When I entered the doctor's study I found him alone. Mr. Henderson, he explained, had gone to Judge Bundy's. Judge Bundy always entertained the lecturer, and he was too generous a man to make an exception even in this case. In speaking of the lecturer the doctor made a wry face. He could not understand how a man of Valerian Harassan's reputation ever allowed such a mountebank to take his place. At McGraw we believed in life; we believed in ambition, and it was terrible—terrible, sir, to have to sit in silence and hear our dearest traditions assailed by one who admitted that he was a failure. Did Mr. Malcolm hear the brutal cut at Judge Bundy? Judge Bundy, sir, was——
I did not stop to hear the eulogy, nor did I consider how I might be prejudicing myself with the president by so rudely breaking from him. But the Professor had come back to me. I cleared the college steps with a bound, and ran over the campus and down the hill into the town. I ran with all a boy's reckless waste of strength, so that when I had covered my half-mile course I had to lean for support against the iron fence which guarded the Bundy home. The great stone pile, with many turrets and a dominating cupola, with wide-spreading verandas and marble lions on the lawn, in the daylight comported itself with dignified aloofness, and now, when night exaggerated its size and a single lonely light flickered in all its vast front, it was forbidding. With something of that forced boldness with which years before I had braved the dark mountains, I made the gate ring a proper notice of my approach and groped my way about the door until I found the bell. The answer came from over my head. Stepping back and looking up, I saw framed in a lighted window a white figure, coatless and collarless, not the distinguished jurist, but a portly man who had been interrupted in the act of preparing for bed. Clothes go a long way toward making a man, and the lack of them brought the judge down to hailing distance.
"What do you want?" he demanded of me, addressing me as any disrobed plebeian might have done.
"I'm Malcolm, sir, David Malcolm," I returned apologetically. "I wish to see Mr. Henderson."
"Henderson, eh?" The judge leaned over the window-sill, and he spoke less sharply. "You'll find him at the station waiting for the night train out. I tried to persuade him to stay, but he wouldn't. How in the world, Mr. Malcolm, could Harassan have sent such a fool in his place? Did you ever hear such utter nonsense? I forgive him about the nails—that was inadvertent, but that stuff about ambition——"
I did not wait to hear the judge controvert my friend's pessimistic philosophy, but with a brusque "good-night" hurried away. The window banged behind me, a sharp commentary on my rudeness. The iron gate clanged again, and I was off down the hill, running toward the lower town.
A shrill whistle stopped me. Looking into the valley I saw a chain of lights weaving their way along the river. They wound through the gap in the mountain, and I saw them no longer. I heard the whistle again, far off now, and it seemed to mock me.
I listened to hear the divine drumbeat. I set myself to march under sealed orders.
To most of us the Professor's speech had been pessimism compact; to me it was inspiring, though wofully lacking in details. I seemed to be marking time. The duties which lay at my hand were unchanged, and I was plodding along as I had plodded before through a commonplace routine. I sought to give to my duties some of the glamour of conquests, but they soon failed to lend themselves to any simulation of romance. After all, marching to the divine drumbeat was simply to follow the precepts ingrained in me as a child, but it is much easier to make a quick charge amid the blare of bugles than to plod along day after day to the monotonous grumble of the drum. I wished that the Professor had been a little more explicit, and yet his last words were always with me. It was as though they were intended for me alone, and I coupled them with his admonition to me that day long ago in the cabin: "Get out of the valley. Do something. Be somebody." My great desire was to see him, for I believed that he could help me to set my course. I wanted help, and my father, my natural adviser, was of little service to me. To him my opportunity was the small one that lay at home. Mr. Pound had washed his hands of me that day when I was bold enough to renounce my purpose of entering the ministry, and now, when in the exultation of the moment my mind reverted to that abandoned plan, I found my own ideas too nebulous to permit me to set myself up as a teacher of divine truth. The law had taken its place with the making of nails, and I did not believe that when my race was run, when I had counted up the wills I had drawn, the bad causes I had defended, the briefs I had written in useless litigations, I could content myself with the thought that I had fought a good fight. For there is a good fight, and to the weakest of us must come a sense of futility in those moments when we awaken from our sloth and hear the distant din of the battle. I thought of medicine, of all professions in itself the most altruistic, and then I found myself face to face with that distressing commonplace, the need of money, for though my father was accounted a rich man in the valley, his wealth was proportioned to the valley standards. A commercial life alone seemed left to me, and then I remembered the million kegs of nails, and I recalled Rufus Blight's achievement of giving away a prize with every pound of tea. Here indeed was a march through waste-lands.
You will think that I was a dreamy, egotistical youth for whom not only the ways of home but the ways of the mass of his fellows were not quite good enough. Perhaps I was. But you must remember a boyhood passed in loneliness; long days when my feet followed the windings of the creek, but my eyes were turned to the distant mountains; the evenings when from the barn-bridge I watched the shadows fall and saw the valley peopled with mysterious shapes. I was ambitious, and I coddled myself with the belief that my ambition did not spring from selfishness, from what the Professor had called the yearning for something more, but from the desire for something better. I did not drag up the roots of my motives to light. Had I, the cynical philosopher must have found that they were nurtured in the same soil that nurtured the ambitions of Judge Bundy.
I had faith in the Professor and I wanted to find him. I could see the inconsistency of his practice and his preaching, but truth is truth no matter by whom uttered. I believed that he could help me, and I wrote to him in the care of Valerian Harassan. The writing of this letter was an evening's labor, for in it I had to tell him what had passed after that day when he had fled into the mountains, of the coming of Rufus Blight and the disappearance of Penelope out of my life; I had much to ask him of her and of himself, and then to lead on to my present quandary. The labor was without any reward. Weeks passed and he did not answer. I wrote to Valerian Harassan and was honored with a prompt reply—his friend Mr. Henderson had returned to San Francisco and he had forwarded my letter there. "But you had as well try to correspond with the will-o'-the-wisp," he wrote. "When last I talked with him, he spoke rather vaguely of going to China and making a trip afoot to Lhasa." Nevertheless, I wrote again, and it was a year later when both of my letters came back to me bearing the post-marks of many cities from coast to coast, to be opened at last by the dead-letter office.
The Professor was silent. Within a week of my graduation I found myself still in a quandary as to my course, and then it came about that it was set for me by the last man in the world whom at that moment I would have chosen for a pilot. This was Boller of '89.
