Important though the event was to Jeremy Robson, the authorities on The Record considered it rather a waste of their brilliant youngster’s time. However, they were appeased by the cropping out meantime of a story so much in the Robson line that it might have been made to order for him. Wackley, the managing editor, outlined it to him, when he arrived in the morning.
“Robson, do you know a queer old bat up on Banks Street who runs a shoe surgery?”
“Eli Wade? Yes; quite well.”
“He’s a nut of the old Know-Nothing kind, isn’t he? Hates all foreigners and all that?”
“He’s a pretty hard-shelled Yankee.”
“Well; he’s done it this time. Made a fine young riot for himself last night. It seems he’s been pasting cartoons and mottoes in his show window; and some of the younger fellows from the Deutscher Club, who pass there on their way home, naturally got sore. Last night with a few beers aboard, they stopped and gave him a raree serenade. Out comes the old boy in his nighty and makes ’em a red-hot speech. They give him the whoop, and he begins to damn ’em all back to Germany.”
“Yes; he’s got fighting stuff in him,” agreed Jeremy.
“Too much for his own good. Somebody ups with a rock, and down comes the big boot over the door. Well, the old boy goes dippy over that. Dives inside and grabs up a hammer and right into them. First thing you know, they have him on a rail—a scantling from that new building on the corner—and are yelling for tar. It might have been serious for the old boy, but just then along comes Andy Galpin of The Guardian. You know him; he’s some young husky. Guard on the O. C. team for three years. Well, he bucks the center and lays out a couple of the merry villagers and there’s a pretty mix-up, and I understand Galpin got one in the eye that didn’t improve his make-up. But the boys were sick of the fun anyway, and they let Galpin get away with it and take old Wade home. Instead of doing the sensible thing and sleeping it off, Wade gets all het up, and swears out warrants and they’re going to thrash it out in police court this noon, in time for the edition. Probably Wade ‘ll make a speech. Anyhow, there’ll be a circus when he goes on the stand. We want a rattling good story on it; and put in your best touches on the old boy. He’ll do for a local character to hang all sorts of stories on, later.”
“But look here, Mr. Wackley: I know Eli Wade pretty well. He’s—he’s a sort of friend of mine.”
“What if he is? You can have fun with him, can’t you? He won’t know the difference. And if he does, he won’t care. Those fanatical guys are crazy for publicity. He’ll eat it up.”
It was Jeremy’s settled intention, so he told himself, as he set out for court, to write an account which, while lively, should fairly set forth his friend’s side. When he saw Eli Wade at court his heart misgave him, the Boot & Shoe Surgeon looked so whitely wrathful. The proceedings dwindled into nothing. The “life” was out of the story, quite to one reporter’s relief, when his evil genius inspired Eli Wade to address the court. At the outset he was simple and dignified. But counsel for the serenaders interpolated some well-timed taunts which roused him to indignation. He had not slept that night, for shame of the treatment to which he had been subjected; and his self-control was in abeyance. Indignation, as he answered the taunts, waxed to fury. He burst into a savage and absurd invective, aimed at “German interlopers,” “foreign clubs that run our city,” and the like; his voice shrilling louder and louder until he was drowned out by the uncontrollable laughter of the court-room. It was all quite absurd and pitiable. Instinctively Jeremy’s pencil took it down. Here was his story, ready to hand.
As he sat in the office, the grip of characterization settled upon him. Oddments and gleams of past conversations in the “Infirmary” came back to him, and he embodied them. Stroke by stroke there grew up under his hand a portrait, crude from haste but vivid, telling, and a stimulant to mirth, not always of the kindliest. It was not intentionally unfair; it was never malicious in purpose. But it was the more deadly in effect. By the magic transformation of print it made out of an unpolished, simple, generous, fervent, and thoughtful artisan, a laughable homunculus. Yet there was in it no element of “fake.” Jeremy could have defended it at all points. Any newspaper judgment would have credited it with due fidelity to facts. The sum-total was a subtle and gross misrepresentation. Had the writer read it over he would perhaps have seen this for himself. But there was no time. He barely caught the edition. Wackley’s: “Great stuff, my boy! You’ll hear of this,” happily distracted him from the stirrings of a conscience which faintly wished to know how Eli Wade would take it.
