He mounted the last flight of stairs into an area of glass-paneled doors, behind which the creative business of the great concern was conducted. Out of one marked "Private," closing it softly and stepping softly, came a round-shouldered, stooping man of middle age, with the apprehensive and palliating manner of a long-service private secretary who has many things to remember and many persons to appease with explanations. It was evident that Peter Mortimer had just come from The Presence. At sight of Jack he drew back in a surprise that broke into a beaming delight which played over his tired and wrinkled features in ecstasy.
"Jack! Jack! You did it! You did it!" he cried.
"Peter!" Jack seized the secretary's hands and swung them back and forth.
"You've got a grip of iron! And tanned—my, how you're tanned! You did it, Jack, you did it! It hardly seems credible, when I think of the last time I saw you."
It was then that the secretary had seen a Jack with his eyes moist; a Jack pasty-faced, hollow-cheeked; and, in what was a revolutionary outburst for a unit in the offices, Peter Mortimer had put his arm around the boy in a cry for the success of the Odyssey for health which the heir was about to begin. And Mortimer's words were sweet, while the words of the farewell from the other side of the glass-paneled door marked "Private" were acrid with the disappointed hopes of the speaker.
"You have always been a weakling, Jack, and I have had little to say about your rearing. Go out to the desert and stay—stay till you are strong!" declared the voice of strength, as if glad to be freed of the sight of weakness in its own image.
"Father did not come to meet me?" Jack observed questioningly now to Mortimer.
"He was very busy—he did not feel certain about the nature of your telegram—he—" and Mortimer's impulses withdrew into the shell of the professional private secretary.
"I wired that he should see for himself if I were well. So he shall!" said Jack, turning toward the door.
"Yes—that will be all right—yes, there is no one with him!"
Mortimer, in the very instinct of long practice, was about to go in to announce the visitor, but paused. As Jack entered, whatever else may have been in his eyes, there was no moisture.
John Wingfield, Sr. sat at a mahogany table without a single drawer, in the centre of a large room with bare, green-tinted walls. His oculist had said that green was the best color for the eyes. Beside the green blotting-pad in front of him was a pile of papers. These would either be disposed of in the course of the day or, if any waited on the morrow's decision, would be taken away by Peter Mortimer overnight. When he rose to go home it was always with a clear desk; a habit, a belief of his singularly well-ordered mind in the mastery of the teeming detail that throbbed under the thin soles of his soft kid shoes. On the other side of the pad was the telephone, and beyond it the supreme implements of his will, a row of pearl-topped push-buttons.
The story of John Wingfield, Sr.'s rise and career, as the lieutenants of the offices and the battalions of the shopping floors knew it, was not the story, perhaps, as Dr. Bennington or Peter Mortimer knew it; but, then, doctors and private secretaries are supposed to hold their secrets. There was little out of the commonplace in the world's accepted version. You may hear its like from the moneyed host at his dinner table in New York or as he shows you over the acres of his country estate, enthusing with a personal narrative of conquest which is to him unique. John Wingfield, Sr. makes history for us in the type of woman whom he married and the type of son she bore him.
He was the son of a New England country clergyman, to whom working his way through college in order to practise a profession made no appeal. Birth and boyhood in poverty had taught him, from want of money, the power of money. He sought the centre of the market-place. At sixteen he was a clerk, marked by his industry not less than by his engaging manners, on six dollars a week in the little store that was the site of his present triumph. Of course he became a partner and then owner. It was his frequent remark, when he turned reminiscent, that if he could only get as good clerks as he was in his day he would soon have a monopoly of supplying New York and its environs with all it ate and wore and needed to furnish its houses; which raises the point that possibly such an equality of high standards in efficiency might make all clerks employers.
The steady flame of his egoism was fanned with his Successes. Without real intimates or friends, he had an effective magnetism in making others do his bidding. It had hardly occurred to him that his discovery of the principle of never doing anything yourself that you can win others to do for you and never failing, when you have a minute to spare, to do a thing yourself when you can do it better than any assistant, was already a practice with leaders in trade and industry before the Pharaohs.
Life had been to him a ladder which he ascended without any glances to right or left or at the rung that he had left behind. The adaptable processes of his mind kept pace with his rise. He made himself at home in each higher stratum of atmosphere. His marriage, delayed until he was forty and already a man of power, was still another upward step. Alice Jamison brought him capital and position. The world was puzzled why she should have accepted him; but this stroke of success he now considered as the vital error of a career which, otherwise, had been flawlessly planned. Yet he could flatter his egoism with the thought that it was less a fault of judgment than of the uncertainty of feminine temperament, which could not be measured by logic.
New York saw little of Mrs. Wingfield after Jack's birth. Her friends knew her as a creature all life and light before her marriage; they realized that the life and light had passed out of her soon after the boy came; and thenceforth they saw and heard little of her. She had given herself up to the insistent possessorship and company of her son. Those who met her when travelling reported how frail she was and how constrained.
Jack was fourteen when his mother died. He was brought home and sent to school in America; and two-years later Dr. Bennington announced that the slender youngster, who had been so completely estranged from the affairs of the store, must matriculate in the ozone of high altitudes instead of in college, if his life were to be saved. Whether Jack were riding over themesasof Arizona or playing in a villa garden in Florence, John Wingfield, Sr.'s outlook on life was the same. It was the obsession of self in his affairs. After the eclipse of his egoism the deluge. The very thought that anyone should succeed him was a shock reminding him of growing age in the midst of the full possession of his faculties, while he felt no diminution of his ambition.
"I am getting better," came the occasional message from that stranger son. And the father kept on playing the tune of accruing millions on the push-buttons. His decision to send Dr. Bennington to Arizona came suddenly, just after he had turned sixty-three. He had had an attack of grip at the same time that his attention had been acutely called to the demoralization of another great business institution whose head had died without issue, leaving his affairs in the hands of trustees.
Two days of confinement in his room with a high pulse had brought reflection and the development of atavism. What if the institution built as a monument to himself should also pass! What if the name of Wingfield, his name, should no longer float twelve stories high over his building! He foresaw the promise of companionship of a restless and ghastly apparition in the future.
But he recovered rapidly from his illness and his mental processes were as keen and prehensile as ever. Checking off one against the other, with customary shrewdness, he had a number of doctors go over him, and all agreed that he was good for twenty years yet. Twenty years! Why, Jack would be middle-aged by that time! Twenty years was the difference between forty-three and sixty-three. Since he was forty-three he had quintupled his fortune. He would at least double it again. He was not old; he was young; he was an exceptional man who had taken good care of himself. The threescore and ten heresy could not apply to him.
Bennington's telegram irritated him with its lack of precision. Fifteen hundred dollars and expenses to send an expert to Arizona and in return this unbusinesslike report: "You will see Jack for yourself. He is coming."
