Halleck met Atherton at the door of his room with his hat and coat on.
“Why, Halleck! I was just going to see if you had come home!”
“You needn't now,” said Halleck, pushing by him into the room. “I want to
see you, Atherton, on business.”
Atherton took off his hat, and closed the door with one hand, while he
slipped the other arm out of his overcoat sleeve. “Well, to tell the truth,
I was going to mingle a little business myself with the pleasure of seeing
you.” He turned up the gas in his drop-light, and took the chair from which
he had looked across the table at Halleck, when they talked there before.
“It's the old subject,” he said, with a sense of repetition in the
situation. “I learn from Witherby that Hubbard has taken that money of
yours out of the Events, and from what I hear elsewhere he is making ducks
and drakes of it on election bets. What shall you do about it?”
“Nothing,” said Halleck.
“Oh! Very well,” returned Atherton, with the effect of being a little
snubbed, but resolved to take his snub professionally. He broke out,
however, in friendly exasperation: “Why in the world did you lend the
fellow that money?”
Halleck lifted his brooding eyes, and fixed them half pleadingly, half
defiantly upon his friend's face. “I did it for his wife's sake.”
“Yes, I know,” returned Atherton. “I remember how you felt. I couldn't
share your feeling, but I respected it. However, I doubt if your loan was a
benefit to either of them. It probably tempted him to count upon money that
he hadn't earned, and that's always corrupting.”
“Yes,” Halleck replied. “But I can't say that, so far as he's concerned,
I'm very sorry. I don't suppose it would do her any good if I forced him to
disgorge any balance he may have left from his wagers?”
“No, hardly.”
“Then I shall let him alone.”
The subject was dismissed, and Atherton waited for Halleck to speak of
the business on which he had come. But Halleck only played with the paper
cutter which his left hand had found on the table near him, and, with his
chin sunk on his breast, seemed lost in an unhappy reverie.
“I hope you won't accuse yourself of doing him an injury,” said Atherton,
at last, with a smile.
“Injury?” demanded Halleck, quickly. “What injury? How?”
“By lending him that money.”
“Oh! I had forgotten that; I wasn't thinking of it,” returned Halleck
impatiently. “I was thinking of something different. I'm aware of disliking
the man so much, that I should be willing to have greater harm than that
happen to him,--the greatest, for what I know. Though I don't know, after
all, that it would be harm. In another life, if there is one, he might
start in a new direction; but that isn't imaginable of him here; he can
only go from bad to worse; he can only make more and more sorrow and shame.
Why shouldn't one wish him dead, when his death could do nothing but good?”
“I suppose you don't expect me to answer such a question seriously.”
“But suppose I did?”
“Then I should say that no man ever wished any such good as that, except
from the worst motive; and the less one has to do with such questions, even
as abstractions, the better.”
“You're right,” said Halleck. “But why do you call it an abstraction?”
“Because, in your case, nothing else is conceivable.”
“I told you I was willing the worst should happen to him.”
“And I didn't believe you.”
Halleck lay back in his chair, and laughed wearily. “I wish I could
convince somebody of my wickedness. But it seems to be useless to try. I
say things that ought to raise the roof, both to you here and to Olive at
home, and you tell me you don't believe me, and she tells me that Mrs.
Hubbard thinks me a saint. I suppose now, that if I took you by the
button-hole and informed you confidentially that I had stopped long enough
at 129 Clover Street to put Bartley Hubbard quietly out of the way, you
wouldn't send for a policeman.”
“I should send for a doctor,” said Atherton.
“Such is the effect of character! And yet out of the fulness of the heart,
the mouth speaketh. Out of the heart proceed all those unpleasant things
enumerated in Scripture; but if you bottle them up there, and keep your
label fresh, it's all that's required of you, by your fellow-beings, at
least. What an amusing thing morality would be if it were not--otherwise.
Atherton, do you believe that such a man as Christ ever lived?”
“I know you do, Halleck,” said Atherton.
