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    THE SALAMANDER




    [Illustration: Dore]




    THE
    SALAMANDER

    _By_
    OWEN JOHNSON

    _Author of_

    THE VARMINT, STOVER AT YALE
    THE SIXTY-FIRST SECOND, ETC.

    WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
    EVERETT SHINN

    INDIANAPOLIS
    THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
    PUBLISHERS

    COPYRIGHT 1914
    THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

    PRESS OF
    BRAUNWORTH & CO.
    BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
    BROOKLYN, N. Y.




    TO MY WIFE




    FOREWORD


Precarious the lot of the author who elects to show his public what it
does not know, but doubly exposed he who in the indiscreet exploration
of customs and manners publishes what the public knows but is unwilling
to confess! In the first place incredulity tempers censure, in the
second resentment is fanned by the necessity of self-recognition. For
the public is like the defendant in matrimony, amused and tolerant when
unconvinced of the justice of a complaint, but fiercely aroused when
defending its errors.

In the present novel I am quite aware that where criticism is most
risked is at the hands of those entrenched moralists who, while
admitting certain truths as fit subjects for conversation, aggressively
resent the same when such truths are published. Many such will believe
that in the following depiction of a curious and new type of modern
young women, product of changing social forces, profoundly significant
of present unrest and prophetic of stranger developments to come, the
author, in depicting simply what does exist, is holding a brief for what
should exist.

If the type of young girls here described were an ephemeral
manifestation or even a detached fragment of our society, there might be
a theoretical justification for this policy of censure by silence. But
the Salamanders are neither irrelevant nor the product of unrelated
forces. The rebellious ideas that sway them are the same ideas that are
profoundly at work in the new generation of women, and while for this
present work I have limited my field, be sure that the young girl of
to-day, from the age of eighteen to twenty-five, whether facing the
world alone or peering out at it from the safety of the family, whether
in the palaces of New York, the homesteads of New England, the manors of
the South or the throbbing cities and villages of the West, whatever her
station or her opportunity, has in her undisciplined and roving
imagination a little touch of the Salamander.

That there exists a type of young girl that heedlessly will affront
every appearance of evil and can yet remain innocent; that this
innocence, never relinquished, can yet be tumultuously curious and
determined on the exploration of the hitherto forbidden sides of life,
especially when such reconnoitering is rendered enticing by the presence
of danger--here are two apparent contradictions difficult of belief. Yet
in the case of the Salamander's brother, society finds no such
difficulty--it terms that masculine process, "seeing the world," a study
rather to be recommended for the sake of satisfied future tranquillity.

That the same can be true of the opposite sex, that a young girl without
physical temptation may be urged by a mental curiosity to see life
through whatever windows, that she may feel the same impetuous frenzy of
youth as her brother, the same impulse to sample each new excitement,
and that in this curiosity may be included the safe and the dangerous,
the obvious and the complex, the casual and the strange, that she may
arrogate to herself the right to examine everything, question
everything, peep into everything--tentatively to project herself into
every possibility and after a few years of this frenzy of excited
curiosity can suddenly be translated into a formal and discreet mode of
life--here is an exposition which may well appear incredible on the
printed page. I say on the printed page because few men are there who
will not recognize the justice of the type of Salamander here portrayed.
Only as their experience has been necessarily individual they do not
proceed to the recognition of a general type. They know them well as
accidents in the phantasmagoria of New York but they do not comprehend
them in the least.

The Salamander in the last analysis is a little atom possessed of a
brain, thrown against the great tragic luxury of New York, which has
impelled her to it as the flame the moth.

She comes roving from somewhere out of the immense reaches of the
nation, revolting against the commonplace of an inherited narrowness,
passionately adventurous, eager and unafraid, neither sure of what she
seeks nor conscious of what forces impel or check her. She remains a
Salamander only so long as she has not taken a decision to enter life by
one of the thousand avenues down which in her running course she has
caught an instant vista. Her name disappears under a new self-baptism.
She needs but a little money and so occasionally does a little work. She
brings no letters of introduction, but she comes resolved to know whom
she chooses. She meets them all, the men of New York, the mediocre, the
interesting, the powerful, the flesh hunters, the brutes and those who
seek only an amused mental relaxation. She attracts them by hook or
crook, in defiance of etiquette, compelling their attention in ways that
at the start hopelessly mystify them and lead to mistakes. Then she
calmly sets them to rights and forgives them. If she runs recklessly in
the paths of danger, it is because to her obsessed curiosity it is
imperative for her to try to comprehend what this danger can mean.

