“Oh, happier he who gains not
The Love some seem to gain:
The joy that custom stains not
Shall still with him remain.
The loveliness that wanes not,
The Love that ne’er can wane.”
THE soft, young contralto voice floating out from the old house on Montgomery Street, mingled with the breath of roses that spread possessively over the veranda. A ripple of sparkling chords, like wind passing over water, died away in a delicate and plaintive minor cadence. A light footstep moved within the house. The voice, now not more than a clear murmur, hummed in the hallway. Something told the listener and lurker on the sidewalk that it were advisable he should be on his way. To be caught staring, gawking and explanationless, before the Wondrous Maiden’s domicile is not the happiest method of producing a favorable impression upon the Wondrous Maiden, which latter was become the immediate and predominant purpose of young Mr. Jeremy Robson’s existence.
He passed on. After a score or more of paces he began to lag and waver. Yet an undue hesitancy of spirit had never been reckonable as among young Mr. Robson’s major failings. He had come along Montgomery Street, which is a free public thoroughfare wherein any and all may pass, without let or hindrance, upon their lawful occasions, a youth upright and secure of himself. Nothing more formidable had marked his itinerary than a singularly sweet young voice, singing to an unknown measure the words of Mr. Andrew Lang’s haunting and wistful lyric. Yet young Mr. Robson became instantly aware of strange symptoms within himself. His pulse was markedly uneven. His eyes were affected by a spasmodic inclination which all but twisted his neck about in the opposite direction to that of his reluctant steps. His mind was a kingdom divided against itself.
Arrived at the corner he found himself racked by conflicting muscular intentions and inhibitions. He turned into Nicklin Avenue, leading downtown to his proper occupation, and almost immediately executed a rightabout-face. He returned to the corner, and rebounded from the impact of an unreasoning and unmanning fear. Again he retraced his steps and halted. His feet gave him the painful impression of a divided allegiance, and he recognized and resented the invalidity of the poet's praise of those supposedly useful members:
“I only have to steer ’em, and
They ride me everywheres.”
In the midst of his confusion he became hotly aware of the surprised scrutiny of a small boy with a dog.
“Lost somethin’?” inquired the small boy, scornfully.
Jeremy Robson started. Was the urchin possessed of the spirit of divination? Certainly young Mr. Robson had lost his nerve. That much he confessed to himself. The small boy’s dog divined the fact also. He made a charge upon the wavering youth with the evident intention of chasing him up a tree. To be flouted in the open day by a cur of highly impeachable antecedents was a little too much!
“Get out!” commanded Jeremy Robson, in a tone which left no room for doubt.
The small boy and his dog retired hastily. Their intended victim, somewhat reconstituted in soul by the victory, clinched his final decision, not indeed without a sinking of the breath, and with a firm tread and an unwavering eye (as he had once written of an unfortunate going to his execution) again plunged into the imminent, deadly breach of Montgomery Street, and headed for the old house amid the roses. He reckoned that she would be just about on the porch now. If she were n’t, he would go on past and make for the office, and try again on the morrow. If she were—well, he had recovered command of at least three matured and plausible lies to explain his presence. Then he saw her, and the lies forsook and left him stranded with nothing better than the truth to tell, if the issue rose.
She was standing at the top of the five veranda steps.
An errant wind weaving among the roses above her, let through swift glints of sunlight, which played upon her face and hair with fairy touches. There was a dreamy and wistful smile, as in lingering memory of the music she had sung, upon her lips. Her face, broad at the temples and narrowing down to a small, self-willed chin, was modeled nearer upon the sensitive and changeful lines of the triangle than upon the cold and classic oval. Above it the splendid mass of tawny hair was hardly kept respectably within bounds by the prisoning devices of net and band. She was slender, and firm-set, and straight with the soft and strong lines of young, untainted health and vigor. By the warm hues, and the lithe poise of her, she was a creature bred in the happy usages of sunlight and free winds and the open spaces. Again he felt in her that subtle, disturbing, starry quality that makes for dreams.
In her hand she swung a broad sun-hat. Reluctantly she lifted her arms to set it on her head. The pulses of Jeremy Robson made a bound of hopefulness. Evidently she was coming out upon the street. Her eyes were lifted and he wondered that he could ever have thought them gray, so flooded were they with hazel lights as they met the radiance, sifting down through the trees. She turned them upon him and a slow recognition grew in them. Opening the gate, she stood waiting. He lifted his hat as he approached.
“Good-morning,” she greeted him in that voice which, with its indefinable distinction of accent, had thrilled in his memory, since he had first heard her speak.
He returned her greeting, calling her by name.
“It is The Record you write for, is it not?” she asked. “Yes. But they don’t print all I write.”
“So I infer,” she returned with grave and intent eyes. “Were you disappointed?”
“A little.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I supposed that you had made up your mind that it was not worth writing after all.”
“It was worth writing.”
“But not worth printing?”
“Worth printing, too. But the editors were afraid of offending the Germans. So they killed it.”
“Did you write it in that way?”
“What way?”
“To offend the Germans.”
“No. I wrote it to show that there was a place for Americanism even in a German meeting.”
“I am glad you did that,” she said quietly.
“You’ve a right to be. You’re responsible. For the way I wrote it, I mean. You gave me the notion.”
“I am glad of that, too. But I am sorrier than ever that I did not see your article.”
“Perhaps I’ll show it to you some day.”
She nodded, without asking him how or where. Marcia Ames was one of those individuals who wait unquestioningly and accept generously. “It is quite a coincidence my meeting you here,” she said. “For I wished to ask you about the article.”
