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The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig

D >> David Graham Phillips >> The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig




"Sure to be upsetting," reflected she; and she laid it aside,
glancing now and then at the bold, nervous, irregular hand and
speculating about the contents and about the writer.

She had gone to bed greatly disturbed in mind as to whether she
was doing well to marry the obstreperous Westerner. "He fascinates
me in a wild, weird sort of a way when I'm with him," she had said
to herself before going to sleep, "and the idea of him is
fascinating in certain moods. And it is a temptation to take hold
of him and master and train him--like broncho-busting. But is it
interesting enough for--for marriage? Wouldn't I get horribly
tired? Wouldn't Grant and humdrum be better? less wearying? "And
when she awakened she found her problem all but solved." I'll send
him packing and take Grant," she found herself saying, "unless
some excellent reason for doing otherwise appears. Grandmother was
right. Engaging myself to him was a mood." Once more she was all
for luxury and ease and calmness, for the pleasant, soothing, cut-
and-dried thing. "A cold bath or a rough rub-down now and then,
once in a long while, is all very well. It makes one appreciate
comfort and luxury more. But that sort of thing every day--many
times each day--" Margaret felt her nerves rebelling as at the
stroking of velvet the wrong way.

She read all her other letters, finished her toilette, had on her
hat, and was having Selina put on her boots when she opened
Craig's letter and read:

"I must have been out of my mind this afternoon. You are wildly
fascinating, but you are not for me. If I led you to believe that
I wished to marry you, pray forget it. We should make each other
unhappy and, worse still, uncomfortable.

"Do I make myself clear? We are not engaged. I hope you will marry
Arkwright; a fine fellow, in every way suited to you, and, I
happen to know, madly in love with you. Please try to forgive me.
If you have any feeling for me stronger than friendship you will
surely get over it.

"Anyhow, we couldn't marry. That is settled.

"Let me have an answer to this. I shall be upset until I hear." No
beginning. No end. Just a bald, brutal casting-off. A hint--more
than a hint--of a fear that she would try to hold him in spite of
himself. She smiled--small, even teeth clenched and eyelids
contracted cruelly--as she read a second time, with this
unflattering suggestion obtruding. The humiliation of being
jilted! And by such a man!--the private shame--the public
disgrace--She sprang up, crunching her foot hard down upon one of
Selina's hands. "What is it?" said she angrily, at her maid's cry
of pain.

"Nothing, Miss," replied Selina, quickly hiding the wounded hand.
"You moved so quick I hadn't time to draw away. That was all."

"Then finish that boot!"

Selina had to expose the hand, Margaret looked down at it
indifferently, though her heel had torn the skin away from the
edge of the palm and had cut into the flesh.

"Hurry!" she ordered fiercely, as Selina fumbled and bungled.

She twitched and frowned with impatience while Selina finished
buttoning the boot, then descended and called Williams. "Get me
Mr. Craig on the telephone," she said.

"He's been calling you up several times to-day, ma'am,--"

"Ah!" exclaimed Margaret, eyes flashing with sudden delight.

"But we wouldn't disturb you."

"That was right," said Margaret. She was beaming now, was all
sunny good humor. Even her black hair seemed to glisten in her
simile. So! He had been calling up! Poor fool, not to realize that
she would draw the correct inference from this anxiety.

"Shall I call him?" "No. I'll wait. Probably he'll call again
soon. I'll be in the library."

She had not been roaming restlessly about there many minutes
before Williams appeared "He's come, himself, ma'am," said he. "I
told him I didn't know whether you'd be able to see him or not."

"Thank you, Williams," said Margaret sweetly. "Order the carriage
to come round at once. Leave Mr. Craig in the drawing-room. I'll
speak to him on the way out."

She dashed upstairs. "Selina! Selina!" she called. And when Selina
came: "Let me see that hand. I hurt you because I got news that
went through me like a knife. You understand, don't you?"

"It was nothing, Miss Rita," protested Selina. "I'd forgot it
myself already."

But Margaret insisted on assuring herself with her own eyes, got
blood on her white gloves, had to change them. As she descended
she was putting on the fresh pair--a new pair. How vastly more
than even the normal is a man's disadvantage in a "serious"
interview with a woman if she is putting on new gloves! She is
perfectly free to seem occupied or not, as suits her convenience;
and she can, by wrestling with the gloves, interrupt him without
speech, distract his attention, fiddle his thoughts, give him a
sense of imbecile futility, and all the time offer him no cause
for resentment against her. He himself seems in the wrong; she is
merely putting On her gloves.

