"You mean when we're both ... free?"
"Suppose I put it ... when _you're_ free?"
"Oh, then there may be ... some one else."
"Some one ... I know?"
I delved into another drawer, hiding my face. "Some one you may have
heard of; but I don't--I don't think you know her."
When I had pushed in the drawer I raised myself; but I was alone in the
room. Ten minutes later I had left the house without a good-by on
either side.
On the door-step, in my working-man's costume, and with the everlasting
bag and suit-case in my hands, I looked up at a starry, windy sky, with
the trees of the Common tossing beneath it.
"My God, what an end!" I cried, inwardly.
But, as far as my knowledge or purpose went, an end it was.
*CHAPTER II*
Noble intentions being easier to conceive than to carry out, it is
hardly surprising that on settling again in New York I found myself "let
down." The sense of adventure was out of it, while that of the mission
had crept in. The old friends were still the old friends; but if my
intercourse with them was not less spontaneous it was certainly more
self-conscious. Back in my squint-eyed room, with the new paper and the
more showy set of fungi, the knowledge that I was there because I chose
to be there, and not because I couldn't help it, marked all my goings
and comings with a point of interrogation.
In some measure, too, it was a point of disapproval. That is to say,
those who welcomed me back took me somewhat in the spirit of a "returned
empty."
"Why, yes, of course, if you want it," was Miss Smith's reply to my
request to have my old room back again; but her intonation was not
wholly that of pleasure. "We thought, my sister and I, that your social
duties in Boston would restrict your movements for the future."
I had pricked their little bubble of romance, and they were
disappointed. That one who had been their lodger was now with the
Olympian gods was a tale to be told as long as they had a room to let,
and to every one who rented one. I saw at once that I couldn't ask them
to believe that I had come back of my own free will. The very magnitude
of my hopes compelled me to be silent with regard to them.
"Punk!" was Pelly's comment, when I braced myself to tell him I had
found home life disillusioning.
That was across the table of the familiar eating-house, as we took our
first meal together. I was obliged to explain myself for the reason
that in the back of his mind, also, I read the conviction that I hadn't
"made good." Compelled to be more primitive than I should have liked, I
had to base my dissatisfaction on the grounds of physical restriction
rather than on those of divine discontent.
"Some of them Boston women will put the lid on a man and lock it down,"
he observed further. "Punk, I call it. Well, now that you've broken
loose, and with your wad, I suppose you'll be givin' yourself a little
run."
I allowed him to make this assumption, thankful that he should
understand me from any point of view; but it was not the point of view
of our former connection. That a man should be down on his luck was one
thing; but that, having got on his feet, he should deliberately become a
waster was another. In any light but that of a reversion to low tastes
I could never have made Sam see my return to the house in Meeting-House
Green. For low tastes he had the same toleration as for misdemeanors;
but he did not disguise the fact that for a man who had got his chance
he considered them low tastes.
At Creed & Creed's I received a similar tempered welcome.
"Sure here's Brogan," Bridget called out to the other men, on seeing me
enter the cavern where four of them were at the accustomed work of
sweeping a consignment that had just been unpacked. Burlap and
sheepskins were still strewn about the floor, so that I had to restrain
the impulse to pick things up and stack them.
Perhaps I can best compare my return to that of a spirit which has
passed to a higher sphere and chooses to be for a short time
re-embodied. Denis, the Finn, and a small wiry man, a stranger to me,
all drew near to stare solemnly. My visit could only be taken as a
condescension, not as a renewed incorporation into the old life. From
that I had been projected forever by the sheer fact of not having to
earn a living in this humble way.
"Aw, but it's well you're lookin'," Gallivan said, awesomely.
"And why shouldn't he be lookin' well," Bridget demanded, "and him with
more butter than he's got bread to spread it on?"
"It's different with us," the Finn said, bitterly, "with no butter and
not enough bread, and more mouths to feed than can ever be filled. I'll
bet you Brogan doesn't think of them, now that he's got his own belly
full."
