The Spread Eagle and Other Stories

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They shook, she firmly, he with the flabby, diffident clasp of childhood
and old age.

"You're a funny kid," said Fitz.

"You're rather a dear," said Eve.

She entered the elevator, closed the door, and disappeared upward, at
the pace of a very footsore and weary snail.

Mrs. Burton was much cheered by Mrs. Williams's visit, as who that
struggles is not by the notice of the rich and the mighty?

"My dear," she said, when Eve entered, "she is so charming, so natural;
she has promised to give a tea for me, and to present me to some of her
friends. I hope you like the boy--Fitz--Fritz--whatever his name is. It
would be so nice if you were to be friends."

"He _is_ nice," said Eve, "ever so nice--but _so_ dull."

"What did you talk about?" asked Mrs. Burton,

"Really," said Eve, aged seven, "I forget."

III

Mrs. Burton had made a failure of her own life.

She had married a man who subsequently had been so foolish as to lose
his money--or most of it.

Eve, who had ever a short memory, does not remember the catastrophe. She
was three at the time of it. She was in the nursery when the blow fell,
and presently her mother came in looking very distracted and wild, and
caught the little girl's face between her hands, and looked into it, and
turned it this way and that, and passed the little girl's beautiful
brown hair through her fingers, and then began to speak violently.

"You sha'n't be shabby," she said. "I will make a great beauty of you.
You've got the beauty. You shall ride in your carriage, even if I work
my hands to the bone. They've bowled me over. But I'm not dead yet.
Elizabeth Burton shall have her day. You wait. I'll make the world dance
for you." Then she went into violent hysterics.

There was a little money left. Mrs. Burton took Evelyn to Europe, and
began to teach her the long litany of success:

Money is God;
We praise thee, etc.,

a very long, somewhat truthful, and truly degraded litany. She taught
her that it isn't handsome is as handsome does, but the boots and
shoes, after all. She taught her that a girl must dress beautifully to
be beautiful, that she must learn all the world's ways and secrets, and
at the same time appear in speech and manner like a child of Nature,
like a newly opened rose. And she taught her to love her country
like this:

"America, my dear, is the one place where a girl can marry enough money
to live somewhere else. Or, if her husband is tied to his affairs, it is
the one place where she can get the most for his money--not as we get
the most for ours, for we couldn't live two minutes on our income in
America--but where the most people will bow the lowest to her because
she is rich; where she will be the most courted and the most envied."

The two mammas worked along similar lines, but for different reasons.
Mrs. Burton strove to make Eve ornamental so that she might acquire
millions; Mrs. Williams strove to Anglicize and Europeanize her son so
that he might ornament those which were already his. Those little spread
eagles, the corpuscles in his blood, folded their wings a trifle as he
grew older, and weren't always so ready to scream and boast; but they
remained eagles, and no amount of Eton and Oxford could turn them into
little unicorns or lions. You may wonder why Fitz's father, a strong,
sane man, permitted such attempts at denationalization upon his son and
heir. Fitz so wondered--once. So wrote. And was answered thus:

... If you're any good it will all come out in the wash. If you aren't
any good it doesn't matter whether your mother makes an Englishman out
of you or a Mandarin. When you come of age you'll be your own man;
that's been the bargain between your mother and me. That will be the
time for you to decide whether to be governed or to help govern. I am
not afraid for you. I never have been.

So Mrs. Williams was not successful on the whole in her attempts to make
a cosmopolitan of Fitz. And that was just enough, because the attempts
were those of an amateur. She had lived a furiously active life of
pleasure; she had made an unassailable place for herself in the best
European society, as at home. She had not even become estranged from her
husband. They were always crossing the ocean to see each other, "if only
for a minute or two," as she used to say, and when Fitz was at school
she spent much of her time in America; and Fitz's short vacations were
wild sprees with his father and mother, come over for the purpose. Mr.
Williams would take an immense country house for a few weeks, with
shooting and riding and all sorts of games thrown in, and have Fitz's
friends by the dozen. But, like as not, Mr. Williams would leave in the
middle of it, as fast as trains and steamers could carry him, home to
his affairs. And even the little English boys missed him sorely, since
he was much kinder to them, as a rule, than their own fathers were, and
had always too many sovereigns in his pocket for his own comfort.

