DEAR SOAMES,—I suppose I ought to call you Mr. Harrowby now, but it don't somehow come natural. Soames you were to me and Soames you will be till I get used to the other thing, which I don't think I shall. I write you these few lines to let you know that I am well and going just the same as ever, though I miss our old times together something fierce. Would like to know how you are, if you ever get time to write. Expect you are having a swell time with all the gay guys in Boston. Friends say that Boston is some sporty town when you get with the inside gang, which I don't suppose you have any trouble in getting. Miss Smith has no one yet for your old room, which is all repapered and fine with a brand-new set of toadstools, real showy ones. Mrs. Leeming is sure some artist, and a nice old girl besides, when she doesn't cry. Had a very nice time at Jim's the other night; just a quart between him and Bridget and me; nothing rough-house, but all as a gentleman should. Bridget could come, as his wife was away burying an uncle at Bing Hampton. Hope you found your wife going strong as this leaves mine at present. Had a very nice letter from her the other day, and answered it on the spot telling her to be true to me and may God bring her and me together again after this long parting. Now no more fromyour friend,PELLY. Write soon.It is impossible to tell you of the glow that warmed and lighted me on reading these friendly lines. They were all the more grateful owing to the fact that if Pelly believed of me what Vio and every one else believed, as quite possibly he did, it would have made no difference. Of the things taught me in my contact with the less sophisticated walks in life, the beauty of a world in which there is comparatively little judging was the most comforting. There were all kinds of jealousies there, bickerings, sulkings, puerilities, and now and then a glorious free fight; but condemnation was rare. The bruised spirit could be at peace in this large charity, and in the spaciousness of its tolerance the humiliated soul could walk with head erect. Its ideals and pleasures might be crude; but they were not pharisaical.If I had any doubt as to my plans I had none any longer. The instinct that urged me back to the room with the new set of toadstools was like that of the poor bull baited in the ring to take refuge amid the dumb, sympathetic herd of its own kind. I asked only to be hidden there, to live and work, or, if necessary, die obscurely.Not that I hadn't had a first impulse to try and clear my name; but the futility of attempting that was soon apparent. I had nothing to offer but my word, and my word had been rejected. In the course of the two or three hours since the scene with Vio and Lydia, while I had gone to the station to secure a berth on a night train for New York and dined at a hotel, I had come to the conclusion that the effort to explain would be folly. The mere fact that my doings between Bourg-la-Comtesse and theAuvergnewere still blurred in my memory would make any tale I told incoherent and open to suspicion. In addition to that Vio knew, Wolf knew, and others knew that I had not offered my services to the Ambulance Corps of my own free will, while my letters had painted my horror of the sights I witnessed with no thought of reserve. My supposed suicide being ascribed to remorse, the discovery that I was alive and well and in hiding in New York—No; the evidence against me was too strong. The one witness who might say something in my favor, Doctor Scattlethwaite, had himself not believed me. He could say that the claim I was putting forth now I had put forth two years previously; but there would be nothing convincing in that.Besides, and there was much in the fact, I wanted to get away, to get back among those who trusted me, and to whom I felt I belonged. If the thread of flame had led me to my old life it was only to show me once for all that there was no place for me in it. Knowing that, I could take hold of the new life more whole-heartedly and probably do better work there. Already new plans were springing to my mind, plans which I could the more easily put into operation because of having some money at my disposal. Mildred Averill would help me in that and perhaps I could help her. If Vio secured a divorce, and I should put no obstruction in the way of that—But Vio herself came into my room with the calm manner and easy movement which in no wise surprised me, as she was subject to such reactions after moments of excitement."What are you doing, Billy?"She seated herself quietly.A coat being spread before me on the bed, I folded the sleeves, and doubled the breasts backward."I'm packing.""What for?""Because I'm going away.""When?""To-night; in an hour or so.""Where to?""New York first.""And then?""I don't know yet. Possibly nowhere. I may stay in New York. Probably I shall.""And not come back here any more?""That's my intention.""What are you doing it for?"Taking the coat I had folded I laid it in my suit-case."I should think you'd see.""Is it—is it because of—of what was said this afternoon?""Partly.""Not altogether?"Pulling another coat from the closet I spread it on the bed."No; not altogether.""What else is there?""Oh, nothing that you'd be interested in. I—I just want to get away.""From me?""Only in the sense that—that you're part of the whole.""The whole what?""The whole life. It's not a life for me any more."She did not deny this or protest against it. For a minute or more she said nothing, though as I crossed the room from the bed to the closet for more clothes I saw in the glass that she furtively dashed away a tear. Yesterday I would have been touched by that; but now that I knew what she believed of me, what she had been believing of me during all the weeks since I had come home, my heart was benumbed. Besides, if she was in love with Dick Stroud there was no reason for my feeling pity.I had begun on collars and neckties when she said:"What kind of a girl was that who was here this afternoon?"[image]I had begun on collars and neckties when Vio said, "What kind of a girl was that who was here this afternoon?""You must have seen something of her for yourself. I understood from her that she'd been coming to see you.""She's been here three times. Alice Mountney sent her, and I believe Lulu Averill sent her to her. I had no idea that she had anything in her mind than just to sell this new kind of corset.""And had she?""Didn't she tell you?""She didn't tell me. If she's said anything to you, I don't know what it can be.""She's not—she's not crazy, is she?""I shouldn't think so. Why do you ask?""Then she's extremely peculiar.""We're all that in our different ways, aren't we?""I don't know now whether to take her seriously or not.""What about?""About—about—Dick."I went on with my packing without answering."What doyouthink?" she asked, at last. "I suppose you have an opinion.""On what point?""The point she brought up ... as to her knowing him ... so well.""I've no opinion about that. I know she knows him ... very well indeed. At least, I take it for granted.""What makes you do that?""Oh, just having seen them together.""Why didn't you tell me?""Why should I have done that? Men don't—don't give each other away.""Then in his knowing her there was something to—to give away.""Evidently.""Then what about your knowing her yourself?""That was different.""Different? How?"Since she was pressing the question I decided not to spare her."I didn't wait for her at a street corner as a form of introduction."Expecting the question, "And did he?" I was surprised that she should make it. "And would it be discreet to inquire what your form of introduction was?""I was presented to her in all propriety by a blind boy named Drinkwater, you heard her mention him, who was my cabin-mate on theAuvergne. He and Miss Blair and I, with some other people, happened to sit at the same table.""And have you no interest in her besides that?""Yes: she's been a very good friend to me. I haven't seen her for two years and more; but that was my fault.""So I understand.""What do you mean by that?'"That if you had no interest in her she had an interest in you, strong enough to—to impel her to make my acquaintance.""With some good end in view, presumably.""With the end in view of giving me the information that—that she knew Dick.""And do you call that taking an interest in me?""What do you think yourself?"Once more I declined to give my impressions. Where Stroud was concerned I had nothing to say. Now that Vio knew something of the truth concerning him I wished not to influence her in any way. The matter seemed oddly far away from me. The tie between Vio and myself being broken in fact, as it soon would be in law, I preferred to leave the subject of my successor where it was."Why do you say," she began after a brief pause, "that this is not a life for you any more?""Because it isn't.""But why isn't it?""For one reason, because I don't like it.""Oh!" She was not expecting this reply and it displeased her. "What's the matter with it?""For me, everything. But it's nothing that you would understand.""I suppose I could understand if you explained to me.""No, you couldn't. Or, rather, I couldn't. The language isn't coined that would give me the words to tell you. It's not the facts of the life I dislike; it's the spirit of it.""Is there anything wrong with the spirit of it?""I'm not saying so. I merely dislike it for myself. For me it's not a real life any more. I belong to—to simpler people with less complex ideas.""Less complex ideas about what?'"About honor for one thing." In my goings and comings round the room I paused in front of her. "Among my friends, my