X Another Sphere
That same evening, his crisp brown mustache hiding the meaning of his mouth, and his drooping lids concealing the purpose of his steel-gray eyes, Wesley Dyker, from the rooms he had rented in an East Side Assembly district, took a cab northwestward through the rain to Riverside Drive. He was dressed precisely as he dressed to go to the house of Rose Légère, but he was bound for the house of Joshua Lennox.
There he had plainly been expected. The liveried, tight-lipped servant, who opened the iron grill-work door for him, showed him deferentially down a long tiled hall and into, not the formal white and gilt reception-room, but a comfortable, dimly-lighted apartment, a smoking-room, hung with fading mediæval tapestries, the floor covered with deep rugs of the Orient, and the chairs wide, broad-armed, and upholstered in soft leather.
“Miss Lennox will be down in a moment, sir,” said the servant. “May I bring you anything, Mr. Dyker?”
Wesley shook his well-shaped head.
“No, thank you, Charles,” he answered, and then, nodding to a decanter that, under a wide, soft-shaded lamp, stood upon a corner table: “Irish?” he asked.
Charles bowed, brought a tray, and, when Dyker had poured the whiskey, added some seltzer, and lighted the cigarette that the guest had taken from a wrought silver box on a nearby tabouret.
“That is all, Charles,” said Dyker, and the servant silently left him alone.
Wesley sank back in his chair with a sigh of comfort. He liked the house of the philanthropic merchant so well that he could have wished its master liked him better, and when, within a few minutes, the master himself chanced into the room, Dyker was prepared to be diplomatic.
Joshua N. Lennox was the explanation of that Mr. Porter who held so much power under him. The latter was tall and thin, the former short and compact, but there all physical differences ended: Mr. Porter had found his model in his employer. Here was the source of the seneschal’s gray hair and side-whiskers, his trap mouth tortured to the line of benevolence, his calm gaze and his manner that combined the precision of the surgeon with the gravity of the head of a Sunday-school. Mr. Lennox, in fact, conducted the second largest Bible Class in New York. He knew its textbook from the first chapter of Genesis to the twenty-second chapter of the Revelation, and he believed in the literal inspiration of every verse of the original and of every syllable of the English translation.
It was in the voice in which he habitually addressed his Bible Class, the voice of one uttering a benediction, that he said:
“Good-evening, Mr. Dyker.”
Wesley put down his glass and rose to his feet.
The man before him was the perfection of that noble work of Heaven, a Prominent Citizen. Joshua Lennox endowed Bowery chapels with organs and meat-supplies; he contributed heavily to missions among the benighted Japanese; he assisted in arbitrating strikes wherein his fellow-employers were concerned; he always served on memorial committees; and he regularly subscribed to the campaign funds of all movements toward municipal political reform.
If his climbing wife insisted upon having liquor in the house, Mr. Lennox never touched it. If she served tobacco, he did not smoke. If she took in a Sunday paper, written and printed on Saturday, he would read no news until the appearance of the Monday journal merely written and printed on Sunday. And if his mercantile establishment sold poker-chips under the pseudonym of “counters,” he was aware only that it did not sell playing-cards. The business he considered as his creation had grown beyond the limits of his power, and though, a good man and sincere, he might have done something by keeping a closer eye upon his work, he was in reality as much the creature of conditions as his worst-paid cash-boy. The great Frederick complained that a monarch could not know all the evil done in his kingdom: Joshua Lennox was so busy benefiting mankind that he had no leisure to observe in his own shop the state of affairs that made his philanthropy financially possible.
“I hope you are going with us to the opera, Mr. Lennox,” said Dyker.
The old man shook his silvered head.
“No,” said he in the slow, deliberate utterance that he had acquired with his first million of dollars; “I am on my way farther down town than that.”
“But you had better come,” urged Wesley, knowing that refusal was certain. “This is the last performance of the season.”
“On the contrary,” the merchant chuckled kindly, “I think you had better let Marian go to the opera alone and come along with me. I am going to the first performance of a new season.”
“Where’s that?”
“To the Municipal Improvement Mass Meeting at Cooper Union.”
That made it Dyker’s turn to smile.
“Oh, but I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I’m on the other side, you know.”
“Against good government?” The elder man manifestly enjoyed this mild thrust.
