A ground-floor window in an apartment building in Madison Avenue, north of
Fifty-ninth street, displayed in calm black lettering the name "Dr. Braden
L. Thorpe, M.D." On the panel of a door just inside the main entrance
there was a bit of gold-leaf information to the effect that office hours
were from 9 to 10 A.M. and from 2 to 4 P.M. There was a reception room and
a consultation room in the suite. The one was quite as cheerless and
uninviting as any other reception room of its kind, and the other
possessed as many of the strange, terrifying and more or less
misunderstood devices for the prolongation of uncertainty in the minds of
the uneasy. During office-hours there was also a doctor there. Nothing was
missing from this properly placarded and admirably equipped
office,—nothing at all except the patients!
About the time that George Tresslyn fared forth into the world again,
Thorpe hung out his shingle and sat himself down under his own gates to
wait for the unwary. But no one came. The lame, the halt and even the
blind had visions that were not to be dissipated by anything so trivial as
a neat little sign in an office window. The name of Braden Thorpe was on
the lips of every one. It was mentioned, not with horror or disgust, but
as one speaks of the exalted genius whose cure for tuberculosis has
failed, or of the man who found the North Pole by advertising in the
newspapers, or of the books of Henry James. He was a person to steer clear
of, that was all.
Every newspaper in the country discussed him editorially, paragraphically,
and as an article of news. For weeks after the death of Templeton Thorpe
and the publication of his will, not a day passed in which Braden Thorpe's
outlandish assault upon civilisation failed to receive its country-wide
attention in the press. And when editorial writers, medical sharps, legal
experts and grateful reporters failed to avail themselves of the full
measure of space set apart for their gluttony, ubiquitous "Constant
Reader" rushed into print under many aliases and enjoyed himself as never
before.
In the face of all this uproar, brought about by the posthumous utterance
of old Templeton Thorpe, Braden had the courage,—or the temerity, if that
is a truer word,—to put his name in a window and invite further attention
to himself.
The world, without going into the matter any deeper than it usually does,
assumed that he who entered the office of Dr. Thorpe would never come out
of it alive!
The fact that Thorpe advocated something that could not conceivably become
a reality short of two centuries made no impression on the world and his
family. Dr. Thorpe believed that it was best to put sufferers out of their
misery, and that was all there was to be said about the matter so far as
Mr. Citizen was concerned.
It would appear, therefore, that all of Templeton Thorpe's ideas, hopes
and plans concerning the future of his grandson were to be shattered by
his own lack of judgment and foresight. Without intending to do so he had
deprived the young man of all that had been given him in the way of
education, training and character. Young Thorpe might have lived down or
surmounted the prejudice that his own revolutionary utterances created,
but he could never overcome the stupendous obstacle that now lay in his
path.
If Mr. Thorpe had hoped to create, or believed sincerely that it was
possible to create, a force capable of overpowering the natural instincts
of man, he had set for himself a task that could have but one result so
far as the present was concerned, and it was in the present that Braden
Thorpe lived, very far removed from the future that Mr. Thorpe appeared to
be seeing from a point close by as he lay on his death-bed. He had
completely destroyed the present usefulness of his grandson. He had put a
blight upon him, and now he was sleeping peacefully where mockery could
not reach him nor reason hold him to account.
The letter that the old man left for his grandson's guidance was an
affectionate apology, very skilfully worded, for having, in a way, left
the bulk of his fortune to the natural heir instead of to the great,
consuming public. True, he did not put this in so many words, but it was
obvious to the young man, if not to others who saw and read, that he was
very clear in his mind as to the real purport and intention of the clause
covering the foundation. He was careful to avoid the slightest expression
that might have been seized upon by the young man as evidence of treachery
on his part in view of the solemn promise he had made to leave to him no
portion of his estate. On the surface, this letter was a simple, direct
appeal to Braden to abide by the terms of the will, and to consider the
trust as sacred in spite of the absence of restrictions. To Braden, there
was but one real meaning to the will: the property was his to have, hold
or dispose of as he saw fit. He was at liberty either to use every dollar
of it in carrying out the expressed sentiments of the testator, or to sit
back luxuriously and console himself with the thought that nothing was
really expected of him.