Boller's father was the owner of a daily newspaper in a small inland city, and in the two years since he had left McGraw the son had risen to the chief editorship. His return to college that year was in the nature of a triumphal progress. He sat with the faculty in the morning chapel service, and Doctor Todd took occasion to refer to the presence of a distinguished alumnus who had made his mark in the profession of journalism. In two years Boller had matured to the wisdom and manner of fifty. He had abandoned the exaggerated clothes of his college days for careless, baggy black. His hair had grown long and was dishevelled by much combing with the fingers, and the mustache, once so carefully trimmed and curled, now drooped mournfully, and he had added a tiny goatee to his facial adornments. Drooping glasses on his nose, with a broad black ribbon suspended from them, gave him an appearance of intellectuality, so astonishing a transformation that it was hard for me to believe that this was the same Boller who had greeted me four years before on the college steps. The next morning after his reappearance Doctor Todd announced that our distinguished alumnus had been induced to speak informally to the students that evening on journalism and its appeal to young men. In the rôle of a very old man, Boller from the chapel rostrum descanted learnedly on what he termed the "greatest power for righteousness in modern times and the dynamic force through the operation of which the race is to attain its ideals." To my mind Boller's view of the power for righteousness troubled itself chiefly with the opposing political party, as was shown by the instance he cited where his own paper had exposed the corrupt Democratic ring in Pokono County and had put in its place a group of Republican patriots. Doctor Todd, however, said afterward that Boller had treated the subject in masterly fashion and that he was proud that McGraw had had its part in forming such a mind. While I had listened to Boller in all seriousness, the Professor's diatribe was too vividly in my memory for me to accept without reservation everything that our distinguished alumnus said. But he did bring to my mind the idea that here possibly was the opportunity which I sought, and long before he had finished my thoughts had wandered far from the chapel and I was picturing myself in an editorial chair and with a caustic pen attacking the devils of which poor man is possessed.
I met Boller in the hall afterward, and as he took my arm condescendingly and walked with me a little way I summoned up courage to invite him to my room and there to open my heart to him.
He lighted one of his own cigars after having declined that which I offered him, and this little evidence of his superior taste served to confirm my opinion of his importance. He crossed his legs carelessly, leaned back and watched a long spire of smoke rise ceilingward. "So you are thinking of journalism, eh, Malcolm?"
"You have set me thinking of it," I returned. "Somehow the law doesn't appeal to me any more. The truth is—" I hesitated, recalling how Boller's subtle ridicule had shaken the purpose so carefully nourished by my parents and Mr. Pound. Though his talk that night had been filled with high-flying phrases about ideals of citizenship and useful manhood, I still had lingering doubts of his entire sincerity, and I cast about for some way of expressing my thoughts without making myself ludicrous in his eyes.
"The truth is—" Boller repeated.
"That I want to take up work that means something more than bread and butter," I responded. "I don't want to be a big fish in a small pond."
"And you think that journalism offers a chance of becoming a whale in a big pond. It does, Malcolm, it does," said Boller. "Journalism is the greatest power in the country to-day. We used to call you the Reverend David. Well, if you still have any lingering desire to be a preacher, the paper is the place for you, not the pulpit. The editorial is the sermon of the future. If you would become a preacher, by all means take up journalism. If you have red blood in your veins you will be a journalist."
Having delivered this advice, Boller sat in silence, regarding me through his drooping glasses and pulling at his goatee, and at that moment I decided to be a journalist. It was the picture which Boller made that settled my mind. There was something attractive in his careless attire—the baggy clothes, the flowing tie; and the glasses with the broad ribbon gave an air of dash and intellectuality which I had never seen in the stiff uniform of the bar, even as worn by that leader, Judge Bundy. It is often such absurd impressions on our unsophisticated minds that set the course of our lives. It was so with me. I compared Boller with Doctor Todd, with Mr. Pound, and in the younger generation with Simmons of his own class, who had become principal of a high-school, and I said to myself that the profession which in two years had made him this confident, masterful man offered the opportunity that I sought.
"If you have red blood, Malcolm—" Boller went on as he polished his glasses. There was a suggestion in his careless manner that he waded in red blood set flowing by his pen. "Journalism is one long fight. If you have ideals, Malcolm—" He looked at me, and then my cheeks flushed as by an inclination of the head I confessed to the possession of ideals. "If you have ideals, you can make a fight for right. In journalism we stand aloof from the play itself, but we endeavor to make the actors perform their parts properly. You remember my description of how we exposed the Pokono County ring. It's a fight like that all the time, but you make yourself felt, you know."
Thoroughly pleased with the militant side of the profession, and having decided that I should enter it, I lost no time inquiring how I should begin. This question took some thought on Boller's part, and he combed his hair with his fingers while he gave it consideration.
"I could put you on theSentinel," he said at last. "You will have to start at the bottom, as a reporter, you understand."
He evidently believed that I should jump at such a prospect, but he did not know that the Professor had filled me with the hope of bigger things. I had taken what Boller had said, and I enlarged it to a wider scale of life. I had no intention of exchanging the opportunities of Harlansburg for those of Coal City. Even the Pokono County gang would be small game for me. But before I could thank Boller for his interest and decline it, he hurried on to fix my salary and to explain the nature of my work. He nettled me, and I protested with heat that I wished to start in a broader field.
"That's all right, Malcolm," said my mentor, undisturbed by the reflection on his own city. "But you can get an invaluable experience on theSentinel. If you start right for New York how are you going to get a job? On the other hand, look at Bob Carmody. He learned with us—three years—and now he has a splendid place on the New YorkRecord, making forty a week—covered the Douglas murder trial. Look at Bush, James Woodbury Bush—he went to Philadelphia after two years with us, and he is literary editor of theGazette—landed it easily. He has already published one book—'Anna Virumque'—a charmingly clever story of early Babylon."
The success of Bob Carmody and James Woodbury Bush, while they confirmed me in my respect for the profession of journalism and in my resolve to enter it, did not shake my purpose to waste no time in desultory skirmishing. That I decided so promptly that New York was to be my scene of action was due to Boller's casual mention of Bob Carmody's salary, which by rapid calculation I found to equal Doctor Todd's and to surpass my father's income. The figures were large. I flattered myself that I found no appeal in the money, but regarded it simply as the measure of the power and importance which Bob Carmody had attained. The value of his brain labor was nearly double the value of the foodstuff produced on my father's farm. The figures were impressive. I knew, however, that I could not argue with Boller, supported as he was by experience, and my way with him lay in an obstinate declaration of my purpose.
"It's good of you to offer me a place," I said. "But I'm not going to waste any time. A few days at home, and I am off to New York."
If Boller felt any irritation at my rejection of his offer, he did not show it. Doubtless he laid my refusal to the ignorance of youth, for he stood over me, regarding me through the drooping glasses, as my father would have regarded me had I declared to him some reckless purpose.
"You make a mistake, David," he said. He stood at the door, with one hand fumbling the knob. "Still, I wish you success. Suppose I give you a letter to Carmody. It would be a great help, you know. And I'll write for you a general recommendation—to whom it may concern—on our letterhead; it will be of service." He opened the door and stepped out. He hesitated and came back. "I might tell you, Malcolm, that I hope soon to launch into New York journalism, when I have exhausted the possibilities of Coal City. A man can't sit still, you know—that is, if he has red blood in his veins."
Boller said no more that night, but his manner in parting made it clear to me that if he came to New York it was his purpose to be of great service to me, to lift me up with him. His assumption of superiority filled me with a desire to outrun him. Vanity is a great stimulus to action, and the inspiring note of my life was forgotten as I contemplated David Malcolm in his sanctum, at a table littered with pages, every one of which would stab some devil of corruption or brighten some lonely hour, pausing at his labor to blow spires of smoke ceilingward while he gave kindly advice to the man who sat before him, respectfully erect on his chair, regarding him through drooping glasses.
