Although the vehicle of his professional activities had for some years been a small and stertorous automobile locally known as "Puffy Pete," Mr. James Mindle always referred to his process of postal transfer from the station to the town as "teamin' over the mail." He was a frail, grinny man from the prairie country, much given to romantic imaginings and an inordinate admiration for Banneker.
Having watched from the seat of his chariot the brief but ceremonial entry of Number Three, which, on regular schedule, roared through Manzanita at top speed, he descended, captured the mail-bag and, as the transcontinental pulled out, accosted the station-agent.
What'd she stop for, Ban?
Special orders.
Didn't say nothin' about havin' a ravin' may-ni-ac aboard, did theh?
No.
Ban, was you ever in the State of Ohio?
A long time ago.
Are Ohio folks liable to be loony?
Not more than others, I reckon, Jimmy.
Pretty enthoosiastic about themselves, though, ain't theh?
Why, I don't know. It's a nice country there, Jimmy.
There was one on Number Three sure thought so. Hadn't scarcely come to a stop when off he jumps and waves his fins and gives three cheers for it.
For what?
Ohio. I'm tellin' you. He ramps across the track yippin' 'Ohio! Ohio! Ohio!' whoopity-yoop. He come right at me and I says, 'Watch yehself, Buddy. You'll git left.'
What did he say to that? asked Banneker indulgently.
Never looked at me no more than a doodle-bug. Just yelled 'Ohio!' again. So I come back at him with 'Missourah.' He grabs me by the shoulder and points to your shack. 'Who owns that little shed?' says he, very excited. 'My friend, Mr. Banneker,' says I, polite as always to strangers. 'But I own that shoulder you're leanin' on, and I'm about to take it away with me when I go,' I says. He leaned off and says, 'Where did that young lady come from that was standin' in the doorway a minute ago?' 'Young lady,' Ban. Do you get that? So I says, 'You're lucky, Bud. When I get 'em, it's usually snakes and bugs and such-like rep-tyles. Besides,' I says, 'your train is about to forgit that you got off it,' I says. With that he gives another screech that don't even mean as much as Ohio and tails onto the back platform just in time.
Said Ban, after frowning consideration:
You didn't see any lady around the shack, did you, Jimmy?
Not on your life, replied the little man indignantly. "I ain't had anything like that since I took the mail-teamin' contract."
How good time do you think Puffy Pete could make across-desert in case I should want it? inquired the agent after a pause.
The mail-man contemplated his "team," bubbling and panting a vaporous breath over the platform. "Pete ain't none too fond of sand," he confessed. "But if you want to _git_ anywhere, him and me'll git you there. You know that, Ban."
Banneker nodded comradely and the post chugged away.
Inside the shack Io had set out the luncheon-things. To Banneker's eyes she appeared quite unruffled, despite the encounter which he had surmised from Jimmy's sketch.
Get me some flowers for the table, Ban, she directed. "I want it to look festive."
Why, in particular?
Because I'm afraid we won't have many more luncheons together.
He made no comment, but went out and returned with the flowers. Meantime Io had made up her mind.
I've had an unpleasant surprise, Ban.
I was afraid so.
She glanced up quickly. "Did you see him?"
No. Mindle, the mail transfer man, did.
Oh! Well, that was Aleck Babson. 'Babbling Babson,' he's called at the clubs. He's the most inveterate gossip in New York.
It's a long way from New York, pointed out Banneker.
Yes; but he has a long tongue. Besides, he'll see the Westerleys and my other friends in Paradiso, and babble to them.
Suppose he does?
I won't have people chasing here after me or pestering me with letters, she said passionately. "Yet I don't want to go away. I want to get more rested, Ban, and forget a lot of things."
He nodded. Comfort and comprehension were in his silence.
You can be as companionable as a dog, said Io softly. "Where did you get your tact, I wonder? Well, I shan't go till I must.... Lemonade, Ban! I brought over the lemons myself."
They lunched a little soberly and thoughtfully.
And I wanted it to be festive to-day, said Io wistfully, speaking out her thoughts as usual. "Ban, does Miss Camilla smoke?"
I don't know. Why?
Because if she does, you'll think it all right. And I want a cigarette now.
If you do, I'll _know_ it's all right, Butterfly, returned her companion fetching a box from a shelf.
Hold the thought! cried Io gayly. "There's a creed for you! 'Whatever is, is right,' provided that it's Io who does it. Always judge me by that standard, Ban, won't you?... Where in the name of Sir Walter Raleigh's ghost did you get these cigarettes? 'Mellorosa' ... Ban, is this a Sears-Roebuck stock?"
No. It came from town. Don't you like it?
It's quite curious and interesting. Never mind, my dear; I won't tease you.
For all that Io's "my dear" was the most casual utterance imaginable, it brought a quick flush to Banneker's face. Chattering carelessly, she washed up the few dishes, put them away in the brackets, and then, smoking another of the despised Mellorosas, wandered to the book-shelves.
Read me something out of your favorite book, Ban.... No; this one.
She handed him the thick mail-order catalogue. With a gravity equal to her own he took it.
What will you have?
Let the spirit of Sears-Roebuck decide. Open at random and expound.
He thrust a finger between the leaves and began:
Our Special, Fortified Black Fiber Trunk for Hard Travel. Made of Three-Ply Ven--
Oh, to have my trunks again! sighed the girl. "Turn to something else. I don't like that. It reminds me of travel."
Obedient, Banneker made another essay:
Clay County Clay Target Traps. Easily Adjusted to the Elevation--
Oh, dear! she broke in again. "That reminds me that Dad wrote me to look up his pet shot-gun before his return. I don't like that either. Try again."
This time the explorer plunged deep into the volume.
How to Make Home Home-like. An Invaluable Counselor for the Woman of the Household--
Io snatched the book from the reader's hand and tossed it into a corner. "Sears-Roebuck are very tactless," she declared. "Everything they have to offer reminds one of home. What do you think of home, Ban? Home, as an abstract proposition. Home as the what-d'you-call-'em of the nation; the palladium--no, the bulwark? Home as viewed by the homing pigeon? Home, Sweet Home, as sung by--Would you answer, Ban, if I stopped gibbering and gave you the chance?"
I've never had much opportunity to judge about home, you know.
She darted out a quick little hand and touched his sleeve. The raillery had faded from her face. "So you haven't. Not very tactful of me, was it! Will you throw me into the corner with Mr. Sears and Mr. Roebuck, Ban? I'm sorry."
You needn't be. One gets used to being an air-plant without roots.
Yet you wouldn't have fitted out this shack, she pointed out shrewdly, "unless you had the instincts of home."
That's true enough. Fortunately it's the kind of home I can take along when they transfer me.
Io went to the door and looked afar on the radiant splendor of the desert, and, nearer, into the cool peace of the forest.
But you can't take all this, she reminded him.
No. I can't take this.
Shall you miss it?
A shadow fell upon his face. "I'd miss something--I don't know what it is--that no other place has ever given me. Why do you talk as if I were going away from it? I'm not."
Oh, yes; you are, she laughed softly. "It is so written. I'm a seeress." She turned from the door and threw herself into a chair.
What will take me?
Something inside you. Something unawakened. 'Something lost beyond the ranges.' You'll know, and you'll obey it.
Shall I ever come back, O seeress?
At the question her eyes grew dreamy and distant. Her voice when she spoke sank to a low-pitched monotone.
Yes, you'll come back. Sometime.... So shall I ... not for years ... but-- She jumped to her feet. "What kind of rubbish am I talking?" she cried with forced merriment. "Is your tobacco drugged with hasheesh, Ban?"
He shook his head. "It's the pull of the desert," he murmured. "It's caught you sooner than most. You're more responsive, I suppose; more sens--Why, Butterfly! You're shaking."
A Scotchman would say that I was 'fey.' Ban, do you think it means that I'm coming back here to die? She laughed again. "If I were fated to die here, I expect that I missed my good chance in the smash-up. Fortunately I'm not superstitious."
There might be worse places, said he slowly. "It is the place that would call me back if ever I got down and out." He pointed through the window to the distant, glowing purity of the mountain peak. "One could tell one's troubles to that tranquil old god."
Would he listen to mine, I wonder?
Try him before you go. You can leave them all here and I'll watch over them for you to see that they don't get loose and bother you.
Absolution! If it were only as easy as that! This _is_ a haunted place.... Why should I be here at all? _Why_ didn't I go when I should? Why a thousand things?
Chance.
Is there any such thing? Why can't I sleep at night yet, as I ought? Why do I still feel hunted? What's happening to me, Ban? What's getting ready to happen?
Nothing. That's nerves.
Yes; I'll try not to think of it. But at night--Ban, suppose I should come over in the middle of the night when I can't sleep, and call outside your window?
I'd come down, of course. But you'd have to be careful about rattlers, answered the practical Ban.
Your friend, Camilla, would intercept me, anyway. I don't think she sleeps too well, herself. Do you know what she's doing out here?
She came for her health.
That isn't what I asked you, my dear. Do you know what she's doing?
No. She never told me.
Shall I tell you?
No.
It's interesting. Aren't you curious?
If she wanted me to know, she'd tell me.
Indubitably correct, and quite praiseworthy, mocked the girl. "Never mind; you know how to be staunch to your friends."
In this country a man who doesn't is reckoned a yellow dog.
He is in any decent country. So take that with you when you go.
I'm not going, he asserted with an obstinate set to his jaw.
Wait and see, she taunted. "So you won't let me send you books?" she questioned after a pause.
No.
No, I thank you, she prompted.
No, I thank you, he amended. "I'm an uncouth sort of person, but I meant the 'thank you.'"
Of course you did. And uncouthness is the last thing in the world you could be accused of. That's the wonder of it.... No; I don't suppose it really is. It's birth.
If it's anything, it's training. My father was a stickler for forms, in spite of being a sort of hobo.
Well, forms make the game, very largely. You won't find them essentially different when you go out into the--I forgot again. That kind of prophecy annoys you, doesn't it? There is one book I'm going to send you, though, which you can't refuse. Nobody can refuse it. It isn't done.
What is that?
Her answer surprised him. "The Bible."
Are you religious? Of course, a butterfly should be, shouldn't she? should believe in the release of the soul from its chrysalis--the butterfly's immortality. Yet I wouldn't have suspected you of a leaning in that direction.
Oh, religion! Her tone set aside the subject as insusceptible of sufficient or satisfactory answer. "I go through the forms," she added, a little disdainfully. "As to what I believe and do--which is what one's own religion is--why, I assume that if the game is worth playing at all, there must be a Judge and Maker of the Rules. As far as I understand them, I follow them."
You have a sort of religious feeling for success, though, haven't you? he reminded her slyly.
Not at all. Just human, common sense.
But your creed as you've just given it, the rules of the game and that; that's precisely the Bible formula, I believe.
How do you know? she caught him up. "You haven't a Bible in the place, so far as I've noticed."
No; I haven't.
You should have.
Probably. But I can't, somehow, adjust myself to that advice as coming from you.
Because you don't understand what I'm getting at. It isn't religious advice.
Then what is it?
Literary, purely. You're going to write, some day. Oh, don't look doubtful! That's foreordained. It doesn't take a seeress to prophesy that. And the Bible is the one book that a writer ought to read every day. Isaiah, Psalms, Proverbs. Pretty much all the Old Testament, and a lot of the New. It has grown into our intellectual life until its phrases and catchwords are full of overtones and sub-meanings. You've got to have it in your business; your coming business, I mean. I know what I'm talking about, Mr. Errol Banneker--_moi qui parle_. They offered me an instructorship in Literature when I graduated. I even threatened to take it, just for a joke on Dad. _Now_, will you be good and accept my fully explained and diagrammed Bible without fearing that I have designs on your soul?
Yes.
And will you please go back to your work at once, and by and by take me home and stay to supper? Miss Van Arsdale told me to ask you.
All right. I'll be glad to. What will you do between now and four o'clock?
Prowl in your library and unearth more of your secrets.
You're welcome if you can find any. I don't deal in 'em.
When Banneker, released from his duties until evening train time, rejoined her, and they were riding along the forest trail, he said:
You've started me to theorizing about myself.
Do it aloud, she invited.
Well; all my boyhood I led a wandering life, as you know. We were never anywhere as much as a month at a time. In a way, I liked the change and adventure. In another way, I got dead sick of it. Don't you suppose that my readiness to settle down and vegetate is the reaction from that?
It sounds reasonable enough. You might put it more simply by saying that you were tired. But by now you ought to be rested.
Therefore I ought to be stirring myself so as to get tired again?
If you don't stir, you'll rust.
Rust is a painless death for useless mechanism.
She shot an impatient side-glance at him. "Either you're a hundred years old," she said, "or that's sheer pose."
Perhaps it is a sort of pose. If so, it's a self-protective one.
Suppose I asked you to come to New York?
Intrepid though she was, her soul quaked a little at her own words, foreseeing those mail-order-cut clothes and the resolute butterflyness of the tie greeting her on Fifth Avenue.
What to do?
Sell tickets at the Grand Central Station, of course! she shot back at him. "Ban, you _are_ aggravating! 'What to do?' Father would find you some sort of place while you were fitting in."
'No. I wouldn't take a job from you any more than I'd take anything else."
You carry principles to the length of absurdity. Come and get your own job, then. You're not timid, are you?
Not particularly. I'm just contented.
At that provocation her femininity flared. "Ban," she cried with exasperation and appeal enchantingly mingled, "aren't you going to miss me at all when I go?"
I've been trying not to think of that, he said slowly.
Well, think of it, she breathed. "No!" she contradicted herself passionately. "Don't think of it. I shouldn't have said that.... I don't know what is the matter with me to-day, Ban. Perhaps I _am_ fey." She smiled to him slantwise.
It's the air, he answered judicially. "There's another storm brewing somewhere or I'm no guesser. More trouble for the schedule."
That's right! she cried eagerly. "_Be_ the Atkinson and St. Philip station-agent again. Let's talk about trains. It's--it's so reliable."
Far from it on this line, he answered, adopting her light tone. "Particularly if we have more rain. You may become a permanent resident yet."
Some rods short of the Van Arsdale cabin the trail took a sharp turn amidst the brush. Halfway on the curve Io caught at Banneker's near rein.
Hark! she exclaimed.
The notes of a piano sounded faintly clear in the stillness. As the harmonies dissolved and merged, a voice rose above them, resonant and glorious, rose and sank and pleaded and laughed and loved, while the two young listeners leaned unconsciously toward each other in their saddles. Silence fell again. The very forest life itself seemed hushed in a listening trance.
Heavens! whispered Banneker. "Who is it?"
Camilla Van Arsdale, of course. Didn't you know?
I knew she was musical. I didn't know she had a voice like that.
Ten years ago New York was wild over it.
But why--
Hush! She's beginning again.
Once more the sweep of the chords was followed by the superb voice while the two wayfarers and all the world around them waited, breathless and enchained. At the end, Banneker said dreamily:
I've never heard anything like that before. It says everything that can't be said in words alone, doesn't it? It makes me think of something--What is it? He groped for a moment, then repeated:
'A passionate ballad, gallant and gay, Singing afar in the springtime of life, Singing of youth and of love And of honor that cannot die.'
Io drew a deep, tremulous breath. "Yes; it's like that. What a voice! And what an art to be buried out here! It's one of her own songs, I think. Probably an unpublished one."
Her own? Does she write music?
She is Royce Melvin, the composer. Does that mean anything to you?
He shook his head.
Some day it will. They say that he--every one thinks it's a he--will take Massenet's place as a lyrical composer. I found her out by accidentally coming on the manuscript of a Melvin song that I knew. That's her secret that I spoke of. Do you mind my having told you?
Why, no. It'll never go any further. I wonder why she never told me. And why she keeps so shut off from the world here.
Ah; that's another secret, and one that I shan't tell you, returned Io gravely. "There's the piano again."
A few indeterminate chords came to their ears. There followed a jangling disharmony. They waited, but there was nothing more. They rode on.
At the lodge Banneker took the horses around while Io went in. Immediately her voice, with a note of alarm in it, summoned him. He found her bending over Miss Van Arsdale, who lay across the divan in the living-room with eyes closed, breathing jerkily. Her lips were blue and her hands looked shockingly lifeless.
Carry her into her room, directed Io.
Banneker picked up the tall, strong-built form without effort and deposited it on the bed in the inner room.
Open all the windows, commanded the girl. "See if you can find me some ammonia or camphor. Quick! She looks as if she were dying."
One after another Banneker tried the bottles on the dresser. "Here it is. Ammonia," he said.
In his eagerness he knocked a silver-mounted photograph to the floor. He thrust the drug into the girl's hand and watched her helplessly as she worked over the limp figure on the bed. Mechanically he picked up the fallen picture to replace it. There looked out at him the face of a man of early middle age, a face of manifest intellectual power, high-boned, long-lined, and of the austere, almost ascetic beauty which the Florentine coins have preserved for us in clear fidelity. Across the bottom was written in a peculiarly rhythmic script, the legend:
Toujours a toi. W.
She's coming back, said Io's voice. "No. Don't come nearer. You'll shut off the air. Find me a fan."
He ran to the outer room and came back with a palm-leaf.
She wants something, said Io in an agonized half-voice. "She wants it so badly. What is it? Help me, Ban! She can't speak. Look at her eyes--so imploring. Is it medicine?... No! Ban, can't you help?"
Banneker took the silver-framed portrait and placed it in the flaccid hand. The fingers closed over it. The filmiest wraith of a smile played about the blue lips.
An hour later, Io came out to Banneker waiting fearfully in the big room.
She won't have a doctor. I've given her the strychnia and she insists she'll be all right.
Don't you think I ought to go for the doctor, anyway?
She wouldn't see him. She's very strong-willed.... That's a wonderful woman, Ban. Io's voice shook a little.
Yes.
How did you know about the picture?
I saw it on the dresser. And when I saw her eyes, I guessed.
Yes; there's only one thing a woman wants like _that_, when she's dying. You're rather a wonderful person, yourself, to have known. That's her other secret, Ban. The one I said I couldn't tell you.
I've forgotten it, replied Banneker gravely.
Attendance upon the sick-room occupied Io's time for several days thereafter. Morning and afternoon Banneker rode over from the station to make anxious inquiry. The self-appointed nurse reported progress as rapid as could be expected, but was constantly kept on the alert because of the patient's rebellion against enforced idleness. Seizures of the same sort she had suffered before, it appeared, but none hitherto so severe. Nothing could be done, she told Io, beyond the administration of the medicine, for which she had full directions. One day an attack would finish it all; meantime, in spite of her power of self-repression, she chafed at the monotony of her imprisonment.
In the late afternoon of the day after the collapse, while Io was heating water at the fireplace, she heard a drawer open in the sick-room and hurried back to find Miss Van Arsdale hanging to the dresser, her face gray-splotched and her fingers convulsively crushing a letter which she had taken from under lock. Alarmed and angry, the amateur nurse got her back to bed only half conscious, but still cherishing her trove. When, an hour later, she dared leave her charge, she heard the rustle of smoothed-out paper and remained outside long enough to allow for the reading. On her return there was no sign of the letter. Miss Van Arsdale, a faint and hopeful color in her cheeks, was asleep.
For Banneker these were days of trial and tribulation. Added to the anxiety that he felt for his best friend was the uncertainty as to what he ought to do about the developments affecting her guest. For he had heard once more from Gardner.
It's on the cards, wrote the reporter, "that I may be up to see you again. I'm still working, on and off, on the tip that took me on that wild-goose chase. If I come again I won't quit without some of the wild goose's tail feathers, at least. There's a new tip locally; it leaked out from Paradise. ["The Babbling Babson," interjected the reader mentally.] It looks as though the bird were still out your way. Though how she could be, and you not know it, gets me. It's even a bigger game than Stella Wrightington, if my information is O.K. Have you heard or seen anything lately of a Beautiful Stranger or anything like that around Manzanita?... I enclose clipping of your story. What do you think of yourself in print?"
