He had not, certainly, the air of a dupe or a sentimentalist, but

inspired confidence by his very personality. Youthlike, I watched him

narrowly for flaws, for oratorical tricks, for all kinds of histrionic

symptoms. Again I was near the secret; again it escaped me. The argument

for Christianity lay not in assertions about it, but in being it. This

man was Christianity.... I must have felt something of this, even though

I failed to formulate it. And unconsciously I contrasted his strength,

which reinforced the atmosphere of the room, with that of Ralph

Hambleton, who was, a greater influence over me than I have recorded,

and had come to sway me more and more, as he had swayed others. The

strength of each was impressive, yet this Mr. Brooks seemed to me the

bodily presentment of a set of values which I would have kept constantly

before my eyes.... I felt him drawing me, overcoming my hesitation,

belittling my fear of ridicule. I began gently to open the door--when

something happened,--one of those little things that may change the

course of a life. The door made little noise, yet one of the men sitting

in the back of the room chanced to look around, and I recognized Hermann

Krebs. His face was still sunken from his recent illness. Into his eyes

seemed to leap a sudden appeal, an appeal to which my soul responded yet

I hurried down the stairs and into the street. Instantly I regretted my

retreat, I would have gone back, but lacked the courage; and I strayed

unhappily for hours, now haunted by that look of Krebs, now wondering

what the remarkably sane-looking and informal clergyman whose presence

dominated the little room had been talking about. I never learned, but

I did live to read his biography, to discover what he might have talked

about,--for he if any man believed that life and religion are one, and

preached consecration to life's task.

Of little use to speculate whether the message, had I learned it then,

would have fortified and transformed me!

In spite of the fact that I was unable to relate to a satisfying

conception of religion my new-born determination, I made up my mind, at

least, to renounce my tortuous ways. I had promised my father to be

a lawyer; I would keep my promise, I would give the law a fair trial;

later on, perhaps, I might demonstrate an ability to write. All very

praiseworthy! The season was Lent, a fitting time for renunciations and

resolves. Although I had more than once fallen from grace, I believed

myself at last to have settled down on my true course--when something

happened. The devil interfered subtly, as usual--now in the person of

Jerry Kyme. It should be said in justice to Jerry that he did not look

the part. He had sunny-red, curly hair, mischievous blue eyes with

long lashes, and he harboured no respect whatever for any individual or

institution, sacred or profane; he possessed, however, a shrewd sense

of his own value, as many innocent and unsuspecting souls discovered

as early as our freshman year, and his method of putting down the

presumptuous was both effective and unique. If he liked you, there could

be no mistake about it.

One evening when I was engaged in composing a theme for Mr. Cheyne on

no less a subject than the interpretation of the work of William

Wordsworth, I found myself unexpectedly sprawling on the floor, in my

descent kicking the table so vigorously as to send the ink-well a foot

or two toward the ceiling. This, be it known, was a typical proof of

Jerry's esteem. For he had entered noiselessly, jerking the back of

my chair, which chanced to be tilted, and stood with his hands in his

pockets, surveying the ruin he had wrought, watching the ink as it

trickled on the carpet. Then he picked up the book.

“Poetry, you darned old grind!” he exclaimed disgustedly. “Say, Parry, I

don't know what's got into you, but I want you to come home with me

for the Easter holidays. It'll do you good. We'll be on the Hudson, you

know, and we'll manage to make life bearable somehow.”

I forgot my irritation, in sheer surprise.

“Why, that's mighty good of you, Jerry--” I began, struggling to my

feet.

“Oh, rot!” he exclaimed. “I shouldn't ask you if I didn't want you.”

There was no denying the truth of this, and after he had gone I sat for

a long time with my pen in my mouth, reflecting as to whether or not

I should go. For I had the instinct that here was another cross-roads,

that more depended on my decision than I cared to admit. But even then

I knew what I should do. Ridiculous not to--I told myself. How could a

week or ten days with Jerry possibly affect my newborn, resolve?

Yet the prospect, now, of a visit to the Kymes' was by no means so

glowing as it once would have been. For I had seen visions, I had

dreamed dreams, beheld a delectable country of my very own. A

year ago--nay, even a month ago--how such an invitation would have

glittered!... I returned at length to my theme, over which, before

Jerry's arrival, I had been working feverishly. But now the glamour had

gone from it.

Presently Tom came in.

“Anyone been here?” he demanded.

“Jerry,” I told him.

“What did he want?”

“He wanted me to go home with him at Easter.”

“You're going, of course.”

“I don't know. I haven't decided.”

“You'd be a fool not to,” was Tom's comment. It voiced, succinctly, a

prevailing opinion.

It was the conclusion I arrived at in my own mind. But just why I had

been chosen for the honour, especially at such a time, was a riddle.

Jerry's invitations were charily given, and valued accordingly; and more

than once, at our table, I had felt a twinge of envy when Conybear or

someone else had remarked, with the proper nonchalance, in answer to a

question, that they were going to Weathersfield. Such was the name of

the Kyme place....

I shall never forget the impression made on me by the decorous luxury

of that big house, standing amidst its old trees, halfway up the gentle

slope that rose steadily from the historic highway where poor Andre was

captured. I can see now the heavy stone pillars of its portico vignetted

in a flush of tenderest green, the tulips just beginning to flame forth

their Easter colours in the well-kept beds, the stately, well-groomed

evergreens, the vivid lawns, the clipped hedges. And like an

overwhelming wave of emotion that swept all before it, the

impressiveness of wealth took possession of me. For here was a kind of

wealth I had never known, that did not exist in the West, nor even in

the still Puritan environs of Boston where I had visited. It took itself

for granted, proclaimed itself complacently to have solved all problems.

By ignoring them, perhaps. But I was too young to guess this. It was

order personified, gaining effect at every turn by a multitude of

details too trivial to mention were it not for the fact that they

entered deeply into my consciousness, until they came to represent,

collectively, the very flower of achievement. It was a wealth that

accepted tribute calmly, as of inherent right. Law and tradition

defended its sanctity more effectively than troops. Literature descended

from her high altar to lend it dignity; and the long, silent library

displayed row upon row of the masters, appropriately clad in morocco or

calf,--Smollett, Macaulay, Gibbon, Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Dickens,

Irving and Thackeray, as though each had striven for a tablet here. Art

had denied herself that her canvases might be hung on these walls; and

even the Church, on that first Sunday of my visit, forgot the blood of

her martyrs that she might adorn an appropriate niche in the setting.

The clergyman, at one of the dinner parties, gravely asked a blessing as

upon an Institution that included and absorbed all other institutions in

its being....

The note of that house was a tempered gaiety. Guests arrived from New

York, spent the night and departed again without disturbing the even

tenor of its ways. Unobtrusive servants ministered to their wants,--and

to mine....

Conybear was there, and two classmates from Boston, and we were treated

with the amiable tolerance accorded to college youths and intimates of

the son of the house. One night there was a dance in our honour. Nor

have I forgotten Jerry's sister, Nathalie, whom I had met at Class Days,

a slim and willowy, exotic young lady of the Botticelli type, with

a crown of burnished hair, yet more suggestive of a hothouse than of

spring. She spoke English with a French accent. Capricious, impulsive,

she captured my interest because she put a high value on her favour;

she drove me over the hills, informing me at length that I was

sympathique--different from the rest; in short, she emphasized and

intensified what I may call the Weathersfield environment, stirred up in

me new and vague aspirations that troubled yet excited me.

Then there was Mrs. Kyme, a pretty, light-hearted lady, still young,

who seemed to have no intention of growing older, who romped and played

songs for us on the piano. The daughter of an old but now impecunious

Westchester family, she had been born to adorn the position she held,

she was adapted by nature to wring from it the utmost of the joys it

offered. From her, rather than from her husband, both of the children

seemed to have inherited. I used to watch Mr. Grosvenor Kyme as he sat

at the end of the dinner-table, dark, preoccupied, taciturn, symbolical

of a wealth new to my experience, and which had about it a certain

fabulous quality. It toiled not, neither did it spin, but grew as if by

magic, day and night, until the very conception of it was overpowering.

What must it be to have had ancestors who had been clever enough to sit

still until a congested and discontented Europe had begun to pour its

thousands and hundreds of thousands into the gateway of the western

world, until that gateway had become a metropolis? ancestors, of course,

possessing what now suddenly appeared to me as the most desirable of

gifts--since it reaped so dazzling a harvest-business foresight. From

time to time these ancestors had continued to buy desirable corners,

which no amount of persuasion had availed to make them relinquish. Lease

them, yes; sell them, never! By virtue of such a system wealth was as

inevitable as human necessity; and the thought of human necessity did

not greatly bother me. Mr. Kyme's problem of life was not one of making

money, but of investing it. One became automatically a personage....

It was due to one of those singular coincidences--so interesting a

subject for speculation--that the man who revealed to me this golden

romance of the Kyme family was none other than a resident of my own

city, Mr. Theodore Watling, now become one of our most important

and influential citizens; a corporation lawyer, new and stimulating

qualification, suggesting as it did, a deus ex machina of great affairs.

That he, of all men, should come to Weathersfield astonished me, since

I was as yet to make the connection between that finished, decorous,

secluded existence and the source of its being. The evening before my

departure he arrived in company with two other gentlemen, a Mr. Talbot

and a Mr. Saxes, whose names were spoken with respect in a sphere of

which I had hitherto taken but little cognizance-Wall Street. Conybear

informed me that they were “magnates,”... We were sitting in the

drawing-room at tea, when they entered with Mr. Watling, and no sooner

had he spoken to Mrs. Kyme than his quick eye singled me out of the

group.

“Why, Hugh!” he exclaimed, taking my hand. “I had no idea I should meet

you here--I saw your father only last week, the day I left home.” And he

added, turning to Mrs. Kyme, “Hugh is the son of Mr. Matthew Paret, who

has been the leader of our bar for many years.”

