They helped Aladdin back to the smithy, for his only covering was a clumsy blanket; and there he put on his shrunken clothes, which meanwhile had dried. The kindly men pressed food on him, but he could not eat. He could only sit blankly by the fire and nurse the numb, overpowering pain in his heart. Another had succeeded where he had failed. Even at parting, just now, Margaret’s eyes had not been for him, but for the stranger who had done so easily what he had not been able to do at all. The voyage down the river had been mere foolishness without result. He had not rescued his fair lady, but deserted her upon a desert island. For him no bouquets were flung, nor was there to be any clapping of hands. After a time he rose like one dreaming, and went slowly, for he was sick and weak, up to the great pillared house of Hannibal St. John. The senator in that stern voice of his had bade him come; nothing could be any worse than it was. He would go. He knocked, and they showed him into the library. It was four walls of leather books, an oak table neater than a pin, a huge chair covered with horsehair much worn, and a blazing fire of birch logs. Before the fire, one hand thrust into his coat, the other resting somewhat heavily upon the head of a whalebone cane, stood the senator. Far off Aladdin heard Margaret’s laugh and with it another young laugh. Then he looked up like a little hunted thing into the senator’s smoldering eyes.
“Sit down in that chair,” said the senator, pointing with his cane to the only chair in the room. His voice had the effect of a strong muscular compulsion to which men at once yielded. Aladdin sat into the big chair, his toes swinging just clear of the ground. Then there was silence. Aladdin broke it.
“Is Margaret all right?” he gulped.
The senator disregarded the question. Having chosen his words, he said them.
“I do not know,” he began, “what my daughter was doing in a boat with you. I do not object to her enjoying the society at proper times of suitable companions of her own age, but the society of those who lead her into temptation is not suitable.” Aladdin fairly wilted under the glowering voice. “You will not be allowed to associate with her any more,” said the senator. “I will speak to your father and see that he forbids it.”
Aladdin climbed out of the chair, and stumbled blindly into the table. He had meant to find the door and go.
“Wait; I have not done,” said the senator.
Aladdin turned and faced the enemy who was taking away the joy of life from him.
“In trying to atone for your fault,” said the senator, “by imperiling your life, you did at once a foolhardy and a fine thing—one which I will do my best to repay at any time that you may see fit to call upon me. For the present you may find this of use.” He held forward between his thumb and forefinger a twenty-dollar gold piece. Aladdin groped for words, and remembered a phrase which he had heard his own father return to a tormentor. He thrust his red hands into his tight pockets, and with trembling lips looked up.
“It’s a matter of pride,” he said, and walked out of the room. When he had gone the senator took from his pocket a leather purse, opened it, put back the gold piece, and carefully tied the string. Then far from any known key or tune the great man whistled a few notes. Could his constituents have heard, they would have known—and often had the subject been debated—that Hannibal St. John was human.
Aladdin stood for a while upon the lofty pillared portico of the senator’s house, and with a mist in his eyes looked away and away to where the cause of all his troubles flowed like a ribbon of silver through the bright-colored land. Grown men, having, in their whole lives, suffered less than Aladdin was at that moment suffering, have considered themselves heartbroken. The little boy shivered and toiled down the steps, between the tall box hedges lining the path, and out into the road. A late rose leaning over the garden fence gave up her leaves in a pink shower as he passed, and at the same instant all the glass in a window of the house opposite fell out with a smash. These events seemed perfectly natural to Aladdin, but when people, talking at the tops of their voices and gesticulating, began to run out of houses and make down the hill toward the town, he remembered that, just as the rose-leaves fell and just as the glass came out of the window-frame, he had been conscious of a distant thudding boom, and a jarring of the ground under his feet. So he joined in the stream of his neighbors, and ran with them down the hill to see what had happened.
Aladdin remembered little of that breathless run, and one thing only stood ever afterward vivid among his recollections. All the people were headed eagerly in one direction, but at the corner of the street in which Aladdin lived, an awkish, half-grown girl, her face contorted with terror, struggled against the tugging of two younger companions and screamed in a terrible voice:
“I don’t wahnt to go! I don’t wahnt to go!”
But they dragged her along. That girl had no father, and her mother walked the streets. She would never have any beauty nor any grace; she was dirt of the dirt, dirty, but she had a heart of mercy and could not bear to look upon suffering.
“I don’t wahnt to go! I don’t wahnt to go!” and now the scream was a shudder.