It seemed to me an opening.
"Well, suppose I did? Suppose I'd come back to hand down some of the
butter?"
"Aw, cut it out, Brogan," the Finn laughed, joylessly. "I was only
kiddin' you. We don't pass the buck, none of us don't. What you got,
keep; and if you don't, then the more fool you."
In Denis's yearning eyes were the only signs of remote comprehension in
the company.
"Sure ye don't have to pass the buck just because y' ask the saints to
pray for ye, do ye? Pray for us, Brogan. Ye've got nothing else to do."
It was another opening.
"I wish I had, Denis. I've found that I don't know how to loaf. If you
hear of anything--"
He nodded, with beatified aspiration in his leathery old face.
"Aw, then, if it's that way you feel, the Holy Mother 'll find ye
something, Protestant though y' are, just as sure as she showed ould
Biddy Murphy, and her a Protestant too, that me mother knew in Ireland
where there was two-and-sixpence lyin' in the mud, and she with the rent
comin' due the next mornin': This is the new Brogan," he continued, with
a wave of his hand toward the dark, wiry man, who responded with a grin.
"He can't talk our talk hardly not at all, not no more than the monkey I
used to tell you about. A Pole he calls hisself; but I nivver heard of
no such nation as that till I come to this country. We nivver had them
in Ireland at all--at all. There was Ulster men, and Munster men, and
men from the County Monaghan; but I nivver heard tell of no Poles. Do
you think they's have sowls like us? Or would they be like them Chinees
and Japansey men?"
"For Gawd's sake, here's the Floater," Bridget warned, softly, and every
man got back to his work.
Back at their work they had no time for further conversation; and in
some way, impossible for me to tell you in words, I felt myself
eliminated from their fellowship. They would always be friendly; but
the knowledge that I was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh,
which had once been the outcome of a common need, was no longer theirs
nor mine. I could look in at them in this non-committal way as often as
I chose; but I should never get any farther.
Something of the sort was manifest when I next met Lydia Blair. Our
standing toward each other was different. Little as she had understood
me before, she understood me less in this new role than in any other.
"You sure are the queerest guy I ever met," she said, at one time in the
course of the evening. "I sometimes wonder if you're all there."
But that was after I had been foolish enough to try to make her see my
point of view toward life, and failed. Before that she had been
sympathetic.
Our first conversation had been over the telephone, when I had called up
Clotilde's to ask if Miss Blair had returned from Boston.
"Miss Blair at the 'phone," was the reply. "Who's this?"
Somewhat timidly I said I was Mr. Harrowby, repeating the name twice
before she recognized it as mine. Having invited her to dine with me
and go to the theater I got a quavering, "Sure!" which lacked her usual
spontaneity.
"You don't seem pleased," I said.
"Oh, I'm pleased enough. I'm only wondering if--if you are."
"Why shouldn't I be, when I've asked you?"
"Well, I put my foot in it for fair, didn't I?"
"You mean in Boston? Oh, that was all right. I know you meant to do me
a good turn; and perhaps you've done it."
"Oh, I _meant_ to; but I sure did get a lesson. My mother used to tell
me to keep my fingers out of other people's pies; and I'm going to from
this time on."
In the evening, seated opposite me at the little table at Josephine's,
with the din of a hundred diners giving us a sort of privacy, she told
me more about it.
"You see, it was this way: He'd always been talking to me about this
rich young Boston widow he'd met at Palm Beach, trying to get my mad
up."
"What did he say of her?"
"Well, the sort of thing he _would_ say. He's a good judge of a woman,
you must admit; and he thought she was about the classiest. It was when
I began to tell him what I wanted to be that he sprang that on me, said
she was the model for me to study, and that when it came to the dressy
vampire Agnes Dunham wasn't in it.
"Did he call this--this Boston lady a dressy vampire?"
