OAKLEY drew down the top of his desk and left the office. Before
locking the door, on which some predecessor had caused the words,
“Department of Transportation and Maintenance. No admittance, except on
business,” to be stencilled in black letters, he called to McClintock,
who, with Dutch Pete, was still fussing over the wheezy switch-engine.
“Will you want in the office for anything, Milt?” The master-mechanic,
who had been swearing at a rusted nut, got up from his knees and,
dangling a big wrench in one hand, bawled back: “No, I guess not.”
“How's the job coming on?”
“About finished. Damn that fool Bennett, anyhow! Next time he runs this
old bird-cage into a freight, he'll catch hell from me!”
After turning the key on the Department of Transportation and
Maintenance, Oakley crossed the tracks to the station and made briskly
off up-town, with the wind and rain blowing in his face.
He lived at the American House, the best hotel the place could boast. It
overlooked the public square, a barren waste an acre or more in extent,
built about with stores and offices; where, on hot summer Saturdays,
farmers who had come to town to trade, hitched their teams in the
deep shade of the great maples that grew close to the curb. Here, on
Decoration Day and the Fourth of July, the eloquence of the county
assembled and commuted its proverbial peck of dirt in favor of very
fine dust. Here, too, the noisiest of brass-bands made hideous hash of
patriotic airs, and the forty odd youths constituting the local militia
trampled the shine from each other's shoes, while their captain, who
had been a sutler's clerk in the Civil War, cursed them for a lot of
lunkheads. And at least once in the course of each summer's droning
flight the spot was abandoned to the purely carnal delights of some
wandering road circus.
In short, Antioch had its own life and interests, after the manner of
every other human ant-hill; and the Honorable Jeb Barrow's latest public
utterance, Dippy Ellsworth's skill on the snare-drum, or “Cap” Roberts's
military genius, and whether or not the Civil War would really have
ended at Don-elson if Grant had only been smart enough to take his
advice, were all matters of prime importance and occupied just as much
time to weigh properly and consider as men's interests do anywhere.
In Antioch, Oakley was something of a figure. He was the first manager
of the road to make the town his permanent headquarters, and the town
was grateful. It would have swamped him with kindly attention, but he
had studiously ignored all advances, preferring not to make friends. In
this he had not entirely succeeded. The richest man in the county, Dr.
Emory, who was a good deal of a patrician, had taken a fancy to him, and
had insisted upon entertaining him at a formal dinner, at which there
were present the Methodist minister, the editor of the local paper, the
principal merchant, a judge, and an ex-Congressman, who went to sleep
with the soup and only wakened in season for the ice-cream. It was the
most impressive function Oakley had ever attended, and even to think of
it still sent the cold chills coursing down his spine.
That morning he had chanced to meet Dr. Emory on the street, and the
doctor, who could always be trusted to say exactly what he thought, had
taken him to task for not calling. There was a reason why Oakley had
not done so. The doctor's daughter had just returned from the East, and
vague rumors were current concerning her beauty and elegance. Now, women
were altogether beyond Oakley's ken. However, since some responsive
courtesy was evidently expected of him, he determined to have it over
with at once. Imbued with this idea, he went to his room after supper to
dress. As he arrayed himself for the ordeal, he sought to recall a past
experience in line with the present. Barring the recent dinner, his most
ambitious social experiment had been a brakesmen's ball in Denver, years
before, when he was conductor on a freight. He laughed softly as he
fastened his tie.
“I wonder what Dr. Emory would think if I told him I'd punched a fellow
at a dance once because he wanted to take my girl away from me.” He
recalled, as pointing his innate conservatism, that he had decided not
to repeat the experiment until he achieved a position where a glittering
social success was not contingent upon his ability to punch heads.
It was still raining, a discouragingly persistent drizzle, when Oakley
left his hotel and turned from the public square into Main Street. This
Main Street was never an imposing thoroughfare, and a week of steady
downpour made it from curb to curb a river of quaking mud. It was lit
at long intervals by flickering gas-lamps that glowed like corpulent
fireflies in the misty darkness beneath the dripping maple-boughs. As in
the case of most Western towns, Antioch had known dreams of greatness,
dreams which had not been realized. It stood stockstill, in all its raw,
ugly youth, with the rigid angularity its founders had imposed upon
it when they hacked and hewed a spot for it in the pine-woods, whose
stunted second growth encircled it on every side.
