WHEN Bromley came in at half-past eleven, glowing from his brisk walk
in the cool night air from the Demming house in upper Fourteenth
Street, he found that Philip had not yet gone to bed; was sitting with
his hands locked over a knee and an extinct pipe between his teeth, his
face the face of a man frowningly at odds with himself and his world.
“Heavens, Phil!” was the play-boy’s greeting, “You look as if you had
lost every friend you ever had and never expected to find another.
What’s gnawing you now?”
“I suppose you would call it nothing,” returned the loser moodily.
“I’ve merely been finding out that I can be still another and different
kind of a crazy fool.”
Bromley grinned. “You have been to the Corinthian again?”
“Oh, hell--no! I said a different kind of a fool. Drop it, Harry. I
don’t want to talk about it.”
Thus extinguished, Bromley slipped out of his overcoat, struggled
into a smoking jacket, and filled and lighted his pipe; all this in
comradely silence. After a time the mere fact of his presence seemed to
exert a mollifying effect, for when Philip spoke again it was to say,
less irritably: “I have found the Dabney family, at last.”
“Good!” exclaimed the play-boy. “Nothing so very foolish about that.
How did it eventuate?”
In clipped sentences Philip told of the accidental street meeting with
Jean, and of the dinner _à deux_ at Charpiot’s, winding up with: “It
fairly gave me a heartache to see how hungry she was. She said she
hadn’t had time to go out to luncheon, but I am morally certain that
was only half of the truth. The other half was that she couldn’t afford
to feed herself in the middle of the day.”
Bromley whistled softly.
“Say, Philip, that is tough! I know, because I have been there myself.
What else did you find out?”
“After dinner I walked home with her, though she didn’t want me to.
When we reached the place I saw why she had tried to shake me. They are
living in a shabby tenement block down there within a stone’s throw of
the Corinthian. She apologized for not being able to ask me in.”
“Suffering Scott!--in _that_ neighborhood? Wasn’t there anybody to tell
them what they were getting into down there?”
“She gave me to understand that there was no choice; that they were
obliged to take shelter where they could find it--and afford it. They
know--or at least she does--what sort of people they are mixing with.
She says they are kind to her and her mother and the children.”
Bromley nodded slowly. “People of that sort would be--to hard-luck
people of her sort. That is one of the queer things in this mixed-up
world of ours. So far as sheer safety is concerned, she is probably
just as safe in that tenement dive as she would be in the most
respectable mansion in Denver. All the same, we ought to get them out
of there. Have you thought of anything?”
“No; I can’t think. I had a crazy fit just after she left me, and I
haven’t been able to think of much else since.”
“Suppose you unload on me and get it off your chest,” Bromley suggested.
“I will, because you ought to know. If you are to go on living in the
same apartment with a howling maniac----”
“All right; tell me what the maniac has been doing.”
“You have heard me speak of Middleton, the fat-faced railroad clerk I
was rooming with when you first met me?”
“Yes.”
“He isn’t half a bad fellow in some ways, but, like a good many others
in this demoralized town, he has a rotten streak in him. He is--or
was--engaged to a girl back in Ohio; but that hasn’t kept him from
chasing all sorts of women out here. To-night, after I left Jean, I
found him loafing on the nearest street corner. He told me he was
waiting for a girl; a girl who worked in a millinery shop. I led him
on until he told me her name, which he had got from one of her girl
workmates. He said it was a boy’s name--Jean.”
“You labored with him in good, old Puritan-dominie fashion?” said
Bromley, with a crooked smile.
“You know mighty well I didn’t; though that would have been the
sensible thing to do. He has an obscene twist in his brain, but for
all that, I have no reason to believe that he hasn’t some decent
limitations. If I had told him who the Dabneys are, and that they are
friends of mine, that would have settled it. Instead of doing that, I
went crazy mad--knocked him down and beat him--made a shouting ass of
myself.”
Bromley laughed and thrust a hand across the reading table.
“Shake--you old fighting Roundhead!” he said. “Now I know you are all
human! Is that what you were looking so glum about? You needn’t lose
any sleep over such a little gust of righteous indignation as that. As
a matter of fact, you ought to sleep the better for it.”
“Wait,” said Philip soberly. “It isn’t the mere fact that Middleton got
what he was asking for; it is the other and bigger fact that I am no
longer my own man, Harry. The frantic gold chase we have been through
has done something to me; I don’t know what it is; but I do know I am
not the man I was when I left New Hampshire a little more than eighteen
months ago. I’m hag-ridden--possessed of a dumb devil. Every now and
then I am made to realize that there are hellish possibilities in me
that I never even dreamed of before I came out here.”
Bromley grew philosophical.
“The possibilities, hellish or otherwise, active or dormant, lie in
every man of us born of woman, Philip. If we are, at bottom, creatures
of heredity, on the surface we are pretty strictly creatures of
environment; by which I mean that the environment calls to the surface
only those qualities in us that are in harmony with it--that will
respond to it. Back home, I take it, you had your little commonplace
round and lived in it. Out here, all the traditional strings are off,
and we are free to revert to type, if we feel like it.”
“M-m,” said Philip, thin-lipped; “very pretty--in theory. But it
doesn’t get me anywhere. You can’t argue from the general to the
particular; not in my case, anyway.”
There was the wisdom of the wise fools of all the ages in Bromley’s
smile.
