"But I know a bench off to the right, where it isn't likely you'll
be found by any questing partner, and you needn't confess to having
had a companion. Will you come and talk to me?"
"I'm a bird of passage," she answered, smiling, "and I've only to
unfold my wings and fly away from the smoke of scandal. Yes, I'll
come--if you won't talk--too much. You see, after all, I won't
flatter you. It's the night I want, not talk ... the wonderful night!"
But, of course, they did talk. She was an American girl, she told him,
and had studied art a little, but would never be much of a painter.
She had been teaching classes in a city high school in the Middle
West, when suddenly life there seemed to have gone humdrum and stale.
She had a little money saved, not much, but enough if she managed
well, and she'd boldly resigned and determined, once at least before
she was too old, to follow spring around the world. She had almost
given up the idea of painting now, but thought presently she might
go in for writing, where, after all, perhaps, her real talent lay.
She had gotten a letter of introduction in Suva to the Tretheways
and she would be here until the next steamer after the morrow's.
These were the bare facts. Harber gave a good many more than he got,
he told me, upon the theory that nothing so provoked confidence as
giving it. He was a little mad himself that night, he admits, or
else very, very sane. As you will about that. But, from the moment
she began to talk, the thought started running through his head that
there was fate in this meeting.
There was a sort of passionate fineness about her that caught and
answered some instinct in Harber ... and I'm afraid they talked more
warmly than the length of their acquaintance justified, that they
made one another half-promises, not definite, perhaps, but implied;
promises that....
"I _must_ go in," she said at last, reluctantly.
He knew that she must, and he made no attempt to gainsay her.
"You are going to America," she went on. "If you should----"
And just at that moment, Harber says, anything seemed possible to him,
and he said eagerly: "Yes--if you will--I should like----"
How well they understood one another is evident from that. Neither
had said it definitely, but each knew.
"Have you a piece of paper?" she asked.
Harber produced a pencil, and groped for something to write upon.
All that his pockets yielded was a sealed envelope. He gave it to her.
She looked at it closely, and saw in the brilliant moonshine that it
was sealed and stamped and addressed.
"I'll spoil it for mailing," she said.
"It doesn't matter," Harber told her ineptly. "Or you can write it
lightly, and I'll erase it later."
There was a little silence. Then suddenly she laughed softly, and
there was a tiny catch in the voice. "So that you can forget?" she
said bravely. "No! I'll write it fast and hard ... so that you can ...
never ... forget!"
And she gave him first his pencil and envelope, and afterward her
hand, which Harber held for a moment that seemed like an eternity
and then let go. She went into the house, but Harber didn't follow
her. He went off to his so-called hotel.
In his room, by the light of the kerosene-lamp, he took out the
envelope and reed what she had written. It was:
Vanessa Simola, Claridon, Michigan.
He turned over the envelope and looked at the address on the other
side, in his own handwriting:
Miss Janet Spencer, Tawnleytown....
And the envelope dropped from his nerveless fingers to the table.
Who shall say how love goes or comes? Its ways are a sacred,
insoluble mystery, no less. But it had gone for Harber: and just as
surely, though so suddenly, had it come! Yes, life had bitterly
tricked him at last. She had sent him this girl ... too late! The
letter in the envelope was written to tell Janet Spencer that within
six weeks he would be in Tawnleytown to claim her in marriage.
One must be single-minded like Harber to appreciate his terrible
distress of mind. The facile infidelity of your ordinary mortal
wasn't for Harber. No, he had sterner stuff in him.
Vanessa! The name seemed so beautiful ... like the girl herself,
like the things she had said. It was an Italian name. She had told
him her people had come from Venice, though she was herself
thoroughly a product of America. "So that you can never forget," she
had said. Ah, it was the warm blood of Italy in her veins that had
prompted that An American girl wouldn't have said that!
He slit the envelope, letting the letter fall to the table, and put
it in his pocket.
Yet why should he save it? He could never see her again, he knew.
Vain had been those half-promises, those wholly lies, that his eyes
and lips had given her. For there was Janet, with her prior promises.
Ten years Janet had waited for him ... ten years ... and suddenly,
aghast, he realized how long and how terrible the years are, how they
can efface memories and hopes and desires, and how cruelly they had
dealt with him, though he had not realized it until this moment.
