Natural Selection (Bunner)/Part 1

HELSEA Village has never had the aggressive exclusiveness of Greenwich. It exists to-day, and vaguely knows itself by name, close to the heart of the great city that has swallowed it up; but it is in nowise such a distinct entity as the brave little tangle of crooked streets a few blocks to the south. Greenwich has always been Greenwich, and the Ninth Ward has been the centre of civilization to the dwellers therein. But Chelsea has tried to be fashionable, has opened its doors to foreign invaders, and has even had an attack of Anglomania, and branched out into Terraces in the true London style. And so it has lost homogeneity and originality, and it has only a peculiar and private air of ambitionless and uninviting gloom to set it apart as a special quarter of New York. But Chelsea certainly does look like the inhabitants of its own boarding-houses—most respectable people, who have only tried too hard at elegant gentility for their own comfort or prosperity. And the place has one other strong individuality. I do not know that there are very many ailanthus-trees in Chelsea; but there is, to me, a pervading odor of that gruesome exotic in all the streets, and I think an imaginative person might detect the smell even in the midwinter blasts that howl up from the North River.

Contemplation of one Chelsea street had a depressing effect upon Miss Celia Leete, as she sat by her window at five o'clock of a summer Saturday afternoon. Her room was in the front of a third story of a comfortable white wooden house, one of a little squad that stood well back from the street, the first two stories all but hidden by green-latticed verandas.

Miss Celia Leete looked through the thin and dusty Leaves of the horse-chestnut-tree on the sidewalk, and her gaze roved idly up and down the hue of boarding-houses across the way. They were boarding-houses with certain aspirations. They had also high stoops and elaborate cast-iron balconies. Yet, somehow, they did not look like even the second-cousins of those lordlier structures within the sacred one block's space east and west from Fifth Avenue. Perhaps this was partly because right next to them came the little tailor's shop, red brick, painted redder yet, ten feet wide and one story high, with the German tailor's wife forever standing in the door-way, holding her latest baby in her bare red arms.

The children of shabby and not over clean gentility were playing in shrill-voiced chorus on the sidewalk in front of the high-stoop houses. Occasionally one of them would recognize a home-returning father, and, without pausing in the merry round of Spanish Fly or Par, would give his parent the hail of easy equality, "H'lo, Pa!"

The heads of families in the boarding-house colony were sometimes employed in the wholesale houses down-town; but oftener were clerks or floor-walkers in large dry-goods shops, or proprietors of smaller establishments on the West-side avenues. One of these gentlemen arrived at his domicile as Miss Celia Leete looked out of her window. He mechanically took his night-key from his pocket, but he replaced it, for the door was open, and most of the ladies of the house were disposed about the steps, in all the finery that the "bargain counters" of Fourteenth Street could furnish. Then this conversation fell sharply upon the dull and sultry air:

"Why, Mr. Giddens, that you? Early to-night, ain't you? Wasn't it awful hot down-town?"

By a delicate convention of the place, even the boarder who was in charge of the Gent's Furnishing Goods Department of Messrs. Sonnenschein and Regenschirm, a mile up Eighth Avenue, was supposed to transact bis business "down-town."

"Hot enough for me [a responsive ripple of merriment]. I ain't a hog, Miss Seavey. Why, Miss Wicks, you down again? Haven't seen yon in three days. Quite a stranger. How's the neuralger?"

"Better now, thank you, Mr. Giddens; but I had an awfle siege of it this time. I was most afraid to show myself, I've run down so."

"Idersed you'd run up, 'stid 'f down. Never saw you lookin' better."

"Oh, Mr. GKddens, you're so gallant! I wonder your wife ain't jealous of you, you're so gallant to all the ladies. There, you go right along to her, or she'll say somethin' to me, I know she will." And with a gentle push, and amid much tittering, Mr. Giddens disappeared in the dark door-way.

Celia Leete turned from her window. She was sick of life, of the place, of herself—of something, she could not quite tell what.

And yet her ailment was common enough, and simple enough, and she defined her longing sufficiently well when she said to herself, as she sometimes did: "I wish I was someone else."