She was wrong in her guess that Arkwright had been at him. He had
simply succumbed to his own fears and forebodings, gathered in
force as soon as he was not protected from them by the spell of
her presence. The mystery of the feminine is bred into men from
earliest infancy, is intensified when passion comes and excites
the imagination into fantastic activity about women. No man, not
the most experienced, not the most depraved, is ever able wholly
to divest himself of this awe, except, occasionally, in the case
of some particular woman. Awe makes one ill at ease; the woman
who, by whatever means, is able to cure a man of his awe of her,
to make him feel free to be himself, is often able to hold him,
even though he despises her or is indifferent to her; on the other
hand, the woman who remains an object of awe to a man is certain
to lose him. He may be proud to have her as his wife, as the
mother of his children, but he will seek some other woman to give
her the place of intimacy in his life.

At the outset on an acquaintance between a man and a woman his awe
for her as the embodiment of the mystery feminine is of great
advantage to her; it often gets him for her as a husband. In this
particular case of Margaret Severence and Joshua Craig, while his
awe of her was an advantage, it was also a disadvantage. It
attracted him; it perilously repelled him. He liked to release his
robust imagination upon those charms of hers--those delicate,
refined beauties that filled him with longings, delicious in their
intensity, longings as primeval in kind as well as in force as
those that set delirious the savage hordes from the German forests
when they first poured down over the Alps and beheld the jewels
and marbles and round, smooth, soft women of Italy's ancient
civilization. But at the same time he had the unmistakable, the
terrifying feeling of dare-devil sacrilege. What were his coarse
hands doing, dabbling in silks and cobweb laces and embroideries?
Silk fascinated him; but, while he did not like calico so well, he
felt at home with it. Yes, he had seized her, had crushed her
madly in the embrace of his plowman arms. But that seemed now a
freak of courage, a drunken man's deed, wholly beyond the nerve of
sobriety.

Then, on top of all this awe was his reverence for her as an
aristocrat, a representative of people who had for generations
been far removed above the coarse realities of the only life he
knew. And it was this adoration of caste that determined him. He
might overcome his awe of her person and dress, of her tangible
trappings; but how could he ever hope to bridge the gulf between
himself and her intangible superiorities? He was ashamed of
himself, enraged against himself for this feeling of worm gazing
up at star. It made a mockery of all his arrogant, noisy
protestations of equality and democracy.

"The fault is not in my ideas," thought he; "THEY'RE all right.
The fault's in me--damned snob that I am!"

Clearly, if he was to be what he wished, if he was to become what
he had thought he was, he must get away from this sinister
influence, from this temptation that had made him, at first onset,
not merely stumble, but fall flat and begin to grovel. "She is a
superior woman--that is no snob notion of mine," reflected he.
"But from the way I falter and get weak in the knees, she ought to
be superhuman--which she isn't, by any means. No, there's only one
thing to do--keep away from her. Besides, I'd feel miserable with
her about as my wife." My wife! The very words threw him into a
cold sweat.

So the note was written, was feverishly dispatched.

No sooner was it sent than it was repented. "What's the matter
with me?" demanded he of himself, as his courage came swaggering
back, once the danger had been banished. "Why, the best is not too
good for me. She is the best, and mighty proud she ought to be of
a man who, by sheer force of character, has lifted himself to
where I am and who, is going to be what I shall be. Mighty proud!
There are only two realities--money and brains. I've certainly got
more brains than she or any of her set; as for money, she hasn't
got that. The superiority is all on my side. I'm the one that
ought to feel condescending."

What had he said in his note? Recalling it as well as he could--
for it was one, the last, of more than a dozen notes he had
written in two hours of that evening--recalling phrases he was
pretty sure he had put into the one he had finally sent, in
despair of a better, it seemed to him he had given her a wholly
false impression--an impression of her superiority and of his
fear and awe. That would never do. He must set her right, must
show her he was breaking the engagement only because she was not
up to his standard. Besides, he wished to see her again to make
sure he had been victimized into an engagement by a purely
physical, swiftly-evanescent imagining. Yes, he must see her, must
have a look at her, must have a talk with her.

"It's the only decent, courageous thing to do in the
circumstances. Sending that note looked like cowardice--would be
cowardice if I didn't follow it up with a visit. And whatever else
I am, surely I'm not a coward!"