“You’re doing golf tomorrow,” continued the managing editor. “Don’t bother to come to the office first.”
Profiting by this, Jeremy, an hour before match time, called at Miss Pritchard’s for Marcia. He was informed that she had left on an errand, but would meet him at the Country Club. When, just before the first pair teed up, she appeared, her mentor was startled, she looked so wan and languid.
“Good Heavens!” said Jeremy in a whisper. “You haven’t let this thing get on your nerves?”
She shook her head. Her eyes did not avoid his now; but the changeful lights seemed to have dwindled to the merest flicker in inscrutable depths.
“Let me get you a cup of coffee. That’ll brace you up.”
“I shall be all right,” she said with an effort.
At the call for the fourth pair she stepped to the tee and hit a ball straight down the center for 160-odd yards. It was the virtue of her game that she was straight on the pin, nine shots out of ten, thereby overcoming the handicap of greater distance sure to be against her in college competition. Great and grinful was the satisfaction of her trainer at observing the demeanor of her opponent. When he was presented to her, that gentleman, a sightly and powerful youth notable for his long drives, took one extended, admiring, and astounded survey of “M. Ames”—he hadn’t known what the bewildering fates held in store for him inquired privately but passionately of high Heaven and his team-mates how a fellow was going to keep his eye on the ball with a vision like that to look at, and entered upon a disastrous career by nearly slaying, with his first drive, a squirrel in a tree a good hundred yards off the course. He recovered in time to record an unparalleled ten for the first hole. M. Ames, dead on the pin, scored a correct five. Everson (the Kirk boy) contributed three putts on the second green, and M. Ames won it in a sound four. But as his pupil took her stance for a brassie, after a respectable tee-shot from the third, Jeremy perceived with dismay that her hands were shaking. Up went her head, as she swung, and the ball darted from the toe of her club into the rough. She was out in three, but again she succumbed to star-gazing on her mashie shot, and her opponent still triangulating the course like a care-free surveyor, was able to halve it. From then on, Jeremy the mentor was in agony. Except off the tees, where she clung to her beautiful, free-limbed, lissome swing, as it were by instinct, No. 4 for Old Central topped, sliced, pulled, and scarified the helpless turf. The gallant foeman was so distressed at her obviously unusual ineptitudes, that his own game went glimmering down the grassy bypaths that lead to traps and bunkers. Only this involuntary gallantry saved M. Ames from practical extinction. As it was, she was two down at the end of the first nine, with a dismal fifty-four. As they left the ninth green she turned to Jeremy:
“Would you mind not caddying for me the rest of the match?”
“But Marcia!” he cried, aghast. “What’s wrong?”
“You have got on my nerves.”
“I haven’t said a word except to steady you.”
“I am sorry,” she said inflexibly.
An angry gleam flashed in Jeremy’s eyes. “Of course, if you feel that way about it—”
“I do. I am sorry,” she repeated.
“Do you mind my following you?” he asked with semi-sardonic intent.
“I should rather you did not.”
“Well, good Heavens! Something has happened to spoil your nerve.”
“Then what—”
“Come for me after the match. We can talk then.”
With this Jeremy had to be content. Relieved of his presence, M. Ames summoned all her force to the rescue of her nerves, and astonished her opponent with a forty-four, steadily and carefully played. The match, which had originally been counted upon by a careful captain as a probable win for Old Central, was a tie, under the scoring system agreed upon.
Dismal misgivings, meanwhile, had beset Jeremy Robson, the promising young reporter of The Record. Already he was, in his heart, on the defensive when, as he and Marcia turned out at the gate, she said:
“Did you write the article about Eli Wade?”
“Yes.”
“I thought it must have been yours,” said her lips. The tone said, “I hoped it was not.”
