Men of No Property (33 page)

“Happy New Year, Vinnie.” Stephen pushed him away after a hug to look at him. “Good God!”

“I’m awfully glad it’s you, Stephen. Do I look that bad? I am sorry…”

“You’re not the first man I’ve met in your condition this morning,” Stephen said. “Stay on your feet and I’ll fix you something.” He went to the wash stand and took a small phial from his pocket. He mixed a potion in water and brought it. “Drink hearty!” He grinned as Vinnie downed the brew and shuddered.

“It tastes poisonous.”

“It will find good company.”

Farrell set about putting the room in order. He gave the fire a kick and opened the shutters, and then removed Vinnie’s cravat from the bust of Cicero on his desk.

Vinnie watched him and, without his realizing it, the pain left his head. His hand was almost steady as he poured two cups of coffee. “Oh, Stephen, it was the strangest night.”

Farrell sat down on the arm of a chair and tasted the coffee. “Want to talk about it?”

“No, I guess not. If it hadn’t happened I would. I mean…”

“I think I know what you mean. I’m sorry I wasn’t here, Vinnie.”

“It’s all right. I guess one must work things out himself anyway.”

“Rather. Jeremiah tells me you’ve worked a number of things out yourself. The upper third this term, no less.”

Vinnie took a deep draught of coffee. “Remember this time last year?”

Farrell nodded. “I learned more in a month than in all my years in Trinity, trying to keep up with you.”

“You’re a splendid teacher.”

Stephen smiled. “I should like very much to teach,” he said.

“Better than the law?”

“Perhaps. I should not be missed from the bar, that’s certain. But since I’ve settled upon that I must make my mark in it somehow. Not that I want fame. Nor fortune. Perhaps that’s my trouble. I’m not a proper sort for America. I don’t care enough for finance and trade.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Vinnie said.

Stephen nodded. “Especially now.”

“I haven’t congratulated you, Stephen.”

“I’m content to wait until you’ve met Delia.”

“What’s she like?”

“That’s no question to ask a man just married. She’s fair and sweet…and wise and merry. I hope she will be to you what she is to me, Vinnie. I’ve told her very much about you.” He smiled. “But nonetheless she’s eager to meet you.”

“This afternoon,” Vinnie said. “And I promise to be in better condition. Stephen, I’m going to try for a medal in oratory this term.”

Farrell looked at him. “I think that’s splendid.” He drained his cup and put it on the mantel. “There is this you must understand of my discontent, Vinnie. It comes of practicing law with a politician, and Robbins, my senior partner, is that. But I do believe that advocacy is one of the great callings to which a man can turn. I don’t know another which requires more courage. To stand between a man and disaster, sometimes between him and the gallows is a frightening thing. Do you mind if I preach a little—as though you could stop me now?”

“I don’t mind,” Vinnie said.

“I doubt that I have the power to influence you, but I’d like you to know how I feel about it. First must come courage, for you will sometimes lose. That is personal defeat as few men know it, even revolutionaries. The law requires a good mind. But more important by far, I think, is the good heart. To be a good advocate you must be capable of loving all men, for it is the only way you’ll know them. It isn’t much to have learned, Vinnie, but there are some simple things one learns slowly. If you wait until you know a man to give him your love you will not know or love him, and the loss will be yours. But if you come to know men by way of love, you will understand evil, and you will know how much evil a man can do and not become himself evil. This, I think, an advocate must understand and believe. You will never, never defend the evil a man has done. But you will often defend a man who has done evil.” Stephen got to his feet. “Class adjourned.”

“I think you must be a good lawyer, Stephen.”

“I should be a good one. Let’s put it that way. I was trained to be a barrister, but I was not called to the bar until I had discovered some small talent of the pen. The poverty of Irish letters made it seem much larger than it was and then Irish revolt waited upon it. Oh, you will meet John Mitchel today…”

Vinnie was well aware that Mitchel was in New York. He had been given a triumphant welcome on his arrival the month before as though, some said, he had defeated the British, not escaped them.

“… He, too, was trained to the law. But he is still out of patience with it—as he is with a world that will not unseat its tyrants. Well, power and glory to him, I say, and God help him. He will be as bitter a man when he quits New York as was Kossuth. He will learn that Irishmen, like Hungarians, must win their own independence—and at home, not abroad.”

“It’s been such a long time since we talked like this,” Vinnie said.

