It was bright morning when Hugo awoke. Through the window-pane in the room where he had slept, he could see a straggling back yard; damp clothes moved in the breeze, and beyond was a depression green with young shoots. He descended to the restaurant and ate his breakfast. Automobiles were swishing along the road outside and he could hear a clatter of dishes in the kitchen. Afterwards he went out doors and walked through the busy centre of the village and on into the country.
Sun streamed upon him; the sky was blue; birds twittered in the budding bushes. He had almost forgotten the beauty and peacefulness of springtime; now it came over him with a rush—pastel colours and fecund warmth, smells of earth and rain, melodious, haphazard wind. He knew intuitively that McClaren would never send for him; he wondered what Mr. Mills would say to Mr. Shayne about him. Both thoughts passed like white clouds over his mind and he forgot them for an indolent vegetative tranquillity.
The road curved over hills and descended into tinted valleys. Farmers were ploughing and planting. The men at the restaurant had told him that he was in Connecticut. That did not matter, for any other place would have been the same on this May morning. A truck-driver offered him a ride, which Hugo refused, and then, watching the cubic van surge away in the distance, he wished fugitively that he had accepted.
Two half dollars and a quarter jingled in his pocket. His suit was seedy and his beard unshaven. A picture of New York ran through his mind: he stood far off from it gazing at the splendour of its towers in the morning light; he came closer and the noise of it smote his ears; suddenly he plunged into the city, his perspective vanished, and there rose about him the ugly, unrelated, inchoate masses of tawdriness that had been glorious from a distance, while people—dour, malicious, selfish people who scuttled like ants—supplanted the vista of stone and steel. The trite truth of the ratio between approach and enchantment amused him. It was so obvious, yet so few mortals had the fine sense to withdraw themselves. He was very happy walking tirelessly along that road.
After his luncheon he allowed a truck to carry him farther from the city, deeper into the magic of spring. The driver bubbled with it—he wore a purple tulip in his greasy cap and he slowed down on the hilltops with an unassuming reverence and a naïve slang that fitted well with Hugo's mood. When he reached his destination, Hugo walked on with reluctance. Shadows of the higher places moved into the lowlands. He crossed a brook and leaned over its middle on the bridge rail, fascinated by an underwater landscape, complete, full of colour, less than a foot high. From every side came the strident music of frogs. Spring, spring, spring, they sang, rolling their liquid gutturals and stopping abruptly when he came too near.
In the evening, far from the city, he turned from the pavement on a muddy country road, walking on until he reached the skeleton of an old house. There he lay down, taking his supper from his pocket and eating it slowly. The floor of the second story had fallen down and he could see the stars through a hole in the roof. In such houses, he thought, the first chapters of American history had been lived. When it was entirely dark, a whippoorwill began to make its sweet and mournful music. Warmth and chilliness came together from the ground. He slept.
In the morning he followed the road into the hills. Long stretches of woodland were interrupted by fields. He passed farmhouses and the paved drive of an estate. More than a mile from the deserted farm, more than two miles from the main road, half hidden in a skirt of venerable trees, he saw an old, green house behind which was a row of barns. It was a big house; tile medallions had been set in its foundations by an architect whose tombstone must now be aslant and illegible. It was built on a variety of planes and angles; gables cropped at random from its mossy roof. Grass grew in the broad yard under the trees, and in the grass were crocuses, yellow and red and blue, like wind-strewn confetti.
Hugo paused to contemplate this peaceful edifice. A man walked briskly from one of the barn doors. He perceived Hugo and stopped, holding a spade in his hand. Then, after starting across to the house, he changed his mind and, dropping the spade, approached Hugo.
"Looking for work, my man?"
Hugo smiled. "Why—yes."
"Know anything about cattle?"
"I was reared in a farming country."
"Good." He scrutinized Hugo minutely. "I'll try you at eight dollars a week, room, and board." He opened the gate.
Hugo paused. The notion of finding employment somewhere in the country had been fixed in his mind and he wondered why he waited, even as he did, when the charm of the old manor had offered itself to him as if by a miracle. The man swung open the gate; he was lithe, sober, direct.
"My name is Cane—Ralph Cane. We raise blooded Guernsey stock here. At the moment we haven't a man."
"I see," Hugo said.
"I could make the eight ten—in a week—if you were satisfactory."
"I wasn't considering the money—"
"How?"
"I wasn't considering the money."
"Oh! Come in. Try it." An eagerness was apparent in his tone. While Hugo still halted on a knoll of indecision, a woman opened the French windows which lined one façade of the house and stepped down from the porch. She was very tall and very slender. Her eyes were slaty blue and there was a delicate suggestion—almost an apparition—of grey in her hair.
"What is it, Ralph?" Her voice was cool and pitched low.
"This is my wife," Cane said.
"My name is Danner."
Cane explained. "I saw this man standing by the gate, and now I'm hiring him."
"I see," she said. She looked at Hugo. The crystalline substance of her eyes glinted transiently with some inwardness—surprise, a vanishing gladness, it might have been. "You are looking for work?"
"Yes," Hugo answered.
Cane spoke hastily. "I offered him eight a week and board, Roseanne."
She glanced at her husband and returned her attention inquisitively to Hugo. "Are you interested?"
"I'll try it."
Cane frowned nervously, walked to his wife, and nodded with averted face. Then he addressed Hugo: "You can sleep in the barn. We have quarters there. I don't think we'll be in for any more cold weather. If you'll come with me now, I'll start you right in."
Until noon Hugo cleaned stables. There were two dozen cows—animals that would have seemed beautiful to a rustic connoisseur—and one lordly bull with malignant horns and bloodshot eyes. He shoveled the pungent and not offensive débris into a wheelbarrow and transferred it to a dung-heap that sweated with internal humidity. At noon Cane came into the barn.
"Pretty good," he said, viewing floors fairly shaved by Hugo's diligence. "Lunch is ready. You'll eat in the kitchen."
Hugo saw the woman again. She was toiling over a stove, her hair in disarray, a spotted apron covering her long body. He realized that they had no servants, that the three of them constituted the human inhabitants of the estate—but there were shades, innumerable shades, of a long past, and some of those ghosts had crept into Roseanne's slaty eyes. She carried lunch for herself and her husband into a front room and left him to eat in the soft silence.
After lunch Cane spoke to him again. "Can you plough?"
"It's been a long time—but I think so."
"Good. I have a team. We'll drive to the north field. I've got to start getting the corn in pretty soon."
The room in the barn was bare: four board walls, a board ceiling and floor, an iron cot, blankets, the sound and smell of the cows beneath. Hugo slept dreamlessly, and when he woke, he was ravenous.
His week passed. Cane drove him like a slave-master, but to drive Hugo was an unhazardous thing. He did not think much, and when he did, it was to read the innuendo of living that was written parallel to the existence of his employer and Roseanne. They were troubled with each other. Part of that trouble sprang from an evident source: Cane was a miser. He resented the amount of food that Hugo consumed, despite the unequal ratio of Hugo's labours. When Hugo asked for a few dollars in advance, he was curtly refused. That had happened at lunch one day. After lunch, however, and evidently after Cane had debated with his wife, he inquired of Hugo what he wanted. A razor and some shaving things and new trousers, Hugo had said.
