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Title: The Heritage of Hatcher Ide
Author: Tarkington, Booth [Newton Booth] (1869-1946)
Date of first publication: 1941
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941
Date first posted: 8 December 2018
Date last updated: 8 December 2018
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1589

This ebook was produced by
Al Haines, Cindy Beyer, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.






THE HERITAGE OF HATCHER IDE

by Booth Tarkington




    To Margaret Booth Jameson






CHAPTER I


Scientific digging into buried towns sometimes finds
previous foundations, one beneath another, making it clear that the
ancient communities had every one in turn been overwhelmed by a newer
that built upon the ruins. As he works downward, the excavator thus
reveals clues to the history of the town's dead periods; but a living
city, as it spreads, leaves upon the surface some vestiges of the
previous stages of its life, relics as eloquent to the interested eye as
if the city were already being dug for, which it must be in the end.

So with this American city of the great central plain, the very location
of the skyscrapers, of the Statehouse and the Courthouse and the old
"New Market Building", betokens the site of the earliest settlement.
Where stood the pioneers' straggling cabins, the store and the
blacksmith shop, here still to-day is the community's middle, and here
the price of land has always been highest. Not till the last decade of
the Nineteenth Century, though, did that increasing price acquire such
momentum as to begin to force upward the skyscrapers and noticeably
distend the city's middle, swelling it northward. A few blocks to the
south the railroads crossed the town from east to west, making a South
Side and a North Side; but the South Siders had to cross the tracks to
reach the city's middle, where all the great business was, and they had
to cross the tracks again to go home afterward, so the North Side became
the affluent side.

Affluence, following broad streets northward for residence, before the
Civil War, seemed to be establishing itself permanently just north of
the business heart of the city. In the late 'Sixties and early
'Seventies its domain so spread that the outer boundaries of the "best
residence section" were more than a mile north of the banks, the shops
and the three and four story office buildings. Then were built the big
brick houses, imposing and comfortable, that took throngs of workmen
more than a year to finish; and the owning families settled down among
old trees and new clipped lawns to be imposing and comfortable forever,
like their houses.

These families were not "new rich". They were the ablest descendants of
the ablest pioneers, and it was their intelligence, energy and sound
thrift that had slowly built a prosperous town. They it was who had held
the state for the Union throughout the Civil War; had sent forth many
who came not home; had sent forth privates and corporals who came home
captains and majors; had sent forth colonels who came home generals.
Ancestrally almost all of the families were of Revolutionary stock,
British in remote origin, with able, industrious and patriotic Germans
second to these in number.

Good stock and strong backbones were needed, not only to win the War but
to confront the great business collapse that came eight years later with
the "Panic of '73". That was what is now called a "Major Depression";
but the country and its citizens were sturdy then; they knew how to bear
adversity, how to meet it manfully and to survive it by a time-proven
process, the tightening of belts.

Some of the brick houses changed owners; but of the families that moved
out, and temporarily down, most were building again before the end of
the 'Seventies. Independent, every man free to make his own way, and
doing it, they led their town back into prosperous ways, and, through
the 'Eighties and early 'Nineties, in spite of minor depressions,
steadily enlarged it. The big new houses, like the older, were solid,
imposing and comfortable; but the inhabitants of neither were given over
to luxury or to living upon their heritages. They knew one another well;
they intermarried, spread cousinships and were indeed a caste but never
a caste of snobs. As citizens of the Republic and in their businesses
and professions, and in their manners, they were democratic. To describe
them conveniently a phrase was sometimes used, though seldom by
themselves; they were called the "best people", and, in spite of every
human frailty among them, they were.

They organized charities and built hospitals, founded associations to
bring music, painting and sculpture before those of their
fellow-citizens who could or would enjoy such things. They entered
together into literary clubs, into clubs for theatricals and dances;
they believed in dignity, in refinement, in tactfulness; they believed
in deference to wisdom, learning, achievement, talent, historical
greatness, and to the good life. They went to church, took the children
with them, willing or no; they asked the minister to dinner and were
delighted with his broadmindedness when he told a story with a quoted
damn in it.

They read Emerson, Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Matthew Arnold,
John Ruskin, Thoreau, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Robert Burns and Owen
Meredith; they read Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Tom Moore and Byron;
they read Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Thomas Bailey Aldrich; they
read Washington Irving, Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Poe, Bulwer Lytton,
Robert Louis Stevenson and Bret Harte; they read George Eliot, Jane
Austen, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page,
Lew Wallace and George W. Cable; they read Shakespeare and Goethe; they
read Howells, Henry James, Mark Twain, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy;
they read Tolstoi, Alphonse Daudet, Victor Cherbuliez, the elder Dumas,
Balzac, Zola, Gautier and Flaubert. They read Thackeray and Dickens;
most of all they read Dickens, made his people a part of their daily
talk. Many of the girls wanted to be "Jane Eyre" and the children
learned "declamations" from Longfellow, Whittier, William Cullen Bryant,
James Whitcomb Riley and Eugene Field.

The painters they most admired were Raphael, Murillo, Leonardo da Vinci,
Rembrandt, Sir Joshua Reynolds, David, Greuze, Meissonier, Jean Franois
Millet, Burne-Jones, Alma Tadema and William M. Chase. They thought
Gustave Dor the greatest of all illustrators; they had Landseer
engravings on their walls, and on top of their bookshelves there were
usually the head of Dante in black plaster and a small cream-colored
Venus of Milo. The composers they liked were Verdi, Balfe, Arthur
Sullivan, Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Johann Strauss, Wagner,
and Stephen Foster. The actors who filled the "standing room" semicircle
were Edwin Booth, Irving and Terry, Sarah Bernhardt, Mme. Modjeska,
Salvini and Joseph Jefferson. Thus to the arts the "best people",
leaders of the public taste, were even then by no means indifferent;
many were enthusiasts.

These ablest people of the city, the most prosperous and the most useful
in spreading prosperity to others, were not without assailants.
Sometimes it happened that one or another of them moved into the
histrionic intricacies of politics, perhaps going so far as to aspire to
the governorship of the state or a curule chair in Washington; and there
were campaigns, too, when the members of the caste were stirred to favor
a mayoralty or congressional candidate for his probity, intelligence or
general worth. Such episodes always inspired the obvious incitements:
the "best people" were hotly called "North Side Silk Stockings!" "North
Side Dudes!" "The Idle Rich!" and later, as a reproach bitterly
conveying everything, simply "The Rich!" Those thus accused were seldom
more than distantly aware of being made oratorical targets; when they
heard that a candidate rousing a South Side meeting called them the
"Purse-proud silk-hat element that exploit you" they said it was only
the old game, laughed and forgot.

In this period, when still were alive a few of the "early settlers", men
and women who in their youth had seen Indians on the city's site, there
were already professional and business firms of the third generation,
grandfathers the founders, grandsons coming in after college to begin at
the beginning. Of these the most notably successful were the Linleys at
the law, the Ides in real estate and the Gilpins with their rolling
mill. It was Governor Linley who built the thirty-room stone-trimmed
brick house on Sheridan Avenue in Eighteen sixty-six. The house was of
course called palatial, which may have gratified him; but he was as old
as the century and had a short occupancy, though he lived to see his
grandson christened there by Bishop Hatcher, a month after the
house-warming party.

Other families were as ambitious as the Linleys to have space about them
at home. The Ides and the Gilpins, building at about the same time in
the next block, were only a little less elaborate than the Linleys. The
first and second generations of the Ides had kept their attention upon
real estate, acquired a great deal of it for themselves and profitably
acted as agents for others; but the third head of the family, Oliver
Ide, young and commercially imaginative at the time when the country was
recovering from the shock of 'Seventy-three, added a trust and
investment business that presently became more important to the firm
than real estate. The Ides, a broad-shouldered, strong stock, had
qualifications--caution in the handling of money, especially in the
handling of other people's money; they were of immaculate probity, had
quiet foresightedness and a sense of honor that was a known and quoted
standard for their fellow-citizens.

More, they were generous; and, when the Gilpins lost their rolling mill
and their fine new house in 'Seventy-three, it was Oliver Ide who risked
the better part of his own fortune to get the rolling mill back for
them, though neither he nor they could put them again into their house.
It had been bought by a newcomer, a jovial adventurous fat young man,
Sheffley Lash, who'd built and sold a spur railroad in far west mining
country, to his great advantage. Lash settled himself in the Gilpins'
house, faced it with flamboyantly carved limestone, and, when he and his
partner, Erdvynn, had bought the Gas Works, the Old Jamaica Wholesale
Drug Company, the Bragg and Dorcy Distillery Company, and the National
House (renamed Hotel Lash), visibly enjoyed being known as "the richest
man in town".

The Lashes and the Erdvynns, gay young couples, had a liking for what
was known as high living. They gave "champagne suppers" and drove behind
docked and jingling horses; Mrs. Lash and Mrs. Erdvynn went to Paris,
not to see the Mona Lisa but for clothes. The "best people" never took
the Lashes and Erdvynns quite to their hearts. There existed a feeling
that there was such a thing as being too fashionable and a little too
rich.

The Erdvynns, with an increasing family, built the last of the
substantial houses that went up in the affluent neighborhood that had
then spread more than a mile north of business. This was in Eighteen
ninety-five; and the city, though it grew, was physically almost
spotless, for the newer expansion had been accompanied by the discovery
of adjacent natural gas. Downtown and Uptown, the sky was blue; trees
and foliage, clean green, flourished; snow and white linen stayed white;
the air was pure, and autopsies revealed unblackened lungs.

Before the end of the century the great phase of the Growth had begun;
unlimited immigration and the doubtful blessing of "industrial progress"
were already creating their immensities. The last of natural gas burned
blue and went out; soft coal and its heavy dust sputtered oilily into
flame, instead--and the smoke began to come. There were an East Side and
a West Side now, as well as a South Side; but the old North Side lost
that appellation. It wasn't north enough, came to be too near the middle
of the city, and year by year business took block after block of its
broad streets.

Apartment houses, too, appeared here and there upon these thoroughfares;
and established families, their shrubberies, lawns and peace encroached
upon, were at first resentful; then, one after another, put their ground
upon the market. There began a migration. New houses of stone or brick,
roofed with a tile or slate, were built a mile and a mile-and-a-half and
even two miles north of the old North Side; but that migration didn't go
far enough, for, after the turn into the Twentieth Century, the
"automotive age" was swiftly preparing its destructions.

Downtown, squeezed upward, business clustered the skyscrapers in the
smoke from themselves and from the tall industrial chimneys that were
rising on the city's rim to the east and west and south. Everybody
thought that the cheaper the coal the better, and from all the crowding
multitudes of dwelling houses, and from the schools, churches,
hospitals, groceries, drug stores, saloons, north, south, east and west,
rolled forth the brown-black smoke to thicken the clouds that pulsated
from skyscrapers, apartment houses, factories and freight yards. The
migration from the old North Side continued; migration from the newer
houses to the north began, for the smoke was now upon both.

Almost abruptly the town had become a horseless city, and, as the
automobile made distances inconsequent, new suburbs appeared. The city
first swallowed its old suburbs, then closed the gaps between itself and
the new ones. Before the Great War the Growth was gigantically at work,
and, after the hesitation that followed the return of the soldiers, it
resumed its enormities, uproariously cheering for itself in the noise
and dust and smoke that it was making. Optimism trumpeted unceasingly
through soot-grimed horns of gold: the Growth would go on illimitably.
The National Debt was shrinking; the people of the city, and all
Americans, would be richer and richer forever.




CHAPTER II


As early as Nineteen-hundred and five the Aldriches, a
farming family whose sons "went east to college", had sold land to
smoked-out "North Siders". Beyond the northernmost suburb of that day,
the Aldrich farm lay higher than the plain where spread the city; and it
was found that at the edges of the low plateau, and between the trunks
of old forest trees, there was such a thing as a View. Sunrises, sunsets
and even horizons could be known again from here; and far to the
southwest in the haze could sometimes be discerned the faint blue dome
of the capitol.

Through the old forest groves ran a rough country road, called by the
Aldriches "Butternut Lane", and along this irregular sylvan highway
landscaping began and costly houses in new fashions displaced the
thickets. Family followed family, vacating the sooty brick houses in the
region that now began to be called "downtown"; and, though farther from
the city there was here and there "real country life" in bankers' farm
houses, Butternut Lane finally had most of the elderly survivors of the
Nineteenth Century's caste of the ablest and the greater number of their
descendants. By the end of the first decade after the Great War,
Butternut Lane was, in fact, the successor to the old North Side and the
Twentieth Century's home of the "best people". All in all, though more
loosely united and with many a newcomer among them, they still were
that.

The Ides and the Linleys clung longest to Sheridan Avenue and their old
North Side neighborhood. The rumble and jar of the new mechanical
traffic shook their windows by day; thundered intermittently by night.
Burnt coal and burnt gas were the air they breathed; and they could
seldom alight at the old carriage blocks before their houses, where
still stood the obsolete black cast-iron hitching posts with horses'
heads. Parked cars took all the space, and in Nineteen-sixteen, when a
wedding last filled the Linley house with flowers and music, influence
and police were needed to let the guests arrive at the awning's
entrance.

That was when the stalwart Frederic Ide married Harriet Linley. The
wedding was gay, though the gayety imperfectly covered anxieties; the
bridegroom and his Best Man, the bride's brother, Victor Linley, were to
leave within the same week to be made into soldiers by the training camp
at Plattsburg. Young Victor Linley, mild-mannered, studious, and, like
all of his tribe, fastidious of mind and delicate in body, had broken
the Linley line of lawyers. A Beaux Arts student of architecture in
Paris, he'd also acquired expert chauffeuring by driving an ambulance,
but came home for the wedding and to join his new brother-in-law in
absorbing as much of the military art as they could hastily stuff into
themselves.

This, though they were peaceful young men, they did because, like their
forebears of 1812, they believed that their country would and should
maintain American Rights and the Freedom of the Seas, and that a nation
timorously obedient to the commands of a foreign State in matters
involving murder has lost its independence. So the two old-fashioned
young men went not only to the camp but presently afterward to fight in
a war that was to become in no very long time the most misunderstood,
mis-propagandized and innocently maligned conflict in the country's
history. The Linley house began to brighten again with the return of
Frederic Ide, sound and brown; and the tall plate-glass windows were
radiant far into the smoky night when Major Victor Linley came home, not
sound nor brown but with the four decorations he never wore except upon
the days when he received them.

It was a light-hearted household then, with a baby in it of whom the
father had caught little more than a glimpse before going to war.
Frederic Ide, his happy wife and their first-born, lived with the
Linleys until Nineteen-twenty, when Frederic finished the building of
his spacious new house among the forest trees of Butternut Lane. After
this departure the Linleys still clung to their house, though people
laughed and said their attachment to it was absurd; asked them why they
couldn't see that the old neighborhood was doomed. Realistic irony,
supplanting sentiment, had become the fashion, especially among the
youthful; and the Linleys were demonstrably sentimental.

There were only four of them left. Victor's twin brother had died at
fourteen when the two had diphtheria together; and the youngest of his
three sisters, Alice, married to an engineer, lived in Oregon. The
remaining sister, Nancy, authoritatively called the "most delightful
girl of her time", a delicate slight lovely creature, was frequently
sought in marriage but found life at home too agreeable. She couldn't
help comparing other men with her father and her brother, and she had
something like a passion for the house itself, in spite of what the
Growth was doing to it.

Even after the deaths of their mother and father, within a month of each
other in Nineteen twenty-four, Nancy and Victor, devotedly congenial,
went on living there. The next year, on a summer day, Nancy was struck
down by a truck and brought home in an ambulance. As they carried her in
she made a little gesture with her hand as though she waved a farewell
to the house. "What a dear place it's been!" she said to Victor, and
spoke never again. After that, Victor Linley went to live at the Carlyle
Club, and it was helpful that pressure of work upon a rising architect
could occupy most of his daytime thoughts.

He had his share in the rushing expansions of the city as it over-built
itself in those booming years, not so large a share as that of his
brother-in-law, Frederic Ide. The old firm of Ide and Son had become Ide
and Aldrich, a partnership of two able young men. Frederic, steady of
head and hand, trustworthy in heart and judgment, was called the
"brains" of the firm, and jolly big Harry Aldrich the "mixer" and
"business getter". This being what is known as an "ideal combination",
Ide and Aldrich rode happily atop the great wave that began to sink in
bubble and foam in 'Twenty-nine.

Ide and Aldrich sank with it, but didn't drown--Frederic was too careful
a swimmer. "We've all got to do what our grandfathers did after
'Seventy-three," he said, in Nineteen thirty-one, to his partner. "The
city's been doing what it had done then--over-borrowing, over-buying,
over-expanding, and, worst of all, over-building. That's why the
building trades went down first, taking the rest of us with 'em. The
stock market didn't do it; that was only the pie-crust falling down.
Retrenchment, tightening the belt, everybody getting along with less,
hard economies--we'll have to do it on a bigger scale than our
grandfathers did; but it's the same and only answer. Business is the
life of the country and business is sick; but it'll cure itself. That'll
take some time and there's already great hardship. I don't doubt that
before the sickness of business is over, the city will be feeding
fifteen thousand people a day. That means more taxes on top of other
drains; but naturally we'll do it."

They did it. The city fed more than fifteen thousand people a day; but
business had troubles in addition to its sickness and didn't make a
recovery. Relapse and collapse reached depths, and Frederic was
mystified when the year Nineteen Thirty-three brought new bafflements
instead of an overdue convalescence. His brother-in-law, Victor Linley,
gave him the detached opinion of a meditative observer.

"We're all in for it," Victor said. "When business is sick, the rest of
us ail, too; and business is about to have the peculiar experience of a
doctoring that systematically kicks the patient in his vitals. Of course
the physicians will praise themselves for their benignity."

Frederic asked him what on earth he meant.

"Politics," Victor explained. "You business men used to think it didn't
much matter when the office-seekers assaulted you from down in the South
Side, and it didn't; but now, with distress and bewilderment running
epidemic through a population more educated and less intelligent than it
used to be when it was smaller, look out for soap-boxers! When the type,
politician, first evolved, Fred, merely rudimentary cunning must have
made one or two of 'em try to do what their later successors have almost
all done, and are still doing mostly, of course. I suspect that even in
the stone-age somebody ambitiously climbed up on a rock and made a
speech to all of the tribe that were idle enough to listen. 'I'm your
only friend,' I think he'd shout. 'See those rascals living in better
caves than yours? Hate 'em for it; they're your enemies! You are as
worthy to have the good things of life as anybody else is, aren't you?
It follows that those swindlers must have got the best caves by
oppressing and tricking you. Make me and my brothers your chieftains and
we'll drive the scoundrels out for you so that we shall _all_ enjoy the
best caves!'"

Frederic Ide, as simple in thought as in his honesty, was disturbed yet
incredulous. "Nonsense about caves would do for those times," he said.
"But business must thrive or nobody can. To make things harder for us
now--why, what could be worse for everybody?"

"Everybody except the successful politician, Fred. When was practical
politics ever anything but the struggle for power over people and
property? The politicians have their great chance at last because they
have an audience that's sorry for itself and humanly wants to blame
somebody else. It's always a relief. Good politics would be pretty
stupid if now it doesn't use the old technique; and of course you're the
mark for both the politicians and the uplifters to shoot at. They've
both got all this convenient social-and-economic type of verbiage to
use, and they will--till the politician has pretty much everything and
everybody under his thumb. If you business men complain that he's
incompetently making rather a botch of affairs that used to be yours
he'll say he's saving you from a bloody revolution. Simultaneously he'll
announce to the people that you're the selfish few who want to starve
the poor."

"That's a horrible prediction," Frederic Ide said. "You utter it
lightly. Are you spending your time these days in becoming a philosophic
humorist?"

"What else have I to do with it?" his brother-in-law asked, and wasn't
answered.

Frederic couldn't develop a philosophic humor, himself; and, as the hard
times didn't soften, found little humor in anything. His buoyant
partner, Harry Aldrich, worked undespondently, for he was a sprightly
and ever-hopeful soul; but Frederic bent to the burden. Not even his
wife knew what miles of floor-pacing he did, what care shortened his
sleep as he strove to pay his bills, to continue the expensive education
of his three children and to keep the old firm on its feet. Ide and Son,
and afterward Ide and Aldrich, had a large establishment. The depleted
business couldn't carry so many people, and every dismissal in turn was
an anguish to the head of the firm and a shock to his light-hearted but
kindly partner.

Business got its head up a little now and then, but complained that "for
the public good" it was being so "regulated", harried, drained and
bedeviled by squads of new officials and their new rulings that the
elevations could never be better than momentary. Nevertheless, there
were miracles; the very people who bore the largest burdens contrived to
widen the enlightenment of their city. Even in these worst of times,
they enlarged the hospitals and the art museum; and they supported a
symphony orchestra. Nobody thanked them; but public spirit and the
American business man's love of his city die hard.

Youth, thrown upon the world by university and high school
commencements, had as bad a time as anybody did, and here and there,
following a new fashion, insisted upon something's being done for it--a
natural clamor at a time when a great deal was being done for all other
people whose mutual needs or desires organized them into "pressure
groups" sufficiently multitudinous to interest the politicians.
Political assistance for youth didn't reach many of the young people who
came home from the universities to fathers formerly prosperous but now
trying to pay the interest on notes and mortgages.

In better days, when the young graduate returned to the old North Side,
or, later, to Butternut Lane or other well-to-do environs, he usually
hadn't a problem to face and wasn't one, himself. He was taken into his
father's business or perhaps an uncle's office, or a family friend or a
college friend of his own might find place for him; but the Depression
had changed all that. Possession of property had become an insecure
occupation of it; ownership of a business meant fear and the endless
compilation of dangerous reports. To practise a profession was to work
for fees that mightn't be collected; but even in these hazards there was
no room for the yearly multitude of young graduates. They came "out into
the world" to face the long granite wall of opportunity denied. Nobody
had even advice to give them, and, baffled, hurt and perplexed, some of
them turned fitfully to "fascinating new ideologies"; some walked the
streets, some went wild, and some mended the lawnmower and cut the grass
at home. Of all the sufferers from the Depression the children of "the
Rich" were not the least hard-stricken and sorely bewildered.




CHAPTER III


Outside the city and its denser purlieus the sky was
blue and the perspective neatly outlined in the clean air of a chilly
bright afternoon in mid-September, Nineteen thirty-nine, the tenth year
of the Depression. Down in the old "North Side", however, no one could
have been positive that the sun shone; the old "best residence section"
lay ruinous in the smoke. The bad ten years had made it horrible and the
surviving relics of the once imposing neighborhood grotesque. Its former
character had become almost indistinguishable among dusty parking lots,
"used car sales lots", vacant automobile salesrooms, half-empty
apartment buildings, languid filling-stations, outrageously-colored
dirty billboards and the close ranks of small dim houses that had long
since yielded their paint to the acids of the smoke.

Here and there, like degraded old aristocrats dying on their feet among
sick proletarians, a few of the big thick-walled houses still stood, and
the most massively pathetic of the scattered relics, the largest one
left on fallen Sheridan Avenue, loomed dimly through that afternoon's
five o'clock stoking-time clouds of grime. Apparently awaiting the
mercy-stroke of the wrecker, this big dirty old house, painful to the
passer's eye, occasionally to his ear, and, at meal times, to his nose,
now made itself so vague in its own down-blown smoke that the
fly-specked sign, "Rooms", in one of the large, smeared plate-glass
front windows could not be seen from a distance of fifty feet.
Nevertheless, a sauntering gentleman on the opposite side of Sheridan
Avenue paused to gaze that way.

Something over forty and of a slight and short but symmetrical figure,
he had eyes so brightly blue that the color surprised any first glance
at him. The whiteness of his collar, the trimness of his black clothes,
the dustlessness of his hard hat, and the glisten of the malacca
walking-stick in his gray-gloved hand were no more to be expected in
this neighborhood than was the clean bright-collared golden spaniel that
accompanied him. What caught this rather exquisite gentleman's
attention, and brought him and the spaniel to a halt, was a colloquy
taking place across the street. In the marble-floored soiled vestibule
outside the carved walnut front door of the shamed old house, a tallish
young man was being harangued by a soiled fat woman who looked like two
stuffed sacks, one upon the other, with a large unclean vegetable atop
the upper and a pair of torn slippers under the lower.

The vegetable had a voice, cacklingly verbose, and the longer and louder
this tireless voice talked, the more nasally reproachful and
uninterruptable it became. It was accompanied by gestures with a
dust-pan in the one hand and a bunch of rags in the other;--the soiled
fat woman seemed to be injuredly resisting a proposal urged upon her
with feeble persistence by the young man. Evidently she dramatized their
relation, perhaps not without a dramatist's pleasure in effective
"situation"; for the young man's brownish "country gentleman" clothes
were fair provocation to evoke, for the benefit of passing traffic, a
scene of wealth persecuting poverty.

An accusing phrase, "You rich people", often and loudly repeated,
interested some colored women who were idling by, and a group of smutted
children stopped sidewalk play to listen. The gentleman across the
street leaned restfully upon his serviceable malacca stick, smiled
faintly, and the golden-haired spaniel sat down. Sometimes completed
sentences from the controversial vestibule reached that far: "You rich
people think all the poor's got to do's break their backs night and day
to keep you in money. You rich people don't 'preciate the poor's got to
eat same's you rich people."

All at once the young man in the vestibule seemed to become discouraged.
His shoulders drooped, and, as the fat woman retired with a gratified
air behind the closing door, he turned, came gloomily down the broad
steps between carved stone balustrades and gave to view a boy's face
good-looking and pleasant even in disappointment. His hands were deep in
his pockets, and his eyes remained downcast in melancholy till he
reached the sidewalk; then he glanced up, stared and murmured, "Well,
look who's here!"

He crossed the street to the blue-eyed gentleman with the spaniel, and
addressed him. "What on earth are you doing here, Uncle Victor?"

"My afternoon walk for Locksie's health," the uncle replied. "We stopped
to see how much you'd accomplish with Mrs. Schapp. We couldn't hope it'd
be a great deal."

"No! Mrs. Schapp's the most rancid woman I ever had an argument with.
You wouldn't have thought I was trying to collect the rent from her;
you'd have thought I was asking her for spending money to loaf on. Told
me she had her bills to pay! You've never talked to her, have you, sir?"

"Yes. I used to call there on the same mercenary errand, Hatcher. Your
father's given you a job as a rent collector, has he?"

Hatcher Linley Ide, the nephew, looked despairingly at his Uncle Victor
Linley. "My second day at it. Zero! Everybody said it would be hell to
get out of college in Depression; but I'm just finding out. Dante missed
this for his Inferno--sending a lost soul out to listen forever to why
people that never paid any rent aren't going to. I'm supposed to get a
percentage; but I see that was just having fun with me. I think you're
all crazy!"

"Yes, we are," the uncle said placidly. "People usually confirm that
discovery at about your age--newly twenty-two, isn't it, Hatcher?"

"Yes, 'newly'." The nephew looked annoyed. "I suppose that means you're
going to tell me I haven't any idea how young I am. Aunt Ada Ide's been
saying that ever since I bought my first pipe. When does it stop? For
instance, Uncle Victor, would somebody twice your age--say somebody
round eighty or so--tell you that you don't yet know how young you are?"

"I hope so, Hatcher, and I'd no more know what he meant than you do when
your Aunt Ada says it to you. We're all engulfed in our ignorance of our
own youngness, which probably means that man never has knowledge of
himself but is only a sort of cluster, subject to chemical reactions
called instincts and emotions. Let's not go into it. You were saying
that all people of my age are insane. What symptom of our lunacy most
frets you?"

"Why, owning so-called rental property in a section that's gone to rats
and roaches! A few years from now you won't hear a human voice in it;
the only sounds'll be the termites chirping to their mates at evensong."

"'Mates', Hatcher? 'Evensong'? Then love and poetry will still be found
among the ruins, you feel?"

Hatcher made an indignant gesture. "This region's an eyesore, and I'd
hate to tell you how much of it's my father's own property--his
mortgaged very own! He owns whole half blocks of run-down houses, a
third of 'em owing rent and the other two-thirds empty."

"Yes, Hatcher. Your Grandfather Ide was a great believer in real estate
for income. It's why Ide and Aldrich still have a Real Estate
Department."

"Real Estate Department?" the nephew echoed. "Looks more like a Trash
Department to me! If they'd give me some used plumbing and enough fresh
paint, though, I'd rent some of Father's vacant houses to a class of
tenants that'd pay."

"The smoke hasn't much respect for fresh paint, Hatcher."

"I know, I know!" Hatcher said. "You'd have to keep painting. Fresh
every hour. I have an idea, though. There's a color--a kind of grayish
putty-color I'd use with a gray apple-green trim, and I'll bet I
could--" He interrupted himself. "What's the use? Father'd say it'd only
be sending good money after bad. I certainly wouldn't waste it, myself,
on that house across the street. It's hopeless. It's the last place on
the list they gave me for to-day and it's the worst, this old Linley
house. They told me it's a stinger and that it still belongs to you,
Uncle Victor."

"Yes," Mr. Linley admitted. "It's my only tangible asset--to use a legal
word frivolously. I tried to collect the rent myself until I felt that I
was familiar with all that Mrs. Schapp could ever tell me about
everything. Then I entrusted the property to your father's firm; but
don't wear yourself out pleading with Mrs. Schapp, Hatcher. She paid the
first month's rent when she moved in, four years ago. Since
then--fourteen dollars all in one day in a burst of generosity, but
that's already long ago and won't be repeated, I feel."

"What!" Hatcher cried. "Fourteen dollars rent in four years? Why don't
you put her out?"

"Mrs. Schapp? I'm only afraid she'll go without being put, Hatcher. If
she does, nobody else would come in and the house'd be looted of its
sturdy old plumbing, and all the windows broken in a night or two. In
the meantime the taxes--"

"Taxes! You really are crazy, Uncle Victor! Why don't you tear it down
and make the yard into a parking lot, or at least into just a vacant mud
flat? Look how many people have done that. At least it cuts the taxes,
doesn't it?"

"Somewhat, no doubt," Victor Linley said. "Your mother and I were born
there, Hatcher. So were you and so was--"

"Sentimentality about a thing that looks like that! I certainly don't
see it!"

"No?" Mr. Linley gazed thoughtfully across the street at the dismal mass
that was his. "You were a child the last time you were inside the house,
Hatcher; so perhaps you don't remember the drawing-room with the
parquetry floor and the brocade paneling. Your grandmother had her piano
there and used to play accompaniments to my father and his 'cello. He
was born in that house, too, you know, just after your great-grandfather
built it. Your father and mother were married there--a pretty wedding. I
never went farther than the vestibule in my own interviews with Mrs.
Schapp; I shouldn't care to pass that threshold again. The house must
look pretty queer inside, now."

"Outside, too, if you ask me!" Hatcher exclaimed ruthlessly. "Trouble is
you still seem to think of it as the 'old Linley house' full of dear old
memories and so on, whereas the bald truth is it's only Mrs. Schapp's
rooming-house cutting into your income with taxes. Ought to be blown up
if that's the only way to get rid of it." He coughed, as a cloud of
smoke from the cheapest grade of soft coal blew stranglingly down upon
them. "Whoo! What a neighborhood! I'm dirty all over from a day in it.
Let's get out of it. Going my way?"

"Yes. Pleasure. I haven't seen enough of you since you got home." Uncle
and nephew began to walk northward together, and the golden spaniel
trotted a little in advance of them. "How long's it been since we've had
a walk together, Hatcher?"

"Not since the end of my sophomore year, I suppose." The nephew, a head
taller than his uncle, mitigated the quick loose-limbed stride at which
he usually walked, and he laughed apologetically. "Don't mind my insults
about your sentimentalness, Uncle Victor. I'm in a funny condition. I've
been away from home too long. I shouldn't have spent my junior vacation
on that Scandinavian cruise and I ought to've come home last June right
after Commencement instead of letting a classmate drag me out to his
ranch. Seems to me I've been in a kind of trance or something all
through these six years away at school and college and I'm just
beginning to wake up. Ever had that feeling of having been a child, or
in a dream, up to a sudden change in your life? Then you seem to wake up
and begin to really look round you for the first time. Damned
uncomfortable; but that's how I feel. I'm just getting my eyes
open--right in the middle of things I don't understand--and it seems to
me that all I can do is to go after the naked truth about everything and
be tough."

"Tough? Why?"

"Because everything else is, Uncle Victor. Life, I mean. Everything's
changed and my generation's got to face it. We can't look upon life as a
bed of roses the way your generation did. You--"

"Did we?" The inquiry was mild; but Hatcher, glancing downward sidewise
at his uncle's somewhat delicately modeled figure, caught the inference.
Mr. Linley walked with an almost unnoticeable limp; but the stick he
carried was for use, and sometimes he became a little short of breath.

"Oh, I know," Hatcher said. "Your generation had to do the 'Over There'
stuff, and of course I know about your being shot and gassed, too, sir;
but, after all, that was only a tough episode. When you got back life
went on being the same old bed of roses it used to be in the Gay
'Nineties and pretty much always was, in this country, up to now. Now
it's turned tough. The whole world's turned tough, and you've got to be
tough yourself, to deal with it. I seem to've had that bed of roses idea
myself up until just two weeks ago."

"What happened then, Hatcher?"

"Why, that was when I got home. First thing that hit me was right in our
house. Used to be three maids, a house-man and a cook; chauffeur in the
room over the garage. All gone, except the cook and poor old Berry
pretending still to be the gardener and do a little weeding round the
yard. Practically a pensioner because he's too decrepit to be turned
out. No house-man, no maids, no chauffeur, one car instead of three.
Father takes a 'bus to his office and leaves the old rattle-box for
Mother to cash-and-carry in. I'm the one and only un-carred young
business man in the whole country and I'm going to stay that way, I
foresee. I ought to've left college two years ago and gone to work."

"Ought you, Hatcher?"

"Of course I ought! Look where things have got to--everything run down,
and Mother and Father breaking their necks to keep Janey in Smith and
little Frances as a day pupil at the Garden School here. Me, I'd always
expected to go into Ide and Aldrich, of course; so I asked Father when
he wanted me to begin. Damn! For a while he couldn't speak at all."

"Yes," Uncle Victor murmured. "We have those embarrassments nowadays."

"Embarrassments! That what you call 'em? Father finally explained, and I
got the picture: Ide and Aldrich!--Ide and Aldrich, the oldest and
best--Ide and Aldrich so shot to pieces they haven't got room for the
son of the head of the firm to come in as even an office boy. In the
Real Estate Department they've let everybody go except the two oldest
clerks and that old-maid stenographer that's been with 'em ever since
before even Father was born. Got to keep them for charity. Chance for
me? Not very! Nor anywhere else. There's Father--one of the most
important men in town and not an idea in his head how to place me or do
anything with me. So here I am, all educated up and home again to be a
problem child on my parents' hands. What do I do?"

"Apparently you solve the problem yourself, like a little man, Hatcher.
Almost instantly you become Ide and Aldrich's rent collector."