real friends, you can be a coward or a deserter, just as you could be a murderer or a thief, and no one would pass judgment upon you.""And is that ... a virtue?""I don't know anything about its being a virtue; but it is a consolation."As I stood looking down on her she said, softly:"Have I passed judgment upon you?""You've been a brick, Vio: you've been a heroine. The only difference I should note between you and the people to whom I'm going back is that you've suppressed your condemnation, and they didn't feel it.""Did they ...know?""I can't tell you what they knew, for the reason that it wouldn't have mattered. They knew there was something wrong with me, that I was hiding something, that I was probably an outcast of good family; but they gave me a great, big affection to live in, and thought no more about it. You've given me—"There was an extraordinarily brilliant flash of her dark eyes as she lifted them to mine."What?" she interjected. "Have you any idea of what I've given you?""You've given me," I repeated, "the great, big affection to live in, but with something in it that poisoned the air. I'm grateful to you, Vio, more grateful than I can begin to tell you, especially as I know now what you've been thinking all the time; but you can easily understand that I prefer not to live in an atmosphere laden with—""If we purified that, the atmosphere? What then?""It still wouldn't be everything. When I say I don't like the life, it isn't just because it's cast me out; it's because for me—mind you, I'm not speaking of any one else—it's become vapid and—and foolish, and—and a throwing away of time.""And what do you find among the people you—you call your friends that's more worth while?""That's what it's hard to tell you. I find the simple and elemental, something basic and fundamental that the new crisis in existence is telling us to discover and—and rectify. You remember what I said a month or more ago to Stroud, that our building was collapsing?""Yes; and I hoped you were, as people say, talking through your hat.""Well, I wasn't. The building is coming down, right to the foundations. Only the foundations will remain.""They're awfully crude foundations, aren't they?""Exactly. That's just where the trouble is. The bases of our life are ugly and unclean, and so we've turned away and refused to look at them. I'm going back, Vio, to see what I can do to make them less ugly, less unclean, and more secure to build on. Howcanwe erect a society on foundations that already have the element of decay in them before we've added the first layer of our superstructure?"Rising, she went to a window, leaning against it as if tired, and looking out into the darkness."But what can you do, all by yourself?""Very little; but a little is something. It isn't altogether the success or the failure that I'm thinking about; it's the principle.""Oh, if you're going to live by principles—""We've got to live by something. When the world is coming down about our heads.""If it's doing that, one man can't hold it up.""No; but a good many men may. I'm not the only one who's trying.""I never heard of any one trying it like that ... by going back to the foundational, as you call it.""Oh, I think you have. The Man who more than any other has helped the human race did just that thing. You're strict about going to church on Sunday."She was slightly shocked. "I presume you're not going to try to be like Him.""Perhaps not. I may not aim so high. I'm only pointing out the fact that going back to the foundational and beginning there again was His method. Others have followed it, a good many. All the work connected with what we call Settlements—""I never could bear them.""Possibly; but that isn't the point. I'm only saying that in their way settlement workers have been feeling out the special weakness of our civilization, and doing their best to meet it. I suppose our politicians and clergymen and economists have been doing the same. The trouble with them is that they so generally nip the symptom while leaving the root of the disease that they don't accomplish much.""Did you accomplish much yourself when you were—?""I didn't try. I didn't see what I was there for. It's only since coming back here that I've begun to understand why I was led the way I was."Half turning round, she said over her shoulder:"Do you call that being led?"I replied with a distinctness which I tried to make significant:"Yes, Vio; I call it being led. I didn't see it till I got back here; and even here I didn't see it till—till this afternoon. And now—now I've done with all this. I've done with the easy, gentlemanly life of spending money and being waited on. I'm not saying it isn't all right; it's only not all right for me. I've got something else to do. There was a time, you know it as well as I do, when a poor man was an offense to me, and an uncultivated person an abhorrence. I was a snob from every point of view, and I was proud of being one. And now—"Pulling down the shade and turning completely round, she stood with her back to the window."Yes, Billy? And now?""It's no use. I can't tell you. I couldn't explain if I used up all the words in the dictionary. It's just a tugging in my heart to get back where—" I had a sudden inspiration. "Read that," I said, taking Pelly's letter from my pocket.She stood under the central bunch of electrics while I closed the suit-case and fastened the straps. Having finished the letter, she handed it back to me."Well?" I asked."It's just—just a common person's letter, as far as I see, and rather coarse. Boosey might have written it, or Miles, the chauffeur.""And that's all you see in it?""What more is there to see?""That's just it. That's just where the inexplicable thing lies. I see, or rather I feel, a tenderness in it that probably no one could detect but myself. Even the reference to drinking—""The quart.""Yes; the quart. You've got to remember how small the margin for pleasure is in a life like Sam's, and how innocently he and Bridget and Jim can do what they had much better let alone. They're not vicious; they're only—how shall I say?—they're only undeveloped. We're not such saints ourselves, even with our development; and when all civilization has bent its efforts, church and state together, to keep their minds as primitive as possible so that they'll do the most primitive kinds of work, you can't blame them if they take their pleasures and everything else primitively. We've got to have another educational system.""But they say our educational system is very good as it is.""As far as it goes; but we still have one system for the rich and another for the poor, and we shall never get equality of mind till we have equality of educational opportunity. But that's only a detail. It all hangs together. As far as I'm concerned, it sums itself up in the urging that takes me back among simple people because—because I love them, Vio; that's the only word for it, and in their way they've loved me."She crossed the room aimlessly."Other—other people have—have loved you, as you call it, who—who mayn't have been simple.""Y-yes. But—but in the cup they handed to me there were bitter ingredients. In the cup I'm talking of there was only ... love. It was a blind, stumbling, awkward, mannish love, if you like; but it was ... love. It was the pure, unadulterated thing, as unconscious of itself as the air is. The girl who was here this afternoon is an example of it. For anything I know, she was an idiot to have come; but she came, poor soul, because she thought—""Well, what did she think?""That if Dick Stroud were out of the way I should have a better chance with you."She was still moving aimlessly about the room, picking up small objects and putting them down again."She said—she said he'd been tagging around after her, it's her expression, for nearly three years.""To my practically certain knowledge that is so.""She said, too, that she could marry him if she liked, but that she didn't want to.""I don't know anything about that.""If she went with him at all, she said, it would probably be ... without marriage, as she didn't wish to be bound to him."I looked up in curiosity."And did she say there was any possibility of her going with him at all?""I think she did. That's what made me think her touched in her mind or crazy. She said she hadn't decided, or something like that; but as she was going to be an adventuress she had to begin some time, and perhaps it might as well be with him as with any one else. She spoke as if it rested entirely with her to take him or throw him away."Again I decided to be cruel."It very likely does."She was standing now by my dressing-table, and as if my words had meant nothing to her she said:"Aren't you going to take your hair-brush?""Oh, I was forgetting to put it in. Thanks."When I went for it she was holding it in her hand."What a queer, cheap-looking thing! Where on earth did you get it?""I suppose it was at Tours, with the other things, when—""Oh yes! I remember." She moved toward the door. "Your other brushes, the ebony ones with the silver initials, that I gave you before—before we were married, are here. They were with the things found on the bank of that— They forwarded them to me. Shouldn't you—shouldn't you like them?""Thanks, no. This sort of common thing suits me better."I was doing the last things about the room. She was standing with her hand on the knob of the door, which was half open."And when you're back in New York, Billy, doing that kind of thing you talk about, shall you be all alone?"A second's reflection convinced me that it was best to be clear about everything."At first.""And later?"I pulled open a drawer from which I knew I had