The recognition and the tribute to my father were so graciously given

that I warmed with gratitude and pride, while Mr. Kyme smiled a little,

remarking that I was a friend of Jerry's. Theodore Watling, for being

here, had suddenly assumed in my eyes a considerable consequence, though

the note he struck in that house was a strange one. It was, however, his

own note, and had a certain distinction, a ring of independence, of

the knowledge of self-worth. Dinner at Weathersfield we youngsters had

usually found rather an oppressive ceremony, with its shaded lights

and precise ritual over which Mr. Kyme presided like a high priest;

conversation had been restrained. That night, as Johnnie Laurens

afterwards expressed it, “things loosened up,” and Mr. Watling was

responsible for the loosening. Taking command of the Kyme dinner table

appeared to me to be no mean achievement, but this is just what he did,

without being vulgar or noisy or assertive. Suavitar in modo, forbiter

in re. If, as I watched him there with a newborn pride and loyalty, I

had paused to reconstruct the idea that the mention of his name would

formerly have evoked, I suppose I should have found him falling short

of my notion of a gentleman; it had been my father's opinion; but Mr.

Watling's marriage to Gene Hollister's aunt had given him a standing

with us at home. He possessed virility, vitality in a remarkable degree,

yet some elusive quality that was neither tact nor delicacy--though

related to these differentiated him from the commonplace, self-made man

of ability. He was just off the type. To liken him to a clothing

store model of a well-built, broad-shouldered man with a firm neck, a

handsome, rather square face not lacking in colour and a conventional,

drooping moustache would be slanderous; yet he did suggest it.

Suggesting it, he redeemed it: and the middle western burr in his voice

was rather attractive than otherwise. He had not so much the air of

belonging there, as of belonging anywhere--one of those anomalistic

American citizens of the world who go abroad and make intimates of

princes. Before the meal was over he had inspired me with loyalty

and pride, enlisted the admiration of Jerry and Conybear and Johnnie

Laurens; we followed him into the smoking-room, sitting down in a row on

a leather lounge behind our elders.

Here, now that the gentlemen were alone, there was an inspiring

largeness in their talk that fired the imagination. The subject was

investments, at first those of coal and iron in my own state, for Mr.

Watling, it appeared, was counsel for the Boyne Iron Works.

“It will pay you to keep an eye on that company, Mr. Kyme,” he said,

knocking the ashes from his cigar. “Now that old Mr. Durrett's gone--”

“You don't mean to say Nathaniel Durrett's dead!” said Mr. Kyme.

The lawyer nodded.

“The old regime passed with him. Adolf Scherer succeeds him, and you may

take my word for it, he's a coming man. Mr. Durrett, who was a judge of

men, recognized that. Scherer was an emigrant, he had ideas, and rose to

be a foreman. For the last few years Mr. Durrett threw everything on his

shoulders....”

Little by little the scope of the discussion was enlarged until it

ranged over a continent, touching lightly upon lines of railroad, built

or projected, across the great west our pioneers had so lately succeeded

in wresting from the savages, upon mines of copper and gold hidden away

among the mountains, and millions of acres of forest and grazing

lands which a complacent government would relinquish provided certain

technicalities were met: touching lightly, too, very lightly,--upon

senators and congressmen at Washington. And for the first time I learned

that not the least of the functions of these representatives of the

people was to act as the medium between capital and investment, to

facilitate the handing over of the Republic's resources to those in

a position to develop them. The emphasis was laid on development,

or rather on the resulting prosperity for the country: that was the

justification, and it was taken for granted as supreme. Nor was it new

to me; this cult of prosperity. I recalled the torch-light processions

of the tariff enthusiasts of my childhood days, my father's championship

of the Republican Party. He had not idealized politicians, either. For

the American, politics and ethics were strangers.

Thus I listened with increasing fascination to these gentlemen in

evening clothes calmly treating the United States as a melon patch that

existed largely for the purpose of being divided up amongst a limited

and favored number of persons. I had a feeling of being among the

initiated. Where, it may be asked, were my ideals? Let it not be

supposed that I believed myself to have lost them. If so, the impression

I have given of myself has been wholly inadequate. No, they had been

transmuted, that is all, transmuted by the alchemy of Weathersfield,

by the personality of Theodore Watling into brighter visions. My eyes

rarely left his face; I hung on his talk, which was interspersed with

native humour, though he did not always join in the laughter, sometimes

gazing at the fire, as though his keen mind were grappling with a

problem suggested. I noted the respect in which his opinions were

held, and my imagination was fired by an impression of the power to be

achieved by successful men of his profession, by the evidence of their

indispensability to capital itself.... At last when the gentlemen rose

and were leaving the room, Mr. Watling lingered, with his hand on my

arm.

“Of course you're going through the Law School, Hugh,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“Good!” he exclaimed emphatically. “The law, to-day, is more of a

career than ever, especially for a young man with your antecedents and

advantages, and I know of no city in the United States where I would

rather start practice, if I were a young man, than ours. In the next

twenty years we shall see a tremendous growth. Of course you'll be going

into your father's office. You couldn't do better. But I'll keep an eye

on you, and perhaps I'll be able to help you a little, too.”

I thanked him gratefully.

A famous artist, who started out in youth to embrace a military career

and who failed to pass an examination at West Point, is said to have

remarked that if silicon had been a gas he would have been a soldier.

I am afraid I may have given the impression that if I had not gone

to Weathersfield and encountered Mr. Watling I might not have been a

lawyer. This impression would be misleading. And while it is certain

that I have not exaggerated the intensity of the spiritual experience

I went through at Cambridge, a somewhat belated consideration for the

truth compels me to register my belief that the mood would in any case

have been ephemeral. The poison generated by the struggle of my nature

with its environment had sunk too deep, and the very education that

was supposed to make a practical man of me had turned me into a

sentimentalist. I became, as will be seen, anything but a practical man

in the true sense, though the world in which I had been brought up and

continued to live deemed me such. My father was greatly pleased when

I wrote him that I was now more than ever convinced of the wisdom of

choosing the law as my profession, and was satisfied that I had come

to my senses at last. He had still been prepared to see me “go off at a

tangent,” as he expressed it. On the other hand, the powerful effect

of the appeal made by Weathersfield and Mr. Watling must not be

underestimated. Here in one object lesson was emphasized a host of

suggestions each of which had made its impression. And when I returned

to Cambridge Alonzo Cheyne knew that he had lost me....

I pass over the rest of my college course, and the years I spent at the

Harvard Law School, where were instilled into me without difficulty the

dictums that the law was the most important of all professions, that

those who entered it were a priestly class set aside to guard from

profanation that Ark of the Covenant, the Constitution of the United

States. In short, I was taught law precisely as I had been taught

religion,--scriptural infallibility over again,--a static law and a

static theology,--a set of concepts that were supposed to be equal to

any problems civilization would have to meet until the millennium.

What we are wont to call wisdom is often naively innocent of impending

change. It has no barometric properties.

I shall content myself with relating one incident only of this period.

In the January of my last year I went with a party of young men and

girls to stay over Sunday at Beverly Farms, where Mrs. Fremantle--a

young Boston matron had opened her cottage for the occasion. This

“cottage,” a roomy, gabled structure, stood on a cliff, at the foot of

which roared the wintry Atlantic, while we danced and popped corn before

the open fires. During the daylight hours we drove about the country in

sleighs, or made ridiculous attempts to walk on snow-shoes.

On Sunday afternoon, left temporarily to my own devices, I wandered

along the cliff, crossing into the adjoining property. The wind had

fallen; the waves, much subdued, broke rhythmically against the rocks;

during the night a new mantle of snow had been spread, and the

clouds were still low and menacing. As I strolled I became aware of a

motionless figure ahead of me,--one that seemed oddly familiar; the set

of the shabby overcoat on the stooping shoulders, the unconscious pose

contributed to a certain sharpness of individuality; in the act of

challenging my memory, I halted. The man was gazing at the seascape,

and his very absorption gave me a sudden and unfamiliar thrill. The word

absorption precisely expresses my meaning, for he seemed indeed to have

become a part of his surroundings,--an harmonious part. Presently

he swung about and looked at me as though he had expected to find me

there--and greeted me by name.

“Krebs!” I exclaimed.

He smiled, and flung out his arm, indicating the scene. His eyes at that

moment seemed to reflect the sea,--they made the gaunt face suddenly

beautiful.

“This reminds me of a Japanese print,” he said.

The words, or the tone in which he spoke, curiously transformed the

picture. It was as if I now beheld it, anew, through his vision: the

grey water stretching eastward to melt into the grey sky, the massed,

black trees on the hillside, powdered with white, the snow in rounded,

fantastic patches on the huge boulders at the foot of the cliff. Krebs

did not seem like a stranger, but like one whom I had known always,--one

who stood in a peculiar relationship between me and something greater I

could not define. The impression was fleeting, but real.... I remember

wondering how he could have known anything about Japanese prints.

“I didn't think you were still in this part of the country,” I remarked

awkwardly.

“I'm a reporter on a Boston newspaper, and I've been sent up here to

interview old Mr. Dome, who lives in that house,” and he pointed to a

roof above the trees. “There is a rumour, which I hope to verify, that

he has just given a hundred thousand dollars to the University.”

“And--won't he see you?”

“At present he's taking a nap,” said Krebs. “He comes here occasionally

for a rest.”

“Do you like interviewing?” I asked.

He smiled again.

“Well, I see a good many different kinds of people, and that's

interesting.”

“But--being a reporter?” I persisted.

This continued patronage was not a conscious expression of superiority

on my part, but he did not seem to resent it. He had aroused my

curiosity.

“I'm going into the law,” he said.

The quiet confidence with which he spoke aroused, suddenly, a twinge

of antagonism. He had every right to go into the law, of course,

and yet!... my query would have made it evident to me, had I been

introspective in those days, that the germ of the ideal of the

profession, implanted by Mr. Watling, was expanding. Were not

influential friends necessary for the proper kind of career? and where

were Krebs's? In spite of the history of Daniel Webster and a long

line of American tradition, I felt an incongruity in my classmate's

aspiration. And as he stood there, gaunt and undoubtedly hungry, his

eyes kindling, I must vaguely have classed him with the revolutionaries

of all the ages; must have felt in him, instinctively, a menace to the

stability of that Order with which I had thrown my fortunes. And yet

there were comparatively poor men in the Law School itself who had not

made me feel this way! He had impressed me against my will, taken me by

surprise, commiseration had been mingled with other feelings that sprang

out of the memory of the night I had called on him, when he had been

sick. Now I resented something in him which Tom Peters had called

“crust.”