Farrell went to the window. “If only I could overcome my loathing of this city. Sham and riot. Every day the Fourth of July. Run up the flag and you can run down any man beneath it.”

“Is Delia homesick, Stephen?”

Farrell laughed. “You have perceived the very backside of the truth. Delia was never happier. She loves every curse and whistle of it, and promises to be its belle. Which reminds me I must go home to her aid. She will find New Year’s receptions here more arduous than in gentle Charleston.” He paused at Vinnie’s desk and fingered the neckpiece he had removed from the bust of Cicero. Idly, he put it back. “He was more than an orator, this man. He was an advocate and he had courage. When tyranny ruled under the guise of democratic forms, he dared test the forms…and marvelously, they sustained him! Courage, lad: that’s the thing.” He looked back. “Come early to us, will you?”

V
INNIE, WHO ON A
few occasions had visited Stephen in his rooms on Bleecker Street had thought them the very model of a bachelor’s residence—books and pipes, memorabilia of many a walking excursion, and furniture willing to compromise its dignity to a man’s comfort. What he expected of the Farrell suite at the St. Nicholas, he did not know, but certainly he was not prepared for the elegance which greeted him. The hotel itself was shining new and renowned as the best appointed in the country and with all the modern conveniences. It was said that some of New York’s most fashionable families entered spirited bidding with each other for the residential suites. For some it was as much a matter of convenience as of fashion. Such was the growth of the city’s population it had become well nigh impossible for a man to provide a decent home for his family within a reasonable distance of his place of business. One old home after another was abandoned to industry or tenement, and soon thereafter the entire neighborhood. So it was that many people built summer homes at Newport, Rockaway or other ocean points and maintained as well apartments in the better hotels.

Vinnie gave his hat and cloak to the liveried Negro and with Mr. Finn, waited for his host and hostess to turn from the callers just previously arrived. Glimpsing the sparkling buffet in the room beyond, the crystal and silver and snowy-white linen, the many-ribbed roast and the turkey, white-cuffed at the ankles, and having a second more to estimate the fashion of his hostess by the jeweled comb in the back of her hair, Vinnie thought it small wonder that Stephen was afflicted that morning with a great loathing of finance. By these signs he had needed to devote much thought to the matter of late.

Stephen caught his eye and smiled a welcome while he whispered to his wife. Likely it was word that Vinnie had come, for she laid a delicate hand upon the arm of the gentleman talking to her and in a most artful way dismissed him. She turned and appraised the boy for a long instant and then gave him both her hands. “So you’re Vinnie,” she said. By a power he was by no means sure was entirely his own, he lifted her hand to his lips. Fragrant it was as the cherry blossom, and petal soft. Her smile was quicker by far than her speech, conjuring and vanishing the dimples in her cheeks. Her eyes were china blue and her hair as blond as a tassel of wheat. “I must say Stephen didn’t do you justice at all, tellin’ me about you. But no man ever does, tellin’ about another man, I don’t think.” She gave one hand to Mr. Finn, while holding still to Vinnie. “How nice to see you again, Mr. Finn. I do believe there’s gentlemen here of your acquaintance,” and she named certain of the guests already arrived, sorting the merchants from the rest, Vinnie noticed, for Mr. Finn’s approval. “I declare this Northern custom of makin’ calls like a relay race is barbarous. Uncivilized. Try and slow ’em down a trifle, Mr. Finn?”

A more ingratiating way of dismissing a man, Vinnie had not seen. As a gambler could shuffle cards, so could Delia Osborn Farrell maneuver sociabilities. “You just stay by me a bit so we can talk,” she whispered to Vinnie, “unless you’d prefer the company of gentlemen?”

“No ma’am,” he said emphatically.

“Ma’am,” she mimicked. “If you don’t call me Delia, I’m goin’ to call you Mr. Dunne. I’m not so much older than you, young man. Would you like a plate?”

“Not yet, thank you. I’ll feast my eyes for the present.”

Stephen overheard the remark. “Such savoir faire.”

“Don’t you pay him no mind, Vinnie,” Delia said. “That was a charmin’ remark and I’m flattered by it.”

