ITHIRTY YEARS LATE
Arrivingwhen the present century was well started, Elbert Sartwell had now concluded that his was a most untimely birth. For instance, all that war amounted to in his case, was the matter of wearing puttees to school. The magic of his youth was moreover smothered in a houseful of sisters—imprisoned in a sorority-house, he found himself—all his aching and persistent dreams unexpressed.
But the end had come. Elbert had reached decision; so had his father on the same point. They were at odds. It was a matter of grief to the son that for once there could be no compromise.
Fall darkness had closed about him, as these things appeared before Elbert’s mind with finality. He left his room, followed the long wide hall to the door of his father’s dressing-room and knocked. It was the last quarter of an hour before dinner, and the tone of the ‘Come in’ was not encouraging, but it didn’t occur to Elbert to wait until dinner and tobacco had combed down his father’s tag-ends of the day.
Mr. Sartwell was standing before his mirrors and did not turn, as the hall door opened. Elbertnodded at the reflection; also he observed in the glass a look of fresh vexation, which reminded him that his sister Nancy this very afternoon had smashed the fender and left front wheel of the new phaëton. His father had probably just heard about it. The present moment couldn’t be worse, but Elbert didn’t see how he could back out now with his ultimatum unreported.
‘I’ve been thinking it over,’ he said, ‘and I can’t start to work in the office, at least not now. You see, I’ve always wanted—’
‘“Always wanted”—’ broke in Mr. Sartwell, ‘“always wanted” against my better judgment.... A houseful of “always wanteds”! How can a man be expected to stand in the midst of six people, always wanting in different directions?’
‘I hate to be an added trouble to you,’ Elbert said in his unruffled way, ‘but there’s no use of my trying to go into the business, the way I feel.’
‘What is it now?’
Still addressing the mirror, the younger man outlined with some embarrassment that he hadn’t been able to get over his ardor to tackle life on a cattle range. The broad back before him suddenly jerked about. Elbert was held by the first direct look of one whose son has proved a definite disappointment. Many words followed; some heat:
‘... pack a pair of pistols! Step along out overthe real-estate ranges and prairie sub-divisions! Why, I’m actually ashamed to have to tell you, what any kid half your age knows—that there isn’t a West any more, no cattle country—hasn’t been for—why, you’re only about thirty years late—’ Also a final sentence, as Elbert withdrew, to the effect that if he did go forth, he would have to pay his own car fare ‘out into the fenceless spaces.’
There was present at dinner that evening one of sister Nancy’s young men friends, who had no dreams of the West whatsoever. The Sartwell family, diminished by recent marriages of two elder daughters, was pulling together socially, in spite of internal trouble. Elbert’s thoughts were mainly afar on his own problem, but after a time, he couldn’t help noticing the art with which the gentleman-guest played up to his father. It could be done, Elbert reflected. The two sons-in-law, already connected up, had also gone about it this way. He felt like a crossed stick; a spectator merely, in the home dining-room. His glance moved from face to face in the soft creamy light that flowed down through a thin bowl of alabaster, hanging from the ceiling. He alone, an only son, lacked a sort of commonplace craft to smooth his ways. He might have asked for a trip around the world before settling down to a business career—and gotten it.
Elbert retired to his room early. The Sartwell mansion faced the West, and sunsets had reddened his windows from as far back as he could remember. Long ago he had stared into a crimson foam of one certain day’s end, thinking that it was the color of Wyoming. The lure of that crimson foam hadn’t ceased, though it had moved farther South and farther West—Apache country, Navajo country—leading on over the border of late into Mexico itself.
He had been given an automobile at the end of high-school days, but he had wanted a pony. Hours at home he had spent in the garage, secretly wishing all the time it was a corral.
Elbert turned on the lights. Over the back of the chair he was sitting on, was a blanket of Indian red. There were framed Western drawings on the wall, paintings of rodeo and round-up, lonely cattlemen, bison, longhorns, desert and mountain scenes; and in among his books, pasted in an old ledger, was his collection of Indian pictures—heads of all the tribes, famous braves and medicine men—from cigarette, gum, candy packages—no end to the lengths he had gone to get the lot together. He looked back upon the time when the bronzed head of Red Cloud, of the Nez Perces, was the noblest countenance he had ever gazed upon.
A tall, cool person, Elbert could hardly rememberever being really tired. He was practically a stranger to all stimulants and dwelt altogether unaware in a calm that made nervous people either envious at once or hopeless altogether. His steady, homely hands were of that considerable size as to appear empty most of the time, and his blue eyes were so steady and cool that any one undertaking to go against his will, felt a surge of fatigue and irritation at the outset.
Elbert had been pondering a good deal of late on what sort of stuff he was made of. When he read of some hero’s exploits in a newspaper, he asked himself could he have done that. And when he heard of some great suffering or privation of explorers, he wondered how he would have acted, had he been along. But it was the Southwest that perennially and persistently called. He moved to his phonograph, and picked out a book of records from the shelf below. The one he wanted wasn’t there; in fact, he found it still in the machine, from a solitary performance of last evening—a Mexican record. He set it going now and a man’s announcement in Spanish preceded the music, something about ‘Paquita Conesa, tonadillera española, la mas famosa en Mexico y Sudamerica—’
... His favorite record. The song was ‘La Paloma.’ It always seemed to Elbert as if Señorita Paquita were singing in the open air. Hesmiled at a secret thought that always came to him, too—that the words of the song were carved out of starlight.
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,Valgame Dios—’
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,Valgame Dios—’
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,Valgame Dios—’
‘Cuando sali de la Habana,
Valgame Dios—’
Up from the street, at the end of the song, reached his ears the tiresome sweep and swish of tires and carbureters, and from the drawing-room, Nancy’s singing voice. Her young man would be standing beside the piano at this time, his waxen hair brushed back. Elbert smiled wistfully. ‘Thirty years late.’