_By_ SINCLAIR LEWIS
From _The Saturday Evening Post_
_Copyright, 1918, by The Curtis Publishing Company._
_Copyright, 1919, by Sinclair Lewis._
I
From the drawer of his table desk Jasper Holt took a pane of window
glass. He laid a sheet of paper on the glass and wrote, “Now is the time
for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” He studied his round
business-college script, and rewrote the sentence in a small finicky
hand, that of a studious old man. Ten times he copied the words in that
false pinched writing. He tore up the paper, burned the fragments in his
large ash tray and washed the delicate ashes down his stationary
washbowl. He replaced the pane of glass in the drawer, tapping it with
satisfaction. A glass underlay does not retain an impression.
Jasper Holt was as nearly respectable as his room, which, with its
frilled chairs and pansy-painted pincushion, was the best in the
aristocratic boarding house of Mrs. Lyons. He was a wiry, slightly bald,
black-haired man of thirty-eight, wearing an easy gray flannel suit and
a white carnation. His hands were peculiarly compact and nimble. He gave
the appearance of being a youngish lawyer or bond salesman. Actually he
was senior paying teller in the Lumber National Bank in the city of
Vernon.
He looked at a thin expensive gold watch. It was six-thirty, on
Wednesday—toward dusk of a tranquil spring day. He picked up his hooked
walking stick and his gray silk gloves and trudged downstairs. He met
his landlady in the lower hall and inclined his head. She effusively
commented on the weather.
“I shall not be here for dinner,” he said amiably.
“Very well, Mr. Holt. My, but aren’t you always going out with your
swell friends, though! I read in the _Herald_ that you were going to be
star in another of those society plays at the Community Theater. I guess
you’d be an actor if you wasn’t a banker, Mr. Holt.”
“No, I’m afraid I haven’t much temperament.” His voice was cordial, but
his smile was a mere mechanical sidewise twist of the lip muscles.
“You’re the one that’s got the stage presence. Bet you’d be a regular
Ethel Barrymore if you didn’t have to look out for us.”
“My, but you’re such a flatterer!”
He bowed his way out and walked sedately down the street to a public
garage. Nodding to the night attendant, but saying nothing, he started
his roadster and drove out of the garage, away from the center of
Vernon, toward the suburb of Rosebank. He did not go directly to
Rosebank. He went seven blocks out of his way, and halted on Fandall
Avenue—one of those petty main thoroughfares which, with their
motion-picture palaces, their groceries, laundries, undertakers’
establishments and lunch rooms, serve as local centers for districts of
mean residences. He got out of the car and pretended to look at the
tires, kicking them to see how much air they had. While he did so he
covertly looked up and down the street. He saw no one whom he knew. He
went into the Parthenon Confectionery Store.
The Parthenon Store makes a specialty of those ingenious candy boxes
that resemble bound books. The back of the box is of imitation leather,
with a stamping simulating the title of a novel. The edges are
apparently the edges of a number of pages of paper. But these pages are
hollowed out, and the inside is to be filled with candy.
Jasper gazed at the collection of book boxes and chose the two whose
titles had the nearest approach to dignity—Sweets to the Sweet and The
Ladies’ Delight. He asked the Greek clerk to fill these with the less
expensive grade of mixed chocolates, and to wrap them.
From the candy shop he went to a drug store that carried an assortment
of reprinted novels, and from these picked out two of the same
sentimental type as the titles on the booklike boxes. These also he had
wrapped. He strolled out of the drug store, slipped into a lunch room,
got a lettuce sandwich, doughnuts and a cup of coffee at the greasy
marble counter, took them to a chair with a tablet arm in the dim rear
of the lunch room and hastily devoured them. As he came out and returned
to his car he again glanced along the street.
He fancied that he knew a man who was approaching. He could not be sure.
From the breast up the man seemed familiar, as did the customers of the
bank whom he viewed through the wicket of the teller’s window. When he
saw them in the street he could never be sure about them. It seemed
extraordinary to find that these persons, who to him were nothing but
faces with attached arms that held out checks and received money, could
walk about, had legs and a gait and a manner of their own.
He walked to the curb and stared up at the cornice of one of the stores,
puckering his lips, giving an impersonation of a man inspecting a
building. With the corner of an eye he followed the approaching man. The
man ducked his head as he neared, and greeted him, “Hello, Brother
Teller.” Jasper seemed startled; gave the “Oh! Oh, how are you!” of
sudden recognition; and mumbled, “Looking after a little bank property.”
“Always on the job, eh!”
The man passed on.
Jasper got into his car and drove back to the street that would take him
out to the suburb of Rosebank. As he left Fandall Avenue he peered at
his watch. It was five minutes of seven.
At a quarter past seven he passed through the main street of Rosebank,
and turned into a lane that was but little changed since the time when
it had been a country road. A few jerry-built villas of freckled paint
did shoulder upon it, but for the most part it ran through swamps
spotted with willow groves, the spongy ground covered with scatterings
of dry leaves and bark. Opening on this lane was a dim-rutted grassy
private road, which disappeared into one of the willow groves.
Jasper sharply swung his car between the crumbly gate posts and along
the bumpy private road. He made an abrupt turn, came into sight of an
unpainted shed and shot the car into it without cutting down his speed,
so that he almost hit the back of the shed with his front fenders. He
shut off the engine, climbed out quickly and ran back toward the gate.