Cane drove the station wagon to town and returned with the desired articles. He gave them to Hugo.
"Thank you," Hugo said.
Cane chuckled, opening his thin lips wide. "All right, Danner. As a matter of fact, it's money in my bank."
"Money in your bank?"
"Sure. I've lived here for years and I get a ten-per-cent discount at the general store. But I'm charging you full price—naturally."
"Naturally," Hugo agreed.
That was one thing that would make the tribulation in her eyes. Hugo wished that he could have met these two people on a different basis, so that he could have learned the truth about them. It was plain that they were educated, cultured, refined. Cane had said something once about raising cattle in England, and Roseanne had cooked peas as she had learned to cook them in France. "Petits pois au beurre," she had murmured—with an unimpeachable accent.
Then the week had passed and there had been no mention of the advance in wages. For himself, Hugo did not care. But it was easy to see why no one had been working on the place when Hugo arrived, why they were eager to hire a transient stranger.
He learned part of what he had already guessed from a clerk in the general store. One of the cows was ailing. Mr. Cane could not drive to town (Mrs. Cane, it seemed, never left the house and its environs) and they had sent Hugo.
"You working for the Canes?" the clerk had asked.
"Yes."
"Funny people."
Hugo replied indirectly. "Have they lived here long?"
"Long? Roseanne Cane was a Bishop. The Bishops built that house and the house before it—back in the seventeen hundreds. They had a lot of money. Have it still, I guess, but Cane's too tight to spend it." There was nothing furtive in the youth's manner; he was evidently touching on common village gossip. "Yes, sir, too tight. Won't give her a maid. But before her folks died, it was Europe every year and a maid for every one of 'em, and 'Why, deary, don't tell me that's the second time you've put on that dress! Take it right off and never wear it again.'" The joke was part of the formula for telling about the Canes, and the clerk snickered appreciatively. "Yes, sir. You come down here some day when I ain't got the Friday orders to fill an' I'll tell you some things about old man Cane that'll turn your stummick."
Hugo accepted his bundle, set it in the seat beside himself, and drove back to the big, green house.
Later in the day he said to Cane: "If you will want me to drive the station wagon very often, I ought to have a license."
"Go ahead. Get one."
"I couldn't afford it at the moment, and since it would be entirely for you, I thought—"
"I see," Cane answered calmly. "Trying to get a license out of me. Well, you're out of luck. You probably won't be needed as a chauffeur again for the next year. If you are, you'll drive without a license, and drive damn carefully, too, because any fines or any accidents would come out of your wages."
Hugo received the insult unmoved. He wondered what Cane would say if he smashed the car and made an escape. He knew he would not do it; the whole universe appeared so constructed that men like Cane inevitably avoided their desserts.
June came, and July. The sea-shore was not distant and occasionally at night Hugo slipped away from the woods and lay on the sand, sometimes drinking in the firmament, sometimes closing his eyes. When it was very hot he undressed behind a pile of barnacle-covered boulders and swam far out in the water. He swam naked, unmolested, stirring up tiny whirlpools of phosphorescence, and afterwards, damp and cool, he would dress and steal back to the barn through the forest and the hay-sweet fields.
One day a man in Middletown asked Mr. Cane to call on him regarding the possible purchase of three cows. Cane's cows were raised with the maximum of human care, the minimum of extraneous expense. His profit on them was great and he sold them, ordinarily, one at a time. He was so excited at the prospect of a triple sale that for a day he was almost gay, very nearly generous. He drove off blithely—not in the sedan, but in the station wagon, because its gasoline mileage was greater.
It was a day filled with wonder for Hugo. When Cane drove from the house, Roseanne was standing beside the drive. She walked over to the barn and said to Hugo in an oddly agitated voice: "Mr. Danner, could you spare an hour or two this morning to help me get some flowers from the woods?"
"Certainly."
She glanced in the direction her husband had taken and hurried to the kitchen, returning presently with two baskets and a trowel. He followed her up the road. They turned off on an overgrown path, pushed through underbrush, and arrived in a few minutes at the side of a pond. The edges were grown thick with bushes and water weeds, dead trees lifted awkward arms at the upper end, and dragon flies skimmed over the warm brown water.
"I used to come here to play when I was a little girl," she said. "It's still just the same." She wore a blue dress; branches had dishevelled her hair; she seemed more alive than he had ever seen her.
"It's charming," Hugo answered.
"There used to be a path all the way around—with stones crossing the brook at the inlet. And over there, underneath those pine trees, there are some orchids. I've always wanted to bring them down to the house. I think I could make them grow. Of course, this is a bad time to transplant anything—but I so seldom get a chance. I can't remember when—when—"
He realized with a shock that she was going to cry. She turned her head away and peered into the green wall. "I think it's here," she said tremulously.
They followed a dimly discernible trail; there were deer tracks in it and signs of other animals whose feet had kept it passable. It was hot and damp and they were forced to bend low beneath the tangle to make progress. Almost suddenly they emerged in a grove of white pines. They stood upright and looked: wind stirred sibilantly in the high tops, and the ground underfoot was a soft carpet; the lake reflected the blue of the sky instead of the brown of its soft bottom.
"Let's rest a minute," she said. And then: "I always think a pine grove is like a cathedral. I read somewhere that pines inspired Gothic architecture. Do you suppose it's true?"
"There was the lotos and the Corinthian column," Hugo answered.
They sat down. This was a new emotion—a paradoxical emotion for him. He had come to an inharmonious sanctuary and he could expect both tragedy and enchantment. There was Roseanne herself, a hidden beautiful thing in whom were prisoned many beauties. She was growing old in the frosty seclusion of her husband's company. She was feeding on the toothless food of dreams when her hunger was still strong. That much anyone might see; the reason alone remained invisible. He was acutely conscious of an hour at hand, an imminent moment of vision.
"You're a strange man," she said finally.
That was to be the password. "Yes?"
"I've watched you every day from the kitchen window." Her depression had gone now and she was talking with a vague excitement.
"Have you?"
"Do you mind if we pretend for a minute?"
"I'd like it."
"Then let's pretend this is a magic carpet and we've flown away from the world and there's nothing to do but play. Play," she repeated musingly. "I'll be Roseanne and you'll be Hugo. You see, I found out your name from the letters. I found out a lot about you. Not facts like born, occupation, father's first name; just—things."
He dared a little then. "What sort of things, Roseanne?"
She laughed. "I knew you could do it! That's one of them. I found out you had a soul. Souls show even in barn-yards. You looked at the peonies one day and you played with the puppies the next. In one way—Hugo—you're a failure as a farm hand."
"Failure?"
"A flop. You never make a grammatical mistake." She saw his surprise and laughed again. "And your manners—and, then, you understood French. See—the carpet is taking us higher and farther away. Isn't it fun! You're the hired man and I'm the farmer's wife and all of a sudden—we're—"
"A prince and princess?"
