Jack London - "The Son of the Wolf"

Thomas Carlyle - "History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 9"

William Dean Howells - "The Landlord at Lions Head, Complete"

E. Phillips Oppenheim - "The Tempting of Tavernake"

The Philistines

A >> Arlo Bates >> The Philistines




"I dare say he is right," the other returned, smiling. "You had better
beware of stock gambling, if you are not desirous of ending your days
in a poorhouse."

"But what can one do? It is only the men of large experience and so
much capital that they do not need it who have a chance at safe
investments."

He felt that he was bungling horribly, but he knew no other way of
getting on in his attempt. He was terrified by the openness of his
tactics. It seemed to him that any man must be able to perceive what he
was driving at, but he desperately assured himself that after all
Hubbard could not possibly have any reason to suspect him of a design
of pumping him.

"Oh, there are plenty of safe investments," the sitter said, as if the
matter were one of no great moment. Then, looking at his watch, he
added, "I must go in fifteen minutes. I have an engagement."

Fenton dared not risk another direct trial, but he skirted about the
subject on which his thoughts were fixed. His attempts, however, though
ingenious, were fruitless; and he saw Hubbard step down from the dais
where he posed, with a baffled sense of having failed utterly.

"The country is really beginning to look quite spring-like," he said,
as he stood by while his sitter put on his overcoat.

He spoke in utter carelessness, simply to avoid a silence which would
perhaps seem a little awkward; but the shot of accident hit the mark at
which his careful aim had been vain.

"Yes, it is," the other responded. "I was out of town with Staggchase
yesterday, looking at some meadows we talk of buying for a factory
site, and I was surprised to see how forward things are."

Yesterday Mrs. Staggchase had casually mentioned to Fred Rangely that
her husband had gone to Feltonville; and at the St. Filipe Club in the
evening, as they were playing poker, Rangely had excused the absence of
Mr. Staggchase, who was to be of the party, by telling this fact.

After Hubbard was gone, Fenton stood half dizzy with mingled exultation
and shame. He exulted in his victory, but he felt as if he had
committed murder.

And that evening Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson received a note from Mr.
Irons, in which Feltonville was mentioned.




XV

LIKE COVERED FIRE.
Much Ado about Nothing; iii.--2.

Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was playing a somewhat difficult game, and
she was playing it well. She was entertaining Mr. Greenfield, the
Feltonville member, and she had also as a casual guest for the evening,
Mr. Erastus Snaffle, and successfully to work the one off against the
other was a task from which the cleverest of society women might be
excused for shrinking, even had it been presented to her in terms of
her own circle.

Greenfield was an honest, straightforward countryman; big, and rather
burly, with a clear eye and a curling chestnut beard. He was a man at
once of great force of character, and of singular simplicity. He
exerted a vast influence in his country neighborhood in virtue of the
respect inspired by his invincible integrity, a certain shrewdness
which was the more effective at short range from the fact that it was
really narrow in its spread, and perhaps most of all of his bluff,
demonstrative kindliness. Tom Greenfield's hearty laugh and cordial
handshake had won him more votes than many a more able man has been
able to secure by the most thorough acquaintance with the questions and
interests with which election would make it the duty of a man to be
concerned; but it must be added that no man ever used his influence
more disinterestedly and honestly, or more conscientiously fulfilled
the duties of his position, as he understood them.

Such a man was peculiarly likely to become the victim of a woman like
Mrs. Sampson. The plea of relationship on which she had sought his
acquaintance disarmed suspicion at the outset. His country manners were
familiar with family ties as a genuine bond, and he had no reason
whatever to suppose that any ulterior motive was possible to this woman
who affected to be so ignorant of politics and public business.

In the weeks which had elapsed since her interview with Alfred Irons,
Mrs. Sampson had been making the most of the fraction of the season
which remained to her. She had offered excuses which Greenfield's
simple soul found satisfactory why she had not sought her cousin's
acquaintance early in the winter, and the very irksomeness of the
enforced absence from his country home which seized him as spring came
on, made him the more susceptible to the blandishments of the mature
siren who, with cunning art, was meshing her nets about him.

