MR. WALSH MEETS MRS. CRAIGHILL
Wingfield was mistaken when he announced at the Allequippa Club,
apropos of Walsh’s purchase of a controlling interest in the
Wayne-Craighill Company, that Roger Craighill had never appreciated
Walsh’s services. Colonel Craighill not only valued Walsh highly, but
he took occasion to express, in a statement given to the newspapers,
his “deep sense of loss upon the retirement of my faithful chief of
staff, who after years of painstaking labour, reaps the reward of his
own industry and fidelity.” More than this, Colonel Craighill made
Walsh’s passing the occasion for a dinner to all the employees in his
office and to the managers of the mines and coking plants in which he
was interested. Walsh was thus used as an illustration of the qualities
that make for honourable success. This banquet, provided at a leading
hotel toward the end of October, was memorable on many accounts, and
not least for the address delivered to the company by the head of
the table--an utterance marked by noble sentiment and expressing the
highest ideals of conduct in commercial life. Wingfield characterized
this somewhat coarsely as “hot air” when he read it in the newspapers;
the Colonel was, he averred, the Prince of the Platitudinous.
“The Colonel thinks he is looking through the windows of his soul upon
Humanity,” remarked Wingfield to a shrewd, skilful occulist with whom
he shared such heresies; “but the windows of his soul are all mirrors.”
But Wingfield was almost the only man in town who refused to accept
Roger Craighill at rather more than face value.
Wayne, glancing a few days later at Mrs. Blair’s list of persons to be
invited to her reception in their stepmother’s honour, suggested that
Walsh ought to be asked.
“Why Walsh?” asked Mrs. Blair bluntly. “When I pass him in the park
driving his beautiful horses and with a long black cigar in his mouth,
he makes me shudder.”
“When he takes up a list of accounts payable and runs his eye down
the column, all the people who owe money anywhere on earth shudder.
He’s a sphinx, but I like him. He’s been mighty good to me and if you
don’t mind I’ll say that he will be missed at the office more than the
Colonel knows.”
“Oh, tush, Wayne! Father has always said that no man is indispensable,
and he wouldn’t have lost Walsh if he had needed him. Father’s proud
that an old subordinate can go out of the office into a business of his
own.”
“Maybe,” persisted Wayne, “maybe Walsh isn’t the subordinate.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Walsh has been, far more than the Colonel knows, the
_deus ex machina_ of our affairs. Father has not known the details of
his various interests for years--not since I went into the office.
He sees only the results and, thanks to Walsh, they have been very
satisfactory. When there was a nasty trip to take in a hurry to head
off a strike, or to see why we weren’t making the usual tonnages, old
Walsh slipped out of town and looked after it without a word. Father
thinks he did it all; probably thinks it honestly; and Walsh let him
think it. That’s Walsh’s way. When father went out in his private car
and found all the properties in bang-up shape he thought he was looking
at the results of his own management; but in fact Walsh’s eagle eye and
iron grip had done the real work.”
“You mustn’t talk so of father, Wayne; you have grown bitter toward
him and can’t judge him fairly. But if you think Mr. Walsh ought to
be asked to the reception I’ll send him a card. There isn’t any Mrs.
Walsh, I believe?”
“No. He’s married happily to his horses and cigars. Don’t take this too
hard; Walsh has never manifested any interest in social fusses yet and
he’ll hardly begin now. I can’t see him in a dress suit! He won’t come
to your party but it would be decent to send him a ticket.”
“Certainly, Wayne; not because Mr. Walsh has been father’s brains but
because you ask it.”
“Oh, never mind that! Walsh has always been bully to me. I’m keeping
my stock in the mercantile company just because I like him. When we
closed that deal the other day and I told Tom I was going to hold on
to my stock he came as near being affected as I suppose is possible in
such a hardy old plant. The name of the corporation isn’t to be changed
and he said he hoped I’d come to see him occasionally to help his
credit. He was really a good deal tickled over it.”
* * * * *
The Blair house lent itself well to large entertainments. At ten
o’clock the hostess breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that her
party was a success. The representative people of the Greater City
were there. Men and women who, in Mrs. Blair’s phrase, “stood for
something,” had passed in review before Mrs. Roger Craighill. Mrs.
