We three

Front matter

OLl/\/ PS

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

II

EVEN before I was bom the ricKer people of New York did not inhabit that city the year round, but their holiday excursions were far shorter tlTan now, both In distance and duration. To escape the intenser heats of summer the moneyed citizen of those days sent his family to the seaside for six weeks or to the mountains. Later his family began to Insist that it must also be spared the seasons of intense cold. And nowadays there are families (and the number of these Increases by leaps and bounds) who if they are not allowed to escape from ever5rthlng which seems to them disagreeable or difficult, get very down in the mouth about it. Even the laboring classes are affected. The rich man wishes to live without any discomfort whatever, and the poor man wishes to live without doing any work whatever. That, I think, is at the root of their most bloody differences of opinion, for the poor man thinks that the rich man ought to be uncomfortable, and the rich man thinks that the poor man ought to work. And they will never be In agreement.

Given enough money it becomes easier and easier to run from one difficulty or discomfort into another. And even the laborer finds it continually easier to make a living without earning it.

When I was a little boy, Newport and Bar Harbor were a long way from New York. To Europe was a real voyage ; while such places as Palm Beach and Aiken were never mentioned in polite society, for the simple reason that polite society had never heard of them. But nowadays it is not uncommon for a man to have visited all these places (and some of them more than once) in the course of a year. Europe which was once a foreign country is now but as a suburb of New York. And I myself, I am happy to say, have been far oftener in Paris than in Brooklyn.

The modern butterfly thinks little of flying out to Pittsburg or Cleveland or St. Louis for a dance or a mere wedding. He attends athletic events thousands of miles apart, and knows his way from the front door to the bar and card room of every important club between the Jockey Club in Paris and the Pacific Union in San Francisco, excepting, of course, those clubs in his; own city to which he does not happen to belong.

My father, because of my little sister's fragility, was one of the first men I know to make a practice of going South for the winter, and to Long Island for the spring and autumn. In summer we went to Europe or Bar Harbor, for with justice he preferred the climate of the latter to that of Newport or Southampton. We were less and less in our town house, and indeed so jumped about from place to place, that although my mother succeeded in making her other houses easy and indeed charming to live in, I have never known what it was to have a home. And indeed I cannot at this moment call to mind a single New York family of the upper class that lives in a home.

My mother is old-fashioned. She would have preferred to live in one place the year around, to beautify and to ennoble that place ; to be buried from it as she had been married into it, and to leave upon it the stamp of her character, incessant industry and good taste; to fill it gradually with the things she loved best or admired most, and to be always there, ready for the children or the grandchildren to come home.

But she gave up this ambition at a hint of delicacy in a child's face, and a note of anxiety in a husband's

lO voice, and took to packing trunks to go somewhere, and unpacking them when they arrived. Of course she couldn't do this to all of them, for we moved with very many, but there were certain ones to which she would let nobody put hand but herself — ^my father's, my sister's, mine, and her own. And you always knew that if you had accidentally left letters and notes in your pockets that you didn't want seen, they wouldn't be.

My father would almost abuse her for doing so much work with her own hands, and for always being up'so early, but in secret he was very proud of her; and to see her dressed for the dance or the opera, eager and gay as a girl, slender and beautiful, her head very high and fearless, you would have thought that she had never done anything in all her life, but be pampered and groomed and sheltered^

Upon one good old-fashioned custom they were in firm agreement. They always slept in the same bed; they do still. And they will lie in the same grave.

Whichever home it was that we happened to be inhabiting, unless out of season because of my sister, it was always pretty well filled with people. My father loved people, and my mother got to love them

II for his sake. For my part, until very recently, I have always hated to be alone. Flint is a gloomy solitary, but when he meets with Steel there are sparks.

I suppose there are brooding lovers of knowledge in this world who are fonder of their own than of any other company. But most people' can only think half thoughts and need other people to complete them. It is amusing enough to knock a ball against a wall, and a wonderful help in the perfection of strokes, but it is far more amusing to face somebody across a net and play lawn tennis.

My father and mother always hoped that I would be a great man, and even now they hope that I may one day turn over a new leaf. Unfortunately there was no greatness in me, and as for those leaves of my life which I have not yet read, they are uncut, and I am always mislaying the paper knife. And whether the matter on the next leaf or the one after will be new or not, is for the future to know. You cannot, I think, teach a child to grow great.

