THE MAN ON THE PLACE
"Will you do something for me?" Sard had asked Minga on the day of
her friend's arrival. Later she had made the request that Minga lead
up to the subject of Terence O'Brien; only because she had lost the
courage to speak of the thing that those days was continually in her
mind; namely, the mystery of the new man Colter. He, who busied himself
quietly all day about the drives and shrubberies and caring for the
cars, and who, at night, she saw strolling around to the garden seat
to listen to the music of the Judge's pet records. But now, after a
comradeship of two weeks, much of Sard's restraint had vanished, so
that as the two girls glided in the little roadster out of Bogart's
drive one morning and Minga asked curiously, "What was that thing,
Sardy, that you were going to tell me?" her friend's answering laugh
was less conscious than it might have been.
"Oh, I want you to pass on a discovery of mine; something I've got out
in the garage."
"A pup?" Minga was politely interrogative.
Sard bent to shift gears; she smiled cryptically. "No, no, not a dog;
but I picked it up and brought it home the way one would a badly used
dog. It's partly Aunt Reely's pet, too," added Sard gravely; "she gives
him advice, but I found him."
"A turtle," guessed Minga idly; "one doesn't give a turtle advice,
though, does one? Oh," she turned an accusing face on her friend, "I'll
bet it is just that horrid old man, a plain, dirty tramp." Immediately
the little figure in scarlet lost interest, and as the car glided
softly along the river road and up toward the little valley village of
Morris, Sard frowned thoughtfully. "Just the same, I want you to pass
on him," said the older girl; "he's rather a strange specimen, Minga."
Asked her friend abruptly, "Have you ever seen a case of amnesia?"
Minga, wrinkling her brows, remembered that there was a girl who
studied too hard at college and she had amnesia and couldn't remember
to put her clothes on properly. "That," said Minga, with emphasis,
"made me decide right then that I would never study too hard. But I
never saw any amnesia," added Minga. "Is it anything like asthma?"
"It's like the light going out of your head, I guess," said Sard,
"and the paths of your mind don't lead home; don't lead to the You
that knows you; and it will make all the yous suddenly run into each
other, and you are suddenly lost. For instance, I could have amnesia
so that I could see you, but there wouldn't be any me. You know, the
recognition part of me would be all thin air, and objects stuck in it
like houses and men and women that meant nothing. I've been reading it
up," explained Sard.
Minga shivered. "Don't describe such awful things," she begged.
"But it's interesting." There was a reflective light in the other's
eyes. "I was born to be a psychologist, I guess, because such things
interest me. Think, for instance, of not knowing who one is, or one's
own people! Or perhaps standing right in front of one's home and not
recognizing it! Such things happen. Like doors closing on the room
where the mind used to live, and turning the mind out into a cold new
world where it can't take hold, where it has words and intelligence,
but no recognitions."
"Wow!" Minga twisted an unwilling shoulder. "Stop talking about it.
Shut up!"
"Well," argued Sard, "that's what I think is the matter with that man
we've got right before our eyes. Dad and Aunt Reely say it isn't so, of
course; they say I imagine too much." A very slight irritation crept
into the sober young face that scanned the road ahead. "Older people go
in for peace and comfort more than anything else, don't they?"
"I think maybe it's more just public opinion," said Minga, rather
penetratingly for her rattle brain. "Older people get used to what
their set says and does, and it just becomes sort of home life for them
and they don't want anything else. They refuse to get out and think
outside of what that set thinks and does, because it wouldn't be cosy;
it's like going out on a winter trail when everybody is home sitting by
the fire. They want to sit by the fire. They don't want to progress."
"It wouldn't be 'popular,' I suppose." Sard avoided a bump. "It's
funny, but I keep thinking that if any good things are to be
accomplished we'll have to get rid of popularity."
"Well, I shan't," said Minga. "Popularity? You can't get anywhere in
America unless you are popular; but," the little philosopher added
solemnly, "isn't it queer, Sard, that--that we all, you and I and all
of us, have got to run the world some day whether we want to or not?
Everybody else will be dead--all the aunts and fathers and mothers,"
Minga shivered a little--"and we, we shall have to sign the bills and
give the sentences and be responsible." Minga looked dreamingly at the
wind-shield and at the cars flashing by them. She clearly did not like
the prospect.
The older girl nodded. Sard guided her car up to the curb in front of
the little Morris bank.
"What are you going in for?"