But Mrs. Burton's attempts to make a charming cosmopolitan of Eve met
with the greater success that they deserved. They were the efforts of a
professional, one who had staked life or death, so to speak, on the
result. Where Mrs. Williams amused herself and achieved small victories,
Mrs. Burton fought and achieved great conquests. She saved money out of
her thin income, money for the great days to come when Eve was to be
presented to society at Newport; and she slaved and toiled grimly and
with far-seeing genius. Eve's speaking voice was, perhaps, Mrs. Burton's
and her own greatest triumph. It was Ellen Terry's youngest, freshest
voice over again, but with the naivest little ghost of a French accent;
and she didn't seem so much to project a phrase at you by the locutory
muscles as to smile it to you.

Mrs. Burton had, of course, her moments of despair about Eve. But these
were mostly confined to that despairing period when most girls are
nothing but arms and wrists and gawkiness and shyness; when their clear,
bright complexions turn muddy, and they want to enter convents. Eve at
this period in her life was unusually trying and nondescript. She
announced that if she ever married it would be for love alone, but that
she did not intend to marry. She would train to be a cholera nurse or a
bubonic plague nurse--anything, in short, that was most calculated to
drive poor Mrs. Burton frantic. And she grew the longest, thinnest pair
of legs and arms in Europe; and her hair seemed to lose its wonderful
lustre; and her skin, upon which Mrs. Burton had banked so much, became
colorless and opaque and a little blotched around the chin. And she was
so nervous and overgrown that she would throw you a whole fit of
hysterics during piano lessons; and she prayed so long night and morning
that her bony knees developed callouses; and when she didn't have a cold
in her head she was getting over one or catching another.

During this period in Eve's life the children met for the second time.
It was in Vienna. This time Mrs. Burton, as having been longer in
residence, called upon Mrs. Williams, taking Eve with her, after
hesitation. Poor Eve! The graceful, gracious courtesy of her babyhood
was now a performance of which a stork must have felt ashamed; she
pitched into a table (while trying to make herself small) and sent a
pitcher of lemonade crashing to the ground. And then burst into tears
that threatened to become laughter mixed with howls.

At this moment Fitz, having been sent for to "do the polite," entered.
He shook hands at once with Mrs. Burton, whom he had never seen before,
and turned to see how Eve, whom he vaguely remembered, was coming on.
And there she was--nothing left of his vague memory but the immense
eyes. Even these were not clear and bright, but red in the whites and
disordered with tears. For the rest (Fitz made the mental comparison
himself) she reminded him of a silly baby camel that he had seen in the
zoo, that had six inches of body, six feet of legs, and the most bashful
expression imaginable.

Mrs. Burton, you may be sure, did not lose the start that Fitz gave
before he went forward and shook hands with Eve. But she misinterpreted
it. She said to herself (all the while saying other things aloud to Mrs.
Williams): "If he had only seen her a year ago, even a boy of his age
would have been struck by her, and would have remembered her. But now!
Now, he'll never forget her. And I don't blame him. She's so ugly that
he was frightened."

But that was not why Fitz had started. The poor, gawky, long-legged,
tearful, frightened, overgrown, wretched girl had not struck him as
ugly; she had struck him as the most pathetic and to-be-pitied object
that he had ever seen. I do not account for this. I state it. Had she
been pretty and self-possessed he would have left the room presently on
some excuse, but now he stayed--not attracted, but troubled and sorry
and eager to put her at her ease. So he would have turned aside to help
a gutter cat that had been run over and hurt, though he would have
passed the proudest, fluffiest Angora in Christendom with no more than a
glance. He began to talk to her in his plainest, straightest, honestest
Ohioan. It always came out strongest when he was most moved. His
mother's sharp ears heard the A's, how they narrowed in his mouth, and
smote every now and then with a homely tang against the base of his
nose. "Just like his father," she thought, "when some one's in trouble."
And she had a sudden twinge of nostalgia.

Fitz lured Eve to a far corner and showed her a set of wonderful carved
chess-men that he had bought that morning; and photographs of his
friends at Eton, and of the school, and of some of the masters. He
talked very earnestly and elaborately about these dull matters, and
passed by the opportunities which her first embarrassed replies offered
for the repartee of youth. And he who was most impatient of restraint
and simple occupations talked and behaved like a dull, simple, kindly
old gentleman. His method may not have left Eve with a dazzling
impression of him; she could not know that he was not himself, but all
at once a deliberate artist seeking to soothe and to make easy.