"Oh, I do, do I?" Hatcher laughed ruefully. "They let one of the
withered clerks, old Mr. Barley, collect the few still partly
collectible rents. Father saw that if I didn't do something I'd probably
just decay; so he brightened all up and faked this job for me--trying to
collect back rents they've completely given up hoping for, only he
didn't put it that way. He thinks it kids me into feeling I'm really
working because I'm anyhow walking all day, and breathing smoke and
getting filthy inside and out. Good of him; but of course it's just a
joke. You don't need a janitor down at your own office, Uncle Victor, do
you?"

"My own office?" Uncle Victor inquired. "Where's that?"

"What!" Hatcher half-shouted, and, open-mouthed, he looked both alarmed
and indignant. "You're supposed to be an architect, aren't you? You
don't mean you've given it up?"

"No; it gave me up. Architecture's rather closely connected with
building, you know."

"Not even an office any more!" the staring Hatcher exclaimed. "What in
hell do you do?"

"Well--in the afternoon I take a walk with Locksie."

"Is that all? My Cripes!"

"No, Hatcher; he's an absorbing dog," Mr. Linley said. "A gentle modern
creature; but nothing's more interesting than to see the punctilio with
which he observes the inherited etiquette of his ancestors. A civilized
dog; yet every day I learn from him something new about primordial life.
Given to me as a pup by a lady who'd named him Goldilocks. I didn't wish
to seem critical of her; yet I felt I had to help him out of that, so I
call him Locksie. She doesn't mind."

"Now isn't that lucky!" The astounded nephew became satirical. "I must
say you take things rather calmly, Uncle Victor. Here's the whole other
side of the globe gone to war and this whole side of it gone to pot and
you've lost your own profession, even your office; but all that worries
you is--" He paused, wondering why his uncle had halted beside a gate in
a low iron fence. They had come some distance from the painful Linley
house and had reached a less completely dilapidated part of the street.
Behind the iron fence was a short space of smoky grass cut through by a
cement path that led from the gate to the veranda steps of a narrow
brick house. The place was dull, sooty and shabby between a red-painted
grocery and a filling station. "What interests you here, Uncle Victor?"

"I live here."

"What?"

"Very comfortable," Mr. Linley said. "The landlady lets me bathe Locksie
in the cellar twice a week. Food always digestible and by no means
always bad. The other boarders interest me warmly--like a good play.
They're all richly what we call 'characters' and most likeable. For
instance, there's a steam-fitter's assistant who's become a Buddhist
and--"

"Well, I'll be damned!" Hatcher said. "I thought you lived at the
Carlyle Club."

"Not now," his Uncle Victor informed him gently. "The Club's gone, too,
you see."

"I'm damned!"

"Won't you come in?"

"Thanks," Hatcher said. "I've got to keep walking. Good-by, Uncle
Victor!"




CHAPTER IV


Young Hatcher Ide, released from the slower pace of
his uncle and swinging forward at his own natural stride, groped among
his emotions, supposing them to be thoughts. "Some jolt!" he murmured,
alluding to his interior reception of the fall of his elegant Uncle
Victor all the way to a second-rate boarding-house. Uncle Victor's
sangfroid also disturbed the nephew; the recent exhibition of
indifference to calamity went beyond the human. Pleased because he was
allowed to wash his dog twice a week in the cellar! Golly!

Were these older people already calloused to the perishing of the order
to which they belonged, or was it a fact that after you're thirty it
doesn't much matter to you--or to anyone else--what happens to you? Why
had they let everything go to pot? Just dumbness? Well, it was time for
the new generation to get tough, take hold and do something different.

The only question was how to take hold of what.

He walked unanswering miles northward into air that smelt as much of
burned oil as it did of soft coal smoke. Then, arrived in a residential
fringe, he followed an ascending thoroughfare to the top of a suburban
ridge, and turned into a shrubberied street labeled upon a corner lamp
post, Butternut Lane. The "lane" was hard-surfaced between cement
curbstones; but years of skilled landscaping had produced cloistral
privacies for the elaborate houses on both sides of what was now a
suburban avenue. Every prospect that met the eye spoke of success
ensconced in a luxuriously dignified seclusion. Hatcher Ide, turning
into Butternut Lane as sunset edged with gilt the silver trunks of noble
beech trees and glazed with rose the autumnal lawns and gardens, thought
this look of things so false as to be sardonic. Judging by all he'd
heard in the two weeks he'd been at home, he'd come to the conclusion
that everybody in the place was just about broke.

Some of the bankrupts evidently didn't realize their condition. From
between the stone pillars of a driveway gate there rolled forth a darkly
glistening automobile with white-sided wheels. In the driver's seat,
exposed to the weather, sat a proud-eyed colored man in livery, and
behind him, enclosed but visible through clear glass, a pretty woman all
gray fur and gray velvet smiled out upon a world she seemed to like. She
saw Hatcher, leaned forward, gayly threw him a kiss; and he responded by
fumbling at a hat he wasn't accustomed to wearing but had donned as
appropriate to rent-collecting down in the city.

Fifty feet farther on, he stopped and looked over the top of the hedge
that bordered the cement sidewalk. At the other end of a green lawn,
near a house outwardly inspired by Mount Vernon, a girl in a pale green
shirt and bright blue trousers was raking red and yellow leaves into a
pile under one of the tall old trees. She had a neat profile and fair
hair; her figure looked able, and she used the rake with a sustained
vigor.

She saw Hatcher, waved to him with a high-flung hand, dropped the rake,
ran lightly over the grass, and showed him across the top of the hedge a
face much like that of the comely lady who'd just thrown a kiss to him.
"Any luck?" she asked. "How was the job to-day?"

"Same's yesterday," Hatcher said. "Nothing plus nothing. They're all
bums. Me, I'm upside down. Just saw your mother slicking out in her big
town-car. Doesn't anything ever worry her, Dorcy?"

"No; especially not when she's going after Harry." Dorcy smiled
indulgently. She was the only child of the junior partner in the firm of
Ide and Aldrich; and, like almost everybody else, she affectionately
called him "Harry". He was that sort of father. "When Mother drives down
to the office to bring him home, herself, why, for an hour beforehand
you'd think she's going to a party. The Romeo and Juliet stuff's lasted
so long with them it sometimes makes me think their generation did
themselves a good turn tangling escapist romance with sex. Anything
except rent-collecting get you upside down, Hatch?"

"Uncle Victor Linley," Hatcher said. "Ran into him down in the dirtiest
smoke where everybody used to live--nothing but a slum--and I found out
he lives in it now, himself. Know what he's doing? Handmaid to a cocker
spaniel. Some woman named it Goldilocks and gave it to him; so he
changed its name to Locksie. Helps the dog, he told me, and's so tactful
it didn't offend the giver. His mind seemed to dwell on things like
that. Is Uncle Victor screwy or am I?"

Dorcy neglected the question. "He's the most fascinating man in town,"
she said. "Some woman's given him a spaniel, has she? There are others
who'd like to give him a lot more than that. I simply worship his blue
eyes! There's something so mysterious and gripping about that type of
slight, delicate-looking men with brilliant minds that have so much to
offer and--"

"Listen!" Her enthusiasm seemed to stupefy Hatcher. "You're talking
about my uncle, not me! Have you any idea of his age? At that, though,
he doesn't seem to realize any more than a child what's happened to him.
He didn't, even when I talked to him about the kind of world his
generation's let us in for. You don't seem to appreciate that, yourself.
Likely enough it's because of the way your family somehow manage to go
on living. Of course you can still do it because your father hasn't got
my father's expenses--three children to keep in school and college at
the same time, for instance. Take me: right up to when I got home I was
spending as if I were on the top of the wave--and there's Aunt Ada. Your
father hasn't any expensive old-maid sister to support, or old servant
pensioners. Dorcy, you don't seem to realize--"

"Don't I?" Dorcy said. "Because I only rake leaves when the gardener has
too much to do, I haven't got a social conscience? You think because
Father and Mother go on having themselves a big time I'm content to be a
parasite? Girls aren't like that these days--not any more than you are,
yourself."

"Yes, I know." Hatcher was teasingly skeptical. "You all want to be
secretaries or Hollywood, or female broadcasting wagsters, or both kinds
of models or--"

"We do not! Look at my best friend, Mary Gilpin, downtown and on her
feet about ten hours a day. Look at Amy Murray. Amy's been to department
stores and everywhere for weeks and weeks trying to land a job, and if
she hadn't told me that wherever she went too many girls had been there
before her, I'd have been doing the same thing. If it weren't for that,
I'd probably be working harder than you do, Hatcher Linley Ide!"

"Dorcy! You really feel that way? I ask your pardon." Hatcher looked at
her solemnly over the top of the hedge. "Well, what's it all mean? It
means that youth hasn't got anything but its own unrest and that's
something that leads to chaos. Well, what do we do about it? That's up
to the individual. Well, you and I are individuals, aren't we? So what
ought you and I to do?"

"I've been listening to broadcasts like that, too, Hatch; but I haven't
any idea."

"I have," Hatcher said, a little irritated. "It's my own, thanks, and I
just thought of it. We can't find out what we ought to do till we first
find where any openings are. The simple God's truth, Dorcy, is that we
ought to take a car and a trailer, and go up and down this country--I
mean all over it, east and west and north and south--with a fine-tooth
comb and study what's the matter with it and what we can do to remedy it
and find ourselves an opening for a better way of living and--"

"Who?" Dorcy interrupted. "Who ought to take a car and a trailer and--"

"You and I," he said absently. "I suppose we could get married first
and--"

"Hatcher Ide!" Dorcy's color heightened; but she laughed amiably. "Isn't
your head just a bit in the clouds? If you don't mind being reminded,
we're not even engaged."

"Oh, well," he said, "we've always expected to be. I'm serious, Dorcy;
we ought to get a car and a trailer and--"

"What with?" she asked. "I made Father cut my allowance in half the
other day, and what you're earning--I mean what you're _not_ earning--"

"No." He sighed. "Of course it's impractical. Every really sensible idea
always is impractical. For instance, my father's got any quantity of
vacant old brick and frame houses with the plumbing looted out of 'em
and all blacked up with smoke; but if he'd let me buy second-hand
plumbing and paint the outside a dark putty-color that wouldn't much
show smoke smears and with an attractive apple-green trim, and the
inside walls painted--" He stopped abruptly; then added, "Impractical
again, of course!"

"But why, Hatch? Why'n't you go ahead and do it?"

Hatcher laughed. "I put it up to one of the old retainers at the office,
Mr. Barley, and he looked scared. Told me I'd better not suggest my
father's sinking any more money in those properties. Said there was no
use painting anything down in the heavy smoke and everybody quit doing
it long ago. Maybe he's right. Well--most likely what'll really happen,
we'll get into this war against Hitler, ourselves, or, if we don't, some
day I'll stop letting Father kid me into pretending I'm a rent collector
and thumb my way to Canada and join up with some regiment there. You'd
probably go, yourself, as a nurse or something."

"Yes, I wouldn't like to be out of it if--"

"No; you wouldn't. You've got unrest too, of course, Dorcy. Well--" He
sighed again; then was annoyed by a thunderous rumbling upon the street
pavement behind him. He turned his head and saw a procession of four
ponderous closed trucks moving slowly upon Butternut Lane. "What's all
this?" he asked. "Somebody in our neighborhood selling their furniture
and moving out?"

"No; it's furniture moving in," Dorcy informed him. "It's from Paris."

"Where's it going?"

"Into the Lash place, next door. The woman that owns the Lash place is
coming home from France on account of the war. She was the Miss Sarah
Lash that lived there when we were little; but I don't remember her. Do
you?"

"Me? Not any."

"She's rich," Dorcy said. "The Lashes always were, of course, and she's
the only one left, so she's got it all. She's been married twice; she's
a double grass-widow. Her name's Mrs. Florian, Mother told me; but from
the way she spoke I don't think she ever liked her much."

Hatcher wasn't interested. "Well--some old grass-widow," he said
vaguely. "I've got a dollar. I'll grab the car after dinner, Dorcy, and
run you in to see that jungle picture. Right?"

Dorcy stretched an arm across the hedge, gave him a pat on the shoulder.
"Right!"




CHAPTER V


She ran back to her rake, and he swung into his stride
again; but paused as he reached the farther end of the Aldriches' hedge,
because the last of the four big trucks entering the broad driveway of
the "Lash place" momentarily blocked his way. The traveling warehouse
passed between two tall brick pillars capped with carved stone and
followed its monstrous fellows toward the long, many-gabled gray stone
house that faced a lawn three hundred feet deep and thus stood
impressively that far back from the street. A stooping old man had
opened the tall wrought-iron gates for the trucks and was turning to
follow, but saw Hatcher and stopped.

"Giants, ain't they?" he said, proud of the size of the trucks. "There's
French mantelpieces and doorways in 'em, too, along with the furniture
that's every stick of it from the Old Country. Been a contractor in
there ten days now, tearing the place all up, working on plans she sent
him. Yes, sir, I been employed on this place for thirty-one years now,
Mr. Hatcher, and sole caretaker all the long time it's been empty; but I
guess this is the biggest job I've seen yet. I certainly hope Miss
Sarah'll like the way I handle things. How you feeling, Mr. Hatcher?"

"Bad," Hatcher said. "How are you, George?"

"Fine!" George laughed. "I used to say I felt bad, too, sometimes at
your age, fifty years ago; but I didn't. Well, I hope everybody's well
at your house. Guess I better be doing a little overseeing."

Hatcher walked on. The long hedge beside him now was taller than the
Aldriches', walling everything on the other side of it in an
impenetrable security from the tarnishing glance of the passer-by, and
it ended at a haughty brick pillar higher than the hedge. This pillar,
marking a corner of the "Lash place", Hatcher had often climbed, in
earlier years, to seat himself atop the chilly scrolled stone ball above
its square cap; for it marked also a corner of the smaller domain of the
Ides. Beyond the pillar was an upward flourish of Lombardy poplars, then
a thicket of varied shrubberies and another driveway, one into which the
brooding Hatcher turned.

Hearing his name shouted behind him, he turned again, however, and went
back to the sidewalk. A sandy-haired friend-since-childhood's-hour,
Gilpin Murray, who lived in the house opposite, was coming across the
street to greet him. "'Lo, Hatch! How long you been home?"

"Two weeks," Hatcher said, as they shook hands heartily. "You been away,
too, haven't you, Gilp?"

"Yes. Got back yesterday noon. Had a month's job on a stock farm up near
Earlsville. It got auctioned off yesterday, house and all; so that's
washed up. Spent most the summer job-hunting up and down the town.
Pleasant walking, I don't think. Well, anyhow, we had ourselves a time
at Commencement, didn't we? Seems a terrible long time ago, doesn't it?
I suppose you're already started merrily in with Ide and Aldrich. Got
anything for me down there?"

"Murder!" Hatcher said. "Not for me neither. They're just letting me
pretend on no pay."

"Not so bad; not so bad!" Young Gilpin Murray laughed plaintively. "I'd
take a job pretending for nothing any day. I don't so much mind doing
nothing as I do looking like it. Early in July I had one idea.
Practically super-colossal. Get the dandelion rights to all the lawns on
Butternut Lane, dig 'em up for nothing and sell the greens for food; but
they told me that modern spinach is all so cultivated up nobody eats the
plain simple wholesome greens of our forefathers any more, so everything
collapsed. There's one comfort: most of us promising Butternut Laners
are in the same boat. Not all, though. You had a load o' Pinkie Wilson
yet?"

"No. What's he doing?"

"Pinkie?" Gilpin spoke satirically. "Doing? Him? When'd pretty-face
Pinkie Wilson ever do a damn thing but wear all the clothes, ride horses
and eat half the cocktail sandwiches? Still can do on account of all
that Erdvynn money; his mother was an Erdvynn. Phooey! Do you see the
change in me, Hatch? Let it be a lesson to you."

"What's your trouble?"

"It's what idleness does to you, Hatch. Up to this one month's job, me
walking the streets and then sitting round just talking. You get to
listening to your aunts and grandmothers even; you get to telling people
whose mother was who. Yes, sir; I'm all full of genealogy and gossip. I
can tell you just who had so damn much jack to start with they've still
got it--like the Erdvynn money in Pinkie Wilson's family--and what must
be the income tax on this Frenchified old female that's fixing to come
back and live next door to you. Heard about her, haven't you? By the
way, there's a chance you or I might grab, Hatch."

"Chance? What do you mean, chance?"

"My mother tells me the old thing used to be quite a pirate," Gilpin
said. "Out on capture all the time--and, look, she's had two divorces,
so she must expect to circulate some even yet. Well, here we are, two
enterprising young fellers in what they call dire straits; so let the
best man win. What would we care how old or froggified the bride just so
she'd clothe and car us the way we used to be accustomed to and keep us
in--"

Hatcher interrupted. "Oh, hell; talk sense, Gilp!"

"Same old Hatch!" Gilpin laughed. "Same old serious-minded scholar;
won't laugh and joke and cut-up about anything!" Then he looked at
Hatcher with a friendly curiosity. "Going back to Pinkie Wilson, I
suppose you've heard how my handsomest cousin pushed him out the gate?"

"Mary Gilpin? Did she? I thought they were all set."

"Not Mary. She got herself a job in the city library last spring, Hatch,
and, after she'd made Pinkie comprehend she preferred it to him, he
rather turned his affections to another quarter, as the old books used
to say. That's why I'm more or less surprised to hear you haven't run
across him since you got back."

"What?" Hatcher asked. "You mean the 'other quarter' is Dorcy Aldrich?"

"Yes; quite a lot. I thought you might find Pinkie sitting round in the
way a good deal when you're over there, Hatch. Bore for you and Dorcy
both, of course. You're supposed to be rather affianced or something,
aren't you? So I thought you might object to the encumbrance."

"Me?" Hatcher laughed. "I'd look pretty objecting, wouldn't I? What
business would I have being engaged to any girl in the world--with my
prospects? So I'm certainly not."

"No; nor worrying about Pinkie, either," Gilpin said, laughing too.
"Everybody knows that pretty boy'd be as big a laugh to Dorcy as he was
to Mary or would be to anybody else. Well--I'll go back to my tasks now.
I was getting Benedictine off my frazzled dinner coat when I saw you
from the window. If you hear of anything that pays better, for God's
sake let me know!"

"Right, and if you run into a job where there's room for two--"

"Right. Be seein' you, Hatch."

They separated and Hatcher turned back into the driveway. He walked
thoughtfully, though he was not disturbed by his friend's information;
he didn't need to be conceited in order to feel certain that Dorcy
Aldrich would never find the egregious young Wilson anything but a
rather easily disposable form of nuisance. There were serious things to
worry about, and Gilpin's gossip was already dismissed from Hatcher's
mind. The Tudorish brick and half-timbered house now before him,
standing among old forest trees so tall that they shaded its roof, had
an appearance slightly shabby; the slate of the roof, here and there,
obviously needed repair or replacements. Hatcher Ide was home from his
day's work, the second in his life, and was again wondering darkly how
many such profitless days he could endure.

He opened the unlocked front door, stepped into the broad half-paneled
hall, and went into the living-room. Here a wood fire burned hissingly
in a carved oak chimney-breast that reached to the falsely beamed long
ceiling; and a brown-haired thin little girl, Hatcher's ten-year-old
sister Frances, stood staring out into the paled afterglow through the
diamond-shaped panes of a bow window.

"This is getting pretty exciting, Hatch," she said, not turning.

"What is, Francine?"

"Please don't call me 'Francine' nor 'Fanny' either," the little girl
said, immobile. "I know my rights, and it's 'Frances'. Hatch, from here
you can see through a sort of crack in the bushes into the Lash
place--and they're doing just more things over there! They've got the
boards off the windows and everything's all full of people in overalls.
There's a lady named Mrs. Florian coming to live there; but she hasn't
got any children and can't be expected to very soon because now she
hasn't even got any husband. I asked Mother where's Mr. Florian and she
said he's a Frenchman in the French army but got divorced from her.
Mother told me she used to know this Mrs. Florian when she lived there
before she was ever married at all the first time; but I kind of think
she kind of didn't like her much. She hasn't come yet; but I want to get
a good look at her when she does. Don't you, too, Hatch?"

"Why?" Hatcher asked absently. "Just some fat old grass-widow. What
you--"

"I asked Berry." Frances turned, regarded her brother with grave eyes,
brown like her hair and almost embarrassingly worshipful of him. "Berry
was our gardener even then when this Mrs. Florian lived there, and,
being a next-door gardener, he knows all about her. He even knew her
when she wasn't any older than me. Berry didn't say she was fat then. He
said her name was Sarah and she's peculiar."

"Oh, she's peculiar, is she? How?"

"Berry didn't say. He said she went away after she got married, before I
got born, and's never been back. Mother looked funny when I asked her
about her some more and said she didn't care to talk about her; but
maybe that time it was because Father came home sick and she had to be
too busy."

"Father came home sick?" Hatcher said. "What are you talking about?"

"He did. He came home from the office sick about half-past three, just
when I got here from school." Frances's large eyes, unwinking, seemed to
fix themselves upon a far, far distant point, so profound were her
inward calculations. "I bet Father got sick because this Mrs. Florian's
so peculiar and's coming back to live next door."

"What!" Hatcher laughed. "Has Father gone to bed? Where's Mother?"

"No." Systematic, Frances took the questions in turn. "He's kind of
walking round in his room. She's upstairs now, trying to get him to eat
something, the way she always does when anybody's sick and doesn't like
food. He won't. She--" Footsteps were heard upon the oaken stairway
outside the open double doors of the living-room, and Frances paused;
then added, "She's quit. Father never got sick and came home before.
When he had that cold I heard him tell Mother he couldn't stay in the
house because he has to make money. He's strong because in college if he
wasn't strong how could he have been captain of-- What you want,
Mother?"

Mrs. Ide came into the room. Blue-eyed, comely and slight, like her
brother Victor Linley, she lacked his philosophical serenity and had
allowed the shapely contours of her face to be altered by a host of
apprehensions. She smiled, however, as she answered Frances's question.
"I want you to get up to your own room and do your home work. There's
more than an hour before dinner."

Frances gave the bow window a reluctant glance but obediently went to
the door. "Mother," she said musingly, as she went, "why don't you like
Mrs. Florian? Is it because she's coming home made Father sick?"

"You do have ideas!" Mrs. Ide laughed. "Scram, funny child!" Then, as
Frances departed, the mother turned to her son. "Poor Hatch! You don't
look as if you'd begun to like your new job yet."

"I don't, Mother. What's the matter with Father?"

"I don't know. He keeps insisting he's all right but says he won't come
down for dinner; so of course he isn't. Oh, dear me!" Mrs. Ide sank upon
the somewhat worn green upholstery of a sofa before the fire. "I've been
so afraid he'd have a breakdown I--"

"Breakdown?" Hatcher was annoyed. "What are you talking about? Don't
start imagining--"

"But it can't be anything physical," Harriet Ide protested. "Only a few
days before you got home he let me have Dr. Loffen go over him, and the
only thing wrong was that he was underweight. The long strain of these
dreadful times--how many business men we've seen go down under it! I
suppose it comes with a crash when it does come--anything mental."

"Mental?" Hatcher was disgusted. "Are you trying to tell me Father's out
of his head?"

"No, of course not; but he's not like himself, Hatcher, and it's the
first time in my life I ever knew him to come home from business in the
middle of the afternoon because he wasn't well."

At this, Hatcher laughed outright. "There has to be a first time for
everything, doesn't there? Seems to me you're just a wee bit out of your
head, yourself, Mother."

"I hope so!" she sighed. "If you're going upstairs before dinner I wish
you'd go in and see if you can't get him at least to take the broth and
toast I left in his room for him."

"If he doesn't, I will," Hatcher said cheerily, and marched upstairs.
Outside his father's door, with his hand extended to the bronze knob, he
was startled by a sound from within. It was a groan, a brief one--but it
suggested extreme nausea. Hatcher opened the door quickly. "What's the
matter, Father--seasick?"

The kind of groan he'd heard led him to expect physical throes; but, to
his astonishment, his father was walking up and down the large room with
his hands clenched behind him. Hatcher was used to seeing him look
worried; but never before had known him to be anything except
self-contained and steady. He didn't seem to be either, now. Frederic
Ide was a broad-shouldered tall man, not fifty, too thin of late for the
once-modish clothes of Scotch wool it was his habit to wear. He'd begun
to stoop, to grow gray, and his intelligent, conscientious face had lost
ruddiness with every Depression year--but Hatcher had never seen him so
white as now.

"Father! What's wrong? What's--"

"Nothing!" Ide stopped his pacing, unclenched his hands and used them
both in the gesture of a man who passionately repels assistance.
"Nothing's the matter! I felt a little ill downtown and came home;
that's all. Quiet your mother down if you can--so that she'll let me
alone! She--"

"But, Father, I heard you groaning!"

"No, you didn't. I tell you I'm all right. Good heavens! Can't a man
have a slight indisposition for just once in his life without upsetting
the whole household? For God's sake, tell your mother to stop fretting
and not send me any dinner but just let me alone! Tell her I'm not
having a nervous breakdown, either."

"No, sir; of course you're not." Hatcher laughed; then had a thought,
not a well-inspired one. "Father, being in the Real Estate Department,
it seems as if I wouldn't get much chance to talk to you downtown, and I
expect you prefer to put Ide and Aldrich's affairs behind you when
you're home; but I got an idea to-day--it's a business idea and I think
it's a pretty good one--so I might as well take this opportunity to
place it before you. Down at the office after lunch I sprung it on that
wizened old Mr. Barley because he kind of seems to be the head of my
department, and he rather discouraged me and I-- Well, of course I've
only had two days' experience but--but--"

"What is it? What are you trying to say?"

"Well, it's this, sir. There's a kind of grayish putty-color that
wouldn't show smoke much and it goes with a grayish apple-green I'd use
for trim."

"What?"

"Yes, sir. I was thinking that if you'd let me get all those vacant
rental properties of yours down round Sheridan Avenue painted and
brightened up in these two colors--"

Mr. Ide struck his hands together. "Do you want to do it to-night?"

"No, sir."

"Then let me alone!"

Hatcher, a little startled, had another thought. "Father, did anything
at the office send you into a tailspin? Are you worrying worse over
business?"

"No!" Ide shouted, with a vehemence his son had never heard from him.
"Yes! I always am. Who isn't? That's not what's the matter with me, I
tell you. I just want a little quiet, for God's sake, and to be spared
the sight of food." He pointed to a tray of broth and toast upon a
table. "Take those things out with you, will you, please!"

"Yes, sir; if you're sure you're all right--"

"Certainly! Please, please!" The gesture toward the door was one of
entreaty.




CHAPTER VI


Hatcher took the tray and went out, carrying it with
him to his own room, where, being young and not apprehensive about his
appetite for dinner, he kept his word. Of course everything was really
all right, he thought, finishing the broth and toast. He didn't happen
to remember ever hearing his self-contained father say "for God's sake"
before, and certainly he'd never seen him use such gestures; but he'd be
all right to-morrow, of course.

The son talked soothingly to his mother at dinner, and afterward,
forgetting the cares of the day and all other cares, went forth gayly
and took Dorcy to the jungle picture. On the way home they talked about
how much it would cost them to get to Africa on a freighter, and, when
they reached Butternut Lane, Hatcher left the car in the Aldriches'
driveway and went into the house with Dorcy. As they opened the front
door they heard the sound of an uproarious piano.

"It's Harry," Dorcy said, and laughed. "They had a cocktail party here
and then went out to dinner somewhere, and after that they were going to
a meeting to raise money for the Boys' Club; but now they're back and
he's playing swing at Mother because she pretends to hate it. They do
have the biggest times together!"

Mrs. Aldrich, even more piquantly pretty in a blue and gold evening
dress than she'd been in her gray furs and velvet in the afternoon,
appeared in the double doorway that led from the room where resounded
the music. She carried a clinking amber glass in her hand, and, her
sweet eyes sparkling, she laughed happily. "Come in, you children," she
said. "Help me to stop him. I absolutely can't do a thing with him
to-night!"

They did as she asked, and Dorcy, running forward, threw her arms about
the big rubicund blond man who sat thumping the piano. He was
improvising, singing in a hoarse jolly voice as he played, and he tried
to go on despite Dorcy's arms about his neck. "Boops-a-daisy! I'm half
crazy! Take it aisy!" he sang; then protested, "Stop it, Dorcy. Ouch!
You'll spill my grog." He shook her off, drank sputteringly from a
freshly filled glass that he lifted from beside him on the piano bench;
then swung himself round and greeted Hatcher shoutingly. "Sit down, Bo!
That's right; sit down. How's the collecting for our grand old firm
getting on, laddie boy? Don't tell me; don't tell me! I'd offer you a
highball; but the guid wifie here always says you're still too young,
Hatch." He let Dorcy push him to the end of the bench so that she could
sit beside him; then he slapped her loudly on the back. "How's tricks,
baby?"

Dorcy slapped his shoulder heartily, in return. "How went the Boys'
Club, Harry? Raise any money for it?"

"Bet your neck we did, baby! Why for have I been carrying a subscription
list around everywhere I went these last two months? Anybody wants to do
business with me, 'All right,' says I, 'but first: What do I put your
name down for to keep poor kids off the streets nights even if it has to
be only a dollar?' Then here's my only born child asks me if we raised
any money? Shame!"

Dorcy looked at him with fondest pride. "Nobody but you could have kept
the Boys' Club alive through these tough times. Know what a good guy
this guy is, Hatch? Fourth of July he and Mother took a hundred of those
kids out to a camp on Silver Creek--kept 'em there a week; yes, and
stayed there with 'em, themselves. Harry played a tin piano to 'em and
went on hikes with 'em, all bit up with chiggers and mosquitoes till he
looked like a raspberry patch. Heat of the summer, and look how fat poor
Harry is, too! Hurrah for Harry!"

She slapped his shoulder again, just as he drank, so that he choked.
"Stop it!" he said, stooped and set his glass upon the floor. "I'm fat;
but I've got human shoulders, haven't I? Whenever you flatter me up a
little, you always seem to think you have to hit me, too. You're so
muscular I should think the boys'd hate you."

Uproarious, Dorcy slapped him again. "Hurrah for you, Harry! You're the
cats!"

"Yes!" he shouted, jumped up, jerked her up with him, clasped her about
the waist and began to dance with her, singing to an improvised tune,
"Hurrah, hurrah for me! I'm the cats; the cat's whiskers, the cat's
ankles, the cat's uncles and even her tail! I'm all the cats, by glory;
that's why I never fail!"

Mrs. Aldrich, delighted, made burlesque gestures of helplessness. "Such
a man!" she cried to Hatcher. "He's been like this for hours!" She
affected an arch jealousy. "Oh, I know why you're so excited, Harry
Aldrich! It's because that black-haired siren's coming back next door
after all these years and you think you can dazzle her into having one
of her affairs of passion with you!"

Harry Aldrich dropped upon the piano bench, pulled Dorcy down beside
him, lifted his glass, drank hastily; then bellowed with laughter.
"Discovered! Little bright eyes knows my secret. That's a honey! Hatch,
my wife's on to me. Sarah Lash Florian! Her and me--oh, my soul!"

He protracted his merriment; and Hatcher's thoughts, following
involuntarily one of the myriad trails with which memory crosshatches
the human mind, returned momentarily to an inconsequential scene of some
hours earlier. This was of his solemn little sister Frances in the bow
window and of her absurd small voice announcing her infantile
conclusion: "I bet Father got sick because this Mrs. Florian's so
peculiar and's coming back to live next door." Frances's nonsense was no
more significant than Mrs. Aldrich's; the effect upon Hatcher was only
to remind him of his father.

"By the way, sir," he said, "Father wouldn't tell us what was the matter
with him when he got sick down at the office this afternoon and came
home. Before he left did he say anything to you about how he felt or
what was wrong with him?" Mrs. Aldrich and Dorcy instantly made outcries
of sympathy; but Hatcher assured them that nothing serious was in
question and began to repeat his inquiry. "Sir, did Father say whether
he'd eaten anything that disagreed with him or--"

"Why--no," Harry Aldrich said. "I don't think so." He seemed to be
trying to remember. "No, I don't think your father went into any
details, Hatch. I believe I recall he just mentioned that he felt a
little under the weather and thought he'd better go home and lie down a
while. No, I'm pretty sure he didn't say. Get off this bench, baby; your
mother wants me to play Oompta-Zing."

He renewed his performance upon the piano, while his wife and Dorcy,
feigning anguish, tried vainly to dislodge him from the bench. Hatcher
was only vaguely aware of this fond scuffle and of the resounding wires.
Harry Aldrich's tone had been casual and reassuring; but for no clear
reason it evoked imaginings that had slowly been forming themselves
under the surface of Hatcher's mind ever since his odd talk with his
father before dinner. Harry was one of the friendliest, most sympathetic
souls in the world: Was his apparent lack of anxiety assumed out of
consideration for his partner's son and with the wish not to alarm him?
After all, it must have needed some ailment beyond the ordinary to take
that partner home in the middle of the afternoon for the first time in
his life; and surely Harry realized this. All at once a feeling that
something might be pretty wrong at home came upon Hatcher; he rose to
go, and, in spite of reproaches from Dorcy, and Harry Aldrich's protest
that the evening was just beginning, got himself out rather abruptly.

At home, after he'd put the shabby car in the empty-looking big garage
behind the house, his mother met him at the front door. "Be very quiet,
dear," she said. "He hasn't eaten anything; but finally he consented to
try those insomnia pills Dr. Loffen gave me after my operation, and took
two. For quite a while I could hear his bed creaking with his tossing
about; but now it doesn't any more, so I do hope he's asleep."

Hatcher looked at her earnestly. "Did you get him to tell you what was
wrong?"

"No, not a thing. He's never had anything but colds before and I don't
know how to handle him. When he'd look at me, insisting he only needed
to be let alone, his face was just pitiful. It's so strange! Go up
quietly, dear."

Hatcher, increasingly disturbed, went upstairs on tiptoe and, as
noiselessly, into his own room. He undressed, turned out the light, and,
in his pajamas, stepped to his door, opened it and listened. From his
father's room, across the hall, he heard no sound and the whole place
was still; but to his ears there came from the distance a faintish
clatter of busy thumpings. Somewhere in the night, apparently, a lot of
idiots had suddenly decided to build a house. He closed the door softly,
went to the open window near his bed and heard the hammering more
distinctly.

Outside, the big old trees had already shed leaves profusely in high
winds and premature frosts, and, between angular half-bare black
branches, he saw rows of gleaming oblongs, the windows of the long stone
house next door all alight. The noise of the hammers came from there.
Mrs. Florian would be home so soon, then, that night-shifts of workmen
were needed. Lighted windows in that house were as unprecedented as his
father's untimely coming home from business--perhaps because of some
mental shock. Two thoughts now seemed to collide in young Hatcher Ide's
mind almost as spontaneously as, hours earlier, the still younger
fancies of his little sister Frances had put together the two unexpected
things that had happened.

Hatcher remembered the strange groan. Was it fantastic to wonder if his
father had gagged with nausea--nausea not physical--because Mrs. Florian
was coming home? For heaven's sake, then, who and what was this Mrs.
Florian--this twice-married Sarah Lash? Hatcher couldn't remember her at
all; a boy's mind easily erases an adult absentee. His mother, next-door
neighbor to this Sarah Lash, hadn't liked her; and Mrs. Aldrich,
next-door neighbor on the other side, laughed about her, alluded
derisively to "affairs of passion". Gilpin Murray's mother, just across
the street, had used the unpleasantly suggestive term "pirate". Mrs.
Florian had been married twice and was now, for the second time, a
divorce. "One of her affairs of passion," Mrs. Aldrich had said.
Evidently Mrs. Florian'd had quite a number of such affairs.