Banneker thought quite highly of himself in print as he read the article, which he immediately did. The other matter could wait; not that it was less important; quite the contrary; but he proposed to mull it over carefully and with a quiet mind, if he could ever get his mind back to its peaceful current again: meantime it was good for him to think of something quite dissociated from the main problem.
What writer has not felt the conscious red tingle in his cheeks at first sight of himself in the magnified personification of type? Here is something, once himself, now expanded far beyond individual limits, into the proportions of publicity, for all the world to measure and estimate and criticize. Ought it to have been done in just that way? Is there not too much "I" in the presentation? Would not the effect have been greater had the method been less personal? It seemed to Banneker that he himself stood forth in a stark nakedness of soul and thought, through those blatantly assertive words, shameless, challenging to public opinion, yet delightful to his own appreciation. On the whole it was good; better than he would have thought he could do.
What he had felt, in the writing of it, to be jerks and bumps were magically smoothed out in the finished product. At one point where the copy-reader's blue pencil had elided an adjective which the writer had deemed specially telling, he felt a sharp pang of disappointed resentment. Without that characterization the sentence seemed lifeless. Again, in another passage he wished that he had edited himself with more heed to the just word. Why had he designated the train as "rumbling" along the cut? Trains do not rumble between rock walls, he remembered; they move with a sustained and composite roar. And the finger-wringing malcontent who had vowed to "soom"; the editorial pencil had altered that to "sue 'em," thereby robbing it of its special flavor. Perhaps this was in accordance with some occult rule of the trade. But it spoiled the paragraph for Banneker. Nevertheless he was thrilled and elate.... He wanted to show the article to Io. What would she think of it? She had read him accurately: it _was_ in him to write. And she could help him, if only by--well, if only by being at hand.... But Gardner's letter! That meant that the pursuit was on again, more formidably this time. Gardner, the gadfly, stinging this modern Io out of her refuge of peace and safety!
He wrote and dispatched a message to the reporter in care of the Angelica City Herald:
Glad to see you, but you are wasting your time. No such person could be here without my knowing it. Thanks for article.
That was as near an untruth as Banneker cared to go. In his own mind he defended it on the ground that the projected visit would, in fact, be time wasted for the journalist since he, Banneker, intended fully that Gardner should not see Io. Deep would have been his disgust and self-derision could he have observed the effect of the message upon the cynical and informed journalist who, however, did not receive it until the second day after its transmission, as he had been away on another assignment.
The poor fish! was Gardner's comment. "He doesn't even say that she isn't there. He's got to lie better than that if he goes into the newspaper game."
Further, the reporter had received a note from the cowman whom Ban and Io had encountered in the woods, modestly requesting five dollars in return for the warranted fact that a "swell young lady" had been seen in Banneker's company. Other journalistic matters were pressing, however; he concluded that the "Manzanita Mystery," as he built it up headline-wise in his ready mind, could wait a day or two longer.
Banneker, through the mechanical course of his office, debated the situation. Should he tell Io of the message? To do so would only add to her anxieties, probably to no good purpose, for he did not believe that she would desert Miss Van Arsdale, ill and helpless, on any selfish consideration. Fidelity was one of the virtues with which he had unconsciously garlanded Io. Then, too, Gardner might not come anyway. If he did Banneker was innocently confident of his own ability to outwit the trained reporter and prevent his finding the object of his quest. A prospective and possible ally was forecast in the weather. Warning of another rainfall impending had come over the wire. As yet there was no sign visible from his far-horizoned home, except a filmy and changeful wreath of palest cloud with which Mount Carstairs was bedecked. Banneker decided for silence.
Miss Van Arsdale was much better when he rode over in the morning, but Io looked piteously worn and tired.
You've had no rest, he accused her, away from the sick woman's hearing.
Rest enough of its kind, but not much sleep, said Io.
But you've got to have sleep, he insisted. "Let me stay and look after her to-night."
It wouldn't be of any use.
Why not?
I shouldn't sleep anyway. This house is haunted by spirits of unrest, said the girl fretfully. "I think I'll take a blanket and go out on the desert."
And wake up to find a sidewinder crawling over you, and a tarantula nestling in your ear. Don't think of it.
Ban, called the voice of Camilla Van Arsdale from the inner room, clear and firm as he had ever heard it.
He went in. She stretched out a hand to him. "It's good to see you, Ban. Have I worried you? I shall be up and about again to-morrow."
Now, Miss Camilla, protested Banneker, "you mustn't--"
I'm going to get up to-morrow, repeated the other immutably. "Don't be absurd about it. I'm not ill. It was only the sort of knock-down that I must expect from time to time. Within a day or two you'll see me riding over.... Ban, stand over there in that light.... What's that you've got on?"
What, Miss Camilla?
That necktie. It isn't in your usual style. Where did you get it?
Sent to Angelica City for it. Don't you like it? he returned, trying for the nonchalant air, but not too successfully.
Not as well as your spotty butterflies, answered the woman jealously. "That's nonsense, though. Don't mind me, Ban," she added with a wry smile. "Plain colors are right for you. Browns, or blues, or reds, if they're not too bright. And you've tied it very well. Did it take you long to do it?"
Reddening and laughing, he admitted a prolonged and painful session before his glass. Miss Van Arsdale sighed. It was such a faint, abandoning breath of regret as might come from the breast of a mother when she sees her little son in his first pride of trousers.
Go out and say good-night to Miss Welland, she ordered, "and tell her to go to bed. I've taken a sleeping powder."
Banneker obeyed. He rode home slowly and thoughtfully. His sleep was sound enough that night.
Breakfast-getting processes did not appeal to him when he awoke in the morning. He walked over, through the earliest light, to the hotel, where he made a meal of musty eggs, chemical-looking biscuits, and coffee of a rank hue and flavor, in an atmosphere of stale odors and flies, sickeningly different from the dainty ceremonials of Io's preparation. Rebuking himself for squeamishness, the station-agent returned to his office, caught an O.S. from the wire, took some general instructions, and went out to look at the weather. His glance never reached the horizon.
In the foreground where he had swung the hammock under the alamo it checked and was held, absorbed. A blanketed figure lay motionless in the curve of the meshwork. One arm was thrown across the eyes, warding a strong beam which had forced its way through the lower foliage. He tiptoed forward.
Io's breast was rising and falling gently in the hardly perceptible rhythm of her breathing. From the pale yellow surface of her dress, below the neck, protruded a strange, edged something, dun-colored, sharply defined and alien, which the man's surprised eyes failed to identify. Slowly the edge parted and flattened out, broadwise, displaying the marbled brilliance of the butterfly's inner wings, illumining the pale chastity of the sleeping figure as if with a quivering and evanescent jewel. Banneker, shaken and thrilled, closed his eyes. He felt as if a soul had opened its secret glories to him. When, commanding himself, he looked again, the living gem was gone. The girl slept evenly.
Conning the position of the sun and the contour of the sheltering tree, Banneker estimated that in a half-hour or less a flood of sunlight would pour in upon the slumberer's face to awaken her. Cautiously withdrawing, he let himself into the shack, lighted his oil stove, put on water to boil, set out the coffee and the stand. He felt different about breakfast-getting now. Having prepared the arrangements for his prospective guest, he returned and leaned against the alamo, filling his eyes with still delight of the sleeper.
Youthful, untouched, fresh though the face was, in the revealing stillness of slumber, it suggested rather than embodied something indefinably ancient, a look as of far and dim inheritances, subtle, ironic, comprehending, and aloof; as if that delicate and strong beauty of hers derived intimately from the wellsprings of the race; as if womanhood, eternal triumphant, and elusive were visibly patterned there.
Banneker, leaning against the slender tree-trunk, dreamed over her, happily and aimlessly.
Io opened her eyes to meet his. She stirred softly and smiled at him.
So you discovered me, she said.
How long have you been here?
She studied the sun a moment before replying. "Several hours."
Did you walk over in the night?
No. You told me not to, you know. I waited till the dawn. Don't scold me, Ban. I was dead for want of sleep and I couldn't get it in the lodge. It's haunted, I tell you, with unpeaceful spirits. So I remembered this hammock.
I'm not going to scold you. I'm going to feed you. The coffee's on.
How good! she cried, getting to her feet. "Am I a sight? I feel frowsy."
There's a couple of buckets of water up in my room. Help yourself while I set out the breakfast.
In fifteen minutes she was down, freshened and joyous.
I'll just take a bite and then run back to my patient, she said. "You can bring the blanket when you come. It's heavy for a three-mile tramp.... What are you looking thoughtful and sober about, Ban? Do you disapprove of my escapade?"
That's a foolish question.
It's meant to be. And it's meant to make you smile. Why don't you? You _are_ worried. 'Fess up. What's happened?
I've had a letter from the reporter in Angelica City.
Oh! Did he send your article?
He did. But that isn't the point. He says he's coming up here again.
What for?
You.
Does he know I'm here? Did he mention my name?
No. But he's had some information that probably points to you.
What did you answer?
Ban told her. "I think that will hold him off," he said hopefully.
Then he's a very queer sort of reporter, returned Io scornfully out of her wider experience. "No; he'll come. And if he's any good, he'll find me."
You can refuse to see him.
Yes; but it's the mere fact of my being here that will probably give him enough to go on and build up a loathsome article. How I hate newspapers!... Ban, she appealed wistfully, "can't you stop him from coming? Must I go?"
You must be ready to go.
Not until Miss Camilla is well again, she declared obstinately. "But that will be in a day or two. Oh, well! What does it all matter! I've not much to pack up, anyway. How are you going to get me out?"
That depends on whether Gardner comes, and how he comes.
He pointed to a darkening line above the southwestern horizon. "If that is what it looks like, we may be in for another flood, though I've never known two bad ones in a season."
Io beckoned quaintly to the far clouds. "Hurry! Hurry!" she summoned. "You wrecked me once. Now save me from the Vandal. Good-bye, Ban. And thank you for the lodging and the breakfast."
Emergency demands held the agent at his station all that day and evening. Trainmen brought news of heavy rains beyond the mountains. In the morning he awoke to find his little world hushed in a murky light and with a tingling apprehension of suspense in the atmosphere. High, gray cloud shapes hurried across the zenith to a conference of the storm powers, gathering at the horizon. Weather-wise from long observation, Banneker guessed that the outbreak would come before evening, and that, unless the sullen threat of the sky was deceptive, Manzanita would be shut off from rail communication within twelve hours thereafter. Having two hours' release at noon, he rode over to the lodge in the forest to return Io's blanket. He found the girl pensive, and Miss Van Arsdale apparently recovered to the status of her own normal and vigorous self.
I've been telling Io, said the older woman, "that, since the rumor is out of her being here, she will almost certainly be found by the reporter. Too many people in the village know that I have a guest."
How? asked Banneker.
From my marketing. Probably from Pedro.
Very likely from the patron of the Sick Coyote that you and I met on our walk, added the girl.
So the wise thing is for her to go, concluded Miss Van Arsdale. "Unless she is willing to risk the publicity."
Yes, assented Io. "The wise thing is for me to go." She spoke in a curious tone, not looking at Banneker, not looking at anything outward and visible; her vision seemed somberly introverted.
Not now, though, said Banneker.
Why not? asked both women. He answered Io.
You called for a storm. You're going to get it. A big one. I could send you out on Number Eight, but that's a way-train and there's no telling where it would land you or when you'd get through. Besides, I don't believe Gardner is coming. I'd have heard from him by now. Listen!
The slow pat-pat-pat of great raindrops ticked like a started clock on the roof. It ceased, and far overhead the great, quiet voice of the wind said, "Hush--sh--sh--sh--sh!", bidding the world lie still and wait.
What if he does come? asked Miss Van Arsdale
I'll get word to you and get her out some way.
The storm burst on Banneker, homebound, just as he emerged from the woodland, in a wild, thrashing wind from the southwest and a downpour the most fiercely, relentlessly insistent that he had ever known. A cactus desert in the rare orgy of a rainstorm is a place of wonder. The monstrous, spiky forms trembled and writhed in ecstasy, heat-damned souls in their hour of respite, stretching out exultant arms to the bounteous sky. Tiny rivulets poured over the sand, which sucked them down with a thirsting, crisping whisper. A pair of wild doves, surprised and terrified, bolted close past the lone rider, so near that his mount shied and headed for the shelter of the trees again. A small snake, curving indecisively and with obvious bewilderment amidst the growth, paused to rattle a faint warning, half coiled in case the horse's step meant a new threat, then went on with a rather piteous air of not knowing where to find refuge against this cataclysm of the elements.
Lashing in the wind, a long tentacle of the giant ocatilla drew its cimeter-set thong across Ban's horse which incontinently bolted. The rider lifted up his voice and yelled in sheer, wild, defiant joy of the tumult. A lesser ocatilla thorn gashed his ear so that the blood mingled with the rain that poured down his face. A pod of the fishhook-barbed cholla drove its points through his trousers into the flesh of his knee and, detaching itself from the stem, as is the detestable habit of this vegetable blood-seeker, clung there like a live thing of prey, from barbs which must later be removed delicately and separately with the cold steel. Blindly homing, a jack-rabbit ran almost beneath the horse's hooves, causing him to shy again, this time into a bulky vizcaya, as big as a full-grown man, and inflicting upon Ban a new species of scarification. It did not matter. Nothing mattered. He rode on, knees tight, lines loose, elate, shouting, singing, acclaiming the storm which was setting its irrefragable limits to the world wherein he and Io would still live close, a few golden days longer.
What he picked from the wire when he reached it confirmed his hopes. The track was threatened in a dozen places. Repair crews were gathering. Already the trains were staggering along, far behind their schedule. They would, of course, operate as far as possible, but no reliance was to be placed upon their movements until further notice. Through the night traffic continued, but with the coming of the morning and the settling down of a soft, seeping, unintermittent pour of gray rain, the situation had clarified. Nothing came through. Complete stoppage, east and west. Between Manzanita and Stanwood the track was out, and in the other direction Dry Bed Arroyo was threatening. Banneker reported progress to the lodge and got back, soaked and happy. Io was thoughtful and content.
Late that afternoon the station-agent had a shock which jarred him quite out of his complacent security. Denny, the operator at Stanwood, wired, saying:
Party here anxious to get through to Manzanita quick. Could auto make upper desert?
No (clicked Banneker in response). Describe party.
The answer came back confirming his suspicion:
Thin, nice-spoken, wears goggles, smokes cork-tips. Arrived Five from Angelica held here.
Tell impossible by any route (instructed Banneker). Wire result.
An hour later came the reply:
Won't try to-night. Probably horse to-morrow.
Here was a problem, indeed, fit to chill the untimely self-congratulations of Banneker. Should the reporter come in--and come he would if it were humanly possible, by Banneker's estimate of him--it would be by the only route which gave exit to the west. On the other side the flooded arroyo cut off escape. To try to take Io out through the forest, practically trackless, in that weather, or across the channeled desert, would be too grave a risk. To all intents and purposes they were marooned on an island with no reasonable chance of exit--except! To Banneker's feverishly searching mind reverted a local legend. Taking a chance on missing some emergency call, he hurried over to the village and interviewed, through the persuasive interpretation of sundry drinks, an aged and bearded wreck whose languid and chipped accents spoke of a life originally far alien to the habitudes of the Sick Coyote where he was fatalistically awaiting his final attack of delirium tremens.
Banneker returned from that interview with a map upon which had been scrawled a few words in shaky, scholarly writing.
But one doesn't say it's safe, mind you, had warned the shell of Lionel Streatham in his husky pipe. "It's only as a sporting offer that one would touch it. And the courses may have changed in seven years."
Denny wired in the morning that the inquiring traveler had set out from Manzanita, unescorted, on horseback, adding the prediction that he would have a hell of a trip, even if he got through at all. Late that afternoon Gardner arrived at the station, soaked, hollow-eyed, stiff, exhausted, and cheerful. He shook hands with the agent.
How do you like yourself in print? he inquired.
Pretty well, answered Banneker. "It read better than I expected."
It always does, until you get old in the business. How would you like a New York job on the strength of it?
Banneker stared. "You mean that I could get on a paper just by writing that?"
I didn't say so. Though I've known poorer stuff land more experienced men.
More experienced; that's the point, isn't it? I've had none at all.
So much the better. A metropolitan paper prefers to take a man fresh and train him to its own ways. There's your advantage if you can show natural ability. And you can.
I see, muttered Banneker thoughtfully.
Where does Miss Van Arsdale live? asked the reporter without the smallest change of tone.
What do you want to see Miss Van Arsdale for? returned the other, his instantly defensive manner betraying him to the newspaper man.
You know as well as I do, smiled Gardner.
Miss Van Arsdale has been ill. She's a good deal of a recluse. She doesn't like to see people.
Does her visitor share that eccentricity?
Banneker made no reply.
See here, Banneker, said the reporter earnestly; "I'd like to know why you're against me in this thing."
What thing? fenced the agent.
My search for Io Welland.
Who is Io Welland, and what are you after her for? asked Banneker steadily.
Apart from being the young lady that you've been escorting around the local scenery, returned the imperturbable journalist, "she's the most brilliant and interesting figure in the younger set of the Four Hundred. She's a newspaper beauty. She's copy. She's news. And when she gets into a railroad wreck and disappears from the world for weeks, and her supposed fiance, the heir to a dukedom, makes an infernal ass of himself over it all and practically gives himself away to the papers, she's big news."
And if she hasn't done any of these things, retorted Banneker, drawing upon some of Camilla Van Arsdale's wisdom, brought to bear on the case, "she's libel, isn't she?"
Hardly libel. But she isn't safe news until she's identified. You see, I'm playing an open game with you. I'm here to identify her, with half a dozen newspaper photos. Want to see 'em?
No, thank you.
Not interested? Are you going to take me over to Miss Van Arsdale's?
No.
Why not?
Why should I? It's no part of my business as an employee of the road.
As to that, I've got a letter from the Division Superintendent asking you to further my inquiry in any possible way. Here it is.
Banneker took and read the letter. While not explicit, it was sufficiently direct.
That's official, isn't it? said Gardner mildly.
Yes.
Well?
And this is official, added Banneker calmly. "The company can go to hell. Tell that to the D.S. with my compliments, will you?"
Certainly not. I don't want to get you into trouble. I like you. But I've got to land this story. If you won't take me to the place, I'll find some one in the village that will. You can't prevent my going there, you know.
Can't I? Banneker's voice had grown low and cold. A curious light shone in his eyes. There was an ugly flicker of smile on his set mouth.
The reporter rose from the chair into which he had wetly slumped. He walked over to face his opponent who was standing at his desk. Banneker, lithe, powerful, tense, was half again as large as the other; obviously more muscular, better-conditioned, more formidable in every way. But there is about a man, singly and selflessly intent upon his job in hand, an inner potency impossible to obstruct. Banneker recognized it; inwardly admitted, too, the unsoundness of the swift, protective rage rising within, himself.
I don't propose to make trouble for you or to have trouble with you, said the reporter evenly. "But I'm going to Miss Van Arsdale's unless I'm shot on the way there."
That's all right, returned the agent, mastering himself. "I beg your pardon for threatening you. But you'll have to find your own way. Will you put up here for the night, again?"
Thanks. Glad to, if it won't trouble you. See you later.
Perhaps not. I'm turning in early. I'll leave the shack unlocked for you.
Gardner opened the outer door and was blown back into the station by an explosive gust of soaking wind.
On second thought, said he, "I don't think I'll try to go out there this evening. The young lady can't very well get away to-night, unless she has wings, and it's pretty damp for flying. Can I get dinner over at the village?"
Such as it is. I'll go over with you.
At the entrance to the unclean little hotel they parted, Banneker going further to find Mindle the "teamer," whom he could trust and with whom he held conference, brief and very private. They returned to the station together in the gathering darkness, got a hand car onto the track, and loaded it with a strange burden, after which Mindle disappeared into the storm with the car while Banneker wired to Stanwood an imperative call for a relief for next day even though the substitute should have to walk the twenty-odd miles. Thereafter he made, from the shack, a careful selection of food with special reference to economy of bulk, fastened it deftly beneath his poncho, saddled his horse, and set out for the Van Arsdale lodge. The night was pitch-black when he entered the area of the pines, now sonorous with the rush of the upper winds.
