We, the undersigned, exonerate Edwin Brigham of cheating in the poker game in Hampden Scarborough's rooms on Saturday evening, February 20, 18—. And we pledge ourselves never to speak of the matter either to each other or to any one else.
"I've signed first," said Scarborough, rising and holding the pen toward Chalmers. "Now, you fellows sign. Chalmers!"
Chalmers signed, and then Wilton.
"Take Chalmers away with you," said Scarborough to Wilton in an undertone. "I've something to say to Brigham."
When they were gone he again seated himself at his desk and, taking his check-book, wrote a check and tore it out.
"Now, listen to me, Brig," he said friendlily to Brigham, who seemed to be in a stupor. "I've won about six hundred dollars from you, first and last—more, rather than less. Will that amount put you in the way of getting straight?"
"Yes," said Brigham, dully.
"Then here's a check for it. And here's the paper exonerating you. And—I guess you won't play again soon."
The boy choked back his sobs.
"I don't know how I ever came to do it, Scarborough. Oh, I'm a dog, a dog! When I started to come here my mother took me up to her bedroom and opened the drawer of her bureau and took out a savings-bank book—it had a credit of twelve hundred dollars. 'Do you see that?' she said. 'When you were born I began to put by as soon as I was able—every cent I could from the butter and the eggs—to educate my boy. And now it's all coming true,' she said, Scarborough, and we cried together. And——" Brigham burst into a storm of tears and sobs. "Oh, how could I do it!" he said. "How COULD I!"
"You've done wrong," said Scarborough, shakily, "but I've done much worse, Eddie. And it's over now, and everything'll be all right."
"But I can't take your money, Scarborough. I must pay for what I've done."
"You mean, make your mother pay. No, you must take it back, Brigham. I owe it to you—I owe it to your mother. This, is the butter and egg money that I—I stole from her."
He put the papers into the boy's pocket. "You and I are going to be friends," he went on.
"Come round and see me to-morrow—no, I'll look you up." He put out his hand and held Brigham's hand in a courage-giving grasp. "And—I hope I'll have the honor of meeting your mother some day."
Brigham could only look his feelings. Soon after he left Pierson came. His anger had evaporated and his chief emotion was dread lest Scarborough might still be angry. "I want to take back——" he began eagerly, as soon as his head was inside the door.
"I know you do, but you shan't," replied Scarborough. "What you said was true, what Olivia said was true. I've been acting like a blackguard."
"No," said Pierson, "what I said was a disgraceful lie. Will you try to forget it, Scarborough?"
"FORGET it?" Scarborough looked at his friend with brilliant eyes. "Never! So help me God, never! It's one of three things that have occurred to-day that I must never forget."
"Then we can go on as before. You'll still be my friend?"
"Not STILL, Fred, but for the first time."
He looked round the luxurious study with a laugh and a sigh. "It'll be a ghastly job, getting used to the sort of surroundings I can earn for myself. But I've got to grin and bear it. We'll stay on here together to the end of the term—my share's paid, and besides, I'm not going to do anything sensational. Next year—we'll see."
While Pierson was having his final cigarette before going to bed he looked up from his book to see before him Scarborough, even more tremendous and handsome in his gaudy pajamas.
"I wish to register a solemn vow," said he, with mock solemnity that did not hide the seriousness beneath. "Hear me, ye immortal gods! Never again, never again, will I engage in any game with a friend where there is a stake. I don't wish to tempt. I don't wish to be tempted."
"What nonsense!" said Pierson. "You're simply cutting yourself off from a lot of fun."
"I have spoken," said Scarborough, and he withdrew to his bedroom. When the door was closed and the light out he paused at the edge of the bed and said: "And never again, so long as he wishes to retain his title to the name man, will Hampden Scarborough take from anybody anything which he hasn't honestly earned."
And when he was in bed he muttered: "I shall be alone, and I may stay poor and obscure, but I'll get back my self-respect—and keep it—Pauline!"
And Pauline?—She was now looking back upon the first year of her married life.
She had been so brought up that at seventeen, within a few weeks of eighteen, she had only the vaguest notion of the meaning of the step she was about to take in "really marrying" John Dumont. Also, it had never occurred to her as possible for a properly constituted woman not to love her husband. It was clearly her duty to marry Jack; therefore, the doubting thoughts and the ache at the heart which would not ease were merely more outcroppings of the same evil part of her nature that had tempted her into deceiving her parents, and into entangling herself and Scarborough. She knew that, if she were absolutely free, she would not marry Jack. But she felt that she had bartered away her birthright of freedom; and now, being herself, the daughter of HER father and HER mother, she would honorably keep her bargain, would love where she ought to love—at seventeen "I will" means "I shall." And so—they were "really married."
But the days passed, and there was no sign of the miracle she had confidently expected. The magic of the marriage vow failed to transform her; Pauline Dumont was still Pauline Gardiner in mind and in heart. There was, however, a miracle, undreamed of, mysterious, overwhelming—John Dumont, the lover, became John Dumont, the husband. Beside this transformation, the revelation that the world she loved and lived in did not exist for him, or his world for her, seemed of slight importance. She had not then experience enough to enable her to see that transformation and revelation were as intimately related as a lock and its key.
"It's all my fault," she told herself. "It must be my fault." And Dumont, unanalytic and self-absorbed, was amused whenever Pauline's gentleness reminded him of his mother's half-believed warnings that his wife had "a will of her own, and a mighty strong one."
They were back at Saint X in August and lived at the Frobisher place in Indiana Street—almost as pretentious as the Dumont homestead and in better taste. Old Mrs. Dumont had gone to Chicago alone for the furnishings for her own house; when she went for the furnishings for her son's house, she got Mrs. Gardiner to go along—and Pauline's mother gave another of her many charming illustrations of the valuable truth that tact can always have its own way. Saint X was too keen-eyed and too interested in the new Mrs. Dumont to fail to note a change in her. It was satisfied with the surface explanation that Europe in general and Paris in particular were responsible. And it did not note that, while she had always been full of life and fond of company, she was now feverish in her restlessness, incessantly seeking distraction, never alone when she could either go somewhere or induce some one to come to her.
