LANSDALE had defined himself as a reporter on the "Coloradoan," but in
reality he was rather more,--or less,--being that anomalous member of a
newspaper staff known as the literary editor. Kershaw had taken him in
doubtfully, and had afterward wondered why a man with such an evident
gift for journalistic work should prefer to spend his days and nights
writing stories which no one would buy. For, contrary to all precedent,
when he could sink his literary ambitions the fictionist proved to be a
general utility journalist of no uncertain ability, running the office
gamut from proof-reading in an emergency to filling the editorial
columns on the rare occasions when Kershaw was absent.
It was during one of the Kershawan absences that the letter to Bartrow
was written; and the hands of the paper-weight clock on the desk were
pointing to the supper hour when Lansdale dropped the pen and drew
down the desk-curtain. Unlike his chief, he rarely ignored the supper
recess, though a walk in the open air often took the place of the meal;
and having his night's work well in hand, he let himself into the
corridor, said "Down!" and was presently set afoot at the street level.
As usual, the swift rush down the elevator-shaft dizzied him, and he
had to steady himself before he could go on. When he allowed himself to
think about it he realized that these dizzyings were growing commoner,
and were set awhirl by slighter exciting causes. Another man, or a man
with another ailment, might have given the unnerving weakness its true
name and place and succumbed to it; but Lansdale's _métier_ had been
love-transformed into unflinching hopefulness, and the trivialities
of the daily walk had come to be so many blind and desperate sorties
against the indrawing lines of the relentless besieger. For of the two
lions standing in the way to the House Beautiful that named Inequality
had been slain by the collapse of the Lodestar; wherefore this other of
Ill-health must either slay or be slain, since love would not be denied.
This was what was in his resolute step when he went forth into the
night; into the whirl of life on the peopled streets and sidewalks.
Some vague supper promptings were present, but a stronger impulse sent
him riverward, away from the thickly peopled walks and down into the
wholesale district toward a shabby apartment building which had been
left stranded on the bar of traffic when the uptown tide had set in.
The little excursion was purposeless, as had been many another in the
same direction; but when he found himself opposite the stairway of the
shabby building he wondered if he might not go up and ask Constance
for a cup of tea. He was wise in his generation, and he had long
since discovered that the way to Constance Elliott's heart lay through
helpings accepted. With love abounding for any human soul at need,
there were precious reserves of tenderness for those to whom she might
minister.
Lansdale glanced up at the two lighted windows on the third floor and
crossed the street. In the stair archway, which was dimly lighted
by a single inefficient gas-jet, he stumbled upon a bit of by-play,
in which the actors were a man and a woman leaning together across
the stair-rail, and a barelegged boy spying upon the twain from the
dimnesses beyond. The little tableau fell apart at the sound of the
intruder's footsteps. The boy vanished mysteriously, the woman ran
upstairs, and the man turned half angrily, as one faulted. It was
Jeffard; and when he recognized Lansdale he spoke quickly, as if to
forestall possible comment.
"Hello!--think of the devil and you'll hear the clatter of his hoofs. I
was just about to go up to the print-shop to see if I could find you.
Been to supper?"
"No; I was"--
Jeffard cut in again swiftly, with edgings streetward. "That's lucky;
neither have I. Let's go up to the club."
Lansdale acceded rather reluctantly, since a cup of tea with Constance
easily outweighed the grill-room prospect.
"I'll go with you, though I can't promise to play much of a knife and
fork," he said. "I was just going up to ask Miss Elliott to give me a
cup of tea."
They were turning the corner above the stranded apartment house before
Jeffard returned the shuttle of speech.
"So the Elliotts live down there now, do they?"
Lansdale said "Yes," and began to rummage in recollection. Had Jeffard
been on Constance Elliott's visiting list in the prehistoric time? It
was probable that he had been,--with Dick Bartrow for his sponsor. But
at this point recollection turned up the mental notes of a certain talk
with Bartrow, in which the downright one had confessed his sins of
omission Jeffardward. So Lansdale added a query to the affirmative.
"Yes; they live in the Thorson Block. Do you know them?"
Jeffard's reply was no reply. "I'll have to take time to think about
it," he said; and they had traversed the necessary streets and found a
table _à deux_ in the grill-room at the club before he pieced out the
unfinished rejoinder.
"You asked me if I knew the Elliotts. I did know Miss Elliott,--as I
knew some of those people at Mrs. Calmaine's the other evening. It's
quite likely she does not remember me."
Lansdale's brain went apart again, and the reflective half of it
continued the rummaging. On the two or three occasions when he had
mentioned the newest star in the bonanzine firmament Constance had been
visibly disturbed. The nature of her resentment had not been quite
obvious, but Jeffard's tardy rejoinder made it clear. She had known
Jeffard and was sorry to be reminded of him.