Io saw the gleam of his flashlight and ran to the door to meet him.
Are you ready? he asked briefly.
I can be in fifteen minutes. She turned away, asking no questions.
Dress warmly, he said. "It's an all-night trip. By the way, can you swim?"
For hours at a time.
Camilla Van Arsdale entered the room. "Are you taking her away, Ban? Where?"
To Miradero, on the Southwestern and Sierra.
But that's insanity, protested the other. "Sixty miles, isn't it? And over trailless desert."
All of that. But we're not going across country. We're going by water.
By water? Ban, you _are_ out of your mind. Where is there any waterway?
Dry Bed Arroyo. It's running bank-full. My boat is waiting there.
But it will be dangerous. Terribly dangerous. Io, you mustn't.
I'll go, said the girl quietly, "if Ban says so."
There's no other way out. And it isn't so dangerous if you're used to a boat. Old Streatham made it seven years ago in the big flood. Did it in a bark canoe on a hundred-dollar bet. The Arroyo takes you out to the Little Bowleg and that empties into the Rio Solano, and there you are! I've got his map.
Map? cried Miss Van Arsdale. "What use is a map when you can't see your hand before your face?"
Give this wind a chance, answered Banneker. "Within two hours the clouds will have broken and we'll have moonlight to go by.... The Angelica Herald man is over at the hotel now," he added.
May I take a suitcase? asked Io.
Of course. I'll strap it to your pony if you'll get it ready. Miss Camilla, what shall we do with the pony? Hitch him under the bridge?
If you're determined to take her, I'll ride over with you and bring him back. Io, think! Is it worth the risk? Let the reporter come. I can keep him away from you.
A brooding expression was in the girl's deep eyes as she turned them, not to the speaker, but to Banneker. "No," she said. "I've got to get away sooner or later. I'd rather go this way. It's more--it's more of a pattern with all the rest; better than stupidly waving good-bye from the rear of a train."
But the danger.
_Che sara, sara_, returned Io lightly. "I'll trust him to take care of me."
While Ban went out to prepare the horses with the aid of Pedro, strictly enjoined to secrecy, the two women got Io's few things together.
I can't thank you, said the girl, looking up as she snapped the lock of her case. "It simply isn't a case for thanking. You've done too much for me."
The older woman disregarded it. "How much are you hurting Ban?" she said, with musing eyes fixed on the dim and pure outline of the girlish face.
I? Hurt him?
Of course he won't realize it until you've gone. Then I'm afraid to think what is coming to him.
And I'm afraid to think what is coming to me, replied the girl, very low.
Ah, you! retorted her hostess, dismissing that consideration with contemptuous lightness. "You have plenty of compensations, plenty of resources."
Hasn't he?
Perhaps. Up to now. What will he do when he wakes up to an empty world?
Write, won't he? And then the world won't be empty.
He'll think it so. That is why I'm sorry for him.
Won't you be sorry a little for me? pleaded the girl. "Anyway, for the part of me that I'm leaving here? Perhaps it's the very best of me."
Miss Van Arsdale shook her head. "Oh, no! A pleasantly vivid dream of changed and restful things. That's all. Your waking will be only a sentimental and perfumed regret--a sachet-powder sorrow."
You're bitter.
I don't want him hurt, protested the other. "Why did you come here? What should a girl like you, feverish and sensation-loving and artificial, see in a boy like Ban to charm you?"
Ah, don't you understand? It's just because my world has been too dressed up and painted and powdered that I feel the charm of--of--well, of ease of existence. He's as easy as an animal. There's something about him--you must have felt it--sort of impassioned sense of the gladness of life; when he has those accesses he's like a young god, or a faun. But he doesn't know his own power. At those times he might do anything.
She shivered a little and her lids drooped over the luster of her dreaming eyes.
And you want to tempt him out of this to a world where he would be a wretched misfit, accused the older woman.
Do I? No; I think I don't. I think I'd rather hold him in my mind as he is here: a happy eremite; no, a restrained pagan. Oh, it's foolish to seek definitions for him. He isn't definable. He's Ban....
And when you get back into the world, what will you do, I wonder?
I won't send for him, if that's what you mean.
But what _will_ you do, I wonder?
I wonder, repeated Io somberly.
Silently they rode through the stir and thresh of the night, the two women and the man. For guidance along the woods trail they must trust to the finer sense of their horses whose heads they could not see in the closed-in murk. A desultory spray fell upon them as the wind wrenched at the boughs overhead, but the rain had ceased. Infinitely high, infinitely potent sounded the imminent tumult of the invisible Powers of the night, on whose sufferance they moved, tiny, obscure, and unharmed. It filled all the distances.
Debouching upon the open desert, they found their range of vision slightly expanded. They could dimly perceive each other. The horses drew closer together. With his flash covered by his poncho, Banneker consulted a compass and altered their course, for he wished to give the station, to which Gardner might have returned, a wide berth. Io moved up abreast of him as he stood, studying the needle. Had he turned the light upward he would have seen that she was smiling. Whether he would have interpreted that smile, whether, indeed, she could have interpreted it herself, is doubtful.
Presently they picked up the line of telegraph poles, well beyond the station, just the faintest suggestion of gaunt rigor against the troubled sky, and skirted them, moving more rapidly in the confidence of assured direction. A very gradual, diffused alleviation of the darkness began to be felt. The clouds were thinning. Something ahead of them hissed in a soft, full, insistent monosonance. Banneker threw up a shadowy arm. They dismounted on the crest of a tiny desert clifflet, now become the bank of a black current which nuzzled and nibbled into its flanks.
Io gazed intently at the flood which was to deliver her out of the hands of the Philistine. How far away the other bank of the newborn stream might be, she could only guess from the vague rush in her ears. The arroyo's water slipped ceaselessly, objectlessly away from beneath her strained vision, smooth, suave, even, effortless, like the process of some unhurried and mighty mechanism. Now and again a desert plant, uprooted from its arid home, eddied joyously past her, satiated for once of its lifelong thirst; and farther out she thought to have a glimpse of some dead and whitish animal. But these were minor blemishes on a great, lustrous ribbon of silken black, unrolled and re-rolled from darkness into darkness.
It's beckoning us, said Io, leaning to Banneker, her hand on his shoulder.
We must wait for more light, he answered.
Will you trust yourself to _that_? asked Camilla Van Arsdale, with a gesture of fear and repulsion toward the torrent.
Anywhere! returned Io. There was exaltation in her voice.
I can't understand it, cried the older woman. "How do you know what may lie before you?"
That is the thrill of it.
There may be death around the first curve. It's so unknown; so secret and lawless.
Ah, and I'm lawless! cried Io. "I could defy the gods on a night like this!"
She flung her arms aloft, in a movement of sweet, wild abandon, and, as if in response to an incantation, the sky was reft asunder and the moon rushed forth, free for the moment of the clutching clouds, fugitive, headlong, a shining Maenad of the heavens, surrounded by the rush and whirl that had whelmed earth and its waters and was hurrying them to an unknown, mad destiny.
Now we can see our way, said Banneker, the practical.
He studied the few rods of sleek, foamless water between him and the farther bank, and, going to the steel boat which Mindle had brought to the place on the hand car, took brief inventory of its small cargo. Satisfied, he turned to load in Io's few belongings. He shipped the oars.
I'll let her go stem-first, he explained; "so that I can see what we're coming to and hold her if there's trouble."
But can you see? objected Miss Van Arsdale, directing a troubled look at the breaking sky.
If we can't, we'll run her ashore until we can.
He handed Io the flashlight and the map.
You'll want me in the bow seat if we're traveling reversed, said she.
He assented. "Good sailorwoman!"
I don't like it, protested Miss Van Arsdale. "It's a mad business. Ban, you oughtn't to take her."
It's too late to talk of that, said Io.
Ready? questioned Banneker.
Yes.
He pushed the stern of the boat into the stream, and the current laid it neatly and powerfully flat to the sheer bank. Io kissed Camilla Van Arsdale quickly and got in.
We'll wire you from Miradero, she promised. "You'll find the message in the morning."
The woman, mastering herself with a difficult effort, held out her hand to Banneker.
If you won't be persuaded, she said, "then good--"
No, he broke in quickly. "That's bad luck. We shall be all right."
Good luck, then, returned his friend, and turned away into the night.
Banneker, with one foot in the boat, gave a little shove and caught up his oars. An unseen hand of indeterminable might grasped the keel and moved them quietly, evenly, outward and forward, puppets given into the custody of the unregarding powers. Oars poised and ready, Ban sat with his back toward his passenger, facing watchfully downstream.
Leaning back into the curve of the bow, Io gave herself up to the pulsing sweep of the night. Far, far above her stirred a cosmic tumult. The air might have been filled with vast wings, invisible and incessant in the night of wonders. The moon plunged headlong through the clouds, now submerged, now free, like a strong swimmer amidst surf. She moved to the music of a tremendous, trumpeting note, the voice of the unleashed Spring, male and mighty, exulting in his power, while beneath, the responsive, desirous earth thrilled and trembled and was glad.
The boat, a tiny speck on the surface of chaos, darted and checked and swerved lightly at the imperious bidding of unguessed forces, reaching up from the depths to pluck at it in elfish sportiveness. Only when Ban thrust down the oar-blades, as he did now and again to direct their course or avoid some obstacle, was Io made sensible, through the jar and tremor of the whole structure, how swiftly they moved. She felt the spirit of the great motion, of which they were a minutely inconsiderable part, enter into her soul. She was inspired of it, freed, elated, glorified. She lifted up her voice and sang. Ban, turning, gave her one quick look of comprehension, then once more was intent and watchful of their master and servitor, the flood.
Ban, she called.
He tossed an oar to indicate that he had heard.
Come back and sit by me.
He seemed to hesitate.
Let the boat go where it wants to! The river will take care of us. It's a good river, and so strong! I think it loves to have us here.
Ban shook his head.
'Let the great river bear us to the sea,' sang Io in her fresh and thrilling voice, stirring the uttermost fibers of his being with delight. "Ban, can't you trust the river and the night and--and the mad gods? I can."
Again he shook his head. In his attitude she sensed a new concentration upon something ahead. She became aware of a strange stir that was not of the air nor the water.
Hush--sh--sh--sh--sh! said something unseen, with an immense effect of restraint and enforced quiet.
The boat slewed sharply as Banneker checked their progress with a downthrust of oars. He edged in toward the farther bank which was quite flat, studying it with an eye to the most favoring spot, having selected which, he ran the stern up with several hard shoves, leapt out, hauled the body of the craft free from the balked and snatching current, and held out a hand to his passenger.
What is it? she asked as she joined him.
I don't know. I'm trying to think where I've heard that noise before. He pondered. "Ah, I've got it! It was when I was out on the coast in the big rains, and a few million tons of river-bank let go all holds and smushed down into the stream.... What's on your map?"
He bent over it, conning its detail by the light of the flash which she turned on.
We should be about here, he indicated, touching the paper, "I'll go ahead and take a look."
Shan't I go with you?
Better stay quiet and get all the rest you can.
He was gone some twenty minutes. "There's a big, fresh-looking split-off in the opposite bank," he reported; "and the water looks fizzy and whirly around there. I think we'll give her a little time to settle. A sudden shift underneath might suck us down. The water's rising every minute, which makes it worth while waiting. Besides, it's dark just now."
Do you believe in fate? asked the girl abruptly, as he seated himself on the sand beside her. "That's a silly, schoolgirl thing to say, isn't it?" she added. "But I was thinking of this boat being there in the middle of the dry desert, just when we needed it most."
It had been there some time, pointed out Banneker. "And if we couldn't have come this way, I'd have found some other."
I believe you would, crowed Io softly.
So, I don't believe in fate; not the ready-made kind. Things aren't that easy. If I did--
If you did? she prompted as he paused.
I'd get back into the boat with you and throw away the oars.
I dare you! she cried recklessly.
We'd go whirling and spinning along, he continued with dreams in his voice, "until dawn came, and then we'd go ashore and camp."
Where?
How should I know? In the Enchanted Canyon where it enters the Mountains of Fulfillment.... They're not on this map.
They're not on any map. More's the pity. And then?
Then we'd rest. And after that we'd climb to the Plateau Beyond the Clouds where the Fadeless Gardens are, and there...
And there?
There we'd hear the Undying Voices singing.
Should we sing, too?
Of course. 'For they who attain these heights, through pain of upward toil and the rigors of abstention, are as the demigods, secure above evil and the fear thereof.'
I don't know what that is, but I hate the 'upward toil' part of it, and the 'abstention' even more. We ought to be able to become demigods without all that, just because we wish it. In a fairy-tale, anyway. I don't think you're a really competent fairy-tale-monger, Ban.
You haven't let me go on to the 'live happy ever after' part, he complained.
Ah, that's the serpent, the lying, poisoning little serpent, always concealed in the gardens of dreams. They don't, Ban; people don't live happy ever after. I could believe in fairy-tales up to that point. Just there ugly old Experience holds up her bony finger--she's a horrid hag, Ban, but we'd all be dead or mad without her--and points to the wriggling little snake.
In my garden, said he, "she'd have shining wings and eyes that could look to the future as well as to the past, and immortal Hope for a lover. It would be worth all the toil and the privation."
Nobody ever made up a Paradise, said the girl fretfully, "but what the Puritan in him set the road with sharp stones and bordered it with thorns and stings.... Look, Ban! Here's the moon come back to us.... And see what's laughing at us and our dreams."
On the crest of a sand-billow sprawled a huge organ-cactus, brandishing its arms in gnomish derision of their presence.
How can one help but believe in foul spirits with that thing to prove their existence? she said. "And, look! There's the good spirit in front of that shining cloud."
She pointed to a yucca in full, creamy flower; a creature of unearthly purity in the glow of the moon, a dream-maiden beckoning at the gates of darkness to a world of hidden and ineffable beauty.
When I saw my first yucca in blossom, said Banneker, "it was just before sunrise after I had been riding all night, and I came on it around a dip in the hills, standing alone against a sky of pearl and silver. It made me think of a ghost, the ghost of a girl who had died too young to know womanhood, died while she was asleep and dreaming pale, soft dreams, never to be fulfilled."
That's the injustice of death, she answered. "To take one before one knows and has felt and been all that there is to know and feel and be."
Yet--he turned a slow smile to her--"you were just now calling Experience bad names; a horrid hag, wasn't it?"
At least, she's life, retorted the girl.
Yes. She's life.
Ban, I want to go on. The whole universe is in motion. Why must we stand still?
They reembarked. The grip of the hurrying depths took them past crinkly water, lustrously bronze in the moonlight where the bank had given way, and presently delivered them, around the shoulder of a low, brush-crowned bluff, into the keeping of a swollen creek. Here the going was more tricky. There were shoals and whirls at the bends, and plunging flotsam to be avoided. Banneker handled the boat with masterly address, easing her through the swift passages, keeping her, with a touch here and a dip there, to the deepest flow, swerving adroitly to dodge the trees and brush which might have punctured the thin metal. Once he cried out and lunged at some object with an unshipped oar. It rolled and sank, but not before Io had caught the contour of a pasty face. She was startled rather than horrified at this apparition of death. It seemed an accessory proper to the pattern of the bewitched night.
Through a little, silvered surf of cross-waves, they were shot, after an hour of this uneasy going, into the broad, clean sweep of the Little Bowleg River. After the troubled progress of the lesser current it seemed very quiet and secure; almost placid. But the banks slipped by in an endless chain. Presently they came abreast of three horsemen riding the river trail, who urged their horses into a gallop, keeping up with them for a mile or more. As they fell away, Io waved a handkerchief at them, to which they made response by firing a salvo from their revolvers into the air.
We're making better than ten miles an hour, Banneker called over his shoulder to his passenger.
They shot between the split halves of a little, scraggly, ramshackle town, danced in white water where the ford had been, and darted onward. Now Banneker began to hold against the current, scanning the shores until, with a quick wrench, he brought the stern around and ran it up on a muddy bit of strand.
Grub! he announced gayly.
Languor had taken possession of Io, the languor of one who yields to unknown and fateful forces. Passive and at peace, she wanted nothing but to be wafted by the current to whatever far bourne might await her. That there should be such things as railway trains and man-made schedules in this world of winds and mystery and the voice of great waters, was hard to believe; hardly worth believing in any case. Better not to think of it: better to muse on her companion, building fire as the first man had built for the first woman, to feed and comfort her in an environment of imminent fears.
Coffee, when her man brought it, seemed too artificial for the time and place. She shook her head. She was not hungry.
You must, insisted Ban. He pointed downstream where the murk lay heavy. "We shall run into more rain. You will need the warmth and support of food."
So, because there were only they two on the face of the known earth, woman and man, the woman obeyed the man. To her surprise, she found that she was hungry, ardently hungry. Both ate heartily. It was a silent meal; little spoken except about the chances and developments of the journey, until she got to her feet. Then she said:
I shall never, as long as I live, wherever I go, whatever I do, know anything like this again. I shall not want to. I want it to stand alone.
It will stand alone, he answered.
They met the rain within half an hour, a wall-like mass of it. It blotted out everything around them. The roar of it cut off sound, as the mass of it cut off sight. Fortunately the boat was now going evenly as in an oiled groove. By feeling, Io knew that her guide was moving from his seat, and guessed that he was bailing. The spare poncho, put in by Miss Van Arsdale, protected her. She was jubilant with the thresh of the rain in her face, the sweet, smooth motion of the boat beneath her, the wild abandon of the night, which, entering into her blood, had transmuted it into soft fire.
How long she crouched, exultant and exalted, under the beat of the storm, she could not guess. She half emerged from her possession with a strange feeling that the little craft was being irresistibly drawn forward and downward in what was now a suction rather than a current. At the same time she felt the spring and thrust of Banneker's muscles, straining at the oars. She dipped a hand into the water. It ridged high around her wrists with a startling pressure. What was happening?
Through the uproar she could dimly hear Ban's voice. He seemed to be swearing insanely. Dropping to her hands and knees, for the craft was now swerving and rocking, she crept to him.
The dam! The dam! The dam! he shouted. "I'd forgotten about it. Go back. Turn on the flash. Look for shore."
Against rather than into that impenetrable enmeshment of rain, the glow dispersed itself ineffectually. Io sat, not frightened so much as wondering. Her body ached in sympathy with the panting, racking toil of the man at the oars, the labor of an indomitable pigmy, striving to thwart a giant's will. Suddenly he shouted. The boat spun. Something low and a shade blacker than the dull murk about them, with a white, whispering ripple at its edge, loomed. The boat's prow drove into soft mud as Banneker, all but knocking her overboard in his dash, plunged to the land and with one powerful lift, brought boat and cargo to safety.
For a moment he leaned, gasping, against a stump. When he spoke, it was to reproach himself bitterly.
We must have come through the town. There's a dam below it. I'd forgotten it. My God! If we hadn't had the luck to strike shore.
Is it a high dam? she asked.
In this flood we'd be pounded to death the moment we were over. Listen! You can hear it.
The rain had diminished a little. Above its insistence sounded a deeper, more formidable beat and thrill.
We must be quite close to it, she said.
A few rods, probably. Let me have the light. I want to explore before we start out.
Much sooner than she had expected, he was back. He groped for and took her hand. His own was steady, but his voice shook as he said:
Io.
It's the first time you've called me that. Well, Ban?
Can you stand it to--to have me tell you something?
Yes.
We're not on the shore.
Where, then? An island?
There aren't any islands here. It must be a bit of the mainland cut off by the flood.
I'm not afraid, if that's what you mean. We can stand it until dawn.
A wavelet lapped quietly across her foot. She withdrew it and with that involuntary act came understanding. Her hand, turning in his, pressed close, palm cleaving to palm.
How much longer? she asked in a whisper.
Not long. It's just a tiny patch. And the river is rising every minute.
How long? she persisted.
Perhaps two hours. Perhaps less. My good God! If there's any special hell for criminal fools, I ought to go to it for bringing you to this, he burst out in agony.