The Foundation that received such wide-spread notice, and brought down
upon his head, not the wrath but the ridicule of his fellow beings, was
not to serve in any sense as a memorial to the man who provided the money
with which the work was to be carried on. As a matter of fact, old
Templeton Thorpe took very good care to stipulate plainly that it was not
to be employed to any such end. He forbade the use of his name in any
capacity except as one of the _supporters_ of the movement. The whole
world rose up at first and heaped anathemas on the name of Templeton
Thorpe, and then, swiftly recovering its amiable tolerance of fools,
forgot the dead and took its pleasure in "steering clear of the man who
was left to hold the bag of gold," as some of the paragraphers would have
it.
The people forgot old Templeton, and they also became a bit hazy about the
cardinal principle of the Foundation, much as they forget other disasters,
but they did not forget to look upon Braden Thorpe as a menace to mankind.
And so it was that after two months of waiting, he closed his office for
the summer and disappeared from the city. He had not treated a solitary
patient, nor had he been called in consultation by a single surgeon of his
acquaintance, although many of them professed friendship for and
confidence in him.
Six weeks later Simmy Dodge located his friend in a small coast town in
Maine, practically out of the reach of tourists and not at all accessible
to motorists. He had taken board and lodging with a needy villager who was
still honest, and there he sat and brooded over the curse that his own
intelligence had laid upon him. He had been there for a month or more
before he lifted his head, figuratively speaking, to look at the world
again,—and he found it still bright and sparkling despite his desire to
have it otherwise in order that he might be recompensed for his mood. Then
it was that he wrote to Simmy Dodge, asking him to sell the furnishings
and appliances in his office, sublet the rooms, and send to him as soon as
possible the proceeds of the sale. He confessed frankly and in his
straightforward way that he was hard up and needed the money!
Now, it should be remembered that Braden Thorpe had very little means of
his own, a small income from his mother's estate being all that he
possessed. He had been dependent upon his grandfather up to the day he
died. Years had been spent in preparing him for the personal achievements
that were to make him famous and rich by his own hand. Splendid ability
and unquestioned earning power were the result of Templeton Thorpe's faith
in the last of his race. But nothing was to come of it. His ability
remained but his earning power was gone. He was like a splendid engine
from which the motive power has been shut off.
For weeks after leaving New York he had seen the world blackly through
eyes that grasped no perspective. But he was young, he was made of the
flesh that fights, and the spirit that will not down. He looked up from
the black view that had held his attention so long, and smiled. It was not
a gay smile but one in which there was defiant humour. After all, why
shouldn't he smile? These villagers smiled cheerfully, and what had they
in their narrow lives to cause them to see the world brightly? He was no
worse off than they. If they could be content to live outside the world,
why shouldn't he be as they? He was big and strong and young. The fellows
who went out to sea in the fishing boats were no stronger, no better than
he. He could do the things that they were doing, and they sang while they
went to and from their work.
It was the reviving spirit in him that opened his eyes to the lowly joys
surrounding him. He found himself thinking with surprising interest that
he could do what these men were doing and do it well, and after all what
more can be expected of a man than that he should do some one thing well?
He did not realise at the time that this small, mean ambition to surpass
these bold fishermen was nothing less than the resurrection of dead hopes.
And so, when Simmy Dodge walked in upon him one day, expecting to find a
beaten, discouraged skulker, he was confronted by a sun-browned, bare-
armed, bright-eyed warrior whose smile was that of the man who never
laughs,—the grim smile of him who thinks.
The lines in his face had deepened under the influence of sun and wind;
there was a new, almost unnatural ruggedness about the man Simmy had seen
less than two months before. The cheeks had the appearance of being sunken
and there was an even firmer look to the strong chin and jaws than in the
so recent past. Simmy looked at this new, hardy face and wondered whether
two months in the rough world would do as much in proportion for his own
self-despised countenance.
Thorpe had been up since five o'clock in the morning. For two weeks he had
started off every morning at that hour with his landlord for the
timberlands above the town, where they spent the day hewing out the sills
and beams for a new boat-house. Unskilled at such labor, his duties were
not those of the practised workman, but rather those of the "handy man"
upon whom falls the most arduous tasks as a rule. Thorpe's sinews were
strained to the utmost in handling the long, unwieldy trunks of the fallen
trees; his hands were blistered and his legs bruised, but the splendid
muscles were no longer sore, nor was he so fatigued at day's-end that he
could have "dropped in his tracks" right joyfully,—as he had felt like
doing in the first week of his toiling.