In the full enjoyment of health, observing every nice rule for longevity, his slumber sweet, his appetite good, John Wingfield, Sr. had less interest in John Wingfield, Jr. than he had when his bones were aching with the grip. Jack's telegram from Chicago announcing the train by which he would arrive aroused an old resentment, which dated far back to Jack's childhood and to a frail woman who had been proof against her husband's will.
Did this home-coming mean a son who could learn the business; a strong, shrewd, cool-headed son? A son who could be such an adjutant as only one who is of your own flesh and blood can be in the full pursuit of the same family interest as yourself? If Jack were well, would not Bennington have said so? Would he not have emphasized it? This was human nature as John Wingfield, Sr. knew it; human nature which never missed a chance to ingratiate itself by announcing success in the service of a man of power.
The spirit of his farewell message to Jack, which said that strength might return but bade weakness to remain away, and the injured pride of seeing a presentment of wounded egoism in the features of a sickly boy, which had kept him from going to Arizona, were again dominant. Yet that morning he had a pressing sense of distraction. Even Mortimer noticed it as something unusual and amazing. He kept reverting to Jack's history between flashes of apprehension and he was angry with himself over his inability to concentrate his mind. Concentration was his god. He could turn from lace-buyer to floor-walker with the quickness of the swing of an electric switch. Concentrate and he was oblivious to everything but the subject in hand. He was in one of the moments of apprehension, half staring at the buttons on the desk rather than at the papers, when he heard the door open without warning and looked up to see a lean, sturdy height filling the doorway and the light from the window full on a bronzed and serene face.
More than ever was Jack like David come over the hills in his incarnation of sleeping energy. Instead of a sling he carried the rose. Into the abode of the nicely governed rules of longevity came the atmosphere of some invasive spirit that would make the stake of life the foam on the crest of a charge in a splendid moment; the spirit of Señor Don't Care pausing inquiringly, almost apologetically, as some soldier in dusty khaki might if he had marched into a study unawares.
Jack was waiting, waiting and smiling, for his father to speak. In a swift survey, his features transfixed at first with astonishment, then glowing with pride, the father half rose from his chair, as if in an impulse to embrace the prodigal. But he paused. He felt that something under his control was getting out of his control. He felt that he had been tricked. The boy must have been well for a long time. Yes! But he was well! That was the vital point. He was well, and magnificent in his vigor.
The father made another movement; and still Jack was waiting, inquiring yet not advancing. And John Wingfield, Sr. wished that he had gone to the station; he wished that he had paid a visit to Arizona. This thought working in his mind supplied Jack's attitude with an aspect which made the father hesitate and then drop back into his chair, confused and uncertain for the first time in his own office.
"Well, Jack, you—you surely do look cured!" he said awkwardly. "You see, I—I was a little surprised to see you at the office. I sent the limousine for you, thinking you would want to go straight to the house and wash off the dust of travel. Didn't you connect?"
"Yes, thank you, father—and when you didn't meet me—"
"I—I was very busy. I meant to, but something interrupted—I—" The father stopped, confounded by his own hesitation.
"Of course," said Jack. He spoke deferentially, understandingly. "I know how busy you always are."
Yet the tone was such to John Wingfield, Sr.'s ears that he eyed Jack cautiously, sharply, in the expectancy that almost any kind of undisciplined force might break loose from this muscular giant whom he was trying to reconcile with the Jack whom he had last seen.
"I thought I'd stretch my legs, so I came over to the store to see how it had grown," said Jack. "I don't interrupt—for a moment?"
He sat down on the chair opposite his father's and laid his faded cowpuncher hat and the rose on the desk. They looked odd in the company of the pushbuttons and the pile of papers in that neutral-toned room which was chilling in its monotony of color. And though Jack was almost boyishly penitent, in the manner of one who comes before parental authority after he has been in mischief, still John Wingfield, Sr. could not escape the dead weight of an impression that he was speaking to a stranger and not to his own flesh and blood. He wished now that he had shown affection on Jack's entrance. He had a desire to grip the brown hand that was on the edge of the desk fingering the rose stem; but the lateness of the demonstration, its futility in making up for his previous neglect, and some subtle influence radiating from Jack's person, restrained him. It was apparent that Jack might sit on in silence indefinitely; in a desert silence.
"Well, Jack, I hear you had a ranch," said the father, with a faint effort at jocularity.
"Yes, and a great crop of alfalfa," answered Jack, happily.
"And it seems that all the time you were away you have never used your allowance, so it has just been piling up for you."
"I didn't need it. I had quite sufficient from the income of my mother's estate."
"Yes—your mother—I had forgotten!"
"Naturally, I preferred to use that, when I was of so little service to you unless I got strong, as you said," Jack said, very quietly.
Now came another silence, the silence of luminous, unsounded depths concealing that in the mind which has never been spoken or even taken form. Jack's garden of words had dried up, as his ranch would dry up for want of water. He rose to go, groping for something that should express proper contrition for wasted years, but it refused to come. He picked up the rose and the hat, while the father regarded him with stony wonder which said: "Are you mine, or are you not? What is the nature of this new strength? On what will it turn?"
For Jack's features had set with a strange firmness and his eyes, looking into his father's, had a steady light. It seemed as if he might stalk out of the office forever, and nothing could stop him. But suddenly he flashed his smile; he had looked about searching for a talisman and found it in the rose, which set his garden of words abloom again.
"This room is so bare it must be lonely for you," he said. "Wouldn't it be a good idea to cheer it up a bit? To have this rose in a vase on your table where you could see it, instead of riding about in an empty automobile box?"
"Why, there is a whole cold storage booth full of them down on the first floor!" said the father.
"Yes, I saw them in their icy prison under the electric light bulbs. The beads of water on them were like tears of longing to get out for the joy of their swan song under a woman's smiles or beside a sick bed," said Jack, in the glow of real enthusiasm.
"Good line for the ad writer!" his father exclaimed, instinctively. "You always did have fanciful ideas, Jack."
"Yes, I suppose I have!" he said, with some surprise and very thoughtfully. "I suppose that I was born with them and never weeded them out."
"No doubt!" and the father frowned.
Surveying the broad shoulders before him, he was thinking how nothing but aimlessness and fantasies and everything out of harmony with the career to come had been encouraged in the son. But he saw soberness coming into Jack's eyes and with it the pressure of a certain resoluteness of purpose. And now Jack spoke again, a trifle sadly, as if guessing his father's thoughts.
"It will be a case of weeding for me in the future, won't it?" he asked wanly, as he rose. "I am full of foolish ideas that are just bound to run away with me."
"Jack! Jack!" John Wingfield, Sr. put his hands out to the shoulders of his son and gripped them strongly, and for a second let his own weight half rest on that sturdy column which he sensed under the grip. His pale face, the paleness of the type that never tans, flushed. "Jack, come!" he said.
