The Professor launched into a glowing account of the promise of the southern country. To his mind, he had only to reach it to acquire the wealth which he wanted. The man who had failed in every undertaking, who had turned back from every goal to which he had set his eyes, would win there in a few years that for which men in other parts of the world strove a lifetime. I pointed out that the opportunity lay right at his hand, and his answer was to spread wide his arms that I might see the waiter's jacket. He had the better of the argument, but the reason lay in his own character. Then I had recourse to pleading, and my plea was made not for his sake, but for Penelope's, for only when I spoke of her would he listen. I tried to show him Penelope's danger, as it had been revealed to us that very night in Talcott's drunken talk. His reply was a laugh. He had so idealized Penelope that it was inconceivable that she should fall a victim to the attentions of such a vapid creature. He had not seen, as I had, Talcott sober and correct in deportment. He had not fallen, as I had, under the spell of Talcott's easy manner when he had just dropped in from the club to talk of last night's dance and to-morrow's opera. He did not know, as I did, that the whole company from whom Penelope might choose a mate were to the outward eye just such commonplace men whose power of fascination lay in commonplace deeds and words. The Professor, whose whole life had been spent pursuing shadows, was naturally of a romantic turn of mind, and it was even difficult for him to conceive of Penelope marrying at all. That she could be inveigled into so grave a step with a man whose sole claim to merit was well-cut clothes and a command of socialpatoiswas quite beyond his comprehension. In vain I argued that most women married just such men, and perhaps it was because the sex had attained wisdom with experience, had discovered that a brilliant mind on parade might be amusing, but that, like its duller fellows, it retired to barracks and found contentment in the same humdrum existence as they. The birth of eternal, enduring love was but a matter of propinquity. Sitting on the front doorstep of an afternoon talking and strolling down to the drugstore every evening for soda-water, Darby and Joan discovered that existence apart was worse than death. And so might Joan's richer sister in the old carved chair, under the eyes of Reynolds's majestic lady, grow accustomed to the coming and going of Darby's richer brother, confirm herself in the habit of taking narcotic conversation, talk of last night's dinner and to-morrow's dance, until he seemed to become essential to her existence. All this I explained to the Professor. He retorted that I had grown cynical. Perhaps I had grown cynical, but my cynicism was born of experience—bitter experience, I called it then. Perhaps, imbittered by my own thwarted hopes, I exaggerated the danger in which Penelope stood. Perhaps, in my own vanity and jealousy, I magnified Talcott's sins, knowing well enough that, after all, he was no worse than most of his brothers. Yet there was a danger, and its avoidance was simple could I only induce the man before me to abandon his foolish pride. At least, said I, his brother should know of the night's occurrence.
"Know that, after all my boasts, I had come to waiting in a restaurant and quarrelling with drunken boys?" he cried, shaking his head and waving an arm to deny my demand. "Of course, if there were any possibility of Penelope marrying that fool it would be different. But, David, I know Rufus. He is not brilliant, but he is shrewd, and I'll trust him to find out if anybody is after his money. And Penelope? Haven't I seen Penelope many a night stepping into her carriage—don't you think I can trust her to look higher than that?"
I could not change him, though we argued until dawn came. Then we walked together, in the gray of the early morning, from the poor quarter where he lived to Miss Minion's, a house that had grown in my eyes, by contrast, palatial. The street was still deserted, and standing by my door I made a last appeal. But he shook his head.
"Davy, can't you understand?" he said, as he took my hand in parting. "I admit that I have been a failure up to date, but Rufus and Penelope are the last people in the world that I want to know it, and I'll trust you to be discreet. Some day it may be best to tell them, but at present, no. Silence, David; I have your promise. I'm to have one more chance in Argentina, and if I fail you have your way; but I won't fail."
He turned from me and stood very straight. His overcoat collar was buttoned to the neck, hiding the uniform of his adversity. For a moment, as I watched him, he seemed to be in the gulch again; we looked over the towering walls of brick and stone, and to me they were the ridge-side, dark and sombre in the gray light; we looked beyond the crest of it, beyond the chimneys, the tall pines which pierced the sky-line, and our eyes rested on a flake of cloud. I think it must have been there. I felt the pressure of his hand.
"I'll not be gone long, Davy," he said. "I'm coming back very soon, and till then you will take care of Penelope; won't you, boy?"
Spring came and with it the Todds. All that winter they had been so far from me, often so far from my thoughts even, that the remembrance of them would bring a shock like a sudden consciousness of sin or the recollection of a duty left undone. My fiancée's communication with me had dwindled to a weekly post-card. At first these had carried to me some little hint of affection, but latterly Gladys had contented herself with commonplace scrawls announcing that this was where they were staying for a few days or that the window in the hotel marked with a cross was hers. And my replies, so conscientiously written every Saturday night, had become rather brief and formal statements of facts. I had long since ceased to take Miss Minion's stairs two steps at a time in my eagerness to secure the portly epistle from abroad; the post-card which had filled its place I regarded with languid interest. You can imagine, then, that it was with surprise that I found, one evening in May, a fat letter directed to me in the tall, angular hand. The reading of it was like a blow which restored me to my senses. I had awakened to find myself not only engaged but on the verge of marriage. The Todds were coming home!
If my fiancée had neglected me for many months, she now overwhelmed me with sixty closely written pages of devotion. It was as though on coming face to face with steamer tickets she, too, had awakened from a dream and found herself engaged. It might well be true that the few weeks in London before embarking on the homeward stage had been her first opportunity to sit down with pen and paper to have what she called "a talk" with me. A year before that talk would have been highly gratifying and flattering, but now I read with a critical eye, and while I could find no fault with the sentiments expressed, the form of the expression irritated me. It was natural that the sentiment pent up in those months of hurried sight-seeing should break forth in this moment of leisure, but to me, grown practical, the form would have been more effective if direct and simple. In those days Penelope was so distant from me, so cold and implacable, that I might have turned to Gladys Todd with a thought that here at last was peace, an end of absurd and inordinate ambition, and perhaps content. Had she written to me simply that she was coming home, I might have soothed myself with the idea that I, too, was going home, back to the simple ways to which I was born, back, after all, to my own people. But Gladys Todd, grown more cultured than ever in the grand tour and revealing her mind in poetical phrases, was as much a being of another world than mine as was Penelope set in her frame of costly simplicity. I should go to the pier to meet her, I said. I knew that it could not be gladly, but I was bound by a sense of honor, by the remembrance of four years through which she had waited for me so patiently, always cheerful and firm in her faith in my power to win a home for us both. Because I was so bound, I vowed that she should never know the change in me, and then if I set myself to the task I might fan into flame the dead embers of my boyish infatuation.
