DURING the week following the day of repentance and backsliding,
Jeffard's regression down the inclined plane became an accelerated
rush. In that interval he parted with his watch and his surveying
instruments, and made a beginning on his surplus clothing. It was a
measure of the velocity of the descent that the watch, with the transit
and level, brought him no more than seven knife-and-fork meals and an
occasional luncheon. But the clothing being transmutable in smaller
installments, did rather better.
Before the week was out, a bachelor's apartment in a respectable
locality became an incongruous superfluity; and having by no means
reached the philosophical level in his descent, he hid himself from all
comers in a dubious neighborhood below Larimer Street.
The second week brought sharper misery than the first, since it
enforced the pitiful shifts of vagrancy before he could acquire the
spirit-breaking experience which makes them tolerable. But before many
days the poor remnants of pride and self-respect gave up the unequal
struggle, leaving him to his own devices; after which he soon learned
how to keep an open and unbalanced meal-and-cigar account with his few
unmercenary friends.
In a short time, however, the friendly tables began to grow scarce.
Bartrow went back to his mine, and with his going the doors of the St.
James's dining-room opened no more to the proletary. Then came the
return of John Pettigrew, whose hospitality was as boundless as the
range whereon his herds grazed, and who claimed kinship with Jeffard
because both chanced to be transplanted New Englanders. While Pettigrew
stayed in Denver, Jeffard lived on the fat of the land, eating at his
friend's table at the Albany, and gambling with the ranchman's money
at odd hours of the day and night. But after Pettigrew left there was
another lean interval, and Jeffard grew haggard and ran his weight down
at the rate of a pound a day.
In the midst of this came a spasm of the reformative sort, born of a
passing glimpse of Stephen Elliott's daughter on one of her charitable
expeditions. The incident brought him face to face with a fact which
had been unconsciously lending desperation to despair. Now that the
discovery could be no more than an added twist of the thumbscrew, he
began to realize that he had found in the person of the sweet-faced
young woman with the far-seeing eyes the Heaven-born alchemist who
could, if she so willed, transmute the flinty perverseness of him
into plastic wax, shaping it after her own ideals; that it was the
unacknowledged beginning of love which had found wings for the
short-lived flight of higher hopes and more worthy aspirations. The
day of fasting and penitence had set his feet in the way leading to
reinstatement in his own good opinion; but the meeting with Constance
was answerable for a worthier prompting,--a perfervid determination to
fight his way back to better things for righteousness' sake, knowing
that no otherwise could he hope to stand with her on the Mount of
Benediction.
It was against this anointing of grace that he had sinned; and it
was in remorseful memory of it that he brushed his clothes, put on
an ill-fitting air of respectability, and tramped the streets in a
fruitless search for employment until he was ready to drop from fatigue
and hunger. Nothing came of it. The great public, and notably the
employing minority of it, is no mean physiognomist; and the gambler
carries his hall-mark no less than the profligate or the drunkard.
At the close of one of these days of disheartenment, a day wherein a
single cup of coffee had been made to stand sponsor for breakfast,
luncheon, and dinner, Jeffard saw a familiar figure standing at the
counter in one of the newspaper offices. Knowing his man, Jeffard
stopped on the sidewalk and waited. If Lansdale had but the price of a
single meal in his pocket, two men would share that meal that night.
There were two entrances to the newspaper office, and Jeffard watched
beaglewise lest his chance of breaking his fast should vanish while he
tarried. Presently Lansdale came out, and Jeffard fell upon him before
he could latch the door.
"Salaam! Jeffard, my son," said the outcomer. "I saw you waiting for
me. How goes the world-old struggle for existence?"
"Don't remind me of it, Lansdale; do you happen to have the price of a
meal about you?"
Lansdale smiled, and gravely tucking Jeffard's arm under his own,
steered diagonally across the street toward the open doors of a café.
"Now that is what our forefathers called Providence, and what we, being
so much wiser in our own generation, call luck," he declared. "I had
just got a check out of the post-office for a bit of work sent months
ago to an editor whose name is unhasting. When you saw me I was closing
a negotiation, by the terms of which the cashier of the 'Coloradoan'
becomes my banker. Behold, now, the mysteries of--shall we say
Providence? At any time within the six months I would have sworn that
the opportune moment for the arrival of this bit of money-paper had
come; nevertheless Providence, and the slow-geared editor, get it here
just in time to save two men from going to bed supperless. Why don't
you say something?"