He permitted himself something like real dramatic feeling as he signalled his son to follow him out of the office and led the way to a corner of one of the balconies where, under the light from the glass roof of the great central court, he could see down the tiers of floors to the jewelry counter which sparkled at the bottom of the well.
"Look! look!" he exclaimed, rubbing his palms together with a peculiar crisp sound. "All selling my goods! All built from the little store where I began as a clerk!"
"It's—it's immense!" gasped Jack; and he felt a dizziness and confusion in gazing at this kind of an abyss.
"And it's only beginning! It's to go on growing and growing! You see why I wanted you to be strong, Jack; why it would not do to be weak if you had all this responsibility."
This was a form of apology for his farewell to Jack, but the message was the same: He had not wanted a son who should be of his life and heart and ever his in faults and illnesses. This was the recognizable one of the shadows between them now recalled. He had wanted a fresh physical machine into which he could blow the breath of his own masterful being and instil the cunning of his experience. He saw in this straight, clean-limbed youth at his side the hope of Jack's babyhood fulfilled, in the projection of his own ego as a living thing after he himself was gone.
"And it is to go on growing and growing, in my name and your name—JohnWingfield!"
Jack was swallowing spasmodically; he moistened his lips; he grasped the balcony railing so tight that his knuckles were white knobs on the bronze back of his hand. The father in his enthusiasm hardly noticed this.
"What couldn't I have done," he added, "if I had had all this to begin with! All that you will have to begin with!"
Jack managed a smile, rather thin and wavering.
"Yes, I am going to try my best."
"All I ask! You have me for a teacher and I know one or two little things!" said the father, fairly grinning in the transmission of his joke. "Now, you must be short on clothes," he added; "so you can get something ready-made downstairs while you have some making at Thompson's."
"Don't you buy your clothes, your best clothes, I mean, in your own store?" Jack asked. It was his first question in getting acquainted with his future property.
"No. We cater to a little bigger class of trade—one of the many twists of the business," was the answer. "And now we'll meet at dinner, shall we, and have a good long talk," he concluded, closing the interview and turning to the door, his mind snapping back to the matter he was about to take up when he had been interrupted with more eagerness than ever, now that his egoism thrilled with a still greater purpose.
"I—I left my hat on your desk," Jack explained, as he followed his father into the office.
"Well, you don't want to be carrying packages about," said John Wingfield, Sr. "That is hardly the fashion in New York, though John Wingfield's son can make it so if he wants to. I'll have that flat-brimmed western one sent up to the house and you can fit out with another when you go downstairs for clothes. That is, I suppose you will want to keep this as a memento, eh?" and he held out the cowpuncher, sweeping it with a sardonic glance.
"No," Jack answered decisively, out of the impulse that came with the sight of the veteran companion that had shielded him from the sun on the trail. It was good to have any kind of an impulse after his giddiness on the balcony at sight of all the phantasmagoria of detail that he must master.
If he were to be equal to this future there must be an end of temptation. He must shake himself free of the last clinging bit of chrysalis of the old life. His amazed father saw the child of the desert, where convention is made by your fancy and the supply of water in your canteen, go to the window and raise the sash. Leaning out, he let the hat drop into Broadway, with his eyes just over the line of the ledge while he watched it fall, dipping and gliding, to the feet of a messenger boy, who picked it up, waved it gleefully aloft before putting it over his cap, and with mock strides of grandeur went his way.
"That gave him a lot of pleasure—and a remarkably quick system for delivering goods, wasn't it?" said Jack, cheerfully.
"Yes, I should say so!" assented his father, returning to his seat. "Dinner at seven!" he called before the door closed; and as his finger sought one of the push-buttons it rested for a moment on the metal edge of the socket, his head bowed, while an indefinable emotion, mixed of prophecy and recollection, must have fluttered through the routine channels of his vigorous mind.
As Jack came out of the office, Mortimer appeared from an adjoining room in furtive, mouselike curiosity.
"Not much damage done!" said Jack, in happy relief from the ordeal. "I am without a hat, but I have the rose." He held it up before Mortimer's worn, kindly face that had been so genuine in welcome. "Yes, I must have kept it to decorate you, Peter!"
Ineffectually, in timorous confusion, the old secretary protested whileJack fastened it in his buttonhole.
"And you are going to help me, aren't you, Peter?" Jack went on, seriously. "You are going to hold up a finger of warning when I get off the course. I am to be practical, matter-of-fact; there's to be an end to all fantastic ideas."
An end to all fantastic ideas! But it was hardly according to the gospel of the matter-of-fact to take Burleigh, the fitter, out to luncheon. Jack might excuse himself on the ground that he had not yet begun his apprenticeship and had several hours of freedom before his first lesson at dinner. This ecstasy of a recess, perhaps, made him lay aside the derby, which the clerk said was very becoming, and choose a softer head-covering with a bit of feather in the band, which the clerk, with positive enthusiasm, said was still more becoming. At all events, it was easy on his temples, while the derby was stiff and binding and conducive to a certain depression of spirits.
Burleigh, the fitter, was almost as old as Mortimer. He rose to the exceptional situation, his eyes lighting as he surveyed the form to be clothed with a professional gratification unsurpassed by that of Dr. Bennington in plotting Jack's chest with a stethoscope.
"Yes, sir, we will have that dinner-jacket ready to-night, sir, depend upon it—and couldn't I show you something in cheviots?"
Jack broke another precedent. A Wingfield, he decided to patronize the Wingfield store, because he saw how supremely happy every order made Burleigh.
"You can do it as well as Thompson's?" he asked.
"With you, yes, sir—though Thompson is a great expert on round shoulders. But with you, yes, sir!"
When the business of measuring was over, while Burleigh peered triumphant over the pile of cloths from which the masterpieces were to be fashioned, Jack said that he had a ripping appetite and he did not see why he and Burleigh should not appease their hunger in company. Burleigh gasped; then he grinned in abandoned delight and slipped off his shiny coat and little tailor's apron that bristled with pins.
They went to a restaurant of reputation, which Jack said was in keeping with the occasion when a man changed his habits from Arizona simplicity to urban multiplicity of courses. And what did Burleigh like? Burleigh admitted that if he were a plutocrat he would have caviar at least once a day; and caviar appeared in a little glass cup set in the midst of cracked ice, flanked by crisp toast. After caviar came other things to Burleigh's taste. He was having such an awesomely grand feast that he was tongue-tied; but Jack could never eat in silence until he had forgotten how to tell stories. So he told Burleigh stories of the trail and of life in Little Rivers in a way that reflected the desert sunshine in Burleigh's eyes. Burleigh thought that he would like to live in Little Rivers. Almost anyone might after hearing Jack's description, in the joy of its call to himself.