So I stood on the pier that May morning when the Todds came home. So grim was my determination that I might have stood there with a smiling, expectant face had I not in that very hour seen Penelope. I had held to that cherished custom of mine to begin my day with a walk up-town, for always there was a bare chance that I might have a glimpse of her. There was poor consolation in her passing bow; but I could not let her go altogether out of my existence, and even her distant greeting served to keep me in the number of her acquaintances. This day I wanted to take a formal farewell, as if in doffing my hat I renounced all my claims, abandoned all my idle dreams, and set myself to the right path. Of course, I met her, and for a time I had cause to regret that I had not taken the direct way to the pier, for Penelope that morning, as she drove by me rapidly down the avenue, was the embodiment of loveliness, a loveliness beyond the reach of him whom fortune held to the sidewalk. Her horses seemed to step with pride at being a part of such a perfect turnout, and the men on the box to have turned to statues by the congealing of their self-importance. Seeing her, erect, a slender, quiet figure in filmy black, with a white-gloved hand on her parasol, you forgave the horses for lifting their feet so mincingly and the men for staring before them with such hauteur. She whirled by me in all that costly simplicity. I doffed my hat. She saw me and, strangely enough, smiled at me more kindly than in many days. I watched until even the men's tall hats were lost in the maze at Twenty-third Street, and as I watched I said my silent farewell to Penelope Blight.
On the pier, in the cheering, expectant throng that watched the steamer turning into her dock, I leaned on my cane and fixed my eyes with resolution on the ship which was bringing me a life of happiness. But I was silent as I pondered over the radiant smile with which I had been greeted as the carriage swept by. A week ago Penelope had given her head just a tilt of recognition; this morning she had seemed genuinely glad to see me, as though it were a pleasure to know that I lived in the same world. This afternoon, I said forgetfully, I would call upon her again—I had not called for so long. Then I heard my name. I came back to the pier and the cheering crowd, and, looking up, saw Gladys Todd.
Beside me there was a young man who brandished his cane to the peril of his neighbors' heads while he shouted again and again to his inamorata. My duty was to evince just such joy, but when I tried to call her name my lips refused to form it, and I only raised my hat and smiled. Gladys, standing by the ship's rail, waved her hand at me. Then she seemed to forget me entirely, and turned to a youngish-looking, stout man at her side.
The stout man began to interest me, because Gladys had written to me that she would be on deck this day straining her eyes to the shore where her knight would be waiting. Now it seemed as though a brief glance at her knight was sufficient, and that she found more charm in this portly fellow traveller.
Ex-Judge Bundy had small side-whiskers, and always wore a large derby and a frock coat, sometimes black, sometimes pale gray. This youngish-looking stout man was clean shaven, and he had the ruddy skin of the out-of-doors. His hat was brown felt, with its crown wound around with a white pugree—a rather affected hat, but it harmonized with his rough gray tweeds. His appearance was English; he might be, I thought, the governor of some island colony. But when he raised himself from the rail on which he had been leaning, slipped one hand into the breast of his coat, and turned to address Doctor Todd, speaking as though he were Jupiter and the doctor Mercury disguised in dingy clerical clothes, I recognized the patron of my alma mater.
They came down the gangway one by one, the ex-judge leading; then Gladys Todd, rather mannish in a straight-cut English suit and a sailor hat, slung from her shoulder a camera, and nestling in one arm a Yorkshire terrier; then Doctor Todd, unchanged, in the same clothes in which he had sailed, for he was one of those men who could go twice around the world and collect nothing but statistics and postcards; then Mrs. Todd with her two greatest acquisitions in bold evidence, a lorgnette and a caged paroquet.
For a moment I felt that I had come solely to welcome ex-Judge Bundy home. He was first to get my hand, and he held it while he told me how kind it was of me to take so much trouble; it was good to be home; he was always glad to get back to America—speaking as though these expeditions were annual events. He might have gone on and presented me to his friends the Todds had I not disengaged myself and turned to my fiancée with a hand outstretched.
"Look out for Blossom," she warned me, hardly more than touching my finger-tips. "Blossom always snaps at strangers."
Blossom justified the statement by barking viciously at me.
"I am so glad to have you back again, Gladys," I said, speaking in a low voice, for I had an instinctive feeling that ex-Judge Bundy had turned his head, though ostensibly he was busy with porters.
"And it's so nice to see you," she replied, and her gaze wandered vaguely about the pier. She had written that it would be so good just to let her eyes rest on me, but now their appetite was quickly satisfied, and it nettled me.
I spoke to her again, louder, reiterating my delight, and she raised her eyebrows and answered that she was glad that I was pleased. Doctor Todd and Mrs. Todd, however, were not so casual in their greeting. The doctor took both of my hands and declared that this was a happy family reunion. Mrs. Todd kissed me on both cheeks and gave me the paroquet to carry. As we made our way through the crowd, she asked me if I did not think that Gladys had improved, but to myself, as I watched her striding ahead of us in her mannish clothes, I said that she certainly looked quite trim and smart, and I found myself wondering if she still painted tulips on black plaques or would deign to sing "Douglas, tender and true"? Perhaps, to her mind, broadened by a year of travel, I was but a provincial fellow, whose musical education had not gone beyond "The Minute Guns at Sea," who, never having seen the galleries of Europe, could have no appreciation of art.
I was irritated. I wanted to set myself right in her mind, to show her that I, too, had grown broader and wiser. But there was no opportunity. She was busy either with the trunks or in keeping Blossom quiet. During the drive to the hotel the situation was little better. We were in an ancient barouche, piled high with luggage, Mrs. Todd, Gladys, and I, ex-Judge Bundy having tactfully suggested that he take the doctor with him in a hansom.
Mrs. Todd was voluble. She was artfully sentimental. She spoke of the day when, as a young girl, she had left home for six weeks, and she recalled her emotions as she came back to find the doctor waiting for her at the station. They were married shortly afterward. How history repeats itself! But Gladys was not impressed by the coincidence. She merely said that she was glad to have Blossom ashore again, for at times the dog had been fearfully sea-sick. I could have strangled Blossom. Nothing is more humiliating to a man than to discover that a woman's love for him is waning. Here is a reflection on his power of fascination. But it is doubly humiliating to find himself supplanted by a little woolly dog, to see the caresses which he would claim as his showered with ostentation on a diminutive animal. At that moment it seemed that Blossom had supplanted me. He nestled in her arm, and when for the tenth time I expressed my delight in having her home, she turned from me and stroked the creature's silky back. Time and again I, striving to do my duty, charged against the steel points of her indifference. Even Mrs. Todd noticed my plight. As we were leaving the carriage at the Broadway hotel whither Judge Bundy had led the way she whispered to me that evidently three was a crowd, and acting on that belief, she contrived to leave the two of us alone in the great parlor of the hotel while the doctor and the Judge held a colloquy with the clerk.