I brought you. Whatever there is, we'll go to it together.
You're wonderful beyond all wonders. Aren't you afraid?
I don't know. It isn't so much fear, though I dread to think of that hammering-down weight of water.
Don't! he cried brokenly. "I can't bear to think of you--" He lifted his head sharply. "Isn't it lightening up? Look! Can you see shore? We might be quite near."
She peered out, leaning forward. "No; there's nothing." Her hand turned within his, released itself gently. "I'm not afraid," she said, speaking clear and swift. "It isn't that. But I'm--rebellious. I hate the idea of it, of ending everything; the unfairness of it. To have to die without knowing the--the realness of life. Unfulfilled. It isn't fair," she accused breathlessly. "Ban, it's what we were saying. Back there on the river-bank where the yucca stands. I don't want to go--I can't bear to go--before I've known ... before...."
Her arms crept to enfold him. Her lips sought his, tremulous, surrendering, demanding in surrender. With all the passion and longing that he had held in control, refusing to acknowledge even their existence, as if the mere recognition of them would have blemished her, he caught her to him. He heard her, felt her sob once. The roar of the cataract was louder, more insistent in his ears ... or was it the rush of the blood in his veins?... Io cried out, a desolate and hungry cry, for he had wrenched his mouth from hers. She could feel the inner man abruptly withdrawn, concentrated elsewhere. She opened her eyes upon an appalling radiance wherein his face stood out clear, incredulous, then suddenly eager and resolute.
It's a headlight! he cried. "A train! Look, Io! The mainland. It's only a couple of rods away."
He slipped from her arms, ran to the boat.
What are you going to do? she called weakly. "Ban! You can never make it."
I've got to. It's our only chance.
As he spoke, he was fumbling under the seat. He brought out a coil of rope. Throwing off poncho, coat, and waistcoat, he coiled the lengths around his body.
Let me swim with you, she begged.
You're not strong enough.
I don't care. We'd go together ... I--I can't face it alone, Ban.
You'll have to. Or give up our only chance of life. You must, Io. If I shouldn't get across, you may try it; the chances of the current might help you. But not until after you're sure I haven't made it. You must wait.
Yes, she said submissively.
As soon as I get to shore, I'll throw the rope across to you. Listen for it. I'll keep throwing until it strikes where you can get it.
I'll give you the light.
That may help. Then you make fast under the forward seat of the boat. Be sure it's tight.
Yes, Ban.
Twitch three times on the rope to let me know when you're ready and shove out and upstream as strongly as you can.
Can you hold it against the current?
I must. If I do, you'll drift around against the bank. If I don't--I'll follow you.
No, Ban, she implored. "Not you, too. There's no need--"
I'll follow you, said he. "Now, Io."
He kissed her gently, stepped back, took a run and flung himself upward and outward into the ravening current.
She saw a foaming thresh that melted into darkness....
Time seemed to have stopped for her. She waited, waited, waited in a world wherein only Death waited with her.... Ban was now limp and lifeless somewhere far downstream, asprawl in the swiftness, rolling a pasty face to the sky like that grisly wayfarer who had hailed them silently in the upper reach of the river, a messenger and prophet of their fate. The rising waters eddied about her feet. The boat stirred uneasily. Mechanically she drew it back from the claim of the flood. A light blow fell upon her cheek and neck.
It was the rope.
Instantly and intensely alive, Io tautened it and felt the jerk of Ban's signal. With expert hands she made it fast, shipped the oars, twitched the cord thrice, and, venturing as far as she dared into the deluge, pushed with all her force and threw herself over the stern.
The rope twanged and hummed like a gigantic bass-string. Io crawled to the oars, felt the gunwale dip and right again, and, before she could take a stroke, was pressed against the far bank. She clambered out and went to Banneker, guiding herself by the light. His face, in the feeble glow, shone, twisted in agony. He was shaking from head to foot. The other end of the rope which had brought her to safety was knotted fast around his waist.... So he would have followed, as he said!
Through Io's queer, inconsequent brain flitted a grotesque conjecture: what would the newspapers make of it if she had been found, washed up on the river-bank, and the Manzanita agent of the Atkinson and St. Philip Railroad Company drowned and haltered by a long tether to his boat, near by? A sensational story!...
She went to Banneker, still helplessly shaking, and put her firm, slight hands on his shoulders.
It's all right, Ban, she said soothingly. "We're out of it."
Arrived safe was the laconic message delivered to Miss Camilla Van Arsdale by Banneker's substitute when, after a haggard night, she rode over in the morning for news.
Banneker himself returned on the second noon, after much and roundabout wayfaring. He had little to say of the night journey; nothing of the peril escaped. Miss Welland had caught a morning train for the East. She was none the worse for the adventurous trip. Camilla Van Arsdale, noting his rapt expression and his absent, questing eyes, wondered what underlay such reticence.... What had been the manner of their parting?
It had, indeed, been anti-climax. Both had been a little shy, a little furtive. Each, perhaps feeling a mutual strain, wanted the parting over, restlessly desiring the sedative of thought and quiet memory after that stress. The desperate peril from which they had been saved seemed a lesser crisis, leading from a greater and more significant one; leading to--what? For his part Banneker was content to "breathe and wait." When they should meet again, it would be determined. How and when the encounter might take place, he did not trouble himself to consider. The whole universe was moulded and set for that event. Meantime the glory was about him; he could remember, recall, repeat, interpret....
For the hundredth time--or was it the thousandth?--he reconstructed that last hour of theirs together in the station at Miradero, waiting for the train. What had they said to each other? Commonplaces, mostly, and at times with effort, as if they were making conversation. They two! After that passionate and revealing moment between life and death on the island. What should he have said to her? Begged her to stay? On what basis? How could he?.... As the distant roar of the train warned them that the time of parting was close, it was she who broke through that strange restraint, turning upon him her old-time limpid and resolute regard.
Ban; promise me something.
Anything.
There may be a time coming for us when you won't understand.
Understand what?
Me. Perhaps I shan't understand myself.
You'll always understand yourself, Io.
If that comes--when that comes--Ban, there's something in the book, _our_ book, that I've left you to read.
'The Voices'?
Yes. I've fastened the pages together so that you can't read it too soon.
When, then?
When I tell you ... No; not when I tell you. When--oh, when you must! You'll read it, and afterward, when you think of me, you'll think of that, too. Will you?
Yes.
Always?
Always.
No matter what happens?
No matter what happens.
It's like a litany. She laughed tremulously.... "Here's the train. Good-bye, dear."
He felt the tips of slender fingers on his temples, the light, swift pressure of cold lips on his mouth.... While the train pulled out, she stood on the rear platform, looking, looking. She was very still. All motion, all expression seemed centered in the steady gaze which dwindled away from him, became vague ... featureless ... vanished in a lurch of the car.
Banneker, at home again, planted a garden of dreams, and lived in it, mechanically acceptant of the outer world, resentful of any intrusion upon that flowerful retreat. Even of Miss Van Arsdale's.
Not for days thereafter did the Hunger come. It began as a little gnawing doubt and disappointment. It grew to a devastating, ravening starvation of the heart, for sign or sight or word of Io Welland. It drove him out of his withered seclusion, to seek Miss Van Arsdale, in the hope of hearing Io's name spoken. But Miss Van Arsdale scarcely referred to Io. She watched Banneker with unconcealed anxiety.
... Why had there been no letter?...
Appeasement came in the form of a package addressed in her handwriting. Avidly he opened it. It was the promised Bible, mailed from New York City. On the fly-leaf was written "I.O.W. to E.B."--nothing more. He went through it page by page, seeking marked passages. There was none. The doubt settled down on him again. The Hunger bit into him more savagely.
... Why didn't she write? A word! Anything!
... Had she written Miss Van Arsdale?
At first it was intolerable that he should be driven to ask about her from any other person; about Io, who had clasped him in the Valley of the Shadow, whose lips had made the imminence of death seem a light thing! The Hunger drove him to it.
Yes; Miss Van Arsdale had heard. Io Welland was in New York, and well. That was all. But Banneker felt an undermining reserve.
Long days of changeless sunlight on the desert, an intolerable glare. From the doorway of the lonely station Banneker stared out over leagues of sand and cactus, arid, sterile, hopeless, promiseless. Life was like that. Four weeks now since Io had left him. And still, except for the Bible, no word from her. No sign. Silence.
Why that? Anything but that! It was too unbearable to his helpless masculine need of her. He could not understand it. He could not understand anything. Except the Hunger. That he understood well enough now....
At two o'clock of a savagely haunted night, Banneker staggered from his cot. For weeks he had not known sleep otherwise than in fitful passages. His brain was hot and blank. Although the room was pitch-dark, he crossed it unerringly to a shelf and look down his revolver. Slipping on overcoat and shoes, he dropped the weapon into his pocket and set out up the railroad track. A half-mile he covered before turning into the desert. There he wandered aimlessly for a few minutes, and after that groped his way, guarding with a stick against the surrounding threat of the cactus, for his eyes were tight closed. Still blind, he drew out the pistol, gripped it by the barrel, and threw it, whirling high and far, into the trackless waste. He passed on, feeling his uncertain way patiently.
It took him a quarter of an hour to find the railroad track and set a sure course for home, so effectually had he lost himself.... No chance of his recovering that old friend. It had been whispering to him, in the blackness of empty nights, counsels that were too persuasive.
Back in his room over the station he lighted the lamp and stood before the few books which he kept with him there; among them Io's Bible and "The Undying Voices," with the two pages still joined as her fingers had left them. He was summoning his courage to face what might be the final solution. When he must, she had said, he was to open and read. Well ... he must. He could bear it no longer, the wordless uncertainty. He lifted down the volume, gently parted the fastened pages and read. From out the still, ordered lines, there rose to him the passionate cry of protest and bereavement:
............................Nevermore Alone upon the threshold of my door Of individual life I shall command The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand Serenely in the sunshine as before, Without the sense of that which I forbore--Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine With pulses that beat double. What I do And what I dream include thee, as the wine Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue God for myself, He hears that name of thine And sees within my eyes the tears of two.
Over and over he read it with increasing bewilderment, with increasing fear, with slow-developing comprehension. If that was to be her farewell ... but why! Io, the straightforward, the intrepid, the exponent of fair play and the rules of the game!... Had it been only a game? No; at least he knew better than that.
What could it all mean? Why that medium for her message? Should he write and ask her? But what was there to ask or say, in the face of her silence? Besides, he had not even her address. Miss Camilla could doubtless give him that. But would she? How much did she understand? Why had she turned so unhelpful?
Banneker sat with his problem half through a searing night; and the other half of the night he spent in writing. But not to Io.
At noon Camilla Van Arsdale rode up to the station.
Are you ill, Ban? was her greeting, as soon as she saw his face.
No, Miss Camilla. I'm going away.
She nodded, confirming not so much what he said as a fulfilled suspicion of her own. "New York is a very big city," she said.
I haven't said that I was going to New York.
No; there is much you haven't said.
I haven't felt much like talking. Even to you.
Don't go, Ban.
I've got to. I've got to get away from here.
And your position with the railroad?
I've resigned. It's all arranged. He pointed to the pile of letters, his night's work.
What are you going to do?
How do I know! I beg your pardon, Miss Camilla. Write, I suppose.
Write here.
There's nothing to write about.
The exile, who had spent her years weaving exquisite music from the rhythm of desert winds and the overtones of the forest silence, looked about her, over the long, yellow-gray stretches pricked out with hints of brightness, to the peaceful refuge of the pines, and again to the naked and impudent meanness of the town. Across to her ears, borne on the air heavy with rain still unshed, came the rollicking, ragging jangle of the piano at the Sick Coyote.
Aren't there people to write about there? she said. "Tragedies and comedies and the human drama? Barrie found it in a duller place."
Not until he had seen the world first, he retorted quickly. "And I'm not a Barrie.... I can't stay here, Miss Camilla."
Poor Ban! Youth is always expecting life to fulfill itself. It doesn't.
No; it doesn't--unless you make it.
And how will you make it?
I'm going to get on a newspaper.
It isn't so easy as all that, Ban.
I've been writing.
In the joyous flush of energy, evoked under the spell of Io's enchantment, he had filled his spare hours with work, happy, exuberant, overflowing with a quaint vitality. A description of the desert in spate, thumb-nail sketches from a station-agent's window, queer little flavorous stories of crime and adventure and petty intrigue in the town; all done with a deftness and brevity that was saved from being too abrupt only by broad touches of color and light. And he had had a letter. He told Miss Van Arsdale of it.
Oh, if you've a promise, or even a fair expectation of a place. But, Ban, I wouldn't go to New York, anyway.
Why not?
It's no use.
His strong eyebrows went up. "Use?"
You won't find her there.
She's not in New York?
No.
You've heard from her, then? Where is she?
Gone abroad.
Upon that he meditated. "She'll come back, though."
Not to you.
He waited, silent, attentive, incredulous.
Ban; she's married.
Married!
The telegraph instrument clicked in the tiny rhythm of an elfin bass-drum. "O.S. O.S." Click. Click. Click-click-click. Mechanically responsive to his office he answered, and for a moment was concerned with some message about a local freight. When he raised his face again, Miss Van Arsdale read there a sick and floundering skepticism.
Married! he repeated. "Io! She couldn't."
The woman, startled by the conviction in his tone, wondered how much that might imply.
She wrote me, said she presently.
That she was married?
That she would be by the time the letter reached me.
("You will think me a fool," the girl had written impetuously, "and perhaps a cruel fool. But it is the wise thing, really. Del Eyre is so safe! He is safety itself for a girl like me. And I have discovered that I can't wholly trust myself.... Be gentle with him, and make him do something worth while.")
Ah! said Ban. "But that--"
And I have the newspaper since with an account of the wedding.... Ban! Don't look like that!
Like what? said he stupidly.
You look like Pretty Willie as I saw him when he was working himself up for the killing. Pretty Willie was the soft-eyed young desperado who had cleaned out the Sick Coyote.
Oh, I'm not going to kill anybody, he said with a touch of grim amusement for her fears. "Not even myself." He rose and went to the door. "Do you mind, Miss Camilla?" he added appealingly.
You want me to leave you now?
He nodded. "I've got to think."
When would you leave, Ban, if you do go?
I don't know.
On the following morning he went, after a night spent in arranging, destroying, and burning. The last thing to go into the stove, 67 S 4230, was a lock of hair, once glossy, but now stiffened and stained a dull brown, which he had cut from the wound on Io's head that first, strange night of theirs, the stain of her blood that had beaten in her heart, and given life to the sure, sweet motion of her limbs, and flushed in her cheeks, and pulsed in the warm lips that she had pressed to his--Why could they not have died together on their dissolving island, with the night about them, and their last, failing sentience for each other!
The flame of the greedy stove licked up the memento, but not the memory.
You must not worry about me, he wrote in the note left with his successor for Miss Van Arsdale. "I shall be all right. I am going to succeed."
Mrs. Brashear's rooming-house on Grove Street wore its air of respectability like a garment, clean and somber, in an environment of careful behavior. Greenwich Village, not having fully awakened to the commercial advantages of being a _locale_, had not yet stretched between itself and the rest of New York that gauzy and iridescent curtain of sprightly impropriety and sparkling intellectual naughtiness, since faded to a lather tawdry pattern. An early pioneer of the Villager type, emancipated of thought and speech, chancing upon No. 11 Grove, would have despised it for its lack of atmosphere and its patent conservatism. It did not go out into the highways and byways, seeking prospective lodgers. It folded its hands and waited placidly for them to come. When they came, it pondered them with care, catechized them tactfully, and either rejected them with courteous finality or admitted them on probation. Had it been given to self-exploitation, it could have boasted that never had it harbored a bug or a scandal within its doors.
Now, on this filmy-soft April day it was nonplussed. A type new to its experience was applying for a room, and Mrs. Brashear, who was not only the proprietress, but, as it were, the familiar spirit and incarnation of the institution, sat peering near-sightedly and in some perturbation of soul at the phenomenon. He was young, which was against him, and of a winning directness of manner, which was in his favor, and extremely good to look at, which was potential of complications, and encased in clothing of an uncompromising cut and neutral pattern (to wit; No. 45 T 370, "an ideal style for a young business man of affairs; neat, impressive and dignified"), which was reassuring.
My name is Banneker, he had said, immediately the door was opened to him. "Can I get a room here?"
There is a room vacant, admitted the spirit of the house unwillingly.
I'd like to see it.
As he spoke, he was mounting the stairs; she must, perforce, follow. On the third floor she passed him and led the way to a small, morosely papered front room, almost glaringly clean.
All right, if I can have a work-table in it and if it isn't too much, he said, after one comprehensive glance around.
The price is five dollars a week.
Had Banneker but known it, this was rather high. The Brashear rooming-house charged for its cleanliness, physical and moral. "Can I move in at once?" he inquired.
I don't know you nor anything about you, Mr. Banneker, she replied, but not until they had descended the stairs and were in the cool, dim parlor. At the moment of speaking, she raised a shade, as if to help in the determination.
Is that necessary? They didn't ask me when I registered at the hotel.
Mrs. Brashear stared, then smiled. "A hotel is different. Where are you stopping?"
At the St. Denis.
A very nice place. Who directed you here?
No one. I strolled around until I found a street I liked, and looked around until I found a house I liked. The card in the window--
Of course. Well, Mr. Banneker, for the protection of the house I must have references.
References? You mean letters from people?
Not necessarily. Just a name or two from whom I can make inquiries. You have friends, I suppose.
No.
Your family--
I haven't any.
Then the people in the place where you work. What is your business, by the way?
I expect to go on a newspaper.
Expect? Mrs. Brashear stiffened in defense of the institution. "You have no place yet?"
He answered not her question, but her doubt. "As far as that is concerned, I'll pay in advance."
It isn't the financial consideration, she began loftily--"alone," she added more honestly. "But to take in a total stranger--"
Banneker leaned forward to her. "See here, Mrs. Brashear; there's nothing wrong about me. I don't get drunk. I don't smoke in bed. I'm decent of habit and I'm clean. I've got money enough to carry me. Couldn't you take me on my say-so? Look me over."
Though it was delivered with entire gravity, the speech provoked a tired and struggling smile on the landlady's plain features. She looked.
Well? he queried pleasantly. "What do you think? Will you take a chance?"
That suppressed motherliness which, embodying the unformulated desire to look after and care for others, turns so many widows to taking lodgers, found voice in Mrs. Brashear's reply:
You've had a spell of sickness, haven't you?
No, he said, a little sharply. "Where did you get that idea?"
Your eyes look hot.
I haven't been sleeping very well. That's all.
Too bad. You've had a loss, maybe, she ventured sympathetically.
A loss? No.... Yes. You might call it a loss. You'll take me, then?
You can move in right away, said Mrs. Brashear recklessly.
So the Brashear rooming-house took into its carefully guarded interior the young and unknown Mr. Banneker--who had not been sleeping well. Nor did he seem to be sleeping well in his new quarters, since his light was to be seen glowing out upon the quiet street until long after midnight; yet he was usually up betimes, often even before the moving spirit of the house, herself. A full week had he been there before his fellow lodgers, self-constituted into a Committee on Membership, took his case under consideration in full session upon the front steps. None had had speech with him, but it was known that he kept irregular hours.
What's his job: that's what I'd like to know, demanded in a tone of challenge, young Wickert, a man of the world who clerked in the decorative department of a near-by emporium.
Newsboy, I guess, said Lambert, the belated art-student of thirty-odd with a grin. "He's always got his arms full of papers when he comes in."
And he sits at his table clipping pieces out of them and arranging them in piles, volunteered little Mrs. Bolles, the trained nurse on the top floor. "I've seen him as I go past."
Help-wanted ads, suggested Wickert, who had suffered experience in that will-o'-the-wisp chase.
Then he hasn't got a job, deduced Mr. Hainer, a heavy man of heavy voice and heavy manner, middle-aged, a small-salaried accountant.
Maybe he's got money, suggested Lambert.
Or maybe he's a dead beat; he looks on the queer, opined young Wickert.