Eve did not enjoy that call; she enjoyed nothing in those days but
prayer and despair; but she got to the end of it without any more tears
and crashes. And she said to her mother afterward that young Williams
seemed a nice boy--but so dull. Well, they were quits. She had seemed
dull enough to Fitz. A sick cat may touch your heart, but does not
furnish you with lively companionship. Fitz was heartily glad when the
Burtons had gone. He had worked very hard to make things possible for
that absurd baby camel.

"You may call her an absurd baby camel," said his mother, "but it's my
opinion that she is going to be a very great beauty."

"_She!"_ exclaimed Fitz, thinking that the ugliness of Eve might have
unhinged his mother's beauty-loving mind.

"Oh," said his mother, "she's at an age now--poor child! But don't you
remember how the bones of her face--"

"I am trying to forget," said Fitz with a tremendous shudder for the
occasion.

IV

Fitz did not take a degree at Oxford. He left in the middle of his last
term, leaving many friends behind. He stood well, and had been in no
especial difficulty of mischief, and why he left was a mystery. The
truth of the matter is that he had been planning for ten years to leave
Oxford in the very middle of his last term. For upon that date fell his
twenty-first birthday, when he was to be his own man. He spent a few
hours in his mother's house in London. And, of course, she tried to make
him go back and finish, and was very much upset, for her. But Fitz
was obdurate.

"If it were Yale, or Princeton, or Harvard, or Berkeley, or Squedunk,"
he said, "I would stick it out. But a degree from Oxford isn't worth six
weeks of home."

"But aren't you going to wait till I can go with you?"

"If you'll go with me to-night you shall have my state-room, and I'll
sleep on the coal. But if you can't go till to-morrow, mother mine, I
will not wait. I have cabled my father," said he, "to meet me at
quarantine."

"Your poor, busy father," she said, "will hardly feel like running on
from Cleveland to meet a boy who is coming home without a degree."

"My father," said Fitz, "will be at quarantine. He will come out in a
tug. And he will arrange to take me off and put me ashore before the
others. If the ship is anywhere near on schedule my father and I will be
in time to see a ball game at the Polo Grounds."

Something in the young man's honest face and voice aroused an answering
enthusiasm in his mother's heart.

"Oh, Fitz," she said, "if I could possibly manage it I would go with
you. Tell your father that I am sailing next week. I won't cable.
Perhaps he'll be surprised and pleased."

"I _know_ he will," said Fitz, and he folded his mother in his arms and
rumpled her hair on one side and then on the other.

* * * * *

Those who beheld, and who, because of the wealth of the principal
personages, took notice of the meeting between Fitz and his father, say
that Fitz touched his father's cheek with his lips as naturally and
unaffectedly as if he had been three years old, that a handshake between
the two men accompanied this salute, and that Williams senior was heard
to remark that it had looked like rain early in the morning, but that
now it didn't, and that he had a couple of seats for the ball game. What
he really said was inside, neither audible nor visible upon his
smooth-shaven, care-wrinkled face. It was an outcry of the heart, so
joyous as to resemble grief.

There was a young and pretty widow on that ship who had made much of
Fitz on the way out and had pretended that she understood him. She
thought that she had made an impression, and that, whatever happened, he
would not forget her. But when he rushed up, his face all joyous, to say
good-by, her heart sank. And she told her friends afterward that there
was a certain irresistible, orphan-like appeal about that young
Williams, and that she had felt like a mother toward him. But this was
not till very much later. At first she used to shut herself up in her
room and cry her eyes out.

They lunched at an uptown hotel and afterward, smoking big cigars, they
drove to a hatter's and bought straw hats, being very critical of each
other's fit and choice.

Then they hurried up to the Polo Grounds, and when it began to get
exciting in the fifth inning, Fitz felt his father pressing something
into his hand. Without taking his eyes from Wagsniff, who was at the
bat, Fitz put that something into his mouth and began to chew. The two
brothers--for that is the high relationship achieved sometimes in
America, and in America alone, between father and son--thrust their new
straw hats upon the backs of their round heads, humped themselves
forward, and rested with their elbows on their knees and watched--no,
that is your foreigner's attitude toward a contest--they _played_
the game.

