WARRY'S REPENTANCE
Saxton dined alone at the Clarkson Club, as he usually did, and went
afterward to his office, which he still maintained in the Clarkson
National Building. He had been studying the report of an engineering
expert on a Colorado irrigation scheme and he was trying to master and
correct its weaknesses. As he hung over the blue-prints and the pages of
figures that lay before him, the flashing red wheels of Mabel Margrave's
trap kept interfering; he wished Warry had not turned up just as he had.
He thought he understood why his friend had been so occupied in his
office of late; but whether Warry and Evelyn Porter were engaged or not,
Warry ought to find better use for his talents than in amusing Mabel
Margrave. John lighted his pipe to help with the blue-prints, and while
he drew it into cozy accord with himself, the elevator outside
discharged a passenger; he heard the click of the wire door as the cage
receded, followed by Raridan's quick step in the hall, and Warry broke
in on him. "Well, you're the limit! I'd like to know what you mean by
roosting up here and not staying in your room where a white man can find
you." He stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his top-coat,
and glared at Saxton, who lay back in his chair and bit his pipe. "I
wish by all the gods I could rattle you once and shake you out of your
damned Harvard aplomb!" Raridan did not usually invoke the gods, and he
rarely damned anything or anybody.
"That's a very pretty coat you have on, Mr. Raridan. It must be nice to
be a plutocrat and wear clothes like that."
"The beastly thing doesn't fit," growled Raridan, throwing himself into
a chair. "I don't fit, and my clothes don't fit, and--"
"And you're having a fit. You'd better see a nerve specialist." Warry
was pounding a cigarette on the back of his case.
"I say, Saxton," he said calmly.
"Well! Has Vesuvius subsided?" Saxton sat up in his chair and watched
Raridan breaking matches wastefully in a nervous effort to strike a
light.
"John Saxton, what a beastly ass I am! What a merry-go-round of a fool I
make of myself!" Warry blew a cloud of smoke into the air.
"Yes," said John, pulling away at his pipe.
"As I'm a living man, I had no more intention of driving with that girl
than I had of going up in a balloon and walking back. You know I never
knew her well; I don't want to know her, for that matter; not on your
life!"
"Is this a guessing contest? I suppose I'm the goat. Well, you didn't
care for Miss Margrave's society; is that what you're driving at? She
shan't hear this from me; I'm as safe as a tomb. Moreover, I don't enjoy
her acquaintance. Go ahead now, full speed."
"And it was just my infernal hard luck that I got caught this
afternoon," continued Warry, ignoring him. "Sometimes it seems to me
that I'm predestined and foreordained to do fool things. I've been
working like blue blazes on that washerwoman's suit against the
Transcontinental,--running their switch through her back yard,--and I
had put away all kinds of temptation and was feeling particularly
virtuous; but here came the Margrave nigger with that girl's note, and I
went up the street in long jumps to meet her, and let her drive me all
over town and all over the country, and order me a highball on the
Country Club porch, and generally make an ass of me. I wish you'd do
something to me; hit me with a club, or throw me down the elevator, or
do something equally brutal and coarse that would jar a little of the
folly out of me. Why," he continued, with utter self-contempt, through
which his humor glimmered, "I ought to have turned down Mabel's
invitation as soon as I saw the monogram on her note paper. Three
colors, and letters as big as your hand! My instinctive good taste
falters, old man; it needs restoring and chastening."
"I quite agree with you, sir. But it's more gallant to abuse yourself
than Miss Margrave's stationery--that is, if I am correctly gathering up
the crumbs of your thought. I believe you had reached the highball
incident in your recital. Was it rye or Scotch? This is the day of
realism, and if I'm to give you counsel, or sympathy, or whatever it is
you want, I must know all the petty details."
"Don't be foolish," said Raridan, staring abstractedly; then he bent his
eyes sharply on Saxton.
"See here, John," he said quietly, folding his arms. He had never
before called Saxton by his first name; and the change marked a further
advance of intimacy.
"Yes."
"You know I'm a good deal of a fool and all that sort of thing--"
"Chuck that and go ahead."