“The law!” I repeated. “Why?”

“Well,” he said, “even when I was a boy, working at odd jobs, I used to

think if I could ever be a lawyer I should have reached the top notch of

human dignity.”

Once more his smile disarmed me.

“And now” I asked curiously.

“You see, it was an ideal with me, I suppose. My father was responsible

for that. He had the German temperament of '48, and when he fled to this

country, he expected to find Utopia.” The smile emerged again, like

the sun shining through clouds, while fascination and antagonism again

struggled within me. “And then came frightful troubles. For years he

could get only enough work to keep him and my mother alive, but he never

lost his faith in America. 'It is man,' he would say, 'man has to grow

up to it--to liberty.' Without the struggle, liberty would be worth

nothing. And he used to tell me that we must all do our part, we who had

come here, and not expect everything to be done for us. He had made that

mistake. If things were bad, why, put a shoulder to the wheel and help

to make them better.

“That helped me,” he continued, after a moment's pause. “For I've seen

a good many things, especially since I've been working for a newspaper.

I've seen, again and again, the power of the law turned against those

whom it was intended to protect, I've seen lawyers who care a great

deal more about winning cases than they do about justice, who prostitute

their profession to profit making,--profit making for themselves and

others. And they are often the respectable lawyers, too, men of high

standing, whom you would not think would do such things. They are on the

side of the powerful, and the best of them are all retained by rich

men and corporations. And what is the result? One of the worst evils, I

think, that can befall a country. The poor man goes less and less to the

courts. He is getting bitter, which is bad, which is dangerous. But men

won't see it.”

It was on my tongue to refute this, to say that everybody had a chance.

I could indeed recall many arguments that had been drilled into me;

quotations, even, from court decisions. But something prevented me from

doing this,--something in his manner, which was neither argumentative

nor combative.

“That's why I am going into the law,” he added. “And I intend to stay

in it if I can keep alive. It's a great chance for me--for all of us.

Aren't you at the Law School?”

I nodded. Once more, as his earnest glance fell upon me, came that

suggestion of a subtle, inexplicable link between us; but before I could

reply, steps were heard behind us, and an elderly servant, bareheaded,

was seen coming down the path.

“Are you the reporter?” he demanded somewhat impatiently of Krebs. “If

you want to see Mr. Dome, you'd better come right away. He's going out

for a drive.”

For a while, after he had shaken my hand and departed, I stood in the

snow, looking after him....

VIII

On the Wednesday of that same week the news of my father's sudden and

serious illness came to me in a telegram, and by the time I arrived at

home it was too late to see him again alive. It was my first experience

with death, and what perplexed me continually during the following days

was an inability to feel the loss more deeply. When a child, I had been

easily shaken by the spectacle of sorrow. Had I, during recent years, as

a result of a discovery that emotions arising from human relationships

lead to discomfort and suffering, deliberately been forming a shell,

until now I was incapable of natural feelings? Of late I had seemed

closer to my father, and his letters, though formal, had given evidence

of his affection; in his repressed fashion he had made it clear that he

looked forward to the time when I was to practise with him. Why was it

then, as I gazed upon his fine features in death, that I experienced

no intensity of sorrow? What was it in me that would not break down? He

seemed worn and tired, yet I had never thought of him as weary, never

attributed to him any yearning. And now he was released.

I wondered what had been his private thoughts about himself, his

private opinions about life; and when I reflect now upon my lack of

real knowledge at five and twenty, I am amazed at the futility of an

expensive education which had failed to impress upon me the simple,

basic fact that life was struggle; that either development or

retrogression is the fate of all men, that characters are never

completely made, but always in the making. I had merely a disconcerting

glimpse of this truth, with no powers of formulation, as I sat beside my

mother in the bedroom, where every article evoked some childhood scene.

Here was the dent in the walnut foot-board of the bed made, one wintry

day, by the impact of my box of blocks; the big arm-chair, covered

with I know not what stiff embroidery, which had served on countless

occasions as a chariot driven to victory. I even remembered how every

Wednesday morning I had been banished from the room, which had been so

large a part of my childhood universe, when Ella, the housemaid, had

flung open all its windows and crowded its furniture into the hall.

The thought of my wanderings since then became poignant, almost

terrifying. The room, with all its memories, was unchanged. How safe I

had been within its walls! Why could I not have been, content with what

it represented? of tradition, of custom,--of religion? And what was it

within me that had lured me away from these?

I was miserable, indeed, but my misery was not of the kind I thought it

ought to be. At moments, when my mother relapsed into weeping, I glanced

at her almost in wonder. Such sorrow as hers was incomprehensible. Once

she surprised and discomfited me by lifting her head and gazing fixedly

at me through her tears.

I recall certain impressions of the funeral. There, among the

pall-bearers, was my Cousin Robert Breck, tears in the furrows of his

cheeks. Had he loved my father more than I? The sight of his grief moved

me suddenly and strongly.... It seemed an age since I had worked in

his store, and yet here he was still, coming to town every morning and

returning every evening to Claremore, loving his friends, and mourning

them one by one. Was this, the spectacle presented by my Cousin Robert,

the reward of earthly existence? Were there no other prizes save those

known as greatness of character and depth of human affections? Cousin

Robert looked worn and old. The other pall-bearers, men of weight, of

long standing in the community, were aged, too; Mr. Blackwood, and Mr.

Jules Hollister; and out of place, somehow, in this new church building.

It came to me abruptly that the old order was gone,--had slipped away

during my absence. The church I had known in boyhood had been torn down

to make room for a business building on Boyne Street; the edifice in

which I sat was expensive, gave forth no distinctive note; seemingly

transitory with its hybrid interior, its shiny oak and blue and red

organ-pipes, betokening a compromised and weakened faith. Nondescript,

likewise, seemed the new minister, Mr. Randlett, as he prayed unctuously

in front of the flowers massed on the platform. I vaguely resented his

laudatory references to my father.

The old church, with its severity, had actually stood for something. It

was the Westminster Catechism in wood and stone, and Dr. Pound had been

the human incarnation of that catechism, the fit representative of a

wrathful God, a militant shepherd who had guarded with vigilance his

respectable flock, who had protested vehemently against the sins of the

world by which they were surrounded, against the “dogs, and sorcerers,

and whoremongers, and murderers and idolaters, and whosoever loveth

and maketh a lie.” How Dr. Pound would have put the emphasis of the

Everlasting into those words!

Against what was Mr. Randlett protesting?

My glance wandered to the pews which held the committees from various

organizations, such as the Chamber of Commerce and the Bar Association,

which had come to do honour to my father. And there, differentiated from

the others, I saw the spruce, alert figure of Theodore Watling. He, too,

represented a new type and a new note,--this time a forceful note,

a secular note that had not belonged to the old church, and seemed

likewise anomalistic in the new....

During the long, slow journey in the carriage to the cemetery my mother

did not raise her veil. It was not until she reached out and seized

my hand, convulsively, that I realized she was still a part of my

existence.

In the days that followed I became aware that my father's death had

removed a restrictive element, that I was free now to take without

criticism or opposition whatever course in life I might desire. It may

be that I had apprehended even then that his professional ideals would

not have coincided with my own. Mingled with this sense of emancipation

was a curious feeling of regret, of mourning for something I had never

valued, something fixed and dependable for which he had stood, a rock

and a refuge of which I had never availed myself!... When his will was

opened it was found that the property had been left to my mother during

her lifetime. It was larger than I had thought, four hundred thousand

dollars, shrewdly invested, for the most part, in city real estate. My

father had been very secretive as to money matters, and my mother had no

interest in them.

Three or four days later I received in the mail a typewritten letter

signed by Theodore Watling, expressing sympathy for my bereavement, and

asking me to drop in on him, down town, before I should leave the city.

In contrast to the somewhat dingy offices where my father had practised

in the Blackwood Block, the quarters of Watling, Fowndes and Ripon on

the eighth floor of the new Durrett Building were modern to a degree,

finished in oak and floored with marble, with a railed-off space where

young women with nimble fingers played ceaselessly on typewriters. One

of them informed me that Mr. Watling was busy, but on reading my card

added that she would take it in. Meanwhile, in company with two others

who may have been clients, I waited. This, then, was what it meant to be

a lawyer of importance, to have, like a Chesterfield, an ante-room where

clients cooled their heels and awaited one's pleasure...

The young woman returned, and led me through a corridor to a door on

which was painted Mr. Wailing.

I recall him tilted back in his chair in a debonnair manner beside his

polished desk, the hint of a smile on his lips; and leaning close to him

was a yellow, owl-like person whose eyes, as they turned to me, gave the

impression of having stared for years into hard, artificial lights. Mr.

Watling rose briskly.

“How are you, Hugh?” he said, the warmth of his greeting tempered by

just the note of condolence suitable to my black clothes. “I'm glad

you came. I wanted to see you before you went back to Cambridge. I must

introduce you to Judge Bering, of our State Supreme Court. Judge, this

is Mr. Paret's boy.”

The judge looked me over with a certain slow impressiveness, and gave me

a soft and fleshy hand.

“Glad to know you, Mr. Paret. Your father was a great loss to our bar,”

he declared.

I detected in his tone and manner a slight reservation that could not be

called precisely judicial dignity; it was as though, in these few words,

he had gone to the limit of self-commitment with a stranger--a striking

contrast to the confidential attitude towards Mr. Watling in which I had

surprised him.

“Judge,” said Mr. Watling, sitting down again, “do you recall that time

we all went up to Mr. Paret's house and tried to induce him to run for

mayor? That was before you went on the lower bench.”

The judge nodded gloomily, caressing his watch chain, and suddenly rose

to go.

“That will be all right, then?” Mr. Watling inquired cryptically, with

a smile. The other made a barely perceptible inclination of the head and

departed. Mr. Watling looked at me. “He's one of the best men we have on

the bench to-day,” he added. There was a trace of apology in his tone.

He talked a while of my father, to whom, so he said, he had looked up

ever since he had been admitted to the bar.