He had quite fallen into the habit of passing his unoccupied evenings
with the widow, and she in turn had denied herself to some of her
familiar friends on occasions when she had reason to expect him. Had
she known he was likely to come this evening, she would have taken care
to guard against his meeting with Snaffle; but as that gentleman was
first in the field, she had her choice between sending Greenfield away
and seeing them together. Like the clever woman she was, she chose the
latter alternative, and found, too, her account in so doing.

Erastus Snaffle was more familiarly than favorably known in financial
circles of Boston, as the man who had put afloat more wild-cat stocks
than any other speculator on the street. It might be supposed that his
connection with any scheme would be enough to wreck its prospects, yet
whatever he took hold of floated for a time. There was always a feeling
among his victims that at length he had come to the place where he must
connect himself with a respectable scheme for the sake of re-
establishing his reputation; but this hope was never realized. Perhaps
whatever he touched ceased from that moment to be either reliable or
respectable. However, since Snaffle was possessed of so inexhaustible a
fund of plausibility that he never failed to find investors who placed
confidence in his wildest statements, it after all made very little
difference to him what his reputation or his financial standing might
be.

By one of those singular compensations in which nature seems now and
then to make a struggle to adjust the average of human characteristics
with something approaching fairness, Snaffle was hardly less gullible
than he was skilful in ensnaring others. He was continually making a
fortune by launching some bogus stock or other, but it seemed always to
be fated that he should lose it again in some equally wild scheme
started by a brother sharper. Perhaps between his professional strokes
he was obliged to practise at raising credulity in himself merely to
keep his hand in; perhaps it was simply that the habit of believing
financial absurdities had become a sort of second nature in him; or yet
again is it possible that he felt obliged to assume credulity in regard
to the falsehoods of his fellow sharpers, as a sort of equivalent for
the faith he so often demanded of them; but, whatever may have been the
reason, it was at least a fact that his money went in much the same way
it came.

In person, Erastus Snaffle was not especially prepossessing. His face
would have been more attractive had the first edition of his chin been
larger and the succeeding ones smaller, while the days when he could
still boast of a waist were so far in the irrevocable past that the
imagination refused so long a flight as would be required to reach it.
His eyes were small and heavy-lidded, but in them smouldered a dull
gleam of cunning that at times kindled into a pointed flame. His dress
was in keeping with his person, and his manner quite as vulgar as
either.

He was sitting to-night in one corner of the sofa, his corpulent person
heaped up in an unshapely mass, talking with a fluency that now and
then died away entirely, while he paused to speculate what sort of a
game his hostess might be playing with Mr. Greenfield.

"The fact is," Mrs. Sampson was saying, as Snaffle recalled his
attention from one of these fits of abstraction, "that I don't know
what I shall do this summer; and I don't like to believe that summer is
so near that I must decide soon."

"You were at Ashmont last year, weren't you?" Snaffle asked. "Why don't
you go there again."

Mrs. Sampson shot him a quick glance which Snaffle understood at once
to mean that he was to second her in something she was attempting. He
did not yet get his clew clearly enough to understand just how, but the
look put him on the alert, as the hostess answered,--

"Oh, it is all spoiled. The railroad has been put through and all the
summer visitors are giving it up. I'm sure I don't know what will
become of all the poverty-stricken widows that made their living out of
taking boarders. That railroad has been an expensive job for Ashmont in
every way."

Greenfield smiled, his big, genial smile which had so much warmth in
it.

"That isn't usually the way people look at the effect of a railroad on
a town."

This time the look which Mrs. Sampson gave Snaffle told him so plainly
what she wanted him to do that he spoke at once, her almost
imperceptible nod showing him that he was on the right track.

"Oh, a railroad is always the ruin of a small town," he said, "unless
it is its terminus. It sucks all the life out of the villages along the
way. You go along any of the lines in Massachusetts, and you will find
that while the towns have been helped by the road, the small villages
have been knocked into a cocked hat. All the young people have left
them; all the folks in the neighborhood go to some city to do their
trading, and the stuffing is knocked out of things generally."

Mrs. Sampson looked at Snaffle with a thoroughly gratified expression.

"I don't know much about the business part of the question, of course,"
she said, "but I do know that a railroad takes all the young men out of
a village. A woman I boarded with at Ashmont last year wrote to me the
other day in the greatest distress because her only son had left her.
She said it was all the railroad, and her letter was really pathetic."