"That's exactly right. I won't pretend I'm not curious—morbidly curious. But I won't ask questions, either, because that isn't what the carpet is for."
"What is it for, Roseanne?"
"To get away from the world, silly. And now—there's a look about you. When I was a little girl, my father was a great man, and many great men used to come to our house. I know what the frown of power is and the attitude of greatness. You have them—much more than any pompous old magnate I ever laid eyes on. The way you touch things and handle them, the way you square your shoulders. Sometimes I think you're not real at all and just an imaginary knight come to storm my castle. And sometimes I think you're a very famous man whose afternoon walk just has been extended for a few months. The first thought frightens me, and the second makes me wonder why I haven't seen your picture in the Sunday rotogravures."
Hugo's shoulders shook. "Poor Princess Roseanne. And what do I think about you, then—"
She held up her hand. "Don't tell me, Hugo. I should be sad. After all, my life—"
"May be what it does not appear to be."
She took a brittle pine twig and dug in the mould of the needles until it broke. "Ralph—was different once. He was a chemist. Then—the war came. And he was there and a shell—"
"Ah," Hugo said. "And you loved him before?"
"I had promised him before. But it changed him so. And it's hard."
"The carpet," he answered gently. "The carpet—"
"I almost dropped off, and then I'd have been hurt, wouldn't I?"
"A favour for a favour. I'm not a great man, but I hope to be one. I have something that I think is a talent. Let it go at that. The letters come from my father and mother—in Colorado."
"I've never seen Colorado."
"It's big—"
"Like the nursery of the Titans, I think," she said softly, and Hugo shuddered. The instinct had been too true.
Her eyes were suddenly stormy. "I feel old enough to mother you, Hugo. And yet, since you came, I've been a little bit in love with you. It doesn't matter, does it?"
"I think—I know—"
"Sit closer to me then, Hugo."
The sun had passed the zenith before they spoke connectedly again. "Time for the magic carpet to come to earth," she said gaily.
"Is it?"
"Don't be masculine any longer—and don't be rudely possessive. Of course it is. Aren't you hungry?"
"I was hungry—" he began moodily.
"All off at earth. Come on. Button me. Am I a sight?"
"I disregard the bait."
"You're being funny. Come. No—wait. We've forgotten the orchids. I wonder if I really came for orchids. Should you be terribly offended if I said I thought I did?"
"Extravagantly offended."
Cane returned late in the day. The cows had been sold—"I even made five hundred clear and above the feeding and labour on the one with the off leg. She'll breed good cattle." The barns were as clean as a park, and Roseanne was singing as she prepared dinner.
Nothing happened until a hot night in August. The leaves were still and limp, the moon had set. Hugo lay awake and he heard her coming quietly up the stairs.
"Ralph had a headache and he took two triple bromides. Of course, I could always have said that I heard one of the cows in distress and came to wake you. But he's jealous, poor dear. And then—but who could resist a couple of simultaneous alibis?"
"Nobody," he whispered. She sat down on his bed. He put his arm around her and felt that she was in a nightdress. "I wish I could see you now."
"Then take this flashlight—just for an instant. Wait." He heard the rustle of her clothing. "Now."
She heard him draw in his breath. Then the light went out.
With the approach of autumn weather Roseanne caught a cold. She continued her myriad tasks, but he could see that she was miserable. Even Cane sympathized with her gruffly. When the week of the cattle show in New York arrived, the cold was worse and she begged off the long trip on the trucks with the animals. He departed alone with his two most precious cows, scarcely thinking of her, muttering about judges and prizes.
Again she came out to the barn. "You've made me a dreadful hypocrite."
"I know it."
"You were waiting for me! Men are so disgustingly sure of everything!"
"But—"
"I've made myself cough and sniffle until I can't stop."
Hugo smiled broadly. "All aboard the carpet...."
They lay in a field that was surrounded by trees. The high weeds hid them. Goldenrod hung over them. "Life can't go on—"
"Like this," he finished for her.
"Well—can it?"
"It's up to you, Roseanne. I never knew there were women—"
"Like me? You should have said 'was a woman.'"
"Would you run away with me?"
"Never."
"Aren't we just hunting for an emotion?"
"Perhaps. Because there was a day—one day—in the pines—"
He nodded. "Different from these other two. That's because of the tragic formation of life. There is only one first, only one commencement, only one virginity. Then—"
"Character sets in."
"Then it becomes living. It may remain beautiful, but it cannot remain original."
"You'd be hard to live with."
"Why, Roseanne?"
"Because you're so determined not to have an illusion."
"And you—"
"Go on. Say it. I'm so determined to have one."
"Are we quarreling? I can fix that. Come closer, Roseanne." Her face changed through delicate shades of feeling to tenderness and to intensity. Abruptly Hugo leaped to his feet.
The rhythmic thunder rode down upon them like the wind. A few yards away, head down, tail straight, the big bull charged over the ground like an avalanche. Roseanne lifted herself in time to see Hugo take two quick steps, draw back his fist, and hit the bull between the horns. It was a diabolical thing. The bull was thrown back upon itself. Its neck snapped loudly. Its feet crumpled; it dropped dead. Twenty feet to one side was a stone wall. Hugo picked up a hoof and dragged the carcass to the base of the wall. With his hand he made an indenture in the rocks, and over the face of the hollow he splashed the bull's blood. Then he approached Roseanne. The whole episode had occupied less than a minute.
She had hunched her shoulders together, and her face was pale. She articulated with difficulty. "The bull"—her hands twitched—"broke in here—and you hit him."
"Just in time, Roseanne."
"You killed him. Then—why did you drag him over there?"
"Because," Hugo answered slowly, "I thought it would be better to make it seem as if he charged the wall and broke his neck that way."
Her frigidity was worse than any hysteria. "It isn't natural to be able to do things like that. It isn't human."
He swallowed; those words in that stifled intonation were very familiar. "I know it. I'm very strong."
Roseanne looked down at the grass. "Wipe your hand, will you?"
He rubbed it in the earth. "You mustn't be frightened."
"No?" She laughed a little. "What must I be, then? I'm alive, I'm crawling with terror. Don't touch me!" She screamed and drew back.
"I can explain it."
"You can explain everything! But not that."
"It was an idiotic, wild, unfair thing to have happen at this time," he said. "My life's like that." He looked beyond her. "I began wanting to do tremendous things. The more I tried, the more discouraged I became. You see, I was strong. There have been other things figuratively like the bull. But the things themselves get littler and more preposterous, because my ambition and my nerve grows smaller." He lowered his head. "Some day—I shan't want to do anything at all any more. Continuous and unwonted defeat might infuriate some men to a great effort. It's tiring me." He raised his eyes sadly to hers. "Roseanne—!"
She gathered her legs under herself and ran. Hugo made no attempt to follow her. He merely watched. Twice she tripped and once she fell. At the stone wall she looked back at him. It was not necessary to be able to see her expression. She went on across the fields—a skinny, flapping thing—at last a mere spot of moving colour.