taken all the contents."You mean when we're both ... free?""Suppose I put it ... whenyou'refree?""Oh, then there may be ... some one else.""Some one ... I know?"I delved into another drawer, hiding my face. "Some one you may have heard of; but I don't—I don't think you know her."When I had pushed in the drawer I raised myself; but I was alone in the room. Ten minutes later I had left the house without a good-by on either side.On the door-step, in my working-man's costume, and with the everlasting bag and suit-case in my hands, I looked up at a starry, windy sky, with the trees of the Common tossing beneath it."My God, what an end!" I cried, inwardly.But, as far as my knowledge or purpose went, an end it was.CHAPTER IINoble intentions being easier to conceive than to carry out, it is hardly surprising that on settling again in New York I found myself "let down." The sense of adventure was out of it, while that of the mission had crept in. The old friends were still the old friends; but if my intercourse with them was not less spontaneous it was certainly more self-conscious. Back in my squint-eyed room, with the new paper and the more showy set of fungi, the knowledge that I was there because I chose to be there, and not because I couldn't help it, marked all my goings and comings with a point of interrogation.In some measure, too, it was a point of disapproval. That is to say, those who welcomed me back took me somewhat in the spirit of a "returned empty.""Why, yes, of course, if you want it," was Miss Smith's reply to my request to have my old room back again; but her intonation was not wholly that of pleasure. "We thought, my sister and I, that your social duties in Boston would restrict your movements for the future."I had pricked their little bubble of romance, and they were disappointed. That one who had been their lodger was now with the Olympian gods was a tale to be told as long as they had a room to let, and to every one who rented one. I saw at once that I couldn't ask them to believe that I had come back of my own free will. The very magnitude of my hopes compelled me to be silent with regard to them."Punk!" was Pelly's comment, when I braced myself to tell him I had found home life disillusioning.That was across the table of the familiar eating-house, as we took our first meal together. I was obliged to explain myself for the reason that in the back of his mind, also, I read the conviction that I hadn't "made good." Compelled to be more primitive than I should have liked, I had to base my dissatisfaction on the grounds of physical restriction rather than on those of divine discontent."Some of them Boston women will put the lid on a man and lock it down," he observed further. "Punk, I call it. Well, now that you've broken loose, and with your wad, I suppose you'll be givin' yourself a little run."I allowed him to make this assumption, thankful that he should understand me from any point of view; but it was not the point of view of our former connection. That a man should be down on his luck was one thing; but that, having got on his feet, he should deliberately become a waster was another. In any light but that of a reversion to low tastes I could never have made Sam see my return to the house in Meeting-House Green. For low tastes he had the same toleration as for misdemeanors; but he did not disguise the fact that for a man who had got his chance he considered them low tastes.At Creed & Creed's I received a similar tempered welcome."Sure here's Brogan," Bridget called out to the other men, on seeing me enter the cavern where four of them were at the accustomed work of sweeping a consignment that had just been unpacked. Burlap and sheepskins were still strewn about the floor, so that I had to restrain the impulse to pick things up and stack them.Perhaps I can best compare my return to that of a spirit which has passed to a higher sphere and chooses to be for a short time re-embodied. Denis, the Finn, and a small wiry man, a stranger to me, all drew near to stare solemnly. My visit could only be taken as a condescension, not as a renewed incorporation into the old life. From that I had been projected forever by the sheer fact of not having to earn a living in this humble way."Aw, but it's well you're lookin'," Gallivan said, awesomely."And why shouldn't he be lookin' well," Bridget demanded, "and him with more butter than he's got bread to spread it on?""It's different with us," the Finn said, bitterly, "with no butter and not enough bread, and more mouths to feed than can ever be filled. I'll bet you Brogan doesn't think of them, now that he's got his own belly full."It seemed to me an opening."Well, suppose I did? Suppose I'd come back to hand down some of the butter?""Aw, cut it out, Brogan," the Finn laughed, joylessly. "I was only kiddin' you. We don't pass the buck, none of us don't. What you got, keep; and if you don't, then the more fool you."In Denis's yearning eyes were the only signs of remote comprehension in the company."Sure ye don't have to pass the buck just because y' ask the saints to pray for ye, do ye? Pray for us, Brogan. Ye've got nothing else to do."It was another opening."I wish I had, Denis. I've found that I don't know how to loaf. If you hear of anything—"He nodded, with beatified aspiration in his leathery old face."Aw, then, if it's that way you feel, the Holy Mother 'll find ye something, Protestant though y' are, just as sure as she showed ould Biddy Murphy, and her a Protestant too, that me mother knew in Ireland where there was two-and-sixpence lyin' in the mud, and she with the rent comin' due the next mornin': This is the new Brogan," he continued, with a wave of his hand toward the dark, wiry man, who responded with a grin. "He can't talk our talk hardly not at all, not no more than the monkey I used to tell you about. A Pole he calls hisself; but I nivver heard of no such nation as that till I come to this country. We nivver had them in Ireland at all—at all. There was Ulster men, and Munster men, and men from the County Monaghan; but I nivver heard tell of no Poles. Do you think they's have sowls like us? Or would they be like them Chinees and Japansey men?""For Gawd's sake, here's the Floater," Bridget warned, softly, and every man got back to his work.Back at their work they had no time for further conversation; and in some way, impossible for me to tell you in words, I felt myself eliminated from their fellowship. They would always be friendly; but the knowledge that I was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, which had once been the outcome of a common need, was no longer theirs nor mine. I could look in at them in this non-committal way as often as I chose; but I should never get any farther.Something of the sort was manifest when I next met Lydia Blair. Our standing toward each other was different. Little as she had understood me before, she understood me less in this new rôle than in any other."You sure are the queerest guy I ever met," she said, at one time in the course of the evening. "I sometimes wonder if you're all there."But that was after I had been foolish enough to try to make her see my point of view toward life, and failed. Before that she had been sympathetic.Our first conversation had been over the telephone, when I had called up Clotilde's to ask if Miss Blair had returned from Boston."Miss Blair at the 'phone," was the reply. "Who's this?"Somewhat timidly I said I was Mr. Harrowby, repeating the name twice before she recognized it as mine. Having invited her to dine with me and go to the theater I got a quavering, "Sure!" which lacked her usual spontaneity."You don't seem pleased," I said."Oh, I'm pleased enough. I'm only wondering if—if you are.""Why shouldn't I be, when I've asked you?""Well, I put my foot in it for fair, didn't I?""You mean in Boston? Oh, that was all right. I know you meant to do me a good turn; and perhaps you've done it.""Oh, Imeantto; but I sure did get a lesson. My mother used to tell me to keep my fingers out of other people's pies; and I'm going to from this time on."In the evening, seated opposite me at the little table at Josephine's, with the din of a hundred diners giving us a sort of privacy, she told me more about it."You see, it was this way: He'd always been talking to me about this rich young Boston widow he'd met at Palm Beach, trying to get my mad up.""What did he say of her?""Well, the sort of thing hewouldsay. He's a good judge of a woman, you must admit; and he thought she was about the classiest. It was when I began to tell him what I wanted to be that he sprang that on me, said she was the model for me to study, and that when it came to the dressy vampire Agnes Dunham wasn't in it."Did he call this—this Boston lady a dressy vampire?""Oh, he didn't mean that. It was only that for any one who wanted to be a dressy vampire she was a smart style. A vampire mustn't look a vampire, or she might as well go out of business. The one thing I criticized in Agnes Dunham in 'The Scarlet Sin' was that a woman who advertised herself so much as an adventuress wouldn't get very far with her adventuring.""I see. You'd go in for a finer art.""I'd go in for pulling the thing off, whatever it was; but that's not what I want to tell you. To go back to what he was always saying about this Boston lady, it made me crazy to see her. In the corset business I'd got intimate with a good many society women, and most of them were gumps. For one good vampire there were a hundred with the kick of a boiled potato. That made me all the crazier to see, and I thought about it and thought about it. Then, one day, Harry called me on the 'phone to