This Gladys Todd, sitting amid the faded grandeur of the hotel parlor, this handsome mannish woman in a tweed suit, with a snappy dog in her arm, was not the same girl beside whom I had sat ages ago, watching her paint tulips and sprays of wisteria, not the same whose voice had joined with mine in the sentimental strains of "Annie Laurie." But I felt that I had a duty, and I sat down on the sofa and held out my hand and in a voice of pleading asked her again if she was not glad to see me.
"No, David," she said, turning her eyes downward to Blossom.
I was quite unprepared for such a frank admission, and it came like a blow. In all my thought of Gladys Todd I had quite accustomed myself to the confession that I did not look with pleasure to her home-coming, but that she might regard me in the same light never occurred to me. This knowledge was humiliating. I had been holding myself to the strict line of duty and honor, but I had never suspected that she might be impelled by exactly the same motives. Now I was hurt. As I sat staring at her I cast about for the reason of the change. In my case it was another woman, but a superlatively wonderful woman. In hers it might be another man, a superlatively wonderful man. The idea was not pleasant. In my case there was at least the excuse of old acquaintance. In hers the change must have come in a single week at sea, where miles of walking on the deck and hours leaning on the rail with elbows close together might have revealed some kindred spirit. There flashed to me her action in turning from me, the watcher on the pier, to ex-Judge Bundy, and in him losing all thought of me. But ex-Judge Bundy was not a superlatively wonderful man. He was only a rich widower with two married daughters, and was old enough to be her father. My estimate of my own worth was not so modest that I could conceive of my interests ever being seriously jeopardized by this pompous maker of nails. It was pleasanter to think that the fault lay rather in my own unworthiness than in another's worth, and my pride urged me to combat her, to prove that while I might not be all that a woman of her ideals could ask, yet my shortcomings were those of my fellows in mass and not of the individual.
"I do not understand, Gladys," I said, and I held out my hand to take hers and to reassert my old ascendancy, but I was foiled by Blossom, who darted at me with such fierceness as to compel me to draw back.
"David, I'm so sorry," she said. She looked me in the eyes and spoke with the even voice of one who had entire command of herself. "The plain truth is that I have made a great mistake. I really thought I cared for you."
"And now you think you don't," I said, brushing aside such an absurdity with a wave of my hand. "Nonsense! After four years, you can not tell me that you have suddenly discovered that you never cared for me. I can not give you up for some absurd whim."
She shook her head. "It is not a whim. I see clearly now. We were very young when we became engaged, and I didn't understand how serious the step really was. In the last week at sea I have had time to think it all over, and now I know it best that after this we be just friends—nothing more. You will forget me. You will find another woman worthier of you."
Little as I knew of women, I realized that while these last two statements might be perfectly true, to accept them as true would sever the last strand of the cord which bound us. At that moment I did not want to lose Gladys Todd. She was very lovely as she sat there, with her eyes downcast, caressing her dog. She was the promised reward of my years of work. For her I had labored, scrimped and saved, cramped myself in a narrow room in a boarding-house, and almost shunned my fellows, to realize our dream of the little house on the bit of green. At that moment the dream was very dear to me and I could not see it wrecked for some whim. I grew belligerent. I reached out my hand again, as though by mere physical power I would prove my unchanging mind, but again Blossom was on guard.
"I shall not forget you," I said, and I folded my arms with grim determination and fixed my eyes on her face to break her by mere will-power. And then to what untruth did pride drive me? "I have not changed. I shall never change, Gladys. I love you now more than ever, and I will not give you up."
The light in her eyes was not quite so cold, nor was her voice so even and at her command. "I am sorry, David, but you must."
"But I won't," I returned.
"Oh, why do you drive me to it?" she cried with a gesture of despair."Can't you see, David, that there is some one else to be considered?"
"Some one else?" I exclaimed.
"I didn't think you would be so ungenerous—so selfish," she said in a low voice, while her hands played rapidly over Blossom's head. "I have tried to be honorable and fair to you. But he was so kind, so good—he is so lonely——"
"He—who is he?" I demanded, in my anger abandoning all effort to hold to the honorable course to which I had set myself.
"You should not ask me," she replied, her voice growing hard. "After I had come to know him, to know how fine he was, I really tried to keep on caring for you, David, but I simply couldn't. I am fond of you, of course, but not in the way I thought. You are too young. It is a mistake for a woman to marry a man of her own age. She should marry one whom she can look up to, honor and respect. Love in a cottage is well enough to read of, I suppose, but enduring love must be built on something more."
I wanted to laugh at myself for the fool I had been. I arose. It was useless to sit longer with folded arms and determined eyes fixed on her face, to break her will by hypnotic power. I knew that I was defeated, and however better defeat might be than victory, judged in wisdom, it was not pleasant to a man of spirit. I stood before her pulling on a glove and she looked up at me with a suggestion of defiance. I was not heart-broken. I felt that I should be, but I knew that I was suffering only in my pride. I wanted to sit down again in friendly fashion and tell her how hard I had tried to do my duty, that I too loved another, and that now she had made the way easy for me, but I refrained from such petty revenge.
I held out my hand. "I wish you all happiness, Gladys," I said. "You must not trouble about me. No doubt you have chosen wisely."
"You are a dear, good boy, David," she said, rising and addressing me in a motherly tone as though she had suddenly attained twice my years. "You will find another woman more worthy of you—I know you will. And when you come to Harlansburg you must bring her to see us. We shall be such good friends."
To Harlansburg? The whole story was clear in my mind. I remembered the Egyptian picture, the pyramids, the camels, and young Marshall's warning. And I had been so blind that a moment since I was saying that if another man had wrought this changed mind in Gladys Todd he must be a superlatively wonderful man. After all, the superlatively wonderful man was ex-Judge Bundy. Now the blow to my pride was fairly crushing. It did seem that I had a few natural qualities which should have weighed in the scales against such a rival. But if I had youth, he had wealth; if I had promise, he had the same promise of youth fulfilled in giant nail works; if I offered a vine-clad cottage on a bit of green, he could give the big gray-stone house with many turrets, the lawn with the marble lions and perfect terraces sloping down to the ornate fence. The very absurdity of the situation saved me from regret.
Gladys Todd was looking at me with narrowed eyes. I think she expected some outburst of emotion. Perhaps she felt sorry for the pain that she had caused me. But as I looked at her and remembered the past, as I thought of the judge, the house, and the marble lions, even my wounded pride was forgotten. I checked the smile which was threading my lips. I took my congé as a man should, gravely, with head bowed under the crushing blow, with eyes downcast as though they would never again look up into the joyous sunlight. I turned and left the room.
