The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories

One morning, while Webb was still one with his little family, he read, as was usual with him on the long ride down-town, his Harlem edition of one of the New York dailies.  He finished the news, the editorials, the special articles:  nothing was there to upset the equilibrium of his life.  His attention was attracted, as he was about to close the paper, by a long leaded “story” of a ball given the night before by some people named Webb.  Their superior social importance was made manifest by the space and type allotted them, by the fact that their function was not held over for the Sunday issue, and by the imposing rhetoric of the head-lines.

Andrew read the story with a feeling of personal interest.  From that moment, unsuspected by himself, the readjustment of his mind to other interests began—­the divorce of his inner life from the simple conditions of his youth.

Thereafter he searched the Society columns for accounts of the doings of the Webb folk.  Thence, by a natural deflection, he became generally interested in the recreations of the great world:  he acquired a habit, much to his sister’s delight, of buying the weekly chronicles of Society, and all the Sunday issues of the important dailies.

At first the sparkle and splendor, the glamour and mystery of the world of fashion dazzled and delighted him.  It was to him what fairy tales of prince and princess are to children.  For even he, prosaic, phlegmatic, with nerves of iron and brain of shallows, had in him that germ of the picturesque which in some natures shoots to high and full-flowered ideals, in others to lofty or restless ambitions, coupled with a true love of art; and yet again develops a weed of tenacious root and coarse enduring fibre which a clever maker of words has named snobbery.

Gradually within Andrew’s slow mind grew a dull resentment against Fate for having played him so sinister a trick as to give him the husk without the kernel, a title without a story that any one would ever care to read.  Why, when one of those Webb babies was due,—­the family appeared to be a large one,—­could not his little wandering ego have found its way into that ugly but notable mansion on Fifth Avenue instead of having been spitefully guided to a New Jersey farm?  Not that Andrew expressed himself in this wise.  Had he put his thoughts into words, he would probably have queried in good terse English:  “Why in thunder can’t I be Schuyler Churchill Webb instead of a nobody in Harlem?  He’s just my age, and I might as well have been he as not.”

His twenty-third birthday cake, prepared by loving hands, had scarcely been eaten when the waves of snobbery first lapped his feet.  At twenty-five they had broken high above his head, and the surge was ever in his ears.  He was not acutely miserable:  his health was too perfect, his appetite too good.  But deeper and deeper each week did he bury his perplexed head in the social folk-lore of New York and Newport.  Oftener and oftener during the city season did he promenade central Fifth Avenue from half-past four until half-past five in the afternoon of pleasant days.  He lived for the hour which would find him sauntering from Forty-first Street to the Park and back again.  He knew all the fashionable men and women by sight.  There was no one to tell him their names, but the names themselves were more familiar than the rows of figures in his books down-town.  He fitted them to such presences as seemed to demand them as their right.  He grew into a certain intimacy with the slender trimly accoutred girls who held themselves so erectly and wore their hair with such maidenly severity.  They were so different in appearance from all the women he had known or seen, and from the languishing creatures in his mother’s cherished Book of Beauty, that he came to look upon them as a race apart, which they were; as something not quite human, which was a slander.  As they stalked along so briskly in their tailor-made frocks, their cheeks and eyes brilliant with health, the average observer would have likened them to healthy high-bred young race-horses.

On the whole, however, Andrew gave the full measure of his admiration to the women who took their exercise less violently.  When the spring came, and the Park was green, he would stand in the plaza, surrounded by its great hotels, the deep rumble of the avenue behind him, forgetting even the phalanxes of tramping girls, with their accessories of boys and poodles.  Before him were the wide gates of the Park, the green wooded knolls rolling away—­almost to his home in Harlem.  Just beyond the gates was a bend in the driveway, and he never tired of watching the stream of carriages wind as from a cavern and roll out to the avenue.  The vivid background claimed as its own those superb traps with their dainty burdens of women who held their heads so haughtily, whose plumage was so brilliant.  The horses glittered and pranced.  The parasols fluttered like butterflies above the flower-faces beneath.  Webb would stand entranced, bitterly thankful that there was such a scene for him to look upon, choking back a sob that he had no part in it.

When summer came and Society flitted to Newport, that paradise in which he only half believed, he was more lonely and glum than the loneliest and glummest and most blasé clubman, who clung to his window because he hated Newport and could not afford London.  Quite accidentally, when his infatuation was about three years old, he came into a singular compensation.  In the summer, during his ten days’ vacation, when he was tramping through the woods, he fell in with a party of Western people, who manifested much interest in New York.  To Andrew there was only one New York, and with that his soul was identified.  Insensibly, he began to talk of New York Society as if it were part of his daily experience.  His careful, if restricted, study of its habits had made him sufficiently familiar with it to enable him to deceive the wholly ignorant.  He described the people, their brilliant “functions,” the individualities of certain of its members.  He talked freely of Ward McAllister, and imitated that gentleman’s peculiarities of thought and speech, so familiar to the newspaper reader.  For the time he deceived himself as well as his hearers; and so fascinating did he find this delusion, that he remained with the inquisitive and guileless party until the end of his vacation.  After that he made it a point each year to attach himself to some party of tourists, and to tell them of New York Society, plus Andrew Webb.  He was not a liar in the ordinary sense of the word.  In his home and in the bank where he played his daily game of give-and-take, his reputation for veracity was enviable.  Every mortal not an idiot has his day-dreams.  Webb merely dreamed his aloud to an audience.  And these summers were the oases of his life.

He had one other pleasure equally keen.  On the first day of each month he dined at Delmonico’s.  In the beginning it meant the forfeit of his usual stand-up luncheon, but he had decided that the cause was worthy of the sacrifice.  One evening, however, he lingered on upper Fifth Avenue longer than usual, and entered late.  The restaurant was crowded.  He stood at the door, hesitating, knowing that he would not be permitted to seat himself at a table already occupied by even one person.  Suddenly a small common-looking little man came forward and touched his arm.

“Won’t you share my table?” he said, effusively.  “My name’s Slocum, and I’ve seen you here often.  You mustn’t go away.  Come in.”

Andrew gratefully accepted, and followed Mr. Slocum over to the little table on the other side of the room.

“I say,” said Slocum, after Webb had ordered his dinner, “I’ve hit on a plan.  It’s been in my head for some time.  How often do you come here?”

“Once a month.”

“That’s my game exactly.  I’m a clerk on a small salary; but I must have one good dinner a month, if I don’t have my hair cut.  Now, suppose we dine together.  One portion’s enough for two, and the same dinner’ll only cost each of us half what it does now.  See?”

Andrew did not take kindly to Mr. Slocum:  the vulgar young man was so different from the magnificent creatures about him.  But the offer was not to be ignored, and he closed with it.  For the following three years, until he was twenty-eight, he dined regularly at Delmonico’s, and in that rarefied atmosphere his head gently swam.  He forgot the flat in Harlem,—­forgot that he was Andrew, not Schuyler Churchill Webb.