"Now, if you would trust me," said Burleigh, when they left the restaurant, "I should like to send out for some cloths not in stock for a couple of suits. And couldn't I make you up three or four fancy waistcoats, with a little color in them—the right color to go with the cloth? You can carry a little color—decidedly, yes."
"Yes, I rather like color," said Jack, succumbing to temptation, though he felt that the heir to great responsibilities ought to dress in the most neutral of tones.
"And I should like to select the ties to go with the suits and a few shirts, just to carry out my scheme—a kind of professional triumph for me, you see. May I?"
"Go ahead!" said Jack.
"And you can depend on your evening suit to be up in time. But I am going to rush a little broader braid on those ready-made trousers—you can carry that, too," Burleigh concluded.
When they parted Jack turned into Fifth Avenue. Before he had gone a block the bulky eminence of a Fifth Avenue stage awakened his imagination. How could anybody think of confinement in a taxicab when he might ride in the elephant's howdah of that top platform, enjoying mortal superiority over surrounding humanity? Jack hung the howdah with silken streamers and set a mahout's turban on the head of the man on the seat in front of him, while the glistening semi-oval tops of the limousines floating in the mist of the rising grade from Madison Square to Forty-second Street, swarmed and halted in a kind of blind, crampedpas de quatrefrom cross street to cross street, amid the breaking surge of pedestrians.
"Such a throbbing of machine motion," he thought, "that I don't see how anybody can have an emotion of his own without bumping into somebody else's."
It was a scene of another age and world to him, puzzling, overpowering, dismal, mocking him with a sense of loneliness that he had never felt on the desert. Could he ever catch up with this procession which had all the time been moving on in the five years of his absence? Could he learn to talk and think in the regulated manner of the traffic rules of convention? The few chums of his brief home school-days were long away from the fellowship of academies; they had settled in their grooves, with established intimacies. If he found his own flock he could claim admission to the fold only with the golden key of his millions, rather than by the password of kindred understanding.
The tripping, finely-clad women, human flower of all the maelstrom of urban toil, in their detachment seemed only to bring up a visualized picture of Mary. What would he not like to do for her! He wished that he could pick up the Waldorf and set it on the other side of the street as a proof of the overmastering desire that possessed him whenever she was in his mind.
And the Doge! He was the wisest man in the world. With a nod of well-considered and easy generosity Jack presented him with the new Public Library. And then all the people on the sidewalks vanished and the buildings melted away into sunswept levels, and the Avenue was a trail down which Mary came on her pony in the resplendent sufficiency of his dreams.
"Great heavens!" he warned himself. "And I am to take my first lesson in running the business this evening! What perfect lunacy comes from mistaking the top of a Fifth Avenue stage for a howdah!"
How thankful he was that the old brick corner mansion in Madison Avenue, with age alone to recommend its architecture of the seventies—let it stand for what it was—had not been replaced by one of stone freshly polished each year! The butler who opened the door was new and stiffer than the one of the old days; but he saw that the broad hall, with the stairs running across the rear in their second flight, was little more changed than the exterior.
Five years since he had left that hall! He was in the thrall of anticipation incident to seeing old associations with the eyes of manhood. The butler made to take his hat, but Jack, oblivious of the attention, went on to the doorway of the drawing-room, his look centering on a portrait that faced the door. In this place of honor he saw a Gainsborough. He uttered a note of pained surprise.
"There used to be another portrait here. Where is it?" he demanded.
The butler, who had heard that the son of the house was an invalid, had not recovered from his astonishment at the appearance of health of the returned prodigal.
"Upstairs, sir," he answered. "When Mr. Wingfield got this prize last year, sir—"
Though the butler had spoken hardly a dozen words, he became conscious of something atmospheric that made him stop in the confusion of one who finds that he has been garrulous with an explanation that does not explain.
"Please take this upstairs and bring back the other," said Jack.
"Yes, sir. You will be going to your room, sir, and while—" The butler had a feeling of a troublesome future between two masters.
"Now, please!" said Jack, settling into a chair to wait.
The Gainsborough countess, with her sweeping plumes, her rich, fleshy, soft tones, her charming affectation, which gave you, after the art interest, no more human interest in her than in a draped model, was carried upstairs and back came the picture that it had displaced. The frame still bore at the bottom the title "Portrait of a Lady," under which it had been exhibited at the Salon many years ago. It was by a young artist, young then, named Sargent. He had the courage of his method, this youngster, no less than Hals, who also worked his wonders with little paint when this suited his genius best. The gauze of the gown where it blended with the background at the edge of the line of arm was so thin, seemingly made by a single brush-stroke, that it almost showed the canvas.
A purpose in that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! The eyes of the portrait alone seemed deep. They were lambent and dark, looking straight ahead inquiringly, yet in the knowledge that no answer to the Great Riddle could change the course of her steps in the blind alley of a life whose tenement walls were lighted with her radiance. You could see through the gown, through the flesh of that frail figure, so lacking in sensuousness yet so glowing with a quiet fire, to the soul itself. She seemed of such a delicate, chaste fragility that she could be shattered by a single harsh touch. There would be no outcry except the tinkle of the fragments. The feelings of anyone who witnessed the breaking and heard the tinkle would be a criterion of his place in the wide margin between nerveless barbarism and sensitive gentility.
"I give! I give! I give!" was her message.
For a long time, he had no measure of it, Jack sat studying the portrait, set clear in many scenes of memory in review. It had been a face as changeful as the travels, ever full of quick lights and quick shadows. He had had flashes of it as it was in the portrait in its very triumph of resignation. He had known it laughing with stories of fancy which she told him; sympathetic in tutorial illumination as she gave him lessons and brought out the meaning of a line of poetry or a painting; beset by the restlessness which meant another period of travel; intense as fire itself, gripping his hands in hers in a defiance of possession; in moods when both its sadness and its playfulness said, "I don't care!" and again, fleeing from his presence to hide her tears.
It was with the new sight of man's maturity and soberness that he now saw his mother, feeling the intangible and indestructible feminine majesty of her; feeling her fragility which had brought forth her living soul in its beauty and impressionableness as a link with the cause of his Odyssey; believing that she was rejoicing in his strength and understanding gloriously that it had only brought him nearer to her.
After he had been to his room to dress he returned to the same chair and settled into the same reverie that was sounding depths of his being that he had never suspected. He was mutely asking her help, asking the support of her frail, feminine courage for his masculine courage in the battle before him; and little tremors of nervous determination were running through him, when he heard his father's footstep and became conscious of his father's presence in the doorway.
There was a moment, not of hesitation but of completing a thought, before he looked up and rose to his feet. In that moment, John Wingfield, Sr. had his own shock over the change in the room. The muscles of his face twitched in irritation, as if his wife's very frailty were baffling invulnerability. Straightening his features into a mask, his eyes still spoke his emotion in a kind of stare of resentment at the picture.
