The Reluctant One
One knew Anthony Fry for two or three decades before quite understanding
him. David's great disadvantage, of course, was that he had met Anthony
only an hour or so before. To David, doubtless, the quiet, mysterious,
speculative smile seemed sinister, for he repeated thickly:
"I want my--my cap and my coat and----"
"Well, what are you going to do if you don't get them?" Anthony laughed.
"What did you say?" David asked quickly.
"What if you don't get your coat?"
"Does that mean that you're going to keep me here, whether I want to
stay or not?" the boy asked quickly.
"Not just that, perhaps, but it does mean that I'm going to keep you
here for a little while, David, until you've come to your senses
and----"
"I'll yell!" David stated.
"Eh?"
"If you try to keep me here I'll yell until everybody in the house comes
in to see what's happening!"
Anthony laughed quietly.
"Don't be ridiculous, David," he said. "I've lived here for years, and
they will know perfectly well that I'm not injuring you in any way."
"Oh!" gasped David.
"So just sit down again and consider what I have offered you. Sit still
for just one minute and consider--and then give me your answer."
Finger-tips drumming, benevolent gaze beaming over his glasses, the
unusual Anthony waited. David's scared eyes roved the room, wandered
over Johnson Boller, reading his paper, and finally settled so steadily
on that gentleman that he looked up and, looking, read David's mind and
shrugged his shoulders.
"Your own fault, kid," said he. "I wanted to give you a free ride, but
you had to come up and hear what he had to say."
"Johnson!" Anthony said sharply, "Just let the youngster's mental
processes work the thing out in their own way."
Half a minute dragged along--yet before it was gone one saw clearly that
the mental processes had taken their grip. An extremely visible change
was coming over David Prentiss. He gulped down certain emotions of his
own, and presently managed to smile, uneasily at first and then with a
certain confidence. He cleared his throat and, with a slight huskiness,
addressed Anthony:
"Er--do I understand that you want me to stay here until I fully
appreciate all you've offered me, Mr. Fry?"
"Virtually that."
"Well, I appreciated that all along; but--but I was sort of worried
about it getting so late, you know," David said brightly. "I certainly
do appreciate it, and I thank you very much. Now can I have my coat?"
"Really decided to grip the opportunity, eh?" Anthony asked keenly.
"You bet!"
Johnson Boller laid aside his paper.
"Now chase him, Anthony!" he said. "He's standing up and holding the
sugar on his nose. Slip the kid a five-dollar bill and let Wilkins----"
"Do you really imagine that I'd rouse all the boy's hopes and then play
him a shabby trick like that?" Anthony asked sharply.
"Huh?"
"Most emphatically not!" Mr. Fry said. "I'll play no such shabby trick
on the youngster. He shall have exactly the chance I promised, and I
shall watch the working out of the idea with the most intense interest.
David, I'm going to keep you here from this minute!"
"Keep me here?" David echoed blankly.
"Certainly."
David gazed fixedly at the electrolier.
"Well, I'll tell you, Mr. Fry," he said. "I'd like to stay to-night, but
I can't--not to-night. You see, I have to go home to my father. He's
an--an invalid."
"We'll telephone the good news to him," Anthony smiled.
"You can't," said David. "We're too poor to have a telephone."
"Very well. Then we'll wire him."
David shook his head energetically.
"That wouldn't do, either," said he. "Father's sick, you know. His
heart's very weak. Just the sight of a telegram might kill him."
"Unfortunate!" Anthony sighed and shrugged his shoulders. "Very well,
David. Then you shall write him a note, and I'll have Wilkins take it to
him."
David swallowed audibly and smiled a wild little smile.
"Oh, no! Not that, sir!" said he. "That might be even worse than a
telegram, I think."
"Why?"
"Well, father would be likely to think that I'd been--been injured and
taken into some swell home, you know, and that I was writing like that
just to reassure him. No," David said firmly, "that would be the worst
possible thing. I'll have to go myself and talk it over with father
and--now if I can have my cap and my coat?"