"Oh, that's a woman's way of looking at it," rejoined Greenfield, the
greatest struggle of whose life, as Mrs. Sampson was perfectly well
aware, was to keep at home his only child, a youth just coming to
manhood. "It is easy enough for boys to get away nowadays, and just
having a railroad at the door wouldn't make any great difference."

"It does, though, make a mighty sight of difference," Snaffle said,
rolling his head and putting his plump white hands together. "Somehow
or other, the having that train scooting by day in and day out
unsettles the young fellows. The whistle stirs them up, and keeps
reminding them how easy it is to go out West or somewhere or other.
I've seen it time and again."

"Well," Greenfield returned, a shadow over his genial face, "I have a
youngster that's got the Western fever pretty bad without any railroads
coming to Feltonville. But what you say is only one side of the
question. When a railroad comes it always brings business in one way or
another. The increase of transportation facilities is sure to build
things up."

"Oh, yes, it builds them up," Snaffle chuckled, as if the idea afforded
him infinite amusement, "but how does it work. There are two or three
men in the town who start market gardens and make something out of it.
They sell their produce in the city and they do their trading there;
they hire Irish laborers from outside the village; and how much better
off is the town, except that it can tax them a trifle more if it can
get hold of the valuation of their property." "Which it generally
can't," interpolated Greenfield grimly, with an inward reminder of
certain experiences as assessor.

"Or somebody starts a factory," Snaffle went on, "and then the town is
made, ain't it? Outside capital is invested, outside operatives brought
in to turn the place upside down and to bring in all the deviltries
that have been invented, and all the town has to show in the long run
is a little advance in real estate over the limited area where they
want to build houses for the mill-hands. There's no end of rot talked
about improving towns by putting up factories, but I can't see it
myself."

Snaffle sometimes said that he believed in nothing but making money,
and there was never any reason to suppose he held an opinion because he
expressed it. He said what he felt to be politic, and a long and
complicated experience enabled him to defend any view with more or less
plausibility upon a moment's notice. He was clever enough to see that
for some reason the widow wished him to pursue the line of talk he had
taken, and he was ready enough to oblige her. He never took the trouble
to inquire of himself what his opinions were, because that question was
of so secondary importance; he merely exerted himself to make the most
of any points that presented themselves to his mind in favor of the
side it was for his advantage to support.

"'Pon my word," Greenfield said, with a laugh, "you talk like an old
fogy of the first water. I wouldn't have suspected you of looking at
things that way."

"Mr. Snaffle is always surprising," Mrs. Sampson said, with her most
dazzling smile, "but he is generally right."

"Thank you. I can't help at any rate seeing that there are two sides to
this thing, and I am too old a bird to be caught with the common chaff
that people talk."

Mr. Greenfield settled himself comfortably in his chair and laughed
softly. The discussion was so purely theoretical that he could be
amused without looking upon it seriously.

"For my part," he remarked, his big hand playing with a paper-knife on
one of the little tables, which, to a practised eye, suggested cards,
"I am of the progressive party, thank you. I believe in opening up the
country and putting railroads where they will do the most good. A few
people get their old prejudices run against, but on the whole it is for
the interest of a town to have a railroad, and it is nonsense to talk
any other way."

Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson leaned forward to lay her fingers upon the
speaker's arm.

"That is just it, Cousin Tom," she said, with a languishing glance.
"You always look at things in so large a way. You never let the matter
of personal interest decide, but think of the public good,"

The flattery was somewhat gross, but men will swallow a good deal in
the way of praise from women. They are generally slow to suspect the
fair sex of sarcasm, and allow themselves the luxury of enjoying the
pleasure of indulging their vanity untroubled by unpleasant doubts
concerning the sincerity of compliments which from masculine lips would
offend them. Greenfield laughed with a perceptible shade of
awkwardness, but he was evidently not ill pleased.

"Oh, well," he returned, "that is because thus far it has happened that
my personal interests and my convictions have worked together so well.
You might see a difference if they didn't pull in the same line."

Mrs. Sampson considered a moment, and then rose, bringing out a
decanter of sherry with a supply of glasses and of biscuit from a
convenient closet in the bottom of a secretary.

