His Own People

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HIS OWN PEOPLE

by Booth Tarkington





I. A Change of Lodging

The glass-domed "palm-room" of the Grand Continental Hotel Magnifique in
Rome is of vasty heights and distances, filled with a mellow green light
which filters down languidly through the upper foliage of tall palms,
so that the two hundred people who may be refreshing or displaying
themselves there at the tea-hour have something the look of under-water
creatures playing upon the sea-bed. They appear, however, to be unaware
of their condition; even the ladies, most like anemones of that
gay assembly, do not seem to know it; and when the Hungarian band
(crustacean-like in costume, and therefore well within the picture)
has sheathed its flying tentacles and withdrawn by dim processes, the
tea-drinkers all float out through the doors, instead of bubbling up
and away through the filmy roof. In truth, some such exit as that was
imagined for them by a young man who remained in the aquarium after they
had all gone, late one afternoon of last winter. They had been marvelous
enough, and to him could have seemed little more so had they made such a
departure. He could almost have gone that way himself, so charged was
he with the uplift of his belief that, in spite of the brilliant
strangeness of the hour just past, he had been no fish out of water.

While the waiters were clearing the little tables, he leaned back in his
chair in a content so rich it was nearer ecstasy. He could not bear to
disturb the possession joy had taken of him, and, like a half-awake boy
clinging to a dream that his hitherto unkind sweetheart has kissed him,
lingered on in the enchanted atmosphere, his eyes still full of all they
had beheld with such delight, detaining and smiling upon each revelation
of this fresh memory--the flashingly lovely faces, the dreamily lovely
faces, the pearls and laces of the anemone ladies, the color and
romantic fashion of the uniforms, and the old princes who had been
pointed out to him: splendid old men wearing white mustaches and single
eye-glasses, as he had so long hoped and dreamed they did.

"Mine own people!" he whispered. "I have come unto mine own at last.
Mine own people!" After long waiting (he told himself), he had seen
them--the people he had wanted to see, wanted to know, wanted to
be _of!_ Ever since he had begun to read of the "beau monde" in his
schooldays, he had yearned to know some such sumptuous reality as that
which had come true to-day, when, at last, in Rome he had seen--as he
wrote home that night--"the finest essence of Old-World society mingling
in Cosmopolis."

Artificial odors (too heavy to keep up with the crowd that had
worn them) still hung about him; he breathed them deeply, his eyes
half-closed and his lips noiselessly formed themselves to a quotation
from one of his own poems:

While trails of scent, like cobweb's films
Slender and faint and rare,
Of roses, and rich, fair fabrics,
Cling on the stirless air,
The sibilance of voices,
At a wave of Milady's glove,
Is stilled--

He stopped short, interrupting himself with a half-cough of laughter as
he remembered the inspiration of these verses. He had written them three
months ago, at home in Cranston, Ohio, the evening after Anna McCord's
"coming-out tea." "Milady" meant Mrs. McCord; she had "stilled" the
conversation of her guests when Mary Kramer (whom the poem called a
"sweet, pale singer") rose to sing Mavourneen; and the stanza closed
with the right word to rhyme with "glove." He felt a contemptuous pity
for his little, untraveled, provincial self of three months ago, if,
indeed, it could have been himself who wrote verses about Anna McCord's
"coming-out tea" and referred to poor, good old Mrs. McCord as "Milady"!

The second stanza had intimated a conviction of a kind which only poets
may reveal:

She sang to that great assembly,
They thought, as they praised her tone;
But she and my heart knew better:
Her song was for me alone.

He had told the truth when he wrote of Mary Kramer as pale and sweet,
and she was paler, but no less sweet, when he came to say good-by to
her before he sailed. Her face, as it was at the final moment of the
protracted farewell, shone before him very clearly now for a moment:
young, plaintive, white, too lamentably honest to conceal how much her
"God-speed" to him cost her. He came very near telling her how fond of
her he had always been; came near giving up his great trip to remain
with her always.

