 | Marjorie Daw, and other people |  |
8. MLLE. OLYMPE ZABRISKI.
1. I.
WE are accustomed to speak with a certain
light irony of the tendency which women
have to gossip, as if the sin itself, if it is a sin,
were of the gentler sex, and could by no chance
be a masculine peccadillo. So far as my observation
goes, men are as much given to small talk
as women, and it is undeniable that we have
produced the highest type of gossiper extant.
Where will you find, in or out of literature, such
another droll, delightful, chatty busybody as
Samuel Pepys, Esq., Secretary to the Admiralty
in the reigns of those fortunate gentlemen
Charles II. and James II. of England? He is
the king of tattlers, as Shakespeare is the king
of poets.
If it came to a matter of pure gossip, I would
back Our Club against the Sorosis or any women's
drawing-room four or five young fellows lounging
in easy-chairs, cigar in hand, and now and then
bringing their heads together over the small
round Japanese table which is always the pivot
of these social circles, you may be sure they are
discussing Tom's engagement, or Dick's extravagance,
or Harry's hopeless passion for the
younger Miss Fleurdelys. It is here that old
Tippleton gets execrated for that everlasting bon
mot of his which was quite a success at dinner-parties
forty years ago; it is here the belle of the
season passes under the scalpels of merciless
young surgeons; it is here B's financial condition
is handled in a way that would make B's
hair stand on end; it is here, in short, that everything
is canvassed,—everything that happens in
our set, I mean, much that never happens, and a
great deal that could not possibly happen. It
was at Our Club that I learned the particulars
of the Van Twiller affair.
It was great entertainment to Our Club, the
Van Twiller affair, though it was rather a joyless
thing, I fancy, for Van Twiller. To understand
the case fully, it should be understood that Ralph
sensitive men living. He is a lineal descendant
of Wouter Van Twiller, the famous old Dutch
governor of New York,—Nieuw Amsterdam,
as it was then; his ancestors have always been
burgomasters or admirals or generals, and his
mother is the Mrs. Vanrensselaer Vanzandt
Van Twiller whose magnificent place will be
pointed out to you on the right bank of the
Hudson, as you pass up the historic river towards
Idlewild. Ralph is about twenty-five years old.
Birth made him a gentleman, and the rise of
real estate—some of it in the family since
the old governor's time—made him a millionnaire.
It was a kindly fairy that stepped in and
made him a good fellow also. Fortune, I take it,
was in her most jocund mood when she heaped
her gifts in this fashion on Van Twiller, who was,
and will be again, when this cloud blows over,
the flower of Our Club.
About a year ago there came a whisper—if
the word “whisper” is not too harsh a term to
apply to what seemed a mere breath floating
gently through the atmosphere of the billiard-room—imparting
the intelligence that Van
everybody suddenly takes to wearing square-toed
boots, or to drawing his neckscarf through a
ring, so it became all at once the fashion, without
any preconcerted agreement, for everybody to
speak of Van Twiller as a man in some way
under a cloud. But what the cloud was, and
how he got under it, and why he did not get
away from it, were points that lifted themselves
into the realm of pure conjecture. There was
no man in the club with strong enough wing
to his imagination to soar to the supposition that
Van Twiller was embarrassed in money matters.
Was he in love? That appeared nearly as
improbable; for if he had been in love all the
world — that is, perhaps a hundred first families
— would have known all about it instantly.
“He has the symptoms,” said Delaney, laughing.
“I remember once when Jack Flemming
—”
“Ned!” cried Flemming, “I protest against
any allusion to that business.”
This was one night when Van Twiller had
wandered into the club, turned over the magazines
absently in the reading-room, and wandered
most careless eye would have remarked the great
change that had come over Van Twiller. Now
and then he would play a game of billiards with
Bret Harte or John Hay, or stop to chat a moment
in the vestibule with Whitelaw Reid; but
he was an altered man. When at the club, he
was usually to be found in the small smokingroom
up stairs, seated on a fauteuil fast asleep,
with the last number of The Nation in his hand.
Once if you went to two or three places of an
evening, you were certain to meet Van Twiller at
them all. You seldom met him in society now.
By and by came whisper number two, a
whisper more emphatic than number one, but
still untraceable to any tangible mouth-piece.
