For myself I should have chosen the hut where I first met the Professor
above the home to which he led me in the early morning. If the old was
tumble-down, dark and ill-furnished, its air was the pure air of the
mountains and the way to it through things green and lovely. To the
new we went through squalid streets, westward, toward the river; we
turned into a dilapidated tenement; we climbed three flights of rickety
stairs into a room which compared to mine as mine to the house of Rufus
Blight. The lighted gas revealed hardly more than a narrow cell, with
dirty, torn paper on the walls, a narrow bed, a cheap table, and a
single chair. Giving me the chair, my host seated himself upon the
bed, so close to me, of necessity, that our knees touched. To my eyes
he was little older than that day fifteen years before when we had met.
He was old then to my youthful view. Thinner he could not have been,
and now only the scattered white hairs and the deepened lines of his
face marked his increased years. He had laid aside his overcoat, and
sat before me clad in his waiter's clothes, but the waiter's mien was
gone. With his legs crossed, his hands clasped over one knee, his head
drawn down between his shoulders, he seemed the languid, weary man of
the store-porch, whose eyes quickened only at the trumpet-call to
debate. Clearly his attitude toward me was one of antagonism. This I
saw in his quiet gaze and in the restless twitching of fingers,
impatient for the cut and thrust of argument.
On our way from O'Corrigan's to his squalid room, the Professor had
spoken little. For the most part, as he plodded along at my side, he
had contented himself in expressing opinions not complimentary to
Herbert Talcott, in voicing his regret that he had not thrashed him
instead of merely shaking him. That he had not thrashed Talcott was
hardly evidence of the mildness of his attack. It was rather because I
had interposed; and then O'Corrigan, in the character of the outraged
proprietor of a highly respectable restaurant, had intruded himself
into the quarrel, even going so far as to threaten to call the police.
But I was first in the _mêlée_, and on me fell the blame of saving
Talcott from merited chastisement. For this the Professor upbraided
me. He spoke as though Talcott had been the aggressor. Had not
Talcott struck him a blow under the eye? Yes, but it was feebly given.
But the sting of it was to the Professor's pride, and he would regret
to his dying day that I had withheld him from giving the young
scoundrel his just deserts.
Poor Talcott! I confessed to myself that it would have given me
pleasure to have had some part in his chastisement, and as we plodded
westward through the empty streets I pictured him driving home in a
hansom, trying to gather his scattered wits and to discover some reason
why a quiet, respectful waiter should have assailed him without cause.
Poor muddled Talcott! He did not know that his betrayer had been
distilled in far-off Scotland, and had lain away in vats a score of
years awaiting that very moment to make him speak his honest thought
just as the quiet, respectful waiter was bending behind him to pick up
crumbs. Perhaps he could not even remember what he was saying when he
was stopped by the long fingers which were thrust down the back of his
neck. Did he remember, what he was saying could be none of the
waiter's affair, anyway. It could matter nothing to that humble
creature if he did speak of Rufus Blight as a vulgar little brute and
of Penelope as "a bit raw, but worth marrying for her money alone." "A
woman's millions never grow _passé_," was an aphorism which fitted the
lips of the half-drunken cynic. To be sure, the things which he had
said were not such as a man would give expression to were he cold
sober, even if he thought them, and much less would he apply them to
particular persons, yet when you are sitting late at night with such a
good fellow as Bob Grant over your fifth Scotch and soda, you are
likely to be a little unguarded. For who would think of a waiter
objecting? Poor, muddled, drunken Talcott! He did not know that he
really had given the first blow, had changed the obsequious waiter into
a fury by striking him in the heart of his pride. And to such a fury
had the Professor been wrought, and so firmly did anger hold his mind,
that my own sudden interference was received by him as quite in the
ordinary, though he protested against my good offices. He remonstrated
indignantly when I acquiesced in O'Corrigan's assertion that my humble
friend must be demented, a plea which opened a way out of the
predicament. Fortunately, the Professor's own wisdom in refusing an
explanation of an apparently unprovoked assault gave color to this
theory, and as Talcott's one clear thought was to escape without any
unpleasant notoriety, O'Corrigan satisfied his ire by ordering his mad
employee out of the place.