Then he saw his son's shoulders rising above his own and looked into his son's eyes to see them smiling. Long isolated by his power from clashes of will under the roof of his store or his house, the father had a sense of the rippling flash of steel blades. A word might start a havoc of whirling, burning sentences, confusing and stifling as a desert sandstorm; or it might bring a single killing flash out of gathering clouds.
Thus the two were facing each other in a silence oppressive to both, which neither knew how to break, when relief came in the butler's announcement of dinner. Indeed, by such small, objective interruptions do dynamic inner impulses hang that this little thing may have suppressed the lightnings.
The father was the first to speak. He hoped that a first day in New York had brought Jack a good appetite; certainly, he could see that the store had given him a wonderful fit for a rush order.
There were to be no stories of Little Rivers at dinner; no questions asked about desert life. This chapter of Jack's career was a past rung of the ladder to John Wingfield, Sr. who was ever looking up to the rungs above. The magnetism and charm with which he won men to his service now turned to the immediate problem of his son, whom he was to refashion according to his ideas.
"Are you ready to settle down?" he asked, half fearful lest that scene in the drawing-room might have wrought a change of purpose.
In answer he was seeing another Jack; a Jack relaxed, amiable, even amenable.
"If you have the patience," said Jack. "You know, father, I haven't a cash-register mind. I'm starting out on a new trail and I am likely to go lame at times. But I mean to be game."
He looked very frankly and earnestly into his father's eyes.
"Wild oats sown! My boy, after all!" thought the father. "Respected his mother! Well, didn't I respect mine? Of course—and let him! It is good principles. It is right. He has health; that is better than schooling."
In place of the shock of the son's will against his, he was feeling it as a force which might yet act in unison with his. He expanded with the pride of the fortune-builder. He told how a city within a city is created and run; of tentacles of investment and enterprise stretching beyond the store in illimitable ambition; how the ball of success, once it was set rolling, gathered bulk of its own momentum and ever needed closer watching to keep it clear of obstacles.
"And I am to stand on top like a gymnast on a sphere or be rolled under," thought Jack. "And I'll have cloth of gold breeches and a balancing pole tipped with jewels; but—but—"
"A good listener, and that is a lot!" thought the father, happily.
Jack had interrupted neither with questions nor vagaries. He was gravely attentive, marveling over this story of a man's labor and triumph.
"And the way to learn the business is not from talks by me," said his father, finally. "You cannot begin at the top."
"No! no!" said Jack, aghast. "The top would be quite too insecure, too dizzy to start with."
"Right!" the father exclaimed, decidedly. "You must learn each department of itself, and then how it works in with the others. It will be drudgery, but it is best—right at the bottom!"
"Yes, father, where there is no danger of a fall."
"You will be put on an apprentice salary of ten dollars a week."
"And I'll try to earn it."
"Of course, you understand that the ten is a charge against the store. That's business. But as for a private allowance, you are John Wingfield's son and—"
"I think I have enough of my own for the present," Jack put in.
"As you wish. But if you need more, say the word. And you shall name the department where you are to begin. Did you get any idea of which you'd choose from looking the store over to-day?"
"That's very considerate of you!" Jack answered. He was relieved and pleased and made his choice quickly, though he mentioned it half timidly as if he feared that it might be ridiculous, so uncertain was he about the rules of apprenticeship.
"You see I have been used to the open air and I'd like a little time in which to acclimatize myself in New York. Now, all those big wagons that bring the goods in and the little wagons that take them out—there is an out-of-door aspect to the delivery service. Is that an important branch to learn?"
"Very—getting the goods to the customer—very!"
"Then I'll start with that and sort of a roving commission to look over the other departments."
"Good! We will consider it settled. And, Jack, every man's labor that you can save and retain efficiency—that is the trick! Organization and ideas, that's what makes the employer and so makes success. Why, Jack, if you could cut down the working costs in the delivery department or improve the service at the present cost, why—" John Wingfield, Sr. rubbed the palms of his hands together delightedly.
Everything was going finely—so far. He added that proviso ofso farinstinctively.
"Besides, Jack," he went on, changing to another subject that was equally vital to his ego, "this name of Wingfield is something to work for. I was the son of a poor New England clergyman, but there is family back of it; good blood, good blood! I was not the first John Wingfield and you shall not be the last!"
He rose from the table, bidding the servant to bring the coffee to the drawing-room. With the same light, quick step that he ascended the flights in the store, he led the way downstairs, his face alive with the dramatic anticipation that it had worn when he took Jack out of the office to look down from the balcony of the court.
"Ah, we have something besides the store, Jack!" he was saying, in the very exultation of the pride of possession, as he went to the opposite side of the mantel from the mother's portrait and turned on the reflector over a picture.
Jack saw a buccaneer under the brush of the gold and the shadows of Spain; a robust, ready figure on fighting edge, who seemed to say, "After you, sir; and, then, pardon me, but it's your finish, sir!"
"It's a Velasquez!" Jack exclaimed.
"And you knew that at a glance!" said his father.
"Why, yes!"
"Not many Velasquezes in America," said the father, thinking, incidentally, that his son would not have to pay the dealers a heavy toll for an art education, while he revelled in a surprise that he was evidently holding back.
"Or many better Velasquezes than this, anywhere," added Jack. "What mastery! What a gift from heaven that was vouchsafed to a human being to paint like that!"
He was in a spell, held no less by the painter's art than by the subject.
"Absolutely a certified Velasquez, bought from the estate of Count Galting," continued his father. "I paid a cool two hundred and fifty thousand for it. And that isn't all, Jack, that isn't all that you are going to drudge for as an apprentice in the delivery department. I know what I am talking about. I wasn't fooled by any of the genealogists who manufacture ancestors. I had it all looked up by four experts, checking one off against another."
"Yes," answered Jack, absently. He had hardly heard his father's words. In fervent scrutiny he was leaning forward, his weight on the ball of the foot, the attitude of the man in the picture.
"And who do you think he is—who?" pursued John Wingfield, Sr.
"A man who fought face to face with the enemy; a man whom men followed!Velasquez caught all that!" answered Jack.
"That old fellow was a great man in his day—a great Englishman—and his name was John Wingfield! He was your ancestor and mine!"
After a quick breath of awakening comprehension Jack took a step nearer the portrait, all his faculties in the throe of beaming inquiry of Señor Don't Care and desert freedom, in the self-same, alert readiness of pose as the figure he was facing.
"They say I resemble him!" The father repeated that phrase which he had used in benignant satisfaction to many a guest, but now seeing with greedy eyes a likeness between his son and the ancestor deeper than mere resemblance of feature, he added: "But you—you, Jack, you're the dead spit of him!"
"Yes," said Jack, as if he either were not surprised or were too engrossed to be interested. To the buccaneer's "After you, sir; and, then, your finish, sir!" he seemed to be saying, in the fully-lived spirit of imagination: "A good epitaph, sir! I'll see that it is written on your tombstone!"