"Oh, he didn't mean that. It was only that for any one who wanted to be
a dressy vampire she was a smart style. A vampire mustn't look a
vampire, or she might as well go out of business. The one thing I
criticized in Agnes Dunham in 'The Scarlet Sin' was that a woman who
advertised herself so much as an adventuress wouldn't get very far with
her adventuring."
"I see. You'd go in for a finer art."
"I'd go in for pulling the thing off, whatever it was; but that's not
what I want to tell you. To go back to what he was always saying about
this Boston lady, it made me crazy to see her. In the corset business
I'd got intimate with a good many society women, and most of them were
gumps. For one good vampire there were a hundred with the kick of a
boiled potato. That made me all the crazier to see, and I thought about
it and thought about it. Then, one day, Harry called me on the 'phone
to say-- fxsYou see, he's living with the Averills, and when that Mrs.
Mountney-- Well, when he told me who you were, and that the lady wasn't
a widow any more than I am, well, I simply laid down and passed away.
To think that _you_, the fellow we'd been putting down as a mystery and
a swell crook--"
"What did you put me down for then when you found out?"
"We didn't get a line on it all at once. That was later. Mrs. Mountney
told Lulu, and Dick Stroud told me, and so--"
"Did you all believe what you heard?"
"It was pretty hard not to, wasn't it? after the queer things you'd been
doing. There was just one person who stuck it out that it wasn't true;
and that was little Milly. She didn't say much to the family; but to me
she declared that if all the armies in France were to swear to it, she'd
still know there was some mistake. She's another one I can't make out."
"What can't you make out about her?"
"Whether she's got a heart in her body, or only a hard-boiled egg."
"Oh, I fancy she has a heart all right."
"I used to fancy the same thing, or rather I took it for granted; but
ever since-- Well, she just stumps me."
She reverted to her errand in Boston and what came of it.
"It wasn't till I began to hear of what was going on there that it
seemed to me--" the veil of tears to which her eyes were liable
descended like a distant mist--"that it seemed to me a darned shame."
"What seemed to you a darned shame in particular?"
"Well, first that Dick Stroud should be pulling the wool over any other
woman's eyes, especially a rich one, and then that he should be
upsettin' your apple-cart when you'd had so much trouble already. After
that it all came easy."
"What came easy?"
"Getting to know Mrs. Harrowby, and all the rest of it. The first once
or twice I didn't see how to bring in Dick Stroud's name without seeming
to do it on purpose; but after I met you in the up-stairs hall, why it
was just natural. Say, you copped a peach when you got married; do you
know it?"
"Why do you say that?"
"Because I've got eyes in my head; and, say, she's the one I saw you
with that time I told you about, ever so long ago, and it must have been
in New York. I suppose some guy had taken me to a swell restaurant to
blow me in for a dinner; but anyhow she was the one. The minute I saw
her back I knew there were not two such _speaking_ backs in the world.
As for me modeling myself on her, well, an old hour-glass pair of stays
might as well try to be Clotilde's Number Three Coar Pearl. And, say,
she's some sport, isn't she? When I told her more about Dick Stroud and
me, after you'd gone away that afternoon, she never turned a hair. Mrs.
Mountney says she was going to marry him if you hadn't turned up, and
even now he's hoping to marry her; but when I let her have the whole
bunch of truth, she took it like a rag doll will take a pin-prick.
Never moved a muscle, or showed that it wasn't just my story, and not a
bit her own. Of course I took my cue from that--it was my line all
along--and was just the poor working-girl telling her life history to a
sympathetic lady, just as they hand it out in books; but she carried the
thing off something swell. In fact, she made me more than half think--"
"What?" I questioned, when she held her idea suspended there.
"I don't believe I'll tell you. There are things a man had better find
out for himself; do you know it?"
"I sha'n't find out anything for myself," I said, "because--because I've
given up the fight."
She stared at me with eyes wide open in incredulous horror.
"You've given up the fight for a peach like that! Well, of all the poor
boobs!" Leaning back in her chair she scanned my appearance. "I thought
there was something wrong when I saw you got up like that. You can beat
Walter Haines, the quick-change man, when it comes to clothes, believe
_me_. What have you got on now?"