Behold the path now made plain for the lurker and retracer of steps! No need even for those well-formulated lies; he could simply accept the theory of coincidence. And, most unaccountably, he found that he could n’t. Perhaps he could have, had he not looked into her eyes just then. That steady, limpid, candid, confident regard of hers forbade even a petty and harmless deceit of convenience. Once for all Jeremy Robson knew that whatever might be between them in future, there would at least be truth. And with a sharp pang, felt the foreboding that the truth might yet hurt him to the limit of his capacity for pain.
“No,” he denied. “No coincidence.”
“Not?” she asked, surprised.
“I’ve passed here every day for the last ten days.”
“Do you live on this block?”
“No. In the other end of town, up near the University.”
“Then you would not pass here to go to The Record office.”
“Your geography is unimpeachable.”
“Is it a riddle? I am not at all clever at them.”
“It’s a confession. I’ve been coming this way day after day for a particular purpose.”
“What was it?”
“To see you again.”
“What did you wish to see me about?”
“Nothing. Nothing in particular.”
“Just to see me? That is very nice of you.” She studied him with her direct and serene regard. But a small and willful dimple materialized on the brown curve of her cheek, and a little one-sided smile went up to meet it. “Not as a reporter this time?”
“Not in the least. A reporter may be just an ordinary human being, off duty, you know.”
“Are you just an ordinary human being?”
“Very much so. Don’t I strike you that way?” His tone was one of exaggerated anxiety.
The girl studied him with impersonal interest, quite free from embarrassment. Magnus Laurens had credited him with good looks. In the usual sense, Miss Ames decided, confirming her first opinion, he was not entitled to this credit. He was rather rugged of build and face, with mobile lips, boyish and pleasant eyes, an obstinate jaw which looked as if it might set to courage and endurance or perhaps to sullenness, and the expression and bearing of one vividly and intelligently curious about the life-scheme of which he was a part. The girl noted, with approval, his dress: quietly harmonious in every detail yet without suggesting the finicky habit; a style which would have been unremarkable in New York or London, but which stood out with a pleasant distinction among the more casual and careless garb of the Middle West.
“I really had not given it much thought,” she answered, having completed her scrutiny. “Your methods seem rather out of the ordinary.”
“Are you a million years old?” he asked abruptly.
If his intention was to startle her, it failed signally. “Surely that is a very personal question. I am not—quite. Why do you ask?”
“Because you look so like a kid and yet you’ve got the nerve—no, not nerve—the confidence and manner of your own great-grandmother. It’s very confusing,” complained young Mr. Robson, leaning dejectedly upon the gate.
“Perhaps it arrives from my having been brought up abroad and much among older people,” she surmised, with one of her slightly un-English turns of phrase. “One reason for my coming here to the University is to accustom myself to your American ways.”
“‘Your’ American ways?”
“Our American ways,” she amended sweetly. “Oh, I am all American in my heart!” The gay and willful little dimple again materialized on her cheek. “Still, one cannot remain indefinitely leaning over a gate in conversation, however thrilling, with a young man whose name one does not even know, can one?” she pointed out.
“You don’t know my name?” Young Mr. Robson looked distinctly annoyed. “Mr. Laurens presented me. Don’t you remember?”
“But you were only a reporter who was going to write something about me, then.” With an emphasis on the final word, slight, indeed, yet amply sufficient to make amends.
Her caller brightened perceptibly. “Surname Robson. Given name, Jeremy. Jem, when you get to know me better.”
She opened her eyes very wide to take in this idea. “You expect that we are going to know each other so well as that?”
“We certainly are if I can bring it about. Don’t you think I’ve made a good start?”
“At least a quick one. What is your next step?”
“That’s what’s worrying me a little.”
“But so progressing a young man as you, with so much perseverance,” she taunted, “surely if you planned to see me once, you would plan how to see me again. Perhaps, though, you do not wish to see me again soon,” she added, with an adorable mock-melancholy droop of the alluring lips.
“You’ll never win any guessing contests on that form, Miss Ames,” he assured her, shaking his head solemnly. “But you’re right enough about my having a plan. The question is, will it work.”
“Try it.”
“Here goes. You’re trying for the Varsity golf team, are n’t you?”
“I intend to, if I improve enough.”
“Are you pretty good?”
“I am steady. Only twice I have been as high as one hundred. But my short approaches are bad.”
“I can help ’em.”
“Can you? Are you a good player?”
“Fair. But I’ll tell you what I am. I’m a good coach. We never lost an intercollegiate at Kirk in the three years I captained the team.”
“And you offer to coach me? It is very kind of you.”
“Wait. It may not be so simple as all that.”
“Shall you exact terms?” she smiled.
“This depends on how much you are in earnest about making the team.”
“Very much.”
“Enough to get up at five in the morning and play a round?”
“Why such an unearthly hour?”
“It’s about the only time I can be sure of. Don’t forget I’m a hard-working reporter.”
“I thought you wished me to forget it, only a moment ago,” she teased.
“I want you to remember that I’m a man,” he retorted, “besides being a reporter. And that you and I are going to be friends.” He looked her fairly in the eyes. “At least,” he added quietly.
The baffling lights in her eyes deepened as she met his gaze, unwaveringly. “I believe that we are—at least,” she said. “When shall we begin?”
“Wehavebegun.”
“The golf, I mean.”
“To-morrow.”
She laughed outright. “You lose no time.”
“I don’t know that I have any to lose. I don’t know how long you’re to be here.”
“Nor do I,” she answered with a sudden gravity. “Very well; to-morrow. I will meet you at the club house at 5.45. Oh! I forgot. My golf shoes are at Eli Wade’s. You remember; the ‘Boot & Shoe Surgeon’?”