He has a very fine and sensitive face. I think he has been ill. The opinion came from a thin, quietly dressed woman of the early worn-out period of life, who sat a little apart from the others. Young Wickert started a sniff, but suppressed it, for Miss Westlake was held locally in some degree of respect, as being "well-connected" and having relatives who called on her in their own limousines, though seldom.
Anybody know his name? asked Lambert.
Barnacle, said young Wickert wittily. "Something like that, anyway. Bannsocker, maybe. Guess he's some sort of a Swede."
Well, I only hope he doesn't clear out some night with his trunk on his back and leave poor Mrs. Brashear to whistle, declared Mrs. Bolles piously.
The worn face of the landlady, with its air of dispirited motherliness, appeared in the doorway. "Mr. Banneker is a _gentleman_," she said.
Gentleman from Mrs. Brashear, with that intonation, meant one who, out of or in a job, paid his room rent. The new lodger had earned the title by paying his month in advance. Having settled that point, she withdrew, followed by the two other women. Lambert, taking a floppy hat from the walnut rack in the hall, went his way, leaving young Wickert and Mr. Hainer to support the discussion, which they did in tones less discreet than the darkness warranted.
Where would he hail from, would you think? queried the elder. "Iowa, maybe? Or Arkansas?"
Search me, answered young Wickert. "But it was a small-town carpenter built those honest-to-Gawd clothes. I'd say the corn-belt."
Dressed up for the monthly meeting of the Farmers' Alliance, all but the oil on his hair. He forgot that, chuckled the accountant.
He's got a fine chance in Nuh Yawk--of buying a gold brick cheap, prophesied the worldly Wickert out of the depths of his metropolitan experience. "Somebody ought to put him onto himself."
A voice from the darkened window above said, with composure, "That will be all right. I'll apply to you for advice."
Oh, Gee! whispered young Wickert, in appeal to his companion. "How long's he been there?"
Acute hearing, it appeared, was an attribute of the man above, for he answered at once:
Just put my head out for a breath of air when I heard your kind expressions of solicitude. Why? Did I miss something that came earlier?
Mr. Hainer melted unostentatiously into the darkness. While young Wickert was debating whether his pride would allow him to follow this prudent example, the subject of their over-frank discussion appeared at his elbow. Evidently he was as light of foot as he was quick of ear. Meditating briefly upon these physical qualities, young Wickert said, in a deprecatory tone:
We didn't mean to get fresh with you. It was just talk.
Very interesting talk.
Wickert produced a suspiciously jeweled case. "Have a cigarette?"
I have some of my own, thank you.
Give you a light?
The metropolitan worldling struck a match and held it up. This was on the order of strategy. He wished to see Banneker's face. To his relief it did not look angry or even stern. Rather, it appeared thoughtful. Banneker was considering impartially the matter of his apparel.
What is the matter with my clothes? he asked.
Why--well, began Wickert, unhappy and fumbling with his ideas; "Oh, _they_'re all right."
For a meeting of the Farmers' Alliance. Banneker was smiling good-naturedly. "But for the East?"
Well, if you really want to know, began Wickert doubtfully. "If you won't get sore--" Banneker nodded his assurance. "Well, they're jay. No style. No snap. Respectable, and that lets 'em out."
They don't look as if they were made in New York or for New York?
Young Mr. Wickert apportioned his voice equitably between a laugh and a snort. "No: nor in Hoboken!" he retorted. "Listen, 'bo," he added, after a moment's thought. "You got to have a smooth shell in Nuh Yawk. The human eye only sees the surface. Get me? And it judges by the surface." He smoothed his hands down his dapper trunk with ineffable complacency. "Thirty-eight dollars, this. Bernholz Brothers, around on Broadway. Look it over. That's a cut!"
Is that how they're making them in the East? doubtfully asked the neophyte, reflecting that the pinched-in snugness of the coat, and the flare effect of the skirts, while unquestionably more impressive than his own box-like garb, still lacked something of the quiet distinction which he recalled in the clothes of Herbert Cressey. The thought of that willing messenger set him to groping for another sartorial name. He hardly heard Wickert say proudly:
If Bernholz's makes 'em that way, you can bet it's up to the split-second of date, and _maybe_ they beat the pistol by a jump. I bluffed for a raise of five dollars, on the strength of this outfit, and got it off the bat. There's the suit paid for in two months and a pair of shoes over. He thrust out a leg, from below the sharp-pressed trouser-line of which protruded a boot trimmed in a sort of bizarre fretwork. "Like me to take you around to Bernholz's?"
Banneker shook his head. The name for which he sought had come to him. "Did you ever hear of Mertoun, somewhere on Fifth Avenue?"
Yes. And I've seen Central Park and the Statue of Liberty, railed the other. "Thinkin' of patternizing Mertoun, was you?"
Yes, I'd like to.
Like to! There's a party at the Astorbilt's to-morrow night; you'd _like_ to go to that, wouldn't you? Fat chance! said the disdainful and seasoned cit. "D'you know what Mertoun would do to you? Set you back a hundred simoleons soon as look at you. And at that you got to have a letter of introduction like gettin' in to see the President of the United States or John D. Rockefeller. Come off, my boy! Bernholz's 'll fix you just as good, all but the label. Better come around to-morrow."
Much obliged, but I'm not buying yet. Where would you say a fellow would have a chance to see the best-dressed men?
Young Mr. Wickert looked at once self-conscious and a trifle miffed, for in his own set he was regarded as quite the mould of fashion. "Oh, well, if you want to pipe off the guys that _think_ they're the whole thing, walk up the Avenue and watch the doors of the clubs and the swell restaurants. At that, they haven't got anything on some fellows that don't spend a quarter of the money, but know what's what and don't let grafters like Mertoun pull their legs," said he. "Say, you seem to know what you want, all right, all right," he added enviously. "You ain't goin' to let this little old town bluff you; ay?"
No. Not for lack of a few clothes. Good-night, replied Banneker, leaving in young Wickert's mind the impression that he was "a queer gink," but also, on the whole, "a good guy." For the worldling was only small, not mean of spirit.
Banneker might have added that one who had once known cities and the hearts of men from the viewpoint of that modern incarnation of Ulysses, the hobo, contemptuous and predatory, was little likely to be overawed by the most teeming and headlong of human ant-heaps. Having joined the ant-heap, Banneker was shrewdly concerned with the problem of conforming to the best type of termite discoverable. The gibes of the doorstep chatterers had not aroused any new ambition; they had merely given point to a purpose deferred because of other and more immediate pressure. Already he had received from Camilla Van Arsdale a letter rich in suggestion, hint, and subtly indicated advice, with this one passage of frank counsel:
If I were writing, spinster-aunt-wise, to any one else in your position, I should be tempted to moralize and issue warnings about--well, about the things of the spirit. But you are equipped, there. Like the "Master," you will "go your own way with inevitable motion." With the outer man--that is different. You have never given much thought to that phase. And you have an asset in your personal appearance. I should not be telling you this if I thought there were danger of your becoming vain. But I really think it would be a good investment for you to put yourself into the hands of a first-class tailor, and follow his advice, in moderation, of course. Get the sense of being fittingly turned out by going where there are well-dressed people; to the opera, perhaps, and the theater occasionally, and, when you can afford it, to a good restaurant. Unless the world has changed, people will look at you. _But you must not know it_. Important, this is!... I could, of course, give you letters of introduction. "_Les morts vont vite_," it is true, and I am dead to that world, not wholly without the longings of a would-be _revenant_; but a ghost may still claim some privileges of memory, and my friends would be hospitable to you. Only, I strongly suspect that you would not use the letters if I gave them. You prefer to make your own start; isn't it so? Well; I have written to a few. Sooner or later you will meet with them. Those things always happen even in New York.... Be sure to write me all about the job when you get it--
Prudence dictated that he should be earning something before he invested in expensive apparel, be it never so desirable and important. However, he would outfit himself just as soon as a regular earning capacity justified his going into his carefully husbanded but dwindling savings. He pictured himself clad as a lily of the field, unconscious of perfection as Herbert Cressey himself, in the public haunts of fashion and ease; through which vision there rose the searing prospect of thus encountering Io Welland. What was her married name? He had not even asked when the news was broken to him; had not wanted to ask; was done with all that for all time.
He was still pathetically young and inexperienced. And he had been badly hurt.
Dust was the conspicuous attribute of the place. It lay, flat and toneless, upon the desk, the chairs, the floor; it streaked the walls. The semi-consumptive office "boy's" middle-aged shoulders collected it. It stirred in the wake of quiet-moving men, mostly under thirty-five, who entered the outer door, passed through the waiting-room, and disappeared behind a partition. Banneker felt like shaking himself lest he should be eventually buried under its impalpable sifting. Two hours and a half had passed since he had sent in his name on a slip of paper, to Mr. Gordon, managing editor of the paper. On the way across Park Row he had all but been persuaded by a lightning printer on the curb to have a dozen tasty and elegant visiting-cards struck off, for a quarter; but some vague inhibition of good taste checked him. Now he wondered if a card would have served better.
While he waited, he checked up the actuality of a metropolitan newspaper entrance-room, as contrasted with his notion of it, derived from motion pictures. Here was none of the bustle and hurry of the screen. No brisk and earnest young figures with tense eyes and protruding notebooks darted feverishly in and out; nor, in the course of his long wait, had he seen so much as one specimen of that invariable concomitant of all screen journalism, the long-haired poet with his flowing tie and neatly ribboned manuscript. Even the office "boy," lethargic, neutrally polite, busy writing on half-sheets of paper, was profoundly untrue to the pictured type. Banneker wondered what the managing editor would be like; would almost, in the wreckage of his preconceived notions, have accepted a woman or a priest in that manifestation, when Mr. Gordon appeared and was addressed by name by the hollow-chested Cerberus. Banneker at once echoed the name, rising.
The managing editor, a tall, heavy man, whose smoothly fitting cutaway coat seemed miraculously to have escaped the plague of dust, stared at him above heavy glasses.
You want to see me?
Yes. I sent in my name.
Did you? When?
At two-forty-seven, thirty, replied the visitor with railroad accuracy.
The look above the lowered glasses became slightly quizzical. "You're exact, at least. Patient, too. Good qualities for a newspaper man. That's what you are?"
What I'm going to be, amended Banneker.
There is no opening here at present.
That's formula, isn't it? asked the young man, smiling.
The other stared. "It is. But how do you know?"
It's the tone, I suppose. I've had to use it a good deal myself, in railroading.
Observant, as well as exact and patient. Come in. I'm sorry I misplaced your card. The name is--?
Banneker, E. Banneker.
Following the editor, he passed through a large, low-ceilinged room, filled with desk-tables, each bearing a heavy crystal ink-well full of a fluid of particularly virulent purple. A short figure, impassive as a Mongol, sat at a corner desk, gazing out over City Hall Park with a rapt gaze. Across from him a curiously trim and graceful man, with a strong touch of the Hibernian in his elongated jaw and humorous gray eyes, clipped the early evening editions with an effect of highly judicious selection. Only one person sat in all the long files of the work-tables, littered with copy-paper and disarranged newspapers; a dark young giant with the discouraged and hurt look of a boy kept in after school. All this Banneker took in while the managing editor was disposing, usually with a single penciled word or number, of a sheaf of telegraphic "queries" left upon his desk. Having finished, he swiveled in his chair, to face Banneker, and, as he spoke, kept bouncing the thin point of a letter-opener from the knuckles of his left hand. His hands were fat and nervous.
So you want to do newspaper work?
Yes.
Why?
I think I can make a go of it.
Any experience?
None to speak of. I've written a few things. I thought you might remember my name.
Your name? Banneker? No. Why should I?
You published some of my things in the Sunday edition, lately. From Manzanita, California.
No. I don't think so. Mr. Homans. A graying man with the gait of a marionnette and the precise expression of a rocking-horse, who had just entered, crossed over. "Have we sent out any checks to a Mr. Banneker recently, in California?"
The new arrival, who was copy-reader and editorial selecter for the Sunday edition, repeated the name in just such a wooden voice as was to be expected. "No," he said positively.
But I've cashed the checks, returned Banneker, annoyed and bewildered. "And I've seen the clipping of the article in the Sunday Sphere of--"
Just a moment. You're not in The Sphere office. Did you think you were? Some one has directed you wrong. This is The Ledger.
Oh! said Banneker. "It was a policeman that pointed it out. I suppose I saw wrong." He paused; then looked up ingenuously. "But, anyway, I'd rather be on The Ledger."
Mr. Gordon smiled broadly, the thin blade poised over a plump, reddened knuckle.
Would you! Now, why?
I've been reading it. I like the way it does things.
The editor laughed outright. "If you didn't look so honest, I would think that somebody of experience had been tutoring you. How many other places have you tried?"
None.
You were going to The Sphere first? On the promise of a job?
No. Because they printed what I wrote.
The Sphere's ways are not our ways, pronounced Mr. Gordon primly. "It's a fundamental difference in standards."
I can see that.
Oh, you can, can you? chuckled the other. "But it's true that we have no opening here."
(The Ledger never did have an "opening"; but it managed to wedge in a goodly number of neophytes, from year to year, ninety per cent of whom were automatically and courteously ejected after due trial. Mr. Gordon performed a surpassing rataplan upon his long-suffering thumb-joint and wondered if this queer and direct being might qualify among the redeemable ten per cent.)
I can wait. (They often said that.) "For a while," added the youth thoughtfully.
How long have you been in New York?
Thirty-three days.
And what have you been doing?
Reading newspapers.
No! Reading--That's rather surprising. All of them?
All that I could manage.
Some were so bad that you couldn't worry through them, eh? asked the other with appreciation.
Not that. But I didn't know the foreign languages except French, and Spanish, and a little Italian.
The foreign-language press, too. Remarkable! murmured the other. "Do you mind telling me what your idea was?"
It was simple enough. As I wanted to get on a newspaper, I thought I ought to find out what newspapers were made of.
Simple, as you say. Beautifully simple! So you've devised for yourself the little job of perfecting yourself in every department of journalism; politics, finances, criminal, sports, society; all of them, eh?
No; not all, replied Banneker.
Not? What have you left out?
Society news was the answer, delivered less promptly than the other replies.
Bestowing a twinkle of mingled amusement and conjecture upon the applicant's clothing, Mr. Gordon said:
You don't approve of our social records? Or you're not interested? Or why is it that you neglect this popular branch?
Personal reasons.
This reply, which took the managing editor somewhat aback, was accurate if not explanatory. Miss Van Arsdale's commentaries upon Gardner and his quest had inspired Banneker with a contemptuous distaste for this type of journalism. But chiefly he had shunned the society columns from dread of finding there some mention of her who had been Io Welland. He was resolved to conquer and evict that memory; he would not consciously put himself in the way of anything that recalled it.
Hum! And this notion of making an intensive study of the papers; was that original with you?
Well, no, not entirely. I got it from a man who made himself a bank president in seven years.
Yes? How did he do that?
He started by reading everything he could find about money and coinage and stocks and bonds and other financial paper. He told me that it was incredible the things that financial experts didn't know about their own business--the deep-down things--and that he guessed it was so with any business. He got on top by really knowing the things that everybody was supposed to know.
A sound theory, I dare say. Most financiers aren't so revealing.
He and I were padding the hoof together. We were both hoboes then.
The managing editor looked up, alert, from his knuckle-tapping. "From bank president to hobo. Was his bank an important one?"
The biggest in a medium-sized city.
And does that suggest nothing to you, as a prospective newspaper man?
What? Write him up?
It would make a fairly sensational story.
I couldn't do that. He was my friend. He wouldn't like it.
Mr. Gordon addressed his wedding-ring finger which was looking a bit scarified. "Such an article as that, properly done, would go a long way toward getting you a chance on this paper--Sit down, Mr. Banneker."
You and I, said Banneker slowly and in the manner of the West, "can't deal."
Yes, we can. The managing editor threw his steel blade on the desk. "Sit down, I tell you. And understand this. If you come on this paper--I'm going to turn you over to Mr. Greenough, the city editor, with a request that he give you a trial--you'll be expected to subordinate every personal interest and advantage to the interests and advantages of the paper, _except_ your sense of honor and fair-play. We don't ask you to give that up; and if you do give it up, we don't want you at all. What have you done besides be a hobo?"
Railroading. Station-agent.
Where were you educated?
Nowhere. Wherever I could pick it up.
Which means everywhere. Ever read George Borrow?
Yes.
The heavy face of Mr. Gordon lighted up. "Ree-markable! Keep on. He's a good offset to--to the daily papers. Writing still counts, on The Ledger. Come over and meet Mr. Greenough."
The city editor unobtrusively studied Banneker out of placid, inscrutable eyes, soft as a dove's, while he chatted at large about theaters, politics, the news of the day. Afterward the applicant met the Celtic assistant, Mr. Mallory, who broadly outlined for him the technique of the office. With no further preliminaries Banneker found himself employed at fifteen dollars a week, with Monday for his day off and directions to report on the first of the month.
As the day-desk staff was about departing at six o'clock, Mr. Gordon sauntered over to the city desk looking mildly apologetic.
I practically had to take that young desert antelope on, said he.
Too ingenuous to turn down, surmised the city editor.
Ingenuous! He's heir to the wisdom of the ages. And now I'm afraid I've made a ghastly mistake.
Something wrong with him?
I've had his stuff in the Sunday Sphere looked up.
Pretty weird? put in Mallory, gliding into his beautifully fitting overcoat.
So damned good that I don't see how The Sphere ever came to take it. Greenough, you'll have to find some pretext for firing that young phenomenon as soon as possible.
Perfectly comprehending his superior's mode of indirect expression the city editor replied:
You think so highly of him as that?
Not one of our jobs will be safe from him if he once gets his foot planted, prophesied the other with mock ruefulness. "Do you know," he added, "I never even asked him for a reference."
You don't need to, pronounced Mallory, shaking the last wrinkle out of himself and lighting the cigarette of departure. "He's got it in his face, if I'm any judge."
Highly elate, Banneker walked on springy pavements all the way to Grove Street. Fifteen a week! He could live on that. His other income and savings could be devoted to carrying out Miss Camilla's advice. For he need not save any more. He would go ahead, fast, now that he had got his start. How easy it had been.
Entering the Brashear door, he met plain, middle-aged little Miss Westlake. A muffler was pressed to her jaw. He recalled having heard her moving about her room, the cheapest and least desirable in the house, and groaning softly late in the night; also having heard some lodgers say that she was a typist with very little work. Obviously she needed a dentist, and presumably she had not the money to pay his fee. In the exultation of his good luck, Banneker felt a stir of helpfulness toward this helpless person.
Oh! said he. "How do you do! Could you find time to do some typing for me quite soon?"
It was said impulsively and was followed by a surge of dismay. Typing? Type what? He had absolutely nothing on hand!
Well, he must get up something. At once. It would never do to disappoint that pathetic and eager hope, as of a last-moment rescue, expressed in the little spinster's quick flush and breathless, thankful affirmative.
Ten days' leeway before entering upon the new work. To which of scores of crowding purposes could Banneker best put the time? In his offhand way the instructive Mallory had suggested that he familiarize himself with the topography and travel-routes of the Island of Manhattan. Indefatigably he set about doing this; wandering from water-front to water-front, invading tenements, eating at queer, Englishless restaurants, picking up chance acquaintance with chauffeurs, peddlers, street-fakers, park-bench loiterers; all that drifting and iridescent scum of life which variegates the surface above the depths. Everywhere he was accepted without question, for his old experience on the hoof had given him the uncoded password which loosens the speech of furtive men and wise. A receptivity, sensitized to a high degree by the inspiration of new adventure, absorbed these impressions. The faithful pocket-ledger was filling rapidly with notes and phrases, brisk and trenchant, set down with no specific purpose; almost mechanically, in fact, but destined to future uses. Mallory, himself no mean connoisseur of the tumultuous and flagrant city, would perhaps have found matter foreign to his expert apprehension could he have seen and translated the pages of 3 T 9901.
Banneker would go forward in the fascinating paths of exploration; but there were other considerations.