This time the whisper said Van Twiller was
in love. But with whom? The list of possible
Mrs. Van Twillers was carefully examined by
experienced hands, and a check placed against a
fine old Knickerbocker name here and there, but
nothing satisfactory arrived at. Then that same
still small voice of rumor, but now with an easily
detected staccato sharpness to it, said that Van
Twiller was in love — with an actress! Van
all this waste of raw material in the way of
ancestors to bring to perfection, — Ralph Van
Twiller, the net result and flower of his race,
the descendant of Wouter, the son of Mrs.
Vanrensselaer Vanzandt Van Twiller, — in love
with an actress! That was too ridiculous to
be believed, — and so everybody believed it.
Six or seven members of the club abruptly
discovered in themselves an unsuspected latent
passion for the histrionic art. In squads of two
or three they stormed successively all the theatres
in town, — Booth's, Wallack's, Daly's Fifth Ave-nue
(not burnt down then), and the Grand Opera
House. Even the shabby homes of the drama
over in the Bowery, where the Germanic Thespius
has not taken out his naturalization papers,
underwent rigid exploration. But no clew was
found to Van Twiller's mysterious attachment.
The opéra bouffe, which promised the widest
field for investigation, produced absolutely nothing,
not even a crop of suspicions. One night,
after several weeks of this, Delaney and I
fancied we caught a glimpse of Van Twiller
in the private box of an up-town theatre, where
which we did not care to sit through; but we
concluded afterwards it was only somebody that
looked like him. Delaney, by the way, was
unusually active in this search. I dare say he
never quite forgave Van Twiller for calling
him Muslin Delaney. Ned is fond of ladies'
society and that's a fact.
The Cimmerian darkness which surrounded
Van Twiller's inamorata left us free to indulge
in the wildest conjectures. Whether she was
black-tressed Melpomene, with bowl and dagger,
or Thalia, with the fair hair and the laughing
face, was only to be guessed at. It was popularly
conceded, however, that Van Twiller was on the
point of forming a dreadful mèsalliance.
Up to this period he had visited the club
regularly. Suddenly he ceased to appear. He
was not to be seen on Broadway, or in the
Central Park, or at the houses he generally
frequented. His chambers — and mighty comfortable
ones they were—on Thirty-fourth Street
were deserted. He had dropped out of the world,
shot like a bright particular star from his orbit
in the heaven of the best society.
“Where's Van Twiller?”
“Who's seen Van Twiller?”
“What has become of Van Twiller?”
Delaney picked up the Evening Post, and read,
— with a solemnity that betrayed young Firkins
into exclaiming, “By Jove now!” —
“Married, on the 10th instant, by the Rev.
Friar Laurence, at the residence of the bride's
uncle, Montague Capulet, Esq., Miss Adrienne Le
Couvreur to Mr. Ralph Van Twiller, both of this
city. No cards.”
“It strikes me,” said Frank Livingstone, who
had been ruffling the leaves of a magazine at the
other end of the table, “that you fellows are in a
great fever about Van Twiller.”
“So we are.”
“Well, he has simply gone out of town.”
“Where?”
“Up to the old homestead on the Hudson.”
“It's an odd time of year for a fellow to go
into the country.”
“He has gone to visit his mother,” said Livingstone.
“In February?”
“I did n't know, Delaney, there was any statute
mother in February if he wants to.”
Delaney made some light remark about the
pleasure of communing with Nature with a cold
in her head, and the topic was dropped.
Livingstone was hand in glove with Van Twiller,
and if any man shared his confidence it was
Livingstone. He was aware of the gossip and
speculation that had been rife in the club, but he
either was not at liberty or did not think it worth
while to relieve our curiosity. In the course of a
week or two it was reported that Van Twiller
was going to Europe; and go he did. A dozen
of us went down to the Scotia to see him off. It
was refreshing to have something as positive as
the fact that Van Twiller had sailed.
2. II.
Shortly after Van Twiller's departure the
whole thing came out. Whether Livingstone
found the secret too heavy a burden, or whether
it transpired through some indiscretion on the
part of Mrs. Vanrensselaer Vanzandt Van Twiller,
I cannot say; but one evening the entire
story was in the possession of the club.
Van Twiller had actually been very deeply interested
— not in an actress, for the legitimate
drama was not her humble walk in life, but — in
Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski, whose really perilous
feats on the trapeze had astonished New
York the year before, though they had failed to
attract Delaney and me the night we wandered
into the up-town theatre on the trail of Van
Twiller's mystery.