I explained that it had been my Sunday suit during the time I had been
working at Creed & Creed's.
"Then for Gawd's sake go and take it off, before we start for the
theater. I'll wait for you here. You can go and come in a taxi. I've
been looking at you all along, and thinking it must be the latest
wrinkle from Boston. Boston _has_ funny ways, now hasn't it? And so--"
It was here that I ventured on the exposition of my new scheme of life,
getting no appreciation beyond the question as to my sanity quoted
above. Later in the evening as, after the theater, I drove her back to
Miss Flowerdew's in a taxi, she summed up the situation thus:
"Look-a-here! I never did take stock in that bum story of your being a
quitter on the battlefield; but now I sure will if you walk out and hand
the show over to Dick Stroud. Why, he's worth two of you! Look how he
sticks! He'll get _me_ one of these days, just by his sticking, if I'm
not careful; and when it comes to a woman like that-- Why, I'm ashamed
to go round with such a guy. And say, the next time you ask me to
dinner, you'll not be got up like the bogie-man dressed for his wife's
funeral. You'll look like you did the other day in Boston, or the first
time I saw you, or it will be nix on little Lydia."
Drinkwater's tone was similar and yet different. It was different in
that while his premises as to "sticking" coincided with Lydia's, his
conclusions were not the same.
Perhaps he was not the same Drinkwater. More than two years having
passed since I had seen him, I found in him more than two years of
development. A crude boy when last we had met, association with a man
like Averill, combined with his own instinct for growth, had made him
something of a man of the world not the less sympathetic for his honest
pug-face and his blindness. The fact that he asked me to dine with him
at his university club was an indication of progress in itself.
He gave me his confidences before I offered mine, sketching a career in
which stenography figured as no more than the handmaid to a passion for
biological research. From many of the details of research he was, of
course, precluded by his blindness; but his methodical habits, his
memory, and his faculty for induction had more than once put Averill on
the track of one thing when looking for another. It was thus that they
had discovered the _ophida parotidea_ while experimenting for the germ
of the Spanish influenza. Incidentally, his salary had been creeping
upward in proportion as he made himself more useful.
"And Lydia's been a wonder," he declared, his face shining. "Talk about
sticking! The way that girl's stuck to me in every kind of tight place!
Always thinking of other people and how to pull them out of the holes
they get into! In the Middle Ages she'd have been a saint. Now she's
just an up-to-date New York girl."
By the time he had finished this rhapsody I was ready to tell him a part
of my own life tale, on which I found him more responsive than any one I
had met. As to my mental misfortunes in France he accepted the
narrative without questioning. When I came to what I painted as
domestic conditions outlived on both sides he passed the topic over with
the lightness born of tact. You see it was an altogether older and more
serious Drinkwater with whom I had to deal; and yet one not less
enthusiastic.
I discovered this when, with much misgiving, I hinted at the task to
which I wished to dedicate anything left in my life.
"You've got it, old boy," he half shouted, slapping his leg. "There are
three or four big jobs through which we white Americans have got to save
our country, and among them the free play of class-contribution is
almost the first. Say, these fellows that go jazzing about class
welfare get my goat. Class co-operation is what we want; and it's what
classes come into existence to give. You can't suppress classes, not
yet awhile at any rate, in a country full of inequalities; but what we
can do is to get the classes that form themselves spontaneously to take
their gifts and pass 'em on to each other. Each works out something
that another doesn't, and so can benefit the bunch all round. Say,
Jasper, you'll hit the nail of one of our biggest national weaknesses
right on the head as soon as you've learned how to do it."
"Yes, but the learning how to do it is just where the hitch seems to
come in. I've been in New York three weeks and I'm just where I was
when I came."
"Say, I'll give you a line on that. Do you know how a young fellow in a
country town--I don't know anything about swell places like New
York--becomes a barber?"