Lansdale had not done full justice to himself in slurring his own point
of view in the letter to Bartrow. So far as he had analyzed it he had
been content to call it negative, but it was not quite that. On the
contrary, it was complaisant, concerning itself chiefly with the things
of past sight, and not unduly with those of present rumor. Jeffard
might be an indubitable scoundrel in his later reincarnation, as
certain of the mining-camp newspapers had intimated in their accounts
of the fight for possession; but in the older time he had been a good
fellow and a generous friend at a pinch. Lansdale remembered some of
the generosities, and his heart went soft at the recollection of them.
Kershaw had kept the secret of the prearranged purchase of certain
unusable manuscripts, but the pigeon-holes of a newspaper office are
open archives, and one day Lansdale had found a clue which he had
followed out to his comforting; a string of hitherto unexplainable
incidents, with two stanch friends at the end of it.
One of these loyal friends was the man at whom public opinion was
now pointing a dubious finger; and while Lansdale was munching his
toast and drinking his cup of weak tea in troubled silence, it began
to be discomfortingly evident that he must presently take sides for
or against the man whose hospitality he was at that moment sharing.
Left to itself, the insularity in him would have evaded the issue.
Loyalty of the crucible-test degree of fineness--the loyalty of the
single eye--must needs sit below the salt at the table of any analyst
of his kind; and Lansdale was a student first and a partisan only when
benefits unforgot constrained him. Moreover, frankness in the last
resort is rarely at its best in any vivisector of his fellow-men, and
it was with no little difficulty that Lansdale made shift to overleap
the barrier of reserve.
"Jeffard," he began, when the weak tea was low in the cup, "we used to
be pretty near to each other in a time that I like to remember; will
you bear with me if I say what is in my mind?"
"Surely," said Jeffard; but the tone was not of assurance.
"You know what the newspapers intimated last fall, and what people are
saying of you now?"
"Yes."
"And that your silence makes it rather hard for your friends?"
"I have no friends, Lansdale."
"Oh, yes, you have; or you would have if you would take the trouble to
set yourself aright."
"What if I cannot set myself aright?"
"I should be sorry to believe that,--more than sorry to be driven to
admit the alternative."
"What is the alternative?"
Lansdale hesitated, as one who has his point at his adversary's breast
and is loath to drive it in. "I don't quite like to put it in words,
Jeffard; the English is a bit harsh. But you will understand that it
is the smiting of a friend. So long as you refuse to say you didn't,
the supposition is that you have robbed a man to whom you were under
rather heavy obligations."
"Is that Bartrow's supposition?"
"He says it isn't, but I'm afraid the wish is the father to the
thought: in his case as in--as in that of others." Lansdale added the
inclusive in the hope that the wound would be the better for probing.
Jeffard's laugh was altogether bitter. "'Give a dog a bad name,'" he
quoted. "Do you know, I fancied Dick would be obstinate enough to stand
out against the apparent fact?"
"That is precisely what he has done, and with less reason than the most
devoted partisan might demand. You know you told him that the claim was
Garvin's. He wouldn't believe the newspaper story; he insisted that you
would be able to 'square' yourself, as he phrased it, when you came
out."
Jeffard was looking past his interlocutor, out and beyond to where the
farther tables were emptying themselves of the late diners.
"Yet it is his supposition; and your own, you were going to say. Is it
Miss Elliott's also?"
Lansdale resisted the impulse to rummage again, and said: "I don't know
that--how should I know? But rumor has made the charge, and you have
not denied it."
"I don't mean to deny it--not even to her. But neither have I admitted
it."
"My dear Jeffard! aren't the facts an admission?--at least, so long as
they stand uncontradicted."
"Everybody seems to think so,--and I can afford to be indifferent."
"Having the money, you mean?--possibly. Am I to take that as an
admission of the facts?"
"Facts are fixtures, aren't they? things not to be set up or set aside
by admissions or denials. But you may take it as you please."
Lansdale shook his head as one whose deprecation is too large for
speech. "I can't begin to understand it, Jeffard,--the motive which
could impel a man of your convictions, I mean."
Jeffard broke forth in revilings. "What do you know about my
convictions? What do you know about anything in the heart of man? You
have a set of formulas which you call types, and into which you try to
fit all human beings arbitrarily, each after his kind. It's the merest
child's-play; a fallacy based on an assumption. No two men can be
squared by the same rule; no two will do the same things under exactly
similar conditions. Character-study is your specialty, I believe;
but you have yet to learn that the human atom is an irresponsible
individuality."