The blue darkness outside the window, patched in the middle distance
with the rows of lemon-colored oblongs, seemed to become ominous. Night,
for youth especially, is incentive to fancies that may be charming--or
may be dreadful. Hatcher felt a secret somewhere. Could it be possible
that one of this Sarah Lash's affairs of passion--a hidden one--when his
father was younger--Hatcher almost gagged, himself; but his imaginings
continued. Was this gross old grass-widow coming home to plaster the
former object of one of her affairs of passion with reminders and--and
some hideous form of blackmail--or what?

"That'd be a hot one for me!" he thought. "Just the finishing touch for
little old Hatcher Linley Ide, B. A.!" His was a generous nature,
devotedly loyal; nevertheless, it can't be denied that at twenty-two our
first misgivings in the face of catastrophe--especially imagined
catastrophe--are usually for ourselves. Hatcher's mental picture was of
himself returned to a depleted household and no job--and, as "the
finishing touch", to bear the conspicuous odium of being the son of a
man held up to the city's derision by the clamorous echoes of some sexy
old scandal. "Sweet!" he thought. "Wherever I go, everybody looking at
me sidewise, wondering if I can take it. Grand!"

Then Hatcher thought of the face of his father--a fine face and a
strong, good face, lined with the years of struggle to uphold an old
business and a growing family--and a muffled laugh whispered in the
darkened bedroom. "It's a crazy world; but I must be the craziest
damnfool in it!" Hatcher said.

He got into bed, and went to sleep thinking about pretty Dorcy Aldrich
and about dirty old mortgaged houses freshened up with grayish
putty-colored paint and a green trim.




CHAPTER VII


"Father's all right to-day," little Frances informed
him when he came down in the morning and found her alone at the
breakfast table. "Anyhow, Hatch, he said so and wouldn't say anything
else. You're late, Hatch. Mother said he looked terrible and she
wouldn't let him go downtown in the 'bus. She took him in the car. Aunt
Ada's quit visiting Aunt Alice Upham out west and's getting home this
morning. She sent a telegram and Mother's going to meet her at the
station and told me to tell you please be sure to come home for lunch to
show Aunt Ada you're glad she's back, whether we are or not. Mother's
going to get Uncle Victor to come to lunch, too. Mother just loves Uncle
Victor. So do I. Mother had a letter from Janey that says she's crazy
over trickonometry and old Berry's got such a cold he can't rake up the
leaves and we mustn't any of us go near him or we'll catch it; but he
told me before I came indoors to breakfast that Mrs. Florian's got two
Great Danes. They came in boxes big as street-cars and old George's got
'em locked up in the garage over there. There's fifty cents under your
plate. Mother left it so you'd have 'bus fare and be sure and come home
to lunch. G'by!"

She danced out of the brown-paneled room, emitted slender trillings in
the hall, as she set forth for school; and her brother, having somewhat
grimly taken the silver coin from under his plate, thanked the elderly,
rather infirm colored cook for bringing him sustenance, ate it hurriedly
and departed to business.

Neither his father nor the jovial Harry was in the offices of Ide and
Aldrich when he arrived. Mr. Barley, withered clerk, gave him a fresh
list of delinquent tenants, explaining apologetically that most of them
were colored and skilled in the art of postponement. Hatcher found them
so indeed, as he tramped the smoke-fogged streets and alleys; but he had
one success. Just before noon he collected three dollars and fifty cents
on an account totaling eighty-five dollars. Thus he had something to
show for his work when he reached home for lunch. He exhibited the money
to a brightly blue-eyed handsome slight gentleman of forty or so and a
tall, elegant melancholy lady of similar age, whom he found in the
living-room. The tall lady was his Aunt Ada, his father's sister, who'd
unfortunately had to live with the Ides ever since the financial
collapse of Nineteen thirty-three obliterated two-thirds of her income.
Hatcher kissed her jaw dutifully, inquired after his Aunt Alice whom
she'd been visiting; then brought forth three unappetizing dollar bills,
four dimes and two nickels.

"Beginning to pour in on me!" he said. "Ide and Aldrich get three
dollars and fifteen cents and I duly receive my ten per cent
commission--thirty-five cents for two days and a half's work as a
bad-rent collector. Nothing like beginning the good old career in a big
way. Did Mother say if Father's coming home for lunch, Aunt Ada?"

"No; she said he told her he had too much to do to-day. I suppose it's a
good sign, his being so busy."

"I wonder!" Hatcher said, and sat down sprawlingly. "For instance, if
anybody saw me downtown, tearing from hovel to hovel, they'd think I was
as busy as a flea on a strip-tease gal; but neither would be a good
sign."

"Hatcher!" Miss Ide seemed to flinch.

"Well, there _are_ such things," her nephew said stubbornly. "I know
your generation didn't mention 'em, of course. More or less hypocritical
of you, wasn't it?" He turned to the blue-eyed gentleman. "You're
willing to admit that now, aren't you, Uncle Victor?"

"No; I'm afraid we mentioned everything." Mr. Linley looked vaguely
reminiscent. "Your Aunt Ada and I were of the post-war 'wild young
people', you see, Hatcher. I fear we were even wilder and 'franker' than
your own outfit; we had more money to run wild with and it was more of a
novelty then to be shocking. One of the discoveries you'll make as you
grow older, Nephew, is that every new generation evolves out of its own
inexperience a theory that all generations before it were 'frustrated'
by the false dignity of their manners. Youth is always rather
self-congratulatory about its own wildness and its consequent freedom
from previous interfering hypocrisies; but don't take this thought to
heart, Hatcher--your Aunt Ada and I are in no position to reprove you.
Twenty years ago you mightn't have recognized either of us."

Hatcher laughed. "I would you, if you talked as much like a book then as
you do now, Uncle Victor. Did you?"

"I don't know, Hatcher. I suppose years of idleness in one's profession,
with consequently increased reading and meditation, might foster
pedantry of speech; but whether or not my friends and family suffered
from this impediment of mine when I was at your age might depend upon
the type of book of which my stiltedness reminds you."

Mr. Linley spoke, not with an air of superiority but as if Hatcher had
suggested a subject upon which it might be rather interesting to hold an
amiably informal session of inquiry; and the nephew was piqued. He often
found himself somewhat irritated by his uncle and tempted to "get fresh"
with him. Hatcher felt that he didn't comprehend what manner of man
Victor Linley actually was, and wondered if anybody at any age could be
so calmly detached from the "terrible realities of life" as Victor
appeared to be. There was perceptible upon him, and in his manner, the
kind of distinction that suggested (in Hatcher's phrase) a man with a
whale of a past. Hatcher admired this; but his youngness and the
contrasted skimpiness of his own past naturally aroused a slight
resentment in him without his being aware of its cause. Above all, he
was annoyed by Mr. Linley's placidity in the face of the crisis in
public affairs at home and abroad, and the serenity with which he seemed
merely to observe his own troubles as well as those of his nearest
relatives.

"Type of book?" Hatcher responded tartly, the more so as he affected to
feel an amused indifference. "Oh, any of those old books of the Gay
'Nineties. Did you talk that way then, sir?"

Aunt Ada crushed him. "Your uncle was born, I believe, in the year
Eighteen ninety-six. Lord Macaulay is supposed to have written Latin at
the age of three, and your uncle was thought a bright boy; but not that
precocious." She turned to Victor. "I suppose the very young always feel
that nothing much ever really happened in the world before they arrived
in it, themselves."

"May I speak for you, Hatcher?" the uncle asked. "Isn't this where you
should use the expression 'Oh, yeah?'--or am I wrong?"

"You am," Hatcher replied. "We don't do that any more--badly dated.
Don't try to keep up with us; just be yourself." Then, feeling that
after all he'd rather more than held his own against these natural
antagonists, he remembered something he'd planned to ask them if he got
the chance. "By the way, speaking of wildness, I hear we used to have a
neighbor that belonged to your generation and made quite a name for
herself in that line. Have you heard this big old place next door's been
getting all opened up again while you were away, Aunt Ada?"

"I have," she replied, and her intentionally visible expression of
dislike helped to make it significant that she said no more.

Hatcher knew by experience that when Aunt Ada looked like this he
wouldn't get any satisfaction from her. He addressed his uncle. "What
about it?" he asked. "I suppose of course you used to know this Mrs.
What's-her-name when she was a Miss Lash, didn't you, Uncle Victor? From
all I hear, her female contemporaries still have it in for her. How'd
she go down with the boys? For instance, what do you say she's like,
sir?"

At that, there took place an occurrence unexampled in Hatcher's
recollections of the most imperturbable person known to him. The fact
that the question about Mrs. Florian gave Mr. Linley an emotion was made
plain by an involuntary physical effect. His complexion, which was
evenly of an agreeable slight pallor, changed its hue so distinctly that
Hatcher himself felt suddenly embarrassed.

"Oh--I beg your pardon, Uncle Victor--I--" he stammered. "I didn't know
she--I mean--"

"I'm afraid I can't say what she's like," Mr. Linley said coolly. "She's
not been here for some time, and people change. Locksie's followed your
mother out to the kitchen; but he's supposed to have only one meal a
day, in the evening. Notoriously she loves to feed everybody, and your
cook, too, being colored, would be generous. If you have any influence
with either of them would you mind trying to save Locksie from an
indigestion?"

"I'll put him in my room while he's here," Hatcher said, and went upon
the errand.

After lunch, when Uncle Victor had strolled away with the golden spaniel
flickering about him, the puzzled nephew applied himself to his Aunt Ada
before he returned to his unprofitable chores downtown. She'd stepped
out of the front door with him and was speaking severely of old Berry's
little care of the lawn. "What was the matter with Uncle Victor?"
Hatcher asked, interrupting. "I mean when he got so red all over his
face because I wanted to know what this Mrs. Florian's like. Look; did
he get himself snarled up in one of those affairs of passion she was
supposed to be always having with different men?"

"Affairs of passion?" Miss Ide was incredulous chillingly. "Victor
Linley? In an affair of passion? Can you imagine it! He's a gentleman,
and you might well respect him more than to think such a thing. A woman
who married a Spaniard and then--"

"Spaniard, Aunt Ada? I thought he was a--"

"Her first husband was a Spaniard. Came here singing tenor in an opera
troupe," Miss Ide said. "She married him almost overnight. Then she went
abroad and got rid of him and married a Frenchman and--"

"You're sure Uncle Victor never was in love with her?"

"Never!" Miss Ide said sharply. "He certainly was not; but you don't
have to know everything, do you? I don't wish to be critical; but hadn't
you better put your mind on your work, Hatcher, and see if you can't
help your poor father save this family from abject poverty? You've been
home long enough to know that these are bad times, haven't you?"

"Yes; they look that way to me, thanks," Hatcher said absently, and went
on his way, frowning.

He'd got at least one thing out of Aunt Ada. With younger people she was
always one of these you-don't-have-to-know-everything-do-you old
gals--probably because she knew so darned little herself she wanted to
make it seem a treasure--but anyhow he'd wormed her into admitting that
Uncle Victor hadn't blushed about Mrs. Florian because _he'd_ ever had
any affair of passion with her. So what? Had Uncle Victor markedly
changed color in his capacity as a brother-in-law, resentful because of
some old delinquency on the part of his sister's husband? Afraid that
Mrs. Florian's return might bring into the light something that had lain
long in darkness--something that Uncle Victor knew and probably that
Harry Aldrich knew but that Hatcher's mother plainly didn't know?

Uncle Victor was one of these men who know pretty much everything about
people but keep it to themselves, just on principle; and when such a man
turns red there's something important in the wind. Hatcher's father was
in a spot, a bad one; no doubt at all about that. He'd abruptly come
home yesterday possessed by some kind of horror--a seasick kind of
horror was exactly what his overheard groan had expressed. Hatcher'd
finally laughed at himself last night for suspecting that Mrs. Florian's
imminent return had caused the groan. Now, with his imaginings
accumulatively stirred, he was almost sure that it had.

When he went to the offices of Ide and Aldrich, late in the afternoon,
to turn in the day's takings, still three dollars and a half, his father
again wasn't there. Both partners had been out all day--"mostly at the
banks, I suppose," old Mr. Barley said tiredly, but not as if he spoke
of anything unusual. Hatcher walked all the way home because he'd
renewed his intention to be tough and meant to squeeze every penny; and
when he arrived he found his father reading the evening paper in the
small library behind the living-room. Mr. Ide replied with some
impatience to the son's inquiries: yesterday's upset amounted to nothing
whatever, he said; he was in his customary state of good health and
would be greatly obliged if his family'd stop treating him as an
invalid. He looked like one, though, Hatcher thought. Within a day and a
night his father seemed what people call "changed".

...This was Hatcher's word for it, and Harriet Ide's word, too.
"Changed!" she lamented, coming to sit with her son at the breakfast
table on another morning when he'd descended late. "I never saw anything
like it. All through the Depression he's at least had his appetite; but
now that's gone. He didn't eat a bite this morning--just black
coffee--and then running to the 'bus as if demons were after him. And
can I get a word out of him about what's the matter? 'Nothing,' he keeps
telling me. 'Nothing at all,' he says--as if I had no eyes. Business has
been killing him all these years and now it's come to a head; I know it!
Either Ide and Aldrich are in some dreadful crisis right now or else he
sees one coming and's in despair of holding it off. I can't understand
Harry Aldrich--living the way they do and whenever you see Harry he's as
laughing and confident and gay as ever. How does he do it?"

"Like a lot of others," Hatcher suggested. "Partners ought to be
opposite in temperament, one always up and one mostly down. Lots of
firms are like that."

"Yes, I know, Hatcher; but nobody ought to be so 'down' as your poor
father is. You see what a strain he's under, don't you, Hatcher?"

Hatcher did. He thought, too, that he himself was under a rather sharp
strain--coming home after six years of unindustrious carefree living to
find his family facing penury and threatened by worse. Yet how could
there be a public scandal unless this passionate old Mrs. Florian was
the kind of woman to make one? She had plenty of money: What would she
gain by stirring up mud she'd surely be messed in, herself? It looked
crazy; but certainly his father was frightened and this tough world was
getting tougher. The only way to meet that was to get tougher, yourself.
Hatcher went his rounds among the delinquent tenants, doing his best to
be every day tougher and tougher; but week after week of this endeavor
didn't seem to make him tough enough. Being tough with most of these
tenants, indeed, was a waste of histrionics, they were in such hopeless
difficulties; others were unbelievably adept in the art of promising,
some were openly seductive, and all of them out-talked him.

One day he did get almost tough, for a few stern moments, in the marble
vestibule of the ghastly old Linley house down in the thickest smoke.
He'd grown to hate Mrs. Schapp, the landlady; she changed her tactics
every time he called, which was, toughly, every third day. He didn't
have to be told that his Uncle Victor needed the money for the four
years' unpaid rent; Hatcher was determined to get it for him, and his
own percentage as well. Mrs. Schapp wept touchingly. The drama ended
with the collector's lending her a half-dollar (another his mother'd
left under his breakfast plate) and then correctly calling himself a
gypped sucker before he reached the sidewalk.

Beginning to doubt the value of toughness, and perceiving that he didn't
do it well, he presently discovered that his doorstep conversations were
making him sympathetically intimate with a number of the delinquents.
Among them was a former house-painter who'd lost his right hand in an
accident but spoke boastfully to Hatcher, one day, of what he could do
with his left if anybody'd give him a chance.

"See here," the collector said instantly, "I want to get a special shade
of grayish putty-color and one of grayish apple-green that won't show
smoke much. Can you mix colors?"

"Can I mix colors!"

Hatcher had almost six dollars that day, immediately bought pigments and
had the one-handed expert paint the front doorway and the window frames,
not of his own dwelling but of the vacant one next door. The effect was
beyond the best expectations.

Having returned to see it improved by a second coat of putty-color and
apple-green on the Saturday afternoon of that week, he congratulated the
painter and himself, paid his last cent for labor well done; then set
forth to tell Dorcy all about it. Exuberant, he gave Uncle Victor's
narrow-fronted boarding-house a jocularly condescending grunt when he
passed it on his northward way, and strode on buoyantly through the
miles of thinning smoke to Butternut Lane.

When he came to the Aldriches' hedge he moved more slowly, for it was
Dorcy's seemingly casual habit to be somewhere about the front lawn at
this hour; but to-day he walked half the length of the hedge before he
saw her--and then he saw her disappointedly. She came round a corner of
the house, disheveled, swinging a tennis racquet and chatteringly
accompanied by another girl and two boys; they'd been playing on Dorcy's
court behind her mother's garden. The four young people, Butternut Lane
intimates since earliest childhood, walked familiarly, and the boy
beside Dorcy had his arm about her.

Hatcher didn't like that, especially because he didn't like the boy,
Erdvynn Wilson. More than one unfavorable discussion of this person had
taken place of late between Hatcher and his still jobless friend, Gilpin
Murray, and the two were as one in finding Pinkie Wilson increasingly an
incentive to left-wing radicalism. They agreed that there must be
something fundamentally wrong with the capitalistic system since the
bird-brained, showy Wilsons were almost the only Butternut Lane family
that hadn't been at least half-shattered by the Depression. It was
pretty tough, the friends thought, that the bird-brainedest of all the
Wilsons, Pinkie, who'd had to leave college prematurely but not
surprisingly, was allowed by our lax form of government to display
himself upon the polo field while his obvious intellectual betters
walked the streets unsalaried. Polo and all of Pinkie's other light
activities were criminally inappropriate to the times, Hatcher and
Gilpin often told each other earnestly. Moreover, girls had a habit of
saying that Pinkie was "too good-looking for his own good"; and only a
night or two ago Hatcher'd used almost his worst profanity when Dorcy
innocently expressed this theory. Now she was cheerfully wearing
Pinkie's arm round her!

She saw the hat and head bobbing along above the hedge, waved her
racquet, called "Hatch! Hatch!" and ran forward. She had to run fast.
"Wait! What's the matter? Wait!" she cried, and contrived to stop him
just at the end of the hedge. "What's the news? How's the house-painting
coming on? How'd things go to-day, Hatch?"

"All right," he said. "Better than usual. Pretty good. I'm feeling fine.
Well, cherish your health, gal!"

"But, Hatch--" she called, as he moved on. "What's your hurry?"

"Me?" He laughed genially back at her over his shoulder. "Busy business
man. Cherish your health, gal; cherish your health. G'by!"




CHAPTER VIII


He knew that she was looking hurtly after him, not
understanding; and that pleased him. Then he was bitter again. Fine
world, this was! Most impressive old firm in the city gone plumb
stagnant--and one partner singing and laughing, and the other shot to
pieces because the ghost of some long-buried wanton idiocy threatened to
come to life and plaster him and his family with infamy! Then, just when
there was something interesting to tell her about putty-color and green
paint, here was the best girl in the world using the arm of a gilded
wart like Pinkie Wilson for a sash! "What next?" Hatcher asked aloud,
addressing the inquiry to sadistic destiny. "What next?"

The unpleasing answer delayed not longer than the following day.

In the morning his father and mother went to church; they returned late
from Communion Service, looking gravely somewhat emotional, Hatcher
thought. He spent the afternoon playing a two-ball foursome on a public
course with three companions who, like himself, had to make the best of
things since the lapse of family memberships in the decimated Butternut
Lane Country Club. The three were congenial to Hatcher--Gilpin Murray,
Gilpin's cheerful, commonsense sister Amy, and their comely tall cousin
Mary Gilpin, a "grand gal" by Hatcher's definition, because she'd done
her last two years of college "under her own steam", because she was now
earning a salary, and most of all because she'd turned a denying back
upon Pinkie Wilson. She was Dorcy Aldrich's most intimate friend, a
relation of which Hatcher strongly approved; but he didn't talk of Dorcy
to Mary Gilpin this afternoon, though she was his partner in the match.
Glumly, he spoke only of golf.

Saving even gasoline, the four had walked all the way to the links; they
returned as economically. Toward the end of their homeward trudge in the
sunset, they passed the Butternut Lane Country Club gates and were just
in time to see a laughing Dorcy Aldrich shooting forth beside young Mr.
Wilson in his open yellow car. All of the pedestrians responded
enthusiastically to Dorcy's waving hand; then Hatcher and Gilpin,
walking behind the two girls, again told each other, with helpless
repetitions, what they thought of Pinkie Wilson. To Hatcher it seemed
that his "What next?" had been answered in full.

He was mistaken. When he reached home he found his little sister Frances
on the darkening front lawn waiting for him.

"Something bad's happened," she said. "I want to tell you about it
because you're my friend and the only one I can, because if I try to
tell Aunt Ada anything she always says 'That'll _do_!' She isn't here
anyways; she's at Vespers. Hatch, I bet it's terrible!"

"What is?" he asked crossly. "Vespers?"

"No. Hatch, Father went in Mother's room over two hours ago, and I
happened to go upstairs and I could hear him talking and talking to her;
but I don't know what he said because I'm too honorable to try and
listen. So then after a while I went back; but the door's pretty thick
and I was just walking by; but I did hear Mother sort of scream. She
said, 'No, no, no, no!' She said it like she was begging him not to say
something she didn't want him to. Then, when I came by the next time I
heard her crying out loud, Hatch; but I couldn't tell what about. I bet
somebody's dead. You don't expect it's Janey, do you, Hatch?"

"Janey? No! There was a letter from her yesterday. Are they still up
there in Mother's room?"

"No. Father's in his own room and you can't hear a sound. I bet he's
fixing to commit suicide! I bet--"

Hatcher shouted at her. "Shut up! You ought to be ashamed of being so
silly!"

"Well, then," Frances said, "I bet he's anyways reading the Bible or
something. Mother came downstairs and wouldn't let me ask her any
questions and went in the lib'ary. She's there now."

Hatcher strode into the house, down the hall and into the library.
Harriet Ide sat at a desk, writing names upon a long sheet of paper, and
the lighted lamp beside the desk showed new tears upon her cheeks. She
didn't look up, but moved so as to avert her face from her son and spoke
in a low controlled voice. "If there's something you want, Hatch, I
can't talk to you just now; I'm busy."

He came near her. "What are you crying about, Mother?"

"Nothing. I'm not."

"I saw you," he said. "What's worse, I know a good deal more about why
you're crying than you think I do."

"What?" At this, she turned and looked at him, startled. "You say--"

"Yes, Mother; I do. I admit I don't know the details; but I'd be pretty
dumb if I didn't see what's happened. Father's in a spot and it's got so
bad that at last he's had to tell you because you'd find out anyhow--and
pretty soon, too--if he didn't. He told you this afternoon. Well, I'm
your son; I'm grown up and I've got my eyes open. I haven't accomplished
much yet; but I'm going to, one way or another, and it's time a little
confidence was placed in me. Mother, will you just kindly tell me what's
the matter?"

"Please, Hatch!" Mrs. Ide wiped her eyes. "Frances is playing outdoors
somewhere. Will you please get her in and see if she's done her home
work for Monday? If she hasn't, will you--"

"No, I won't! Mother, I can see you're going to stand by Father, no
matter what, and I honor you for it; I think it's the goods. Well, I
like Father as much as you do. I want to be loyal to him, too. I can see
now what sacrifices he's made for me, to put me through school and
col--"

"Hatcher!" Mrs. Ide's voice became imploring. "Will you please, please
let me get on with what I'm doing? Can't you see I'm busy?"

"What at?" he asked imperiously.

"This list. I stopped the Blue Book years ago and I've got to make a
list of people that must be invited to a Tea we're giving next--"

"A Tea?" Hatcher cried, aghast. "A Tea? Everything's on the way to hell
and you're giving a Tea? What for?"

"For Mrs. Florian," his mother said.

"What? For whom? What? Why--"

"For Mrs. Florian. I'm trying not to leave out any old friends of the
Lash family; but she's been away so long and there've been so many
changes--"

"Listen!" Hatcher said. "Mother, if you're making this sacrifice--"

"Hatcher! Don't you suppose I know we can't afford it? But it has to be
done and I've got to send the cards out to-morrow morning. It's for
Thursday, so I haven't any time to--"

"When's she coming?"

"She came yesterday, Hatcher."

"Yesterday? She's already here!" Hatcher's voice was solemn. "Mother,
I'm your son and Father's son. I want you to talk to me freely and I
have the right to ask it. Are you going to or aren't you?"

"There's nothing I can tell you," she said, and looked at him piteously.
"Please just let me get ahead with my list, dear."

"All right!" Hatcher drew in his breath emotionally, turned on his heel
and marched out of the room. In the hall he encountered his Aunt Ada,
who'd just come in. "Aunt Ada," he said dramatically, because he felt
that way, "did you know that my mother is giving a Tea for Mrs. Florian
on Thursday?"

"Why, no." Aunt Ada looked reflective. "I suppose we'd have to, though.
After so many years somebody'd have to show her some attention; get her
started again, so to speak. Naturally, it'd be we or the Aldriches."

To Hatcher, Aunt Ada seemed pretty obtuse. He went outdoors, walked
vaguely about the lawn in the early dark, thinking painfully. His
father's silence was at last broken; he'd thrown himself on his wife's
mercy. Hatcher thought of little Frances's hearing the tragic outcry of
that afternoon: "No, no, no, no!" But his mother was game; she could
take it all right, for now she was going to face the world, let it file
by and see her openly standing up to it with Mrs. Florian beside her.
Was the Tea to be a challenge to the public or to Mrs. Florian--or to
try to placate her? Mrs. Florian! Just how horrible was that woman?

He went round the corner of the house, then bore to his right, pressed
among shrubberies and stood looking at a long stone mass in its great
space of darkness. A few windows were lighted, and, as he looked, a
vari-colored illumination appeared suddenly upon the face of the
night--blackly outlined scarlets, greens, yellows, blues and
vermilions--a slim pointed window of stained glass in the end wall of
the nearer wing. She was there. A change had come upon that house;--for
the first time in his memory it seemed to be living. It contained not
people but a presence, and the house itself was a part of that impending
presence. Hatcher looked at the slim patch of lighted colors and had
impulses as various as its glowing hues.

...Babies, having more in common than the rest of us, show more
resemblance to one another. Later, as we pass through the "seven ages",
we increasingly diverge, becoming more and more markedly individual.
Thus, at twenty-two, Hatcher Ide was in some things older than his age;
but in others he was younger. If need arose he could utter discourse
upon Aristotle or Beowulf, or even upon what a physicist defines as
Forbidden; yet because of various inexperiences personal to himself he
was at times capable of ideas no more mature than those of his little
sister Frances.

Where others of his age might be worldly-wise, snappy and precocious,
Hatcher Ide could be infantile. He could also be acute, and, in his
renewed alarm for his father, he was suddenly able to take a new view of
him. In childhood carefully trained to be respectful, and afterward
returning but briefly from school and college, Hatcher had never once
thought of Frederic Ide as a person; he'd always viewed him as a valued
sample of the class labeled "Fathers"--a sample of course excelling
others in wisdom, liberality and appropriate reticence. Now suddenly
inspired, Hatcher comprehended that Frederic Ide was a man and in this
capacity had led a life of his own before a son arrived and failed to
make his acquaintance. Hatcher was at least worldly-wise enough to be
aware that nobody of much experience or reading is surprised by any
revelation of follies committed with ladies by able-minded men of better
reputation than Solomon.

Standing in the shrubberies, Frederic Ide's son then had an interesting
vision of himself in action. He'd go decisively and immediately to his
father, stand before him and say, "Father, you've done the sporting
thing in spilling this sickening old mush of yours to Mother; but don't
let's let her in for _too_ much. She oughtn't to have to stand up in a
receiving line at a Tea with that woman; there's a better way of doing
this thing. You can see I know practically all about the whole business;
but I haven't any reproaches for you--I only want the slate wiped clean.
I'm here to help you. Father, get out of that chair and walk right
straight over to the Lash place with me! I'm your son, and you and I'll
go in there with our heads up and show that woman whatever she thinks
she's got up her sleeve, your family's standing by you. We'll have it
out with her right here and now!"

"_Hatch!_ Hatcher _Ide_! Hatchie!" A childish voice called him urgently.
"Where are you, Hatch? Uncle Victor and everybody's here and
everything's on the table and Mother says if you don't come in right now
it'll all get cold. You come in, Hatcher Ide!"

"I'm coming, Frances."

He went indoors and found his mother, his father, his Aunt Ada and his
Uncle Victor half through the evening meal. Both Mr. and Mrs. Ide,
pallid but self-contained, proved able to discuss foreign affairs with
Mr. Linley; and Hatcher, observing his father surreptitiously, felt that
it would be wiser not to make any offer to join him in an out-facing
call upon Mrs. Florian. The son perceived, in fact, that his parents
intended to keep their trouble to themselves and that the best thing he
could do was to be tactful about it. Tactful seemed to mean silent.




CHAPTER IX


This week he began to have better luck with his
collections and in three days brought almost a hundred dollars into the
office. Old Mr. Barley said that such progress was unbelievable; and,
faintly brightening, he remarked that business seemed to be picking up
quite a little all over town, and indeed--maybe because of the war in
Europe--improving a bit elsewhere in the country, so he heard. Moreover,
he'd been to see the one-armed house-painter's doorway and window
frames. Mr. Barley thought there might be something in Hatcher's idea,
after all--people liked new paint and freshened up houses--and he was
going to recommend to Mr. Ide that Mr. Hatcher be allowed to go just a
trifle further with the experiment if it could be done very, very
economically.

"Economically!" Hatcher laughed aloud. "For practically nothing I've got
Mr. Floatus, the one-armed man--he's a genius--and I've been talking
about it to two out-and-down tenants who can do anything when they're
sober. Then I know two active widows, both of 'em colored; they're
high-spirited because they want to get off Relief, and for a mere song I
can put them at cleaning up and painting the insides of our houses. I've
got a friend, Gilp Murray, who wants the job of scraping all the old
wallpaper off the walls and patching the plaster before it's painted.
He'll work for no pay whatever unless and until the houses he works on
get rented. One trouble with those empty houses is you've always had 'em
papered. In the smoke you need walls that'll wash."

"You're certainly very persuasive," Mr. Barley said. "If I can gain Mr.
Ide's attention, I hope I can convince him we should go ahead--on a
minute scale, of course, and always remembering that it's only an
experiment."

Hatcher, a little chesty in spite of himself, began dreamily to foresee
a day when he'd be able to purchase a pair of low-priced but workable
"used cars", one for his father and one for himself; and a brief
conversation overheard at home, from the large pantry between the
dining-room and the kitchen, increased his pleasure. His appetite, in
spite of his troubles, often reverted to what it had been during his
adolescence and even earlier; he'd quietly gone to the pantry for
cookies when he heard his name mentioned in the kitchen by Lora, the
elderly colored cook. "Mist' Hatcher, he a hard worker, I tell you. Yes,
ma'am! I hear the Boss tellin' the Madam how Mist' Hatcher doin' fine.
Yes, ma'am, now the Boss lookin' so peakid, I prophesy Mist' Hatcher he
go' be the man of the family."

"The man of the family?" This was the voice of old Berry, the gardener.
"No, no, Lora! Mr. Hatcher's a good boy; but so long as his father's
alive the man of the family won't be anybody else."

Little Frances spoke then, though not distinctly because she was eating.
"I think Uncle Victor's the man of the family."

"No'm," Lora said. "He nice man; but if somebody walk over him he ain't
go' make a fuss about it. No'm, Mist' Berry, you watch what I say: Mist'
Hatcher go' be the man of the family."

Hatcher retired softly, with a handful of cookies and a good opinion of
himself. Unexpected tributes, even from the lowly, are the most
heartening.

On the next afternoon, nevertheless, it was with a sluggish step that
the young collector came home to Butternut Lane. This had been the most
successful day of his business life, thus far; but it was the Thursday
of his mother's strange Tea for Mrs. Florian, and he approached the
festival reluctantly. In the distance the sight of lines of automobiles
waiting at the curb on both sides of the street daunted him, and, as he
came nearer, their feeble glistenings where thin last sunshine reached
them seemed lights of ill omen. He walked more and more slowly.

Old Berry, grandiosely directing traffic along the Ides' driveway, saw
him coming and spared for him the wave of a conspicuous, unfamiliar
white glove; then called genially, "Better hurry if you expect to get
any chicken salad; this crowd's like old times!" Hatcher went round the
house to the back door, passed through a tumultuous kitchen, ascended
the dark rear stairway, and, with a beating heart, was in his own room.

He removed the grime of the city, and, preoccupied with troubled
imaginings, refurbished himself completely. He had to turn on the light
before he donned the long coat he'd last worn at a classmate's wedding
in June, and after that he became aware that for some time he'd been
hearing music. He listened more attentively. "Great grief!" he muttered.
"Lansor's orchestra! House full of caterer's waiters and Lansor's
orchestra. Well, the good old Ide family's blowing up with a bang!"

From the top of the front stairway he looked down and saw the broad hall
below him almost jostlingly crowded with people more or less well known
to him and of all ages over seventeen. The house must be packed, he
thought. Blended smells came up to him--odors of coffee, rum-spiced
punch, warm foods, clustered flowers and the synthetic scents with which
many women had powdered or sprayed themselves. Thronging noises pressed
upward into his ears, making one conglomerate sound of fiddlings,
flutings, the shoutings of women, interspersing soprano laughter, and
the animal-like fanfares of saxophones as the orchestra, previously
dulcet, edged into "swing". Hatcher came down the stairs slowly,
troubled and antagonistic, nevertheless not unpleasingly aware of
himself as a figure of drama. The sense of crisis was strong upon him.
He felt that he was at a turning point in his life, and he prepared to
meet it sternly: he intended to look Mrs. Florian straight in the eye.
Maybe it'd be a good idea to put his hand on his mother's shoulder first
and then look Mrs. Florian straight in the eye--or would it be better to
look Mrs. Florian straight in the eye first and then put his hand on his
mother's shoulder?

He was looked straight in the eye, himself, before he reached the foot
of the stairway. Dorcy Aldrich, pretty and in pretty clothes, and with
her pretty mother, was one of a Tea-clamorous group there. Laughing with
Mary Gilpin and Amy Murray, she turned her head, glanced up over her
shoulder and saw Hatcher. She ascended three steps of the stairway,
stopped him, grasped his elbow roughly and looked him straight in the
eye. "Why so late?" she said. "You oaf, what's been eating you? Do you
think I'm going to wear my blue pants out forever raking leaves and
weeding from four-thirty to six every afternoon waiting for you to come
by and tell me what's happened to your idea about painting those vacant
houses? Show me much more of this pouting and you'll have to get
somebody else to plan trailer trips with and stowing away on a freighter
with and life in the African jungle with. There are a few other
wishful-thinking glamor boys in this town, you know!"

"Not for you, Dorcy!" he said, making an effort to laugh tauntingly. "Go
try the others, just to show me how sore you are!"

He moved down a step, meaning to leave her; but she held his arm
strongly. "What have you stopped coming by for? You tell me!"