say— fxsYou see, he's living with the Averills, and when that Mrs. Mountney— Well, when he told me who you were, and that the lady wasn't a widow any more than I am, well, I simply laid down and passed away. To think thatyou, the fellow we'd been putting down as a mystery and a swell crook—""What did you put me down for then when you found out?""We didn't get a line on it all at once. That was later. Mrs. Mountney told Lulu, and Dick Stroud told me, and so—""Did you all believe what you heard?""It was pretty hard not to, wasn't it? after the queer things you'd been doing. There was just one person who stuck it out that it wasn't true; and that was little Milly. She didn't say much to the family; but to me she declared that if all the armies in France were to swear to it, she'd still know there was some mistake. She's another one I can't make out.""What can't you make out about her?""Whether she's got a heart in her body, or only a hard-boiled egg.""Oh, I fancy she has a heart all right.""I used to fancy the same thing, or rather I took it for granted; but ever since— Well, she just stumps me."She reverted to her errand in Boston and what came of it."It wasn't till I began to hear of what was going on there that it seemed to me—" the veil of tears to which her eyes were liable descended like a distant mist—"that it seemed to me a darned shame.""What seemed to you a darned shame in particular?""Well, first that Dick Stroud should be pulling the wool over any other woman's eyes, especially a rich one, and then that he should be upsettin' your apple-cart when you'd had so much trouble already. After that it all came easy.""What came easy?""Getting to know Mrs. Harrowby, and all the rest of it. The first once or twice I didn't see how to bring in Dick Stroud's name without seeming to do it on purpose; but after I met you in the up-stairs hall, why it was just natural. Say, you copped a peach when you got married; do you know it?""Why do you say that?""Because I've got eyes in my head; and, say, she's the one I saw you with that time I told you about, ever so long ago, and it must have been in New York. I suppose some guy had taken me to a swell restaurant to blow me in for a dinner; but anyhow she was the one. The minute I saw her back I knew there were not two suchspeakingbacks in the world. As for me modeling myself on her, well, an old hour-glass pair of stays might as well try to be Clotilde's Number Three Coar Pearl. And, say, she's some sport, isn't she? When I told her more about Dick Stroud and me, after you'd gone away that afternoon, she never turned a hair. Mrs. Mountney says she was going to marry him if you hadn't turned up, and even now he's hoping to marry her; but when I let her have the whole bunch of truth, she took it like a rag doll will take a pin-prick. Never moved a muscle, or showed that it wasn't just my story, and not a bit her own. Of course I took my cue from that—it was my line all along—and was just the poor working-girl telling her life history to a sympathetic lady, just as they hand it out in books; but she carried the thing off something swell. In fact, she made me more than half think—""What?" I questioned, when she held her idea suspended there."I don't believe I'll tell you. There are things a man had better find out for himself; do you know it?""I sha'n't find out anything for myself," I said, "because—because I've given up the fight."She stared at me with eyes wide open in incredulous horror."You've given up the fight for a peach like that! Well, of all the poor boobs!" Leaning back in her chair she scanned my appearance. "I thought there was something wrong when I saw you got up like that. You can beat Walter Haines, the quick-change man, when it comes to clothes, believeme. What have you got on now?"I explained that it had been my Sunday suit during the time I had been working at Creed & Creed's."Then for Gawd's sake go and take it off, before we start for the theater. I'll wait for you here. You can go and come in a taxi. I've been looking at you all along, and thinking it must be the latest wrinkle from Boston. Bostonhasfunny ways, now hasn't it? And so—"It was here that I ventured on the exposition of my new scheme of life, getting no appreciation beyond the question as to my sanity quoted above. Later in the evening as, after the theater, I drove her back to Miss Flowerdew's in a taxi, she summed up the situation thus:"Look-a-here! I never did take stock in that bum story of your being a quitter on the battlefield; but now I sure will if you walk out and hand the show over to Dick Stroud. Why, he's worth two of you! Look how he sticks! He'll getmeone of these days, just by his sticking, if I'm not careful; and when it comes to a woman like that— Why, I'm ashamed to go round with such a guy. And say, the next time you ask me to dinner, you'll not be got up like the bogie-man dressed for his wife's funeral. You'll look like you did the other day in Boston, or the first time I saw you, or it will be nix on little Lydia."Drinkwater's tone was similar and yet different. It was different in that while his premises as to "sticking" coincided with Lydia's, his conclusions were not the same.Perhaps he was not the same Drinkwater. More than two years having passed since I had seen him, I found in him more than two years of development. A crude boy when last we had met, association with a man like Averill, combined with his own instinct for growth, had made him something of a man of the world not the less sympathetic for his honest pug-face and his blindness. The fact that he asked me to dine with him at his university club was an indication of progress in itself.He gave me his confidences before I offered mine, sketching a career in which stenography figured as no more than the handmaid to a passion for biological research. From many of the details of research he was, of course, precluded by his blindness; but his methodical habits, his memory, and his faculty for induction had more than once put Averill on the track of one thing when looking for another. It was thus that they had discovered theophida parotideawhile experimenting for the germ of the Spanish influenza. Incidentally, his salary had been creeping upward in proportion as he made himself more useful."And Lydia's been a wonder," he declared, his face shining. "Talk about sticking! The way that girl's stuck to me in every kind of tight place! Always thinking of other people and how to pull them out of the holes they get into! In the Middle Ages she'd have been a saint. Now she's just an up-to-date New York girl."By the time he had finished this rhapsody I was ready to tell him a part of my own life tale, on which I found him more responsive than any one I had met. As to my mental misfortunes in France he accepted the narrative without questioning. When I came to what I painted as domestic conditions outlived on both sides he passed the topic over with the lightness born of tact. You see it was an altogether older and more serious Drinkwater with whom I had to deal; and yet one not less enthusiastic.I discovered this when, with much misgiving, I hinted at the task to which I wished to dedicate anything left in my life."You've got it, old boy," he half shouted, slapping his leg. "There are three or four big jobs through which we white Americans have got to save our country, and among them the free play of class-contribution is almost the first. Say, these fellows that go jazzing about class welfare get my goat. Class co-operation is what we want; and it's what classes come into existence to give. You can't suppress classes, not yet awhile at any rate, in a country full of inequalities; but what we can do is to get the classes that form themselves spontaneously to take their gifts and pass 'em on to each other. Each works out something that another doesn't, and so can benefit the bunch all round. Say, Jasper, you'll hit the nail of one of our biggest national weaknesses right on the head as soon as you've learned how to do it.""Yes, but the learning how to do it is just where the hitch seems to come in. I've been in New York three weeks and I'm just where I was when I came.""Say, I'll give you a line on that. Do you know how a young fellow in a country town—I don't know anything about swell places like New York—becomes a barber?"I said I didn't, that I had never given a thought to the subject."Well, he doesn't learn, and nobody ever teaches him. He just sits round in the barber shop, brushing hats and hanging up overcoats, and wishing to the Lord hewasa barber, and all of a sudden heisone. He's watched the shaves and hair-clips, hardly knowing he's been doing it, but wishing like blazes all the while, and at last it comes to him like song to a young bird. Now you've got to sit round. Sit tight and sit round. Wish and watch, and watch and wish, and the divine urge that turns a youngster into a barber, because that's what he's got his heart on, will steer you into the right way. This isn't going to be anything you can learn, as you'd learn to drive a motor or dissect a dead body. It won't be a profession, it'll be alife, that'll show you the trick. Don't try to hurry things, Jasper; and don't expect that three weeks or three months or three years are going to make this mum old world fork you out its secrets. Just stick, and if you don't do the thing you're aiming at you'll do another just as useful. Why, the doctor was going to chuck all his experiments on the influenza bug when I persuaded him to keep at it; and so he discovered the thing that scientists have been after since Dockendorff thought he'd tracked it down as long ago as 1893. Allsticking!"