Janet ... why, actually, Janet was a stranger, he didn't know Janet
any more! She was nothing but a frail phantom of recollection: the
years had erased her! But this girl--warm, alluring, immediate....
No--no! It couldn't be.
So much will the force of an idea do for a man, you see. Because, of
course, it could have been. He had only to destroy the letter that
lay there before him, to wait on until the next sailing, to make
continued love to Vanessa, and never to go to Tawnleytown again.
There was little probability that Janet would come here for him. Ten
years and ten thousand miles ... despite all that he had vowed on
Bald Knob that Sunday so long ago, wouldn't you have said that was
barrier enough?
Why, so should I! But it wasn't.
For Harber took the letter and put it in a fresh envelope, and in
the morning he went aboard the steamer without seeing the girl again ...
unless that bit of white standing near the top of the slope, as the
ship churned the green harbour water heading out to sea, were she,
waving.
But he kept the address she had written.
Why? He never could use it. Well, perhaps he didn't want to forget
too soon, though it hurt him to remember. How many of us, after all,
have some little memory like that, some intimate communion with
romance, which we don't tell, but cling to? And perhaps the memory
is better than the reality would have been. We imagine ... but that
again is cynical. Harber will never be that now. Let me tell you why.
It's because he hadn't been aboard ship on his crossing to Victoria
twenty-four hours before he met Clay Barton.
Barton was rolled up in rugs, lying in a deck-chair, biting his
teeth hard together to keep them from chattering, though the
temperature was in the eighties, and most of the passengers in white.
Barton appeared to be a man of forty, whereas he turned out to be in
his early twenties. He was emaciated to an alarming degree and his
complexion was of the pale, yellow-green that spoke of many
recurrences of malaria. The signs were familiar to Harber.
He sat down beside Barton, and, as the other looked at him half a
dozen times tentatively, he presently spoke to him.
"You've had a bad time of it, haven't you?"
"Terrible," said Barton frankly. "They say I'm convalescent now. I
don't know. Look at me. What would you say?"
Harber shook his head.
Barton laughed bitterly. "Yes, I'm pretty bad," he agreed readily.
And then, as he talked that day and the two following, he told
Harber a good many things.
"I tell you, Harber," he said, "we'll do anything for money. Here I
am--and I knew damned well it was killing me, too. And yet I stuck
it out six months after I'd any earthly business to--just for a few
extra hundreds."
"Where were you? What were you doing?" asked Harber.
"Trading-post up a river in the Straits Settlements," said Barton.
"A crazy business from the beginning--and yet I made money. Made it
lots faster than I could have back home. Back there you're hedged
about with too many rules. And competition's too keen. You go into
some big corporation office at seventy-five a month, maybe, and
unless you have luck you're years getting near anything worth having.
And you've got to play politics, bootlick your boss--all that. So I
got out.
"Went to California first, and got a place in an exporting firm in
San Francisco. They sent me to Sydney and then to Fiji. After I'd
been out for a while and got the hang of things, I cut loose from
them.
"Then I got this last chance, and it looked mighty good--and I
expect I've done for myself by it. Five years or a little better.
That's how long I've lasted. Back home I'd have been good for
thirty-five. A short life and a merry one, they say. Merry. Good God!"
He shook his head ironically.
"The root of all evil," he resumed after a little. "Well, but you've
got to have it--can't get along without it in _this_ world. You've
done well, you say?"
Harber nodded.
"Well, so should I have, if the cursed fever had let me alone. In
another year or so I'd have been raking in the coin. And now here I
am--busted--done--;--_fini_, as the French say. I burned the candle
at both ends--and got just what was coming to me, I suppose. But how
_could_ I let go, just when everything was coming my way?"
"I know," said Harber. "But unless you can use it----"
"You're right there. Not much in it for me now. Still, the medicos
say a cold winter back home will.... I don't know. Sometimes I don't
think I'll last to....
"Where's the use, you ask, Harber? You ask me right now, and I can't
tell you. But if you'd asked me before I got like this, I could have
told you quick enough. With some men, I suppose, it's just an
acquisitive nature. With me, that didn't cut any figure. With me, it
was a girl. I wanted to make the most I could for her in the
shortest time. A girl ... well...."
Harber nodded. "I understand. I came out for precisely the same
reason myself," he remarked.