He liked this; but used a pleading tone. "I've got to go, Dorcy.
Honestly. It's just been an accident. I'm working pretty hard these
days, and walking all the way home it's almost a block shorter to come
into Butternut Lane from town at the other end. That's why--"

"You little liar!" Dorcy said. "You're more frenzied about me than ever
and you're acting up merely because Pinkie Wilson--" She stopped, seeing
that she had lost his attention. "Will you listen to me! Who you looking
at?"

As they stood thus upon the stairway the music came from the living-room
at their left, where upon the cleared floor there was a crowded dancing.
To their right were the open double doors of Mrs. Ide's large
"reception-room", which likewise was crowded; Hatcher stared over moving
heads and through this doorway at a face he didn't know--that of a
dark-eyed, black-haired woman who was talking to his Uncle Victor
Linley. She was slender, tall, had to bend her graceful head a little to
look into Mr. Linley's eyes--which she seemed to be doing--and Hatcher's
instant impression was of someone unusual, a person distinguishable from
all others anywhere.

"Who's that?" he asked.

"It's my Ideal!" Dorcy mocked him. "Your fascinating uncle. You'd never
be jealous of poor Pinkie Wilson again if you knew how my heart flutters
whenever I see Mr. Victor Linley. He could have me for just a
glance--and about every other gal in the house, too, darn it! I wish
you'd get the dear sweet mysterious man to talk to me seriously, just
for once. He's the grandest--"

"I don't mean my uncle," Hatcher said, and, as he spoke, the gaze of the
dark lady beyond the doorway moved from his uncle's face, swept slightly
upward and came to rest for an appreciable moment upon himself. He had a
new experience. The deeply lustrous dark eyes seemed to envelop him in
an intensely personal comprehension of him, and to speak to him
invitingly, in a mystic language, the silent words best translatable as
"You--and I." The deep and brilliant glance passed on, came back to him
again, lingered briefly again, and returned to his uncle's face. "I
don't mean my uncle," Hatcher repeated slowly. "Who's that girl?"

"Girl?" Dorcy asked. "What girl?"

"The one Uncle Victor's talking to."

"Girl?" Dorcy couldn't believe her ears. "Girl!"

"Who is she, Dorcy?"

"It's Mrs. Florian!"

"Why, no. I mean the one my uncle--"

"Certainly," Dorcy said. "Mr. Linley's talking to her; but don't you see
she hasn't any hat and she's standing between your mother and your Aunt
Ada, receiving? Idiot, it's Mrs. Florian!"

"Why, no; that can't be," he insisted. "Mrs. Florian's a--"

"Yes; so she is, Hatch. Double grass-widow and all that, though I don't
deny she doesn't look it. But calling her a 'girl'--Murder! Come back to
my question. If it isn't Pinkie Wilson that's the matter with you, what
is it?"

"Nothing," the dazed Hatcher said. "Nothing at all."

Dorcy was left upon the stairway calling after him hotly. "Well, darn
you!" Hatcher, with a blank mind, fumblingly passed through groups in
the hall, through the wide doorway, and stood staring before his mother.

He looked at her; but was only faintly aware of her and so didn't
observe that she'd used rouge to-day or that her smile was a brief
convulsion of the lips. She turned toward Mrs. Florian. "This is our
Hatcher--the little boy next door you once wanted spanked for chasing
your Siamese cat."

Hatcher might have thought the manner of this introduction outrageously
ill-chosen; but only his ears, not his mind, heard it. Sarah Florian had
turned her head and was looking at him for the third time.




CHAPTER X


Her warm dark eyes, now at close range, avowed an
already increased knowledge of him and a prescience of more. "Yes. Here
you are," the look implied. "Well, here am I! How much would you care to
have that mean?"

There exist constitutionally flirtatious men and boys whose eyes
habitually invite the ladies to adventure; but the thing is more
successfully feminine. Men and boys, even to-day, are of the more
gullible sex and readily fail to perceive that the ocular invitations
they receive would be extended to all others of their kind within
eye-reach. Hatcher's field of vision lost area, excluding everything but
Mrs. Florian's lustrous eyes, the smooth shapeliness of her ageless
face, and the green sparklings of emeralds clipped to her small ears.
The exquisitely dressed black hair had never been cropped; she had it
all, and, if her lips were touched with color not theirs, Hatcher didn't
know it. She spoke, and the very quality of her slightly hushed
contralto voice seemed to say the same thing that her eyes did, no
matter what the words.

"Yes," Mrs. Florian said in this lovely voice, "you're Hatcher Linley
Ide. Your uncle pointed you out to me as you stood on the stairway a
moment ago." She gave him a warm hand with long fingers that closed
about his firmly. "I think you look rather like him. Are you?"

"Me? I--" Hatcher was confused; had really nothing to say. "Do you mean
am I like Uncle Victor?"

She withdrew her hand slowly and smiled. "Is he, Victor?" She didn't
await an answer. "I've been at home for almost a week. When are you
coming to see me, Victor? To-night?"

"Unfortunately--" Mr. Linley began; but his reply consisted of only the
one word, for she stopped him.

"Oh, very!" she said sharply; then her voice was hushedly rich again.
"Mr. Ide, will you be a Moses and find water for me in this wilderness?"

Making his way perforce slowly, though people were beginning to leave,
Hatcher had to go to the dining-room upon the errand. When he returned
he found his uncle in the act of moving away from Mrs. Florian, whose
fine complexion showed a heightened color.

"Do! Do go!" Hatcher heard her say, though she spoke under her breath.
"You and your excuses!" Mr. Linley, mildly preoccupied, bowed
submissively and continued upon his way. She took the glass from Hatcher
and drank. "Thank you. I much prefer you to your uncle!" Then, as she
gave back the glass, she delighted and astonished him. "Don't you go
away, too," she said hurriedly. "A lot of these people are coming back
to swarm about; but it won't be long. They're going, and then we--"

She was interrupted and Hatcher politely pushed aside by a group of
ladies and a man or two, all insisting that they must tell her once more
how delighted they were that she'd returned to her native habitat.
Holding the half-empty glass, Hatcher stood just outside the fluctuant
semicircle of backs. "And then we--" remained excitingly with him. What
fascinating promise was implied? "And then we--" what?

The exclamative people about Mrs. Florian were succeeded by others. He
heard most of them calling her "Sarah"; but "Sally" came from a few of
the older ones; and they were all noisily polite, congratulating
Butternut Lane upon having her again. He caught glimpses of her through
the orifices between bobbing heads; once had another look from her
through such an aperture. "Good!" the look seemed to say. "You
understand, you're waiting. This'll soon be over and then we--"

Dorcy's father and mother took an almost boisterously hospitable leave
of the returned neighbor. "Sarah! As wonderful-looking as ever!" Hatcher
heard Mrs. Aldrich exclaiming. "Harry and I are planning a welcome home
dinner for you, Sarah, if you'll let us."

The laughter of the rubicund Harry, always hearty, was loud. "Yes, I'm
going to make it splendiferous; but my wife'll keep it as formal as she
can--to stop me from sitting in a corner with you, Sally!" he explained.
"Eleanor'll do anything to keep us apart because she's jealous of you.
Been jealous of you all these years--and right she is, at that! Didn't I
tell you yesterday you're a marvel? Not a line--younger than
ever--handsomer than ever--I swear it!--not a pound too much, still the
young Diana!" He finished by shouting "Ouch!" and roaring jovially as
Mrs. Aldrich pushed him along to make way for others.

A cloud of confusion drifted out of Hatcher's mind, vanished as he stood
there; and he was aware of neither its vanishing nor of its having
oppressed his recent imaginings. In youth's field of imagination
hobgoblin herds may graze night after night, only to be swept away in an
instant by a breath, leaving but buttercups and daisies waving in the
sunshine. Hatcher'd already forgotten his strange wonderings about his
father and Mrs. Florian, his picturings of her as an impending presence.
All of his previous thoughts about her were so magically erased by the
sight of her that they didn't even seem to him preposterous; they didn't
seem anything at all because they no longer had any existence. Mrs.
Florian's first upward glance at him as he paused upon the stairway had
annihilated everything he'd heard about her; and now he forgot
everything he'd thought about her, himself.

He was unaware, too, that he still stood holding the glass from which
she'd drunk and that his attentive posture could suggest to certain
minds a cup-bearer to royalty or an anxious bedside nurse bearing a
precious medicament. Thus his realization that several of his
contemporaries were laughing at him was slow. Across the room, Dorcy
Aldrich stood clutching the shoulder of an almost too good-looking blond
boy, and both were in a high state of merriment, Dorcy's young cheeks
being flushed with it. In the wide doorway, just behind this pair and
halted in the act of leaving, Gilpin Murray, his sister Amy and his
cousin Mary, had heard the laughter and perceived the cause of it. They,
too, laughed freely.

Over the noise of other voices, Hatcher heard Dorcy gurglingly shouting
his name, and he looked at her and young Mr. Wilson with the
disapproving wonder of one who beholds the causeless jocosities of
strangers. Dorcy, clinging more helplessly to Pinkie Wilson, pointed to
the glass in Hatcher's hand; and Hatcher, after seeming surprised to
find it there, set it down inappropriately upon the brown velvet seat of
an upholstered chair beside him.

This increased the enjoyment of the young people who were watching him;
in particular it seemed to carry the mirth of Dorcy and her clutched
friend to an ecstasy. Hatcher stood staring inquiringly--upon which the
laughter was even louder--and then Gilpin Murray, wiping his eyes,
departed with his sister and his cousin. Dorcy's father and mother
joined her and her handsome blond companion; and the party of four moved
out into the hall. Hearty Harry Aldrich had his arm about Dorcy's
mirthful friend's shoulders, and Mrs. Aldrich, too, appeared to be
delighted with this young man. Somewhere in the back of Hatcher's mind
was the impression that the Aldriches were rather fondly taking Pinkie
Wilson home to dinner with them; that Dorcy's parents were making much
of him. This seemed rather silly and in questionable taste, Hatcher
thought; but he felt no strong objection. It seemed to him that poor
Dorcy wasn't looking her best to-day; he'd never noticed before that her
face was almost just the least bit unformed. Somehow, she seemed to look
rather too pink, a little awkward--and too young.

For some time the gabble of hurried high voices had become less
voluminous. Cars rolled away in steady procession from the porte-cochre
beside the house, and the front door was constantly opened for the
departure of unchauffeured guests, who gladly began resting their
throats the instant they got them outdoors. The musicians had gone, a
final group in the hall fluttered away; and all at once the scented
still air of the bright quiet rooms seemed filled with the vacuous
languor that comes upon a house just emptied of a throng. Hatcher
perceived that Mrs. Florian was taking her leave of his father and his
mother and his Aunt Ada; that she was thanking them and that his father
and mother, though tired, were still valiantly hospitable.

"And then we--" Hatcher thought. He stepped forward and Mrs. Florian
took his arm.

"I'm going to steal you," she said. "Your mother's told me I may. Will
you mind taking me home?"

"No; not at all," he replied. "I'd rather. I mean I--I'll be delighted."

He walked with her into the hall, would have turned toward the front
door but a pressure upon his arm guided him the other way. "I think my
car will be under the porte-cochre, Mr. Ide. That's at the side door,
isn't it?"

"Oh!" he said. "Oh, I beg your pardon!" Then he felt that this was a
silly thing to have said, and began to say it again. "I beg your-- I
mean, is it? I mean, yes, of course the porte-cochre's outside the side
door. Yes--I--" His voice seemed to run out of power; an overwhelming
self-consciousness possessed him and he didn't know how to be rid of it.

Just inside the door that led to the porte-cochre a mulatto chauffeur
stood holding a long cloak of dark fur. He didn't offer it to Mrs.
Florian; but, after a quick side-glance at the approaching pair, handed
it to Hatcher. Hatcher held it for her, put it deferentially upon her;
they stepped into the lighted car and a moment later rolled in darkness
out of the driveway.

"I want to show you my house," Mrs. Florian said. "It's been done over
for me in a terrific hurry; but I think you'll see that it's agreeably
changed."

"I wouldn't know," Hatcher said. "Maybe I was in it once or twice years
ago; but I don't remember."

"It's just as well that you don't. What a dreary place it was then!--all
early Twentieth Century American, largely over-stuffed satin sofas and
lamps six feet high with enormous fringed shades. It always oppressed me
horribly. I took the first desperate chance of escape."

Hatcher had a qualm. Hadn't Aunt Ada or somebody told him that Sarah
Lash had married a Spanish tenor "almost overnight"? Already the thought
hurt him. Did the "first desperate chance of escape" mean that Spaniard?
"You--" he began; then finished inadequately, "you did?"

They were in the light again, for the swift car had already brought them
to her door, or at least to the foot of a flight of stone steps that led
up to one of her doors. It opened, apparently of itself, as Hatcher and
Mrs. Florian reached the top step; but, when they'd passed into a high
and wide dim hall, he perceived that the person who had opened the door,
and now closed it with care that it should make no noise, was a
Philippine Islander in white. Mrs. Florian made a gesture toward a
doorway at the left.

"Give me fifteen minutes," she said, and walked quickly down the hall
toward a stairway.

Hatcher went into the room at the left, and, although the light was
there as faint as in the hall, found himself reminded of Eighteenth
Century French prints that he'd seen somewhere. A dark reflection of
himself approached him in a long mirror over a narrow marble mantelpiece
upon which stood a pair of two-pronged crystal candelabra wherein wax
candles burned. From the high long ceiling, like floating crystalline
ghosts, hung aligned three unlighted glass chandeliers; but other
candles in sconces upon the walls gave the room a spotty illumination.
He saw delicate needlepoint sofas, palely brocaded chairs with curved
slim legs, fragile-looking tables with gilt little boxes and porcelain
figurines upon them. He'd seen rooms done in the French style
before--usually called "Louie Cans" by sturdy Americans--but this one,
he thought, had something different about it, a finer validity. A
harmonizing fadedness everywhere made him feel himself in the presence
of "genuine antiques", daunting because he knew nothing about them.

Mrs. Florian naturally would have just such things as part of her
background; so he was thinking when the Filipino who had admitted them
came in, bringing cocktails and cigarettes. Hatcher took a cocktail and
a cigarette, sat down and tried to prepare something effective to say
when Mrs. Florian should return. A little gold and porcelain clock upon
a marquetry and ormulu commode struck seven in a tiny silver voice. This
was the dinner hour at home, and the clock didn't help him to prepare a
witty word or two with which to greet her entrance. "I'm sunk because
I've got to hop," was the best he thought he could do, and it didn't
seem to be in the right key. He said nothing at all when she came.

Not because of men's alleged preference for black velvet did she wear
this fabric; she knew that her eyes and hair suggested it, and thus she
appeared to Hatcher as a woman all of finely shaped black velvet and an
ineffable pearliness--this latter quality being put into his mind,
without his knowing it, by the pearls with which she'd supplanted the
emeralds clipped to her ears in the afternoon. Hatcher had seen handsome
women in black velvet and pearls before; but, like the reproductions of
French furniture he'd beheld elsewhere, they now seemed to him
imitations and spurious.

An effulgence seemed to come into the room, glowing about Sarah Florian.
This was a hypnotic phosphorescence produced in Hatcher's mind by the
stirring grace with which she came into view and moved toward him. She
did nothing, not even the crossing of a threshold, without somehow
making what she did dramatic, and to Hatcher she seemed to advance not
only into the room but into a fate predestined to march with his. He'd
planned to be tough in a tough-grown world; but he was young, and, in a
changing universe, some things don't change.

"I should have consulted you as well as your mother," she said, once
more enriching his hearing with the lovely voice. "I'm keeping you to
dinner with me unless you-- In America do people still say they have 'a
date'?"

"I haven't." This was beyond his hoping. "If I had I'd--I'd skip it. I
wouldn't mind standing anybody up. I'd rather."

"I think I won't take you over the house," she said. "There's too much
of it and we'll just talk, instead; but we have time now before dinner
for me to show you just one thing. Perhaps it won't interest you much.
I'd like to see if it does." She crossed the room to an inner door.
"Will you follow me?"

"Why, certainly!" he responded, and was at once sorry he'd said it. For
some reason "Why, certainly" hadn't sounded just right.

Keeping a little in advance of him, she led him through a corridor, and
he wished that the soles of his shoes didn't make such a noise upon its
marble floor; but unless he went on tiptoe, which would be ridiculous,
there didn't seem to be any help for it. At the end of the corridor was
an old brown, worm-holed closed door under a pointed stone arch. "What
I'm going to show you," she said, "I had before I escaped from this town
and this house that the foolish war's driven me back to. It's just the
same as it was before I left. I haven't changed it, because it means a
part of my girlhood that can still stir wings within me."

She opened the door and they stepped into what seemed to Hatcher a small
stone-walled Gothic chapel. Opposite him was the stained-glass window
he'd seen flash into color one night, and before it stood something like
an altar, a priedieu between lighted big candles spiked upon tall
candlesticks of ancient wrought iron. Hatcher was puzzled but reverent.

"This was my oratory when I was a young girl," Mrs. Florian said. "At
fifteen I became a Romanist and offered up long, long prayers here. Of
course I'm a pagan now. Every sensible person is; don't you think?"

"Yes," Hatcher replied, and just stopped himself from saying "Why,
certainly!" again.

"I'm a pagan," she repeated, facing the priedieu. "Only pagans can find
any reality in this brief flight of a swallow's wing across the light,
this little flicker of consciousness we call life." She turned her eyes
to him gravely. "Being a pagan, I'm never false to myself; I'm never
cowardly enough to resist my impulses. You understand that I had one the
first moment I saw you, don't you?"

"An impulse about--about me? You mean you had an impulse to bring me
home with you?"

"Yes--even to bring you here, to my oratory, with me. I wondered."

"You did? You wondered--"

"I wondered if you were somebody with whom I could be utterly myself."

"Well, I certainly hope so," Hatcher said. "I'm sure I--"

"We'll see," she interrupted, speaking softly. "I'm a pagan but--isn't
it strange?--I'm still religious. I've never once in my life come into
this place without saying a prayer. I don't know to whom or to what I
pray; but I always do it. I'm afraid you'll have to let me."

Hatcher felt alarmingly clumsy. "You mean--right now?"

"Yes, I do." She smiled at him; then was grave again. Turning away from
him suddenly, she advanced a long, sweeping step toward the priedieu,
sank with disarming grace upon one knee before it, raised both arms
high, widely apart; then slowly brought the palms of her hands together,
and closed her eyes. Her shapely lips moved, and the uplifted hands,
pearly in the thin still candlelight, remained poised for moments; there
were rhythmic faint gleamings in the trimly waved thick black hair, and
Hatcher knew that never before had he seen so beautiful a kneeling
figure. He was startled but touched, too, by so much faith in his
sympathetic understanding; and she was quickly upon her feet again, as
gracefully as she'd sunk down.

"There!" she said, and smiled wistfully. "Does that prove what I
wondered about you?"

"I certainly--I do hope so."

"No," she interrupted. "You're only thinking you've just found out how
theatrical I can be!"

"I'm not," he assured her. "Indeed I'm not! I wouldn't have any such
idea."

"You're sure? Then perhaps I'll tell you what I prayed." Again she
seemed doubtful of him. "Americans nowadays use an expression, I
believe--'putting on an act'. You're sure you don't think that's what
I've just been doing for you?"

"No, no! Never! I wouldn't--"

She smiled again, and nodded, satisfied. "No, I see you don't. You do
understand. You're very different from your uncle. He used to tell me
that my little oratory was--was near-silk!" Her smile departed.

"Uncle Victor?" Hatcher said. "No, I'm really not a bit like him; you
never can tell what he's going to say."

"No, you cannot. I found that out long ago. He doesn't seem to have
changed a great deal."

"Well--" Hatcher didn't care to put in much time, just now, talking
about his uncle. "You said perhaps you'd tell me what you prayed."

"Perhaps I shall. You're taller than your uncle, more an Ide than a
Linley, and yet there's something about you that's like him. I thought I
noticed he limps a little more than he used to."

"Yes," Hatcher said. "He got smashed up a bit in the other World War,
you know."

"Yes, I know. I suppose that's still found a part of his fascination for
the girls?"

"'Girls'?" Hatcher was puzzled. "Of course they like him and make the
sort of fuss over him they do over older people; but if you mean do they
get gaga about him, why, of course they wouldn't on account of his age."

"I see," Mrs. Florian said. "No, of course they wouldn't--on account of
his age. I suppose, though, in older circles--among faded widows and
married women--"

"Oh, yes; everybody likes him."

"Naturally." She gave Hatcher a side-glance and smiled again. "We won't
waste any more words on him. We're more interesting, ourselves, aren't
we? Do you like my little oratory?"

"I think it's great."

She looked down, then up; and laughed charmingly. "And me?"

This took his breath. "I think--I think you're the goods!" he said, and,
again feeling off key, he tried to do better. "I think you're rather
glorious."

"Nonsense!"

"I do!"

"Then--" She stopped laughing. "Then I'll tell you what I prayed. I
prayed that I might find a new friend. Since I came home I've heard
another American expression. See if I use it correctly. I prayed that I
might find a new friend. 'So what?'"

"Do you mean--" he began.

"Yes, I do!"

"Oh!" Hatcher said.

They stood looking at each other then in a silence that seemed
spontaneous between them and was understood by Hatcher as a ceremonial
hush following the completion of an emotional compact--one that was to
be effective his whole life long. This look, full of earnest promises on
his part and mysteries on hers, was slowly being severed when another
Philippine Islander, not he who had opened the front door, spoke from
the entrance to the corridor.

"Madam serve'."




CHAPTER XI


Mrs. Florian explained that her dining-room was a vast
and lonely place still occupied by scaffolding and step-ladders; they
dined in a small but rosy bower, lighted by candles and a brisk little
fire. The guest, no expert, suspected that he partook of subtle foods
and distinguished wines; but he wasn't able to give them much attention.
He was not himself--at least not as he'd heretofore known himself. He
wished to talk brilliantly, but could barely talk at all; and, when he
did, he heard himself with misgiving. He couldn't remember ever
listening to himself before when he spoke; he wished he'd formed the
habit, for even his pronunciation of certain simple words seemed
execrable. He heard himself burring his R's and nasally shortening his
A's, and, when once or twice he tried to improve his utterance, he
blushed in shame of the affectation. He felt fluttery under the
breastbone; his head seemed to be filled with light--rosy amber light, a
little foggy. Sometimes he didn't know what the lady across the table
was saying to him; he was too preoccupied with just the sound of her
voice and the sight of her face above the bowl of yellow-hearted pink
small chrysanthemums in the center of the lacy table.

Fortunately he wasn't expected to say much. She told him of her life in
France, now and then speaking of it intimately. "How quickly a whole
phase of one's existence can become dreamlike!" she said, finishing this
subject. "Already it seems a mere vapor of my imagination that I ever
lived in that villa at Vesinet. Sometimes I wonder how on earth it's
happened that here I am again in this American Midland town that I was
born in; but of course I had to come somewhere--and here was this house
of mine. I couldn't stay in France, and naturally I had to become an
American citizen again, with a man as grasping as Colonel Florian trying
to seize upon everything--oh, yes; even after the decree of divorce! I
suppose one learns to live through almost anything, even through scenes
of unspeakable sordidness. One mustn't go into the details of a
disillusionment, though, not even with a--friend."

"Please do," Hatcher said. "I'd like to hear 'em. I mean--I don't
mean--I mean--"

"No, no." She smiled, and rose from the table. "We'll talk of lovelier
things. If you've finished your coffee we'll just sit by the fire and
pretend we've known each other ever since we were born. Could you?"

Hatcher could; and, upon a gesture from her, the two Islanders who had
begun to clear the table moved a delicate little sofa from the wall and
placed it before the fire. Hatcher and Mrs. Florian sat down, side by
side. She waved her cigarette toward his and the two thin streams of
smoke were joined for a moment before disappearing upward in the
firelight.

"People's lives are like that sometimes, aren't they?" she said. "They
float to each other--mingle a while--then separate like that--and go up
the chimney! Are our two lives like that, perhaps?"

"Our two lives?" Hatcher spoke in a low voice. "Yours and mine? I
certainly hope--"

"Help me," she said, and leaned back. "Almost all the faces at your
mother's this afternoon were familiar to me; but I've forgotten so
much--the names and who people are and what they are. I must begin to
know about them again of course, since I'm to live with them. You'll
tell me?"

"Sure. I mean--"

"I tried," Mrs. Florian went on. "This morning, for instance, I took the
telephone book and began to pick out the names I remembered and bring to
mind the faces that belonged to them. Curiously, I recall quite a number
of names that aren't in the telephone book any more. By the way, your
uncle's was one of them." She laughed absently. "Does he feel himself to
be so terrifically important nowadays that he won't have his name in the
telephone book?"

"Uncle Victor?"

"Yes, Victor Linley. Is he so besieged by telephone calls that he--"

"Good Lord, no!" Hatcher said. "I mean, certainly not business calls. He
hasn't even got an office any more."

"He's retired?"

"Retired? No. Plumb flopped!" Hatcher said. "The Depression--"

"Really?" Mrs. Florian spoke quickly. "But he always--"

"Uncle Victor's an architect, you know, and for years there hasn't been
any building going on, to speak of."

"I see." She was meditative for a moment. "I'm glad he didn't come
to-night. I suppose you heard me asking him? If he'd come it would have
prevented--this!" With light fingers she just touched the back of
Hatcher's hand. "I suppose when ladies want to get hold of him--if they
still do--they call him at his club. I think it used to be the Carlyle
Club; but to-day, in the telephone book, I couldn't find--"

"No, it's out," Hatcher said. "It's gone and he doesn't belong to any
nowadays. I'm afraid you'll have to get used to a lot of things being
different; I've had to do that, myself. For instance, most of those
people you met this afternoon at my mother's, old Butternut Lane and
Company, of course they're still putting up a front all right; but a lot
of it must be just window-dressing--certainly with those who depend on
real estate for their incomes. Speaking of that, there's something I'd
like your advice about."

"My advice?" A somewhat dry amusement might have been detected in Mrs.
Florian's expression. "My advice--about real estate?"

"Yes. You see my father owns a lot of vacant houses that we couldn't
even give away because they eat their heads off in taxes and interest on
mortgages; but I have a theory that even in a dirty neighborhood if you
keep a house all freshened up in new paint you can always rent it. Don't
you think so?"

Her response was not elaborate. "Very likely."

"What I want to ask you," Hatcher went on eagerly, "it's that there's a
certain shade of grayish putty-color I'd use on the main body of the
house, with a grayish apple-green for trim; and I never saw more taste
in color than you've got in this house, so do you think--"

"Your uncle's an architect." Mrs. Florian showed more animation. "Why
don't you ask him?"

Hatcher felt a little let down. "I did; but I don't think I got him to
put his mind on it much. As I was saying, real estate in this town's
gone blooey complete. I hope you don't own any."

"No; except this house," Mrs. Florian said. "My grandfather never
believed in real property for investment. I suppose your uncle's gone
out in the country?" Then, as Hatcher looked blank, she laughed as if
slightly amused by an inconsequent recollection. "I seem to recall that
he used to talk about building a house on some ground he owned along a
pretty creek, miles out of town. He always loved the country, and now,
since his club's gone, I just wondered if perhaps he'd built that house
he planned."

"Lord, no!" Hatcher laughed ruefully. "He doesn't own any land in the
country nowadays, or anything worth anything that I know of. All he
seems to have left is the old Linley house 'way down on Sheridan Avenue;
and I happen to know the gross income from that's amounted to exactly
fourteen dollars in four years. I don't know what the poor old bird does
live on; but he seems to get along somehow in his own way."

"Where?" Mrs. Florian again spoke quickly. "At your house? Does he live
with--"

"No. He lives down on Sheridan Avenue, a few blocks from the terrible
old Linley place. I suppose as boarding-houses in that part of town go,
it's not so bad; but--"

"A boarding-house?" The idea seemed to startle Mrs. Florian. "Victor
Linley! Why, Sheridan Avenue was beginning to be a wreck even before I
left here!"

"Oh, good old Uncle Victor takes it all right," Hatcher said. "Got a dog
they let him wash in the cellar and you'd never know from him he's not
perfectly contented."

"No," she assented. "I'm sure you wouldn't--from him."

"Me, I don't get him," Hatcher said, and for a troubled moment wondered
if it could be possible that Mrs. Florian had brought him home with her
less on his own account than his uncle's. Then, feeling the strongly
personal glow of her eyes upon him, he dismissed the suspicion;
nevertheless, he changed the subject. "I mean Uncle Victor's like a lot
of these other people that seem to be just taking it lying down and
still smiling. Why did they ever let the country get into this
condition? Of course I'm just beginning to be a miserable kind of rent
collector down in that very section. I try to collect rents all up and
down Sheridan Avenue every day, and is it a bum job! I'm trying to learn
my father's business from somewhere below the bottom; but I--" He
paused, and the firelight upon his earnest young face made clear his
expression of conscientious modesty. "I don't suppose I ought to talk so
much about myself; but--well, you've made me feel-- Well, if I could,
I'd like to tell you--"

"Yes." She leaned forward, resting her elbow upon her knee and her cheek
upon her hand, with her eyes in warm shadow. "You must tell me all about
yourself. Everything. I want to know everything. Didn't I say we were
going to talk as if we'd known each other all our lives?"

"Yes." Hatcher's moved voice was almost a whisper. "Yes, somehow I feel
as if we had."

"Yes," she said. "When did this happen to him--to Victor Linley? How
long has he been living in a boarding-house on Sheridan Avenue?"

"Oh, quite a while, I gather. You see, I've been mostly away a long
time, myself--wasting my energy in college while the whole world was
going to pot. I--I'd like to tell you how I feel about that. I--"

"Yes, you must. Everything," Mrs. Florian said, and rose. "First I want
to play to you."

"On a piano?" Hatcher asked, and wondered why on earth he'd thought of
such a question. "Yes, I see; of course it would be. Yes, certainly I--"
Then he finished by adding, "That'll be definitely wonderful!" and
rightly feeling that he couldn't have been more banal.

He followed her through another corridor and into a big square room so
dark that for a moment or two the furniture was indistinguishable. The
only light was that of a blue-shaded small lamp upon a distant table,
and near this lamp a great black wing seemed to rise, poised for
flight--the lifted lid of a concert piano. Mrs. Florian touched his arm.
"Sit here," she said, and, as he took the chair she indicated, he
discovered with a groping hand that part of it was metal. Then his eyes,
accommodating themselves to the interior twilight, began to perceive
that the room and its furniture were "modernistic", the dim forms were
"starkly functional", and here was another vivid token of the rich
variety of the owner's esthetic nature. She went to the piano, sank upon
the bench before the keyboard, was a faintly seen still shape there for
moments; then her hands slowly rose and she began to play.




CHAPTER XII


What she first played completely mystified Hatcher.
There seemed to be no harmonies at all; certainly there was never the
hint of a melody and nowhere could he hear any resemblance to even what
he was accustomed to think of as modern music. There were thunderous
passages that ended indecisively; then there were patterings from the
upper reaches of the keyboard; then there were both but without any
cohesion, or, so far as he could perceive, any meaning.

"That's Bretsch," she said, stopping abruptly. "He hasn't been heard
much in America. Do you see any resemblance to me?"

"To you?" Hatcher asked. "Well, I--"

"Bretsch calls it 'One Woman'." Mrs. Florian laughed. "He dedicated it
to me. It's his impression of me, he insists. Well, my friend, does it
teach you to know me a little?"

"I wish it could!" Hatcher spoke out so earnestly and so loudly that the
sound of his voice in the big quiet room horrified him, and the
directness of what he said struck him as almost vulgar. He felt that he
ought to say only subtle implying things to Mrs. Florian, especially in
this spacious darkness and after such advanced music. "I mean I don't
get it," he went on, trying to improve his effect. "That is, I get it
and I don't get it. There's kind of a something--it's a something--"

"Yes," Mrs. Florian said. "Everybody knows Bretsch is a great man; but
I'm not there. He and I were too brutally different; so how could he? We
were always quarreling. I'm glad you didn't find me in it. Tell me: Do
you get much music here?"

"I? Well, you see, I haven't been back here long enough to--"

"I used to starve in this town," she said. "For music--among other
things. Your uncle gave a few dinners one winter, with a Russian string
quartet to play afterward--nothing but classics! I told him I couldn't
bear it. I understand the place is trying to be more civilized nowadays
and has something like a real symphony orchestra; but I reserve my
opinion till I've heard it. I went into the art museum they seem to
rather brag about now; and a young man there told me that they were at
last hoping to acquire a Picasso. About time! I found they didn't even
know anything at all about Mrdling and how far he's gone beyond
Picasso. Mrdling told me at Biarritz last year that only two museums
and one collector in America had pictures of his! What do you think of
that?"

"Well, I--I suppose it's pretty grim; but I--I ought to say that I
myself--I don't--"

She didn't listen; she shrugged her shoulders. "If I starve again it's
my own fault for coming back here when I ought to have known how it
would be, of course. Well, that's enough repining. Now we'll be
sentimental."

With that, she began to play, expertly and with exquisite feeling,
fragments familiar to Hatcher, though he couldn't have named them except
as probably bits from Chopin and Liszt most likely. When she stopped he
was panicky, afraid he'd say the wrong thing; therefore he only murmured
"Great!" in a voice so low that he didn't know whether she heard him or
not. She rose, came toward him and stood before him. He got out of his
chair.

"Do you know the most frequently repeated line in Shakespeare's plays?"
she asked. "I think it is, 'Give me your hand.'"

"Is--is it? You mean you--" He took the hand she extended.

"I mustn't keep you any later to-night, my new old friend," she said.
"Men tire easily if they're quickly given--much. To-morrow?"

"To-morrow?" Uplifted, Hatcher was breathless. "You'll make it a date? I
mean--"

"Yes," she said. "Could you come about four o'clock? I'd like to take
you driving with me. Would you?"

"I would!" Hatcher said, with an emphasis that again seemed to be almost
vulgar; but he was reassured by the fact that her hand remained firmly
in his for the moment of silence that followed and was their parting.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Out of Mrs. Florian's house, he couldn't go home at once. His head and
chest were both tumultuous, and the autumnal night air was delicious
upon cheeks that tingled from within. He walked the whole length of
Butternut Lane, then back again to where it debouched from the boulevard
that came out from the city, and, as he passed along a familiar hedge,
near this upper end of the Lane, he heard faint sounds of a jazzing
piano and hints of singing voices. The windows of the Aldriches' house
were a merrymaking illumination in the night, and he felt an easy
condescension toward what was going on there--Harry Aldrich at the
piano, with his doting wife and Dorcy, and Pinkie Wilson, and probably
some more of "the crowd" whooping and "swinging", having themselves a
big time. To Hatcher their pleasures seemed childish, even ignoble, and
yet befitting. Why shouldn't little people have their little enjoyment
of the kind of things they enjoy?

Nothing about himself could have seemed more ridiculous than that he'd
lately been rather jealous of Pinkie Wilson. Lately? Yes, lately by the
calendar--but already that feeling appeared to have been an experience
in another life, a dull small life from which he'd suddenly and
marvelously emerged. There wasn't anything really to object to about
Pinkie Wilson. A perfectly decent fellow in his pretty-faced dumb little
way. Dorcy Aldrich was a good girl, and Hatcher liked her; but if she
wanted to grope about with Pinkie Wilson, why shouldn't she? Hatcher
felt nothing but benevolence for all those obscure good creatures at the
Aldriches' to-night.