Aladdin’s street was crowded to suffocation, and the front of the house where Aladdin lived was blown out, and men with grave faces were going about among the ruins looking for what was left of Aladdin’s father.
A much littler boy than Aladdin stood in the yard of the house. In his arms folded high he clutched a yellow cat, who licked his cheek with her rough tongue. The littler boy kept crying, “‘Laddin, ‘Laddin!”
Aladdin took the little boy and the yellow cat all into one embrace, and people turned away their heads.
In the ensuing two days Aladdin matured enormously, for though a kind neighbor took him in, together with his brother Jack and the yellow cat, he had suffered many things and already sniffed the wolf at the door. The kind neighbor was a widow lady, whose husband, having been a master carpenter of retentive habits, had left her independently rich. She owned the white-and-green house in which she lived, the plot of ground, including a small front and a small back yard, upon which it stood, and she spent with some splendor a certain income of three hundred and eighty-two dollars a year. Every picture, every chair, every mantelpiece in the Widow Brackett’s house was draped with a silk scarf. The parlor lamp had a glass shade upon which, painted in oils, by hand, were crimson moss-roses and scarlet poppies. A crushed plush spring rocker had goldenrod painted on back and seat, while two white-and-gold vases in precise positions on the mantel were filled with tight round bunches of immortelles, stained pink. Upon the marble-topped, carved-by-machine-walnut-legged table in the bay-window were things to be taken up by a visitor and examined. A white plate with a spreading of foreign postage-stamps, such as any boy collector has in quantities for exchange, was the first surprise: you were supposed to discover that the stamps were not real, but painted on the plate, and exclaim about it. A china basket contained most edible-looking fruit of the same material, and a huge album, not to be confounded with the family Bible upon which it rested, was filled with speaking likenesses of the Widow Brackett’s relatives. The Bible beneath could have told when each was born, when many had died, and where many were buried. But nobody was ever allowed to look into the Widow Brackett’s Bible for information mundane or spiritual, since the only result would have been showers of pressed ferns and flowers upon the carpet, which was not without well-pressed flowers and ferns of its own.
Very soon after the explosion of the wonderful lamp the Widow Brackett had taken Aladdin and Jack and the cat into her house and seen to it that they had a square meal. Early on the second day she came to the conclusion that if it could in any way be made worth her while, she would like to keep them until they grew up. And when the ground upon which Aladdin’s father’s house had stood was sold at auction for three hundred and eight dollars, she let it be known that if she could get that she would board the two little waifs until Aladdin was old enough to work. The court appointed two guardians. The guardians consulted for a few minutes over something brown in a glass, and promptly turned over the three hundred and eight dollars to the Widow Brackett; and the Widow Brackett almost as promptly made a few alterations in the up-stairs of her house the better to accommodate the orphans, tied a dirty white ribbon about the yellow cat’s neck, and bought a derelict piano upon which her heart had been set for many months. She was no musician, but she loved a tightly closed piano with a scarf draped over the top, and thought that no parlor should be without one. Up to middle C, as Aladdin in time found out, the piano in question was not without musical pretensions, but above that any chord sounded like a nest of tin plates dropped on a wooden floor, and the intervals were those of no known scale nor fragment thereof. But in time he learned to draw pleasant things from the old piano and to accompany his shrill voice in song. As a matter of fact, he had no voice and never would have, but almost from the first he knew how to sing. It so happened that he was drawn to the piano by a singular thing: a note from his beloved.
It came one morning thumb-marked about the sealing, and covered with the generous sprawl of her writing. It said:
DEAR ALADDIN: Do not say anything about this because I do not know if my father would like it but I am so sorry about your father blowing up and all your troubles and I want you to know how sory I am. I must stop now because I have to practis.
Your loving friendMARGARET ST. JOHN.
Aladdin was an exquisite speller, and the first thing he noticed about the letter was that it contained two words spelled wrong, and that he loved Margaret the better by two misspelled words, and that he had a lump in his throat.
He had found the letter by his plate at breakfast, and the eyes of Mrs. Brackett fastened upon it.
“I don’t know who ken have been writin’ to you,” she said.
“Neither do I,” said Aladdin, giving, as is proper, the direct lie to the remark inquisitive. He had put the letter in his pocket.
“Why don’t you open it and see?”
Aladdin blushed.
“Time enough after breakfast,” he said.
There was a silence.
“Jack’s eatin’ his breakfast; why ain’t you eatin’ yours?”
