WARRY RARIDAN'S INDIGNATION
Raridan stayed in town all summer, and he and Saxton saw a good deal of
each other. They drove often to the country club together, and Saxton
became, as people said, another of Warry's enthusiasms. Saxton was no
idler, and he was conscientiously striving to bring order out of chaos
in the interests which had been confided to him. He was annoyed, at
first, when Raridan in his unlimited leisure, began to invade his
office; but as the confidence and ease of real friendship grew between
them he did not scruple to send him away, or to throw him a newspaper
and bid him read and keep still. Raridan was the plaything of many
moods; Saxton was equable and steady. They sought each other with the
old perversity of antipodal natures.
Saxton came in unexpectedly on Raridan at The Bachelors' one evening in
September. The day had been hot with the final fling of summer, but a
thunder shower had cooled the atmosphere, and there stole in pleasantly
the drip, drip, of the rain which was now abating. Heat lightning glowed
in the west with the luminousness so marked in that region.
"It's an infernal, hideous shame," called Raridan fiercely through the
dark, recognizing Saxton's step.
"Thanks! I'm glad I came," said Saxton, cheerfully.
"I'd like to be a cannibal for a few hours," growled Raridan, kicking a
chair toward Saxton without rising from the couch where he lay sprawled.
Saxton went about quietly, lighting the gas, picking up the books and
newspapers which Raridan had evidently cast from him in his rage, and
making a seat for himself by the window.
"I'm not an expert in lunacy, but I'll hear your trouble. Go ahead."
Raridan got up suddenly, his glasses swinging wildly from their cord.
"Put out that light," he commanded savagely; and Saxton did as he was
bidden.
"Do you know what Evelyn Porter's going to do?" demanded Raridan.
"I certainly do not. You seem to want to leave me in the dark; and
that's no joke."
"She's going to be queen of their infernal Knights of Midas ball, that's
what."
"Your language is spirited, I must say. I think we may classify that as
important if true."
"It's an outrage; an infernal damned shame!" Raridan went on.
"Language unbecoming an officer and a gentleman--"
"There's a fine girl, as charming as any girl dare be. She has a father
who doesn't appreciate her;--a good fellow and all that and he wouldn't
hurt her for anything on earth; but he hasn't got any sensibility;
that's the trouble with scores of American fathers. These Western ones
are worse than any others. They break their sons in, whenever they can,
to the same collars they've worn themselves. Their daughters they
usually don't understand at all! They intimidate their wives so that the
poor things don't dare call their souls their own; but the women are the
saving remnant out here. And when a particularly fine one turns up she
ought to be protected from the curse of our infernal commercialism."
He threw himself into a chair and lighted a cigarette.
Saxton laughed silently.
"Isn't this a new responsibility you've taken on? I don't believe these
things are as bad as you make them out to be. The commercial curse is
one of the things you can't dodge these days. It's just as bad in Boston
as it is here; and you find it wherever you find live people who want
bread to eat and cake if they can get it."
"But to visit the curse on a girl,--a fine girl,--"
"A pretty girl,--" Saxton suggested.
"A really charming girl," continued Warrick, with unabated earnestness,
"is a rotten shame."
"I'm afraid you're taking it too seriously," said Saxton. "If Miss
Porter were not a very sensible young woman it would be different. You
don't think for a moment that she would have her head turned--"
"No, sir; not a bit of it; but it's the principle of the thing that I'm
kicking about. This is one of the things that I detest in these Western
towns. It's the inability to escape from their infernal business. On the
face of it their Midas ball is a social event, but at the bottom, it's
merely a business venture. All the business men have got to go in for
it, but it doesn't stop there; they must drag their families in. Evelyn
Porter has got to mix up with the daughters of the plumbers and the
candlestick makers in order that the god of commerce may be satisfied."
"You don't quite grasp the situation," said Saxton. "If you had to get
out among these men who have hard work to do every day you'd have a
different feeling about such things. They've got to make the town go,
and this carnival is one of the ways in which they can stir things up
commercially, and at the same time give pleasure to a whole lot of
people."
"Now look here, you know as well as I do that you can't mix up all sorts
and conditions of men, and particularly women, in this way, without
making a mess of it. A man may introduce the green grocer at the corner,
and all that kind of ruck, to his wife and daughter, but what's the good
of it?"