Hugo turned and stared at the brown mound of the bull. After a moment he walked over and stood above it. Its tongue hung out and its mouth grinned. It lay there dead, and yet to Hugo it still had life: the indestructibility of a ghost and the immortality of a symbol. He sat beside it until sundown.
At twilight he entered the barn and tended the cows. The doors of the house were closed. He went without supper. Cane returned jubilantly later in the evening. He called Hugo from the back porch.
"Telegram for you."
Hugo read the wire. His father was sick and failing rapidly. "I want my wages," he said. Then he went back to the barn. His trifling belongings were already wrapped in a bundle. Cane reluctantly counted out the money. Hugo felt nauseated and feverish. He put the money in his pocket, the bundle under his arm; he opened the gate, and his feet found the soft earth of the road in the darkness.
Hugo had three hours to wait for a Chicago train. His wages purchased his ticket and left him in possession of twenty dollars. His clothing was nondescript; he had no baggage. He did not go outside the Grand Central Terminal, but sat patiently in the smoking-room, waiting for the time to pass. A guard came up to him and asked to see his ticket. Hugo did not remonstrate and produced it mechanically; he would undoubtedly be mistaken for a tramp amid the sleek travellers and commuters.
When the train started, his fit of perplexed lethargy had not abated. His hands and feet were cold and his heart beat slowly. Life had accustomed him to frustration and to disappointment, yet it was agonizing to assimilate this new cudgeling at the hands of fate. The old green house in the Connecticut hills had been a refuge; Roseanne had been a refuge. They were, both of them, peaceful and whimsical and they had seemed innocent of the capacity for great anguish. Every man dreams of the season-changed countryside as an escape; every man dreams of a woman on whose broad breast he may rest, beneath whose tumbling hair and moth-like hands he may discover forgetfulness and freedom. Some men are successful in a quest for those anodynes. Hugo could understand the sharp contours of one fact: because he was himself, such a quest would always end in failure. No woman lived who could assuage him; his fires would not yield to any temporal powers.
He was barren of desire to investigate deeper into the philosophy of himself. All people turned aside by fate fall into the same morass. Except in his strength, Hugo was pitifully like all people: wounds could easily be opened in his sensitiveness; his moral courage could be taxed to the fringe of dilemma; he looked upon his fellow men sometimes with awe at the variety of high places they attained in spite of the heavy handicap of being human—he looked upon them again with repugnance—and very rarely, as he grew older, did such inspections of his kind include a study of the difference between them and him made by his singular gift. When that thought entered his mind, it gave rise to peculiar speculations.
He approached thirty, he thought, and still the world had not re-echoed with his name; the trumps, banners, and cavalcade of his glory had been only shadows in the sky, dust at sunset that made evanescent and intangible colours. Again, he thought, the very perfection of his prowess was responsible for its inapplicability; if he but had an Achilles' heel so that his might could taste the occasional tonic of inadequacy, then he could meet the challenge of possible failure with successful effort. More frequently he condemned his mind and spirit for not being great enough to conceive a mission for his thews. Then he would fall into a reverie, trying to invent a creation that would be as magnificent as the destructions he could so easily envision.
In such a painful and painstaking mood he was carried over the Alleghenies and out on the Western plains. He changed trains at Chicago without having slept, and all he could remember of the journey was a protracted sorrow, a stabbing consciousness of Roseanne, dulled by his last picture of her, and a hopeless guessing of what she thought about him now.
Hugo's mother met him at the station. She was unaltered, everything was unaltered. The last few instants in the vestibule of the train had been a series of quick remembrances; the whole countryside was like a long-deserted house to which he had returned. The mountains took on a familiar aspect, then the houses, then the dingy red station. Lastly his mother, upright and uncompromisingly grim, dressed in her perpetual mourning of black silk. Her recognition of Hugo produced only the slightest flurry and immediately she became mundane.
"Whatever made you come in those clothes?"
"I was working outdoors, mother. I got right on a train. How is father?"
"Sinking slowly."
"I'm glad I'm in time."
"It's God's will." She gazed at him. "You've changed a little, son."
"I'm older." He felt diffident. A vast gulf had risen between this vigorous, religious woman and himself.
She opened a new topic. "Whatever in the world made you send us all that money?"
Hugo smiled. "Why—I didn't need it, mother. And I thought it would make you and father happy."
"Perhaps. Perhaps. It has done some good. I've sent four missionaries out in the field and I am thinking of sending two more. I had a new addition put on the church, for the drunkards and the fallen. And we put a bathroom in the house. Your father wanted two, but I wouldn't hear of it."
"Have you got a car?"
"Car? I couldn't use one of those inventions of Satan. Your father made me hire this one to meet you. There's Anna Blake's house. She married that fellow she was flirting with when you went away. And there's our house. It was painted last month."
Now all the years had dropped away and Hugo was a child again, an adolescent again. The car stopped.
"You can go right up. He's in the front room. I'll get lunch."
Hugo's father was lying on the bed watching the door. A little wizened old man with a big head and thin yellow hands. Illness had made his eyes rheumy, but they lighted up when his son entered, and he half raised himself.
"Hello, father."
"Hugo! You've come back."
"Yes, father."
"I've waited for you. Sit down here on the bed. Move me over a little. Now close the door. Is it cold out? I was afraid you might not get here. I was afraid you might get sick on the train. Old people are like that, Hugo." He shaded his eyes. "You aren't a very big man, son. Somehow I always remembered you as big. But—I suppose"—his voice thinned—"I suppose you don't want to talk about yourself."
"Anything you want to hear, father."
"I can't believe you came back." He ruminated. "There were a thousand things I wanted to ask you, son—but they've all gone from my mind. I'm not so easy in your presence as I was when you were a little shaver."
Hugo knew what those questions would be. Here, on his death-bed, his father was still a scientist. His soul flinched from giving its account. He saw suddenly that he could never tell his father the truth; pity, kindredship, kindness, moved him. "I know what you wanted to ask, father. Am I still strong?" It took courage to suggest that. But he was rewarded. The old man sighed ecstatically. "That's it, Hugo, my son."
"Then—father, I am. I grew constantly stronger when I left you. In college I was strong. At sea I was strong. In the war. First I wanted to be mighty in games and I was. Then I wanted to do services. And I did, because I could."
The head nodded on its feeble neck. "You found things to do? I—I hoped you would. But I always worried about you. Every day, son, every day for all these years, I picked up the papers and looked at them with misgivings. 'Suppose,' I said to myself, 'suppose my boy lost his temper last night. Suppose someone wronged him and he undertook to avenge himself.' I trusted you, Hugo. I could not quite trust—the other thing. I've even blamed myself and hated myself." He smiled. "But it's all right—all right. So I am glad. Then, tell me—what—what—"
"What have I done?"
"Do you mind? It's been so long and you were so far away."
"Well—" Hugo swept his memory back over his career—"so many things, father. It's hard to recite one's own—"
"I know. But I'm your father, and my ears ache to hear."