“Of course; you want to be specialized. We all do. I’ve prophesied
for you before, and I can do it again if you want me to. You are of
the tribe of those who have to emerge through great tribulation.
There is a strong man and a broad man inside of you, Philip, and some
day he will break out and come to his own. When he does, there will
probably be a great smashing of window-panes and a kicking-out of door
panels--wreckage a-plenty--and after it is all over you will doubtless
wonder why there had to be an earthquake in your particular case. But
the fact will remain.”
Philip grunted. “Are you trying to tell me that I am hidebound?”
“Call it that, if you like. Life is little to you yet; some day you
will see how wide the horizons really are. But, as I say, you are
likely to pay for the privilege--pay in advance. It’s coming to you.”
Silence for a few moments while the smoke curled upward in delicate
little rings from Bromley’s pipe. Then Philip said soberly: “You spoke
a while back of reversion to type. I don’t know what type it is that I
am reverting to. My people are all decent and well behaved, as far back
as I know anything about them.”
“Oh, that,” said Bromley lightly. “When it comes to ancestors and the
heredities, most of us can find anything we are looking for, if we go
back far enough. It is a family tradition of ours that there was once a
Wigglesworth who was a raw-head-and-bloody-bones pirate and wound up by
getting himself hanged in chains. I shouldn’t worry, if I were you.”
“That is just the difference between us, Harry,” was the somber
rejoinder. “You wouldn’t worry if you knew the world were coming to an
end to-morrow. I don’t happen to be built that way. For a time this
evening, while I was with Jean Dabney, I was able to recognize myself
as the normal Philip Trask. But a few minutes after we parted I was a
bloody murderer--in all but the actual accomplishment of the thing;
I could have killed Middleton without a qualm. If the crazy fit had
lasted a minute or two longer, I don’t doubt but I should have killed
him.”
“Well, you didn’t kill him; which is the main thing, after all. Let
it go. You’ve got it out of your system now. I suppose your silly
conscience will make you go and apologize to the masher, but that’s a
future--a bridge to be crossed when you come to it. Let’s talk about me
for a while. I’ve had a jolt, too, to-night.”
“A jolt? You don’t look it.”
“That’s it; no matter how sick a fellow is, if he doesn’t look sick he
gets no sympathy. Just the same, I’m stabbed to the heart. I have been
discovered.”
Philip’s smile was grim, but it was a smile. “Sheriff after you with a
warrant?” he bantered.
“Worse. At Mrs. Demming’s to-night I met a man who knows me--knew me
back home, I mean.”
“Anything fatal about that?”
“The fatality lies in what he told me. Have I ever, by any chance,
happened to mention the Follansbees to you?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Friends of the family for three generations. Tom Follansbee was my
classmate in college for the little time the powers that were let me
stay on the campus. My governor and the Judge were also classmates. You
get the idea?--the two families as thick as peas in a pod?”
“I’m listening.”
“Just a minute and you’ll get the full impact of my jolt. There are two
daughters, Eugenia and Lucy Ann. Back in the dark ages, when we were
both in frocks and pinafores, the two families settled it that Eugenia
and I were to marry when we grew up.”
“And when you did grow up you both revolted?”
“No; only one of us--more’s the pity. I’m a worse rotter than your
man Middleton. Of course I like Eugie--like her immensely; we grew up
together. The trouble is she likes me; not wisely, but a lot too well.
She has always taken the pinafore arrangement as a settled thing. I am
afraid she still takes it that way.”
“Well, there isn’t any other ‘one and only’ in the case, is there?”
“Not so you could observe it. But that isn’t the question. I haven’t
any conscience--not in your meaning of the word--but I have something
that partly answers the same purpose. I don’t want to be cajoled into
marrying a woman that I don’t love in a marrying way. It would be a
sorry bargain for the woman.”
“I see. But this is all back-number stuff. Where does your jolt come
in?”
“At the front door, and as large as life. The younger sister’s
health isn’t good; weak lungs. Thurlow--he’s the chap I met at Mrs.
Demming’s--tells me that the whole Follansbee clan is about to come to
Colorado to try the effect of the altitudes on Lucy Ann. Philip, old
boy, I’m a ruined community!”
Philip smiled again, less grimly, this time. The play-boy was
presenting another facet of his many-sided character, an entirely new
and different one.
“Afraid the charming Eugenia will marry you out of hand?” he jested.
“You’ve hit the nail squarely on the head! If she could find me as
you found me last spring--a shameless down-and-out--there might be
some hope for me. But now ... it’s a fearful price to have to pay for
bracing up, Philip!”
“What are you going to do about it--dodge?”
“I can’t dodge. Thurlow will meet the Follansbees when they arrive, and
the first thing he will tell them--oh, pot! don’t you see that I’m in
for it up to my neck?”
Philip tossed his cold pipe aside and got out of his chair.
“Better go to bed and sleep on it,” he counselled. “Perhaps it won’t
seem so much like an unmixed misfortune in the morning.” And as he
reached his bed-room door: “This Miss Follansbee--is she good-looking,
Harry?”
“A glorious blonde, handsome enough to make your hair curl.”
“Humph!” said Philip; “it strikes me you might be a lot worse off than
you are. You might have epilepsy, or rheumatism, or small-pox, or
something of that sort. Good-night.” And he went off to bed.