I cannot leave them thus without telling the reader that they survived
the almost fatal ninth, when, with the score 3-2 against, two out and a
man on first, Wagsniff came once more to the bat and, swinging cunningly
at the very first ball pitched to him by the famous Mr. Blatherton,
lifted it over the centrefielder's head and trotted around the bases
and, grinning like a Hallowe'en pumpkin, came romping home.

At dinner that night Williams senior said suddenly:

"Fitz, what you do want to do?"

A stranger would have thought that Fitz was being asked to choose
between a theatre and a roof-garden, but Fitz knew that an entirely
different question was involved in those casually spoken words. He was
being asked off-hand to state off-hand what he was going to do with his
young life. But he had his answer waiting.

"I want to see the world," he said.

Williams senior, as a rule, thought things out in his own mind and did
not press for explanations. But on the present occasion he asked:

"As how?"

Fitz smiled very youthfully and winningly.

"I've seen some of it," he said, "right side up. Now I want to have a
look upside-down. If I go into something of yours--as myself--I don't
get a show. I'm marked. The other clerks would swipe to me, and the
heads would credit me with brains before I showed whether I had any or
not. I want you to get me a job in Wall Street--under any other name
than my own--except Percy"--they both laughed--"your first name and
mamma's maiden name would do--James Holden. And nobody here knows me by
sight, I've been abroad so much; and it seems to me I'd get an honest
point of view and find out if I was any good or not, and if I could get
myself liked for myself or not."

"Well," said his father; "well, that's an idea, anyhow."

"I've had valets and carriages and luxuries all my life," said Fitz. "I
think I like them. But I don't _know_--do I? I've never tried the other
thing. I'm sure I don't want to be an underpaid clerk always. But I am
sure I want to try it on for a while."

"I was planning," said his father, "to take a car and run about the
country with you and show you all the different enterprises that I'm
interested in. I thought you'd make a choice, find something you liked,
and go into it for a starter. If you're any good you can go pretty far
with me pulling for you. You don't like that idea?"

"Not for now," said Fitz. "I like mine better."

"Do you want to live on what you earn?"

"If I can stand it."

"You'll be started with ten dollars a week, say. Can you do it?"

"What did grandpa start on?" asked Fitz.

"His board, two suits of clothes, and twenty-four dollars a year," said
William senior with a proud ring in his voice.

"And you?"

"I began at the bottom, too. That was the old-fashioned idea. Father
was rich then. But he wanted me to show that I was some good."

"Did grandpa pull for you, or did you have to find yourself?"

"Well," said the father diffidently, "I had a natural taste for
business. But," and he smiled at his son, "I shouldn't live on what you
earn, if I were you. You needn't spend much, but have a good time out of
hours. You'll find yourself working side by side with other sons of rich
men. And you can bet your bottom dollar _they_ don't live on what they
can earn. Unless you make a display of downright wealth you'll be judged
on your merits. That's what you're driving at, isn't it?"

So they compromised on that point; and the next morning they went
downtown and called upon Mr. Merriman, the great banker. He and Williams
had been in many deals together, and on one historic occasion had
supported prices and loaned so much ready money on easy terms as to
avert a panic.

"John," said Williams senior, "my son Fitz."

"Well, sir," said Merriman, only his eyes smiling, "you don't look like
a foreigner."

"I'm not," said Fitz stoutly.

"In that case," said Merriman, "what can I do for you?"

"I want to be called James Holden," said Fitz, "and to have a job in
your office."

Merriman listened to the reasons with interest and amusement. Then he
turned to Williams senior. "May I drive him?" he asked grimly.

"If you can," said Fitz's father. And he laughed.

Finally, it was arranged that, in his own way, Fitz was to see the
world.

V

Fitz's experiment in finding himself and getting himself liked for
himself alone was a great failure. He had not been in Mr. Merriman's
employ two hours before he found that he disliked long sums in addition,
and had made friends with Wilson Carrol, who worked next to him. Indeed,
Fitz made friends with everybody in the office inside of two weeks, and
was responsible for a great deal of whispering and hanging out of back
windows for a puff of smoke. Nobody but Mr. Merriman knew who he was,
where he came from, or what his prospects were. Everybody liked him--for
himself. Rich or poor, it must have been the same. His idea that
character, if he had it, would tell in the long run proved erroneous. It
told right away.