So the Professor came into my charge. Had we met after a separation of
only a day, his treatment of me could not have been more casual. He
consented to my accompanying him home, but this seemed less from a
desire to see me again than to protest against my having publicly
humiliated him by treating him as demented. He had always thought that
David Malcolm would understand him under every circumstance; that
whatever his condition and whatever mine, when we met again it would be
with mutual esteem. Yet David Malcolm had judged him by his clothes,
had given him a waiter's heart and mind with a waiter's garb! He was
bent on proving to me that, however low he might have fallen in the
world's eye, he was as sane as he ever had been, and that in accepting
O'Corrigan's opinion so readily I had done him a wrong.
Now when we were sitting in his room, so close that our knees touched,
he seemed by his silence to tell me that he had spoken, and that my
part was to excuse and to explain what he deemed a reflection on
himself. I saw him in his shabby waiter's garb. This was the uniform
in which he marched, moved night after night with shuffling feet and
eyes alert lest he break the dishes--marched to the divine drumbeat,
marched under God's sealed orders. His own high-flowing phrases came
back to me, and I could have laughed, seeing him, but I remembered that
those phrases had been the sabre cuts which drove me into action, that
but for them I might be dozing like the very dogs, dozing with the
unhappy restlessness of enforced inaction. Perhaps I was moving to
barren conquests, but barren conquests are better than defeat. He had
moved to defeat, and I pitied him. He asked of me excuse and
explanation. I, having none to give, was silent. But I think he must
have seen in my eyes something of the same light which he found in them
that morning in the smoky cabin. Then he had reached down, taken me in
his arms and called me his only friend. Now with a sudden movement he
held out his hand to mine. Anger was gone. He had forgotten Talcott.
He had forgotten the stranger who seized his arm and thwarted his fury.
He saw only the boy who yesterday had stood at his side when every
man's hand was against him.
"Davy--Davy," he cried, "you have come again to help me."
"Yes--to take you home," said I, "to your brother and Penelope."
He made a gesture of dissent and his eyes narrowed. "No," he returned
with sharpness. "That cannot be. Don't you suppose that I should have
gone to them of my own accord had it been possible?"
"But it is possible," I said. "They want you. I have it from their
own lips."
"I know--I know," he replied. "Rufus would give me a home. Rufus
would give me money--all I need a hundred times over. But is that what
I really need? I want to do something myself, David--to be somebody
myself. I have it in me. All I ask is an opportunity." He brought
his fist down on his knee. "And by heaven, I will find it! I will
show them I'm not the worthless fellow I seem."
"But they don't think you worthless, Professor," said I, addressing him
as I might have, had we been in the cabin again. "They have been
searching for you everywhere----"
"But never expecting to find me as I am now," he interrupted, spreading
wide his arms and inviting me to behold him as he was, a shabby waiter.
"Rufus, who has made what the world calls a success, would be proud of
me; and Penelope, who has learned to think with the rest of the world,
would be proud of me--proud to present me to her friends--to splendid
fellows like Talcott and his muddle-headed companion." He leaned
forward and tapped me on the knee with his long forefinger, and his
face broke into a bitter smile as he spoke more quietly. "David, I
have seen Penelope. I came to New York just to be near her, and many a
night I have stood for hours across the street from her house only to
get a glimpse of her. And sometimes as I see her stepping in or out of
her carriage I say to myself that she cannot be my daughter; and if I
spoke to her how high she would toss her head! Why, she would lose
less caste by walking with Talcott drunk than with me as I am now."
"But she need not see you as you are now," I protested, half smiling at
the incongruous picture which he had drawn of Penelope walking down the
avenue by the side of this shabby waiter. "They need not even know----"
I paused to grasp at some inoffensive phrase in which to describe his
forlorn condition.
"That I have fallen so low," he exclaimed. He had been quick to see my
predicament, and laughed. "I know what you are thinking of, David.