“I’ll get them this afternoon, and bring them with me.”
“‘Lo, Miss Marcy!”
The interruption, in a cheerful sing-song, came from behind Jeremy. He turned to face the small boy and the dog of his earlier encounter.
“Good-morning, Buddy,” returned the girl.
“I’ve come to weed the sparr’grass.”
“Yes: we have been expecting you.”
“I stopped by home to get you these.” He brought out a fistful of deep-hearted pansies, bound in a pink string.
The girl took them, gave him a little, quick pat of the hand which he accepted with a flush of mingled adoration and embarrassment, and pinned them at her throat.
“This is Mr. Burton Higman,” she said. “Mr. Jeremy Robson. To his friends, Jem, and Mr. Higman to his friends, Buddy.”
Mr. Higman regarded Mr. Robson with a consideration in which there was more of suspicion than friendliness.
“Where ’dje gittim?” he demanded of Miss Ames.
“I did not get him. He came,” explained the girl.
“Yep. I seen him before he got here. He was down on the corner, actin’ queer.”
“Hold on, now, Buddy,” protested the other, looking pained. “Don’t take away a man’s character.”
Miss Ames motioned him to silence, and turned an eye of lively anticipation upon the urchin.
“What was he doing?”
“Snake-turns. Walk down Nicklin Avenya; turn. Walk up to the corner; turn again. Stop at the corner; talk to a tree. Walk down Nicklin Avenya again; turn oncet more. Stand still. I watcht him.”
“What did he do then?” asked the girl, enjoying the discomfiture of her caller.
The narrator rubbed one foot over the other and considered. “Sweat,” he stated conscientiously. “Look at his collar.”
Mr. Robson’s involuntary hand and Miss Ames’ involuntary gaze met upon the article of apparel indicated. It melted under the double pressure.
“Walked back up to Montgomery Street,” continued the conscientious chronicler en joyably. “Stopped. Cussed the tree. Sweat some more. Turned down Bank—”
“That will do, Buddy. You should be a detective.” Mr. Burton Higman blushed in glory. The girl turned to the accused. “Is all this true?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Any mitigating circumstances?”
“I was screwing up my courage to face an ordeal.”
“What’s an ordeal?” demanded the watchful Mr. Higman.
“I am,” replied Miss Ames.
“Yep: I’m on,” observed her youthful admirer, enlightened. “Mr. Wade on the School Board made us a talk Sat’day, about ordeals. Said each one of us should adopt a high ordeal and stick to it. If you’re one, and I got to do it, I choose to adopt you.”
“Buddy,” said his rival.
“Yep?”
“Will you sell out your claim for a dime?”
“No,sir!”
“For a quarter?”
“Nope.”
“Foradol—”
“Quit! No fair!” protested Mr. Higman in a voice of poignant agony.
“You’re right. It is n’t fair. Shake, old boy.” Young Mr. Robson gravely shook young Burton Higman by the hand. “Between you and me, only honorable and knightly rivalry. We’ll go fishing some day and talk over high ordeals and other matters close to the heart.”
“And at present Buddy and I will map out the attack upon the asparagus,” said the girl.
She turned away, with a smile of dismissal for her informal caller.
As he took himself off, Marcia Ames turned to her other admirer. “Well, Buddy. What do you think of him?”
“He’s a nut,” was the prompt and uncompromising decision.
“So bad? If it is bad. What is a nut?”
“Plumb crazy.”
“You think so? Perhaps, a little.”
“Plumb!” persisted the other jealously. But the innate and responsive fair-mindedness of youth prompted him to add: “But, say! When he kinda smiles that way at ye, it’s all off. There’s nothin’ to it. It gets you. Ain’t it true?” inquired Buddy earnestly.
The unanalytical Buddy was flattered, thrilled, and faintly puzzled by the instant response to this speech when, laughing, his goddess caught him in a quick, warm little hug. He did n’t wholly understand why she did it.
For that matter, neither did she.
GOLF boots?” said Eli Wade, Boot & Shoe Surgeon.
“Fer the young lady at Miss Pritchard’s? Right here.” He held them up to his own admiration. “A foot that’sright” said the Boot & Shoe Surgeon. “Rightandlight. Honest wear on them boots. Even as a die. No sloppy, slovenly running down at one side of the heel. The wearer of them boots carries her weight square an’ level, she does. She stands straight an’ she walks straight. Yes, an’ she talks you straight, an’ looks you straight in the eye. Why did n’t she come for ’em herself, same as she brung ’em? Not ailin’, is she?”
“I was going by this way, so I stopped in to save time,” said Jeremy Robson.
“You’re welcome. But I’d ruther she’d come, herself. We had a good talk, her an’ me, when she brung in the boots.” He wrapped them up clumsily but carefully. “A good operation,” stated the Boot & Shoe Surgeon. “Anextrygood operation. But no extry charge.”
A figure stirred in a long canvas chair in the corner. From it came a mutter in which the words “Scab-work” in a contemptuous tone were alone comprehensible. The figure reared a white-thatched head, and a keen, lined face, above a sinewy neck set upon a spare frame. “Rich, ain’t she?” said the figure. “Let her pay extry, then, for extry work.”