It came as a familiar refrain. It caused Anthony's eye to darken
suddenly as he sat back and stared at the boy.
"Confound your hat and coat!" he rapped out. "See here, David. You write
the note, and I myself will take it to your father and explain--and be
sure that he will rejoice. There is the desk. Where do you live?"
His tone was not nearly so benevolent. Opposition, as always, was
rousing Anthony's unfortunate stubbornness; with or without reason, had
David but known it, every mention of that cap and coat was diminishing
his chances of walking out of the Lasande--and it is possible that he
sensed something of the kind, for his smile disappeared abruptly, and
the assurance that had been with him was no more.
"I can't tell you where I live!" he said hoarsely.
"In the name of heaven, why not?" Anthony snapped.
"Because--because--well, you may not understand this, sir, but I
promised father I wouldn't tell any one where we live."
"What?"
"I did, and I can't break a promise!" David insisted. "You see, father
was rich once, and he's terribly proud. He doesn't want any one to know
we live in such a poor place, because somebody he used to know might
hear of it and try to help him, and that would break father's heart."
"His heart's in pretty bad shape, isn't it?" Johnson Boller muttered.
"Frightful!" said David. "And that's why I'll have to go now and explain
to him and think it all over and----"
"Why think it over?" Anthony rasped. "Isn't your mind made up now?"
"Of course it is," the boy said hastily. "Only I'll have to tell father
and then come back here in the morning, Mr. Fry; only--_I have, to go
home now_!"
His voice broke strangely.
Anthony Fry looked him over with a quantity of sour curiosity.
If the golden opportunity before his very eyes was making even the trace
of an impression on David Prentiss, the boy's faculty for masking his
true emotions was downright amazing. That bright, rather attractive
young countenance told of absolutely nothing but the heartfelt desire to
escape from the gentleman who wished to improve his condition.
It was the same old story, world-old and world-wide. David, once he was
out of this apartment, would never return; with opportunity fairly
pushing against him, he turned from her in terror, refusing to know that
she was there.
Well, then, he _should_ see her!
Anthony's square chin set. He rose with a jerk and stood surveying the
nervous David, a tall, commanding, rather fearsome figure. Some little
time he transfixed the lad with his cold, hard eyes, while David grew
paler and paler; then he walked down upon David, who cringed visibly,
and seized his shoulders.
"David," he said sternly, "you have no conception at all of what I am
trying to offer you. I'm going to keep you here until you have."
"Keep me--here?" David faltered.
"Just that."
It was in Johnson Boller's mind to rise and deliver a little speech of
his own, pointing out the legal rights of David Prentiss and the chance
that, at some later date, interested parties might hear of this evening
and use it in moving Anthony toward an insane asylum. Yet he did not
speak, for he grew interested in David himself.
That bewildered youngster was shrinking and shrinking away from Anthony.
He was wilting before the stem eye, and he was smiling in the sickliest,
most ghastly fashion. And now he was nodding submissively and speaking:
"Yes, I'll stay, Mr. Fry."
"Ah!" said Anthony.
"I--I'm glad to stay," David assured him.
Then, looking at Anthony, he contrived another smile and yawned; and
having yawned once, he yawned again, vastly, and stretching the second
time.
"The--the trouble with me is that I'm sleepy," David stated, in a
strange, low voice. "I get that way because I'm not used to late hours,
and when I do get sleepy I--I can't think or talk or do anything. I'll
be myself in the morning, Mr. Fry; but if I'm going to stay here, I'd
like to go to bed now."
He yawned again and still again, quite noisily and eying Anthony in an
odd, expectant, pleading way. Anthony, after a puzzled moment, shrugged
his shoulders and smiled.
"Go to bed if you like, David," he said. "There are one or two things I
want to say to you first."
"Yes, sir," David said obediently.
"To-morrow, when you have slept on it, I'm confident that you will see
the huge opportunity that I have offered you, and that you will stay
with me as one of my little household. It is not an exacting position,
but there are one or two laws you must remember. For the first--no
dissipation. You don't drink, David?"