The college lights were out. I moved to the window and stayed there for a long time, looking into the summer night. The street lamps checkered the slope below me, but my eyes went past them; in the depths of the valley the nail-works were glowing, piling up their tale of kegs, but I looked beyond them to the mountain which rose from the river and travelled away like a great shadow, cutting the star-lighted sky. Where mountain and sky mingled, indefinable in the night, my eyes rested, but my mind plunged on. My arms lay folded on the window-sill, and into them my head sank. I crossed mountain after mountain, and they were but shadows to my youthful strength. What a man David Malcolm became that night! He won everything that the world holds worth striving for. He won them all so easily by always doing what was right. He travelled far because he marched so straight. Then he mounted to the highest peak—a feat so rare that even his great modesty could not suppress a cry of exultation. He heard the crunching of a hoe, and, following the sound, saw the Professor battling with the ever-charging weeds. The gaunt man regarded him quietly; then said: "David, you have come far." He raised the hoe and pointed to the sky. "And I suppose they have heard of it off there—in Mars and Saturn." He turned to the ground, to an army of ants working on a pyramid of sand. "And down there—I suppose they have heard of it." David Malcolm looked about him. The world seemed waste as far as his mind could carry. The Professor saw the disappointment clouding his face, for he stepped closer to him and, laying a hand upon his shoulders, said: "Remember, David, sealed orders."
In those last days at college, when in moments of contemplation I sketched with free imagination a long and unbroken career of success, whether I would or not, Gladys Todd was always gliding into my dreams. She had been too long a central figure in them for me to evict her easily. I knew that I had best begin my march unhampered by impedimenta of any kind, but I found it no easy task to get myself into light marching order. While I had never made a serious proposal for her hand, I had in sentimental moments said things which implied that at the proper time I should offer myself formally. That the offer would bring her prompt acquiescence I never for a moment doubted. But more embarrassing was the attitude of Doctor and Mrs. Todd. They treated me as though I were a member of the family. Mrs. Todd's eyes always beamed with a peculiarly motherly light when they rested on me, and now I recalled with something akin to terror an evening when Gladys at the piano was accompanying me as I sang "The Minute Guns at Sea." Her mother entered the parlor. It did her good, she said, to see us, for it brought back the dear days when she and Doctor Todd had sung as we were singing at that very same piano. Doctor Todd never expressed his thoughts with quite such frankness, but now I could remember many times when he had treated me with fatherly consideration. To end abruptly such a friendship seemed not alone a gross abandonment of Gladys Todd, but of Doctor Todd and Mrs. Todd. The sensible thing to do was clear to me in my saner moments. During the few days that remained to me at college I should continue the friendship, but it would be friendship and nothing more. Then I would go away, politely, as hundreds of other young men before me had left Harlansburg, with a formal parting handshake to hundreds of other young women who had played soft accompaniments while they sang "The Minute Guns at Sea"; as for Doctor and Mrs. Todd, another young man would soon be standing by that same piano awakening their cherished memories.
It was in this other hypothetical young man that I found the stumbling-block whenever my mind was settled to do the sensible thing. The trouble was that I loved Gladys Todd. When I fixed my purpose to march to the strife unhampered by any domestic ties, I felt that I was making myself a martyr to duty. I began to compromise. In a few years, when my feet were firmly set in the road and I had grown strong enough to march with impedimenta, I should come back and claim Gladys Todd, and my return would be a triumph like that of Boller of '89, only in a degree far higher, for from her hands I should receive the victor's garland.
I might have struggled on with such confused ideas as these had it not been for the hypothetical other man. He haunted me. The hypothesis became a fact. It found embodiment in Boller of '89. When after three interminable days of self-denial I presented myself one evening at the president's house, a look of annoyance with which Gladys greeted me seemed connected in some way with the presence of Boller. In my state of mind I should have suspected any octogenarian who smiled on Gladys Todd as plotting against my happiness. That she was essential to my happiness I realized as I watched her, in the shaded lamplight, her face turned to him as she listened intently to an account of his recent visit to Washington. They did not treat me as though I made a crowd. That, at least, would have given me some importance. My rôle was a younger brother's. Boller's greeting was kindly, but he made unmistakable his superiority in years and wisdom as he lapsed into an arm-chair and toyed with the broad black ribbon adorning his glasses, while I was condemned to sit upright on a spindly chair. When he addressed me it was to explain things of which he presumed that I was ignorant, and he gave no heed to my vehement protests to the contrary. When Gladys Todd addressed me it was to call attention to some peculiarly interesting feature of Boller's discourse. They did not drive me to despair, though I was sure this to be their aim. They simply aroused my fighting blood. All other thoughts for the future were forgotten, buried under the repeated vow that I would repay Gladys Todd a thousand times for this momentary coldness and would deal a stinging blow to Boller's self-complacency.
Boller announced to us in confidence that, having seen Washington, it was now his intention to go abroad. I could not understand why we were pledged to secrecy as to his plans, for the country would not be entirely upset by his departure; but it was clear to my suspicious mind that his revelations had a twofold purpose—to lift himself to greater heights of superiority over the humble college boy and to make himself a more desirablepartifor Gladys Todd. In his words, in the quiet smile with which he was regarding her, I read his secret hope that when he went abroad she would be with him as Mrs. Boller. Restless, uncomfortable, and angry as I was, I had been at the point of leaving, but this disclosure changed my purpose. I realized that I was in no mere skirmish and I dared not give an inch of ground. I stayed. Boller talked on. The clock on the mantel struck the hour, then the half. He looked at me significantly, but I did not move. The clock struck the hour again, and Boller rose with a sigh. He suggested that I go with him, but I shook my head and stood with my hands behind my back, tearing at my fingers. He smiled and stepped to the door, with Gladys Todd following. They paused. He spoke in an undertone, and I caught but two words, "At three." He raised his voice and bade me good-night, calling me "Davy" as though I were a mere boy. Again he said, "At three," jotting the hour indelibly in his mind.
Gladys Todd from the shaded lamplight looked at me with a face clouded with displeasure. I, sitting on my spindly chair, very upright, heard the cryptic number three ringing in my brain. What was going to happen "at three"? At three to-morrow they would walk along the lane which wound around the town and down to the river. I thought of it now as "our lane," a sanctuary that would be desecrated by Boller's mere presence. The plausible theory became a fact. I must act, and act at once. For me to act was to avow my love. I must propose to Gladys Todd. In that purpose all else was forgotten—even Boller. Over and over again I declared to myself that I loved her, but the simple words halted at my lips. A thousand protestations of my undying love pushed and crowded and jostled one another until they were strangling me. Without a tremor in my voice I could have told Gladys Todd that some other man loved her to distraction, and yet, when it was so vital to my happiness that I speak for myself, the simple words halted at my lips and checked the whole onrush of passionate avowal.
Thinking that distance might have some part in my unnerving, I joggled my chair a few feet nearer, grasped a knee in each hand, and leaning forward fixed a determined gaze upon her face. I had abandoned all idea of saying those three words as they should be said for the first time. To say them at all, I must blurt them out, but I believed that with them said the floodgates would be opened and the true lover-like appeal burst forth. Gladys Todd must have thought that I was angry, for she asked me what was the matter. Some inane reply forced its way through the press of unuttered avowals. Now, I said, I will tell her what the matter really is, and I have always believed that I should have done so at that moment had not the front door banged, heralding the coming of Doctor Todd.
He entered the room, and I numbered him with Boller among the enemies of my happiness. He took the very chair which Boller had occupied, and made himself comfortable for the rest of my stay.