"I saved a man pinned under a wagon. I saved a man from a shark. I pulled open a safe in which a man was smothering. Many things like that. Then—there was the war."
"I know. I know. When you wrote that you had gone to war, I was frightened—and happy. Try as I might, I could not think of a great constructive cause for you to enter. I had to satisfy myself by thinking that you could find such a cause. Then the war came. And you wrote that you were in it. I was happy. I am old, Hugo, and perhaps my nationalism and my patriotism are dead. Sides in a war did not seem to matter. But peace mattered to me, and I thought—I hoped that you could hasten peace. Four years, Hugo. Your letters said nothing. Four years. And then it stopped. And I understood. War is property fighting property, not David fighting Goliath. The greatest David would be unavailing now. Even you could do little enough."
"Perhaps not so little, father."
"There were things, then?"
Hugo could not disappoint his father with the whole formidable truth. "Yes." He lied with a steady gaze. "I stopped the war."
"You!"
"After four years I perceived the truth of what you have just said. War is a mistake. It is not sides that matter. The object of war is to make peace. On a dark night, father, I went alone into the enemy lines. For one hundred miles that night I upset every gun, I wrecked every ammunition train, I blew up every dump—every arsenal, that is. Alone I did it. The next day they asked for peace. Remember the false armistice? Somehow it leaked out that there would be victory and surrender the next night—because of me. Only the truth about me was never known. And a day later—it came."
The weak old man was transported. He raised himself up on his elbows. "You did that! Then all my work was not in vain. My dream and my prayer were justified! Oh, Hugo, you can never know how glad I am you came and told me this. How glad."
He repeated his expression of joy until his tongue was weary; then he fell back. Hugo sat with shining eyes during the silence that followed. His father at length groped for a glass of water. Strength returned to him. "I could ask for no more, son. And yet we are petulant, insatiable creatures. What is doing now? The world is wicked. Yet it tries half-heartedly to rebuild itself. One great deed is not enough—or are you tired?"
Hugo smiled. "Am I ever tired, father? Am I vulnerable?"
"I had forgotten. It is so hard for the finite mind to think beyond itself. Not tired. Not vulnerable. No. There was Samson—the cat." He was embarrassed. "I hurt you?"
"No, father." He repeated it. Every gentle fall of the word "father" from his lips and every mention of "son" by his father was rare privilege, unfamiliar elixir to the old man. His new lie took its cue from Abednego Danner's expressions. "My work goes on. Now it is with America. I expect to go to Washington soon to right the wrongs of politics and government. Vicious and selfish men I shall force from their high places. I shall secure the idealistic and the courageous." It was a theory he had never considered, a possible practice born of necessity. "The pressure I shall bring against them will be physical and mental. Here a man will be driven from his house mysteriously. There a man will slip into the limbo. Yonder an inconspicuous person will suddenly be braced by a new courage; his enemies will be gone and his work will progress unhampered. I shall be an invisible agent of right—right as best I can see it. You understand, father?"
Abednego smiled like a happy child. "I do, son. To be you must be splendid."
"The most splendid thing on earth! And I have you to thank, you and your genius to tender gratitude to. I am merely the agent. It is you that created and the whole world that benefits."
Abednego's face was serene—not smug, but transfigured. "I yearned as you now perform. It is strange that one cloistered mortal can become inspired with the toil and lament of the universe. Yet there is a danger of false pride in that, too. I am apt to fall into the pit because my cup is so full here at the last. And the greatest problem of all is not settled."
"What problem?" Hugo asked in surprise.
"Why, the problem that up until now has been with me day and night. Shall there be made more men like you—and women like you?"
The idea staggered Hugo. It paralyzed him and he heard his father's voice come from a great distance. "Up in the attic in the black trunk are six notebooks wrapped in oilpaper. They were written in pencil, but I went over them carefully in ink. That is my life-work, Hugo. It is the secret—of you. Given those books, a good laboratory worker could go through all my experiments and repeat each with the same success. I tried a little myself. I found out things—for example, the effect of the process is not inherited by the future generations. It must be done over each time. It has seemed to me that those six little books—you could slip them all into your coat pocket—are a terrible explosive. They can rip the world apart and wipe humanity from it. In malicious hands they would end life. Sometimes, when I became nervous waiting for the newspapers, waiting for a letter from you, I have been sorely tempted to destroy them. But now—"
"Now?" Hugo echoed huskily.
"Now I understand. There is no better keeping for them than your own. I give them to you."
"Me!"
"You, son. You must take them, and the burden must be yours. You have grown to manhood now and I am proud of you. More than proud. If I were not, I myself would destroy the books here on this bed. Matilda would bring them and I would watch them burn so that the danger would go with—" he cleared his throat—"my dream."
"But—"
"You cannot deny me. It is my wish. You can see what it means. A world grown suddenly—as you are."
"I, father—"
"You have not avoided responsibility. You will not avoid this, the greatest of your responsibilities. Since the days when I made those notes—what days!—biology has made great strides. For a time I was anxious. For a time I thought that my research might be rediscovered. But it cannot be. Theory has swung in a different direction." He smiled with inner amusement. "The opticians have decided that the microscope I made is impossible. The biochemists, moving through the secretions of such things as hippuric acid in the epithelial cells, to enzymes, to hormones, to chromosomes, have put a false construction on everything. It will take hundreds, thousands of years to see the light. The darkness is so intense and the error so plausible that they may never see again exactly as I saw. The fact of you, at best, may remain always no more than a theory. This is not vanity. My findings were a combination of accidents almost outside the bounds of mathematical probability. It is you who must bear the light."
Hugo felt that now, indeed, circumstance had closed around him and left him without succour or recourse. He bowed his head. "I will do it, father."
"Now I can die in peace—in joy."
With an almost visible wrench Hugo brought himself back to his surroundings. "Nonsense, father. You'll probably get well."
"No, son. I've studied the progress of this disease in the lower orders—when I saw it imminent. I shall die—not in pain, but in sleep. But I shall not be dead—because of you." He held out his hand for Hugo.
Some time later the old professor fell asleep and Hugo tiptoed from the room. Food was sizzling downstairs in the kitchen, but he ignored it, going out into the sharp air by the front door. He hastened along the streets and soon came to the road that led up the mountain. He climbed rapidly, and when he dared, he discarded the tedious little steps of all mankind. He reached the side of the quarry where he had built the stone fort, and seated himself on a ledge that hung over it. Trees, creepers, and underbrush had grown over the place, but through the October-stripped barricade of their branches he could see a heap of stones that was his dolmen, on which the hieroglyph of him was inscribed.
Two tears scalded his cheeks; he trembled with the welter of his emotions. He had failed his father, failed his trust, failed the world; and in the abyss of that grief he could catch no sight of promise or hope. Having done his best, he had still done nothing, and it was necessary for him to lie to put the thoughts of a dying man to rest. The pity of that lie! The folly of the picture he had painted of himself—Hugo Danner the scourge of God, Hugo Danner the destroying angel, Hugo Danner the hero of a quick love-affair that turned brown and dead like a plucked flower, the sentimental soldier, the involuntary misanthrope.
