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I recalled some words of Stein's. . . . "In the destructive element immerse! . . . To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream and so always usque ad finem . . ." He was romantic, but none the less true.
'When I rose to get back to the house I caught sight of Stein's drab coat through a gap in the foliage, and very soon at a turn of the path I came upon him walking with the girl. Her little hand rested on his forearm, and under the broad, flat rim of his Panama hat he bent over her, grey-haired, paternal, with compassionate and chivalrous deference. I stood aside, but they stopped, facing me.
His business associates thought him a man of taste and culture, a patron of the arts, a credit to the garment trade. "One of Stein's many ambitions was to be thought a success with women. He got considerable notoriety in the garment world by his attentions to an emotional actress who is now quite forgotten, but who had her little hour of expectation.
I, however, adhered to my resolution and said, "I am willing to give a small farewell concert at Herr Stein's, for my few kind friends here who are connoisseurs." The Director was quite distressed, and exclaimed, "It is abominable shameful; who could have believed such a thing of Langenmantl! Par Dieu! if he really wished it, no doubt it would have been carried through." We then separated.
Then there was a dancer; then, just after Gorky's visit here, a Russian anarchist woman. After that the coat-makers and shirtwaist-makers began to whisper that Stein's great success was with Kitty Ayrshire. "It is the hardest thing in the world to disprove such a story, as Dan Leland and I discovered.
I was obliged to control myself with all my might, or I must have given some polite hint about this. On going upstairs I had the satisfaction of playing for nearly three-quarters of an hour on a good clavichord of Stein's, in the presence of the stuck-up young son, and his prim condescending wife, and the simple old lady.
He looked boyishly obstinate, and yet, Win thought, as if he might be easy to "get round," unless some prejudice kept him firm. She would not have thought of him at all had not the flush which suddenly swept over Miss Stein's face suggested that this was "he." Win was instantly sure that here was the man in the case; now, cherchez la femme! And she had not to search far.
It seems certain that Stein's influence weighed much with Alexander in this final compromise, which postponed the irritating question of the eastern frontier and bent all the energies of two great States to the War of Liberation.
Jim had pointed him out to me once as a respectable petty trader owning a small seagoing native craft, who had showed himself "one of the best at the taking of the stockade." I was not very surprised to see him, since any Patusan trader venturing as far as Samarang would naturally find his way to Stein's house. I returned his greeting and passed on.
Poor ladies! they were destined before long to encounter worse hardships than Annot Stein's little bed, and frugal supper. "But, Madame," said Annot, as she sat demurely on the corner of her chair, "this Santerre is not the sort of man at all we all took him to be. Peter was over here, though he has gone back again now, and Peter says he is quite a good fellow in his way."
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