THE SALAMANDER

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