HE FINDS HIMSELF
XXIII
LABELLED AND SHIPPED
Behold Jack clad in the habiliments of conventional civilization taken
from the stock of ready-made suitings in an El Paso store! They were of
the Moscowitz and Guggenheim type, the very latest and nattiest, as
advertised in popular prints. The dealer said that no gentleman could be
well dressed without them. He wanted to complete the transformation with
a cream-colored Fedora or a brown derby.
"I'll wait on the thirty-third degree a little longer," said Jack,
fondling the flat-brimmed cowpuncher model of affectionate predilection.
Swinging on a hook on the sleeper with the sway of the train, its company
was soothing to him all the way across the continent.
The time was March, that season of the northern year when winter growing
stale has a gritty, sticky taste and the relief of spring seems yet far
away. After the desert air the steam heat was stifling and nauseating.
Jack's head was a barrel about to burst its hoops; his skin drying like a
mummy's; his muscles in a starchy misery from lack of exercise. He felt
boxed up, an express package labelled and shipped. When he crawled into
his berth at night it was with a sense of giving himself up to
asphyxiation at the whim of strange gods.
If you have ever come back to town after six months in the woods, six
months far from the hysteria of tittering electric bells, the brassy
honk-honk of automobiles, the clang of surface cars and the screech of
their wheels on the rails, multiply your period of absence by ten, add a
certain amount of desert temperament, and you will vaguely understand how
the red corpuscles were raising rebellion in Jack's artery walls on the
morning of his journey's end. From the ferryboat on the dull-green bosom
of the river he first renewed his memory of the spectral and forbidding
abysses and pinnacles of New York. Here time is everything; here man has
done his mightiest in contriving masses to imitate the architectural
chaos of genesis. A mantle of chill, smoky mist formed the dome of
heaven, in which a pale, suffused, yellowish spot alone bespoke the
existence of a sun in the universe.
In keeping with his promise to Dr. Bennington he had wired to his father,
naming his train; and in a few minutes Wingfield, Sr. and Wingfield, Jr.
would meet for the first time in five years. Jack was conscious of a
faster beating of his heart and a feeling of awesome expectancy as the
crowd debouched from the ferryboat. At the exit to the street a big
limousine was waiting. The gilt initials on the door left no doubt for
whom it had been sent. But there was no one to meet him, no one after his
long absence except a chauffeur and a footman, who glanced at Jack
sharply. After the exchange of a corroborative nod between them the
footman advanced.
"If you please, Mr. Wingfield," he said, taking Jack's suit case.
"What would Jim Galway think of me now!" thought Jack. He put his head
inside the car cautiously. "Another box!" he thought, this time aloud.
"You have the check for it, sir?" asked the footman, thinking that Jack
was using the English of the mother island for trunk.
"No. That's all my baggage."
In the tapering, cut-glass vase between the two front window-panels of
the "box" was a rose--a symbol of the luxury of the twenty millions,
evidently put there regularly every morning by direction of their master.
Its freshness and color appealed to Jack. He took it out and pressed it
to his nostrils.
"Just needs the morning sun and the dew to be perfect," he said to the
amazed attendants; "and I will walk if you will take the suit case to
the house."
He kept the rose, which he twirled in his fingers as he sauntered across
town, now pausing at curb corners to glance back in thoughtful survey,
now looking aloft at the peaks of Broadway which lay beyond the foothills
of the river-front avenues.
"All to me what the desert is to other folks!" he mused; "desert, without
any cacti or mesquite! All the trails cross one another in a maze. A
boxed-up desert--boxes and boxes piled on top of one another! Everybody
in harness and attached by an invisible, unbreakable, inelastic leash to
a box, whither he bears his honey or goes to nurse his broken wings!--so
it seems to me and very headachy!"
At Madison Square he was at the base of the range itself; and halting on
the corner of Twenty-third Street and the Avenue he was a statue as aloof
as the statue of Farragut from his surroundings. Salt sea spray ever
whispers in the atmosphere around the old sailor. How St. Gaudens
created it and keeps it there in the heart of New York is his secret.
Possibly the sculptor put some of his soul into it as young Michael
Angelo did into his young David.
It is a great thing to put some of your soul into a thing, whether it is
driving a nail or moulding a piece of clay into life. There are men who
pause before the old Admiral and see the cutwater of men-of-war's bows
and hear the singing of the signal halyards as they rise with the command
to close in. Perhaps the Eternal Painter had put a little of his soul
into the heart of Jack; for some busy marchers of the Avenue trail as
they glanced at him saw the free desert and heard hoof-beats in the sand.
Others seeing a tanned Westerner kissing his hand to Diana of Madison
Square Garden probably thought him mad. Next, performing another
sentimental errand for the Doge of Little Rivers, his gaze rose along the
column of the Metropolitan tower. Its heights were half shrouded in mist,
through which glowed the gold of the lantern.
"Oh, bully! bully!" he thought. "The only sun in sight a manufactured
one, shining on top of a manufactured mountain! It is a big business
building a mountain; only, when God Almighty scattered so many ready-made
ones about, why take the trouble?" he concluded. "Or so it seems to me,"
he added, sadly, in due appreciation of the utterly reactionary mood of a
man who has been boxed up for a week.
Now he turned toward a quarter which he had, thus far, kept out of the
compass of observation. He looked up the jagged range of Broadway where,
over a terra-cotta pile, floated a crimson flag with "John Wingfield" in
big, white letters.
"My mountain! My box! My millions!" he breathed half audibly.
How the people whom he passed, their faces speaking city keenness of
ambition, must envy his position! How little reason they had to envy him,
he thought, as he walked around the great building and saw his name
glaring at him in gilt letters over the plate-glass windows and on all
the delivery wagons, open-mouthed for the packages being wheeled out
under the long glass awning.
"A whole block now! Yes, the doctor was right. It must be thirty instead
of twenty millions!" he concluded, as his vision swept the straight-line,
window-checkered mass of the twelve stories. "And I do wish we had a
tower! If one could go up on top of a tower and look out over the range
now and then and breathe deep, it would help."
When he entered the main door he paused in a maze, gazing at the acreage
of counters manned by clerks and the aisles swarming with shoppers under
the glare of the big, electric globes, and listening to the babble of
shrill talk, the calls of the elevator boys, the coughing of the
pneumatic tubes and the clang of the elevator doors. It was all like some
devilishly complicated dream from which he would never awake. He must
have a little time in order to orient himself before he could think
rationally. The roar of the train still obsessed him; the air in the
store seemed more stifling than that of the sleeper.
So he decided that, rather than be shot up into The Presence by the
elevator, he would gradually scale the heights. Ascending stairway after
stairway, he ranged back and forth over the floors, a stranger in his
own wonderland. When he reached the eleventh floor, with only one more to
the offices, the whole atmosphere seemed suddenly to turn rare with
expectancy; a rustle to run through all the goods on the counters; the
very Paris gowns among which he was standing to be called to martial
attention.
"The boss!" he heard one of the model girls say.
Turning to follow her nod toward the stairway, Jack saw, two-thirds of
the way up the broad flight, a man past middle age, in dark gray suit and
neutral tie, rubbing his palms together as he surveyed a stratum of his
principality. The sight of him to Jack was like the touch of a myriad
electric needles that pricked sharply, without exhilaration.
"The boss is likely to run up that way any time of the day," said the
model girl to a customer; "and what he don't see don't count!"
"Not much older; not much changed!" thought Jack; and his realization of
the disinterestedness of his observation tipped the needles with acid.
In the sharpness of the master's button-counting survey there was swift
finality; and his impressions completed, analyzed, docketed for
reference, he ran on up the flight with light step, still rubbing the
palms of his hands in the unctuously well-contained and appreciative
sense of his power. To Jack he was a fascinating, grand, distant figure,
this of his own father, yet mortally near.
If the model girl had had the same keenness of observation for what is
borne in the face as for what is worn on the back, she could not have
failed to note the strong family resemblance between the young man
standing near her and the man who had paused on the stairway. This
glimpse of his father's mastery of every detail of that organization
which he had built, this glimpse of cool, self-centered authority, only
reminded Jack of his own ignorance and flightiness in view of all that
would be expected of him. He knew less than one of the cash girls about
how to run the store. A duel with Leddy was a simple matter beside this
battle he had to wage.
He mounted the last flight of stairs into an area of glass-paneled doors,
behind which the creative business of the great concern was conducted.
Out of one marked "Private," closing it softly and stepping softly, came
a round-shouldered, stooping man of middle age, with the apprehensive and
palliating manner of a long-service private secretary who has many things
to remember and many persons to appease with explanations. It was evident
that Peter Mortimer had just come from The Presence. At sight of Jack he
drew back in a surprise that broke into a beaming delight which played
over his tired and wrinkled features in ecstasy.
"Jack! Jack! You did it! You did it!" he cried.
"Peter!" Jack seized the secretary's hands and swung them back and forth.
"You've got a grip of iron! And tanned--my, how you're tanned! You did
it, Jack, you did it! It hardly seems credible, when I think of the last
time I saw you."
It was then that the secretary had seen a Jack with his eyes moist; a
Jack pasty-faced, hollow-cheeked; and, in what was a revolutionary
outburst for a unit in the offices, Peter Mortimer had put his arm around
the boy in a cry for the success of the Odyssey for health which the
heir was about to begin. And Mortimer's words were sweet, while the words
of the farewell from the other side of the glass-paneled door marked
"Private" were acrid with the disappointed hopes of the speaker.
"You have always been a weakling, Jack, and I have had little to say
about your rearing. Go out to the desert and stay--stay till you are
strong!" declared the voice of strength, as if glad to be freed of the
sight of weakness in its own image.
"Father did not come to meet me?" Jack observed questioningly now
to Mortimer.
"He was very busy--he did not feel certain about the nature of your
telegram--he--" and Mortimer's impulses withdrew into the shell of the
professional private secretary.
"I wired that he should see for himself if I were well. So he shall!"
said Jack, turning toward the door.
"Yes--that will be all right--yes, there is no one with him!"
Mortimer, in the very instinct of long practice, was about to go in to
announce the visitor, but paused. As Jack entered, whatever else may have
been in his eyes, there was no moisture.
XXIV
IN THE CITADEL OF THE MILLIONS
John Wingfield, Sr. sat at a mahogany table without a single drawer, in
the centre of a large room with bare, green-tinted walls. His oculist had
said that green was the best color for the eyes. Beside the green
blotting-pad in front of him was a pile of papers. These would either be
disposed of in the course of the day or, if any waited on the morrow's
decision, would be taken away by Peter Mortimer overnight. When he rose
to go home it was always with a clear desk; a habit, a belief of his
singularly well-ordered mind in the mastery of the teeming detail that
throbbed under the thin soles of his soft kid shoes. On the other side of
the pad was the telephone, and beyond it the supreme implements of his
will, a row of pearl-topped push-buttons.
The story of John Wingfield, Sr.'s rise and career, as the lieutenants of
the offices and the battalions of the shopping floors knew it, was not
the story, perhaps, as Dr. Bennington or Peter Mortimer knew it; but,
then, doctors and private secretaries are supposed to hold their secrets.
There was little out of the commonplace in the world's accepted version.
You may hear its like from the moneyed host at his dinner table in New
York or as he shows you over the acres of his country estate, enthusing
with a personal narrative of conquest which is to him unique. John
Wingfield, Sr. makes history for us in the type of woman whom he
married and the type of son she bore him.
He was the son of a New England country clergyman, to whom working his
way through college in order to practise a profession made no appeal.
Birth and boyhood in poverty had taught him, from want of money, the
power of money. He sought the centre of the market-place. At sixteen he
was a clerk, marked by his industry not less than by his engaging
manners, on six dollars a week in the little store that was the site of
his present triumph. Of course he became a partner and then owner. It was
his frequent remark, when he turned reminiscent, that if he could only
get as good clerks as he was in his day he would soon have a monopoly of
supplying New York and its environs with all it ate and wore and needed
to furnish its houses; which raises the point that possibly such an
equality of high standards in efficiency might make all clerks employers.
The steady flame of his egoism was fanned with his Successes. Without
real intimates or friends, he had an effective magnetism in making others
do his bidding. It had hardly occurred to him that his discovery of the
principle of never doing anything yourself that you can win others to do
for you and never failing, when you have a minute to spare, to do a thing
yourself when you can do it better than any assistant, was already a
practice with leaders in trade and industry before the Pharaohs.
Life had been to him a ladder which he ascended without any glances to
right or left or at the rung that he had left behind. The adaptable
processes of his mind kept pace with his rise. He made himself at home
in each higher stratum of atmosphere. His marriage, delayed until he was
forty and already a man of power, was still another upward step. Alice
Jamison brought him capital and position. The world was puzzled why she
should have accepted him; but this stroke of success he now considered as
the vital error of a career which, otherwise, had been flawlessly
planned. Yet he could flatter his egoism with the thought that it was
less a fault of judgment than of the uncertainty of feminine temperament,
which could not be measured by logic.
New York saw little of Mrs. Wingfield after Jack's birth. Her friends
knew her as a creature all life and light before her marriage; they
realized that the life and light had passed out of her soon after the boy
came; and thenceforth they saw and heard little of her. She had given
herself up to the insistent possessorship and company of her son. Those
who met her when travelling reported how frail she was and how
constrained.
Jack was fourteen when his mother died. He was brought home and sent to
school in America; and two-years later Dr. Bennington announced that the
slender youngster, who had been so completely estranged from the affairs
of the store, must matriculate in the ozone of high altitudes instead of
in college, if his life were to be saved. Whether Jack were riding over
the _mesas_ of Arizona or playing in a villa garden in Florence, John
Wingfield, Sr.'s outlook on life was the same. It was the obsession of
self in his affairs. After the eclipse of his egoism the deluge. The very
thought that anyone should succeed him was a shock reminding him of
growing age in the midst of the full possession of his faculties, while
he felt no diminution of his ambition.
"I am getting better," came the occasional message from that stranger
son. And the father kept on playing the tune of accruing millions on the
push-buttons. His decision to send Dr. Bennington to Arizona came
suddenly, just after he had turned sixty-three. He had had an attack of
grip at the same time that his attention had been acutely called to the
demoralization of another great business institution whose head had died
without issue, leaving his affairs in the hands of trustees.
Two days of confinement in his room with a high pulse had brought
reflection and the development of atavism. What if the institution built
as a monument to himself should also pass! What if the name of Wingfield,
his name, should no longer float twelve stories high over his building!
He foresaw the promise of companionship of a restless and ghastly
apparition in the future.
But he recovered rapidly from his illness and his mental processes were
as keen and prehensile as ever. Checking off one against the other, with
customary shrewdness, he had a number of doctors go over him, and all
agreed that he was good for twenty years yet. Twenty years! Why, Jack
would be middle-aged by that time! Twenty years was the difference
between forty-three and sixty-three. Since he was forty-three he had
quintupled his fortune. He would at least double it again. He was not
old; he was young; he was an exceptional man who had taken good care of
himself. The threescore and ten heresy could not apply to him.
Bennington's telegram irritated him with its lack of precision. Fifteen
hundred dollars and expenses to send an expert to Arizona and in
return this unbusinesslike report: "You will see Jack for yourself. He
is coming."
In the full enjoyment of health, observing every nice rule for
longevity, his slumber sweet, his appetite good, John Wingfield, Sr.
had less interest in John Wingfield, Jr. than he had when his bones
were aching with the grip. Jack's telegram from Chicago announcing the
train by which he would arrive aroused an old resentment, which dated
far back to Jack's childhood and to a frail woman who had been proof
against her husband's will.
Did this home-coming mean a son who could learn the business; a strong,
shrewd, cool-headed son? A son who could be such an adjutant as only one
who is of your own flesh and blood can be in the full pursuit of the same
family interest as yourself? If Jack were well, would not Bennington have
said so? Would he not have emphasized it? This was human nature as John
Wingfield, Sr. knew it; human nature which never missed a chance to
ingratiate itself by announcing success in the service of a man of power.
The spirit of his farewell message to Jack, which said that strength
might return but bade weakness to remain away, and the injured pride of
seeing a presentment of wounded egoism in the features of a sickly boy,
which had kept him from going to Arizona, were again dominant. Yet that
morning he had a pressing sense of distraction. Even Mortimer noticed it
as something unusual and amazing. He kept reverting to Jack's history
between flashes of apprehension and he was angry with himself over his
inability to concentrate his mind. Concentration was his god. He could
turn from lace-buyer to floor-walker with the quickness of the swing of
an electric switch. Concentrate and he was oblivious to everything but
the subject in hand. He was in one of the moments of apprehension, half
staring at the buttons on the desk rather than at the papers, when he
heard the door open without warning and looked up to see a lean, sturdy
height filling the doorway and the light from the window full on a
bronzed and serene face.
More than ever was Jack like David come over the hills in his incarnation
of sleeping energy. Instead of a sling he carried the rose. Into the
abode of the nicely governed rules of longevity came the atmosphere of
some invasive spirit that would make the stake of life the foam on the
crest of a charge in a splendid moment; the spirit of Señor Don't Care
pausing inquiringly, almost apologetically, as some soldier in dusty
khaki might if he had marched into a study unawares.
Jack was waiting, waiting and smiling, for his father to speak. In a
swift survey, his features transfixed at first with astonishment, then
glowing with pride, the father half rose from his chair, as if in an
impulse to embrace the prodigal. But he paused. He felt that something
under his control was getting out of his control. He felt that he had
been tricked. The boy must have been well for a long time. Yes! But he
was well! That was the vital point. He was well, and magnificent in
his vigor.
The father made another movement; and still Jack was waiting, inquiring
yet not advancing. And John Wingfield, Sr. wished that he had gone to
the station; he wished that he had paid a visit to Arizona. This thought
working in his mind supplied Jack's attitude with an aspect which made
the father hesitate and then drop back into his chair, confused and
uncertain for the first time in his own office.
"Well, Jack, you--you surely do look cured!" he said awkwardly. "You see,
I--I was a little surprised to see you at the office. I sent the
limousine for you, thinking you would want to go straight to the house
and wash off the dust of travel. Didn't you connect?"
"Yes, thank you, father--and when you didn't meet me--"
"I--I was very busy. I meant to, but something interrupted--I--" The
father stopped, confounded by his own hesitation.
"Of course," said Jack. He spoke deferentially, understandingly. "I know
how busy you always are."
Yet the tone was such to John Wingfield, Sr.'s ears that he eyed Jack
cautiously, sharply, in the expectancy that almost any kind of
undisciplined force might break loose from this muscular giant whom he
was trying to reconcile with the Jack whom he had last seen.
"I thought I'd stretch my legs, so I came over to the store to see how it
had grown," said Jack. "I don't interrupt--for a moment?"
He sat down on the chair opposite his father's and laid his faded
cowpuncher hat and the rose on the desk. They looked odd in the company
of the pushbuttons and the pile of papers in that neutral-toned room
which was chilling in its monotony of color. And though Jack was almost
boyishly penitent, in the manner of one who comes before parental
authority after he has been in mischief, still John Wingfield, Sr.
could not escape the dead weight of an impression that he was speaking to
a stranger and not to his own flesh and blood. He wished now that he had
shown affection on Jack's entrance. He had a desire to grip the brown
hand that was on the edge of the desk fingering the rose stem; but the
lateness of the demonstration, its futility in making up for his previous
neglect, and some subtle influence radiating from Jack's person,
restrained him. It was apparent that Jack might sit on in silence
indefinitely; in a desert silence.
"Well, Jack, I hear you had a ranch," said the father, with a faint
effort at jocularity.
"Yes, and a great crop of alfalfa," answered Jack, happily.
"And it seems that all the time you were away you have never used your
allowance, so it has just been piling up for you."
"I didn't need it. I had quite sufficient from the income of my
mother's estate."
"Yes--your mother--I had forgotten!"
"Naturally, I preferred to use that, when I was of so little service to
you unless I got strong, as you said," Jack said, very quietly.
Now came another silence, the silence of luminous, unsounded depths
concealing that in the mind which has never been spoken or even taken
form. Jack's garden of words had dried up, as his ranch would dry up for
want of water. He rose to go, groping for something that should express
proper contrition for wasted years, but it refused to come. He picked up
the rose and the hat, while the father regarded him with stony wonder
which said: "Are you mine, or are you not? What is the nature of this
new strength? On what will it turn?"
For Jack's features had set with a strange firmness and his eyes, looking
into his father's, had a steady light. It seemed as if he might stalk out
of the office forever, and nothing could stop him. But suddenly he
flashed his smile; he had looked about searching for a talisman and found
it in the rose, which set his garden of words abloom again.
"This room is so bare it must be lonely for you," he said. "Wouldn't it
be a good idea to cheer it up a bit? To have this rose in a vase on your
table where you could see it, instead of riding about in an empty
automobile box?"
"Why, there is a whole cold storage booth full of them down on the first
floor!" said the father.
"Yes, I saw them in their icy prison under the electric light bulbs. The
beads of water on them were like tears of longing to get out for the joy
of their swan song under a woman's smiles or beside a sick bed," said
Jack, in the glow of real enthusiasm.