“Rich she may or may not be,” replied the Boot & Shoe Surgeon. “Proud she ain’t. Comes in here as free as fresh air an’ as pleasant. ‘Mr. Wade?’ s’ she. ‘Doctor Wade, when I’m in the Surgery, Miss,’ s’ I. ‘Doctor Wade, you get my trade,’ s’ she, and laughed a little, for she had n’t meant to say it that way. ‘That’s as purty a rhyme as ever I heard in my life, Miss,’ s’ I. I looked at the boots. ‘Furrin?’ s’ I. ‘Yes,’ s’ she. I looked up at her. ‘Furrin?’ s’ I. ‘No,’ s’ she. ‘American,’ s’ she. ‘As American as you are.’ ‘Glad to hear it,’ s’ I. ‘You must be an American from ’way-back,’ s’ I, ‘fer the Wades f’m Wal-tham? s’ I, ‘have fit in every war f’m the Revolution sence, all an’ inclusive, an’ I reckon to live to fight in the comin’ one, ef they take ’em over sixty years of age,’ s’ I. ‘What is the comin’ one, Doctor Wade?’ s’ she. ‘Why, the war when us Americans has got to get together and fight for Americar against all these durn fur-riners that think they own the earth,’ s’ I. ‘That’s the comin’ war as I reckon it, an’ I guess it’s comin’ right here in Centralia an’ through the Middle West purty soon unless we figger to let ourselves get shewed plum off the map,’ s’ I. Then she told me about noticin’ the flag an’ the motter in my winder, an’ says that’s why she brung me her trade, an’ she hopes the flag ’ll stay there, fer trade follers the flag, s’ she, or ought to in sech a good cause. An’ she laughs that laugh of hern, like music, an’ we settled down an’ had a real good palaver. So,” said the Boot & Shoe Surgeon, “she gets a low-priced, extry-good operation. Though I’m bound to say, she’d ’a’ got somethin’ extry jest on the straight way she wears shoe-leather.”
“You read character from shoes, then,” commented Jeremy Robson, mildly amused.
“What’d I be if I couldn’t? A cobbler! A leather-patcher! Not a genuwyne Boot & Shoe Surgeon. Character in shoes? Of course there is. Lemme see yours.” He lifted up first one, then the other foot of his visitor, as if he were a horse, and shook his head soberly over them.
“You stumble,” he said. “You ain’t struck your gait, yet. Bump up against things when there’s no sense in it. Foolish. Obstinit, too, I would n’t wonder. Lazy? M-m-m! I dunno. I guess you like the easy way an’ a clear path pretty good. If you’re sensible an’ saving, better leave them shoes with me for a little toning-up.”
“Will you undertake to improve my character with the improvement to my shoes?”
“Laugh at me if you like. You don’t laugh at folks that believes in palmistry. What’s a man’s palm to read! He can change every line in it with a hoe, or an awl, or a golf-stick. But his shoes! Ah! As a man walks, so he is. An’ his shoes tell the tale. Take these, young man.” The Boot & Shoe Surgeon laid an affectionate hand upon Miss Marcia Ames’ boots. “Study ’em. They’ll repay you. There’s courage an’ clean pride an’ a warm heart that travels the path she walks. Yes; an’ a touch of vanity—Why not? An’ a temper of their own, them boots. Hot an’ quick an’ generous. You’ve got to travel some to keep pace with them boots. I dunno when I’ve had a pair to match ’em. Here’s another pair ’ll go far.” He lifted them into view. “Hand-made, stout-made, and serviceable. They ’re climbers, they are! They ’ll reach the high places—if they don’t slip.”
“Who owns them?”
“The Honorable Martin Embree.”
“A faker,” grunted the white-haired figure.
“A climber. A hustler. A fighter. No faker. Yet—they may slip,” said the diagnostician, studying the sole of the left boot. “Theymayslip. Gave me some advice, when he saw my winder. ‘Leave the flag, but take out the motter,’ s’ he. ‘There’s no sense in that “It stands alone.” The country is big enough an’ broad enough for all nationalities, an’ welcome,’ s’ he.’”
“Sensible enough,” growled the figure in the chair. “But he’s a faker. A half-heart. All for the people in words. But put it up to him in deeds—he ain’t there.”
“He’s a Socialist,” explained the Boot & Shoe Surgeon, pointing his awl at the chair. “Nicholas Milliken. Make you acquainted. What did you say your name was?”
“Jeremy Robson,” said its owner, who had n’t yet said anything of the sort.
The figure in the chair for the first time honored him with its attention.
“On The Record?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Reporter?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ve got the soul of a louse.”
“Soft words, Nick,” prescribed Eli Wade.
“Soft words? Hard facts! The soul of a louse!”
“Who the devil are you?” demanded Jeremy.
“A Socialist,” repeated the Boot & Shoe Surgeon. “Don’t mind him.”
Milliken rose and stood before the subject of his com-temptuous phrase; long, lean, dry, and bitter. “Me?” said he. “I’m a man. I’m no hired pen. I write for The Free-Thinker, when I write.”
“Rest of the time he sets type on The Record,” explained Wade.
“That’s it. Many a time I’ve run the stick over your stuff.”
“It seems to have made an unfavorable impression on you,” remarked Jeremy.
“Oh, you can write.” The other flung the concession to him condescendingly. “I grant you that. What good does that do you? You’ve got to trim your facts to your owner’s orders, have n’t you?”
“Not facts,” denied the reporter with some heat. “Facts are facts. I don’t trim them for anybody.”
“Nobody trims them after they’re written, either, I suppose.”
The tone was not to Jeremy’s liking. “The copy-desk—” he began.
“Oh, cut the guff! The copy-desk is a hired blue pencil, just like you’re a hired pen. You know what I mean. Why did n’t they print your story on the girl at the Federated German Societies meeting? Was n’t it facts? Was n’t it good enough?”
Jeremy was silent.