DEAR SOAMES,—I suppose I ought to call you Mr. Harrowby now, but it don't somehow come natural. Soames you were to me and Soames you will be till I get used to the other thing, which I don't think I shall. I write you these few lines to let you know that I am well and going just the same as ever, though I miss our old times together something fierce. Would like to know how you are, if you ever get time to write. Expect you are having a swell time with all the gay guys in Boston. Friends say that Boston is some sporty town when you get with the inside gang, which I don't suppose you have any trouble in getting. Miss Smith has no one yet for your old room, which is all repapered and fine with a brand-new set of toadstools, real showy ones. Mrs. Leeming is sure some artist, and a nice old girl besides, when she doesn't cry. Had a very nice time at Jim's the other night; just a quart between him and Bridget and me; nothing rough-house, but all as a gentleman should. Bridget could come, as his wife was away burying an uncle at Bing Hampton. Hope you found your wife going strong as this leaves mine at present. Had a very nice letter from her the other day, and answered it on the spot telling her to be true to me and may God bring her and me together again after this long parting. Now no more from
PELLY. Write soon.
It is impossible to tell you of the glow that warmed and lighted me on reading these friendly lines. They were all the more grateful owing to the fact that if Pelly believed of me what Vio and every one else believed, as quite possibly he did, it would have made no difference. Of the things taught me in my contact with the less sophisticated walks in life, the beauty of a world in which there is comparatively little judging was the most comforting. There were all kinds of jealousies there, bickerings, sulkings, puerilities, and now and then a glorious free fight; but condemnation was rare. The bruised spirit could be at peace in this large charity, and in the spaciousness of its tolerance the humiliated soul could walk with head erect. Its ideals and pleasures might be crude; but they were not pharisaical.
If I had any doubt as to my plans I had none any longer. The instinct that urged me back to the room with the new set of toadstools was like that of the poor bull baited in the ring to take refuge amid the dumb, sympathetic herd of its own kind. I asked only to be hidden there, to live and work, or, if necessary, die obscurely.
Not that I hadn't had a first impulse to try and clear my name; but the futility of attempting that was soon apparent. I had nothing to offer but my word, and my word had been rejected. In the course of the two or three hours since the scene with Vio and Lydia, while I had gone to the station to secure a berth on a night train for New York and dined at a hotel, I had come to the conclusion that the effort to explain would be folly. The mere fact that my doings between Bourg-la-Comtesse and theAuvergnewere still blurred in my memory would make any tale I told incoherent and open to suspicion. In addition to that Vio knew, Wolf knew, and others knew that I had not offered my services to the Ambulance Corps of my own free will, while my letters had painted my horror of the sights I witnessed with no thought of reserve. My supposed suicide being ascribed to remorse, the discovery that I was alive and well and in hiding in New York—
No; the evidence against me was too strong. The one witness who might say something in my favor, Doctor Scattlethwaite, had himself not believed me. He could say that the claim I was putting forth now I had put forth two years previously; but there would be nothing convincing in that.
Besides, and there was much in the fact, I wanted to get away, to get back among those who trusted me, and to whom I felt I belonged. If the thread of flame had led me to my old life it was only to show me once for all that there was no place for me in it. Knowing that, I could take hold of the new life more whole-heartedly and probably do better work there. Already new plans were springing to my mind, plans which I could the more easily put into operation because of having some money at my disposal. Mildred Averill would help me in that and perhaps I could help her. If Vio secured a divorce, and I should put no obstruction in the way of that—
But Vio herself came into my room with the calm manner and easy movement which in no wise surprised me, as she was subject to such reactions after moments of excitement.
"What are you doing, Billy?"
She seated herself quietly.
A coat being spread before me on the bed, I folded the sleeves, and doubled the breasts backward.
"I'm packing."
"What for?"
"Because I'm going away."
"When?"
"To-night; in an hour or so."
"Where to?"
"New York first."
"And then?"
"I don't know yet. Possibly nowhere. I may stay in New York. Probably I shall."
"And not come back here any more?"
"That's my intention."
"What are you doing it for?"
Taking the coat I had folded I laid it in my suit-case.
"I should think you'd see."
"Is it—is it because of—of what was said this afternoon?"
"Partly."
"Not altogether?"
Pulling another coat from the closet I spread it on the bed.
"No; not altogether."
"What else is there?"
"Oh, nothing that you'd be interested in. I—I just want to get away."
"From me?"
"Only in the sense that—that you're part of the whole."
"The whole what?"
"The whole life. It's not a life for me any more."
She did not deny this or protest against it. For a minute or more she said nothing, though as I crossed the room from the bed to the closet for more clothes I saw in the glass that she furtively dashed away a tear. Yesterday I would have been touched by that; but now that I knew what she believed of me, what she had been believing of me during all the weeks since I had come home, my heart was benumbed. Besides, if she was in love with Dick Stroud there was no reason for my feeling pity.
I had begun on collars and neckties when she said:
"What kind of a girl was that who was here this afternoon?"
[image]I had begun on collars and neckties when Vio said, "What kind of a girl was that who was here this afternoon?"
[image]
[image]
I had begun on collars and neckties when Vio said, "What kind of a girl was that who was here this afternoon?"
"You must have seen something of her for yourself. I understood from her that she'd been coming to see you."
"She's been here three times. Alice Mountney sent her, and I believe Lulu Averill sent her to her. I had no idea that she had anything in her mind than just to sell this new kind of corset."
"And had she?"
"Didn't she tell you?"
"She didn't tell me. If she's said anything to you, I don't know what it can be."
"She's not—she's not crazy, is she?"
"I shouldn't think so. Why do you ask?"
"Then she's extremely peculiar."
"We're all that in our different ways, aren't we?"
"I don't know now whether to take her seriously or not."
"What about?"
"About—about—Dick."
I went on with my packing without answering.
"What doyouthink?" she asked, at last. "I suppose you have an opinion."
"On what point?"
"The point she brought up ... as to her knowing him ... so well."
"I've no opinion about that. I know she knows him ... very well indeed. At least, I take it for granted."
"What makes you do that?"
"Oh, just having seen them together."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Why should I have done that? Men don't—don't give each other away."
"Then in his knowing her there was something to—to give away."
"Evidently."
"Then what about your knowing her yourself?"
"That was different."
"Different? How?"
Since she was pressing the question I decided not to spare her.
"I didn't wait for her at a street corner as a form of introduction."
Expecting the question, "And did he?" I was surprised that she should make it. "And would it be discreet to inquire what your form of introduction was?"
"I was presented to her in all propriety by a blind boy named Drinkwater, you heard her mention him, who was my cabin-mate on theAuvergne. He and Miss Blair and I, with some other people, happened to sit at the same table."
"And have you no interest in her besides that?"
"Yes: she's been a very good friend to me. I haven't seen her for two years and more; but that was my fault."
"So I understand."
"What do you mean by that?'
"That if you had no interest in her she had an interest in you, strong enough to—to impel her to make my acquaintance."
"With some good end in view, presumably."
"With the end in view of giving me the information that—that she knew Dick."
"And do you call that taking an interest in me?"
"What do you think yourself?"
Once more I declined to give my impressions. Where Stroud was concerned I had nothing to say. Now that Vio knew something of the truth concerning him I wished not to influence her in any way. The matter seemed oddly far away from me. The tie between Vio and myself being broken in fact, as it soon would be in law, I preferred to leave the subject of my successor where it was.
"Why do you say," she began after a brief pause, "that this is not a life for you any more?"
"Because it isn't."
"But why isn't it?"
"For one reason, because I don't like it."
"Oh!" She was not expecting this reply and it displeased her. "What's the matter with it?"
"For me, everything. But it's nothing that you would understand."
"I suppose I could understand if you explained to me."
"No, you couldn't. Or, rather, I couldn't. The language isn't coined that would give me the words to tell you. It's not the facts of the life I dislike; it's the spirit of it."
"Is there anything wrong with the spirit of it?"
"I'm not saying so. I merely dislike it for myself. For me it's not a real life any more. I belong to—to simpler people with less complex ideas."
"Less complex ideas about what?'
"About honor for one thing." In my goings and comings round the room I paused in front of her. "Among my friends, my real friends, you can be a coward or a deserter, just as you could be a murderer or a thief, and no one would pass judgment upon you."
"And is that ... a virtue?"
"I don't know anything about its being a virtue; but it is a consolation."
As I stood looking down on her she said, softly:
"Have I passed judgment upon you?"
