Chapter 14

In the lobby Archer ran into Ned Winsett. Janey called Winsett one of Archer's "clever people." He was the only one Archer liked to talk with. With him, talk went deeper than the easy jokes of club and eating-house.

Across the house, Archer noticed Winsett's worn coat and bent shoulders. Once Winsett's eyes turned toward the Beaufort box. They shook hands, and Winsett proposed a glass of beer at a little German restaurant around the corner.

Archer was not in the mood for that kind of talk. He said he had work at home.

"Oh, well, so have I," said Winsett, "and I'll be the Industrious Apprentice too." He meant the hard-working boy in some famous old pictures.

They walked along together. "Look here," Winsett said presently. "What I really want is the name of the dark lady in that fine box of yours. She was with the Beauforts, wasn't she? The one your friend Lefferts seems so taken with."

Archer felt a flash of anger without knowing why. What did Ned Winsett want with Ellen Olenska's name? And why set it next to Lefferts's? Such curiosity was unlike Winsett. But after all, Archer remembered, he was a journalist, paid to write for the newspapers.

"It's not for an interview, I hope?" Archer said, laughing.

"Well, not for the press. Just for myself," Winsett answered. "The fact is, she's a neighbour of mine. A strange part of town for such a beauty to settle in. And she has been very kind to my little boy."

"He fell down the steps by her door, chasing his little cat, and cut himself badly. She rushed in with nothing on her head, carrying him in her arms. His knee was tied up beautifully. She was so kind, and so beautiful, that my wife was too full of wonder to ask her name."

A pleasant warmth spread through Archer's heart. The story was nothing special. Any woman would do as much for a neighbour's child.

But it was just like Ellen, he felt, to rush in with no hat, the boy in her arms. It was like her to make poor Mrs. Winsett forget, in her wonder, to ask a name.

"That is the Countess Olenska," he said. "She is a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott's."

"Whew — a Countess!" said Ned Winsett. "Well, I didn't know Countesses were so friendly with their neighbours. Mingotts are not."

"They would be, if you let them."

"Ah, well…" It was their old, endless argument about the "clever people" who refused to visit the fashionable world. Both men knew it was no use going on.

"I wonder," Winsett said, "how a Countess comes to live in our slum?" A slum was a poor, crowded part of town.

"Because she doesn't care at all where she lives," said Archer. "Or about any of the little sign-posts of our society." He felt a secret pride in his own picture of her.

"H'm. She has lived in bigger places, I suppose," said Winsett. "Well, here's my corner."

He walked off across Broadway with his loose, tired step. Archer stood and turned over his last words.

Winsett had those sudden flashes of sharp sight, the most interesting thing about him. They made Archer wonder why he accepted failure so calmly, at an age when most men still fight.

Winsett had a wife and child, but Archer never saw them. They met at the Century, or at places where newspaper men and theatre people went, like that restaurant.

Winsett let Archer understand that his wife was an invalid, a person always too ill to go out. That might be true of the poor lady. Or it might only mean no social gifts, or no evening dress, or both.

Winsett hated social rules with a wild hate. Archer dressed for the evening because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable. He never stopped to think how much clean clothes and comfort cost on a small budget.

To him, Winsett's attitude was part of the boring "Bohemian" pose, the free, careless style of poor artists. Fashionable people changed their clothes without talking about it. They never went on about their servants. That, Archer felt, was why they seemed the simpler, easier ones.

All the same, Winsett always woke Archer's mind. Whenever he saw that thin bearded face and sad eyes, he pulled Winsett from his corner for a long talk.

Winsett did not write for the papers by choice. He was a pure man of letters, born to make books, in a world that had no need of them.

He published one small book of short, fine pieces on great writing. It sold one hundred and twenty copies. Thirty were given away. The publishers destroyed the rest, as the contract allowed, to make room for books that would sell.

After that he gave up his true calling and took a small editor's job on a weekly paper for women. In its pages, dress pictures and sewing patterns ran beside New England love-stories. There were also advertisements for drinks with no wine in them.

About "Hearth-fires," as the paper was called, he was endlessly funny. But under the fun there was the dry bitterness of a still young man who tried and gave up.

Talk with him made Archer measure his own life and feel how little it held. But Winsett's life held still less. Their shared love of books and ideas made their talks bright and alive.

Yet their talk usually stayed the quiet talk of dilettantes. A dilettante tastes art and ideas lightly, and never fights for them.

"The fact is, life is not much of a fit for either of us," Winsett once said. "I have lost, and nothing can be done about it. I can make only one kind of thing, and there is no market for it here. There will be no market in my lifetime."

"But you are free and you are well-off. Why don't you take hold of real life? There is only one way to do it. Go into politics."

Archer threw his head back and laughed. In a flash, one saw the uncrossable space between men like Winsett and Archer's kind. Everyone in polite society knew that in America "a gentleman could not go into politics." But he could hardly say it that way to Winsett.

So he slid past the point. "Look at the career of the honest man in American politics," he said. "They don't want us."

"Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"

Archer's laugh died into a small smile, the smile of a man looking down from above. There was no use in more talk. Everyone knew the sad story of the few gentlemen who tried city or state politics in New York.