But you can teach a child to dance and swim and shoot and sail, and to ride and to be polite, and to keep clean, and by example rather than precept, to be natural and unaffected ! It was hoped then that

I would be a great man; in the event, however, of my turning out to be nothing but a butterfly, I was brought up to be as ornamental a butterfly as possible. I cannot remember when I wasn't being prepared and groomed to take, without awkwardness, a place in society.

Well-bred grown-ups talk to children, without affectation or condescension, as if they too were grown-ups. My parents were always entertaining people, and it was assumed without comment that I too was host no less than they. Twice a day I had to be in evidence : at tea time, face and hands shining clean, hair carefully brushed, my small body covered with crisp white duck, black silk stockings on my legs, and patent leather pumps on my feet. No conversation was required of me, but if I had forgotten a name and the face that went with it, I was allowed to feel uncomfortable ; allowed to feel as a grown man feels when he has accidentally said something that would better have been left unsaid. It was my duty to go accurately from guest to guest, to shake hands, and to say perfectly naturally not "Hunh!" as so many modern children do, but "How do you do, Mrs. Lessing," or "How do you do, Mrs. Green," and not to stare and fidget or be awkward.

Then I had my tea, discolored hot water with sugar and cream, my buttered toast, and a bit of cake. After that my mother would make it exceedingly easy for me to get away. My second public appearance was just before dinner. Then, dressed once more in white and patent leather, I came to the drawing-room to wish and be wished good night.

To obey my mother, when there was no real temptation to disobey her, was very easy, and nobody ever saw me look sulky or balky when I was told to do this or that. It was easy to obey her, because from the first, she took it absolutely for granted that she was going to be obeyed. Of course it was different with general orders designed to cover long periods of time, for here the tempter had his chance at me, and I was forever falling. "Stop kicking the table leg, Archie," is an order easily and instantly obeyed. For "Never kick a table," I cannot say the same. I used to divide her orders into two classes : The now news and the never nevers. The latter were mostly beyond me. Though you may halt one sinner in the act of throwing a stone at another, there is little reason to believe that he will not soon be trying his aim again.

I like children when they are polite and a little H reticent, when they are not too much in evidence, and when the whole household is not made to revolve about them.

Fulton once said to me, in that shy yet eager way of his : "If only I could arrest my babies' development ; keep them exactly as they are ; on tap when I wanted them, and hibernated like a couple of little bears when I was busy and mustn't be disturbed! They should never change, while I lived, if I had my way. And I'd promise not to abuse my privileges. I'd only take 'em out of the ice box when I absolutely needed them and couldn't do without them."

It was the first time that I ever was in the Fulton house that he said that. The two babies, a boy and a girl, Jock and "Hurry," two roly-polies, with their mother's eyes and mischievous smile, had been brought in to the tea table to be polite and share a lump of sugar. And they had been very polite, and had shown the proper command over their shyness, and had shaken me decorously by the hand, and made their funny grave little bows and asked me how I did. And I had said something in praise of the little girl to her face, and Fulton had reproached me a little for doing so.

}Ve Three

"In India," he had said, "it is very bad luck to praise a child to its face, very bad luck indeed."

"I'm so sorry," I said, when the children had gone. "I ought to have remembered that even very little babies In the cradle understand everything that's said to them. May I praise them now? Because they are the two most delicious babies in the world. I'd like to eat them."

"When I'm tired or worried," said Fulton, hid eyes lighting with tenderness, "Hurry always knows. And she comes and climbs Into my lap and leans against me without saying a word, and she keeps creepy-mouse still until she knows that I'm feeling better. Then she chuckles, and I hug her. Sometimes I wish that she was made like a tennis ball; then I could hug her as hard as I wanted to without hurting her."

While he was speaking, Mrs. Fulton looked all the time at her husband's face. I remember thinking, "God! If ever some woman should look at me like that!" Her mouth smiled mischievously, just the way little Hurry's smiled, and her eyes — I won't try to describe the love and tenderness that was in them, nor the dog-like faithfulness — were eyes that prayed. And they were the deepest, most brilliant

i6 blue — like those Rheims windows that the Beast smashed the other day. She laughed and said: "Hurry and her father don't care about each other — not at all."

Fulton lifted his eyes to hers and it was as if "I love you" flashed from each to the other in that crumb of time. His face reddened a little, and hers became more rosy. They weren't a bit ashamed of being obviously in love with each other. I think they rather prided themselves on it.

"Why //Mrr3».2"' I asked. "Is it a real name? Of course I remember Hurry Harry in Cooper "

"Her real name is Lucy," said Fulton, "same as her Mumsey, but they look so ridiculously alike that I was afraid I'd get 'em mixed up. And so we call her Hurry, because she always hurries; she hurries like mad. Same as her Mumsey."

"Do you," I asked, "hurry hke mad?"

She gave a comical hurried nod that made me laugh right out, and Fulton said :

"She has smashed the more haste the less speed fallacy all to pieces." You could see that the man was glowing with pride. And he began to boast about her, and though she tried to stop him, she couldn't help looking perfectly delighted with herself, like some radiant child in the new dress for the party.

When Fulton had finished his eulogy, a long one, filled with humor, character drawing, and tenderness — something in his voice rather than his words, perhaps, always gave people the feeling that he had a wonderfully light touch, and a point of view at once sentimental and humorous — I reproached him, in turn, for praising a child to her face.

"In India," I said, "it's considered beastly unlucky."

Mrs. Fulton sprang to his defense. "I'm not a child," she defied me, "I'm a married woman."

They took me to the front door themselves, and watched me as far as the gate. I know this, because although I did not look back, it was when I reached the gate that I heard the door close, and I thought: "Now if I looked back, and the door was transparent, I'd see a pretty picture. It's a thousand to one shot that he's caught her in his arms and is kissing her and that she's perfectly delighted."

Ill

IT is not easy for me to keep away from Lucy Fuhon either on paper or in i-eal life. The latter I have to do, for I think that I am able to keep a promise, and I ought to do the former as much as I can, if I am to tell her story and her husband's and my own in their true proportions. Otherwise we should but appear as one of those "eternal triangles" to which so much of French dramatic genius has been devoted; whereas it appears to me, though not, I am afraid, to Fulton, that if our relations to each other could be symbolized by a figure, that figure would not he a triangle; but a cross, let us say, between a triangle and a square.

Fulton and I are the same age. We were in the same class at Mr. Cutter's school for a year or two, and were quite friendly at times. But except that we both collected postage stamps, we had no tastes in common. It is almost enough to say that he was full of character and reserve, and that I was unstable and kept the whole of my goods displayed in the shop window. I cannot imagine thirteen-yearold Fulton in love with fifteen-year-old Nell or Nancy, but I was frequently in love with both at the same time, or so fancied myself, and, almost consciously, as it seems, he was conserving his powers of loving for the one great passion of his life, when he should give all that a man may have in him of purity and faith and purpose. But when my time for a great passion came, though I gave all that I had to give, it is true, still that all was not the whole that I might have had; it was only all that was left, all that had not already been given. But there was enough at that to hurt and do harm.

Fulton was studious and enamored of knowledge for its own sake. I was lazy and only interested in such pieces of knowledge as I felt might be of use to me. But we both stood well in our classes; he because he had brains and knew how to use them, and I because the Lord had gifted me with a capital sight memory.

Perhaps I should do better to state who our intimates were in those days, and what has become of them. Fulton's most intimate friend was a boy named Lansing, who made a practice of cutting open dead things to see what was inside of them. Today

Lansing (of course that's not his real name) is so great a surgeon that even the man in the street knows him by sight. My most intimate friend was Harry Colemain, and we were mixed up in all sorts of deviltries together. To me he has been always a faithful friend and a charming companion, but of his career, what can I say that is really pleasant? Nothing, unless I modify each statement by pages of explanation and reminiscence. As he danced the old dances, so he dances the new, to greater perfection than any man in New York. He is gorgeously built, and has a carriage of the head, an eye and a smile, and a way with him that can shake a man from the water wagon or a woman from her virtue. He smokes like a factory, and drinks like a fish, yet at a moment's notice he is ready for some great feat of endurance — such as playing through the racket championship, or swimming from Newport to Narragansett Pier. He might have been — anything you please. But what can I say definitely that he is? Well, at this very moment, he is co-respondent in a divorce suit which is delighting the newspapers, and it looks as if he'd have to marry her in the end. And that's a pity because they were tired of each other before they got found out, and she's not the kind of woman that his friends are going to like.