“I’ll tell you,” resumed the implacable Socialist. “They were afraid. Afraid of the German crowd. Call their souls their own? Not any more than you can.”
“What about yourself, Nick?” put in the proprietor of the place. “You take The Record’s money, the same as this gentleman, only maybe not so much of it.”
“Do I sell myself for it? Would I write for The Record? Or any other of the capitalistic press? Eli Wade, you’re honest, you are. A fool, but honest. You don’t know what a reporter’s got to do to hold his job. Why, if you was to get into some mix-up over a pair of shoes with the owner of his paper to-morrow, he’d be sent down here to write you wrong, whether you were right or wrong, and he’d do it. He’d have to do it. That’s what comes of a privately owned press, under our capitalistic system.”
Through the gross exaggeration Jeremy felt the point of a half-truth and resented it. “No decent reporter would do it,” he asserted.
“Who said anything about ‘decent’ reporters?” countered the other.
Jeremy’s face changed; his weight shifted slightly upon his feet. Not so slightly but that the pedal diagnostician noticed the movement. “Want to get your eye punched?” he inquired, of Milliken. “You’re going the right way for it.”
The Socialist grinned wickedly and relishingly. “Don’t like that, huh? All right. Come to me a year from now and tell me I’m wrong, and I’ll apologize. That’s fair. Ain’t it?”
“That’s fair,” corroborated the Boot & Shoe Surgeon.
“Mind you,” continued the Socialist, pursuing his favorite path of self-explication; “I would n’t ha’ printed your story, either. It was a fool story. Ain’t the Germans just as good as we are? Better ’n a lot of us. They believe in the rights o’ men, they do. None of your dirty aristocratic notions about them. Look at Germany! Most Socialistic country in the world to-day. Most civilized, too.”
“Let ’em stay in their own country, then,” said Eli Wade. “We don’t want ’em.”
“Ah, but we do! We need ’em to help on the Social Revolution.”
“My folks fit in one American Revolution,” said the
Doctor stoutly. “I don’t reckon none of us is going to fight in another led by Germans and crazy folks.”
“You’ll come around,” laughed Milliken. “You’ll live to be ashamed of that silly motto in your window. Take it out! Take it out, Eli Wade, and put the Red Flag of World-Brotherhood in its place.”
“Above the American flag, mebbe?”
“Along with it. My stock’s as good Yankee as yours, Eli. But I’m ready to fight again for libutty, and you ain’t. You read too much in the capitalistic press. Some day you’ll be reading this young feller’s editorials, all about the rights o’ capital and what the laboring man owes to his employer.”
“You will not,” said Jeremy.
“Trying your pen at editorials, ain’t you?”
“Have you been setting those up, too?”
“Exactly. You’ll land. You’ve got the knack. The slick, smooth, oily trick of making the thing seem what it ain’t. So pretty soon I’ll have to take that back about your having the soul of a louse. You’ll be worse than that. I’ll tell you what you’ll be.” And he told, naming a very ancient and much blown-upon profession.
“That’ll be enough an’ some-to-carry from you,” said the Boot & Shoe Surgeon indignantly. “Get out of my place an’ don’t come back until you’ve cleaned your dirty tongue.”
Resentment of his brusque dismissal was far remote from Mr. Nicholas Milliken’s philosophic mind, if one were to judge by the cheerful smile with which he rose. “All right, old moozle-head!” he returned affectionately. “He fires me about once a week,” he explained to Jeremy. “That’s when he can’t stand any more good, plain facts. They boil over on him and out I go, with the steam. Don’t you mind me, either, young feller. You’ll see I’m right, one day. We’re all bound upon the Wheel of Things, as the old Lammy said to Kim. Supprised, are you, that I know Roodyerd Kipling?” He preened himself with a childish vanity. “I read everything! The old Lammy was a bit of a Socialist himself. All bound upon the Wheel of Things. And if I see a little clearer than you, it’s only because I happen to be bound a turn or two higher up.”
The ineffable patronage of this amused Jeremy into good humor. “I’ll call on you for that apology, though, one of these days,” he said to the parting guest, Eli Wade looked after Milliken with a frown. “Them shoes of his have got a gallows gait,” he declared. “Lawless paths! Lawless paths! Why do I stand his bitter tongue? I guess it’s because he makes me think. I wish I had his education,” sighed the old man.
“Where did he get it?”
“Picked it up. Libraries, night schools, and the like. He was a New England mill-hand, always in hot water. Stirrin’ up labor troubles an’ all that. Picked up typography an’ drifted out here. A quirky mind an’ a restless one, an’ a bad course it sets for his feet to follow,” said the gentle, one-ideaed old philosopher of foot-gear. “But not a bad heart, Nick has n’t. Come in again, young gentleman,” he added. “Not in the way of trade. Come in an’ talk with the old man. One of you newspaper gentlemen drops in for a chat, often. Mr. Galpin of The Guardian. You’ll know him, I guess?”
“Very well.”
“Them are his spare shoes, yonder. Rough, ordinary, plain articles. Plodders. But good wearing stuff in ’em an’ right solid on the ground, every inch. Slow-moving,” he nodded thoughtfully. “Yes; they’ll move slow, but they won’t never wobble. An’ don’t think to trip up the man that walks in ’em. It ain’t to be done.”
“I believe you’re right, there.”