"Not a drop, sir."
"And for another," Anthony said gravely, "no women!"
"Eh?" said David.
"Absolutely no women in this Hotel Lasande!" Anthony repeated, with a
fanatic force that caused Johnson Boller to snort disgustedly and throw
up his hands. "This is, perhaps, more strictly than any other house in
New York an all-man establishment. There are not even women servants
here, David, and other sorts of women _don't_ run in and out of here. In
fact, the ladies who do come--relatives of the tenants, of course--are
so very few that they're all known to the clerks. So, while you may have
a sweetheart, David, and while she may be all very well in her
place--keep her out of here!"
"But----"
"That's the unwritten law of the house, and it makes for profound
peace," Anthony concluded. "You'll appreciate it more fully when you
have lived here for a time."
David, facing Mr. Fry, gazed at the floor and yawned again.
"I guess I'll go to bed," he said weakly.
"And before that we'll start you on the right track," Anthony said with
a gentle smile. "You'll take a good, hot bath."
He pressed the button and Wilkins appeared.
"The guest-chamber for young Mr. Prentiss, Wilkins," said Anthony. "You
will outfit him with pajamas of my own and the gray bathrobe I used last
year. To-morrow we'll get you something that fits, David."
David nodded numbly.
"And, Wilkins," said his master, "you will assist Mr. Prentiss with his
bath."
David's nod broke in two.
"I don't want any help," he said.
"But Wilkins----"
"Wilkins or anybody else; I don't want any help with a bath. I know how
to take a bath, at least. I don't know how you swells take yours, but I
take mine alone; I don't want any one pottering around me, and I won't
have it!"
His countenance flushed angrily, and Anthony favored him with an
indulgent smile. After all, he was very young.
"As you please, David. Show him to the north bathroom, Wilkins. That is
all."
But he tapped Wilkins's shoulder and held him back a moment to add:
"And get his wretched togs, Wilkins. I'll dress him properly to-morrow;
but get those rags away from him."
"Very good, sir," said Wilkins, as he glided down the corridor after
David.
The proprietor of Fry's Imperial Liniment watched him go and smiled
softly, returning to his chair to grin at Johnson Boller in a perfectly
human fashion. Johnson Boller, on the other hand, did not grin at all.
He merely gazed at his old friend until, after a minute or two, Anthony
asked:
"Well--what do you think?"
"I think you're a nut!" Johnson Boller said with sweet candor. "I think
you're a plain da--well, I think you're unbalanced. You know what that
young thug will do to you, don't you?"
"Eh?"
"If he's the crook he looks, he'll light out of here about three in the
morning with everything but the piano and your encyclopædia. If he isn't
a crook, just as soon as he gets loose and talks it over with his
friends, he'll have you pinched for detaining him here against his will;
and I'll give you ten to one that he collects not less than twenty-five
hundred dollars before he's through. You scared him stiff with your
eagle eye and your crazy notions, and he pleaded guilty so he could go
to bed and get away from you. I'll have to testify to that if he calls
on me."
"Fiddlesticks!" said Anthony Fry.
"Is it? Wait and see, Anthony," Johnson Boller said earnestly. "That kid
spells trouble. I can feel it in the air."
"You can always feel it in the air," Anthony smiled.
"Maybe so; but this feeling amounts to a pain!" Boller said warmly.
"This is a hunch--a premonition--one of those prophetic aches that can't
be ignored. Why, he had a fight started before you had spoken ten words
to him, and----"
"Oh, rot!" Anthony said.
Johnson Boller drew a deep, concerned breath.
"On the level," he said, "are you going to keep this kid imprisoned
here?"
"By no means," Anthony laughed. "As a matter of fact, all I want to do
is to talk to him in the morning. I want to know, Johnson, whether he
will actually persist in fighting off the chance I'm offering
him--because it's so confounded characteristic of the whole human race.