Blair was catholic-minded in social matters. The wide advertisement of
her city through the coarse social exploits of some of her citizens
during the Great Prosperity had aroused her bitter resentment, and she
had summoned for this occasion many who, able to declare themselves
guiltless of wealth, proved in their own lives and aspirations that
something besides vulgarity and greed emerge from the seething caldron
to which the Greater City may be likened. It was Mrs. Blair’s delight
to discover, and as far as lay in her power, to stimulate and reward
ambition in the arts and sciences. She had promoted the fortunes of
a long line of young physicians, placing them on hospital boards and
sending them influential patients. Poor artists were sure to find
sitters if she took them up; the young girl seeking countenances to
immortalize in miniature would, if satisfactorily weighed in Mrs.
Blair’s balance, find herself embarrassed with clients. John McCandless
Blair could never tell, when he went home to dinner, what new musical
genius would be enthroned in the music room--young men in flowing black
scarfs, or, rather more delectable, young girls of just the right type
to look well at the harp, and who, no matter what strains might be
evoked by their fingers, yet possessed in the requisite degree what
Mrs. Blair capitalized as Soul.
Mrs. Blair’s reception drew a wide circle within which Mrs. Craighill
made the acquaintance of her husband’s fellow-townsmen. Curiosity
proved stronger in most cases than fealty to the dead, even among the
first Mrs. Craighill’s friends. The obvious answer to any invidious
question as to the wife’s previous history was that a man standing
as high as Colonel Craighill, and as careful as he of his honour and
good name, was unlikely to make a marriage that would jeopardize his
position.
There were, however, absences that expressed the resentment of certain
old friends of the family who had, in Mrs. Blair’s phrase, “taken
a stand.” These were fewer than Mrs. Blair had hoped for but Mrs.
Wingfield did not appear; the pastor emeritus of Memorial Church, a
gentleman who had been favoured by fortune and was in no wise dependent
on Craighill patronage, had declined earlier an invitation to dine
and a request for the honour of his presence at the reception; and a
retired general of the army, who sat with Roger Craighill among the
elders of Memorial, not only scorned these overtures but expressed
discreetly his feeling that the marriage had been an act of disloyalty
to the Craighill children. There were not more than half a dozen
of these instances, and while they were not, to be sure, of great
importance, Mrs. Blair magnified their significance and took pains to
thank the absentees later for their attitude. Dick Wingfield, keen in
such matters, found upon analysis that those who, like his own mother,
rejected the newcomer, were persons who had nothing whatever to lose
by incurring the disfavour of Roger Craighill. His mother was rich and
an independent spirit if ever one existed; the old minister’s income
could not be disturbed by Roger Craighill or anyone else; the retired
general had, as a lieutenant, invested his scant savings in Omaha and
Seattle town lots, and checks from Washington were only an incident of
his income. Nobody, in fact, whom Roger Craighill could possibly reach,
no one likely to need his help in any way whatever, had joined in this
tame rebellion.
Wingfield, not easily astonished by anything, was nevertheless amazed
to meet Walsh at Mrs. Blair’s reception. He imagined that he knew Walsh
pretty well, but their acquaintance had been a matter of contact at the
Club, warmed into friendliness during a period in which Wingfield had,
as he put it, “affected horse.” Wingfield was looking for the youngest
débutante when he came upon Walsh stolidly smoking in the Blair
library. Walsh in a white waistcoat was something new under the sun.
It occurred to Wingfield that he had never seen him in anyone’s house
before. He stopped to smoke a cigarette that he might, if possible,
analyze Walsh’s emotions in this alien air.
“So you’ve quit the Colonel--taken over the Wayne-Craighill Company.
If you have any stock to sell I’d like to have a slice. I’ve always
thought the grocery business must be entertaining. Its ethnological
relations would appeal to me. I understand that these people who pile
themselves on our social dump--the riff-raff of Europe--bring their
delectable appetites with them, and that your cellars are as savoury as
a Chinese stinkpot with the bouquet of finnan haddie and such epicurean
delights. So Wayne’s going to stay in, is he?”
Walsh took the cigar from his mouth and nodded.
“Yes; Wayne’s vice-president of the company now.”
“That’s good. You and I are the only people hereabouts who really
appreciate Wayne. There are things that Wayne can do.”
Walsh nodded again. He settled himself back in his chair comfortably
and looked at Wingfield with liking. A bronze Buddha, a striking item
of the lares and penates of the Blair home, gazed down upon them
benevolently.
“Wayne,” said Walsh deliberately, “was born to be a man of power. He
was built for big transactions.”