"You did?" said Barton, looking at him sadly. "Well, luck was with
you, then. You look so--so damned fit! You can go back to her ...
while I ... ain't it hell? Ain't it?" he demanded fiercely.
"Yes," admitted Harber, "it is. But at the same time, I'm not sure
that anything's ever really lost. If she's worth while----"
Barton made a vehement sign of affirmation.
"Why, she'll be terribly sorry for you, but she won't _care_,"
concluded Harber. "I mean, she'll be waiting for you, and glad to
have you coming home, so glad that...."
"Ah ... yes. That's what ... I haven't mentioned the fever in
writing to her, you see. It will be a shock."
Harber, looking at him, thought that it would, indeed.
"I had a letter from her just before we sailed," went on the other,
more cheerfully. "I'd like awfully, some time, to have you meet her.
She's a wonderful girl--wonderful. She's clever. She's much cleverer
than I am, really ... about most things. When we get to Victoria,
you must let me give you my address."
"Thanks," said Harber. "I'll be glad to have it."
That was the last Harber saw of him for five days. The weather
had turned rough, and he supposed the poor fellow was seasick,
and thought of him sympathetically, but let it rest there. Then,
one evening after dinner, the steward came for him and said that
Mr. Clay Barton wanted to see him. Harber followed to Barton's stateroom,
which the sick man was occupying alone. In the passageway near the
door, he met the ship's doctor.
"Mr. Harber?" said the doctor. "Your friend in there--I'm sorry to
say--is----"
"I suspected as much," said Harber. "He knows it himself, I think."
"Does he?" said the doctor, obviously relieved. "Well, I hope that
he'll live till we get him ashore. There's just a chance, of course,
though his fever is very high now. He's quite lucid just now, and
has been insisting upon seeing you. Later he mayn't be conscious.
So----"
Harber nodded. "I'll go in."
Barton lay in his berth, still, terribly thin, and there were two
pink patches of fever burning upon his cheek-bones. He opened his
eyes with an infinite weariness as Harber entered the room, and
achieved a smile.
"Hard luck, old fellow," said Harber, crossing to him. "'Sall
_up_!" said Barton, grinning gamely. "I'm through. Asked 'em to
send you in. Do something for me, Harber--tha's right, ain't
it--Harber's your name?"
"Yes. What is it, Barton?"
Barton closed his eyes, then opened them again.
"Doggone memory--playin' tricks," he apologized faintly. "This,
Harber. Black-leather case inside leather grip there--by the wall.
Money in it--and letters. Everything goes--to the girl. Nobody else.
I know you're straight. Take 'em to her?"
"Yes," said Harber.
"Good," said Barton. "All right, then! Been expecting this. All ready
for it. Name--address--papers--all there. She'll have no
trouble--getting money. Thanks, Harber." And after a pause, he added:
"Better take it now--save trouble, you know."
Harber got the leather case from the grip and took it at once to his
own stateroom.
When he returned, Barton seemed for the moment, with the commission
off his mind, a little brighter.
"No end obliged, Harber," he murmured.
"All right," said Harber, "but ought you to talk?"
"Won't matter now," said Barton grimly. "Feel like talking now.
To-morrow may be--too late!" And after another pause, he went on:
"The fine dreams of youth--odd where they end, isn't it?
"This--and me--so different. So different! Failure. She was wise--but
she didn't know everything. The world was too big--too hard for me.
'You can't fail,' she said, '_I won't let you fail_!' But you see----"
Harber's mind, slipping back down the years, with Barton, to his own
parting, stopped with a jerk.
"What!" he exclaimed.
Barton seemed drifting, half conscious, half unconscious of what he
was saying. He did not appear to have heard Harber's exclamation over
the phrase so like that Janet had given him.
"We weren't like the rest," droned Barton. "No--we wanted more out of
life than they did. We couldn't be content--with half a loaf. We
wanted--the bravest adventures--the yellowest gold--the...."
Picture that scene, if you will. What would _you_ have said? Harber
saw leaping up before him, with terrible clarity, as if it were
etched upon his mind, that night in Tawnleytown ten years before. It
was as if Barton, in his semidelirium, were reading the words from
_his_ past!
