THE TURN OF THE PAGE
John Valiant stirred and laughed, a little self-consciously, for there
had been drops on his face.
Presently he took a check-book from his pocket and began to figure on
the stub, looking up with a wry smile. "To come down to brass tacks,"
he muttered, "when I've settled everything (thank heaven, I don't owe
my tailor!) there will be a little matter of twenty-eight hundred odd
dollars, a passe motor and my clothes between me and the bread-line!"
Everything else he had disposed of--everything but the four-footed
comrade there at his feet. At his look, the white bulldog sprang up
whining and made joyful pretense of devouring his master's immaculate
boot-laces. Valiant put his hand under the eager muzzle, lifted the
intelligent head to his knee and looked into the beseeching amber eyes.
"But I'd not sell you, old chap," he said softly; "not a single lick
of your friendly pink tongue; not for a beastly hundred thousand!"
He withdrew his caressing hand and looked again at the check-stub.
Twenty-eight hundred! He laughed bleakly. Why, he had spent more than
that a month ago on a ball at Sherry's! This morning he had been rich;
to-night he was poor! He had imagined this in the abstract, but now of
a sudden the fact seemed fraught with such a ghastly and nightmarish
ridiculousness as a man might feel who, going to bed with a full thatch
of hair, confronts the morning mirror to find himself as bald as a
porcelain mandarin.
What could he do? He could not remember a time when he had not had all
that he wanted. He had never borrowed from a friend or been dunned by an
importunate tradesman. And he had never tried to earn a dollar in his
life; as to current methods of making a living, he was as ignorant as a
Pueblo Indian.
What did others do? The men he knew who joked of their poverty and their
debts, and whose hilarious habit it was to picture life as a desperate
handicap in which they were forever "three jumps ahead of the sheriff",
somehow managed to cling to their yachts and their stables. Few of his
friends had really gone "smash", and of these all but one had taken
themselves speedily and decently off. He thought of Rod Creighton, the
one failure who had clung to the old life, achieving for a transient
period the brilliant success of living on his friends. When this ended
he had gone on the road for some champagne or other. Everybody had
ordered from him at the start. But this, too, had failed. He had dropped
out of the clubs and there had at last befallen an evil time when he had
come to haunt the avenue, as keen for stray quarters as any pan-handler.
Where was Creighton now, he wondered?
Across the avenue was Larry Treadwell's brokerage office. Larry had a
brain for business; as a youthful scamp in knickerbockers he had been as
sharp as a steel-trap. But what did he, John Valiant, know of business?
Less than of law! Why, he was not fit to smirk behind a counter and
measure lace insertion for the petticoats of the women he waltzed with!
All he was really fit for was to work with his hands!
He thought of a gang of laborers he had seen that afternoon breaking the
asphalt with crowbars. What must it be to toil through the clammy cold
of winter and the smothering fur-heat of summer, in some revolting
routine of filth and unredeemable ugliness? He looked down at his supple
white fingers and shivered.
He rose grimly and dragged his chair facing the window. The night was
balmy and he looked down across the darker sea of reefs, barred like a
gigantic checker-board by the shining lines of streets, to where the
flashing electric signs of the theater district laid their wide swath
of colored radiance. The manifold calls of the street and the buzz of
trolleys made a dull tonal background, subdued and far-away.
To be outside! All that light and color and comfort and pleasure would
hum and sparkle on just the same, though he was no longer within the
circle of its effulgence--slaving perhaps, he thought with a twisted
smile, at some tawdry occupation that called for no experience, to
pay for a meal in some second-rate restaurant and a pallet in some
shabby-genteel, hall bedroom, till his clothes were replaced by
ill-fitting "hand-me-downs"--till by wretched gradations he arrived
finally at the status of the dime seat in the gallery and five-cent
cigars!
There was one way back. It lay through the hackneyed gateway of
marriage. Youth, comeliness and fine linen, in the world he knew, were
a fair exchange for wealth any day. "Cutlet for cutlet"--the satiric
phrase ran through his mind. Why not? Others did so. And as for himself,
it perhaps need be no question of plain and spinstered millions--there
was Katharine Fargo!
He had known her since a time when she bestrode a small fuzzy pony in
the park, cool as a grapefruit and with a critical eye, even in her ten
years, for social forms and observances. In the intervals of fashionable
boarding-schools he had seen her develop, beautiful, cold, stately and
correct. The Fargo fortune--thanks to modern journalism, which was fond
of stating that if the steel rails of the Fargo railways were set end
to end, the chain would reach from the earth to the planet Saturn or
thereabouts--was as familiar to the public imagination as Caruso or
the Hope diamond. And the daughter Katharine had not lacked admirers;
shop-girls knew the scalps that dangled from her girdle. But in his
heart John Valiant was aware, by those subtle signs which men and women
alike distinguish, that while Katharine Fargo loved first and foremost
only her own wonderful person, he had been an easy second in her regard.
He remembered the last Christmas house-party at the Fargos' place on
the St. Lawrence. Its habitues irreverently dubbed this "The Shack",
but it was the nursling of folk who took their camping luxuriously, in
a palatial structure which, though built, as to its exterior, of logs,
was equipped within with Turkish bath, billiard-room and the most
indefatigable chef west of St. Petersburg. The evening before his host's
swift motor had hooted him off to the station, as its wide hall exhaled
the bouquet of after-dinner cigars, he had looked at her standing in the
wide doorway, a rare exquisite creature--her face fore-shortened and
touched to a borrowed tenderness by the flickering glow of the burning
logs in the room behind--the perfect flower, he had thought, of the
civilization in which he lived.
John Valiant looked down at the bulldog squatted on the floor, his eyes
shining in the dimness. A little hot ripple had run over him. "Not on
your life, Chum!" he said. "No shameless barter! There must be other
things besides money and social position in this doddering old world,
after all!"
The dog whined with delight at the voice and jumped up to lick the
strong tense hand held down to him. "Do you know, old chap," his master
continued, "I've been handing myself a collection of cold marble truths
in the last few weeks? I've been the prize dolt of the whole show, and
you ought to have thrown me over long ago. You've probably realized it
all along, but it has never dawned on me until lately. I've worn the
blue ribbon so long I'd come to think it was a decoration. All my life
I've been just another of those well-meaning, brainless young idiots who
have never done a blessed thing that's the slightest value to anybody
else. Well, Chum, we're through. We're going to begin doing something
for ourselves, if it's only raising cabbages! And we're going to stand
it without any baby-aching--the nurse never held our noses when we took
our castor-oil!"
It was folded down, that old bright page. _Finis_ had been written to
the rose-colored chapter. And even as he told himself, he was conscious
of a new rugged something that had been slowly dawning within him, a
sense of courage, even of zest, and a furious hatred of the self-pity
that had wrenched him even for a moment.
He turned from the window, picked up his letters, and followed by the
dog, went slowly up another flight to his room.