He felt something else, at least temporarily, when he finally entered
his father's house. His mother sat alone in the living-room, with a book
face down upon her lap, and, though she smiled when he spoke to her,
there was a wan anxiety in her face; it reached him even through the
exaltation of his mood. "What's the matter, Mother?" he asked. "I'm
afraid you must be tired to death after standing up through all that
party this afternoon."

"No, I'm not tired, Hatcher."

"Then what's the--" He paused. Disturbing recent events, for some hours
forgotten, recalled themselves to his mind. "See here, Father's in some
kind of jam and you know what it is and it's eating you up. Well, I
ought to be helping; but how can I if you don't tell me? I wouldn't dare
ask Father again, and down at the offices of Ide and Aldrich I
practically never see him. I'm only there about fifteen minutes twice a
day, and, though Harry Aldrich says 'Hi, boy!' to me when he's going in
or out, the only person I ever get to talk to's old Mr. Barley, and he's
in his second childhood and never knew anything anyhow. Yet I'm supposed
to be learning the business! Well, if this is a business trouble,
oughtn't you to tell me?" He put his hand upon his mother's shoulder.
"Why won't you come clean with me? What is it that's griping you like
this?"

"Nothing," she said, in a voice so frail that it was almost unheard;
then she looked up, smiled again and tried to speak casually. "Did you
have a pleasant evening? Did Sarah Florian seem pleased with our having
had the Tea for her?"

"Pleased, Mother? Why, naturally. I'm sure she was."

"Did she say so, Hatcher?"

"Well, I don't exactly--" He was vague.

"Did she--" Mrs. Ide paused, looked down at her hands, which were folded
rather tightly above the book upon her lap. "Did Sarah-- Do you think
she's pleased to be back among the old friends of her family? Did she
happen to speak of any of us--the Aldriches, for instance, or your Aunt
Ada--or your Uncle Victor--or anybody?"

"Aunt Ada? No, I don't think so, Mother; but it seems to me we did talk
a little about Uncle Victor. Yes, I remember. I happened to mention that
he's living in a boarding-house down on Sheridan Avenue and she seemed
surprised to hear it."

"Was that all--just surprised?"

"Why, yes. What--"

"Nothing," Mrs. Ide said. "We all used to know her pretty well, you see,
and I just wondered if she still takes some interest in us. Was your
Uncle Victor the only one of us she spoke of?"

"Yes, I believe so, Mother. You see, with a woman like that you find so
many things to talk about because she's--" Hatcher, with sudden caution,
denied his desire to continue warmly upon this theme. He yearned to talk
to his mother of Sarah Florian, to ask a thousand questions about her
and to learn everything of her that he could; but something within him
warned him to shy away from the subject. He had an impression that it
wouldn't be loyal to ask questions that mightn't be answered
sympathetically; intuition strongly suggested that he'd be happier if he
didn't talk about Mrs. Florian to anyone at all--or listen, either.
Somebody'd be certain to tell him about that Spaniard again. "Yes, I
believe Uncle Victor was the only one of the family we mentioned," he
said, and added quickly, "You really ought to be in bed by this time,
Mother."

"Yes, I suppose so." Mrs. Ide set her book upon a table beside her, rose
and in a troubled way looked as if something had pleased her. She kissed
her son. "Goodnight, dear. Walk lightly as you pass your father's room.
I'm afraid so many people this afternoon tired him, and then of course
there's the dreadful expense. Goodnight, dear."

...Hatcher, in bed, didn't fall asleep so quickly as was his custom;
but he was glad to remain awake. Ethereal, he seemed to float through
Mrs. Florian's great house, following a stirringly graceful black velvet
figure and a white neck with dully glistening black hair above
it--following through corridors into candle-lighted rooms, one of them
with an altar and a stained-glass window, another with rosy firelight
that played upon crystal and silver and white lace and pink
chrysanthemums, and flashed twinkling little highlights into a pair of
softly inscrutable dark eyes that looked at him long and mysteriously.
Mysteriously? Yes, mysterious with unfathomable prophecies. Prophecies
that were all almost promises?

He remembered lightheaded pretty little Mrs. Aldrich's jocose allusion
to Sarah Florian's "affairs of passion" and again he recalled his Aunt
Ada's sniffy reference to Sarah Florian's marrying a Spaniard "almost
overnight"; but he thought himself already above being indignant with
either of these traducers. People dislike what they don't understand, he
thought, and how could these commonplace neighborhood ladies understand
a magnificent, dark, glowing woman like Mrs. Florian, a brilliant woman
of the world who dwelt deeply and richly in exotic life and not in their
provincial corners. They were mere petty local extroverts; whereas she
was really of a hardboiled paganism, bold and frank--yet at the same
time she was touchingly religious and so wrapped in darkest velvet that
she'd never be revealed except to the eyes she herself selected.

Now, so long as he lived, he'd never forget her answered prayer for a
new friend--nor what Shakespeare most often wrote: "Give me your hand".
Again and again he felt that hand, strong within his own, heard the
lovely voice hushed in the almost complete darkness of the music-room.
"Give me your hand"! Then, as he came nearer to his sleep, another
literary allusion drifted into his charmed mind--a recollection of one
of those old Nineteenth Century books that had been required reading
during a long-ago phase of his education, "Henry Esmond". Yes, Henry
Esmond had married a woman quite a little older than Henry Esmond was,
and it had been a happy marriage.

With this last somewhat coherent thought, young Hatcher Ide passed into
a state of slumber.




CHAPTER XIII


He might almost as well have remained in that slumber
throughout the next day. As he went his rounds he presented to view, if
anybody had understood, a fine sample of dual personality. One of his
selves, mainly body, performed the functions of a struggling young
business man while the other, gone poet, floated among mirages of pink
chrysanthemums, Gothic glass and kneeling beauty, to the accompaniment
of an ethereal grand piano. Toward noon he drifted into a gloomy
smoke-colored small house on a side street off Sheridan Avenue,
downtown, and found Gilpin Murray and Gilpin's cousin, Mary, scraping
off dampened wallpaper in a dismaying little parlor.

Mary, looking tall in a green smock, and with her sleeves rolled high,
didn't stop work when Hatcher appeared; but Gilpin willingly paused to
explain her and for conversation. "Don't worry; she isn't in on my
contract with you, Hatch," he said. "She's only helping me out because
of cousinly admiration for me and love of my new art. She has a day's
vacation from the Library on account of it's the County Chairman's
funeral or something. Tried to get Amy too; but Mother stuck her to
sew." With the air of a collector displaying a masterpiece, he stepped
backward and waved a hand toward the horrible wall. "Well, how does it
look to you?"

"To me?" Hatcher asked. "Look?"

Gilpin gave him a puzzled scrutiny. "See here, is what was the matter
with you at your mother's Tea yesterday afternoon still going on?"

Hatcher frowned vaguely. "What's on your mind?"

"What's on _mine_? Haven't you come out of it? I mean when you were
holding that goblet and so choked with your wing collar or something you
didn't know that Dorcy and all of us were laughing at you. You didn't
know it even after you put the water down on a velvet chair for somebody
to sit on."

"I didn't," Hatcher said. "I don't know what you're talking about. I
didn't."

"Did! Mary saw it, too. Didn't you, Mary?"

Mary Gilpin, not turning her head, went on industriously with her
scraping. "Yes, I did."

"There!" Gilpin said. "Want any more proof? You didn't look human. You
looked--"

Hatcher interrupted him. "Well, I think this work's getting on very
satisfactorily here. Mr. Floatus is going to begin the putty-color on
the outside Monday. I've got to go see him. Good-bye."

Mary stopped scraping and turned her head. "Amy can't get away; but
Dorcy said she'd make a four with us this afternoon. We thought we'd
have time for nine holes before dinner. Meet us there at five?"

"Meet you?" Hatcher asked. "There? Where?"

"At the municipal links in the Park, Hatcher."

"Oh, no," he said absently. "Thanks, I'd like to--but I can't. I'm sure
you'll enjoy it; but I have to see Mr. Floatus now before twelve
o'clock, so good-bye."

He wandered away as driftingly as he'd come in. The cousins were left
staring at each other, Gilpin wonderingly but with some humor, Mary
without any humor at all.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Mrs. Florian met Hatcher almost at the door when he arrived for their
afternoon drive, and, though he'd but lately been enough of a radical to
censure Pinkie Wilson for playing polo during the Depression, he felt no
disapproval of this lady for her need of two spruce maids to aid her
final preparation for the outdoors--one to bring her a muff and the
other to hand her a bag of enmeshed gold and platinum links. On the
spot, and without internal argument, Hatcher revised his view of
economics. He perceived that not the rich but those who work for them
benefit most by luxurious expenditures; the worker gets his living, the
spender only superfluous finery. The costly meshed bag had made
employment for many people, beginning with the miners who brought forth
its metals; and in his generous new mood Hatcher could easily have
forgiven Pinkie the polo ponies that kept stablemen off relief rolls. So
swift, sometimes, is the emotional swing from left-wing to right.

Mrs. Florian murmured to her handmaidens in French, a Filipino opened
the door, and another Islander, new to Hatcher, preceded her down the
steps and opened the door of the glossy black car. In the front seat,
excluded from the interior by glass, sat not the mulatto chauffeur of
last evening but a white man in black livery.

Hatcher, having disposed of his previous economics, felt that a
magnificent woman had the right to surround herself magnificently;
luxury had an artistic propriety as the background for Mrs. Florian and
was a perfect part, so to speak, of her picture. Of that picture, the
foreground, holding and compelling the center of his gaze, or anyone's,
was of course the miraculous face, which he now for the first time saw
in the light of day. Something of mystery was retained, however. The
sable collar of Mrs. Florian's coat was high and close, and a dotted
mesh veil descended half way to her chin.

Old George stood beaming at the gates, and, as the car passed between
them, he removed his cap and bowed enthusiastically. Hatcher waved to
him through the closed window. "Until last night everything about your
gorgeous house has always seemed to be closed off and locked up, except
old George," he said. "Old George is a lifelong friend of mine."

"Is he?" Mrs. Florian's tone was thoughtful. "I understand the workmen
found the place in a state of neglect. I don't care especially for this
English lodge-keeper effect, bobbing at the gates. I suppose he thinks
he has to do it to keep up the pretense of being of use."

"Yes, the poor old fellow," Hatcher said, and thought appreciatively of
the kindness that had kept the half-decrepit retainer on pay during so
many years. "Poor old George, he's been delighted a lot over your coming
home. Have you told your driver where you want to go? Out Silver Creek
way, perhaps?"

"No, not to-day," she answered, as the car turned southward from
Butternut Lane. "I told him to drive into the city. I think last night
you said that down in the grimy old part is where you work so hard day
after day. I want to see it."

"You--you want--" Hatcher had to begin again. "You want to see where
I--"

"Yes." From behind the wide-meshed veil there came a glance that dazed
him. "I want to see where you spend your days working in the smoke.
Shouldn't I care to? We had a little ceremony of friendship last night,
didn't we?" Then she spoke more briskly. "Besides, I want to go all over
the old part of town and have you tell me about the changes. I suppose
very few people that I used to know live down in the smoke nowadays."

"Why, no; not any of 'em."

"My sentimentalism may shock you," she said. "I want to see where you
work--yes, and I want to see the old dead street where I played as a
child. I was born down there, and, though I was only a little girl when
my grandfather built the house on Butternut Lane, to-day I feel I'd like
to see what's left of poor old Sheridan Avenue. Do you mind?"

"Do I mind!" This brought him another dazing glance from her.

On Sheridan Avenue she had her chauffeur stop twice, once before a sooty
"used car" sales lot, the site of the house where she'd been born, and
once before the old Linley house. Here she made the delay a little
longer. "Unbelievable!" she said, and shivered as she peered intently at
the big repellent relic. "The house had been vacated before I went away;
but it wasn't like this. There were some trees left and a number of the
people one knew still lived in the neighborhood. When I was little we
children met for our dancing class in the ballroom on the top floor.
Your mother and your Aunt Alice and your uncle were older, of course,
and not in the class; but their sister, Nancy, the one killed in an
accident, was much younger, so she was a member. Alice married a man out
West, didn't she?--and, by the way, I think you said your uncle lives
somewhere in this horrid stretch. Where?"

"It's a boarding-house," Hatcher said. "We passed it coming down; it's a
few blocks back. Just over on West Eighth Street I've had a doorway and
window-trim painted those colors I was telling you about. I'd like to
get your ideas about that, and if you like we could look in on a couple
of working-people I've got scraping off wallpaper inside a house near
there. They--"

"You want me to meet them?" Mrs. Florian was indulgently amused.

"You already know them. Anyhow, you met 'em yesterday at my mother's,
and their families are old neighbors of yours. It's Gilp Murray that
lives just across Butternut Lane from our house and his cousin Mary
Gilpin from next door beyond. I've got Gilp on my regular staff--without
pay for the present--and Gilp's got Mary on his, at least for to-day and
without pay any time; so you see what a head for business I have, after
all! If they're still there we could give 'em a look-in. You--you were
so awfully kind as to say you--you felt some interest in where I work,
and I really would like to get your opinion on what colors we ought to
use for the interiors. Besides that, just below here there are one or
two more of the old big houses left. If you'd like, we'll--"

"No; it's too harrowing!" She tapped upon the glass before them;
signalled the driver to turn about. He did so and they went northward.
For a moment Hatcher felt a little disappointed by the sketchiness of
her survey of his field of endeavor; but she smiled and her shoulder
touched his. "Sights as sordid as this always half-suffocate me," she
said. "I can't stand much of them; but at least I've seen enough to know
what splendid determination must be a part of your character--to keep
you doggedly spending your days in such an environment. At my first
sight of you I had the feeling that you care for fine and beautiful
things as much as I do; so now I know what your hours and hours down
here must cost you. You mentioned that Victor Linley lives somewhere
about here. If we happen to pass the place--"

"It's yonder," Hatcher said. "Up ahead. Now you can see it. There. It's
the house just beyond the filling-station and--"

"_That?_" She leaned partly across Hatcher, staring from the window.
"That scrawny brick house with the red grocery on the other side of it?"

"Yes; that's it."

"Victor Linley!" Mrs. Florian spoke the name in a sort of gasp; then she
leaned back and laughed briefly and oddly. "Victor Linley!"

Hatcher had a thought inspired by the tone of her laughter. "You don't
really like him? Uncle Victor's generally supposed to've always been
pretty popular. Did he ever do something you didn't--"

"Oh, dear me, no!" she said quickly. "It was only the contrast that
struck me. You see, when I came out he was one of the 'older men' of
course and immensely looked up to as always the glass of fashion and the
mould of form. That ugly cramped boarding-house down here in this
dinginess, it seems just a--a bit inconceivable! Do you know somewhere
out of the smoke where we could go for a cup of tea?"

"Ye--es." Hatcher had a qualm; then hastily recalled that there was as
much as four dollars, of his own, in his pocket. "Yes, there's a place
called The Green Heron about two miles north of Butternut Lane. I don't
know how good the tea is."

Mrs. Florian said it didn't matter, just so the place was quiet and they
could talk; but after they'd been given a red lacquered table in a
rather crowded room at The Green Heron she was by no means talkative. As
for Hatcher, he wasn't aware of how silently he sat and looked at her;
nor of the proof she gave him that her preference for candle-lighted dim
rooms in her own house was an esthetic choice rather than the defensive
precaution of a woman who knows she can no longer be beautiful except in
shadow. Late sunshine came copiously through the large western windows
of the tea-room; Mrs. Florian pushed her veil above her eyes, widely
opened the fur collar from her throat and glanced at Hatcher as if she
asked gravely, "Did you think I didn't dare?"

He'd had no such doubts and therefore didn't perceive her challenge.

"You're not drinking your tea," she said.

"I'm not?" Hatcher drank seriously, and again occupied himself with
gazing at her.

Mrs. Florian's silence gave consent to all his looking, and so did her
eyes, now and then; but after a time she asked, "Who are your amused
little friends?"

"Where?"

"In the doorway, just going out."

Hatcher turned a blank face slowly to look over his shoulder. Passing
out through the doorway were several girls and a boy or two, all of them
in a mirthful slight commotion. The last of the girls, flushed with her
gayety, looked back at Hatcher, met his stare of vacant inquiry and
uttered a giggling squeak. She flicked him the wave of a gloved hand
that for an unknown reason seemed mocking, and then was gone.

"That?" Hatcher said. "Oh, that's only some of the Butternut Lane crowd
of canaries. The one that waved to me was Lennie Aldrich, Dorcy's
cousin--I mean, she's related to Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich next door to you
on the other side from our house. They're always whooping; they don't
count." Then, as Mrs. Florian smiled upon him, he had a shortness of
breath, and added impulsively, "Nothing counts but-- I mean nothing
counts except--except--" His voice faded out; though not because he
suspected that what he was saying hadn't much novelty.

"No, nothing else does," she said satisfactorily; and he felt that
another almost unbearably dear and far-reaching ceremony had taken place
between them.

When he left her at her own door, at the end of a succeeding almost
talkless half hour together, he was again unable to go directly home.
Just before the door closed upon her, she'd looked over her shoulder to
ask: "You'd like my playing to you again?"

"Like it? Would I _like_ it?"

"Then to-night--about nine?"

"Oh!" Hatcher said. "Oh, thank you!"

With long, exultant steps he strode through the twilight. To-night, upon
her own initiative, he'd again be with her in a companionship of two
alone. Three times she'd asked him--and all in the space of the one day
of twenty-four hours! Such a thing couldn't happen without a dizzying
significance; no one could be so humble-minded as not to perceive that.
Her three invitations were assuredly the promise that this new
companionship--a finer, loftier and yet more warmly enticing one than
any he'd ever known before--would continue and grow closer. How close
who could say? Already it was an intimacy when most was expressed in
looks and silences, not words. He'd be content, nay exhilarated, to keep
it just as it was; and, radiantly foreseeing that he was to be with her
in following days as often as during this first one, he felt that he was
entering the door of an exquisite new life in which he could be happy so
long as he and she could share moments that seemed complete
comprehensions of each other, could have little ceremonies of
friendship--and he could look and look at her.

Through lovely dusk and caressive darkness young Hatcher went, more
borne than walking. The dull everyday evening meal at home was almost
over before he could subdue his uplifted heart enough to go in and face
his almost forgotten family.




CHAPTER XIV


Youth, even in a Depression, even in "realistic"
hardship--alas! even in war--must still dwell in illusion; but when the
illusion is sweet the hours of delight are keener than they can be
again. So, naturally, the breaking up of fond absorptions in the unreal
startle the young into sharp agitations and despondencies. Hatcher Ide
so lost himself in the excluding new life he thought he lived with Sarah
Florian, through the few fleet weeks between their first hours together
and the evening of the dinner Harry Aldrich and his wife gave for her,
that the very drawing-room preliminaries to the dinner brought him the
sensations of a person summarily banished from home by the authorities.
He had only a word from her--and no look at all. Her head was turned
another way to speak to somebody else as he reached her; and a
regardless group of people he defined as "old marrieds" immediately
intervened. He felt himself thrust aside as too young and consequently
too unimportant; and the arrangements in the dining-room, when the
company went thither, exasperatingly confirmed this impression.

In the movement to the feast he was but an unnoticed item in a clamorous
rabble of young at the tail of a parade distantly headed, not without
some effect of jovial stateliness, by the host with the honored lady
upon his arm. Hatcher, searching for his own proper place at table, went
from disappointment to disappointment before he discovered the card
marked with his name; and, when he did find it and was seated, he
thought he might as well have been sent to eat outdoors, he was that far
from Sarah Florian.

She was upon the beaming Harry's right at the head of the long central
table; and some thirty middle-aged and older people sat honored there.
Plainly they were thought more her peers than were the chattering young
groups at the smaller tables that encircled the large one like inferior
sparklings clustered about the light of a great gem in the setting of a
ring. Only at intervals could Hatcher catch, between heads and through
elaborate patterns of flowers, niggard glimpses of the dark lady who
absorbed him--just bits of her face, a gleam of white forehead under
rhythmic black hair, a highlight upon a lustrous eye, a corner of a
mouth, pale rose, and a provocative contour of rounded chin. He had the
impression that most of the time she was talking busily to his Uncle
Victor, who sat upon her right with only the top of his head visible to
Hatcher.

The nephew felt his exile to be an exclusion founded upon his merely
numerical age, and his sense of the injustice was acute. The wise laws
of his country permitted him to vote: Wasn't that enough to let him be
thought fit to associate with adults? His feeling was a little like that
of a bright boy who's been encouraged to shine in grown-up company, and,
while doing so, is abruptly sent up to the nursery to join the other
children. He was the one person present who'd been exalted to bright
intimacy with the guest of honor. Amid the throng he was the only one
who really knew her, daily sharing a hundred unspoken thoughts with
her--yet here he was on the outer fringes, and with obscurity almost
conspicuously thrust upon him! Harry Aldrich had promised to make this
dinner "splendiferous" and had kept his word; the splendor was an
additional annoyance to Hatcher, and so was the mechanized excitement of
the many voices.

The more he looked about him, the more mortifyingly his sequestration
stressed itself. He wasn't even at Dorcy's table--apparently was thought
to be of so little weight in the world that he wasn't asked to sit at
the same table with the daughter of the family giving the party! Would
Mrs. Florian perhaps observe this genuine slight and deduce that he was
held to be of no consequence, not only by his host and hostess but by
his own contemporaries? Dorcy's table, placed near the head of the great
central one, was noisy with laughter and importance. Dorcy seemed to be
making a rosy whoop-te-do over everything, especially over Pinkie Wilson
who sat next to her--and, what was inexplicably outrageous, she had Gilp
Murray, Hatcher's own mere employee, at that table; and the mere
employee was seen and heard to join Dorcy in approving convulsions
caused by something Pinkie Wilson said. Gilp was acting like a dirty
hypocrite, Hatcher thought.

True, Dorcy's best friend, Mary Gilpin, was placed next to the
self-defined outcast, upon his right; but that didn't assuage his
feeling of being snubbed. Gloomy and not caring who knew it, he talked
disjointedly to Mary, who'd lately spent another holiday helping her
cousin to remove wallpaper. "Gilp says he's on the top of the wave," she
told Hatcher. "He says these houses he's helping you do over are going
to put him on pay before long because they're sure to rent. He thinks
you and he ought to patent that contraption for steaming the wallpaper
before it's scraped. The color you're going to use on the interiors is
good, too--really quite lovely. Your friends ought to congratulate you
on the whole idea, Hatch."

"Ought they?" he asked. "I don't seem to hear 'em doing it. Where are
they all?"

"Where--" Mary began, laughed, and then, after a glance down the room to
where the hilarity at Dorcy's table was increasing, looked serious and
changed the subject. She talked for a time about college psychology
courses and had such absent responses that she thought it better to let
him brood; she began to speak to the boy on the other side of her.
Hatcher was granted a seclusion that lasted until the girl at his left,
Dorcy's cousin, Lennie, startled him by a sudden dig of her elbow into
his ribs.

"Right you are, darling!" she said. "Don't try to eat or talk or
anything. Just sit in that same old trance."

"What old trance?" Hatcher looked at her unamiably. "Don't jab that
spike into me again; I'm not one of your darlings. What old trance?"

"The same one a lot of us saw you in that day at The Green Heron,
darling, when you didn't have the faintest idea who your lifelong
friends were or what a lovey-dove sight you were making of yourself. I
hear it goes on all the time."

"You mean now, for instance?" Struck suddenly in almost a vital part,
Hatcher instinctively did his poor best to be offensive. "You mean I'm
making a lovey-dove sight of myself with you right now, beautiful?
Trying to look deep in your marvelous eyes and everything?"

"No, presh!" Lennie laughed in a manner that convinced him he'd been
right in never thinking much of her. "My worst enemy couldn't accuse me
of being that old."

"That old?" he repeated slowly; then caught her meaning, and was
speechless.

"Me, I'm just a squablet," Lennie explained. "_I_ couldn't _hope_ to
make you the talk of the town! You could pursue me foaming with passion
in public and nobody'd start chattering about you every time as many as
two people get together, the way they do now. How do you _like_ all of a
sudden living in the great white glare of the spotlight, Hatch old son?"

"See here," Hatcher began, indeed helpless. A choking apprehension of
what she'd say next was upon him. "If you enjoy talking gibberish--"

"Gibberish!" Lennie exclaimed gayly. "Can it be I'm the _first_ to tell
you that you've become practically Butternut Lane's star celebrity?
Driving with her every afternoon, closeted with her every night in the
dark recesses of the palace, groveling under tables in tea-rooms to find
her gloves when she drops 'em--"

"See here--" Hatcher floundered, all the more impotent because of fury.
Strange fears, too--fears of hearing incredible defamations--had risen
within him. "I always knew this was the worst hell-hole of gossip on
earth! I only wish I _did_ drive with her 'every afternoon';
unfortunately for me I don't, and I've never been in any tea-room with
her oftener than--"

"Wipe the red off your face, pal!" Lennie was in a minor ecstasy. "What
a shame all these old spite-cats are starting to say you're on the road
to turning into a rich, rich lady's gigolo! So soon after college, too,
poor child!" She affected a confidential and compassionate manner. "It's
a _crime_ a person can't go out driving afternoons reg'lar with another
person and not be seen all over everywhere looking all gaspy! Part of
it, I bet you, it's nothing but the vulgar prattle of servants--all this
about your being there every single night--because one of those Filipino
boys is crazy about Aunt Eleanor Aldrich's maid, Ella, and loves to run
and tell her--"

"What!" Hatcher exclaimed. "You admit yourself that servants--"

"Sure, Hatch! Maybe that's how Dorcy's the first person to hear the news
fresh every morning. Think it might be the reason you're not sitting at
her table to-night? Do listen to 'em! Ain't it a shame she's having
herself such a big time with the Wilson pulchritude? Me, I say it was a
hellish cruelty not to put you at the big table with the old folks,
where that marvelous Mrs. Florian is. Of course it's perfectly natural
for you to go goofy over her, Hatcher, because it runs in your family, I
hear."

"What?"

"Oh, yes," Lennie said. "My mother told me yesterday that just before
the giddy Sarah started in marrying around everywhere she was supposed
to be engaged to one of your relatives."

"One of my rel--" The recollection of wild imaginings of his own rushed
upon the staggered Hatcher. "You're crazy! My father--my father never--"

"Your _father_?" Lennie was first astounded, then uproarious. "Why, you
poor babe, you must be afraid she's even older than she _is_! How long
since your father was a bachelor and in a position to be engaged to
anybody? About twenty-five years?" Her laughter was louder and louder.
"_No_, little Rollo, it wasn't your father everybody thought she was
going to marry; it was your uncle. Just only your _uncle_, that's all!"

"You--" Hatcher began; but his self-possession was gone. In a quavering
voice, "You're--just crazy!" was all that he was able to say.

"No, dearie!" Lennie returned, smiling upon him cruelly. "It was my
mother told me. Look at her. She's sitting at the big mature table next
to your own poor father that you've been traducing. Doesn't she look
fairly sane? She told me it was never announced but everybody was sure
Mr. Victor Linley and the giddy Sarah were just about to put up the
banns when, bingo! the gal turned a handspring, grabbed a passing
Mexican and--"

"Mexican! She never--"

"Never in her life married a Mexican?" Lennie leaped at the chance he
gave her. "Never in her whole _life_? Not _once_? Not one single
Mexican? Just stuck to French and Span--"

"You're a marvel!" Hatcher contrived to interrupt, and, horribly aware
that he was trembling all over, steadied his hands by resting them upon
the edge of the table. "Just to think that all this noise could come
from such a little chest and throat!"

"Sweet of you!" Lennie squealed. "I wish you could see your face!
Goggy-eyed over sacrilege, what? Here's a cute one for you, adorable:
it's by special request that your Uncle Victor's sitting next to the
guest of honor. _Whose_ special request, presh? Why, _hers_! Aunt
Eleanor couldn't help telling. Piquant, what, under the circumstances?
Wouldn't it be _rapturous_ if the dear dead past should come to life
again and maybe some day you'll be calling her 'Aunt Sarah'?"

"What a cut-up you are!" Hatcher had strength enough to say savagely, as
he turned his shoulder upon her. Cackling voices blasphemed in sacred
hidden grottoes where he was an acolyte. His nerves seemed to rock; he
was bewildered, insulted, thrown down, stamped upon and scarified. With
Lennie's laughter stinging into his reddened left ear, he swung to Mary
Gilpin, a movement that was in reality a flight for shelter. Behind this
always cool, high-minded girl he hoped to collect himself and be at
least a little ready if Lennie struck again. "I suppose you've heard
some of the tripe I've been talking with that pinwheel on the other side
of me?" he asked.

"Yes," Mary Gilpin said. "If you're really worried about Mrs. Florian's
age, Hatcher, I think you can calculate it with some accuracy. I hadn't
happened to hear that she was once engaged to Mr. Linley; though of
course it's legendary what flutters he caused for years after he came
home from the last war. I believe, though, Mrs. Florian wasn't much over
twenty-two or twenty-three the first time she was married and left here,
and she's been away only a dozen years or so. You see that comes fairly
close; she could easily be no more than thirty-five--or even as young as
thirty-four."

"I'm not interested! I'm not interested in people's ages!"

"No, Hatcher? Of course everybody's been talking about her these weeks
she's been home, though I understand they always did--even when she was
quite a young girl. She's the sort of person who creates that."

"Creates what?"

"Talk," Mary said. "She emanates something; everybody's got to look at
her. It's as if she herself so intensely feels that she's the star of
the play that her emotional conviction of her starship spreads a thought
contagion. Everybody here to-night may not be talking of her just at the
moment; but they're all conscious of her all the time--and she could
hardly bear it if they weren't. You see that inevitably makes anybody
who's much seen with her talked about, too. Don't be angry with Lennie,
though; she's only being loyal."

"Loyal! What a ridiculous--"

"No," Mary Gilpin said. "She's not the only one who could feel hurt on
Dorcy's account, Hatcher."

"What?" He stared at her hotly. "On Dorcy's account? Why, Dorcy-- Why,
weeks ago she practically dropped me for--" He laughed roughly. "Oh,
what's it matter?"

Mary gave him a steady look. "Are you going to let Dorcy go?"

"Let her go? What do you mean? I haven't got her. Never did have.
She's--"

"Are you?" Mary Gilpin asked. "Are you going to let her go?"

"Oh, for Cripe's sake!" Hatcher felt he had enough to bear without
having these two girls try to make him feel guilty--guilty of what?
Hadn't he a right to his own life? What was everybody trying to do to
him? "See here," he began. "I've always been Dorcy's friend and always
will be; but I certainly--"

Into his leftward ribs little Lennie Aldrich spiked her elbow again.
"Listen! Can't you listen even to the _music_?"

"What music?"

From a corridor outside the dining-room there came the strains of a
harp, a flute, a violin and a 'cello playing an old Irish air to which
famous words had been set by Thomas Moore. Led by their hearty host, the
guests at the center table applauded, the young followed; and many of
the diners went so far as to lift their voices in the old song.

"Get it, Hatch?" Lennie squeaked. "'Oh, believe me if all those
endearing _young_ charms'--my gosh, who thought of _that_? It's in honor
of _her_. Under the circumstances, what a boner, huh? Listen, Hatch,
here's the best part!" She joined her shrill voice to the others. "'And
around the dear ruin each wish of my heart'--"

Hatcher listened to the accursed music as long as he could; then shouted
brutally, his face almost touching Lennie's. "Will you close that trap,
or can't you? I've got some ear and you're flat. You're _flat_, I tell
you! For Cripe's sake--"

The music stopped; so did Lennie, and Mary Gilpin touched Hatcher's arm.
"_Sh_, Hatch!" she said. "Mr. Aldrich is going to make a speech."

Harry Aldrich, big and smiling, a glass of champagne in his hand, had
risen; and, after subduing the greeting shouts of "Yay, good old Harry!"
and "Yay, Uncle Harry!" obtained silence. "Just a quick one," he said.
"After that the tables'll be cleared away for dancing in this room by
all ages, and bridge outfits are set in the living-room for addicts. The
library is reserved for fiances and fiancs, and the breakfast-room for
really interested drinkers... Who let out that cheer?... But
first, let's be serious for just one moment. A dear old friend has
lately returned among us. More than that, she's a dear old family
friend; her family were for three generations the friends of the
families of nearly every person here, and she herself spent her bright
girlhood with us. Now she returns to us more beautiful and more alluring
than ever. May her life among us be as much happier for herself as her
presence will make our own lives for us! Neighbors, old friends, young
and old comrades in the life of our city, I give you the health of our
old new friend, Sarah Lash that was, Sarah Florian that is!" Here the
speaker seemed affected by emotion; his voice trembled. "God bless you,
Sarah!"

He lifted his glass, drank, and all the company, except Mrs. Florian,
stood to honor the toast. Then she, rising, said, "I thank you!" in a
clear voice, and sank almost to the floor in a sweeping curtsey. When
the prolonged approving collegiate shouting of "_Ya-a-ay!_" had died
away, the exodus from the room began, with Harry Aldrich leading and
Sarah Florian upon his arm.

Hatcher had looked at her when she rose and stood, before sinking in her
exquisitely supple curtsey; then he'd turned his face away. For him she
was a worshiped white statue splotched by insulting hands--hands that
also strove to daub soilingly something fine, pure and, as he'd vainly
thought, untouchable, within himself. Until the resultant turbulence in
his breast was quieted he felt that he could not go near her. Among the
crowd pressing toward the door, he found himself beside Gilpin Murray
who, in high spirits, was unusually tactless.

"Grand party, Hatch, what? Like old times! Who'd think there was any
Depression? Had us a big time at our table. One thing I've got to hand
Pinkie Wilson, he's there when it comes to wise-cracking! He can
certainly be funny, that bird, when he wants to, and so can Dorcy."

"At whose expense?" Hatcher, hot in the head, lost all discretion.
"Mine?"

"Yours?" Gilpin Murray was taken aback by his friend's intensity. "Well,
everybody's, Hatch. Sort of a riot over pretty much the whole field;
can't deny you might have been mentioned."

"'Mentioned'!" Hatcher said. "Ah, yes--'mentioned'!"

"Why so jumpy, Boss? Don't get sore and fire me."

"I won't!" Hatcher said bitterly, swung away from him and was seized
upon by his Aunt Ada.

"Of all the balderdash!" She projected a rapid fire of under-cover
indignation. "I never dreamed Harry Aldrich could make such a goose of
himself--throwing money around like this! As if the Tea your mother gave
for her wasn't enough! Now, look at that!" She made a gesture toward the
end of the room where musicians had grouped their chairs and begun to
tune their instruments. "Lansor's full orchestra and four or five extra
pieces! I should think Eleanor Aldrich would give Harry fits for
slopping over in that toast the way he did. Everybody here knows what
piffle it was; at least all the grown-up people do. Almost shedding
tears over what a dear third-generation family friend she is, when
everybody knows that at heart she's always been exactly like that old
parvenu barbarian of a grandfather of hers! Did you notice your father
during dinner?"

"What?" Hatcher tried to move away. "No, I--"

Aunt Ada detained him; she caught his sleeve. "He looked perfectly
ghastly, and even Eleanor saw it and asked me what on earth's the matter
with him. He told me before we came he wanted to get away the first
instant he could. Now I've lost him, and your mother too, in this
shuffle. See if you can't find them for me and tell them I'm going home
with them."