"Good line for the ad writer!" his father exclaimed, instinctively. "You
always did have fanciful ideas, Jack."
"Yes, I suppose I have!" he said, with some surprise and very
thoughtfully. "I suppose that I was born with them and never weeded
them out."
"No doubt!" and the father frowned.
Surveying the broad shoulders before him, he was thinking how nothing but
aimlessness and fantasies and everything out of harmony with the career
to come had been encouraged in the son. But he saw soberness coming into
Jack's eyes and with it the pressure of a certain resoluteness of
purpose. And now Jack spoke again, a trifle sadly, as if guessing his
father's thoughts.
"It will be a case of weeding for me in the future, won't it?" he asked
wanly, as he rose. "I am full of foolish ideas that are just bound to run
away with me."
"Jack! Jack!" John Wingfield, Sr. put his hands out to the shoulders
of his son and gripped them strongly, and for a second let his own
weight half rest on that sturdy column which he sensed under the grip.
His pale face, the paleness of the type that never tans, flushed.
"Jack, come!" he said.
He permitted himself something like real dramatic feeling as he signalled
his son to follow him out of the office and led the way to a corner of
one of the balconies where, under the light from the glass roof of the
great central court, he could see down the tiers of floors to the jewelry
counter which sparkled at the bottom of the well.
"Look! look!" he exclaimed, rubbing his palms together with a peculiar
crisp sound. "All selling my goods! All built from the little store where
I began as a clerk!"
"It's--it's immense!" gasped Jack; and he felt a dizziness and confusion
in gazing at this kind of an abyss.
"And it's only beginning! It's to go on growing and growing! You see why
I wanted you to be strong, Jack; why it would not do to be weak if you
had all this responsibility."
This was a form of apology for his farewell to Jack, but the message was
the same: He had not wanted a son who should be of his life and heart and
ever his in faults and illnesses. This was the recognizable one of the
shadows between them now recalled. He had wanted a fresh physical machine
into which he could blow the breath of his own masterful being and instil
the cunning of his experience. He saw in this straight, clean-limbed
youth at his side the hope of Jack's babyhood fulfilled, in the
projection of his own ego as a living thing after he himself was gone.
"And it is to go on growing and growing, in my name and your name--John
Wingfield!"
Jack was swallowing spasmodically; he moistened his lips; he grasped the
balcony railing so tight that his knuckles were white knobs on the bronze
back of his hand. The father in his enthusiasm hardly noticed this.
"What couldn't I have done," he added, "if I had had all this to begin
with! All that you will have to begin with!"
Jack managed a smile, rather thin and wavering.
"Yes, I am going to try my best."
"All I ask! You have me for a teacher and I know one or two little
things!" said the father, fairly grinning in the transmission of his
joke. "Now, you must be short on clothes," he added; "so you can get
something ready-made downstairs while you have some making at
Thompson's."
"Don't you buy your clothes, your best clothes, I mean, in your own
store?" Jack asked. It was his first question in getting acquainted with
his future property.
"No. We cater to a little bigger class of trade--one of the many twists
of the business," was the answer. "And now we'll meet at dinner, shall
we, and have a good long talk," he concluded, closing the interview and
turning to the door, his mind snapping back to the matter he was about to
take up when he had been interrupted with more eagerness than ever, now
that his egoism thrilled with a still greater purpose.
"I--I left my hat on your desk," Jack explained, as he followed his
father into the office.
"Well, you don't want to be carrying packages about," said John
Wingfield, Sr. "That is hardly the fashion in New York, though John
Wingfield's son can make it so if he wants to. I'll have that
flat-brimmed western one sent up to the house and you can fit out with
another when you go downstairs for clothes. That is, I suppose you will
want to keep this as a memento, eh?" and he held out the cowpuncher,
sweeping it with a sardonic glance.
"No," Jack answered decisively, out of the impulse that came with the
sight of the veteran companion that had shielded him from the sun on
the trail. It was good to have any kind of an impulse after his
giddiness on the balcony at sight of all the phantasmagoria of detail
that he must master.
If he were to be equal to this future there must be an end of temptation.
He must shake himself free of the last clinging bit of chrysalis of the
old life. His amazed father saw the child of the desert, where convention
is made by your fancy and the supply of water in your canteen, go to the
window and raise the sash. Leaning out, he let the hat drop into
Broadway, with his eyes just over the line of the ledge while he watched
it fall, dipping and gliding, to the feet of a messenger boy, who picked
it up, waved it gleefully aloft before putting it over his cap, and with
mock strides of grandeur went his way.
"That gave him a lot of pleasure--and a remarkably quick system for
delivering goods, wasn't it?" said Jack, cheerfully.
"Yes, I should say so!" assented his father, returning to his seat.
"Dinner at seven!" he called before the door closed; and as his finger
sought one of the push-buttons it rested for a moment on the metal edge
of the socket, his head bowed, while an indefinable emotion, mixed of
prophecy and recollection, must have fluttered through the routine
channels of his vigorous mind.
XXV
"BUT WITH YOU, 'YES, SIR'"
As Jack came out of the office, Mortimer appeared from an adjoining room
in furtive, mouselike curiosity.
"Not much damage done!" said Jack, in happy relief from the ordeal. "I am
without a hat, but I have the rose." He held it up before Mortimer's
worn, kindly face that had been so genuine in welcome. "Yes, I must have
kept it to decorate you, Peter!"
Ineffectually, in timorous confusion, the old secretary protested while
Jack fastened it in his buttonhole.
"And you are going to help me, aren't you, Peter?" Jack went on,
seriously. "You are going to hold up a finger of warning when I get off
the course. I am to be practical, matter-of-fact; there's to be an end to
all fantastic ideas."
An end to all fantastic ideas! But it was hardly according to the gospel
of the matter-of-fact to take Burleigh, the fitter, out to luncheon. Jack
might excuse himself on the ground that he had not yet begun his
apprenticeship and had several hours of freedom before his first lesson
at dinner. This ecstasy of a recess, perhaps, made him lay aside the
derby, which the clerk said was very becoming, and choose a softer
head-covering with a bit of feather in the band, which the clerk, with
positive enthusiasm, said was still more becoming. At all events, it was
easy on his temples, while the derby was stiff and binding and conducive
to a certain depression of spirits.
Burleigh, the fitter, was almost as old as Mortimer. He rose to the
exceptional situation, his eyes lighting as he surveyed the form to be
clothed with a professional gratification unsurpassed by that of Dr.
Bennington in plotting Jack's chest with a stethoscope.
"Yes, sir, we will have that dinner-jacket ready to-night, sir, depend
upon it--and couldn't I show you something in cheviots?"
Jack broke another precedent. A Wingfield, he decided to patronize
the Wingfield store, because he saw how supremely happy every order
made Burleigh.
"You can do it as well as Thompson's?" he asked.
"With you, yes, sir--though Thompson is a great expert on round
shoulders. But with you, yes, sir!"
When the business of measuring was over, while Burleigh peered triumphant
over the pile of cloths from which the masterpieces were to be fashioned,
Jack said that he had a ripping appetite and he did not see why he and
Burleigh should not appease their hunger in company. Burleigh gasped;
then he grinned in abandoned delight and slipped off his shiny coat and
little tailor's apron that bristled with pins.
They went to a restaurant of reputation, which Jack said was in keeping
with the occasion when a man changed his habits from Arizona simplicity
to urban multiplicity of courses. And what did Burleigh like? Burleigh
admitted that if he were a plutocrat he would have caviar at least once a
day; and caviar appeared in a little glass cup set in the midst of
cracked ice, flanked by crisp toast. After caviar came other things to
Burleigh's taste. He was having such an awesomely grand feast that he
was tongue-tied; but Jack could never eat in silence until he had
forgotten how to tell stories. So he told Burleigh stories of the trail
and of life in Little Rivers in a way that reflected the desert sunshine
in Burleigh's eyes. Burleigh thought that he would like to live in Little
Rivers. Almost anyone might after hearing Jack's description, in the joy
of its call to himself.
"Now, if you would trust me," said Burleigh, when they left the
restaurant, "I should like to send out for some cloths not in stock for a
couple of suits. And couldn't I make you up three or four fancy
waistcoats, with a little color in them--the right color to go with the
cloth? You can carry a little color--decidedly, yes."
"Yes, I rather like color," said Jack, succumbing to temptation, though
he felt that the heir to great responsibilities ought to dress in the
most neutral of tones.
"And I should like to select the ties to go with the suits and a few
shirts, just to carry out my scheme--a kind of professional triumph for
me, you see. May I?"
"Go ahead!" said Jack.
"And you can depend on your evening suit to be up in time. But I am going
to rush a little broader braid on those ready-made trousers--you can
carry that, too," Burleigh concluded.
When they parted Jack turned into Fifth Avenue. Before he had gone a
block the bulky eminence of a Fifth Avenue stage awakened his
imagination. How could anybody think of confinement in a taxicab when he
might ride in the elephant's howdah of that top platform, enjoying mortal
superiority over surrounding humanity? Jack hung the howdah with silken
streamers and set a mahout's turban on the head of the man on the seat in
front of him, while the glistening semi-oval tops of the limousines
floating in the mist of the rising grade from Madison Square to
Forty-second Street, swarmed and halted in a kind of blind, cramped _pas
de quatre_ from cross street to cross street, amid the breaking surge of
pedestrians.
"Such a throbbing of machine motion," he thought, "that I don't see
how anybody can have an emotion of his own without bumping into
somebody else's."
It was a scene of another age and world to him, puzzling, overpowering,
dismal, mocking him with a sense of loneliness that he had never felt on
the desert. Could he ever catch up with this procession which had all the
time been moving on in the five years of his absence? Could he learn to
talk and think in the regulated manner of the traffic rules of
convention? The few chums of his brief home school-days were long away
from the fellowship of academies; they had settled in their grooves, with
established intimacies. If he found his own flock he could claim
admission to the fold only with the golden key of his millions, rather
than by the password of kindred understanding.
The tripping, finely-clad women, human flower of all the maelstrom of
urban toil, in their detachment seemed only to bring up a visualized
picture of Mary. What would he not like to do for her! He wished that he
could pick up the Waldorf and set it on the other side of the street as
a proof of the overmastering desire that possessed him whenever she was
in his mind.
And the Doge! He was the wisest man in the world. With a nod of
well-considered and easy generosity Jack presented him with the new
Public Library. And then all the people on the sidewalks vanished and
the buildings melted away into sunswept levels, and the Avenue was a
trail down which Mary came on her pony in the resplendent sufficiency of
his dreams.