If he's as obstinate in the morning as he is now--well, I suppose I'll
turn him loose with a ten-dollar bill, and look around for another
subject. I'd really like to approach a dozen men, picked haphazard, and
write a little paper on the manner in which they greet opportunity."
"Yes, but not while I'm with you," Johnson Boller said. "Anthony, do
this--get the kid aside in the morning and tell him you'd been drinking
heavily all day and didn't know what you were doing to-night. See? Make
a joke of it and slip him fifty to keep quiet, and then----"
"Ah, Wilkins," Anthony smiled. "Got his togs, did you?"
The invaluable one bowed and held the shabby garments at a distance from
his person.
"He passed them out to me through a crack in the door," he reported
disgustedly. "What shall I do with them? They're hardly worth pressing,
sir."
"Of course not. Don't bother with them," Anthony smiled, and waved his
man away. "Johnson, turn intelligent for a moment, will you?"
"Why? Intelligence has no place in this evening."
"Oh, yes it has. Let's examine the case of this David youngster and try
to reconstruct his emotions and his mental impressions when confronted
with opportunity such as----"
"Damn opportunity!" said Johnson Boller, rising with a jerk. "I'm going
to bed!"
* * * * *
Only once had Johnson Boller tarried in Montreal, and on that occasion
the thermometer had ranged about ninety in the shade. Yet now, as he
slumbered fitfully in Anthony's Circassian guest-chamber, childhood
notions of Canada came to haunt his dreams.
He saw snow--long, glistening roads of snow over which Beatrice whizzed
in a four-horse sleigh, with driver and footman on the box, and beside
her a tall, foreign-looking creature with a big mustache and flashing
eyes and teeth. He talked to Beatrice and leaned very close, devouring
her beauty with his eyes; and Johnson Boller groaned, woke briefly, and
drifted off again.
He saw ice; they were holding an ice carnival in Montreal, and everybody
was on skates. Beatrice was on skates, ravishing in white fur, leading
some sort of grand march with the Governor General of Canada, who skated
very close to her and devoured her beauty with his bold, official eyes,
causing Johnson Boller to groan again and thresh over on his other side.
He saw a glittering toboggan slide; laughing people in furs were there
at the head of the slide, notably Beatrice, chatting shyly with a blond
giant in a Mackinaw, who leaned very close to her as they prepared to
coast and devoured her beauty with his large, blue eyes. Now they
settled on the toboggan, just these two, although Johnson Boller's
astral self seemed to be with them. The blond giant whispered something,
and they slid down--down--down!
And they struck something, and Johnson Boller was on his feet in the
middle of the Circassian chamber, demanding:
"What's that? What was that?"
Somewhere, Anthony was muttering and moving about. Somewhere else,
Wilkins was chattering; but the main impression was that the roof had
fallen in--and Johnson Boller, struggling into his bathrobe, stumbled to
the door and burst into the brilliant living-room.
In the center of the room, flattened upon the floor, was Anthony's
substantial little desk. Papers were around it and blotters and letters
without number, and the old-fashioned inkwell had shot off its top and
set a black streak across the beautiful Oriental carpet.
Two chairs were on their sides, also, but the striking detail of the
picture was furnished by David Prentiss. That young man was sprawled
crazily, just beyond the desk, and beside him, holding him down with
both hands, was Wilkins, tastefully arrayed in the flowered silk pajamas
Anthony had discarded last year as too vivid.
"I've got him, sir!" Wilkins' pale lips reported, as his master
appeared. "I have him fast."
"What'd he do?" Johnson Boller asked quickly. "Pull a knife on you,
Wilkins?"
"He'd not time for that, sir," Wilkins said grimly. "I think he stumbled
over a chair and took the desk along with him, trying to get out. I
always wake just as the clock strikes two, and stay awake ten minutes or
more, and that's how I came to hear him and get him. He was just getting
to his feet when I ran in and turned on the lights, and he----"
"Let him up!" Anthony said sharply.
"But don't let go of him!" Johnson Boller said harshly. "I missed the
time by an hour, but I was right otherwise, Anthony. He's got the silver
and your stick-pins and rings on him, and--what the dickens is he
wearing?"