“Well, that depends upon what you call _me_. It what I was--if my well
Sunday-schooled youth--is I, I do. But if I, poising dubiously on the
momentary present, between the past and future, am I, I'm afraid I don't.
And yet it seems to me that I have a fairish sort of faith. I know that, if
Christ never lived on earth, some One lived who imagined him, and that One
must have been a God. The historical fact oughtn't to matter. Christ being
imagined, can't you see what a comfort, what a rapture, it must have been
to all these poor souls to come into such a presence and be looked through
and through? The relief, the rest, the complete exposure of Judgment Day--”
“Every day is Judgment Day,” said Atherton.
“Yes, I know your doctrine. But I mean the Last Day. We ought to have
something in anticipation of it, here, in our social system. Character is a
superstition, a wretched fetish. Once a year wouldn't be too often to seize
upon sinners whose blameless life has placed them above suspicion, and turn
them inside out before the community, so as to show people how the smoke
of the Pit had been quietly blackening their interior. That would destroy
character as a cult.” He laughed again. “Well, this isn't business,--though
it isn't pleasure, either, exactly. What I came for was to ask you
something. I've finished at the Law School, and I'm just ready to begin
here in the office with you. Don't you think it would be a good time for
me to give up the law? Wait a moment!” he said, arresting in Atherton an
impulse to speak. “We will take the decent surprise, the friendly demur,
the conscientious scruple, for granted. Now, honestly, do you believe I've
got the making of a lawyer in me?”
“I don't think you're very well, Halleck,” Atherton began.
“Ah, _you're_ a lawyer! You won't give me a direct answer!”
“I will if you wish,” retorted Atherton.
“Well.”
“Do you want to give it up?”
“Yes.”
“Then do it. No man ever prospered in it yet who wanted to leave it. And
now, since it's come to this, I'll tell you what I really _have_ thought,
all along. I've thought that, if your heart was really set on the law, you
would overcome your natural disadvantages for it; but if the time ever came
when you were tired of it, your chance was lost: you never would make a
lawyer. The question is, whether that time has come.”
“It has,” said Halleck.
“Then stop, here and now. You've wasted two years' time, but you can't get
it back by throwing more after it. I shouldn't be your friend, I shouldn't
be an honest man, if I let you go on with me, after this. A bad lawyer is
such a very bad thing. This isn't altogether a surprise to me, but it will
be a blow to your father,” he added, with a questioning look at Halleck,
after a moment.
“It might have been, if I hadn't taken the precaution to deaden the place
by a heavier blow first.”
“Ah! you've spoken to him already?”
“Yes, I've had it out in a sneaking, hypothetical way. But I could see
that, so far as the law was concerned it was enough; it served. Not that
he's consented to the other thing; there's where I shall need your help,
Atherton. I'll tell you what my plan is.” He stated it bluntly at first;
and then went over the ground and explained it fully, as he had done at
home. Atherton listened without permitting any sign of surprise to escape
him; but he listened with increasing gravity, as if he heard something not
expressed in Halleck's slow, somewhat nasal monotone, and at the end he
said, “I approve of any plan that will take you away for a while. Yes, I'll
speak to your father about it.”
“If you think you need any conviction, I could use arguments to bring
it about in you,” said Halleck, in recognition of his friend's ready
concurrence.
“No, I don't need any arguments to convince me, I believe,” returned
Atherton.
“Then I wish you'd say something to bring me round! Unless argument is used
by somebody, the plan always produces a cold chill in me.” Halleck smiled,
but Atherton kept a sober face. “I wish my Spanish American was here! What
makes you think it's a good plan? Why should I disappoint my father's hopes
again, and wring my mother's heart by proposing to leave them for any such
uncertain good as this scheme promises?” He still challenged his friend
with a jesting air, but a deeper and stronger feeling of some sort trembled
in his voice.
Atherton would not reply to his emotion; he answered, with obvious evasion:
“It's a good cause; in some sort--the best sort--it's a missionary work.”
“That's what my mother said to me.”
