The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories

For one hour Andrew sat there, and at its end he comprehended why the cottagers did not concern themselves about the tickets sold.  Not one icy glance had been directed at the treble row of seats, not one inquiring stare bent upon the occasional tourist-couple who summoned courage to take a whirl.  He and his companions might have been invisible intruders on a foreign planet, for all the notice the elect took of them.  There was nothing overt, nothing unkind, but the stranger was as effectually frozen out as if he had fled before a battery of lorgnettes.  The cottagers were like one large family.  There was no more reserve among the young people than if they had been a party of happy well-trained schoolchildren.  What wonder that the stranger within their gates felt his remoteness!  During the “Lancers” they almost romped.  They might have been on the lawn of one of their own cottages, and these outsiders hanging on the fence.  To any and all without their world they were unaffectedly oblivious.

At the end of the hour Andrew rose heavily and left his seat.  His face was gray, his knees shook a little.  He understood.

* * * * *

But his cup of bitterness was not yet full.  As he made his way down the passage behind one of the rows of chairs reserved for the cottagers, he beheld a girl who had just entered.  He stood still and stared at her, wondering that he had ever thought other women beautiful.  If those he had worshipped were princesses, this was a goddess.  Only New York could give her that nameless distinction, so curiously unlike the graceful breeding of older lands,—­the difference between the hothouse orchid and the lily of ancient parks.  This girl’s figure was more Junoesque than was usual with her kind, her waist larger.  She was very tall.  Her carriage was one of regal simplicity, as if she were wont to walk on stars.  Her shining brown hair was gathered into a knot at the base of her classic head.  Her brow and chin and throat were perfect in their modelling.  Her skin, of a marvellous whiteness, seemed to shed a light of its own; one might surely examine it with a microscope and find no flaw.  Her mouth and nose were irregular, but her large blue-gray eyes shone triumphant, and she had beautiful ears.  She wore a simple gown of pale blue organdie, clinging to her faultless figure, even at the throat and wrists.  At her right was the new-found relative of the Webbs, half a head too short to reach that exquisite ear with his mumblings.  About her were several other men.

Andrew’s capacity for love may not have been very profound, but he loved this woman at once and finally.  It was a love that would have delighted the cynical Schopenhauer and the philosophical Darwin.  The instinct of selection had never been more spontaneously and unerringly exercised.  He was conscious of neither passion nor sentiment, however.  She hovered in his visions as a companion at great functions—­his possession whom all the world would envy.  It was not so much she he loved as what she represented.

His attention was momentarily distracted by the remarkable antics of an elderly man.  This person was bowing and genuflecting before the goddess, rolling his eyes upward, throwing out his hands, clasping and wringing them—­a pantomime of speechless admiration.  To Andrew he looked like an elderly billy-goat with a thorn in its hoof.  The goddess looked down upon him with an expression of good-natured contempt.  The men applauded heartily.  Andrew once more riveted his gaze on the face which had completed his undoing.  In a moment the girl’s clear eyes met his, then moved past as indifferently as if she had gazed upon space.  Andrew turned, forgetting his hat, and almost ran from the house, down the street, and up the stairs to his apartment.  He flung himself into a chair, buried his face in his hands, and groaned aloud.  The hopelessness of his case surged through his brain with pitiless reiteration.  He might as well attempt to fly to one of the cold stars above his casement as to besiege the society of New York.  There was literally no human being out of earth’s millions to give him the line that would pass him through those open invincible portals.  Had he been a baboon from Central Africa, his chances would have been better; he would have compelled their attention for a moment.

There were heavy portières over his door; no one could hear his groans, and he afforded himself that measure of relief.  The tears ran down his cheeks; he twisted his strong hands together.  Those whose hearts have been convulsed by the bitterness of love, by the loss of children, by the downfall of great hopes, may read with scorn this suffering of a snob.  It may seem a mean and trivial emotion.  But he has had scant opportunity to study his kind who knows nothing of the power of the snob to suffer.  An artist may toil on unrecognized, yet with the deep delight of his art as compensation.  A man in public life may be stung with a thousand bitter defeats, but he has the joy of the fight, the self-respect of legitimate ambition.  But for the repeated defeats of even the successful snob, what compensation?  Step by step he climbs, to find another still to mount, each bristling with obstacles, to which he yields the shreds and patches of his self-respect.  The bitter knowledge that he is on tolerance is ever with him—­that no matter how high he rises, he can never reach his goal, for at the goal are only those who have never known the need to strive.  ’Tis a constant battle for a soap-bubble, an ambition without soul.

And Andrew?  He had not even planted his foot on the first step.  For five years he had lived in a fool’s paradise, a corroding dream.  There was literally nothing else on earth that he wanted.  His money had come to him as the very irony of Fate.  It could not give him the one thing he wished, and he had no other use for it.  His dream was over.  He felt like an aged man set free from an asylum for the demented after a period of incarceration which had devoured the good years of his life.  He looked at what still seemed wealth to him as such a man would look at all the joys of light and liberty and taste, offered to his paralyzed senses.

When the sun rose it shone down with an air of personal sympathy upon the fleet of white yachts in the bay, upon the grand old avenues, upon the relics of an historic past no cottager ever thinks of, upon the splendid houses of those who have made Newport’s younger fame.  And it straggled through one pair of heavy curtains and gleamed upon the white face of a young man who had joined the ranks of those that proclaim the world their conqueror.