"Well, David, you will soon be leaving us forever," he said, bringing his hands together and smiling at me over his wide-spread fingers. In that word "forever" I saw a hidden meaning, and behind my back I clinched my hands and registered my unalterable will. "You are going out into the world to make your name, David," the doctor went on, growing grave. "I do hope that you will succeed as well as Boller of '89. Boller, David, is a man of whom McGraw is proud—a remarkable young man. He dropped into my study for a few minutes this evening and it was a pleasure to listen to him. Such a breadth of view! Such nobility of purpose! He will rise high—that young man. We shall hear much of Boller."
It had been my intention to try to sit out Doctor Todd, but I was in no mood to listen to these praises of Boller from one whom I now regarded as his confederate. I took my leave as quickly as I could, but it was with the inwardly avowed purpose of returning as quickly as I could. Then, I said, the three words would be spoken, not rudely blurted out, but spoken as they should be for the first time. The mention of Boller had brought back to my mind the haunting "three," to echo in every corridor of my brain, and before I fell asleep that night, exhausted by over-thinking, I lifted my hands into the blackness and whispered what had so long hung unuttered on my lips. To-morrow, I said, I shall say it—at two.
At two in the afternoon I found Gladys Todd in the little vine-covered veranda in the rear of the house, painting. I am sure that had I seen her for the first time as she sat there at her easel beautifying a black plaque with a bunch of tulips, every wave of her hand as she plied the brush would have struck the divine spark in my heart. Marguerite at her spinning was not more lovely. The place was ideal for my purpose. We were above the town, hidden by height from its sordidness, and we looked far into mountain-tops where white clouds loitered on the June-day peace. The fresh green of early summer was about us, and the only sound was the drum of bees in the honeysuckle. The time, too, was ideal, for it was a whole hour until "three." My position was ideal, for I placed my chair very close to her and leaned forward with one hand outstretched to support my appeal. Thus I stayed, mute, like an actor who has forgotten his lines. The three words came to my lips, only to halt there.
Fortunately Gladys Todd did not notice my embarrassment, for her eyes were on her work, and while she painted she was telling me of a game of tennis which she had played that morning with the three Miss Minnicks. To the three Miss Minnicks I laid the blame of my silence. Had she been talking of any one else or of anything else, I said, I could have uttered the vital fact which hung so reluctantly on my lips, but to break in rudely in a recitation of fifteen thirties, vantages in and vantages out, with an announcement that I loved her would be quite ridiculous. I dropped my hand and stretched back in my chair. Gladys Todd talked on and painted.
The college clock struck the half-hour, and for me the one clanging note was a solemn warning. I sat up very straight, I grasped the sides of the chair, and the words were uttered. But to me it seemed that some other David Malcolm had spoken them—mere shells of words that rattled in my ears.
"David!" The voice and tone were like my mother's. Gladys Todd stopped painting and, turning, looked at me strangely. I could not have faced that gaze of hers and said another word, but she quickly averted her eyes, abandoned brush and palette, and sat studying her clasped hands.
There was nothing now to hold back the flood of passionate avowal. Perhaps my voice was a little weak, but it grew stronger as I took heart at the sight of her listening so quietly. I told her that I had loved her that evening when we first met; that since then, in all my waking moments, she had been in my thoughts; I had never loved another woman; I never could love another woman. With my outstretched arm hovering so near to her I might have taken her unawares, taken her into my possession and throttled any rising protest; but to touch her with my little finger would have seemed to me a profanation. I expected her to sink into the embrace of that solitary arm.
But she did not. She looked up at me and said: "David, I am sorry—so sorry."
"Sorry?"
There was a ring of indignation in my voice. I was not prepared for such an enigmatic answer. Indeed, I had expected but one response, the one that was mine by right of four years of devotion, by right of those beacon-lights which I had seen so often in her eyes. Sorry? If she was sorry, why had she led me to spend so many hours in her company, why had she walked with me in "our lane," where the very air seemed to brood with sentimental thought? I doubted if I heard her rightly.
"Very, very sorry, David," she repeated. "I never dreamed that you cared for me in this way. I thought you were a good friend. I never could think of you as anything else than a good friend."
I was too much stunned to speak. For days I had been rehearsing in my mind what I should say to her when her hand was in mine, but I had not prepared for a contingency like this. I was helpless. I could only lean back in my chair and gaze at her reproachfully.
"You will forget me very soon," she said, looking up after a moment. "You are going away in a few days. You must forget me, David. Promise me you will."
She took up her brush and palette and began to touch the plaque lightly. As I remember her now, Gladys Todd's face was loveliest in profile. "Promise me," she said, tossing her head and focussing her eyes on the tulips.
Poor David Malcolm! You were young then and little learned in the ways of women. You did not know that to a woman a proposal is a thing not to be ended lightly with consent. You did not know that when the gentlest woman angles she is as any fisher who plays the game with rod and reel and delights in the rushes of the victim. You made no mad rushes. You sat stupidly quiescent. You saw the fair profile dimly as though it were receding into the mists beyond your reach. Your pride was hurt. You were angry and would have flung yourself out of her presence, but you could not endure the shame of defeat.
The college clock struck three. It aroused me from my stupor, and I did make one mad rush, in my confusion acting with more acumen than I knew.
"I never will forget you—I never can forget you," I said brokenly.
The door creaked and I arose, but it was not to face Boller. Knitting in hand, Mrs. Todd bustled out. She made no apology for her intrusion. The veranda was the coolest place in the house, and as she sank into a chair I numbered her with Boller and Doctor Todd, with the enemies of my happiness. Her round, innocent face seemed to mask a grim purpose to sit there for the rest of the afternoon. Gladys Todd talked of the three Miss Minnicks again as she plied her brush, and Mrs. Todd of Mr. Minnick and Mrs. Minnick as she worked her needles. They crushed the struggling hope I had for one moment more in which to make a last appeal. Boller did not come. The college clock struck four and still there was no sign of him. I was sure that he had some knowledge of my presence, and perhaps waited for a signal from the house announcing my departure. In that case it was useless for me to stay longer listening to idle chatter about the Minnicks, and so, utterly unhappy, smarting with the sense of defeat, humiliated, I made my departure, and fled across the campus to the college and my room.
I took no supper. The mere idea of food was nauseating. I paced the floor with my thoughts in chaos. Of consolation I had but one unsteady gleam—at least I should be burdened with no harassing financial problem. Sometimes the question of my meagre resources had been amazingly persistent, but I had fought it down as unworthy to have a place with nobler thoughts. Now it rose again, and for a moment it seemed that I had escaped a heavy burden. Then I remembered Boller. I pictured Boller sitting in the vine-clad veranda while Gladys Todd painted; Boller in the Todd parlor, standing under a bower of clematis, while Gladys Todd moved toward him in step to the wedding-march played by the eldest Miss Minnick. In the sleepless hours that followed, one purpose fixed itself in my mind. I should leave McGraw next day at the sacrifice of a useless diploma. So I wrote to Gladys Todd. I wrote many notes before I was satisfied, and the one I despatched had, I thought, a manly, sensible tone. I did not wish to spend another week in sight of her home and yet banished from it, I said; I had cherished certain hopes, and now I could not stand idle in their wreckage; I had my work to do and was away to do it, but I could not leave without a friendly good-by to her and without expressing a wish for her happiness. This last was a subtle reference to Boller. Having made it, the words which followed were astonishing, but they were born of a faint hope that after all I might not have to go. I told her that she knew best and I would forget her, and now I was going for a last walk in the lane where we had spent so many happy hours, and then to take myself to new scenes, bearing with me the memory of her as just a friend.