You saw me an obsequious, tip-grasping fellow, with a spirit as heavy
as his feet. You think me broken and down and out." The hands spread
wide again. "I--down and out? Why, Davy, I've been like this a score
of times, and I am still game. You must not think that because of a
little temporary embarrassment I am in prime condition to go crawling
to Rufus and tell him that I have failed and need his help. I told
Rufus that I would come back and claim Penelope when she could be proud
to own me as her father." He brought his fist down on his knee again.
"She couldn't be very proud now, but I'll show them!"
It was hard to combat so overwhelming a pride as this, a pride which
seemed to thrive in the ashes of hope. I tried to break it by speaking
of his brother and daughter, giving him an account of my renewed
acquaintance with them and of their talk of him. The effect was to set
him smoking a very black pipe. Rising and leaning over the foot-rail
of the bed, much as in the old days he leaned lazily over the store
counter, he held his eyes fixed on mine, and smoked while I argued. He
was a patient listener. My own story was interwoven with his, and that
he might understand my relations with his brother and Penelope, I told
him briefly all that had occurred with me since that day when we parted
in the clearing. When I came to the college lecture, and my efforts to
see him then, and to find him, he made a motion as though to interrupt.
I paused. He commanded me to go on, and the smile which came to his
face at my mention of his discourse on "Life" held there until I had
finished. But my story, intended to give force to my arguments for him
to surrender his pride, only served to put him in a reminiscent mood.
"That was a lecture, wasn't it, David?" he said, laughing. "Why, do
you know that when I talked that night I almost imagined that I was a
success in life. It was the introduction that did it--distinguished
traveller--famous journalist. And you, I suppose, accepted it all as
truth. Still, you may be thankful you didn't have to hear Harassan--a
gigantic windbag, if there ever was one. I fell in with him one day in
a smoking-car and got to talking about my travels. He was preparing a
lecture on China, and as he had never been there, I was useful, so he
took me into his house until he had pumped me dry. I substituted for
him that night at your college for half the fee--was to read his
lecture, but when I got started on it I couldn't stand it. An
astonishing man, Harassan! When he died he left a modest fortune made
in spouting buncombe; and yet--" The Professor held out a hand in
appeal. "How many men are called great because they succeed in talking
buncombe and selling rubbish! That is what discourages me so; and
doesn't it make you a little bitter when you meet men surrounded by
every material evidence of success and go fishing in their brains and
can't hook up a single original idea of any kind? Why, I've met
hundreds of them, Davy. Now that night Harassan would have hurled at
you a lot of pompous commonplaces, and you would have hailed him as a
great and wise man. I broke from the beaten path. I told you plain
truth. Was I ever asked to lecture again? People won't pay to hear
plain truth, Davy. I suspect that I should have done better had I not
been trying all my life to drive plain truth into unwilling ears."
"I suspect so, too," said I mildly.
He laughed at my ready acquiescence. "I started wrong at home," he
went on. "Had I listened to Rufus and plodded along in his humdrum
way, I suppose I'd be rich now. But I couldn't. After I left the
valley I went to Kansas and really settled down, got a school to teach,
and for a time I was quite in the way of becoming a successful
educator--principal of a high-school, perhaps. I might even have
become president of a college, but to die the head of a fresh-water
college did not seem a very glorious end; nor did teaching a lot of
foolish young men to live what are held successful lives seem very
inspiring living. So I went on west to San Francisco and tried
newspaper work. It seemed just the vocation for me. Here I could use
my sword against the dragons of untruth and corruption. The beast
stalks forth brazenly enough, and without considering the moral side at
all, it is sport to attack him. To get myself into a position to
attack him, I had to serve an apprenticeship. You know what that
means--the daily digging for ephemeral facts. But I stuck to it. I
saw the day when I should be the most feared man on the coast, wielding
a pen as efficacious as a surgeon's knife. Unfortunately, my knife
first struck a politician named Mulligan, who owned some stock in the
paper. You know the result. I could direct my caustic pen against
O'Connor or Einstein, but from Mulligan came my living. I took to the
sea to breathe purer air, sailing as supercargo on a trading vessel.