Aladdin fell upon his breakfast for the sake of peace. And Mrs. Brackett said no more. Some days later, for she was not to be denied in little matters or great, Mrs. Brackett found where Aladdin had hidden the letter, took it up, read it, sniffed, and put it back, with the remark that she never “see such carryin’s-on.”
Aladdin hid, and read his letter over and over; then an ominous silence having informed him that Mrs. Brackett had gone abroad, he stole into the parlor, perched on the piano-stool, and, like a second Columbus, began to discover things which other people have to be shown. The joy of his soul had to find expression, as often afterward the sorrow of it.
That winter Jack entered school in the lowest class, and the two little boys were to be seen going or coming in close comradeship, fair weather or foul. The yellow cat had affairs of gallantry, and bore to the family, at about Christmas-time, five yellow kittens, which nobody had the heart to drown, and about whose necks, at the age of eye-opening, the Widow Brackett tied little white ribbons in large bows.
Sometimes Aladdin saw Margaret, but only for a little.
So the years passed, and Aladdin turned his sixteenth year. He was very tall and very thin, energetic but not strong, very clever, but with less application than an uncoerced camel. To single him from other boys, he was full of music and visions. And rhymes were beginning to ring in his head.
A week came when the rhymes and the music went clean out of his head, which became as heavy as a scuttle full of coal, and he walked about heavily like an old man.
One day, during the morning session of school, Aladdin’s head got so heavy that he could hardly see, and he felt hot all over. He spoke to the teacher and was allowed to go home. Mrs. Brackett, when she saw him enter the yard, was in great alarm, for she at once supposed that he had done something awful, which was not out of the question, and suffered expulsion.
“What have you done?” she said.
“Nothing,” said Aladdin. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Mrs. Brackett tossed her hands heavenward.
“What is the matter?” she cried.
“I don’t know,” said Aladdin. She followed him into the house and up the stairs, which he climbed heavily.
“Where do you feel bad, ‘Laddin O’Brien?” she said sharply.
“It’s my head, ma’am,” said Aladdin. He went into his room and lay face down on the bed, having first dropped his schoolbooks on the floor, and began to talk fluently of kings’ daughters and genii and copper bottles.
The Widow Brackett was an active woman of action. Flat-footed and hatless, but with incredible speed, she dashed down the stairs, out of the house, and up the street. She returned in five minutes with the doctor.
The doctor said, “Fever.” It was quite evident that it was fever; but a doctor’s word for it put everything on a comfortable and satisfactory footing.
“We must get him to bed,” said the doctor. He made the attempt alone, but Aladdin struggled, and the doctor was old. Mrs. Brackett came to the rescue and, finally, they got Aladdin, no longer violent, into his bed, while the doctor, in a soft voice, said what maybe it was and what maybe it wasn’t,—he leaned to a bilious fever,—and prescribed this and that as sovereign in any case. They darkened the room, and Aladdin was sick with typhoid fever for many weeks. He was delirious much too much, and Mrs. Brackett got thin with watching. Occasionally it seemed as if he might possibly live, but oftenest as if he would surely die.
In his delirium for the most part Aladdin dwelt upon Margaret, so that his love for her was an old story to Mrs. Brackett. One gay spring morning, after a terrible night, Aladdin’s fever cooled a little, and he was able to talk in whispers.
“Mrs. Brackett,” he said, “Mrs. Brackett.”
She came hurriedly to the bed.
“I know you’re feelin’ better, ‘Laddin O’Brien.”
He smiled up at her.
“Mrs. Brackett,” he said, “I dreamed that Margaret St. John came here to ask how I was—did she?”
Margaret hadn’t. She had not, so hedged was her life, even heard that Aladdin lay sick.
Mrs. Brackett lied nobly.
“She was here yesterday,” she said, “and that anxious to know all about you.”
Aladdin looked like one that had found peace.
“Thank you,” he said.
Mrs. Brackett raised his head, pillow and all, very gently, and gave him his medicine.
“How’s Jack?” said Aladdin.
“He comes twice every day to ask about you,” said Mrs. Brackett. “He’s livin’ with my brother-in-law.”
“That’s good,” said Aladdin. He lay back and dozed. After a while he opened his eyes.
“Mrs. Brackett-”
“What is it, deary?” The good woman had been herself on the point of dozing, but was instantly alert.
“Am I going to die?”
“You goin’ to die!” She tried to make her voice indignant, but it broke.
“I want to know.”
“He wants to know, good land!” exclaimed Mrs. Brackett.
“If a man’s going to die,” said Aladdin, aeat-sixteen, “he wants to know, because he has things that have to be done.”