Hatcher left his Aunt Ada; but he didn't go to look for his father and
mother. He wished to be alone and in the dark; yet, even though he
couldn't bear to go near her, he hadn't the will to leave a house that
contained Sarah Florian--his feet wouldn't take him. After a desultory
wandering without speaking to anybody, he stood in a corridor and stared
through a doorway that gave him a view of her back as she sat at a card
table. Harry Aldrich was her partner and they played against two sleek
white-haired gentlemen known to Hatcher as golfing and bridging old
widowers. More _old_ people! Didn't the Aldriches have _any_ sense?

Two nineteen-year-old girls, unaware of Hatcher behind them, were also
staring through the doorway. "They say she's a wolf at bridge," one of
them said. "Golly, what wicked shoulders! Look, if a woman keeps her
figure at least till she's getting towards forty--"

"Righto!" the other murmured covertly, but Hatcher heard her too well.
"That's another disgusting advantage a woman her age has over us. We
fledglings never seem to know what to do with our shoulders; we keep
flopping 'em around. They look meager and minus self-confidence compared
to the chastely voluptuous sculpture _she_ has to offer. These shapely
divorces! No wonder poor little Hatchie Ide--"

Hatcher heard no more. Quivering, he moved down the hall.

Was everybody in the world talking smearingly about him--and about
people's ages? Hateful voices tormented his mind's ear with
phrases--"easily be no more than thirty-five"... "the first time she
was married"... "been away only a dozen years or so." A dozen years
ago Hatcher had been ten years old; and, at twenty-two, not twice
twelve, "a dozen years or so" means a vastness in time. To be twelve
years older than twenty-two, maybe "even as young as thirty-four", is
imaginable but unthinkable.

These echoings upon the problem of age were not the worst. "A rich, rich
lady's gigolo"! Lennie'd raked him with that and then her malice had
gone to the utmost limit of hideous comedy: "Maybe some day you'll be
calling her 'Aunt Sarah'!"

A sudden recollection came smitingly upon him--of Uncle Victor's turning
red when asked a simple question about Mrs. Florian--and Hatcher
remembered how often she had talked to him of his uncle, how many
questions about him she asked. He remembered, too, the faint suspicions
he'd had, sometimes, that maybe she was more interested in him in his
capacity as a nephew than--than as a man! Was that what he was to her--a
_nephew_? Had he been too happy in his believing, of late, that he
"completely understood" her? In reality had he come no nearer to that,
nor to her, than on his first evening with her when she'd seemed to him
a beautiful mystery--unbelievably kind, inexpressibly lovely, but a
mystery?

Aunt Ada'd told him sharply that his Uncle Victor Linley had never been
in love with Sarah Lash; but did Aunt Ada know? Did even his mother
know? He doubted it. But there were two people here to-night who knew
the truth--Uncle Victor and Sarah herself; and Hatcher had to know,
couldn't sleep until he knew. If Uncle Victor was still in the house he
could find him and have the truth from him.




CHAPTER XV


He had no difficulty in finding his Uncle Victor.
Attracted by a sound of ivory clickings as he went down the corridor,
Hatcher entered Harry Aldrich's billiard-room and beheld Mr. Linley, who
was there alone. He was chalking a cue before resuming a meditative
practise with two gleaming white spheres and a red upon a strongly
illuminated green cloth, the rest of the room being in shadow. "Good
evening, Nephew," he said. "I believe you don't play this--"

"No, I don't. The fact is I--"

"Looking for somebody?" Uncle Victor asked. "If I'm not too intrusive I
think that a few minutes ago I saw her dancing with the scion of the
still affluent Wilson dynasty and looking--well, almost as pretty as her
mother. Eleanor's the sky for prettiness, isn't she? Perhaps I should
retract the expression 'Wilson dynasty'. Since the Wilsons derive from
the Erdvynns, perhaps 'dynasty' isn't just the proper word; but--"

"Never mind proper words, please!" Hatcher said. "I'm not exactly in a
mood to care about proper words."

"No? It's just as well to have a thought to 'em, though." Mr. Linley,
leaning across the bright table, planned a shot deliberately, made it
with precision. That habitual calmness of his fine profile, as he thus
occupied himself, had a baffling effect upon his nephew.

"I don't know if you'll be willing to listen," Hatcher said. "But I came
here to--to--"

"Willing to listen?" Mr. Linley again chalked his cue. "Indeed yes.
Something to tell me?"

"No; to ask you." Hatcher felt that the only way to ask was to ask. He
tried to blurt it out. "I want to know-- Well, the fact is, I came here
to ask you a question, Uncle Victor."

"Why not?" The uncle planned another shot, sighting carefully. "By all
means ask it. I know really so little about anything that I can't
guarantee a correct answer."

"You can to this," Hatcher informed him, and was dismayed by a doubt of
his voice's steadiness. "You--you're one of the only two persons that
can answer the question I came here to--to ask you."

"Two?" Mr. Linley changed his plan and aimed his shot from another
angle. "There are only two authorities on your subject, then, and I'm
one of them? Who is my colleague?"

"It's--" Hatcher paused. "That doesn't matter. I want to ask
you-- Perhaps you'll tell me it's not my affair; perhaps you'll tell me
to get the hell out of here; perhaps you'll--"

"No, I won't, Hatcher; not at all. What is it?"

The uncle made his shot, again with success; then stood upright, cue in
hand, and looked at the nephew. Hatcher, in shadow himself, saw the
quiet blue inquiry of the eyes, likewise in shadow, on the other side of
the table, and found this mild gaze intolerably embarrassing. "It's a
question I've got to ask. I wouldn't if I didn't. I wouldn't be
intrusive any more than you would, yourself; but--but some things are
important."

"So they are, Hatcher. In fact, I think almost everything is. I don't
know of anything at all that wouldn't be important if we could get at
the whole truth of it. If we'd habitually examine what we pass over as
negligible trifles we might improve our conceptions of the universe and
consequently our conduct and contentment." Uncle Victor had begun to
speak with a brightened interest, even with eagerness. "Of course the
thought isn't new; but, for instance, by observing the behavior of my
friend and dog, the small Locksie, every morning just after he wakes up
in his easy chair across the room from my bed, I--"

"Please listen!" Hatcher said. "I don't want to talk about that. I
simply want to ask you--"

"Yes?" Mr. Linley said encouragingly, as his nephew once more paused.
"I've been able to gather that you have on your mind a question. It
seems to distress you, rather; and you've told me that only one other
person knows the answer. The other, presumably, isn't within reach at
the moment; so you intend to put the question to me but find a
difficulty in so doing. Perhaps I can help you. Your mother's informed
me of the pressure you've kindly been bringing to collect the rents on
the old Linley house. Possibly your problem concerns it. Would I be
right in guessing that the only other person who could solve it is my
self-centered delinquent tenant, Mrs. Schapp?"

"Damn!" Hatcher said. "No, you wouldn't!"

"Then I'm all at sea." Mr. Linley again applied himself to the billiard
table. "If you could somehow bring yourself to put your question into
spoken words--"

"I will, by God!" Hatcher said, and, staring fiercely at the serene face
once more bent down to the shining levelled cue, knew that he couldn't.
Uncle Victor's placidly detached impersonalness was too much for the
nephew, who now helplessly felt that he was appearing to be just a boy.
"Damn that noise!" he said, referring to clamors from the not distant
dining-room where the orchestra seemed to be growing "hot". Hatcher
wiped his forehead. "How can anybody think? The fact is, I came here to
ask you--to ask you--"

"Yes, Hatcher?"

Groping for almost any plausible question to substitute for the one he
couldn't put, Hatcher caught at a straw. "Well, you're supposed by all
the family to do a lot of thinking about everything. I'd like to
hear--to hear what you think about the state of business in this
country."

"Dear me!" Mr. Linley was puzzled. "I shouldn't call that an intrusive
question. There must be something behind it, Hatcher. I can't believe
you sincere in this flattery--that I'm one of the only two persons who
can answer you. Would the other perhaps be Mr. Morgan, or the President
of the United States, or--"

"All right!" Hatcher said. "Go ahead! Rib me all you care to; I'm just a
young fool you wouldn't talk seriously to, of course!"

"I wouldn't? At the slightest prompting I'd talk seriously to anybody,
Hatcher, and by the barrel. You tempt me to answer your question by
explaining the idea that man progresses only through adapting himself to
nature, learning and obeying natural law. In a Depression produced by
the natural law of supply and demand, experimenters declared that they
would overcome the law by disregarding it. They would do that and they
would do this in spite of the law of supply and demand--which is now
actively avenging the insult, so business doesn't recover. It may grow
worse through two causes, one being the fact that politicians, like most
people, love power. Seeking it, they cunningly belittle liberty, knowing
that free people, temporarily hungry, will enslave their future for
bread in the present. The other cause may be that in countries where the
love of liberty has never grown, the politicians, already having
complete power over their own people, naturally wish to extend it over
all the rest of us and have made this war to which, so far, we seem to
be paying too little attention, since presently we, too, may become--"

"Damn!" Hatcher cried again. "Can't you stop? Now I _will_ ask you what
I came here to ask you!" To the nephew it seemed unbelievable that any
intelligent woman could ever have been in love with so discursive a man
as this uncle of his. "I will! I--I--"

"Ah, then after all I've failed to catch your purport, Hatcher?"

"Some_what_!" Hatcher said savagely. "Do you think the matter with me is
I need a lecture on What's-Behind-The-News? I came here to ask you a
question, a personal question, I tell you, and I want an answer! I--"

"Yes?" his uncle said. "As personal as you like, Hatcher. What is it?"

"It's this. It's simply this." Once more Hatcher failed; he couldn't do
it. Facing the indomitably cool detachment of his uncle, he
couldn't--and again he caught at any straw. "Well, it's this. I didn't
mean business in general; I meant-- Well, you're one of the family and I
meant I'd like to hear--to hear what you know about the state of my
father's business."

"You would?" Mr. Linley put his cue in the rack and dusted the chalk
from his fingers with a fine white handkerchief. "I see. You meant that
your father's the other person who knows the answer but you feel a
hesitancy about asking him? I'm sorry not to have the knowledge you've
imagined that I have. Aren't you in a position to know rather more about
the matter than I?"

"No, I'm not." At the moment Hatcher's interest in this subject was
indeed slight; but he felt he'd have to continue to show some or appear
completely ridiculous. "I don't know any more about the business now
than I did the first day. I thought-- I just thought maybe you--"

"No." Mr. Linley had become serious. "Something's occurred that worries
you about it, Hatcher?"

"Well-- Father's been looking harried and sick, and one day, you know,
he came home and seemed to have had some sort of shock not exactly
physical--"

"Yes; so your mother told me at the time. Ah--I've noticed that she's
seemed distressed, of late. Of course there's always the Depression;
however, I understand that business in general, just at the moment,
seems to be growing better. Harry Aldrich was elatedly telling everybody
so at the table this very evening; but I happened to glance at your
father just then and he looked as though such optimism made him sick. Of
course it's a strain to be fighting off insolvency year after year
and--"

"Bankruptcy?" Hatcher said. "Oh, well! Everybody's in the same boat. I
suppose we'd manage to live somehow; they all seem to. Father'd mortgage
the house or--"

"No, I believe that was done as long ago as 'Thirty-three, Hatcher, when
almost all of Butternut Lane fell very much indeed into the same boat.
I'm afraid your father's house is like most of the others--already
mortgaged for more than it'd sell for, because nobody'll buy such houses
nowadays. About this recent apprehension of his, don't you think your
mother might have more than an inkling of--"

"Yes, I do."

"So do I," Mr. Linley said. "Have you asked her what--"

"Asked her?" Hatcher echoed impatiently. "She couldn't answer me. Says
nothing's the matter and cries. I'm to run and play with my toys.
Everybody treats me as if I were about four years old!" He looked
angrily at his uncle, turned on his heel and strode to the other end of
the room. "Yes, and that's about how old I feel right now, too, if you
care to know!"

Mr. Linley didn't seem aware of the outburst but stood apparently lost
in thought, his preoccupied gaze upon the illumined green cloth of the
billiard table. "Your youth may not be the reason why she doesn't
answer," he said; though Hatcher, muttering profanely to himself, didn't
hear him. "Some things sometimes daren't be told to anybody, young or
old."

"What?"

"I was just thinking," his uncle said musingly. "They're very dear to
me, your father and your mother; no man ever had a better
brother-in-law. The Aldriches, too. I was Harry's Best Man, and
Eleanor's lovely as a flower--and as fragile. Odd contradiction. How can
anything be that wrong with the business when Harry and Eleanor are so
exuberant? And yet--there it is!" He looked up, met his nephew's staring
eyes absently. "It's significant that you should have noticed it, too.
Yes, very significant. I'm glad you've spoken of it to me. I--" Abruptly
these ruminations came to an end; Mr. Linley took a flat watch from the
pocket of his white waistcoat, glanced at it and spoke briskly. "Ha! I
believe I can say goodnight to Eleanor now without being accused of not
having enjoyed myself. Locksie has a clock in his system and knows to
the minute what time to expect his final evening stroll on Sheridan
Avenue. He's expecting it now and might disturb the other boarders if
his demands become sonorous. I can just comfortably catch the
half-hourly trolley. Going my way, Hatcher?"

"No, I'm not. I'm going; but I'm going my own way," Hatcher said, and he
added, as his uncle left the room ahead of him, "And the hell with it!"

...The moon, high and bright over the frosted earth, made a smooth
slim path down Mr. Linley's silk hat as nephew and uncle said goodnight
to each other outside Harry Aldrich's driveway gates and went their
separate ways. Hatcher walked slowly, came to a halt and looked up at
the moon. From down the street the light tap of Mr. Linley's
walking-stick upon the pavement was becoming inaudible; the tom-tom beat
of Lansor's orchestra thumped faintly through the cold air, and
Hatcher's urge to follow an impulse was strong. He wanted to go back; he
wanted to stand for just one more long moment looking through an open
doorway at the back of a beautiful head and the sculpturing of shoulders
envied by a pair of poisonous stringy girls whose own shoulders were
always on the jerk.

After first finding it impossible to leave that house, he had become
unable to remain within it. Now it seemed impossible to continue to move
away from it. Time and again, since his infancy, he'd thought he must be
really in love; but he'd never felt anything comparable to the racking
that now possessed him. Never, indeed, for Dorcy! Maybe at times he'd
been almost in love with her; maybe some day he might have drifted into
being more so, if he'd never seen Sarah Florian. What he felt for Sarah
Florian was measurelessly deeper than the utmost emotion any girl of his
own age, or younger, could have caused within him, he was certain. Only
a woman superbly matured could inspire such a passion; and so he didn't
wish Sarah Florian younger--he only wished himself older. Then neither
could be smirched. Where on earth was there a more agonizing position
than that of a man all upset like this about a woman who had once been
on the point, people said, of marrying his uncle? Of course anybody'd
call such a man an infatuated little damn fool.

Hatcher thought of his father and mother and of the worrying he'd done
about the anxiety they couldn't conceal. Only a business trouble! He
still pitied them; but how really petty any mere business trouble was,
even a bankruptcy, compared to the tragic condition in which he found
himself to-night! He knew that he'd have thought his position comedy if
another had occupied it; might even have laughed at the sufferings of a
penniless young man horribly talked about for being in love with a
beautiful millionaire woman probably at least twelve years his senior.
Yes, of course people were laughing at him--giggling, stringing him,
trying to make him feel guilty--even a grand girl like Mary Gilpin
trying to do that and despising him--everybody trying to destroy the
finest experience he'd ever known, something that was now the very life
of him.

Hatcher looked up at the inscrutable moon and had one of the oldest
thoughts that it inspires; poets long before the Renaissance worked
embroideries all through Hatcher's question: How could that moon look
down now, and thousands of years ago and thousands of years hence, and
not weep for the anguishes among the children of earth it beheld from
its icy height?

The moon remained emotionless, as cool as Uncle Victor Linley himself.
Hatcher walked on. How long could he bear the state of things--and the
state of his own feelings--without doing something? Doing what? He
hadn't known how to make himself ask his own uncle a simple direct
personal question; what could he say to Sarah Florian? Well, he could
say the truth to her, the crazy truth--and he'd go to her and do it. The
words he'd use began to come into his mind: "Do you remember that first
evening you gave me? Do you remember our little ceremony of friendship?
Do you remember all the freighted moments we've had together since then?
Now you see what they've done to me! Everybody in this town's laughing
at me. Old spite-cats are calling me your gigolo. Well, let 'em! I don't
care. To me not a damn thing on this earth matters except one--and
that's you. Yes; here I am. I've got an education that's no use to me
and thirty-one dollars in the bank. They tell me you were once engaged
to my uncle. Well, if that's true it can't be helped now. It makes me
just that much more ridiculous; but you've utterly fascinated me. I only
know that my life's yours to do what you will with it because, damn it,
I love you! I love you! I love you! What are you going to do about it?"

Hatcher considered saying this to her to-night; he thought of going into
the "Lash place", sitting on the cold stone steps until Sarah Florian
came home, when he'd rise before her, pale and stern in the moonlight,
and begin with, "It's I! Yes, half frozen but--"

Then rose in his mind the picture of her as she sat composedly at the
bridge table with her fine motionless back to him; and, for reasons he
didn't try to explore, he postponed his climax to the morrow.




CHAPTER XVI


When the morrow came something appeared to stand in
the way, preventing him; and this was the technique that had been
evolved by Mrs. Florian to regulate, so to speak, their meetings. All of
these had been upon her initiative. Just before he left her she'd say,
"To-morrow?" or perhaps, if he'd been driving with her, "To-night?"
Sometimes she'd telephone, "Would you care to come to me--immediately?"
or "Would you like to spare time for a drive and tea to-morrow?" Now at
their last parting she'd said nothing, and five whole days passed
without word from her. He suffered, his heart burned with urgencies; but
her method upon him had been so effective that in spite of everything he
couldn't bring himself to go to her door and ask for her. She'd
delicately implanted within him an awareness that he was to come to her
when she signalled and not otherwise--or something might be spoiled!

Before he knew Mrs. Florian he couldn't have imagined himself in such a
coil--to be in love with somebody next door and incapable of moving an
inch toward her unless she happened to send for him! Love, it appeared,
was crazy nowadays, like everything else: business and politics and the
wars in Europe and Asia. Youth was as helplessly baffled by love as by
the insanity of the general world;--and how had it lucklessly befallen
him that he hadn't been born at least twelve or fourteen years earlier?
If he were that old, he thought, he'd not only be safely beyond the
reach of ridicule, but he'd surely know how to ring a lady's door-bell.
She was avowedly his dearest friend, and he was afraid even to telephone
her!

In other fields than love he did better than he knew, and the days that
passed without summons from next door might well have pleased him as
portents of a business career. The house with the freshly painted
doorway and window frames and interior refurbishment was leased by a
solvent tenant. "Snapped at it!" Mr. Barley said. Then, on the strength
of this plain testimony to the worth of Hatcher's idea, Mr. Barley
assumed the responsibility for allowing him to extend his other
renovations and to double the number of his renovators. "I haven't been
able to gain your father's attention," the old man said, "but on the
strength of this rental I think we may dare go that far without undue
risk."

One squad, for exteriors, Hatcher put under Mr. Floatus, the one-armed
painter, and the other, for interiors, under Gilpin Murray, who was
proud of his subordinates, though they consisted of the two
out-and-downers and the two colored widows. Gilpin's exhortations kept
the out-and-downers sober, and the widows, though elderly, were
diligent. Hatcher, setting-to with this group, himself, proved that he
was a thorough hands-clothes-and-face-painter. One of the colored women
helped to clean him with turpentine, and gave him kind advice: "Some
people got the brains to work with their han's an' brains, bofe," she
said, "an' some only got the brains to work with their brains. You jes'
keep you' han's in you' pockets, honey."

Mr. Barley, visiting the scene of experiment, said the "new generation"
was going to take hold the right way, nobody need be uneasy any more
about that; and Hatcher should have been delighted so to stir this dried
old man. Perhaps there was a slight elevation of spirits after the
tribute, before its recipient remembered that really he was suffering
all the time. He worked harder and walked faster on his collecting
rounds in order to come home earlier in the afternoons with a good
conscience, hoping that Mrs. Florian would telephone him; but she
maintained her unfathomable silence.

As twilight on the fifth lorn day began to dim the living-room where he
did most of his waiting and hoping, his manner disturbed his little
sister. "I'd hate to _haf_ to go to my own room without even Mother
making me do my home work there, Hatch," she said plaintively, from the
fireside. "Couldn't you sit down?"

"Yes, do, please!" Aunt Ada, the other occupant of the room, looked up
from an embroidery that engaged her. "Young people seem to feel they
can't live unless they're restless nowadays."

"No, we don't, Aunt Ada," Frances said. "Look at me; I'm just sitting
here quietly. Why didn't you come home to lunch to-day, Hatch? You
oughtn't to work so hard, especially not on Saturday. I've seen Mrs.
Florian six times now altogether, Hatch; she dresses well. Polly Wilson
that used to be my most intimate friend at school said this morning her
mother says she bets you want to get married to Mrs. Florian, Hatch, and
must be a simple idiot; so I've stopped speaking to her."

"Frances!" Aunt Ada's tone of reproof was mild; she looked amused.
"Don't talk so absurdly!"

"I wasn't the one," Frances explained. "It was Polly Wilson's mother. I
wouldn't like Hatch to get married to Mrs. Florian because then he'd
have to go and live at her house. Aunt Ada, what was it old George
wanted Father to do about Mrs. Florian?"

"Never mind," the aunt said. "Little pitchers needn't have such big--"

"Mine aren't and he did, Aunt Ada. Poor old George was crying when he
came in the kitchen, and I heard him, and he asked if he couldn't see
Father, and Father came and talked to him and I heard them saying 'Mrs.
Florian' any number of times. I--"

Hatcher turned sharply from the bay window. "What is all this? What are
you talking about now? What do you mean about old George crying and
wanting to see Father?"

"Never mind!" Aunt Ada used one of her formulas. "It's nothing that
concerns you, Hatcher, and it isn't this family's affair. Young people
don't need to know every--"

"Damn it!" Hatcher broke out, and he continued to speak harshly in spite
of Aunt Ada's pointing eloquently at Frances to remind him that there
was an innocent child in the room. "I'm sick and tired of all the
hush-hush business always going on in this house as if I were still a
schoolboy and had no right to know anything about anything or--"

"It happened at lunch-time, Hatch," Frances interposed eagerly. "I like
it when you swear, Hatch. I've heard lots and lots all over everywhere,
Aunt Ada. Father was home at lunch-time and that's why old George came
to see him; and another thing I heard him tell Father was he'd been to
the Aldriches but Mr. Harry Aldrich said he couldn't do anything to help
him. Old George was in a great deal of trouble, Hatch, and you could see
Father felt sorry for him; and so did I and so did Lora and our old
Berry, because Berry came in the kitchen, too--he came in with
George--and Aunt Ada and Mother heard them and came out there, and I
thought Mother was almost going to cry on George's account before they
noticed I was there and told me I had to go out. Do you remember those
Great Danes Mrs. Florian had when she first came, Hatch?"

"No, I don't. What have they got to do with old George?"

"Nothing except he said she treated them better than him. She wanted 'em
to trail around after her in the garden and everywhere, one on each
side, and when they wouldn't and didn't pay much attention to her, she
had 'em sent where they came from and got her money back; but George
said they'd be happy compared to him. I wish you'd swear some more,
Hatch; it makes your voice sound so nice."

"I will!" Hatcher said. "I'll swear plenty if I don't find out--"

"Very well!" Aunt Ada really wanted to talk about what had happened.
"Since you _must_ know, then, old George came here because he'd just
been discharged. He came to beg your father to intervene for him with
Mrs. Florian."

"What?"

"Yes. It seemed he'd been discharged just for leaving a door open
somewhere last night--discharged and told to move his things out of that
little cottage he's lived in on the rear of the Lash place so many
years. She ordered him to go immediately and declined to listen to him.
He told us he supposed maybe he was growing forgetful in his old age
because it was true he did leave the door open; but it had never
happened before and never would again, if your father would only
persuade her to take him back."

"Go on!" Hatcher spoke sharply. "What'd Father say?"

"He told George he'd try to help him along till he could find another
place--but at George's age who'd hire him, and for what? George said
he'd rather die than give up his cottage, he's so used to it--and the
little garden he's made for himself there so many years!--but your
father told him he didn't feel at liberty to speak to Mrs. Florian about
it. Naturally Frederic knew it wouldn't be the slightest use."

"Why not?" Hatcher's voice was loud. "_Why_ wouldn't it be of use? If
she understood--"

"You think she doesn't?" Aunt Ada laughed.

"Certainly she doesn't!"

"You think not, Hatcher? I suppose because she's rather taken you up
lately--an old habit of hers, by the way, so look out!--you think you
understand her better than we do who knew her from A to Z when she was
the worst spoiled brat and afterwards the worst spoiled flapper that
ever--"

"See here!" Hatcher said. "See here!"

Aunt Ada laughed again. "Ask anybody that knew her! She was ingrowing
enough on her own account; but her grandfather spoiled her, just the way
he'd spoiled her father, who all his life thought everybody on earth had
to get out of his way and finally thought so once too often! That was
when he and his giddy little wife were driving at eighty miles an hour
on Jefferson Boulevard and a milk-wagon didn't get out of the way
because it couldn't. After that, her grandfather only had Sarah to
spoil, and I must say she took to it! If there ever was a worse
self-centered, more affected do-whatever-she-pleased hard-as-nails
show-off young girl that didn't care for anything on earth except to be
a sensation and make people talk about her, and pose and have her own
way willy-nilly over anybody's dead body, and do any wild thing that
came into her head--and so no wonder when that Spaniard came along
she--"

"That's enough!" Hatcher shouted. "You seem to forget that you're
speaking of a lady of whom I have the honor to be a friend!"

"Is she, Hatcher?" little Frances asked. "I'm glad that's all, because
Polly Wilson's mother told her--"

"Damn!" Hatcher said fiercely. "Damn and damn!" he added, strode from
the room and out of the house.

He blamed himself as well as Aunt Ada. His intuition had told him from
the first not to speak of Sarah Florian to anybody, not to listen to a
word spoken of her if he could possibly help it, and now he'd just let
himself be betrayed into something like a discussion of her. What had
happened, in consequence, were these fresh wounds. Was love, after all,
as many poets complained, nothing but torment? No; other young men fell
in love and everybody was pleasant about it, seemed delighted, said
nothing that wasn't agreeable. Why was he singled out to be rolled in
thorns and showered with darts--even in his own home? There was only one
house, it seemed, where slander wasn't spoken and indignity couldn't
reach him.

In the darkness that had fallen he pressed through the widely bordering
shrubberies and looked at that substantial house, intending only to look
at it. No stained-glass pattern shone through the night from the nearer
wing; but there were faintly lighted windows farther on, both upstairs
and down. Hatcher went forward, slowly crossing Mrs. Florian's wide dim
lawn; then he halted, looking up at a figure vaguely seen between the
curtains at one of the windows of the second floor. He couldn't be sure,
but had a catch in his breath as he thought he recognized the figure as
hers and that perhaps she saw him standing out there, a lonely shape in
the cold darkness. The curtains closed; and, at that, he went on,
ascended stone steps and dared to push the button beside the door above
them. He waited long enough to regret the desperate impulse and to
decide upon retreat; then a Filipino suddenly opened the door, and
Hatcher heard her piano.

The Filipino said, "Walk inside. I go see." Hatcher went into the Louis
XV room; the Filipino retired and didn't reappear; the piano continued
to be heard. Its music was disturbingly elegiac. There were passages
resembling the Death March in the "Eroica", though Hatcher didn't
identify them; and other mournfulness was heard, sometimes borrowed,
sometimes improvised, while the caller waited and waited and waited. At
last, at the end of half an hour perhaps, an almost too poignantly
familiar melody succeeded the funerary demonstration. The strains of
"Liebestraum" caressed his ear with an infinite tenderness, speaking of
love ineffable--then a third of the keyboard crashed as if struck by a
passionate arm. There was a moment's silence and Sarah Florian swept
into the room, sank swiftly into a chair in a beautiful posture of pain,
her head thrown back, her eyes closed and her extended arms resting
listlessly upon the arms of the chair.

"How did you know?" she asked; and her richly hushed voice expressed
emotional exhaustion. "How did you know that I wanted you to come just
now? I sent a message through the ether; you must have caught it. The
first time I saw you--as you stood above the crowd on the stairway there
in your house--I knew that we could do things like this together. I'd
have telephoned you; but you _felt_ my call and came."




CHAPTER XVII


"Yes--I think so--I believe I did." The lovely
exhausted voice convinced Hatcher that maybe he'd obeyed something like
a mystic urge. "Yes, I wouldn't have come if I hadn't felt--hadn't felt
I don't know just what. It's mysterious but--"

"Yet I kept you waiting." She opened her eyes languidly and repeated, "I
kept you waiting."

"Yes. Five whole days."

"No; I mean just now." Mrs. Florian disposed of the five whole days by
ignoring them. "I went on playing, trying to get myself out of a
desperate mood before I could see even you."

"Desperate?" The word shocked Hatcher; it was unthinkable that this
proud splendid woman should speak so strickenly. "You say you've been
feeling desperate? I do hope you haven't--haven't been hearing--"

"Hearing?" Mrs. Florian looked at him with quickly widened eyes.
"Hearing what?"

"Nothing. I didn't mean--"

"Oh, yes, you did!" she said. "You mean there's talk--talk about me.
Frogs' chorusing in this little pond! Of course there is; there always
was. As if I ever cared or could care now for _that_! Do you suppose I'd
change any slightest thing in my life because of gabble? No, I don't
yield to froth. What plays dirges upon me is this futility--this
vacuity--in my life!"

"Vacuity?" Hatcher wasn't resentful; he only felt overlooked. "You mean
there isn't much that appeals to you--hardly anything at all? You
mean--"

"No, I don't. Some things appeal too much entirely. I mean that I'm
getting nowhere, not achieving what I want--and isn't that dust and
ashes in the mouth? What a life; what an emptiness! What have I?
Nothing!"

"You?" Hatcher said plaintively. "Nothing?"

It was on the edge of his lips to insist that she had one possession at
least. He wanted to say: "You have _me_, Sarah Florian. I own nothing
but my life to give you; but that's yours. Even if it's true that you
got tough with old George and once fell for my uncle and then threw him
off the boat, I offer my life to you. Take it and do what you will with
it. It's not much; but couldn't it be anyhow something?" Hatcher was so
near saying this that probably the reason he didn't was that he hadn't
the time. Mrs. Florian's listlessness was gone; she sat straight, made a
protestive gesture with both hands and uttered an exclamation that
sounded like anger.

"_Uh_!" she cried. "These damnable days, and this one worst of all! It
began wrong--the most sordid episode this morning. I think you once said
you knew that pettifogging old George who's been living on my place all
these years."

"Yes." Hatcher was greatly troubled. "I--I thought I'd ask you-- It
seems he came over to our house all upset and--"

"How exactly like him!" Sarah Florian's face flushed with indignation.
"Whining all over the neighborhood for sympathy! I'm furious with myself
for standing the old hypocrite as long as I have. He wasn't telling
anybody what he'd _done_, I'll swear. _Why_ did he say he was
discharged?"

"I believe there was something about a door and--"

"Yes, there certainly was; but I'll be bound he didn't say which door,
or what he murdered! It was the door to my hothouse. He'd let my
greenhouses all go to rack and ruin; but I've been having them restored,
and only yesterday I had my florist begin to fill one of them with
plants and flowers. George has been pretending to be a night watchman so
he could put it over on me he's doing something useful. He poked around
in the hothouse; then went out and left the door open for pipes to
freeze in the bitter cold. This morning there was hardly a plant or
flower he hadn't killed. He brought death to my flowers! Can anything
excuse that?"

"Oh, I didn't know," Hatcher said feebly. "I didn't--"

"That's murder!" she interrupted. "It may be worth it to get rid of him.
Nobody could know the boredom I've suffered from him and his airs of
being the old family retainer, his never-ending garrulity--to show how
devoted and useful he is, so that he could go on sponging on me the rest
of his life! All this time he's had his cottage and the same wages from
me that my grandfather was foolish enough to give him, a hundred dollars
a month! I've paid it year after year because Harry Aldrich wrote me
that the place had to be looked after and George was honest. Honest!
Living on me, doing less than nothing, drawing all that money from me,
and then finishing by murdering my flowers that had a better right to
live than _he_ had! Do you think I should bear that?"

"N--no--" Hatcher said. He was still sorry for George; he couldn't help
but be so. Yet it seemed to him that in this passion for her flowers she
showed a poetic kind of chivalry. "Of course I understand. I know how
you feel. You went in there and saw everything all frozen and withered
and--"

"It was criminal!" she cried. "So was his neglect of my house. Workmen
told me the dust and cobwebs in my garrets and cellars were dreadful.
What did he care, so he had his wages for nothing?" Mrs. Florian's
indignation became even sharper; her voice had lost the rich hushedness
she usually put upon it and was loud and determined. "Cheating! He
cheated me for twelve years--because I'm a woman! Well, so I am; but
that's one thing I'll not let anybody on earth do to me and get away
with it. I'll not be cheated!"

Her militancy astonished Hatcher; for heretofore he'd seen but gentle
aspects of her. She'd been elusively moody sometimes but always sweetly
so; now she was flashingly in arms, a beautiful strong woman who could
and would give alms, he thought--would give tremendously if she
chose--but knew her rights, would fight for them at the drop of a hat
and couldn't be beaten down, much less cajoled. She could be as sternly
just as she could be divinely tender, and this showed the opulent
variety of her nature: What could be more stirringly admirable? Still
there lingered within Hatcher a faintly felt sting of sympathy for old
George;--but it certainly had been a pretty bad thing to kill all those
flowers, and Sarah Florian was magnificent. Hatcher said so, in a voice
as hushed as hers usually was.

"I think you're magnificent," he said.

Again she proved how various she could be. She jumped up and in two
strides reached him where he sat facing her. She sank upon one knee
before him, in the loveliest of all her postures. She took both of his
hands in hers and looked at him dizzyingly. "You don't mean that!"

"Mean it?" the whirling Hatcher whispered, almost voiceless. "Oh, my
darl--"

Then she was more various than ever. Before he knew it she was on her
feet again, had caressed his cheek with a light hand and had turned
away. "You're wrong of course," she said quickly, and laughed with a
little pathos. "Only sometimes I like to hear someone say it!"

"Sarah--" Hatcher rose and he stood at her shoulder. "Sarah, I--"

"You're sweet, Hatcher." She turned to face him, smiling wistfully. "Of
course I know that I'm anything but magnificent. I'm just a woman who
won't be battered about." Then her smile vanished; she looked at him
with sharpest inquiry. "Before I told you just now that George had
murdered my flowers, were you inclined to be critical of me?"