"I must do it!" he whispered fiercely. The ruined stones echoed the sound of his voice with a remote demoniac jeer. Do what? What, strong man? What?
Now the winds keened from the mountains, and snow fell. Abednego Danner, the magnificent Abednego Danner, was carried to his last resting-place, the laboratory of nature herself. His wife and his son followed the bier; the dirge was intoned, the meaningless cadence of ritual was spoken to the cold ground; a ghostly obelisk was lifted up over his meagre remains. Hugo had a wish to go to the hills and roll down some gigantic chunk of living rock to mark that place until the coming of a glacier, but he forbore and followed all the dark conventions of disintegration.
The will was read and the bulk of Hugo's sorry gains was thrust back into his keeping. He went into the attic and opened the black trunk where the six small notebooks lay in oilpaper. He took them out and unwrapped them. The first two books were a maze of numbered experiments. In the third a more vigorous calligraphy, a quivering tracery of excitement, marked the repressed beginning of a new earth.
He bought a bag and some clothes and packed; the false contralto of his mother's hymns as she went about the house filled him with such despair that he left after the minimum interval allowed by filial decency. She was a grim old woman still, one to whom the coming of the kingdom to Africa was a passion, the polishing of the coal stove a duty, and the presence of her unfamiliar son a burden.
When he said good-by, he kissed her, which left her standing on the station platform looking at the train with a flat, uncomprehending expression. Hugo knew where he was going and why: he was on his way to Washington. The great crusade was to begin. He had no plans, only ideals, which are plans of a sort. He had told his father he was making the world a better place, and the idea had taken hold of him. He would grapple the world, his world, at its source; he would no longer attempt to rise from a lowly place; he would exert his power in the highest places; government, politics, law, were malleable to the force of one man.
Most of his illusion was gone. As he had said so glibly to his father, there were good men and corrupt in the important situations in the world; to the good he would lend his strength, to the corrupt he would exhibit his embattled antipathy. He would be not one impotent person seeking to dominate, but the agent of uplift. He would be what he perceived life had meant him to be: an instrument. He could not be a leader, but he could create a leader.
Such was his intention; he had seen a new way to reform the world, and if his inspiration was clouded occasionally with doubt, he disavowed the doubts as a Christian disavows temptation. This was to be his magnificent gesture; he closed his eyes to the inferences made by his past.
He never thought of himself as pathetic or quixotic; his ability to measure up to external requirements was infinite; his disappointment lay always (he thought) in his spirit and his intelligence. He went to Washington: the world was pivoting there.
His first few weeks were dull. He installed himself in a pleasant house and hired two servants. The use to which he was putting his funds compensated for their origin. It was men like Shayne who would suffer from his mission. And such a man came into view before very long.
Hugo interested himself in politics and the appearance of politics. He read theCongressional Record, he talked with everyone he met, he went daily to the Capitol and listened to the amazing pattern of harangue from the lips of innumerable statesmen. In looking for a cause his eye fell naturally on the problem of disarmament. Hugo saw at once that it was a great cause and that it was bogged in the greed of individuals. It is not difficult to become politically partisan in the Capitol of any nation. It was patent to Hugo that disarmament meant a removal of the chance for war; Hugo hated war. He moved hither and thither, making friends, learning, entertaining, never exposing his plan—which his new friends thought to be lobbying for some impending legislation.
He picked out an individual readily enough. Some of the men he had come to know were in the Senate, others in the House of Representatives, others were diplomats, newspaper reporters, attachés. Each alliance had been cemented with care and purpose. His knowledge of an enemy came by whisperings, by hints, by plain statements.
Congressman Hatten, who argued so eloquently for laying down arms and picking up the cause of humanity, was a guest of Hugo's.
"Danner," he said, after a third highball, "you're a sensible chap. But you don't quite get us. I'm fighting for disarmament—"
"And making a grand fight—"
The Congressman waved his hand. "Sure. That's what I mean. You really want this thing for itself. But, between you and me, I don't give a rap about ships and guns. My district is a farm district. We aren't interested in paying millions in taxes to the bosses and owners in a coal and iron community. So I'm against it. Dead against it—with my constituency behind me. Nobody really wants to spend the money except the shipbuilders and steel men. Maybe they don't, theoretically. But the money in it is too big. That's why I fight."
"And your speeches?"
"Pap, Danner, pure pap. Even the yokels in my home towns realize that."
"It doesn't seem like pap to me."
"That's politics. In a way it isn't. Two boys I was fond of are lying over there in France. I don't want to make any more shells. But I have to think of something else first. If I came from some other district, the case would be reversed. I'd like to change the tariff. But the industrials oppose me in that. So we compromise. Or we don't. I think I could put across a decent arms-limitation bill right now, for example, if I could get Willard Melcher out of town for a month."
"Melcher?"
"You know him, of course—at least, who he is. He spends the steel money here in Washington—to keep the building program going on. Simple thing to do. The Navy helps him. Tell the public about the Japanese menace, the English menace, all the other menaces, and the public coughs up for bigger guns and better ships. Run 'em till they rust and nobody ever really knows what good they could do."
"And Melcher does that?"
The Congressman chuckled. "His pay-roll would make your eyes bulge. But you can't touch him."
Hugo nodded thoughtfully. "Don't you think anyone around here works purely for an idea?"
"How's that? Oh—I understand. Sure. The cranks!" And his laughter ended the discussion.
Hugo began. He walked up the brick steps of Melcher's residence and pulled the glittering brass knob. A servant came to the door.
"Mr. Danner to see Mr. Melcher. Just a moment."
A wait in the hall. The servant returned. "Sorry, but he's not in."
Hugo's mouth was firm. "Please tell him that I saw him come in."
"I'm sorry, sir, but he is going right out."
"Tell him—that he will see me."
The servant raised his voice. "Harry!" A heavy person with a flattened nose and cauliflower ears stepped into the hall. "This gentleman wishes to see Mr. Melcher, and Mr. Melcher is not in—to him. Take care of him, Harry." The servant withdrew.
"Run along, fellow."
Hugo smiled. "Mr. Melcher keeps a bouncer?"
An evil light flickered in the other's eyes. "Yeah, fellow. And I came up from the Pennsy mines. I'm a tough guy, so beat it."
"Not so tough your ears and nose aren't a sight," Hugo said lightly.
The man advanced. His voice was throaty. "Git!"
"You go to the devil. I came here to see Melcher and I'm going to see him."
"Yeah?"
The tough one drew back his fist, but he never understood afterwards what had taken place. He came to in the kitchen an hour later. Mr. Melcher heard him rumble to the floor and emerged from the library. He was a huge man, bigger than his bouncer; his face was hard and sinister and it lighted with an unpleasant smile when he saw the unconscious thug and measured the size of Hugo. "Pulled a fast one on Harry, eh?"
"I came to see you, Melcher."
"Well, might as well come in now. I worked up from the mines myself, and I'm a hard egg. If you got funny with me, you'd get killed. Wha' daya want?"