The outer man, for example. The inner man, too; the conscious inner man strengthened upon the strong milk of the philosophers, the priests, and the prophets so strangely mingled in that library now stored with Camilla Van Arsdale; exhilarated by the honey-dew of "The Undying Voices," of Keats and Shelley, and of Swinburne's supernal rhythms, which he had brought with him. One visit to the Public Library had quite appalled him; the vast, chill orderliness of it. He had gone there, hungry to chat about books! To the Public Library! Surely a Homeric joke for grim, tomish officialdom. But tomish officialdom had not even laughed at him; it was too official to appreciate the quality of such side-splitting innocence.... Was he likely to meet a like irresponsiveness when he should seek clothing for the body?
Watch the clubs, young Wickert had advised. Banneker strolled up Fifth Avenue, branching off here and there, into the more promising side streets.
It was the hour of the First Thirst; the institutions which cater to this and subsequent thirsts drew steadily from the main stream of human activity flowing past. Many gloriously clad specimens passed in and out of the portals, socially sacred as in the quiet Fifth Avenue clubs, profane as in the roaring, taxi-bordered "athletic" foundations; but there seemed to the anxious observer no keynote, no homogeneous character wherefrom to build as on a sure foundation. Lacking knowledge, his instinct could find no starting-point; he was bewildered in vision and in mind. Just off the corner of the quietest of the Forties, he met a group of four young men, walking compactly by twos. The one nearest him in the second line was Herbert Cressey. His heavy and rather dull eye seemed to meet Banneker's as they came abreast. Banneker nodded, half checking himself in his slow walk.
How are you? he said with an accent of surprise and pleasure.
Cressey's expressionless face turned a little. There was no response in kind to Banneker's smile.
Oh! H'ware you! said he vaguely, and passed on.
Banneker advanced mechanically until he reached the corner. There he stopped. His color had heightened. The smile was still on his lips; it had altered, taken on a quality of gameness. He did not shake his fist at the embodied spirit of metropolitanism before him, as had a famous Gallic precursor of his, also a determined seeker for Success in a lesser sphere; but he paraphrased Rastignac's threat in his own terms.
I reckon I'll have to lick this town and lick it good before it learns to be friendly.
A hand fell on his arm. He turned to face Cressey.
You're the feller that bossed the wreck out there in the desert, aren't you? You're--lessee--Banneker.
I am. The tone was curt.
Awfully sorry I didn't spot you at once. Cressey's genuineness was a sufficient apology. "I'm a little stuffy to-day. Bachelor dinner last night. What are you doing here? Looking around?"
No. I'm living here.
That so? So am I. Come into my club and let's talk. I'm glad to see you, Mr. Banneker.
Even had Banneker been prone to self-consciousness, which he was not, the extreme, almost monastic plainness of the small, neutral-fronted building to which the other led him would have set him at ease. It gave no inkling of its unique exclusiveness, and equally unique expensiveness. As for Cressey, that simple, direct, and confident soul took not the smallest account of Banneker's standardized clothing, which made him almost as conspicuous in that environment as if he had entered clad in a wooden packing-case. Cressey's creed in such matters was complete; any friend of his was good enough for any environment to which he might introduce him, and any other friend who took exceptions might go farther!
Banzai! said the cheerful host over his cocktail. "Welcome to our city. Hope you like it."
I do, said Banneker, lifting his glass in response.
Where are you living?
Grove Street.
Cressey knit his brows. "Where's that? Harlem?"
No. Over west of Sixth Avenue.
Queer kind of place to live, ain't it? There's a corkin' little suite vacant over at the Regalton. Cheap at the money. Oh!-er-I-er-maybe--
Yes; that's it, smiled Banneker. "The treasury isn't up to bachelor suites, yet awhile. I've only just got a job."
What is it?
Newspaper work. The Morning Ledger.
Reporting? A dubious expression clouded the candid cheerfulness of the other's face.
Yes. What's the matter with that?
Oh; I dunno. It's a piffling sort of job, ain't it?
Piffling? How do you mean?
Well, I supposed you had to ask a lot of questions and pry into other people's business and--and all that sorta thing.
If nobody asked questions, pointed out Banneker, remembering Gardner's resolute devotion to his professional ideals, "there wouldn't be any news, would there?"
Sure! That's right, agreed the gilded youth. "The Ledger's the decentest paper in town, too. It's a gentleman's paper. I know a feller on it; Guy Mallory; was in my class at college. Give you a letter to him if you like."
Informed that Banneker already knew Mr. Mallory, his host expressed the hope of being useful to him in any other possible manner--"any tips I can give you or anything of that sort, old chap?"--so heartily that the newcomer broached the subject of clothes.
Nothin' easier, was the ready response. "I'll take you right down to Mertoun. Just one more and we're off."
The one more having been disposed of: "What is it you want?" inquired Cressey, when they were settled in the taxi which was waiting at the club door for them.
Well, what _do_ I want? You tell me.
How far do you want to go? Will five hundred be too much?
No.
Cressey lost himself in mental calculations out of which he presently delivered himself to this effect:
Evening clothes, of course. And a dinner-jacket suit. Two business suits, a light and a dark. You won't need a morning coat, I expect, for a while. Anyway, we've got to save somethin' out for shirts and boots, haven't we?
I haven't the money with me remarked Banneker, his innocent mind on the cash-with-order policy of Sears-Roebuck.
Now, see here, said Cressey, good-humoredly, yet with an effect of authority. "This is a game that's got to be played according to the rules. Why, if you put down spot cash before Mertoun's eyes he'd faint from surprise, and when he came to, he'd have no respect for you. And a tailor's respect for you," continued Cressey, the sage, "shows in your togs."
When do I pay, then?
Oh, in three or four months he sends around a bill. That's more of a reminder to come in and order your fall outfit than it is anything else. But you can send him a check on account, if you feel like it.
A check? repeated the neophyte blankly. "Must I have a bank account?"
Safer than a sock, my boy. And just as simple. To-morrow will do for that, when we call on the shirt-makers and the shoe sharps. I'll put you in my bank; they'll take you on for five hundred.
Arrived at Mertoun's, Banneker unobtrusively but positively developed a taste of his own in the matter of hue and pattern; one, too, which commanded Cressey's respect. The gilded youth's judgment tended toward the more pronounced herringbones and homespuns.
All right for you, who can change seven days in the week; but I've got to live with these clothes, day in and day out, argued Banneker.
To which Cressey deferred, though with a sigh. "You could carry off those sporty things as if they were woven to order for you," he declared. "You've got the figure, the carriage, the--the whatever-the-devil it is, for it."
Prospectively poorer by something more than four hundred dollars, Banneker emerged from Mertoun's with his mentor.
Gotta get home and dress for a rotten dinner, announced that gentleman cheerfully. "Duck in here with me," he invited, indicating a sumptuous bar, near the tailor's, "and get another little kick in the stomach. No? Oh, verrawell. Where are you for?"
The Public Library.
Gawd! said his companion, honestly shocked. "That's a gloomy hole, ain't it?"
Not so bad, when you get used to it. I've been putting in three hours a day there lately.
Whatever for?
Oh, browsing. Book-hungry, I suppose. Carnegie hasn't discovered Manzanita yet, you know; so I haven't had many library opportunities.
Speaking of Manzanita, remarked Cressey, and spoke of it, reminiscently and at length, as they walked along together. "Did the lovely and mysterious I.O.W. ever turn up and report herself?"
Banneker's breath caught painfully in his throat.
D'you know who she was? pursued the other, without pause for reply to his previous question; and still without intermission continued: "Io Welland. _That_'s who she was. Oh, but she's a hummer! I've met her since. Married, you know. Quick work, that marriage. There was a dam' queer story whispered around about her starting to elope with some other chap, and his going nearly batty because she didn't turn up, and all the time she was wandering around in the desert until somebody picked her up and took care of her. You ought to know something of that. It was supposed to be right in your back-yard."
I? said Banneker, commanding himself with an effort; "Miss Welland reported in with a slight injury. That's all."
One glance at him told Cressey that Banneker did indeed "know something" of the mysterious disappearance which had so exercised a legion of busy tongues in New York; how much that something might be, he preserved for future and private speculation, based on the astounding perception that Banneker was in real pain of soul. Tact inspired Cressey to say at once: "Of course, that's all you had to consider. By the way, you haven't seen my revered uncle since you got here, have you?"
Mr. Vanney? No.
Better drop in on him.
He might try to give me another yellow-back, smiled the ex-agent.
Don't take Uncle Van for a fool. Once is plenty for him to be hit on the nose.
Has he still got a green whisker?
Go and see. He's asked about you two or three times in the last coupla months.
But I've no errand with him.
How can you tell? He might start something for you. It isn't often that he keeps a man in mind like he has you. Anyway, he's a wise old bird and may hand you a pointer or two about what's what in New York. Shall I 'phone him you're in town?
Yes. I'll get in to see him some time to-morrow.
Having made an appointment, in the vital matter of shirts and shoes, for the morning, they parted. Banneker set to his browsing in the library until hunger drove him forth. After dinner he returned to his room, cumbered with the accumulation of evening papers, for study.
Beyond the thin partition he could hear Miss Westlake moving about and humming happily to herself. The sound struck dismay to his soul. The prospect of work from him was doubtless the insecure foundation of that cheerfulness. "Soon" he had said; the implication was that the matter was pressing. Probably she was counting on it for the morrow. Well, he must furnish something, anything, to feed the maw of her hungry typewriter; to fulfill that wistful hope which had sprung in her eyes when he spoke to her.
Sweeping his table bare of the lore and lure of journalism as typified in the bulky, black-faced editions, he set out clean paper, cleansed his fountain pen, and stared at the ceiling. What should he write about? His mental retina teemed with impressions. But they were confused, unresolved, distorted for all that he knew, since he lacked experience and knowledge of the environment, and therefore perspective. Groping, he recalled a saying of Gardner's as that wearied enthusiast descanted upon the glories of past great names in metropolitan journalism.
They used to say of Julian Ralph that he was always discovering City Hall Park and getting excited over it; and when he got excited enough, he wrote about it so that the public just ate it up.
Well, he, Banneker, hadn't discovered City Hall Park; not consciously. But he had gleaned wonder and delight from other and more remote spots, and now one of them began to stand forth upon the blank ceiling at which he stared, seeking guidance. A crowded corner of Essex Street, stewing in the hard sunshine. The teeming, shrill crowd. The stench and gleam of a fish-stall offering bargains. The eager games of the children, snatched between onsets of imminent peril as cart or truck came whirling through and scattering the players. Finally the episode of the trade fracas over the remains of a small and dubious weakfish, terminating when the dissatisfied customer cast the delicacy at the head of the stall-man and missed him, the _corpus delicti_ falling into the gutter where it was at once appropriated and rapt away by an incredulous, delighted, and mangy cat. A crude, commonplace, malodorous little street row, the sort of thing that happens, in varying phases, on a dozen East-Side corners seven days in the week.
Banneker approached and treated the matter from the viewpoint of the cat, predatory, philosophic, ecstatic. One o'clock in the morning saw the final revision, for he had become enthralled with the handling of his subject. It was only a scant five pages; less than a thousand words. But as he wrote and rewrote, other schemata rose to the surface of his consciousness, and he made brief notes of them on random ends of paper; half a dozen of them, one crowding upon another. Some day, perhaps, when there were enough of them, when he had become known, had achieved the distinction of a signature like Gardner, there might be a real series.... His vague expectancies were dimmed in weariness.
Such was the genesis of the "Local Vagrancies" which later were to set Park Row speculating upon the signature "Eban."
Accessibility was one of Mr. Horace Vanney's fads. He aspired to be a publicist, while sharing fallible humanity's ignorance of just what the vague and imposing term signifies; and, as a publicist, he conceived it in character to be readily available to the public. Almost anybody could get to see Mr. Vanney in his tasteful and dignified lower Broadway offices, upon almost any reasonable or plausible errand. Especially was he hospitable to the newspaper world, the agents of publicity; and, such is the ingratitude of the fallen soul of man, every newspaper office in the city fully comprehended his attitude, made use of him as convenient, and professionally regarded him as a bit of a joke, albeit a useful and amiable joke. Of this he had no inkling. Enough for him that he was frequently, even habitually quoted, upon a wide range of windy topics, often with his picture appended.
With far less difficulty than he had found in winning the notice of Mr. Gordon, Banneker attained the sanctum of the capitalist.
Well, well! was the important man's greeting as he shook hands. "Our young friend from the desert! How do we find New York?"
From Banneker's reply, there grew out a pleasantly purposeless conversation, which afforded the newcomer opportunity to decide that he did not like this Mr. Vanney, sleek, smiling, gentle, and courteous, as well as he had the brusque old tyrant of the wreck. That green-whiskered autocrat had been at least natural, direct, and unselfish in his grim emergency work. This manifestation seemed wary, cautious, on its guard to defend itself against some probable tax upon its good nature. All this unconscious, instinctive reckoning of the other man's characteristics gave to the young fellow an effect of poise, of judicious balance and quiet confidence. It was one of Banneker's elements of strength, which subsequently won for him his unique place, that he was always too much interested in estimating the man to whom he was talking, to consider even what the other might think of him. It was at once a form of egoism, and the total negation of egotism. It made him the least self-conscious of human beings. And old Horace Vanney, pompous, vain, the most self-conscious of his genus, felt, though he could not analyze, the charm of it.
A chance word indicated that Banneker was already "placed." At once, though almost insensibly, the attitude of Mr. Vanney eased; obviously there was no fear of his being "boned" for a job. At the same time he experienced a mild misgiving lest he might be forfeiting the services of one who could be really useful to him. Banneker's energy and decisiveness at the wreck had made a definite impression upon him. But there was the matter of the rejected hundred-dollar tip. Unpliant, evidently, this young fellow. Probably it was just as well that he should be broken in to life and new standards elsewhere than in the Vanney interests. Later, if he developed, watchfulness might show it to be worth while to....
What is it that you have in mind, my boy? inquired the benign Mr. Vanney.
I start in on The Ledger next month.
The Ledger! Indeed! I did not know that you had any journalistic experience.
I haven't.
Well. Er--hum! Journalism, eh? A--er--brilliant profession!
You think well of it?
I have many friends among the journalists. Fine fellows! Very fine fellows.
The instinctive tone of patronage was not lost upon Banneker. He felt annoyed at Mr. Vanney. Unreasonably annoyed. "What's the matter with journalism?" he asked bluntly.
The matter? Mr. Vanney was blandly surprised. "Haven't I just said--"
Yes; you have. Would you let your son go into a newspaper office?
My son? My son chose the profession of law.
But if he had wanted to be a journalist?
Journalism does not perhaps offer the same opportunities for personal advancement as some other lines, said the financier cautiously.
Why shouldn't it?
It is largely anonymous. Mr. Vanney gave the impression of feeling carefully for his words. "One may go far in journalism and yet be comparatively unknown to the public. Still, he might be of great usefulness," added the sage, brightening, "very great usefulness. A sound, conservative, self-respecting newspaper such as The Ledger, is a public benefactor."
And the editor of it?
That's right, my boy, approved the other. "Aim high! Aim high! The great prizes in journalism are few. They are, in any line of endeavor. And the apprenticeship is hard."
Herbert Cressey's clumsy but involuntary protest reasserted itself in Banneker's mind. "I wish you would tell me frankly, Mr. Vanney, whether reporting is considered undignified and that sort of thing?"
Reporters can be a nuisance, replied Mr. Vanney fervently. "But they can also be very useful."
But on the whole--
On the whole it is a necessary apprenticeship. Very suitable for a young man. Not a final career, in my judgment.
A reporter on The Ledger, then, is nothing but a reporter on The Ledger.
Isn't that enough, for a start? smiled the other. "The station-agent at--what was the name of your station? Yes, Manzanita. The station-agent at Manzanita--"
Was E. Banneker, interposed the owner of that name positively. "A small puddle, but the inhabitant was an individual toad, at least. To keep one's individuality in New York isn't so easy, of course."
There are quite a number of people in New York, pointed out the philosopher, Vanney. "Mostly crowd."
Yes, said Banneker. "You've told me something about the newspaper business that I wanted to know." He rose.
The other put out an arresting hand. "Wouldn't you like to do a little reporting for me, before you take up your regular work?"
What kind of reporting?
Quite simple. A manufacturing concern in which I own a considerable interest has a strike on its hands. Suppose you go down to Sippiac, New Jersey, where our factories are, spend three or four days, and report back to me your impressions and any ideas you may gather as to improving our organization for furthering our interests.
What makes you think that I could be useful in that line? asked Banneker curiously.
My observations at the Manzanita wreck. You have, I believe, a knack for handling a situation.
I can always try, accepted Banneker.
Supplied with letters to the officials of the International Cloth Company, and a liberal sum for expenses, the neophyte went to Sippiac. There he visited the strongly guarded mills, still making a feeble pretense of operating, talked with the harassed officials, the gang-boss of the strike-breakers, the "private guards," who had, in fact, practically assumed dominant police authority in the place; all of which was faithful to the programme arranged by Mr. Vanney. Having done so much, he undertook to obtain a view of the strike from the other side; visited the wretched tenements of the laborers, sought out the sullen and distrustful strike-leaders, heard much fiery oratory and some veiled threats from impassioned agitators, mostly foreign and all tragically earnest; chatted with corner grocerymen, saloon-keepers, ward politicians, composing his mental picture of a strike in a minor city, absolutely controlled, industrially, politically, and socially by the industry which had made it. The town, as he came to conceive it, was a fevered and struggling gnome, bound to a wheel which ground for others; a gnome who, if he broke his bonds, would be perhaps only the worse for his freedom. At the beginning of the sixth day, for his stay had outgrown its original plan, the pocket-ledger, 3 T 9901, was but little the richer, but the mind of its owner teemed with impressions.
It was his purpose to take those impressions in person to Mr. Horace Vanney, by the 10 A.M. train. Arriving at the station early, he was surprised at being held up momentarily by a line of guards engaged in blocking off a mob of wailing, jabbering women, many of whom had children in their arms, or at their skirts. He asked the ticket-agent, a big, pasty young man about them.
Mill workers, said the agent, making change.
What are they after?
Wanta get to the 10.10 train.
And the guards are stopping them?
You can use your eyes, cantcha?
Using his eyes, Banneker considered the position. "Are those fellows on railroad property?"
What is it to you whether they are or ain't?
Banneker explained his former occupation. "That's different," said the agent. "Come inside. That's a hell of a mess, ain't it!" he added plaintively as Banneker complied. "Some of those poor Hunkies have got their tickets and can't use 'em."
I'd see that they got their train, if this was my station, asserted Banneker.
Yes, you would! With that gang of strong-arms against you.
Chase 'em, advised Banneker simply. "They've got no right keeping your passengers off your trains."
Chase 'em, ay? You'd do it, I suppose.
I would.
How?
You've got a gun, haven't you?
Maybe you think those guys haven't got guns, too.
Well, all I can say is, that if there had been passengers held up from their trains at my station and I didn't get them through, _I_'d have been through so far as the Atkinson and St. Philip goes.
This railroad's different. I'd be through if I butted in on this mill row.
How's that?
Well, for one thing, old Vanney, who's the real boss here, is a director of the road.
So _that_'s it! Banneker digested this information. "Why are the women so anxious to get away?"
They say--the local agent lowered his voice--"their children are starving here, and they can get better jobs in other places. Naturally the mills don't want to lose a lot of their hands, particularly the women, because they're the cheapest. I don't know as I blame 'em for that. But this business of hiring a bunch of ex-cons and--Hey! Where are you goin'?"
Banneker was beyond the door before the query was completed. Looking out of the window, the agent saw a fat and fussy young mother, who had contrived to get through the line, waddling at her best speed across the open toward the station, and dragging a small boy by the hand. A lank giant from the guards' ranks was after her. Screaming, she turned the corner out of his vision. There were sounds which suggested a row at the station-door, but the agent, called at that moment to the wire, could not investigate. The train came and went, and he saw nothing more of the ex-railroader from the West.