"You MUST be careful, my dear," said her mother-in-law, as soon as she learned that she had a grandmotherly interest in her daughter-in-law's health. "You'll wear yourself out with all this running about."
Pauline laughed carelessly, recklessly.
"Oh, I'm disgustingly healthy. Nothing hurts me. Besides, if I were quiet, I think I should—EXPLODE!"
Late in September Dumont had to go to New York. He asked her to go with him, assuming that she would decline, as she had visitors coming. But she was only too glad of the chance to give her increasing restlessness wider range. They went to the Waldorf—Scarborough and Pierson had been stopping there not a week before, making ready for that sensational descent upon Battle Field which has already been recorded. The first evening Dumont took her to the play. The next morning he left her early for a busy day down-town—"and I may not be able to return for dinner. I warned you before we left Saint X," he said, as he rose from breakfast in their sitting-room.
"I understand," she answered. "You needn't bother to send word even, if you don't wish. I'll be tired from shopping and shan't care to go out this evening, anyhow."
In the afternoon she drove with Mrs. Fanshaw, wife of one of Jack's business acquaintances—they had dined at the Fanshaws' when they paused in New York on the way home from Europe. Pauline was at the hotel again at five; while she and Mrs. Fanshaw were having tea together in the palm garden a telegram was handed to her. She read it, then said to Mrs. Fanshaw: "I was going to ask you and your husband to dine with us. Jack sends word he can't be here, but—why shouldn't you come just the same?"
"No you must go with us," Mrs. Fanshaw replied. "We've got a box at Weber and Fields', and two men asked, and we need another woman. I'd have asked you before, but there wouldn't be room for any more men."
Mrs. Fanshaw had to insist until she had proved that the invitation was sincere; then, Pauline accepted—a distraction was always agreeable, never so agreeable as when it offered itself unannounced. It was toward the end of the dinner that Mrs. Fanshaw happened to say: "I see your husband's like all of them. I don't believe there ever was a woman an American man wouldn't desert for business."
"Oh, I don't in the least mind," replied Pauline. "I like him to show that he feels free. Why, when we were in Paris on the return trip and had been married only two months, he got tangled up in business and used to leave me for a day—for two days, once."
At Pauline's right sat a carefully dressed young man whose name she had not caught—she learned afterward that he was Mowbray Langdon. He was now giving her a stare of amused mock-admiration. When he saw that he had her attention, he said: "Really, Mrs. Dumont, I can't decide which to admire most—YOUR trust or your husband's."
Pauline laughed—it struck her as ridiculous that either she or Jack should distrust the other. Indeed, she only hazily knew what distrust meant, and hadn't any real belief that "such things" actually existed.
Half an hour later the party was driving up to Weber and Fields'. Pauline, glancing across the thronged sidewalk and along the empty, brilliantly lighted passage leading into the theater, saw a striking, peculiar-looking woman standing at the box-office while her escort parleyed with the clerk within. "How much that man looks like Jack," she said to herself—and then she saw that it was indeed Jack. Not the Jack she thought she knew, but quite another person, the one he tried to hide from her—too carelessly, because he made the common mistake of underestimating the sagacity of simplicity. A glance at the woman, a second glance at Dumont, his flushed, insolent face now turned full front—and she KNEW this unfamiliar and hitherto-only-hinted Jack.
The omnibus was caught in a jam of cars and carriages; there were several moments of confusion and excitement. When the Fanshaw party was finally able to descend, she saw that Jack and his companion were gone—the danger of a scene was over for the moment. She lingered and made the others linger, wishing to give him time to get to his seats. When they entered the theater it was dark and the curtain was up. But her eyes, searching the few boxes visible from the rear aisle, found the woman, or, at least, enough of her for recognition—the huge black hat with its vast pale blue feather. Pauline drew a long breath of relief when the Fanshaws' box proved to be almost directly beneath, the box.
If she had been a few years older, she would have given its proper significance to the curious fact that this sudden revelation of the truth about her husband did not start a tempest of anger or jealousy, but set her instantly to sacrificing at the shrine of the great god Appearances. It is notorious that of all the household gods he alone erects his altar only upon the hearth where the ashes are cold.
As she sat there through the two acts, she seemed to be watching the stage and taking part in the conversation of the Fanshaws and their friends; yet afterward she could not recall a single thing that had occurred, a single word that had been said. At the end of the last act she again made them linger so that they were the last to emerge into the passage. In the outside doorway, she saw the woman—just a glimpse of a pretty, empty, laughing face with a mouth made to utter impertinences and eyes that invited them.
Mrs. Fanshaw was speaking—"You're very tired, aren't you?"
"Very," replied Pauline, with a struggle to smile.
"What a child you look! It seems absurd that you are a married woman. Why, you haven't your full growth yet." And on an impulse of intuitive sympathy Mrs. Fanshaw pressed her arm, and Pauline was suddenly filled with gratitude, and liked her from that moment.
Alone in her sitting-room at the hotel, she went up to the mirror over the mantel, and, staring absently at herself, put her hands up mechanically to take out her hat-pins. "No, I'll keep my hat on," she thought, without knowing why. And she sat, hat and wrap on, and looked at a book. Half an hour, and she took off her hat and wrap, put them in a chair near where she was sitting. The watched hands of the clock crawled wearily round to half-past one, to two, to half-past two, to three—each half-hour an interminable stage. She wandered to the window and looked down into empty Fifth Avenue. When she felt that at least an hour had passed, she turned to look at the clock again—twenty-five minutes to four. Her eyes were heavy.
"He is not coming," she said aloud, and, leaving the lights on in the sitting-room, locked herself in the bedroom.
At five o'clock she started up and seized the dressing-gown on the chair near the head of the bed. She listened—heard him muttering in the sitting-room. She knew now that a crash of some kind had roused her. Several minutes of profound silence, then through the door came a steady, heavy snore.
The dressing-gown dropped from her hand. She slid from the bed, slowly crossed the room, softly opened the door, looked into the sitting-room. A table and a chair lay upset in the middle of the floor. He was on a sofa, sprawling, disheveled, snoring.