Hugo sat down in a leather chair and lit a cigarette. He was comparatively without emotion. This was his appointed task and he would make short shrift of it. "I came here, Melcher," he began, "to talk about your part in the arms conferences. It happens that I disagree with you and your propaganda. It happens that I have a method of enforcing my opinion. Disarmament is a great thing for the world, and putting the idea across is the first step toward even bigger things. I know the relative truths of what you say about America's peril and what you get from saying it. Am I clear?"
Melcher had reddened. He nodded. "Perfectly."
"I have nothing to add. Get out of town."
Melcher's eyes narrowed. "Do you really believe that sending me out of town would do any good? Do you have the conceit to think that one nutty shrimp like you can buck the will and ideas of millions of people?"
Hugo did not permit his convictions to be shaken. "There happen to be extenuating circumstances, Melcher."
"Really? You surprise me." The broad sarcasm was shaken like a weapon. "And do you honestly think you could chase me—me—out of here?"
"I am sure of it."
"How?"
Hugo extinguished his cigarette. "I happen to be more than a man. I am—" he hesitated, seeking words—"let us say, a devil, or an angel, or a scourge. I detest you and what you stand for. If you do not leave—I can ruin your house and destroy you. And I will." He finished his words almost gently.
Melcher appeared to hesitate. "All right. I'll go. Immediately. This afternoon."
Hugo was astonished. "You will go?"
"I promise. Good afternoon, Mr. Danner."
Hugo rose and walked toward the door. He was seething with surprise and suspicion. Had he actually intimidated Melcher so easily? His hand touched the knob. At that instant Melcher hit him on the head with a chair. It broke in pieces. Hugo turned around slowly.
"I understand. You mistook me for a dangerous lunatic. I was puzzled for a moment. Now—"
Melcher's jaw sagged in amazement when Hugo did not fall. An instant later he threw himself forward, arms out, head drawn between his shoulders. With one hand Hugo imprisoned his wrists. He lifted Melcher from the floor and shook him. "I meant it, Melcher. And I will give you a sign. Rotten politics, graft, bad government, are doomed." Melcher watched with staring eyes while Hugo, with his free hand, rapidly demolished the room. He picked up the great desk and smashed it, he tore the stone mantelpiece from its roots; he kicked the fireplace apart; he burst a hole in the brick wall—dragging the bulk of a man behind him as he moved. "Remember that, Melcher. No one else on earth is like me—and I will get you if you fail to stop. I'll come for you if you squeal about this—and I leave it to you to imagine what will happen."
Hugo walked into the hall. "You're all done for—you cheap swindlers. And I am doom." The door banged.
Melcher swayed on his feet, swallowed hard, and ran upstairs. "Pack," he said to his valet.
He had gone; Hugo had removed the first of the public enemies. Yet Hugo was not satisfied. His approach to Melcher had been dramatic, terrifying, effective. There were rumours of that violent morning. The rumours said that Melcher had been attacked, that he had been bought out for bigger money, that something peculiar was occurring in Washington. If ten, twenty men left and those rumours multiplied by geometrical progression, sheer intimidation would work a vast good.
But other facts disconcerted Hugo. In the first place, his mind kept reverting to Melcher's words: "Do you have the conceit to think that one person can buck the will of millions?" No matter how powerful that person, his logic added. Millions of dollars or people? the same logic questioned. After all, did it matter? People could be perjured by subtler influences than gold. Secondly, the parley over arms continued to be an impasse despite the absence of Melcher. Perhaps, he argued, he had not removed Melcher soon enough. A more carefully focused consideration showed that, in spite of what Hatten had said. It was not individuals against whom the struggle was made, but mass stupidity, gigantic bulwarks of human incertitude. And a new man came in Melcher's place—a man who employed different tactics. Hugo could not exorcise the world.
A few days later Hugo learned that two radicals had been thrown into jail on a charge of murder. The event had taken place in Newark, New Jersey. A federal officer had attempted to break up a meeting. He had been shot. The men arrested were blamed, although it was evident that they were chance seizures, that their proved guilt could be at most only a social resentfulness. At first no one gave the story much attention. The slow wheels of Jersey justice—printed always in quotation marks by the dailies—began to turn. The men were summarily tried and convicted of murder in the first degree. A mob assaulted the jail where they were confined—without success. Two of the mob were wounded by riot guns.
A meeting was held in Berlin, one in London, another in Paris. Moscow was silent, but Moscow was reported to be in an uproar. The trial assumed international proportions overnight. Embassies were stormed; legations from America were forced to board cruisers. Strikes were ordered; long queues of sullen men and women formed at camp kitchens. The President delivered a message to Congress on the subject. Prominent personages debated it in public halls, only to be acclaimed and booed concomitantly. The sentence imposed on two Russian immigrants rocked the world. In some cities it was not safe for American tourists to go abroad in the streets. And all the time the two men drew nearer to the electric chair.
It was then that Hugo met Skorvsky. Many people knew him; he was a radical, a writer; he lived in Washington, he styled himself an unofficial ambassador of the world. A small, dark man with a black moustache who attended one of Hugo's informal afternoon discussions on a vicarious invitation. "Come over and see Hugo Danner. He's something new in Washington."
"Something new in Washington? I shall omit the obvious sarcasm. I shall go." Skorvsky went.
Hugo listened to him talk about the two prisoners. He was lucid; he made allowances for the American democracy, which in themselves were burning criticism. Hugo asked him to dinner. They dined at Hugo's house.
"You have the French taste in wines," Skorvsky said, "but, as it is to my mind the finest taste in the world, I can say only that."
Hugo tried to lead him back to the topic that interested both of them so acutely. Skorvsky shrugged. "You are polite—or else you are curious. I know you—an American business man in Washington with a purpose. Not an apparent purpose—just now. No, no. Just now you are a host, cultivated and genial, and retiring. But at the proper time—ah! A dam somewhere in Arizona. A forest that you covet in Alaska. Is it not so?"
"What if it is not?"
Skorvsky stared at the ceiling. "What then? A secret? Yes, I thought that about you while we were talking to the others to-day. There is something deep about you, my new friend. You are a power. Possibly you are not even really an American."
"That is wrong."
"You assure me that I am right. But I will agree with you. You are, let us say, the very epitome of the man Mr. Mencken and Mr. Lewis tell us about so charmingly. I am Russian and I cannot know all of America. You might divulge your errand, perhaps?"
"Suppose I said it was to set the world aright?"
Skorvsky laughed lightly. "Then I should throw myself at your feet."
Both men were in deadly earnest, Hugo not quite willing to adopt the Russian's almost effeminate delicacy, yet eager to talk to him, or to someone like him—someone who was more than a great self-centred wheel in the progress of the nation. Hugo yielded a little further. "Yet that is my purpose. And I am not altogether impotent. There are things I can do—" He got up from the table and stretched himself with a feline grace.
"Such as?"
"I was thinking of your two compatriots who were recently given such wretched justice. Suppose they were liberated by force. What then?"
"Ah! You are an independent communist?"