"Well, what's the good of a democracy anyhow?" demanded Saxton. "I used
to have those ideas, too, when I was younger, but I thought it all over
when I was herding cattle up in Wyoming and I renounced such notions for
all time, even before I went broke. I found when I got back East that I
carried my new convictions with me, and the sight of civilized people
and good food did not change me."
"Well, the girl oughtn't to be sacrificed anyhow," said Warrick,
spitefully.
Saxton bit his pipe hard and grinned.
"Look here, Raridan, I'm afraid it's the girl and not the philosophy of
the thing that's worrying you. Why didn't you tell me it was the girl,
and not the social fabric generally, that you want to defend?"
Both Saxton and Raridan were a good deal at the Porters'. He knew that
Raridan had been a playmate of Evelyn's in their youth, when the elder
Porters and Raridans had been friends and neighbors. There existed
between them the lighthearted camaraderie that young people carry from
youth to maturity, and it had touched Saxton with envy. As a man having
no fixed duties, Raridan sometimes went, in the middle of the hot
mornings, to the Porter hilltop, where it was pleasant to sit and talk
to a pretty girl and look down on the seething caldron below, when every
other man of the community was sweltering at the business of earning his
daily bread.
"You oughtn't to get so violent about these things," Saxton went on to
say. "You will yourself be one of the ornaments of the show, and you
will dance before the throne and be glad of the chance. They have a
king, don't they? You might get the job. Who's going to be king, by the
way?"
"Wheaton, I fancy; the announcement hasn't been made yet."
"Oh," said Saxton, significantly. "Is this a little jealousy? Are we
sorry that we're not to wear the royal robes ourself? Well! well, I
begin to understand!"
"I don't like that either, if you want to know. It all gets back to the
accursed commercial idea. Wheaton's the cashier in Porter's bank. It's
very fitting that the president's daughter and the young and brilliant
cashier should be identified together in a public function like this. No
doubt Wheaton is fixing it up."
"Well, why don't you fix it up? I have been deluding myself with the
idea that you were a person of consequence in this town, yet you admit
that in a mere trifling social matter you are outwitted, or about to be,
by one of these commercial persons you hate so much, or say you do."
He spoke tauntingly, but Raridan was evidently serious in his complaint,
and Saxton turned the talk into other channels. The Chinese servant came
in presently with a card for Raridan.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "it's Bishop Delafield." He plunged downstairs
and returned immediately with a man whose great figure loomed darkly in
the doorway.
Raridan made a light.
"We've been doing the dim, religious act here," he said, after
introducing Saxton. "The lightning out there has been fine."
"You feel that you can't trust me in the dark," said the bishop; "or
perhaps that I won't appreciate the 'dim religious,' as you call it.
Turn down the gas and save my feelings."
Saxton was well acquainted with Warrick's zeal in church matters and was
not surprised to find a church dignitary in his friend's rooms. He had
never met the Bishop of Clarkson before, and he was a little awestruck
at the heroic size of this man who had just given him so masculine a
grasp of the hand and so keen a scrutiny.
The bishop extended his vast bulk in Raridan's easiest chair, and
accepted a cigar from the box which Warry passed to him.
"You've come just in time to save us from fierce contentions," said
Raridan, all amiability once more, while the bishop lighted his cigar.
He was very bald, and his head shone so radiantly that Saxton felt that
he could still see it in the dark after Warrick had turned down the
lights. There was an atmosphere about the man of great physical
strength, and his deep-set eyes under their shaggy brows were quick and
penetrating. Here was a man famous in his church for the energy and
sacrifice which he had brought to the work of a missionary in one of the
great Western dioceses. He had been bereft, in his young manhood, of his
wife and children, and had thereafter offered himself for the roughest
work of his church. He was sixty years old and for twenty years had been
a bishop, first in a vast region of the farther Northwest, where the
diocesan limits were hardly known, and where he had traveled ponyback
and muleback until called to be the Bishop of Clarkson. He was famous as
a preacher, and when he appeared from time to time in the pulpits of
Eastern churches, he swayed men mightily by the vigor and simplicity of
his eloquence. He had, in his younger days, been reckoned a scholar, but
the study of humanity at close hand had superseded long ago his interest
in books and learning. He had a deep, melodious voice and there was
charm and magnetism in him, as many people of many sorts and conditions
knew.