The Emory home had once been a farm-house of the better class; various
additions and improvements gave it an air of solid and substantial
comfort unusual in a community where the prevailing style of
architecture was a square wooden box, built close to the street end of a
narrow lot.
The doctor himself answered Oakley's ring, and led the way into the
parlor, after relieving him of his hat and umbrella.
“My wife you know, Mr. Oakley. This is my daughter.”
Constance Emory rose from her seat before the wood fire that smoldered
on the wide, old-fashioned hearth, and gave Oakley her hand. He saw a
stately, fair-haired girl, trimly gowned in an evening dress that to his
unsophisticated gaze seemed astonishingly elaborate. But he could not
have imagined anything more becoming. He decided that she was very
pretty. Later he changed his mind. She was more than pretty.
For her part, Miss Emory saw merely a tall young fellow, rather
good-looking than otherwise, who was feeling nervously for his cuffs.
Beyond this there was not much to be said in his favor, but she was
willing to be amused.
She had been absent from Antioch four years. These years had been spent
in the East, and in travel abroad with a widowed and childless sister of
her father's. She was, on the whole, glad to be home again. As yet she
was not disturbed by any thoughts of the future. She looked on the world
with serene eyes. They were a limpid blue, and veiled by long, dark
lashes. She possessed the poise and unshaken self-confidence that comes
of position and experience. Her father and mother were not so well
satisfied with the situation; they already recognized that it held the
elements of a tragedy. In their desire to give her every opportunity
they had overreached themselves. She had outgrown Antioch as surely as
she had outgrown her childhood, and it was as impossible to take her
back to the one as to the other.
The doctor patted Oakley on the shoulder.
“I am glad you've dropped in. I hope, now you have made a beginning, we
shall see more of you.”
He was a portly man of fifty, with kindly eyes and an easy, gracious
manner. Mrs. Emory was sedate and placid, a handsome, well-kept woman,
who administered her husband's affairs with a steadiness and economy
that had made it possible for him to amass a comfortable fortune from
his straggling country practice.
Constance soon decided that Oakley was not at all like the young men
of Antioch as she recalled them, nor was he like the men she had known
while under her aunt's tutelage--the leisurely idlers who drifted with
the social tide, apparently without responsibility or care.
He proved hopelessly dense on those matters with which they had been
perfectly familiar. It seemed to her that pleasure and accomplishment,
as she understood them, had found no place in his life. The practical
quality in his mind showed at every turn of the conversation. He
appeared to hunger after hard facts, and the harder these facts were the
better he liked them. But he offended in more glaring ways. He was too
intense, and his speech too careful and precise, as if he were uncertain
as to his grammar, as, indeed, he was.
Poor Oakley was vaguely aware that he was not getting on, and the strain
told. It slowly dawned upon him that he was not her sort, that where
he was concerned, she was quite alien, quite foreign, with interests
he could not comprehend, but which gave him a rankling sense of
inferiority.
He had been moderately well satisfied with himself, as indeed he had
good reason to be, but her manner was calculated to rob him of undue
pride; he was not accustomed to being treated with mixed indifference
and patronage. He asked himself resentfully how it happened that he
had never before met such a girl. She fascinated him. The charm of her
presence seemed to suddenly create and satisfy a love for the beautiful.
With generous enthusiasm he set to work to be entertaining. Then a
realization of the awful mental poverty in which he dwelt burst upon him
for the first time. He longed for some light and graceful talent with
which to bridge the wide gaps between the stubborn heights of his
professional erudition.
He was profoundly versed on rates, grades, ballast, motive power, and
rolling stock, but this solid information was of no avail He could on
occasion talk to a swearing section-boss with a grievance and a brogue
in a way to make that man his friend for life; he also possessed the
happy gift of inspiring his subordinates with a zealous sense of duty,
but his social responsibilities numbed his faculties and left him a
bankrupt for words.
The others gave him no assistance. Mrs. Emory, smiling and good-humored,
but silent, bent above her sewing. She was not an acute person, and the
situation was lost upon her, while the doctor took only the most casual
part in the conversation.
Oakley was wondering how he could make his escape, when the door-bell
rang. The doctor slipped from the parlor. When he returned he was not
alone. He was preceded by a dark young man of one or two and thirty.