"I won't let you fail! ... half a loaf ... the bravest adventures ...
the yellowest gold." Incredible thing! That Barton and _his_ girl
should have stumbled upon so many of the phrases, the exact phrases!
And suddenly full knowledge blinded Harber.... No! No! He spurned it.
It couldn't be. And yet, he felt that if Barton were to utter one
more phrase of those that Janet had said and, many, many times since,
written to _him_, the impossible, the unbelievable, would be stark,
unassailable fact.
He put his hand upon Barton's arm and gently pressed it.
"Barton," he said, "tell me--Janet--Tawnleytown?"
Barton stared with glassy, unseeing eyes for a moment; then his
eyelids fell.
"The bravest adventures--the yellowest gold," he murmured. Then, so
faintly as almost to baffle hearing: "Where--all--our--dreams?
Gone--aglimmering. Gone."
That was all.
Impossible? No, just very, very improbable. But how, by its very
improbability, it does take on the semblance of design! See how by
slender a thread the thing hung, how every corner of the plan fitted.
Just one slip Janet Spencer made; she let her thoughts and her words
slip into a groove; she repeated herself. And how unerringly life
had put her finger upon that clew! So reasoned Harber.
Well, if the indictment were true, there was proof to be had in
Barton's leather case!
Harber, having called the doctor, went to his stateroom.
He opened the leather case. Inside a cover of yellow oiled silk he
found first a certificate of deposit for three thousand pounds, and
beneath it a packet of letters.
He unwrapped them.
And, though somehow he had known it without the proof, at the sight
of them something caught at his heart with a clutch that made it
seem to have stopped beating for a long time. For the sprawling
script upon the letters was almost as familiar to him as his own.
Slowly he reached down and took up the topmost letter, drew the thin
shiny sheets from the envelope, fluttered them, dazed, and stared at
the signature:
Yours, my dearest lover, JANET.
Just so had she signed _his_ letters. It _was_ Janet Spencer. Two of
her argosies, each one laden with gold for her, had met in their
courses, had sailed for a little together.
The first reasonable thought that came to Harber, when he was
convinced of the authenticity of the miracle, was that he was
free--free to go after the girl he loved, after Vanessa Simola. I
think that if he could have done it, he'd have turned the steamer
back to the Orient in that moment. The thought that the ship was
plunging eastward through a waste of smashing heavy seas was
maddening, no less!
He didn't want to see Janet or Tawnleytown, again. He did have, he
told me, a fleeting desire to know just how many other ships Janet
might have launched, but it wasn't strong enough to take him to see
her. He sent her the papers and letters by registered mail under an
assumed name.
And then he went to Claridon, Michigan, to learn of her people when
Vanessa might be expected home. They told him she was on her way. So,
fearing to miss her if he went seeking, he settled down there and
stayed until she came. It was seven months of waiting he had ... but
it was worth it in the end.
* * * * *
And that was Harber's romance. Just an incredible coincidence, you
say. I know it. I told Harber that. And Mrs. Harber.
And _she_ said nothing at all, but looked at me inscrutably, with a
flicker of scorn in her sea-gray eyes.
Harber smiled lazily and serenely, and leaned back in his chair, and
replied in a superior tone: "My dear Sterne, things that are made in
heaven--like my marriage--don't just happen. Can't you see that your
stand simply brands you an unbeliever?"
And, of course, I _can_ see it. And Harber may be right. I don't know.
Does any one, I wonder?
ALMA MATER
BY O. F. LEWIS
From _The Red Book_
Professor Horace Irving had taught Latin for nearly forty years at
Huntington College. Then he had come back to Stuyvesant Square, in
New York. Now he lived in a little hall bedroom, four flights up,
overlooking the Square.
Habitually he walked from the Square westward to Fourth Avenue, in
the afternoon, when the weather permitted. He had been born only
three doors from where he now lived. The house of his birth had gone.
It was sixty years since he had been a boy and played in this Square.
Now he would pause at the corner of Fourth Avenue in his walks, and
remember the Goelet's cow and the big garden and the high iron fence
at Nineteenth Street and Broadway. Great buildings now towered there.
South along Fourth Avenue he would walk, a little man, scarcely five
feet four in height, even with the silk hat and the Prince Albert
coat. His white hair grew long over his collar, and people would
notice that almost more than anything else about him. He may have
weighed between ninety and a hundred pounds. The coat was worn and
shiny, but immaculate. The tall hat was of a certain type and year,
but carefully smoothed and still glossy.