For two years I knocked about the South Sea Islands and along the coast
of Asia, and it seemed that I was gathering a vast amount of
information which would be of service to the race if preserved in a
book. How I worked over that book! When I got back to San Francisco I
saw my fame and fortune about to be made by it. At last the power to
do something worth while was in my reach."
The Professor paused. He spread wide his arms in a gesture to express
futility. "I had as well stood on the highest peak of the Rockies and
read my manuscript to space. The distinguished traveller and author!"
With a hand upon his heart, he bowed gravely. "The author of one
thousand volumes of uncut leaves. Useless! Well, I suppose Harassan
found the one I gave him of some service, for he got most of his famous
Chinese lecture out of it. There was some pretty good stuff in that
book, too, but Harassan was the only man I ever heard of who agreed
with me; and he--well, he was a successful idiot."
"And of course you never shared the benefits he reaped," said I.
"Benefits from Harassan?" The Professor laughed. "Why, David, you
might have thought that I had ruined Harassan from the way he talked
when he received a letter from Todd, that president of yours. Todd
said that I would subvert the morals of the country. So the Reverend
Valerian and I parted with words--he to go to China in his mind, I to
work my way there in the body." The Professor rested himself on the
bed, and between puffs at his pipe continued: "I had an idea of going
to Tibet. That seemed to be really doing something--to go to Lhasa and
unveil its mysteries to the world. I started from Peking, afoot
mostly, and so you see I didn't make very rapid progress, and while
walking I had plenty of time to think. When I was about half-way to
the border, the absurdity of the thing came to me--spending years to
get into Tibet, only to find there a filthy land ruled by a mad
religion. I got almost to Shen-si, and turned back. Somehow China
suited me. I fell into the Chinese way of thinking, and might have
gone on satisfied with a daily dole of rice and fish had it not been
for Penelope. I never could forget Penelope. Always, it seemed to me,
she must be waiting for me to come back with my promises fulfilled, to
return a man she could be proud to own her father. It looked pretty
black for me then, David. China isn't a place to accomplish much, and
I might as well have gone on to Lhasa as to do what I did--work three
years in the consulate at Che-Foo as interpreter and useful man, eyes,
arms, and brains for a politician from Missouri. But my one purpose
was to get home, to see Penelope, to see her a woman grown, and
perhaps--I would say to myself sometimes--to speak to her."
"And you have found her a woman grown," said I. "Now you have only to
speak to her."
He shook his head. "I've been here three months now, David, and I have
seen her perhaps a score of times; and when I see her, sometimes
entering that great house, sometimes driving in her carriage, always
the very picture of the ideal princess, she seems a creature of another
world than mine, and I laugh at myself for trying to believe that there
ever was a time when she sat on my knees and talked of days to come
when we should have a house like that and drive in such a carriage!
Would she understand me now? Would temporary necessity condone my
descending to this uniform? I tried to do better when I came here, but
I couldn't. I tried even your profession, but they wanted young men.
I came to this only to be near her. But I am away again, David. I
must be up and doing." He had risen, and was speaking rapidly as he
paced the narrow limits of the room. "Money is what I need and I will
have it. Money has always seemed to me a paltry thing to work for, but
now it is for Penelope's sake. There has been a plan in my mind for
some time, David, only I have delayed starting on it--for Penelope's
sake, you understand. I'm going to Argentina. There was a man on my
ship coming out from Yokohama who was bound for Argentina, and he told
me----"
The Professor launched into a glowing account of the promise of the
southern country. To his mind, he had only to reach it to acquire the
wealth which he wanted. The man who had failed in every undertaking,
who had turned back from every goal to which he had set his eyes, would
win there in a few years that for which men in other parts of the world
strove a lifetime. I pointed out that the opportunity lay right at his
hand, and his answer was to spread wide his arms that I might see the
waiter's jacket. He had the better of the argument, but the reason lay
in his own character. Then I had recourse to pleading, and my plea was
made not for his sake, but for Penelope's, for only when I spoke of her
would he listen. I tried to show him Penelope's danger, as it had been
revealed to us that very night in Talcott's drunken talk. His reply
was a laugh. He had so idealized Penelope that it was inconceivable
that she should fall a victim to the attentions of such a vapid
creature. He had not seen, as I had, Talcott sober and correct in
deportment. He had not fallen, as I had, under the spell of Talcott's
easy manner when he had just dropped in from the club to talk of last
night's dance and to-morrow's opera. He did not know, as I did, that
the whole company from whom Penelope might choose a mate were to the
outward eye just such commonplace men whose power of fascination lay in
commonplace deeds and words. The Professor, whose whole life had been
spent pursuing shadows, was naturally of a romantic turn of mind, and
it was even difficult for him to conceive of Penelope marrying at all.