"You've been a brick, Vio: you've been a heroine. The only difference I should note between you and the people to whom I'm going back is that you've suppressed your condemnation, and they didn't feel it."
"Did they ...know?"
"I can't tell you what they knew, for the reason that it wouldn't have mattered. They knew there was something wrong with me, that I was hiding something, that I was probably an outcast of good family; but they gave me a great, big affection to live in, and thought no more about it. You've given me—"
There was an extraordinarily brilliant flash of her dark eyes as she lifted them to mine.
"What?" she interjected. "Have you any idea of what I've given you?"
"You've given me," I repeated, "the great, big affection to live in, but with something in it that poisoned the air. I'm grateful to you, Vio, more grateful than I can begin to tell you, especially as I know now what you've been thinking all the time; but you can easily understand that I prefer not to live in an atmosphere laden with—"
"If we purified that, the atmosphere? What then?"
"It still wouldn't be everything. When I say I don't like the life, it isn't just because it's cast me out; it's because for me—mind you, I'm not speaking of any one else—it's become vapid and—and foolish, and—and a throwing away of time."
"And what do you find among the people you—you call your friends that's more worth while?"
"That's what it's hard to tell you. I find the simple and elemental, something basic and fundamental that the new crisis in existence is telling us to discover and—and rectify. You remember what I said a month or more ago to Stroud, that our building was collapsing?"
"Yes; and I hoped you were, as people say, talking through your hat."
"Well, I wasn't. The building is coming down, right to the foundations. Only the foundations will remain."
"They're awfully crude foundations, aren't they?"
"Exactly. That's just where the trouble is. The bases of our life are ugly and unclean, and so we've turned away and refused to look at them. I'm going back, Vio, to see what I can do to make them less ugly, less unclean, and more secure to build on. Howcanwe erect a society on foundations that already have the element of decay in them before we've added the first layer of our superstructure?"
Rising, she went to a window, leaning against it as if tired, and looking out into the darkness.
"But what can you do, all by yourself?"
"Very little; but a little is something. It isn't altogether the success or the failure that I'm thinking about; it's the principle."
"Oh, if you're going to live by principles—"
"We've got to live by something. When the world is coming down about our heads."
"If it's doing that, one man can't hold it up."
"No; but a good many men may. I'm not the only one who's trying."
"I never heard of any one trying it like that ... by going back to the foundational, as you call it."
"Oh, I think you have. The Man who more than any other has helped the human race did just that thing. You're strict about going to church on Sunday."
She was slightly shocked. "I presume you're not going to try to be like Him."
"Perhaps not. I may not aim so high. I'm only pointing out the fact that going back to the foundational and beginning there again was His method. Others have followed it, a good many. All the work connected with what we call Settlements—"
"I never could bear them."
"Possibly; but that isn't the point. I'm only saying that in their way settlement workers have been feeling out the special weakness of our civilization, and doing their best to meet it. I suppose our politicians and clergymen and economists have been doing the same. The trouble with them is that they so generally nip the symptom while leaving the root of the disease that they don't accomplish much."
"Did you accomplish much yourself when you were—?"
"I didn't try. I didn't see what I was there for. It's only since coming back here that I've begun to understand why I was led the way I was."
Half turning round, she said over her shoulder:
"Do you call that being led?"
I replied with a distinctness which I tried to make significant:
"Yes, Vio; I call it being led. I didn't see it till I got back here; and even here I didn't see it till—till this afternoon. And now—now I've done with all this. I've done with the easy, gentlemanly life of spending money and being waited on. I'm not saying it isn't all right; it's only not all right for me. I've got something else to do. There was a time, you know it as well as I do, when a poor man was an offense to me, and an uncultivated person an abhorrence. I was a snob from every point of view, and I was proud of being one. And now—"
Pulling down the shade and turning completely round, she stood with her back to the window.
"Yes, Billy? And now?"
"It's no use. I can't tell you. I couldn't explain if I used up all the words in the dictionary. It's just a tugging in my heart to get back where—" I had a sudden inspiration. "Read that," I said, taking Pelly's letter from my pocket.
She stood under the central bunch of electrics while I closed the suit-case and fastened the straps. Having finished the letter, she handed it back to me.
"Well?" I asked.
"It's just—just a common person's letter, as far as I see, and rather coarse. Boosey might have written it, or Miles, the chauffeur."
"And that's all you see in it?"
"What more is there to see?"
"That's just it. That's just where the inexplicable thing lies. I see, or rather I feel, a tenderness in it that probably no one could detect but myself. Even the reference to drinking—"
"The quart."
"Yes; the quart. You've got to remember how small the margin for pleasure is in a life like Sam's, and how innocently he and Bridget and Jim can do what they had much better let alone. They're not vicious; they're only—how shall I say?—they're only undeveloped. We're not such saints ourselves, even with our development; and when all civilization has bent its efforts, church and state together, to keep their minds as primitive as possible so that they'll do the most primitive kinds of work, you can't blame them if they take their pleasures and everything else primitively. We've got to have another educational system."
"But they say our educational system is very good as it is."
"As far as it goes; but we still have one system for the rich and another for the poor, and we shall never get equality of mind till we have equality of educational opportunity. But that's only a detail. It all hangs together. As far as I'm concerned, it sums itself up in the urging that takes me back among simple people because—because I love them, Vio; that's the only word for it, and in their way they've loved me."
She crossed the room aimlessly.
"Other—other people have—have loved you, as you call it, who—who mayn't have been simple."
"Y-yes. But—but in the cup they handed to me there were bitter ingredients. In the cup I'm talking of there was only ... love. It was a blind, stumbling, awkward, mannish love, if you like; but it was ... love. It was the pure, unadulterated thing, as unconscious of itself as the air is. The girl who was here this afternoon is an example of it. For anything I know, she was an idiot to have come; but she came, poor soul, because she thought—"
"Well, what did she think?"
"That if Dick Stroud were out of the way I should have a better chance with you."
She was still moving aimlessly about the room, picking up small objects and putting them down again.
"She said—she said he'd been tagging around after her, it's her expression, for nearly three years."
"To my practically certain knowledge that is so."
"She said, too, that she could marry him if she liked, but that she didn't want to."
"I don't know anything about that."
"If she went with him at all, she said, it would probably be ... without marriage, as she didn't wish to be bound to him."
I looked up in curiosity.
"And did she say there was any possibility of her going with him at all?"
"I think she did. That's what made me think her touched in her mind or crazy. She said she hadn't decided, or something like that; but as she was going to be an adventuress she had to begin some time, and perhaps it might as well be with him as with any one else. She spoke as if it rested entirely with her to take him or throw him away."
Again I decided to be cruel.
"It very likely does."
She was standing now by my dressing-table, and as if my words had meant nothing to her she said:
"Aren't you going to take your hair-brush?"
"Oh, I was forgetting to put it in. Thanks."
When I went for it she was holding it in her hand.
"What a queer, cheap-looking thing! Where on earth did you get it?"
"I suppose it was at Tours, with the other things, when—"
"Oh yes! I remember." She moved toward the door. "Your other brushes, the ebony ones with the silver initials, that I gave you before—before we were married, are here. They were with the things found on the bank of that— They forwarded them to me. Shouldn't you—shouldn't you like them?"
"Thanks, no. This sort of common thing suits me better."
I was doing the last things about the room. She was standing with her hand on the knob of the door, which was half open.
"And when you're back in New York, Billy, doing that kind of thing you talk about, shall you be all alone?"
A second's reflection convinced me that it was best to be clear about everything.
"At first."
"And later?"
I pulled open a drawer from which I knew I had taken all the contents.
"You mean when we're both ... free?"
"Suppose I put it ... whenyou'refree?"
"Oh, then there may be ... some one else."
"Some one ... I know?"
I delved into another drawer, hiding my face. "Some one you may have heard of; but I don't—I don't think you know her."