"Great heavens!" he warned himself. "And I am to take my first lesson in
running the business this evening! What perfect lunacy comes from
mistaking the top of a Fifth Avenue stage for a howdah!"
XXVI
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
How thankful he was that the old brick corner mansion in Madison Avenue,
with age alone to recommend its architecture of the seventies--let it
stand for what it was--had not been replaced by one of stone freshly
polished each year! The butler who opened the door was new and stiffer
than the one of the old days; but he saw that the broad hall, with the
stairs running across the rear in their second flight, was little more
changed than the exterior.
Five years since he had left that hall! He was in the thrall of
anticipation incident to seeing old associations with the eyes of
manhood. The butler made to take his hat, but Jack, oblivious of the
attention, went on to the doorway of the drawing-room, his look centering
on a portrait that faced the door. In this place of honor he saw a
Gainsborough. He uttered a note of pained surprise.
"There used to be another portrait here. Where is it?" he demanded.
The butler, who had heard that the son of the house was an invalid, had
not recovered from his astonishment at the appearance of health of the
returned prodigal.
"Upstairs, sir," he answered. "When Mr. Wingfield got this prize last
year, sir--"
Though the butler had spoken hardly a dozen words, he became conscious
of something atmospheric that made him stop in the confusion of one
who finds that he has been garrulous with an explanation that does
not explain.
"Please take this upstairs and bring back the other," said Jack.
"Yes, sir. You will be going to your room, sir, and while--" The butler
had a feeling of a troublesome future between two masters.
"Now, please!" said Jack, settling into a chair to wait.
The Gainsborough countess, with her sweeping plumes, her rich, fleshy,
soft tones, her charming affectation, which gave you, after the art
interest, no more human interest in her than in a draped model, was
carried upstairs and back came the picture that it had displaced. The
frame still bore at the bottom the title "Portrait of a Lady," under
which it had been exhibited at the Salon many years ago. It was by a
young artist, young then, named Sargent. He had the courage of his
method, this youngster, no less than Hals, who also worked his wonders
with little paint when this suited his genius best. The gauze of the gown
where it blended with the background at the edge of the line of arm was
so thin, seemingly made by a single brush-stroke, that it almost showed
the canvas.
A purpose in that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! The
eyes of the portrait alone seemed deep. They were lambent and dark,
looking straight ahead inquiringly, yet in the knowledge that no answer
to the Great Riddle could change the course of her steps in the blind
alley of a life whose tenement walls were lighted with her radiance. You
could see through the gown, through the flesh of that frail figure, so
lacking in sensuousness yet so glowing with a quiet fire, to the soul
itself. She seemed of such a delicate, chaste fragility that she could be
shattered by a single harsh touch. There would be no outcry except the
tinkle of the fragments. The feelings of anyone who witnessed the
breaking and heard the tinkle would be a criterion of his place in the
wide margin between nerveless barbarism and sensitive gentility.
"I give! I give! I give!" was her message.
For a long time, he had no measure of it, Jack sat studying the portrait,
set clear in many scenes of memory in review. It had been a face as
changeful as the travels, ever full of quick lights and quick shadows. He
had had flashes of it as it was in the portrait in its very triumph of
resignation. He had known it laughing with stories of fancy which she
told him; sympathetic in tutorial illumination as she gave him lessons
and brought out the meaning of a line of poetry or a painting; beset by
the restlessness which meant another period of travel; intense as fire
itself, gripping his hands in hers in a defiance of possession; in moods
when both its sadness and its playfulness said, "I don't care!" and
again, fleeing from his presence to hide her tears.
It was with the new sight of man's maturity and soberness that he now saw
his mother, feeling the intangible and indestructible feminine majesty of
her; feeling her fragility which had brought forth her living soul in its
beauty and impressionableness as a link with the cause of his Odyssey;
believing that she was rejoicing in his strength and understanding
gloriously that it had only brought him nearer to her.
After he had been to his room to dress he returned to the same chair and
settled into the same reverie that was sounding depths of his being that
he had never suspected. He was mutely asking her help, asking the support
of her frail, feminine courage for his masculine courage in the battle
before him; and little tremors of nervous determination were running
through him, when he heard his father's footstep and became conscious of
his father's presence in the doorway.
There was a moment, not of hesitation but of completing a thought, before
he looked up and rose to his feet. In that moment, John Wingfield, Sr.
had his own shock over the change in the room. The muscles of his face
twitched in irritation, as if his wife's very frailty were baffling
invulnerability. Straightening his features into a mask, his eyes still
spoke his emotion in a kind of stare of resentment at the picture.
Then he saw his son's shoulders rising above his own and looked into
his son's eyes to see them smiling. Long isolated by his power from
clashes of will under the roof of his store or his house, the father
had a sense of the rippling flash of steel blades. A word might start a
havoc of whirling, burning sentences, confusing and stifling as a
desert sandstorm; or it might bring a single killing flash out of
gathering clouds.
Thus the two were facing each other in a silence oppressive to both,
which neither knew how to break, when relief came in the butler's
announcement of dinner. Indeed, by such small, objective interruptions do
dynamic inner impulses hang that this little thing may have suppressed
the lightnings.
The father was the first to speak. He hoped that a first day in New York
had brought Jack a good appetite; certainly, he could see that the store
had given him a wonderful fit for a rush order.
XXVII
BY RIGHT OF ANCESTRY
There were to be no stories of Little Rivers at dinner; no questions
asked about desert life. This chapter of Jack's career was a past rung of
the ladder to John Wingfield, Sr. who was ever looking up to the rungs
above. The magnetism and charm with which he won men to his service now
turned to the immediate problem of his son, whom he was to refashion
according to his ideas.
"Are you ready to settle down?" he asked, half fearful lest that scene in
the drawing-room might have wrought a change of purpose.
In answer he was seeing another Jack; a Jack relaxed, amiable,
even amenable.
"If you have the patience," said Jack. "You know, father, I haven't a
cash-register mind. I'm starting out on a new trail and I am likely to go
lame at times. But I mean to be game."
He looked very frankly and earnestly into his father's eyes.
"Wild oats sown! My boy, after all!" thought the father. "Respected his
mother! Well, didn't I respect mine? Of course--and let him! It is good
principles. It is right. He has health; that is better than schooling."
In place of the shock of the son's will against his, he was feeling it as
a force which might yet act in unison with his. He expanded with the
pride of the fortune-builder. He told how a city within a city is created
and run; of tentacles of investment and enterprise stretching beyond the
store in illimitable ambition; how the ball of success, once it was set
rolling, gathered bulk of its own momentum and ever needed closer
watching to keep it clear of obstacles.
"And I am to stand on top like a gymnast on a sphere or be rolled under,"
thought Jack. "And I'll have cloth of gold breeches and a balancing pole
tipped with jewels; but--but--"
"A good listener, and that is a lot!" thought the father, happily.
Jack had interrupted neither with questions nor vagaries. He was gravely
attentive, marveling over this story of a man's labor and triumph.
"And the way to learn the business is not from talks by me," said his
father, finally. "You cannot begin at the top."
"No! no!" said Jack, aghast. "The top would be quite too insecure, too
dizzy to start with."
"Right!" the father exclaimed, decidedly. "You must learn each department
of itself, and then how it works in with the others. It will be drudgery,
but it is best--right at the bottom!"
"Yes, father, where there is no danger of a fall."
"You will be put on an apprentice salary of ten dollars a week."
"And I'll try to earn it."
"Of course, you understand that the ten is a charge against the store.
That's business. But as for a private allowance, you are John Wingfield's
son and--"
"I think I have enough of my own for the present," Jack put in.
"As you wish. But if you need more, say the word. And you shall name the
department where you are to begin. Did you get any idea of which you'd
choose from looking the store over to-day?"
"That's very considerate of you!" Jack answered. He was relieved and
pleased and made his choice quickly, though he mentioned it half timidly
as if he feared that it might be ridiculous, so uncertain was he about
the rules of apprenticeship.
"You see I have been used to the open air and I'd like a little time in
which to acclimatize myself in New York. Now, all those big wagons that
bring the goods in and the little wagons that take them out--there is an
out-of-door aspect to the delivery service. Is that an important branch
to learn?"
"Very--getting the goods to the customer--very!"
"Then I'll start with that and sort of a roving commission to look over
the other departments."
"Good! We will consider it settled. And, Jack, every man's labor that you
can save and retain efficiency--that is the trick! Organization and
ideas, that's what makes the employer and so makes success. Why, Jack, if
you could cut down the working costs in the delivery department or
improve the service at the present cost, why--" John Wingfield, Sr.
rubbed the palms of his hands together delightedly.
Everything was going finely--so far. He added that proviso of _so far_
instinctively.
"Besides, Jack," he went on, changing to another subject that was equally
vital to his ego, "this name of Wingfield is something to work for. I was
the son of a poor New England clergyman, but there is family back of it;
good blood, good blood! I was not the first John Wingfield and you shall
not be the last!"
He rose from the table, bidding the servant to bring the coffee to the
drawing-room. With the same light, quick step that he ascended the
flights in the store, he led the way downstairs, his face alive with the
dramatic anticipation that it had worn when he took Jack out of the
office to look down from the balcony of the court.
"Ah, we have something besides the store, Jack!" he was saying, in the
very exultation of the pride of possession, as he went to the opposite
side of the mantel from the mother's portrait and turned on the reflector
over a picture.
Jack saw a buccaneer under the brush of the gold and the shadows of
Spain; a robust, ready figure on fighting edge, who seemed to say, "After
you, sir; and, then, pardon me, but it's your finish, sir!"
"It's a Velasquez!" Jack exclaimed.
"And you knew that at a glance!" said his father.
"Why, yes!"
"Not many Velasquezes in America," said the father, thinking,
incidentally, that his son would not have to pay the dealers a heavy toll
for an art education, while he revelled in a surprise that he was
evidently holding back.
"Or many better Velasquezes than this, anywhere," added Jack. "What
mastery! What a gift from heaven that was vouchsafed to a human being to
paint like that!"
He was in a spell, held no less by the painter's art than by the subject.
"Absolutely a certified Velasquez, bought from the estate of Count
Galting," continued his father. "I paid a cool two hundred and fifty
thousand for it. And that isn't all, Jack, that isn't all that you are
going to drudge for as an apprentice in the delivery department. I know
what I am talking about. I wasn't fooled by any of the genealogists who
manufacture ancestors. I had it all looked up by four experts, checking
one off against another."
"Yes," answered Jack, absently. He had hardly heard his father's words.
In fervent scrutiny he was leaning forward, his weight on the ball of the
foot, the attitude of the man in the picture.