"Why--no. No, I--"

"I'm glad you weren't," she said. "It would have been the end of this
friendship. That's one thing I never could endure, criticism from a
friend. The rest can say what they please of me; but not my friends. My
friends must accept me wholly or not at all." She began to speak with
great vigor, frowning, and more as if she declared herself to the world
than merely to one rapt caller. "I don't ask them to understand me; I do
ask them to take me as I am, and I'll not have them pecking at me. I
won't endure it! If whole belief in me's too much, then they're not my
friends; they're my enemies. Understanding's more than I expect from
either friends or enemies; I've never had it from a soul upon this
earth."

"Are you sure?" Hatcher said. "Don't you think--"

"No, you couldn't," she interrupted, not abating her intensity. "In my
whole life nobody ever did, no matter how I've tried to reveal myself.
Yet how simple I am! I'm just a huntress for happiness; that's all. How
long and how hard I've sought it--and how often I've thought, for a
moment, that I was almost on the verge of finding it! Then--collapses,
treacheries I couldn't even avenge, peckings, flaws found in me,
emptiness where I thought there'd be perfect beauty. Yet still I'm a
huntress. How bitter! I was put into this life to find happiness and
there isn't any. I hunt for a thing that has no existence anywhere."

"No; you're wrong," Hatcher said, in a voice as faint as his words were
brave. "I have it when I--when I'm here with you."

At this, suddenly, her mood once more changed entirely. She looked
delighted with him, was all smiles and pleasure. "You dear boy!" she
said. "You really _do_ know how to be my friend. There!" She took his
hand and retained it. "See what you've done: so quickly I'm all soothed
out! I mustn't keep you any longer because I've got to fly to dress and
dine with those Wilsons and go to a concert with them. It's the symphony
orchestra. You're going, perhaps?"

"No, I believe we don't subscribe any more. I--"

"Nor any of your family?" she asked, still keeping his hand. "Your Aunt
Ada--or any of them?"

"No, I don't think so."

She looked disappointed. "I only thought if I happened to see one of
them it'd be a little--well, almost like seeing _you_. A rather
far-fetched pleasure, perhaps!" Her fingers increased their pressure
upon his own strongly; then released them. "There. You darling boy!" She
set her hand upon his breast, gave him a light push toward the door.
"Run!"

Hatcher, as lightfooted now as lightheaded, was out of the house and
across the great space of starlit lawn almost as swiftly as if he did
actually run. An unbelievable triumph was in his heart, and his physical
eyes saw little of what they looked upon. At home, he thought of going
to the concert where from the gallery he could perhaps look down upon a
lovely head of symphonically arranged black hair; but he couldn't afford
a ticket and really didn't need to do anything like that. His
exhilaration required no such feeding.

He was in great spirits, teased his little sister gayly, scarce knowing
what he said; and so, until more than an hour after dinner, wasn't aware
of what an extremity of gloom his parents had reached. He'd consented to
backgammon with Frances before she went to bed and was playing the game
hilariously with her in the living-room when they were interrupted by
the chattering summons of the telephone bell in the hall; Frances jumped
up, dropping her dice-box upon the table.

Hatcher caught her by the arm. "Sit down, you squirrel. What's the
matter? It's your move."

"Let me go, Hatch. Didn't you hear the bell? Father and Mother both
promised I could be the telephone-answerer for this house." She called
to her parents for corroboration. They sat together at the other end of
the long room, Frederic Ide with a magazine and his wife with a book,
though they were not reading but talking in lowered voices. "Didn't you
promise I could be telephone-answerer, both of you?"

Preoccupied, they paid no heed, and Hatcher still detained the little
girl. "What on earth do you want to be telephone-answerer for?"

"Please let go, Hatch! It's because that way a person gets to know a
good deal of what's going on and I like to."

"Just a natural-born gossip!" Hatcher laughed loudly. "I never saw it
come out earlier on anybody. You ought to be ashamed of what you're
going to grow up to be, Francine!"

"Stop calling me 'Francine' and let me go! It's ringing again and if I
don't get there Aunt Ada'll hear it in her room upstairs and beat me to
it the way she did that last time Mrs. Florian called you, because Aunt
Ada loves to just as much as I do--so please, Hatch!"

He released her. "Scram!"

She ran out lightly; and then, as the room became quieter after the
noise she and Hatcher had been making, the voices of his father and
mother unfortunately became audible to him. "It was grasping at a
straw," he heard his father saying. "The crazy hope that these years
might have made a change in--"

"Yes, all thrown away!" Mrs. Ide said, lamentant. "I might have known
nothing could change such a woman. If she can be that hard-hearted to
poor old George--"

Hatcher jumped up and strode the length of the room. "What's this?" he
said. "I'm getting pretty tired of hearing such things! Mother, if you
don't like Mrs. Florian what'd you break your neck to give her that Tea
for?"

His mother looked up at him. "I didn't know you could hear. You weren't
supposed to--"

"Yes, I know!" he said bitterly. "I'm never supposed to hear anything or
be told anything. I'm too young, of course. I'll repeat my question:
Mother, if you don't like Mrs. Florian what'd you spend all that money
and energy giving that Tea for her for?"

Mrs. Ide put her hand in her husband's and hung her head. "We hoped it
would please her."

Hatcher remained stern. "If you don't like her, why did you want to
please her?"

"That'll do, Hatcher." Frederic Ide looked up with eyes too dulled to be
commanding. "Your mother and I are having a private talk."

"It's too late for that," Hatcher said. "You've both got to be made to
understand I'm no longer a minor, and if your private talks include the
name of Sarah Florian I demand--"

He was interrupted. Little Frances appeared in the doorway. "Hatcher,
it's for you; but don't let her keep you long or we won't get to finish
our game unless Mother'll let me stay up. It's still my move."

"Who wants to speak to me?"

"Dorcy."

"Oh, all right!" Hatcher said roughly, and went to the telephone.

Dorcy's voice sounded tense and queer; there were quavers in it. "Hatch,
can you come here--I mean to our house? Would you come right away? Will
you, please? Will you?"

"Well, I--"

"Please, Hatch! Oh, please!"

Hatcher, sickeningly afraid that he was going to have to tell her as
gently as he could that he'd never really cared for her in that way,
said, "Yes, certainly," and went forth.




CHAPTER XVIII


He needn't have feared that he'd have to tell Dorcy
how sure she could always be of his true friendship for her, though
unhappily not of more; she was already counting upon the friendship. She
was waiting at the door for him, opened it before he rang, and he saw
that under a white fur wrap she wore a pretty pink evening dress
familiar to him, but that her eyes were frightened and her lips twitchy.

"Come in just for a minute," she said. "I want you to go somewhere with
me, if you can."

"I can. I will." Hatcher spoke promptly. "What's the matter?"

"It's about Father. I want you to go with me to bring him home, if we
can find him."

"Your father?" Hatcher, who'd stepped in and closed the door, couldn't
imagine what she meant. "Find your father?"

"Oh, Hatch!" Dorcy was shaking; she leaned against him, her cheek upon
his shoulder, and he put an arm about her. "Hatch, it's awful! Mother
and I didn't know what to do or who to send for to help us. Your
father's looked so ill lately Mother thought-- And besides we'd rather
he didn't know. You won't tell him. Your Uncle Victor was out, the
telephone at his boarding-house told us. We haven't any right to call on
you, of course; but--but you've always been so good and kind and such
a--a dependable neighbor and friend that I--" She looked up at him then,
as he held her, and for a moment it seemed to him that his apprehension
was realized; that her wet eyes were really asking him if he wasn't, in
spite of everything, more than a dependable neighbor and friend--or if
he wouldn't some time care to be--but, if such a question was indeed in
that instant asked of him, Dorcy must have seen the answer quickly. She
stepped away from him. "We don't know where Father is, Hatch.
He's--he's--"

"He's what?" Hatcher was incredulous. Big, hearty, jolly Harry Aldrich
was the last man in the world anybody'd ever be worried or distressed
about, he thought. "What's the matter with your father?"

"He's drunk," Dorcy whispered.

"What! Why, I never heard of--"

"No, nor did we, Hatch--Mother and I. He never in the world before
to-night--"

"Oh, see here!" Hatcher, relieved, patted her shoulder. "Why, Dorcy,
that can happen to anybody. With a man like your father it'd be just an
accident--a little more than he realized he was pouring in, that's all.
Good heavens, old girl, don't take such a thing seriously! What's got
into you? Your mother certainly knows better than to worry about it,
doesn't she?"

"She's sunk, Hatch; completely. We're both scared."

"But why? Almost every man--at least once or twice in a lifetime--"

"No, no!" Dorcy said. "It wasn't like that. Mother and he were going to
the Symphony and so was I. It was seven o'clock and I was just starting
for the Wilsons' to dine there and go with their party--when Father came
in. I never saw anything like the way he looked--it just wasn't the same
man. He frightened us both."

"What? But that's nonsense, Dorcy. Anybody when he's oiled up a bit
doesn't look--"

"No, no!" Dorcy put both her hands over her heart. "You just couldn't
understand unless you'd seen him, Hatch. I've seen plenty of people
badly off, but not like that. He hadn't been here a minute before Mother
got just weak and I ran to telephone the Wilsons I had a sick headache.
He was tragic, Hatch. He said the most terrible things."

"What sort of things?"

"He kept saying there was going to be nothing but war in the world and
God was going to strike it down. It was more as if he'd lost his mind
than as if he'd been drinking; but of course he had--and he said he was
going to stay drunk forever. Then he got to sobbing and laughing
together and telling Mother over and over she mustn't mind anything he
said because everything would be all right to-morrow. Of course we
didn't want the servants to hear him, and I ran to close the doors to
that part of the house; but I heard Mother call me and ran back. They
were at the front door here and she was trying to hold him; but he tore
himself loose from her and shouted he was never coming home again and
ran out. He had a taxi outside and was gone before I could get to it."

"I see," Hatcher said thoughtfully. "Maybe you're right; maybe we'd
better go look for him. Where--"

"We don't know. We telephoned and telephoned--even to all the hotels,
getting him paged, and waiting and waiting and waiting. Then, when it
was all of no use, I thought of you, and Mother said yes, you'd be the
one. I've got her lying down in yonder, and I thought if you'd come, you
and I could take her big car and we'd go the round of the bars and I'd
sit outside and wait while you went into the different places alone,
because if I went in with you I think the mood he's in would make him
break away again or start up another scene like the one that went on
here. He likes you, and if we find him and you could persuade him to
come out to the car and get in, why, then I'm pretty sure I could handle
him while you'd drive us home. It's all I can think of. I don't know
what else to try."

"I do," Hatcher said. "There's not the slightest use of your going,
Dorcy. All I need's the car. I'll go through every rum hole in the town
till I find him and I'll bring him home and put him to bed, myself. Just
you and your mother keep out of the way when I get him here and I'll--"

Dorcy shook her head determinedly. "No; you don't know the state he's
in. It'll need both of us."

"No, it won't." Hatcher held up a hand, and laughed. He'd just heard
wheels on the driveway. "It won't need anybody. There's a car right now
and I'll bet anything you like it's your father. He's come home himself,
probably a good deal sobered up. You'll see."

Dorcy uttered a great sigh. "Oh, if it only is!"

They listened and heard laughter outside, Harry Aldrich's laughter, and
his voice calling something indistinguishable but cheerful to the
departing driver. Dorcy threw open the door, and Harry walked in, still
laughing but not steady upon his feet.

He took Dorcy in his arms effusively. "Only child I ever had," he said.
"Best one, too! Hello, Hatcher-young-fellow-me-lad! Where's your mother,
Dorcy? Got to swear myself--I mean square myself--for being downtown so
late, keeping dinner waiting and everything all this time. Must be after
seven o'clock and she'll give me fits because we're going to the
Sylph--Symphony and she loves to be on time to music and I've still got
to dress. Can't help it. Unfinished business kept me at the office;
simply had to be 'tended to. Been at my desk every minute since lunch,
hours and hours and hours!" He released Dorcy and leaned against the
wall. "Wasn't I asking you where's your mother, or not?"

Mrs. Aldrich, with tears just swept from her pretty face, appeared from
the living-room, stared unbelievingly and then, with a sharp cry of
relief, rushed to her husband and flung her arms about him. "Oh, Harry!"
she cried. "Thank heaven! Thank heaven! Dear heart, you frightened me
so!"

"Me!" He was deeply puzzled. "Wouldn't frighten a pigeon! When'd I ever
frighten my own baby, my own sweet love Eleanor? What makes you tell
such stories, honey?"

She clung to him; then took a step backward and tried to be severe with
him. "Harry Aldrich, where on earth did you get such a binge?"

"That's incorrect, beloved." He folded his arms upon his chest,
evidently hoping to look more dignified. "One doesn't get a binge; one
gets on one." His eyes, not focusing easily, again became aware of
Hatcher. "Well, well; isn't this Fred Ide's boy, young Hatcher? Hatch,
you're too young. That's the only trouble; you're too young."

Hatcher laughed. "No, I'm not, sir--not too young to help you up to
bed."

Mrs. Aldrich laughed too, and thanked him. "No, dear boy," she added.
"I'll do that easily."

"You will not! Never!" her husband said; but his gaze remained
waveringly upon Hatcher. "Nobody will. Hatch boy, I've always loved your
father. It was your grandfather took me into the firm; but Fred got him
to. I love Fred Ide dearly and I always will, no matter what he does. We
all of us make mistakes and they get us into big trouble. If your poor
father--" Harry paused; his arms slipped, spoiling the dignified
posture, and he tried fumblingly to put his hands in his trousers
pockets. "Well, anyway, I love Fred Ide. Whatever he does, or's done,
or's going to do, I'm still _for_ him; remember that! Stay to dinner
with us, Hatch. Eleanor Aldrich, you little skeezix, what you laughing
at?"

"At you, because you're just babbling--and because I'm so glad you're
home," she explained, as she put an arm about him. "Come on; you're
going to bed."

"I'm going to play the piano. Bed, no! I wouldn't for--I wouldn't for
the last twenty-two thousand dollars in the world. I won't!" He
continued to protest, seemingly unaware that all the time he was
yielding to his wife's pressure and moving with her down the hall toward
the stairway. "I decline! Four of us here, aren't they? That's exactly a
quartet; so we're all going to sing. Sing as long as we live! Sing
anyhow that long. I won't go to bed! Hate bed."

"Lift your foot and step up," his wife instructed him, as they reached
the stairway, and they began to ascend, with Harry insisting at every
step that he wouldn't take the next one.

In her great relief Eleanor Aldrich continued to laugh fondly, radiant
because he had come safely home to her. Nothing was more evident than
that she loved him as much when he was drunk as when he was sober, and
that Harry, drunk or sober, adored her. So, with a pang of envy in his
heart, the young man gazing up at them thought that here was a picture
of triumphant love, another example of love that wasn't baffling and
painful. From the landing Eleanor looked back over her shoulder.

"Don't come, Dorcy," she called. "Thank you again and again, Hatch--you
were so kind. But everything's all right, bless heaven!"

"Yes, of course it is," Hatcher said, and turned to Dorcy. "I'll be
trotting along."

She was staring toward the upper flight of the stairway. "It's so
strange--his forgetting he'd been here before and all that terrible--"

"Nonsense! Didn't you ever hear of anybody's drawing a blank before?"

"Yes, of course; but not like-- Oh, well!" She extended her hand,
withdrew it as soon as he'd clasped it. "Thank you. You've been kind.
Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Dorcy. You'd be foolish to worry any more about nothing. You
and your mother are all right now."

"Are--we?" she said, as he stepped out into the darkness; and the slight
hesitation before she added the second of the two words held the
disturbing implication that although everything was now probably all
right for her mother it mightn't be quite so all right for herself.

The involuntarily conveyed slight hint of pathos remained with Hatcher
botheringly, bringing upon him the same unwarranted sense of guiltiness
that cool Mary Gilpin and spiteful Lennie Aldrich had incited, on the
night of the Aldriches' great dinner for Sarah Florian. _Why_ should he
feel guiltiness when he was guilty of nothing? Dorcy, in trouble, had
sent for him and he'd been glad to come--he'd always do anything on
earth for her--but why hadn't she and her mother sent for Pinkie Wilson,
instead? Because Pinkie's parents were giving a party and might have
objected to his leaving it? No, that didn't seem to be the answer.
Hatcher knew that in her moment of need Dorcy's heart had still turned
to him and not to Erdvynn Wilson; this was what caused the sense of
guilt. Once, he and Dorcy had both rather expected to be engaged some
day, he supposed; but it hadn't happened and now it never could. That it
couldn't wasn't his fault; yet here he was bedeviled for it! What were
people made of? What was he himself made of, that he had to suffer for
what he couldn't help?

Not rid of bafflements brought upon him by Dorcy's pathetic "Are--we?"
he found others to oppress him. Castaway imaginings again began to land
upon the shores of his mind, though no longer was any absurd old scandal
concerning Mrs. Florian brought with them. Before his first sight of
her, Hatcher had been able to imagine that even his good father might be
penalized for an ancient amorous dalliance; but the very air the son
breathed throughout his whole boyhood at home had precluded any thought
that financial dishonor could ever by any possibility taint the name of
Frederic Ide or that of the firm of Ide and Aldrich. To-night he hadn't
paid serious attention to Harry Aldrich's liquored maunderings in the
moments of their utterance; but afterward some of them seemed to repeat
themselves, becoming significant.

Was the gist of them that no matter what his partner had done, Harry'd
loyally stand by him? In wine there is sometimes too much truth: Did
Harry mean that worse than insolvency was hovering, that there might
be--some sort of scrape? Once more, Hatcher began to be frightened about
his father; but the amorphous fear was only a malicious squeak from one
of the harpies that again flew to harry him.

The exultant mood of a few hours ago was gone. A statistician's chart of
Hatcher's feelings during this one evening would have carried a line
from a point far down on the page to the upper margin, then dropped it
all the way to the lower, not omitting some wobbles on both the upward
and downward side of the acute angle. These deflections would mark the
jolts in the young man's emotions, in particular an almost submerged yet
hurting doubt concerned with Sarah Florian. People didn't like her
because of course they didn't understand her, and she was all the more
perfect because she was so far above them that they couldn't. She'd been
absolutely right about poor old George, certainly; but--but, after all,
Hatcher found that he couldn't think of the old man without adding the
compassionate adjective. "Poor" old George! What had happened to him was
just, of course, but maybe a bit tough if you thought of poor old
George's way of looking at it.

In childhood and first youth, troubles usually seem to come one at a
time because one is enough to fill the young heart. To be able to suffer
from several simultaneously is sometimes a sign that the youth has begun
his advance toward maturity. Not six months ago young Hatcher Ide, a
grave old Senior, had stood with his Class for the evening music on the
campus, and had loudly sung, with but the airiest sense of the words:

    _"When the cares of life o'er-take us,_
    _Mingling fast our locks with gray,_
    _Should our dearest hopes betray us,_
    _False Fortune fall away--"_

To-night Hatcher began to know a little about this. He almost began, in
fact, to be his age.




CHAPTER XIX


Poor old George, who'd been more or less in the
compassionate thoughts of several of Hatcher's relatives most of that
day, put himself bodily into the sight of one of them the next morning.
Mr. Victor Linley, in this commercially idle and less fortunate period
of his life, had developed a routine; and a feature of it was that on
one of his daily walks with his golden spaniel he passed his sole
possession in the way of real estate and gave it first a shiver and then
a meditative glance. He kept always to the opposite side of the street.
That abominable-looking big relic, the old Linley house, was a little
the more bearable for the distance and the additional intervention of
smoke-thickened air. Mr. Linley's habit was to give the house only the
one brief melancholy look as he passed; but, on this cold and therefore
more than usually smoky Sunday morning, that look was lengthened, as it
had been upon the afternoon early in the autumn when he'd seen his
nephew trying to collect rent from the verbose landlady, Mrs. Schapp.
Again, as on that afternoon, he paused across the street, and Locksie
sat down.

Old George came out from the marble vestibule; and soot-streaked Mrs.
Schapp, a half-eaten link of sausage in her hand, called cacklingly
after him before she closed the door. Old George, stooping and slow,
descended the steps and crossed the street to the waiting gentleman.

"I was setting at the window looking for you," George said. "She told me
you 'most always come by, Sunday mornings, about this time. Hollering
after me just now I got to pay my room rent in advance next Saturday
same as yesterday. She needn't worry."

"No, George," Linley assented. "Neither need you. The fact is, I
suggested your taking a room there because I thought you could chalk up
anything you might come to owe Mrs. Schapp against what she owes me. It
wasn't my idea that you'd pay anything at all."

"Yes, sir, I know. It was kind of you; but I can handle the three
dollars and a half a week for the room all right. That leaves me about
four to eat and dress on, and, as I've got a little kerosene sort of
stove, I can do it. My stomach don't relish much but coffee anyhow, and
my great-nephew's invited me to have supper with him and his family
whenever I get a mind to. Oh, I'll do, sir; I'll do well enough except
for missing what I been used to. That hits me kind of hard."

"Yes. Too bad!" Linley said. "Don't forget, though, that when you want
to spend that three dollars and a half a week on yourself instead of
paying Mrs. Schapp, you have a right to do it. If she makes a fuss, just
refer her to me."

"Thank you, sir; but the financial part of my trouble isn't worrying me
much. You see, after my family died I was able to save some; and last
year Mr. Aldrich told me to put it into the Heat and Light Company and I
did, and it's been picking up; so I figure it'll bring me in as much as
four hundred dollars a year. You see, a man like me can figure out to
live on that, sir." George glanced over his shoulder and shook his head.
"My, my! It seems pretty strange to me, and must seem more so to you, to
think I'm living in the grand old Linley house. Why, my heavens, I
remember when--"

"Yes, George; so do I."

"I bet you do, sir," George said. "I guess I'll get used to always
hearing that squalling voice of hers whatever part of the house she's
in. It seems wrong to hear such sounds and think of what goes on in all
the fine big rooms with the beautiful walnut wood-trim and parquetry
floors--and everything all so dirty and smoky and noisy! My room's up in
the Mansard roof where she's got it all subdivided with wallboard
partitions to make the rooms smaller and get more lodgers in. I guess,
though, you know better about how she's got the place fixed than I do
and--"

"No." Mr. Linley's smooth brow was shadowed for a moment; his
imperturbability flickered. "No, I--I haven't been in the house for some
years. I don't--"

"No, sir." The sympathetic George spoke quickly. "You wouldn't like it,
and I guess the more you don't see what's inside there the better you'll
feel. On the other hand, sir, I just wanted to tell you I'm all right.
She keeps the house pretty cold; but I own a couple of quilts and I can
get nice and warm cheap whenever I choose to go to bed. Well, sir, I
just wanted to thank you and apologize for having bothered you with my
troubles."

"Not at all," Linley said. "Every man must go to his friends sometimes,
and, since you insist on paying Mrs. Schapp for your room, I'm afraid
you're thanking me for nothing."

"No, I'm not, sir. You see, I've got your idea about not paying to fall
back on, if ever I get pinched or sick or anything, and that's a big
comfort. Besides, I been thinking over one or two things you says to me
yesterday and it give me quite a brace." George laughed a little
ruefully. "In particular, there's what you says about when a man's in
hard luck, what a comfort he can get out of his vanity if he learns he's
got the backbone to stand up and say, 'Go ahead, Trouble, get worse. You
can't squeeze a yip out o' me!' Guess that might be the last and only
satisfaction some of us'll get out of our life, speaking of myself. I
got one yip left, though; can't help it. Leaving that door open didn't
do all she claims it done; not by no means!"

"No," Victor Linley said slowly. "No, I was sure of that, George."

"No, sir. Guess _you_ know her all right! Them pipes didn't freeze and
it only damaged one or two plants near the door. Of course I ought to've
shut it tighter so the wind couldn't blowed it open; but it looks to me
like just an excuse. Yes, she's been wanting to get rid of me all along.
Everybody but her's been mighty kind. What a woman! Well, sir, good-bye
for the time being. I didn't mean to intafere with your walk this long."

The interference had been a pleasure, Victor said; and, to the spaniel's
delight, resumed the walk northward. A few minutes later master and dog
were in their quarters in the brick boarding-house and both began to
enjoy a luxury reserved for Sundays. Linley lighted a fire in the grate
under the "fumed oak" mantelpiece in his sitting-room; the kindling
crackled encouragingly, and a drift of early snowflakes outside the
grimed windows completed a picture of philosophic coziness.

"There, Locksie," Linley said, placing a cushion near the hearth for
him. "Excuse my dissipation." He took the dissipation from an upper
waistcoat pocket, a cigar of the one type he enjoyed. For economic
reasons he smoked on Sundays only; then he allowed himself two of these
rewarding cigars, and presented the first to himself as a complement to
the morning walk. "Snug enough, Locksie, what?" he said.

He was, in fact, as his nephew had discontentedly observed, by no means
a discontented man; and he'd made his lodgings pleasanter than the
exterior of the house suggested as possible. The bedroom was not
uncomfortable, and in the sitting-room he'd himself neatly built the
book shelves that supported the well-bound remaining items of his once
elaborate library. Across the front of the room, beneath two windows
that looked down upon the street, a long table extended, displaying
unfinished architectural designs, drawings in experimental stages and
light sketches of details.

True, everything in the place was slightly grimy to both touch and sight
despite Mr. Linley's own incessant tidiness and the struggles of a stout
housemaid who'd become romantically devoted to this boarder; the air was
tinged with a repulsive blue-gray, for the city smoke crept everywhere
and could not be excluded. The fine cigar had lost no more than a third
of its length when the fastidious bachelor, sighing, rose from his chair
beside the fire to resume his war upon the creeping smudge. He brought a
clean bit of soft cloth from a drawer of the long table and began to
wipe carefully the framed photographs he kept upon the mantelpiece.

These, five in number, were "amateur shots"; but his expression as he
cleaned them was token that he treasured them. All but one were of
"family groups". The first that he cleaned was new; it showed his
handsome sister Alice, Mrs. Upham, her handsome husband and their two
homely little boys who'd arrived late to the Uphams and were
approximately contemporaneous with their small cousin, Frances Ide. The
second photograph was of Victor's sister Harriet, Mrs. Ide, her stalwart
husband, Frederic, and their three good-looking children, Hatcher, Janey
and little Frances. The third was of his friend Harry Aldrich and
Harry's pretty wife, Eleanor, and their pretty daughter, Dorcy, taken
when Dorcy was a child.

Victor Linley looked fondly at one after another of these little
pictures, though his gaze dwelt longest on the third--that of the young
Aldrich family; it seemed to bring upon him a solicitous perplexity. The
fourth of the photographs he touched lightly indeed, for it showed three
people laughing together on the front steps of the old Linley house--his
father and his mother and a young girl, delicate and fair, his sister
Nancy. His moment of communion with the three figures was brief, as if a
longer one couldn't be borne; and the movement of his hand, when he set
the picture back upon the mantelpiece, was as gently careful as if he
feared its slightest fluctuation might jar the dead themselves.

The last of the framed "shots" was of half a dozen youthful officers in
khaki seated about a sidewalk table before a French caf; and the soft
cloth had but touched it when there was a knock upon the door and one of
Mr. Linley's fellow-boarders walked in--a thick-haired, hollow-eyed
young man whose scarlet tie was the more noticeable for its background
of dark blue shirt. His facial contours expressed amused superiority,
projecting upon the world the continuous self-congratulation of an
intellect convinced that its capacity for deep thinking isn't likely to
be matched anywhere.

"Hi!" he said amiably. "I was walkin' up the Avenue a ways behind you,
and I got onto something about you that handed me a laugh, Linley: you
limp worse when you don't think anybody's lookin' at you."

"Do I, Mr. Boerl? Won't you sit down?"

"Nope; I just come in to see if you don't agree we boarders better fix
up a Round Robin against all this mashed turnip at table. If she won't
listen, might picket her--'Unfair to boarders' stomachs', what?" He
looked over Linley's shoulder at the photographed group of officers.
"Guess that's when you got your limp, huh? Guess you feel like a sucker
when you remember you fought in _that_ war, huh? 'Make the world safe
for democracy'. That's a hot one! Gives you a laugh now to think you
thought you were makin' the world safe for democracy when you went over
the top, don't it?"

"No," Victor Linley said reflectively. "That was just a civilian's
oratorical slogan, a mistaken afterthought. The army didn't go for that
reason, you see. I don't recall ever hearing it mentioned among us
then."

"You don't?" Boerl looked surprised; but recovered himself immediately
and became informative. "Then you must been like a lot the others--just
let drums and bands and the old star-spangled banner shot-in-the-arm
drag you into an imper'alist war without the slightest real idea what
you were fightin' for. Just sucked in to be cannon-fodder, the same as
these boobs right now in the phony war that's on, over in Europe.
Maginot line, Siegfried line, phooey!--British Tories and American
airplane and steel plutocrats gettin' rich, and all it amounts to is a
sit-down strike. But you wait till the cap't'list foreign gover'ments
try to demobilize! I'll give you a tip: when they try to demobilize,
look out!--because right then the phony angle might be over. Certain
parties on the inside track might decide it's the psychological moment
for sort of a _class_ war--and, boy! will that be a real one!"

"I'm afraid this one is," Mr. Linley said. "I'm afraid this period you
call 'phony' can't last much longer. I fear--"

"Listen, Linley. Don't kid yourself. Both sides, it's only a couple
gangsters walkin' around each other and both afraid to use their guns,
while good old Soviet Russia's just lookin' on laughin' because Uncle
Joe Stalin knows if them two ever _did_ begin shootin' each other up,
why, _his_ Big Day's come! Don't trouble your head, Linley, because them
two gangsters know it, too; they won't fight." Boerl glanced at the
drawings on the long table and became approving. "Pretty good. First
rate. Somebody hand you a building job at last?"

"No. Just keeping my hand in."

"I see," Boerl said. "Trouble with you, Linley, the way I size you up,
it's you don't know how to push yourself. As long as we keep this
crackpot cap't'list system a man's got to plug for himself or he can't
succeed, and you don't know how to do that. Building's beginning to show
life again, some, and there's several firms of architects in this city
already up to real business right now. Well, you're as good as any of
'em; so why aren't you--"

"No, I'm not." Mr. Linley looked ruefully amused. "It's friendly of you
to think so; but I never was a really important architect, I'm afraid,
and now I doubt if my ideas would do at all. I'm too crotchety and
traditional, you see, Mr. Boerl. I'm not up with these times; I never
could bear to design flimsy houses and I don't like purely functional
buildings, either. No." He shook his head. "I'm afraid there's no hope
for me at all."

"None at all?" Boerl asked, and laughed. "Well, you used to make a
pretty good income out of architecture, didn't you?"

"No; not very. Fair, but--"

"I see," Boerl said. "But they say you used to live pretty high, even
sweller than this. If it wasn't out of your profession, you must have
had big outside resources. Depression hit your dividends, did it?"

"Yes; it seems so."

"Seems so? That's cool!" Mr. Linley's fellow-boarder looked at him with
a condescending indulgence. "You're a queer bird, Linley. Fact is, I
think you're one of the oddest guys I ever met. Everybody in the house
likes you, and I guess they all of 'em think they know you; but I happen
to have just a few more brains than the rest of 'em, so I see that we
none of us do. I don't really get you at all. For instance, you're the
star boarder and you got a swell place here, perfectly elegant--but not
a radio nor current literature, and you don't go to movies; yet you
always seem interested in everything. Some people might say you're sort
of haywire, kind of an innocent foolish guy." Boerl laughed. "Not me. I
think you're deeper than that. I expect maybe the truth is you're what
might be called a good deal of a philosopher."

"I?" Linley looked surprised. "No. I believe philosophers are usually
supposed to take a much less personal interest in things than I do."

"That so, Linley? Well, then, maybe we'll just have to classify you as
sort of general good fella. That teacher across the table from me,
though, claims you're what they call a socialite. Guess she's right.
Take these swell dames, now, that drive up and send their chauffeurs in
to get you to come down and--"

"I'm watched, then?" Linley laughed. "The few times that's happened, Mr.
Boerl, I think the ladies were probably relatives of mine or--"

"Oh, of course! All of 'em just his sisters and his cousins and his
aunts. Foxy guy!" Boerl became humorously insinuating. "How about the
dark brunette in the platinum-plated town-car? Saw you out in front on
the curbstone talkin' through the window to her, myself, day before
yesterday--you bare-headed and serious as hell, and the slick mulatto
chauffeur wise enough to act like he was interested in his radiator.
Some baby, pal! I took a good gander at her and she's some baby, believe
you me. Boy! I sure yearned. You _bet_ you're watched, Linley, when
you're talkin' to tricks like that. Don't try to tell me that
black-haired, black-eyed babe was just one of your relations! For that
matter, I guess some of _them_ are pretty high-flyers, too."

"I'm afraid not," Linley said. "I'm afraid they fly rather low nowadays,
Mr. Boerl."

"That so? Well, anyhow, that teacher says they always been big bugs in
the city, because you belong to one of the old original cap't'list
families that used to run this part the country." He laughed genially.
"Well, since Hitler and Uncle Joe Stalin jolted us with their pact, some
of us aren't talkin' so loud; but our crowd still kind of expects to
take over this old U.S.A. some day not so far off maybe, and run it
scientifically on our own lines. I guess, though, you're one of the few
of the old oppressors we won't send to the guillotine. No, sir, you live
in a good deal of style here; but anybody can tell by lookin' at you
that you wouldn't harm a flea, and so we'll go easier on you than on--"

He was interrupted by a tapping upon the hall door. Victor Linley said,
"Excuse me, Mr. Boerl. This is very interesting and I hope to hear more
of it; but I--" Then, as explanation of the unfinished sentence, he
opened the door and beheld the stout housemaid who tried her best to
keep his rooms clean.

"It's a lady caller, Mr. Linley," she announced deferentially. "It's
Mrs. Frederic Ide, sir."

"I'll get out," Boerl said, stepping toward the door. "No high society
for me, thanks! I'll--"

"Not at all," Victor interrupted, as Mrs. Ide came in. "Won't you stay?
I'd like you to meet my sister. Harriet, this is Mr. Boerl, one of my
friends here and--"

"Glad to made your 'quaintance," Boerl said to her, obviously
intimidated and in hasty departure, though her nod and glance were not
discourteous. "Be seein' you, Linley."




CHAPTER XX


"What an unpleasant type!" Harriet Ide sat down sadly.
"I can't tell you, Victor, how it makes me feel to see you living in
such a place and with such people about you!"

"Dear girl, I can only tell you again how wrong you are." He took a
chair opposite her, beside the fireplace; the golden spaniel jumped upon
his lap and disposed himself there for renewed slumbers. "These rooms
are comfortable and the people are interesting."

"Oh, Victor!"

"They are," he insisted. "They lead as interesting lives as anybody does
and have as interesting thoughts. My fellow-boarders are anything but
commonplace, though I admit nothing's commonplace if you really take
time to look at it. It's absorbing to see how perfectly my friends here
fit into the pattern of all human life--just as the rest of us
compulsorily do, of course, every man in his own way. I don't know
anything more dramatically a cross-section of the world than what's
narrow-mindedly called a 'second-rate boarding-house'. It's always
fascinating."

"Fascinating? Oh, Victor, what a word for this dingy--"

"It's a beautiful example of a microcosm!" he protested, with unusual
animation. "By the pattern of all human life I mean the variegated
shapes produced by the single force that moves us--the force that's
sometimes called good and's sometimes called evil but is always the same
thing, the root of all human action, the thing that makes progress and
decadence, and war and peace, and generosity and greed--and booms and
depressions--and capitalism and communism and--"

"Victor!" His sister's sad voice was a little impatient. "I really don't
know what you're talking about."