“Doctor said you wasn’t to talk much,” said Mrs. Brackett.
“If I’ve got to die,” said Aladdin, abruptly, “I’ve got to see Margaret.”
A woman in a blue wrapper, muddy slippers, her gray hair disheveled, hatless, her eyes bright and wild, burst suddenly upon Hannibal St. John where he sat in his library reading in the book called “Hesperides.”
“Senator St. John,” she began rapidly, “Aladdin O’Brien’s sick in my house, and the last thing he said was, ‘I’ve got to see Margaret’; and he’s dyin’ wantin’ to see her, and I’ve come for her, and she’s got to come.”
It was a tribute to St. John’s genius that in spite of her incoherent utterance he understood precisely what the woman was driving at.
“You say he’s dying?” he said.
“Doctor’s given up hope. He’s had a relapse since this mornin’, and she’s got to come right now if she’s to see him at all.”
The senator hesitated for once.
“It’s got nothin’ to do with the proprieties,” said Mrs. Brackett, sternly, “nor what he was to her, nor her to him; it’s a plain case of humanity and—”
“What is the nature of the sickness?” asked the senator.
“It’s fever—”
“Is it contagious?” asked the senator.
“No, it ain’t!” almost shrieked the old lady. “And what if it was?”
“Of course if it were contagious she couldn’t go,” said the senator.
“It ain’t contagious, and, what’s more, he once laid down his life for her on the log, that time.”
“If you assure me the fever is not contagious—”
“You’ll let her come—”
“It seems nonsense,” said the senator. “They are only children, and I don’t want her to get silly ideas.”
“Only children!” exclaimed Mrs. Brackett. “Senator, give me the troubles of the grown-ups, childbirth, and losing the first-born with none to follow, the losing of husband and mother, and the approach of old age,—give me them and I’ll bear them, but spare me the sorrows and trials of little children which we grown-ups ain’t strong enough to bear. You can say I said so,” she finished defiantly.
The senator bowed in agreement.
“I believe you are right,” he said. “I will take you home in my carriage, Mrs.—”
“Brackett,” said she, with pride.
The senator stepped into the hall and raised his voice the least trifle.
“Daughter!”
She answered from several rooms away, and came running. Her hands were inky, and she held a letter. She was no longer the timid little girl of the island, for somehow that escapade had emancipated her. She had waited for a few days in expectation of damnation, but, that failing to materialize, had turned over a leaf in her character, and became such a bully at home that the family and servants loved her more and more from day to day. She was fourteen at this time; altogether exquisite and charming and wayward.
“Aladdin O’Brien is very sick, daughter,” said the senator, “and we are going to see him.”
“And don’t tell him that you didn’t come to ask after him yesterday,” said Mrs. Brackett, defiantly, “because I said you did. I had my reasons,” she went on, “and you can say I said so.”
Margaret ran up-stairs to get her hat. She was almost wild with excitement and foreboding of she knew not what.
The letter which she had been writing fell from her hand. She picked it up, looked hastily at the superscription, “Mr. Peter Manners, Jr.,” and tore it into pieces.
There is no doubt that Aladdin’s recovery dated from Margaret’s visit. The poor boy was too sick to say what he had planned, but Margaret sat by his bed for a while and held his hand, and said little abrupt conventional things that meant much more to them both, and that was enough. Besides, and under the guns of her father’s eyes, just before she went away she stooped and kissed him on the forehead, and that was more than enough to make anybody get over anything, Aladdin thought. So he slept a long cool sleep after Margaret had gone, and woke free of fever. As he lay gathering strength to sit up in bed, which treat had been promised him in ten days, Aladdin’s mind worked hard over the future, and what he could machinate in order one day to be almost worthy to kiss the dust under Margaret’s feet. She sent him flowers twice, but was not allowed to come and see him again.
Aladdin had awful struggles with the boredom of convalescence. He felt perfectly well, and they wouldn’t let him get up and out; everything forbidden he wanted to eat. And his one solace was the Brackett library. This was an extraordinary collection of books. They were seven, and how they got there nobody knows. The most important in the collection was, in Mrs. Brackett’s estimation, an odd volume of an encyclopedia, bound in tree-calf and labeled, “Safety-lamps to Stranglers.” Next were four fat tomes in the German language on scientific subjects; these, provided that anybody had ever wanted to read them, had never succeeded in getting themselves read, but they had cuts and cuts which were fascinating to surmise about. The sixth book was the second volume of a romance called “The Headsman,” by “the author of ‘The Spy,’” and the seventh was a back-split edition of Poe’s poems.
The second volume of “The Headsman” went like cakes and syrup on a cold morning, for it was narrative, and then it was laid aside, because it was dull. The four German books had their cuts almost examined out of them, and the encyclopedia book, from “Safety-lamps to Stranglers,” practically had its contents torn out and devoured. In after life Aladdin could always speak with extraordinary fluency, feeling, and understanding on anything that began with S, such as Simeon Stylites and Senegambia. But the poems of Poe were what made his sickness worth while and put the call upon all his after life. We learn of the critics and professors of English that there are greater lyric poets than Poe. They will base this on technicalities and theories of what poetry has been and what poetry ought to be, and will not take into account the fact that of all of them—Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth when he is a poet at all, Heine, and the lyric body of Goethe and the rest—not one in proportion to the mass of his production so often leaves the ground and spreads wings as Poe,—
If I might dwellWhere IsrafelHath dwelt, and he where I,He might not sing so wildly wellA mortal melody,While a bolder note than his might swellFrom my lyre within the sky,—
and that where they have, they have perhaps risen a little higher, but never have sung more hauntingly and clear. The wonderful sounds and the unearthly purity—the purity of a little child that has died—took Aladdin by the throat and shook up the imagination and music that had lain dormant within him; his father’s bent for invention clarified into a passion for creation. The first thing he read was three stanzas on the left-hand page where the book opened to his uneager hands, and his eyes, expectant of disappointment,—for up to that time, never having read any, he hated poetry,—fell on one of the five or six perfect poems in the world:
Helen, thy beauty is to meLike those Nicean barks of yoreThat gently o’er a perfumed seaThe weary, wayworn wanderer boreTo his own native shore.On desperate seas long wont to roam,Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,Thy naiad airs have brought me homeTo the glory that was Greece,And the grandeur that was Rome.Lo, in yon brilliant window-nicheHow statue-like I see thee stand,The agate lamp within thy hand!Ah, Psyche! From the regions whichAre holy land.
And he knew that he had read the most exquisite, the most insouciant, and the most universal account of every man’s heart’s desire—Margaret as she would be when she grew tall. He knew little of the glory that was Greece or the grandeur that was Rome, but whatever they were, Margaret had all of them, and the hyacinth hair, very thick and clustery and beautiful, and the naiad airs. Ah, Psyche!
And he read forward and back in the book, and after a little he knew that he had a soul, and that the only beautiful thing in the world is beauty, and the only sad thing, and that beauty is truth.
Open at the lines to Helen he laid the book face down upon his heart, with his hands clasped over it, and shut his eyes.
“Now I know what I’ve got to do,” he said. “Now I know what I’ve got to do.”
He dreamed away hours until suddenly the need of deeds set him bolt upright in bed, and he called to Mrs. Brackett to bring him pencil and paper. From that time on he was seldom without them, and, by turns reading and writing, entered with hope and fortitude into the challenging field of literature. And from the first, however ignorant and unkempt the effort, he wrote a kind of literature, for he buckled to no work that he knew, and was forever striving after an ideal (nebulous, indescribable, and far) of his own, and that is literature. Go to those who have wrought for—forever (without, of course, knowing it) and those who have wrought earnestly for the day, and these things you will find made the god in their machine: Raphael’s sonnets and Dante’s picture! Aladdin had no message, that he knew of, for the world, but the call of one of the arts was upon him; and he knew that willy-nilly he must answer that call as long as eyes could see, or hands hold pen, or tongue call for pencil and paper, money buy them, or theft procure them. He set himself stubbornly and courageously to the bitter-sweet task of learning to write.
“It must be like learning anything else,” he said, his eyes on a sheet of seemingly uncorrectable misbalances, “and just because I’m rotten at it now doesn’t prove that if I practise and practise, and try and try, and hope and hope, I won’t be some good sometime.”
He saw very clearly the squat dark tower itself in the midst of the chin-upon-hand hills, and the world and his friends sitting about to see him fail. He saw them, and he knew them all, and yet, with Childe Roland,
Dauntless the slughorn to his lips he set,And blew.
And incidentally, when he got well and returned to school, he entered on a period of learning his lessons, for he thought that these might one day be of use to him in his chosen line.