Although Mr. Horace Vanney smiled pleasantly enough when Banneker presented himself at the office to make his report, the nature of the smile suggested a background more uncertain.
Well, what have you found, my boy? the financier began.
A good many things that ought to be changed, answered Banneker bluntly.
Quite probably. No institution is perfect.
The mills are pretty rotten. You pay your people too little--
Where do you get that idea?
From the way they live.
My dear boy; if we paid them twice as much, they'd live the same way. The surplus would go to the saloons.
Then why not wipe out the saloons?
I am not the Common Council of Sippiac, returned Mr. Vanney dryly.
Aren't you? retorted Banneker even more dryly.
The other frowned. "What else?"
Well; the housing. You own a good many of the tenements, don't you?
The company owns some.
They're filthy holes.
They are what the tenants make them.
The tenants didn't build them with lightless hallways, did they?
They needn't live there if they don't like them. Have you spent all your time, for which I am paying, nosing about like a cheap magazine muckraker? It was clear that Mr. Vanney was annoyed.
I've been trying to find out what is wrong with Sippiac. I thought you wanted facts.
Precisely. Facts. Not sentimental gushings.
Well, there are your guards. There isn't much sentiment about them. I saw one of them smash a woman in the face, and knock her down, while she was trying to catch a train and get out of town.
And what did you do?
I don't know exactly how much. But I hope enough to land him in the hospital. They pulled me off too soon.
Do you know that you would have been killed if it hadn't been for some of the factory staff who saved you from the other guards--as you deserved, for your foolhardiness?
The young man's eyebrows went up a bit. "Don't bank too much on my foolhardiness. I had a wall back of me. And there would have been material for several funerals before they got me." He touched his hip-pocket. "By the way, you seem to be well informed."
I've been in 'phone communication with Sippiac since the regrettable occurrence. It perhaps didn't occur to you to find out that the woman, who is now under arrest, bit the guard very severely.
Of course! Just like the rabbit bit the bulldog. You've got a lot of thugs and strong-arm men doing your dirty work, that ought to be in jail. If the newspapers here ever get onto the situation, it would make pretty rough reading for you, Mr. Vanney.
The magnate looked at him with contemptuous amusement. "No newspaper of decent standing prints that kind of socialistic stuff, my young friend."
Why not?
Why not! Because of my position. Because the International Cloth Company is a powerful institution of the most reputable standing, with many lines of influence.
And that is enough to keep the newspapers from printing an article about conditions in Sippiac? asked Banneker, deeply interested in this phase of the question. "Is that the fact?"
It was not the fact; The Sphere, for one, would have handled the strike on the basis of news interest, as Mr. Vanney well knew; wherefore he hated and pretended to despise The Sphere. But for his own purposes he answered:
Not a paper in New York would touch it. Except, he added negligently, "perhaps some lying, Socialist sheet. And let me warn you, Mr. Banneker," he pursued in his suavest tone, "that you will find no place for your peculiar ideas on The Ledger. In fact, I doubt whether you will be doing well either by them or by yourself in going on their staff, holding such views as you do."
Do you? Then I'll tell them beforehand.
Mr. Vanney privately reflected that there was no need of this: _he_ intended to call up the editor-in-chief and suggest the unsuitability of the candidate for a place, however humble, on the staff of a highly respectable and suitably respectful daily.
Which he did. The message was passed on to Mr. Gordon, and, in his large and tolerant soul, decently interred. One thing of which the managing editor of The Ledger was not tolerant was interference from without in his department.
Before allowing his man to leave, Mr. Vanney read him a long and well-meant homily, full of warning and wisdom, and was both annoyed and disheartened when, at the end of it, Banneker remarked:
I'll dare you to take a car and spend twenty-four hours going about Sippiac with me. If you stand for your system after that, I'll pay for the car.
To which the other replied sadly that Banneker had in some manner acquired a false and distorted view of industrial relations.
Therein, for once in an existence guided almost exclusively by prejudice, Horace Vanney was right. At the outset of a new career to which he was attuning his mind, Banneker had been injected into a situation typical of all that is worst in American industrial life, a local manufacturing enterprise grown rich upon the labor of underpaid foreigners, through the practice of all the vicious, lawless, and insidious methods of an ingrown autocracy, and had believed it to be fairly representative. Had not Horace Vanney, doubtless genuine in his belief, told him as much?
We're as fair and careful with our employees as any of our competitors.
As a matter of fact there were, even then, scores of manufacturing plants within easy distance of New York, representing broad and generous policies and conducted on a progressive and humanistic labor system. Had Banneker had his first insight into local industrial conditions through one of these, he might readily have been prejudiced in favor of capital. As it was, swallowing Vanney's statement as true, he mistook an evil example as a fair indication of the general status. Then and there he became a zealous protagonist of labor.
It had been Mr. Horace Vanney's shrewd design to show a budding journalist of promise on which side his self-interest lay. The weak spot in the plan was that Banneker did not seem to care!
Banneker's induction into journalism was unimpressive. They gave him a desk, an outfit of writing materials, a mail-box with his name on it, and eventually an assignment. Mr. Mallory presented him to several of the other "cubs" and two or three of the older and more important reporters. They were all quite amiable, obviously willing to be helpful, and they impressed the observant neophyte with that quiet and solid _esprit de corps_ which is based upon respect for work well performed in a common cause. He apprehended that The Ledger office was in some sort an institution.
None of his new acquaintances volunteered information as to the mechanism of his new job. Apparently he was expected to figure that out for himself. By nature reticent, and trained in an environment which still retained enough of frontier etiquette to make a scrupulous incuriosity the touchstone of good manners and perhaps the essence of self-preservation, Banneker asked no questions. He sat and waited.
One by one the other reporters were summoned by name to the city desk, and dispatched with a few brief words upon the various items of the news. Presently Banneker found himself alone, in the long files of desks. For an hour he sat there and for a second hour. It seemed a curious way in which to be earning fifteen dollars a week. He wondered whether he was expected to sit tight at his desk. Or had he the freedom of the office? Characteristically choosing the more active assumption, he found his way to the current newspaper files. They were like old friends.
Mr. Banneker. An office boy was at his elbow. "Mr. Greenough wants you."
Conscious of a quickened pulse, and annoyed at himself because of it, the tyro advanced to receive his maiden assignment. The epochal event was embodied in the form of a small clipping from an evening paper, stating that a six-year-old boy had been fatally burned at a bonfire near the North River. Banneker, Mr. Greenough instructed him mildly, was to make inquiries of the police, of the boy's family, of the hospital, and of such witnesses as he could find.
Quick with interest he caught up his hat and hurried out. Death, in the sparsely populated country wherefrom he hailed, was a matter of inclusive local importance; he assumed the same of New York. Three intense hours he devoted to an item which any police reporter of six months' standing would have rounded up in a brace of formal inquiries, and hastened back, brimful of details for Mr. Greenough.
Good! Good! interpolated that blandly approving gentleman from time to time in the course of the narrative. "Write it, Mr. Banneker! write it."
How much shall I write?
Just what is necessary to tell the news.
Behind the amiable smile which broadened without lighting up the sub-Mongol physiognomy of the city editor, Banneker suspected something. As he sat writing page after page, conscientiously setting forth every germane fact, the recollection of that speculative, estimating smile began to play over the sentences with a dire and blighting beam. Three fourths of the way through, the writer rose, went to the file-board and ran through a dozen newspapers. He was seeking a ratio, a perspective. He wished to determine how much, in a news sense, the death of the son of an obscure East-Side plasterer was worth. On his return he tore up all that he had written, and substituted a curt paragraph, without character or color, which he turned in. He had gauged the value of the tragedy accurately, in the light of his study of news files.
Greenough showed the paragraph (which failed to appear at all in the overcrowded paper of next morning) to Mr. Gordon.
The new man doesn't start well, he remarked. "Too little imaginative interest."
Isn't it knowledge rather than lack of interest? suggested the managing editor.
It may come to the same thing. If he knows too much to get really interested, he'll be a dull reporter.
I doubt whether you'll find him dull, smiled Mr. Gordon. "But he may find his job dull. In that case, of course he'd better find another."
Indeed, that was the danger which, for weeks to follow, Banneker skirted. Police news, petty and formal, made up his day's work. Had he sought beneath the surface of it the underlying elements, and striven to express these, his matter as it came to the desk, however slight the technical news value might have been, would have afforded the watchful copy-readers, trained to that special selectiveness as only The Ledger could train its men, opportunity of judging what potentialities might lurk beneath the crudities of the "cub." But Banneker was not crude. He was careful. His sense of the relative importance of news, acquired by those weeks of intensive analysis before applying for his job, was too just to let him give free play to his pen. What was the use? The "story" wasn't worth the space.
Nevertheless, 3 T 9901, which Banneker was already too cognoscent to employ in his formal newsgathering (the notebook is anathema to the metropolitan reporter), was filling up with odd bits, which were being transferred, in the weary hours when the new man sat at his desk with nothing to do, to paper in the form of sketches for Miss Westlake's trustful and waiting typewriter. Nobody could say that Banneker was not industrious. Among his fellow reporters he soon acquired the melancholy reputation of one who was forever writing "special stuff," none of which ever "landed." It was chiefly because of his industry and reliability, rather than any fulfillment of the earlier promise of brilliant worth as shown in the Sunday Sphere articles, that he got his first raise to twenty dollars. It surprised rather than gratified him.
He went to Mr. Gordon about it. The managing editor was the kind of man with whom it is easy to talk straight talk.
What's the matter with me? asked Banneker.
Mr. Gordon played a thoughtful tattoo upon his fleshy knuckles with the letter-opener. "Nothing. Aren't you satisfied?"
No. Are you?
You've had your raise, and fairly early. Unless you had been worth it, you wouldn't have had it.
Am I doing what you expected of me?
Not exactly. But you're developing into a sure, reliable reporter.
A routine man, commented Banneker.
After all, the routine man is the backbone of the office. Mr. Gordon executed a fantasia on his thumb. "Would you care to try a desk job?" he asked, peering at Banneker over his glasses.
I'd rather run a trolley car. There's more life in it.
Do you _see_ life, in your work, Mr. Banneker?
See it? I feel it. Sometimes I think it's going to flatten me out like a steam-roller.
Then why not write it?
It isn't news: not what I see.
Perhaps not. Perhaps it's something else. But if it's there and we can get a gleam of it into the paper, we'll crowd news out to make a place for it. You haven't been reading The Ledger I'm afraid.
Like a Bible.
Not to good purpose, then. What do you think of Tommy Burt's stuff?
It's funny; some of it. But I couldn't do it to save my job.
Nobody can do it but Burt, himself. Possibly you could learn something from it, though.
Burt doesn't like it, himself. He told me it was all formula; that you could always get a laugh out of people about something they'd been taught to consider funny, like a red nose or a smashed hat. He's got a list of Sign Posts on the Road to Humor.
The cynicism of twenty-eight, smiled the tolerant Mr. Gordon. "Don't let yourself be inoculated."
Mr. Gordon, said Banneker doggedly; "I'm not doing the kind of work I expected to do here."
You can hardly expect the star jobs until you've made yourself a star man.
Banneker flushed. "I'm not complaining of the way I've been treated. I've had a square enough deal. The trouble is with me. I want to know whether I ought to stick or quit."
If you quit, what would you do?
I haven't a notion, replied the other with an indifference which testified to a superb, instinctive self-confidence. "Something."
Do it here. I think you'll come along all right.
But what's wrong with me? persisted Banneker.
Too much restraint. A rare fault. You haven't let yourself out. For a space he drummed and mused. Suddenly a knuckle cracked loudly. Mr. Gordon flinched and glared at it, startled as if it had offended him by interrupting a train of thought. "Here!" said he brusquely. "There's a Sewer-Cleaners' Association picnic to-morrow. They're going to put in half their day inspecting the Stimson Tunnel under the North River. Pretty idea; isn't it? Suppose I ask Mr. Greenough to send you out on the story. And I'd like a look at it when you turn it in."
Banneker worked hard on his report of the picnic; hard and self-consciously. Tommy Burt would, he knew, have made a "scream" of it, for tired business men to chuckle over on their way downtown. Pursuant to what he believed Mr. Gordon wanted, Banneker strove conscientiously to be funny with these human moles, who, having twelve hours of freedom for sunshine and air, elected to spend half of it in a hole bigger, deeper, and more oppressive than any to which their noisome job called them. The result was five painfully mangled sheets which presently went to the floor, torn in strips. After that Banneker reported the picnic as he saw, felt, and smelt it. It was a somber bit of writing, not without its subtleties and shrewd perceptions; quite unsuitable to the columns of The Ledger, in which it failed to appear. But Mr. Gordon read it twice. He advised Banneker not to be discouraged.
Banneker was deeply discouraged. He wanted to resign.
Perhaps he would nave resigned, if old Mynderse Verschoyle had not died at eight o'clock on the morning of the day when Banneker was the earliest man to report at the office. A picturesque character, old Mynderse, who had lived for forty-five years with his childless wife in the ancient house on West 10th Street, and for the final fifteen years had not addressed so much as a word to her. She had died three months before; and now he had followed, apparently, from what Banneker learned in an interview with the upset and therefore voluble secretary of the dead man, because, having no hatred left on which to center his life, he had nothing else to live for. Banneker wrote the story of that hatred, rigid, ceremonious, cherished like a rare virtue until it filled two lives; and he threw about it the atmosphere of the drear and divided old house. At the end, the sound of the laughter of children at play in the street.
The article appeared word for word as he had written it. That noon Tommy Burt, the funny man, drawing down his hundred-plus a week on space, came over and sat on Banneker's desk, and swung his legs and looked at him mournfully and said:
You've broken through your shell at last.
Did you like it? asked Banneker.
Like it! My God, if I could write like that! But what's the use! Never in the world.
Oh, that's nonsense, returned Banneker, pleased. "Of course you can. But what's the rest of your 'if'?"
I wouldn't be wasting my time here. The magazines for me.
Is that better?
Depends on what you're after. For a man who wants to write, it's better, of course.
Why?
Gives him a larger audience. No newspaper story is remembered overnight except by newspaper men. And they don't matter.
Why don't they matter? Banneker was surprised again, this time rather disagreeably.
It's a little world. There isn't much substance to it. Take that Verschoyle stuff of yours; that's literature, that is! But you'll never hear of it again after next week. A few people here will remember it, and it'll help you to your next raise. But after you've got that, and, after that, your lift onto space, where are you?
The abruptly confidential approach of Tommy Burt flattered Banneker with the sense that by that one achievement of the Verschoyle story he had attained a new status in the office. Later there came out from the inner sanctum where sat the Big Chief, distilling venom and wit in equal parts for the editorial page, a special word of approval. But this pleased the recipient less than the praise of his peers in the city room.
After that first talk, Burt came back to Banneker's desk from time to time, and once took him to dinner at "Katie's," the little German restaurant around the corner. Burt was given over to a restless and inoffensively egoistic pessimism.
Look at me. I'm twenty-eight and making a good income. When I was twenty-three, I was making nearly as much. When I'm thirty-eight, where shall I be?
Can't you keep on making it? asked Banneker.
Doubtful. A fellow goes stale on the kind of stuff I do. And if I do keep on? Five to six thousand is fine now. It won't be so much ten years from now. That's the hell of this game; there's no real chance in it.
What about the editing jobs?
Desk-work? Chain yourself by the leg, with a blue pencil in your hand to butcher better men's stuff? A managing editor, now, I'll grant you. He gets his twenty or twenty-five thousand if he doesn't die of overstrain, first. But there's only a few managing editors.
There are more editorial writers.
Hired pens. Dishing up other fellows' policies, whether you believe in 'em or not. No; I'm not of that profession, anyway. He specified the profession, a highly ancient and dishonorable one. Mr. Burt, in his gray moods, was neither discriminating nor quite just.
Banneker voiced the question which, at some point in his progress, every thoughtful follower of journalism must meet and solve as best he can. "When a man goes on a newspaper I suppose he more or less accepts that paper's standards, doesn't he?"
More or less? To what extent? countered the expert.
I haven't figured that out, yet.
Don't be in a hurry about it, advised the other with a gleam of malice. "The fellows that do figure it out to the end, and are honest enough about it, usually quit."
You haven't quit.
Perhaps I'm not honest enough or perhaps I'm too cowardly, retorted the gloomy Burt.
Banneker smiled. Though the other was nearly two years his senior, he felt immeasurably the elder. There is about the true reporter type an infinitely youthful quality; attractive and touching; the eternal juvenile, which, being once outgrown with its facile and evanescent enthusiasms, leaves the expert declining into the hack. Beside this prematurely weary example of a swift and precarious success, Banneker was mature of character and standard. Nevertheless, the seasoned journalist was steeped in knowledge which the tyro craved.
What would you do, Banneker asked, "if you were sent out to write a story absolutely opposed to something you believed right; political, for instance?"
I don't write politics. That's a specialty.
Who does?
'Parson' Gale.
Does he believe in everything The Ledger stands for?
Certainly. In office hours. For and in consideration of one hundred and twenty-five dollars weekly, duly and regularly paid.
Outside of office hours, then.
Ah; that's different. In Harlem where he lives, the Parson is quite a figure among the reform Democrats. The Ledger, as you know, is Republican; and anything in the way of reform is its favorite butt. So Gale spends his working day poking fun at his political friends and associates.
Out West we'd call that kind of fellow a yellow pup.
Well, don't call the Parson that; not to me, warned the other indignantly. "He's as square a man as you'll find on Park Row. Why, you were just saying, yourself, that a reporter is bound to accept his paper's standards when he takes the job."
Then I suppose the answer is that a man ought to work only on a newspaper in whose policies he believes.
Which policies? A newspaper has a hundred different ones about a hundred different things. Here in this office we're dead against the split infinitive and the Honest Laboring Man. We don't believe he's honest and we've got our grave doubts as to his laboring. Yet one of our editorial writers is an out-and-out Socialist and makes fiery speeches advising the proletariat to rise and grab the reins of government. But he'd rather split his own head than an infinitive.
Does he write anti-labor editorials? asked the bewildered Banneker.
Not as bad as that. He confines himself to European politics and popular scientific matters. But, of course, wherever there is necessity for an expression of opinion, he's anti-socialist in his writing, as he's bound to be.
Just a moment ago you were talking of hired pens. Now you seem to be defending that sort of thing. I don't understand your point of view.
Don't you? Neither do I, I guess, admitted the expositor with great candor. "I can argue it either way and convince myself, so far as the other fellow's work is concerned. But not for my own."
How do you figure it out for yourself, then?
I don't. I dodge. It's a kind of tacit arrangement between the desk and me. In minor matters I go with the paper. That's easy, because I agree with it in most questions of taste and the way of doing things. After all The Ledger _has_ got certain standards of professional conduct and of decent manners; it's a gentleman's paper. The other things, the things where my beliefs conflict with the paper's standards, political or ethical, don't come my way. You see, I'm a specialist; I do mostly the fluffy stuff.
If that's the way to keep out of embarrassing decisions, I'd like to become a specialist myself.
You can do it, all right, the other assured him earnestly. "That story of yours shows it. You've got The Ledger touch--no, it's more individual than that. But you've got something that's going to stick out even here. Just the same, there'll come a time when you'll have to face the other issue of your job or your--well, your conscience."
What Tommy Burt did not say in continuation, and had no need to say, since his expressive and ingenuous face said it for him, was, "And I wonder what you'll do with _that_!"
A far more influential friend than Tommy Burt had been wondering, too, and had, not without difficulty, expressed her doubts in writing. Camilla Van Arsdale had written to Banneker:
... I know so little of journalism, but there are things about it that I distrust instinctively. Do you remember what that wrangler from the _Jon Cal_ told Old Bill Speed when Bill wanted to hire him: "I wouldn't take any job that I couldn't look in the eye and tell it to go to hell on five minutes' notice." I have a notion that you've got to take that attitude toward a reporting job. There must be so much that a man cannot do without loss of self-respect. Yet, I can't imagine why I should worry about you as to that. Unless it is that, in a strange environment one gets one's values confused.... Have you had to do any "Society" reporting yet? I hope not. The society reporters of my day were either obsequious little flunkeys and parasites, or women of good connections but no money who capitalized their acquaintanceship to make a poor living, and whom one was sorry for, but would rather not see. Going to places where one is not asked, scavenging for bits of news from butlers and housekeepers, sniffing after scandals--perhaps that is part of the necessary apprenticeship of newspaper work. But it's not a proper work for a gentleman. And, in any case, Ban, you are that, by the grace of your ancestral gods.
