As the two neared the opera house, Miss Anthon walked more leisurely
and paid some attention to her companion. The night was soft for
November; she had no wish to immure herself in the close hotel.
“Paris takes me out of my skin,” she said half apologetically. “The
whole thing absorbs me; every one seems to be living so eagerly.”
“Puttering about, I should say. They are like a lot of children!” her
companion replied unenthusiastically. He had been born on a farm in
upper Michigan--he called it Michigāān--and had ridden his pony to
school six miles each day, after doing “father’s chores.” A month of
Paris had not rubbed off his peasant suspiciousness. As if in defence
of his truculent attitude, he added, “You hit me pretty hard, Miss
Anthon,--what you said about Americans appreciating only the success of
dollars and politics.”
“Why?” The girl focussed her attention wonderingly on her companion.
“That’s what I am after, always have been, since I began teaching
elocution and literature up in the old Michigan school. I taught
there two years,” he continued simply, with the homely, unconscious
conceit of a man interested in his own drama, yet who can relish the
picturesqueness of it. “Then I saw my way to some college learning, and
in one way or another I kept at the state university for four years.
One summer I peddled dry-goods in Iowy and Nebrasky. Another I sold
ploughs in Texas.”
His companion sauntered slowly, keeping a sympathetic silence. There
was a pleasant kind of brag in his simple epic.
“But I got my chance one red-hot August day, when I met Joe Dinsmore in
the smoking-car of a C. B. & Q. train, crossing a Kansas prairie. Big
Joe was on his way to look over a piece of land that had come back on a
client of his on a mortgage. He took to me, and we rode over to see the
sand-heap his man had lent twenty thousand on. The mortgage called it
‘fertile farming land.’ Dinsmore swore and then laughed when he’d seen
the miles of drouth and blasted grass and corn. But I got out of the
buggy and scraped a hole in the hot ground. Then I took a look at the
air; my! it just waltzed and sang over our heads, fit to blister the
paint on the team. Well, we drove on, Dinsmore mad, and me quiet, until
we came to the Waralla River. Then I smiled.”
His face relaxed at the memory, and he pushed his tall silk hat back to
a rakish angle, unconscious of the city, of the whirling carriages, of
everything save that vital moment of triumph out on the arid prairie.
“Dinsmore was mopping his head and growling: ‘Rantoul was a blankish
eastern idiot; he might as well throw up the sponge. Two square miles
of this ash-heap!’
“But,” in the fervour of his tale, Wilbur turned squarely to the girl,
“I smiled at him. ‘Dinsmore,’ I said, ‘you know how to draw a brief and
run a caucus and bluff a jury,--and perhaps a few other things,--but
you don’t understand this game.’ ‘Well,’ he growled, ‘what have you got
to offer?’ ‘Irrigation,’ I said; and he howled. ‘Irrigate, you damn
fool, when the banks of that cussed river are twenty-five feet high on
either side, and no coal within two hundred miles!’
“Then I explained myself. I told him how I and a classmate at Michigan
one spring invented just the machine for this. ‘It’s working to-day on
father’s farm up in northern Michigan.’ ‘How long will it take us to
git there?’ he jerked out. ‘Three days.’ Well, the old wheel we had
rigged up, Jim Center and me, was there pumping away like the day we
left it, when Dinsmore and I drove over from the station.”
Here Wilbur, in his excitement, had stopped at a deserted _brasserie_,
and taking two chairs from the nearest table, he described minutely
the water-hoister with all its superb points. Miss Anthon sank into a
chair. They were near the hotel now, and the tale absorbed her.
“Dinsmore looked it over; he said nothing; then he started it running;
then he looked it over again. ‘My boy,’ he said, as we walked up to the
house, ‘there is a desk for you in my office in Chicago. You read law.
Some day you will be managing a “Water-Hoister Company.”’ That was near
three years ago.”
Wilbur ordered a _bock_. After one sip he put the glass down and went
on. There were delightful appendices to this epic. Dinsmore had tried
to cheat him, but--
“I held him up in his own office, on the tenth floor of the Sears
building. ‘A square deal,’ I said, ‘or you don’t get out of this
office.’ And Dinsmore has done the right thing ever since.”
Miss Anthon’s blood ran in little throbs as he described this primitive
arrangement in the tenth floor of an office-building, where the old eel
of a politician had been foiled by his sharp clerk.
“Then Dinsmore tried to do Rantoul on his land, when he saw what a fat
thing we had. But,” here the young fellow smiled in appreciation of his
astuteness rather than of his honesty, “Rantoul has his third now.”
Later Wilbur had gone to Washington as secretary for an Illinois boss,
and while there had arranged the patents and started the Water-Hoister
Improvement Company. Center was remembered.
“I gave him a quarter of my third. He is teaching school up Minnesota
way. Some day he will be a rich man and won’t know what has struck him.”
“How can you be spared?” Miss Anthon asked, as the story seemed to end
in the air. “How did you dare to run over here for three months and be
so far away from your schemes?”
Wilbur laughed and was silent for a moment, with that look of seeing
around a corner which comes into the faces of shrewd, new men.
“Well, Miss Anthon,” he gazed at her frankly, as if she would compel
his inmost secrets, “I’m not quite fit for what’s ahead, not even
with what I got over there at the old school. I mean to get into
bigger things than this water-hoister affair. So it won’t hurt me to
have a look around; it’s about the last time I shall have a chance.
And I worked hard at the job, got Rantoul’s affairs all cleared up,
his creditors satisfied. There’s nothing to do now, but wait for the
factory to turn out the machines. I shall be starting back soon when
the time comes to boom. And,” he added jocularly, “Paris is good enough
for me when I’m not in shirtsleeves.”
Miss Anthon’s face glowed with her excitement over the story. It
touched her imagination: money-getting, it seemed, might be another
affair than taciturn, reserved old John Anthon had made it. Wilbur
brought out the romance. And she pardoned the hero’s genial complacency
in his own cleverness, his colossal confidence that the world and he
had been made just so that he might bring about his combinations. His
tolerance of the old world, in spite of his suspicion, was also fine.
She got up, regretfully, aware for the first time that it was not quite
the place for her,--the Boulevard des Capucines at ten o’clock, sitting
with a young man who sipped a _bock_.
A few moments later she bade him good-night, and shook hands heartily,
with a kind of recognition for the interest he had given her. Life
must be made to march, and whoever gratified this craving would get
his meed of generous acknowledgment. And Wilbur felt a little of the
elation of the dominant male. He was not making love; he had too little
submissiveness to be a lover. Rather, he had impressed himself, and
that was a necessity of his nature.