Senator St. John, for he was at heart democratic, and heard little of Aladdin that was not to Aladdin’s credit, derigorized the taboo which he had once placed on Aladdin’s and Margaret’s friendship, and allowed the young man to come occasionally to the house, and occasionally loaned him books. Margaret was really at the bottom of this, but she stayed comfortably at the bottom, and teased her father to do the needful, and he, wrapped up in the great issues which were threatening to divide the country, complied. In those days the senator’s interests extended far beyond his family, Margaret and the three powerful sons who were building a reputation for the firm of John St. John & Brothers, lawyers in Portland. He gave Aladdin leave to come and go, even smiled grimly as he did so, and, except at those moments when he met him face to face, forgot that Aladdin existed. Margaret enjoyed Aladdin hugely, and unconsciously sat for the heroine of every novel he began, and the inspiration of every verse that he wrote. When Aladdin reached his eighteenth year and Margaret her sixteenth there was such a delightful and strong friendship between them that the other young people of the town talked. Margaret in her heart of hearts was fonder of Aladdin than of anybody else—when she was with him, or under the immediate influence of having been with him, for nobody else had such extraordinary ideas, or such a fund of amusing vitality, or such fascinating moods. Like every one with a touch of the Celt in him, Aladdin was by turns gloomiest and most unfortunate of all mortals upon whom the sun positively would not shine, or the gayest of the gay. From his droll manner of singing a song, to the seriousness with which he sometimes bore all the sufferings of all the world, he seemed to her a most complex and unusual individual. But his spells were of the instant, and her thoughts were very often on that beautiful young man, Manners, who, having completed his course at the law school, was coming to spend a month before he should begin to practise. Since his first visit years ago, Manners, now a grown man of twenty, had spent much of many of his vacations with the St. Johns. The senator was obliged, as well as his limitations would allow, to take the place of a mother to Margaret, and though it was barely guessable from his words or actions, he loved Peter Manners like a son, and had resolved, almost since the beginning, to end by having him for one. And the last time that Manners had visited them in Washington, St. John had seen to it that he shook hands with all the great men who were making history. Once the senator and Margaret had visited the Manners in New York. That had been a bitter time for Aladdin, for while all the others of his age were sniffing timidly at love and life, he had found his grand passion early and stuck to it, and was now blissful with hope and now acrid with jealousy. Peter Manners he hated with a green and jealous hatred. And if Peter Manners had any of the baser passions, he divined this, and hated Aladdin back, but rather contemptuously. They met occasionally, and the meetings, always in the presence of Margaret, were never very happy. She was woman enough to rejoice at being a bone of contention, and angel enough to hate seeing good times spoiled.
But it was hard on Aladdin. He could go to her house almost when he liked, and be welcomed by her, but to her father and the rest of the household he was not especially welcome. They were always polite to him, and always considerate, and he felt—quite rightly—that he was merely tolerated, as a more or less presentable acquaintance of Margaret’s. Manners, on the other hand, and it took less intuition to know it, was not only greatly welcome to Margaret, but to all the others—from the gardener up to the senator. Manners’ distinction of manner, his wellbred, easy ways, his charmingly enunciative and gracious voice, together with his naive and simple nature, went far with people’s hearts. Aladdin bitterly conceded every advantage to his rival except that of mind. To this, for he knew even in his humble moments that he himself had it, he clung tenaciously. Mrs. Brackett, with a sneaking admiration for Peter Manners, whom she had once seen on the street, had Aladdin’s interests well in heart, and the lay of the matter well in hand. She put it like this to a friendly gossip:
“I guess’ Laddin O’Brien’s ‘bout smaht enough to go a long ways further than fine clothes and money and a genealogical past will carry a body. He writes sometimes six and eight big sides of paper up in a day, and if he ain’t content with that he just tears it up and goes at it again. There won’t be anybody’ll go further in this world than ‘Laddin O’Brien, and you can say I said so—”
Here under oath of secrecy Mrs. Brackett lowered her voice and divulged a secret:
“He got a letter this mornin’ sayin’ that the Portland’spy’ is goin’ to print three poems he sent ‘em, and enclosin’ three dollars to pay for ‘em. I guess beginnin’ right now he could go along at that rate and make mebbe five or six hundred dollars a year. Poetry’s nothin’ to him; he can write it faster than you and I can baste.”
At the very moment of this adoring act of divulgence Aladdin was in the parlor, giving his first taste of success a musical soul, and waiting—waiting—waiting until it should be late enough in the day for him to climb the hill to the St. Johns’ and hand over the Big News to Margaret. And as he sat before the piano, demipatient and wholly joyful, his fingers twinkled the yellowed and black keys into fits of merriment, or, after an abrupt pause, built heap upon heap of bass chords. Then the mood would change and, to a whanging accompaniment, he would chant, recitative fashion, the three poems which alone he had made.