"And who do you think he is--who?" pursued John Wingfield, Sr.
"A man who fought face to face with the enemy; a man whom men followed!
Velasquez caught all that!" answered Jack.
"That old fellow was a great man in his day--a great Englishman--and his
name was John Wingfield! He was your ancestor and mine!"
After a quick breath of awakening comprehension Jack took a step nearer
the portrait, all his faculties in the throe of beaming inquiry of Señor
Don't Care and desert freedom, in the self-same, alert readiness of pose
as the figure he was facing.
"They say I resemble him!" The father repeated that phrase which he had
used in benignant satisfaction to many a guest, but now seeing with
greedy eyes a likeness between his son and the ancestor deeper than mere
resemblance of feature, he added: "But you--you, Jack, you're the dead
spit of him!"
"Yes," said Jack, as if he either were not surprised or were too
engrossed to be interested. To the buccaneer's "After you, sir; and,
then, your finish, sir!" he seemed to be saying, in the fully-lived
spirit of imagination: "A good epitaph, sir! I'll see that it is written
on your tombstone!"
The father, singularly affected by the mutual and enjoyed challenge that
he was witnessing, half expected to see a sword leap out of the scabbard
of the canvas and another from Jack's side.
"If he had lived in our day," said the father, "he would have built
himself a great place; he would have been the head of a great
institution, just as I am."
"Two centuries is a long way to fetch a comparison," answered Jack,
hazily, out of a corner of his brain still reserved for conversation,
while all the rest of it was centered elsewhere. "He might have been a
cow-puncher, a revolutionist, or an aviator. Certainly, he would never
have been a camp-follower."
"At all events, a man of power. It's in the blood!"
"It's in the blood!" Jack repeated, with a sort of staring, lingering
emphasis. He was hearing Mary's protest on the pass; her final,
mysterious reason for sending him away; her "It's not in the blood!"
There could be no connection between this and the ancestor; yet, in the
stirred depths of his nature, probing the inheritance in his veins, her
hurt cry had come echoing to his ears.
"Why, I would have paid double the price rather than not have got that
picture!" the father went on. "There is a good deal of talk about family
trees in this town and a strong tendency in some quarters for second
generations of wealth to feel a little superiority over the first
generation. Here I come along with an ancestor eight generations back,
painted by Velasquez. I tell you it was something of a sensation when I
exhibited him in the store!"
"You--you--" and Jack glanced at his father perplexedly; "you exhibited
him in the store!" he said.
"Why, yes, as a great Velasquez I had just bought. I didn't advertise him
as my ancestor, of course. Still, the fact got around; yes, the fact got
around, Jack."
While Jack studied the picture, his father studied Jack, whose face and
whose manner of blissful challenge to all comers in the unconcern of easy
fatality and ready blade seemed to grow more and more like that of the
first John Wingfield. At length, Jack passed over to the other side of
the mantel and turned on the reflector over the portrait of his mother;
and, in turn, standing silently before her all his militancy was gone and
in its place came the dreamy softness with which he would watch the
Eternal Painter cloud-rolling on the horizon. And he was like her not in
features, not in the color of hair or eyes, but in a peculiar
sensitiveness, distinguished no less by a fatalism of its own kind than
was the cheery aggressiveness of the buccaneer.
"Yes, father," he said, "that old ruffian forebear of ours could swear
and could kill. But he had the virtue of truth. He could not act or live
a lie. And I guess something else--how supremely gentle he could be
before a woman like her. Velasquez brought out a joyous devil and Sargent
brought out a soul!"
John Wingfield, Sr., who stood by the grate, was drumming nervously on
the mantel. The drumming ceased. The fingers rested rigid and white on
the dark wood. Alive to another manifestation of the lurking force in
his son, he hastened to change the subject.
"I had almost forgotten that you always had a taste for art, Jack."
"Yes, from her;" which was hardly changing the subject.
"As for the first John Wingfield, you may be sure that I wanted to know
everything there was to know about the old fellow," said the father. "So
I set a lot of bookworms looking up the archives of the English and
Spanish governments and digging around in the libraries after material.
Then I had it all put together in proper shape by a literary sharp."
"You have that!" cried Jack. "You have the framework from which you can
build the whole story of him--the story of how he fought and how
Velasquez came to paint him? Oh, I want to read it!" With an unexplored
land between gilt-tooled covers under his arm he went upstairs early, in
the transport of wanderlust that had sent him away over the sand from
Little Rivers. _Sí, sí_, Firio, outward bound, camp under the stars! If
Señor Don't Care's desert journeys were over--and he had no thought but
that they were--there was no ban on travelling in fancy over sea trails
in the ancestor's company.
Jack was with the buccaneer when he boarded the enemy at the head of his
men; with him before the Board of Admiralty when, a young captain of
twenty-two, he refused to lie to save his skin; with him when, in answer
to the scolding of Elizabeth, then an old woman, he said: "It is glorious
for one who fought so hard for Your Majesty to have the recognition even
of Your Majesty's chiding in answer to the protest of the Spanish
ambassador," which won Elizabeth's reversal of the Admiralty's decision;
with him when, in a later change of fortune, he went to the court of
Spain for once on a mission which required a sheathed blade; with him
when the dark eye of Velasquez, who painted men and women of his time
while his colleagues were painting Madonnas, glowed with a discoverer's
joy at sight of this fair-haired type of the enemy, whom he led away to
his studio.
More than once was there mention of the fact that this terrible fighter
was gentle with women and fonder of the company of children than of
statesmen or courtiers. He had married the daughter of a great merchant,
a delicate type of beauty; the last to fascinate a buccaneer, according
to the gossips of the time. Rumor had it that he had taken her for the
wherewithal to pay the enormous debts contracted in his latest exploit.
To disprove this he went to sea in a temper with a frigate and came back
laden with the treasure of half a dozen galleons, to find that his wife
had died at the birth of a son. He promised himself to settle down for
good; but the fog of London choked lungs used to soft airs; he heard the
call of the sun and was away again to seek adventure in the broiling
reaches of the Caribbean. A man of restless, wild spirit, breathing
inconsistencies incomprehensible to the conventions of Whitehall! And his
son had turned a Cromwellian, who, in poverty, sought refuge in America
when Charles II. came to the throne; and from him, in the vicissitudes of
five generations, the poor clergyman was descended.
Thus ran the tale in its completeness. The end of the ancestor's career
had been in keeping with its character and course. He had been spared
the slow decay of faculties in armchair reminiscence. He had gone down in
his ship without striking his colors, fighting the Spaniards one to
three. When Jack closed the cover on the last page tenderly and in
enraptured understanding, it was past midnight.
The spaciousness of the sea under clouds of battle smoke had melted into
the spaciousness of the desert under the Eternal Painter's canopy. Then
four walls of a bedroom in Madison Avenue materialized, shutting out the
horizon; a carpet in place of sand formed the floor; and in place of a
blanket roll was a canopied bed upon which a servant had laid out a suit
of pajamas. In the impulse of a desire to look into the face of the first
John Wingfield in the light of all he now knew, Jack went downstairs, and
in the silence of the house drank in the portrait again.
"You splendid old devil, you!" he breathed, understandingly. "How should
you like to start out delivering goods with me in the morning?"
XXVIII
JACK GETS A RAISE
The next morning Jack went down town with his father in the limousine.
About an hour later, after he had been introduced to the head of the
delivery division, he was on his way up town beside a driver of one of
the wagons on the Harlem route. He was in the uniform of the Wingfield
light cavalry, having obtained a cap with embroidered initials on the
front. The driver was like to burst from inward mirth, and Jack was
regarding the prospect with veritable juvenile zest.
At dinner that evening John Wingfield, Jr. narrated his experiences of
the day to John Wingfield, Sr. with the simplicity and verisimilitude
that always make for both realism and true comedy.
"But, Jack, you took me too literally! It is hardly in keeping with your
position! You--"
"Why, I thought that the only way to know the whole business was to
play every part. Didn't you ever deliver packages in person in your
early days?"
"I can't say that I did!" the father admitted wryly.
"Then it seems to me that you missed one of the most entertaining and
instructive features," Jack continued. "You cannot imagine the majestic
feminine disdain with which you may be informed that a five-cent bar of
soap should be delivered at the back door instead of the front door. The
most indignant example was a red-haired woman who was doing her own work
in a flat. She fairly blazed. She wanted to know if I didn't know what
dumb-waiters were for."
"And what did you say?" the father asked wearily; for the ninth John
Wingfield had a limited sense of humor.
"Oh, I try, however irritating the circumstances, to be most courtly, for
the honor of the store," said Jack. "I told her that I was very sorry and
I would speak to you in person about the mistake."
"You mean that you admitted who you were?"
"Oh, no! The red-haired woman laughed and took the package in at the
front door," Jack responded. Anybody in Little Rivers would have
understood just how he looked and smiled and why it was that the
red-haired woman laughed.
"Jack--now, really, Jack, this is not quite dignified!" expostulated the
father. "What do you think your ancestor would say to it?"
"I suspect that he would have made an even more ingratiating bow to the
lady than I could," said Jack, thoughtfully. "They had the grand manner
better developed in his day than in ours."
In the ensuing weeks John Wingfield, Sr. dwelt in a kind of infernal
wonder about his son. He was cheered when some friend of his world who
had met Jack in the garb of his caste, as fitted by Burleigh, would say:
"Fine, strapping son you have there, Wingfield!" He was abashed and
dumfounded when Jack announced that he had taken Mamie Devore, who sold
culinary utensils in the basement, out to luncheon with her "steady
company," Joe Mathewson, driver of one of the warehouse trucks.
"They were a little awed at first," Jack explained, "but they soon
became natural. I don't know anything pleasanter than making people feel
perfectly natural, do you? You see, Joe and Mamie are very real, father,
and most businesslike; an ambitious, upstanding pair. They're going to
have two thousand dollars saved before they marry.
"'I don't believe that a woman ought to work out after she's married,'
was the way Joe put it. And Mamie, with her eyes fairly devouring him,
snapped back: 'No, she'd have enough to do looking after you, you big
old bluff!'
"Mamie is a wiry little thing and Joe is a heavyweight, with a hand
almost as big as a baseball mit. That's partly why their practical
romance is so fascinating. Why, it's wonderful the stories that are
playing themselves out in that big store, father! Well, you see Joe is on
a stint--two thousand before he gets Mamie. He had been making money on
the side nights in boxing bouts. But Mamie stopped the fighting. She said
she was not going to have a husband with the tip of his nose driven up
between his eyes like a bull-dog's. And what do you imagine they are
going to do with the two thousand? Buy a farm! Isn't that corking!"
