The City of Masks Part 3

"The best tailor in London made that suit of clothes," said Lord Temple, surveying his friend with an appraising eye. Out of the corner of the same eye he explored the region beyond the group that now cl.u.s.tered about the hostess. Evidently he discovered what he was looking for.

Leaving the Baron high and dry, he skirted the edge of the group and, with beaming face, came to Lady Jane.

"My family is of Vienna," the Baron was saying to the Marchioness, "but of late years I have called Constantinople my home."

"I understand," said she gently. She asked no other question, but, favouring him with a kindly smile, turned her attention to the men who lurked insignificantly in the shadow of his vast bulk.

The Prince was a pale, dreamy young man with flowing black hair that must have been a constant menace to his vision, judging by the frequent and graceful sweep of his long, slender hand in brus.h.i.+ng the encroaching forelock from his eyes, over which it spread briefly in the nature of a veil. He had the fingers of a musician, the bearing of a violinist. His head drooped slightly toward his left shoulder, which was always raised a trifle above the level of the right. And there was in his soft brown eyes the faraway look of the detached. The insignia of his house hung suspended by a red ribbon in the centre of his white s.h.i.+rt front, while on the lapel of his coat reposed the emblem of the Order of the Golden Star. He was a Pole.

Count Von Blitzen, a fair-haired, pink-skinned German, urged himself forward with typical, not-to-be-denied arrogance, and crushed the fingers of the Marchioness in his fat hand. His broad face beamed with an all-enveloping smile.

"Only patriots and lovers venture forth on such nights as this," he said, in a guttural voice that rendered his French almost laughable.

"With an occasional thief or varlet," supplemented the Marchioness.

"Ach, Dieu," murmured the Count.

Fresh arrivals were announced by Cricklewick. For the next ten or fifteen minutes they came thick and fast, men and women of all ages, nationality and condition, and not one of them without a high-sounding t.i.tle. They disposed themselves about the vast room, and a subdued vocal hubbub ensued. If here and there elderly guests, with gnarled and painfully scrubbed hands, preferred isolation and the pictorial contents of a magazine from the land of their nativity, it was not with sn.o.bbish intentions. They were absorbing the news from "home," in the regular weekly doses.

The regal, resplendent Countess du Bara, of the Opera, held court in one corner of the room. Another was glorified by a pet.i.te baroness from the Artists' Colony far down-town, while a rather dowdy lady with a coronet monopolized the attention of a small group in the centre of the room.

Lady Jane Thorne and Lord Temple sat together in a dim recess beyond the great chair of state, and conversed in low and far from impersonal tones.

Cricklewick appeared in the doorway and in his most impressive manner announced Her Royal Highness, the Princess Mariana Theresa Sebastano Michelini Celestine di Pavesi.

And with the entrance of royalty, kind reader, you may consider yourself introduced, after a fas.h.i.+on, to the real aristocracy of the City of New York, United States of America,--the t.i.tled riff-raff of the world's cosmopolis.

CHAPTER III

THE CITY OF MASKS

NEW YORK is not merely a melting pot for the poor and the humble of the lands of the earth. In its capacious depths, unknown and unsuspected, float atoms of an entirely different sort: human beings with the blood of the high-born and lofty in their veins, derelicts swept up by the varying winds of adversity, adventure, injustice, lawlessness, fear and independence.

Lords and ladies, dukes and d.u.c.h.esses, counts and countesses, swarm to the Metropolis in the course of the speeding year, heralded by every newspaper in the land, feted and feasted and glorified by a capricious and easily impressed public; they pa.s.s with pomp and panoply and we let them go with reluctance and a vociferous invitation to come again. They come and they go, and we are informed each morning and evening of every move they have made during the day and night. We are told what they eat for breakfast, luncheon and dinner; what they wear and what they do not wear; where they are entertained and by whom; who they are and why; what they think of New York and--but why go on? We deny them privacy, and they think we are a wonderful, considerate and hospitable people. They go back to their homes in far-off lands,--and that is the end of them so far as we are concerned.

They merely pause on the lip of the melting pot, briefly peer into its simmering depths, and then,--pa.s.s on.