That she could be inveigled into so grave a step with a man whose sole
claim to merit was well-cut clothes and a command of social _patois_
was quite beyond his comprehension. In vain I argued that most women
married just such men, and perhaps it was because the sex had attained
wisdom with experience, had discovered that a brilliant mind on parade
might be amusing, but that, like its duller fellows, it retired to
barracks and found contentment in the same humdrum existence as they.
The birth of eternal, enduring love was but a matter of propinquity.
Sitting on the front doorstep of an afternoon talking and strolling
down to the drugstore every evening for soda-water, Darby and Joan
discovered that existence apart was worse than death. And so might
Joan's richer sister in the old carved chair, under the eyes of
Reynolds's majestic lady, grow accustomed to the coming and going of
Darby's richer brother, confirm herself in the habit of taking narcotic
conversation, talk of last night's dinner and to-morrow's dance, until
he seemed to become essential to her existence. All this I explained
to the Professor. He retorted that I had grown cynical. Perhaps I had
grown cynical, but my cynicism was born of experience--bitter
experience, I called it then. Perhaps, imbittered by my own thwarted
hopes, I exaggerated the danger in which Penelope stood. Perhaps, in
my own vanity and jealousy, I magnified Talcott's sins, knowing well
enough that, after all, he was no worse than most of his brothers. Yet
there was a danger, and its avoidance was simple could I only induce
the man before me to abandon his foolish pride. At least, said I, his
brother should know of the night's occurrence.
"Know that, after all my boasts, I had come to waiting in a restaurant
and quarrelling with drunken boys?" he cried, shaking his head and
waving an arm to deny my demand. "Of course, if there were any
possibility of Penelope marrying that fool it would be different. But,
David, I know Rufus. He is not brilliant, but he is shrewd, and I'll
trust him to find out if anybody is after his money. And Penelope?
Haven't I seen Penelope many a night stepping into her carriage--don't
you think I can trust her to look higher than that?"
I could not change him, though we argued until dawn came. Then we
walked together, in the gray of the early morning, from the poor
quarter where he lived to Miss Minion's, a house that had grown in my
eyes, by contrast, palatial. The street was still deserted, and
standing by my door I made a last appeal. But he shook his head.
"Davy, can't you understand?" he said, as he took my hand in parting.
"I admit that I have been a failure up to date, but Rufus and Penelope
are the last people in the world that I want to know it, and I'll trust
you to be discreet. Some day it may be best to tell them, but at
present, no. Silence, David; I have your promise. I'm to have one
more chance in Argentina, and if I fail you have your way; but I won't
fail."
He turned from me and stood very straight. His overcoat collar was
buttoned to the neck, hiding the uniform of his adversity. For a
moment, as I watched him, he seemed to be in the gulch again; we looked
over the towering walls of brick and stone, and to me they were the
ridge-side, dark and sombre in the gray light; we looked beyond the
crest of it, beyond the chimneys, the tall pines which pierced the
sky-line, and our eyes rested on a flake of cloud. I think it must
have been there. I felt the pressure of his hand.
"I'll not be gone long, Davy," he said. "I'm coming back very soon,
and till then you will take care of Penelope; won't you, boy?"