Three days thereafter a caller came to see Jeremy at The Record office. His card indicated that he was Mr. Arthur Welton, representing the firm of Hunt & Hunt, Attorneys, Philadelphia. His appearance indicated that he was about Jeremy’s age. His bearing indicated that he was older than Pharaoh’s uncle, and charged with world-destinies. Jeremy had a shrewd guess that this was his first mission away from home.
Mr. Welton looked Jeremy over minutely and shook hands. The firm of Hunt & Hunt, which he had the honor to represent, had charge of the affairs of Miss Editha Greer, deceased, he informed Mr. Robson. Would Mr. Robson kindly put on his coat?
“Do you want me to go out with you?” asked Jeremy.
“As you prefer.”
“What’s the matter with this? Nobody will interrupt us here.”
“Very well.” The age-old youth wrapped himself in an air of superior expectancy.
“Go ahead,” said the reporter.
“The coat,” reminded Mr. Welton.
Jeremy was annoyed. “Why the devil should I put on a coat with the mercury ramping around 90?”
“A mere formality,” murmured his visitor.
“Oh, very well!” growled Jeremy. He departed and presently returned, fully and uncomfortably garmented.
Again Mr. Arthur Welton inspected him carefully. “You do not wear mourning, I observe.”
“I do not.”
“Why not, may I ask?”
“Don’t believe in it. It’s a pagan custom and usually hypocritical.”
“I cannot agree with you,” retorted the other weightily. “On principle, I cannot agree with you. In the present instance, would it be an evidence of hypocrisy to have shown a formal mark of sorrow for the loss of your great-aunt?”
“It would.”
“You felt, then, no affection or esteem for the late Miss Editha Greer?”
“What business is that of yours?”
“It is so much the business of my firm that I have traveled a thousand miles to ascertain your attitude.”
“The condition!” cried Jeremy, aloud. “I beg your pardon,” he added. “If you had told me that this was a legal cross-examination—”
“Not precisely that, Mr. Robson. I should have thought that you would appreciate its purport,” returned the other in a tone of grave rebuke.
“I do.” There was a grim set to the other’s lips. “I know Aunt Edie well enough to appreciate her practical jokes.”
“Really, Mr. Robson! I am bound to protest against the assumption that our late client—”
“All right! All right! I withdraw it. Fire ahead.”
Mr. Arthur Weston looked delicately but impressively pained. “You felt no affection or esteem for the deceased?” he inquired through pursed lips.
“I liked the old lady, in a way,” confessed Jeremy reminiscently. “She had such a cheery spice of the devil in her. And her tongue! And her pen! Oh, Lord! What an editorial writer she’d have made, if she could have kept out of jail.”
“I need hardly tell you, Mr. Robson, that she gravely disapproved of your journalistic predilections.”1
“Nobody need tell me after she got through. Nobody need tell anybody anything that my Great-Aunt Greer had told ’em first.”
“In order that the record may be clear, let me put this to you. It is admitted that you disapprove of symbolical mourning; that you do not practice it. If you did practice it, would you have worn mourning for the deceased Miss Greer?”
“If the dog hadn’t stopped to scratch the flea would he have caught the rabbit?” retorted the irreverent Mr. Robson.
“I must insist upon a reply.”
“No; I certainly shouldn’t. Why should I? I’m not grieving over Aunt Edie’s death. She’s no real loss to me. Nor gain, either, now,” he added with a rueful grin. “I’m not going to pretend. So, you see, there’s not even a mitigating circumstance.”
“Mitigating circ—”
“Good legal phrase, isn’t it? Oh, I understand your errand perfectly. Aunt Edie wrote me that there was a ‘condition’ to the legacy that I wouldn’t fulfill. If you’d come out here and found me all swathed up in black like a mummy, and with a funereal gulp in my voice when I spoke of my dear old Auntie, and the general manners of an undertaker right on the job, I expect it might have been worth twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars to me. Even a mourning band on my coat and a few appropriate sighs in the right place might have got me five or ten thousand. Maybe if I’d stopped to figure it out, I’d have dressed the part. A fellow will do a good deal for money. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t.” The memory of Marcia’s frank and lustrous eyes checked him. Could he have met their challenge, with the black badge of hypocrisy on him? “No! I’m damned if I would!” he declared with profound sincerity. “So there you have it. I know where I get off, and I don’t much care, to tell the truth. I lose.”