The father, singularly affected by the mutual and enjoyed challenge that he was witnessing, half expected to see a sword leap out of the scabbard of the canvas and another from Jack's side.
"If he had lived in our day," said the father, "he would have built himself a great place; he would have been the head of a great institution, just as I am."
"Two centuries is a long way to fetch a comparison," answered Jack, hazily, out of a corner of his brain still reserved for conversation, while all the rest of it was centered elsewhere. "He might have been a cow-puncher, a revolutionist, or an aviator. Certainly, he would never have been a camp-follower."
"At all events, a man of power. It's in the blood!"
"It's in the blood!" Jack repeated, with a sort of staring, lingering emphasis. He was hearing Mary's protest on the pass; her final, mysterious reason for sending him away; her "It's not in the blood!" There could be no connection between this and the ancestor; yet, in the stirred depths of his nature, probing the inheritance in his veins, her hurt cry had come echoing to his ears.
"Why, I would have paid double the price rather than not have got that picture!" the father went on. "There is a good deal of talk about family trees in this town and a strong tendency in some quarters for second generations of wealth to feel a little superiority over the first generation. Here I come along with an ancestor eight generations back, painted by Velasquez. I tell you it was something of a sensation when I exhibited him in the store!"
"You—you—" and Jack glanced at his father perplexedly; "you exhibited him in the store!" he said.
"Why, yes, as a great Velasquez I had just bought. I didn't advertise him as my ancestor, of course. Still, the fact got around; yes, the fact got around, Jack."
While Jack studied the picture, his father studied Jack, whose face and whose manner of blissful challenge to all comers in the unconcern of easy fatality and ready blade seemed to grow more and more like that of the first John Wingfield. At length, Jack passed over to the other side of the mantel and turned on the reflector over the portrait of his mother; and, in turn, standing silently before her all his militancy was gone and in its place came the dreamy softness with which he would watch the Eternal Painter cloud-rolling on the horizon. And he was like her not in features, not in the color of hair or eyes, but in a peculiar sensitiveness, distinguished no less by a fatalism of its own kind than was the cheery aggressiveness of the buccaneer.
"Yes, father," he said, "that old ruffian forebear of ours could swear and could kill. But he had the virtue of truth. He could not act or live a lie. And I guess something else—how supremely gentle he could be before a woman like her. Velasquez brought out a joyous devil and Sargent brought out a soul!"
John Wingfield, Sr., who stood by the grate, was drumming nervously on the mantel. The drumming ceased. The fingers rested rigid and white on the dark wood. Alive to another manifestation of the lurking force in his son, he hastened to change the subject.
"I had almost forgotten that you always had a taste for art, Jack."
"Yes, from her;" which was hardly changing the subject.
"As for the first John Wingfield, you may be sure that I wanted to knoweverything there was to know about the old fellow," said the father. "SoI set a lot of bookworms looking up the archives of the English andSpanish governments and digging around in the libraries after material.Then I had it all put together in proper shape by a literary sharp."
"You have that!" cried Jack. "You have the framework from which you can build the whole story of him—the story of how he fought and how Velasquez came to paint him? Oh, I want to read it!" With an unexplored land between gilt-tooled covers under his arm he went upstairs early, in the transport of wanderlust that had sent him away over the sand from Little Rivers.Sí, sí, Firio, outward bound, camp under the stars! If Señor Don't Care's desert journeys were over—and he had no thought but that they were—there was no ban on travelling in fancy over sea trails in the ancestor's company.
Jack was with the buccaneer when he boarded the enemy at the head of his men; with him before the Board of Admiralty when, a young captain of twenty-two, he refused to lie to save his skin; with him when, in answer to the scolding of Elizabeth, then an old woman, he said: "It is glorious for one who fought so hard for Your Majesty to have the recognition even of Your Majesty's chiding in answer to the protest of the Spanish ambassador," which won Elizabeth's reversal of the Admiralty's decision; with him when, in a later change of fortune, he went to the court of Spain for once on a mission which required a sheathed blade; with him when the dark eye of Velasquez, who painted men and women of his time while his colleagues were painting Madonnas, glowed with a discoverer's joy at sight of this fair-haired type of the enemy, whom he led away to his studio.
More than once was there mention of the fact that this terrible fighter was gentle with women and fonder of the company of children than of statesmen or courtiers. He had married the daughter of a great merchant, a delicate type of beauty; the last to fascinate a buccaneer, according to the gossips of the time. Rumor had it that he had taken her for the wherewithal to pay the enormous debts contracted in his latest exploit. To disprove this he went to sea in a temper with a frigate and came back laden with the treasure of half a dozen galleons, to find that his wife had died at the birth of a son. He promised himself to settle down for good; but the fog of London choked lungs used to soft airs; he heard the call of the sun and was away again to seek adventure in the broiling reaches of the Caribbean. A man of restless, wild spirit, breathing inconsistencies incomprehensible to the conventions of Whitehall! And his son had turned a Cromwellian, who, in poverty, sought refuge in America when Charles II. came to the throne; and from him, in the vicissitudes of five generations, the poor clergyman was descended.
Thus ran the tale in its completeness. The end of the ancestor's career had been in keeping with its character and course. He had been spared the slow decay of faculties in armchair reminiscence. He had gone down in his ship without striking his colors, fighting the Spaniards one to three. When Jack closed the cover on the last page tenderly and in enraptured understanding, it was past midnight.
The spaciousness of the sea under clouds of battle smoke had melted into the spaciousness of the desert under the Eternal Painter's canopy. Then four walls of a bedroom in Madison Avenue materialized, shutting out the horizon; a carpet in place of sand formed the floor; and in place of a blanket roll was a canopied bed upon which a servant had laid out a suit of pajamas. In the impulse of a desire to look into the face of the first John Wingfield in the light of all he now knew, Jack went downstairs, and in the silence of the house drank in the portrait again.
"You splendid old devil, you!" he breathed, understandingly. "How should you like to start out delivering goods with me in the morning?"
The next morning Jack went down town with his father in the limousine. About an hour later, after he had been introduced to the head of the delivery division, he was on his way up town beside a driver of one of the wagons on the Harlem route. He was in the uniform of the Wingfield light cavalry, having obtained a cap with embroidered initials on the front. The driver was like to burst from inward mirth, and Jack was regarding the prospect with veritable juvenile zest.
At dinner that evening John Wingfield, Jr. narrated his experiences of the day to John Wingfield, Sr. with the simplicity and verisimilitude that always make for both realism and true comedy.
"But, Jack, you took me too literally! It is hardly in keeping with your position! You—"
"Why, I thought that the only way to know the whole business was to play every part. Didn't you ever deliver packages in person in your early days?"