It would not require a profound psychologist, knowing who and what Miss Celia Leete was, and knowing also that she had spent one year of the most purely formative period of her young life in a semi-fashionable boarding-school, to deduce from this statement a general idea of what manner of person Miss Celia Leete wished to be, could she he someone other than herself.

Miss Celia Leete was the younger daughter of David Leete, the manufacturer of the once famous "William Riley" baking-powder. There was no levity prepense in the peculiar suggestiveness of this name. Mr. Leete had perhaps never heard of the Celtic Lover who of old time was hidden by his aristocratic lady-love to "rise up" and accompany her to "far Amerikey." But he had bought the receipt for his excellent baking-powder From a clever young Irishman who chanced to be a namesake of the lovelorn emigrant whose tale is told in immortal verse, and he loyally gave the inventor due credit, and stood upon his own merits as an honest manufacturer. It was long ago, in the earlier days of baking-powder, that David Leete put the "William Riley" on the market. It was a great success among those first adventurous housewives who were heretical enough to shake off the thralldom of yeast. Of later years, other baking-powders had crowded between it and the great baking public, yet it still sold much as it had at first, when hundreds only, instead of thousands, put faith in the fermenting powers of the new discovery. The adventurous housewives of the first generation had grown old and conservative, and they clung to the William Riley powder, and thought ill of those giddy young matrons who dallied with more modern compounds.

So David Leete was well-to-do. He might have lived in a much finer house than the white frame cottage; but that was the first house he had ever bought, and thence he had ordered that it should be borne when the time came for him to leave New York forever. For even the truest old New Yorker must now go into exile with Death, and lie down at last in a Brooklyn cemetery or far up in trim Woodlawn.

From the old house, then, he walked to his Houston Street factory every morning at eight o'clock. It had been six o'clock in the baking-powder's first days of struggle, and then it had been seven, and half-past seven, and now that his son Alonzo was old enough to look after the business, he was thinking of making it nine. At half-past twelve he came back for dinner; at six he was home, in his shirt-sleeves and his big slippers, waiting for supper with a good appetite and a clear conscience.

Mr. Leete had a better appetite for his supper than his younger daughter could often muster up. By six o'clock, as a general thing, the day had grown very heavy to this young lady, and she was not tempted by the cold meat, the hot biscuit, the cake and the tea which were good enough for her father and her mother, her brother Alonzo and her sister Dorinda, more commonly called Dodie or Doe.

But then there were many things that Celia did not fancy, in spite of the fact that the rest of the family liked them. Such strange differences of taste will occasionally occur in even the most conservatively regulated households—and the standard-bearer of a new school of domestic ethics has to suffer, as a rule. Were we not well abreast with the world when last we took our bearings, some twenty or thirty years ago? Are we to set our sails now to suit these saucy chits whom we ourselves brought into the world? What was right in our time is right for all time, and there's an end of it.

Celia did not, however, suffer martyrdom because of any ideas which may have stimulated her young imagination. Her mother said she was "a peaky, Miss Nancy sort of a fussy child, not 'tall like Popper Leete, nor like my own folks, neither." Father Leete thought sometimes that she had been "spilte by that highty-tighty boardin'-school." Dorinda considered her "awfle queer," and wished she were "like the other girls," and Alonzo silently disapproved of her ways and manners—saying once, in fact, that he thought she had too many of the latter. Yet they all loved her and indulged and petted her. They did not understand her, of course; but, then, there was no necessity of understanding her. Children are fanciful, and Celia was still the child of the house.

And although these quoted utterances told, in a broad way, the truth about Celia's differences with the family standard of ethics, it is safe to say that no member of the household had anything like a realizing sense of that truth. If they perceived in the young woman an unwise and futile ambition, they misapprehended the nature of the ambition itself, and pictured the aspirant as desirous merely of those material things the possession of which represented to them social superiority. If they had been asked to put their ideas in words, they would have said that Celia wished to live in a house on Fifth Avenue, to drive on that thoroughfare in a fine carriage, to give balls, and to dance the german, whatever that was, and to have her name in the Home Journal every week. And, doubtless, these things were all in Celia's list of vague desires; but also her heart yearned after a certain something which sometimes goes with these things, which yet she knew was not hers by birth—whereas the notion that there was any difference in human quality between themselves and the haughtiest of the people in what was called society had never entered into the head of any living Leete until Celia was sent to a boarding-shool [sic] in the Orange Mountains, the year that they thought her lungs were weak. The Leetes had, like other folks, their own little foot-rule to measure the world with, and they used it with stern and unimaginative justice. They measured all people with it—king and clodhopper, poet and peasant. If you fell below what they held to be the proper stature of man, they might recognize you in your place as a fellow-mortal and a factor in the affairs of life; but they would have none of you socially. If you touched the exact mark, you were a "gentleman" or a "lady," as the case might be. If—by mischance—you rose above that fixed line—why, there was something wrong about you, that was sure; at the best, you were queer, and queer was a word of serious condemnation in the Leete vocabulary.

As an instance of this impartiality in judgment, let us take the case of the Wykoffs. The Wykoffs were the owners of the whole block in which Mr. Leete's factory stood, and for thirty years old John Wykoff had been a model landlord. That is, he had treated Mr. Leete like a gentleman, and Mr. Leete had treated him like a gentleman, and everything was perfectly satisfactory. But now John Wykoff was dead, and his son reigned in his place, and it appeared that this young whippersnapper of a Randolph Wykoff, through his lawyers, had ordered that Mr. Leete's lease should not be renewed when his five years came to an end in the spring. The lease was not to be renewed that had been renewed once every five years since 1862. The rent had always been paid promptly—John Wykoff had never had to wait a day or an hour, nor had he ever been called upon to pay a cent for repairs. And here was this young pup of a son turning out his best tenant, just for some crazy scheme of building a great co-operative factory to cover the whole block. John Wykoff was a perfect gentleman, but his son was no gentleman at all, that was one thing sure and settled.

"But I'll give him a piece of my mind," said Mr. Leete, at dinner. "I'll give him a piece of my mind when he comes back from gallivanting about Europe. Gimme some more cabbage, Ma Leete; I ain't lost my appetite, if the Wykoffs have gone back on me."

Celia Leete, whose brief experience of a strange social world had led her to doubt the accuracy and the usefulness of the Leete foot-rule, sat alone, on this particular afternoon, in the chamber which she shared with Dorinda. She was trying to read a novel of local manufacture, which, according to a press-notice quoted from the Peoria Palladium, gave "a vivid glimpse into the highest stratum of New York's most exclusive society." It told about a young country-girl, of overpowering refinement and general moral and mental correctness, who had come to New York to pay a visit to some worldly and aristocratic relations, several of whom she Lured into righteousness during her stay. This young lady was anally saved from the wiles of a titled foreign adventurer by the interposition of the hero, a dark and superficially cynical person, who had sounded all the depths and heights of swellness, and who, finding all things else hollow and objectionable, married her and took her off to do missionary work in the far West, where he felt that he could readily win the confidence and friendship of the miners and the Red Indians, and let the light of apostolic Episcopalianism into their darkened lives.

Celia Leete was not successful in her attempt to read this tender tale. She had got it out of the Mercantile Library on the strength of the advertisement which quoted the Peoria Palladium's notice. Almost all the characters had names that began with "Van" or "Vander," and the dinner-table talk and ball-room chat were of an elegance that would have been intolerable in any but the very highest stratum of society. Yet Celia was not pleased with it. She longed for a higher social life; but this was too much for her. Her desire had in it a more modest working. She even wondered whether it was true or not—she wondered if the man who had written that book knew anything more about the life he described than she did herself. It was a puzzling thing. She wanted to be "nice;"' but what was it, in fact, to be "nice?" Was it to talk in that long-winded way, and make references to all sorts of things which could only be learned out of books? If it was, it must be desperately stupid. She wished that she had some clear idea of what really constituted that better life which she knew existed—somewhere, somehow. She wished that, some sudden miracle would open a higher circle of society (she believed in "circles;" nay, in iron-bound rings of society) to the Leete family, and that all of them might be given a supernatural grace to lit them for their new surroundings.

Yes, she was looking for the Fairy Prince; that was it. She did not know it; but she was looking for him. If she could have seen deep enough into the depths of her unformulated fancy, she would have seen that the miracle she awaited was a man.