Sard flashed a smile. "Well, I--I am going in to pay Mr. Lowden, that's
the cashier, some money I borrowed the day I found this man Colter. You
see," added Sard casually, "I found him in the gutter up here in Morris
and I had no place to take him to nor any money and Mr. Lowden managed
for me. He seemed to know what to do." Sard got out and leaned against
the car. Her straight, slim personality in its turquoise blue cap
and scarf was a lively bit of poised youth; she stood twinkling into
Minga's perturbed eyes as she said:
"Oh, you'll have to get used to my queer people that I try to rescue,"
then, "when we go back I'm going to take you to the garage and show
Colter to you and then you've got to put on your thinking cap and tell
me what has happened to him and what he is!"
"Of all things," breathed little Minga with disgust, "and there's a rip
in your sleeve, too," she added in tones of injury. "Sard, don't go and
get queer and interested in things that awful way that some girls do."
Minga was clearly aggrieved.
But Sard had run up the bank steps and turned in the direction of
the cashier's office. Through the plate glass window she bowed to
the president; his massive head and broad low brow and deep-set eyes
emphasized a rather unusual type of the quiet country gentleman.
Stepping into the partitioned consulting-room the girl found someone
already in conference with the cashier. It was Watts Shipman. Sard drew
back. "Oh, I'm intruding." She was hesitant.
"No, indeed;" both men rose with cordial insistence. "I was just
going," said Shipman reassuringly.
The girl flushed. "I can come back again," then something steadying
her, to the cashier, "I wanted to settle with you, Mr. Lowden,
about our man Colter. You were so kind that day, you helped me so
wonderfully." She smiled a little shyly. "For a moment I didn't know
what to do."
The man made courteous deprecation. "I was so glad to be of service."
Anticipating the girl's wish, he put a slip of paper into her hand, and
Sard read it interestedly, her brows raised.
"This can't be all. He was two nights at that boarding-house, I think,
and his clothes were pressed and laundered--and--someone got him
shoes----"
"Just the same," the young fellow laughed, "that's all it is. I
strongly suspect, Miss Bogart, that the village philanthropists were
as much interested in your case as you were, only," he sighed a
little, "you took the lead. You were the real Samaritan; the rest of
us might--well, it is just possible we could have passed that man day
after day until he dropped dead from neglect and exhaustion. The doctor
said it was only a question of a few hours more without food."
"You would have believed he was a tramp," excused Sard. Though she knew
it was no excuse.
"But you knew that he was not a tramp," said the man quietly. Then as
he gravely acknowledged the sum Sard laid on the desk, "Does he grow
more coherent?"
Sard looked grateful for this intelligent interest, so different from
the sensational kind manifested by other acquaintances. "He just
works," she said thoughtfully, "works and reads and says very little.
He almost never goes to the kitchen as the other men we employ do, and
he reads a great deal and takes long walks. He knows the countryside
thoroughly and if you ask him questions about flowers, he tells you
queer scientific things, and--and----" she hesitated.
The look of interest on the face of the lawyer sitting here made
the girl pause; an inherent reticence in Sard was a noticeable
characteristic. Before Shipman she was on her guard; with a little nod
she turned and was gone.
The two men, admiring, noted the quick decision, the arrest of
confidence, and smiled at each other.
"It was Miss Bogart who headed my cavalcade last night," said Shipman,
"and she was spokeswoman for the O'Brien matter. Has she, do you think,
much influence with her father?"
The young cashier put his finger-tips together. "With Bogart? Did you
ever know anyone who ever had any influence with Bogart? You don't
know the man; he's not modern in any sense. He has the hard and fixed
ideas of crime and punishment. He believes in the Example. Punishment
is his fetich. From his point of view, if he gives this young chap a
life sentence, fewer old men will get shot in the back. That's Bogart's
point of view." The cashier ruminated for a few moments, then added,
"any jury knows it and plays upon it."
His visitor nodded, then smiled a rather dry smile. "It might, however,
eventually mean more old men shot in the back," he said. Then rising,
"Well, I've enjoyed our talk and thanks for helping me out with this
scheme of the ransoming of Terence, by that young crowd. It is funny,
but it is significant, and they mean business. They will pay a certain
sum per head into your hands Saturday nights, and it goes into the
O'Brien fund." The lawyer hesitated, adding in a low voice, "I need not
tell you that I cannot save the chap. I know that he did the thing, but
I mean to try and get a shorter sentence, twenty years perhaps," he
shrugged his shoulders, adding, "and you and I know precisely what a
man's life is worth after twenty years in prison."