“Right? Cert’nly I’m right. Leather never lies. Not good leather. An’ poor leather’s a dead give-away. My museum of soles.” He waved a showman’s hand toward the rows of shoes suspended neatly in brackets of his own devising against the walls. “Look at them Congress gaiters. Would n’t you know they was a banker’s belongings? Robert Wanser, President of the Trust Company. Full and easy and comfortable and mebbe a little sly in the gait. But there’s weight in ’em. Don’t get in their way. There’s Rappelje’s next ’em; Professor Rappelje, of the University. Queer neighbors. Straight and thin and fine finished, his gear. Mebbe a little pinchy. But a man to swear by. And Bausch: them high-button calfs. He’s a buster. Busts his buttons off. One of them big, puffin’-up Germans. Always marching. Tramp-tramp-tramp: the goose-step. Nothin’ o’ that in that lot on the end. Judge Dana. See the ball of the soles? Worn down. Creeps, he does. Guess he can jump too, after he’s crept near enough. An’ that pair below, on the right. That’s a shuffler. Mr. Wymett. Owns The Guardian and runs it. Now here’s a mincer. Dainty an’ soft he goes an’ dainty an’ soft he lives: the Rev. Mr. Merserole, rector of our rich folks’ church. For all that, there’s stuff an’ weight in his shoes.” His hand hovered and touched a pair of elegantly made, low, laced Oxfords, of almost feminine delicacy. “Style there, eh? Know what they want, those shoes. Got to be jest so. Spick an’ span. They say Montrose Clark never has to pay to have ’em cleaned.”
“Why is that?” asked Jeremy, responsive to the look of invitation in the old man’s eye.
“Got so many boot-lickers around him,” chuckled the philosopher. “Kick you as soon as look at you, those would, for all they look so finicky.”
“I’ll come in to see you when I need pointers about people,” said Jeremy, smiling.
The Boot & Shoe Surgeon handed him the repaired golf-boots. “I’m an ignorant old man,” he said, “but I know folks’s feet and sometimes I can guess what path they’ll take. I’ve been talking pretty free to you, Mr. Robson, for a stranger. But I reckon you’re trustable, ’spite of what Nick Milliken says.”
“I reckon I am, Doctor Wade,” returned Jeremy, and believed himself as he said it.
“Yes: the old man likes to talk,” confessed Eli Wade; “an’ about people. Gossip, some call it. That’s a silly word. What’s history but gossip about folks that are dead? But, of course, a man like me has to be careful who he talks to, being in public life.”
“Certainly,” acquiesced the amused Jeremy. “But I did n’t know you were in public life. What office do you hold?”
“I’m on the Fenchester Public School Board,” said Eli Wade with simple but profound pride.
BOBOLINK on a grass-tuft piped ecstatic welcome to a long-lost friend, the sun. Five gray and weary days had passed since that amiable orb had bestowed so much as one uncloaked beam upon birds and men, and on each of those rain-soaked days, Jeremy Robson had racked his overstrained vocabulary for new objurgations against the malign fates which had spread a watery barrier between himself and Marcia Ames. Now the sun was an hour above the eastern horizon with a flawless sky outspread like a luxurious carpet for its day’s journey. Secure at that hour in the undisputed possession of the earth, bobolink swayed and sang, when to its wrath and amaze a shining missile descended from the sky and bounded with sprightly twists toward its chosen choir-loft.
“Sliced into the rough again,” said a voice of despair from the hollow below, and two figures appeared, headed toward the singer, who moved on with an indignant and expostulatory chirp, but found another perch still within ear-shot.
“Because you willnotkeep your head down,” reprehended the deeper tones of the young man.
Bobolink stretched his liquid throat in a love-song. He sang the warm sweetness of the earth, and the conquering glory of the sun; the breeze’s kiss and the welcome of the flower for the bees, and youth which is made up of all these and comes but once. Out of a full heart he sent forth his missioning call to young hearts; then, as the girl turned an exquisite face toward him, he waited for her response.
“That is four,” said she, “and I am not out yet.” And she hewed away a whole clump of innocent daisies, with one ferocious chop.
“You should have used a niblick the first time,” observed the young man.
Perceiving that romance had forever departed from the human race when, on such a May morning, such a maid and such a youth could satisfy their soul with such conversation as this, bobolink flew away to a tussock in an adjacent field where his own private romance was safe hidden.
To versatile human kind, it is given to make love in many and diverse manners uncomprehended of the bird species. Not the least ingenious of his species, Mr. Jeremy Robson had marked out as his first step the establishment of a systematic association with Miss Marcia Ames, through golf; and until that association could be trusted to walk alone, as it were, he purposed to confine his attention strictly to the matter in hand. Her desire to make the college team was a very genuine one, and he guessed her to be a young lady of no small determination. Therefore, he was well satisfied to observe that, on this their first experiment as teacher and pupil, she was playing rather poorly. This meant longer and more arduous practice. At the end of the first round, during which he had devoted close attention but scant suggestion to her performance, he was four up and her card showed a painful total.
“Fifty-twos will never land you anywhere,” was the conclusion which he derived from the addition.
“What is to be done?” she asked in her precise English. “I grow worse.”
“Do you read Ibsen?” he inquired.
“I have read him a great deal. But not upon golf,” said Miss Ames with raised eyebrows.
“Does your playing suggest any particular character of his?”
“You are being absurd. Or is it one of your riddles, at which I am not clever?”
“I’m giving you a test in self-analysis. ‘The Ibsen character whom you suggest, particularly when you play your iron shots, is Little Eyolf. The l silent, as in ’Hades.’”
“I do not think that a very funny joke,” she said scornfully.
“It’s been turned down by three comic papers, though,” he defended.
“Then why must I bear it?”