"Ah!" He shivered as one shivers at the thought of disaster narrowly
averted. "The fates were good that I only came near it!"

He took from his breast-pocket an engraved card, without having to
search for it, because during the few days the card had been in his
possession the action had become a habit.

"Comtesse de Vaurigard," was the name engraved, and below was written in
pencil: "To remember Monsieur Robert Russ Mellin he promise to come to
tea Hotel Magnifique, Roma, at five o'clock Thursday."


There had been disappointment in the first stages of his journey, and
that had gone hard with Mellin. Europe had been his goal so long, and
his hopes of pleasure grew so high when (after his years of saving and
putting by, bit by bit, out of his salary in a real-estate office)
he drew actually near the shining horizon. But London, his first
stopping-place, had given him some dreadful days. He knew nobody, and
had not understood how heavily sheer loneliness--which was something he
had never felt until then--would weigh upon his spirits. In Cranston,
where the young people "grew up together," and where he met a dozen
friends on the street in a half-hour's walk, he often said that he
"liked to be alone with himself." London, after his first excitement in
merely being there, taught him his mistake, chilled him with weeks of
forbidding weather, puzzled and troubled him.

He was on his way to Paris when (as he recorded in his journal) a light
came into his life. This illumination first shone for him by means of
one Cooley, son and inheritor of all that had belonged to the late great
Cooley, of Cooley Mills, Connecticut. Young Cooley, a person of
cheery manners and bright waistcoats, was one of Mellin's few
sea-acquaintances; they had played shuffleboard together on the steamer
during odd half-hours when Mr. Cooley found it possible to absent
himself from poker in the smoking-room; and they encountered each other
again on the channel boat crossing to Calais.

_"Hey!"_ was Mr. Cooley's lively greeting. "I'm meetin' lots of people
I know to-day. You runnin' over to Paris, too? Come up to the boat-deck
and meet the Countess de Vaurigard."

"Who?" said Mellin, red with pleasure, yet fearing that he did not hear
aright.

"The Countess de Vaurigard. Queen! met her in London. Sneyd introduced
me to her. You remember Sneyd on the steamer? Baldish Englishman--red
nose--doesn't talk much--younger brother of Lord Rugden, so he says.
Played poker some. Well, _yes!_"

"I saw him. I didn't meet him."

"You didn't miss a whole lot. Fact is, before we landed I almost had him
sized up for queer, but when he introduced me to the Countess I saw my
mistake. He must be the real thing. _She_ certainly is! You come along
up and see."

So Mellin followed, to make his bow before a thin, dark, charmingly
pretty young woman, who smiled up at him from her deck-chair through
an enhancing mystery of veils; and presently he found himself sitting
beside her. He could not help trembling slightly at first, but he would
have giving a great deal if, by some miraculous vision, Mary Kramer and
other friends of his in Cranston could have seen him engaged in what he
thought of as "conversational badinage" with the Comtesse de Vaurigard.

Both the lady and her name thrilled him. He thought he remembered the
latter in Froissart: it conjured up "baronial halls" and "donjon keeps,"
rang resonantly in his mind like "Let the portcullis fall!" At home he
had been wont to speak of the "oldest families in Cranston," complaining
of the invasions of "new people" into the social territory of the
McCords and Mellins and Kramers--a pleasant conception which the
presence of a De Vaurigard revealed to him as a petty and shameful
fiction; and yet his humility, like his little fit of trembling, was
of short duration, for gay geniality of Madame de Vaurigard put him
amazingly at ease.

At Calais young Cooley (with a matter-of-course air, and not seeming to
feel the need of asking permission) accompanied her to a compartment,
and Mellin walked with them to the steps of the coach, where he paused,
murmuring some words of farewell.

Madame de Vaurigard turned to him with a prettily assumed dismay.