"How about a game of golf on the Wedgewood course to-morrow? You want
to get your revenge?"
They shook hands on it; the younger man looked into the dark eyes, so
full of human kindness, yet so austere and lonely.
"Watts Shipman," the young cashier said slowly, "what are you doing up
there on that mountain? Anything you shouldn't--home brew,--sirens?"
The lawyer laughed; he caught up his riding crop. "Come up and see;
walk up, do you good to climb that far; no wine, no women, not even
some of our best suppressed literature. I'm--I'm just trying," the
lawyer threw back his head and drew a deep breath, "to get hold of
life, real life, the kind of thing that eludes men until too late they
turn and clutch for it."
The other laughed. "And so you saw wood and wash your own dishes?
Wonderful realization of life!"
Shipman's mouth twisted into appreciation of the thing. "I've got a
vegetable garden--raise nearly all my own produce. I've planted it in
terraces half down the mountainside the way the Greeks do in Thessaly.
That's a wonderful scheme for natural irrigation. Anyway," the lawyer
squared away and delivered a teasing punch on his friend's chest,
"I've got back a good digestion and can stretch like a tiger and feel
the morning sun along my bare flanks and--and I can laugh heartily,
and I've forgotten the smell of money and I've gone back to a boyish
repugnance for dirty things and lying things and under-handed things."
The older man cast a penetrating look into the very stuff of his
friend. "Isn't it up to us to create new standards?" he asked squarely;
"are you satisfied with the old? I'm not! I want clean standards, but I
want 'em built on facts, not on calendar mottoes."
The other shook his head. "So do I," he said in a low tone, "but,"
he waved his hand to the street outside, "do you see much out there
that looks like new standards? It's the calendar motto still." For a
moment the two men stood in the window reading the street like a book
on which figures of men and women like words told the story of the
vicinity. Morris's mild, plainly-dressed women doing the morning's
marketing, face, features and walk betokening a certain niggardliness
with life; a complacent adjustment to the best that has been instead
of an insistence upon the best that shall be. Occasional handsome cars
holding peevish city faces come to the country for a great poison herb,
Novelty. Young people flitting about in droves driven by insatiability
and their peculiar disease, leisure and unapplied brains. One or two
old forms tottering in the sunshine, pleased, interested with little
trivial occurrences, yet powerful, holding the power of prestige.
The usual village types, the static parson, the elastic politician,
the loafers on the corner, the nameless village woman, the scoundrel
village man, the sanctimonious gossips, the schools at twelve pouring
out of their hoppers the little victims of all whatever good or ill
might be; up and down the streets, these forms, symbols of life, moved
and went about their business. But no matter what they spelled in
between they wrote irrevocably on the pavements, Greed, and also Fear,
and Popularity. They did not write Progress.
Watts, his dark face turned on the others, looked inquiringly. "The
same as Athens under Pericles, I suppose?" he questioned. "The great
souls come and go and agonize and cry in the wilderness, and the little
souls determine what shall be." He held out his hand once more and the
other gripped it.
"You talk like a man-Cassandra," the cashier grumbled, "but I'm coming
up on your old mountain top to hear some more of your wild stuff."
As Shipman passed down the bank steps he saw the Bogart car sail by
and the two tams, the red and the blue, bobbed gaily at him. "See you
at the dance next Saturday." It was Minga who called this carelessly.
It was the same Minga who a few nights ago on the mountain top had
told Watts Shipman she hated him. Now her vivid face framed in its
blowing curls looked calm appreciation. The Bunch were "for" Watts;
also the big club dance was in the air; her instinct for collecting
partners bade her forget the cigarette episode. Watts, while he raised
his eyebrows, gestured enthusiastically. Sard also waved her hand,
and the flash of her deep eyes got to the man in a way she might not
have intended. For a moment he stood and looked after them down the
principal little street of Morris. It was the blue tam-o'-shanter that
still filled his vision.
"Blue ran the flash across," he quoted thoughtfully. But it was not of
blue violets that the great lawyer was thinking; it was of personality,
of personality that was like a flame, flashing across dullness and
smugness and cheap pride, to what cost? Watts Shipman, climbing to his
mountain top, questioned, for no man knew better than he the painful
cost of honest personality.