John Wingfield, Sr. shrugged his shoulders, but did not express his
feelings with any remark. It seemed to him that Jack must have been born
without a sense of proportion.
With the breaking of spring, when gardens were beginning to sprout, Jack
broadened his study to the trails of Westchester, Long Island, and New
Jersey, coursed by the big automobile vans of the suburban delivery. To
the people of the store, whose streets he traversed at will in
unremitting wonder over its varied activities, he had brought something
of the same sensation that he had to an Arizona town. He came to know the
employees by name, even as he had his neighbors in Little Rivers. He
nodded to the clerks as he passed down an aisle. They watched for his
coming and brightened with his approach and met his smile with their
smiles. In their idle moments he would stop and talk of the desert.
Although he was learning to like the store as a community of human beings
its business was as the works of a watch, when all he knew was how to
tell the time by the face. But he tried hard to learn; tried until his
head was dizzy with a whirl of dissociated facts, which he knew ought to
be associated, and under the call of his utter restlessness would
disappear altogether for two or three days.
"Relieving the pressure! It's a safety-valve so I shan't blow up," he
explained to his father, sadly.
"Take your time," said John Wingfield, Sr., having in mind a recent talk
with Dr. Bennington.
Jack listened faithfully to his father's clear-cut lessons. He asked
questions which only made his father sigh; for they had little to do with
the economy of working costs. All his suggestions were extravagant; they
would contribute to the joy of the employees, but not to profit. And
other questions made his father frown in devising answers which were in
the nature of explanations. Born of his rambling and humanly observant
relations with every department, they led into the very heart of things
in that mighty organization. There were times when it was hard for him
to control his indignation. There were trails leading to the room with
the glass-paneled door marked "Private" which he half feared to pursue.
Thus, between father and son remained that indefinable chasm of thought
and habit which filial duty or politeness could not bridge. No stories of
the desert were ever told at home, though it was so easy to tell them to
Burleigh or Mathewson, those contrasts in a pale fitter of clothes and a
herculean rustler of dry-goods boxes. But echoes of the tales came to the
father through his assistants. He had the feeling of some stranger spirit
in his own likeness moving there in the streets of his city under the
talisman of a consanguinity that was nominal. One day he put an inquiry
to the general manager concretely, though in a way to avoid the
appearance of asking another's opinion about his own son.
"He has your gift of winning men to him. There is no denying his
popularity with the force," said the general manager, who was a diplomat.
The same question was put to Peter Mortimer.
"We all love him. I think a lot of people in the store would march out to
the desert after him," said Mortimer, with real rejoicing in his candor
and courage. Indeed, of late he had been developing cheer as well as
courage, imbibing both, perhaps, from the roses in the vase on his
employer's desk. Jack had ordered a fresh bunch put there every day; and
when employees were sick packages of grapes and bunches of flowers came
to them, in Little Rivers fashion, with J.W. on the card, as if they had
come from the head of the firm himself.
"Maybe Jack will soften the old man a little," ran a whisper from
basement to roof. For the battalions called him "Jack," rather than "Mr.
Wingfield," just as Little Rivers had.
"The boy's good nature isn't making him too familiar with the employees?"
was a second question which the father had asked both the general manager
and Mortimer.
"No. That is the surprising thing--the gift of being friendly without
being familiar," answered the manager.
"He's got a kind of self-respect that induces respect in others,"
said Peter.
John Wingfield, Sr. was the proprietor of the store, but the human world
of the store began to feel a kind of proprietorship in Jack, while its
guardian interest in helping him in his mistakes was common enough to be
a conspiracy.
And the callouses were gone from his hands. There was no longer a
dividing line between tan and white on his forehead. No outward symbol of
the desert clung to his person except the moments of the far vision of
distances in his eyes. Superficially, on the Avenue he would have been
taken for one of his caste.
But tossing a cowpuncher hat out of a window into Broadway was easier
than tossing a thing out of mind. He sat up nights to write to Mary.
Letter after letter he poured out as a diary of his experiences in his
new world, letters breathing a pupil's hope of learning and all that
pupil's sorry vagaries. No answer ever came, not even to the most
appealing ones about his most adventurous conflicts with the dinosaur.
He felt the chagrin of the army of unpublished novelists who lay their
hearts bare on the stone slab of the dissectors in a publisher's
office. He might as well have thrown all he wrote into the
waste-basket so far as any result was concerned; yet he kept on
writing as if it were his glorious duty to report to her as his
superior. But he found a more responsive correspondent in Jim Galway;
and this was the letter he received:
"DEAR JACK:
"The whole valley is not yet sprouting with dates as you said it would
from your thinking of us. Maybe we didn't use the right seed. Your ranch
is still called Jack's ranch, and Firio is doing his best and about the
best I ever knew in an Indian. But as you always said, Indians are mostly
human, like the rest of us, barring a sort of born twist in their
intellect for which they aren't responsible. You see, Jack, a lot of your
sayings still live with us, though you are gone.
"Well, Firio keeps your P.D. exercised and won't let anybody but himself
ride him. He says you will need him. For you can't budge the stubborn
little cuss. He declares you're coming back. When we tell him you're
worth twenty millions and he's plumb full of primitive foolishness and
general ignorance of the outside world, he says, '_Sí_, he will come
back!' like some heathen oracle that's strong on repetition and weak on
vocabulary.
"Of course you know about the new addition to our citizenship, John
Prather, that double of yours that you didn't happen to meet. And I
might mention that by this time, after we've seen so much of him, we
agree with the Doge that he doesn't look a bit like you. Well, he's
making a fine ranch across the road from you, but hiring all his work
done, which ain't exactly according to Little Rivers custom, as you
will remember. The Doge sets a lot by him, though I can't see how
there's much in common between them. This fellow's not full of all that
kind of scholastic persiflage that you are, Jack. He's so all-fired
practical his joints would crack if he wasn't so oily; and he's up to
old man Lefferts' pretty often.
"He goes to Phoenix a good deal. When I was there the other day I heard
he was circulating around among the politicians in his quiet way, and I
saw him and Pete Leddy hobnobbing together. I didn't like that. But when
I told the Doge of it he said he guessed there wasn't much real
hobnobbing. The Doge is certainly strong for Prather. Another thing I
heard was that, after all, old man Lefferts' two partners aren't dead,
and Prather's been hunting them up.
"Come to think of it, I didn't tell you that Pete Leddy and some of the
gang have been back in town. Of course we have every confidence in the
Doge, he's been so fair to this community. Still, some of us can't help
having our private suspicions, considering what a lot we have at stake.
And four or five of us was talking the other night, when suddenly we all
agreed how you'd shine in any trouble, and if there was going to be
any--not that there is--we wished you were here.
"Well, Jack, the pass hasn't changed and the sunsets are just as grand as
ever and the air just as free. The pass won't have changed and the
sunsets will be doing business at the old stand when the antiquaries are
digging up the remote civilization of Little Rivers and putting it in a
high scale because they ran across a pot of Mrs. Galway's jam in the
ruins--the same hifalutin compliment being your own when you were
nursing your wound, as you will remember.
"Here's wishing you luck from the whole town, way out here in nowhere.
"As ever yours,
"James R. Galway.
"P.S. Belvy Smith wants to know if you won't write just one story. I told
her you were too busy for such nonsense now. But she refuses to believe
it. She says being busy doesn't matter to you. She says the stories just
pop out. So I transmit her request. J.R.G."
"P.D. waiting!" breathed Jack. "No changing Firio! He is like the pass. I
wonder how Wrath of God and Jag Ear are!"
He wrote a story for Belvy. He wrote to Firio in resolute assertion that
he would never require the services of P.D. again, when he knew that
Firio, despite the protests, would still keep P.D. fit for the trail. He
wrote to Jim Galway how immersed he was in his new career, but that he
might come for a while--for a little while, with emphasis--if ever Jim
wired that he was needed.
"That was a good holiday--a regular week-end debauch away from the shop!"
he thought, when the letters were finished.
Soon after this came an event which, for the first time, gave John
Wingfield, Sr. a revelation of the side of his son that had won Little
Rivers and the interest of the rank and file of the store. Among Jack's
many suggestions, in his aim to carry out his father's talk about the
creative business sense the first night they were together, had been one
for a suburban clubbing delivery system. It had been dismissed as
fantastic, but Jack had asked that it be given a trial and his father had
consented. Its basis was a certain confidence in human nature. Jack and
his father had dined together the evening after the master of the
push-buttons had gone through the final reports of the experiment.
"Well, Jack, I am going to raise your salary to a hundred a week," the
father announced.
"On the ground that if you pay me more I might make myself worth more?"
Jack asked respectfully.
"No, as a matter of business. Whenever any man makes two dollars for the
store, he gets one dollar and I keep the other. That is the basis of my
success--others earning money for me. Your club scheme is a go. As the
accountant works it out, it has brought a profit of two hundred a week."
"Then I have done something worth while, really?" Jack asked, eagerly,
but half sceptical of such good fortune.
"Yes. You have created a value. You have used your powers of observation
and your brain. That's the thing that makes a few men employers while the
multitude remains employees."
"Father! Then I am not quite hopeless?"
"Hopeless! My son hopeless! No, no! I didn't expect you to learn the
business in a week, or a month, or even a year. Time! time!"
Nor did John Wingfield, Sr. wish his son to develop too rapidly. Now
that he was so sure of beating threescore and ten, while retaining the
full possession of his faculties, if he followed the rules of longevity,
he would not have welcomed a son who could spring into the saddle at
once. He wanted to ride alone. He who had never shared his power with
anyone! He who had never admitted anyone into even a few shares of
company partnership in his concern! Time! time! The boy would never fall
heir to undivided responsibility before he was forty. John Wingfield,
Sr. was pleased with himself; pleased over a good sign; and he could not
deny that he was pleased at the sudden change in Jack. For he saw Jack's
eyes sparkling into his own; sparkling with comradeship and spontaneous
gratification. Was the boy to be his in thought and purpose, after all?
Yes, of course; yes, inevitably, with the approach of maturity. Gradually
the flightiness of his upbringing would wear off down to the steel, the
hard-tempered, paternal steel.
"You can scarcely realize what a fight it has been for me until you know
the life I led out in Arizona, getting strong for you and the store,"
Jack began.
"Strong for me! For the store! Yes, Jack!" There was an emphasis on the
subjective personal pronoun--for _him_; for the store!