Slowly she advanced toward him—she was barefooted, and the white nightgown clinging to her slender figure and the long braid down her back made her look as young as her soul—the soul that gazed from her fixed, fascinated eyes, the soul of a girl of eighteen, full as much child as woman still. She sat down before him in a low chair, her elbows on her knees, her chin supported by her hands, her eyes never leaving his swollen, dark red, brutish face—a cigar stump, much chewed, lay upon his cheek near his open mouth. He was as absurd and as repulsive as a gorged pig asleep in a wallow.
The dawn burst into broad day, but she sat on motionless until the clock struck the half-hour after six. Then she returned to the bedroom and locked herself in again.
Toward noon she dressed and went into the sitting-room. He was gone and it had been put to rights. When he came, at twenty minutes to one, she was standing at the window, but she did not turn.
"Did you get my note?" he asked, in a carefully careless tone. He went on to answer himself: "No, there it is on the floor just where I put it, under the bedroom door. No matter—it was only to say I had to go out but would be back to lunch. Sorry I was kept so late last night. Glad you didn't wait up for me—but you might have left the bedroom door open—it'd have been perfectly safe." He laughed good-naturedly. "As it was, I was so kind-hearted that I didn't disturb you, but slept on the sofa."
As he advanced toward her with the obvious intention of kissing her, she slowly turned and faced him. Their eyes met and he stopped short—her look was like the eternal ice that guards the pole.
"I saw you at the theater last night," she said evenly. "And this morning, I sat and watched you as you lay on the sofa over there."
He was taken completely off his guard. With a gasp that was a kind of groan he dropped into a chair, the surface of his mind strewn with the wreckage of the lying excuses he had got ready.
"Please don't try to explain," she went on in the same even tone. "I understand now about—about Paris and—everything. I know that—father was right."
He gave her a terrified glance—no tears, no trace of excitement, only calmness and all the strength he knew was in her nature and, in addition, a strength he had not dreamed was there.
"What do you intend to do?" he asked after a long silence.
She did not answer immediately. When she did, she was not looking at him.
"When I married you—across the river from Battle Field," she said, "I committed a crime against my father and mother. This is—my punishment—the beginning of it. And now—there'll be the—the—baby—" A pause, then: "I must bear the consequences—if I can. But I shall not be your wife—never—never again. If you wish me to stay on that condition, I'll try. If not—"
"You MUST stay, Pauline," he interrupted. "I don't care what terms you make, you must stay. It's no use for me to try to defend myself when you're in this mood. You wouldn't listen. But you're right about not going. If you did, it'd break your father's and mother's hearts. I admit I did drink too much last night, and made a fool of myself. But if you were more experienced, you'd—"
He thought he had worked his courage up to the point where he could meet her eyes. He tried it. Her look froze his flow of words. "I KNOW that you were false from the beginning," she said.
"The man I thought you were never existed—and I know it. We won't speak of this—ever—after now. Surely you can't wish me to stay?" And into her voice surged all her longing to go, all her hope that he would reject the only terms on which self-respect would let her stay.
"Wish you to stay?" he repeated. And he faced her, looking at her, his chest heaving under the tempest of hate and passion that was raging in him—hate because she was defying and dictating to him, passion because she was so beautiful as she stood there, like a delicate, fine hot-house rose poised on a long, graceful stem. "No wonder I LOVE you!" he exclaimed between his clenched teeth.
A bright spot burned in each of her cheeks and her look made him redden and lower his eyes.
"Now that I understand these last five months," she said, "that from you is an insult."
His veins and muscles swelled with the fury he dared not show; for he saw and felt how dangerous her mood was.
"I'll agree to whatever you like, Pauline," he said humbly. "Only, we mustn't have a flare-up and a scandal. I'll never speak to you again about—about anything you don't want to hear."
She went into her bedroom. When, after half an hour, she reappeared, she was ready to go down to lunch. In the elevator he stole a glance at her—there was no color in her face, not even in her lips. His rage had subsided; he was ashamed of himself—before her. But he felt triumphant too.
"I thought she'd go, sure, in spite of her fear of hurting her father and mother," he said to himself. "A mighty close squeak. I was stepping round in a powder magazine, with every word a lit match."
In January she sank into a profound lassitude. Nothing interested her, everything wearied her. As the time drew near, her mother came to stay with her; and day after day the two women sat silent, Mrs. Gardiner knitting, Pauline motionless, hands idle in her lap, mind vacant. If she had any emotion, it was a hope that she would die and take her child with her.
"That would settle everything, settle it right," she reflected, with youth's morbid fondness for finalities.
When it was all over and she came out from under the opiate, she lay for a while, open-eyed but unseeing, too inert to grope for the lost thread of memory. She felt a stirring in the bed beside her, the movement of some living thing. She looked and there, squeezed into the edge of the pillow was a miniature head of a little old man—wrinkled, copperish. Yet the face was fat—ludicrously fat. A painfully homely face with tears running from the closed eyes, with an open mouth that driveled and drooled.
"What is it?" she thought, looking with faint curiosity. "And why is it here?"
Two small fists now rose aimlessly in the air above the face and flapped about; and a very tempest of noise issued from the sagging mouth.
"A baby," she reflected. Then memory came—"MY baby!"
She put her finger in the way of the wandering fists. First one of them, then the other, awkwardly unclosed and as awkwardly closed upon it. She smiled. The grip tightened and tightened and tightened until she wondered how hands so small and new could cling so close and hard. Then that electric clasp suddenly tightened about her heart. She burst into tears and drew the child against her breast. The pulse of its current of life was beating against her own—and she felt it. She sobbed, laughed softly, sobbed again.
Her mother was bending anxiously over her.
"What's the matter, dearest?" she asked. "What do you wish?"
"Nothing!" Pauline was smiling through her tears. "Oh, mother, I am SO happy!" she murmured.
And her happiness lasted with not a break, with hardly a pause, all that spring and all that summer—or, so long as her baby's helplessness absorbed the whole of her time and thought.
When Pierson, laggard as usual, returned to Battle Field a week after the end of the long vacation, he found Scarborough just establishing himself. He had taken two small and severely plain rooms in a quaint old frame cottage, one story high, but perched importantly upon a bank at the intersection of two much-traveled streets.
"What luck?" asked Pierson, lounging in on him.
"A hundred days' campaign; a thousand dollars net," replied the book agent. "And I'm hard as oak from tramping those roads, and I've learned—you ought to have been along, Pierson. I know people as I never could have come to know them by any other means—what they think, what they want, how they can be reached."