They were at the door of the café, and Jeffard gripped his companion's
arm and thrust him in. "Can't you see that I'm too damned hungry to
talk?" he demanded savagely; and Lansdale wisely held his peace until
the barbarian in his guest had been appeased.
When the soup and fish had disappeared, Jeffard was ashamed of himself,
and said as much.
"You mustn't mind what I said," he began, by way of making amends.
"I used to think I was a civilized being, but, God help me, Lansdale,
I'm not! When I've gone without food for twenty-four hours on end, I'm
nothing more or less than a hungry savage."
Lansdale smiled intelligence. "I know the taste of it, and it's bad
medicine--for the soul as well as for the body," he rejoined. "There is
reason to suspect that Shakespeare never went hungry, else he wouldn't
have said, 'Sweet are the uses of adversity.' They're not sweet;
they're damnably bitter. A man may come forth of the winepress with
bones unbroken and insight sharpened to the puncturing point; but his
capacity for evil will be increased in just proportion."
"I don't want to believe that," said Jeffard, whose despair was not yet
proof against a good meal in good company.
"You needn't, but it's true. The necessities breed a certain
familiarity with evil. Moral metes and bounds have a trick of
disappearing in the day of physical dearth. When hunger has driven a
man over the ethical boundary a few times, the crossing becomes easy;
and when hunger drops the whip, inclination is very likely to take it
up."
Jeffard laughed. "'The words of Agur the son of Jakeh,'" he quoted. "I
believe you'd moralize if you were going to be hanged, Lansdale."
"Perhaps I should. What possible contingency could offer better
opportunities? And am I not going to be hanged--or choked, which
amounts to the same thing?"
Jeffard looked up quickly and saw what the myopia of hunger had
hitherto obscured: that his companion's smooth-shaven face seemed
gaunter than usual, and that his hands were unsteady when he lifted the
knife and fork.
"Colorado isn't helping you, then," he said.
"No; but it isn't altogether Colorado's fault. The Boston medicine man
said change of climate, plenty of outdoor indolence, nutritious food
at stated intervals. I have all any one could ask of the first, and as
little of either of the others as may be."
"But you do good work, Lansdale. I've always believed you could make it
win, in time. Hasn't the time come yet?"
"No. What I can do easiest would bring bread and meat, if I could sell
it; but a literary hack-writer has no business in Colorado--or anywhere
else outside of the literary centres. In Boston I could always find an
odd job of reviewing, or space-writing, or something that would serve
to keep body and soul together; but here they won't have me even in the
newspapers."
"Overcrowded, I suppose, like everything else in this cursed country."
"That's the alleged reason; but the fact is that I'm not a journalist.
Your thoroughbred newspaper man has more or less contempt for a fellow
who can't or won't write journalese."
They had attained to the dessert, and the waiter was opening a modest
bottle of claret for them. Jeffard turned his wineglass down.
"What! Is that the way you flout a man's hospitality?" demanded
Lansdale, in mock displeasure.
"No; I don't mean to do that. But I'm drunken with feasting now, and if
I put wine into me I shall pawn the coat off my back before midnight
for a stake to play with."
Lansdale smiled. "I'll see that you don't have to. Turn up your glass."
But Jeffard was obstinate, and sat munching raisins while Lansdale
sipped his wine. When the waiter brought the cigars he came out of his
reverie to say, "You want to live, don't you, Lansdale?"
The potential man of letters took time to think about it. "I suppose
I do; else I shouldn't be starving to death in Denver," he admitted
finally.
"And there is nothing but the lack of a little ready money that keeps
you from giving the Boston doctor's prescription a fair trial. If I had
the money I believe I'd change places with you; that is, I'd give you
the money in exchange for your good chance of being able to shuffle off
mortality without the help of extraneous means. I think I've had enough
of it."
"Do you? That proves how little a man has learned when he thinks he has
arrived. Now pull yourself together, and tell me what you really would
do if you became suddenly rich."
"How rich?"