From the shield of a bank of alder bushes he peered out. Two chattering
women were going down the public road. They stared in through the gate
and half halted.
“That’s where that hermit lives,” said one of them.
“Oh, you mean the one that’s writing a religious book, and never comes
out till evening? Some kind of a preacher?”
“Yes, that’s the one. John Holt, I think his name is. I guess he’s kind
of crazy. He lives in the old Beaudette house. But you can’t see it from
here—it’s clear through the block, on the next street.”
“I heard he was crazy. But I just saw an automobile go in here.”
“Oh, that’s his cousin or brother or something—lives in the city. They
say he’s rich, and such a nice fellow.”
The two women ambled on, their chatter blurring with distance. Standing
behind the alders Jasper rubbed the palm of one hand with the fingers of
the other. The palm was dry with nervousness. But he grinned.
He returned to the shed and entered a brick-paved walk almost a block
long, walled and sheltered by overhanging willows. Once it had been a
pleasant path; carved wooden benches were placed along it, and it
widened to a court with a rock garden, a fountain and a stone bench. The
rock garden had degenerated into a riot of creepers sprawling over the
sharp stones; the paint had peeled from the fountain, leaving its iron
cupids and naiads eaten with rust. The bricks of the wall were smeared
with lichens and moss and were untidy with windrows of dry leaves and
cakes of earth. Many of the bricks were broken; the walk was hilly in
its unevenness. From willows and bricks and scuffled earth rose a damp
chill.
But Jasper did not seem to note the dampness. He hastened along the walk
to the house—a structure of heavy stone which, for this newish
Midwestern land, was very ancient. It had been built by a French fur
trader in 1839. The Chippewas had scalped a man in its very dooryard.
The heavy back door was guarded by an unexpectedly expensive modern
lock. Jasper opened it with a flat key and closed it behind him. It
locked on a spring. He was in a crude kitchen, the shades of which were
drawn. He passed through the kitchen and dining room into the living
room. Dodging chairs and tables in the darkness as though he was used to
them he went to each of the three windows of the living room and made
sure that all the shades were down before he lighted the student’s lamp
on the game-legged table. As the glow crept over the drab walls Jasper
bobbed his head with satisfaction. Nothing had been touched since his
last visit.
The room was musty with the smell of old green rep upholstery and
leather books. It had not been dusted for months. Dust sheeted the stiff
red velvet chairs, the uncomfortable settee, the chill white marble
fireplace, the immense glass-fronted bookcase that filled one side of
the room.
The atmosphere was unnatural to this capable business man, this Jasper
Holt. But Jasper did not seem oppressed. He briskly removed the wrappers
from the genuine books and from the candy-box imitations of books. One
of the two wrappers he laid on the table and smoothed out. Upon this he
poured the candy from the two boxes. The other wrapper and the strings
he stuffed into the fireplace and immediately burned. Crossing to the
bookcase he unlocked one section and placed both the real books and the
imitation books on the bottom shelf. There was a row of rather
cheap-looking novels on this shelf, and of these at least six were
actually such candy boxes as he had purchased that evening.
Only one shelf of the bookcase was given over to anything so frivolous
as novels. The others were filled with black-covered, speckle-leaved,
dismal books of history, theology, biography—the shabby-genteel sort of
books you find on the fifteen-cent shelf at a secondhand bookshop. Over
these Jasper pored for a moment as though he was memorizing their
titles.
He took down “The Life of the Rev. Jeremiah Bodfish” and read aloud: “In
those intimate discourses with his family that followed evening prayers
I once heard Brother Bodfish observe that Philo Judæus—whose scholarly
career always calls to my mind the adumbrations of Melanchthon upon the
essence of rationalism—was a mere sophist—”
Jasper slammed the book shut, remarking contentedly, “That’ll do. Philo
Judæus—good name to spring.”
He relocked the bookcase and went upstairs. In a small bedroom at the
right of the upper hall an electric light was burning. Presumably the
house had been deserted till Jasper’s entrance, but a prowler in the
yard might have judged from this ever-burning light that some one was in
residence. The bedroom was Spartan—an iron bed, one straight chair, a
washstand, a heavy oak bureau. Jasper scrambled to unlock the lowest
drawer of the bureau, yank it open, take out a wrinkled shiny suit of
black, a pair of black shoes, a small black bow tie, a Gladstone collar,
a white shirt with starched bosom, a speckly brown felt hat and a wig—an
expensive and excellent wig with artfully unkempt hair of a faded brown.
He stripped off his attractive flannel suit, wing collar, blue tie,
custom-made silk shirt and cordovan shoes, and speedily put on the wig
and those gloomy garments. As he donned them the corners of his mouth
began to droop. Leaving the light on and his own clothes flung on the
bed he descended the stairs. He was obviously not the same man who had
ascended them. As to features he was like Jasper, but by nature he was
evidently less healthy, less practical, less agreeable, and decidedly
more aware of the sorrow and long thoughts of the dreamer. Indeed it
must be understood that now he was not Jasper Holt, but Jasper’s twin
brother, John Holt, hermit and religious fanatic.