By the rule, I should have looked back, hesitated, and gone on. But my mind was filled with the fear of meeting Doctor Todd or Mrs. Todd, or worse, Judge Bundy. How to treat Judge Bundy, did I meet him, was not clear—whether to pass him with a haughty stare, or to stop and congratulate him, or even thank him. Discreetly I followed the dark windings of the hall and left the hotel by a private entrance. In the street I looked up into the sunshine. I was free. I could not dissemble with myself any longer, and I turned to the avenue with a quick and joyous step. A new life had opened to me and I was stepping into it unburdened, and with a prize to fight for. In those few moments Gladys Todd had gone into the past. She was hardly more than a shadow to me now, hardly more real than Mr. Pound or Miss Spinner or any other of the dim figures in my memory. Before me was Penelope—the future and Penelope. Her world was not my world, but I vowed that I would make it mine.
Perhaps, I said, I shall see her again this very morning and perhaps she will greet me again with that same kindly, glorious smile. And surely she would smile did she know that I was free from the yoke to which I had bent myself in a moment of forgetfulness. My duty had been to Penelope since that day when we rode from the clearing, and from that day my heart had always been with her. Reading from the past, her destiny and mine were written before me in clear, bold letters. How good the world was! How bright the day! How quick my step as I turned up-town!
And I saw Penelope. She bowed to me from a hansom, and I answered, beaming. I halted. Herbert Talcott was sitting at her side. He stared at me, tipped his hat brusquely, then turned to her and made some laughing remark.
I stood looking after the receding hansom until it disappeared in the maze of traffic. I took my congé as a man does sometimes, with my head bowed under the crushing blow, and my eyes downcast, knowing in my heart that for me the sunshine could nevermore be joyous.
There was no doubt in my mind that Penelope Blight was engaged to marry Talcott. They announced the fact when they rode the length of the Avenue together in a hansom. But had I questioned the meaning of their appearing thus in public I could not long have cheered myself with vain hope, for the papers next morning blazoned the news to all the world. That they printed it under great staring head-lines was not surprising to me, for to me this fact transcended all others in importance. Beside it the rumblings of war in the Balkans, the devastating flood in China, or the earthquake which wrecked a southern city were trifles. So to my distorted view the papers were filled with the announcement of my overwhelming misfortune. Only by the greatest effort could I drag myself from reading and rereading to my humdrum task. Before me in black and white was the last chapter in my own story, the story which had begun that day when I went fishing. Every line of it, couched in the hackneyed phrases of the business, was a cutting blow, and yet I must return again and again to the beating. Had Rufus Blight been a poor man, a worthy man whose sole claim to consideration lay in his having discovered some balm for human ills, then a paragraph would have sufficed for the announcement of his niece's engagement. But he was a millionaire; he lived in one of the largest houses in town, and his niece was the greatest catch of the day, measured in dollars; therefore, the coming marriage was worthy of columns. The existence of Herbert Talcott became also of prime importance, not because he had ever done anything, but because he was to marry the heiress of the Blight fortune. How many a worthy Jones or a poor but noble Robinson has to descend to an advertisement to make his happiness known to the careless world? How many a lovely Joan goes to her wedding unread-of because her forebears were lacking, not in those qualities which open the gates of heaven, but in acquisitiveness?
To the public it could matter little that Rufus Blight was a simple, kindly soul who was as contented years ago when he stood behind his counter as to-day when he sought on the golf-links that sense of action which is necessary to a man's happiness. The vital fact was that the trust had paid him millions for his steel-works; not that Penelope was a simple, lovely woman like thousands of her sisters, but that her wedding-gifts would be worthy of the daughter of Maecenas. Accustomed though I had become in the routine of my work to just such a judgment of vital facts, now that the story told was my own last chapter I made a silent protest against the manner of the telling.
I thought of Rufus Blight as a quiet man, happiest not in the stately library, but in his den surrounded by a medley of homely things. Thinking of Penelope I turned to those vagrant dreams, now forbidden. In them Penelope and I were to go back to the valley, to ride again over the mountain road, to stand again as we had stood that day when she led me over the tangled trail into the sunlit clearing. Those were joys in which millions had no part. But as I read of the Blight millions, and of that blue-blooded Talcott line which traced back a hundred years to a member of the cabinet, it was hard for me to believe that I knew these exalted beings, that I had sat with Rufus Blight and talked of days in the valley, that Penelope and I had galloped over the country astride the same white mule, that I even had engaged with one so distinguished as Herbert Talcott in a brawl in a restaurant. Gilded by those who report the comings and goings of those whom one should know, as Mrs. Bannister might put it, they seemed aliens, manikins that moved in a stage world. As such I tried to think of them, for it was best, but I had as well set myself to efface my memory.
The last chapter of my own story was written by unknown hands. The epilogue remained, in which I was to go on seeking what contentment I could find in action. But my whole story was not written on these flimsy pages. It was before me always and always I was turning to it, always asking myself how it would have run had this not happened or had that occurred. Studying it over and over again in my room at night and on my long walks up-town, I found that I could not think of Penelope Blight as an alien creature for whose happiness I had no longer any care. What of her story which was in the writing? Did she know this Talcott whom she had chosen to fill its last pages? She knew him as I knew him first, as a quiet, gentlemanly man with pleasant manners. Was it not her right to know him as I knew him now, as a drunken brawler, who in his cups had betrayed the unworthy motive of his devotion? These questions troubled me for many days. I was not a prude. I knew that all men have their foibles, that many great men have over-indulged in liquor, that a man's whole character is not to be damned by a single slip. I knew that did all women see the men whom they choose for marriage as others see them we should have a plague of spinsters. But I feared for Penelope Blight. This was not because Talcott was worse than the mass of his fellows, but because the best of his fellows was none too good for her. But how could I go to her and declare that Talcott when drunk had avowed a purpose to marry her for her millions? It seemed the part of a tattler. The world would say that I acted from jealousy. Indeed, it was hard at times to convince myself that jealousy was not the basis of my fear for her. Yet I felt that I must save her from a disillusionment which might come too late. Were her father here that disillusionment would be speedy; but he was far away, and always his last words were with me, as he spoke them that night in the street: "You will take care of Penelope, won't you, boy?"
I had promised that. It was simply repeating my boyhood promise. And now I kept asking myself if I was not forgetting that trust when I kept silent because I feared in my pride to place myself in the light of an intermeddler, a bearer of scandalous tales; I would remember that morning when we had stood by the cabin door and I told her not to be afraid for I was guarding her. Was I guarding her?
For two weeks I kept puzzling over my course of action. I felt that the knowledge I held was hers by right, and hers, not mine, to judge of its triviality. Yet I could not bring myself to face her with it. Then came the time when I had to speak at once if I was to speak at all.
Mr. Hanks sent for me. As I stood before him, he studied me through his spectacles with his cold eyes, as he had studied me in those days when I was trying to persuade him to give me work, and I began counting my sins, wondering if in the cataclysm of ill luck which had overtaken me, I was to lose my position also.
After a moment he asked, as casually as he might have assigned me to an expedition to Harlem a few years before: "Malcolm, how soon can you leave for London?"