Margaret had indulged in no masculine ingenuities of logic. Woman-
like, she had gone straight to the practical point: Craig had
written instead of coming--he was, therefore, afraid of her.
Having written he had not fled, but had come--he was, therefore,
attracted by her still. Obviously the game lay in her own hands,
for what more could woman ask than that a man be both afraid and
attracted? A little management and she not only would save herself
from the threatened humiliation of being jilted--jilted by an
uncouth nobody of a Josh Craig!--but also would have him in
durance, to punish his presumption at her own good pleasure as to
time and manner. If Joshua Craig, hardy plodder in the arduous
pathway from plowboy to President, could have seen what was in the
mind so delicately and so aristocratically entempled in that
graceful, slender, ultra-feminine body of Margaret Severence's, as
she descended the stairs, putting fresh gloves upon her beautiful,
idle hands, he would have borrowed wings of the wind and would
have fled as from a gorgon.

But as she entered the room nothing could have seemed less
formidable except to the heart. Her spring dress--she was wearing
it for the first time--was of a pale green, suggesting the
draperies of islands of enchantment. Its lines coincided with the
lines of her figure. Her hat, trimmed to match, formed a magic
halo for her hair; and it, in turn, was the entrancing frame in
which her small, quiet, pallid face was set--that delicate,
sensitive face, from which shone, now softly and now brilliantly,
those hazel eyes a painter could have borrowed for a wood nymph.
In the doorway, before greeting him, she paused.

"Williams," she called, and Craig was thrilled by her "high-bred"
accent, that seemed to him to make of the English language a
medium different from the one he used and heard out home.

"Yes, ma'am," came the answer in the subtly-deferential tone of
the aristocracy of menialdom, conjuring for Craig, with the aid of
the woman herself and that aristocratic old room, a complete
picture of the life of upper-class splendor.

"Did you order the carriage, as I asked?"

"Yes, ma'am; it's at the door."

"Thank you." And Margaret turned upon an overwhelmed and dazzled
Craig. He did not dream that she had calculated it all with a view
to impressing him--and, if he had, the effect would hardly have
been lessened. Whether planned or not, were not toilette and
accent, and butler and carriage, all realities? Nor did he suspect
shrewd calculations upon snobbishness when she said: "I was in
such haste to dress that I hurt my poor maid's hand as she was
lacing my boot"--she thrust out one slender, elegantly-clad foot--
"no, buttoning it, I mean." Oh, these ladies, these ladies of the
new world--and the old--that are so used to maids and carriages
and being waited upon that they no more think of display in
connection with them than one would think of boasting two legs or
two eyes!

The advantage from being in the act of putting on gloves began at
the very outset. It helped to save her from deciding a mode of
salutation. She did not salute him at all. It made the meeting a
continuation, without break, of their previous meeting.

"How do you like my new dress?" she asked, as she drew the long
part of her glove up her round, white arm.

"Beautiful," he stammered.

From the hazel eyes shot a shy-bold glance straight into his; it
was as if those slim, taper fingers of hers had twanged the
strings of the lyre of his nerves. "You despise all this sort of
trumpery, don't you?"

"Sometimes a man says things he don't mean," he found tongue to
utter.

"I understand," said she sympathetically, and he knew she meant
his note. But he was too overwhelmed by his surroundings, by her
envelope of aristocracy, too fascinated by her physical charm, too
flattered by being on such terms with such a personage, to venture
to set her right. Also, she gave him little chance; for in almost
the same breath she went on: "I've been in such moods!--since
yesterday afternoon--like the devils in Milton, isn't it?--that
are swept from lands of ice to lands of fire?--or is it in Dante?
I never can remember. We must go straight off, for I'm late. You
can come, too--it's only a little meeting about some charity or
other. All rich people, of course--except poor me. I'm sure I
don't know why they asked me. I can give little besides advice.
How handsome you are to-day, Joshua!"

It was the first time she had called him by his first name. She
repeated it--"Joshua--Joshua"--as when one hits upon some
particularly sweet and penetrating chord at the piano, and strikes
it again, and yet again.

They were in the carriage, being whirled toward the great palace
of Mrs. Whitson, the latest and grandest of plutocratic monuments
that have arisen upon the ruins of the old, old-fashioned American
Washington. And she talked incessantly--a limpid, sparkling,
joyous strain. And either her hand sought his or his hers; at any
rate, he found himself holding her hand. They were almost there
before he contrived to say, very falteringly: "You got my note?"