The afternoon found me in the lane, on a knoll where the leafage broke and gave a vista of rolling country. My eyes were turned to the hills, but my ears were quickened to catch the sound of foot-falls. In my heart I said that I should never hear them; my dismissal had been too peremptory for me to cozen myself with so absurd an idea. But the hope which had brought me there would not die. Sometimes the wind stirred the leaves and grass, and I would start and look up the lane. Time after time I was the victim of that teasing wind, and with recurring disappointments my spirits sank lower. Then when an hour remained before my train left, and I was standing undecided whether or not to keep to my vigil, I heard a sharp crackle of dry twigs behind me.
Gladys Todd had come. She was carrying her sketch-book, and dropped it in confusion when she saw me emerge from behind the trunk of a great oak. I seized it and held it as a bond against her retreat, affecting not to see the hand which she held out commanding its return. I had planned exactly what I should say did she appear in just this way, and now my well-turned phrases scattered and I stood before her, silent, regarding her. It was just as well. My solemn eyes must have said more than any wordy speech.
"I did not expect to find you here, Mr. Malcolm," she said, dropping her hand as a sign of momentary surrender.
Her tone was one of genuine surprise, and though the statement was astonishing I could not conceive a woman of her character deviating from the straight line of truth, and the hope which had soared high at her coming in answer to my subtle call now sank away. I held out the book mutely.
She did not see it. "I was on my way to the river to sketch," she said. "I had no idea—" She dropped down on the bank and began to pick vaguely at the clover. "Please go. Good-by."
The brim of her sailor hat guarded her face, so that she really did not see the book which I was holding toward her. I placed it on the grass beside her and turned to obey, intending to march away in military fashion, perhaps whistling my defiance.
"You'll promise to forget me," I heard her say.
I looked down at her, but the hat screened her face.
"Yes," I answered, with a steadiness that was surprising, for my throat was parched and my knees had become very weak, so weak that I gave up all thought of marching in military fashion and gathered strength to drag myself out of her sight. I went up the lane slowly. I looked back and saw her sitting very still, one hand on her big portfolio, the other listless on the clover. I reached the bend in the lane. Passing it, I should march on to my conquests, unhappy, wofully unhappy, but going faster because alone.
"David," she called.
I stepped back, hardly believing my ears. She was sitting very still, looking over the lane and the hills. I went nearer. She was like stone. I sat down at her side and somehow my hand touched her hand on the big portfolio, and her hand did not move. And somehow my hand closed on hers.
"David," she said, looking up, "you won't forget me, will you?"
Forget you! I swore to Gladys Todd that I had been idly boasting. I would have carried her image to the grave, burned on my heart. The memory of her would have been the only light in all my life of darkness. But now there was no darkness. For us there was only glorious day. The astonishing thing, the incomprehensible thing, was that Gladys Todd could love me; that it was really true that she loved me that first night we met; that she loved me yesterday when she sat on the vine-clad porch painting tulips so carelessly.
"But I did, David," she protested.
"Then why didn't you say so?" I returned reproachfully.
"Because I wanted to make you say so," she answered.
"But, Gladys," I cried, "I was sure you were in love with Boller."
She stared at me with eyes full of wonder.
"With Boller," I exclaimed. "Boller of '89."
"Why, David Malcolm, you poor, dear child," she cried. "How could you have been so foolish. He left yesterday—yesterday at three."
A cloud suddenly hurled itself across the brightness of my day. It seemed that after all I had hurried unnecessarily, for the financial problem forces itself even into the seventh heaven of love, and now it came like a ghoul to devour my happiness. It assumed concrete form in a picture of Doctor Todd when I went to him empty-handed, and I could not help feeling that it would have been better had I not let suspicion and jealousy hurry me to the attainment of what could have been mine a year later under less embarrassing circumstances.
My moment of abstraction was quickly noticed. Gladys Todd wanted to know my troubles. They were hers now, she said, for thenceforth we must share our burdens. I rose, for I was young. I laughed, and with my laugh the clouds were swept away, for no cloud could veil the sunshine from my heart when the big sketch-book was under my right arm and her small hand was under my left arm as we walked together down that clover-carpeted lane.
I have travelled far in my life, travelled the seven seas by sail and steam, and on horse and camel crossed plain and desert. The Pacific, the Indies, the Arctic—I count over the coasts where my ships have cast anchor; I go back in my memory to the first foreign shores on which my eyes rested, and you perhaps will smile when I tell you that they were the Jersey meadows. I saw them from a car window on a June evening. The train had crossed the bridge at Newark, and below me in the river lay ships—tiny coasters, I know now, but then in the dusk magnified for me to the dignity of world-wanderers. In the salt vapors of the marshes I scented the sea and the far-borne aroma of the tropics, the lands of palm and spice, and I looked away to the encircling hills and their scattered lights with something of the exultation of Columbus when he spied the blazing torch which marked the New World. This was a new world to me. I had known only the inland, little valleys where life moved as placidly as the little rivers which threaded them. Now the sight of mast and spar, the salt vapors, the far-spread lights told me that I had come to a strange land, and I was eager to reach its heart and to see its mysteries. I was keyed high with the hope of conquest. With the salt marshes behind me, I left behind me, too, the Old World, the little valleys, the placid streams, and very straight I was, and very self-confident, when at last I looked across the dark river to the towering shadow of the city, pierced by its myriad stars. I felt neither fear nor loneliness. This city had been building for these hundreds of years for just this hour. It waited to receive me.
But the David Malcolm who stood bewildered in the streets was not the conqueror who had stepped ashore from the ferry-boat. The life a moment ago so precious had suddenly lost its value in the eyes of the unknowing. Yesterday he had walked through Malcolmville, and every man, woman and child in its straggling length had come out to bid him farewell. His departure was an event. His arrival in these strange streets was an event, but to him alone. His very existence was not recognized save by those churlish souls with whom his awkwardness brought him into physical contact. A belt-line car charged at him as though it mattered little if he were ground beneath its wheels. A truck hurled at him as though it were a positive blessing could the world be rid of him. Plunging to safety, he bowled over a man who made it perfectly plain that he regarded himself as just as important as Malcolm of '91. Pausing on a corner with his shining suit-case at his feet, he looked about him. Then he became in his own mind but another ant in a giant hill.