It is not with such as they that this narrative has to deal. It is not of the heralded, the glorified and the toasted that we tell, but of those who slip into the pot with the coa.r.s.er ingredients, and who never, by any chance, become actually absorbed by the processes of integration but remain for ever as they were in the beginning: distinct foreign substances.

From all quarters of the globe the drift comes to our sh.o.r.es. New York swallows the good with the bad, and thrives, like the cannibal, on the man-food it gulps down with ravenous disregard for consequences or effect. It rarely disgorges.

It eats all flesh, foul or fair, and it drinks good red blood out of the same cup that offers a black and nauseous bile. It conceals its inward revulsion behind a bland, disdainful smile, and holds out its hands for more of the meat and poison that comes up from the sea in s.h.i.+ps.

It is the City of Masks.

Its men and women hide behind a million masks; no man looks beneath the mask his neighbour wears, for he is interested only in that which he sees with the least possible effort: the surface. He sees his neighbour but he knows him not. He keeps his own mask in place and wanders among the millions, secure in the thought that all other men are as casual as he,--and as charitable.

From time to time the newspapers come forward with stories that amaze and interest those of us who remain, and always will remain, romantic and impressionable. They tell of the royal princess living in squalor on the lower east side; of the heir to a baronetcy dying in poverty in a hospital somewhere up-town; of the countess who defies the wolf by dancing in the roof-gardens; of the lost arch-duke who has been recognized in a gang of stevedores; of the earl who lands in jail as an ordinary hobo; of the baroness who supports a s.h.i.+ftless husband and their offspring by giving music-lessons; of the retiring scholar who scorns a life of idleness and a coronet besides; of s.h.i.+fty ne'er-do-wells with t.i.tles at homes and aliases elsewhere; of fugitive lords and forgotten ladies; of thieves and bauds and wastrels who stand revealed in their extremity as the sons and daughters of n.o.ble houses.

In this City of Masks there are hundreds of men and women in whose veins the blood of a sound aristocracy flows. By choice or necessity they have donned the mask of obscurity. They tread the paths of oblivion. They toil, beg or steal to keep pace with circ.u.mstance. But the blood will not be denied. In the breast of each of these drifters throbs the pride of birth, in the soul of each flickers the unquenchable flame of caste.

The mask is for the man outside, not for the man inside.

Recently there died in one of the munic.i.p.al hospitals an old flower-woman, familiar for three decades to the thousands who thread their way through the maze of streets in the lower end of Manhattan. To them she was known as Old Peg. To herself she was the Princess Feododric, born to the purple, daughter of one of the greatest families in Russia. She was never anything but the Princess to herself, despite the squalor in which she lived. Her epitaph was written in the bold, black head-lines of the newspapers; but her history was laid away with her mask in a graveyard far from palaces--and flower-stands. Her headstone revealed the uncompromising pride that survived her after death. By her direction it bore the name of Feododric, eldest daughter of His Highness, Prince Michael Androvodski; born in St. Petersburgh, September 12, 1841; died Jan. 7, 1912; wife of James Lumley, of County Cork, Ireland.

It is of the high-born who dwell in low places that this tale is told.

It is of an aristocracy that serves and smiles and rarely sneers behind its mask.

When Cricklewick announced the Princess Mariana Theresa the hush of deference fell upon the a.s.sembled company. In the presence of royalty no one remained seated.

She advanced slowly, ponderously into the room, bowing right and left as she crossed to the great chair at the upper end. One by one the others presented themselves and kissed the coa.r.s.e, unlovely hand she held out to them. It was not "make-believe." It was her due. The blood of a king and a queen coursed through her veins; she had been born a Princess Royal.

She was sixty, but her hair was as black as the coat of the raven. Time, tribulation, and a harsh destiny had put each its own stamp upon her dark, almost sinister, face. The black eyes were sharp and calculating, and they did not smile with her thin lips. She wore a great amount of jewellery and a gown of blue velvet, lavishly bespangled and generously embellished with laces of many periods, values and, you could say, nativity.