"At once," I said, and I spoke as casually as he, though my heart leaped at the mention of London, for here I sensed an opportunity beyond my wildest hopes.
"At once," he laughed and rubbed his hands with satisfaction. "I told the old man you would say that. He said that you were too young to fill Colt's shoes. Colt is ill, Malcolm; has to come home for a year's rest and I have backed you to do his work awhile. Of course, you won't do it as well as he, but you will do it fairly well, I think."
"I will do my best," said I, smiling.
"That is the way to talk," he returned. "I need hardly tell you to keep your head and work hard, and perhaps you will pull through till Colt gets back. He will be a little hurt when he sees his substitute. He has been there twenty years and feels himself quite a figure in the world, but as he has cabled for relief at once, he can't complain if we send him the one man who is always ready to go anywhere at once. Really, you have three days; you sail on Saturday."
I could have gone that day, had Hanks commanded it. The trust which he imposed in me was my reward for always having obeyed him without question, and in my state of mind that morning, between walking from his office to the steamer for years of absence and staying as I was, I should have chosen the former alternative. I wanted to get away. The only place where I could find even the shadow of contentment was at my desk. There imperative tasks filled a mind at other times occupied with unwholesome brooding. I seemed to move through waste places, with no object to catch the eye and thought and to drive away the consciousness of my unhappiness. Even my walk on Fifth Avenue had been abandoned lest at any moment Penelope might pass me with Talcott at her side; Miss Minion's had become a place of terror, for by ill chance Tom Marshall had been introduced to Talcott and he had developed a habit of dropping in on me and telling me what he had said to Bert Talcott and what Bert Talcott had said to him. He seemed to think that Talcott had conferred knighthood on him by knowing him. There were times, even, when I had gravely considered abandoning my chosen career and retiring to a bucolic life of loneliness in the valley. And at other times, into such depths of despondency was I plunged that I could seriously consider abandoning self entirely and devoting the remainder of my wrecked life to doing good, though just what trend my saintliness would take I never determined. In monkish days, I suppose, I should have gone into a cloister. But Hanks aroused me. Of course he did not know my thoughts. With his clear eyes he did not see that my life was a ruin. He regarded me rather as a fortunate man to whom opportunities were opening wonderfully well, and I accepted his view; though I was sure that I was taking a road which led to nowhere, yet travelling was better than sitting still. Looking at Hanks, I forgot that he had a wife and four accomplished daughters over in Jersey, and I said that I should take life as he took it, with a cynical interest in the game, with all thought on the run of the cards and little for personal winnings.
When I had cleared my desk for my successor and had bidden good-by to my old known tasks, I found myself turning to the new and unknown with more interest than I had believed myself capable of showing. So much was to be done in those three days that I had little time for self-condolence. One day had to be taken for a farewell to my parents; and what a day it was, with my father and mother driving down to Pleasantville in the late night to meet me that they might not lose one moment of my visit! Only when I slept were they from my side, for my mother's mind was filled with all the stories of shipwreck that she had ever read, and my father had doubts as to whether or not the moral environment of London was such as he would ask for his son. My father never had much faith in my moral strength. Then Mr. Pound came up to see me, having, as usual, commandeered Mr. Smiley's comfortable phaeton for the transport of himself and Mrs. Pound. His hair was white now, and he bent a little, and his voice had lost some of its pompous roll, but his phrases were as round as ever. He insisted that I owned the paper. He placed his hand on my head and for the information of Miss Agnes Spinner named my good points much as a jockey would those of a favorite horse. He congratulated himself on the success of his method of training and called on Judge Malcolm to admit that his effort to have his son go to Princeton had been based on a misconception of the underlying merits of the McGraw system of education.
The Pounds stayed to supper, much to my mother's suppressed indignation, for she had invited them, never thinking that under such unusual circumstances they would accept so promptly, so that by the time they drove away I had begun to feel that I must have made this hurried journey just to say good-by to my old mentor. In the hour, all too brief, that remained to me my mother broached the subject of my broken engagement, for in that she saw the reason of my melancholy, which I had been at pains to conceal. It could not be hidden from her quick eyes. She was convinced that Gladys Todd was not in her right mind; no woman in her right mind would deliberately refuse to marry such a man as her son. Was it a question of blood? Surely there was none better in the land than that which flowed in the veins of the McLaurins. Was it money? There was no finer farm in all the valley than the one which some day would be mine, with the bridge stock and the Kansas bonds. Was it character? Recalling the Sunday afternoons when she and I had worked together so patiently over the catechism and Bible lessons, she was sure that she had done her duty toward me and could never dream of my having failed in mine. So, to my mother's thinking, the loss was Gladys Todd's, a consoling view of my plight which she endeavored to make me take, and she sought to cheer me with a highly uncomplimentary estimate of the frivolous character of my quondam fiancée. It could serve no purpose for me to enlighten her as to the real truth, for did she know the truth she might be haunted by the dread spectre of self-destruction. So her last words as we parted were an admonition to me not to think that all women were as blind and as faithless as Gladys Todd.
Her arms were around my neck and she whispered in my ear, that even my father might not hear her: "Davy, take Penelope. We McLaurins always looked down on the Blights, but that makes no difference, Davy—take Penelope."
But one day was left to me before I went to my new life, and yet I was still asking myself if I was taking care of Penelope. I had set myself to go through life alone, regarding all women with cynical indifference. But of her I could not think with cynical indifference. Her one act which might have fed my cynicism was her choice of a man of the character of Herbert Talcott. Then, after all, I reflected, she did not know his true character. And yet did I? Was it my place to become a bearer of tales? Over and over I asked myself the question, and I could find no other answer than that of affirmation, for it was her right to know what had occurred between her father and Talcott. And she should know it, I said at last decisively; she should know it, not from me, but from Rufus Blight. And, telling it, I must give up my last hope of her.
So I went to Rufus Blight on the afternoon before I sailed, and I went not without misgivings as to the part that I was playing. Many times in the walk up the Avenue I turned back, doubting, and then I would repeat my old-time promise to Penelope and the Professor's injunction given to me that early morning as we stood together on the street. And so at last I found myself before the great house, and the grilled door closed behind me, leaving no retreat.
Mr. Blight was in his "den," resting after his day's golf in a deep chair by an open window, and he rose from a litter of evening papers to greet me.
"Well, David, we thought that you had forgotten us," he said. "Penelope remarked just this morning that it was high time you appeared to offer your congratulations."
"I have been very busy," I returned. "To-morrow I start abroad for a year at least, and I came to say good-by and to tell you——"
In my eagerness to have my story over I should have plunged right into it, but he interrupted me.
"Abroad, eh? Well, we may see you after the wedding. We are all going over after the wedding."