Wingfield was surprised into silence. He had never before heard Walsh
express himself as to the character of any man and there was something
akin to heartiness in this endorsement of Wayne Craighill. Wingfield
forgot his quest of the débutante in his eagerness to hear the
inscrutable Walsh’s opinions. Fearing that he might relapse into one of
the silences for which he was famous, Wingfield applied the prod.
“The Colonel never understood Wayne,” he remarked leadingly.
“That is possible,” replied Walsh, after a moment of deliberation.
“Wayne could do anything he wanted to--lead forlorn hopes, command a
battleship, preach a sermon, run a coal mine, or sell a gold brick. The
Scotch in him is pretty sound yet. He’s a free spender, but he has his
thrifty side.”
“Um--yes. Wayne has brains.”
“Why don’t you take him in hand, Walsh, and teach him how to work?”
After a prolonged silence Walsh asked dryly:
“Why?”
“Because the Colonel has failed at it.”
The two men looked at each other fixedly for a moment.
“He tried hard enough. He’s disappointed in Wayne.”
Walsh spoke as though he were repeating an accepted opinion rather than
voicing his own thought. Wingfield caught him up.
“It pleases the Colonel to think that he possesses anything as well
authenticated as a thankless child. The serpent’s tooth tickles the
Colonel’s vanity. Resignation becomes the Colonel like a pale lavender
necktie.”
“He may work his way out. Marriage might help him.”
“That’s not so easy. A bad marriage would send him clear to the bottom.
You’ve got to find a particular sort of girl for his case.”
“I agree with you. The girls that are here to-night--the pretty
daughters of best families--that kind would be no good for him; and
besides, they’re not going to try it. Their papas and mamas wouldn’t
let them if they wanted to.”
Wingfield was delighted to hear these expressions from Walsh. It was
as though the sphinx, breaking the silence of centuries, had suddenly
bent down and addressed a chance traveller on the topics of the day.
Walsh spoke, moreover, with the quiet conviction of one who had thought
deeply on the subject under discussion.
“You are quite right. I agree with you fully!” declared Wingfield,
anxious to hear further from Walsh. “It would take a plucky girl to
tackle Wayne.”
“Brains, common sense, patience! A good, sensible working-girl would be
my choice.”
Walsh stroked his bald pate with his hand, and drew deeply upon
his cigar. Wingfield was pondering Walsh’s words carefully, fully
appreciating the flattery of the old fellow’s unwonted loquacity.
“How are we going to find her?”
“We are not going to find her. Wayne’s a lucky devil--such fellows are
usually lucky--and his future must take care of itself.”
“So our prince must marry a pauper, the girl behind the glove counter,
the angel whose nimble digits gambol merrily upon the typewriter,
the low-voiced houri who trifles with the world’s good nature in
the telephone exchange? Wayne is fastidious. How are you going to
arrange the time and the place and the loved one altogether?” demanded
Wingfield.
“I’m not a fool, Mr. Wingfield; I’m not going to arrange it at all! I’d
look pretty in the matchmaking business,” concluded Walsh grimly.
“No; I guess not,” smiled Wingfield; but he was startled by Walsh’s
next statement, delivered quietly and with his cigar in his mouth.
“I could hardly qualify as an expert on marriage, having failed at it
myself.”
Walsh’s tone forbade inquiry. He had opened a door into some dark
chamber of his past, then closed it tight and shot the bolt back into
place. He rose, clumsily and lumberingly, and dropped his cigar into
an ash tray. The long, blank surface of his bald head wrinkled as his
brows lifted, and his eyes widened as though fixed on a horizon against
which he had glimpsed the familiar outlines of some wave-washed and
hopeless argosy. By a common impulse the men clasped hands silently.
“An election bet or what?” cried Mrs. Blair in the doorway. “With all
the trouble there is about getting men, I should like to know what you
two mean by hobnobbing here by yourselves. I shall punish you for
this, Mr. Walsh, by making you take me in to supper.”
The guests were being served in the dining room and in the hall and
conservatory adjoining. Mrs. Blair convoyed Walsh to a corner where
Mrs. Craighill was seated at a table with the solidest bank president
of the Greater City. This person was, however, slightly deaf, and as
Mrs. Blair rose frequently, in her office of hostess, to assure herself
of the comfort of the others who were straying in for supper, Walsh
found opportunity for speech with Mrs. Craighill, whom he had observed
only passingly in the drawing room.
“This is the most hospitable place! Everyone is so very kind,” murmured
Mrs. Craighill.