There was still much of the boy in Pierson's face. But Scarborough looked the man, developed, ready.
Pierson wandered into the bedroom to complete his survey. "I see you're going to live by the clock," he called out presently. He had found, pasted to the wall, Scarborough's schedule of the daily division of his time; just above it, upon a shelf, was a new alarm clock, the bell so big that it overhung like a canopy. "You don't mean you're going to get up at four?"
"Every morning—all winter," replied Scarborough, without stopping his unpacking. "You see, I'm going to finish this year—take the two years in one. Then I've registered in a law office—Judge Holcombe's. And there's my speaking—I must practise that every day."
Pierson came back to the sitting-room and collapsed into a chair. "I see you allow yourself five hours for sleep," he said. "It's too much, old man. You're self-indulgent."
"That's a mistake," replied Scarborough. "Since making out the schedule I've decided to cut sleep down to four hours and a half."
"That's more like it!"
"We all sleep too much," he continued. "And as I shan't smoke, or drink, or worry, I'll need even less than the average man. I'm going to do nothing but work. A man doesn't need much rest from mere work."
"What! No play?"
"Play all the time. I've simply changed my playthings."
Pierson seated himself at the table and stared gloomily at his friend.
"Look here, old man. For heaven's sake, don't let Olivia find out about this program."
But Olivia did hear of it, and Pierson was compelled to leave his luxury in the main street and to take the two remaining available rooms at Scarborough's place. His bed was against the wall of Scarborough's bedroom—the wall where the alarm clock was. At four o'clock on his first morning he started from a profound sleep.
"My bed must be moved into my sitting-room to-day," he said to himself as soon as the clamor of Scarborough's gong died away and he could collect his thoughts. But at four o'clock the next morning the gong penetrated the two walls as if they had not been there. "I see my finish," he groaned, sitting up and tearing at his hair.
He tried to sleep again, but the joint pressure of Olivia's memory-mirrored gray eyes and of disordered nerves from the racking gong forced him to make an effort to bestir himself. Groaning and muttering, he rose and in the starlight looked from his window. Scarborough was going up the deserted street on his way to the woods for his morning exercise. His head was thrown back and his chest extended, and his long legs were covering four feet at a stride. "You old devil!" said Pierson, his tone suggesting admiration and affection rather than anger. "But I'll outwit you."
By a subterfuge in which a sympathetic doctor was the main factor, he had himself permanently excused from chapel. Then he said to Scarborough: "You get up too late, old man. My grandfather used to say that only a drone lies abed after two in the morning, wasting the best part of the day. You ought to turn in, say, at half-past nine and rise in time to get your hardest work out of the way before the college day begins."
"That sounds reasonable," replied Scarborough, after a moment's consideration. "I'll try it."
And so it came to pass that Pierson went to bed at the sound of Scarborough's two-o'clock rising gong and pieced out his sleep with an occasional nap in recitations and lectures and for an hour or two late in the afternoon. He was able once more to play poker as late as he liked, and often had time for reading before the gong sounded. And Scarborough was equally delighted with the new plan. "I gain at least one hour a day, perhaps two," he said. "Your grandfather was a wise man."
Toward spring, Mills, western manager of the publishing house for which Scarborough had sold Peaks of Progress through Michigan, came to Battle Field to see him.
"You were far and away the best man we had out last year," said he. "You're a born book agent."
"Thank you," said Scarborough, sincerely. He appreciated that a man can pay no higher compliment than to say that another is master of his own trade.
"We got about fifty orders from people who thought it over after you'd tried to land them and failed—that shows the impression you made. And you sold as many books as our best agent in our best field."
"I'll never go as agent again," said Scarborough. "The experience was invaluable—but sufficient."
"We don't want you to go as agent. Our proposition is for much easier and more dignified work."
At the word dignified, Scarborough could not restrain a smile. "I've practically made my plans for the summer," he said.
"I think we've got something worth your while, Mr. Scarborough. Our idea is for you to select about a hundred of the young fellows who're working their way through here, and train them in your methods of approaching people. Then you'll take them to Wisconsin and Minnesota and send them out, each man to a district you select for him. In that way you'll help a hundred young men to earn a year at college and you'll make a good sum for yourself—two or three times what you made last summer."
Scarborough had intended to get admitted to the bar in June, to spend the summer at an apprenticeship in a law office and to set up for himself in the fall. But this plan was most attractive—it would give him a new kind of experience and would put him in funds for the wait for clients. The next day he signed an advantageous contract—his expenses for the summer and a guaranty of not less than three thousand dollars clear.
He selected a hundred young men and twelve young women, the most intelligent of the five hundred self-supporting students at Battle Field. Pierson, having promised to behave himself, was permitted to attend the first lesson. The scholars at the Scarborough, School for Book Agents filled his quarters and overflowed in swarms without the windows and the door. The weather was still cool; but all must hear, and the rooms would hold barely half the brigade.
"I assume that you've read the book," began Scarborough. He was standing at the table with the paraphernalia of a book agent spread upon it. "But you must read it again and again, until you know what's on every page, until you have by heart the passages I'll point out to you." He looked at Drexel—a freshman of twenty-two, with earnest, sleepless eyes and a lofty forehead; in the past winter he had become acquainted with hunger and with that cold which creeps into the room, crawls through the thin covers and closes in, icy as death, about the heart. "What do you think of the book, Drexel?"
The young man—he is high in the national administration to-day—flushed and looked uneasy.
"Speak frankly. I want your candid opinion."
"Well, I must say, Mr. Scarborough, I think it's pretty bad."
"Thank you," said Scarborough; and he glanced round. "Does anybody disagree with Mr. Drexel?"
There was not a murmur. Pierson covered his face to hide his smile at this "jolt" for his friend. In the group round one of the windows a laugh started and spread everywhere except to seven of the twelve young women and to those near Scarborough—THEY looked frightened.