The day waned, and it was time to go and tell Margaret. His way lay past the railway-station, under the “Look out for the locomotive” sign, across the track, and up the hill. In the air was the exhilarating evening cool of June, and the fragrance of flowers, which in the north country, to make up for the shorter tale of their days, bloom bigger and smell sweeter than any other flowers in the world. Even in the dirty paved square fronting the station was a smell of summer and flowers. You could see people’s faces lighten and sniff it, as they got out of the hot, cindery coaches of the five-forty, which had just rolled in.
The St. Johns’ fine pair of bays and their open carriage were drawn up beside the station. The horses were entering a spirited, ground-pawing protest against the vicinity of that alway inexplicable and snorting monster on wheels. On the platform, evidently waiting for some one to get off the train, stood St. John and Margaret. She looked much fresher and sweeter than a rose, and Aladdin noted that she was wearing her hair up for the first time. Her dress was a floaty white affair with a blue ribbon round it, and her beautiful, gay young face flushed with excitement and anticipation till it sparkled. There was a large crowd getting off the train, at that aggravating rate of progression with which people habitually leave a crowded public conveyance or a theater, and Margaret and her father were looking through the windows of the cars to see if they could catch a glimpse of whom they sought. Suddenly the senator broke into a smile and waved his cane. The action was so unusual for him that it looked grotesque. Margaret stood on tiptoe and waved her hand, and a presentiment came to Aladdin and took away all his joy.
Peter Manners, looking fresh and clean in spite of his long, dusty ride, got off the train and made a hilarious rush for his friends. He shook hands with Margaret, then with the senator, and turned again to Margaret. She was altogether too pretty, and much too glad to see him. In the excitement of the moment it couldn’t be borne, and he kissed her. Then they both laughed, and the senator laughed, for he was glad. He put his great hand on Manners’ shoulder, and laughing and talking, the three went to the carriage. Then the senator remembered that the checks had been forgotten, and against a voluble protest he secured them from Manners, and went after an expressman. Having found the expressman—one of his constituents and a power in the town,—he handed him the checks, a fifty-cent piece, and a ponderous joke as old as Xerxes, at which the expressman roared. Manners stood by the carriage and looked at Margaret. “Lord God,” he thought, “it has come at last!” and they grinned at each other.
“Mmm!” said Margaret, who stood for the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. She had not expected to be so glad to see him.
Meanwhile Aladdin had turned and was going home.
Margaret caught sight of his back, and the pitiful little droop in the usually erect shoulders, and she divined like a flash, and called after him. He pretended not to hear and went on. In his pocket was the editor’s letter which he had designed to show her. It had lain down and died.
“Why does that man hate me so?” said Manners.
A little of the joy of meeting had gone. A cloud passed over the sun, and the earth was darkened. Many drops of rain began to fall, each making a distinct splash as it struck. One began to smell the disturbed dust. But the flowers continued to send up their incense to heaven, and Manners put his light overcoat about Margaret.
Aladdin had a large acquaintance in the town among all sorts of men, and, as he went home sorrowfully in the rain, he met a youth, older than himself, who had an evil notoriety; for being born with brains, of respectable people, and propitiously launched on the world, he had begun in his early teens, and in the face of the most heartrending solicitude, to drink himself to death. The miserable part of it was that everybody loved him when he was sober, and out of consideration to his family still asked him to the best that the town could do in the way of parties and entertainments. He was a good-looking young man with a big frame and a pale face. His real name was William Addison Larch, but he was better known as “Beau Larch.” He had a nervous, engaging smile, of which he made frequent use.
“My word, Aladdin,” he said, “you look sick as a dog. Come with me and take a snifter for it.”
Aladdin hesitated a moment. And as soon as he had thoroughly made up his mind that it was wrong to say so, he said:
“I believe I will.” The Celt in him was feeling suicidal. They went into the ground-floor room of a house where liquor was sold.
“For me, whisky,” said Beau Larch.
“The same for me,” said Aladdin, with something suspiciously like a gulp. The first drink which a man takes against his better judgment is a grisly epoch in his life. Aladdin realized this, and was at once miserable and willing that it should be so.
“To those that love us!” said Beau Larch.
Aladdin put down his liquor without grimace or gasp.
Beau Larch paid.
In Aladdin’s pocket were three dollars, the first mile-post on the steep road to his ideal. He felt, to be sure that they were there.