“I suppose so,” replied Walsh, his glance falling upon Roger Craighill,
who was relating an anecdote to a circle of wrapt listeners near by.
The financier was intent upon his salad, and Mrs. Craighill gave her
whole attention to Walsh.
“Colonel Craighill has told me a great deal about you, Mr. Walsh.
Let me see what it was that he said--you know how splendidly he puts
everything--he said, ‘Mr. Walsh is a born trustee; you can trust him
with anything.’”
“Those are strong words,” said Walsh, meeting her gaze quietly.
“But you are leaving him, and he is very glad when any of his men
go away from him to do better for themselves. He feels that it’s a
credit to him. I suppose it’s like the pride the colleges take in a
successful graduate.”
Here obviously was an opportunity for Walsh to follow her line of
thought and speak in praise of his alma mater; but he switched the
subject abruptly.
“You are a stranger here, Mrs. Craighill?”
“Yes, I was! But I’m beginning to feel at home already. I suppose it
will take me years to learn everything about this wonderful city.”
“I have been here twenty-five years and have it all to learn--I mean
this sort of thing,” and Walsh glanced about as though to broaden into
generalization his ignorance of society. “This is the first time I have
ever crossed a threshold in this town.”
“How strange!” He was even more difficult than the deaf financier,
this strange old fellow with the shiny pate and unsmiling countenance.
“But,” she laughed, “I’m going to take this as personal to me--your
coming to-night! You won’t grudge me the belief that I’m responsible
for your appearance--your first appearance--if you really mean me to
believe that it is the first!”
“There is no doubt of that. It’s what they call my début. I came”--and
he smiled, a smile that was of the eyes rather than the thin lips--“I
came for that. I came just to see you.”
He looked at her so fixedly that she shrugged her shoulders and turned
away. This might be the privilege of an old friend of her husband, but
his words fell harshly, as from lips unused to gracious speech. Very
likely he was an eccentric character, who, from his own statement,
was ignorant of social usage. His keen scrutiny made Mrs. Craighill
uncomfortable for a moment.
“Now that you have seen me, Mr. Walsh, please tell me your verdict;
spare nothing!”
“I think,” said Walsh bluntly, “that you are much nicer than I
expected.”
He was trying to take a lump of sugar for his coffee with the tongs,
but his hand shook.
“Fingers were made first! Allow me! You are smoking too much--that’s
the answer,” she laughed. Walsh was annoyed by this evidence of
weakness, for his nerves were usually steady, and he was vexed to be
obliged to accept her help.
“Horses and cigars are your only diversions, I hear, Mr. Walsh.”
“Who told you that?”
“It was Wayne, I think.”
“Oh, yes; Wayne,” repeated Walsh, as though recalling the name with
difficulty.
“Wayne and you are great friends.”
“Well, I don’t know that he would admit it,” and Walsh smiled. Mrs.
Craighill reflected that there was something akin to tenderness just
now in the face of this curious man.
“Oh, he told me about it! He spoke of you much more enthusiastically
than Colonel Craighill did. It was not that Colonel Craighill didn’t
say everything that was kind; but with Wayne, it was as though----”
“Well?”
“As though he loved you--there!”
The colour deepened in Walsh’s weather-beaten face, ruddy at all times
from the park air, where he drove in every sort of weather; even his
bald crown reddened. He was undoubtedly pleased; but he said, with an
effort at lightness:
“That’s just like Wayne; he’s a great joker.”
Mrs. Blair flashed back upon them now, and charged them with
treasonable confidences. The old banker had detached himself some time
earlier and joined the circle which Colonel Craighill was addressing
in his semi-oratorical key on the opposite side of the room. Mrs.
Craighill and Walsh, having satisfied their own imaginary social
hunger, remained with Mrs. Blair while she had her coffee.
“You must come up and see the dance. All the prettiest girls have come.
You must go up to the ballroom, too, Mr. Walsh. And I’m going to tell
you now, for fear I forget it, how pleased I am that you came.”
“You were kind to ask me. It has been a privilege to meet Mrs.
Craighill.”
Walsh stood up abruptly, bowed with a quaint touch of manner to each of
the ladies, pleaded an engagement downtown, and left them.
Mrs. Craighill was surprised to find herself turning her head to watch
his burly figure through the door.
* * * * *
Wayne, roaming the house restlessly, drifted into the conservatory. It
had been his sister’s habit to ignore what was practically ostracism
as far as he was concerned socially. She realized the justice of
his exclusion, but inwardly, with sisterly fidelity, resented it.