Fulton's friend Ludlow has just published the best book on the birds of New York, past and present, that was ever written. My friend Pierson died the other day of pneumonia. As a boy he had the constitution of an ox, and ought to have thrown off pneumonia as I would throw off a cold in the head, but the doctors say that he had simply burned up his powers of resistance with overdoses of alcohol. You never saw him drunk or off his balance or merry in any way; he simply and slowly soaked himself till his insides were like sponges dipped in the stuff. And Pierson's not the only man in my circle who has gone out like that; and as they went so will others go; strong and well Saturday to the casual eye, and dead Monday.

This is not the time to take up those great issues which have risen between those who are tempted by drink and fall, and those who are not tempted and don't. But I am very sure of this : that a vast majority of the men who make the world go round drink or have drunk; and that when at last the world comes to be governed by those who don't and haven't, it will be even worse governed, more pettily and meddlesomely, than it is at present. And that is saying a good deal, even for a butterfly.

You mustn't gather that Fulton and his friends were a goody-goody set of boys. They erred and strayed from their ways at times, like the worst of us. There was Browning for instance, a born experimenter, who so experimented with cocktails one fine morning (at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-third Street) that he marched into Madame Castignet's French class, drunk as a lord, full of argument, and was presently expelled from the school. It was commonly said that the disgrace of it would hound him through life. Far from it! Those who at this day pack Carnegie Lyceum to hear him play the violin, and who listen, laughing, and crying, and comparing him to the incomparable Kreisler, perceive no disgrace in that youthful episode, rather they see in it an early indication of the divine temperament trying to shake off its fetters and be free.

One boy that I went to school with is on the famous Meadowbrook team ; another has played in Davis Cup matches; another brought home a First from the Olympic games. In' the pack tliat I run with there is even one Roper who achieves a large income by writing fiction for the magazines, but even he isn't in the least like that brilliant little circle to which Fulton belonged. For we feel that we are paying him an immense compliment when we say, "Would you ever suspect that he was an author?" Good at games, fond of late hours and laughter, with the easiest and most affectionate good manners, he is quite convinced, if you can get him to talk shop at all, that art for art's sake is bunk, and that there is more amusement and inspiration to be had on Bailey's Beach and in the Casino at Newport than in the whole of Italy.

I must set Roper off against Fulton's friend Garrick. Poor Garrick slaved and slaved and reached after perfection. Some say that in the thin little volume that he succeeded at last in getting published, and leaving behind for the delight of posterity, he actually touched perfection. Perhaps he did. I don't know. But I do know this : that he had enough talent and energy to make a living, and didn't. That he loved his art more than his wife and family, and that they all starved together. Is it worse to starve your family for love of liquor than for love of art? Roper loves his liquor but he fights against it and makes a handsome income ; Garrick gave himself up body and soul to his love for art, and if it wasn't for his friends Mrs. Garrick would be working in a sweatshop.

Fulton and I discussed him once (when I was going to the Fulton house a good deal) , but we had to give it up as a topic. Fulton saw something fine and generous in the man, and could not speak of him without emotion, while I found it Impossible to speak of him without contempt.

Fulton himself fell away from his friends In later years, not spiritually but physically. Lucy Fulton simply had to go on living among the people with whom she had been brought up, and in the manner to which she was accustomed ; and Fulton seeing her pine and grow sorrowful In other conditions, and bored and fretful, gradually fell into her ways and wishes, as a gentleman shouldn't (but does always), and made his new friends among those who are born to be amused. Her love and happiness were far more important to him than changed ways and the injured feelings of old friends. Once he talked to me about this (for we grew quite intimate). I remember he said:

"Somehow I don't seem to see my old friends any more or keep up with them. If anything happened to Luq^, I'd be absolutely alone in the world, except for the babies. A man does wrong to drift away from those who he knows by a thousand proofs care for him, on any pretext or for any cause."