"Not even that. Just a friend of progress."
"So. A dreamer. One of the few who have wealth. And you have a plan to free these men?"
Hugo shrugged. "I merely speculated on the possible outcome of such a thing; assume that they were snatched from prison and hidden beyond the law."
Skorvsky meditated. "It would be a great victory for the cause, of course. A splendid lift to its morale."
"The cause of Bolshevism?"
"A higher and a different cause. I cannot explain it briefly. Perhaps I cannot explain it at all. But the old world of empires is crumbled. Democracy is at its farcical height. The new world is not yet manifest. I shall be direct. What is your plan, Mr. Danner?"
"I couldn't tell you. Anyway, you would not believe it. But I could guarantee to deliver those two men anywhere in the country within a few days without leaving a trace of how it was done. What do you think of that, Skorvsky?"
"I think you are a dangerous and a valuable man."
"Not many people do." Hugo's eyes were moody. "I have been thinking about it for a long time. Nothing that I can remember has happened during my life that gives me a greater feeling of understanding than the imprisonment and sentencing of those men. I know poignantly the glances that are given them, the stupidity of the police and the courts, the horror-stricken attitude of those who condemn them without knowledge of the truth or a desire for such knowledge." He buried his face in his hands and then looked up quickly. "I know all that passionately and intensely. I know the blind fury to which it all gives birth. I hate it. I detest it. Selfishness, stupidity, malice. I know the fear it engenders—a dreadful and a justified fear. I've felt it. Very little in this world avails against it. You'll forgive so much sentiment, Skorvsky?"
"It makes us brothers." The Russian spoke with force and simplicity. "You, too—"
Hugo crossed the room restlessly. "I don't know. I am always losing my grip. I came to Washington with a purpose and I cannot screw myself to it unremittingly. These men seem—"
Skorvsky was thinking. "Your plan for them. What assistance would you need?"
"None."
"None!"
"Why should I need help? I—never mind. I need none."
"You have your own organization?"
"There is no one but me."
Skorvsky shook his head. "I cannot—and yet—looking at you—I believe you can. I shall tell you. You will come with me to-night and meet my friends—those who are working earnestly for a new America, an America ruled by intelligence alone. Few outsiders enter our councils. We are all—nearly all—foreigners. Yet we are more American than the Maine fisherman, the Minnesota farmer. Behind us is a party that grows apace. This incident in New Jersey has added to it, as does every dense mumble of Congress, every scandalous metropolitan investigation. I shall telephone."
Hugo allowed himself to be conducted half-dubiously. But what he found was superficially, at least, what he had dreamed for himself. The house to which he was taken was pretentious; the people in its salon were amiable and educated; there was no sign of the red flag, the ragged reformer, the anarchist. The women were gracious; the men witty. As he talked to them, one by one, he began to believe that here was the nucleus around which he could construct his imaginary empire. He became interested; he expanded.
It was late in the night when Skorvsky raised his voice slightly, so that everyone would listen, and made an announcement: "Friends, I have had the honour to introduce Mr. Danner to you. Now I have the greater honour of telling you his purpose and pledge. To-morrow night he will go to New Jersey"—the silence became absolute—"and two nights later he will bring to us in person from their cells Davidoff and Pletzky."
A quick, pregnant pause was followed by excitement. They took Hugo by the hand, some of them applauded, one or two cheered, they shouldered near him, they asked questions and expressed doubts. It was broad daylight before they dispersed. Hugo walked to his house, listening to a long rhapsody from Skorvsky.
"We will make you a great man if you succeed," Skorvsky said. "Good-night, comrade."
"Good-night." Hugo went into the hall and up to his bedroom. He sat on his bed. A dullness overcame him. He had never been patronized quite in the same way as he had that night; it exerted at once a corrosive and a lethargic influence. He undressed slowly, dropping his shoes on the floor. Splendid people they were, he thought. A smaller voice suggested to him that he did not really care to go to New Jersey for the prisoners. They would be hard to locate. There would be a sensation and a mystery again. Still, he had found a purpose.
His telephone rang. He reached automatically from the bed. The room was bright with sunshine, which meant that it was late in the day. His brain took reluctant hold on consciousness. "Hello?"
"Hello? Danner, my friend—"
"Oh, hello, Skorvsky—"
"May I come up? It is important."
"Sure. I'm still in bed. But come on."
Hugo was under the shower bath when his visitor arrived. He invited Skorvsky to share his breakfast, but was impatiently refused. "Things have happened since last night, Comrade Danner. For one, I saw the chief."
"Chief?"
"You have not met him as yet. We conferred about your scheme. He—I regret to say—opposed it."
Hugo nodded. "I'm not surprised. I'll tell you what to do. You take me to him—and I'll prove conclusively that it will be successful. Then, perhaps, he will agree to sanction it. Every time I think of those two poor devils—snatched from a mob—waiting there in the dark for the electric chair—it makes my blood boil."
"Quite," Skorvsky agreed. "But you do not understand. It is not that he doubts your ability—if you failed it would not be important. He fears you might accomplish it. I assured him you would. I have faith in you."
"He's afraid I would do it? That doesn't make sense, Skorvsky."
"It does, I regret to say." His expressive face stirred with discomfort. "We were too hasty, too precipitate. I see his reason now. We cannot afford as a group to be branded as jail-breakers."
"That's—weak," Hugo said.
Skorvsky cleared his throat. "There are other matters. Since Davidoff and Pletzky were jailed, the party has grown by leaps and bounds. Money has poured in—"
"Ah," Hugo said softly, "money."
Skorvsky raged. "Go ahead. Be sarcastic. To free those men would cost us a million dollars, perhaps."
"Too bad."
"With a million—the million their electrocution will bring from the outraged—we can accomplish more than saving two paltry lives. We must be hard, we must think ahead."
"In thinking ahead, Skorvsky, do you not think of the closing of a switch and the burning of human flesh?"
"For every cause there must be martyrs. Their names will live eternally."
"And they themselves—?"
"Bah! You are impractical."
"Perhaps." Hugo ate a slice of toast with outward calm. "I was hoping for a government that—did not weigh people against dollars—"
"Nor do we!"
"No?"
Skorvsky leaped to his feet. "Fool! Dreamer! Preposterous idealist! I must be going."
Hugo sighed. "Suppose I went ahead?"
"One thing!" The Russian turned with a livid face. "One thing the chief bade me tell you. If those men escape—you die."
"Oh," Hugo said. He stared through the window. "And supposing I were to offer your chief a million—or nearly a million—for the privilege of freeing them?"
Skorvsky's face returned to its look of transfiguration, the look that had accompanied his noblest words of the night before. "You would do that, comrade?" he whispered. "You would give us—give the cause—a million? Never since the days of our Saviour has a man like you walked on this—"
Hugo stood up suddenly. "Get out of here!" His voice was a cosmic menace. "Get out of here, you dirty swine. Get out of here before I break you to matchwood, before I rip out your guts and stuff them back through your filthy, lying throat. Get out, oh, God, get out!"