That a man like Van Twiller should be fascinated
for an instant by a common circus-girl
seems incredlble; but it is always the incredible
thing that happens. Besides, Mademoiselle
a most daring and startling gymnaste, with a
beauty and a grace of movement that gave to
her audacious performance almost an air of
prudery. Watching her wondrous dexterity and
pliant strength, both exercised without apparent
effort, it seemed the most natural proceeding in
the world that she should do those unpardonable
things. She had a way of melting from one
graceful posture into another, like the dissolving
figures thrown from a stereopticon. She was a
lithe, radiant shape out of the Grecian mythology,
now poised up there above the gas-lights, and
now gleaming through the air like a slender gilt
arrow.
I am describing Mademoiselle Olympe as she
appeared to Van Twiller on the first occasion
when he strolled into the theatre where she was
performing. To me she was a girl of eighteen
or twenty years of age (maybe she was much
older, for pearl-powder and distance keep these
people perpetually young), slightly but exquisitely
built, with sinews of silver wire; rather
pretty, perhaps, after a manner, but showing
plainly the effects of the exhaustive drafts she
Twiller was an enthusiast on the subject of calisthenics.
“If I had a daughter,” Van Twiller used
to say, “I would n't send her to a boarding-school,
or a nunnery; I'd send her to a gymnasium
for the first five years. Our American
women have no physique. They are lilies, pallid,
pretty, — and perishable. You marry an American
woman, and what do you marry? A headache.
Look at English girls. They are at least
roses, and last the season through.”
Walking home from the theatre that first
night, it flitted through Van Twiller's mind
that if he could give this girl's set of nerves
and muscles to any one of the two hundred high-bred
women he knew, he would marry her on the
spot and worship her forever.
The following evening he went to see Mademoiselle
Olympe again. “Olympe Zabriski,” he
thought, as he sauntered through the lobby,
“what a queer name! Olympe is French, and
Zabriski is Polish. It is her nom de guerre, of
course; her real name is probably Sarah Jones.
What kind of creature can she be in private life,
I wonder? I wonder if she wears that costume
from a horizontal bar. Of course she rocks
the baby to sleep on the trapeze.” And Van
Twiller went on making comical domestic tableaux
of Mademoiselle Zabriski, like the clever, satirical
dog he was, until the curtain rose.
This was on a Friday. There was a matinée
the next day, and he attended that, though he
had secured a seat for the usual evening entertainment.
Then it became a habit of Van
Twiller's to drop into the theatre for half an
hour or so every night, to assist at the interlude,
in which she appeared. He cared only for her
part of the programme, and timed his visits
accordingly. It was a surprise to himself when
he reflected, one morning, that he had not missed
a single performance of Mademoiselle Olympe for
two weeks.
“This will never do,” said Van Twiller.
“Olympe” — he called her Olympe, as if she
were an old acquaintance, and so she might have
been considered by that time — “is a wonderful
creature; but this will never do. Van, my boy,
you must reform this altogether.”
But half past nine that night saw him in his
week. A habit leads a man so gently in the
beginning that he does not perceive he is led, —
with what silken threads and down what pleasant
avenues it leads him! By and by the soft silk
threads become iron chains, and the pleasant
avenues Avernus!
Quite a new element had lately entered
into Van Twiller's enjoyment of Mademoiselle
Olympe's ingenious feats, — a vaguely born apprehension
that she might slip from that swinging
bar, that one of the thin cords supporting it
might snap, and let her go headlong from the
dizzy height. Now and then, for a terrible instant,
he would imagine her lying a glittering,
palpitating heap at the foot-lights, with no color
in her lips! Sometimes it seemed as if the girl
were tempting this kind of fate. It was a hard,
bitter life, and nothing but poverty and sordid
misery at home could have driven her to it.
What if she should end it all some night, by just
unclasping that little hand? It looked so small
and white from where Van Twiller sat!
This frightful idea fascinated while it chilled
him, and helped to make it nearly impossible
beginning his attendance had not interfered with
his social duties or pleasures; but now he came
to find it distasteful after dinner to do anything
but read, or walk the streets aimlessly, until
it was time to go to the play. When that was over,
he was in no mood to go anywhere but to his
rooms. So he dropped away by insensible degrees
from his habitual haunts, was missed, and began
to be talked about at the club. Catching some
intimation of this, he ventured no more in the
orchestra stalls, but shrouded himself behind
the draperies of the private box in which Delaney
and I thought we saw him on one occasion.