“It would be a pleasure to me, Hugh, as well as a matter of pride,” he

said cordially, but with dignity, “to have Matthew Paret's son in my

office. I suppose you will be wishing to take your mother somewhere this

summer, but if you care to come here in the autumn, you will be welcome.

You will begin, of course, as other young men begin,--as I began. But

I am a believer in blood, and I'll be glad to have you. Mr. Fowndes and

Mr. Ripon feel the same way.” He escorted me to the door himself.

Everywhere I went during that brief visit home I was struck by change,

by the crumbling and decay of institutions that once had held me in

thrall, by the superimposition of a new order that as yet had assumed

no definite character. Some of the old landmarks had disappeared; there

were new and aggressive office buildings, new and aggressive residences,

new and aggressive citizens who lived in them, and of whom my mother

spoke with gentle deprecation. Even Claremore, that paradise of my

childhood, had grown shrivelled and shabby, even tawdry, I thought, when

we went out there one Sunday afternoon; all that once represented

the magic word “country” had vanished. The old flat piano, made in

Philadelphia ages ago, the horsehair chairs and sofa had been replaced

by a nondescript furniture of the sort displayed behind plate-glass

windows of the city's stores: rocking-chairs on stands, upholstered in

clashing colours, their coiled springs only half hidden by tassels, and

“ornamental” electric fixtures, instead of the polished coal-oil lamps.

Cousin Jenny had grown white, Willie was a staid bachelor, Helen an old

maid, while Mary had married a tall, anaemic young man with glasses,

Walter Kinley, whom Cousin Robert had taken into the store. As I

contemplated the Brecks odd questions suggested themselves: did honesty

and warm-heartedness necessarily accompany a lack of artistic taste?

and was virtue its own reward, after all? They drew my mother into the

house, took off her wraps, set her down in the most comfortable rocker,

and insisted on making her a cup of tea.

I was touched. I loved them still, and yet I was conscious of

reservations concerning them. They, too, seemed a little on the

defensive with me, and once in a while Mary was caustic in her remarks.

“I guess nothing but New York will be good enough for Hugh now. He'll be

taking Cousin Sarah away from us.”

“Not at all, my dear,” said my mother, gently, “he's going into Mr.

Watling's office next autumn.”

“Theodore Watling?” demanded Cousin Robert, pausing in his carving.

“Yes, Robert. Mr. Watling has been good enough to say that he would like

to have Hugh. Is there anything--?”

“Oh, I'm out of date, Sarah,” Cousin Robert replied, vigorously severing

the leg of the turkey. “These modern lawyers are too smart for me.

Watling's no worse than the others, I suppose,--only he's got more

ability.”

“I've never heard anything against him,” said my mother in a pained

voice. “Only the other day McAlery Willett congratulated me that Hugh

was going to be with him.”

“You mustn't mind Robert, Sarah,” put in Cousin Jenny,--a remark

reminiscent of other days.

“Dad has a notion that his generation is the only honest one,” said

Helen, laughingly, as she passed a plate.

I had gained a sense of superiority, and I was quite indifferent to

Cousin Robert's opinion of Mr. Watling, of modern lawyers in general.

More than once a wave of self-congratulation surged through me that I

had possessed the foresight and initiative to get out of the wholesale

grocery business while there was yet time. I looked at Willie, still

freckled, still literal, still a plodder, at Walter Kinley, and I

thought of the drabness of their lives; at Cousin Robert himself as he

sat smoking his cigar in the bay-window on that dark February day, and

suddenly I pitied him. The suspicion struck me that he had not prospered

of late, and this deepened to a conviction as he talked.

“The Republican Party is going to the dogs,” he asserted.

“It used to be an honourable party, but now it is no better than the

other. Politics are only conducted, now, for the purpose of making

unscrupulous men rich, sir. For years I furnished this city with good

groceries, if I do say it myself. I took a pride in the fact that the

inmates of the hospitals, yes, and the dependent poor in the city's

institutions, should have honest food. You can get anything out of the

city if you are willing to pay the politicians for it. I lost my city

contracts. Why? Because I refused to deal with scoundrels. Weill and

Company and other unscrupulous upstarts are willing to do so, and poison

the poor and the sick with adulterated groceries! The first thing I knew

was that the city auditor was holding back my bills for supplies, and

paying Weill's. That's what politics and business, yes, sir, and the

law, have come to in these days. If a man wants to succeed, he must turn

into a rascal.”

I was not shocked, but I was silent, uncomfortable, wishing that it were

time to take the train back to the city. Cousin Robert's face was

more worn than I had thought, and I contrasted him inevitably with

the forceful person who used to stand, in his worn alpaca coat, on the

pavement in front of his store, greeting with clear-eyed content his

fellow merchants of the city. Willie Breck, too, was silent, and Walter

Kinley took off his glasses and wiped them. In the meanwhile Helen had

left the group in which my mother sat, and, approaching us, laid her

hands on her father's shoulders.

“Now, dad,” she said, in affectionate remonstrance, “you're excited

about politics again, and you know it isn't good for you. And besides,

they're not worth it.”

“You're right, Helen,” he replied. Under the pressure of her hands he

made a strong effort to control himself, and turned to address my mother

across the room.

“I'm getting to be a crotchety old man,” he said. “It's a good thing I

have a daughter to remind me of it.”

“It is a good thing, Robert,” said my mother.

During the rest of our visit he seemed to have recovered something of

his former spirits and poise, taking refuge in the past. They talked

of their own youth, of families whose houses had been landmarks on the

Second Bank.

“I'm worried about your Cousin Robert, Hugh,” my mother confided to me,

when we were at length seated in the train. “I've heard rumours that

things are not so well at the store as they might be.” We looked out

at the winter landscape, so different from that one which had thrilled

every fibre of my being in the days when the railroad on which we

travelled had been a winding narrow gauge. The orchards--those that

remained--were bare; stubble pricked the frozen ground where tassels

had once waved in the hot, summer wind. We flew by row after row of

ginger-bread, suburban houses built on “villa plots,” and I read in

large letters on a hideous sign-board, “Woodbine Park.”

“Hugh, have you ever heard anything against--Mr. Watling?”

“No, mother,” I said. “So far as I knew, he is very much looked up to by

lawyers and business men. He is counsel, I believe, for Mr. Blackwood's

street car line on Boyne Street. And I told you, I believe, that I met

him once at Mr. Kyme's.”

“Poor Robert!” she sighed. “I suppose business trouble does make one

bitter,--I've seen it so often. But I never imagined that it would

overtake Robert, and at his time of life! It is an old and respected

firm, and we have always had a pride in it.”...

That night, when I was going to bed, it was evident that the subject was

still in her mind. She clung to my hand a moment.

“I, too, am afraid of the new, Hugh,” she said, a little tremulously.

“We all grow so, as age comes on.”

“But you are not old, mother,” I protested.

“I have a feeling, since your father has gone, that I have lived my

life, my dear, though I'd like to stay long enough to see you happily

married--to have grandchildren. I was not young when you were born.” And

she added, after a little while, “I know nothing about business affairs,

and now--now that your father is no longer here, sometimes I'm afraid--”

“Afraid of what, mother?”

She tried to smile at me through her tears. We were in the old

sitting-room, surrounded by the books.

“I know it's foolish, and it isn't that I don't trust you. I know that

the son of your father couldn't do anything that was not honourable. And

yet I am afraid of what the world is becoming. The city is growing so

fast, and so many new people are coming in. Things are not the same.

Robert is right, there. And I have heard your father say the same thing.

Hugh, promise me that you will try to remember always what he was, and

what he would wish you to be!”

“I will, mother,” I answered. “But I think you would find that Cousin

Robert exaggerates a little, makes things seem worse than they really

are. Customs change, you know. And politics were never well--Sunday

schools.” I, too, smiled a little. “Father knew that. And he would never

take an active part in them.”

“He was too fine!” she exclaimed.

“And now,” I continued, “Cousin Robert has happened to come in contact

with them through business. That is what has made the difference in him.

Before, he always knew they were corrupt, but he rarely thought about

them.”

“Hugh,” she said suddenly, after a pause, “you must remember one

thing,--that you can afford to be independent. I thank God that your

father has provided for that!”

I was duly admitted, the next autumn, to the bar of my own state, and

was assigned to a desk in the offices of Watling, Fowndes and Ripon.

Larry Weed was my immediate senior among the apprentices, and Larry was

a hero-worshipper. I can see him now. He suggested a bullfrog as he sat

in the little room we shared in common, his arms akimbo over a law book,

his little legs doubled under him, his round, eyes fixed expectantly

on the doorway. And even if I had not been aware of my good fortune

in being connected with such a firm as Theodore Watling's, Larry would

shortly have brought it home to me. During those weeks when I was making

my first desperate attempts at briefing up the law I was sometimes

interrupted by his exclamations when certain figures went by in the

corridor.

“Say, Hugh, do you know who that was?”

“No.”

“Miller Gorse.”

“Who's he?”

“Do you mean to say you never heard of Miller Gorse?”

“I've been away a long time,” I would answer apologetically. A person of

some importance among my contemporaries at Harvard, I had looked forward

to a residence in my native city with the complacency of one who has

seen something of the world,--only to find that I was the least in the

new kingdom. And it was a kingdom. Larry opened up to me something of

the significance and extent of it, something of the identity of the men

who controlled it.

“Miller Gorse,” he said impressively, “is the counsel for the railroad.”

“What railroad? You mean the--” I was adding, when he interrupted me

pityingly.

“After you've been here a while you'll find out there's only one

railroad in this state, so far as politics are concerned. The Ashuela

and Northern, the Lake Shore and the others don't count.”

I refrained from asking any more questions at that time, but afterwards

I always thought of the Railroad as spelled with a capital.

“Miller Gorse isn't forty yet,” Larry told me on another occasion.

“That's doing pretty well for a man who comes near running this state.”

For the sake of acquiring knowledge, I endured Mr. Weed's patronage. I

inquired how Mr. Gorse ran the state.

“Oh, you'll find out soon enough,” he assured me.

“But Mr. Barbour's president of the Railroad.”

“Sure. Once in a while they take something up to him, but as a rule he

leaves things to Gorse.”