The overweighted legal victim of responsibilities almost too heavy to be borne slowly and accurately gathered up his hat, his gloves, his cane, his portfolio, and his eye-glasses in the absorbed manner of one taking an inventory. He bowed a solemn and professional farewell to Mr. Robson. At the door he paused. A gleam as of some faint, inward flickering of the eternal human which must at times assert itself even through the cerements of legal procedure, appeared upon his pink and careworn features.
“No,” he pronounced profoundly. “You win.”
9
“What’s the matter with you, Robson?”
Young Jeremy Robson turned a lack-luster eye upon Wackley, his managing editor. “Nothing,” he said listlessly.
“You’re not looking well.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” said the reporter, dully wishing his solicitous superior at the devil.
“Want a few days off to go fishin’?”
“No, thanks.”
“What do you want?” inquired Wackley, dreading to hear that a raise of pay was the requisite. Cheered by the valuable reporter’s negative declaration of content with his lot as it was, the editor continued: “A sick owl is a merry wag to what you’ve been for the last ten days. All the ginger has gone out of your stuff. Can’t you dig us up something more as good as your Eli Wade story?”
In that moment Jeremy Robson savored the sensations of the chicken-killing puppy when, awaking from blessedly forgetful reverie, it finds the dismal and penal relic of its crime still fast about its neck.
“Look here,” pursued Wackley. “This isn’t going to do. You quit for the day, and go home. Tomorrow there’s going to be doings in the Senate. Martin Embree is going to spring something. You cover it. We’ll want a good story, if the stuff comes through. Beat it for home, now!”
Home? Young Jeremy Robson felt a loathly distaste for his quiet room up off the campus. But so he felt a loathly distaste for the whole of that hollow and lifeless shell about him, which had so lately been the world of his crowded, vigorous interests. Man delighted him not; no, nor woman, either; not even the pride of his work and his satisfaction in having become something of a figure, though in a minor degree, locally. He hungered, with the intensity of a self-willed and rather lonely nature, for the sight and sound and essence of Marcia Ames who was some weeks and Heaven only knew how many miles away from him. Young Jeremy Robson had suffered as severe a hurt as youth can suffer and still continue to be youth.
He wandered idly up the Nicklin Avenue hill and turned into the shaded sweetness of Montgomery Street. Miss Letitia Pritchard was at her hedge-row, cutting roses. She was a placid and vigorous mite of a woman, unfaded at fifty, sweet and hardy and fresh-hued and rugged like a late, frost-resisting apple.
“How hot and tired you look!” was her greeting across the barrier of bloom and fragrance. “Come in and I’ll give you some iced ginger-and-lemon.” She led the way to a dwarfish table in a fairy grotto of rocks and climbing flowers. “Are you never coming to see me anymore?”
“I didn’t know you’d care to have me,” he replied, exactly like a forlorn small
boy.
“Your rival, Buddy Higman, comes every day. Though that’s partly business. But he always starts in by asking, ‘Heard from Her, again, Miss Letty?’”
Her visitor gave her a grateful look. “What do you hear, Miss Pritchard?”
“My young and dangerous cousin is dashing about New York at a great rate,” she informed him, “enjoying life to the utmost.”
“Then she hasn’t sailed yet.”
“She sails in a fortnight.”
“Does she say anything about coming back?”
The rosy spinster shook her head. “Not a word. But then, Marcia doesn’t say things. She does ’em.”
“Do you think she will come back—some time?”
“Probably not. I think she will—well, do what is best for her. Without being at all a selfish person, Marcia has a singular instinct for doing what is best for herself. In the real sense, I mean.”