She laughed gayly. "Oh, yes--and your own answer to it, Joshua--my
love"--the "my love" in a much lower, softer tone, with suggestion
of sudden tears trembling to fall.

"But I meant it," he said, though in tones little like any he was
used to hearing from his own lips. But he would not dare look
himself in the face again if he did not make at least a wriggle
before surrendering.

"We mean many things in as many moods," said she. "I knew it was
only a mood. I knew you'd come. I've such a sense of implicit
reliance on you. You are to me like the burr that shields the nut
from all harm. How secure and cozy and happy the nut must feel in
its burr. As I've walked through the woods in the autumn I've
often thought of that, and how, if I ever married--"

A wild impulse to seize her and crush her, as one crushes the ripe
berry for its perfume and taste, flared in his eyes. She drew away
to check it. "Not now," she murmured, and her quick breath and
flush were not art, but nature. "Not just now--Joshua."

"You make me--insane," he muttered between his teeth. "God!--I DO
love you!"

They were arrived; were descending. And she led him, abject and in
chains, into the presence of Mrs. Whitson and the most fashionable
of the fashionable set. "So you've brought him along?" cried Mrs.
Whitson. "Well, I congratulate you, Mr. Craig. It's very evident
you have a shrewd eye for the prizes of life, and a strong, long
reach to grasp them."

Craig, red and awkward, laughed hysterically, flung out a few
meaningless phrases. Margaret murmured: "Perhaps you'd rather go?"
She wished him to go, now that she had exhibited him.

"Yes--for Heaven's sake!" he exclaimed. He was clutching for his
braggart pretense of ease in "high society" like a drowning man
scooping armsful of elusive water.

She steered her captive in her quiet, easeful manner toward the
door, sent him forth with a farewell glance and an affectionate
interrogative, "This afternoon, at half-past four?" that could not
be disobeyed.

The mutiny was quelled. The mutineer was in irons. She had told
him she felt quite sure about him; and it was true, in a sense
rather different from what the words had conveyed to him. But it
was of the kind of security that takes care to keep the eye
wakeful and the powder dry. She felt she did not have him yet
where she could trust him out of her sight and could herself
decide whether the engagement was to be kept or broken.

"Why, my dear," said Mrs. Whitson, "he positively feeds out of
your hand! And such a wild man he seemed!"

Margaret, in the highest of high spirits, laughed with pleasure.

"A good many," pursued Mrs. Whitson, "think you are throwing
yourself away for love. But as I size men up--and my husband says
I'm a wonder at it--I think he'll be biggest figure of all at one
end of Pennsylvania Avenue or the other. Perhaps, first one end,
then at the other."

"I'm glad to hear you say that," cried Margaret, with the keen
enthusiasm with which, in time of doubt, we welcome an ally to our
own private judgment. "But," she hastened to add, with veiled eye
and slightly tremulous lip, "I'm ready to take whatever comes."

"That's right! That's right!" exclaimed Mrs. Whitson, a tender and
dreamy sentimentalist except in her own affairs. "Love is best!"

"Love is best," echoed Margaret.





CHAPTER XIII

A MEMORABLE MEETING


In that administration the man "next" the President was his
Secretary of the Treasury, John Branch, cold and smooth and able,
secreting, in his pale-gray soul, an icy passion for power more
relentless than heat ever bred. To speak of him as unscrupulous
would be like attributing moral quality to a reptile. For him
principle did not exist, except as an eccentricity of some
strangely-constructed men which might be used to keep them down.
Life presented itself to him as a series of mathematical problems,
as an examination in mathematics. To pass it meant a diploma as a
success; to fail to pass meant the abysmal disgrace of obscurity.
Cheating was permissible, but not to get caught at it. Otherwise
Branch was the most amiable of men; and why should he not have
been, his digestion being good, his income sufficient, his
domestic relations admirable, and his reputation for ability
growing apace? No one respected him, no one liked him; but every
one admired him as an intellect moving quite unhampered of the
restraints of conscience. In person he was rather handsome, the
weasel type of his face being well concealed by fat and by
judicious arrangements of mustache and side-whiskers. By
profession he was a lawyer, and had been most successful as
adviser to wholesale thieves on depredations bent or in search of
immunity for depredations done. It was incomprehensible to him why
he was unpopular with the masses. It irritated him that they could
not appreciate his purely abstract point of view on life; it
irritated him because his unpopularity with them meant that there
were limits, and very narrow ones, to his ambition.