“And the change will be good for your health.”
“That's what I said to my mother!”
Atherton remained silent, waiting apparently for Halleck to continue, or to
end the matter there, as he chose.
It was some moments before Halleck went on; “You would say, wouldn't you,
that my first duty was to my own undertakings, and to those who had a right
to expect their fulfilment from me? You would say that it was an enormity
to tear myself away from the affection that clings to me in that home of
mine, yonder, and that nothing but some supreme motive, could justify me?
And yet you pretend to be satisfied with the reasons I've given you. You're
not dealing honestly with me, Atherton!”
“No,” said Atherton, keeping the same scrutiny of Halleck's face which he
had bent upon him throughout, but seeming now to hear his thoughts rather
than his words. “I knew that you would have some supreme motive; and if I
have pretended to approve your scheme on the reasons you have given me, I
haven't dealt honestly with you. But perhaps a little dishonesty is the
best thing under the circumstances. You haven't told me your real motive,
and I can't ask it.”
“But you imagine it?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you imagine? That I have been disappointed in love? That
I have been rejected? That the girl who had accepted me has broken her
engagement? Something of that sort?” demanded Halleck, scornfully.
Atherton did not answer.
“Oh, how far you are from the truth! How blest and proud and happy I should
be if it were the truth!” He looked into his friend's eyes, and added
bitterly: “You're not curious, Atherton; you don't ask me what my trouble
really is! Do you wish me to tell you what it is without asking?”
Atherton kept turning a pencil end for end between his fingers, while a
compassionate smile slightly curved his lips. “No,” he said, finally, “I
think you had better not tell me your trouble. I can believe very well
without knowing it that it's serious--”
“Oh, tragic!” said Halleck, self-contemptuously.
“But I doubt if it would help you to tell it. I've too much respect for
your good sense to suppose that it's an unreality; and I suspect that
confession would only weaken you. If you told me, you would feel that you
had made me a partner in your responsibility, and you would be tempted to
leave the struggle to me. If you're battling with some temptation, some
self-betrayal, you must make the fight alone: you would only turn to an
ally to be flattered into disbelief of your danger or your culpability.”
Halleck assented with a slight nod to each point that the lawyer made.
“You're right,” he said, “but a man of your subtlety can't pretend that he
doesn't know what the trouble is in such a simple case as mine.”
“I don't know anything certainly,” returned Atherton, “and as far as I can
I refuse to imagine anything. If your trouble concerns some one besides
yourself,--and no great trouble can concern one man alone,--you've no right
to tell it.”
“Another Daniel come to judgment!”
“You must trust to your principles, your self-respect, to keep you right--”
Halleck burst into a harsh laugh, and rose from his chair: “Ah, there you
abdicate the judicial function! Principles, self-respect! Against
_that_? Don't you suppose I was approached _through_ my principles and
self-respect? Why, the Devil always takes a man on the very highest plane.
He knows all about our principles and self-respect, and what they're made
of. How the noblest and purest attributes of our nature, with which we trap
each other so easily, must amuse him! Pity, rectitude, moral indignation, a
blameless life,--he knows that they're all instruments for him. No, sir! No
more principles and self-respect for me,--I've had enough of them; there's
nothing for me but to run, and that's what I'm going to do. But you're
quite right about the other thing, Atherton, and I give you a beggar's
thanks for telling me that my trouble isn't mine alone, and I've no right
to confide it to you. It is mine in the sense that no other soul is defiled
with the knowledge of it, and I'm glad you saved me from the ghastly
profanation, the sacrilege, of telling it. I was sneaking round for your
sympathy; I did want somehow to shift the responsibility on to you; to get
you--God help me!--to flatter me out of my wholesome fear and contempt of
myself. Well! That's past, now, and--Good night!” He abruptly turned away
from Atherton and swung himself on his cane toward the door.
Atherton took up his hat and coat. “I'll walk home with you,” he said.
“All right,” returned Halleck, listlessly.
“How soon shall you go?” asked the lawyer, when they were in the street.