“To make the point stick in your memory. Once, quite early in the morning, I came around the corner of a barn on a Philadelphia golf course, and there was a nice-looking elderly lady whom I had seen the day before taking her two small grandchildren out walking, addressing a ball with a brassie and saying, ‘Eye on the ball; slow back; carry through. Eye on the ball; slow back; carry through,’ over and over again. Brassie shots were her weakness. The next day that persevering old grandma went out and made low score in the National Women’s Championship. Now, if you’ll just think of yourself as Little Eyolf until you’re good and mad, it’ll help do the trick.”
“What were you doing in Philadelphia?” inquired the girl irrelevantly.
“Not golfing,” he returned. “So, if you don’t mind, we’ll postpone that. This is a golf lesson, and right here the serious business of the day begins. The first consideration is to cure you of star-gazing. You appreciate that that’s your main trouble?”
“Raising my head, you mean?”
“That’s it. Star-gazing, we call it.”
“It occurs because I forget myself.”
“And mostly on your irons. You get your wooden shots off clean. Now, let’s drive.”
Two straight shots flew down the course, his the longer by fifteen yards. A ninety-yard approach lay before her.
“Beginneth here the first lesson,” said Jeremy. “It’s a sure cure, on the homoeopathic principle. Invented it myself for a fellow on our college team who was a stargazer, and he showed his gratitude by eliminating me from the individual championship, that fall.” He took a cardboard box from his pocket, and extracted from it one of a number of small, gilt stars such as stationers carry in stock. This he pressed down upon the grass so close behind his pupil’s ball as almost to touch its lower arc. “Behold the star of your hopes.”
“What am I to do with it?”
“Keep your eye on it—if you can.”
“Until after I have struck the ball?”
“Longer than that. After you’ve played, step forward and plant the sole of your foot on the star. But you won’t be able to do it. Not the first time.”
“I shall,” said the girl with quiet conviction.
Taking her stance, she measured the distance with a careful eye, and sent the ball off with a clean click. Her head remained bent with an almost devotional intentness. She stepped forward and covered the star with that boot which Eli Wade had so warmly praised.
“Good!” approved the instructor. “You’ve got will power.”
“I have needed to have,” replied the girl. Her tone was curiously musing and confidential. “May I look up now?”
“Surely. ‘You’ll like the view.”
The ball, rising high, had landed upon the edge of the green and rolled to within ten feet of the cup.
“Oh!” she cried. “Do you suppose I could do it again?”
“Any number of times, if you’ll keep your eye on the star.”
“But one could not carry about a box of stars in a match, could one?”
“One could. But it won’t be necessary. Two weeks’ practice at that will get you clean out of the Little Eyolf habit.”
“Will it, indeed? But why do you look so intently at the spot?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Jeremy hastily. “It was your boot—I mean, I was thinking what that queer old codger Eli Wade said when I went after your boots.”
“And wasthatgolf?” inquired Miss Ames with a demure and candid air. “No? Then, if you do not mind, we will postpone it, shall we not?”
“Stung!” confessed Jeremy. “We shall.”
The bestarred second round cut no less than five strokes from the score of the gratified pupil and her even more highly pleased instructor. This in spite of the fact that she had once lifted her head and perpetrated a lamen table foozle, whereupon Jeremy gravely pasted one of the stars on the toe of her left boot: “To keep you reminded,” he explained.
“But,” he added, “you’ve got to clip at least three more strokes off to be safe. That’ll take you all your time.”
It took a disproportionate amount of Jeremy Robson’s, too, which, to do him justice, he did not begrudge. As a corollary to the morning lessons he took to dropping in at the Pritchard mansion of an evening to discuss some of the more abstruse points of the game, where he found himself in active competition with the picked youth of the University and the town, for Miss Marcia gathered a court as irresistibly as a flower gathers bees. Quite unjustifiably Jeremy was inclined to sulk a bit over this, unmindful of the favor of the gods in affording him her undivided companionship in those early morning hours. Whereupon the gods, as is their custom, withdrew their unappreciated bestowals. Buddy Higman discovered the golf practice and straightway volunteered as caddy. Jealousy as well as desire to be of service to the liege lady prompted his offer, which was straightway accepted. So the morning practice continued while bobolink from his daisied choir-loft (no longer invaded by balls wandering from the straight and narrow path which leads to the House of Bogie) alternately cheered and jeered at this chaperoned companionship.
One stroke, two strokes, and finally five strokes were subtracted from the aspirant’s nine-hole score. Her master gave her his blessing and told her to go in and win. In the Varsity competition, she qualified with a highly respectable round, and in the play-off for the team, won her place. The team captain posted the choice for the yearly match against Kirk College on the athletic bulletin, one line of which read:
No. 4—M. Ames.
In special celebration of the event, the pupil accepted an invitation to dine at the Country Club that evening with the instructor.
“Will you make an agreement?” she asked, as they faced each other across the little table, pleasantly remote in a far corner of the veranda.
“Unsight-unseen?” he smiled. “All right. I’ll swap.”
“That is quite too American for me. But you agree. Then let us not speak the word ‘golf’ all this evening. I am tired of it.”
“Stale,” commented the expert. “You must lay off for a week. Well, let’s forget it. What shall we talk about?”
“What are you doing here in Fenchester?”
He smiled at the directness of the question. “Plain and fancy reporting.”
“You do not seem to belong here.”
“What makes you think that?”
She considered him meditatively. “I suppose it was your clothes, first. You dress differently from the others. More like the men I have known over there.”
“Remnants of past glory,” he assured her lightly. “I have n’t always lived here, you know.”
“Where then? Do you mind my asking?”
“Not a bit. I’ve drifted about doing worthless things for several years. Philadelphia mainly, New York a little. Getting myself mis-educated. You see, I’m something of a failure.”