"I can't say that I did!" the father admitted wryly.
"Then it seems to me that you missed one of the most entertaining and instructive features," Jack continued. "You cannot imagine the majestic feminine disdain with which you may be informed that a five-cent bar of soap should be delivered at the back door instead of the front door. The most indignant example was a red-haired woman who was doing her own work in a flat. She fairly blazed. She wanted to know if I didn't know what dumb-waiters were for."
"And what did you say?" the father asked wearily; for the ninth JohnWingfield had a limited sense of humor.
"Oh, I try, however irritating the circumstances, to be most courtly, for the honor of the store," said Jack. "I told her that I was very sorry and I would speak to you in person about the mistake."
"You mean that you admitted who you were?"
"Oh, no! The red-haired woman laughed and took the package in at the front door," Jack responded. Anybody in Little Rivers would have understood just how he looked and smiled and why it was that the red-haired woman laughed.
"Jack—now, really, Jack, this is not quite dignified!" expostulated the father. "What do you think your ancestor would say to it?"
"I suspect that he would have made an even more ingratiating bow to the lady than I could," said Jack, thoughtfully. "They had the grand manner better developed in his day than in ours."
In the ensuing weeks John Wingfield, Sr. dwelt in a kind of infernal wonder about his son. He was cheered when some friend of his world who had met Jack in the garb of his caste, as fitted by Burleigh, would say: "Fine, strapping son you have there, Wingfield!" He was abashed and dumfounded when Jack announced that he had taken Mamie Devore, who sold culinary utensils in the basement, out to luncheon with her "steady company," Joe Mathewson, driver of one of the warehouse trucks.
"They were a little awed at first," Jack explained, "but they soon became natural. I don't know anything pleasanter than making people feel perfectly natural, do you? You see, Joe and Mamie are very real, father, and most businesslike; an ambitious, upstanding pair. They're going to have two thousand dollars saved before they marry.
"'I don't believe that a woman ought to work out after she's married,' was the way Joe put it. And Mamie, with her eyes fairly devouring him, snapped back: 'No, she'd have enough to do looking after you, you big old bluff!'
"Mamie is a wiry little thing and Joe is a heavyweight, with a hand almost as big as a baseball mit. That's partly why their practical romance is so fascinating. Why, it's wonderful the stories that are playing themselves out in that big store, father! Well, you see Joe is on a stint—two thousand before he gets Mamie. He had been making money on the side nights in boxing bouts. But Mamie stopped the fighting. She said she was not going to have a husband with the tip of his nose driven up between his eyes like a bull-dog's. And what do you imagine they are going to do with the two thousand? Buy a farm! Isn't that corking!"
John Wingfield, Sr. shrugged his shoulders, but did not express his feelings with any remark. It seemed to him that Jack must have been born without a sense of proportion.
With the breaking of spring, when gardens were beginning to sprout, Jack broadened his study to the trails of Westchester, Long Island, and New Jersey, coursed by the big automobile vans of the suburban delivery. To the people of the store, whose streets he traversed at will in unremitting wonder over its varied activities, he had brought something of the same sensation that he had to an Arizona town. He came to know the employees by name, even as he had his neighbors in Little Rivers. He nodded to the clerks as he passed down an aisle. They watched for his coming and brightened with his approach and met his smile with their smiles. In their idle moments he would stop and talk of the desert.
Although he was learning to like the store as a community of human beings its business was as the works of a watch, when all he knew was how to tell the time by the face. But he tried hard to learn; tried until his head was dizzy with a whirl of dissociated facts, which he knew ought to be associated, and under the call of his utter restlessness would disappear altogether for two or three days.
"Relieving the pressure! It's a safety-valve so I shan't blow up," he explained to his father, sadly.
"Take your time," said John Wingfield, Sr., having in mind a recent talk with Dr. Bennington.
Jack listened faithfully to his father's clear-cut lessons. He asked questions which only made his father sigh; for they had little to do with the economy of working costs. All his suggestions were extravagant; they would contribute to the joy of the employees, but not to profit. And other questions made his father frown in devising answers which were in the nature of explanations. Born of his rambling and humanly observant relations with every department, they led into the very heart of things in that mighty organization. There were times when it was hard for him to control his indignation. There were trails leading to the room with the glass-paneled door marked "Private" which he half feared to pursue.
Thus, between father and son remained that indefinable chasm of thought and habit which filial duty or politeness could not bridge. No stories of the desert were ever told at home, though it was so easy to tell them to Burleigh or Mathewson, those contrasts in a pale fitter of clothes and a herculean rustler of dry-goods boxes. But echoes of the tales came to the father through his assistants. He had the feeling of some stranger spirit in his own likeness moving there in the streets of his city under the talisman of a consanguinity that was nominal. One day he put an inquiry to the general manager concretely, though in a way to avoid the appearance of asking another's opinion about his own son.
"He has your gift of winning men to him. There is no denying his popularity with the force," said the general manager, who was a diplomat.
The same question was put to Peter Mortimer.
"We all love him. I think a lot of people in the store would march out to the desert after him," said Mortimer, with real rejoicing in his candor and courage. Indeed, of late he had been developing cheer as well as courage, imbibing both, perhaps, from the roses in the vase on his employer's desk. Jack had ordered a fresh bunch put there every day; and when employees were sick packages of grapes and bunches of flowers came to them, in Little Rivers fashion, with J.W. on the card, as if they had come from the head of the firm himself.
"Maybe Jack will soften the old man a little," ran a whisper from basement to roof. For the battalions called him "Jack," rather than "Mr. Wingfield," just as Little Rivers had.
"The boy's good nature isn't making him too familiar with the employees?" was a second question which the father had asked both the general manager and Mortimer.
"No. That is the surprising thing—the gift of being friendly without being familiar," answered the manager.
"He's got a kind of self-respect that induces respect in others," said Peter.
John Wingfield, Sr. was the proprietor of the store, but the human world of the store began to feel a kind of proprietorship in Jack, while its guardian interest in helping him in his mistakes was common enough to be a conspiracy.
And the callouses were gone from his hands. There was no longer a dividing line between tan and white on his forehead. No outward symbol of the desert clung to his person except the moments of the far vision of distances in his eyes. Superficially, on the Avenue he would have been taken for one of his caste.
But tossing a cowpuncher hat out of a window into Broadway was easier than tossing a thing out of mind. He sat up nights to write to Mary. Letter after letter he poured out as a diary of his experiences in his new world, letters breathing a pupil's hope of learning and all that pupil's sorry vagaries. No answer ever came, not even to the most appealing ones about his most adventurous conflicts with the dinosaur. He felt the chagrin of the army of unpublished novelists who lay their hearts bare on the stone slab of the dissectors in a publisher's office. He might as well have thrown all he wrote into the waste-basket so far as any result was concerned; yet he kept on writing as if it were his glorious duty to report to her as his superior. But he found a more responsive correspondent in Jim Galway; and this was the letter he received:
"The whole valley is not yet sprouting with dates as you said it would from your thinking of us. Maybe we didn't use the right seed. Your ranch is still called Jack's ranch, and Firio is doing his best and about the best I ever knew in an Indian. But as you always said, Indians are mostly human, like the rest of us, barring a sort of born twist in their intellect for which they aren't responsible. You see, Jack, a lot of your sayings still live with us, though you are gone.