The father's face beamed a serene delight. This Jack accepted as the
expression of sympathy and understanding which he had craved. It was to
him an inspiration of fellowship that set the well of his inner being in
overflow and the force of his personality, which the father had felt
uncannily before the mother's picture, became something persuasive in its
radiance rather than something held in leash as a threatening and
volcanic element. Now he could talk as freely and happily of the desert
to his father as to Burleigh and Mathewson. He told of the long rides;
of Firio and Wrath of God. He made the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells heard in
the silence of the dining-room as it was heard in the silences of the
trail. He mentioned how he was afraid to come back after he was strong.
"Afraid?" queried his father.
"Yes. But I was coming--coming when, at the top of the pass, I saw Little
Rivers for the first time."
He sketched his meeting with Mary Ewold; the story of the town and the
story of Jasper Ewold as he knew it, now glancing at his father, now
seeming to see nothing except visualization of the pictures of his story.
The father, looking at the table-cloth, at times playing with his
coffee-spoon, made no comment.
"And that first night I saw that Jasper Ewold had met me somewhere
before. But--" he went on after going back to the incident of the villa
in his childhood--"that hardly explained. How could he remember the face
of a grown man from the face of a boy? Jasper Ewold! Do you recall ever
having met him? He must have known my mother. Perhaps he knew you, though
why he should not have told me I don't know."
"Yes, yes--Jasper Ewold," said the father. "I knew him in his younger
days. His was an old family up in Burbridge, the New England town where I
came from. Too much college, too much travel, as I remember,
characterized Jasper Ewold. No settled point of view; and I judge from
what you say that he must have run through his patrimony. One of the ups
and downs of the world, Jack. And he never mentioned that he had met me?"
"No."
"Probably a part of that desert notion of freemasonry in keeping pasts a
secret. But why did you stay on after you had recovered from your wound?"
he asked penetratingly, though he was looking again at the bottom of his
coffee-cup.
"For a reason that comes to a man but once in his life!" Jack answered.
Had the father looked up--it was a habit of his in listening to any
report to lower his eyes, his face a mask--he might have seen Jack's
face in the supremacy of emotion, as it was when he had called up to
Mary from the canyon and when he had pleaded with her on the pass. But
John Wingfield, Sr. could not mistake the message of a voice vibrating
with all the force of a being let free living over the scene. With the
shadows settling over his eyes, Jack came to her answer and to the
finality of her cry:
"It's not in the blood!"
The only sound was a slight tinkle of a spoon against the coffee-cup.
Looking at his father he saw a nervous flutter in his cheeks, his lips
hard set, his brow drawn down; and the rigidity of the profile was such
that Jack was struck by the shiver of a thought that it must have been
like his own as others said it was when he had gripped Pedro Nogales's
arm. But this passed quickly, leaving, however, in its trail an
expression of shock and displeasure.
"So it was the girl, that kept you--you were in love!" John Wingfield,
Sr. exclaimed, tensely.
"Yes, I was--I am! You have it, father, the unchangeable all of it! I
face a wall of mystery. 'It's not in the blood!' she said, as if it were
some bar sinister. What could she have meant?"
In the fever of baffled intensity crying for light and help, he was
sharing the secret that had beset him relentlessly and giving his father
the supreme confidence of his heart. Leaning across the table he grasped
his father's hand, which lay still and unresponsive and singularly cold
for a second. Then John Wingfield, Sr. raised his other hand and patted
the back of Jack's hesitantly, as if uncertain how to deal with this
latest situation that had developed out of his son's old life. Finally he
looked up good-temperedly, deprecatingly.
"Well, well, Jack, I almost forgot that you are young. It's quite a bad
case!" he said.
"But what did she mean? Can you guess? I have thought of it so much that
it has meant a thousand wild things!" Jack persisted desperately.
"Come! come!" the father rallied him. "Time, time!"
He gripped the hand that was gripping his and swung it free of the table
with a kindly shake. All the effective charm of his personality which he
never wasted, the charm that could develop out of the mask to gain an end
when the period of listening was over, was in play.
"She excited the opposition of the strength in you," he said. "You ask
what did she mean? It is hard to tell what a woman means, but I judge
that she meant that it was not in her blood to marry a fellow who went
about fighting duels and breaking arms. She would like a more peaceful
sort; and, yes, anything that came into her mind leaped out and you were
mystified by her strange exclamation!"
"Perhaps. I suppose that may be it. It was just myself, just my devil!"
Jack assented limply.
"Time! time! All this will pass."
Jack could not answer that commonplace with one of his own, that it would
not pass; he could only return the pressure when his father, rising and
coming around the table, slipped his arm about the son in a demonstration
of affection which was like opening the gate to a new epoch in their
relations.
"And you would have killed Leddy! You could have broken that Mexican in
two! I should like to have seen that! So would the ancestor!" said the
father, giving Jack a hug.
"Yes, but, father, that was the horror of it!"
"Not the power to do it--no! I mean, Jack, that in this world it is well
to be strong."
"And you think that I am no longer a weakling?" Jack asked strangely;
"that I carried out your instructions when you sent me away?"
"Oh, Jack, you remember my farewell remark? It was made in irritation and
suffering. That hurt me. It hurt my pride and all that my work stands
for. It hurt me as much as it hurt you. But if it was a whip, why, then,
it served a purpose, as I wanted it to."
"Yes, it was a whip!" said Jack, mechanically.
"Then all ends well--all quits! And, Jack," he swung Jack, who was
unresisting but unresponsive, around facing him, "if you ever have any
doubts or any questions to ask bring them to me, won't you?"
"Yes."
"And, Jack, a hundred a week to-morrow! You're all right, Jack!" And he
gave Jack a slap on the back as they left the dining-room.
XXIX
A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL
Light sang in the veins and thoughts of a city. Light cleansed the
streets of vapors. Light, the light of the sunshine of late May, made a
far different New York from the New York under a blanket of March mist of
the day of Jack's arrival. The lantern of the Metropolitan tower was all
blazing gold; Diana's scarf trailed behind her in the shimmering abandon
of her _honi soit qui mal y pense_ chases on Olympus; Admiral Farragut
grew urbane, sailing on a smooth sea with victory won; General Sherman in
his over-brightness, guided by his guardian lady, still gallantly pursued
the tone of time in the direction of the old City Hall and Trinity; and
the marble façade of the new library seemed no less at home than under an
Agean sky. An ecstasy, blinding eyes to blemishes, set critical faculties
to rejoicing over perfections. They graciously overlooked the blotch of
red brick hiding the body of St. Patrick's on the way up town in
gratitude for twin spires against the sky.
Enveloping radiance gilded the sharp lines of skyscrapers and swept away
the shadows in the chasms between them. It pointed the bows of busy tugs
with sprays of diamonds falling on the molten surface of rivers and bays.
It called up paeans of childish trebles from tenement alleys; slipped
into the sickrooms of private houses, delaying the advent of crape on
the door; and played across the rows of beds in the public wards of
hospitals in the primal democracy of the gift of ozone to the earth.
The milky glass roof of the central court of the Wingfield store acted as
a screen to the omnipotent visitor, but he set unfiltered patches of
delight in the aisles and on the counters near the walls. Mamie Devore
and Burleigh and Peter Mortimer and many other clerks and employees asked
if this were like a desert day and Jack said that it was. He longed to be
free of all roofs and feel the geniality of the hearth-fire of the
planetary system penetrating through his coat, his skin, his flesh, into
his very being. Why not close the store and make a holiday for everybody?
he asked himself; only to be amazed, on second thought, at such a
preposterous suggestion from a hundred-dollar-a-week author of created
profits in the business. He was almost on the point of acting on another
impulse, which was that he and his father break away into the country in
a touring car, not knowing where they were going to stop until hunger
overtook an inn. This, too, he dismissed as a milder form of the same
demoralizing order of heresy, bound to be disturbing to the new filial
relations springing from the night when he had told his desert story over
the coffee, which, contrary to the conventional idea of an exchange of
confidences clearing the mind of a burden, had only provoked more
restlessness.
At least, he would fare forth for a while on the broad asphalt trail that
begins under the arch of the little park and runs to the entrance of the
great park. Even as the desert has its spell of overawing stillness in an
uninhabited land, so this trail had its spell of congested human
movement in the heart of habitations. A broad, luminous blade lay across
the west side of the street and left the other in shade; and all the
world that loved sunshine and had no errands on the east side kept to the
west side. There was a communism of inspiration abroad. It was a
conqueror's triumph just to be alive and feel the pulse-beat of the
throng. The very over-developed sensitiveness of city nerves became
something to be thankful for in providing the capacity for keener
enjoyment as compensation for the capacity for keener pain.
Womankind was in spring plumage. The mere consciousness of the value of
light to their costumes, no less than the elixir in their nostrils, gave
vivacity to their features. As usual, Jack was seeing them only to see
Mary. The creation of no _couturier_ could bear rivalry with the garb in
which his imagination clothed her. He found himself suddenly engrossed in
a particular exhibit of fashion's parade a little distance ahead and
going in the same direction as himself, a young woman in a simplicity of
gown to which her carriage gave the final touch of art. Her steps had a
long-limbed freedom and lightness, with which his own steps ran in a
rhythm to the music of some past association. The thrall of a likeness,
which more and more possessed him, made him hasten to draw near for a
more satisfying glimpse.
The young woman turned her head to glance into a shop-window and then
there could be no mistaking that cheek and chin and the peculiar relation
of the long lashes to the brow. It was the profile whose imprint had
become indelible on his mind when he had come round an elbow of rock on
Galeria. The Jack of wild, tumultuous pleading who had parted from Mary
Ewold on the pass became a Jack elate with the glad, swimming joy of May
sunshine at seeing and speaking to her again.
"Mary! Mary!" he cried. "My, but you've become a grand swell!" he
breathed delectably, with a fuller vision of her.
"Jack!"
There was a nervous twitching of her lips. He saw her eyes at first in a
blaze of surprise and wonder; then change to the baffling sparkle, hiding
their depths, of the slivers of glass on the old barrier. His smile and
hers in unspoken understanding said that two comrades of another trail
had met on the Avenue trail. There had not been any Leddy; there had not
been any scene on the pass. They were back to the conditions of the
protocol he had established when they started out from the porch of the
Ewold bungalow in the airiest possible mood to look at a parcel of land.
"And you also have become a grand swell!" she said. "Did you expect that
I should be in a gray riding-habit? Certainly I didn't expect to see you
in chaps and spurs."
It was brittle business; but with a common resource in play they managed
it well. And there they were walking together, noted by passers-by for
their youth and beaming oblivion to everything but themselves.
"How long have you been here?" Jack asked.
"Two weeks," she answered.
Two weeks in the same town and this his first glimpse of her! What a maze
New York was! What a desert waste of two weeks!