She has no salon to receive her guests--she turns her bedroom at noon
into a drawing-room, not inviting every one, but to those to whom she
extends the privilege fiercely regulating the proprieties. She may have
a regular occupation or an occasional one, neither must interfere with
her liberty of pleasure. She needs money--she acquires it indirectly, by
ways that bear no offense to her delightfully illogical but keen
sensibilities. With one man she will ride in his automobile, far into
the night--to another she will hardly accord the tips of her gloves. She
makes no mistakes. Her head is never dizzy. Her mind is in control and
she knows at every moment what she is doing. She will dare only so far
as she knows she is safe.

She runs the gamut of the city, its high lights and its still shadows.
She enters by right behind its varied scenes. She breakfasts on one egg
and a cup of coffee, takes her luncheon from a high-legged stool in a
cellar restaurant, reluctantly counting out the change, and the same
night, with supreme indolence, descends from a luxurious automobile,
before the flaring portals of the restaurant most in fashion, giving her
fingers to those who rank among the masters of the city.

This curiosity that leads her to flit from window to window has in it no
vice. It is fed only by the zest of life. Her passion is to know, to
leave no cranny unexplored, to see, not to experience, to flit
miraculously through the flames--never to be consumed!

That her standard of conduct is marvelous, that her ideas of what is
permitted and what is forbidden are mystifying, is true. So too is it
difficult to comprehend, in the society of men of the world, what is
fair and what is unfair, what is "done" and what is not "done." To
understand the Salamander, to appreciate her significance as a criticism
of our present social forms, one must first halt and consider what
changes are operating in our social system.

       *       *       *       *       *

If one were privileged to have the great metropolis of New York reduced
to microcosm at his feet, to be studied as man may study the marvelous
organism of the anthill or the hive, two curious truths would become
evident. First that those whom the metropolis engenders seldom succeed
their fathers, that they move in circles as it were, endlessly revolving
about a fixed idea, apparently stupefied by the colossal shadows under
which they have been born; secondly that daily, hourly even, a stream of
energetic young men constantly arrives from the unknown provinces, to
reinvigorate the city, rescue it from stagnation, ascending abruptly to
its posts of command, assuming direction of its manifold
activities--ruling it.

Further, one would perceive that the history of the city is the result
of these two constantly opposed forces, one striving to conserve, the
other to acquire. The inheritors constantly seek to define the city's
forms, encase its society, limit its opportunities, transform its young
activities into inheritable institutions; while the young and ardent
adventurers who come with no other baggage than their portmanteaux of
audacity and sublime disdain, are constantly firing it with their
inflaming enthusiasm, purifying it with their new health, forcing the
doors of reluctant sets, storming its giant privileges, modernizing its
laws, vitalizing its arts, capturing its financial hierarchies, opposing
to the solidifying force of attempted systems their liberating
corrective of opportunity and individualism. Of the two forces, only the
conqueror from without is important.

This phenomenon of immigration is neither new nor peculiar to our
civilization. It is indeed the living principle of a metropolis which,
as it requires food, water, fire for its material existence, must also
hourly levy, Minotaur-like, its toll on foreign youth. Woman has had no
counterpart to this life-giving fermentation of young men. The toll of
the metropolis has been the toll of corruption, spreading corruption,
and this continuous flow of the two sexes through the gates of the city
has been like the warring passage through the arteries of red
life-defending corpuscles and disease-bearing germs.

Now suddenly to one who thus profoundly meditates this giant scheme, a
new phenomenon has appeared. All at once amid the long stretching lines
of young men that seek the city from the far horizon appear the figures
of young women, not by hundreds but by the thousands, following in the
steps of their brothers, wage-earners animated by the same desire for
independence, eager and determined for a larger view of life, urged
outward by the same imperative revolt against stagnation, driven by the
same unrest for the larger horizon. This culminative movement, begun in
the decline of the nineteenth century, may well be destined to mark the
twentieth century as the great era of social readjustment.

In the past the great block to woman's complete and equal communion with
man has been her economic dependence on him; while she has not been
necessary to man, man has been necessary to her. Hence her forced
acceptation of his standard of her position and her duties. In one
generation, by this portentous achievement of economic independence,
woman in a night, like Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham