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The Voice of the City The Defeat of the City 2,338
words The
Defeat of the City
Robert Walmsley's descent upon the city resulted in a Kilkenny
struggle. He came out of the fight victor by a fortune and a reputation.
On the other hand, he was swallowed up by the city. The city gave him what
he demanded and then branded him with its brand. It remodeled, cut,
trimmed, and stamped him to the pattern it
approves. It opened its social gates to him and shut him in on a
close-cropped, formal lawn with the select herd of ruminants. In dress,
habits, manners, provincialism, routine, and narrowness he acquired that
charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated
crassness, that over-balanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman
so delightfully small in his greatness.
One of the up-state rural counties pointed with pride to the
successful young metropolitan lawyer as a product of its soil. Six years
earlier this county had removed the wheat straw from between its
huckleberry-stained teeth and emitted a derisive and bucolic laugh as old
man Walmsley's freckle-faced "Bob" abandoned the certain
three-per-diem meals of the one-horse farm for the discontinuous quick
lunch counters of the three-ringed metropolis. At the end of the six years
no murder trial, coaching party, automobile accident or cotillion was
complete in which the name of Robert Walmsley did not figure. Tailors
waylaid him in the street to get a new wrinkle from the cut of his
unwrinkled trousers. Hyphenated fellows in the clubs and members of the
oldest subpoenaed families were glad to clap him on the back and allow him
three letters of his name.
But the Matterhorn of Robert Walmsley's success was not scaled
until he married Alicia Van Der Pool. I cite the Matterhorn, for just so
high and cool and white and inaccessible was this daughter of the old
burghers. The social Alps that ranged about her—over whose bleak passes
a thousand climbers struggled—reached only to her knees. She towered in
her own atmosphere, serene, chaste, prideful, wading in no fountains,
dining no monkeys, breeding no dogs for bench shows. She was a Van Der
Pool. Fountains were made to play for her, monkeys were made for other
people's ancestors; dogs, she understood, were created to be companions of
blind persons and objectionable characters who smoked pipes.
This was the Matterhorn that Robert Walmsley accomplished. If he
found, with the good poet with the game foot and artificially curled hair,
that he who ascends to mountain tops will find the loftiest peaks most
wrapped in clouds and snow, he concealed his chillblains beneath a brave
and smiling exterior. He was a lucky man and knew it, even though he were
imitating the Spartan boy with an ice-cream freezer beneath his doublet
frappeeing the region of his heart.
After a brief wedding tour abroad, the couple returned to create a
decided ripple in the calm cistern (so placid and cool and sunless it is)
of the best society. They entertained at their red brick mausoleum of
ancient greatness in an old square that is a cemetery of crumbled glory.
And Robert Walmsley was proud of his wife; although while one of his hands
shook his guests' the other held tightly to his alpenstock and
thermometer.
One day Alicia found a letter written to Robert by his mother. It
was a unerudite letter, full of crops and motherly love and farm notes. It
chronicled the health of the pig and the recent red calf, and asked
concerning Robert's in return. It was a letter direct from the soil,
straight from home, full of biographies of bees, tales of turnips, cans of
new-laid eggs, neglected parents and the slump in dried apples.
"Why have I not been shown your mother's esters?" asked
Alicia. There was always
something in her voice that made you think of lorgnettes, of accounts at
Tiffany's, of sledges smoothly gliding on the trail from Dawson to Forty
Mile, of the tinkling of pendent prisms on your grandmothers' chandeliers,
of snow lying on a convent roof; of a police sergeant refusing bail.
"Your mother," continued Alicia, "invites us to make a
visit to the farm. I have never seen a farm. We will go there for a week
or two, Robert."
"We will, " said Robert, with the grand air of an
associate Supreme Justice concurring in an opinion. "I did not lay
the invitation before you because I thought you would not care to go. I am
much pleased at your decision."
