Seth Bristow had bought the house only six months before from the man who had built it but lost his fortune before moving in. Such was the history of Manhattan real estate.
The front door opened at his approach, and he passed, after surrendering his coat and top hat to a footman, down a dark corridor to the darker parlor in back. The curtains had been drawn for Mrs. Bristow's reception, though it was only three o'clock, and the gas lights and candelabra were aglow as for an evening party. Behind his host and hostess was a huge canvas on which the Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome were seen turning thumbs down in response to a red-faced, hirsute gladiator's call for their verdict as to the victim sprawling in the arena sand under his heel. The curtains of the Bristows' great chamber, the rugs, the coverings of the chairs and ottomans, were all of the same dark, murk
y red. Mahogany, wherever it peeked out, was black and twisted. There was a glint of gold and silver on the sideboards and tables.
Mrs. Bristow, pale-faced and nervous, with black, darting eyes and hands that moved like snakes' heads, greeted him with effusion.
"We were so hoping for a visit from your grandfather this afternoon. But dear Miss Handy sent me a sweet note to say that the old gentleman has a cold. I trust it's nothing serious. Oh, it's not? Good! One must be so careful at his age. I hardly like the idea that my uncle said he might drop in today. The dear man should look out for himself, particularly with this terrible Erie battle going on! And how are your distinguished parents? I should love to see them one day. Do you think they'd come? And what about dear Mr. and Mrs. Van Rensselaer?"
Selby, who knew that his grandfather had unexpected liberalities and was within the social reach of the Bristows, was also aware that his aunt Lily would not go to their house to ransom the life of a kidnapped child. But it was not kind to acknowledge such things, even by implication.
"I can't imagine why any member of my family wouldn't be tickled pink to be asked to a lovely party like this."
"Really? But Mrs. Van Rensselaer is supposed to be so exclusive!"
Selby's pleasant smile concealed his wince. How could the woman be so vulgar? And yet, though totally devoid of imagination or humor, she had a brain; she was not Vanderbilt's niece for nothing. Selby was sure that she could have drawn an inventory of every piece of tangible personal property in that house and given him the exact market value of each. Why had fate subjected her to the ignominy of playing the one game at which she could never succeed? And the one game her failure at which she would never comprehend?
"Well, I guess everybody likes to think of himself as exclusive," he observed mildly. "But it's only a kind of coyness, don't you think? Aunt Lily's probably wondering what she can have done not to be invited by the Bristows."
"If I believed that" exclaimed his literal-minded hostess, but then even she penetrated his game. "Oh, you young men! There's no getting you to take things seriously."
He took advantage of the amiability of her tone to turn his attention to her husband. Seth Bristow, sixty and bald, was much older than his wife. He had small, watery blue eyes, a crooked nose, thick, pale lips that seemed to be always parted, a soft, hollow voice and bad breath.
"We want you to go on the Erie sleeper to Buffalo," he told Selby, moving at once and without the least apology, to business. "I hear they're taking a substantial overload. And that they missed two stops on the Petauket run. Weren't you on that?"
Selby explained that he was not. Mr. Bristow never praised and never condemned; he simply pointed out deficiencies as he found them. He was the dryest man Selby had ever encountered; he seemed to regard the faintest intrusion of a non-business-related subject, at any time of the day or night, or in any place, as a lapse of taste, almost like a breaking of wind. Selby, intrigued, had tried to see if there were not one other subject on which Bristow could be drawn, but he had found none. Man to him existed only to buy, sell and make a profit. Seth Bristow was like a character in a restoration comedy who had no qualities beyond those suggested by his name; he might have been a "Mr. Shortsale" or a "Mr. Put-call." And yet, for all of this, he was supposed to be financially shaky, and it was rumored that Vanderbilt knew that he sometimes traded against him. It was only on the tenuous relationship of marriage to a disliked niece, and possibly because treason amused the Commodore, that the broker was tolerated at all.
Selby, who cared little for his job and less for his host, moved away to the buffet, where he was disgusted to find neither wine nor spirits, but only a pale lemon punch. He reflected how tough a religious prejudice must be when a social ambition as strong as Mrs. Bristow's had to be thwarted by it. Old Seth let his Presbyterian god slumber all week, but he awakened him on Sunday, in time to mar his wife's festivities. Even the Commodore would not be able to get a drink!
And the Commodore had now arrived. The forty or more guests in the chamber made no secret of what was almost their obeisance when the great man, tall, broad-shouldered, white-haired, imposing, appeared in the parlor doorway, wearing what seemed to be the same frock coat whose marble replica adorned his famous statue by de Groot over the portal to the Hudson River freight dock in St. John's Park. All general conversation ceased as the hostess nervously led her uncle among the guests, half of whom, Selby guessed, were directly or indirectly his employees. The gossip at Bristow & Mayer had been that Vanderbilt would go to Mrs. Bristow's and to half a dozen other houses on Sunday afternoon, to demonstrate his imperturbability in the midst of the Erie crisis. Erie had hit 81 the day before, and the city was close to panic.