“Against irregularity, Mr. Lennox. There never has been and there never can be any lasting reform from the outside. We must clean our own houses. That is why I have moved to my present address. I believe in reform from within the party, and I believe that to effect this we want men of your sort to help us indoors and not to attack us from the street.”
The merchant’s cold eye looked hard at the speaker, but Dyker’s lowered lids betrayed nothing.
“Yes,” replied Lennox, dryly; “I heard that when Tammany Hall first came into power, but I have never seen any trace of reform from the inside. What I have seen is the spectacle of most of these inside reformers developing into leaders of the machine. If you will take an older man’s advice, you will withdraw while there is yet time.”
Wesley’s reply sprang ready to his lips, but, before he could utter it, Marian Lennox came into the room.
Something of herself the girl received, no doubt, from her climbing mother; something, probably, from her satisfied father, and more than she guessed from a narrow environment. Nevertheless, four years at college had cultivated in her what seemed to be a spirit of independence, and a brief life in the city had confirmed in her what she was certain were opinions of her own.
She was tall and moved with assurance. Her full throat rose above the ermine of her cloak, supporting a delicately carved head, the head of a Greek cameo, held rigidly erect. The hair was a rich chestnut, the eyes large and brown, and the mouth at once firm and kindly. Her skin was very fair and her gloved hands long and slender.
She caught her father’s concluding words.
“While there is yet time,” she paraphrased, “Mr. Dyker will withdraw from this room and get me to the opera-house before the overture has ended. I am so unfashionable as to want my music entire.”
She was used to commanding her parents in their own house, and she thought that she was used to commanding Wesley everywhere, so that she dismissed Lennox and secured Dyker’s entrance into her waiting limousine with almost no delay whatever.
“There,” she remarked as she settled herself comfortably for their drive; “I rather fancy that I rescued you from a sermon.”
Dyker laughed shortly.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I esteem your father so much that I should like him to like me.”
“But you think that he doesn’t like you?”
“I think that he is slow to see that two persons may differ on a question of political tactics and yet remain, both of them, honest men.”
“And may they?” bantered Marian.
“Well,” he lightly accepted the challenge, “I shall take the specific case. There is no doubting your father’s sincerity; there is no doubting the sincerity of nearly all the men that will, with him, to-night try to launch another of these municipal-reform parties which, if they ever get started at all, are sure to run on the rocks at last.”
“And on the other hand,” said the girl, “I suppose I must generously refuse to doubt the sincerity of Tammany Hall?”
“On the other hand you must justly refuse to doubt the sincerity of a few young men who have seen that reform-parties always end in violent reaction within the city and, if briefly successful, weaken the party in the next national campaign. You must refuse to doubt the sincerity of these young men when they go into the heart of the East Side to live and work among the people that make up the organization’s fighting-strength. You must believe in them when they try to get nominated for even the smallest offices on the machine-ticket. And you must have faith that, if they can work themselves at last into places of power, they will reform the party in the only way that will keep it reformed.”
“Dear me,” sighed Marian, “it seems that it was father that I rescued from a sermon.”
“Well,” said Dyker, “you asked me why your father and I should not mistrust each other, and there you have the reason. You know what I am trying to do; I have told you my plans as I haven’t told them to another human being—and you should know that I am not to be suspected.”
There was a ring in his voice that touched her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I beg you’ll forgive me. Only really, you know, you can’t expect father to be with you: he would have to break the habit of a lifetime.”
“I don’t ask him to be with me; I only ask him to believe that a man can work with the organization and yet have pure principles.”
“He can’t even go so far as that; he says that every system is the reflection of the men that make it, and he says that the system you support battens on horrors.”
“But it can’t be the system. The horrors existed long before the system. Is he such a conservative as not to be able to see that?”
“He isn’t a conservative; he is the one unprogressive thing in nature: the liberal of a preceding generation. Only the other day I mentioned something I have been thinking about doing—something that several of my most conventional friends have been doing for ever so long—and he was so dreadfully shocked that, though I’m now resolved upon my course, I can’t guess how he’ll take it.”
Dyker’s curiosity was easily piqued.
“If you proposed it,” he said, “I can’t imagine that it was such a very terrible thing.”
“Oh, no; it was merely that I want to be of some use in the world and so have made up my mind to go in for settlement-work.”