"Well, Firio keeps your P.D. exercised and won't let anybody but himself ride him. He says you will need him. For you can't budge the stubborn little cuss. He declares you're coming back. When we tell him you're worth twenty millions and he's plumb full of primitive foolishness and general ignorance of the outside world, he says, 'Sí, he will come back!' like some heathen oracle that's strong on repetition and weak on vocabulary.
"Of course you know about the new addition to our citizenship, John Prather, that double of yours that you didn't happen to meet. And I might mention that by this time, after we've seen so much of him, we agree with the Doge that he doesn't look a bit like you. Well, he's making a fine ranch across the road from you, but hiring all his work done, which ain't exactly according to Little Rivers custom, as you will remember. The Doge sets a lot by him, though I can't see how there's much in common between them. This fellow's not full of all that kind of scholastic persiflage that you are, Jack. He's so all-fired practical his joints would crack if he wasn't so oily; and he's up to old man Lefferts' pretty often.
"He goes to Phoenix a good deal. When I was there the other day I heard he was circulating around among the politicians in his quiet way, and I saw him and Pete Leddy hobnobbing together. I didn't like that. But when I told the Doge of it he said he guessed there wasn't much real hobnobbing. The Doge is certainly strong for Prather. Another thing I heard was that, after all, old man Lefferts' two partners aren't dead, and Prather's been hunting them up.
"Come to think of it, I didn't tell you that Pete Leddy and some of the gang have been back in town. Of course we have every confidence in the Doge, he's been so fair to this community. Still, some of us can't help having our private suspicions, considering what a lot we have at stake. And four or five of us was talking the other night, when suddenly we all agreed how you'd shine in any trouble, and if there was going to be any—not that there is—we wished you were here.
"Well, Jack, the pass hasn't changed and the sunsets are just as grand as ever and the air just as free. The pass won't have changed and the sunsets will be doing business at the old stand when the antiquaries are digging up the remote civilization of Little Rivers and putting it in a high scale because they ran across a pot of Mrs. Galway's jam in the ruins—the same hifalutin compliment being your own when you were nursing your wound, as you will remember.
"Here's wishing you luck from the whole town, way out here in nowhere.
"As ever yours,
"James R. Galway.
"P.S. Belvy Smith wants to know if you won't write just one story. I told her you were too busy for such nonsense now. But she refuses to believe it. She says being busy doesn't matter to you. She says the stories just pop out. So I transmit her request. J.R.G."
"P.D. waiting!" breathed Jack. "No changing Firio! He is like the pass. I wonder how Wrath of God and Jag Ear are!"
He wrote a story for Belvy. He wrote to Firio in resolute assertion that he would never require the services of P.D. again, when he knew that Firio, despite the protests, would still keep P.D. fit for the trail. He wrote to Jim Galway how immersed he was in his new career, but that he might come for a while—for a little while, with emphasis—if ever Jim wired that he was needed.
"That was a good holiday—a regular week-end debauch away from the shop!" he thought, when the letters were finished.
Soon after this came an event which, for the first time, gave John Wingfield, Sr. a revelation of the side of his son that had won Little Rivers and the interest of the rank and file of the store. Among Jack's many suggestions, in his aim to carry out his father's talk about the creative business sense the first night they were together, had been one for a suburban clubbing delivery system. It had been dismissed as fantastic, but Jack had asked that it be given a trial and his father had consented. Its basis was a certain confidence in human nature. Jack and his father had dined together the evening after the master of the push-buttons had gone through the final reports of the experiment.
"Well, Jack, I am going to raise your salary to a hundred a week," the father announced.
"On the ground that if you pay me more I might make myself worth more?"Jack asked respectfully.
"No, as a matter of business. Whenever any man makes two dollars for the store, he gets one dollar and I keep the other. That is the basis of my success—others earning money for me. Your club scheme is a go. As the accountant works it out, it has brought a profit of two hundred a week."
"Then I have done something worth while, really?" Jack asked, eagerly, but half sceptical of such good fortune.
"Yes. You have created a value. You have used your powers of observation and your brain. That's the thing that makes a few men employers while the multitude remains employees."
"Father! Then I am not quite hopeless?"
"Hopeless! My son hopeless! No, no! I didn't expect you to learn the business in a week, or a month, or even a year. Time! time!"
Nor did John Wingfield, Sr. wish his son to develop too rapidly. Now that he was so sure of beating threescore and ten, while retaining the full possession of his faculties, if he followed the rules of longevity, he would not have welcomed a son who could spring into the saddle at once. He wanted to ride alone. He who had never shared his power with anyone! He who had never admitted anyone into even a few shares of company partnership in his concern! Time! time! The boy would never fall heir to undivided responsibility before he was forty. John Wingfield, Sr. was pleased with himself; pleased over a good sign; and he could not deny that he was pleased at the sudden change in Jack. For he saw Jack's eyes sparkling into his own; sparkling with comradeship and spontaneous gratification. Was the boy to be his in thought and purpose, after all? Yes, of course; yes, inevitably, with the approach of maturity. Gradually the flightiness of his upbringing would wear off down to the steel, the hard-tempered, paternal steel.
"You can scarcely realize what a fight it has been for me until you know the life I led out in Arizona, getting strong for you and the store," Jack began.
"Strong for me! For the store! Yes, Jack!" There was an emphasis on the subjective personal pronoun—forhim; for the store!
The father's face beamed a serene delight. This Jack accepted as the expression of sympathy and understanding which he had craved. It was to him an inspiration of fellowship that set the well of his inner being in overflow and the force of his personality, which the father had felt uncannily before the mother's picture, became something persuasive in its radiance rather than something held in leash as a threatening and volcanic element. Now he could talk as freely and happily of the desert to his father as to Burleigh and Mathewson. He told of the long rides; of Firio and Wrath of God. He made the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells heard in the silence of the dining-room as it was heard in the silences of the trail. He mentioned how he was afraid to come back after he was strong.
"Afraid?" queried his father.
"Yes. But I was coming—coming when, at the top of the pass, I saw LittleRivers for the first time."
He sketched his meeting with Mary Ewold; the story of the town and the story of Jasper Ewold as he knew it, now glancing at his father, now seeming to see nothing except visualization of the pictures of his story. The father, looking at the table-cloth, at times playing with his coffee-spoon, made no comment.