“That’s a good sign, for people to recognize my style. What did you think of it?”
“It was clever.”
There was no warmth in the tone. Rather a reluctant relinquishment of disbelief.
“I’m glad you liked it.”
“I did not like it. I hated it.”
“Oh, that’s the personal view,” he said indulgently.
“Perhaps.”
“The Bellair Journal has offered me a job on the strength of it.”
“Were you obliged to take that—what is the term—that assignment?”
“A reporter takes what is handed out to him.”
“I suppose so. That would be the danger. I should fear that.”
“Fear what? I can’t imagine you fearing anything.”
“I should fear getting into that habit of mind. Complaisant. Servile.”
“That’s an ugly word, Marcia,” he said, flushing.
“I am sorry. Perhaps there is a side to it that I do not understand. But surely, oh, surely, you need not have written it in that way!”
“My dear girl! Personal feeling has no relation to newspaper work. I can’t juggle with facts because the man happens to be my friend. That isn’t honest.”
“Is this honest?” She held up the clipping which she took from her pocket.
Jeremy quailed before the hurtness of her eyes, which was wonder more than reproach.
“There isn’t a word in it,” he began, “that—”
“There is not a thought in it that is not a cruel injustice.”
“You’ve no right to say that.”
“That is true. You remind me.”
“Oh, Marcia,” he cried miserably. “Don’t take it that way. I’d have thrown up my job sooner than write it if I’d known that you’d feel it so.”
“It does not matter about me. But you! How could you have done it! How could you have used his gentle, sweet, simple philosophy—his talks between friends in the shop—to make a mock of him?”
“I didn’t. I swear I didn’t.”
She put the clipping into his hand. Re-read, now, the words were self-damnatory. Jeremy groaned.
“It has hurt him so terribly,” she said.
“You’ve seen him?”
“Yes. He has resigned his place on the School Board. Mr. Dolge advised him to get off before he was laughed off.”
Jeremy stared at the words of his facile portraiture as if they had suddenly been informed with venom. “And he was so proud of it!” he muttered.
“It was a large thing in his little life,” said the girl. “He feels disgraced.”
Wackley’s easy and cynical assumption that the subject of the sketch would be “crazy for publicity” recalled itself to Jeremy. He swore beneath his breath. “When did you see Eli?
“This morning. At the hospital.”
“The hospital! Is he injured that badly?”
“No. You had not heard? It is Mr. Galpin, a friend of Eli’s—who stood by him.”
“Andy Galpin! How bad is it?”
“Much worse than they supposed. He will be nearly blind in one eye.”
“Good Lord!”
“And is he a friend of yours, also; Mr. Galpin?”
“Andy? Yes; of course he is.”
“But you made no inquiry about him.”
“I didn’t know.”
Her eyes, steady and deep-lighted, still did not judge him, still pathetically wondered at him.
“Marcia!” he broke out. “I haven’t been able to think of anything but you. I haven’t had anything in my heart—”
“Please!”
He stopped, appealing to her with his look.
“I think you have to think of Eli Wade.”
Jeremy winced and was silent. Their car pulled up at the Pritchard gate. She got out, but did not ask him to come in.
“The worst of it is that it’s hurt you,” he muttered. “I didn’t know that you cared so much about him.”
“It was not he that I cared so much about,” returned Marcia steadily. “It was you.”
She turned and passed into the house. Try as he might, on his way to the hospital to see Andrew Galpin, Jeremy could derive from that low-toned avowal neither hope nor comfort for a sick heart and a grilling conscience.
The doctors would not let him see Galpin.
As by tradition bound, his “story” of the golf match focused on the one and unique girl-player on the team. She was the “human interest” center. So skillfully did he skirt the edge of her bad play that only an analysis of the score would apprise the reader of the partial failure. Her good shots were described in glowing terms. To her, the casual reader would have supposed, belonged the chief credit on Old Central’s side; and the copy-reader, who was no golfer, in good faith headed it “Miss Ames Gains Tie for O. C.”; the final team score having also been all even, though it should have been Old Central’s victory had No. 4 played up to her standard. The writing of the article cheered up the writer notably. Here was no wounding word or acid-bitten phrase. There was only the clear purpose to please. Again Jeremy had been caught and carried in the whirl of his semi-creative enthusiasm.