I was lonely now, but I had no fear. I watched the unceasing flow of life around me, and I said that I could move in it as boldly as any man, and perhaps a little better than most men, and if the time came when I must at last be caught beneath a belt-line car my removal from these mad activities would at least be dignified by a notice in the papers. The shrinkage to my self-importance added fire to my ambition. More carefully but resolutely I threaded my way up Cortlandt Street, and at every step my sense of my unimportance increased. Even my hotel seemed to be a hotel of no importance. Mr. Pound had stayed there in 1876, and his account of its magnitude and luxury had led me to believe that I could find it merely by asking. Three men met my simple inquiry with shakes of the head and hurried brusquely on, and yet they were respectable and intelligent-looking. The policeman at the Broadway corner had at least heard of my hostelry; he remembered having seen it when he first came on the force, but he was inclined to believe that it had long since been torn down. This was discouraging, but I did not abandon my search, for Mr. Pound had advised me to make myself known to Mr. Wemple, the head clerk, a friend of his, who would doubtless be of service to me. And now in my great loneliness I wanted to find not the hotel, but Mr. Wemple, for I knew that with him I could talk on terms of friendship, however frail. From the horse-car jogging up Broadway I watched for the corner where the policeman told me the hotel had been; I reached it and saw a tall building adorned by many golden signs, inviting me not to the comfort of bed and board but to the purchase of linens and hosiery. It was growing late. The part of the town through which I was passing had put out its lights and gone home to bed, so I had to abandon hope of finding Mr. Wemple, and turned into the first hotel I saw, an imposing place with a broad window in which sat a solemn, silent row of men gazing vacantly into the street.
Here at last I ended my journey, weary and lonely, without even Mr. Wemple to welcome me to the city where I had cast my fortunes. Before long I joined the solemn line and sat watching the street, and Broadway below Union Square at night, even in those times, was not an enlivening scene. My conquest was forgotten; my mind wandered back to the valley at home. Here I sat listlessly, in a hot, narrow canyon through which swept a thin, sluggish stream of life; above me was just a patch of sky; before me was a tall cliff of steel and stone, pierced by numberless dead windows. As I sat in the glare of electric lights, in smoke-charged air, my ears ringing with the harsh medley of the street, I fancied myself on the barn-bridge again. The moon would be rising over the ridges and the valley would lie at my feet with its checkered fields of brown and gray rolling away to the mountains, and the music of the valley would be no harsh clatter of bells and hoofs; I should hear the wind in the trees, the rustle of the ripening grain, the whippoorwill calling from the elm by the creek, and the restless bleating of sheep in the meadow. Thinking of these things, I asked myself if the life I had left was not far better than the one I had chosen; if the highest reward for my coming years of labor would not be the right to return to it. But for pride I could have abandoned all my mighty plans at that moment and gone back, even, as the Professor had said, to doze like the very dogs. I dared not. My parents' joy at my return might over-balance the loss of their high hopes for my fame, and had they alone been in my thoughts I should have taken the night train home. But I could not go back to Gladys Todd beaten before I had even come to blows with life.
The last picture I had of her was the heroic one of a woman speeding her knight to battle. Gladys had an embarrassing way of calling me "her knight." She stood on the platform of the Harlansburg station, and I leaned from a window of the moving train. Beside her was Doctor Todd waving his hat, and behind her the three Miss Minnicks with handkerchiefs fluttering. She was very straight and very still, but I knew what was in her thoughts. She had faith in my strength; when she saw me again my feet would be firmly set on the ladder by which men climb above the heads of their herded fellows. In the hours of the long journey the picture of her was very clear to me; I seemed to be wearing her colors as I went to the conflict; with her spirit watching over me, I could strike no mean blow nor use my strength in any unworthy cause.
How glad I was that she could not see me now, as I sat in the hotel window on two legs of my chair, with my feet on the brass rail, a figure of dejection. The glamour of my great adventure was gone. I had come quickly to the waste places of which the Professor had spoken. When I closed my eyes to the noisome street and the clamor, when I saw the pines on the ridge-top clear cut against the moonlit sky, when I heard the whippoorwill calling from the elm and the sheep bleating in the meadow, I believed that I was marching to barren conquests and fighting for worthless booty. But I dared not turn back.
In the morning, however, I looked at that same street with different eyes. The thin, sluggish stream of life had swollen to a mighty current. The raucous little medley of the night was lost in the thunders of the awakened city. The towering canyon was swept by the brightest of suns. I seemed to be standing idle in the midst of the conflict, and I was eager to plunge into it. So at noon that day I began my fight. I presented myself at the editorial rooms ofThe Recordand asked for Mr. Carmody. In my hand I held a letter to him from Boller, recommending me in such high terms that it seemed highly improbable that he could refuse me his good offices. To support Boller's assertions as to my acquirements I had also letters from Doctor Todd and Mr. Pound. According to Doctor Todd, the journal which secured the services of David Malcolm was to be congratulated; he recited my high achievements, my graduation with honors in the largest class in the history of McGraw, my winning of the junior oratorical contest with a remarkable oration on "Sweetness and Light." Mr. Pound was less fulsome in his praises, for he was by nature a pessimistic man, but he could vouch for my honesty, though, to be frank, he had been disappointed by my abandoning my purpose to enter the ministry; yet he had known me from infancy, he had had a little part in the development of my mind, and he was confident that I needed but the opportunity to make my mark in any profession.
With such support, my air when I asked for Mr. Carmody was naturally one of assurance. The office-boy, an ancient man in the anteroom, handed my card and Boller's letter to a very young assistant, and where my eyes followed him through a door I saw a number of men seated at battered desks. Some were writing; some were reading; some merely smoking; some had their heads together and talked in low tones. All were in their shirt-sleeves; and none presented the dignified appearance of my conception of a journalist, and especially of so successful a journalist as Mr. Bob Carmody. I was confident that the very young office-boy would pass them and go to the doors beyond, which must lead to the true sanctum. No; where he stopped I saw a wide-spread paper; over the top of it a mop of flaming red hair, and bulging from the sides of it the sleeves of a very pink shirt. The curtain was lowered, disclosing a round, red face heavily blotched with shaving-powder. There was nothing of dignity in Mr. Carmody's appearance; there was nothing in his rotund features to suggest any high purpose or distinguished ambition; indeed, it seemed that he would be content to sit forever on that small chair at that battered desk.
He dropped the paper, looked at my card, and read Boller's letter. Evidently it amused him, for the half-burned cigarette in his mouth moved convulsively, and as he came toward me there sprang up in my mind doubts as to Boller's estimate of him. But he proved a good-natured young man and certainly very modest. Sitting on the ancient office-boy's desk, he addressed me in low tones, as though he feared to be overheard. He was glad to know any friend of Boller's, but evidently Boller was laboring under a misapprehension as to his importance. He disavowed having any influence. Had he the power, nothing would delight him more than to give a friend of Boller a job. I had never thought of myself hunting anything so commonplace as a job, but as I listened to him and looked past him into the editorial room my ideas of my chosen profession were rapidly readjusting themselves and I was casting about for a way in which to continue my quest without the influence on which I had counted so heavily. I protested that I had never dreamed of him giving me a job; I had come to him simply for advice, and perhaps an introduction to the real powers.
Mr. Carmody gave an uneasy glance over his shoulders to a large desk in the corner, where sat a tall, thin man who seemed absorbed in a game of checkers played with newspaper clippings. Mr. Hanks, the city editor, he explained; nothing that he could say would have any influence on Mr. Hanks. On my insisting, however, he at last consented to sound Mr. Hanks on my behalf; he approached him with something of the caution he would have used in confronting a tiger; he waved his hand to me to assure me that all was well, and when I stood by the big desk he disappeared, and it was many days before I saw him again.