“You should not say that even in fun. I do not like to hear it.”
“It is n’t in fun. Ask my aged and highly respectable great-aunt, Miss Greer, in Philadelphia, and you’ll learn something to my disadvantage.”
“I shall,” said the girl gravely, “if I ever go back there. Did you live with her?”
“For a time. After my college course she sent me on a year’s tour and then made me take one of those ornamental post-graduate courses that lead into the lily-fingered occupations that are neither professions nor business. She had a fond hope that I’d take to diplomacy.”
“No!” said the girl with unflattering surprise. “I know many diplomats. I do not think you would be successful there.”
“I’m about as diplomatic as a punch in the eye,” admitted her companion. “The old lady considered it plumb disgusting of me not to take to refined international mendacity. But then I did n’t take to much of anything else that she laid out for me. I had vulgar tastes. I wanted to go into the newspaper business, and when I’d learnt it, have Great-Aunt kindly buy me a paper to play with. Great-Aunt did n’t see it that way. She cut me off with a small amount of hard cash and a large amount of hard talk, and I took a School of Journalism course and eventually drifted out here because I liked what I remembered of the town and wanted to bore in where I was n’t hampered by friends and acquaintances. Does that strike you as a record of glowing success? Considering that I’m nearly twenty-seven years old, and have n’t made a scratch on the face of the world yet?”
“But you began late,” condoned his companion. “And you are still learning. But I cannot see why your aunt should object to your wishing to own a newspaper. One would say, a harmless ambition.”
“One that I’m quite unlikely to realize, now. As for its being harmless, why, my dear child—excuse the freedom of an aged golf-professor—there’s a charge of dynamite in every font of type.”
“Then you have a penchant for high explosives?”
“Have I? I don’t think I’d put it that way,” mused Jeremy. “I’ve a taste for adventure. And running a newspaper of your own has always seemed to me about the liveliest and most adventurous job going. But I don’t want to blow things up.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Oh, just to have a hand in things, in a real, live American community like this, where the soil is good and new ideas sprout. I’d like to get into the political fight, too. A really good one, I mean, with something worth aiming at.”
“That I can understand. But I still fail to make you fit into this environment.”
“What about yourself?” he countered “Have n’t you rather the air of coming out of the great world and condescending to this raw and rural town?”
“Have I? Have I been condescending to you?”
“If you had, it would be more than I deserve,” he said contritely. “I’d no business to say that. And I did n’t mean it, anyway. But this is a queer place for you to be, is n’t it?”
“Not for my purposes?”
“Are you specializing at Old Central?”
“One might call it that. I made inquiries for the most typically American college, and a list was made up for me. I chose the University of Centralia to be with my mother’s cousin, Miss Pritchard.”
“Just like that? All yourself?”
“All myself,” she assented gravely.
“You came here to get Americanized?”
“Yes. My mother married again. A German. A man of great scientific attainments and high position. He is very gentle and vague and absent-minded, and good to me. And when I told them that I would like to take my own money and come here to my own country for a year before”—she hesitated almost imperceptibly—“before anything was settled for me, he consented. Think what a wrench it must have been for his old-world prejudices against emancipated women and all that!”
“Yet I don’t think you need Americanizing. You’re a real American type if there ever was one.”
She flushed a little. “I like to hear that. My father would have liked it. What makes you say it?”
“It’s—it’s your honesty, I think. There’s a quality of frankness about you that could be—well, almost brutal, I think. Do you know what I mean?”
“I suppose I am a crank. That is American enough, is it not?” she laughed. “A crank about the truth. I hate anything that even suggests a lie, or a dodging, or an evasion. So perhaps I should not like your newspaper profession.”
“But that’s just it!” he cried eagerly. “If one had a paper of one’s own, he could make his own rules for the game.”
“If he were big enough—and brave enough.”
“Brave enough,” he repeated. “Eli Wade said that about you, too. Reading your character from your shoes, you know. That you had courage and honesty. I think he thought it a rare thing in a woman.”
“It is not,” she flashed. “But if I have, it is no credit to me. I have wholly loved and trusted only one person on earth. That was my father, and he was the soul of truth. So, some of my friends laugh at me a little and think me a crank, because I have—what do you Americans—weAmericans say?—no use for any one whom I cannot wholly trust.”
“And you would be hard, too,” he said.
“Perhaps. If I were, it would be because I could not help it. I think that I do things because something inside makes me before I have even time to consider, sometimes.”
“Like your standing up alone at the Federated German meeting. By the way, I brought my story of it for you to read.”
She held out her hand for the proofs. “I am glad,” she said.
She read it, slowly and studiously, and as she read an expression, new to Jeremy in the changeful charm of her face, puzzled his watchful eyes.
“It is very vivid,” she said, “and enthusiastic.”
She rose. On their way back to the Pritchard house she plied him with questions bearing on the technique of journalism. As he stood, bareheaded under the porch light looking up at her, she asked:
“May I keep the proof of the article?”
“Yes. You like it, then?”
“I love it. But I am glad that it was not published.”
“Why?”
“There is too much Me in it.” She paused. “Did I seem to you like that—then?”
“Yes. And more.”
She shook her head. “I am glad that it was not published,” she repeated. “It would have said to too many people—” She hesitated.
“What?” he asked.
For the first time her eyes faltered before his. They were hesitant, and deep-shadowed and troubled.
“What?” he repeated.
“What should have been said to only one.”
“Marcia!” he cried.
But the door had closed on her and he barely heard her soft-toned “Good-night” from beyond its jealous interception.