With a lull in the arrival of callers, Delia left Stephen to receive and drew Vinnie apart to a nest of chairs, choosing one for him less able to his support than a mushroom. “Don’t you worry about that chair,” she said at his hesitancy. “It’s strong as King Louis himself and he lived to near a hundred. My grandfather brought it back to Charleston from when he was in foreign service. I remember him sayin’, “I can tell a gentleman by the way he sits a horse and a Louis Fourteenth chair.’ Most men don’t care if they’re sittin’ on tradition or a tar barrel, but I like tradition, don’t you, Vinnie?”

He smiled his acquiescence although for comfort he’d have taken the tar barrel. One really did not need to say much in conversation with Delia, just occasional words of approval, and she would prattle on pleasantly, her eye straying now and then to her other guests, and if she needed to excuse herself to attend them, her conversation on her return picked up from where she had left off as though she had paused for no more than breath. “Stephen says Ireland’s full of traditions if the people weren’t too poor to care about them. His own family goes back three hundred years. Did you know that, Vinnie?”

“No,” he admitted. Truly, he knew very little about Stephen before America.

“His mother’s a beautiful woman. That’s her portrait Mr. Finn’s lookin’ at now.” Vinnie glanced toward the picture. He would need to go nearer to really see it. “I think your Mr. Finn is so quaint,” she went on. “Stephen’s very fond of him, and I’ll tell you the truth, Vinnie, I like him better myself than the company of wild Irishmen Stephen’s takin’ up with again…” There was something in her attitude toward Mr. Finn that made Vinnie feel uncomfortable, but he had no time then to explore it. “They’re talkin’ about startin’ a paper, you know. John Mitchel just out of jail and startin’ up already. I don’t mind some of his associates, but I’m frightened of Mr. Mitchel. That man’s full of hate, Vinnie. You can smell it on his breath.” She laid cool fingers on Vinnie’s hand. “Stephen says it’s only Englishmen he hates, but I’d like to know how he can always tell an Englishman.” She gave a deep sigh. “I suppose I shouldn’t be talkin’ like this, but it just seemed I was gettin’ Stephen contented and settled when Mr. Mitchel had to escape from Van Diemen’s Land or wherever it was.”

Vinnie laughed. She spoke as though John Mitchel’s escape and arrival in New York had been timed to upset her nicest calculations.

“Oh, you can laugh, goin’ back safe to that Yale College of yours. But you should hear them talkin’. England’s goin’ to get into war with Russia and they ought to send somebody to talk with the tsar. Imagine, talkin’ with the tsar about invadin’ Ireland! He’s got so many millions and millions of acres of land now and peasants and slaves, what would he want with Ireland, will you tell me that? It just don’t make sense, you know that, Vinnie.”

Delia had not noticed her husband’s eyes upon her, but Vinnie did, watching the callers come and go in a nearly constant parade while Delia was talking. Stephen finally crossed the room to them.

“Come, Vinnie,” he said. “I want you to meet John Mitchel.” It was not so much that, Vinnie thought, as that he wanted Delia to return to the place of reception.

Delia sighed. “We were just gettin’ nicely started, Vinnie and me.”

“There will be a time, my dear,” Stephen said gently. “You must prosper us all with your attentions today.”

For an instant about her mouth Vinnie saw the shape of a pout. It vanished so quickly he thought he must be mistaken, for Delia no sooner turned her back on them than she happily picked up the refrain of some previous conversation with another gentleman.

“You will be friends, you and Delia,” Stephen said. “You’ve not had enough of the company of women, I expect.”

“The God’s truth that,” Vinnie said. “My tongue thickens like plaster in their presence.”

John Mitchel was distinguishable from any place in the room, surrounded as he was by a coterie of boisterous fellows. Every now and then their laughter caused guests of more sedate demeanor to suspend their own conversations and turn Young Ireland’s way until the hilarity subsided. Stephen soon forgot his avowed purpose in carrying Vinnie off. From one cluster of guests to another they moved, savoring bits of talk on the theatre, on Thackeray, on what had become of table rappings. Confronted by a party of young men, their plates and glasses full and their praise high for the host they didn’t recognize, Stephen murmured: “We must have a good draft in the chimney. I swear they didn’t come in by the door.”

“It’s a grand gathering, Stephen,” Vinnie said.

Stephen squeezed his arm. “Isn’t it? And men of all persuasions, thank God!”

He would remember that, Vinnie thought, and the fervor with which Stephen said it. It was as though he had determined his guests by their diversity. Suddenly Vinnie spied the artist whose painting he had bought for Mr. Finn a few days before.