The calm way in which Mr. Blight spoke of the wedding chilled me. It was so absolutely settled that there was to be a wedding that in me there seemed to be embodied that mythical person who is commanded so sternly to speak or forever hold his peace. For a time I did hold my peace, but it was only because Rufus Blight evinced such a lively interest in my affairs that I had no opportunity to speak of those matters which touched him so intimately.
"Well, we certainly shall hunt you up in London in September," he said. "We shall be over in September. The wedding is to be in July at Newport. We have taken a house there, or rather Mrs. Bannister has for us." He saw that I could not restrain a smile at the mention of Mrs. Bannister, and he laughed heartily. "I don't know how we should get along without Mrs. Bannister. You see, David, all I know anything about is the steel trade, and being out of that I have to have a general manager for this social business. She certainly does manage. Why, if it wasn't for her I doubt if we could arrange a wedding. Indeed, I sometimes even doubt if there would be an engagement."
This same doubt had been tenaciously present in my own mind for some days, and much as I should have liked to express it with heat and to join to it my opinion of the masterful woman's manoeuvres, I simply laughed formally and said, "Indeed!"
"I can talk to you confidentially, David," Rufus Blight went on, leaning toward me with his cigar poised in the air. "It is good to have an old friend to whom you can unburden your mind, and it has been on my mind that Mrs. Bannister has had too large a finger in this matrimonial pie—not, of course, that I am not pleased. I am getting old, and it is a relief to think of Penelope settled in life with a thoroughly respectable, steady young man like Talcott; but, do you know, I suspect sometimes that Mrs. Bannister had more to do with Penelope making up her mind than is altogether wise? She has talked about him continually, and between his coming to the house continually and Mrs. Bannister talking of him continually, Penelope didn't have a fair chance."
Rufus Blight smoked thoughtfully, and I remarked that I had no doubt that Penelope knew her own mind.
"Oh, yes," he returned. "Understand that I have nothing whatever against Talcott. She might fare far worse. He is unapproachable as far as character goes, but sometimes he seems to me rather dull. I suppose that is because he doesn't do anything, and I wonder how long Penelope will be satisfied with a man who doesn't do anything but what Mrs. Bannister calls 'go everywhere.' Will she not soon weary of going everywhere? I couldn't stand it myself. The other night I had to go to Talcott's uncle's to dine, and how I wished that I was home! The uncle is a respectable old man, too, who has never done anything either, and all he talked about was terrapin and gout. When he had finished with them in the smoking-room, his mind seemed exhausted, and he left me to the mercy of another man who tried to pump me about International Steel common. Is that pleasure?" Rufus Blight waved his cigar with a gesture of contempt. "I suppose Penelope would be perfectly safe with such people if anything happened to me; but would she be happy? Mrs. Bannister says that I should be satisfied to have her marry into a family so eminently respectable, and I suppose I should."
He looked at me, asking my opinion.
"Undoubtedly the Talcotts are highly respectable," said I. "They are one of the few old families who have succeeded in maintaining their position in New York."
"That is just what Mrs. Bannister says," he returned. "They are certainly very kindly, and could not have treated Penelope better than they have. Talcott's aunt has Penelope with her all the time. I suppose I should be satisfied." He hesitated a moment. "But, confound it, David, don't you see, I am not? Sometimes I think it must be because I am jealous, and I try to put that feeling away and to look impartially at Penelope's happiness. Then I must agree with Mrs. Bannister. Here is Talcott, a young man of good family, of exemplary conduct. The only thing against him is an idle life; but if he doesn't have to work, why should he? Yet it seems to me that Penelope is not the kind of woman who would be satisfied with a husband who sat around the house all day and found his main interest in terrapin and gout. Can't you see my predicament, David?"
He rose and paced the room. Twice he circled the table, while I sat in silence watching him. Then he halted at the fireplace and stood there, forgetfully warming his hands at an imaginary blaze. After a moment he faced me. "I know about making steel, David, but in matters like this I am utterly lost. How I wish Hendry were here to advise me!"
My opportunity had come more easily than I had expected. "I can help you, perhaps," said I, "for I have seen him."
"You have seen him?" cried Rufus Blight, and he crossed the room to me in great excitement. "When, David, and where?"
"Here in New York."
"Splendid! And he is coming to us, eh? I know he is at last."
"In two years. He has promised to come home in two years."
Rufus Blight sat down in his old chair and stared at me. "In two years? Why, David, we need him now. He must come now. We will bring him home—you and I."
"But we can't," said I. "He is far from here now; he went away last winter."
"You saw him and did not bring him home!" Rufus Blight's voice rose to a pitch of indignation. "I don't understand. Did you tell him how we wanted him—Penelope and I—how we had searched for him everywhere?" I nodded. "You told him that and he would not come?" He leaned toward me angrily. "Well, why didn't you let me know about him?"
"Because it could have done no good," I answered. "I had to promise him that I would not, yet because he feared that I should break my promise, he slipped away. I saw him but once. When I went to see him again he was gone—to Argentina."
"I see," said Rufus Blight more gently. "You must pardon my losing my temper, but it was hard to think that he was near us and yet we never knew it; strange that you did not tell us of it earlier."
"I should not tell you now were there not certain circumstances connected with my meeting with your brother that it is best that you know," I returned.
I went on with my story very quietly, as if it were one in which I had little personal concern. I knew that Rufus Blight was not quick to catch the hidden meaning of a word or tone, so that it was not from any fear of him discovering my biassed mind that I made my statement so unimpassioned. It was because I wanted to satisfy myself that I was acting alone for Penelope's good and disclosing the truth, uncolored, for her to judge. Slowly I told it all, in a dry, unvarnished sequence of facts. I told him of my visit to O'Corrigan's; of the fight and my interference; of my hours with his brother and his account of his wanderings and trials; of my vain plea to bring him back to Penelope and his refusal to surrender his search for that chimerical prize for which he had struggled so futilely. To me the vital part of my story had to do with Herbert Talcott. But for its apparent effect on Rufus Blight I had as well discovered his brother thrashing Tom Marshall. To him that incident was trivial. What he wanted to know was how Henderson looked. Was he well? Was he in absolute poverty? Did he speak as though he really meant to come home in two years? When I had finished he asked me these questions again and again. He thrashed the whole story over, all but the essential part. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Henderson in want? To think of his brother in want and he so willing to share with him the fruits of his enormous prosperity. Henderson going afoot to Tibet? What a man he was! That was just the kind of thing he would do—some wild chase like that. And the South Seas? How I should like to hear him tell about them, David! He will come back—he has promised—in two years. He will fail. Poor old Hendry always fails, but it will be good to have him—he in that chair, I in this—and to hear him talk of it all.
So always was the essential fact missed. I was angry with Rufus Blight. I wanted to shake him, to shout into his ear, to drive into his dull brain the real purpose of my story. But I held my temper and reverted to the fight with quiet but meaning emphasis.
