He passed into the adjoining room, which was his bedroom, and shut the
door. Here at his table, he passed all of the hours that he spent in the
house, except after supper, when he did his work in the sitting-room
with Nicolovius. He felt that, in honor, he owed some companionship, of
the body at least, to the old man in exchange for the run of the house,
and his evenings were his conscientious concession to his social duty.
But sometimes he felt the surprising and wholly irrational impulse to
concede more, to give the old man a larger measure of society than he
was, so to say, paying for. He felt it now as he seated himself
methodically and opened his table drawer.
From a purely selfish point of view, which was the only point of view
from which such a compact need be considered, he could hardly think that
his new domestic arrangement was a success. Greater comforts he had, of
course, but it is not upon comforts that the world's work hangs. The
important facts were that he was paying as much as he had paid at Mrs.
Paynter's, and was enjoying rather less privacy. He and Nicolovius were
friends of convenience only. Yet somehow the old professor managed to
obtrude himself perpetually upon his consciousness. The young man began
to feel an annoying sense of personal responsibility toward him, an
impulse which his reason rejected utterly.
He was aware that, personally, he wished himself back at Mrs. Paynter's
and the Scriptorium. A free man, in possession of this knowledge, would
immediately pack up and return. But that was just the trouble. He who
had always, hitherto, been the freest man in the world, appeared no
longer to be free. He was aware that he would find it very difficult to
walk into the sitting-room at this moment, and tell Nicolovius that he
was going to leave. The old man would probably make a scene. The
irritating thing about it was that Nicolovius, being as solitary in the
great world as he himself, actually _minded_ his isolation, and was
apparently coming to depend upon _him_.
But after all, he was contented here, and his work was prospering
largely. The days of his preparation for his _Post_ labors were
definitely over. He no longer had to read or study; he stood upon his
feet, and carried his editorial qualifications under his hat. His duties
as assistant editor occupied him but four or five hours a day; some
three hours a day--the allotment was inexact, for the Schedule had lost
its first rigid precision--to the Sciences of Physical Culture and
Human Intercourse; all the rest to the Science of Sciences. Glorious
mornings, and hardly less glorious nights, he gave, day after day, week
after week, to the great book; and because of his astonishingly enhanced
vitality, he made one hour tell now as an hour and a half had told in
the period of the establishment of the Scriptorium.
And now, without warning and prematurely, the jade Fortune had pitched a
bomb at this new Revised Schedule of his, leaving him to decide whether
he would patch up the pieces or not. And he had decided that he would
not patch them up. Colonel Cowles was dead. The directors of the _Post_
might choose him to succeed the Colonel, or they might not. But if they
did choose him, he had finally made up his mind that he would accept the
election.
In his attitude toward the newspaper, Queed was something like those
eminent fellow-scientists of his who have set out to "expose"
spiritualism and "the occult," and have ended as the most gullible
customers of the most dubious of "mediums." The idea of being editor for
its own sake, which he had once jeered and flouted, he had gradually
come to consider with large respect. The work drew him amazingly; it was
applied science of a peculiarly fascinating sort. And in the six days of
the Colonel's illness in May, when he had full charge of the editorial
page--and again now--he had an exhilarating consciousness of personal
power which lured him, oddly, more than any sensation he had ever had in
his life.
No inducements of this sort, alone, could ever have drawn him from his
love. However, his love was safe, in any case. If they made him editor,
they would give him an assistant. He would keep his mornings for
himself--four hours a day. In the long vigil last night, he had threshed
the whole thing out. On a four-hour schedule he could finish his book in
four years and a half more:--an unprecedentedly early age to have
completed so monumental a work. And who could say that in thus making
haste slowly, he would not have acquired a breadth of outlook, and
closer knowledge of the practical conditions of life, which would be
advantageously reflected in the Magnum Opus itself?