This was Griffith Ryder, the owner of the Antioch _Herald_.
“My dear,” said he, “Mr. Ryder.” Ryder shook hands with the two
ladies, and nodded carelessly to Oakley; then, with an easy, graceful
compliment, he lounged down in a chair at Miss Emory's side.
Constance had turned from the strenuous Oakley to the new-comer with a
sense of unmistakable relief. Her mother, too, brightened visibly. She
did not entirely approve of Ryder, but he was always entertaining in a
lazy, indifferent fashion of his own.
“I see, Griff,” the doctor said, “that you are going to support Kenyon.
I declare it shakes my confidence in you,” And he drew forward his
chair. Like most Americans, the physician was something of a politician,
and, as is also true of most Americans, not professionally concerned in
the hunt for office, this interest fluctuated between the two extremes
of party enthusiasm before and non-partisan disgust after elections.
Ryder smiled faintly. “Yes, we know just how much of a rascal Kenyon is,
and we know nothing at all about the other fellow, except that he
wants the nomination, which is a bad sign. Suppose he should turn out
a greater scamp! Really it's too much of a risk.” he drawled, with an
affectation of contempt.
“Your politics always were a shock to your friends, but this serves to
explain them,” remarked the doctor, with latent combativeness. But Ryder
was not to be beguiled into argument. He turned again to Miss Emory.
“Your father is not a practical politician, or he would realize that it
is only common thrift to send Kenyon back, for I take it he has served
his country not without profit to himself; besides, he is clamorous and
persistent, and there seems no other way to dispose of him. It's either
that or the penitentiary.”
Constance laughed softly. “And so you think he can afford to be honest
now? What shocking ethics!”
“That is my theory. Anyhow, I don't see why your father should wish me
to forego the mild excitement of assisting to re-elect my more or less
disreputable friend. Antioch has had very little to offer one until
you came,” he added, with gentle deference. Miss Emory accepted the
compliment with the utmost composure. Once she had been rather flattered
by his attentions, but four years make a great difference. Either he had
lost in cleverness, or she had gained in knowledge.
He was a very tired young man. At one time he had possessed some
expectations and numerous pretensions. The expectation had faded out
of his life, but the pretence remained in the absence of any vital
achievement. He was college-bred, and had gone in for literature. From
literature he had drifted into journalism, and had ended in Antioch as
proprietor of the local paper, which he contrived to edit with a lively
irresponsibility that won him few friends, though it did gain him some
small reputation as a humorist.
His original idea had been that the management of a country weekly would
afford him opportunity for the serious work which he believed he could
do, but he had not done this serious work, and was not likely to do it.
He derived a fair income from the _Herald_, and he allowed his ambitions
to sink into abeyance, in spite of his cherished conviction that he
was cut out for bigger things. Perhaps he had wisely decided that his
pretensions were much safer than accomplishment, since the importance of
what a man actually does can generally be measured, while what he might
do admits of exaggerated claims.
Oakley had known Ryder only since the occasion of the doctor's dinner,
and felt that he could never be more than an acquired taste, if at all.
The editor took the floor, figuratively speaking, for Miss Emory's
presence made the effort seem worth his while. He promptly relieved
Oakley of the necessity to do more than listen, an act of charity for
which the latter was hardly as grateful as he should have been. He was
no fool, but there were wide realms of enlightenment where he was an
absolute stranger, so, when Constance and Ryder came to talk of books
and music, as they did finally, his only refuge was in silence, and
he went into a sort of intellectual quarantine. His reading had been
strictly limited to scientific works, and to the half-dozen trade and
technical journals to which he subscribed, and from which he drew the
larger part of his mental sustenance. As for music, he was familiar
with the airs from the latest popular operas, but the masterpieces were
utterly unknown, except such as had been brought to his notice by
having sleeping-cars named in their honor, a practice he considered very
complimentary, and possessing value as a strong commercial endorsement.
He amused himself trying to recall whether it was the “Tannhauser”
or the “Lohengrin” he had ridden on the last time he was East. He was
distinctly shocked, however, by “Gôtterdammerung,” which was
wholly unexpected. It suggested such hard swearing, or Dutch Pete's
untrammelled observations in the yards when he had caught an urchin
stealing scrap-iron--a recognized source of revenue to the youth of
Antioch. But he felt more and more aloof as the evening wore on. It was
something of the same feeling he had known as a boy, after his mother's
death, when, homeless and friendless at night, he had paused to glance
in through uncurtained windows, with a dumb, wordless longing for the
warmth and comfort he saw there.