Wilson Carrol and half a dozen other clerks in the office were the sons
of rich men, put to work because of the old-fashioned idea that
everybody ought to work, and at the same time pampered, according to the
modern idea, with comfortable allowances over and beyond their pay.
With one or other of these young men for companion, and presently for
friend, Fitz began to lead the agreeable summer life of New York's
well-to-do youth. He allowed himself enough money to keep his end up,
but did not allow himself any especial extravagances or luxuries. He
played his part well, appearing less well off than Carrol, and more so
than young Prout, with whom he got into much mischief in the office.
Whatever these young gentlemen had to spend they were always hard up.
Fitz did likewise. If you dined gloriously at Sherry's and had a box at
the play you made up for it the next night by a chop at Smith's and a
cooling ride in a ferry-boat, say to Staten Island and back. Saturday
you got off early and went to Long Island or Westchester for tennis and
a swim, and lived till Monday in a luxurious house belonging to a
fellow-clerk's father, or were put up at the nearest country club.

Downtown that summer there was nothing exciting going on. The market
stood still upon very small transactions, and there was no real work for
any one but the book-keepers. The more Fitz saw of the science of
addition the less he thought of it, but he did what he had to do (no
more) and drew his pay every Saturday with pride. Once, there being a
convenient legal holiday to fatten the week-end, he went to Newport with
Carrol and got himself so much liked by all the Carrol family that he
received and accepted an invitation to spend his long holiday with them.
He and Carrol had arranged with the powers to take their two weeks off
at the same time--from the fifteenth to the end of August. And during
business hours they kept their heads pretty close together and did much
plotting and planning in whispers.

But Mrs. Carrol herself was to have a finger in that vacation. The
presence in her house of two presentable young men was an excellent
excuse for paying off dinner debts and giving a lawn party and a ball.
Even at Newport there are never enough men to go round, and with two
whole ones for a basis much may be done. The very night of their arrival
they "ran into" a dinner-party, as Carrol expressed it. It was a large
dinner; and the young men, having got to skylarking over their dressing
(contrary to Mrs. Carrol's explicit orders) descended to a drawing-room
already full of people. Carrol knew them all, even the famous new
beauty; but Fitz--or James Holden, rather--had, except for the Carrols,
but a nodding acquaintance with one or two of the men. He felt shy, and
blushed very becomingly while trying to explain to Mrs. Carrol how he
and Wilson happened to be so unfortunate as to be late.

"Well," she said, "I'm not going to punish you this time. You are to
take Miss Burton in."

"Which is Miss Burton?" asked Fitz, on whose memory at the moment the
name made no impression.

"Do you see seven or eight men in the corner," she said, "who look as if
they were surrounding a punch-bowl?"

"Miss Burton is the punch-bowl?" he asked.

"All those men want to take her in," said Mrs. Carrol, "and you're going
to make them all very jealous."

Dinner was announced, and Mrs. Carrol, with Fitz in tow, swept down upon
the group of men. It parted reluctantly and disclosed, lolling happily
in a deep chair, the most beautiful girl in the world. She came to her
feet in the quickest, prettiest way imaginable, and spoke to Mrs. Carrol
in the young Ellen Terry voice, with its little ghost of a French
accent. Fitz did not hear what she said or what Mrs. Carrol answered. He
only knew that his heart was thumping against his ribs, and that a
moment later he was being introduced as Mr. Holden, and that Eve did not
know him from Adam.

Presently she laid the tips of her fingers on his arm, and they were
going in to dinner.

"I think Mrs. Carrol's a dear," said Fitz, "to give me you to take in
and to sit next to. I always wanted people to like me, but now all the
men hate me. I can feel it in the small of my back, and I like it. Do
you know how you feel in spring--the day the first crocuses come out?
That's the way it makes me feel."

She turned her great, smiling eyes upon him and laughed. The laugh died
away. His young, merry face had a grim, resolved look. So his father
looked at critical times.

"I thought you were joking--rather feebly," she said.

"I don't know," said he, "that I shall ever joke again."

"You make your mind up very quickly," she said.

"The men of my family all do," he said. "But it isn't my mind that's
made up."

Something of the girl's stately and exquisite poise forsook her. Her
eyes wore a hunted look for a moment. She even felt obliged to laugh to
cover her confusion.

"It's my heart," said Fitz. "I saw you--and that is all there is to it."

"Aren't you in something of a hurry?" she asked, her eyes twinkling. She
had felt for a moment like a soldier surprised without weapons. But now,
once more, she felt herself armed _cap a pie_.

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