When I had pushed in the drawer I raised myself; but I was alone in the room. Ten minutes later I had left the house without a good-by on either side.
On the door-step, in my working-man's costume, and with the everlasting bag and suit-case in my hands, I looked up at a starry, windy sky, with the trees of the Common tossing beneath it.
"My God, what an end!" I cried, inwardly.
But, as far as my knowledge or purpose went, an end it was.
CHAPTER II
Noble intentions being easier to conceive than to carry out, it is hardly surprising that on settling again in New York I found myself "let down." The sense of adventure was out of it, while that of the mission had crept in. The old friends were still the old friends; but if my intercourse with them was not less spontaneous it was certainly more self-conscious. Back in my squint-eyed room, with the new paper and the more showy set of fungi, the knowledge that I was there because I chose to be there, and not because I couldn't help it, marked all my goings and comings with a point of interrogation.
In some measure, too, it was a point of disapproval. That is to say, those who welcomed me back took me somewhat in the spirit of a "returned empty."
"Why, yes, of course, if you want it," was Miss Smith's reply to my request to have my old room back again; but her intonation was not wholly that of pleasure. "We thought, my sister and I, that your social duties in Boston would restrict your movements for the future."
I had pricked their little bubble of romance, and they were disappointed. That one who had been their lodger was now with the Olympian gods was a tale to be told as long as they had a room to let, and to every one who rented one. I saw at once that I couldn't ask them to believe that I had come back of my own free will. The very magnitude of my hopes compelled me to be silent with regard to them.
"Punk!" was Pelly's comment, when I braced myself to tell him I had found home life disillusioning.
That was across the table of the familiar eating-house, as we took our first meal together. I was obliged to explain myself for the reason that in the back of his mind, also, I read the conviction that I hadn't "made good." Compelled to be more primitive than I should have liked, I had to base my dissatisfaction on the grounds of physical restriction rather than on those of divine discontent.
"Some of them Boston women will put the lid on a man and lock it down," he observed further. "Punk, I call it. Well, now that you've broken loose, and with your wad, I suppose you'll be givin' yourself a little run."
I allowed him to make this assumption, thankful that he should understand me from any point of view; but it was not the point of view of our former connection. That a man should be down on his luck was one thing; but that, having got on his feet, he should deliberately become a waster was another. In any light but that of a reversion to low tastes I could never have made Sam see my return to the house in Meeting-House Green. For low tastes he had the same toleration as for misdemeanors; but he did not disguise the fact that for a man who had got his chance he considered them low tastes.
At Creed & Creed's I received a similar tempered welcome.
"Sure here's Brogan," Bridget called out to the other men, on seeing me enter the cavern where four of them were at the accustomed work of sweeping a consignment that had just been unpacked. Burlap and sheepskins were still strewn about the floor, so that I had to restrain the impulse to pick things up and stack them.
Perhaps I can best compare my return to that of a spirit which has passed to a higher sphere and chooses to be for a short time re-embodied. Denis, the Finn, and a small wiry man, a stranger to me, all drew near to stare solemnly. My visit could only be taken as a condescension, not as a renewed incorporation into the old life. From that I had been projected forever by the sheer fact of not having to earn a living in this humble way.
"Aw, but it's well you're lookin'," Gallivan said, awesomely.
"And why shouldn't he be lookin' well," Bridget demanded, "and him with more butter than he's got bread to spread it on?"
"It's different with us," the Finn said, bitterly, "with no butter and not enough bread, and more mouths to feed than can ever be filled. I'll bet you Brogan doesn't think of them, now that he's got his own belly full."
It seemed to me an opening.
"Well, suppose I did? Suppose I'd come back to hand down some of the butter?"
"Aw, cut it out, Brogan," the Finn laughed, joylessly. "I was only kiddin' you. We don't pass the buck, none of us don't. What you got, keep; and if you don't, then the more fool you."
In Denis's yearning eyes were the only signs of remote comprehension in the company.
"Sure ye don't have to pass the buck just because y' ask the saints to pray for ye, do ye? Pray for us, Brogan. Ye've got nothing else to do."
It was another opening.
"I wish I had, Denis. I've found that I don't know how to loaf. If you hear of anything—"
He nodded, with beatified aspiration in his leathery old face.
"Aw, then, if it's that way you feel, the Holy Mother 'll find ye something, Protestant though y' are, just as sure as she showed ould Biddy Murphy, and her a Protestant too, that me mother knew in Ireland where there was two-and-sixpence lyin' in the mud, and she with the rent comin' due the next mornin': This is the new Brogan," he continued, with a wave of his hand toward the dark, wiry man, who responded with a grin. "He can't talk our talk hardly not at all, not no more than the monkey I used to tell you about. A Pole he calls hisself; but I nivver heard of no such nation as that till I come to this country. We nivver had them in Ireland at all—at all. There was Ulster men, and Munster men, and men from the County Monaghan; but I nivver heard tell of no Poles. Do you think they's have sowls like us? Or would they be like them Chinees and Japansey men?"
"For Gawd's sake, here's the Floater," Bridget warned, softly, and every man got back to his work.
Back at their work they had no time for further conversation; and in some way, impossible for me to tell you in words, I felt myself eliminated from their fellowship. They would always be friendly; but the knowledge that I was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, which had once been the outcome of a common need, was no longer theirs nor mine. I could look in at them in this non-committal way as often as I chose; but I should never get any farther.
Something of the sort was manifest when I next met Lydia Blair. Our standing toward each other was different. Little as she had understood me before, she understood me less in this new rôle than in any other.
"You sure are the queerest guy I ever met," she said, at one time in the course of the evening. "I sometimes wonder if you're all there."
But that was after I had been foolish enough to try to make her see my point of view toward life, and failed. Before that she had been sympathetic.
Our first conversation had been over the telephone, when I had called up Clotilde's to ask if Miss Blair had returned from Boston.
"Miss Blair at the 'phone," was the reply. "Who's this?"
Somewhat timidly I said I was Mr. Harrowby, repeating the name twice before she recognized it as mine. Having invited her to dine with me and go to the theater I got a quavering, "Sure!" which lacked her usual spontaneity.
"You don't seem pleased," I said.
"Oh, I'm pleased enough. I'm only wondering if—if you are."
"Why shouldn't I be, when I've asked you?"
"Well, I put my foot in it for fair, didn't I?"
"You mean in Boston? Oh, that was all right. I know you meant to do me a good turn; and perhaps you've done it."
"Oh, Imeantto; but I sure did get a lesson. My mother used to tell me to keep my fingers out of other people's pies; and I'm going to from this time on."
In the evening, seated opposite me at the little table at Josephine's, with the din of a hundred diners giving us a sort of privacy, she told me more about it.
"You see, it was this way: He'd always been talking to me about this rich young Boston widow he'd met at Palm Beach, trying to get my mad up."
"What did he say of her?"
"Well, the sort of thing hewouldsay. He's a good judge of a woman, you must admit; and he thought she was about the classiest. It was when I began to tell him what I wanted to be that he sprang that on me, said she was the model for me to study, and that when it came to the dressy vampire Agnes Dunham wasn't in it.
"Did he call this—this Boston lady a dressy vampire?"
"Oh, he didn't mean that. It was only that for any one who wanted to be a dressy vampire she was a smart style. A vampire mustn't look a vampire, or she might as well go out of business. The one thing I criticized in Agnes Dunham in 'The Scarlet Sin' was that a woman who advertised herself so much as an adventuress wouldn't get very far with her adventuring."
"I see. You'd go in for a finer art."
"I'd go in for pulling the thing off, whatever it was; but that's not what I want to tell you. To go back to what he was always saying about this Boston lady, it made me crazy to see her. In the corset business I'd got intimate with a good many society women, and most of them were gumps. For one good vampire there were a hundred with the kick of a boiled potato. That made me all the crazier to see, and I thought about it and thought about it. Then, one day, Harry called me on the 'phone to say— fxsYou see, he's living with the Averills, and when that Mrs. Mountney— Well, when he told me who you were, and that the lady wasn't a widow any more than I am, well, I simply laid down and passed away. To think thatyou, the fellow we'd been putting down as a mystery and a swell crook—"
"What did you put me down for then when you found out?"
