"Well, good luck on your trip," said Giles, accompanying Abner to the
door of the studio.
"And let us hear from you once in a while," added Medora.
"Surely," said Abner. "Look for a clipping, now and then, to show you
what they are saying of me."
"And for what you have to say of them we must wait until your return?"
said Medora.
"Not necessarily," rejoined Abner. "I might"--with the emission of an
obscure, self-conscious sound between a chortle and a gasp, instantly
suppressed--"I might write."
"Do, by all means," said Stephen.
"We shall follow your course with the greatest interest," added Medora.
Almost forthwith began the receipt of newspapers--indifferently printed
sheets from minor cities scattered across Indiana and Ohio. The first two
or three of them came addressed to Giles, but all the subsequent ones
were sent direct to Medora. These publications invariably praised Abner's
presence--for he always towered magnificently on the lecture-platform,
and his delivery--for he read resoundingly with a great deal of clearness
and precision. But they frequently deplored the sombreness of his
subject-matter, and as the tour came to extend farther east, these
objections began to assume a jocular and satirical cast, until the
seaboard itself was reached, when newspapers ceased altogether and
letters began to take their place. These were addressed, with complete
absence of subterfuge, to Medora, and they displayed an increasing
tendency toward the drawing of comparisons between the East and the West,
with the difference more and more in favour of the latter. Abner felt
with growing keenness the formality and insincerity of an old society,
its cynical note, its materialistic ideals, the intrenched injustice
resulting from accumulated and inherited wealth, the conventions that
hampered initiative and froze goodwill. "I shall be glad to get back West
again," he wrote.
Medora smiled over these observations. "What would the poor dear fellow
think of London or Paris, then, I wonder?" she said.
"I am glad to see that you will come back to us better satisfied with
us," she wrote,--"if only by comparison. Meanwhile, remember that whether
other audiences may be agreeable or the reverse, there is one audience
waiting for you here with which you ought to feel at home and--by this
time--in sympathy."
And indeed Abner faced Mrs. Whyland's little circle, when the time
finally came round, with much less sense of irksomeness and repugnance
than he had expected. Some twenty or thirty people assembled in the
Whyland drawing-room on one mid-March evening, and he soon perceived,
with a great relief, that they meant to respect both him and their
hostess.
"There is every indication that they intend to behave," said Bond in a
reassuring whisper. "Everything will go charmingly."
People arrived slowly and it was after nine before the slightest evidence
that anything like a programme had been arranged came into view. Abner,
by reason of this delay, would have had serious doubts of any real
interest in his art if a number of ladies had not plied him in the
interval with various little compliments and attentions. He found things
to say in reply; he also engaged in converse with a number of gentlemen,
who possibly had slight regard for literature but who could not help
respecting his size and sincerity. He loomed up impressively in his
frock-coat and steel-gray scarf, and nobody, as in the satiric East, was
heard to comment on his lack of conformity with the customs of "society."
"Tkh!" said Whyland. "You have come again without your overcoat, they
tell me."
The lake wind was fiercely hectoring the bare elm-trees before the house,
and the electric globes registered their tortures on the wide reach of
the curving roadway.
Abner tossed his head carelessly, in proud boast of his own robustness.
"What's three blocks?" he asked.
"Come into the dining-room and have something," said his host.