And yet he had come to wear the hallmarks of the pack, and to talk the language of the world that only asks to be happy and amused. He took to games seriously and played them well, and you couldn't point to him as one of those cautious persons who never by any chance drank even one cocktail too many. Indeed, he often became hilarious and witty, and added no end to the gayety of occasions, and was afterward privately reproached by Lucy. Coming from another, the hilarity and wit would have rejoiced her, but, coming from her nearest and dearest, her mind narrowed, and the cold fear that women have of liquor possessed her.

To me it has always been comical, even when I didn't feel well myself, to see the husbands come into the club after a big night; each wearing upon his face, as plainly as if they had been physical scratches, the marks of the wifely tears which he had been forced to witness, and of the reproaches which he had been forced to hear, and yet each trying to look as if he was the master of his own house and his own destiny. No well-born woman, however cold and calculating, can silently put up with her husband's drinking, yet how easily she overlooks it in any other man ! How many excuses she will find for him:

"Why, he's quite wonderful I Of course I knew at once that he was tipsy, but he was perfectly sensible — ^perfectly."

If men didn't drink, women wouldn't have so many parties to go to or so much money to spend. How many teetotalers let their wives spend them Into ruin and disgrace ? It is the drinking American who indulges his wife and lets her make a fool of herself and him. It's his unconfessed, and perhaps unadmitted, remorse seeking a short cut to forgiveness.

It seems that I played too much pool and billiards for a small boy ; and got into too much city mischief, for I learned at the end of a delightful Newport summer that I was to finish my schooling, not at Mr. Cutter's, but at Groton.

IV

IN those Groton days I let matches strictly alone ; I neither played with them, nor used them to light cigarettes with. I was vaguely ambitious to be great and splendid, and I was down on purposeless boys who didn't behave themselves.

Lucy's brother was in my form. She used to come to visit him, with her parents, in their car. Even for Groton parents the Ludlows were enormously rich, or if they weren't enormously rich, 'they were enormous spenders.

Lucy was seven years our junior, but even in those baby days she had the laughing mouth and the praying eyes that were to play such havoc later on. She was a child of the world; natural, straightforward, and easy-going.

Lucy at nine was so pretty, so engaging, and had so much charm and magnetism that I remember having regretted, very solemnly, and with youthful finality, that we did not belong to the same generation. I was sorry that she was not fifteen or sixteen like myself; so that I could be in love with her and she with me !

Once Lucy was so sick that they thought she was going to die, and Schuyler was called home from school. The whole school was affected, so strong and vivid was its memory of an engaging and fearless child. I remember being sorrier than ever that I had been confirmed into a system which makes disease contagious instead of health, and asking one of the masters how he reconciled the death of a kid like that, whom everybody loved, with his conception of an all-wise and all-merciful God. He answered, it has always seemed to me very lamely, that if we didn't believe that all was for the best, in this best of all worlds, we should never get anywhere.

All for the best ! If we are to forgive the Power that sets him on, why not the murderer himself who does the real dirty work? If all is for the best, so then must the component parts of all (each and every) be for the best. In" short we can do no wrong in this best of worlds. Oh, what grim, weakminded nonsense they prate and preach !

There was hand-clapping when the Rector told us that Schuyler/ Ludlow's little sister was going to get well, and presently Schuyler returned to school somewhat self-important, as becomes one who has sat at meat with famous doctors, and talked of them in Extremis.

The first time I rode with Lucy through the Aiken woods, I recalled this famous illness of hers, and I think it had something to do with all that happened afterward.

We had lost ourselves, a little, as you do at Aiken, among the infinity of sand trails beyond the Whitney drive. We knew where we were, of course, and we knew where Aiken was, but every trail that started toward it fetched up short with a wrong turning. It was one of those bright hot days in late February, when a few jasmine flowers have opened, and you are pretty sure that there won't be any more long spells of rain or freezing cold. Even Lucy, who loved riding, was content to sit a walking horse, and bask in the sunshine.

I mentioned her famous illness, and she remembered nothing about it. "I'm always too busy," she said, "with what's going on right now to remember things."

"Why," I said, "Schuyler was sent for, and you were given up half a dozen times. Don't you really remember at all?"

"They wouldn't have told me I was being given 30 up right and left, would they? Probably it didn't hurt much, and I was given a great many presents. It seems to me I do remember one particularly great time of presents, when lots of old gentlemen came to see me."