The Honourable Mrs. Priestly-Duff having been a militant suffragette before a sudden and enforced departure from England, was the only person there with the hardihood to proclaim, not altogether _sotto voce_, that the "get-up" was a fright.

Restraint vanished the instant the last kiss of tribute fell upon her knuckles. The Princess put her hand to her side, caught her breath sharply, and remarked to the Marchioness, who stood near by, that it was dreadful the way she was putting on weight. She was afraid of splitting something if she took a long, natural breath.

"I haven't weighed myself lately," she said, "but the last time I had this dress on it felt like a kimono. Look at it now! You could not stuff a piece of tissue paper between it and me to save your soul. I shall have to let it out a couple of--What were you about to say, Count Fogazario?"

The little Count, at the Marchioness's elbow, repeated something he had already said, and added:

"And if it continues there will not be a trolley-car running by midnight."

The Princess eyed him coldly. "That is just like a man," she said. "Not the faintest idea of what we were talking about, Marchioness."

The Count bowed. "You were speaking of tissue paper, Princess," said he, stiffly. "I understood perfectly."

Once a week the Marchioness held her amazing salon. Strictly speaking, it was a co-operative affair. The so-called guests were in reality contributors to and supporters of an enterprise that had been going on for the matter of five years in the heart of unsuspecting New York.

According to his or her means, each of these exiles paid the t.i.the or tax necessary, and became in fact a member of the inner circle.

From nearly every walk in life they came to this common, converging point, and sat them down with their equals, for the moment laying aside the mask to take up a long-discarded and perhaps despised reality. They became lords and ladies all over again, and not for a single instant was there the slightest deviation from dignity or form.

Moral integrity was the only requirement, and that, for obvious reasons, was sometimes overlooked,--as for example in the case of the Countess who eloped with the young artist and lived in complacent shame and happiness with him in a three-room flat in East Nineteenth street. The artist himself was barred from the salon, not because of his ign.o.ble action, but for the sufficient reason that he was of ign.o.ble birth.

Outside the charmed conclave he was looked upon as a most engaging chap.

And there was also the case of the appallingly amiable baron who had fired four shots at a Russian Grand-Duke and got away with his life in spite of the vaunted secret service. It was of no moment whatsoever that one of his bullets accidentally put an end to the life of a guardsman.

That was merely proof of his earnestness and in no way reflected on his standing as a n.o.bleman. Nor was it adequate cause for rejection that certain of these men and women were being sought by Imperial Governments because they were political fugitives, with prices on their heads.

The Marchioness, more prosperous than any of her a.s.sociates, a.s.sumed the greater part of the burden attending this singular reversion to form. It was she who held the lease on the building, from cellar to roof, and it was she who paid that important item of expense: the rent. The Marchioness was no other than the celebrated Deborah, whose gowns issuing from the lower floors at prodigious prices, gave her a standing in New York that not even the plutocrats and parvenus could dispute. In private life she may have been a Marchioness, but to all New York she was known as the queen of dressmakers.

If you desired to consult Deborah in person you inquired for Mrs.

Sparflight, or if you happened to be a new customer and ignorant, you were set straight by an attendant (with a slight uplifting of the eyebrows) when you asked for Madame "Deborah."

The owners.h.i.+p of the rare pieces of antique furniture, rugs, tapestries and paintings was vested in two members of the circle, one occupying a position in the centre of the ring, the other on the outer rim: Count Antonio Fogazario and Moody, the footman. For be it known that while Moody reverted once a week to a remote order of existence he was for the balance of the time an exceedingly prosperous, astute and highly respected dealer in antiques, with a shop in Madison Avenue and a clientele that considered it the grossest impertinence to dispute the prices he demanded. He always looked forward to these "drawing-rooms,"

so to speak. It was rather a joy to disregard the aspirates. He dropped enough hs on a single evening to make up for a whole week of deliberate speech.

As for Count Antonio, he was the purveyor of Italian antiques and primitive paintings, "authenticity guaranteed," doing business under the name of "Juneo & Co., Ltd. London, Paris, Rome, New York." He was known in the trade and at his bank as Mr. Juneo.