Whereupon I resolved to have a good look at Mr. Gorse at the first

opportunity. One day Mr. Watling sent out for some papers.

“He's in there now;” said Larry. “You take 'em.”

“In there” meant Mr. Watling's sanctum. And in there he was. I had only

a glance at the great man, for, with a kindly but preoccupied “Thank

you, Hugh,” Mr. Watling took the papers and dismissed me. Heaviness,

blackness and impassivity,--these were the impressions of Mr. Gorse

which I carried away from that first meeting. The very solidity of his

flesh seemed to suggest the solidity of his position. Such, say the

psychologists, is the effect of prestige.

I remember well an old-fashioned picture puzzle in one of my boyhood

books. The scene depicted was to all appearances a sylvan, peaceful one,

with two happy lovers seated on a log beside a brook; but presently, as

one gazed at the picture, the head of an animal stood forth among the

branches, and then the body; more animals began to appear, bit by bit; a

tiger, a bear, a lion, a jackal, a fox, until at last, whenever I

looked at the page, I did not see the sylvan scene at all, but only the

predatory beasts of the forest. So, one by one, the figures of the real

rulers of the city superimposed themselves for me upon the simple and

democratic design of Mayor, Council, Board of Aldermen, Police Force,

etc., that filled the eye of a naive and trusting electorate which

fondly imagined that it had something to say in government. Miller Gorse

was one of these rulers behind the screen, and Adolf Scherer, of the

Boyne Iron Works, another; there was Leonard Dickinson of the Corn

National Bank; Frederick Grierson, becoming wealthy in city real estate;

Judah B. Tallant, who, though outlawed socially, was deferred to as the

owner of the Morning Era; and even Ralph Hambleton, rapidly superseding

the elderly and conservative Mr. Lord, who had hitherto managed the

great Hambleton estate. Ralph seemed to have become, in a somewhat

gnostic manner, a full-fledged financier. Not having studied law, he had

been home for four years when I became a legal fledgling, and during

the early days of my apprenticeship I was beholden to him for many

“eye openers” concerning the conduct of great affairs. I remember him

sauntering into my room one morning when Larry Weed had gone out on an

errand.

“Hello, Hughie,” he said, with his air of having nothing to do.

“Grinding it out? Where's Watling?”

“Isn't he in his office?”

“No.”

“Well, what can we do for you?” I asked.

Ralph grinned.

“Perhaps I'll tell you when you're a little older. You're too young.”

And he sank down into Larry Weed's chair, his long legs protruding on

the other side of the table. “It's a matter of taxes. Some time ago I

found out that Dickinson and Tallant and others I could mention were

paying a good deal less on their city property than we are. We don't

propose to do it any more--that's all.”

“How can Mr. Watling help you?” I inquired.

“Well, I don't mind giving you a few tips about your profession, Hughie.

I'm going to get Watling to fix it up with the City Hall gang. Old

Lord doesn't like it, I'll admit, and when I told him we had been

contributing to the city long enough, that I proposed swinging into line

with other property holders, he began to blubber about disgrace and what

my grandfather would say if he were alive. Well, he isn't alive. A good

deal of water has flowed under the bridges since his day. It's a mere

matter of business, of getting your respectable firm to retain a City

Hall attorney to fix it up with the assessor.”

“How about the penitentiary?” I ventured, not too seriously.

“I shan't go to the penitentiary, neither will Watling. What I do is to

pay a lawyer's fee. There isn't anything criminal in that, is there?”

For some time after Ralph had departed I sat reflecting upon this new

knowledge, and there came into my mind the bitterness of Cousin Robert

Breck against this City Hall gang, and his remarks about lawyers. I

recalled the tone in which he had referred to Mr. Watling. But Ralph's

philosophy easily triumphed. Why not be practical, and become master

of a situation which one had not made, and could not alter, instead

of being overwhelmed by it? Needless to say, I did not mention the

conversation to Mr. Watling, nor did he dwindle in my estimation. These

necessary transactions did not interfere in any way with his personal

relationships, and his days were filled with kindnesses. And was not

Mr. Ripon, the junior partner, one of the evangelical lights of the

community, conducting advanced Bible classes every week in the Church

of the Redemption?... The unfolding of mysteries kept me alert. And I

understood that, if I was to succeed, certain esoteric knowledge must

be acquired, as it were, unofficially. I kept my eyes and ears open, and

applied myself, with all industry, to the routine tasks with which every

young man in a large legal firm is familiar. I recall distinctly my

pride when, the Board of Aldermen having passed an ordinance lowering

the water rates, I was intrusted with the responsibility of going before

the court in behalf of Mr. Ogilvy's water company, obtaining a temporary

restricting order preventing the ordinance from going at once into

effect. Here was an affair in point. Were it not for lawyers of the

calibre of Watling, Fowndes and Ripon, hard-earned private property

would soon be confiscated by the rapacious horde. Once in a while I was

made aware that Mr. Watling had his eye on me.

“Well, Hugh,” he would say, “how are you getting along? That's right,

stick to it, and after a while we'll hand the drudgery over to somebody

else.”

He possessed the supreme quality of a leader of men in that he took

pains to inform himself concerning the work of the least of his

subordinates; and he had the gift of putting fire into a young man by

a word or a touch of the hand on the shoulder. It was not difficult for

me, therefore, to comprehend Larry Weed's hero-worship, the loyalty of

other members of the firm or of those occupants of the office whom I

have not mentioned. My first impression of him, which I had got at Jerry

Kyme's, deepened as time went on, and I readily shared the belief of

those around me that his legal talents easily surpassed those of any of

his contemporaries. I can recall, at this time, several noted cases in

the city when I sat in court listening to his arguments with thrills

of pride. He made us all feel--no matter how humble may have been our

contributions to the preparation--that we had a share in his triumphs.

We remembered his manner with judges and juries, and strove to emulate

it. He spoke as if there could be no question as to his being right

as to the law and the facts, and yet, in some subtle way that bated

analysis, managed not to antagonize the court. Victory was in the air in

that office. I do not mean to say there were not defeats; but frequently

these defeats, by resourcefulness, by a never-say-die spirit, by a

consummate knowledge, not only of the law, but of other things at which

I have hinted, were turned into ultimate victories. We fought cases from

one court to another, until our opponents were worn out or the decision

was reversed. We won, and that spirit of winning got into the blood.

What was most impressed on me in those early years, I think, was the

discovery that there was always a path--if one were clever enough to

find it--from one terrace to the next higher. Staying power was the most

prized of all the virtues. One could always, by adroitness, compel a

legal opponent to fight the matter out all over again on new ground, or

at least on ground partially new. If the Court of Appeals should fail

one, there was the Supreme Court; there was the opportunity, also, to

shift from the state to the federal courts; and likewise the much-prized

device known as a change of venue, when a judge was supposed to be

“prejudiced.”

IX.

As my apprenticeship advanced I grew more and more to the inhabitants of

our city into two kinds, the who were served, and the inefficient, who

were separate efficient, neglected; but the mental process of which the

classification was the result was not so deliberate as may be supposed.

Sometimes, when an important client would get into trouble, the affair

took me into the police court, where I saw the riff-raff of the city

penned up, waiting to have justice doled out to them: weary women who

had spent the night in cells, indifferent now as to the front they

presented to the world, the finery rued that they had tended so

carefully to catch the eyes of men on the darkened streets; brazen young

girls, who blazed forth defiance to all order; derelict men, sodden and

hopeless, with scrubby beards; shifty looking burglars and pickpockets.

All these I beheld, at first with twinges of pity, later to mass them

with the ugly and inevitable with whom society had to deal somehow.

Lawyers, after all, must be practical men. I came to know the justices

of these police courts, as well as other judges. And underlying my

acquaintance with all of them was the knowledge--though not on the

threshold of my consciousness--that they depended for their living,

every man of them, those who were appointed and those who were elected,

upon a political organization which derived its sustenance from the

element whence came our clients. Thus by degrees the sense of belonging

to a special priesthood had grown on me.

I recall an experience with that same Mr. Nathan. Weill, the wholesale

grocer of whose commerce with the City Hall my Cousin Robert Breck had

so bitterly complained. Late one afternoon Mr. Weill's carriage ran

over a child on its way up-town through one of the poorer districts. The

parents, naturally, were frantic, and the coachman was arrested. This

was late in the afternoon, and I was alone in the office when the

telephone rang. Hurrying to the police station, I found Mr. Weill in

a state of excitement and abject fear, for an ugly crowd had gathered

outside.

“Could not Mr. Watling or Mr. Fowndes come?” demanded the grocer.

With an inner contempt for the layman's state of mind on such occasions

I assured him of my competency to handle the case. He was impressed, I

think, by the sergeant's deference, who knew what it meant to have such

an office as ours interfere with the affair. I called up the prosecuting

attorney, who sent to Monahan's saloon, close by, and procured a release

for the coachman on his own recognizance, one of many signed in blank

and left there by the justice for privileged cases. The coachman was

hustled out by a back door, and the crowd dispersed.

The next morning, while a score or more of delinquents sat in the

anxious seats, Justice Garry recognized me and gave me precedence. And

Mr. Weill, with a sigh of relief, paid his fine.

“Mr. Paret, is it?” he asked, as we stood together for a moment on

the sidewalk outside the court. “You have managed this well. I will

remember.”

He was sued, of course. When he came to the office he insisted on

discussing the case with Mr. Watling, who sent for me.

“That is a bright young man,” Mr. Weill declared, shaking my hand. “He

will get on.”

“Some day,” said Mr. Watling, “he may save you a lot of money, Weill.”

“When my friend Mr. Watling is United States Senator,--eh?”

Mr. Watling laughed. “Before that, I hope. I advise you to compromise

this suit, Weill,” he added. “How would a thousand dollars strike you?

I've had Paret look up the case, and he tells me the little girl has had

to have an operation.”

“A thousand dollars!” cried the grocer. “What right have these people to

let their children play on the streets? It's an outrage.”

“Where else have the children to play?” Mr. Watling touched his arm.

“Weill,” he said gently, “suppose it had been your little girl?” The

grocer pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his bald forehead. But he

rallied a little.