"What! You stay at Calais?" she cried, pausing with one foot on the step
to ascend. "Oh! I am sorry for you. Calais is ter-rible!"

"No. I am going on to Paris."

"So? You have frien's in another coach which you wish to be wiz?"

"No, no, indeed," he stammered hastily.

"Well, my frien'," she laughed gayly, "w'y don' you come wiz us?"

Blushing, he followed Cooley into the coach, to spend five happy hours,
utterly oblivious of the bright French landscape whirling by outside the
window.

There ensued a month of conscientious sightseeing in Paris, and that
unfriendly city afforded him only one glimpse of the Countess. She
whizzed by him in a big touring-car one afternoon as he stood on an
"isle of safety" at the foot of the Champs Elysees. Cooley was driving
the car. The raffish, elderly Englishman (whose name, Mellin knew,
was Sneyd) sat with him, and beside Madame de Vaurigard in the tonneau
lolled a gross-looking man--unmistakably an American--with a jovial,
red, smooth-shaven face and several chins. Brief as the glimpse was,
Mellin had time to receive a distinctly disagreeable impression of this
person, and to wonder how Heaven could vouchsafe the society of Madame
de Vaurigard to so coarse a creature.

All the party were dressed as for the road, gray with dust, and to all
appearances in a merry mood. Mellin's heart gave a leap when he saw that
the Countess recognized him. Her eyes, shining under a white veil, met
his for just the instant before she was quite by, and when the machine
had passed a little handkerchief waved for a moment from the side of the
tonneau where she sat.

With that he drew the full breath of Romance.

He had always liked to believe that _"grandes dames"_ leaned back in
the luxurious upholstery of their victorias, landaulettes, daumonts or
automobiles with an air of inexpressible though languid hauteur. The
Newport letter in the Cranston Telegraph often referred to it. But
the gayety of that greeting from the Countess' little handkerchief
was infinitely refreshing, and Mellin decided that animation was more
becoming than hauteur--even to a _"grande dame."_

That night he wrote (almost without effort) the verses published in the
Cranston Telegraph two weeks later. They began:

_Marquise, ma belle_, with your kerchief of
lace
Awave from your flying car,
And your slender hand--

The hand to which he referred was the same which had arrested his
gondola and his heart simultaneously, five days ago, in Venice. He was
on his way to the station when Madame de Vaurigard's gondola shot out
into the Grand Canal from a narrow channel, and at her signal both boats
paused.

"Ah! but you fly away!" she cried, lifting her eyebrows mournfully,
as she saw the steamer-trunk in his gondola. "You are goin' return to
America?"

"No. I'm just leaving for Rome."

"Well, in three day' _I_ am goin' to Rome!" She clapped her hands
lightly and laughed. "You know this is three time' we meet jus' by
chance, though that second time it was so quick--_pff_! like that--we
didn't talk much togezzer! Monsieur Mellin," she laughed again, "I think
we mus' be frien's. Three time'--an' we are both goin' to Rome! Monsieur
Mellin, you believe in _Fate_?"

With a beating heart he did.

Thence came the invitation to meet her at the Magnifique for tea, and
the card she scribbled for him with a silver pencil. She gave it with
the prettiest gesture, leaning from her gondola to his as they parted.
She turned again, as the water between them widened, and with her "_Au
revoir_" offered him a faintly wistful smile to remember.

All the way to Rome the noises of the train beat out the measure of his
Parisian verses:

_Marquise, ma belle_, with your kerchief of
lace
Awave from your flying car--

He came out of his reverie with a start. A dozen men and women, dressed
for dinner, with a gold-fish officer or two among them, swam leisurely
through the aquarium on their way to the hotel restaurant. They were the
same kind of people who had sat at the little tables for tea--people of
the great world, thought Mellin: no vulgar tourists or "trippers" among
them; and he shuddered at the remembrance of his pension (whither it was
time to return) and its conscientious students of Baedeker, its dingy
halls and permanent smell of cold food. Suddenly a high resolve lit his
face: he got his coat and hat from the brass-and-blue custodian in the
lobby, and without hesitation entered the "bureau."