"Well, I'll be jiggered," said Simmy, still holding Thorpe's hand as he
backed away from him the better to take in this new and strange creature
in overalls. Thorpe and his grizzled host had just come down from the
woods with a load of pine logs, and had found the trim, immaculate little
New Yorker waiting for them at the breakwater, directed thither by the
housewife in the winding lane that was called High Street. "By the way, is
your name Thorpe?" he added quizzically.
"Yep," said the graduate of three great universities, gripping the little
man's hand a trifle harder. "All that is left of me is named Thorpe,
Simmy."
"Have you—hired out as a—Good Lord, Brady, you're not as hard up as all
that, are you?" Simmy's face was bleak with concern.
"I'm doing it for the fun of the thing," said Thorpe. "Next week I'm going
out with the boats. I say, Simmy, have you a cigarette about your person?
I haven't had a—"
Half an hour later, Simmy was seated in the cool little front porch with
its screen of vines, the scent of the sea filling his sensitive nostrils,
and he was drinking buttermilk.
"Now, see here, Brady, it's all damned tommyrot," he was saying,—and he
had said something of the kind several times before in the course of their
earnest conversation. "There's just one course open to you, and that's the
right one. You've got to come back to New York and look people in the eye
and tell 'em to go to Gehenna if they don't like what you're doing. You
can't go on living like this, no matter how much you love it now. You're
not cut out for this sort of thing. Lordy, if I was as big and brutal
looking as you are at this minute I'd stand up for myself against—"
"But you will not understand," repeated Thorpe doggedly. "If my
attainments, as you call them, are to be of no value to me in helping
mankind, what is there left for me to do but this? Didn't I have enough of
it in those horrible two months down there to prove to me that they hate
me? They—"
"You weren't so thin skinned as all this when you were writing those
inspired articles of yours, were you? Confound you, Brady, you invited all
of this, you brought it down upon your head with all that nonsense
about—why, it was you who converted old Templeton Thorpe and here you are
running away like a 'white-head.' Haven't you any back-bone?"
"That's all very well, Simmy, but of what value is a back-bone in a case
like mine? If I had ten back-bones I couldn't compel people to come to me
for treatment or advice. They are afraid of me. I am a doctor, a surgeon,
a friend to all men. But if they will not believe that I am their friend,
how can I be of service to them?"
"You'll get patients, and plenty of 'em too, if you'll just hang on and
wait. They'll come to know that you wouldn't kill a cockroach if you could
help it. You'll—what's the matter?" He broke off suddenly with this sharp
question. A marked pallor had come over Thorpe's sunburnt face.
"Nothing—nothing at all," muttered the other. "The heat up there in the
woods—"
"You must look out for that, old boy," said Simmy anxiously. "Go slow.
You're only a city feller, as they'd say up here. What a God-forsaken
place it is! Not more than two hundred miles from Boston and yet I was a
whole day getting here."
"It is peaceful, Simmy," said Thorpe.
"I grant you that, by Jove. A fellow could walk in the middle of the
street here for a solid year without being hit by an automobile. But as I
was saying, you can make a place for yourself—"
"I should starve, old fellow. You forget that I am a poor man."
"Rats! You've got twenty-five thousand dollars a year, if you'll only be
sensible. There isn't another man in the United States who would be as
finicky about it as you are, no matter how full of ideals and principles
he may be stuffed."
Thorpe looked up suddenly. His jaw was set hard and firm once more. "Don't
you know what people would say about me if I were to operate and the
patient died?—as some of them do, you know. They would say that I did it
deliberately. I couldn't afford to lose in a single instance, Simmy. I
couldn't take the chance that other surgeons are compelled to take in a
great many cases. One failure would be sufficient. One—"
"See here, you've just got to look at things squarely, Braden. You owe
something to your grandfather if not to yourself. He left all that money
for a certain, definite purpose. You can't chuck it. You've got to come to
taw. You say that he took this means of leaving the money to you, that the
trust thing is all piffle, and all that sort of thing. Well, suppose that
it is true, what kind of a fool would you be to turn up your nose at six
million dollars? There are all kinds of ways of looking at it. In the
first place, he didn't leave it to you outright. It _is_ a trust, or a
foundation, and it has a definite end in view. You are the sole trustee,
that's the point on which you elect to stick. You are to be allowed to
handle this vast fortune as your judgment dictates, _as a trustee_, mind
you. You forget that he fixed your real position rather clearly when he
stipulated that you were to have a salary of twenty-five thousand dollars
a year, and fees as a trustee. That doesn't look as though he left it to
you without strings, does it?"