"I expected Mr. Drexel's answer," began Scarborough. "Before you can sell Peaks of Progress each of you must be convinced that it's a book he himself would buy. And I see you've not even read it. You've at most glanced at it with unfriendly eyes. This book is not literature, gentlemen. It is a storehouse of facts. It is an educational work so simply written and so brilliantly illustrated that the very children will hang over its pages with delight. If you attend to your training in our coming three months of preliminary work you'll find during the summer that the book's power to attract the children is its strongest point. I made nearly half my sales last summer by turning from the parents to the children and stirring their interest."
Pierson was now no more inclined to smile than were the pupils.
"When I started out," continued Scarborough, "I, too, had just glanced at the book and had learned a few facts from the prospectus. And I failed to sell, except to an occasional fool whom I was able to overpower. Every one instinctively felt the estimate I myself placed upon my goods. But as I went on the book gradually forced itself upon me. And, long before the summer was over, I felt that I was an ambassador of education to those eager people. And I'm proud that I sold as many books as I did. Each book, I know, is a radiating center of pleasure, of thought, of aspiration to higher things. No, ladies and gentlemen, you must first learn that these eight hundred pages crowded with facts of history, these six hundred illustrations taken from the best sources and flooding the text with light, together constitute a work that should be in all humble households."
Scarborough had his audience with him now.
"Never sneer," he said in conclusion. "Sneering will accomplish nothing. Learn your business. Put yourself, your BEST self, into it. And then you may hope to succeed at it."
He divided his pupils into six classes of about twenty each and dismissed them, asking the first class to come at three the next afternoon. The young men and young women went thoughtfully away; they were revolving their initial lesson in the cardinal principle of success—enthusiasm. When the two friends were alone Pierson said: "Do you know, I'm beginning to get a glimpse of you. And I see there isn't anything beyond your reach. You'll get whatever you want."
Scarborough's reply was a sudden look of dejection, an impatient shrug. Then he straightened himself, lifted his head with a lion-like toss that shook back the obstinate lock of hair from his forehead. He laid his hand on his friend's shoulder. "Yes," he said, "because I'm determined to want whatever I get. Good fortune and bad—everything shall be grist for THIS mill."
Pierson attended next day's class and afterward went to Olivia with an account of it.
"You ought to have seen him put those fellows through, one at a time. I tell you, he'll teach them more in the next three months than they'll learn of the whole faculty. And this summer he'll get every man and woman of them enough to pay their way through college next year."
"What did he do to-day?" asked Olivia. Of the many qualities she loved in Pierson, the one she loved most was his unbounded, unselfish admiration for his friend.
"He took each man separately, the others watching and listening. First he'd play the part of book agent with his pupil as a reluctant customer. Then he'd reverse, and the pupil as agent would try to sell him the book, he pretending to be an ignorant, obstinate, ill-natured, close-fisted farmer or farmer's wife. It was a liberal education in the art of persuasion. If his pupils had his brains and his personality, Peaks of Progress would be on the center-table in half the farm parlors of Wisconsin and Minnesota by September."
"IF they had his personality, and IF they had his brains," said Olivia.
"Well, as it is, he'll make the dumbest ass in the lot bray to some purpose."
In September, when Scarborough closed his headquarters at Milwaukee and set out for Indianapolis, he found that the average earnings of his agents were two hundred and seventy-five dollars, and that he himself had made forty-three hundred. Mills came and offered him a place in the publishing house at ten thousand a year and a commission. He instantly rejected it. He had already arranged to spend a year with one of the best law firms in Indianapolis before opening an office in Saint X, the largest town in the congressional district in which his farm lay.
"But there's no hurry about deciding," said Mills. "Remember we'll make you rich in a few years."
"My road happens not to lie in that direction," replied Scarborough, carelessly. "I've no desire to be rich. It's too easy, if one will consent to give money-making his exclusive attention."
Mills looked amused—had he not known Scarborough's ability, he would have felt derisive.
"Money's power," said he. "And there are only two ambitions for a wide-awake man—money and power."
"Money can't buy the kind of power I'd care for," answered Scarborough. "If I were to seek power, it'd be the power that comes through ability to persuade."
"Money talks," said Mills, laughing.
"Money bellows," retorted Scarborough, "and bribes and browbeats, bully and coward that it is. But it never persuades."
"I'll admit it's a coward."
"And I hope I can always frighten enough of it into my service to satisfy my needs. But I'm not spending my life in its service—no, thank you!"
While Scarborough was serving his clerkship at Indianapolis, Dumont was engaging in ever larger and more daring speculations with New York as his base. Thus it came about that when Scarborough established himself at Saint X, Dumont and Pauline were living in New York, in a big house in East Sixty-first Street.
And Pauline had welcomed the change. In Saint X she was constantly on guard, always afraid her father and mother would see below that smiling surface of her domestic life which made them happy. In New York she was free from the crushing sense of peril and restraint, as their delusions about her were secure. There, after she and he found their living basis of "let alone," they got on smoothly, rarely meeting except in the presence of servants or guests, never inquiring either into the other's life, carrying on all negotiations about money and other household matters through their secretaries. He thought her cold by nature—therefore absolutely to be trusted. And what other man with the pomp and circumstance of a great and growing fortune to maintain had so admirable an instrument? "An ideal wife," he often said to himself. And he was not the man to speculate as to what was going on in her head. He had no interest in what others thought; how they were filling the places he had assigned them—that was his only concern.
In one of those days of pause which come now and then in the busiest lives she chanced upon his letters from Europe in her winter at Battle Field. She took one of them from its envelope and began to read—carelessly, with a languid curiosity to measure thus exactly the change in herself. But soon she was absorbed, her mind groping through letter after letter for the clue to a mystery. The Dumont she now knew stood out so plainly in those letters that she could not understand how she, inexperienced and infatuated though she then was, had failed to see the perfect full-length portrait. How had she read romance and high-mindedness and intellect into the personality so frankly flaunting itself in all its narrow sordidness, in all its poverty of real thought and real feeling?
And there was Hampden Scarborough to contrast him with. With this thought the truth suddenly stared at her, made her drop the letter and visibly shrink. It was just because Scarborough was there that she had been tricked. The slight surface resemblance between the two men, hardly more than the "favor" found in all men of the family of strong and tenacious will, had led her on to deck the absent Dumont with the manhood of the present Scarborough. She had read Scarborough into Dumont's letters. Yes, and—the answers she addressed and mailed to Dumont had really been written to Scarborough.