"Oh, make it a comfortable figure; say eight or ten thousand a month
for an income."
"I'd do what I said I should,--change places with you; only I suppose
that wouldn't be possible. Failing that"--He pondered over it for a
moment, balancing his fork on the edge of his plate the while. "A few
weeks ago I should have mapped out a future worth talking about. I had
a lucid day, in which the things that make for ambition of the better
sort had their inning. If you had asked me such a question then, I
should doubtless have told you that I should try to realize the ideals
of other days; to walk uprightly, and to hold great wealth as it should
be held--in trust for the good of one's kind; to win the love of the
ideal woman, perhaps; and, having won it, to sit at her feet until I
had learned how to be God's almoner."
Lansdale's smile was not wholly cynical. "But now?" he queried.
"But now I know my own limitations. I think I should go back to the old
farm in the Berkshire Hills, and try to make it earn me bread and meat."
"But you couldn't spend ten thousand a month on an abandoned farm,
though I grant you it would be a pretty expensive luxury. What would
you do with the lave of it?"
Jeffard's lips tightened, and his face was not pleasant to look upon.
"I'd let it go on accumulating, piling up and up till there was no
shadow of possibility that I should ever again come to know what it
means to be without money. And even then I should know I could never
get enough," he added.
This time Lansdale's smile was of incredulity. "Let me prophesy," he
suggested. "When your lucky day overtakes you, you will do none of
these things. Jeffard the fool may be heard of wherever the Associated
Press has a wire or a correspondent; but Jeffard the miser will never
exist outside of your own unbalanced imagination. Let's go out and
walk. It's fervidly close in here."
Arm in arm they paced the streets until nearly midnight, talking of
things practical and impracticable, and keeping well out of the present
in either the past or the future. When Lansdale said good-night, he
stuffed a bank-note into Jeffard's pocket.
"It's only a loan," he protested, when Jeffard would have made him take
it back. "And there are no conditions. You can go and play with it, if
that's what you'd rather do."
The suggestion was unfortunate, though possibly the result would have
been the same in any event. Five minutes after parting from Lansdale,
Jeffard had taken his place in the silent group around the table in the
upper room; and by the time the pile of counters under his hand had
increased to double the amount of Lansdale's gift, he was oblivious to
everything save the one potent fact--that after so many reverses his
luck had turned at last.
Five hundred and odd dollars he had at one time in that eventful
sitting, and his neighbor across the corner of the table, a grizzled
miner with the jaw of a pugilist and eyes that had a trick of softening
like a woman's, had warned him by winks, nods, and sundry kicks under
the table to stop. Jeffard scowled his resentment of the interference
and played on, losing steadily until his capital had shrunk to fifty
dollars. Then the miner rose up in his place, reached across, and gave
Jeffard an open-handed buffet that nearly knocked him out of his chair.
"Dad blame you!" he roared; "I'll learn you how to spile my play! Stan'
up and fight it out like a man!"
The game stopped at once. The dealer held his hand, and the banker
reached for his revolver.
"You two gen'lemen cash in and get out o' here," he commanded. "This is
a gen'leman's game, and we don't run no shootin'-gallery--leastwise,
not unless _I_ have to take a hand in it. Pass in your chips."
They both obeyed; the miner with maledictory reluctance, and Jeffard
in a tremulous frenzy of wrath. When they reached the sidewalk,
Jeffard flung himself savagely upon his assailant, only to learn that
abstinence is a poor trainer, and that he was little better than a
lay-figure in the grasp of the square-jawed one with the melting eyes.
The big man thrust him into a corner and held him there until he
listened to reason.
"You blamed idjit! you hain't got sense enough to go in when it rains!
Hold still, 'r I'll bump your head ag'inst the wall! As I was sayin',
you don't know enough to pound sand. Every single time I've been in
this dive, you've been here, too, a-blowin' yourself like you had a
wad as big as a feather bed, and you know danged well you hain't got
nothin'. And you wouldn't 'a' kep' a dern cent to-night, if I hadn't
thumped you and raised a row. Now you go and hunt you a place to sleep
while you've got dust enough to pay for it; and don't you come round
here ag'in till you've put a whole grub-stake inside of you. Savez?"