There was a pathos in him that touched her; and as she saw him moving
about alone, or joining some group where size minimized the danger of
contamination, her heart ached for him. Wayne, as he lounged listlessly
in the dining room door, saw Walsh in conversation with Mrs. Craighill
a moment before Mrs. Blair rejoined them. Wayne stood just behind
his father and several of Colonel Craighill’s auditors looked up and
smiled, but without relaxing their attention.
“You young people,” Colonel Craighill was saying, “can’t be expected to
love this town of ours as we old folks do, who, you might say, fought
and bled for it. Even now,” he continued, adjusting his plate carefully
upon his knee and lifting his eyes dreamily, “the Civil War period is
as remote in the minds of the new generation as the Wars of the Roses.”
“Tell us a war story, Colonel!” cried a girl in the circle; “something
really terrible--of how you led a forlorn hope, the flag lifted in
one hand and your trusty sword in another, sprinting right over the
ramparts at Saratoga or The Cowpens, or whatever the place was----”
Colonel Craighill joined in the laugh at his own expense, and appealed
to the group:
“Doesn’t this prove what I was saying? You children know nothing of
American history. I didn’t quite come over with Columbus, Julia. A
few weeks ago I was talking to the president--I hadn’t really gone to
Washington for the purpose but we got into it somehow----”
Wingfield, who had brought the prettiest of the débutantes down
from the ballroom, paused a moment to catch the drift of the
Colonel’s story. He was bound for the conservatory, where there were
opportunities for the better study of his butterfly, who was a trifle
awed by the attention of a grown man, one who had, in fact, been in her
father’s class at Pennsylvania. Wayne, with something akin to a grin on
his face, turned away abruptly out of hearing of his father’s voice,
nodded to Wingfield and passed on. His friend, with the careless ease
that distinguished him, had sighted a waiter and two chairs in a far
corner of the conservatory and led the way thither.
“Did you hear Julia Morse sting the Colonel?” he asked the girl, as
he unfolded his napkin. “I shall have to look her up; I’ve done her
a cruel injustice. I supposed Julia was a stanch subscriber to the
Craighill superstition, but she’s clearly deeper than I imagined. It’s
odd I never knew Julia’s true worth; I’m annoyed by my own density. The
salad--yes!”
“The Craighill superstition?” asked the girl, the knowledge and
wisdom of Wingfield’s forty-three years towering over her youth and
inexperience like a mighty cliff.
“Just that--quite that! The Colonel’s military greatness ranks with the
ladder superstition, the Friday superstition, the thirteen at table
superstition, and all those things.”
“But Colonel Craighill was a soldier in the Civil War--of course not in
the Revolution, I know that.”
“Now really, if you won’t ever say I told you--if this can be a
little confidence just between ourselves as old friends--I’ll tell
you something. The Colonel was never a real colonel at all. But when
General Lee started for Chicago by way of Gettysburg in the summer of
1863, Pittsburg was terribly frightened, so the old folks say--I wasn’t
here, I assure you!--and Colonel Craighill bossed the men who dug
entrenchments around the city to keep the Confederates out. He did it
well. When your father and I were kids together--doesn’t it seem absurd
that you and I can’t be contemporaries, instead?--oh, my, please forget
that I began that sentence; it leads clear back to the time when the
Indians camped where the Craighill building stands.
“Well, as I was saying, the Colonel was only a sort of home-guard
trench-digger and that sort of thing. He helped the women manage fairs
and did it very prettily, but ever since the War the Colonel’s stock
as a red-handed slayer of his country’s foes has been rising. He ranks
with Wellington and Grant, with a little dash of Sheridan thrown in.”
“I sit behind Colonel Craighill in church and it doesn’t seem possible
that he would deceive anyone,” remarked the girl, half afraid to yield
to her delight in these profane utterances.
“Ah! but he deceives himself; he really believes that he held up the
pillars of the Union cause and who are we to question him? And he’s
an ardent if cautious reformer; he’d rather cut the ten commandments
to a scant six than mutilate the present tariff, which alone is holy
to us Pennsylvanians. Do you know, this salad is really edible; I
must congratulate Mrs. Blair on her cook. Of course we’re to see
you everywhere now. Please don’t be running off all the time; it’s
demoralizing. If we good people don’t stay at home, what, may I ask,
will become of Pittsburg? We produce everything in Pennsylvania, as you
may have noticed--everything but local pride!”