She tossed the letters back into the box from which they had reappeared after four long years. She seated herself on the white bear-skin before the open fire; and with hands clasped round her knees she rocked herself slowly to and fro like one trying to ease an intolerable pain.
Until custom dulled the edge of that pain, the days and the nights were the cruelest in her apprenticeship up to that time.
When her boy, Gardiner, was five years old, she got her father and mother to keep him at Saint X with them.
"New York's no place, I think, to bring up and educate a boy in the right way," she explained. And it was the truth, though not the whole truth. The concealed part was that she would have made an open break with her husband had there been no other way of safeguarding their all-seeing, all-noting boy from his example.
Before Gardiner went to live with his grandparents she stayed in the East, making six or eight brief visits "home" each year. When he went she resolved to divide her year between her pleasure as a mother and her obligation to her son's father, to her parents' son-in-law—her devotions at the shrine of Appearances.
It was in the fall of the year she was twenty-five—eight years and a half after she left Battle Field—that Hampden Scarborough reappeared upon the surface of her life.
On a September afternoon in that year Olivia, descending from the train at Saint X, was almost as much embarrassed as pleased by her changed young cousin rushing at her with great energy—"Dear, dear Olivia! And hardly any different—how's the baby? No—not Fred, but Fred Junior, I mean. In some ways you positively look younger. You know, you were SO serious at college!"
"But you—I don't quite understand how any one can be so changed, yet—recognizable. I guess it's the plumage. You're in a new edition—an edition deluxe."
Pauline's dressmakers were bringing out the full value of her height and slender, graceful strength. Her eyes, full of the same old frankness and courage, now had experience in them, too. She was wearing her hair so that it fell from her brow in two sweeping curves reflecting the light in sparkles and flashes. Her manner was still simple and genuine—the simplicity and genuineness of knowledge now, not of innocence. Extremes meet—but they remain extremes. Her "plumage" was a fashionable dress of pale blue cloth, a big beplumed hat to match, a chiffon parasol like an azure cloud, at her throat a sapphire pendant, about her neck and swinging far below her waist a chain of sapphires.
"And the plumage just suits her," thought Olivia. For it seemed to her that her cousin had more than ever the quality she most admired—the quality of individuality, of distinction. Even in her way of looking clean and fresh she was different, as if those prime feminine essentials were in her not matters of frequent reacquirement but inherent and inalienable, like her brilliance of eyes and smoothness of skin.
Olivia felt a slight tugging at the bag she was carrying. She looked—an English groom in spotless summer livery was touching his hat in respectful appeal to her to let go. "Give Albert your checks, too," said Pauline, putting her arm around her cousin's waist to escort her down the platform. At the entrance, with a group of station loungers gaping at it, was a phaeton-victoria lined with some cream-colored stuff like silk, the horses and liveried coachman rigid. "She's giving Saint X a good deal to talk about," thought Olivia.
"Home, please, by the long road," said Pauline to the groom, and he sprang to the box beside the coachman, and they were instantly in rapid motion. "That'll let us have twenty minutes more together," she went on to Olivia. "There are several people stopping at the house."
The way led through Munroe Avenue, the main street of Saint X. Olivia was astonished at the changes—the town of nine years before spread and remade into an energetic city of twenty-five thousand.
"Fred told me I'd hardly recognize it," said she, "but I didn't expect this. It's another proof how far-sighted Hampden Scarborough is. Everybody advised him against coming here, but he would come. And the town has grown, and at the same time he's had a clear field to make a big reputation as a lawyer in a few years, not to speak of the power he's got in politics."
"But wouldn't he have won no matter where he was?" suggested Pauline.
"Sooner or later—but not so soon," replied Olivia.
"No—a tree doesn't have to grow so tall among a lot of bushes before it's noticed as it does in a forest."
"And you've never seen him since Battle Field?" As Olivia put this question she watched her cousin narrowly without seeming to do so.
"But," replied Pauline—and Olivia thought that both her face and her tone were a shade off the easy and the natural—"since he came I've been living in New York and haven't stayed here longer than a few days until this summer. And he's been in Europe since April. No," she went on, "I've not seen a soul from Battle Field. It's been like a painting, finished and hanging on the wall one looks toward oftenest, and influencing one's life every day."
They talked on of Battle Field, of the boys and girls they had known—how Thiebaud was dead and Mollie Crittenden had married the man who was governor of California; what Howe was not doing, the novels Chamberlayne was writing; the big women's college in Kansas that Grace Wharton was vice-president of. Then of Pierson—in the state senate and in a fair way to get to Congress the next year. Then Scarborough again—how he had distanced all the others; how he might have the largest practice in the state if he would take the sort of clients most lawyers courted assiduously; how strong he was in politics in spite of the opposition of the professionals—strong because he had a genius for organization and also had the ear and the confidence of the people and the enthusiastic personal devotion of the young men throughout the state. Olivia, more of a politician than Fred even, knew the whole story; and Pauline listened appreciatively. Few indeed are the homes in strenuously political Indiana where politics is not the chief subject of conversation, and Pauline had known about parties and campaigns as early as she had known about dolls and dresses.
"But you must have heard most of this," said Olivia, "from people here in Saint X."
"Some of it—from father and mother," Pauline answered. "They're the only people I've seen really to talk to on my little visits. They know him very well indeed. I think mother admires him almost as much as you do. Here's our place," she added, the warmth fading from her face as from a spring landscape when the shadow of the dusk begins to creep over it.
They were in the grounds of the Eyrie—the elder Dumont was just completing it when he died early in the previous spring. His widow went abroad to live with her daughter and her sister in Paris; so her son and his wife had taken it. It was a great rambling stone house that hung upon and in a lofty bluff. From its windows and verandas and balconies could be seen the panorama of Saint Christopher. To the left lay the town, its ugly part—its factories and railway yards—hidden by the jut of a hill. Beneath and beyond to the right, the shining river wound among fields brown where the harvests had been gathered, green and white where myriads of graceful tassels waved above acres on acres of Indian corn. And the broad leaves sent up through the murmur of the river a rhythmic rustling like a sigh of content. Once in a while a passing steamboat made the sonorous cry of its whistle and the melodious beat of its paddles echo from hill to hill. Between the house and the hilltop, highway lay several hundred acres of lawn and garden and wood.