"I 'm not quite satisfied where I am staying--where I'm stopping, that
is," he said to the clerk. "I think I'll take a room here."

"Very well, sir. Where shall I send for your luggage?"

"I shall bring it myself," replied Mellin coldly, "in my cab."

He did not think it necessary to reveal the fact that he was staying at
one of the cheaper pensions; and it may be mentioned that this reticence
(as well as the somewhat chilling, yet careless, manner of a gentleman
of the "great world" which he assumed when he returned with his trunk
and bag) very substantially increased the rate put upon the room he
selected at the Magnifique. However, it was with great satisfaction
that he found himself installed in the hotel, and he was too recklessly
exhilarated, by doing what he called the "right thing," to waste any
time wondering what the "right thing" would do to the diminishing pad of
express checks he carried in the inside pocket of his waistcoat.

"Better live a fortnight like a gentleman," he said, as he tossed his
shoes into a buhl cabinet, "than vegetate like a tourist for a year."

He had made his entrance into the "great world" and he meant to hold his
place in it as one "to the manor born." Its people should not find
him lacking: he would wear their manner and speak their language--no
gaucherie should betray him, no homely phrase escape his lips.

This was the chance he had always hoped for, and when he fell asleep
in his gorgeous, canopied bed, his soul was uplifted with happy
expectations.





II. Music on the Pincio

The following afternoon found him still in that enviable condition as
he stood listening to the music on the Pincian Hill. He had it of rumor
that the Fashion of Rome usually took a turn there before it went to
tea, and he had it from the lady herself that Madame de Vaurigard would
be there. Presently she came, reclining in a victoria, the harness of
her horses flashing with gold in the sunshine. She wore a long ermine
stole; her hat was ermine; she carried a muff of the same fur, and
Mellin thought it a perfect finish to the picture that a dark gentleman
of an appearance most distinguished should be sitting beside her. An
Italian noble, surely!

He saw the American at once, nodded to him and waved her hand. The
victoria went on a little way beyond the turn of the drive, drew out of
the line of carriages, and stopped.

"Ah, Monsieur Mellin," she cried, as he came up, "I am glad! I was so
foolish yesterday I didn' give you the address of my little apartment
an' I forgot to ask you what is your hotel. I tol' you I would come here
for my drive, but still I might have lost you for ever. See what many
people! It is jus' that Fate again."

She laughed, and looked to the Italian for sympathy in her kindly
merriment. He smiled cordially upon her, then lifted his hat and smiled
as cordially upon Mellin.

"I am so happy to fin' myself in Rome that I forget"--Madame de
Vaurigard went on--"_ever'sing!_ But now I mus' make sure not to lose
you. What is your hotel?"

"Oh, the Magnifique," Mellin answered carelessly. "I suppose everybody
that one knows stops there. One does stop there, when one is in Rome,
doesn't one?"

"Everybody go' there for tea, and to eat, sometime, but to _stay_--ah,
that is for the American!" she laughed. "That is for you who are all so
abomin-_ab_-ly rich!" She smiled to the Italian again, and both of them
smiled beamingly on Mellin.

"But that isn't always our fault, is it?" said Mellin easily.

"Aha! You mean you are of the new generation, of the yo'ng American' who
come over an' try to spen' these immense fortune'--those _'pile'_--your
father or your gran-father make! I know quite well. Ah?"

"Well," he hesitated, smiling. "I suppose it does look a little by way
of being like that."

"Wicked fellow!" She leaned forward and tapped his shoulder chidingly
with two fingers. "I know what you wish the mos' in the worl'--you
wish to get into mischief. That is it! No, sir, I will jus' take you in
han'!"

"When will you take me?" he asked boldly.