"But she means a whole lot to me. You know whom I mean." Saxton knew he
did not mean Mabel Margrave. "You know," Raridan went on, "we were kids
together up there on those hills. We both had our dancing lessons at her
house, and did such stunts as that together."
"Yes," said Saxton.
"I want to work and show that I'm some good. I want to make myself
worthy of her." He got up and walked the floor, while Saxton sat and
watched him.
"I can't talk about it; you understand what I want to do. It has seemed
to me lately that I have more to overcome than I can ever manage. I made
a lot of fuss about that Knights of Midas rot. I ought to have helped
her about that; it was hard for her, but I was too big a fool to know
it, and I made myself ridiculous lecturing her. I forgot that she'd
grown up, and I didn't know she felt as she did about it. I acted as if
I thought she was crazy to pose in that fool show, when I might have
known better. It was downright low of me." He stood at the window
playing with the cord of the shade and looking out over the town. Saxton
walked to the window and stood by him, saying nothing; and after a
moment he put his hand on Raridan's shoulder and turned him round and
grasped Warry's slender fingers in his broad, strong hand.
"I understand how it is, old man. It isn't so bad as you think it is,
I'm sure. It will all come out right, and while we're making confessions
I want to make one too. I feel rather foolish doing it--as if I were in
the game--" and he smiled in the way he had, which brought his humility
and patience and desire to be on good terms with the world into his
face,--"but I want you to know about this afternoon--that--that just
happened--my being with her. You see, I didn't know she was there, and
she had--I guess she had broken her driver or something, and quit, and I
was coming in and she picked me up, and I'm sorry, and--"
Raridan wheeled on him as if he had just caught the drift of his talk.
"Oh, come off! You howling idiot! Don't you talk that way to me again.
Get your hat now and let's get out of this."
"I'm glad you're feeling better," said Saxton, and laughed with real
relief.
John turned out the light, and while they waited for the elevator to
come up for them Warry jingled the coins and keys in his pockets before
he blurted:
"I say, John, I'm an underbred, low person, and am not worthy to be
called thy friend, and you may hate me all you like, but one thing I'd
like to know. Did she say anything about me when you passed us this
afternoon--make any comment or anything? You know I despise myself for
asking, but--"
Saxton laughed quietly.
"Yes, she did; but I don't know that I ought to tell you. It was really
encouraging."
"Well, hurry up."
"She said, 'Miss Margrave has a lot of style; don't you think so?'"
"Is that all?" demanded Raridan, stepping into the car.
"That's all. It wasn't very much; but it was the way she said it; and as
she said it she brushed a fly from the horse with the whip, and she did
it very carefully."
In the corridor below they met Wheaton coming out of the side door of
the bank. He had been at work, he said. Raridan asked him to go with
them to the club for a game of billiards, but he pleaded weariness and
said he was going to bed.
The three men walked up Varney Street together. Those spirits that order
our lives for us must have viewed them with interest as they tramped
through the street. They were men of widely different antecedents and
qualities. Circumstances, in themselves natural and harmless, had
brought them together. The lives of all three were to be influenced by
the weakness of one, and one woman's life was to be profoundly affected
by contact with all of them. It is not ordained for us to know whether
those we touch hands with, and even break bread with, from day to day,
are to bring us good or evil. The electric light reveals nothing in the
sibyl's book which was not disclosed of old to those who pondered the
mysteries by starlight and rushlight.
Wheaton left them at the club door and went on to The Bachelors',
which, was only a step farther up the street.
"How do you like Wheaton by this time?" asked Raridan, as they entered
the club.
"I hardly know how to answer that," Saxton answered. "He's treated me
well enough. It seems to me I'm always trying to find some reason for
not liking him, but I can't put my hand on anything tangible."
"That's the way I feel," said Raridan, hanging up his coat in the
billiard room. "He's a rigid devil, some way. There's no let-go in him.
I guess the law allows us to dislike some people just on general
principles, and Jim likes himself so well that you and I don't matter.
It's your shot."