WARRICK RARIDAN
The Clarkson Club was, during most of the day, the loneliest place in
town. Only a few of the sleeping rooms were occupied regularly, and
luncheon was the one incident of the day that drew any considerable
number of men to the dining-room. The antlered heads of moose and elk
were hung in the hall, and colored prints of English hunting scenes and
bad oil portraits traits of several pioneers were scattered through the
reading and lounging rooms. There was a room which was referred to
flatteringly as the library, but its equipment of literature consisted
of an encyclopedia and of novels which had been contributed by members
at times coincident with housecleaning seasons at home. Clarkson
business men who maintained non-resident memberships in Chicago or St.
Louis clubs, said, in excusing the poor patronage of the Clarkson Club,
that Clarkson was not a club town, like Kansas City or Denver, where
there were more unattached men with money to spend.
Saxton was not over-sensitive, but the stiffness and hardness of the
club house were not without their disagreeable impression on him as he
sat at dinner toward the close of his first day in Clarkson. Two of the
men to whom Porter had introduced him at noon proved to be fellow
lodgers, and they exchanged greetings with him from the table where they
sat together. They unsociably read their evening papers as they ate, and
left before he finished. He had lighted a cigar over his coffee, and was
watching the fading colors of a brilliant sunset when a young man
appeared at the door, and after a brief inspection of Saxton's back
walked over to him.
"Aren't you Mr. Saxton? I thought you must be he. My name is Raridan.
Don't let me break in on your meditations," he added, taking the chair
which the waiter drew out for him. "I met Mr. Porter a while ago, and he
adjured me on penalties that I won't name to be good to you. I don't
know whether this is obeying orders,"--he broke off in a laugh,--"that
depends on the point of view." He had produced a cigarette case from his
pocket and rolled a white cylinder between his palms before lighting it.
As the flame leaped from the match, Saxton noted the young man's thin
face, his thick, curling dark hair, his slight mustache, the slenderness
of his fingers. The eyes that lay back of rimless glasses were almost
too fine for a man; but their gentleness and kindliness were charming.
"You are guilty of a very Christian act," Saxton said. "I was just
wondering whether, after the sun had gone down behind that ridge over
there, the world would still be going round."
"The world never stops entirely here," returned Raridan, "but the motion
sometimes gets very slow. Mr. Porter tells me that you're to be one of
us. Let me congratulate us,--and you!"
"I'm not so sure about you," rejoined Saxton. "At my last stopping
place in the West they had a way of getting rid of undesirable members
of the community, and I've never got over being nervous. But that was
Wyoming. I'm sure you're more civilized here."
"Not merely civilized; we are civilization! You see I'm a native, and
devoted to the home sod. My father was one of the first settlers. I
never knew why," he laughed again--it was a pleasant laugh--"but I've
tried to live up to my duties as one of the first Caucasians born in the
county. Some day I'll be exhibited at the State Fair and little children
will look at me with awe and admiration."
"That makes me feel very humble. I'm almost afraid to tell you that I'm
a native of Boston, with a long line of highly undistinguished and
terribly conventional ancestors back of me. My father was never west of
Albany; my mother was never in a sleeping-car. But I'm not a tenderfoot.
I rode the initiating bronco in Wyoming through all the degrees; and a
cowboy once shot at me on his unlucky day."
"Oh, your title's clear. That record gives you all the rights of a
native."
Raridan waved away the waiter who had been hovering near, and who now
went over to the electric switch and threatened them with light.
"That's too good to lose," Raridan said, nodding toward the west in
explanation.
Warrick Raridan was, socially speaking, the most available man in the
Clarkson Blue Book. He was a graduate in law who did not practise, for
he had, unfortunately, been left alone in the world at twenty-six, with
an income that seemed wholly adequate for his immediate or future
needs. He maintained an office, which was fairly well equipped with the
literature of his profession, but this was merely to take away the
reproach of his busier fellow citizens; it was not thought respectable
to be an idler in Clarkson, even on reputable antecedents and
established credit. But Raridan's office was useful otherwise than in
providing its owner with a place for receiving his mail. It was the
rendezvous for a variety of committees to which he was appointed by such
unrelated bodies as the Clarkson Dramatic Club and the Diocesan Board of
Missions of the Episcopal Church. He had never, by any chance, been
pointed to as a model young man, but religious matters interested him
sporadically, and he was referred to facetiously by his friends, when
his punctilious religious observances were mentioned, as a fine type of
the "cheerful Christian." He appeared every Sunday at the cathedral,
which was the fashionable church in Clarkson, where he passed the plate
for the alms and oblations of the well-dressed congregation; and he said
of himself, with conscious humor, that he thought he did it rather well.