They carried their clean clothes down into that dirty work, and the work destroyed them. The day for such things was past. The country now belonged to the party bosses and the newcomers from other lands. Honest people had to fall back on sport or culture.

"Culture!" said Winsett. "Yes, if we had it! There are only a few little local spots of it, dying out here and there. They die for lack of care, like a garden no one digs and no one brings new seed to."

"They are the last pieces of the old European tradition that your grandfathers brought over. But you are a pitiful little minority. You have no centre, no competition, and no audience. You are like the pictures on the walls of an empty house — 'The Portrait of a Gentleman.'"

"None of you will ever amount to anything until you roll up your sleeves and get down into the dirt. That, or emigrate… God! If I could emigrate…"

To emigrate meant to leave your own country for good.

Archer pushed the idea away in his mind and turned the talk back to books. There Winsett was unsure, but always interesting.

Emigrate? A gentleman could never leave his own country. He could no more do that than roll up his sleeves and go down into the dirt. A gentleman stayed at home and took no part. But you could not make a man like Winsett see that.

That was why Winsett's New York of book clubs and foreign restaurants let him down. At first shake it seemed a kaleidoscope, a toy tube of colored pieces falling into new patterns. In the end it proved a smaller box than Fifth Avenue, with a pattern that repeated more.

The next morning Archer searched town for more yellow roses, and found none. The search made him late at the office. It made no difference to anyone.

Sharp anger filled him at the careful emptiness of his life. Why was he not on the warm sand at St. Augustine with May Welland? No one was fooled by his show of legal work.

Old-fashioned law firms like Mr. Letterblair's mostly cared for great family properties and safe, careful investments. Each held two or three well-off young men with no hunger to rise. For some hours each day they sat at their desks, doing small tasks or reading newspapers.

It was thought proper for them to have an occupation. But plain money-making was still seen as beneath a gentleman. The law was a profession, so it counted as more gentlemanly than business.

None of them had much hope of really rising. Over many of them a green mould was spreading, like the soft growth on old bread. It was the mould of dull, careless habit.

Archer went cold at the thought that it might be spreading over him too. True, he had other tastes and interests. He travelled in Europe on his holidays and saw the "clever people" May spoke of. He tried, as he once sadly told Madame Olenska, to "keep up."

But once he was married, what would happen to this narrow strip of life, where his real self lived? He knew other young men who dreamed his dream, though with less fire. One by one, they sank into the smooth, rich, sleepy round of their elders.

From the office he sent a note to Madame Olenska by hand. He asked to call that afternoon, and begged her to leave a reply at his club. He found nothing there. No letter came the next day either.

The silence stung him far more than reason could explain. The next morning, he saw a beautiful bunch of yellow roses in a flower-shop window. He left them there.

On the third morning a few lines came by post from the Countess Olenska. To his surprise, she wrote from Skuytercliff. The van der Luydens went back there after putting the Duke on his ship.

Her letter began suddenly, with no opening words:

"I ran away the day after I saw you at the play, and these kind friends have taken me in. I wanted to be quiet and think things over. You were right when you told me how kind they are. I feel so safe here. I wish that you were with us."

She ended with a plain "Yours sincerely," and said nothing about the day of her return.

The tone surprised the young man. What was Madame Olenska running away from? And why did she need to feel safe? His first thought was of some dark danger from abroad. Then he remembered he did not know her way of writing letters.

Perhaps her style ran to colorful over-statement. Women always made things sound bigger than they were, he thought. Besides, she was not at ease in English. She often spoke it as if she was turning it word by word out of French.

In French, her first line would be "Je me suis évadée" — "I escaped." Put that way, it might only mean escape from a boring round of parties. Very likely that was true. He judged her quick to change, and quickly tired of the pleasure of the moment.

It amused him that the van der Luydens carried her off to Skuytercliff a second time. And this time they set no end to it. The doors of Skuytercliff rarely opened to visitors, and never warmly. A cold week-end was the most ever offered to the few let in.

On his last visit to Paris, Archer saw a delightful play by Labiche, "Le Voyage de M. Perrichon." In it, M. Perrichon pulls a young man out of a glacier. After that, he holds on to him with a firm love that never lets go.

The van der Luydens had pulled Madame Olenska from a fate almost as cold as the ice. There were many other reasons for liking her. But under them all, Archer knew, was a gentle purpose that would not bend. They meant to go on saving her.

He felt disappointment that she was away. Almost at once, he remembered. The day before, he refused an invitation from the Reggie Chiverses for the coming Sunday. Their house stood on the Hudson, a few miles below Skuytercliff.

He was tired of the noisy, friendly parties at Highbank. They meant sliding down snowy hills, ice-boats, and rides over the snow. They meant long walks, harmless love-talk, and jokes even more harmless.

Besides, a box of new books just arrived from his London book-seller. He wanted only a quiet Sunday at home with his riches.

But now he went into the club writing-room. He wrote a hurried telegram, a message sent in a moment along the electric wire. He told the servant to send it at once.

Mrs. Reggie never minded when visitors suddenly changed their minds. Her house could always stretch, and there was always room to spare.