Undoubtedly! reflected young Mr. Jeremy Robson. She had done the best thing for herself in judging him and finding him lacking. Acceptance of which fact gave to his face an expression which caused Miss Pritchard to look the other way. Presently she went to a shelf in the nook and brought out an envelope which she placed in her caller’s hand.
“Aren’t they good!” said she.
He smoothed out the curving paper, and Marcia’s own face smiled forth its quaint and inscrutable witchery at him.
“I took it the day before she went away. There’s one to spare,” she suggested.
“Do you think she’d want me to have it?” he asked, his hungry gaze set upon the little print.
“You’re a nice boy,” said Miss Letitia Pritchard. (“And all the nicer,” she thought to herself, “for being so much a boy.”) “Yes; she’d be glad to have you have it, I think.”
“She didn’t say so?”
Sympathy for the eagerness of his tone softened the old maid’s smile. “No. She didn’t say so. She didn’t say anything about you, except that you’d come to see me. For a time I thought her prophecy was wrong.”
“I’d like to come again.”
“As often as you like,” she said kindly. “You’re one of three people she talked to me about, the night before she left. The others were Buddy—she is going to help him get an education when the time comes—and Eli Wade.”
From day to day Jeremy had postponed the dreaded confessional visit to the Boot & Shoe Surgeon. “You’ve reminded me of an errand, Miss Pritchard,” he said.
Bidding her good-bye, he went direct to the Infirmary. The old practitioner sat hunched over a pair of white buckskins. He lifted a mild, but questioning face to Jeremy.
“Come in, Mr. Robson,” said he. “It’s quite some time sence you was here.”
“I was ashamed to come,” blurted Jeremy.
“Shucks! Don’t say that. You can’t be responsible for what they order you to write. That’s a reporter’s job.”
“Who says so?”
“Nick Milliken. He says any reporter’d have to do the same.”
This was a bitter flavoring to the dose. “That isn’t so,” replied Jeremy quietly. “I needn’t have written it; not that way. I needn’t have written it at all.”
The Boot & Shoe Surgeon set down the subject upon which he was operating. “I don’t understand,” he said, puzzled and despondent. “Did you want to do it?”
“That isn’t the question. I didn’t have to do it. If necessary I could have resigned.”
The old man’s face cleared up. “Quit your job? That’d ’a’ been foolish. There wasn’t any call for you to do that.”
“Anyhow I’m mighty sorry I ever touched the story. And if I’d known what it was going to do to you”—The old man flinched involuntarily at this reference to the dead glories of his School Board incumbency—“I’d never have touched it in the world.”
“Sure you would! You’d do it again. Tomorrow if the orders came.”
Jem whirled to meet the malevolent smile of Nicholas Milliken, the Socialist, standing in the doorway.
“I told you not to blame this young feller,” the newcomer bade Eli Wade. “He can’t help it. He’s only a louse-souled ratchet in the machinery of the capitalistic press.” Obviously much pleased with this rich metaphor, Mr. Milliken entered and seated himself.
“Well, I knew he wouldn’t do it to me a-purpose,” said Eli Wade.
Jeremy Robson felt sick; too sick even to be incensed at Milliken who proceeded:
“Didn’t even know the little game they were playing, did you, young feller? Well, you see, Eli, here, he’s a radical as far as his intelligence will carry him. That’s my influence on him. The bosses don’t want radicals on the School Board. They don’t want ’em anywhere. Anyhow the Schools belong to the Germans: that’s their specialty. So, Eli being against the cultural-extension-of-German plan, they stir up the Germans against him, and then sick the newspapers onto him, and when they sick, you do the yapping. That’s all there is to that. Except that Smiling Mart, the damned hypocrite, steps up and eases Eli out to help put in another German and clinch his hold on a few more German votes. Not that it ain’t all right, at that; if they’ll put in a good radical. The cultural extension’s good enough, like anything else that’ll help people think. Oh, these fools! They can’t see education is what’s going to dish ’em all and bring on the Social Revolution.”
“Don’t you talk against Martin Embree, Nick,” admonished the proprietor. “There ain’t a straighter set pair o’ feet in the State of Centralia.”