The rooms of the Eyrie and its well-screened verandas were in a cool twilight, though the September sun was hot.
"They're all out, or asleep," said Pauline, as she and Olivia entered the wide reception hall. "Let's have tea on the east veranda. Its view isn't so good, but we'll be cooler. You'd like to go to your room first?"
Olivia said she was comfortable as she was and needed the tea. So they went on through the splendidly-furnished drawing-room and were going through the library when Olivia paused before a portrait—"Your husband, isn't it?"
"Yes," replied Pauline, standing behind her cousin. "We each had one done in Paris."
"What a masterful face!" said Olivia. "I've never seen a better forehead." And she thought,
"He's of the same type as Scarborough, except—what is it I dislike in his expression?"
"Do you notice a resemblance to any one you know?" asked Pauline.
"Ye-e-s," replied Olivia, coloring. "I think——"
"Scarborough, isn't it?"
"Yes," admitted Olivia.
After a pause Pauline said ambiguously: "The resemblance is stronger there than in life."
Olivia glanced at her and was made vaguely uneasy by the look she was directing at the face of the portrait. But though Pauline must have seen that she was observed, she did not change expression. They went out upon the east veranda and Olivia stood at the railing. She hardly noted the view in the press of thoughts roused by the hints of what was behind the richly embroidered curtain of her cousin's life.
All along the bluff, some exposed, some half hid by dense foliage, were the pretentious houses of the thirty or forty families who had grown rich through the industries developed within the past ten years. Two foreign-looking servants in foreign-looking house-liveries were bringing a table on which was an enormous silver tray with a tea-service of antique silver and artistic china. As Olivia turned to seat herself a young man and a woman of perhaps forty, obviously from the East, came through the doors at the far end of the long porch. Both were in white, carefully dressed and groomed; both suggested a mode of life whose leisure had never been interrupted.
"Who are coming?" asked Olivia. She wished she had gone to her room before tea. These people made her feel dowdy and mussy.
Pauline glanced round, smiled and nodded, turned back to her cousin.
"Mrs. Herron and Mr. Langdon. She's the wife of a New York lawyer, and she takes Mr. Langdon everywhere with her to amuse her, and he goes to amuse himself. He's a socialist, or something like that. He thinks up and says things to shock conservative, conventional people. He's rich and never has worked—couldn't if he would, probably. But he denounces leisure classes and large fortunes and advocates manual labor every day for everybody. He's clever in a queer, cynical way."
A Mrs. Fanshaw, also of New York, came from the library in a tea-gown of chiffon and real lace. All were made acquainted and Pauline poured the tea. As Olivia felt shy and was hungry, she ate the little sandwiches and looked and listened and thought—looked and thought rather than listened. These were certainly well-bred people, yet she did not like them.
"They're in earnest about trifles," she said to herself, "and trifle about earnest things." Yet it irritated her to feel that, though they would care not at all for her low opinion of them, she did care a great deal because they would fail to appreciate her.
"They ought to be jailed," Langdon was drawling with considerable emphasis.
"Who, Mr. Langdon?" inquired Mrs. Fanshaw—she had been as abstracted as Olivia. "You've been filling the jails rapidly to-day, and hanging not a few."
Mrs. Herron laughed. "He says your husband and Mrs. Dumont's and mine should be locked up as conspirators."
"Precisely," said Langdon, tranquilly. "They'll sign a few papers, and when they're done, what'll have happened? Not one more sheep'll be raised. Not one more pound of wool will be shorn. Not one more laborer'll be employed. Not a single improvement in any process of manufacture. But, on the other hand, the farmer'll have to sell his wool cheaper, the consumer'll have to pay a bigger price for blankets and all kinds of clothes, for carpets—for everything wool goes into. And these few men will have trebled their fortunes and at least trebled their incomes. Does anybody deny that such a performance is a crime? Why, in comparison, a burglar is honorable and courageous. HE risks liberty and life."
"Dreadful! Dreadful!" exclaimed Mrs. Fanshaw, in mock horror. "You must go at once, Mowbray, and lead the police in a raid on Jack's office."
"Thanks—it's more comfortable here." Langdon took a piece of a curious-looking kind of hot bread. "Extraordinary good stuff this is," he interjected; then went on: "And I've done my duty when I've stated the facts. Also, I'm taking a little stock in the new trust. But I don't pose as a 'captain of industry' or 'promoter of civilization.' I admit I'm a robber. My point is the rotten hypocrisy of my fellow bandits—no, pickpockets, by gad!"
Olivia looked at him with disapproving interest. It was the first time she had been present at a game of battledore and shuttlecock with what she regarded as fundamental morals. Langdon noted her expression and said to Pauline in a tone of contrition that did not conceal his amusement: "I've shocked your cousin, Mrs. Dumont."
"I hope so," replied Pauline. "I'm sure we all ought to be shocked—and should be, if it weren't you who are trying to do the shocking. She'll soon get used to you."
"Then it was a jest?" said Olivia to Langdon.
"A jest?" He looked serious. "Not at all, my dear Mrs. Pierson. Every word I said was true, and worse. They——"
"Stop your nonsense, Mowbray," interrupted Mrs. Herron, who appreciated that Olivia was an "outsider." "Certainly he was jesting, Mrs. Pierson. Mr. Langdon pretends to have eccentric ideas—one of them is that everybody with brains should be put under the feet of the numskulls; another is that anybody who has anything should be locked up and his property given to those who have nothing."
"Splendid!" exclaimed Langdon. And he took out a gold cigarette case and lighted a large, expensive-looking cigarette with a match from a gold safe. "Go on, dear lady! Herron should get you to write our prospectus when we're ready to unload on the public. The dear public! How it does yearn for a share in any piratical enterprise that flies the snowy flag of respectability." He rose. "Who'll play English billiards?"
"All right," said Mrs. Herron, rising.
"And I, too," said Mrs. Fanshaw.
"Give me one of your cigarettes, Mowbray," said Mrs. Herron. "I left my case in my room."
Pauline, answering Olivia's expression, said as soon as the three had disappeared:
"Why not? Is it any worse for a woman than for a man?"