The quality was still there when he read it over on the following day. Intent upon his sunshine-scattering he sent an early proof to “M. Ames.” He felt, on the whole, that he had been, if not unjustly, at least untenderly treated. Overnight he had been able to persuade himself that the Wade sketch represented a fine type of loyalty to profession rising triumphant above personal feelings. All that was needed to reestablish him firmly in the conviction of righteousness, was Marcia’s appreciation of his golf-story. He went to the Pritchard house to receive it. Marcia was not there. She had gone for a few days’ visit at the Magnus Laurens’ country place. Jeremy sent a hasty, reproachful and alarmed note after her. Why had she left without a word? What did it all mean? When was she coming back? When could he see her and explain? As a composition it was distinctly below standard for the rising young star of The Record. But at least it could boast the highly-prized quality of heart-interest.
Jeremy called again at the hospital to see Andrew Galpin. That battered warrior received him with immitigable cheerfulness.
“Ay-ah,” he explained. “Something busted inside the eye. It ain’t as bad as they thought. They’re going to save quite a glimmer of sight in it, and ‘my right eye is a good little eye,’” he chanted. “Back on the job in a week or so.”
Jeremy, craving solace, asked whether his friend had seen the Eli Wade story; then, remembering his disability, corrected himself hastily.
“Sure I saw it. Or had it seen for me. I made ’em read me both papers from end to end. That was a crackajack story. You keep on like this, young fellow, and Fenchester’ll be too small to hold you.”
“I’m afraid it hurt Eli Wade’s feelings,” said the visitor hesitantly. “Did he say anything to you about it?”
“Ay-ah. He spoke of it.”
“What did he say?”
“We-ell; he said—Sure you want to know?” Jeremy nodded. “He said, ‘I’d never have believed it from the way he wears his shoes.’ Like the poor old n
ut, ain’t it?”
“Andy, was the story so rotten?”
“I just told you it was a crackajack piece of work.”
“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about my doing it at all.”
“It was your assignment, wasn’t it?”
“Certainly, it was,” assented Jeremy, comforted and justified. “I had to take it or quit my job, didn’t I?”
“Oh, I guess you’re stronger than that on The Record.”
“What would you have done in my place?”
“Me? Oh, I’m a reporter. I reckon I’d have done the story.” But there was no conviction in Galpin’s tone. Jeremy wished he could have seen the bandaged eyes. He mistrusted that they would have avoided his.
“That’s part of the business,” he declared, self-defensively.
“That’s the hell of the business,” said Andrew Galpin.
Jeremy left the hospital feeling that Marcia Ames and Andrew Galpin had said much the same thing to him about his article, in widely different terms.
Marcia’s reply to his note came several days later. Its brevity did not conceal an indefinable and disturbing reserve. She would see him, she wrote, when she returned. With the note was inclosed the proof of the golf report. Its margin carried a penciled note.
“Can you not see that this only makes it worse?”
Jeremy read his cherished report once more, and saw.
It was a lie.
7
Lake Skohota1 thrusts a long and slender arm past Fenchester to throw it cherishingly about a tiny island, cut off from the University campus and made part of it again by an arched bridge overhanging dappled waters. Willows bending from the islet’s bank weave their thousand-fingered enchantments above the dreaming shallows. The subtle spice of sedge and marsh-bloom blows from it to disperse its spell upon the air that whispers a never-finished tale of secrecy and sorcery to the trees. It is a place of witchery.
The sheen of countless stars glowed above the bridge and wavered below it, as two figures emerged from the pathway and paused at the summit of the arch to lean and look down through the darkness at the blackly opalescent gleam of the waters. A canoe stole around the bend and slipped beneath them, the stroke of its paddles accentuated in cool, delicious plashes of sound as it entered the arch.
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