"That's business," Snaffle said, joyously. "Sherry ain't much for a man
of my size, but it's better than nothing."

"It is a hint though," the hostess said, filling his glass.

"A hint!" he repeated.

"Yes; a hint that it is getting late, and that I am tired, and you must
go home."

"Oh, ho!" he laughed uproariously; "now I won't let you in for that
good thing on the Princeton Platinum stock. You'll wish you hadn't
turned me out of the house when you see that stock quoted at fifty per
cent above par."

"Ah, I know all about Princeton Platinum," she responded, showing her
white teeth rather more than was absolutely demanded by the occasion;
"besides, I've no money to put into anything."

"What about Princeton Platinum?" Greenfield asked, turning toward the
other a shrewd glance. "I've heard a good deal of talk about it lately,
but I didn't pay much attention to it."

"Princeton Platinum," the hostess put in before Snaffle could speak,
"is Mr. Snaffle's latest fairy story. It is a dream that people buy
pieces of for good hard samoleons, and"--

"Good _what?_" interrupted the country member.

"Shekels, dollars, for cash under whatever name you choose to give it;
and then some fine morning they all wake up."

"Well?" demanded Snaffle, to whom the jest seemed not in the least
distasteful. "And what then?"

"Oh, what is usually left of dreams when one wakes up in the morning?"

The fat person of the speculator shook with appreciation of the wit of
this sally, which did not seem to Greenfield so funny as from the
laughter of the others he supposed it must really be. The latter rose
when Snaffle did and prepared to say good-night, but Mrs. Sampson
detained him. "I want to speak with you a moment," she said. "Good-
night, Mr. Snaffle. Bear us in mind when Princeton Platinum has made
your fortune, and don't look down on us."

"No fear," he returned. "When that happens, I shall come to you for
advice how to spend it."

There was too much covetousness in her voice as she answered jocosely
that she could tell him. The struggle of life made even a jesting
supposition of wealth excite her cupidity. She sighed as she turned
back into the parlor and motioned Greenfield to a seat. Placing herself
in a low, velvet-covered chair, she stretched out her feet before her,
displaying the black silk stocking upon a neat instep as she crossed
them upon a low stool.

"I am sure I don't know how to say what I want to," she began, knitting
her brows in a perplexity that was only part assumed. "Something has
come to me in the strangest way, and I think I ought to tell you,
although I haven't any interest in it, and it certainly isn't any of my
business."

Her companion was too blunt to be likely to help her much. He simply
asked, in the most straightforward manner,--

"What is it?"

"It's about public business," she said. "Why!" she added, as if a
sudden light had broken upon her. "I really believe I was going to be a
lobbyist. Fancy me lobbying! What does a lobbyist do?"

"Nothing that you'd be likely to have any hand in," returned
Greenfield, smiling at the absurdity of the proposition. "What is all
this about?"

"I suppose I should not have thought of it but for the turn the talk
took to-night," she returned with feminine indirectness. "It was odd,
wasn't it, that we should get to talking of the harm railroads do, when
it was about a railroad that I was going to talk."

"There's only one railroad scheme on foot this spring that I know
anything about, and that's for a branch of the Massachusetts Outside
Railroad through Wachusett. That isn't in the Legislature either."

"That's the one. It's going to be in the Legislature. There's going to
be an attempt to change the route."

"Change the route?"

"Yes, so it will go through--but will you promise not to tell this to a
living mortal?"

"Of course."

"I suppose," she said, regarding her slipper intently, "that I really
ought not to tell you; but I can't help it somehow. Your name is to be
used."

"My name?"

"Yes, the men who are planning the thing say that it will be so evident
that you'd want the road to go this new way, that if you vote with the
Wachusett interest they'll swear you are bought."

"Swear I'm bought? Pooh! Tom Greenfield is too well known for that sort
of talk to hold water."

"But through your own town"--

Mrs. Sampson regarded her companion closely as she slowly pronounced
these words. They roused him like an electric shock.

"Through Feltonville?"

She nodded, compressing her lips, but saying nothing.

"Phew! This is a tough nut to crack. But are you sure that is to be
tried?"

"Yes; there is a scheme for a few monopolists to buy up mill privileges
and run factories at Feltonville; and they mean to make the road serve
them, instead of its being put where the public need it."