At this, the pleasant murmur of laughter--half actual and half
suggested--with which she underlined the conversation, became loud and
clear, as she allowed her vivacious glance to strike straight into his
upturned eyes, and answered:

"As long as a little turn roun' the hill, _now_. Cavaliere Corni--"

To Mellin's surprise and delight the Italian immediately descended from
the victoria without the slightest appearance of irritation; on
the contrary, he was urbane to a fine degree, and, upon Madame de
Vaurigard's formally introducing him to Mellin, saluted the latter with
grave politeness, expressing in good English a hope that they might meet
often. When the American was installed at the Countess' side she spoke
to the driver in Italian, and they began to move slowly along the ilex
avenue, the coachman reining his horses to a walk.

"You speak Italian?" she inquired.

"Oh, not a great deal more than a smattering," he replied airily--a
truthful answer, inasmuch as a vocabulary consisting simply of _"quanty
costy"_ and _"troppo"_ cannot be seriously considered much more than a
smattering. Fortunately she made no test of his linguistic attainment,
but returned to her former subject.

"Ah, yes, all the worl' to-day know' the new class of American," she
said--"_your_ class. Many year' ago we have another class which Europe
didn' like. That was when the American was ter-ri-ble! He was the--what
is that you call?--oh, yes; he 'make himself,' you say: that is it. My
frien', he was abominable! He brag'; he talk' through the nose; yes,
and he was niggardly, rich as he was! But you, you yo'ng men of the new
generation, you are gentlemen of the idleness; you are aristocrats, with
polish an' with culture. An' yet you throw your money away--yes, you
throw it to poor Europe as if to a beggar!"

"No, no," he protested with an indulgent laugh which confessed that the
truth was really "Yes, yes."

"Your smile betray' you!" she cried triumphantly. "More than jus' bein'
guilty of that fault, I am goin' to tell you of others. You are not the
ole-time--what is it you say?--Ah, yes, the 'goody-goody.' I have
heard my great American frien', Honor-able Chanlair Pedlow, call it the
Sonday-school. Is it not? Yes, you are not the Sonday-school yo'ng men,
you an' your class!"

"No," he said, bestowing a long glance upon a stout nurse who
was sitting on a bench near the drive and attending to twins in a
perambulator. "No, we're not exactly dissenting parsons."

"Ah, no!" She shook her head at him prettily. "You are wicked! You are
up into all the mischief! Have I not hear what wild sums you risk at
your game, that poker? You are famous for it."

"Oh, we play," he admitted with a reckless laugh, "and I suppose we do
play rather high."

"High!" she echoed. "_Souzands!_ But that is not all. Ha, ha, ha,
naughty one! Have I not observe' you lookin' at these pretty creature',
the little contadina-girl, an' the poor ladies who have hire' their
carriages for two lire to drive up and down the Pincio in their bes'
dress an' be admire' by the yo'ng American while the music play'? Which
one I wonder, is it on whose wrist you would mos' like to fasten a
bracelet of diamon's? Wicked, I have watch' you look at them--"

"No, no," he interrupted earnestly. "I have not once looked away from
you, I _could n't_." Their eyes met, but instantly hers were lowered;
the bright smile with which she had been rallying him faded and there
was a pause during which he felt that she had become very grave. When
she spoke, it was with a little quaver, and the controlled pathos of
her voice was so intense that it evoked a sympathetic catch in his own
throat.

"But, my frien', if it should be that I cannot wish you to look so at
me, or to speak so to me?"

"I beg your pardon!" he exclaimed, almost incoherently. "I didn't mean
to hurt your feelings. I wouldn't do anything you'd think ungentlemanly
for the world!"

Her eyes lifted again to his with what he had no difficulty in
recognizing as a look of perfect trust; but, behind that, he perceived a
darkling sadness.