"Hendry was always a handy man with his fists, David," said Rufus Blight. "In his younger days he was hard to arouse, but get him angry and he was the devil himself. He wasn't afraid of anything. It was just like him to start alone to Lhasa—just like him, David."
I had begun to suspect that Rufus Blight was not so obtuse as I judged him, but was passing over that part of my story which had to do with Talcott, because he really liked Talcott and was inclined to lighten the shadow which his conduct that night had thrown on his exemplary character. I had told him all. I had repeated the exact words which the Professor had given me as the cause of the assault, and now in his brother's mind they were lost in a rapt interest in his adventures. If with design, then my mission had been futile, and it was wisdom to retreat. If without design, I could not bring myself to the rôle of a prosecutor, and to argue was to tread on dangerous ground. I had done what I believed right. I had kept my promise. So I rose to go. I must have given Rufus Blight a strange look as I held out my hand. I was furious at him for his obtuseness or his cunning, and I must have shown it, for he returned my gaze with a puzzled stare. Then a gleam of light filtered into that brain, so competent to deal with steel-works, so hopelessly dull on other matters.
"David," he said, "you have delayed a long time in telling me this.Now, why?"
I answered him, speaking no longer in cold, business-like tones. I held out my hands wide apart and took a step toward him to bring my eyes nearer his, for every nerve was set to drive the truth into him.
"I tell you now because your brother's last words to me were, 'Take care of Penelope.' How can I take care of Penelope? She has gone far from me. It is for you that his words have meaning. Can't you see?"
His hands were groping vaguely in the air behind him. He found the arms of his chair and sat down weakly, and with his head thrown back he looked up at me with an expression of wonder on his face.
"I leave to-morrow," said I. "It will be a long time before I see you again. Will you say good-by to Penelope for me?"
"I see, David," he exclaimed. His voice snapped, as I fancy it did sometimes when affairs in the steelworks were awry. "I was so interested in Hendry I forgot all about that fellow Talcott. Now, tell me this—did he——"
"I have told you everything," said I. "There is nothing left for me to say except good-by."
* * * * * *
Far, indeed, had Penelope gone from me. So I had said to Rufus Blight—almost my last word to him. So I said to myself as I stood by the steamer's rail and looked back to the towering mass of the lower city. That very morning I had seen her: she driving down the Avenue, alone, sitting very straight and still in her victoria; I on the pavement, taking my last walk up-town in the never failing hope to have a glimpse of her. Now, what would I have given not to have yielded to that temptation? She had seen me. I halted sharply and raised my hat, thinking that she might stop to say good-by, for she knew that I was going away. She did see me. She looked straight at me, coldly, and not even by a tremor of her eyebrows did she give a sign that to her I was other than any stranger loitering on the curb.
Time, the philosopher said, takes no account of humanity. "The activest man sets around mostly," I once heard Stacy Shunk remark as he sat curled up on the store-porch, nursing a bare foot and viewing the world through the top of his hat. Did the most active man calmly and without egotism dissect the sum of his useful accomplishment, he would be highly discouraged, for time is a relentless destroyer. But a man can not take so disdainful a measure of his own value. He must live. To superior minds like the philosopher's or Stacy Shunk's he may be living his tale of years happy in constantly hoodwinking himself with the idea that he is an important factor in some great purpose. Now in certain moods I might attain to the lofty view of the philosopher and Stacy Shunk. Then I would be confronted by my friend the Professor, who would have been dissatisfied had he been the author of Plato's dialogues or the victor of Waterloo. Then it seemed to me that the wise man would allow himself to be hoodwinked, and would walk hard and fast without too critical an eye on the results of his journey. It is when he sits around that Stacy Shunk's active man is discontented, and this is not because he accomplishes much when working, but because he accomplishes less when idle. Here I had the example of Rufus Blight, brought at last to expending his restless energy in chopping golf-balls out of bunkers. So work became to me the panacea for my ills. I plunged into the struggle harder than ever, and in working found that self-forgetfulness which is akin to contentment. It was indeed marching under sealed orders.
Those nights at sea the Professor's words were often in my mind. I was terribly lonely, and I could stand by the hour at the ship's rail looking into the heavens, and beyond them into the limitless spaces where our vulgar minds have placed the home of the Great Spirit whose mysterious purposes we fulfil. How infinitesimal seemed my own part in that purpose, though I played it as best I could. I turned in vain to those limitless spaces to ask why and for what I lived? Did I ask how I should live, the answer came from the limitless spaces within me as clearly as though written on this page. My mother had written it there, unscientifically yet indelibly, in my boyhood days, and Mr. Pound had added his few words, almost hidden beneath a mass of verbiage about Ahasuerus, and before them my forebears had every one of them left imprinted some sage injunction gained from their experience in living. So I gathered my strength to do my best. But there was a lack of definiteness in my purpose. There was no goal at which I aimed. In my younger days I had had instilled into me the necessity of aspiring to a particular height, to something concrete, to become a leader at the bar, in politics or commerce, a Webster, a Clay, or a Girard. But now I cared little if I never owned the paper for which I worked. The task at hand alone interested me, and to that I bent every energy.
One task lay at my hand that year when I was in London, beside the routine of my office, and now I undertook its completion for the personal pleasure which it gave me to gather into concise form the result of some years of study and patient digging for facts in forgotten volumes and manuscripts. The result was surprising. The book, offered to a publisher with diffident apology, raised a storm of discussion in a half-dozen languages. To me it had been only a pleasant intellectual exercise to trace "the habit of war" back to the simple animal instincts of our ancestors; to follow the changing methods of fighting from the days when men assailed one another with stone axes to the modern expression of fighting intelligence in the battleship; to show how, with every step which we had taken to eradicate disease and alleviate suffering, we had taken two in refining and organizing our power of destruction. I had facts and figures to mark the steps in this twofold human progress, and to show the cost to the race of a single century not only of warring, but of following the sage injunction to be prepared for war in times of peace. Had I closed my labor there, the book would have been lost on the shop-shelves; but writing ironically, I went on to argue on the benefits of war and of the necessity of the race continuing in the exercise of this elemental passion. I had always abhorred preaching, and here to preach I used a method of inversion, peppering my argument with platitudes on war as a needed discipline for the spiritual in man by its lessons in fortitude and self-sacrifice, and on the softening influences of peace. But what I had intended as subtle irony was discovered by a great conservative journal to be an unassailable argument, supported by facts and figures, demonstrating the futility of the movements for international amity. I was hailed as a bold, clear thinker who had pricked the bubble of unintelligent altruism, who at a time when philanthropists were preaching disarmament had proved that men could never disarm as long as they were born with arms, legs and healthy senses.