"I don't know why not," replied Olivia. "There must be another reason than because I don't do it, and didn't think ladies did. But that's the only reason I can give just now."
"What do you think of Langdon?" asked Pauline.
"I guess my sense of humor's defective. I don't like the sort of jest he seems to excel in."
"I fancy it wasn't altogether a jest," said Pauline. "I don't inquire into those matters any more. I used to, but—the more I saw, the worse it was. Tricks and traps and squeezes and—oh, business is all vulgar and low. It's necessary, I suppose, but it's repulsive to me." She paused, then added carelessly, yet with a certain deliberateness, "I never meddle with Mr. Dumont, nor he with me."
Olivia wished to protest against Pauline's view of business. But—how could she without seeming to attack, indeed, without attacking, her cousin's husband?
Dumont brought Fanshaw up in his automobile, Herron remaining at the offices for half an hour to give the newspapers a carefully considered account of the much-discussed "merger" of the manufacturers of low-grade woolens. Herron had objected to any statement. "It's our private business," he said. "Let them howl. The fewer facts they have, the sooner they'll stop howling." But Dumont held firm for publicity. "There's no such thing as a private business nowadays," he replied. "Besides, don't we want the public to take part of our stock? What's the use of acting shady—you've avoided the legal obstacles, haven't you? Let's tell the public frankly all we want it to know, and it'll think it knows all there is to know."
The whole party met in the drawing-room at a quarter-past eight, Langdon the last to come down—Olivia was uncertain whether or not she was unjust to him when she suspected design in his late entrance, the handsomest and the best-dressed man of the company.
He looked cynically at Dumont. "Well, fellow pirate: how go our plans for a merry winter for the poor?"
"Ass!" muttered Herron to Olivia, who happened to, be nearest him. "He fancies impudence is wit. He's devoid of moral sense or even of decency. He's a traitor to his class and shouldn't be tolerated in it."
Dumont was laughingly answering Langdon in his own vein.
"Splendidly," he replied, "thanks to our worthy chaplain, Herron, who secures us the blessing and protection of the law."
"That gives me an appetite!" exclaimed Langdon. "I feared something might miscarry in these last hours of our months of plotting. Heaven be praised, the people won't have so much to waste hereafter. I'm proud to be in one of the many noble bands that are struggling to save them from themselves."
But Dumont had turned away from him; so he dropped into Mrs. Herron's discussion with Mrs. Fanshaw on their proposed trip to the Mediterranean. Dinner was announced and he was put between Mrs. Herron and Olivia, with Dumont on her right. It was a round table and Olivia's eyes lingered upon its details—the embroidered cloth with real lace in the center, the graceful antique silver candlesticks, the tall vases filled with enormous roses—everything exquisitely simple and tasteful.
Langdon talked with her until Mrs. Herron, impatient at his neglect, caught his eye and compelled his attention. Dumont, seeing that Olivia was free, drew her into his conversation with Mrs. Fanshaw; and then Mrs. Fanshaw began to talk with Mr. Herron, who was eating furiously because he had just overheard Langdon say: "That was a great day for pirates when they thought of taking aboard the lawyers as chaplains."
All the men were in high spirits; Dumont was boyish in his exuberance. When he left home that morning he was four times a millionaire; now he was at least twelve times a millionaire, through the magic of the "merger." True, eight of the twelve millions were on paper; but it was paper that would certainly pay dividends, paper that would presently sell at or near its face value. And this success had come when he was only thirty-four. His mind was already projecting greater triumphs in this modern necromancy by which millionaires evoke and materialize millions from the empty air—apparently. He was bubbling over with happiness—in the victory won, in victories to be won.
Olivia tried him on several subjects, but the conversation dragged. Of Pauline he would not talk; of Europe, he was interested only in the comfort of hotels and railway trains, in the comparative merits of the cooking and the wines in London and Paris. But his face—alert, shrewd, aggressive—and his mode of expression made her feel that he was uninteresting because he was thinking of something which he did not care to expose to her and could not take his mind from. And this was the truth. It was not until she adventured upon his business that he became talkative. And soon she had him telling her about his "combine"—frankly, boastfully, his face more and more flushed, for as he talked he drank.
"But," he said presently, "this little matter to-day is only a fair beginning. It seemed big until it was about accomplished. Then I saw it was only a suggestion for a scheme that'd be really worth, while." And he went on to unfold one of those projects of to-day's commerce and finance that were regarded as fantastic, delirious a few years ago. He would reach out and out for hundreds of millions of capital; with his woolens "combine" as a basis he would build an enormous corporation to control the sheep industry of the world—to buy millions of acres of sheep-ranges; to raise scores of millions of sheep; to acquire and to construct hundreds of plants for utilizing every part of the raw product of the ranges; to sell wherever the human race had or could have a market.
Olivia was ambitious herself, usually was delighted by ambition in others. But his exhibit of imagination and energy repelled her, even while it fascinated. Partly through youth, more through that contempt for concealment which characterizes the courageous type of large man, he showed himself to her just as he was. And she saw him not as an ambition but as an appetite, or rather a bundle of appetites.
"He has no ideals," she thought. "He's like a man who wants food merely for itself, not for the strength and the intellect it will build up. And he likes or dislikes human beings only as one likes or dislikes different things to eat."
"It'll take you years and years," she said to him, because she must say something.
"Not at all." He waved his hand—Olivia thought it looked as much like a claw as like a hand. "It's a sky-scraper, but we build sky-scrapers overnight. Time and space used to be the big elements. WE practically disregard them." He followed this with a self-satisfied laugh and an emptying of his champagne glass at a gulp.
The women were rising to withdraw. After half an hour Langdon and Herron joined them. Dumont and Fanshaw did not come until eleven o'clock. Then Dumont was so abrupt and surly that every one was grateful to Mrs. Fanshaw for taking him away to the west veranda. At midnight all went to their rooms, Pauline going with Olivia, "to make sure you haven't been neglected."
She lingered until after one, and when they kissed each the other good night, she said: "It's done me a world of good to see you, 'Livia—more even than I hoped. I knew you'd be sympathetic with me where you understood. Now, I feel that you're sympathetic where you don't understand, too. And it's there that one really needs sympathy."
"That's what friendship means—and—love," said Olivia.