“You fight these damage cases for the street railroads all through the

courts.”

“Yes,” Mr. Watling agreed, “but there a principle is involved. If the

railroads once got into the way of paying damages for every careless

employee, they would soon be bankrupt through blackmail. But here you

have a child whose father is a poor janitor and can't afford sickness.

And your coachman, I imagine, will be more particular in the future.”

In the end Mr. Weill made out a cheque and departed in a good humour,

convinced that he was well out of the matter. Here was one of many

instances I could cite of Mr. Watling's tenderness of heart. I felt,

moreover, as if he had done me a personal favour, since it was I who had

recommended the compromise. For I had been to the hospital and had seen

the child on the cot,--a dark little thing, lying still in her pain,

with the bewildered look of a wounded animal....

Not long after this incident of Mr. Weill's damage suit I obtained a

more or less definite promotion by the departure of Larry Weed. He had

suddenly developed a weakness of the lungs. Mr. Watling got him a place

in Denver, and paid his expenses west.

The first six or seven years I spent in the office of Wading, Fowndes

and Ripon were of importance to my future career, but there is little

to relate of them. I was absorbed not only in learning law, but in

acquiring that esoteric knowledge at which I have hinted--not to be

had from my seniors and which I was convinced was indispensable to

a successful and lucrative practice. My former comparison of the

organization of our city to a picture puzzle wherein the dominating

figures become visible only after long study is rather inadequate. A

better analogy would be the human anatomy: we lawyers, of course, were

the brains; the financial and industrial interests the body, helpless

without us; the City Hall politicians, the stomach that must continually

be fed. All three, law, politics and business, were interdependent,

united by a nervous system too complex to be developed here. In these

years, though I worked hard and often late, I still found time for

convivialities, for social gaieties, yet little by little without

realizing the fact, I was losing zest for the companionship of my former

intimates. My mind was becoming polarized by the contemplation of

one object, success, and to it human ties were unconsciously being

sacrificed.

Tom Peters began to feel this, even at a time when I believed

myself still to be genuinely fond of him. Considering our respective

temperaments in youth, it is curious that he should have been the first

to fall in love and marry. One day he astonished me by announcing his

engagement to Susan Blackwood.

“That ends the liquor, Hughie,” he told me, beamingly. “I promised her

I'd eliminate it.”

He did eliminate it, save for mild relapses on festive occasions. A more

seemingly incongruous marriage could scarcely be imagined, and yet it

was a success from the start. From a slim, silent, self-willed girl

Susan had grown up into a tall, rather rawboned and energetic young

woman. She was what we called in those days “intellectual,” and had

gone in for kindergartens, and after her marriage she turned out to be

excessively domestic; practising her theories, with entire success, upon

a family that showed a tendency to increase at an alarming rate.

Tom, needless to say, did not become intellectual. He settled

down--prematurely, I thought--into what is known as a family man,

curiously content with the income he derived from the commission

business and with life in general; and he developed a somewhat critical

view of the tendencies of the civilization by which he was surrounded.

Susan held it also, but she said less about it. In the comfortable but

unpretentious house they rented on Cedar Street we had many discussions,

after the babies had been put to bed and the door of the living-room

closed, in order that our voices might not reach the nursery. Perry

Blackwood, now Tom's brother-in-law, was often there. He, too, had

lapsed into what I thought was an odd conservatism. Old Josiah, his

father, being dead, he occupied himself mainly with looking after

certain family interests, among which was the Boyne Street car line.

Among “business men” he was already getting the reputation of being a

little difficult to deal with. I was often the subject of their banter,

and presently I began to suspect that they regarded my career and

beliefs with some concern. This gave me no uneasiness, though at limes

I lost my temper. I realized their affection for me; but privately

I regarded them as lacking in ambition, in force, in the fighting

qualities necessary for achievement in this modern age. Perhaps,

unconsciously, I pitied them a little.

“How is Judah B. to-day, Hughie?” Tom would inquire. “I hear you've put

him up for the Boyne Club, now that Mr. Watling has got him out of that

libel suit.”

“Carter Ives is dead,” Perry would add, sarcastically, “let bygones be

bygones.”

It was well known that Mr. Tallant, in the early days of his newspaper,

had blackmailed Mr. Ives out of some hundred thousand dollars. And

that this, more than any other act, stood in the way, with certain

recalcitrant gentlemen, of his highest ambition, membership in the

Boyne.

“The trouble with you fellows is that you refuse to deal with conditions

as you find them,” I retorted. “We didn't make them, and we can't change

them. Tallant's a factor in the business life of this city, and he has

to be counted with.”

Tom would shake his head exasperatingly.

“Why don't you get after Ralph?” I demanded. “He doesn't antagonize

Tallant, either.”

“Ralph's hopeless,” said Tom. “He was born a pirate, you weren't,

Hughie. We think there's a chance for his salvation, don't we, Perry?”

I refused to accept the remark as flattering.

Another object of their assaults was Frederick Grierson, who by this

time had emerged from obscurity as a small dealer in real estate into a

manipulator of blocks and corners.

“I suppose you think it's a lawyer's business to demand an ethical

bill of health of every client,” I said. “I won't stand up for all of

Tallant's career, of course, but Mr. Wading has a clear right to take

his cases. As for Grierson, it seems to me that's a matter of giving a

dog a bad name. Just because his people weren't known here, and because

he has worked up from small beginnings. To get down to hard-pan, you

fellows don't believe in democracy,--in giving every man a chance to

show what's in him.”

“Democracy is good!” exclaimed Perry. “If the kind of thing we're coming

to is democracy, God save the state!”...

On the other hand I found myself drawing closer to Ralph Hambleton,

sometimes present at these debates, as the only one of my boyhood

friends who seemed to be able to “deal with conditions as he found

them.” Indeed, he gave one the impression that, if he had had the making

of them, he would not have changed them.

“What the deuce do you expect?” I once heard him inquire with

good-natured contempt. “Business isn't charity, it's war.

“There are certain things,” maintained Perry, stoutly, “that gentlemen

won't do.”

“Gentlemen!” exclaimed Ralph, stretching his slim six feet two: We were

sitting in the Boyne Club. “It's ungentlemanly to kill, or burn a town

or sink a ship, but we keep armies and navies for the purpose. For a

man with a good mind, Perry, you show a surprising inability to think

things, out to a logical conclusion. What the deuce is competition, when

you come down to it? Christianity? Not by a long shot! If our nations

are slaughtering men and starving populations in other countries,--are

carried on, in fact, for the sake of business, if our churches are

filled with business men and our sky pilots pray for the government, you

can't expect heathen individuals like me to do business on a Christian

basis,--if there is such a thing. You can make rules for croquet, but

not for a game that is based on the natural law of the survival of the

fittest. The darned fools in the legislatures try it occasionally, but

we all know it's a sop to the 'common people.' Ask Hughie here if there

ever was a law put on the statute books that his friend Watling couldn't

get 'round'? Why, you've got competition even among the churches. Yours,

where I believe you teach in the Sunday school, would go bankrupt if it

proclaimed real Christianity. And you'll go bankrupt if you practise

it, Perry, my boy. Some early, wide-awake, competitive, red-blooded bird

will relieve you of the Boyne Street car line.”

It was one of this same new and “fittest” species who had already

relieved poor Mr. McAlery Willett of his fortune. Mr. Willett was a

trusting soul who had never known how to take care of himself or his

money, people said, and now that he had lost it they blamed him. Some

had been saved enough for him and Nancy to live on in the old house,

with careful economy. It was Nancy who managed the economy, who

accomplished remarkable things with a sum they would have deemed poverty

in former days. Her mother had died while I was at Cambridge. Reverses

did not subdue Mr. Willett's spirits, and the fascination modern

“business” had for him seemed to grow in proportion to the misfortunes

it had caused him. He moved into a tiny office in the Durrett Building,

where he appeared every morning about half-past ten to occupy himself

with heaven knows what short cuts to wealth, with prospectuses of

companies in Mexico or Central America or some other distant place:

once, I remember, it was a tea, company in which he tried to interest

his friends, to raise in the South a product he maintained would surpass

Orange Pekoe. In the afternoon between three and four he would turn up

at the Boyne Club, as well groomed, as spruce as ever, generally with a

flower in his buttonhole. He never forgot that he was a gentleman,

and he had a gentleman's notions of the fitness of things, and it was

against his principles to use, a gentleman's club for the furtherance of

his various enterprises.

“Drop into my office some day, Dickinson,” he would say. “I think I've

got something there that might interest you!”

He reminded me, when I met him, that he had always predicted I would get

along in life....

The portrait of Nancy at this period is not so easily drawn. The decline

of the family fortunes seemed to have had as little effect upon her as

upon her father, although their characters differed sharply. Something

of that spontaneity, of that love of life and joy in it she had

possessed in youth she must have inherited from McAlery Willett,

but these qualities had disappeared in her long before the coming of

financial reverses. She was nearing thirty, and in spite of her beauty

and the rarer distinction that can best be described as breeding, she

had never married. Men admired her, but from a distance; she kept them

at arm's length, they said: strangers who visited the city invariably

picked her out of an assembly and asked who she was; one man from New

York who came to visit Ralph and who had been madly in love with her,

she had amazed many people by refusing, spurning all he might have

given her. This incident seemed a refutation of the charge that she was

calculating. As might have been foretold, she had the social gift in

a remarkable degree, and in spite of the limitations of her purse the

knack of dressing better than other women, though at that time the

organization of our social life still remained comparatively simple, the

custom of luxurious and expensive entertainment not having yet set in.

The more I reflect upon those days, the more surprising does it seem

that I was not in love with her. It may be that I was, unconsciously,

for she troubled my thoughts occasionally, and she represented all the

qualities I admired in her sex. The situation that had existed at the

time of our first and only quarrel had been reversed, I was on the

highroad to the worldly success I had then resolved upon, Nancy was

poor, and for that reason, perhaps, prouder than ever. If she was

inaccessible to others, she had the air of being peculiarly inaccessible

to me--the more so because some of the superficial relics of our

intimacy remained, or rather had been restored. Her very manner of

camaraderie seemed paradoxically to increase the distance between us. It

piqued me. Had she given me the least encouragement, I am sure I should

have responded; and I remember that I used occasionally to speculate as

to whether she still cared for me, and took this method of hiding her

real feelings. Yet, on the whole, I felt a certain complacency about it

all; I knew that suffering was disagreeable, I had learned how to avoid

it, and I may have had, deep within me, a feeling that I might marry her

after all. Meanwhile my life was full, and gave promise of becoming even

fuller, more absorbing and exciting in the immediate future.