“Now you ‘ll have one with me,” he said.
When the sudden rain-storm had rained and thundered and lightened itself out, they went to another saloon, and from there to the Boat Club, of which Beau Larch was a member and whither he asked Aladdin to supper. Fishes and lobsters and clams were the staple articles of Boat Club suppers, and over savory messes of these, helped down with much whisky and water, Aladdin and Beau Larch made the evening spin. Aladdin, talking eagerly and with the naivete of a child, wondered why he had never liked this man so much before. And Larch told the somewhat abject story of his life three times with an introduction of much racy anecdote.
Aladdin’s head held surprisingly well. Every now and then he would hand himself an inward congratulation on the alertness and clearness of his mind, and think what a fine constitution he must have. They got to singing after a while, and reciting poems, of which each knew a quantity by heart. And, oddly enough, Aladdin, though he had been brought up to speak sound American, developed in his cups, and afterward clung to, in moments of exhilaration or excitement, an indescribably faint but perfectly distinct Hibernian accent. It was the heritage to which he was heir, and made his eager and earnest rendering of “Annabel Lee” so pathetic that Beau Larch wept, and knocked a glass off the table....
Men came and sat with them, and Aladdin discovered in himself what he had hitherto never suspected—the power of becoming heart-to-heart friends with strangers in two seconds.
Aladdin was never able to remember just how or when or with whom they left the Boat Club. He only remembered walking and walking and talking and talking, and finally arguing a knotty question, on which all defended the same side, and then sitting down on the steps of a house in a low quarter of the town, and pouring the ramifications of all his troubles into the thoroughly sympathetic if somewhat noncomprehending ears of Beau Larch. He talked long and became drunker as he talked, while Larch became soberer. Then Aladdin remembered that the door at the top of the steps had opened, and a frowzy head had been stuck out, and that a brassy voice, with something at once pathetic and wheedling in it, had said:
“Aren’t you coming in, boys?”
Then Aladdin remembered that Beau Larch and he had had angry words, and that Beau Larch had told him not to make an ass of himself, and for heaven’s sake to go home. To which Aladdin had retorted that he was old enough to know what was good for him, and hated the world and didn’t give a damn who knew it, and wouldn’t go home. Aladdin could swear that after that he only closed his eyes for a second to shut out something or other, and that when he opened them, the reverberation of a door closing was in his ears. But for all that Beau Larch had gone, and was to be seen neither up the street nor down. Although his own was past mending, Beau Larch, drunk as he was, had done a good deed that night, for he had guarded a precious innocence against the assaults of a drunken little Irish boy who was feeling down about something—a girl named something or other, Beau Larch thought, and another boy named something or other. The next day Beau had forgotten even that much.
Aladdin thought that Larch was hiding in jest. He arose unsteadily and wandered off in search of him. After a time he found himself before the door of his own house. There were lights in the parlor, and Aladdin became almost sober. He realized with a thrill of stricken conscience that Mrs. Brackett was sitting up for him, and he was afraid. He tried the front door and found it unlocked. He went in. On the right, the door leading into the parlor stood open. On the table burned a lamp. Beside the table in the crushed plush rocker sat Mrs. Brackett. Her spectacles were pushed high up on her forehead. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was slightly open. From the corners of her eyes red marks ran down her cheeks. Her thin gray hair was in disarray. In her lap, open, lay her huge family Bible; a spray of pressed maidenhair fern marked the place.
Aladdin, somewhat sobered by now, and already stung with the anguish of remorse, tiptoed into the parlor and softly blew out the light; but the instant before he did so he glanced down at the Bible in the good lady’s lap and saw that she had been reading about the prodigal son. Great tears ran out of Aladdin’s eyes. He went up-stairs, weeping and on tiptoe, and as he passed the door of his brother’s room he heard a stir within.
“Is that you, ‘Laddin?”
“Sssh, darlint,” said Aladdin; “you’ll wake Mother Brackett.”
In his own room there was a lamp burning low, and on his bureau was a note for him from Margaret:
DEAR ALADDIN: Papa wants you to come up and have supper with us. Peter Manners is here, and I think it will be fun. Please do come, and remember a lot of foolish songs to sing. Why wouldn’t you speak to me? It hurts so when you act like that....
Aladdin, kissing the note, went down on his knees and twice began to pray, “O God—O God!” He could say no more, but all the penitence and heartburnings of his soul were in his prayer. Later he lay on his bed staring into a darkness which moved in wheels, and he kept saying to the darkness: