# The Relentless City/Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI
Long Island is separated from New York by a narrow sound, across which ferry-boats ply in both directions with extreme punctuality. From any part of New York city a couple of electric cars or an electric railway will take you to the threshold of the ferry-boat, and trains await you at the back-door, so to speak, of the ferry-boats, to convey you down the length of Long Island. On board the ferry-boat you can buy a variety of badly-printed and sensational daily papers for the sum of one cent; you can get your boots blacked for very little more; and no doubt, if there was sufficient demand, the directors would enable you to have your teeth brushed or your hair combed. No part of the equipment, however, is at all lovely. It answers the purpose of conveying you cheaply and expeditiously from one point to another, and enables you to finish your toilet in transit, which is an invaluable boon to those who want to save time. As a matter of fact, everyone wants to save time, but it has been reserved for Americans to invent such methods of doing it. The rest of the world, therefore, is in their debt. The debt is acknowledged, but the rest of the world, quite inscrutably, does not choose to follow their example. All may raise the flower now all have got the seed, but they do not raise the flower.
There is no ' class ' on these boats; there is no ' class ' on the elevated railway; there is no ' class ' on the electric cars. Millionaires in Long Island, in consequence, have the ​privilege of enjoying the same discomforts as other people, and even Lewis S., who could have bought up the whole system of electric cars, overhead railway, and ferry-boats (after a little judicious distribution of emoluments to the officials of New York City) , habitually went by these unlovely conveyances, because there were no other. During his transit he once sent a cablegram buying, at any price, the whole dinner-service which had been used on the last occasion on which Marie Antoinette dined at Petit Trianon. It was extremely expensive, and, as he wrote, the drippings from the rain fell on to his cablegram form, for the boat was full. Subsequently he argued with the boot-boy who had blacked his boots, but gave in when the boy produced his tariff-card. And Democracy, the spirit of his fellow-passengers, sympathized in the main with him.
Once arrived on Long Island, a walk of a hundred yards or so leads to the ticket-office. Those hundred yards are uncovered, however; but since people who live on Long Island must pass them in order to get into the Delectable City, there is no reason why the railroad or the ferry-boat company should offer conveniences in the way of shelter to their passengers. Given competition, any line would vie with the others in mirrors and gilded furniture; but if there is none, why on earth spend a penny? Not a passenger the less will travel because the mode of transit is bestial. Thus, common-sense, as usual, emerges triumphant.
For the purpose of this narrative, the low-lying swamp and companies of jerry-built houses that cluster round the various stations on the line may be disregarded, and after half an hour's travelling the train emerges into a very pleasant land. There are no high uplands to dwarf the immediate landscape, but there are trees of tolerable growth and slim presence to add distinction to it. Underneath these trees, as the train nears Port Washington, grow high clumps of purple Michaelmas daisies, now, in September, ​full of bursting bud, and the temperate sea-winds give a vividness of colour to the prevailing green, which reminds foreigners of the Devon sea-coast.
Mrs. Palmer's new-built house stood on a charming hilltop some mile or so beyond the station. The site had been occupied till a few years before by a delightful bungalow structure, built of wood, with shingled walls, and surrounded on all sides by deep, shady verandas. The wood in those days came right up to the house on two sides, and was just lopped of its topmost branches on a third, so that where the ground fell away rapidly from the house a charming glimpse of the dim blue sound could be seen framed in sky and treetops, while the fourth side was open, the house-front giving on to a broad lawn of velvety turf which changed into rougher meadow-land in the middle distance, while over distant tree-tops and a wash of green country the gray smoke of New York sat on the horizon. The house, in fact, had been like a hundred other houses on Long Island, not perhaps very pretty, still less beautiful, but not without a certain haphazard picturesqueness about it, restful and unpretending, and most eminently adapted for the purpose of affording to the brain-heated business man a draught of coolness and greenness. Moreover, it had expressed somehow the genius of the place; its woods, not huge nor of magnificent trees, but of pleasant growth, always sounded in whispers through the rooms; and even as the greatest heats of summer came tempered by the passage of the winds through the filter of the woodlands, so, one would have thought, the fever of New York was abated here, even as the smoke of the city was but a gray tache on the horizon. It had, as all houses should, been in tune with the pleasant, mediocre charm of the island, even as the châteaux on the Loire express the broad grandeur and classical formality of the landscape, as the big houses of England are in the scale of their huge timbered parks, and, for that matter, as ​the county gaol expresses the security which His Majesty kindly affords to the criminal classes.
But within the last few years the whole place had been completely changed, and it was no longer the genius of Long Island, but the genius of mushroom wealth, that crowned the hill-top. For a quarter of a mile on every side round the house the trees had been felled and their roots dynamited, and huge lawns spread their green carpets in the most ample expanses. Four-square in the centre stood the immense house of gray stone, copied largely from one of the Valois châteaux in the South of France, but with various protuberances, in the shape of a theatre, a swimming-bath, and a tennis-court, grafted on to it. A carriage-drive lay in long curves like a flicked whip-lash, surmounting terrace after terrace set with nugatory nudities, till it reached the lead-roofed portico at the front, where two great Græco-Roman candelabra of Parian marble stood one on each side of the door, pierced for gas, and crowned by large glass globes. To the north lay the Italian garden, all laurels and tessellated pavement, cypresses and statuary, fountains and flower-beds. To the west were the tennis and croquet lawns, and to the south, where the ground in old days had fallen tumbling towards the sea, it had been built up with thousands of tons of earth and faced with masonry, so that from the edge of the terrace one looked down on to the topmost fans of the waving trees. Heavy gilded vanes crowned the lead roofs, and high over the central dome of the building a flag-staff displayed Mrs. Palmer's very original device—Love caught in a rose-bush—to the airs of heaven. Round the extreme edge of the terrace ran the bicycle track, on which Lewis S. Palmer did his ten miles a day, with black hatred in his heart of this extraordinary waste of time.
The estate, which was of great extent, and produced nothing whatever, since, to Mrs. Palmer's way of thinking, to live on an estate which produced anything was of the ​nature of keeping a shop, was all pressed into the amiable service of providing entertainment for the guests, and of showing the wondering world a specimen of the delectable life. For several miles the road through the woods had been run in artfully contrived gradients, carried on struts over too precipitous ravines, and quarried through cuttings to avoid undesirable steepnesses. The sides of the cuttings were admirably planted, and creepers and ivy covered the balustrades of the bridges. A golf-course, smooth as a billiard- table, and not too heavily bunkered, lay near the house, and Mrs. Palmer had tried a most original experiment last year of stocking the woods with all sorts of game, to provide mixed shooting for a couple of parties in the autumn. This had not been wholly a success, for the deer she had turned out were so tame that they gazed in timid welcome at the shooters, probably expecting to be fed, till they fell riddled with bullets, while the pheasants were so wild that nobody could touch a tail-feather. But the costume of the chasseurs—green velvet, very Robin-Hoody—had been most tasteful, and she herself, armed with a tiny pea-rifle and dressed in decent imitation of Atalanta, had shot a roebuck and a beater, the latter happily not fatally.
From the centre of the terrace on the east, which had been brought over entire from a needy Italian palace, a broad flight of steps of rose-coloured marble led down to the sea. A small breakwater was sufficient to provide station and anchorage for the two steam-yachts and smaller pleasure-boats, but otherwise the shore had not been meddled with. There was a charming beach of sand, and a little further on a fringe of seaweed-covered rock-pools. Behind this was a small natural lagoon in a depression in the sandy foreshore, some half-acre in extent, fed by a stream that came down through the woods, but brackish through the infiltration of the salt water. This that highly original ​woman had chosen to be the scene of the fête which was to astonish society next week; but the secret had been well kept, and no one except Reggie Armstrong knew the precise details of the new surprise. For a fortnight or so, however, it was common knowledge that a great many large pans wrapped in tarpaulin had been arriving, and the shore had been populous with men who plied some sort of bare-legged avocation, which implied wading in the lagoon. But the foreman of the company who was executing Mrs. Palmer's orders had received notice that if any word of what was being done leaked out or reached the papers, at that moment all work would be suspended, and the firm would never have another order from her. She herself, sometimes alone, sometimes with Reggie, inspected the work; otherwise no one was allowed near the place. The yachts of her dearest friends, it is true, constantly passed and repassed up the sound, and many were the opera-glasses levelled at the shore; but what the bare-legged men were doing baffled conjecture and the best glasses.
The house inside was, with the exception of one small suite, of the most sumptuous description. A huge hall, paved with marble, and covered as to its walls with superb woodwork of Grinling Gibbons, occupied the centre of the ground-floor, and en suite round it were the rooms for entertaining. Ping-pong being at this moment fashionable, it was to be expected that almost every room had its table, and it was curious to see the hideous little black board on its cheap trestle legs occupying the centre of the great French drawing-room. Old rose-coloured satin was stretched on the walls, an immense Aubusson carpet covered the floor. All the furniture was gems of the early Empire style; the big ormolu clock was by Vernier; great Dresden parrots in gilt mounts held the shaded electric lights, and a statuette by Clodion stood on the Queen's escritoire from the Tuileries. One side of the square block of house was entirely occupied ​by the picture-gallery, which contained some extremely fine specimens of the great English portrait-school, a few dubious old masters, some good Lancrets, and several very valuable pictures by that very bright young American artist, Sam Wallace. These, as all the world knows, represent scenes from the ballet and such subjects, and he is supposed to have a prodigious eye for colour. Here, too, of course, was an unrivalled place for ping-pong, and Mrs. Palmer had caused to be made a very large court, so that four people could play together. Great grave English footmen, when the game was in progress, were stationed at each end to pick up the balls, and hand them on silver salvers to the server; and they had rather a busy time of it, for the majority of Mrs. Palmer's guests found a difficulty in inducing the ball to go anywhere near the table. But they found it very amusing, and it produced shrieks of senseless laughter.
An observant man might have noticed in a dark corner of the hall a small green baize door. It was in shadow of the staircase, and might easily have escaped him altogether; but if he noticed it, it would have struck him as odd that this plain baize door, with three brass initials on it—L. S. P.—should find a place in this magnificence. If it had only been L. S. D., it would have been quite in place, and might have been taken to be the shrine of the tutelary god of the place. Shrine indeed it was, and the tutelary god sat within; for the initials were those of Mrs. Palmer's husband.
It was a perfectly plain, bare room, with drugget on the floor, an almanac hung near the fireplace, a large table stood in the centre of the room, on which were piles of papers, apparatus for writing, and usually a glass of milk. From the door to the right there came the subdued tickings of telegraph apparatus; near that door sat a young man on a plain wooden chair, and at the table sat a small, gray-haired man, ​very thin and spare, with bushy eyebrows which frowned over his work. From time to time he would throw on to the floor a scrap of paper. Then the young man would get up noiselessly, pick it up, and go through with it into the room from which came the tickings of the telegraph. Then he would return and sit down again. Occasionally a muffled knock would come at the same door, upon which he would rise and take a paper which was handed him, and lay it quite close to the right hand of the man who sat at the table, who either crumpled it up after reading it or wrote something in reply. These answers and messages were all written on small scraps of paper measuring about three inches by one; there was a pile of them always ready by his left hand. A telephone also stood on this table which rang very constantly. Then the man at the table would, as if automatically, place the receiver at his ear and listen, sometimes not even looking up from his writing, and often replacing the instrument without a word. More rarely he looked up, and he would say a few words—' Yes, yes,' ' No, certainly not,' ' Very well, buy,' or ' Sell at once,' ' Yes, all!' Sometimes, again, it would be he who first used the instrument, and he would ring up his head clerk in New York or a partner, never in a hurry, never apparently impatient. On the other hand, he would not wait idle till the answering bell rang, but go steadily on with his work. At such moments he would raise his eyes sometimes when he was speaking, and if you happened to catch his glance, it is probable you would never forget it, but would understand, though momentarily only and dimly maybe, that at the table in the bare room there sat a Force, a great natural phenomenon, before which all the splendour and magnificence of the house, all the illimitable outpouring of wealth which it implied, became insignificant—a mere shirt-button or a tie-pin to the man from whose brain it had all sprung.
In face, but for those extraordinary eyes, dark gray in ​colour, but of a vitality so great that it seemed as if each was a separate living entity, his features were somewhat insignificant. He had gray, rather thin whiskers, and iron-gray hair, still thick, and not yet deserting his forehead. His nose was slightly hooked, suggesting that a spoonful, perhaps, of Jewish blood ran in his veins; his mouth was very thin-lipped and compressed. In body, he was short and thin almost to meagreness, and, owing to a nearly total absence of digestive power, he lived practically exclusively on milk, of which he drank some five or six pints a day. And in nothing was his power of control so amazingly shown; for ten years ago he had been both gourmet and gourmand, and had habitually eaten enormous masses of food with a relish and palate for the curiously delicate and uncultivated sense of taste that Savarin might have envied. Even now, when he sat at the head of the table at his wife's parties, he knew, partly by keenness of nostril, partly by look, whether any dish was not perfectly cooked, and next morning the first of the slips which he dropped on to the floor to be picked up by the young man at the door might run: ' To the chef: Not enough asparagus-heads in the sauce Milanaise, Some three weeks ago I told you the same thing.—L. S. P.'
This extraordinary sense of, and attention to, detail, characteristic of the great Napoleon, was also most characteristic of Mr. Palmer. Only the night before his daughter had come down to dinner in a new dress, and found herself the instant target for the piercing gray eye of her father.
' There ought to be two straps on the shoulder, not one,' he said; ' it is copied from the figure of Madame Matignon, in the picture of the last fête of the Empress Eugenie. Pray have it altered.'
' Dear old pápa,' remarked Amelie, ' I dare say you know everything, but it wouldn't be so pretty.'
' That is a matter of taste, but it would be right.'
​This characteristic, which appeared so strongly even in such branches of human interest as the position of a strap or a bow on a woman's dress, appeared most piercingly of all on questions concerning finance. Figures, indeed, once seen by him, seemed to be indelibly imprinted on his mind, and, without reference, he would embark on enterprises where an accurate knowledge of previous balance-sheets and present prices was essential. It was essential to him; only, instead of referring to books which would give him the required information, he carried it about in his head. To his partners and those who were associated with him in business he was a source of constant wonder. Partners they might be to him in name, and, since they were all well-tried and trusted men, they no doubt were of assistance to him; but as far as executive power was concerned, they might as well have been junior clerks in some other firm, for Palmer went on his way automatically, self-balanced on the topmost crest of the huge wave of prosperity that was flooding America, quicker than the whole of the rest of the New York Market to scent coming trouble or prosperity in the world of money, prompter than any to take advantage of it. Then, when his day's work was done, at whatever hour that might be, it was as if the word ' business ' was unknown to him, and there sat at table, dressed in loose and somewhat ill-fitting clothes, a man of very simple and kindly nature, a connoisseur in cookery, art, and millinery, a gentleman at heart, and to the backbone an American—one who, in spite of his gentleness, was without breeding; one who, in spite of his deep and varied knowledge, was without culture.
He and Amelie were seated at lunch alone together on the day following Mrs. Emsworth's triumphant début. Amelie had only just come in from her ride—the horse she preferred to ride was one which few men could have sat—and she still wore her riding-habit. She was quite obviously the ​authentic daughter of her father and mother, and, like a clever girl, which she undoubtedly was, she had selected, so it seemed, all the good points possessed by both her parents, rejected all their weaknesses, and embodied the result in the adorable compound known as Amelie Palmer. She had been right, for instance, in possessing herself of her mother's extraordinary vitality and physical health, rejecting her father's digestive apparatus; on the other hand, she had chosen her father's eyes, impressing upon them, however, a certain femininity, and had set them in a complexion of dazzling fairness, which she owed to her mother. And out of the careful selection there had sprung, crowning it all, the quality that more than anything else was she—namely, her unrivalled exuberance of enjoyment. Whether it was some new social effort of her mother's to which she brought her glorious presence, whether she rode alone through the flowering woods, or accompanied her father on his hygienic bicycle ride—' pápa's treadmill,' as she called it—she brought to all her occupations the great glowing lantern of her joy, the same brilliant smile of welcome for anything that might turn up, the same divine content. She took nothing seriously, but had enthusiasm for everything. Of refinement or intellectual qualities she had none whatever, but he would be a bloodless man who could really deplore their absence when he looked on that brilliant vitality. Surely it would be time enough to think of such gray gifts when the sparkling tide of her life ran less riotously; at present it would be like teaching some clean-limbed young colt of the meadows to sit up and beg or shake a paw.
In a certain way (and it is part of the purpose of this story to draw out the eventual pedigree of the resemblance) her joie de vivre was very much akin to that quality which had so captivated the Americans in New York on the occasion of Mrs. Emsworth's first night. In the older woman, since ​her nature had been longer in the crucible of life, it had necessarily undergone a certain change; but the critical observer, had he hazarded the conjecture that at Amelie's age Mrs. Emsworth had been very like Amelie, would, though he was quite wrong about it, have had the satisfaction of making a really clever mistake. For Mrs. Emsworth at that age had been possessed of a somewhat serious and joyless nature; her present joie de vivre was the result of her experience of life, the conviction, thoughtfully arrived at, that joy is the thing worth living for. But Amelie's exuberance was the result, not of philosophy, but of instinct; she laughed like a child merely because she laughed. And the critical observer, if, after making one clever mistake, he had been willing to hazard another, and had guessed that at Mrs. Emsworth's age Amelie would be like Mrs. Emsworth, would have risked a mistake that was not clever. For it is very seldom that experience confirms one's childish instincts; in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it either eradicates them altogether, or, at any rate, modifies them almost beyond recognition. Mrs. Emsworth had won back to what had not been in her an instinct when she was a child; and it was more unlikely that Amelie, when a woman, would retain the instincts that were now hers.
At the present moment Amelie's enthusiasm was largely taken up with food.
' Pápa, you have an angelic nature,' she said; ' and how you can sit there chewing crackers and sipping milk without throwing the table things at me I can't conjecture.'
' Habit of self-control, Amelie,' said he, his eyes smiling at her; ' perhaps you will learn it some day. When does your mother come down?'
' This afternoon, with the two English folk. She's been telephoning all the morning. When mámma gets hold, real tight hold, of the telephone, she doesn't let go under an hour or two. Now, I'm not like that. The moment I ring ​anyone up, I forget what I was going to say, and have to ask them to dinner instead. I guess you and mámma took all the brains of the family. Pápa, I had the heavenliest ride this morning, all through the fir-woods, and Tamburlaine wanted to jump the sound. The daisies are all coming out, and it smelt so good. Oh, it smelt so good, like—like a drug store. There's the telephone again!'
Mr. Palmer considered this a moment.
' When your mother gave her hunting-party last year,' he said, ' she commenced ringing the telephone at half-past ten in the morning, and she was late for lunch because she hadn't finished. Top speed all the time, too. She takes things seriously; that's why she comes out on top every time.'
' Yes, some more,' said Amelie to the footman.
Mr. Palmer looked quickly at the dish as it was handed her.
' What mess is that?' he asked.
' Pigeons once,' said she; ' it won't be anything in a minute or two.'
' There ought to be mushrooms in the stew. It's meant to be à la Toulon. I've forgotten more about cookery than our present chef ever knew.'
Amelie laughed.
' Poor pápa! what a lot you must forget! I guess you're failing. Well, I've regretfully finished my lunch. Are you going treadmilling?'
' Yes. Who comes down with your mother?'
' Mrs. Massington and Lord Keynes. The others come on Saturday—Mrs. Emsworth, Bilton, and that lot. Pápa, I've thought of the right name for Reggie Armstrong at last. It's Ping-pong. He's just that.'
Mr. Palmer considered this.
' Yes, Ping-pong is about the size. Small set, though. Come and treadmill, Amelie.'
​She got up and stretched herself, then let one arm fall round her father's neck.
' There are schemes in the air,' she said to him, as they walked out. ' But on the day you see me marry Ping-pong you may tie me up by the heels to Tamburlaine's tail.'
From which it may be seen that either Amelie was charmingly lacking in the wisdom of the world, or that her mother had more of it than one would have guessed.