Felix Fay saw with his mind’s eye the map on the wall of the railway
station—the map with a picture of iron roads from all over the middle
west centering in a dark blotch in the corner.
He was sitting at a desk in the office of the Port Royal Daily Record,
writing headings on sheaves of items sent in by country correspondents.
_John Hoffman has finished his new barn._
_Born to Mr. and Mrs. Elbert Hayes last Wednesday a fine ten pound boy._
_Miss Edythe Brush has returned to the State Normal for the fall term._
And so on.
Felix wrote at the top of the page, _Wheaton Whittlings_. A rotten
heading—but it would have to do. He yawned, and then stared unseeingly
at the next page.
He was not thinking about those news-items. He was thinking about
Chicago....
A year ago, he had determined to leave Port Royal forever—and go to
Chicago.
But here he was, still!
2
He had hoped, a year ago, to find, in the excitement of a new life in
Chicago, healing for the desperate hurts of love. If only he had gone
then!...
But he hadn’t had the money to buy a railway ticket.
He had taken this job on the Record, and settled down to life in Port
Royal again as a reporter.
His twenty-first year had gone by.
The hurts of love, so intolerably hard to bear, had healed.
After all, Joyce Tennant had loved him; nothing could ever take away his
memories of those starlit evenings on the river, and in the little cabin
on their lonely island. She had loved him, she had been his. There was
comfort in that thought.... The hurts of love had healed.
But the hurts of pride remained. Loving him, she had chosen to marry
another. That wound still ached....
She had seen him all along for what he was—a moonstruck dreamer! She had
thought him the fit companion of a reckless love-adventure—that was all.
Her scorn, or what seemed to him her scorn, mirrored and magnified by
the secret consciousness of his own weakness, came to assume in his mind
the proportions of a final and universal judgment.
A dreamer? And a dreamer only? His egotism could not endure the thought.
The shadow-world of ideas, of theories, of poetic fancies, amidst which
he had moved all his life, was not enough. He must live in the real
world.
Chicago became for him the symbol of that real world. It was no longer a
place of refuge—it was a test, a challenge. He would go there not as a
moonstruck dreamer, but as a realist, able to face the hard facts of
life.
He would become a different person.
He was tired of being Felix Fay the fool, the poet, the theorist. He
would rather be anybody else in the world than that Felix Fay whose
ridiculous blunderings he knew by heart.
He could imagine himself in Chicago, a changed person—a young man of
action, practical, alert, ruthlessly competitive....
Dreaming of success in Chicago, he sat idly at his desk in Port Royal.
3
It was late in the afternoon. No one was left in the office but himself
and Hastings, the city editor.
“Fay!”
He looked up. The city editor beckoned him over.
“Look at this.”
Hastings held in his hand the sheaf of items from Wheaton, over which
Felix had casually written a heading half an hour before. Felix held out
his hand and took them. Something was wrong. He looked anxiously at the
items, written in grey pencil on coarse paper in a straggling hand. The
page uppermost was numbered “3.” He had hardly glanced at it. Evidently
he had overlooked something.
It caught his eye instantly—the second item from the top:
_A man named Cyrus Jenks, known as Old Cy, committed suicide
last night by hanging himself in the barn. He was a well-known
village character, chiefly noted for his intemperate habits. The
inquest will be held today. His one good trait was his devotion
to his old mother, who died recently. He was her illegitimate
child. She was one of the Bensons, who until her disgrace were
one of the principal families in the county. Her father was
Judge Benson. The family moved to North Dakota years ago, and
left her here in the old family home, where she lived alone with
her son until she died. Before hanging himself Old Cy set fire
to the house, and it was partly burned. Since the old lady’s
death he had received several offers for the place, but refused
to sell, and said that no one should ever set foot in his
mother’s house. The incident is causing much local comment._
Felix drew a long breath. He certainly had overlooked something! He
could see that story, with its headlines, on the front page of the
Record—rewritten by himself. It was just the kind of story that he could
handle in a way to bring out all its values. And he had had it in his
hands—and had let it pass through them, buried in a collection of
worthless country items!
“The postmistress at Wheaton,” Hastings was saying gently, “is not
supposed to know a front-page story. You are supposed to know—that is
the theory on which you are hired.”
Felix did not reply. There was nothing to be said.
Hastings was looking at him thoughtfully. “I don’t know what’s got into
you, Felix,” he said. “I thought you were going to make a good newspaper
man. And sometimes I think so still. But mostly—you aren’t worth a
damn.”