There was nothing repelling in Mr. Hanks. Indeed, he seemed rather a mild man, but when he turned on me a pair of large spectacles I felt suddenly as though I were a curious insect being examined under magnifying-glasses. Mr. Hanks, with his thin, pale face and dishevelled hair, appeared more an entomologist than a militant editor. In a moment, however, I saw him in action. He shot his bare arm across the littered desk, he seemed to try to destroy his brass bell, and with every ring he shouted, "Copy—copy!" Office-boys sprang from the floor and dropped from the ceiling; they tumbled over one another in their hurry to answer the summons. He reprimanded them for being asleep. I thought that they would be ordered to bring Mr. Malcolm a chair, but instead one received from a waving hand a bunch of paper, and they retired as they had come, into the floor and the ceiling. I was under the magnifying-glasses again.
"Well, Mr. Malcolm," said Mr. Hanks, leaning back in his chair and clasping his hands behind his head, "ever done any newspaper work?"
"No, sir," I answered boldly. "I have just graduated from McGraw."
"And where in the devil is McGraw?" he asked in a slow, wondering voice.
How I wished for Doctor Todd! In five minutes this self-confident journalist would blush for his own ignorance. But Doctor Todd not being here to confound him with facts, there was nothing better for me to do than to hand him the letter. His face lighted with a smile as he read it. The effect was so good that I followed it with Mr. Pound's. The effect of Mr. Pound's was so good that I was confident that I should soon be a journalist in fact, for Mr. Hanks read it over twice.
"My boy," he began, regarding me through his spectacles benignly. At that familiar address my heart leaped. "Let me give you some advice." My heart fell. "Take those letters and lock them up to read when you are ten years older. Then start out and go from office to office until you get a place. Don't be discouraged. Some day you'll break in somewhere."
"But I want to work onThe Record," I cried. "It's politics agree with mine—it is Republican. It is a respectable paper. It——"
Mr. Hanks was leaning over his desk. "Pile," he said, addressing the fat man who sat across from him, "that was a good beat we had on the Worthing divorce—I see all the evenings are after it hard. We must have a second-day story."
"I am ready," I said a little louder, "to begin with any kind of work."
Mr. Hanks looked up as though surprised that I was still there. "You've come at a bad time," he said brusquely. "Summer—we are letting men go every day. But don't get discouraged. I worked four months for my first job, and I didn't come from McGraw either. Keep going the rounds."
Then he seemed to forget my existence and resumed his game of checkers.
His dismissal was a terrible blow, but I had read enough of great men to know that they had to fight for their opportunities, and I was determined not to be a weakling and go down in the first skirmish. For a moment I stood bewildered at the entrance ofThe Recordbuilding, stunned by the unexpected outcome of my visit there. I was indignant at Boller for having raised my hopes so high. I was indignant at Mr. Carmody for not measuring up to Boller's estimate. I was indignant at Mr. Hanks for not making a searching inquiry into my attainments, for his ignorance of McGraw and his amusement over my precious letters. I vowed that some day Mr. Hanks should be put under my magnifying-glass, to shrivel beneath my burning gaze.
To break in somewhere proved a long task. From Miss Minion's boarding-house on Seventeenth Street, where I established myself, I went forth daily to the siege of Park Row. I was shot up to heaven to editorial rooms beneath gilded domes, and as quickly shot down again. I climbed to editorial rooms less exaltedly placed, up dark, bewildering stairways which seemed devised to make approach by them a peril. I soon knew the faces of all the city editors in town, and all the head office-boys were as familiar with mine. At the end of the first round I began to look more kindly on Mr. Hanks and to realize the wisdom of his advice that I lock away my letters. I recalled the varied receptions they had met, and when I started on my second round they were hidden in my trunk. Repeated rebuffs had a salutary effect. My egotism was reduced to a vanishing-point, my pride was quickened, and with my pride my determination to accomplish my purpose. Even had I lacked pride, I must have been nerved to my dogged persistence by the memory of Gladys Todd with Doctor Todd and the three Miss Minnicks speeding me to my triumphs. Every evening when I came home, tired and discouraged, to Miss Minion's, I found a letter addressed to me in a tall, angular hand—a very fat letter which seemed to promise a wealth of news and encouragement. But Gladys Todd could say less on more paper than I had believed possible. Encouragement she gave me, but never news. News would have spoiled the graceful flow of her sentences. Yet she was wonderfully good in the way she received my accounts of my disappointments. She was prouder than ever of "her knight"; her faith in him was firmer than ever; as she sat in the evening, in the soft light of the lamp, she was thinking of me with lance couched charging again and again against the embattled world.
At first in my replies I found a certain satisfaction in recounting my defeats; for in fighting on I seemed to be proving my superior worth and strength, and I became almost boastful of my repeated failures. But the glamour of defeat wears off as the cause for which one fights becomes more hopeless, and after a month I seemed farther than ever from attaining my desire. I became depressed in the tone of my letters, but as my spirits sank Gladys Todd's seemed to soar.
One particularly fat epistle I found on my bureau on an evening when I was so discouraged that I was beginning to consider heeding my father's appeal that I return home and study for the Middle County bar. I opened it with dread. I wanted no comfort, but here in my hands were twenty pages of Gladys Todd's faith in me and her pride in me. She was sure that I should have the opportunity which I sought, and, having it, would mount to the dizziest heights. She likened me to a crusader who wore her colors and was charging single-handed against the gates of the Holy City and shouting his defiance of the infidels who held it. It was an exalted idea, but I remembered my tilt that afternoon with the ancient office-boy ofThe Record, and his refusal to take my seventh card to Mr. Hanks. The comparison was so absurd that I laughed as I had not laughed in many days, and with the sudden up-welling of my mirth, lonely mirth though it was, the blood which had grown sluggish quickened, the drooping courage rose, I saw the world through clearer eyes. The next afternoon when I faced the ancient office-boy the remembrance of Gladys Todd's metaphor made me smile, and so overcome was he by this unusual geniality that he did take in my card to Mr. Hanks.
"Again," said Mr. Hanks, leaning back in his chair and surveying me through his magnifying-glasses. "Young man, are you never going to give me a rest?"
"Never," said I, smiling. "You advised me to go the rounds and not to be discouraged."
"Have you got your letters with you?" he asked mildly.
"They are locked away in my trunk," said I.
"You certainly have taken my advice with a vengeance," said he. "I suppose I shall have to do something to protect myself."
He leaned over his desk and became absorbed in his everlasting game of checkers. The smile left my face, for I thought that he had forgotten my presence, as he had forgotten it so many times before. But after a moment he slanted his head, focussed one microscope on me, and said: "Do you think you could cover Abraham Weinberg's funeral this afternoon?"
So it was that Gladys Todd's crusader at last broke down the gates of the Holy City. But I fear that it was to become one of the defending infidels. Doctor Todd, in his letter to whom it might concern, announced that David Malcolm was about to launch himself into journalism. And now, after long waiting, David Malcolm was launched. Just when he was despairing of ever leaving the ways he had shot down them suddenly into the Temple Emanu-El and the funeral of Abraham Weinberg.