“Oh, there's a ship sailing from New York next week,” said Halleck, in the
same tone of weary indifference. “I shall go in that.”
They talked desultorily of other things.
When they came to the foot of Clover Street, Halleck plucked his hand
out of Atherton's arm. “I'm going up through here!” he said, with sullen
obstinacy.
“Better not,” returned his friend, quietly.
“Will it hurt her if I stop to look at the outside of the house where she
lives?”
“It will hurt you,” said Atherton.
“I don't wish to spare myself!” retorted Halleck. He shook off the touch
that Atherton had laid upon his shoulder, and started up the hill; the
other overtook him, and, like a man who has attempted to rule a drunkard by
thwarting his freak, and then hopes to accomplish his end by humoring it,
he passed his arm through Halleck's again, and went with him. But when they
came to the house, Halleck did not stop; he did not even look at it; but
Atherton felt the deep shudder that passed through him.
In the week that followed, they met daily, and Halleck's broken pride no
longer stayed him from the shame of open self-pity and wavering purpose.
Atherton found it easier to persuade the clinging reluctance of the father
and mother, than to keep Halleck's resolution for him: Halleck could no
longer keep it for himself. “Not much like the behavior of people we read
of in similar circumstances,” he said once. “_They_ never falter when they
see the path of duty: they push forward without looking to either hand; or
else,” he added, with a hollow laugh at his own satire, “they turn their
backs on it,--like men! Well!”
He grew gaunt and visibly feeble. In this struggle the two men changed
places. The plan for Halleck's flight was no longer his own, but
Atherton's; and when he did not rebel against it, he only passively
acquiesced. The decent pretence of ignorance on Atherton's part necessarily
disappeared: in all but words the trouble stood openly confessed between
them, and it came to Atherton's saying, in one of Halleck's lapses of
purpose, from which it had required all the other's strength to lift him:
“Don't come to me any more, Halleck, with the hope that I shall somehow
justify your evil against your good. I pitied you at first; but I blame you
now.”
“You're atrocious,” said Halleck, with a puzzled, baffled look. “What do
you mean?”
“I mean that you secretly think you have somehow come by your evil
virtuously; and you want me to persuade you that it is different from
other evils of exactly the same kind,--that it is beautiful and sweet and
pitiable, and not ugly as hell and bitter as death, to be torn out of you
mercilessly and flung from you with abhorrence. Well, I tell you that you
are suffering guiltily, for no man suffers innocently from such a cause.
You must _go_, and you can't go too soon. Don't suppose that I find
anything noble in your position. I should do you a great wrong if I didn't
do all I could to help you realize that you're in disgrace, and that you're
only making a choice of shames in running away. Suppose the truth was
known,--suppose that those who hold you dear could be persuaded of
it,--could you hold up your head?”
“Do I hold up my head as it is?” asked Halleck. “Did you ever see a more
abject dog than I am at this moment? Your wounds are faithful, Atherton;
but perhaps you might have spared me this last stab. If you want to know,
I can assure you that I don't feel any melodramatic vainglory. I know that
I'm running away because I'm beaten, but no other man can know the battle
I've fought. Don't you suppose I know how hideous this thing is? No one
else can know it in all its ugliness!” He covered his face with his hands.
“You are right,” he said, when he could find his voice. “I suffer guiltily.
I must have known it when I seemed to be suffering for pity's sake; I knew
it before, and when you said that love without marriage was a worse hell
than any marriage without love, you left me without refuge: I had been
trying not to face the truth, but I had to face it then. I came away in
hell, and I have lived in hell ever since. I had tried to think it was a
crazy fancy, and put it on my failing health; I used to make believe that
some morning I should wake and find the illusion gone. I abhorred it from
the beginning as I do now; it has been torment to me; and yet somewhere
in my lost soul--the blackest depth, I dare say!--this shame has been so
sweet,--it is so sweet,--the one sweetness of life--Ah!” He dashed the weak
tears from his eyes, and rose and buttoned his coat about him. “Well, I
shall go. And I hope I shall never come back. Though you needn't mention
this to my father as an argument for my going when you talk me over with
him,” he added, with a glimmer of his wonted irony. He waited a moment, and
then turned upon his friend, in sad upbraiding: “When I came to you a year
and a half ago, after I had taken that ruffian home drunk to her--Why
didn't you warn me then, Atherton? Did you see any danger?”
