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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 remodelled, 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 overbalanced 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 chilblains 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.