One of the most fascinating figures, to me, of that Order being woven,

like a cloth of gold, out of our hitherto drab civilization,--an Order

into which I was ready and eager to be initiated,--was that of Adolf

Scherer, the giant German immigrant at the head of the Boyne Iron

Works. His life would easily lend itself to riotous romance. In the old

country, in a valley below the castle perched on the rack above, he had

begun life by tending his father's geese. What a contrast to “Steeltown”

with its smells and sickening summer heat, to the shanty where Mrs.

Scherer took boarders and bent over the wash-tub! She, too, was an

immigrant, but lived to hear her native Wagner from her own box at

Covent Garden; and he to explain, on the deck of an imperial yacht,

to the man who might have been his sovereign certain processes in the

manufacture of steel hitherto untried on that side of the Atlantic. In

comparison with Adolf Scherer, citizen of a once despised democracy, the

minor prince in whose dominions he had once tended geese was of small

account indeed!

The Adolf Scherer of that day--though it is not so long ago as time

flies--was even more solid and impressive than the man he afterwards

became, when he reached the dizzier heights from which he delivered

to an eager press opinions on politics and war, eugenics and woman's

suffrage and other subjects that are the despair of specialists. Had he

stuck to steel, he would have remained invulnerable. But even then

he was beginning to abandon the field of production for that of

exploitation: figuratively speaking, he had taken to soap, which with

the aid of water may be blown into beautiful, iridescent bubbles to

charm the eye. Much good soap, apparently, has gone that way, never to

be recovered. Everybody who was anybody began to blow bubbles about that

time, and the bigger the bubble the greater its attraction for investors

of hard-earned savings. Outside of this love for financial iridescence,

let it be called, Mr. Scherer seemed to care little then for glitter

of any sort. Shortly after his elevation to the presidency of the Boyne

Iron Works he had been elected a member of the Boyne Club,--an honour of

which, some thought, he should have been more sensible; but generally,

when in town, he preferred to lunch at a little German restaurant

annexed to a saloon, where I used often to find him literally towering

above the cloth,--for he was a giant with short legs,--his napkin

tucked into his shirt front, engaged in lively conversation with the

ministering Heinrich. The chef at the club, Mr. Scherer insisted, could

produce nothing equal to Heinrich's sauer-kraut and sausage. My earliest

relationship with Mr. Scherer was that of an errand boy, of bringing

to him for his approval papers which might not be intrusted to a common

messenger. His gruffness and brevity disturbed me more than I cared to

confess. I was pretty sure that he eyed me with the disposition of the

self-made to believe that college educations and good tailors were

the heaviest handicaps with which a young man could be burdened: and I

suspected him of an inimical attitude toward the older families of the

city. Certain men possessed his confidence; and he had built, as it

were, a stockade about them, sternly keeping the rest of the world

outside. In Theodore Watling he had a childlike faith.

Thus I studied him, with a deliberation which it is the purpose of these

chapters to confess, though he little knew that he was being made the

subject of analysis. Nor did I ever venture to talk with him, but held

strictly to my role of errand boy,--even after the conviction came over

me that he was no longer indifferent to my presence. The day arrived,

after some years, when he suddenly thrust toward me a big, hairy hand

that held the document he was examining.

“Who drew this, Mr. Paret!” he demanded.

Mr. Ripon, I told him.

The Boyne Works were buying up coal-mines, and this was a contract

looking to the purchase of one in Putman County, provided, after a

certain period of working, the yield and quality should come up to

specifications. Mr. Scherer requested me to read one of the sections,

which puzzled him. And in explaining it an idea flashed over me.

“Do you mind my making a suggestion, Mr. Scherer?” I ventured.

“What is it?” he asked brusquely.

I showed him how, by the alteration of a few words, the difficulty to

which he had referred could not only be eliminated, but that certain

possible penalties might be evaded, while the apparent meaning of the

section remained unchanged. In other words, it gave the Boyne Iron Works

an advantage that was not contemplated. He seized the paper, stared

at what I had written in pencil on the margin, and then stared at me.

Abruptly, he began to laugh.

“Ask Mr. Wading what he thinks of it?”

“I intended to, provided it had your approval, sir,” I replied.

“You have my approval, Mr. Paret,” he declared, rather cryptically, and

with the slight German hardening of the v's into which he relapsed at

times. “Bring it to the Works this afternoon.”

Mr. Wading agreed to the alteration. He looked at me amusedly.

“Yes, I think that's an improvement, Hugh,” he said. I had a feeling

that I had gained ground, and from this time on I thought I detected a

change in his attitude toward me; there could be no doubt about the new

attitude of Mr. Scherer, who would often greet me now with a smile and

a joke, and sometimes went so far as to ask my opinions.... Then, about

six months later, came the famous Ribblevale case that aroused the moral

indignation of so many persons, among whom was Perry Blackwood.

“You know as well as I do, Hugh, how this thing is being manipulated,”

he declared at Tom's one Sunday evening; “there was nothing the matter

with the Ribblevale Steel Company--it was as right as rain before

Leonard Dickinson and Grierson and Scherer and that crowd you train with

began to talk it down at the Club. Oh, they're very compassionate. I've

heard 'em. Dickinson, privately, doesn't think much of Ribblevale paper,

and Pugh” (the president of the Ribblevale) “seems worried and looks

badly. It's all very clever, but I'd hate to tell you in plain words

what I'd call it.”

“Go ahead,” I challenged him audaciously. “You haven't any proof that

the Ribblevale wasn't in trouble.”

“I heard Mr. Pugh tell my father the other day it was a d--d outrage. He

couldn't catch up with these rumours, and some of his stockholders were

liquidating.”

“You, don't suppose Pugh would want to admit his situation, do you?” I

asked.

“Pugh's a straight man,” retorted Perry. “That's more than I can say

for any of the other gang, saving your presence. The unpleasant truth is

that Scherer and the Boyne people want the Ribblevale, and you ought to

know it if you don't.” He looked at me very hard through the glasses he

had lately taken to wearing. Tom, who was lounging by the fire, shifted

his position uneasily. I smiled, and took another cigar.

“I believe Ralph is right, Perry, when he calls you a sentimentalist.

For you there's a tragedy behind every ordinary business transaction.

The Ribblevale people are having a hard time to keep their heads above

water, and immediately you smell conspiracy. Dickinson and Scherer have

been talking it down. How about it, Tom?”

But Tom, in these debates, was inclined to be noncommittal, although it

was clear they troubled him.

“Oh, don't ask me, Hughie,” he said.

“I suppose I ought to cultivate the scientific point of view, and look

with impartial interest at this industrial cannibalism,” returned Perry,

sarcastically. “Eat or be eaten that's what enlightened self-interest

has come to. After all, Ralph would say, it is nature, the insect world

over again, the victim duped and crippled before he is devoured, and the

lawyer--how shall I put it?--facilitating the processes of swallowing

and digesting....”

There was no use arguing with Perry when he was in this vein....

Since I am not writing a technical treatise, I need not go into the

details of the Ribblevale suit. Since it to say that the affair, after

a while, came apparently to a deadlock, owing to the impossibility of

getting certain definite information from the Ribblevale books, which

had been taken out of the state. The treasurer, for reasons of his own,

remained out of the state also; the ordinary course of summoning him

before a magistrate in another state had naturally been resorted to, but

the desired evidence was not forthcoming.

“The trouble is,” Mr. Wading explained to Mr. Scherer, “that there is no

law in the various states with a sufficient penalty attached that will

compel the witness to divulge facts he wishes to conceal.”

It was the middle of a February afternoon, and they were seated in deep,

leather chairs in one corner of the reading room of the Boyne Club. They

had the place to themselves. Fowndes was there also, one leg twisted

around the other in familiar fashion, a bored look on his long and

sallow face. Mr. Wading had telephoned to the office for me to bring

them some papers bearing on the case.

“Sit down, Hugh,” he said kindly.

“Now we have present a genuine legal mind,” said Mr. Scherer, in the

playful manner he had adopted of late, while I grinned appreciatively

and took a chair. Mr. Watling presently suggested kidnapping the

Ribblevale treasurer until he should promise to produce the books as the

only way out of what seemed an impasse. But Mr. Scherer brought down a

huge fist on his knee.

“I tell you it is no joke, Watling, we've got to win that suit,” he

asserted.

“That's all very well,” replied Mr. Watling. “But we're a respectable

firm, you know. We haven't had to resort to safe-blowing, as yet.”

Mr. Scherer shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say it were a matter

of indifference to him what methods were resorted to. Mr. Watling's eyes

met mine; his glance was amused, yet I thought I read in it a query

as to the advisability, in my presence, of going too deeply into the

question of ways and means. I may have been wrong. At any rate, its

sudden effect was to embolden me to give voice to an idea that had begun

to simmer in my mind, that excited me, and yet I had feared to utter it.

This look of my chief's, and the lighter tone the conversation had taken

decided me.

“Why wouldn't it be possible to draw up a bill to fit the situation?” I

inquired.

Mr. Wading started.

“What do you mean?” he asked quickly.

All three looked at me. I felt the blood come into my face, but it was

too late to draw back.

“Well--the legislature is in session. And since, as Mr. Watling says,

there is no sufficient penalty in other states to compel the witness to

produce the information desired, why not draw up a bill and--and have

it passed--” I paused for breath--“imposing a sufficient penalty on home

corporations in the event of such evasions. The Ribblevale Steel Company

is a home corporation.”

I had shot my bolt.... There followed what was for me an anxious

silence, while the three of them continued to stare at me. Mr. Watling

put the tips of his fingers together, and I became aware that he was not

offended, that he was thinking rapidly.

“By George, why not, Fowndes?” he demanded.