For an hour they argued the great question. Simmy did not pretend that he
accepted Braden's theories; in fact, he pronounced them shocking. Still,
he contended, that was neither here nor there. Braden believed in them,
and it wasn't any affair of his, after all.
"I don't believe it is right for man to try to do God's work," said he, in
explaining his objections. "But it doesn't matter what I think about it,
old chap, so don't mind me."
"Can't you understand, Simmy, that I advocate a simple, direct means of
relieving the—"
"Sure, I understand," broke in Simmy agreeably.
"Does God send the soldiers into battle, does he send the condemned man to
the gallows? Man does that, doesn't he? If it is God's work to drop a
small child into a boiling vat by accident, and if He fails to kill that
child at once, why shouldn't it be the work of man to complete the job as
quickly as possible? We shoot down the soldiers. Is that God's work? We
hang the murderer. Is that God's work? Emperors and kings conduct their
wars in the name of God and thousands of God's creatures go down to death.
Do you believe that God approves of this slaughter of the strong and
hardy? God doesn't send the man to the gallows nor the soldier to the
fighting line. Man does that, and he does it because he has the power to
do it, and he lives serene in the consolation that the great, good God
will not hold him to account for what he has done. We legalise the killing
of the strong; but not for humane reasons. Why shouldn't we legalise the
killing of the weak for humane reasons? It may interest you to know,
Simmy, that we men have more merciful ways of ending life than God Himself
directs. Why prolong life when it means agony that cannot be ended except
by the death that so certainly waits a few days or weeks beyond—"
"How can you be sure that a man is going to die? Doctors very frequently
say that a person has no chance whatever, and then the fellow fools 'em
and gets well."
"I am not speaking of such cases. I only speak of the cases where there
can be no doubt. There are such cases, you see. I would let Death take its
toll, just as it has always done, and I would fight for my patient until
the last breath was gone from his body. Two weeks ago a child was gored by
a bull back here in the country. It was disembowelled. That child lived
for many hours,—and suffered. That's what I mean, in substance. I too
believe in the old maxim,—'while there's life there's hope.' That is the
foundation on which our profession is built. A while ago you spoke of the
extremely aged as possible victims of my theories. I suppose you meant to
ask me if I would include them in my list. God forbid! To me there is
nothing more beautiful than a happy, healthy, contented old age. We love
our old people. If we love them we do not think of them as old. We want
them to live,—just as I shall want to live, and you, Simmy. And we want
them to die when their time comes, by God's hand not man's, for God does
give them a peaceful, glorious end. But we don't want them to suffer, any
more than we would want the young to suffer, I loved my grandfather. Death
was a great boon to him. He wanted to die. But all old men do not want to
die. They—"
"We're not getting anywhere with this kind of talk," interrupted Simmy.
"The sum and substance is this: you would put it in the power of a few men
to destroy human life on the representation of a few doctors. If these
doctors said—"
"And why not? We put it into the power of twelve men to send a man to the
gallows on the testimony of witnesses who may be lying like thieves. We
take the testimony of doctors as experts in our big murder trials. If we
believe some of them we hang the man because they say he is sane. On the
other hand we frequently acquit the guilty man if they say he's insane."
Simmy squinted a half-closed eye, calculatingly, judicially. "My dear
fellow, the insane asylums in this country to-day hold any number of
reasonably sane inmates, sent there by commissions which perhaps
unintentionally followed out the plans of designing persons who were
actuated solely by selfish and avaricious motives. Control of great
properties falls into the hands of conspiring relatives simply because it
happened to be an easy matter to get some one snugly into a madhouse." He
said no more. Braden was allowed to draw his own conclusions.