"Oh, no, I haven't; I grant you that. But logically"--
"Logic has nothing whatever to do with it. It's ego, pure and
unstrained, in most of us; a sluggish river of self, with a quicksand
of evil for its bottom."
Lansdale borrowed a gun of his antagonist, and sighted it accurately.
"What do you know about humanity as a whole? What do you know about any
part of it save your own infinitesimal fraction?--which seems to be a
rather unfair sample."
Jeffard confessed judgment and paid the costs. "I don't know very much
about the sample, Lansdale. One time--it was in the sophomore year, I
believe--I thought I knew my own potentialities. But I didn't. If any
one had prophesied then that I had it in me to do what I have done, I
should have demanded a miracle to confirm it."
"But you must justify yourself to yourself," Lansdale persisted.
"Why must I? That is another of your cut-and-dried formulas. So
far from recognizing any such obligation, I may say that I gave up
trying to account for myself a long time ago. And if I have found it
impossible, it isn't worth while for you to try."
Lansdale was not the man to bruise his hands with much beating upon
the barred doors of any one's confidence. So he said, "I'm done. It's
between you and your conscience,--if you haven't eliminated that with
the other things. But I had hoped you'd see fit to defend yourself.
The eternal query is sharp enough without the pointing of particular
instances."
Jeffard squared himself, with his elbows on the table.
"Do you want an hypothesis, too?--as another man did? Take this, and
make the most of it. You knew me and my lacks and havings. You knew
that I had reached a point at which I would have pawned my soul for
the wherewithal to purchase a short hour or two of forgetfulness. Hold
that picture in your mind, and conceive that a summer of unsuccessful
prospecting had not changed me for better or worse. Is the point of
view unobstructed?"
"The point of view is your own, not mine," Lansdale objected. "And,
moreover, the summer did change you, because advancement in some
direction is an irrefrangible law. But go on."
"I will. This man whom you have in mind was suddenly brought face to
face with a great temptation,--great and subtle. Garvin drove the
tunnel on the Midas three years ago and abandoned it as worthless. It
was my curiosity which led to the discovery of the gold. It was I who
took the sample to the assayer and carried the news of the bonanza to
Garvin. I might have kept the knowledge to myself, but I didn't. Why?
do you ask? I don't know--perhaps because it didn't occur to me. What
followed Bartrow has told you, but not all. Let us assume that the race
to Aspen was made in good faith; that this man who had put honor and
good report behind him really meant to stand between a drunken fool and
the fate he was rushing upon. Can you go so far with me?"
Lansdale nodded. He was spellbound, but it was the artist in him and
not the man who hung breathless upon the edge of expectancy.
"Very well; now for the crux. This man knelt behind a locked door and
heard himself execrated by the man he was trying to save; heard the
first kindly impulse he had yielded to in months distorted into a
desperate plan to rob the cursing maniac. Is it past belief that he
crept away from the locked door and sat down to ask himself in hot
resentment why he should go on? Is it not conceivable that he should
have begun to give ear to the plea of self-preservation?--to say to
himself that if the maniac were no better than a lost man it was no
reason that the treasure should be lost also?"
It was altogether conceivable, and Lansdale nodded again. Jeffard found
a cigar and went on while he was clipping the end of it.
"But that was not all. Picture this man at the crumbling point of
resolution tiptoeing to the door to listen again. He has heard enough
to convince him that the miracle of fortune will be worse than wasted
upon the drunken witling. Now he is to hear that the besotted fool
has already transferred whatever right he had in the Midas to the two
despoilers; signed a quitclaim, sold his miracle for a drink or two of
whiskey, more or less. Are you listening?"
Lansdale moistened his lips with the lees of the tea in the empty cup,
and said, "Yes; go on."
Jeffard sat back and lighted the cigar. "That's all," he said curtly.
"It's enough, isn't it? You knew the man a year ago; you think you
know him now. What would he do?"
If the hypothesis were intended to be a test of blind loyalty it missed
the mark by just so much as the student of his kind must hold himself
aloof from sympathetic entanglements. Lansdale weighed the evidence,
not as a partisan, but rather as an onlooker whose point of view was
wholly extrinsic.
"I understand," said he; "the man would do as you have done. It's your
own affair. As I said a few minutes ago, it is between you and your
private conscience. And I dare say if the facts were known the public
conscience wouldn't condemn you. Don't you want to use the columns of
the 'Coloradoan'?"
Jeffard's negative was explosive. "Do you write me down a fool as well
as a knave? Damn the public conscience!"
"Don't swear; I was only offering to turn the stone for you if you've
anything to grind."
