CHAPTER VI

In the early dawn there had been a slight shower of rain, but by the time the sun was high enough to shine over the town's highest buildings, the clouds parted, and presently drifted away altogether, leaving the golden disc full freedom in giving a brilliant look to the clean-washed streets. By noon everything was as bright as a newly-scoured kitchen.

It was at that time of the year when spring is kissing a greeting to summer. There was not too much heat. Growth and activity were not yet subdued by the later la.s.situde of midsummer. In the parks the trees were full of blossoms, the flowers were spelling out the runes that the gardners had contrived for the Sunday sight-seers, and the roadways were alive with well-equipped traps of every sort. The avenue was colorful and kaleidoscopic. Dog-carts, driven by smartly-gowned, square-sitting girls, bowled along noiselessly, the footmen looking as stolid as if carved in wood. Landaus, with elderly women leaning far back into the cushions, and shading their complexions under lace-decked parasols, went by with an occasional rattling of chains. The careful observer might have noticed that the number of smart vehicles was a trifle larger than usual; there were more coaches out, and the air resounded more often to the various military and hunting-calls that the English grooms were executing on their horns.

It was Derby Day.

d.i.c.k was walking along the avenue watching, with his artist eyes open for all the picturesque effect of the whole--the yellow haze of the sun that filled the atmosphere in and out of which all these rapid color-effects flashed swiftly, the thin strip of sky-reflecting water to the east, the line of gra.s.s and the sky-touching horizon of huge buildings--when he heard someone calling out his name.

"Lancaster!" It was Stanley, driving a dog-cart and a neat bay cob. "The very man! Jump in, won't you? Going down to the Derby. Thing you shouldn't miss; lots of color and all that sort of thing! Asked Vanstruther to go down with me, but one of his dime-novel heroes is ill or something of that sort, and he's off the list. That's good of you.

Look how you're stepping. This brute has been eating his head off all week, and isn't really fit for a Christian to drive. That's it! Now."

They went spinning along the avenue.

In the instant or two before he climbed into the dog-cart, d.i.c.k had reflected that while he was not over-fond of Stanley in a good many ways, the man was undeniably a clever fellow, always to be depended on for bright talk; besides he did feel very much like studying the scene of a Derby Day with its many-colored facets.

Watching the rapid, shifting beauties of the boulevard, d.i.c.k burst into a little sigh of admiration. "Ah," he said, "this is good! This is living!"

"Youthful enthusiasm," muttered the other man. "Delightful thing--youthful enthusiasm--to get over."

"Oh, no! I hope I never shall! What is life worth if one is not to show that one enjoys it? How can you look at a day like this--a splendid, champagnelike day--and yet--"

"My dear fellow," interrupted Stanley, with a queer smile, "when a man gets to my time of life there is always something melancholy to him in the picture of a spring day. It reminds him of his own youth: all tears and sunshine. Today there are neither tears or sunshine; it is all just contemplation. I don't seem to belong to the play at ail, any more, myself; I'm merely a spectator. To the spectator there is always something pathetic about joy."

"Your lunch was indigestable, that's all that is the matter with you,"

laughed d.i.c.k. "It's a dogma of mine that pessimism is merely another word for indigestion."

"Dogma!" sighed Stanley, "Don't you know that all dogmas are obsolete?

Don't you know that in this rapid age we believe everything, accept everything and yet doubt everything?"

"Isn't that a trifle paradoxical?"

"No; only modern! We believe everything that inventors or scientists may tell us; but in the world spiritual we believe nothing. Is that a paradox?"

"But indigestion is surely, h'm, material rather than spiritual?" d.i.c.k enjoyed the verbal parries that he was always sure of with Stanley. He was always trying to get at the secret man's cynicism, a cynicism that was the essence of what many other men of the world he lived in seemed to feel, but were not all, perhaps, so well able to express.

"Oh well," was Stanley's answer, "after all, it doesn't matter. Nothing makes any difference." He looked blankly ahead as if all the world was contained in the s.p.a.ce occupied between the cob's ears. Then he went on, in his minor monotone, "No, nothing, except--"

d.i.c.k, thinking to be cheery, put in "Except marriage?"

"No!" came from Stanley, with a sudden flick of the whip over the cob's flanks, "that only makes differences."

d.i.c.k laughed somewhat impatiently. "Oh!" he urged, "why sit there and be dismal? Why not wake up and live? Surely the air is full of it, of this fair Life? Enjoy it, brace up, be young!"

"Ah, if I only could again, if I only could! Oh, to be young again! He is the Autocrat of today, the young man." He lapsed into his sneer once more. "The young man of today thinks he has the experience of the centuries at his fingertips, whereas he really has only the gloves that were made yesterday and will split tomorrow."

"You are not only unjust," protested d.i.c.k, "you are flippant."

"Of course I am! The keynote of this end of the century is lightness.

The modern declares that life is but a joke, and a bad one at best. How to live without ever allowing oneself to suspect that life is more than a game in which the odds are heads, Death wins; tails, Man loses: that is the great problem of the decade. The universal solution of the difficulty is the practice of superficiality. Skim! Be light! Never penetrate below the surfaces! Never search the deep! Make love as if it were a tourney of jests; die as if it were a riddle well guessed! Be scintillantly versatile, rather than thorough; hide your ignorance with bland blasedom; treat tragedy as an intruder, comedy as a chum, and as a reward you will be called 'up-to-date.' Nay, more: your fashionable friends may even misp.r.o.nounce French in your behalf and dub you _fin de siecle_!"

d.i.c.k shuddered laughingly. "A horrible philosophy," he said. And yet he was glad of the other's bitterness; it showed, through all its veil of sneers and scorn, something of the point of view of the foremost in that race toward Death that some of the town-dwellers are wont to call Life.