"Oh, I dare say people will go on putting obstacles out of their way till
the end of time," said he coolly. "If I covet your wife or your ass or
your money-bags I put poison in your tea and you very obligingly die, and
all that the law can do is to send me after you as soon as the lawyers
have got through with me. That is no argument, Simmy. That sort of thing
will go on forever."
Finally Thorpe settled back in his chair resignedly, worn out by the
persistent argument of his tormentor.
"Well, suppose that I agree with all you say,—what then? Suppose that I
take up my burden, as you say I should, and set out to bring the world
around to my way of thinking, where am I to begin and how?"
Simmy contrived to suppress the sigh of relief that rose to his lips. This
was making headway, after all. Things looked brighter.
"My dear fellow, it will take you a good many years to even make a
beginning. You can't go right smack up against the world and say: 'Here,
you, look sharp! I'm going to hit you in the eye.' In the first place, you
will have to convince the world that you are a great, big man in your
profession. You will have to cure ten thousand people before you can make
the world believe that you are anybody at all. Then people will listen to
you and what you say will have some effect. You can't do anything now.
Twenty years from now, when you are at the top of your profession, you
will be in a position to do something. But in the meantime you will have
to make people understand that you can cure 'em if anybody can, so that
when you say _you_ can't cure 'em, they'll know it's final. I'm not asking
you to renounce your ideas. You can even go on talking about them and
writing to the newspapers and all that sort of thing, if you want to, but
you've got to build up a reputation for yourself before you can begin to
make use of all this money along the lines laid down for you. But first of
all you must make people say that in spite of your theories you are a
practical benefactor and not a plain, ordinary crank. Go on sowing the
seed if you will, and then when the time comes found a college in which
your principles may be safely and properly taught, and then see what
people will say."
"It sounds very simple, the way you put it," said Thorpe, with a smile.
"There is no other way, my friend," said Simmy earnestly.
Thorpe was silent for a long time, staring out over the dark waters of the
bay. The sun had slipped down behind the ridge of hills to the south and
west, and the once bright sea was now cold and sinister and unsmiling. The
boats were stealing in from its unfriendly wastes.
"I had not thought of it in that light, Simmy," he said at length. "My
grandfather said it might take two hundred years."
"Incidentally," said Simmy, shrewdly, "your grandfather knew what he was
about when he put in the provision that you were to have twenty-five
thousand dollars a year as a salary, so to speak. He was a far-seeing man.
He knew that you would have a hard, uphill struggle before you got on your
feet to stay. He may even have calculated on a lifetime, my friend. That's
why he put in the twenty-five. He probably realised that you'd be too
idiotic to use the money except as a means to bring about the millennium,
and so he said to himself 'I'll have to do something to keep the damn'
fool from starving.' You needn't have any scruples about taking your pay,
old boy. You've got to live, you know. I think I've got the old
gentleman's idea pretty—"
"Well, let's drop the subject for to-night, Simmy," said Thorpe, coming to
his feet. His chin was up and his shoulders thrown back as he breathed
deeply and fully of the new life that seemed to spring up mysteriously
from nowhere. "You'll spend the night with me. There is a spare bed and
you'll—"
"Isn't there a Ritz in the place?" inquired Simmy, scarcely able to
conceal his joy.
"Not so that you can notice it," replied Thorpe gaily. He walked to the
edge of the porch and drank in more of that strange, puzzling air that
came from vast distances and filled his lungs as they had never been
filled before.
Simmy watched him narrowly in the failing light. After a moment he sank
back comfortably in the old rocking chair and smiled as a cat might smile
in contemplating a captive mouse. The rest would be easy. Thorpe would go
back with him. That was all that he wanted, and perhaps more than he
expected. As for old Templeton Thorpe's "foundation," he did not give it a
moment's thought. Time would attend to that. Time would kill it, so what
was the use worrying. He prided himself on having done the job very
neatly,—and he was smart enough to let the matter rest.
"What is the news in town?" asked Braden, turning suddenly. There was a
new ring in his voice. He was eager for news of the town!
"Well," said Simmy naively, "there is so much to tell I don't believe I
could get it all out before dinner."
"We call it supper, Simmy."
"It's all the same to me," said Simmy.