What a tribe, Selby reflected, and what a prophet! These be thy gods, O Israel! What could he do with this world in which he found himself? He could not love it, like Fred. He could not despise it, like his mother. He had made up his mind he could not paint it. Could he write about it, satirize it? Dickens had torn such a world apart in Our Mutual Friend. But Dickens had hated the Veneerings, and Selby could not find it in his heart to hate even the Bristows. He thought that he might want, in some vague sentimental fashion, to "save" them, and it was perfectly manifest that they had no desire to be saved.
Putting his hands in his pockets, he reviewed his situation. He enjoyed his job well enough; he liked racketing about the state, and he found time, as always, to talk to people in bars. But the job was temporary. One could not spy on Erie forever. Indeed, if the Commodore won his stock battle, the spy would be idle again. He supposed that he could always sell stocks and bonds, like Fred, but he was sure he would hate it. There was also his mother's suffrage work, or the political reform movement starting up in Boston, but Selby inclined to the opinion that the times were premature for both. It seemed futile even to try to make a start until the public mind, now sick of idealism and avid for industrial expansion, should swing around a bit. Oh, a swing would come; it was bound to come. But what could one do while two-thirds of the nation seemed concentrated on hounding out of office a President who was guilty of nothing but trying to perform his constitutional duties?
"Do you remember this young man, Uncle Corneel?" Mrs. Bristow was saying. The honored guest, to whose arm his hostess was clinging, had paused before Selby. "He's Fred Fairchild's brother."
Vanderbilt grunted and gave Selby an appraising stare. "You work for Bristow, too, young fella?"
"More or less, sir."
"I reckon that ain't quite enough."
"Or else too much. I was just thinking, Mr. Vanderbilt. What can a young man do to become quickly rich?"
"Really, Mr. Fairchild," Mrs. Bristow gasped. "I can't have my uncle bothered with such..."
"Oh, be quiet, Rosalinda. I like a young man to speak his mind. Tell me, sonny. You got any money?"
"A little, sir."
"Well, buy all the Central stock you can git your hands on. You can't go wrong."
"But isn't the profit pretty well out of that, sir? After all, you got there first."
Vanderbilt chuckled. "You're like all the young men. You ask for advice, and then you give it."
"No, sir, I'm sincerely humble. Do you mean the little guy can't do better than follow the great one?"
"Well, I'll tell you this, my friend. Half the fortunes in this world were made in businesses after the so-called smart investors thought it was too late to buy in. The big men don't take chances. It's the pioneer who goes broke. I didn't go into steam until I knew it was safe. Same thing in rails."
"But I suppose if one rides a great man's shoulders, one must know when to get off." Selby had deduced that Vanderbilt was the better type of bully, the kind that savored boldness.
"Yes, you must have a nose for Waterloo," the Commodore replied with another chuckle. "A lot of people thought mine had come yesterday. A lot of people were wrong."
"I'll buy Central tomorrow, sir."
"Never tell anyone what you're going to d
o. Just go ahead and do it. Come and see me any time, young man. You're a grandson of old Handy, ain't you? We'll try not to hold that against you!"
And with a high cackle the lord of Central moved on. Selby crossed the room now to join a young lady, some twenty years of age, who had been watching their colloquy. She had long, smooth dark hair, parted in the middle, and black, bright eyes in a pale face of almost too regular features. She was dressed in a sober dark red, like the room. It might have been protective coloration. But anyone could see that Elmira Bristow was a very determined young lady. What did she need to be protected against?
"I like your great-uncle, Ellie," Selby observed, when he was beside her. "And what's more, I think he liked me."
"What an honor!"
"You don't consider it one?"
"Should I?"
"You don't like your Uncle Corneel?"
"I hate him."
Selby, who always amused himself with Fred's passionate little goddess, was gratified to see that his afternoon was not going to be lost, in spite of the lemonade punch. "How can you say such a thing? Let alone mean it? Think how scandalized the people here would be if they could hear you. Pure sacrilege!"
"Oh, it's not his fault," she said impatiently. "It's not because of anything he's done. It's because they all fawn on him so disgustingly. And he despises them for it! Particularly my parents."
"But can you blame him for despising toadies?"
Ellie made no move to except her parents from his unflattering classification. Her quick nod even approved it. "I don't blame him. He's quite right. But I don't like being lumped in the despised group. So I despise him right back!"
"Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that you envy him?"
"No! I don't envy him in the least. I care nothing for his noisy steamboats or his rattling trains. Rushing people faster and faster over land and water so they can make more money. I find the whole business unutterably vulgar. Uncle Corneel may charm you with his rough-and-tumble way, but it's all just pose. He's much more literate than he lets on. And, basically, he's cold as ice. He never respected his son, Cousin Will, until the latter bested him in a contract over a sale of manure!" Ellie looked even prettier as she wrinkled her nose in distaste. "And that's what all these people worship!"
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