“Yes, sir,” said Felix. “—I mean, no, I don’t think I am, either.”
He was going to be fired.... Well, he deserved it. He ought to have been
fired long ago. And he was rather glad that it was happening.
Hastings was rather taken aback. “Well,” he said, “frankly, I was going
to let you go. But—well, there’s no harm done this time; we’d already
gone to press when that stuff came in. Of course, I don’t say that
your—your letting it get by was excusable. In fact, I simply can’t
understand it. But—if you realize—”
So he was not going to be fired after all! Felix was unaccountably
sorry.
“If you think you can pull yourself together—” said Hastings. “I’d hate
to have you leave the Record. I’ve always—”
Felix felt desperate. He knew now why he wanted to be fired. It would
give him the necessary push into his Chicago adventure. He would never
have the courage to leave this job, and venture into the unknown, upon
his own initiative. He didn’t have any initiative.
“I don’t think it’s any use, Mr. Hastings,” he said, “keeping me on the
Record.”
Hastings stared at him incredulously.
“I mean,” Felix went on hastily, “I’ve got in a rut. I go through my
work mechanically. I don’t use my brains. I’m dull. And it’s getting
worse. I simply can’t take any interest in my work.”
“You mean you want to be fired?” Hastings asked severely.
It was absurd. In fact, it was preposterous. This was not the way to do
it at all. But it was too late now.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Well, then, you are.” Hastings looked coldly at the ungrateful and
rather sheepish-looking youth standing before him. “Have you got another
job?” he asked suspiciously.
“No—I’m going to Chicago to look for one.”
As soon as he said that, he wished he hadn’t. It committed him to going.
He couldn’t back out now. He had to go.
“And I haven’t any money except my pay-check for this week.”
He hadn’t thought of that before. How could he go without money?
“Will you lend me fifty dollars?”
It had slipped out without his intending it. Felix blushed. He was
certainly behaving like a fool. After proving himself to Hastings an
utter incompetent, to ask him for money.... He would go on a freight
train....
“Fifty—what are you talking about? Chicago!” Hastings was embarrassed,
too. “Why—why—yes, I can lend you some money, if you really want it....
Chicago—I don’t know but what you’re right, after all.... When are you
going?”
Felix was trying to think now before he spoke. He just managed to check
himself on the point of saying, “Tonight!”
All this was happening too swiftly. He needed time to consider
everything, to make his plans. A month would be none too much.
“Next m—Monday,” he said.
4
When Felix left the office he went home by a round-about way which took
him up through one of the quiet residential streets of the town. He
turned a corner, and walked slowly down past a row of cheerful little
houses set back within well-kept lawns. There was nothing magnificent or
showy about these houses—they did not betoken any vast prosperity or
leisure, but only a moderate comfort and security. They might perhaps
suggest a certain middle-class smugness; but even that was no reason why
Felix should have looked at them from under his slouching hat-brim with
such a grimace of hostility. As he neared a particular one of these
houses, he walked faster and bent his head, casting a furtive glance at
its windows. But there was no one to be seen at those windows, and so
Felix looked again and slowed his step a little. In front of the house
he paused momentarily and looked at it with an apparently casual glance.
He had gone past that house, in this manner, a dozen times in the past
year, savoring painfully each time the hard, unmistakable, disciplinary
fact that there, contentedly under that roof, the wife of its owner,
lived Joyce—his Joyce of only a year ago. He had come, now, to read that
lesson in realism for the last time.
He did not want to see the girl who had taught him that lesson. He only
wanted to look at this house in which she lived as another man’s wife.
But, as he walked on past, he did see her. She was standing on the
little side verandah. And in the vivid picture of her which Felix’s eyes
caught before he looked hastily away, he saw that she had a baby in her
arms.
She was looking down at the baby, shaking her head teasingly above it so
that stray locks of her yellow hair touched its face. It uttered a faint
cry, and she shook her curly head again, and looked up, smiling.
But she did not see Felix. She was looking down the street past him. She
was waiting for someone—for the owner of this house, her husband;
waiting for the man who was the father of her child.
This Felix saw and felt with a bewildered and hurt mind in the moment
before he turned his eyes away to stare at the sidewalk in front of him.
He walked on, and in another moment he must perforce enter the field of
her vision as he passed along the street in which her eyes were
searching for another man. He braced himself, threw his head back, and
commenced to whistle a careless tune.
If she saw him, if she noted the familiar slouch of his hat as he passed
out of her sight, she would never know that he had seen—or cared.
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