Little enough did Banneker care for his ancestral gods: but he did greatly care for the maintenance of those standards which seemed to have grown, indigenously within him, since he had never consciously formulated them. As for reporting, of whatever kind, he deemed Miss Van Arsdale prejudiced. Furthermore, he had met the society reporter of The Ledger, an elderly, mild, inoffensive man, neat and industrious, and discerned in him no stigma of the lickspittle. Nevertheless, he hoped that he would not be assigned to such "society news" as Remington did not cover in his routine. It might, he conceived, lead him into false situations where he could be painfully snubbed. And he had never yet been in a position where any one could snub him without instant reprisals. In such circumstances he did not know exactly what he would do. However, that bridge could be crossed or refused when he came to it.
Such members of the Brashear household as chose to accommodate themselves strictly to the hour could have eight o'clock breakfast in the basement dining-room for the modest consideration of thirty cents; thirty-five with special cream-jug. At these gatherings, usually attended by half a dozen of the lodgers, matters of local interest were weightily discussed; such as the progress of the subway excavations, the establishment of a new Italian restaurant in 11th Street, or the calling away of the fourth-floor-rear by the death of an uncle who would perhaps leave him money. To this sedate assemblage descended one crisp December morning young Wickert, clad in the natty outline of a new Bernholz suit, and obviously swollen with tidings.
Whaddya know about the latest? he flung forth upon the coffee-scented air.
The latest in young Wickert's compendium of speech might be the garments adorning his trim person, the current song-hit of a vaudeville to which he had recently contributed his critical attention, or some tidbit of purely local gossip. Hainer, the plump and elderly accountant, opined that Wickert had received an augmentation of salary, and got an austere frown for his sally. Evidently Wickert deemed his news to be of special import; he was quite bloated, conversationally. He now dallied with it.
Since when have you been taking in disguised millionaires, Mrs. Brashear?
The presiding genius of the house, divided between professional resentment at even so remotely slurring an implication (for was not the Grove Street house good enough for any millionaire, undisguised!) and human curiosity, requested an explanation.
I was in Sherry's restaurant last night, said the offhand Wickert.
I didn't read about any fire there, said the jocose Hainer, pointing his sally with a wink at Lambert, the art-student.
Wickert ignored the gibe. Such was the greatness of his tidings that he could afford to.
Our firm was giving a banquet to some buyers and big folks in the trade. Private room upstairs; music, flowers, champagne by the case. We do things in style when we do 'em. They sent me up after hours with an important message to our Mr. Webler; he was in charge of arrangements.
Been promoted to be messenger, ay? put in Mr. Hainer, chuckling.
When I came downstairs, continued the other with only a venomous glance toward the seat of the scorner, "I thought to myself what's the matter with taking a look at the swells feeding in the big restaurant. You may not know it, people, but Sherry's is the ree-churchiest place in Nuh Yawk to eat dinner. It's got 'em all beat. So I stopped at the door and took 'em in. Swell? Oh, you dolls! I stood there trying to work up the nerve to go in and siddown and order a plate of stew or something that wouldn't stick me more'n a dollar, just to _say_ I'd been dining at Sherry's, when I looked across the room, and whadda you think?" He paused, leaned forward, and shot out the climactic word, "Banneker!"
Having his dinner there? asked the incredulous but fascinated Mrs. Brashear.
Like he owned the place. Table to himself, against the wall. Waiter fussin' over him like he loved him. And dressed! Oh, Gee!
Did you speak to him? asked Lambert.
He spoke to me, answered Wickert, dealing in subtle distinctions. "He was just finishing his coffee when I sighted him. Gave the waiter haffa dollar. I could see it on the plate. There I was at the door, and he said, 'Why, hello, Wickert. Come and have a liquor.' He pronounced it a queer, Frenchy way. So I said thanks, I'd have a highball."
Didn't he seem surprised to see you there? asked Hainer.
Wickert paid an unconscious tribute to good-breeding. "Banneker's the kind of feller that wouldn't show it if he was surprised. He couldn't have been as surprised as I was, at that. We went to the bar and had a drink, and then I ast him what'd _he_, have on _me_, and all the time I was sizing him up. I'm telling you, he looked like he'd grown up in Sherry's."
The rest of the conversation, it appeared from Mr. Wickert's spirited sketch, had consisted mainly in eager queries from himself, and good-humored replies by the other.
Did Banneker eat there every night?
Oh, no! He wasn't up to that much of a strain on his finances.
But the waiters seemed to know him, as if he was one of the regulars.
In a sense he was. Every Monday he dined there. Monday was his day off.
Well, Mr. Wickert (awed and groping) _would_ be damned! All alone?
Banneker, smiling, admitted the solitude. He rather liked dining alone.
Oh, Wickert couldn't see that at all! Give him a pal and a coupla lively girls, say from the Ladies' Tailor-Made Department, good-lookers and real dressers; that was _his_ idea of a dinner, though he'd never tried it at Sherry's. Not that he couldn't if he felt like it. How much did they stick you for a good feed-out with a cocktail and maybe a bottle of Italian Red?
Well, of course, that depended on which way was Wickert going? Could Banneker set him on his way? He was taking a taxi to the Avon Theater, where there was an opening.
Did Mr. Banneker (Wickert had by this time attained the "Mr." stage) always follow up his dinner at Sherry's with a theater?
Usually, if there were an opening. If not he went to the opera or a concert.
For his part, Wickert liked a little more spice in life. Still, every feller to his tastes. And Mr. Banneker was sure dressed for the part. Say--if he didn't mind--who made that full-dress suit?
No; of course he didn't mind. Mertoun made it.
After which Mr. Banneker had been deftly enshrouded in a fur-lined coat, worthy of a bank president, had crowned these glories with an impeccable silk hat, and had set forth. Wickert had only to add that he wore in his coat lapel one of those fancy tuberoses, which he, Wickert, had gone to the pains of pricing at the nearest flower shop immediately after leaving Banneker. A dollar apiece! No, he had not accepted the offer of a lift, being doubtful upon the point of honor as to whether he would be expected to pay a _pro rata_ of the taxi charge. They, the assembled breakfast company, had his permission to call him, Mr. Wickert, a goat if Mr. Banneker wasn't the swellest-looking guy he had anywhere seen on that memorable evening.
Nobody called Mr. Wickert a goat. But Mr. Hainer sniffed and said:
And him a twenty-five-dollar-a-week reporter!
Perhaps he has private means, suggested little Miss Westlake, who had her own reasons for suspecting this: reasons bolstered by many and frequent manuscripts, turned over to her for typing, recast, returned for retyping, and again, in many instances, re-recast and re-retyped, the result of the sweating process being advantageous to their literary quality. Simultaneous advantage had accrued to the typist, also, in a practical way. Though the total of her bills was modest, it constituted an important extra; and Miss Westlake no longer sought to find solace for her woes through the prescription of the ambulant school of philosophic thought, and to solve her dental difficulties by walking the floor of nights. Philosophy never yet cured a toothache. Happily the sufferer was now able to pay a dentist. Hence Banneker could work, untroubled of her painful footsteps in the adjoining room, and considered the outcome cheap at the price. He deemed himself an exponent of enlightened selfishness. Perhaps he was. But the dim and worn spinster would have given half a dozen of her best and painless teeth to be of service to him. Now she came to his defense with a pretty dignity:
I am sure that Mr. Banneker would not be out of place in any company.
Maybe not, answered the cynical Lambert. "But where does he get it? I ask you!"
Wherever he gets it, no gentleman could be more forehanded in his obligations, declared Mrs. Brashear.
But what's he want to blow it for in a shirty place like Sherry's? marveled young Wickert.
Wyncha ask him? brutally demanded Hainer.
Wickert examined his mind hastily, and was fain to admit inwardly that he had wanted to ask him, but somehow felt "skittish" about it. Outwardly he retorted, being displeased at his own weakness, "Ask him yourself."
Had any one questioned the subject of the discussion at Mrs. Brashear's on this point, even if he were willing to reply to impertinent interrogations (a high improbability of which even the hardy Wickert seems to have had some timely premonition), he would perhaps have explained the glorified routine of his day-off, by saying that he went to Sherry's and the opening nights for the same reason that he prowled about the water-front and ate in polyglot restaurants on obscure street-corners east of Tompkins Square; to observe men and women and the manner of their lives. It would not have been a sufficient answer; Banneker must have admitted that to himself. Too much a man of the world in many strata not to be adjustable to any of them, nevertheless he felt more attuned to and at one with his environment amidst the suave formalism of Sherry's than in the more uneasy and precarious elegancies of an East-Side Tammany Association promenade and ball.
Some of the youngsters of The Ledger said that he was climbing.
He was not climbing. To climb one must be conscious of an ascent to be surmounted. Banneker was serenely unaware of anything above him, in that sense. Eminent psychiatrists were, about that time, working upon the beginning of a theory of the soul, later to be imposed upon an impressionable and faddish world, which dealt with a profound psychical deficit known as a "complex of inferiority." In Banneker they would have found sterile soil. He had no complex of inferiority, nor, for that matter, of superiority; mental attitudes which, applied to social status, breed respectively the toady and the snob. He had no complex at all. He had, or would have had, if the soul-analysts had invented such a thing, a simplex. Relative status was a matter to which he gave little thought. He maintained personal standards not because of what others might think of him, but because he chose to think well of himself.
Sherry's and a fifth-row-center seat at opening nights meant to him something more than refreshment and amusement; they were an assertion of his right to certain things, a right of which, whether others recognized or ignored it, he felt absolutely assured. These were the readily attainable places where successful people resorted. Serenely determined upon success, he felt himself in place amidst the outward and visible symbols of it. Let the price be high for his modest means; this was an investment which he could not afford to defer. He was but anticipating his position a little, and in such wise that nobody could take exception to it, because his self-promotion demanded no aid or favor from any other living person. His interest was in the environment, not in the people, as such, who were hardly more than, "walking ladies and gentlemen" in a _mise-en-scene_. Indeed, where minor opportunities offered by chance of making acquaintances, he coolly rejected them. Banneker did not desire to know people--yet. When he should arrive at the point of knowing them, it must be upon his terms, not theirs.
It was on one of his Monday evenings of splendor that a misadventure of the sort which he had long foreboded, befell him. Sherry's was crowded, and a few tables away Banneker caught sight of Herbert Cressey, dining with a mixed party of a dozen. Presently Cressey came over.
What have you been doing with yourself? he asked, shaking hands. "Haven't seen you for months."
Working, replied Banneker. "Sit down and have a cocktail. Two, Jules," he added to the attentive waiter.
I guess they can spare me for five minutes, agreed Cressey, glancing back at his forsaken place. "This isn't what you call work, though, is it?"
Hardly. This is my day off.
Oh! And how goes the job?
Well enough.
I'd think so, commented the other, taking in the general effect of Banneker's easy habituation to the standards of the restaurant. "You don't own this place, do you?" he added.
From another member of the world which had inherited or captured Sherry's as part of the spoils of life, the question might have been offensive. But Banneker genuinely liked Cressey.
Not exactly, he returned lightly. "Do I give that unfortunate impression?"
You give very much the impression of owning old Jules--or he does--and having a proprietary share in the new head waiter. Are you here much?
Monday evenings, only.
This is a good cocktail, observed Cressey, savoring it expertly. "Better than they serve to me. And, say, Banneker, did Mertoun make you that outfit?"
Yes.
Then I quit him, declared the gilded youth.
Why? Isn't it all right?
All right! Dammit, it's a better job than ever I got out of him, returned his companion indignantly. "Some change from the catalogue suit you sported when you landed here! You know how to wear 'em; I've got to say that for you.... I've got to get back. When'll you dine with me? I want to hear all about it."
Any Monday, answered Banneker.
Cressey returned to his waiting potage, and was immediately bombarded with queries, mainly from the girl on his left.
Who's the wonderful-looking foreigner?
He isn't a foreigner. At least not very much.
He looks like a North Italian princeling I used to know, said one of the women. "One of that warm-complexioned out-of-door type, that preserves the Roman mould. Isn't he an Italian?"
He's an American. I ran across him out in the desert country.
Hence that burned-in brown. What was he doing out there?
Cressey hesitated. Innocent of any taint of snobbery himself, he yet did not know whether Banneker would care to have his humble position tacked onto the tails of that work of art, his new coat. "He was in the railroad business," he returned cautiously. "His name is Banneker."
I've been seeing him for months, remarked another of the company. "He's always alone and always at that table. Nobody knows him. He's a mystery."
He's a beauty, said Cressey's left-hand neighbor.
Miss Esther Forbes had been quite openly staring, with her large, gray, and childlike eyes, at Banneker, eating his oysters in peaceful unconsciousness of being made a subject for discussion. Miss Forbes was a Greuze portrait come to life and adjusted to the extremes of fashion. Behind an expression of the sweetest candor and wistfulness, as behind a safe bulwark, she preserved an effrontery which balked at no defiance of conventions in public, though essentially she was quite sufficiently discreet for self-preservation. Also she had a keen little brain, a reckless but good-humored heart and a memory retentive of important trifles.
In the West, Bertie? she inquired of Cressey. "You were in that big wreck there, weren't you?"
Devil of a wreck, said Cressey uneasily. You never could tell what Esther might know or might not say.
Ask him over here, directed that young lady blandly, "for coffee and liqueurs."
Oh, I say! protested one of the men. "Nobody knows anything about him--"
He's a friend of mine, put in Cressey, in a tone which ended that particular objection. "But I don't think he'd come."
Instantly there was a chorus of demand for him.
All right, I'll try, yielded Cressey, rising.
Put him next to me, directed Miss Forbes.
The emissary visited Banneker's table, was observed to be in brief colloquy with him, and returned, alone.
Wouldn't he come? interrogated the chorus.
He's awfully sorry, but he says he isn't fit for decent human associations.
More and more interesting!--"Why?"--"What awful thing has he been doing?"
Eating onions, answered Cressey. "Raw."
I don't believe it, cried the indignant Miss Forbes. "One doesn't eat raw onions at Sherry's. It's a subterfuge."
Very likely.
If I went over there myself, who'll bet a dozen silk stockings that I can't--
Come off it, Ess, protested her brother-in-law across the table. "That's too high a jump, even for you."
She let herself be dissuaded, but her dovelike eyes were vagrant during the rest of the dinner.
Pleasantly musing over the last glass of a good but moderate-priced Rosemont-Geneste, Banneker became aware of Cressey's dinner party filing past him: then of Jules, the waiter, discreetly murmuring something, from across the table. A faint and provocative scent came to his nostrils, and as he followed Jules's eyes he saw a feminine figure standing at his elbow. He rose promptly and looked down into a face which might have been modeled for a type of appealing innocence.
You're Mr. Banneker, aren't you?
Yes.
I'm Esther Forbes, and I think I've heard a great deal about you.
It doesn't seem probable, he replied gravely.
From a cousin of mine, pursued the girl. "She was Io Welland. Haven't I?"
A shock went through Banneker at the mention of the name. But he steadied himself to say: "I don't think so."
Herein he was speaking by the letter. Knowing Io Welland as he had, he deemed it very improbable that she had even so much as mentioned him to any of her friends. In that measure, at least, he believed, she would have respected the memory of the romance which she had so ruthlessly blasted. This girl, with the daring and wistful eyes, was simply fishing, so he guessed.
His guess was correct. Mendacity was not outside of Miss Forbes's easy code when enlisted in a good cause, such as appeasing her own impish curiosity. Never had Io so much as mentioned that quaint and lively romance with which vague gossip had credited her, after her return from the West; Esther Forbes had gathered it in, gossamer thread by gossamer thread, and was now hoping to identify Banneker in its uncertain pattern. Her little plan of startling him into some betrayal had proven abortive. Not by so much as the quiver of a muscle or the minutest shifting of an eye had he given sign. Still convinced that he was the mysterious knight of the desert, she was moved to admiration for his self-command and to a sub-thrill of pleasurable fear as before an unknown and formidable species. The man who had transformed self-controlled and invincible Io Welland into the creature of moods and nerves and revulsions which she had been for the fortnight preceding her marriage, must be something out of the ordinary. Instinct of womankind told Miss Forbes that this and no other was the type of man to work such a miracle.
But you did know Io? she persisted, feeling, as she afterward confessed, that she was putting her head into the mouth of a lion concerning whose habits her knowledge was regrettably insufficient.
The lion did not bite her head off. He did not even roar. He merely said, "Yes."
In a railroad wreck or something of that sort?
Something of that sort.
Are you awfully bored and wishing I'd go away and let you alone? she said, on a note that pleaded for forbearance. "Because if you are, don't make such heroic efforts to conceal it."
At this an almost imperceptible twist at the corners of his lips manifested itself to the watchful eye and cheered the enterprising soul of Miss Forbes. "No," he said equably, "I'm interested to discover how far you'll go."
The snub left Miss Forbes unembarrassed.
Oh, as far as you'll let me, she answered. "Did you ride in from your ranch and drag Io out of the tangled wreckage at the end of your lasso?"
My ranch? I wasn't on a ranch.
Please, sir, she smiled up at him like a beseeching angel, "what did you do that kept us all talking and speculating about you for a whole week, though we didn't know your name?"
I sat right on my job as station-agent at Manzanita and made up lists of the killed and injured, answered Banneker dryly.
Station-agent! The girl was taken aback, for this was not at all in consonance with the Io myth as it had drifted back, from sources never determined, to New York. "Were you the station-agent?"
I was.
She bestowed a glance at once appraising and flattering, less upon himself than upon his apparel. "And what are you now? President of the road?"
A reporter on The Ledger.
Really! This seemed to astonish her even more than the previous information. "What are you reporting here?"
I'm off duty to-night.
I see. Could you get off duty some afternoon and come to tea, if I'll promise to have Io there to meet you?
Your party seems to be making signals of distress, Miss Forbes.
That's the normal attitude of my friends and family toward me. You'll come, won't you, Mr. Banneker?
Thank you: but reporting keeps one rather too busy for amusement.
You won't come, she murmured, aggrieved. "Then it _is_ true about you and Io."
This time she achieved a result. Banneker flushed angrily, though he said, coolly enough: "I think perhaps you would make an enterprising reporter, yourself, Miss Forbes."
I'm sure I should. Well, I'll apologize. And if you won't come for Io--she's still abroad, by the way and won't be back for a month--perhaps you'll come for me. Just to show that you forgive my impertinences. Everybody does. I'm going to tell Bertie Cressey he must bring you.... All right, Bertie! I wish you wouldn't follow me up like--like a paper-chase. Good-night, Mr. Banneker.
To her indignant escort she declared that it couldn't have hurt them to wait a jiffy; that she had had a most amusing conversation; that Mr. Banneker was as charming as he was good to look at; and that (in answer to sundry questions) she had found out little or nothing, though she hoped for better results in future.
But he's Io's passion-in-the-desert right enough, said the irreverent Miss Forbes.
Banneker sat long over his cooling coffee. Through haunted nights he had fought maddening memories of Io's shadowed eyes, of the exhalant, irresistible femininity of her, of the pulses of her heart against his on that wild and wonderful night in the flood; and he had won to an armed peace, in which the outposts of his spirit were ever on guard against the recurrent thoughts of her.
Now, at the bitter music of her name on the lips of a gossiping and frivolous girl, the barriers had given away. In eagerness and self-contempt he surrendered to the vision. Go to an afternoon tea to see and speak with her again? He would, in that awakened mood, have walked across the continent, only to be in her presence, to feel himself once more within the radius of that inexorable charm.