She let her eyes wander idly about the room, as she dropped the book on her lap. They rested first on Dorinda's bureau, splendent with chromo cards of variegated gorgeousness; and she sighed. Then they fell on her own severely simple chest of drawers—those her mother had owned in her girlhood. Then they turned to the window, and she looked out, and sighed again, and saw the Fairy Prince.

For the Fairy Prince still comes among us, in spite of what the photographers of fiction say; and every now and then he marries the beggar maid, and takes her home to live with his people, and is mightily sorry for it afterward, although, as his antique prototype most likely did, he makes shift to live happily with her ever after—before the eyes of the world.

The Fairy Prince was instantly recognizable to Celia's eyes, although I am afraid other people would have seen in him no more than a good-looking, robust young man, with shoulders so broad that they drew attention from his six feet of stature—a young man with a well-bred carriage, a healthy, dark skin, fine eyes under soft, heavy, black eyebrows, good teeth, and the promise of a moustache—a young man with an expression of dignified earnestness upon his face which suggested the idea that he took things in this world somewhat seriously, and regarded his own progress through it as an event not to be lightly considered. In short, other people would have seen just such a young man as Harvard College turns out by the dozen, into a gibing, vulgar world, too much given to levity.

But Celia saw in this stranger, as he stood at her father's gate, a vast deal more than this. Perhaps she could not have told us anything further about him than that he was "different." Different, she meant, from the men she knew in her daily life, with a difference that was not only in looks and in bearing, but that even went, to her perception, to his very garments, or at least to his way of wearing a very plain every-day suit of tweed.

He felt about the gate for a bell-handle, and, not finding it, pushed in and walked up the path, casting an inquiring glance upward as he went, and catching a glimpse of Celia at her upper window. In another moment his ring clanged through the empty house. Mrs. Leete was making purchases for the household against Sunday. Dorinda was buying unnecessary personal adornments at 27 cents and 39 cents apiece, as was her wont of a Saturday afternoon. Mr. Leete and Alonzo were still at the factory, for it was pay-day, and they stayed later than the hands. And Susan, the "help," was enjoying herself at the eleventh annual picnic of the Daughters of Temperance and Grand Rebekah Protective Lodge. It was clear that Celia had to go down-stairs and answer the bell. Why should it make her heart flutter and throb with wild and irrational disturbance just to open the door to a stranger of amiable and pacific appearance?

She hurried down the stairs, after a hasty glance at the mirror and the administration of a deft pat or two to what she called, I am sorry to say, her drapery. She wondered how she would look to such alien eyes. She wished that she were in her white flannel, her dearest dress; but there was no time for vain wishing, and she opened the door.

He had not vanished: he was there, raising his hat and asking if this were Mr. Leete's house. The quiet deference of his manner, his low, clear voice, his somewhat unfamiliar accent, all caught her pleased attention and fitted with his outward seeming into one harmonious whole that to Celia appeared nothing short of absolute masculine perfection. It was like a dream coming true; it was as though a more than human messenger had arrived, to summon her to that world which she pictured only in her thoughts. She wondered if her voice was trembling, or if her face was white. Meanwhile the young gentleman looked up at what he believed was the prettiest girl he had ever seen, and heard her say, softly and sweetly:

"Yes, this is Mr. Leete's house; but my father is not in. Do you want to see him?"

Perhaps Celia put forward her relationship to Mr. Leete thus promptly because of some faint fear that the Fairy Prince might take her for the house-maid, though nothing in his courtly manner suggested the idea.

"I do wish to see Mr. Leete," he said, and Celia thought again that his voice was quite in keeping with his other perfections. "My name is Wykoff—Randolph Wykoff—and I am anxious to speak to Mr. Leete on a matter of business. I am afraid he has been greatly annoyed by an error—an inadvertence of my agents."

"Won't you come in?" asked Celia. Randolph Wykoff! There was no doubt about this young monarch's pedigree or his possessions.

"I'm afraid I haven't time," Mr. Wykoff said, as he stepped into the entry and told his tale with a flattering deference in his manner.

"Of course I didn't mean, when I made up my mind to build on that unfortunate block—I didn't mean to give annoyance to any of the tenants—certainly not to Mr. Leete. I have always heard my father speak of Mr. Leete in the highest terms—he has often said that he would rather lose all the rest of his tenants than Mr. Leete."

It may be doubted whether John Wykoff had ever said anything quite so enthusiastic; but his son was young and impulsive, and Mr. Leete's daughter was very pretty.

"I should like very much to leave a message for Mr. Leete, if it wouldn't trouble you too much. No? Well, then, you see"

Randolph Wykoff was in Yokohama when the news of his father's death reached him. He started for home at once, by way of Europe, for he had some business in Belgium. He was a very young man, and as soon as he began to think of anything outside of his immediate grief, he found his whole mind occupied with the consideration of his vast responsibility as the custodian of a mighty fortune. He felt that it was his duty to do something for the world. He could not tell exactly what he ought to do; but he felt, that the World expected something of him, and he set to work at once, hunting for a rich man's mission. Now, he had heard of a certain model usine near Brussels, and he stopped on his homeward way to inspect it. It was in truth an ingeniously planned structure. By a clever economy in the design and in the application of steam-power, it gave cheap and suitable lodgement to a large number of workers in various handicrafts, forming a congeries of factories and workshops within a wonderfully small space. It was, in its way, a nineteenth-century marvel of saving in space and power. Wykoff decided at once that a similar building should take the place of the motley group of wasteful old buildings on his Houston Street block; and he instantly telegraphed his determination to his lawyers in New York, and instructed them not to renew leases. But his brief instructions did not make clear the fact that he meant only to give his tenants a little temporary trouble for their own permanent good; and when he reached New York, he had to face a storm of protests from angry lease-holders. These people he was now striving to placate, and to win over to his new plans. And as the plans were really good—as he had stumbled on a wise enterprise in all honest ignorance—and as he went about his work with much youthful enthusiasm, he had less trouble than might have been looked for.

Much of all this did Mr. Randolph Wykoff communicate to Miss Celia Leete. But even after an exposition so long that he had hardly time, when he left the house, to catch the train for his mother's summer home at East Hampton—even after so long a parley, he thought it necessary to see Mr. Leete again, and in Mr. Leete's house.

"Of course," he said, "I could see him at his office; but I must show him my plans, and my architect's place is very near here in Broadway, and unless"

He paused.

"I'm sure father would be very glad to see you here, Mr. Wykoff," said Celia. What could she say else?

So it was arranged that Mr. Wykoff should call on Monday, just after dinner; and Mr. Wykoff took the glory of his presence out of the dark old entry, and Celia stood in the door-way just long enough to see the Fairy Prince turn at the gate and lift his hat to her. Then she went in and shut the door—and hid her face in her hands.

It was a grand story that Celia had to tell a little later, while her mother and Dorinda were setting the table, and Popper Leete sat in his shirt-sleeves, with his stocking-feet on the window-sill, and divided his attention between the evening paper and his chattering family. The visit of a stranger was always an event of some importance in that quiet household; surely a visitor with such a mission was a rare bird, and one to be well talked over. And then, I regret to say, there was something in the fact that the visitor was a Wykoff, something in the fact that the Wykoffs were "swells." Not that a Wykoff was better than any other man; not that a swell did not deserve the contempt of plain people with no nonsense about them—and yet I believe that every member of that family was secretly conscious of receiving an increment of social value from the fact that a Wykoff had stood within their doors. Somehow it emphasized the fact of their common humanity. They all felt freshly reassured of the great truth, which they had always known—that they might be swells themselves, if they would but stoop to it.

"I told you, Popper Leete," said his wife, as she trotted about the room; "I told you folks like the Wykoffs ain't likely to play such mean tricks as that. It ain't their way. I declare, Celia, how many napkins have you had this week? Now, I see your ring when you put it away yesterday, an' it was jest as clean as it could be, that napkin. If you're so mighty finicky, you'd better wash 'em yourself."

Mr. Leete took Wykoff's explanation as an admission of defeat. There are some people who cannot bear to own that they have been angry for naught.

"I thought he'd come to his senses," Popper Leete condescended to say; "he's a young feller, an' he's got suthin' to learn in this world, he'll find in good time. I give those lawyers a piece of my mind that time, an' I guess he heard of it. Yes, I'm glad he's come to his senses." "What'd he look like, Cele?" Dorinda pestered her; "was he reel good-lookin'? Did he have dimun' studs in his shirt? They say its awfle toney in England to have dimun' studs." Alonzo was the only one who took no interest in the evening's topic of conversation. His air of chill indifference showed that if young Mr. Wykoff were twenty young Mr. Wykoffs. he would have to prove his claims to notice before Alonzo Leete would waste a single question upon him.

Mr. Wykoff appeared promptly at one o'clock on the Monday. He had a long talk with Mr. Leete in the dining-room, and spread his plans out on the broad table. When Mr. Leete saw that for the same rent he was then paying he could have a larger factory, and that the progress of construction could be so arranged as to obviate all necessity for a double removal of his goods and chattels, he expressed a qualified approval of Mr. Wykoff's proposition. When he pointed out a few changes in the plans which he thought would better fit them for American conditions, and the suggestions were gratefully accepted, he in some manner fathered the whole scheme.

After the business-talk, Mr. Wykoff went into the parlor, where the ladies of the family had assembled, and lingered for a little chat. He found a theme in his recent travels, and he got on nobly when his auditors discovered that, while he had no objectionable personal acquaintance with the royal family of England, yet he had seen the Queen and the Prince of Wales and smaller lights of the reigning house, and could tell many entertaining things of their appearance in public, their manners, and their ways. With a tact which comes to a young man only under certain circumstances, he suppressed the fact that he had been presented at court, and said nothing of driving in coroneted carriages and dining at the tables of the great. The chat stretched out; it was past three when Celia tied up his plans for him, and he took his leave.

Dorinda thought him a reel elegant gentlem'n, and Mrs. Leete said: "Why, I think he's a nice, pleasant-spoken, well-behaved young feller. I ain't seen a young man I liked so well in some time."

It is a simple tale. Mr. Wykoff found occasion to come again with his plans, that he might avail himself of Mr. Leete's superior knowledge of the exigencies of practical business. Then he found still other occasions. When the actual work of building began, and he had to superintend it, he fell into a way of walking home with Mr. Leete, and dropping in for a friendly call—sometimes to share a meal. He was received with a shy welcome of subtile significance from Celia, and with a flattered and fluttering cordiality on the part of the rest of the family. Even Alonzo was willing to say, in casual conversation with his friends: "Wykoff—that's Randolph Wykoff, old John Wykoffs son—was in at our house last night, and he said"

But at last they all understood why he sought their society, and that was the drop of acid in the cloudy solution. There were five different individual reactions in the family of Leete. To Celia came the consciousness of a great and closely impending possibility. Her father was disturbed in mind, suspicious, and anxious. He had sufficient knowledge of the world to grasp the fact that men held, in such matters, widely differing codes of morality. He had no idea what Mr. Wykoff's code might be. The young man seemed a well-meaning youth—but what were his intentions? Dorinda had similar doubts, and the thought of losing her only sister, coupled, perhaps, with a trifle of natural jealousy, moved her to an enmity toward the intruder which she could hardly repress. As to Alonzo, he was wounded past all soothing—wounded in the inmost tenderness of a hidden pride. For Alonzo's heart worshipped what his lips contemned. In his secret soul he adored swelldom. And now the aristocracy had held out its shapely hand to him, and for a brief space he had hugged the delusion that he was accepted on his own merits, and that the disadvantages of his parentage and his surroundings—which he recognized, and yet loyally accepted—did not count against him personally. And now he found that he was only the brother of a pretty girl. His spirit was filled with a bitterness that nourished itself in silence, and the dreadful things that he expected to come of the unhallowed courtship are beyond all mentioning here. Good Mrs. Leete alone stood Wykoff's friend in his wooing, and her simple, honest breast heaved with motherly pride and fond, foolish hopes and aspirations.

And meanwhile Randolph Wykoff kept on calling, and seemed totally unconscious of any loss of spontaneity or heartiness in his welcome at the house of the Leetes; and late in September he and Celia told each other that love at first sight was a living truth. After which, Randolph went home to tell his mother.