So David Malcolm was quite unexpectedly raised to some eminence by a conservative English journal which was clamoring for increased naval expenditure; and once discovered, he found himself not without honor in his own country, for he was assailed from the platform of Carnegie Hall by the advocates of a gentle life, and in Congress his work was used as a text-book by those who were fighting for a larger military establishment. TheMorgen-Anzeiger, in Berlin, printed a translation with the purpose of quelling the opposition to army service, while the reading of a chapter in the French Chamber resulted in an appropriation for experiments in submarines. Such was the effect of my well-intended irony. To-day, of course, the true purport of the facts, figures and argument are better known, but then I had the chagrin of seeing my projectile explode in the wrong camp, and I did not try to right myself, because I feared that to explain the error might nullify the ultimate effect of the explosion. To my mother alone did I trouble to point out my real meaning, and then because she had been shocked to see me assailed in her favorite journal, thePresbyterian Searchlight, as a notable example of the result of philosophy unwarmed by religion.
That I should have to make my peace with my mother was not surprising, but my old professional mentor, Mr. Hanks, loved a paradox; if he wanted to call a man a fool, he praised him for his wisdom; if he wished to disprove a proposition, he argued for it, adroitly exposing its weakness, and yet he wrote to me indignantly.
"I can not understand how from the mass of facts you have gathered you could calmly advance to so cruel an argument," he said. "Your own figures protest against your bloodthirsty philosophy. Machiavelli's Prince is a mollycoddle beside your ideal modern statesman. And yet, Malcolm, you could as easily have produced a work which would have stood for years as a reproach to the diplomacy of our time."
Dear old Hanks! It was from his suburban heart that he spoke thus, as the father of four accomplished daughters, and not as the sceptic of the office who was always quick to prick the bubbles of pretence. But it was not long before he had an opportunity to turn ironical himself, and I could fancy the grim smile with which he wrote the despatch which sent me from the academic discussion of war to the study of war at first hand.
"Join the Turks at once."
It was laconic. To me it said more. It was addressed to David Malcolm, suddenly become known as an advocate of wholesale human butchery, and told him to follow the camp and see how suffering benefits the race, to stand by the guns and watch them take the toll that nations pay for their aggrandizement. To-day, when the book is understood, when peace conferences invite me to address them and navy leagues condemn me in resolutions, Hanks wonders why I accepted his commission with such hearty acquiescence. He deems me inconsistent.
The truth was that my heart leaped at this opportunity for real adventure. I was years older than in the days when I dreamed of wearing a cork helmet and carrying the Gospel and an elephant gun into darkest Africa; but few of us, when we become men, really put away childish things. Here was my boyhood's dream come true and glorified. And what a week I had buying my toys! The cork helmet became a reality, and with it I equipped myself with smartly fitting khaki, and in the quiet of my lodgings viewed myself with ineffable satisfaction. I bought equipment enough to have lasted me through a three years' campaign, as I have since learned from experience, for the exigencies of transport made me abandon most of it at the very outset of my new career. But the loss was more than compensated by the delight which I had in the brief possession of so much warlike paraphernalia.
For two years after that I lived in the midst of armies. It was action, and to me inaction was a dreadful sickness. Even when we lay in camps for weeks and months there was the never-ending preparation for the struggles which lay ahead, and though there were hours as quiet as Broadway in mid-August, days could not be dull when you could see the smoke of hostile fires on distant mountains or a wild scout hovering on the fringe of the desert. For me the happiest days were when I could ride with the marching columns, when the distant barking of the guns called me to a hard gallop, when at night by the scant light of a candle I sat in my tent cross-legged, with my pad on my knee and my pencil in hand.
In war man strips himself of the unessential things which make up the museum of superfluities that he calls his home. At home he has countless troubles. Here he has few, but though they are simple, they are vital. I faced these elemental problems for the first time when with my little caravan I set out to join the Turkish army where it lay camped near the Greek frontier. As I rode my vagrant thoughts might turn back to home, and in my heart I might feel the old dull pain and longing, but when a pack-horse was running away with half my commissariat on his back such moody meditations had to be broken short. Some days the question of mere bread for a crying stomach became vital, or a flask of water for a parched throat. There were nights when I should have given all I possessed, not for the folding-bed long since abandoned, but for a blanket in which to wrap myself as I slept in a trench. Within a week it was hard for me to believe that I had not spent all my life in the wake of an advancing army. London, New York—they were of another age. Home to me was a tent pitched by the Thessalian roadside, with my shaggy horses picketed about and my shaggier attendants chattering their strange jargon. This was luxury to one who had slept the night before in the rain, or worse, perhaps, in some shamble in a filthy Greek village. This was hardship, but I came to love it for the action and the forgetfulness. In the brief weeks of an opera-bouffe war I had my first taste of great adventure, and once knowing the joy of it I forgot for a time my academic ideas on the absurdity of international quarrels, and was happy only when I rode with the marching columns.
I came even to love the Turks, and I rode almost a Turk at heart over the plain of Thessaly. For they were strong men, these sturdy brown fellows who slouched as they marched, but always went forward, never faltering when the bullets snapped around them and the red fezzes of their comrades were dropping in the dust. It angered me to see my fellow-Christians shoot them down and then run toward Athens and the protecting skirts of the powers, for I knew that the powers would render their battles futile and their conquests empty and send them back with ranks depleted to their distant hills. They fought, most of them, hardly knowing why, save that in some mysterious way it was for their faith. They were dirty and ragged, but they were patient and brave. Ill-fed and ill-clothed, they could march all day in the scorching sun, uncomplaining, shiver all night in chilling winds, and then shamble on in the face of death.
The Greeks fought a little and ran. They would stand and fight a little again—then run. I thought that we should chase them to Athens. I had visions of riding into the city in the wake of Edhem Pasha and pitching my ragged camp by the Acropolis. But I never passed Pharsala.
It was there that I met the Professor again.
He lay at the foot of a roadside shrine which had been wrecked by a shell and hardly cast a shadow. But he had been dragged out of the noonday heat into that bit of shadow by some kindly enemy and there left to die. The war had finished with him and had swung on. He was hardly worth even an enemy's glance.
Riding by with my eyes intent on the moving fight ahead, I should have passed him but for my dragoman. To Asaf there was nothing unusual in the pitiful figure by the roadside, propped against a stone, with the head fallen on an outstretched arm and a still hand clutching an empty water-flask. It was the clothes that called a second glance. Save the cartridge belt around the waist there was nothing to mark the man as a soldier. The kindly hand which had placed him there had drawn over his face a soiled gray hat; his suit was a worn blue serge, dyed now with dark stains, and his feet were encased in patent-leather shoes, cracked and almost soleless. The plain ahead was filled with the clamor of battle; a pack-train clattered by me, hurrying to the front, and but for these and for Asaf, the ragged Turk at my side, pointing mutely to the still dark heap, I might have thought myself at home, in my own valley, come suddenly on a mountain tragedy. And now I dismounted, and, raising the hat, looked into the thin brown face that I had first seen years ago so wistfully watching the little flake of cloud which hovered over the ridges.