Atherton hesitated: “I knew that, with your habit of suffering for other
people, it would make you miserable; but I couldn't have dreamed this would
come of it. But you've never been out of your own keeping for a moment. You
are responsible, and you are to blame if you are suffering now, and can
find no safety for yourself but in running away.”
“That's true,” said Halleck, very humbly, “and I won't trouble you any
more. I can't go on sinning against her belief in me here, and live. I
shall go on sinning against it there, as long as I live; but it seems to me
the harm will be a little less. Yes, I will go.”
But the night before he went, he came to Atherton's lodging to tell him
that he should not go; Atherton was not at home, and Halleck was spared
this last dishonor. He returned to his father's house through the rain
that was beginning to fall lightly, and as he let himself in with his key
Olive's voice said, “It's Ben!” and at the same time she laid her hand upon
his arm with a nervous, warning clutch. “Hush! Come in here!” She drew him
from the dimly lighted hall into the little reception-room near the door.
The gas was burning brighter there, and in the light he saw Marcia white
and still, where she sat holding her baby in her arms. They exchanged no
greeting: it was apparent that her being there transcended all usage, and
that they need observe none.
“Ben will go home with you,” said Olive, soothingly. “Is it raining?” she
asked, looking at her brother's coat. “I will get my water-proof.”
She left them a moment. “I have been--been walking--walking about,” Marcia
panted. “It has got so dark--I'm--afraid to go home. I hate to--take you
from them--the last--night.”
Halleck answered nothing; he sat staring at her till Olive came back with
the water-proof and an umbrella. Then, while his sister was putting the
waterproof over Marcia's shoulders, he said, “Let me take the little one,”
and gathered it, with or without her consent, from her arms into his. The
baby was sleeping; it nestled warmly against him with a luxurious quiver
under the shawl that Olive threw round it. “You can carry the umbrella,” he
said to Marcia.
They walked fast, when they got out into the rainy dark, and it was hard to
shelter Halleck as he limped rapidly on. Marcia ran forward once, to see
if her baby were safely kept from the wet, and found that Halleck had its
little face pressed close between his neck and cheek. “Don't be afraid,” he
said. “I'm looking out for it.”
His voice sounded broken and strange, and neither of them spoke again till
they came in sight of Marcia's door. Then she tried to stop him. She put
her hand on his shoulder. “Oh, I'm afraid--afraid to go in,” she pleaded.
He halted, and they stood confronted in the light of a street lamp; her
face was twisted with weeping. “Why are you afraid?” he demanded, harshly.
“We had a quarrel, and I--I ran away--I said that I would never come back.
I left him--”
“You must go back to him,” said Halleck. “He's your husband!” He pushed on
again, saying over and over, as if the words were some spell in which he
found safety, “You must go back, you must go back, you must go back!”
He dragged her with him now, for she hung helpless on his arm, which she
had seized, and moaned to herself. At the threshold, “I can't go in!” she
broke out. “I'm afraid to go in! What will he say? What will he do? Oh,
come in with me! You are good,--and then I shall not be afraid!”
“You must go in alone! No man can be your refuge from your husband! Here!”
He released himself, and, kissing the warm little face of the sleeping
child, he pressed it into her arms. His fingers touched hers under the
shawl; he tore his hand away with a shiver.
She stood a moment looking at the closed door; then she flung it open, and,
pausing as if to gather her strength, vanished into the brightness within.
He turned, and ran crookedly down the street, wavering from side to side in
his lameness, and flinging up his arms to save himself from falling as he
ran, with a gesture that was like a wild and hopeless appeal.