"What's the subject, gentlemen?" he asked, smoking contentedly. "I'm
sure something very serious must be before the house."
"Mr. Raridan has been abusing the commercialism of his neighbors," said
Saxton.
"Saxton's a new-comer, Bishop, and doesn't understand the situation
here as you and I do. You know that I'm the only native that dares to
hold honest opinions. The rest all follow the crowd."
"Reformers always have a hard time of it," said the bishop. "If you're
going to make over your fellowmen, you'll have to get hardened to their
indifference. But what's the matter with things to-night; and what are
you gentlemen doing in town, anyway? Aren't there places to go where
it's cool and where there are pretty girls to enchant you?"
Raridan attacked the bishop about some question of ritual that was
agitating the English Church. It was worse than Greek to Saxton, but
Raridan seemed fully informed about it, and turned up the lights to read
a paragraph from an English church paper which was, he protested, rankly
heretical. The bishop smoked his cigar calmly until Raridan had
finished.
"They tell me," he said, when Raridan had concluded by flinging the
whole matter upon his clerical caller with an air of arraigning the
entire episcopate, "that you're a pretty fair lawyer, Warry, only you
won't work. And I hear occasionally that you're about to embrace the
ministry. Now, just think what a time I'd have with you on my hands! You
couldn't get the water hot enough for me. Isn't he ungracious"--turning
to Saxton--"when I came here for rest and recreation, to put me on trial
for my life? You ought to know, young man, that a bishop can be tried
only by his peers."
Raridan threw down his paper, and rang for the Chinaman.
"When I embrace the ministry under you, Bishop, you may be sure that
I'll be humble enough to be good."
The Chinaman brought a variety of liquids, from which they helped
themselves.
"Don't be afraid of the Scotch, Saxton," said Raridan, "the bishop has
seen the bottle before."
The bishop, who was pouring seltzer on his lemon juice, smiled
tolerantly at Raridan's chatter, with whose temper and quality he had
long been familiar, and addressed himself to Saxton. He liked young men,
and had an agreeable way of drawing them out and making them talk about
themselves. When it was disclosed that Saxton had been in the cattle
business, the bishop showed an intimate knowledge of the range and its
ways.
"You see, the bishop's ridden over most of the cattle country in his
day," explained Raridan.
"And evidently not all in Pullman cars," said Saxton.
"I'm considered a heavy load for a cow pony," said the bishop, smiling
down at his great bulk, "so they used sometimes to find a mule for me."
"How are the Porters?" he asked presently of Raridan.
"Very well, and staying on in the heat with the usual Clarkson
fortitude."
"Porter's one of the men that never rest," said the bishop. "I've known
him ever since I've known the West, and he's taken few vacations in that
time."
"Well, he's showing signs of wear," said Raridan. "He's one of the men
who begin with a small business where they do all the work themselves,
and when the business outgrows them, they never realize that they need
help, or that they can have any. Before they made Wheaton cashier,
Porter carried the whole bank in his head. He's improving a little, and
has a stenographer now; but he's nervous and anxious all the while and
terribly fussy over all he does."
"Wheaton ought to be a great help to him," said the bishop. "He seems a
steady fellow, hard working and industrious."
"Oh, he's all those things," Raridan answered carelessly. "He'll never
steal anybody's money."
The bishop talked directly to Raridan about some work which it seemed
the young man had done for him, and rose to go. He had been in town only
a few hours, after a business journey to New York, and on reaching his
rooms had found a summons calling him to a neighboring jurisdiction, to
perform episcopal functions for a brother bishop who was ill. Saxton and
Warrick went down to the car with him, carrying the battered suit cases
which contained his episcopal robes and personal effects. These cases
showed rough usage; they had been to Canterbury and had found lodging
many nights in the sod houses of the plains.
"How do you like him?" asked Raridan, as the bishop climbed into a
street car headed toward the station.
"He looks like the real thing," said Saxton. "He has a voice and a beard
like a prophet."
"He's a fine character,--one of the people that understand things
without being told. A few men and women in the world have that kind of
instinct. They're put here, I guess, to help those who don't understand
themselves."