He would pause often, between Nineteenth Street and Eighteenth Street,
peopling the skyscrapers with ghosts of a former day, when houses
and green gardens lined the streets. The passers-by watched him
casually, perhaps as much as any one notices any one else in New York.
He was, in the Fourteenth Street district, a rarer specimen than
Hindus or Mexican medicine-men. Through the ten years since he had
come, pensioned, from Huntington College, he had become a walking
landmark in this region.
He always walked down on the east side of the street, crossing at
Fourteenth Street. He was carefully piloted, and saluted, by the
traffic policeman. It was a bad crossing. Below Fourteenth Street
things looked much more as they had looked when he was young.
The bookstores were an unceasing hobby to the old man. The
secondhand dealers never made any objection to his reading books
upon the shelves. His purchases were perhaps two books a week, at
ten or even five cents each. Now and again he would find one of his
own "Irving's Latin Prose Composition" texts in the five-cent pile.
Opening the book, he usually would discover strange pencilled
pictures drawn scrawlingly over many of the pages. His "Latin
Composition" wasn't published after 1882, the year the firm failed.
It might have been different for him, with a different publisher.
Late one afternoon in April, Professor Irving stood in his customary
niche at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street, watching the
traffic from a sheltered spot against the wall of the building. He
was becoming exceedingly anxious about the approaching storm. It had
come up since he left Stuyvesant Square, and he had no umbrella. He
must not get his silk hat wet. His thin overcoat was protecting him
but feebly from the wind, which with the disappearance of the sun
had grown sharp and biting. It was rapidly becoming dark. Lights
were flashing in the windows up and down the Avenue.
The Professor decided to stand in a doorway till the shower had
passed over. The chimes in the Metropolitan Tower struck the first
quarter after four, the sounds welling in gusts to the old man's ears.
A little man came to stand in the doorway beside the Professor. The
latter saw that the little man had a big umbrella. Silk hats were so
fearfully expensive in these days!
The heavy drops beat against the pavement in torrents. The first
flash of lightning of the year was followed by a deep roll of thunder.
"I got to go!" said the little man. "Keep the umbrella! I got
another where I work. I'm only fifty-five. You're older than me, a
lot. You better start home. You'll get soaked, standing here!" And
the little man was gone before the Professor could reply.
"An exceedingly kindly, simple man," thought the old Professor. He
had planned, while standing with his unknown benefactor, that he
would go into some store and wait. But now he would chance it, and
cross the street. He saw a lull in the traffic. He started and was
nearly swept off his feet. He got to the middle of the street. The
umbrella grew unwieldy, swinging this way and that, as if tugged by
unseen hands. It turned inside out. Blaring noises from the passing
cars confused the Professor.
The shaft of the umbrella swung violently around and knocked the
silk hat from Professor Irving's head. His white hair was caught by
the wind. Lashed in another direction, the shaft now struck the
Professor's glasses, and they flew away. Now he could see little or
nothing. He became bewildered.
Great glaring headlights broke upon him, passed him, and then
immediately other glaring lights flared up toward him out of the
sheets of water. He couldn't see because of his lost glasses and
because of the stinging rain. He rushed between two cars. He slipped....
The chimes on the Metropolitan Tower rang out, in wails of wild sound,
the half-hour after four.
* * * * *
The attendance that evening at the annual banquet of the New York
alumni of Huntington College exceeded all previous records. The
drive for two million five hundred thousand dollars was on. It was a
small college, but as Daniel Webster said of Dartmouth, there were
those who loved it.
The east ballroom of the hotel was well filled with diners.
Recollections of college days were shouted across tables and over
intervening aisles. There was a million still to raise: but old
Huntington would put it across! They'd gotten out more of the older
men, the men with money, than had ever been seen before at an alumni
dinner.
The income on one million would go into better salaries for the
professors and other teachers. They'd been shamefully underpaid--men
who'd been on the faculty twenty to thirty years getting two thousand!
Well, Huntington College had now a new president, one of the boys of
twenty years ago. Yes sir, things were different. It was in the air.
In the midst of the dinner course, the toastmaster rapped loudly
with the gavel for attention. It was hard to obtain quiet.