It was to John Branch that Madam Bowker applied when she decided
that Joshua Craig must be driven from Washington. She sent for
him, and he came promptly. He liked to talk to her because she was
one of the few who thoroughly appreciated and sympathized with his
ideas of success in life. Also, he respected her as a personage in
Washington, and had it in mind to marry his daughter, as soon as
she should be old enough, to one of her grandnephews.

"Branch," said the old lady, with an emphatic wave of the ebony
staff, "I want that Craig man sent away from Washington."

"Josh, the joke?" said Branch with a slow, sneering smile that had
an acidity in it interesting in one so even as he.

"That's the man. I want you to rid us of him. He has been paying
attention to Margaret, and she is encouraging him."

"Impossible!" declared Branch. "Margaret is a sensible girl and
Josh has nothing--never will have anything."

"A mere politician!" declared Madam Bowker. "Like hundreds of
others that wink in with each administration and wink out with it.
He will not succeed even at his own miserable political game--and,
if he did, he would still be poor as poverty."

"I don't think you need worry about him and Margaret. I repeat,
she is sensible--an admirable girl--admirably brought up. She has
distinction. She has the right instincts."

Madam Bowker punctuated each of these compliments with a nod of
her haughty head. "But," said she, "Craig has convinced her that
he will amount to something."

"Ridiculous!" scoffed Branch, with an airy wave of the hand. But
there was in his tone a concealment that set the shrewd old lady
furtively to watching him.

"What do they think of him among the public men?" inquired she.

"He's laughed at there as everywhere."

Her vigilance was rewarded; as Branch said that, malignance
hissed, ever so softly, in his suave voice, and the snake peered
furtively from his calm, cold eyes. Old Madam Bowker had not lived
at Washington's great green tables for the gamblers of ambition
all those years without learning the significance of eyes and
tone. For one politician to speak thus venomously of another was
sure sign that that other was of consequence; for John Branch, a
very Machiavelli at self-concealment and usually too egotistic to
be jealous, thus to speak, and that, without being able to conceal
his venom--"Can it be possible," thought the old lady, "that this
Craig is about to be a somebody?" Aloud she said: "He is a
preposterous creature. The vilest manners I've seen in three
generations of Washington life. And what vanity, what assumptions!
The first time I met him he lectured me as if I were a schoolgirl
--lectured me about the idle, worthless life he said I lead. I
decided not to recognize him next time I saw him. Up he came, and
without noticing that I did not speak he poured out such insults
that I was answering him before I realized it."

"He certainly is a most exasperating person."

"So Western! The very worst the West ever sent us. I don't
understand how he happened to get about among decent people. Oh, I
remember, it was Grant Arkwright who did it. Grant picked him up
on one of his shooting trips."

"He is insufferable," said Branch.

"You must see that the President gets rid of him. I want it done
at once. I assure you, John, my alarm is not imaginary. Margaret
is very young, has a streak of sentimentality in her. Besides, you
know how weak the strongest women are before a determined assault.
If the other sex wasn't brought up to have a purely imaginary fear
of them I don't know what would become of the world."

Branch smiled appreciatively but absently. "The same is true of
men," said he. "The few who amount to anything--at least in active
life--base their calculations on the timidity and folly of their
fellows rather than upon their own abilities. About Craig--I'd
like to oblige you, but--well, you see, there is--there are
certain political exigencies--"

"Nonsense!" interrupted the old lady. "I know the relative
importance of officials. A mere understrapper like Craig is of no
importance."

"The fact is," said Branch with great reluctance, "the President
has taken a fancy to Craig."

Branch said it as if he hardly expected to be believed--and he
wasn't. "To be perfectly frank," he went on, "you know the
President, how easily alarmed he is. He's afraid Craig may, by
some crazy turn of this crazy game of politics, develop into a
Presidential possibility. Of course, it's quite absurd, but--"

"The more reason for getting rid of him."

"The contrary. The President probably reasons that, if Craig has
any element of danger in him the nearer he keeps him to himself
the better. Craig, back in the West, would be free to grow. Here
the President can keep him down if necessary. And I think our
friend Stillwater will succeed in entangling him disastrously in
some case sooner or later." There Branch laughed pleasantly, as at
the finding of the correct solution to a puzzling problem in
analytics or calculus.

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