"I know it is true," she murmured--"I know. But you see there are time'
when a woman has sorrow--sorrow of one kind--when she mus' be sure that
there is only--only rispec' in the hearts of her frien's."

With that, the intended revelation was complete, and the young man
understood, as clearly as if she had told him in so many words, that she
was not a widow and that her husband was the cause of her sorrow. His
quickened instinct marvelously divined (or else it was conveyed to him
by some intangible method of hers) that the Count de Vaurigard was a
very bad case, but that she would not divorce him.

"I know," he answered, profoundly touched. "I understand."

In silent gratitude she laid her hand for a second upon his sleeve. Then
her face brightened, and she said gayly:

"But we shall not talk of _me!_ Let us see how we can keep you out of
mischief at leas' for a little while. I know very well what you will do
to-night: you will go to Salone Margherita an' sit in a box like all the
wicked Americans--"

"No, indeed, I shall not!"

"Ah, yes, you will!" she laughed. "But until dinner let me keep you from
wickedness. Come to tea jus' wiz me, not at the hotel, but at the little
apartment I have taken, where it is quiet. The music is finish', an' all
those pretty girl' are goin' away, you see. I am not selfish if I take
you from the Pincio now. You will come?"





III. Glamour

It was some fair dream that would be gone too soon, he told himself, as
they drove rapidly through the twilight streets, down from the Pincio
and up the long slope of the Quirinal. They came to a stop in the gray
courtyard of a palazzo, and ascended in a sleepy elevator to the fifth
floor. Emerging, they encountered a tall man who was turning away
from the Countess' door, which he had just closed. The landing was not
lighted, and for a moment he failed to see the American following Madame
de Vaurigard.

"Eow, it's you, is it," he said informally. "Waitin' a devil of a long
time for you. I've gawt a message for you. _He's_ comin'. He writes that
Cooley--"

_"Attention!"_ she interrupted under her breath, and, stepping forward
quickly, touched the bell. "I have brought a frien' of our dear, droll
Cooley with me to tea. Monsieur Mellin, you mus' make acquaintance with
Monsieur Sneyd. He is English, but we shall forgive him because he is a
such ole frien' of mine."

"Ah, yes," said Mellin. "Remember seeing you on the boat, running across
the pond."

"Yes, ev coss," responded Mr. Sneyd cordially. "I wawsn't so fawchnit
as to meet you, but dyuh eold Cooley's talked ev you often. Heop I sh'll
see maw of you hyuh."

A very trim, very intelligent-looking maid opened the door, and the
two men followed Madame de Vaurigard into a square hall, hung with
tapestries and lit by two candles of a Brobdingnagian species Mellin had
heretofore seen only in cathedrals. Here Mr. Sneyd paused.


"I weon't be bawthring you," he said. "Just a wad with you, Cantess, and
I'm off."

The intelligent-looking maid drew back some heavy curtains leading to a
salon beyond the hall, and her mistress smiled brightly at Mellin.

"I shall keep him to jus' his one word," she said, as the young man
passed between the curtains.

It was a nobly proportioned room that he entered, so large that, in
spite of the amount of old furniture it contained, the first impression
it gave was one of spaciousness. Panels of carved and blackened wood
lined the walls higher than his head; above them, Spanish leather
gleamed here and there with flickerings of red and gilt, reflecting
dimly a small but brisk wood fire which crackled in a carved stone
fireplace. His feet slipped on the floor of polished tiles and wandered
from silky rugs to lose themselves in great black bear skins as in
unmown sward. He went from the portrait of a "cinquecento" cardinal to
a splendid tryptich set over a Gothic chest, from a cabinet sheltering
a collection of old glass to an Annunciation by an unknown Primitive.
He told himself that this was a "room in a book," and became dreamily
assured that he was a man in a book. Finally he stumbled upon something
almost grotesquely out of place: a large, new, perfectly-appointed
card-table with a sliding top, a smooth, thick, green cover and patent
compartments.