"So that's what Lincoln's been raking up in Boston," Greenfield said to
himself. "I knew he was up to some deviltry. Wants to sell off those
meadows he's been gathering in on mortgages."

"Of course you'll want to help your town," Mrs. Sampson said,
regretfully. "The men that voted for you'll expect you to do it; but
it's helping on a sly scheme at the expense of the state. I'm sorry
you've got to be on that side."

"Got to be on that side?" he retorted, starting up. "Who says I've got
to be on that side? we'll see about that before we get through. The men
that voted for me expect me to do what is right, and I don't think
they'll be disappointed just yet."

And all things considered, Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson thought she had
done a good evening's work.




XVI

WEIGHING DELIGHT AND DOLE.
Hamlet; i.--2.

"Oh, this is completely captivating," Mrs. Frostwinch said, as she sat
down to luncheon in Edith Fenton's pretty dining-room, and looked at
the large mound-like bouquet of richly tinted spring leaves which
adorned the centre of the table. "That is the advantage of having
brains. One always finds some delightful surprise or other at your
house."

"Thank you," Edith returned, gayly; "but at your house one always has a
delightful surprise in the hostess, so you are not forced to resort to
makeshifts."

Helen Greyson, the third member of the party, smiled and shook her
head.

"Really," she said, "is one expected to keep up to the level of
elaborate compliment like that? I fear I can only sit by in admiring
silence while you two go on."

"Oh, no," the hostess responded. "Mrs. Frostwinch is to talk to you.
That is what you people are here for. I am only to listen."

Edith had invited Helen and Mrs. Frostwinch to take luncheon with her,
and she had really done it to bring these two more closely together.
She was fond of them both, and the effect of her life in the world into
which her marriage had introduced her had been to render her capable of
judging both these women broadly. She admired them both, and while her
feeling of affection had by circumstances been more closely cemented
with Helen, she felt that a strong friendship was possible between
herself and Mrs. Frostwinch should the lines of their lives ever fall
much together.

The modern woman, particularly if she be at all in society, has
generally to accept the possibilities of friendship in place of that
gracious boon itself. The busy round of life to-day gives ample
opportunity for judging of character, so that it is well nigh
impossible not to feel that some are worthy of friendship, some
especially gifted by nature with the power of inspiring it, while, on
the other hand, there are those who repel or with whom the bond would
be impossible. But friendship, however much it be the result of eternal
fitness and the inevitable consequence of the meeting of two harmonious
natures, is a plant of slow growth, and few things which require time
and tranquillity for their nourishment flourish greatly in this age of
restlessness and intense mental activity. The radical and unfettered
Bohemian, or such descendants of that famous race as may be supposed
still to survive, attempts to leap over all obstacles, to create what
must grow, and to turn comradeship into friendship simply because one
naturally grows out of the other; the more conservative and logical
Philistine recognizes the futility of this attitude, and in his too
careful consistency sometimes needlessly brings about the very same
failure by pursuing the opposite course.

Edith was not of the women who naturally analyze their own feelings
toward others over keenly, but one cannot live in a world without
sharing its mental peculiarities. The times are too introspective to
allow any educated person to escape self-examination. The century which
produced that most appalling instance of spiritual exposure, the
"_Journal Intime_" which it is impossible to read without blushing that
one thus looks upon the author's soul in its nakedness, leaves small
chance for self-unconsciousness. Edith could not help examining her
mental attitude toward her companions, and it was perhaps a proof of
the sweetness of her nature that she found in her thought nothing of
that shortcoming in them, or reason for lack of fervor in friendship
other than such as must come from lack of intercourse.

Perhaps some train of thought not far removed from the foregoing made
her say, as the luncheon progressed,--

"Really, it seems to me as if life proceeded at a pace so rapid
nowadays that one had not time even to be fond of anybody."

"It goes too fast for one to have much chance to show it," Helen
responded; "but one may surely be fond of one's friends, even without
seeing them."

"If you will swear not to tell the disgraceful fact," Mrs. Frostwinch
said, "I'll confess that I abhor Walt Whitman; but that one dreadful,
disreputably slangy phrase of his, 'I loaf and invite my soul,' echoes
through my brain like an invitation to Paradise."

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