Wesley Dyker was one of those rare animals, a human being whose parents, though they could have arranged it otherwise, permitted him to be born in New York. He had been reared, at least during the winters of his earlier life, within the Borough of Manhattan, and his views were, like those of most of his even less acclimated neighbors, just as wide as that narrow island, and no wider. Indeed, so far as were concerned his views of the proper sphere of his own womankind, he limited them entirely to an extremely small portion of the city.
“Of course you’re joking,” he said.
“I am in cold earnest,” she assured him.
“But that’s absurd. You’ve—why you don’t know what settlement-work means!”
“I know quite well what it means,” said Marian. “I have friends engaged in it, as I told you, and I’ve been visiting them and seeing their life at close quarters.”
“And you really mean——”
“I really mean that here we are at the Metropolitan, and that we can’t talk on our way upstairs, and we won’t talk while there is music to listen to.”
Slowly their car had taken its grudged place in a long procession of its fellows, one by one unloading the human freight before the brilliantly lighted doorway. The pavement and the steps were a tossing sea of silk hats, colored scarfs, and glittering headdresses. Into this they plunged, hurried to the crowded elevator, traversed a lighted corridor, passed through a short, dark passage and came out to the Lennox box in the great, glaring horseshoe of the opera-house.
Dyker, baffled by the sudden stop that had been put to his protests, looked moodily upon the familiar picture. Below them, climbing to the rail behind which was massed the orchestra, was the pit, white bosoms and bare shoulders, too distant to present, to the unassisted eye, any hint of individuality. Above rose the teeming galleries, line above line of peering faces. And to right and left swept the great curve of the boxes splendid with lace and feathers and jewels.
He saw no more than that during the entire performance and, as Marian, even in the entr’actes, would talk of nothing but the music to which he had refused to listen, he heard less. The opera was “Lucia,” and as Wesley, with a taste worthy of a more discerning critic, considered that work nothing but a display of vocal gymnastics devised for a throat abnormally developed, he would probably have been, in any case, bored.
His father, who had what his friends called “family,” had married what everybody called “money,” but had managed to invest that commodity with a talent for choosing failures, and, when both parents had died, Wesley, fresh from the Columbia Law School, had amazedly found himself in a position where he would actually have to turn his education to practical account. For five years he held a thankless, underpaid and unmentioned partnership in a well-known firm of corporation-lawyers. He drew their briefs, and developed a genuine talent for the task, but he was never given a chance to plead. The worm of necessity spun its cocoon in his brain, but the emerging butterfly of ambition could find no way to liberty.
One day, however, he was commissioned to prepare the case in defense of a large contractor, quite justly accused of fraud. It happened that, when the young lawyer brought the results of his week’s work to his chief, the client in whose interests the work had been done was closeted with the head of the firm, and, Dyker being presented, that contractor learned of Wesley’s service. At the ensuing trial the client was acquitted, and remembered the service. He lived on the East Side and made most of his money from political jobs. The rest followed simply enough. Dyker was introduced to the powers of his patron’s district, and, thinking that he saw here the opportunity of which he had begun to despair, he had left his former employers and was already shouldering his way forward among his new friends. His former acquaintances mildly wondered what the devil he was after; his latter ones began to regard him as a clever fellow, and the newspapers printed stories of him as a young society man that gratuitously gave his legal talents to the help of the poor.
For his own part, Dyker was quite certain of what he was and of what he would be. He had seen, beneath his lowered lids, that a clever man could gain both fortune and power through political prestige, and he meant to use that means to his end. He had also, while still with the firm of corporation-lawyers, been presented to Marian Lennox by her opportunely-met, socially-aspiring mother, and was, whatever his relation with other members of her sex, quite as much in love with her as he could be with anybody. Realizing the power of her father’s fortune and the beauty of the girl herself, he had determined to marry her with as little delay as possible.
Until to-night he had delayed all open pursuit, because there had not been lacking signs to free him from fear of all male rivals; but that Marian should thus suddenly develop a purpose in life meant that he was to have a rival of a far more formidable sort. He set his teeth under his crisp mustache, folded his arms across his heart, and sat stolidly through the interminable opera: as soon as it was over, he meant to play his first lead.
He did play it—played it as soon as their car had crept up in answer to its electric-call and whisked them away into the night. As they shot up the flaming street, her clean-cut profile was almost as distinct as it had been in the box, and the girl, still thrilling with the memory of the music she so passionately loved, was close to the mood best suited to his own.