“Well,” said Fowndes, “there's an element of risk in such a proceeding I

need not dwell upon.”

“Risk!” cried the senior partner vigorously. “There's risk in

everything. They'll howl, of course. But they howl anyway, and nobody

ever listens to them. They'll say it's special legislation, and the

Pilot will print sensational editorials for a few days. But what of

it? All of that has happened before. I tell you, if we can't see those

books, we'll lose the suit. That's in black and white. And, as a matter

of justice, we're entitled to know what we want to know.”

“There might be two opinions as to that,” observed Fowndes, with his

sardonic smile.

Mr. Watling paid no attention to this remark. He was already deep in

thought. It was characteristic of his mind to leap forward, seize a

suggestion that often appeared chimerical to a man like Fowndes and turn

it into an accomplished Fact. “I believe you've hit it, Hugh,” he said.

“We needn't bother about the powers of the courts in other states. We'll

put into this bill an appeal to our court for an order on the clerk

to compel the witness to come before the court and testify, and we'll

provide for a special commissioner to take depositions in the state

where the witness is. If the officers of a home corporation who are

outside of the state refuse to testify, the penalty will be that the

ration goes into the hands of a receiver.”

Fowndes whistled.

“That's going some!” he said.

“Well, we've got to go some. How about it, Scherer?”

Even Mr. Scherer's brown eyes were snapping.

“We have got to win that suit, Watling.”

We were all excited, even Fowndes, I think, though he remained

expressionless. Ours was the tense excitement of primitive man in chase:

the quarry which had threatened to elude us was again in view, and not

unlikely to fall into our hands. Add to this feeling, on my part,

the thrill that it was I who had put them on the scent. I had all the

sensations of an aspiring young brave who for the first time is admitted

to the councils of the tribe!

“It ought to be a popular bill, too,” Mr. Schemer was saying, with a

smile of ironic appreciation at the thought of demagogues advocating it.

“We should have one of Lawler's friends introduce it.”

“Oh, we shall have it properly introduced,” replied Mr. Wading.

“It may come back at us,” suggested Fowndes pessimistically. “The Boyne

Iron Works is a home corporation too, if I am not mistaken.”

“The Boyne Iron Works has the firm of Wading, Fowndes and Ripon behind

it,” asserted Mr. Scherer, with what struck me as a magnificent faith.

“You mustn't forget Paret,” Mr. Watling reminded him, with a wink at me.

We had risen. Mr. Scherer laid a hand on my arm.

“No, no, I do not forget him. He will not permit me to forget him.”

A remark, I thought, that betrayed some insight into my character... Mr.

Watling called for pen and paper and made then and there a draft of the

proposed bill, for no time was to be lost. It was dark when we left

the Club, and I recall the elation I felt and strove to conceal as I

accompanied my chief back to the office. The stenographers and clerks

were gone; alone in the library we got down the statutes and set to

work to perfect the bill from the rough draft, on which Mr. Fowndes had

written his suggestions. I felt that a complete yet subtle change had

come over my relationship with Mr. Watling.

In the midst of our labours he asked me to call up the attorney for the

Railroad. Mr. Gorse was still at his office.

“Hello! Is that you, Miller?” Mr. Watling said. “This is Wading. When

can I see you for a few minutes this evening? Yes, I am leaving for

Washington at nine thirty. Eight o'clock. All right, I'll be there.”

It was almost eight before he got the draft finished to his

satisfaction, and I had picked it out on the typewriter. As I handed it

to him, my chief held it a moment, gazing at me with an odd smile.

“You seem to have acquired a good deal of useful knowledge, here and

there, Hugh,” he observed.

“I've tried to keep my eyes open, Mr. Watling,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “there are a great many things a young man practising

law in these days has to learn for himself. And if I hadn't given you

credit for some cleverness, I shouldn't have wanted you here. There's

only one way to look at--at these matters we have been discussing, my

boy, that's the common-sense way, and if a man doesn't get that point of

view by himself, nobody can teach it to him. I needn't enlarge upon it.”

“No, sir,” I said.

He smiled again, but immediately became serious.

“If Mr. Gorse should approve of this bill, I'm going to send you down to

the capital--to-night. Can you go?”

I nodded.

“I want you to look out for the bill in the legislature. Of course there

won't be much to do, except to stand by, but you will get a better idea

of what goes on down there.”

I thanked him, and told him I would do my best.

“I'm sure of that,” he replied. “Now it's time to go to see Gorse.”

The legal department of the Railroad occupied an entire floor of the

Corn Bank building. I had often been there on various errands, having on

occasions delivered sealed envelopes to Mr. Gorse himself, approaching

him in the ordinary way through a series of offices. But now, following

Mr. Watling through the dimly lighted corridor, we came to a door

on which no name was painted, and which was presently opened by a

stenographer. There was in the proceeding a touch of mystery that

revived keenly my boyish love for romance; brought back the days when I

had been, in turn, Captain Kidd and Ali Baba.

I have never realized more strongly than in that moment the

psychological force of prestige. Little by little, for five years, an

estimate of the extent of Miller Gorse's power had been coming home to

me, and his features stood in my mind for his particular kind of power.

He was a tremendous worker, and often remained in his office until ten

and eleven at night. He dismissed the stenographer by the wave of a hand

which seemed to thrust her bodily out of the room.

“Hello, Miller,” said Mr. Watling.

“Hello, Theodore,” replied Mr. Gorse.

“This is Paret, of my office.”

“I know,” said Mr. Gorse, and nodded toward me. I was impressed by the

felicity with which a cartoonist of the Pilot had once caricatured him

by the use of curved lines. The circle of the heavy eyebrows ended at

the wide nostrils; the mouth was a crescent, but bowed downwards; the

heavy shoulders were rounded. Indeed, the only straight line to be

discerned about him was that of his hair, black as bitumen, banged

across his forehead; even his polished porphyry eyes were constructed on

some curvilinear principle, and never seemed to focus. It might be said

of Mr. Gorse that he had an overwhelming impersonality. One could never

be quite sure that one's words reached the mark.

In spite of the intimacy which I knew existed between them, in my

presence at least Mr. Gorse's manner was little different with Mr.

Watling than it was with other men. Mr. Wading did not seem to mind.

He pulled up a chair close to the desk and began, without any

preliminaries, to explain his errand.

“It's about the Ribblevale affair,” he said. “You know we have a suit.”

Gorse nodded.

“We've got to get at the books, Miller,--that's all there is to it. I

told you so the other day. Well, we've found out a way, I think.”

He thrust his hand in his pocket, while the railroad attorney remained

impassive, and drew out the draft of the bill. Mr. Gorse read it, then

read it over again, and laid it down in front of him.

“Well,” he said.

“I want to put that through both houses and have the governor's

signature to it by the end of the week.”

“It seems a little raw, at first sight, Theodore,” said Mr. Gorse, with

the suspicion of a smile.

My chief laughed a little.

“It's not half so raw as some things I might mention, that went through

like greased lightning,” he replied. “What can they do? I believe it

will hold water. Tallant's, and most of the other newspapers in the

state, won't print a line about it, and only Socialists and Populists

read the Pilot. They're disgruntled anyway. The point is, there's no

other way out for us. Just think a moment, bearing in mind what I've

told you about the case, and you'll see it.”

Mr. Gorse took up the paper again, and read the draft over.

“You know as well as I do, Miller, how dangerous it is to leave this

Ribblevale business at loose ends. The Carlisle steel people and the

Lake Shore road are after the Ribblevale Company, and we can't afford

to run any risk of their getting it. It's logically a part of the Boyne

interests, as Scherer says, and Dickinson is ready with the money for

the reorganization. If the Carlisle people and the Lake Shore get it,

the product will be shipped out by the L and G, and the Railroad will

lose. What would Barbour say?”

Mr. Barbour, as I have perhaps mentioned, was the president of the

Railroad, and had his residence in the other great city of the state. He

was then, I knew, in the West.

“We've got to act now,” insisted Mr. Watling. “That's open and shut.

If you have any other plan, I wish you'd trot it out. If not, I want

a letter to Paul Varney and the governor. I'm going to send Paret down

with them on the night train.”

It was clear to me then, in the discussion following, that Mr. Watling's

gift of persuasion, though great, was not the determining factor in

Mr. Gorse's decision. He, too, possessed boldness, though he preferred

caution. Nor did the friendship between the two enter into the

transaction. I was impressed more strongly than ever with the fact

that a lawsuit was seldom a mere private affair between two persons or

corporations, but involved a chain of relationships and nine times

out of ten that chain led up to the Railroad, which nearly always was

vitally interested in these legal contests. Half an hour of masterly

presentation of the situation was necessary before Mr. Gorse became

convinced that the introduction of the bill was the only way out for all

concerned.

“Well, I guess you're right, Theodore,” he said at length. Whereupon

he seized his pen and wrote off two notes with great rapidity. These he

showed to Mr. Watling, who nodded and returned them. They were folded

and sealed, and handed to me. One was addressed to Colonel Paul Varney,

and the other to the Hon. W. W. Trulease, governor of the state.

“You can trust this young man?” demanded Mr. Gorse.

“I think so,” replied Mr. Watling, smiling at me. “The bill was his own

idea.”

The railroad attorney wheeled about in his chair and looked at me;

looked around me, would better express it, with his indefinite,

encompassing yet inclusive glance. I had riveted his attention. And from

henceforth, I knew, I should enter into his calculations. He had made

for me a compartment in his mind.

“His own idea!” he repeated.

“I merely suggested it,” I was putting in, when he cut me short.

“Aren't you the son of Matthew Paret?”

“Yes,” I said.

He gave me a queer glance, the significance of which I left

untranslated. My excitement was too great to analyze what he meant by

this mention of my father....

When we reached the sidewalk my chief gave me a few parting

instructions.

“I need scarcely say, Hugh,” he added, “that your presence in the

capital should not be advertised as connected with this--legislation.

They will probably attribute it to us in the end, but if you're

reasonably careful, they'll never be able to prove it. And there's no

use in putting our cards on the table at the beginning.”

“No indeed, sir!” I agreed.

He took my hand and pressed it.

“Good luck,” he said. “I know you'll get along all right.”