"We didn't get a line on it all at once. That was later. Mrs. Mountney told Lulu, and Dick Stroud told me, and so—"
"Did you all believe what you heard?"
"It was pretty hard not to, wasn't it? after the queer things you'd been doing. There was just one person who stuck it out that it wasn't true; and that was little Milly. She didn't say much to the family; but to me she declared that if all the armies in France were to swear to it, she'd still know there was some mistake. She's another one I can't make out."
"What can't you make out about her?"
"Whether she's got a heart in her body, or only a hard-boiled egg."
"Oh, I fancy she has a heart all right."
"I used to fancy the same thing, or rather I took it for granted; but ever since— Well, she just stumps me."
She reverted to her errand in Boston and what came of it.
"It wasn't till I began to hear of what was going on there that it seemed to me—" the veil of tears to which her eyes were liable descended like a distant mist—"that it seemed to me a darned shame."
"What seemed to you a darned shame in particular?"
"Well, first that Dick Stroud should be pulling the wool over any other woman's eyes, especially a rich one, and then that he should be upsettin' your apple-cart when you'd had so much trouble already. After that it all came easy."
"What came easy?"
"Getting to know Mrs. Harrowby, and all the rest of it. The first once or twice I didn't see how to bring in Dick Stroud's name without seeming to do it on purpose; but after I met you in the up-stairs hall, why it was just natural. Say, you copped a peach when you got married; do you know it?"
"Why do you say that?"
"Because I've got eyes in my head; and, say, she's the one I saw you with that time I told you about, ever so long ago, and it must have been in New York. I suppose some guy had taken me to a swell restaurant to blow me in for a dinner; but anyhow she was the one. The minute I saw her back I knew there were not two suchspeakingbacks in the world. As for me modeling myself on her, well, an old hour-glass pair of stays might as well try to be Clotilde's Number Three Coar Pearl. And, say, she's some sport, isn't she? When I told her more about Dick Stroud and me, after you'd gone away that afternoon, she never turned a hair. Mrs. Mountney says she was going to marry him if you hadn't turned up, and even now he's hoping to marry her; but when I let her have the whole bunch of truth, she took it like a rag doll will take a pin-prick. Never moved a muscle, or showed that it wasn't just my story, and not a bit her own. Of course I took my cue from that—it was my line all along—and was just the poor working-girl telling her life history to a sympathetic lady, just as they hand it out in books; but she carried the thing off something swell. In fact, she made me more than half think—"
"What?" I questioned, when she held her idea suspended there.
"I don't believe I'll tell you. There are things a man had better find out for himself; do you know it?"
"I sha'n't find out anything for myself," I said, "because—because I've given up the fight."
She stared at me with eyes wide open in incredulous horror.
"You've given up the fight for a peach like that! Well, of all the poor boobs!" Leaning back in her chair she scanned my appearance. "I thought there was something wrong when I saw you got up like that. You can beat Walter Haines, the quick-change man, when it comes to clothes, believeme. What have you got on now?"
I explained that it had been my Sunday suit during the time I had been working at Creed & Creed's.
"Then for Gawd's sake go and take it off, before we start for the theater. I'll wait for you here. You can go and come in a taxi. I've been looking at you all along, and thinking it must be the latest wrinkle from Boston. Bostonhasfunny ways, now hasn't it? And so—"
It was here that I ventured on the exposition of my new scheme of life, getting no appreciation beyond the question as to my sanity quoted above. Later in the evening as, after the theater, I drove her back to Miss Flowerdew's in a taxi, she summed up the situation thus:
"Look-a-here! I never did take stock in that bum story of your being a quitter on the battlefield; but now I sure will if you walk out and hand the show over to Dick Stroud. Why, he's worth two of you! Look how he sticks! He'll getmeone of these days, just by his sticking, if I'm not careful; and when it comes to a woman like that— Why, I'm ashamed to go round with such a guy. And say, the next time you ask me to dinner, you'll not be got up like the bogie-man dressed for his wife's funeral. You'll look like you did the other day in Boston, or the first time I saw you, or it will be nix on little Lydia."
Drinkwater's tone was similar and yet different. It was different in that while his premises as to "sticking" coincided with Lydia's, his conclusions were not the same.
Perhaps he was not the same Drinkwater. More than two years having passed since I had seen him, I found in him more than two years of development. A crude boy when last we had met, association with a man like Averill, combined with his own instinct for growth, had made him something of a man of the world not the less sympathetic for his honest pug-face and his blindness. The fact that he asked me to dine with him at his university club was an indication of progress in itself.
He gave me his confidences before I offered mine, sketching a career in which stenography figured as no more than the handmaid to a passion for biological research. From many of the details of research he was, of course, precluded by his blindness; but his methodical habits, his memory, and his faculty for induction had more than once put Averill on the track of one thing when looking for another. It was thus that they had discovered theophida parotideawhile experimenting for the germ of the Spanish influenza. Incidentally, his salary had been creeping upward in proportion as he made himself more useful.
"And Lydia's been a wonder," he declared, his face shining. "Talk about sticking! The way that girl's stuck to me in every kind of tight place! Always thinking of other people and how to pull them out of the holes they get into! In the Middle Ages she'd have been a saint. Now she's just an up-to-date New York girl."
By the time he had finished this rhapsody I was ready to tell him a part of my own life tale, on which I found him more responsive than any one I had met. As to my mental misfortunes in France he accepted the narrative without questioning. When I came to what I painted as domestic conditions outlived on both sides he passed the topic over with the lightness born of tact. You see it was an altogether older and more serious Drinkwater with whom I had to deal; and yet one not less enthusiastic.
I discovered this when, with much misgiving, I hinted at the task to which I wished to dedicate anything left in my life.
"You've got it, old boy," he half shouted, slapping his leg. "There are three or four big jobs through which we white Americans have got to save our country, and among them the free play of class-contribution is almost the first. Say, these fellows that go jazzing about class welfare get my goat. Class co-operation is what we want; and it's what classes come into existence to give. You can't suppress classes, not yet awhile at any rate, in a country full of inequalities; but what we can do is to get the classes that form themselves spontaneously to take their gifts and pass 'em on to each other. Each works out something that another doesn't, and so can benefit the bunch all round. Say, Jasper, you'll hit the nail of one of our biggest national weaknesses right on the head as soon as you've learned how to do it."
"Yes, but the learning how to do it is just where the hitch seems to come in. I've been in New York three weeks and I'm just where I was when I came."
"Say, I'll give you a line on that. Do you know how a young fellow in a country town—I don't know anything about swell places like New York—becomes a barber?"
I said I didn't, that I had never given a thought to the subject.
"Well, he doesn't learn, and nobody ever teaches him. He just sits round in the barber shop, brushing hats and hanging up overcoats, and wishing to the Lord hewasa barber, and all of a sudden heisone. He's watched the shaves and hair-clips, hardly knowing he's been doing it, but wishing like blazes all the while, and at last it comes to him like song to a young bird. Now you've got to sit round. Sit tight and sit round. Wish and watch, and watch and wish, and the divine urge that turns a youngster into a barber, because that's what he's got his heart on, will steer you into the right way. This isn't going to be anything you can learn, as you'd learn to drive a motor or dissect a dead body. It won't be a profession, it'll be alife, that'll show you the trick. Don't try to hurry things, Jasper; and don't expect that three weeks or three months or three years are going to make this mum old world fork you out its secrets. Just stick, and if you don't do the thing you're aiming at you'll do another just as useful. Why, the doctor was going to chuck all his experiments on the influenza bug when I persuaded him to keep at it; and so he discovered the thing that scientists have been after since Dockendorff thought he'd tracked it down as long ago as 1893. Allsticking!"