“May I talk now?” he asked ruefully.
She smiled.
“You mean to ask if you may argue,” she answered. “No, you may not argue against my determination, and I am a good deal surprised that a man of your sort should want to.”
“I don’t intend to argue,” he protested, leaning the merest trifle toward her. “I mean only to ask you if your determination is quite fixed.”
She bowed her splendid head.
“Quite fixed,” she said.
“So that argument would not shake it?”
“So that no argument could shake it.”
“Nor any persuasion?”
His voice had sunk only a semi-tone, but her feminine ear noted the change.
“Nor any persuasion,” she replied.
“Then suppose I presented to you neither argument nor persuasion, but a condition?”
“But there is no conceivable condition that could arise to change me. You refuse to understand that I see this thing as a duty.”
A lamp stronger than its fellows threw a quick ray full upon her face; her brown eyes were charmingly serious, her lips dangerously sweet.
“What I understand,” responded Dyker, “is that there is one situation in which a woman may find herself where there arises a duty that crowds all others from the board.”
His hand, in the semi-darkness, sought and found her own, its glove withdrawn, cool and firm and unretreating.
“You know the situation I mean,” he said. “I love you. I love you so much, Marian, that I am jealous of any work that would take you from me; I want so much of your love that I can spare none of it—none even for the poor and suffering.”
In that tight grasp her hand fluttered a little, but she did not answer: she could not answer, because, while her brain was telling her that a love so rapacious was necessarily niggardly, her heart was crying out that this was the love it wanted most of all.
“Marian”—his voice shook now with the emotion that was tugging at its leash—“you’ve known for some months that I loved you; all last winter you must have seen this coming; you can’t be unprepared to answer me!”
He possessed himself of her other hand, and pressed her inert palms between his own.
But the girl’s determination loomed large to her. Through her entire life she had been shut away from the real world, behind rich curtains and amid soft lights, until, fired with the unrest of a partial education, she had chanced upon a glimpse of classmates working in what they called the slums, and now, with all the enthusiasm of youth, she had resolved to join them. A maturer woman would not have taken so seriously a sudden impulse to engage in work for which she had no training, but Marian was young.
“I am not unprepared,” she answered. “I did know. But I know too that there are things that can make even love a finer, a better emotion.”
The words reminded her of some speech she had once heard in a play, and, entirely in earnest as she was, the sound of them from her own lips strengthened her. She was in love with Wesley Dyker, but she was more in love with renunciation.
The man, however, shook his head.
“No,” he said, “love is something ultimate. You can’t paint the lily; you can’t part it and share it; you must either cherish it or kill it. Which do you mean to do?”
The car had turned into the smoother way of Riverside Drive, where the lights are far fewer and less bright than Broadway’s. He could not see her face, but he could not doubt the resolve that was in her voice as she answered:
“I mean to take up the work that I have told you of.”
“But that’s folly, Marian!”
He had chosen the wrong term of description, and, the moment he uttered it, he knew that he had erred. “Folly” is the word that youth most resents.
Marian withdrew her hands.
“It is strange,” she said, “to hear you, of all men, laugh at an attempt to help the poor.”
“I am not laughing; I’m too serious to laugh. I am so serious that I can’t pick and choose phrases. I meant only that you can’t help these people without training——”
“I can get training.”
“Without knowing them?”
“The only way to know them is to go to them.”
“But even then, you can do so little. These settlements accomplish practically nothing. They are fads for the people that run them and playthings for the people they are intended to help. I can speak with authority, and I tell you that the young men and women, the boys and girls, that go to them, drop in only when they have nothing else to do, and all the rest of the time go their own ways.”
He forgot that he had said he would not argue. He used all his power to convince and to persuade; but if there is one human being that cannot be moved from a purpose, it is a young girl with a romantic ideal, smarting under what she conceives to be ridicule, and for the first time tasting what she believes to be the bitter-sweets of sacrifice. Even when the verbal war had been carried into her own house, he could bring no concession from her. If he was helping his neighbors, then he should be all the more anxious that she, as the woman he wanted to be his wife, should have precisely the experience that the settlement would supply her.
“Then you mean,” he asked, “that you do care—that you care at least a little?”
He put out his hands, but she did not seem to see them.
“I mean,” she answered, “that we must wait.”