"I haven't. If I wanted the consent of the majority I could buy
it,--buy it if I had shot the maniac instead of letting him shoot me."
"Possibly; and yet you couldn't buy any fraction of it that is worth
having," Lansdale asserted, with conviction. "There are a few people
left who have not bowed the head in the house of Rimmon."
The cynical hardness went out of Jeffard's eye and lip, and for the
first time since the proletary's reincarnation, Lansdale fancied he got
a brief glimpse of the man he had known in the day of sincerity.
"A few, yes; the Elliotts, father and daughter, for two, you would
say. I wonder if you could help me there."
"To their good opinion?--my dear Jeffard, I'm no professional
conscience-keeper!"
"No, I didn't mean that. What I had in mind is a much simpler thing.
A year ago Miss Elliott gave me of her abundance. She meant it as a
gift, though I made it a loan and repaid the principal--when I was able
to. But I am still in her debt. Measured by consequences, which are
the only true interest-table, the earnings of her small investment are
hardly to be computed in dollars and cents. Naturally, she won't take
that view of it, but that does not cancel my obligation. Will you help
me to discharge it? They need money."
Lansdale let the appeal simmer in the pot of reflection. His
inclination was to refuse to be drawn into any such entanglement; but
the opportunity to lessen by ever so little the burdens of the woman he
loved was not to be lightly set aside. None the less, the thing seemed
impossible.
"I'm afraid it's too big for me, Jeffard; I shouldn't know how to go
about it. Don't misunderstand me. I shouldn't stick at the necessary
equivocations; but if you know Miss Elliott you must know that
Machiavelli himself couldn't be insincere with her. She would have to
be told the truth, and"--
He left the sentence incomplete, and Jeffard took it up at the break.
"And if she should acknowledge my obligation--which she would not--she
would refuse to be reimbursed out of Garvin's money. That is why I
haven't sent her a note with a check in it. Will you have another cup
of tea?"
Lansdale took the query as a dismissal of the subject and pushed back
his chair. On the way out they passed a late incomer; a florid man,
with a nervous step and the eye of preoccupation. He nodded to Lansdale
in passing, and Jeffard said, "Do you know him?"
"Yes; it's Finchly,--John Murray's man of business."
Jeffard had apparently relapsed into the deeper depths of cynicism
again.
"Yes, I know. That's the charitable euphemism. Murray is a day laborer,
transmogrified by a lucky strike into a millionaire. He doesn't know
enough to write his own name, much less how to keep a great fortune
from dissolving, so he hires a manager. It was a happy thought. What
does Finchly get?"
Lansdale laughed. "A good living, doubtless."
"Of course; and much more, with the pickings. But there is a salary
which is supposed to be the consideration, isn't there?"
"Oh, yes; and the figure of it varies with the imagination of the
gossips from ten to fifty thousand a year."
Jeffard stopped to relight his cigar, and Lansdale fancied that the
Finchly query went out with the spent match. But Jeffard revived it a
square farther on.
"Suppose we assume, for the sake of argument, that the man has a
conscience. How much could he justly take for the service rendered?"
They were at the entrance of the "Coloradoan" building, and Lansdale
took out his notebook and made a memorandum.
"That is good for a column," he said; "'The Moral Responsibility of
Millionaire-Managers.' I'll answer your question later, when I've had
time to think it over."
"But, seriously," Jeffard insisted. "Is it worth ten thousand a
year?--or the half of it? The man is only a cashier,--a high-class
accountant at best."
"Finchly is much more than that; he is Murray's brain as well as his
pen-hand. But if he were only a money-counter, a money-counter's salary
would be enough; say two or three thousand a year, to be liberal."
Jeffard nodded and was turning away; had in fact taken three steps
streetward, when he came back to return to the subject dropped at the
supper table as though there had been no hiatus.
"You were going to say she would refuse to take Garvin's money, and
I said it for you. Would it make it any easier if I can assure you
that the money I shall put in your hands is honestly mine?--that James
Garvin has no claim, ethical or otherwise, upon it? Take time to
consider it,--with an eye to Miss Elliott's present needs rather than
to my havings or wishes in the matter."
Lansdale was off his guard, and the human side of him came uppermost
in the swift rejoinder,--"Then you didn't tell me the whole truth? The
Midas is honestly yours, after all?"
Jeffard turned away and snapped the ash from his cigar. "Don't jump
at conclusions," he said. "It's always safer to go on voting with the
majority. What I said has nothing to do with the story of the man and
his temptation; but the meanest laborer is worthy of his hire. I worked
all winter with pick and shovel in the Midas. Good-night."