He was capable of quixotism of the most whimsical sort. He had, for a
year, taken his meals at a cheap boarding-house in order that he might
maintain two Indian boys in school. He was not at all aggrieved when, at
the end of the first year, they ran away and resumed tribal relations
with their brethren. He chaffed himself about it to his friends.
"It was wrong for me," he would say, "to try to pervert the tastes of
those young savages. I nearly ruined my own digestion to buy them white
man's luxuries; I wore out my old clothes that they might not go naked;
and all they learned was to smoke cigarettes."
It was not enough to say that Warry Raridan could lead a german or tie
an Ascot tie better than any other man on the Missouri River; for he was
also the best informed man in that same strenuous valley concerning the
traditions of the English stage, and was a fairly good actor himself, as
amateurs go. He had an almost fatal cleverness, which made him impatient
of the restraints of college; and he left in his sophomore year owing to
difficulties with the mathematical requirements. Good books had abounded
in his father's house, and he was from boyhood a persistent, though
erratic reader. He threw himself with enthusiasm into the study of the
rise of monastic orders; and from this he changed lightly to the newest
books on psychology. There were many ways in which he could be
entertaining. He had a slight literary gift, which he cultivated for his
own amusement. His humor was fine and keen, and he occasionally wrote
screeds for the local papers, or mailed, apropos of something or
nothing, pleasant jingles to his intimate friends.
No Clarkson hostess felt that a visiting girl had received courteous
attention unless she carried home a portfolio of verses written in her
honor by Warry Raridan. He gave, indeed, an impression of great
frivolity, but there were people who took him seriously, and lawyers who
knew him well said that he might win success in his profession if he
would apply himself. He had once appeared for the people in a suit to
compel the street-railway company to pave certain streets, as provided
by the terms of its franchise, and had gained his point against the best
lawyers in the state. This accomplished, he refused an appointment as
local counsel for a great railway, and with characteristic perverseness
spent the following summer managing an open-air mission for poor
children.
Saxton was greatly amused and entertained by Raridan. Even those of his
fellow townsmen who did not wholly approve Warry Raridan, admitted his
entertaining qualities; and Saxton, who was painfully conscious of his
own shortcomings and knew that he had not usually been considered worth
cultivating, found himself responding with unwonted lightness to
Raridan's inconsequential talk. Few people had ever thought it necessary
to take pains with John Saxton, and he greatly enjoyed the novelty of
this intercourse with a man of his own age who was not a bore. The
bores, as Saxton remembered from his college days, had taken advantage
of his good nature and marked him for their own; and with a keen
realization of this he had often wondered in bitterness whether they did
not classify him correctly.
"I'll wager that if you stay here a year you'll never leave," said
Raridan, as they went downstairs together. "I've been about a good deal,
and know that we who live here miss a lot of comfort and amusement which
go as a matter of course in older towns. But there's a roominess and
expansiveness about things out here that I like, and I believe most men
who strike it early enough like it, and are lonesome for it if they go
away. These people here think I stay because my few business interests
are here. The truth is that I've tried running away, but after I've
spent a week east of the Alleghanies, I'm sated with the fleshpots and
pine for the wilderness. Why, I go to the stockyards now and then just
to see the train-loads of steers come in. I get sensations out of the
rush and drive of all this that I wouldn't take a good deal for."
"I think I understand how you feel about it," said Saxton, looking more
closely at this young man, who was not ashamed to mention his sensations
of sentiment to a stranger. "There were times in Wyoming when Western
life seemed pretty arid, but when I went back to Boston I was homesick
for Cheyenne."
"That's a far cry, from Boston to Cheyenne," said Raridan, laughing. He
began again volubly: "A good deal depends, I suppose, on which end you
cry from. There's a lot of talk these days about the _nouveaux riches_
by people who haven't any more French than that. We are advised by a
fairly competent poet that men may climb on stepping-stones of their
dead selves to higher things; but if they climb on the pickled remains
of the common or garden pig I don't see anything ignoble about it. I'd a
lot rather ascend on a pyramid of Minnehaha Hams than on my dead self,
which I hope to avoid using for step-ladder purposes as long as
possible. The people here are human beings, and they're all good enough
to suit me. I'd as lief be descended from a canvased ham as an Astor
peltry or a Vanderbilt steamboat. And I'm tired of the jokes in the
barber-shop comic weeklies, about the rich Westerners who make a vulgar
display of themselves in New York. If we do it, it's merely because
we're doing in Rome as the Romans do. These same shampoo and hair-cut
humorists are unable to get away from their jests about the homicidal
tendencies of Western barkeepers and the woolliness of the cowboys.