"Yes. Our decision to come was rather abrupt," she explained. "A sudden
call to travel came to father; came to him like an inspiration that he
could not resist. And how happily he has entered into the spirit of the
city again! It has made him young."
"And it has been quite like martyrdom for you!" Jack put in, teasingly.
"Terrible! Sackcloth and ashes!"
"I see you are wearing the sackcloth."
She laughed outright, with a downward glance at her gown, at once in
guilt and appreciation.
"Another whim of father's."
"The Doge a scapegoat for fashion!"
"Not a scapegoat--a partisan! He insisted on going to one of the best
places. Could I resist? I wanted to see how I felt, how I appeared."
"The veritable curiosity of a Japanese woman getting her first
foreign gown!"
"Thank you! That is another excuse."
"And it certainly looks very well," Jack declared.
"Do you think so?" Mary flushed slightly. She could not help being
pleased. "After six years, could I drop back into the old chrysalis
naturally, without awkwardness? Did I still know how to wear a fine
gown?"--and the gift for it, as anyone could see, was born in her as
surely as certain gifts were born in Jack. "But," she added, severely, "I
have only two--just two! And the cost of them! It will take the whole
orange crop!"
Just two, when she ought to have twenty! When he would have liked to put
all the Paris models in the store in a wagon and, himself driving,
deliver them at her door!
"Having succumbed to temptation, I enjoy it out of sheer respect to
the orange crop," Mary said; "and yes, because I like beautiful
gowns; wickedly, truly like them! And I like the Avenue, just as I
like the desert."
And all that she liked he could give her! And all that he could give she
had stubbornly refused!
The liveliness of her expression, the many shades of meaning that she
could set capering with a glance, were now as the personal reflection of
the day and the scene. Their gait was a sauntering one. They went as far
as the Park and started back, as if all the time of the desert were
theirs. They stopped to look into the windows of shops of every kind,
from antiques to millinery. When he saw a hat which he declared, after
deliberate, critical appraisement, would surely become her, she asked
boldly if it were better than the one she wore.
"I mean an extra hat; that one more hat would have the good fortune of
becoming you!"
"Almost a real contribution to the literature of compliments!" she
answered, unruffled.
He thought, too, that she ought to have a certain necklace in a
jeweler's window.
"To wear over my riding-habit or when I am digging in the flower beds?"
she inquired.
When they passed a display of luxuries for masculine adornment, she found
a further retort in suggesting that he ought to have a certain giddy
fancy waistcoat. He complimented her on her taste, bought the waistcoat
and, going to the rear of the shop, returned wearing it with a
momentarily appreciated show of jaunty swagger.
"Why be on the Avenue and not buy?" he queried, enthusing with a new
idea.
Jim Galway should have a cowpuncher hat as a present. The style of band
was a subject of discussion calling on their discriminative views of
Jim's personal tastes. This led to thoughts of others in Little Rivers
who would appreciate gifts, and to the purchase of toys for the children,
a positive revel. When they were through it was well past noon and they
were in the region of the restaurants. The sun in majestic altitude swept
the breadth of the Avenue.
"Shall we lunch--yes, and in the Best Swell Place?" he asked, as if it
were a matter-of-course part of the programme, while inwardly he was
stirred with the fear of her refusal. He felt that any minute she might
leave him, with no alternative but another farewell. She hesitated a
moment seriously, then accepted blithely and naturally.
"Yes, the Best Swell Place--let's! Who isn't entitled to the Best Swell
Place occasionally?"
After an argument in comparison of famous names, they were convinced that
they had really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant table
at a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that the
assemblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a full
quorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections from
the broad range of a bill of fare.
A luncheon for two narrows a walk on the Avenue, where you are part of a
crowd, into restricted intimacy. He was feeling the intoxication of her
inscrutability, catching gleams of the wealth that lay beyond it, across
the limited breadth of a table-cloth. He forgot about the unspoken
conditions in a sally which was like putting his hand on top of the
barrier for an impetuous leap across.
"I wrote you stacks of letters," he said, "and you never sent me one
little line; not even 'Yours received and contents noted!'"
In a flash all intimacy vanished. She might have been at the other end of
the dining-room in somebody else's party nodding to him as to an
acquaintance. Her answer was delayed about as long as it takes to lift an
arrow from a quiver and notch it in a bowstring.
"A novel may be very interesting, but that does not mean that I write to
the author!"
He imagined her going through the meal in polite silence or in measured
commonplaces, turning the happy parliament into a frigid Gothic ceremony.
Why had he not kept in mind that sufficient to the hour is the pleasure
of it? Famished for her companionship, a foolhardy impulse of temptation
had risked its loss. The waiter set something before them and softly
withdrew. Jack signaled the unspoken humility of being a disciplined
soldier at attention on his side of the barrier and Mary signaled a
trifle superior but good-natured acceptance of his apology and promise of
better conduct.
They were back to the truce of nonsense, apostrophizing the cooking of
the Best Swell Place, setting exclamations to their glimpses of people
passing in the street. For they had never wanted for words when talking
across the barrier; there was paucity of conversation only when he
threatened an invasion.
While a New Yorker meeting a former New Yorker on the desert might have
little to tell not already chronicled in the press, a Little Riversite
meeting a former Little Riversite in New York had a family budget of
news. How high were Jack's hedges? How were the Doge's date-trees? How
was this and that person coming on? Listening to all the details, Jack
felt homesickness creeping over him, and he clung fondly to every one of
the swiftly-passing moments. By no reference and by no inference had she
suggested that there was ever any likelihood of his meeting or hearing
from her again. A thread of old relations had been spun only to be
snapped. She was, indeed, as a visitation developed out of the sunshine
of the Avenue, into which she would dissolve.
"I was to meet father at a bookstore at three," she said, finally,
as she rose.
"Inevitably he would be there or in a gallery," said Jack.
"He has done the galleries. This is the day for buying books--still
more books! I suppose he is spending the orange crop again. If you keep
on spending the same orange crop, just where do you arrive in the maze
of finance?"
"I should not like to say without consulting the head book-keeper or, at
least, Peter Mortimer!"
They were coming out of the door of the Best Swell Place, now. A word and
she would be going in one direction and he in another. How easily she
might speak that word, with an electric and final glance of good-will!
"But I must say howdy do to the Doge!" he urged. "I should like to
see him buying books. What a prodigal debauch of learning! I cannot
miss that!"
"It is not far," she said, prolonging Paradise for him.
A few blocks below Forty-second Street they turned into a cross street
which was the same that led to the Wingfield house; and halfway to
Madison Avenue they entered a bookstore. The light from low windows
spreading across the counters blended with the light from high windows at
the back, and here, on a platform at the head of the stairs, before a big
table sat the Doge, in the majesty of a great patron of literature, with
a clerk standing by in deftly-urging attentiveness. Mary and Jack paused
at the foot of the stairs watching him. Gently he was fingering an old
octavo; fingering it as one would who was between the hyperionic desire
of possession and a fear that a bank account owed its solvency to keeping
the amounts of deposits somewhere in proportion to the amount of
withdrawals.
"No, sir! No more, you tempter!" he declared. "No more, you unctuous
ambassador from the court of Gutenberg! Why, this one would take enough
alfalfa at the present price a ton to bury your store under a haycock as
high as the Roman Pantheon!"
The Doge rose and picked up his broad-brimmed hat, prepared to fly from
danger. He would not expose himself a moment longer to the wiles of
that clerk.
"I'll wait for my daughter down there in the safe and economical environs
of the popular novels fresh from the press!" he said.
Turning to descend the stairs he saw the waiting pair. He stopped stock
still and threw up his hand in a gesture of astonishment. His glance
hovered back and forth between Jack's face and Mary's, and then met
Jack's look with something of the same challenge and confidence of his
farewell on the road out of Little Rivers, and in an outburst of genial
raillery he began the conversation where he had left off with the final
call of his personal good wishes and his salutations to certain landmarks
of New York.
"Well, well, Sir Chaps! I saw Sorolla in his new style; very different
from the academics of the young Sorolla. He has found his mission and let
himself go. No wonder people flocked to his exhibitions on misty days!
The trouble with our artists is that they are afraid to let themselves
go, afraid to be popular. They think technique is the thing, when it is
only the tool. Why, confound it all! all the great masters were popular
in their day--Venetian, Florentine, Flemish! Confound it, yes! And not
one Velasquez"--evidently he was talking partly to get his bearings after
his shock at seeing Jack--"no, not one Velasquez in the Metropolitan! I
go home without seeing a Velasquez. They have the Catherine Lorillard
Wolfe collection, thousands of square yards of it, and yes, cheer up!
Thank heaven, they have some great Americans, Inness and Martin and Homer
and our exile Whistler, who annexed Japan, and our Sargent, born in
Florence. And I did see the Metropolitan tower. I take off my hat, my
broad-brimmed hat, wishing that it were as big as a carter's umbrella, to
that tower. I hate to think it an accident of chaos like the Grand
Canyon. I rather like to think of it as majestic promise."
The Doge had talked so fast that he was almost out of breath. He was
ready to yield the floor to Jack.
"I kissed my hand to Diana for you!" said Jack. "And what do you think?
The lady in answer shook out her scarf and something white and small
fluttered down. I picked it up. It was a note."
"Did you open that note?" asked the Doge in haughty suspicion.
"Naturally."
"Wasn't it marked personal for me?"--this in fine simulation of
indignation.
"Without address!"
"I am chagrined and surprised at Diana," said the Doge ruefully. "It's
the effect of city association. As a matter of course, she ought to have
given it to Mercury, or at least to one of the Centaurs, considering all
the horseshows that have been held under her skipping toes! Well, what
did she say? Being a woman of action she was brief. What did she say?"
"It was in the nature of a general personal complaint. Her costume is in
need of repair; it is flaking disgracefully. She said that if you had not
forsaken your love of the plastic for love of the graphic arts you would
long ago have stolen a little gold off the Eternal Painter's palette,
just to clothe her decently for the sake of her own self-respect--the
town having set her so high that its sense of propriety was quite safe."
"I stand convicted of neglect," said the Doge, coming down to the floor
of the store. "I will shoot her a bundle of gold leaf from the top of the
pass on a ray of evening sunshine."
There, he gave Jack a pat on the shoulder; a hasty, playful, almost
affectionate demonstration, and broke off with a shout of:
"Persiflage, sir, persiflage!"
"It is manna to me!" declared Jack, in the fulness and sweetness of the
sensation of the atmosphere of Little Rivers reproduced in New York.
"And not a Velasquez in the Metropolitan!" mused the Doge, bustling along
the aisle hurriedly. "Well, Mary, we have errands to do. There is no time
to spare."