"I will write to her myself," answered Alicia, with a
faint foreshadowing of enthusiasm. "Felice shall pack my trunks at
once. Seven, I think, will be enough. I do not suppose that your mother
entertains a great deal. Does she give many house parties?"
Robert arose, and as attorney for rural places filed a demurrer
against six of the seven trunks. He endeavored to define, picture,
elucidate, set forth and describe a farm. His own words sounded strange in
his ears. He had not realized how thoroughly urbsidized he had become.
A week passed and found them landed at the little country station
five hours out from the city. A grinning, stentorian, sarcastic youth
driving a mule to a spring wagon hailed Robert savagely.
"Hello, Mr. Walmsley. Found your way back at last, have you?
Sorry I couldn't bring in the automobile for you, but dad's bull-tonguing
the ten-acre clover patch with it today. Guess you'll excuse my not
wearing a dress suit over to meet you—it ain't six o'clock yet, you
know."
"I'm glad to see you, Tom," said Robert, grasping his
brother's hand. "Yes, I've found my way at last. You've a right to
say 'at last.' It's been over two years since the last time. But it will
be oftener after this, my boy."
Alicia, cool in the summer heat as an Arctic wraith, white as a
Norse snow maiden in her flimsy muslin and fluttering lace parasol, came
round the corner of the station; and Tom was stripped of his assurance. He
became chiefly eyesight clothed in blue jeans, and on the homeward drive
to the mule alone did he confide in language the inwardness of his
thoughts.
They drove homeward. The low sun dropped a spendthrift flood of
gold upon the fortunate fields of wheat. The cities were far away. The
road lay curling around wood and dale and hill like a ribbon lost from the
robe of careless summer. The wind followed like a whinnying colt in the
track of Phoebus's steeds.
By and by the farmhouse peeped gray out of its faithful grove; they
saw the long lane with its convoy of walnut trees running from the road to
the house; they smelled the wild rose and the breath of cool, damp willows
in the creek's bed. And then in unison all the voices of the soil began a
chant addressed to the soul of Robert Walmsley. Out of the tilted aisles
of the dim wood they came hollowly; they chirped and buzzed from the
parched grass; they trilled from the ripples of the creek ford; they
floated up in clear Pan's pipe notes from the dimming meadows; the
whippoorwills joined in as they pursued midges in the upper air; slow-going
cow-bells struck out a homely accompaniment—and this was what each one
said: "You've found your way back at last, have you?"
The old voices of the soil spoke of him. Leaf and bud and blossom
conversed with him in the old vocabulary of his careless youth—the
inanimate things, the familiar stones and rails, the gates and furrows and
roofs and turns of road had an eloquence, too, and a power in the
transformation. The country had smiled and he had felt the breath of it,
and his heart was drawn as if in a moment back to his old love. The city
was far away.
This rural atavism, then, seized Robert Walmsley and possessed him.
A queer thing he noticed in connection with it was that Alicia, sitting at
his side, suddenly seemed to him a stranger. She did not belong to this
recurrent phase. Never before had she seemed so remote, so colorless and
high—so intangible and unreal. And yet he had never admired her more
than when she sat there by him in the rickety spring wagon, chiming no
more with his mood and with her environment than the Matterhorn chimes
with a peasant's cabbage garden.
That night when the greetings and the supper were over, the entire
family, including Buff, the yellow dog, bestrewed itself upon the front
porch. Alicia, not haughty but silent, sat in the shadow dressed in
an exquisite pale-gray tea gown. Robert's mother discoursed to her happily
concerning marmalade and lumbago. Tom sat on the top step; Sisters Millie
and Pam on the lowest step to catch the lightning I bugs. Mother had the
willow rocker. Father sat in the big armchair with one of its arms gone.
Buff sprawled in the middle of the porch in everybody's way. The twilight
pixies and pucks stole forth unseen and plunged other poignant shafts of
memory into the heart of Robert. A rural madness entered his soul. The
city was far away.