Those anemic commuters down there know no higher joy than a Weber &
Fields matinee or a Rogers Brothers on the Bronx first-night. Sometimes
I feel moved to grow a line of whiskers and add my barbaric yawp to the
long howl of the Populist wolf. But, you know," he added, suddenly
lowering his voice, "I reserve the right to abuse my fellow citizens
when I love them most. I tore Populism to tatters last fall in a few
speeches they let me make in the back counties. Our central committee
hadn't anything to lose out there. That's why they sent me!"
Saxton was walking beside Raridan in the lower hall. He felt an impulse
to express gratitude for his rescue from the loneliness of the twilight;
but Raridan, talking incessantly, and with hands thrust easily into his
trousers' pockets, led the way into the reading-room.
"Hello, Wheaton, I didn't know you were at home," he called to a man who
sat reading a newspaper, and who now rose on seeing a stranger with
Raridan.
"This is Mr. Saxton, Mr. Wheaton."
"Oh, yes," said the man introduced as Wheaton. "I wondered whether I
shouldn't see you here. Mr. Porter told me you had come."
"I've been bringing Mr. Saxton up to date in local history," said
Raridan.
"Chiefly concerning yourself, I suppose," said Wheaton, with a smile
that did not wholly succeed in being amiable.
"It isn't often I get a chance at a brand new man," Raridan ran on.
"I've told the worst about you, so conduct yourself accordingly."
"Mr. Raridan's worst isn't very bad," said Saxton. "From his account of
this town and its people, the place must be paradise and the inhabitants
saints."
Raridan called for cigars, but Wheaton declined them.
"Remarkable fellow," said Raridan, busy with his match. "Paragon among
our business men; exemplary habits, and so forth." He waved the smoking
matchstick to imply virtues in Wheaton which it was unnecessary to
mention.
Wheaton ignored Raridan's chaffing way. He seemed very serious, and had
not much to say. He had just come home, from a tedious trip to the
western part of the state, he said, on an errand for his bank. He was
tall, slim and dark. There was a suggestion of sleepy indifference in
his black eyes, though he had a well-established reputation for energy
and industry. Saxton commented to himself that Wheaton's hands and feet
were smaller than he thought becoming in a man.
"Mr. Porter told me you were quartered here. I hope they can make you
comfortable. I'm personally relieved that you have come. Your Boston
friends were getting very impatient with us. We shall do all in our
power to aid you; but of course Mr. Porter has said all that to you."
His smile was by a movement of the lips, and his eyes did not seem to
participate in it. He did not refer again to possible business relations
with Saxton, but turned the conversation into general channels. They sat
together for an hour, Raridan, as was his way in any company, doing most
of the talking. They seemed to have the club house to themselves. Now
and then one of the negro servants came and looked in upon them
sleepily. A clerk at the desk in the hall read in peace. A party of
young people could be heard entering by the side door set apart for
women; and muffled echoes of their gaiety reached the trio in the
reading-room.
"That's back in the incurables' ward," said Raridan, in explanation to
Saxton.
"It isn't nice of you to speak of the gentler sex in that way,"
admonished Wheaton.
"Oh, there are girls and girls," said Raridan wearily. "It does seem to
me that Mabel Margrave is always hungry. Why can't she do her eating at
home?"
"He's simply jealous," Wheaton remarked to Saxton. "He always acts that
way when he hears a girl in the ladies' dining-room, and doesn't dare go
back and break in on some other fellow's party."
"When you show signs of mental decay, it's time for us to go home,
Wheaton." Raridan held out his hand to Saxton. "I'm glad you're here,
and you may be sure we'll try to make you like us. Wheaton and I live in
a barracks around the corner, with a few other homeless wanderers. An
ill-favored thing,--but our own! I hope to see you there. Don't be
afraid of the Chinaman at the door. My cell is up one flight and to the
right."
"And don't overlook me there," Wheaton interposed. "I suppose we shall
see you down town very often. Mr. Raridan is the only man in Clarkson
who has no visible means of support. The rest of us are pretty busy; but
that doesn't mean that we shan't be glad to see you at the Clarkson
National."
"You see how intensely commercial he is," said Raridan. "He's talking
for the bank, you notice, and not for himself."
"I'm sure he means both." Saxton had followed them to the front door,
where they repeated their good nights; he then climbed slowly to his
room. He had never before met a man so volatile and fanciful as Warrick
Raridan. He felt the warmth and friendliness of Raridan's nature as
people always did; Wheaton seemed cold and dull in comparison. Saxton
unpacked his trunks and distributed his things about the room. His
effects were simple, as befitted a man who was plain of mind and person.
He had collected none of the memorabilia which young men usually have
assembled at twenty-five. The furnishings of his dressing table and desk
were his own purchases, or those of his sister, who was the only woman
that had ever made him gifts. Having emptied his trunks and sent them to
the storeroom above, he seated himself comfortably in a lounging chair
and smoked a final pipe before turning in.