It was a relief when the doctor took him into the library to examine
specimens of iron-ore he had picked up west of Antioch, where there were
undeveloped mineral lands for which he was trying to secure capital.
This was a matter Oakley was interested in, since it might mean business
for the road. He promptly forgot about Miss Emory and the objectionable
Ryder, and in ten minutes gave the doctor a better comprehension of the
mode of procedure necessary to success than that gentleman had been able
to learn in ten years of unfruitful attempting. He also supplied him
with a few definite facts and figures in lieu of the multitude of
glittering generalities on which he had been pinning his faith as a
means of getting money into the scheme.
When, at last, they returned to the parlor, they found another caller
had arrived during their absence, a small, shabbily dressed man, with a
high, bald head and weak, near-sighted eyes. It was Turner Joyce. Oakley
knew him just as he was beginning to know every other man, woman, and
child in the town.
Joyce rose hastily, or rather stumbled to his feet, as the doctor and
Oakley entered the room.
“I told you I was coming up, doctor,” he said, apologetically. “Miss
Constance has been very kind. She has been telling me of the galleries
and studios. What a glorious experience!”
A cynical smile parted Ryder's thin lips.
“Mr. Joyce feels the isolation of his art here.” The little man blinked
doubtfully at the speaker, and then said, with a gentle, deprecatory
gesture, “I don't call it art.”
“You are far too modest. I have heard my foreman speak in the most
complimentary terms of the portrait you did of his wife. He was
especially pleased with the frame. You must know. Miss Constance, that
Mr. Joyce usually furnishes the frames, and his pictures go home ready
to the wire to hang on the wall.”
Mr. Joyce continued to blink doubtfully at Ryder. He scarcely knew how
to take the allusion to the frames. It was a sore point with him.
Constance turned with a displeased air from Ryder to the little artist.
There was a faint, wistful smile on her lips. He was a rather pathetic
figure to her, and she could not understand how Ryder dared or had the
heart to make fun.
“I shall enjoy seeing all that you have done, Mr. Joyce; and of course I
wish to see Ruth. Why didn't she come with you to-night?”
“Her cousin, Lou Bentick's wife, is dead, and she has been over at his
house all day. She was quite worn out, but she sent you her love.”
Ryder glanced again at Miss Emory, and said, with hard cynicism: “The
notice will appear in Saturday's _Herald_, with a tribute from her
pastor. I never refuse his verse. It invariably contains some
scathing comment on the uncertainty of the Baptist faith as a means of
salvation.”
But this was wasted on Joyce. Ryder rose with a sigh.
“Well, we toilers must think of the morrow.”
Oakley accepted this as a sign that it was time to go. Joyce, too,
stumbled across the room to the door, and the three men took their leave
together. As they stood on the steps, the doctor said, cordially,
“I hope you will both come again soon; and you, too, Turner,” he added,
kindly.
Ryder moved off quickly with Oakley. Joyce would have dropped behind,
but the latter made room for him at his side. No one spoke until Ryder,
halting on a street corner, said, “Sorry, but it's out of my way to go
any farther unless you'll play a game of billiards with me at the hotel,
Oakley.”
“Thanks,” curtly. “I don't play billiards.”
“No? Well, they are a waste of time, I suppose. Good-night.” And he
turned down the side street, whistling softly.
“A very extraordinary young man,” murmured Joyce, rubbing the tip of
his nose meditatively with a painty forefinger. “And with quite an
extraordinary opinion of himself.”
A sudden feeling of friendliness prompted Oakley to tuck his hand
through the little artist's arm. “How is Bentick bearing the loss of his
wife?” he asked. “You said she was your cousin.”
“No, not mine. My wife's. Poor fellow! he feels it keenly. They had not
been married long, you know.”
The rain was falling in a steady downpour. They had reached Turner
Joyce's gate, and paused.
“Won't you come in and wait until it moderates, Mr. Oakley?”
Oakley yielded an assent, and followed him through the gate and around
the house.