The young man sat at his table, the sheaf of yellow sheets which made up
the chapter he was now working on ready under his hand. Around him were
his reference books, his note-books, his pencils and erasers, all the
neat paraphernalia of his trade. Everything was in order; yet he touched
none of them. Presently his eyes fell upon his open watch, and his mind
went off into new channels, or rather into old channels which he thought
he had abandoned for this half-hour at any rate. In five minutes more,
he put away his manuscript, picked up his watch, and strolled back into
the sitting-room.
Nicolovius was sitting where he had left him, except that now he was not
reading but merely staring out of the window. He glanced around with a
look of pleased surprise and welcome.
"Ah-h! Did genius fail to burn?" he asked, employing a bromidic phrase
which Queed particularly detested.
"That is one way of putting it, I suppose."
"Or did you take pity on my solitariness? You must not let me become a
drag upon you."
Queed, dropping into a chair, rather out of humor, made no reply.
Nicolovius continued to look out of the window.
"I see in the _Post_," he presently began again, "that Colonel Cowles,
after getting quite well, broke himself down again in preparing for the
so-called Reunion. It seems rather hard to have to give one's life for
such a rabble of beggars."
"That is how you regard the veterans, is it?"
"Have you ever seen the outfit?"
"Never."
"I have lived here long enough to learn something of them. Look at them
for yourself next week. Mix with them. Talk with them. You will find
them worth a study--and worth nothing else under the sun."
"I have been looking forward to doing something of that sort," said
Queed, introspectively.
Had not Miss Weyland, the last time he had seen her--namely, one evening
about two months before,--expressly invited him to come and witness the
Reunion parade from her piazza?
"You will see," said Nicolovius, in his purring voice, "a lot of shabby
old men, outside and in, who never did an honest day's work in their
lives."
He paused, finished his cigarette and suavely resumed:
"They went to war as young men, because it promised to be more exciting
than pushing a plow over a worn-out hillside. Or because there was
nothing else to do. Or because they were conscripted and kicked into it.
They came out of the war the most invincible grafters in history. The
shiftless boor of a stable-boy found himself transformed into a shining
hero, and he meant to lie back and live on it for the rest of his days.
Be assured that he understood very well the cash value of his old
uniform. If he had a peg-leg or an empty sleeve, so much the more
impudently could he pass around his property cap. For forty years, he
and his mendicant band have been a cursed albatross hung around the
necks of their honest fellows. Able-bodied men, they have lolled back
and eaten up millions of dollars, belonging to a State which they
pretend to love and which, as they well know, has needed every penny for
the desperate struggle of existence. Since the political party which
dominates this State is too cowardly to tell them to go to work or go to
the devil, it will be a God's mercy when the last one of them is in his
grave. You may take my word for that."
But Queed, being a scientist by passion, never took anybody's word for
anything. He always went to the original sources of information, and
found out for himself. It was a year now since he had begun saturating
himself in the annals of the State and the South, and he had scoured the
field so effectually that Colonel Cowles himself had been known to
appeal to him on a point of history, though the Colonel had forty years'
start on him, and had himself helped to make that history.
Therefore Queed knew that Nicolovius, by taking the case of one soldier
in ten, perhaps, or twenty or fifty, and offering it as typical of the
whole, was bitterly caricaturing history; and he wondered why in the
world the old man cared to do it.
"My own reading of the recent history of the South," said Queed, "can
hardly sustain such a view."
"You have only to read further to be convinced."
"But I thought you yourself never read recent history."
Nicolovius flung him a sharp look, which the young man, staring
thoughtfully at the floor, missed. The old professor laughed.
"My dear boy! I read it on the lips of Major Brooke, I read it daily in
the newspapers, I read it in such articles as your Colonel Cowles wrote
about this very Reunion. I cannot get away from history in the making,
if I would. Ah, there is the supper bell--I'm quite ready for it, too.
Let us go down."
They went down arm in arm. On the stairs Nicolovius said: "These
Southern manifestations interest me because, though extreme, they are
after all so absurdly typical of human nature. I have even seen the same
sort of thing in my own land."
Queed, though he knew the history of Ireland very well, could not recall
any parallel to the United Confederate Veterans in the annals of that
country. Still, a man capable of distorting history as Nicolovius
distorted it could always find a parallel to anything anywhere.