You can well understand the elation with which I announced my success to Gladys Todd. It was magnified by the month of disappointment, and to her I felt that I owed a debt. Though I had come to look with irony on her high-flown expressions of faith in me, I realized that the fear of her equally high-flown scorn had more than once kept me from abandoning my project. With pride I enclosed in my letter my account of the funeral of Mr. Weinberg, though I refrained from marring the trophy with an explanation that this first public production of my pen had been allowed to attain the length of a column because his store covered half a block and his advertisements many pages ofThe Record. As a trophy Gladys Todd received it. Declaring that she lacked words in which to express her pride in her knight, she flew to greater heights than ever before. She had placed my first journalistic effort in a scrap-book, and all that I wrote was to be preserved in like manner. I must send her every published line that came from my pen. Her knight had triumphed in his first real passage at arms, and she sent to me a chaplet of victory. It came—not a wreath, but a cushion worked with her own hands, mauve and white, the colors of McGraw, with '91 in black on one side and on the other the word "Excelsior."
The scrap-book grew rapidly to alarming proportions, for having now my opportunity I worked hard, and Mr. Hanks was fond of telling me that I was rapidly outgrowing the reputation Doctor Todd and Mr. Pound had made for me on Park Row. Accounts of murders, suicides, yacht-races, robberies, public meetings, railroad accidents—all the varied events which make up a day's news—followed the funeral into Gladys Todd's archives. You can readily imagine that my views of life soon underwent a change. They became rather distorted, as I see them now; and was it a wonder when my day began at noon and ended in the small hours of the morning, carried me through hospitals, police-stations, and courts, from the darkest slums to the stateliest houses on the Avenue, from the sweatshop to the offices of the greatest financiers. To me all men were simply makers of news, and by their news value I judged them. A man's greatness I measured by the probable length of his obituary notice. Indeed, greatness itself was but the costume of a puppet, so often did I see the sawdust stuffing oozing from the gashes in the cloth. When I met one bank cashier simply because he had stolen, I forgot the thousands of others who were plodding away through lives of dull honesty. Because one Sunday-school superintendent sinned, I classed all his kind as sinners. Becoming versed in the devious ways of statesmen, I began to doubt the virtues of my old heroes whose speeches I had often declaimed with so much unction. I became a cynic. At twenty-two my thoughts matched the epigrams of Rochefoucauld and my philosophy that of Schopenhauer. All my old ideas as to the importance of the work I had chosen and of my own value to the world were quickly dissipated. Often I had cause to remember the Professor and his argument that even of our good actions selfishness was the main-spring, and accepting it as true, and laying bare the roots of my own motives and of those around me, I should have moved confusedly in the darkness had I not come to see more clearly what he meant by marching under sealed orders and to realize that I had a duty and that it was to live by the light I had. I did try to do this. I had a conscience, and though I might believe that it was but a group of conceptions as to the nature of right and wrong poured into my mind by my early instruction, it protested as strongly against abuse as did my digestive organs. Sometimes I had to effect strange compromises with it. Sometimes, in my never ceasing search for facts, I found myself causing pain and trouble to those who were innocently brought under the shadow of crime and scandal, but I justified myself by the theory that they suffered for the good of the many. To me the old dictum that the end justifies the means became a useful balm.
You might think that, with so radical a change in my ideas, I should see Gladys Todd in another light than that of my college days. Indeed, looking back, those college days did seem of another age and another world, but in them Gladys Todd had become linked to me by ties as indissoluble as those which bound me to my father and mother. To what I deemed my broader view of life, their ways of living and their ways of thinking were certainly exceedingly narrow, but none the less I thought of them only with reverence and affection. So it was with Gladys Todd. That mirthful outburst over her effusion about the crusader was followed by many of its kind as her daily letters came to me, but this meant simply that I was growing older than she, and she to my mind became a child, but was none the less lovely for her unsophistication. In the turmoil of my daily work, in the unlovely clatter of Miss Minion's boarding-house, I often recalled the vine-clad veranda and our walks in the grass-grown lane, looked back to them regretfully, looked forward yearningly to the renewal of such hours.
Sometimes when my evening was free from my routine duty, and I was working harder than ever I had worked in my college days, I would forget my task to dream of the time when Miss Tucker's piano would no longer be clattering beneath me, and I should be no more disturbed by Mrs. Kittle, who had a habit of jumping her chair around the room next to mine, when somewhere in the city's outskirts I should have a house of my own, a little house in a bit of green, where I could find quiet and peace and Gladys Todd. For the realization of that dream all that I needed was money. By the lack of it I was condemned to Miss Minion's. Even when I had attained to the munificent salary of Mr. Carmody, a figure which Boller had announced to me with so much awe, I was still far from having an income to keep two in the simplest comfort. It was difficult to make this clear to Gladys Todd. Her father and mother had married on eight hundred dollars a year, and even now my salary equalled the doctor's as president of the college. To her my salary read affluence, and in my letters I began to have difficulty to convince her that I had not grown exceedingly worldly and was not putting material comfort in the balance against unselfish and uncomplaining love. On my third biannual visit to Harlansburg I went armed with facts and figures as to house rents and flat rents, the prices of meats per pound, the cost of fuel, light, and clothing. Having in my pocket such a tabulated statement which showed for incidentals a balance of but fifty dollars, I could not but smile ironically at the manner in which Doctor Todd presented me to his friends. Boller was forgotten. Boller's achievements were outshone by those of David Malcolm. Malcolm's success demonstrated the high character of McGraw's system of training. Malcolm was already being heard from!
Malcolm, with the problem which confronted him, was inwardly gauging his success by his bank account, and even the pride of Gladys Todd was a little clouded when she was called upon to use the same measure.
Sitting in the very chair in the shaded lamplight from which she had looked so admiringly on Boller two years before, she now studied the prospectus of our contemplated venture. She was very lovely, but I remember noticing what I had never before noticed, the wisps of hair which floated a little untidily about her ears. And I did what I had never done before—I compared her with another woman, with Miss Tucker, whose piano had so often disturbed my evening labors. Miss Tucker taught mathematics in an uptown girls' school. She was not as pretty as Gladys Todd, but I remembered how wonderfully neat she was, with never a hair blowing loose, and I remembered too that, though she had disturbed me with her music, I never complained of it, for the sake of the picture which she made every morning when she descended the stoop beneath my window, going to her work as cheerfully and daintily as many of her sisters would to a dinner or a dance.
"We shall only have a hundred dollars left for doctor's bills and car-fare then, David," said Gladys Todd, looking up from the paper. There were tears in her eyes, but they did not affect me as much as her way of doing her hair. How I longed for the courage to tell her that it was decidedly bad form!
"But we shall only have to wait a little longer, Gladys," said I, and I moved my chair beside her chair.
"I know," she returned more bravely, putting her hand in mine. "But you don't realize how lonely I am without you. I want to be with you, helping you—to be at your side comforting you when you are tired, cheering you when you are discouraged."
For that moment I forgot the stray wisps and the Langtry knot.
"But it is only a little while longer," I pleaded. "Let us say inJune. I shall come for you in June. You will wait for me till June?"
Her hand was on my shoulder, and I forgot all about Miss Tucker. For that moment I was the happiest of men.
"Wait for you till June?" she cried. "Why, David, I'd wait for you to eternity."
"You need not," I replied, laughing. "In June I am coming to take you to a little house on a green hill, with a veranda where we can sit on my holidays, you painting tulips on black plaques, and I—well, I with you, just thinking how wonderful it all is and——"
"How wonderful it will be in June!" said Gladys Todd.