Father sat without his pipe, writhing in his heavy boots, a
sacrifice to rigid courtesy. Robert shouted: "NO, YOU don't!" He
fetched the pipe and lit it; he seized the old gentleman's boots and tore
them off. The last one slipped suddenly, and Mr. Robert Walmsley, of Washington
Square, tumbled off the porch backward with Buff on top of him, howling
fearfully. Tom laughed sarcastically.
Robert tore offhis coat and vest and hurled them into a lilac bush.
"Come out here, you landlubber," he cried to Tom,
"and I'll put grass seed on your back. I think you called me a 'dude'
a while ago. Come along and cut your capers."
Tom understood the invitation and accepted it with delight. Three
times they wrestled on the grass, "side holds," even as the
giants of the mat. And twice was Tom forced to bite grass at the hands of
the distinguished lawyer. Disheveled, panting, each still boasting of his
own prowess, they stumbled back to the porch. Millie cast a pert
reflection upon the qualities of a city brother. In an instant Robert had
secured a horrid katydid in his fingers and bore down upon her. Screaming
wildly, she fled up the lane pursued by the avenging glass of form. A
quarter of a mile and they returned, she full of apology to the victorious
"dude." The rustic mania possessed him unabatedly.
"I can do up a cowpenful of you slow hayseeds," he
proclaimed, vaingloriously. "Bring on your bulldogs, your hired men,
and your logrollers. "
He turned handsprings on the grass that prodded Tom to envious
sarcasm. And then, with a whoop, he clattered to the rear and brought back
Uncle Ike, a battered colored retainer of the family, with his banjo, and
strewed sand on the porch and danced "Chicken in the Bread Tray"
and did buck-and-wing wonders for half an hour longer. Incredibly wild and
boisterous things he did. He sang, he told stories that set all but one
shrieking, he played the yokel, the humorous clodhopper; he was mad, mad
with the revival of the old life in his blood.
He became so extravagant that once his mother sought gently to
reprove him. Then Alicia moved as though she were about to speak, but she
did not. Through it all she sat immovable, a slim, white spirit in the
dusk that no man might question or read.
By and by she asked permission to ascend to her room, saying that
she was tired. On her way she passed Robert. He was standing in the door,
the figure of vulgar comedy, with ruffled hair, reddened face and
unpardonable confusion of attire—no trace there of the immaculate Robert
Walmsley, the courted clubman and ornament of select circles. He was doing
a conjuring trick with some household utensils, and the family, now won
over to him without exception, was beholding him with worshipful
admiration.
As Alicia passed in Robert started suddenly. He had forgotten for
the moment that she was present. Without a glance at him she went on
upstairs.
After that the fun grew quiet. An hour passed in talk, and then
Robert went up himself.
She was standing by the window when he entered their room. She was
still clothed as when they were on the porch. Outside and crowding against
the window was a giant apple tree, full blossomed.
Robert sighed and went near the window. He was ready to meet his
fate. A confessed vulgarian, he foresaw the verdict of justice in the
shape of that still, whiteclad form. He knew the rigid lines that a Van
Der Pool would draw. He was a peasant gamboling indecorously in the
valley, and the pure, cold, white, unthawed summit of the Matterhorn could
not but frown on him. He had been unmasked by his own actions. All the
polish, the poise, the form that the city had given him had fallen from
him like an ill‑fitting mantle at the first breath of a country
breeze. Dully he awaited the approaching condemnation.
"Robert," said the calm, cool voice of his judge, "I
thought I married a gentleman."
Yes, it was coming. And yet, in the face of it, Robert Walmsley was
eagerly regarding a certain branch of the apple tree upon which he used to
climb out of that very window. He believed he could do it now. He wondered
how many blossoms there were on the tree— ten millions? But here was
someone speaking again:
"I thought I married a gentleman," the voice went on,
"but ------- "
Why had she come and was standing so close by his side?
"But I find that I have married"—was this Alicia
talking? — "something better—a man—Bob, dear, kiss me, won't
you?"
The city
was far away.
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