The Collected Westerns of William MacLeod Raine: 21 Novels in One Volume

by Unknown

  "But that's not fair. It's no better than stealing."

  "Sh--h! It's high finance. Don't use that other word," he whispered. "And what's fair hasn't a thing to do with it. It's my apple because I've got it."

  "But--"

  He waved her protest aside blandly. "Now try to be content with the lot a wise Providence has awarded you. I eat the apple. You see me eat it.

  That's the usual division of profits. Don't be an agitator, or an anarchist."

  "Don't I get even the core?" she begged.

  "I'd like to give it to you, but it wouldn't be best. You see I don't want to make you discontented with your position in life." He flung what was left of the apple into the sea and came up the steps to join her.

  Laughter was in the eyes of both, but it died out of hers first.

  "Mr. Farnum, is it really as bad as that?" Before he could find an answer she spoke again. "I've wanted for a long time to talk with some one who didn't look at things as we do. I mean as my father does and my uncle does and most of my friends. Tell me what you think of it--you and your friends."

  "That's a large order, Miss Frome. I hardly know where to begin."

  "Wait! Here comes Lieutenant Beauchamp to take me away. I promised to play ring toss with him, but I don't want to go now." She led a swift retreat to a spot on the upper deck shielded from the wind and warmed by the two huge smokestacks. Dropping breathless into a chair, she invited him with a gesture to take another. Little imps of mischief flashed out at him from her eyes. In the adventure of the escape she had made him partner. A rush of warm blood danced through his veins.

  "Now, sir, we're safe. Begin the propaganda. Isn't that the word you use? Tell me all about everything. You're the first real live socialist I ever caught, and I mean to make the most of you."

  "But I'm unfortunately not exactly a socialist."

  "An anarchist will do just as well."

  "Nor an anarchist. Sorry."

  "Oh, well, you're something that's dreadful. You haven't the proper bump of respect for father and for Uncle Joe. Now why haven't you?"

  And before he knew it this young woman had drawn from him glimpses of what life meant to him. He talked to her of the pressure of the struggle for existence, of the poverty that lies like a blight over whole sections of cities, spreading disease and cruelty and disorder, crushing the souls of its victims, poisoning their hearts and bodies. He showed her a world at odds and ends, in which it was accepted as the natural thing that some should starve while others were waited upon by servants.

  He made her see how the tendency of environment is to reduce all things to a question of selfinterest, and how the great triumphant fact of life is that love and kindness persist. Her interest was insatiable. She poured questions upon him, made him tell her stories of the things he had seen in that strange underworld that was farther from her than Asia. So she learned of Oscar Marchant, coughing all day over the shoes he half-soled and going out at night to give his waning life to the service of those who needed him. He told her--without giving names--the story of Sam Miller and his wife, of shop girls forced by grinding poverty to that easier way which leads to death, of little children driven by want into factories which crushed the youth out of them.

  Her eyes with the star flash in them never left his face. She was absorbed, filled with a strange emotion that made her lashes moist. She saw not only the tragedy and waste of life, but a glorious glimpse of the way out. This man and his friends set the common good above their private gain. For them a new heart was being born into the world. They were no longer consumed with blind greed, with love of their petty selves. They were no longer full of cowardice and distrust and enmity. Life was a thing beautiful to them. It was flushed with the color of hope, of fine enthusiasms. They might suffer. They might be defeated. But nothing could extinguish the joy in their souls. They walked like gods, immortals, these brothers to the spent and the maimed. For they had found spiritual values in it that made any material profit of small importance. Alice got a vision of the great truth that is back of all true reforms, all improvement, all progress.

  "Love," she said almost in a whisper, "is forgetting self."

  Jeff lost his stride and pulled up. He thought he could not have heard aright. "I beg your pardon?"

  "Nothing. I was just thinking out loud. Go on please."

  But she had broken the thread of his talk. He attempted to take it up again, but he was still trying for a lead when Alice saw Mrs. Van Tyle and Beauchamp coming toward them.

  She rose. Her eyes were the brightest Jeff had ever seen. They were filled with an ardent tenderness. It was as if she were wrapped in a spiritual exaltation.

  "Thank you. Thank you. I can't tell you what you've done for me."

  She turned and walked quickly away. To be dragged back to the commonplace at once was more than she could bear. First she must get alone with herself, must take stock of this new emotion that ran like wine through her blood. A pulse throbbed in her throat, for she was in a passionate glow of altruism.

  "I'm glad of life--glad of it--glad of it!" she murmured through the veil she had lowered to screen her face from observation.

  It had come to her as a revelation straight from Heaven that there can be no salvation without service. And the motive back of service must be love. Love! That was what Jesus had come to teach the world, and all these years it had warped and mystified his message.

  She felt that life could never again be gray or colorless. For there was work waiting that she could do, service that she could give. And surely there could be no greater happiness than to find her work and do it gladly.

  CHAPTER 17

  All sorts of absurd assumptions pass current as fixed and non- debatable standards. We might be free, and we tie ourselves to the slavery of rutted convention. Afraid of ideas, we come to no definite philosophy of life that is the result of clear and pellucid thinking.

  We must get rid of our bonds, but only in order to take on new ones. For our convictions will shackle us. The difference is that then we shall be servants of Truth and not of dead Tradition. --From the Note Book of a Dreamer.

  THE CHAPERONE EXPLAINS THAT THE REBEL IS IMPOSSIBLE AND THE CHAPERONED BEGS LEAVE TO DIFFER

  Part 1

  "And why mustn't I?" Alice demanded vigorously.

  Her cousin regarded her with indolent amusement. "My dear, you are positively the most energetic person I know. It is refreshing to see with what interest you enter into a discussion."

  Miss Frome, very erect and ready for argument, watched her steadily from the piano stool of their joint sitting room. "Well?"

  "I didn't say you mustn't, my dear. I know better than to deal in imperatives with Miss Alice. What I did was mildly to suggest that you are going rather far. It's all very well to be civil, but--" Mrs. Van Tyle shrugged her shoulders and let it go at that. She was leaning back in an easychair and across its arm her wrist hung. Between the fingers, polished like old ivory to the tapering pink nails, was a lighted cigarette.

  "Why shouldn't I be--pleasant to him? I like him." Her color deepened, but the eyes of the girl did not give way. There was in them a little flare of defiance.

  "Be pleasant to him if you like, and if it amuses you. But--" Again Valencia stopped, but after a puff or two at her cigarette she added presently: "Don't get too interested in him."

  "I'm not likely to," Alice returned with a touch of scorn. "Can't I like a man and admire him without wanting to marry him? I think that's a hateful way to look at it."

  "It's your interpretation, not mine," Mrs. Van Tyle answered with perfect good humor. "Of course you couldn't want to marry him under any circumstances. His station in life--his anarchistic ideas--his reputation as a confirmed libertine--all of them make the thought of such a thing impossible."

  Miss Frome's mind seized on only one of the charges. "I don't believe it. I don't believe a word of it. Anybody can throw mud--and some of it is bound to stick. He's a good man. You can see that i
n his face."

  "You can perhaps. I can't." Valencia studied her beneath a droop of eyelids behind which she was very alert. "Those things aren't said about a man unless they are true. Moreover, it happens we don't have to depend on hearsay."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Do you remember that night we saw the Russian dancers?"

  "Yes."

  "On the way home our car passed him. He was helping a woman out of a cab in front of the building where he rooms. She was intoxicated, and--his arm was round her waist."

  "I don't believe it. It was somebody else," the young woman flamed.

  "His cousin recognized him. So did I."

  "There must be some explanation. I'll ask him."

  "Ask him!" Valencia's level eyebrows lifted "Really, I don't think that will do. Better quietly eliminate him."

  "You mean treat him as if he were guilty when, I am sure he is not."

  Mrs. Van Tyle's little laugh rippled out. "You're quite dramatic about it, my dear. The man's of no importance. He's a poseur, a demagogue, and one with a vicious streak in him. I understand, of course, that you're interested only because he different from the other men you know. That merely a part of his pose."

  "I'm sure it isn't."

  "You're romantic, my dear. I'll admit his arrival on this ship was dramatic. No doubt you're imagining him a knight going back to save gallantly a day that is lost. He's only a politician, and so far as I can understand they are almost all a bad lot."

  "Including Father and Uncle Joe and Ned Merrill?" Alice asked acidly.

  "They are not politicians, but business men. They are in politics merely to protect their interests. But I didn't intend to start a discussion about Mr. Farnum. I ask you to remember that as your chaperone I'm here to represent your father. Would he wish you to be friendly with this man?"

  Alice was silent. What her father would think was not a matter of doubt.

  "The man's impossible," Mrs. Van Tyle went on pleasantly. "And it's just as well to be careful. Not that I'm very prudish myself. But if you're going to marry Ned Merrill--"

  She had struck the wrong note. Like a flash Alice answered.

  "I'm not. That's definitely decided."

  "Really! I thought it was rather arranged," Valencia smiled blandly.

  It was all very well for Alice to protest, but in the end she would be a good girl and do as she was told. Not that her cousin objected to her having a little fling before the fatal day. But why couldn't the girl do her flirting with Beauchamp instead of with this wild socialist?

  Valencia reflected that at any rate she had done her duty.

  Part 2

  Jeff was tramping the deck, his hands in his coat pockets, waiting for the trumpeter to fling out the two bars of music that would summon him to breakfast. He walked vigorously? drawing in deep breaths of the salt sea air. His thoughts were of Alice Frome. He was a lover, and in his imagination she embodied all things beautiful. Her charm flowed through him, pierced him with delight. When he heard music his mind flew to her. It voiced the rhythm of her motions and the sound of her warm laughter. The sunshine but reflected the golden gleams of light in her wavy hair.

  As he swung round the smoking saloon Jeff came face to face with Alice. He turned and caught step with her. The coat she wore came to her ankles, but it could not conceal her light, strong tread nor the long lines of the figure that gave her the grace of a captured wood nymph.

  "Only five hundred miles from Verden. By night we ought to be in wireless communication," he suggested.

  Her glance flashed at him. "You'll be glad to get home."

  "I will and I won't. There's work for me to do there. But it's the first real vacation I ever had in my life that lasted over a week. You can't think how I've enjoyed it."

  "So have I. More than anything I can remember." They stopped to look at a steamer which lay low on the distant horizon line. After they had fallen into step again she continued at the point where they had been interrupted: "And after we reach home? Are you going to come and see me? Are you going to let me meet your friends, those dear people who are giving themselves to make life less hideous and harsh for the weak? Shall I meet Mr. Mifflin . . . and Mr. Miller and your little Socialist poet? Or are you going to desert me?"

  He smiled a little at her way of putting it, but he was troubled none the less. "Are you sure that your way is our way? One can give service on the Hill just as much as down in the bottoms. There's no moral grandeur in rags or in dirt. Isn't your place with your friends?"

  "Haven't I a right to take hold of life for myself at first hand? Haven't I a right to know the truth? What have I done that I should be walled off from all these people who earn the bread I eat?"

  "But your friends . . . your father. . ."

  Her ironic smile derided him. "So after all you haven't the courage of your convictions. Because I'm Peter C. Frome's daughter I'm not to have the right to live."

  "No, it's your right to take hold of life with both hands. But surely you must live it among your own people."

  "I've got to learn how to live it first, haven't I?

  Most of my friends are not even aware there a problem of poverty. They thrust the thought of it from them. Our wealthy class has no social consciousness. Take my father. He thinks the submerged are lost because they are thriftless and that all would be right if they wouldn't drink. To him they are just a waste product of civilization.

  "But can you study the life of the people without growing discontented with the life you must lead?"

  "There is a divine discontent, you know. I've got to see things for myself. Why should all my opinions, my faith, be given to me ready-made. Why must I live by a formula I have never examined? If it isn't true I want to know it. And if it is true I want to know it." She had been looking straight before them toward the rising sun but now her gaze swept round on him. "Don't blame yourself for giving me new thoughts. I suppose all new ideas are likely to make trouble. But I've been working in this direction for years. Ever since I've been a little girl my heresies have puzzled my father. Meeting you has shown me a short cut. That's all."

  Something she had said recalled to him a fugitive memory.

  "Do you know, I think I saw you once when you were a little bit of a thing?"

  "Where?"

  "On the doorstep of your old place. I was rather busy at the time fighting Edward Merrill."

  She stopped, looking at him in surprise. "Were you that boy?"

  "I was that boy."

  "You fought him to help a little ragged girl. She was a foreigner."

  "I've forgotten why I fought him. The reason I remember the occasion is that I met then for the first time two of my friends."

  She claimed a place immediately. "Who was the other one?"

  "Captain Chunn."

  Presently she bubbled into a little laugh. "How did the fight come out? My nurse dragged me into the house."

  "Don't remember. I know the school principal licked me next day. I had been playing hookey."

  They made another turn of the deck before she spoke again.

  "So we're old acquaintances, and I didn't know it. That was nearly eighteen years ago. Isn't it strange that after so long we should meet again only last week?"

  Jeff felt the blood creep into his face. "We met once before, Miss Frome."

  "Oh, on the street. I meant to speak."

  "So did I."

  "When?"

  With his eyes meeting hers steadily Jeff told her of the time she had found him in the bushes and mistaken him for a sick man. He could see that he had struck her dumb. She looked at him and looked away again.

  "Why do you tell me this?" she asked at last in a low voice.

  "It's only fair you should know the truth about me."

  They tramped the circuit once more. Neither of them spoke. The trumpeter's bugle call to breakfast rang out.

  At the bow she stopped and looked down at the waters they were furrowing. It was a long time be
fore she raised her head and met his eyes. The color had whipped into her cheeks, but she put her question steadily.

  "Are you telling me. . . that I must lose my friend?"

  "Isn't that for you to say?"

  "I don't know." She faltered for words, but not the least in her intention. "Are you--what I have always heard you are?"

  "Can you be a little more definite?" he asked gently.

  "Well--dissipated! You're not that?"