And after supper he told him the news as they walked out along the
breakwater.
Anne Thorpe was in Europe. She closed the house as soon as George was able
to go to work, and went away without any definite notion as to the length
of her stay abroad.
"She's terribly upset over having to live in that old house down there,"
said Simmy, "and I don't blame her. It's full of ghosts, good and bad. It
has always been her idea to buy a big house farther up town. In fact, that
was one of the things on which she had set her heart. I don't mind telling
you that I'm trying to find some way in which she can chuck the old house
down there without losing anything. She wants to give it away, but I won't
listen to that. It's worth a hundred thousand if it's worth a nickel. So
she closed the place, dismissed the servants and—"
"'Gad, my grandfather wouldn't like that," said Braden. "He was fond of
Murray and Wade and—"
"Murray has bought a saloon in Sixth Avenue and talks of going into
politics. Old Wade absolutely refused to allow Anne to close up the house.
He has received his legacy and turned it over to me for investment.
Confound him, when I had him down to the office afterwards he as much as
told me that he didn't want to be bothered with the business, and actually
complained because I had taken him away from his work at that hour of the
day. Anne had to leave him there as caretaker. I understand he is all
alone in the house."
"Anne is in Europe, eh? That's good," said Thorpe, more to himself than to
his companion.
"Never saw her looking more beautiful than the day she sailed," said
Simmy, peering hard in the darkness at the other's face. "She hasn't had
much happiness, Brady."
"Umph!" was the only response, but it was sufficient to turn Simmy off
into other channels.
"I suppose you know that George and Lutie are married again."
"Good! I'm glad to hear it," said Thorpe, with enthusiasm.
"Married two weeks after George went to work in that big bank note
company's plant. I got the job for him. He starts at the bottom, of
course, but that's the right way for a chap like George to begin. He'll
have to make good before he can go up an inch in the business. Fifteen a
week. But he'll go up, Brady. He'll make good with Lutie to push from
behind. Awful blow to Mrs. Tresslyn, however. He's a sort of clerk and has
to wear sleeve papers and an eye-shade. I shall never forget the day that
Lutie bought him back." Simmy chuckled.
"Bought him back?"
"Yes. She plunked thirty thousand down on the table in my office in front
of Mrs. Tresslyn and said 'I sha'n't need a receipt, Mrs. Tresslyn. George
is receipt enough for me.' I'd never seen Mrs. Tresslyn blush before, but
she blushed then, my boy. Got as red as fire. Then she rose up in her
dignity and said she wouldn't take the money. How was her son to live, she
said, if Lutie deprived him of his visible means of support? Lutie replied
that if George was strong enough to carry the washing back and forth from
the customers', she'd manage to support him by taking in dirty linen. Then
Mrs. Tresslyn broke down. Damme, Brady, it brought tears to my eyes. You
don't know how affecting it is to see a high and mighty person like Mrs.
Tresslyn humble herself like that. She didn't cry. I was the only one who
cried, curse me for a silly ass. She just simply said that Lutie was the
best and bravest girl in the world and that she was sorry for all that she
had done to hurt her. And she asked Lutie to forgive her. Then Lutie put
her arm around her and called her an old dear. I didn't see any more on
account of the infernal tears. But Lutie wouldn't take back the money. She
said that it didn't belong to her and that she couldn't look George in the
face if she kept it. So that's how it stands. She and George have a tiny
little apartment 'way up town,—three rooms, I believe, and so far she
hasn't taken in anybody's washing. Anne wants to refund the money to
Lutie, but doesn't know how to go about it. She—er—sort of left it to me
to find the way. Lordy, I seem to get all of the tough jobs."
"You are a brick, Simmy," said Thorpe, laying his arm across the little
man's shoulders.
"Heigh-ho!" sighed Simmy. Later on, as they returned through the fog that
was settling down about them, he inquired: "By the way, will you be ready
to start back with me to-morrow?"
"Lord love you, no," cried Thorpe. "I've agreed, to help old man Stingley
with the boat house. I'll come down in three weeks, Simmy."
"Lordy, Lordy!" groaned Simmy, dejectedly. "Three weeks in this God-
forsaken place? I'll die, Brady."
"You? What are you talking about?"
"Why, you don't suppose I'm going back without you, do you?"