Now, I find it very perplexing to explain what
Van Twiller was wholly unable to explain to
himself. He was not in love with Mademoiselle
Olympe. He had no wish to speak to her, or
to hear her speak. Nothing could have been
easier, and nothing further from his desire,
than to know her personally. A Van Twiller
personally acquainted with a strolling female
acrobat! Good heavens! That was something
possible only with the discovery of perpetual
motion. Taken from her theatrical setting.
and Olympe Zabriski would have shocked every
aristocratic fibre in Van Twiller's body. He was
simply fascinated by her marvellous grace and
élan, and the magnetic recklessness of the girl.
It was very young in him and very weak, and
no member of the Sorosis, or all the Sorosisters
together, could have been more severe on Van
Twiller than he was on himself. To be weak,
and to know it, is something of a punishment
for a proud man. Van Twiller took his punishment,
and went to the theatre, regularly.
“When her engagement comes to an end,”
he meditated, “that will finish the business.”
Mademoiselle Olympe's engagement finally did
come to an end, and she departed. But her
engagement had been highly beneficial to the
treasury-chest of the up-town theatre, and before
Van Twiller could get over missing her she
had returned from a short Western tour, and her
immediate reappearance was underlined on the
play-bills.
On a dead-wall opposite the windows of
Van Twiller's sleeping-room there appeared,
as if by necromancy, an aggressive poster with
at least a foot high. This thing stared him
in the face when he woke up, one morning.
It gave him a sensation as if she had called
on him overnight, and left her card.
From time to time through the day he regarded
that poster with a sardonic eye. He had pitilessly
resolved not to repeat the folly of the previous
month. To say that this moral victory cost
him nothing would be to deprive it of merit.
It cost him many internal struggles. It is a fine
thing to see a man seizing his temptation by the
throat, and wrestling with it, and trampling
it under foot like St. Anthony. This was the
spectacle Van Twiller was exhibiting to the
angels.
The evening Mademoiselle Olympe was to
make her reappearance, Van Twiller, having
dined at the club and feeling more like himself
than he had felt for weeks, returned to his
chamber, and putting on dressing-gown and
slippers, piled up the greater portion of his
library about him, and fell to reading assiduously.
There is nothing like a quiet evening at home
with some slight intellectual occupation, after
way.
When the lively French clock on the mantel-piece,
— a base of malachite surmounted by a
flying bronze Mercury with its arms spread gracefully
on the air, and not remótely suggestive
of Mademoiselle Olympe in the act of executing
her grand flight from the trapeze, — when the
clock, I repeat, struck nine, Van Twiller paid no
attention to it. That was certainly a triumph.
I am anxious to render Van Twiller all the
justice I can, at this point of the narrative,
inasmuch as when the half-hour sounded musically,
like a crystal ball dropping into a silver bowl,
he rose from the chair automatically, thrust
his feet into his walking-shoes, threw his overcoat
across his arm, and strode out of the room.
To be weak and to scorn your weakness,
and not to be able to conquer it, is, as has
been said, a hard thing; and I suspect it was
not with unalloyed satisfaction that Van Twiller
found himself taking his seat in the back part of
the private box night after night during the
second engagement of Mademoiselle Olympe. It
was so easy not to stay away!
In this second edition of Van Twiller's fatuity,
his case was even worse than before. He not
only thought of Olympe quite a number of times
between breakfast and dinner, he not only attended
the interlude regularly, but he began, in
spite of himself, to occupy his leisure hours at
night by dreaming of her. This was too much
of a good thing, and Van Twiller regarded it so.
Besides, the dream was always the same,—a
harrowing dream, a dream singularly adapted to
shattering the nerves of a man like Van Twiller.
He would imagine himself seated at the theatre
(with all the members of Our Club in the parquette),
watching Mademoiselle Olympe as usual,
when suddenly that young lady would launch
herself desperately from the trapeze, and come
flying through the air like a firebrand hurled at
his private box. Then the unfortunate man
would wake up with cold drops standing on his
forehead.
There is one redeeming feature in this infatuation
of Van Twiller's which the sober moralist
will love to look upon,—the serene unconsciousness
of the person who caused it. She went
through her rôle with admirable aplomb, drew
appears from first to last to have been ignorant
that there was a miserable slave wearing her
chains nightly in the left-hand proscenium-box.