Yet he could not keep his thoughts long on the serious import of the other's scornful flippancy. How shall two-and-twenty years, and health, and sunshine, and a spirit susceptible to enjoyments that the very atmosphere seemed redolent of, allow a young man to brood on the progress of the world's cancer? No; there were too many distractions!

Tandems whirling by with horsy young men handling the ribbons; brakes full of laughing girls and straw-hatted young men; hackney carriages with four occupants unmistakably of the bookmaker guild.

Just before they rolled into sight of the grand-stand, Stanley said, "Oh, who do you suppose I had a letter from yesterday?"

"No idea."

"The most n.o.ble A.B. Wooton, of the late lamented '_Torch_'."

"You don't say so. His nerve never dies, eh?"

"As I said before, his is not a case of 'nerve'; it is genius. He has the prettiest story you ever read, swears his advertising man deceived him and got the paper into all manner of tight places; found himself forced to get away from the ruins so that he could the better repay his creditors, which he states he has instructed his lawyers to do, and all the rest of it! I don't believe a word of it; but he has got grit!"

"That is a national fault," said d.i.c.k soberly, "the admiration of 'grit'

in scoundrels. For that is all that Wooton is, after all!"

"Oh, well, why split hairs? He never did you any harm, did he? However, about his letter. He writes from Dresden. Says he has just met some Americans--name of Ware, I think. Enjoying himself immensely--girl in the party--moonlight rides and all that sort of thing. Wonder how long he'll last over there?"

"I know some Wares," said d.i.c.k quietly; "but I hardly think it could be the same ones. Though they are in Europe just now, that's true." His thoughts tried to hark back to Lincolnville, to his parting with Dorothy Ware, and to her return; but the present was too strong for him. They were driving across the course at this moment, and over into the field, which was already a motly, colored ma.s.s of vehicles, white dresses, parasols and stamping horses. The tops of coaches were made over into sitting room for summer-dressed girls, of whose faces one caught only the white under-half--the chin and the mouth, in high sun relief--while the eyes were in shade of the huge parasols. One caught glimpses of light shoes and hose; of young men walking, in earnest converse over betting tickets held in hand; of wicker lunch-baskets being brought from the inner chambers of the coaches and prepared for a future hunger; and, beyond, in the grand stand, of a black, indistinguishable ma.s.s of spectators, noisy, tremendous.

As soon as they had found a place for the dog-cart, from which they would be able to see the finish with tolerable comfort and completeness, Stanley said, with a noticeable alacrity succeeding the languid pessimism that had distinguished him all during the drive down.

"Now then, Lancaster, let's hurry over to the betting-shed!"

For a moment only d.i.c.k hesitated. "Going to bet, or just to look on?" he asked.

"Bet, of course, you innocent infant! But, Scotland, you don't have to!

You can just soak in the--what do you call it--the impressionistic view of it. But hurry up, whatever you are going to do, I don't want the odds to tumble down too far before I get there!"

Not so long ago d.i.c.k would have cavilled, hesitated, perhaps refused.

Now he caught his half-uttered objections being met by a whisper in his own mind of 'Don't be a prig!' and he followed Stanley silently. It occurred to him, presently, that to warn oneself of becoming a prig was in itself evidence of priggishness. Impatiently he shook his head, as if to get all a.n.a.lytical reflections out of his head altogether. He looked at the scene around him, and forgot everything else.

The scene in the betting-shed was, just as is the stock exchange floor, the boiling-point of the kettle of froth called metropolitan life.

Around the bookmakers' stands was a seething, struggling ma.s.s of humanity. Each member of this mob was pushing, striving, perspiring for --what?--the chance to get something for nothing! The bookmakers themselves were straining every nerve to keep pace with the public's feverish desire to get rid of it's money. On their little stands, their heads on a level with the black-board that furnished the names of the horses and the odds against, they stood; one hand busy taking in money that was handed in to the inner part of the stand, the other grasping the piece of chalk that ever and again touched the black-board to effect some change in the odds. One man inside was busy with pencil and paper, registering each ticket as it was handed out; another covered the face of the ticket with the hasty hieroglyphics that stood for the horse chosen and the amount wagered and the amount that might be won. Here and there a bookmaker encouraged the "plunge" on some horse that he professed to scorn by shouting forth his odds and the horse's name. The blind struggle of the majority was an amusing spectacle; it certainly seemed to vouch for the truth of the saying that man is a gambling animal. Like serpents, the "touts," professional vendors of spurious stable information, went winding in and out through the throng, sometimes displaying judgment in the would-be bettors they approached, but as often as not displaying most lamentable indiscretion. d.i.c.k watched, with an amused smile, how one of these fellows sided up to a quiet man, who, program in hand, was leaning against a pillar watching the boards and the changes in odds. The quiet man listened to the tout's hoa.r.s.e whisperings, and then threw his coat back showing an "owner's"

badge. The tout slunk sheepishly into the crowd.

"If you take my advice," said Stanley who was fighting his way towards some remote goal or other, "you'll take a little flyer on Dr. Rice.

That's what I'm going to do. There's a fellow on the other side of the ring has him a point higher than anyone else."

d.i.c.k, without having made up his mind as to his own betting or not betting, helped his companion in his struggle to get through the crowd.

Desperate energy was necessary. There was never any time for apologies; elbows were pushed into sides, toes were trodden on, scarfs twisted and sleeve-links broken; no matter, there was money to be won and there was no time either to consider pa.s.sing annoyances or the possibility of loss.

"Ah," said Stanley, finally, as they found themselves in front of a black-board that had a figure "7" chalked to the left of the name Dr.