Silence fell upon them for a little, as David struggled to his feet and
looked about with a strange, trancelike stare--for there was some reason
for Mr. Boller's query.
David, apparently, had dressed for the street. He wore shoes not less
than five sizes too long; he wore a bright brown sack coat which came
almost to his knees, and blue trousers which were turned up until they
all but met the coat. He had acquired a rakish felt hat, too, which
rested mainly on the back of his neck.
"He got them clothes out of the junk-closet at the end of the corridor,
sir," Wilkins said quite breathlessly. "He must have been roaming the
place quite a bit, to have found them, and----"
"What were you trying to do, David?" Anthony snapped.
"I don't know, sir," David said vaguely, passing a hand over his eyes in
a manner far too dramatic to be convincing.
"Where did you get those clothes?"
"I have no idea, sir," David murmured.
"Don't lie to me!" Anthony snapped. "What----"
"I'm not lying, sir," David said in the same vague, far-away tone. "I
must have been asleep, Mr. Fry. I remember having a terrible dream--it
was about father and it seemed to me that he was dying. There were
doctors all about the bed and father was calling to me, and it seemed to
me that I must get to him, no matter what stood in the way. I remember
trying to go to him, and then--why, I must have fallen there, sir, and
wakened."
For an instant the vagueness left his eyes and they looked straight at
Anthony.
"May I go to father now?" he asked. "That--that dream upset me."
"Morning will do for father," Anthony said briefly.
"But I have a feeling that something terrible's going to happen if I
don't go----"
Anthony Fry laid a kindly hand on his shoulder.
"Get back to bed, youngster," he smiled. "You're nervous, I suppose,
being in a strange bed, and all that sort of thing. And incidentally,
get off those clothes and give them to Wilkins."
David gulped audibly.
"I'll pass them out to Wilkins, if I must, sir," he said in the
queerest, choking voice--and he turned from them and shuffled down the
corridor to the north bedroom of Anthony Fry's apartment.
"Curious kid!" Anthony muttered.
"Not nearly as curious as you are," said Johnson Boller. "You didn't
even go through his pockets and get out the stuff while he was here, and
we could see just what he'd taken! You let him go in there and dump the
pockets before he gives up the clothes and----"
Anthony permitted himself a grin and a yawn.
"My dear chap, go back to bed and forget it," he said impatiently. "The
boy was stealing nothing. He may have been trying to escape; he may have
been walking in his sleep. Consciously or subconsciously, he's certainly
giving us a demonstration of humanity's tendency to dodge its
opportunities."
Johnson Boller gave it up and returned, soured, to his Circassian walnut
bedstead--soured because, if there was one thing above all others that
he abominated, it was being routed out in the middle of the night.
Five minutes or more he spent in muttering before he drifted away again,
this time to arrive at somebody's grand ball in Montreal. It was a
tremendous function, plainly given in honor of Beatrice's arrival in
town, yet she was not immediately visible. Johnson Boller's dream
personality hunted around for some time before it found her in the
conservatory.
Behind thick palms, Beatrice sat with a broad-shouldered person in the
uniform of a field-marshal; he had a string of medals on his chest, and
he was devouring her beauty with his hungry eyes. Nay, more, he leaned
close to Beatrice and sought to take her hand, and although she shrank
from him in terror, there was a certain fascinated light in her own
lovely black eyes; she clutched her bosom and sought to escape, but----
"Oh, my Lord!" said Johnson Boller, awakening to stare at the dark
ceiling.
Somewhere a window slammed.
He listened for a little and heard nothing more; then, having the room
nearest the elevators, he heard one of them hum up swiftly and heard the
gate clatter open. And then there were voices and some one knocked on
the door of the apartment with a club, as it seemed. Somebody else
protested and pressed the buzzer--and by that time Wilkins had padded
down the hall and was opening the door.
Johnson Boller caught:
"Police officer! Lemme in quick! You've got a burglar in there!"