That Van Twiller, haunting the theatre with
the persistency of an ex-actor, conducted himself
so discreetly as not to draw the fire of Mademoiselle
Olympe's blue eyes shows that Van Twiller,
however deeply under a spell, was not in
love. I say this, though I think if Van Twiller
had not been Van Twiller, if he had been a man
of no family and no position and no money, if
New York had been Paris, and Thirty-fourth
Street a street in the Latin Quarter—but it is
useless to speculate on what might have happened.
What did happen is sufficient.
It happened, then, in the second week of
Queen Olympe's second unconscious reign, that
an appalling Whisper floated up the Hudson,
effected a landing at a point between Spuyten
Duyvel Crek and Cold Spring, and sought out
a stately mansion of Dutch architecture standing
on the bank of the river. The Whisper straightway
informed the lady dwelling in this mansion
that all was not well with the last of the Van
from his peers, and wasting his nights in a
play-house watching a misguided young woman
turning unmaidenly summersaults on a piece of
wood attached to two ropes.
Mrs. Vanrensselaer Vanzandt Van Twiller
came down to town by the next train to look
into this little matter.
She found the flower of the family taking an
early breakfast, at 11 a. m., in his cosey apartments
on Thirty-fourth Street. With the least
possible circumlocution she confronted him with
what rumor had reported of his pursuits, and
was pleased, but not too much pleased, when he
gave her an exact account of his relations with
Mademoiselle Zabriski, neither concealing nor
qualifying anything. As a confession, it was
unique, and might have been a great deal less
entertaining. Two or three times, in the course
of the narrative, the matron had some difficulty
in preserving the gravity of her countenance.
After meditating a few minutes, she tapped Van
Twiller softly on the arm with the tip of her
parasol, and invited him to return with her the
next day up the Hudson and make a brief visit
invitation with outward alacrity and inward
disugust.
When this was settled, and the worthy lady
had withdrawn, Van Twiller went directly to
the establishment of Messrs Ball, Black, and
Company and selected, with unerring taste, the
finest diamond bracelet procurable. For his
mother? Dear me, no! She had the family
jewels.
I would not like to state the enormous sum
Van Twiller paid for this bracelet. It was such
a clasp of diamonds as would have hastened the
pulsation of a patrician wrist. It was such a
bracelet as Prince Camaralzaman might have
sent to the Princess Badoura, and the Princess
Badoura—might have been very glad to get.
In the fragrant Levant morocco case, where
these happy jewels lived when they were at home,
Van Twiller thoughtfully placed his card, on the
back of which he had written a line begging
Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski to accept the accompanying
trifle from one who had witnessed her
graceful performances with interest and pleasure.
This was not done inconsiderately. “Of course
Van Twiller had said to himself; “a Van Twiller
can neither write an anonymous letter nor
make an anonymous present.” Blood entails its
duties as well as its privileges.
The casket despatched to its destination, Van
Twiller felt easier in his mind. He was under
obligations to the girl for many an agreeable hour
that might otherwise have passed heavily. He
had paid the debt, and he had paid it en prince,
as became a Van Twiller. He spent the rest of
the day in looking at some pictures at Goupil's,
and at the club, and in making a few purchases
for his trip up the Hudson. A consciousness
that this trip up the Hudson was a disorderly retreat
came over him unpleasantly at intervals.
When he returned to his rooms late at night,
he found a note lying on the writing-table. He
started as his eye caught the words “——Theatre”
stamped in carmine letters on one corner of
the envelope. Van Twiller broke the seal with
trembling fingers.
Now, this note some time afterwards fell into
the hands of Livingstone, who showed it to Stuyvesant,
who showed it to Delaney, who showed
The note ran as follows:—
Mr Van Twiller Dear Sir — i am verry great-full
to you for that Bracelett. it come just in the nic
of time for me. The Mademoiselle Zabriski dodg is
about plaid out. My beard is getting to much for me.
i shall have to grow a mustash and take to some other
line of busyness, i dont no what now, but will let
you no. You wont feel bad if i sell that Bracelett. i
have seen Abrahams Moss and he says he will do the
square thing. Pleas accep my thanks for youre Beautiful
and Unexpected present.
The next day Van Twiller neither expressed
nor felt any unwillingness to spend a few weeks
with his mother at the old homestead.
And then he went abroad.
| Marjorie Daw, and other people | |