“All right. Then I’m a goat; look at my hoofs!” grinned the Socialist. “But be patient with our helpless young hired-man writer here.”
Jeremy liked Milliken’s contemptuous excusals less than Wade’s blame, and said so.
“Oh, you ain’t reached the bottom of your ditch yet,” jeered the Socialist. “How’s the editorial end? Still writing ’em?”
“Yes,” said Jeremy shortly.
“Pot of ink; pot o’ glue; pot o’ soft soap and a pair of blinders; there’s your editorial-writer’s outfit. Done any slush-bucketing for Montrose Clark yet?”
“No.”
“Say it as though you didn’t expect to. But you will. Oh, yes; you’ll come to it.”
“Let him be, Nick,” said the gentle old philosopher of foot-garb.
“Did he let you be? Let him listen. One day old Judge Slippery Selden Dana will come puttering into The Record office—”
“On the ball of his sole,” put in the Boot & Shoe Surgeon.
“Pussyfooting. Of course. He’ll suggest to Mr. Farley; that some recognition of Mr. Montrose Clark’s eminent services as a citizen would be timely. Know what that means? Means that Puffy Clark and the P.-U. Co. are getting ready to grab another franchise. Does Mr. Farley see it that way? He does! He remembers a little slice of P.-U. stock in the strong-box. And if Young Feller, here, is good enough with his pen, he wins the job of puffery for the puffiest little public-utility-grafting puff-adder that ever stung a city. And will he see it that way? He will. He’ll remember his little pay envelope at the end of the week, and he’ll come through. It’s a grand little system.”
“Nothing wrong with a system that lets a man get from his employees what he pays for,” defended Jeremy.
“Nothing wrong with your cutting Eli Wade’s throat to order, either. Eh?”
To this Jeremy found no reply.
“Remember that apology I was going to make on demand? Do I hear any demand? I guess the apology’s the other way around.”
“I’ve made it. Not to you, though. I’m going on. Eli! Once more I’m sorry and I’m ashamed.”
“Until next time,” added the irrepressible malice of the white-haired Socialist.
Not trusting himself to reply, the reporter walked out. Within a few strides Milliken was at his side.
“He’s bad hurt, the old boy,” he confided in a wholly altered and wholly sincere tone.
“I’m sorry—”
‘“Oh, your
story is only part of it. Clever! Vur-ree clever. But they’d have got his place on the Board anyway. They needed it.”
“What can I do?”
“Nothing. Unless,” added the other on reflection, “you could slip something pleasant about him over some time. That’d please him. He’s like a child, about print.”
At home Jem took out the picture of Marcia Ames and studied it. Tiny though it was, it was instinct with her very poise and spiritual effluence. As so often with herself, he felt the something unsaid behind the serene self-possession of the face; the something vital for which he must grope. What was the message, the demand which the face was making upon him, which she was making upon him through this dear memento? Ranging back, he recalled in a flash that first impression of her in the meeting, while she was still so completely unknown that he had mistaken even the fundamental matter of sex; the impression of an untouched, untainted valorousness. Again he saw it, reflected from the tiny delicacy of the picture. Plain enough now what she demanded of him.
It was courage.
10
The Senate proceedings did not open until ten o’clock. Meantime Montrose Clark, President of the Fenchester Public Utilities Corporation,1 and in some part godling of local affairs, had telephoned his commands to The Record that a representative be sent to his office that morning to take a statement for the paper. Jeremy, incautiously dropping in at the office early, got the job to do before going to the Capitol. He was admitted to an outer office by the hand-perfected private secretary, cross-questioned briefly, and passed in to the Presence.
Mr. Montrose Clark was telephoning. He was revealed to Jeremy’s inquiring eye as a plump, glossy, red-faced little man with a fussily assured manner, an autocratic voice and a keen and greedy eye. Few indeed were the local pies of promise or flavor in which Mr. Clark did not have a pudgy and profit-taking finger; and his bearing suggested the man comfortably sure of taking care of himself. He snapped “G’-bye” into the telephone and turned to Jeremy.
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