"Why, about human egoism of course, Harriet." His eagerness increased.
"Every meal here is a treat, and I like my associates at table all the
better for the openness with which they show how natural-born universal
egoism controls the stuff they're made of--a substance about as good as
you'll find at most tables. I can't tell you how much I enjoy--"

"Oh, Victor!" Mrs. Ide softly cried again. "You think I don't _know_
what this impoverishment and the dreadful change in your living mean to
you?"

"Impoverishment, no!" he exclaimed. "I used to live in buzz and
bustle--a dozen different kinds of activity. What you call
impoverishment gives me time for meditation; and how does anybody get at
realities without it? We don't know at all what we're doing so long as
we live busily in action, or in emotion, or by stimulants from our five
senses. A man _can_ live, instead, in his mind; and for me this has been
a happy discovery because I've learned that I possess some mental
resources--not important ones of course, except to me; but they suffice.
For most people these lean years have been hard and for some they've
been killing. Thinking of what they've done for just my inconsequent
self, though, Harriet, I could easily find it in my heart to thank God
for the Depression!"

"What?" she murmured vaguely, and, perceiving that she wasn't listening,
he lost his animation, laughed briefly at himself, and, having thrown
the remains of his cigar into the fire, stroked Locksie reflectively.

"You're on your way home from church, Harriet?"

"Yes, I--I thought I'd stop in and see you for a moment."

"Just for a moment? Something you'd like to talk about?"

"No, not in particular, Victor. That is, I--"

"Yes, there is." Victor's hand, about to move caressively upon the
spaniel's golden coat, paused and was still. "I'm afraid I know there's
something in particular you'd like to talk to me about, Harriet."

"No, there isn't, Victor," she said stoutly; but the firelight into
which she gazed showed him the sudden moisture upon her lower eyelids.

"No?" He began to stroke the dog again. "I seem to gather from Hatcher
that he's perceived in you and Fred a considerable uneasiness. I think
he said he'd been asking you about it and--"

"I'd rather not speak of it." Her voice had a little sharpness. "There's
one thing, though, I think perhaps I'd better tell you. I haven't
mentioned it to you before, because what's the use of adding to your
distresses, especially if it mightn't happen? Now, though, I'm afraid
it's going to. When Ada came home from visiting Alice out west she was
worried. Things were going pretty badly with Jack Upham, and Ada was
afraid there was going to be a crash. Well, it's happened. That utility
corporation had to make an economy drive, and Jack's been dropped. I had
a letter from Alice day before yesterday. She said that if he couldn't
find a new position quickly--and there wasn't anything in sight--she was
afraid she'd have to ask if she couldn't bring the children and the
three of them visit us--she spoke of it as a visit, poor thing!--until
Jack could get into something else. It's going to be a problem to
arrange proper room in the house for them, especially if Janey comes
home for the holidays, and with only the cook--no maids to do the
rooms-- Oh, well, I suppose we can manage somehow. If it only hadn't had
to come upon us just now!"

Victor put Locksie down on the rug, and rose. "Well, Alice is my sister,
too," he said.

Mrs. Ide jumped up. "You don't think I've told you about it in the hope
that you could do anything for them, Victor! Good heavens, don't you
suppose we all know you can't? When you're down to living like this--"

He was troubled. "I ought to be able--"

"No--no, please!" She put a hand on his arm. "I oughtn't to've told you.
We can manage. We'll find room in the house and food for them somehow,
and that's all they'll need. Jack's a capable man and he'll get into
something. Ordinarily Fred and I'd be able to handle it if it weren't--"

"Yes?" Victor said quickly. "If it weren't for what?"

"Nothing."

He took both of her hands. "Harriet, this bad luck of the Upham family
_isn't_ what's on your mind. You can't look me in the eye and maintain
it. Won't you tell me?"

"No; I can't tell anybody," she said desolately, released her hands from
his and moved slowly toward the door. "I can't, even though it mayn't be
long before everybody'll know it."

"It's that bad, Harriet--and that close?"

"Yes." For a moment she said no more; then she turned toward him with
the air of one who absentmindedly introduces a negligible subject.
"Oh--I suppose you haven't happened to call on Sarah yet?"

"No, I haven't."

"I suppose you're going to, though, aren't you?" In response he only
looked at her; and, at that, she made a remonstrance. "Oh, but don't you
think you really ought to, Victor? She's asked you, hasn't she? Hasn't
she done more? Hasn't she telephoned? Hasn't she even written to--"

"Yes, I believe so."

"More than once, Victor?" He was silent, and Mrs. Ide spoke impulsively.
"Yes, I see she has! That's a good deal--from Sarah Lash--don't you
think?"

"Is it, Harriet? Well--let's not go into that."

"Others might envy you," Mrs. Ide said. "Your own nephew, for instance."

"My nephew?" Victor, after the briefest moment of surprise, spoke
musingly. "Yes, I see. A good-looking young man only next door. Oh, yes,
of course!"

"Yes," Mrs. Ide said. "Poor Hatcher! She's quite taken him up; so I'm
afraid he'd rather begrudge the invitations you've had. Poor boy, I'm
afraid he's in quite a state."

"You mean he believes he is, Harriet."

"No; I mean he is."

"Dear me!" Victor said. "I'd rather taken it for granted that he and
Dorcy Aldrich--"

"No; not any more, Victor--at least, not any more for Hatcher. I don't
know about Dorcy. I'm afraid the gorgeous Sarah's overwhelmed him.
Preposterous, isn't it?"

"No." Her brother seemed to ponder. "I shouldn't call it preposterous.
He's not much like the boy in the old jokes, falling in love with the
schoolteacher twice his age. Sarah'd most easily capture a good young
imagination. It'd be natural, under the circumstances."

"Perhaps," the sister assented. "I don't know why I've mentioned it; I
didn't mean to, and I don't really take it seriously. At Hatcher's
age--"

"It's highly sensitive," Victor interrupted. "People usually feel pretty
sharply at Hatcher's age."

"Yes--but briefly, Victor."

"If they're sound," he said, "and of course Hatcher's--"

"Victor!" Mrs. Ide stepped toward him. "Couldn't you--couldn't you bring
yourself to be nice to her? I mean couldn't you at least go to see her
and be friendly and--and--"

"And what, Harriet?"

"Oh, dear!" she said, and the words were a moan of
confession--confession that she was desperately asking a great deal of
him. "Couldn't you?"

"No, I could not," he answered.

Her right hand, lifted to add eloquence to the appeal she'd just made to
him, dropped to her side. "I must get myself home," she said in a dead
voice. "You'll come out to us to-night for Sunday evening supper as
usual, won't you?"

"Yes, dear."

Without any more to say she again turned to the door, which he silently
opened for her. He went downstairs with her and out to the curb. She
stepped into her car and drove away, not having spoken to him, or looked
at him, again.

He returned to his room and sat before his disappearing fire, regardless
of the summons of a gong downstairs. Ignoring the sound's more clamorous
repetition, to warn him that his mid-day meal would be both chilled and
sparse if he didn't bestir himself, he became so deeply preoccupied that
he had even no ear for his spaniel's repeatedly expressed wish to return
to his lap. This meditation, by no means the abstract thought of a
detached philosopher, was informing Victor Linley that the people he
most loved in the world were facing imminent peril.

They stood close to calamity, a hint of the nature of which began to be
dimly revealed to him by what his sister had just pitiably implored him
to do. He knew that it wasn't on Hatcher's account that she had begged
him to marry Sarah Florian.




CHAPTER XXI


On Sunday evenings the Ides had supper, not dinner;
and, when Janey or Hatcher, or both, were at home, Mrs. Ide sometimes
asked four or five of their young friends to join the family party at
the table and enliven mild "parlor games" afterward. This evening when
Mr. Linley arrived, a little while before the time set for the meal, he
was clamorously welcomed by his niece, Frances, as he removed his
overcoat in the hall. She came running from the living-room and threw
her arms about him.

"Thank goodness you've come, Uncle Victor!" she cried. "There's a whole
crowd in there and I been trying to entertain 'em; but Hatcher told me
we didn't need anybody to be the life of the party. Hatcher's acting
terrible for a person a party's for. Uncle Victor, would you like to
know a secret?"

"Yes, indeed, Frances! Always."

"It's about Hatcher," Frances whispered. "Mother asked all these people
of his to supper on his account; but she didn't think to tell him they
were coming till late this afternoon and he said he didn't want 'em, she
better telephone 'em not to come; but she said it was too late and he
said all right, he might decide to go out somewhere any minute right in
the middle of it and they'd be on her hands and she deserved it. He
stayed mad about it till they commenced coming and I think he still is,
Uncle Victor, and that's why he was so rude to me about my being the
life of the party that certainly needs one. Don't tell him I told you."

"I won't, Frances."

"Thank you, Uncle Victor." Frances again spoke aloud. "It's stupid in
there. There's only one I can get to do anything and she isn't enough to
make it a good game."

"Game?" her uncle inquired. "What game?"

"Animal-Mineral-or-Vegetable, Uncle Victor. There's Hatcher and Dorcy
and Mary Gilpin and Mr. Wilson, the one they call Pinkie, and Gilpin
Murray and Amy from across the street; and only one of 'em's willing to
play. It's Mary Gilpin, because most of the rest of 'em act like they
just want to sit around and say 'What?' like Hatcher; so I bet they're
in love or've had their feelings hurt or something. Anyhow, it's the way
they act and it gets in my hair! Uncle Victor, will you play
Animal-Mineral-or-Vegetable with me and Mary Gilpin?"

"Glad to," Mr. Linley said. "Just a minute first, though, if you don't
mind." With Frances beside him, he stepped into the living-room to
exchange greetings with the young guests, whom he at once perceived to
be as subdued in manner as his small niece had said. An uneasiness
seemed to prevail, perhaps an emanation from the acting host, Hatcher.
Standing with his back to the room, and apparently unaware of any
hospitable duties, he was gazing out of the bow window.

Mr. Linley made the customary inquiries in regard to the health of
parents, coming to Dorcy last; and, as he took her hand, he looked at
her somewhat attentively. His expressions of solicitude were a little
stressed.

"Mother's fine, thanks," Dorcy said languidly. "Father walked over with
me. He's here, though he isn't staying for supper and's got to go home
to take her to a party somewhere. He's in the library talking to Mr. Ide
if you'd like to see him."

"Yes--yes, I should." Linley turned to Frances, who was insisting upon
her game. "I will, I will," he assented. "Just give me time to say hello
to somebody my own age and I'll be back."

"I bet you won't!" Frances protested. "If you go in the lib'ary with
Father and Uncle Harry Aldrich you'll get started into old people's
talking and you won't come. You'll--"

"Yes, I will!" Linley laughed, touched her cheek, went out into the hall
and took a dozen steps toward the closed door of the library. Having
gone this far, he heard voices suddenly become loud within that
enclosure. He walked more slowly, and then, five feet from the door,
stopped short.

Two outcries, both harshly passionate and almost simultaneous, yet
distinct in his ears, were what halted him. "You damned fool, haven't I
told you how to save yourself?" This was the voice of Harry Aldrich,
altered but recognizable; and almost at the same time Victor heard the
answering fierce shout of Frederic Ide: "Never, by God! I won't do it!"

There was an abrupt silence, one that projected a picture of the
interior behind the baleful door: two hard-breathing men staring at each
other with inflamed eyes. In the hall Victor Linley heard a light gasp
just behind him, and he whirled about to find that little Frances had
thoughtfully followed him and stood there, awed.

"We better not go in," she whispered. "Are Father and Uncle Harry having
a fight?"

"No. What an idea!" He contrived to laugh. "They're just arguing. Didn't
you ever hear anybody talking politics before?"

"Yes; but I never heard--"

"Yes, you have--lots of times. People get excited when they talk
politics nowadays; but it doesn't mean anything." He took her hand.
"Let's go back now. We won't tell anybody, because pretty soon you'll
see; when your father and your Uncle Harry come out of there, they'll be
just as good friends as ever."

"You think so?" As they moved away, she pulled him toward an open double
doorway on their right. "I'd like to be sure, though, myself, Uncle
Victor, if they're going to be friends again or not. Let's go into the
drawing-room instead of back where the others are; then we can look into
the hall and watch them if Father comes, the way he usually does, to let
Uncle Harry out the front door, because I heard Uncle Harry say when he
came that he had to go home right soon. We can kind of sit in the
drawing-room because there aren't any lights lit in there, and then we
can tell if they're going to be friends again by how they act. Don't you
think they sounded awful mad at each other, Uncle Victor?"

"No, of course not. Not really." He laughed again, reassuringly; but let
her have her way, and they went into the dark drawing-room, where they
sat together on a sofa that let them see, through the open double
doorway, the forward part of the hall.

Frances sat close to her uncle. "They kind of scared me," she said in a
small voice.

"Nonsense, dear! They were only--"

"_Sh!_" she whispered. "They're coming already."

Footsteps were what she'd heard, not voices. The two men came quickly
into view, Harry Aldrich a step or two in advance. His face deeply
flushed and his chin up, Harry strode to the front door and opened it
with a jerk, as in headlong departure; but he stopped abruptly and
turned to face his tall partner. Frederic stood before him with head
bowed and shoulders stooped in gaunt dejection. Harry was breathing
hard; but he spoke in a quiet voice.

"I just didn't want to leave any last stone unturned, Fred," he said. "I
really knew it couldn't be done. You understand, don't you?"

"Yes." The answer was just audible. "Yes, I do. I'll see you there at
ten to-morrow morning."

"If--" Harry hesitated. "If I'm a little late don't worry; it won't
matter."

"No--it won't matter, Harry."

"Well--" Harry hesitated again, smiled uncertainly; then suddenly
extended an arm and put a friendly hand on his partner's shoulder.
"Goodnight, old man."

"Goodnight, Harry."

The door closed; Harry Aldrich was gone. Frederic Ide, walking slowly,
returned across the oblong of the drawing-room doorway, and his steps
began to be heard ascending the stairs. To the mind of his
brother-in-law those ascending steps, pausing at intervals, suggested
exhaustion--and a worn-out, distracted man who had to lean heavily upon
the stairway railing in order to complete his ascent.

"Was Uncle Harry going to cry?" little Frances whispered. "His face was
pretty funny and the way his mouth was moving it looked like he was
going to. I guess you were right, though."

"Right?" Her uncle's question was merely murmured; he sat in a profound
cogitation. "What was I right about?"

"Why, about how they'd turn out to be friends even after they were
yelling that way over politics."

"Yes, of course! Of course they're friends." He patted her hand and
rose. "We won't tell anybody about it."

"Why not?"

"Well--just to have another secret between us. Won't that do?"

"Yes--if--" Frances said. "I'd enjoy to have it be another secret with
you, Uncle Victor, if you'll come and play Animal-Mineral-or-Vegetable
with Mary Gilpin and me right now."

"Animal-Mineral-or-Vegetable? Hurrah!" Victor was boisterous, hoping to
make her forget. "Brilliant you and clever Mary Gilpin and stupid I,
we'll play Animal-Mineral-or-Vegetable for hours and hours and we'll not
let anybody stop us!" He took her hand, and, in spite of his limp, began
to prance.

Frances, shouting, capered beside him; hand in hand they danced across
the wide hall and into the living-room. There, however, the small niece
was again disappointed; for they'd no more than sat down with Mary
Gilpin to play their game when Aunt Ada appeared dismally in the doorway
and summoned everybody to the dining-room for supper. They'd have to put
up with her at the head of the table, she said, as Mrs. Ide had a
headache and Mr. Ide didn't care for anything to eat. Then Aunt Ada
added, to Victor, "Harriet sent you her love and asked me to tell you
not to come up to see her, because she's going to try to get to sleep."

"I see," he said. "No, I'll not disturb either of them."

At the table he joined Frances and Mary Gilpin in a struggle to breathe
some gayety into a too-obviously disheartened little party. Aunt Ada,
silent, was like an open sepulcher of half-buried forebodings. The
habitual cheerfulness of Amy and Gilpin Murray, already defeated by the
preoccupation of Gilpin's employer, surrendered the last flag to Aunt
Ada. Dorcy, almost talkless, carefully looked anywhere except at
Hatcher; and the young Wilson, at first insistently possessive in his
manner toward her, became sulky, for he didn't wholly lack powers of
observation. He ate doggedly, not speaking to anybody, or caring how
visible he made his jealousy. Hatcher, paying as slight attention to his
food as to his guests, appeared to be listening and waiting for a sound
from without that would be a signal; and this was, in fact, his
impatient state of mind.

He'd thought all day that such a parting as he'd had with Sarah Florian
last evening must surely, surely be followed quickly by a summons from
her; but it hadn't come--not yet. He'd meant what he said to his mother
about leaving the party on her hands if he should "decide to go out".
Well, he'd have to leave it on Aunt Ada's hands, instead, heaven help
it! but he'd go just the same--if and when the call sounded--and he sat
in suspense. Toward the close of the meal he was needlessly infuriated
by a special solicitude of Aunt Ada's.

"Can't you eat anything at all, Hatcher?"

"Can't I what?"

"Eat," said Aunt Ada. "You haven't touched your spaghetti or your
sweetbread salad. Usually you devour them. Only last Sunday you hardly
left enough for the rest of us. Dorcy'll be wondering what's the matter
with you, Hatcher. Can't you--"

"Eat your own!" Hatcher thus became primitive. "What's on my plate's put
there to do what I like with, isn't it? It's mine, not my relatives',
isn't it? If people attended strictly to their own food this world might
be a better--" Interrupted by the sound of the telephone bell ringing in
the hall, he sprang to his feet and strode to the door. In the same
instant Frances, squealing, was also out of her chair and running to
intercept him.

"Hatch, you sit down!" she cried. "Mother and Father both appointed me
telephone answerer for this house. They gave me the rights and you _haf_
to let me! You stop, Hatcher!"

Clamoring as she ran, she followed him into the hall; then, within a few
moments, both Hatcher and Frances reappeared in the dining-room and
resumed their seats, Frances arriving first and looking pleased.

"Just a wrong number, Aunt Ada," she said demurely, as she sat down.
"Hatcher told 'em so impolitely and hung up; but when I answer people
with the wrong number I always laugh nicely and say they needn't excuse
themselves or anything because I don't mind."

"Junior does, though." Erdvynn Wilson laughed artificially. "Junior
minds. Anyhow, he did this time; didn't you, Junior?"

"'Junior'?" Hatcher said indifferently. "What do you mean, 'Junior'? My
father's name's Frederic and mine is Hatcher."

"Yes." Young Wilson laughed again. "What I mean is Hitler, Junior."

"What?"

"Yes," Pinkie Wilson said. "Seems to be a rumor going round--among all
these other rumors about you--that you're quite the juvenile Hitler, the
way you slave-drive one-armed painters and poor old colored women,
fixing up those hovels you're doing over that ought to be pulled down
for slum clearance." Falsely waggish, he looked about the table for
encouragement. "Yes, indeed; they tell me that as a business man this
young feller Ide's a typical little dictator--eh, Gilp?"

"Terrible," good-natured Gilpin Murray responded. "I'll say this for
him, though: he gets results."

"Yes," Pinkie said. "We _hear_ he does! Particularly along certain lines
touched upon by all the talk going round about his recent spectacular
private life!"

Hatcher, straightening suddenly out of a slump, looked at him across the
table. "What do you mean by that?"

"Oh, nothing. Just trying to get a rise out of you--and it rather
appears that I have! What makes you so jumpy when you hear the
telephone?"

"He isn't!" Frances loyally defended her brother. "I mean he isn't
always. It's only sometimes."

"I'll _bet_!" Erdvynn burst into loud triumphant laughter. "'Only
sometimes'! Right you are, young lady!"

Aunt Ada rose. "I think we'll have to give up waiting for Hatcher to
eat, since he hasn't even begun. Perhaps he'll show more interest in
bridge, if Dorcy'll kindly be his partner."

                 *        *        *        *        *

At the card table in the living-room, however, Hatcher's manner was
still discouraging, though Dorcy was his partner. They played against
Aunt Ada and the young Wilson, while at the other end of the room
Frances had succeeded in adding Amy and Gilpin Murray to Mr. Linley and
Miss Gilpin for the postponed game of Animal-Mineral-or-Vegetable. The
adult participants in this latter contest, striving to lighten the gloom
and please the little girl, made themselves at times too noisy; and,
when this happened, Aunt Ada looked palely at them over her shoulder.
Thereupon they would chide themselves for their thoughtlessness and be
quieter; but finally Aunt Ada did more than merely look at them.

"Frances, really!" she said. "Can't you subdue your voice a little? How
can anybody play contract with all that whooping and squealing going on?
Anyhow, it's your bedtime."

Victor spoke up briskly. "I'm afraid she means the rest of us, too--me
in particular!"

His sidelong observation of the card table had suggested that something
decisive ought to be done. Hatcher, almost oblivious of his cards, sat
gazing into vacant distances like a longing, troubled lover; and Dorcy,
still never looking at him and with her eyes downcast, seemed to be
bearing about as much as she could. Erdvynn Wilson, sullenly boiling,
appeared upon the point of saying something openly destructive. It was
for Dorcy's sake that Victor made his diversion; he thought she badly
needed an excuse to go home and be alone. "Yes, I'm sure your Aunt Ada
means me in particular, Frances," he said, and rose. "I was squealing
worse than anybody. I don't see, though, how she knew it's my bedtime,
too."

Frances made a despairing uproar; but, at the bridge table, Dorcy at
once put down her cards, said flutteringly that she must be getting
home, and the unfortunate game dissolved to no one's regret.
Perfunctorily, Hatcher saw the evening's guests to the front door and
called drearily after them his manufactured objections to their leaving
so early; then, sighing, he sought his own room, his ears pelted by a
shower of reproaches from his small sister. She was ascending the
stairway a step or two in advance of him.

"It's all your fault the party broke up, Hatch!" she cried, repeating
herself; but lowered her voice in response to Aunt Ada's warning that
she'd wake her mother. "Anyways it's your fault and Aunt Ada's together.
Aunt Ada made the fuss about noise that disgusted everybody; but you
were the skull at the feast the whole time, Hatch."

"I was what?"

"You were a skull," Frances explained crossly. "It's Greek. The way they
took their meals. We've been having it in school this week. You either
kept looking at the wall or else you pulled your chin down long with
your mouth kind of open, and frowning so that even Uncle Victor himself
couldn't brighten anything up much. You acted like that all evening!"

"Did I?" Hatcher muttered, and he added, not for her ears, "Well, I
guess I've got enough to make me."

He felt that the "cares of life" had overtaken him indeed; and, alone in
his room, pondered long upon the new one that by this time had become
the most pressing of them. Last night he'd come from Sarah Florian's
house ecstatic because that superbly matured woman had implied
beautiful, unbelievable things. She'd knelt before him, glowing, seized
his hands in hers; she'd spoken marvelous words to him, putting a spell
of caressive togetherness about them both. She'd admitted him to her
inmost being, revealing her very self to him. He'd thought: What did
anything in the world count against this glory? He was hers, a thousand
times utterly hers; and she--hadn't she virtually told him that she
could and might be his?

If that effulgence had been renewed to-day he wouldn't have been
troubling himself about any old "cares of life"; he could have sent them
all to the devil--including even the one set upon him by the probability
that she'd formerly been engaged to his uncle. When he'd left her, a
rosy glow of love had seemed to spring upward like sunrise on the
horizon of the morrow. But to-day had been the morrow and she'd made it
blank. Why? Surely she must know in what suspense he'd be waiting, all
of to-day, after such a parting. Had she let some mood of hers get in
the way? Wasn't he of more weight with her than just one of her moods?
She didn't--didn't merely play with him, did she, leading him a while,
then checking him at will? No, it couldn't be, because a perfect woman
wouldn't do that; and, with this thought, Hatcher was happier--happy
enough, in fact, to believe that she'd surely send for him to-morrow.

So, in the end, youth's celebrated elasticity brought his spirits up
again, made him more fit to meet what was coming upon him. Like an army
in a long battle needing fresh troops to come up singing from the rear,
man's spirit must summon reserves of hopefulness and bright
interpretations to bear what shall befall; and in youth these reserves
are readier to the summons, else the progress of the generations would
be down hill. The intricate interplay of human destinies--that is, the
simple working of causes and effects--was bringing tragedy toward
Hatcher Ide, that night, as he moved restlessly about his room, or sat,
chin in hand, trying to cheer his thoughts of Sarah Florian.

Across the hall his father was not asleep; and, elsewhere along
Butternut Lane and all through the town, men of business and the
professions, whether awake or in slumber, were harried by their own
condition and that of the country. Not even the luckiest of them yet saw
an end to the Depression; but worse moved in the world. Upon the
narrowed ocean and beyond it, bombs were crashing into flesh; eastward
of armed France, eastward of the Maginot line and the Siegfried line,
airplanes and steel tanks rolled underground in endless mass production.
A few miles from Hatcher, old George slept sadly in the despoiled Linley
mansion; while a little farther northward on that same smoky street
Victor Linley sat before his drawing-table, not designing a house but
busy with arithmetic, anxiously scribbling figures in a notebook. Nearer
to Hatcher, much nearer--just beyond the dark lawns of the "Lash place",
in fact--big-shouldered, fair Harry Aldrich tenderly kissed his adoring
wife goodnight after a jolly party.

                 *        *        *        *        *

...Reality sometimes mingles with the end of a dream, so that for the
half-waking sleeper what's actual is indistinguishable from what's
fantasy. Hatcher woke in the morning with the impression that he'd been
dreaming about his mother and that he'd just heard her scream. He
couldn't remember what fantastic thing in his dream had caused the
scream, and the sound in his ears seemed real--almost enough so to be
alarming. Sunshine was strong outside his open window; drowsily he
looked at the little clock on the table beside his bed, and,
comprehending that he'd overslept again, bestirred himself. He was
getting into his bathrobe when he heard someone running in the hall
outside his door--someone with a heavier step than his little sister's.
Running. That was queer. What was anybody running through the upstairs
hall for? He went to the door, stepped out and saw that the speeding
person was his Aunt Ada.

"What's the matter?" he called, as she reached the head of the stairway
to descend. "Is anything wrong with Mother? Where is she?"

"Your mother?" she called back, letting him see her startled face for an
instant. "She's gone to the Aldriches'. They just telephoned your father
and they've both gone. I'm going, too."

He advanced farther into the hall. "To the Aldriches'? What for, this
early? What--"

"Harry Aldrich is dead."

Hatcher didn't know what she meant. "What did you say? What about Harry
Aldrich?"

Aunt Ada was half way down the stairs; but her voice came back like a
blow in his face.

"He's dead."




CHAPTER XXII


Seven or eight cars stood in the Aldriches' driveway
when Hatcher arrived, breathless and still dressing himself; and when he
went into the house it seemed full of silent or whispering people. He
didn't see his father or his mother or his Aunt Ada but caught a glimpse
of his little enemy, Dorcy's cousin Lennie Aldrich; she was sitting on
the stairway half way up to the landing and crying so hard into a blue
handkerchief that although he hated her he felt sorry for her. Mary
Gilpin, who'd just descended the stairs, saw him and hurried forward to
speak to him.

"Come with me, please," she whispered quickly, and took him to a rear
hallway, where there was only a small table with a telephone upon it and
a chair beside it. She closed the door. "I've got a tedious job for
you," she told him. "Your mother said you weren't up, and I was just
going to send for you. I'll have some breakfast brought to you here and
I hope you'll get a chance to eat it. I'll relieve you myself for half
an hour at noon and you can get some lunch in the dining-room. We'd like
you to take charge of the telephoning."

"Mary!" he said. "I don't believe it's happened. What was it? What--"

"It was in his sleep, Hatcher. That's what you're to tell people when
they ask. You're just to say that it must have been his heart, because
when they went to call him this morning they found he'd died peacefully
in his sleep. The funeral will be at three o'clock Wednesday afternoon.
You'll have a great many calls because he was the most popular man in
town. Just tell everybody what I've told you. That's all, except that
your uncle, Mr. Linley, is going to see any reporters who come to the
house; but if newspapers telephone ask them to wait a minute, and go
into the living-room where your uncle will be and tell him. He'll come
and answer them. He knows what to say and will attend to the papers if
you'll take care of the rest."

Hatcher sat down at the table. "Of course I will. But, Mary, please--"

The bell of the telephone was already ringing; she paused for a final
injunction. "Your mother and father are upstairs with Dorcy and Mrs.
Aldrich; but of course you'll say none of them can talk to anybody.
Don't forget to call your uncle when any of the papers--"

The voice already speaking into Hatcher's ear came from a newspaper
office; he told Mary so, and, as she was at the door, it was she who
hurried to send his uncle. Victor came quickly and, standing, took the
instrument from Hatcher.

"Yes?... This is Victor Linley, at Mr. Aldrich's house... Oh, it's
you, is it, Bewley?... Yes, of course, any questions you like...
Very sudden indeed... No, I haven't heard anybody speak of his having
been depressed lately; I should say he's consistently been the most
cheerful and optimistic business man in town... No, I don't see why
you should infer any such thing, Bewley... Oh, very possibly, very
possibly; but for the past six or seven years hasn't almost everybody
been raising every cent he could at the banks and elsewhere? I don't see
anything exceptional in that... No, Fred Ide can't talk to anybody;
he's too much overcome... Yes, you can send a man up here if you
like; I'll see him, certainly. Tell him to ask at the door for me...
Yes, as soon as you like. Good morning."

"Uncle Victor--" Hatcher began huskily, as Mr. Linley set down the
instrument. "I wish you'd--I don't-- How long have you been here?"

"About an hour. Eleanor sent her car for me."

"Well, then? Do you know--"

Hatcher'd risen, and his uncle took the vacant chair with an effect of
dropping upon it. "Harry was the best of men!" he said. "The best of
men--the kindest-- No one could have foreseen--"

"I just don't get it. I--I--" Hatcher stammered. "Why, he-- Wasn't he in
robust health? He's always looked so husky and--"

"I think I'll have to tell you, Hatcher. It seems--it seems to have been
an accident."

"Accident!" Hatcher cried; then choked down his voice. "Accident?"

"Yes. He and Eleanor got home a little after twelve last night. He'd
been as jolly as usual and still seemed so when he told her goodnight.
At some time after that he appears to have done a thing he'd never done
before. He wrote a message on a slip of paper and fastened it with a
thumbtack on the outside of his door. It said that he'd taken something
to make him sleep and he didn't wish to be called in the morning because
he wanted to get all the rest he could before an important business
engagement he had to-day. When Dorcy got up and saw the paper on his
door it frightened her because she'd never known him to do such a thing
and he'd always been violently opposed to any kind of sleeping
potions--so she opened the door and looked in. Dr. Loffen says that by
then Harry'd been gone several hours."

"But, Uncle Victor, that looks--it looks--"

"Yes, Hatcher. Loffen says it was morphine. Nobody knows where Harry got
it. Probably now nobody ever will know; but that isn't important. He may
have had it for some time. It's got to be an accident, Hatcher."

"But, my God, Uncle Victor--" Hatcher clapped his hand over his mouth,
apparently knowing no other means to check his outcry.

"It's got to be an accident," his uncle repeated doggedly. "What's left
of Eleanor's mind is trying to believe it and we're doing all we can to
get Dorcy to see it that way, too. What helps us most is the fact that
Harry hadn't locked his door."

"He hadn't?" Hatcher said. "He even thought of that--to make it look
like an accident?"

"Keep your mind on the one necessity, Hatcher: that it's _got_ to be an
accident. Dr. Loffen was one of Harry's closest friends and he's going
the limit that the overdose was just a tired man's mistake. All the
insurance Harry had was hypothecated long ago; so that isn't in it."

"Then what is?" Hatcher's voice was so thick, and yet so broken, that
the question wasn't distinct.

"What?"

Hatcher drew a long breath and made himself understood. "Then what _is_
in it? Why did he do it?"

Victor looked at the shaking boy compassionately. "Why does anybody do
anything? Is there ever a human action into which an almost infinite
number of motives haven't--"

"Damn!" Hatcher said. "I didn't ask you for one of your philosophical
disquisitions. I asked you why my father's partner has killed himself!"

"I can't tell you."

The telephone rang again, and Victor rose quickly. "There; sit down and
take that call. Mary says she gave you your instructions. You're only to
answer all inquiries by saying it happened in his sleep and must have
been his heart. That's true, and is enough. You'll have to help us see
it through, Hatcher."

"I'll try," Hatcher said, and took up his task.

The telephonic calls came steadily, with scarce time between for his
mind to repeat to itself the shrieking question that beset it. Not until
near midnight did the telephone abate enough for him to lie down on the
cot Mary Gilpin sent to the small hallway for him; and by seven in the
morning the insistent little bell was ringing again. He was busier
throughout this second day than on the first; but by evening there was a
slackening.

He'd had a peculiar disappointment, one he was able to feel in spite of
an overwhelming weariness: Sarah Florian's voice hadn't been of the
multitude he'd heard. He'd hoped for the reward of a few tense words
with her, but they'd not been spoken; so probably she had come herself
to condole, rich-voiced and gentle--had been in the same house with him
and he hadn't even known it! "No luck," he sighed, and wasn't aware that
his thought was incongruous.

At eleven o'clock Mary came to tell him to go home; henceforth she could
easily take care of the lessened pressure, herself. Hatcher went out
limply, and, on his way to the front door, passed through the room where
stood Harry Aldrich's piano. It was closed, and a tiptoeing tired sister
of Eleanor Aldrich's was arranging flowers in vases upon it. Hatcher had
no memory of ever seeing that piano closed; the lid should never be
lifted again, he thought--as if the black shining case contained the
dead relic of a merry and manly voice to be heard no more, forever.

At the other end of the room Victor Linley sat flaccidly in a big chair,
and Hatcher stopped to speak to him, in a voice appropriately hushed. "I
guess those damn calls are about through, because everybody in the city
directory's rung up at least twice. I'm gone in the head." He looked
about the room, the air of which was daunting with the smell of flowers
that already were everywhere and rose high against the walls. "Lord,
isn't this horrible! Aren't you going to get any sleep?"

"Yes--later. I had quite a rest to-day; I was downtown all afternoon."

Hatcher was drooping; but he lingered. "Is it always like this--always
people murmuring or whispering in the next room or in the hall, and you
don't know what goes on upstairs but keep thinking about it--and all
these ghastly-smelling flowers? Is it always the same?"

"Yes; pretty much," his uncle answered gently. "I don't find that I get
very used to it, though."

"'Very'? My God!" Hatcher said. "Me, I've got a million voices in my
ears, all squeaking, 'I can't believe it! This is the greatest shock to
me!' and 'Why, I saw him downtown only last Saturday and he was looking
so well!' Ninety-nine out of a hundred all saying the same thing, and do
I wish I could get 'em out of my hair! Mary says I'm to be one of the
'active pallbearers' to-morrow afternoon; I suppose you and Father are
'honorary'. Pleasant job for all of us. Of course I've been present
at--at things like this--two or three times during my life; but I don't
think I ever realized before that people really do die. I almost wish
they didn't. Listen to me--talking waggish! I'd better be getting home
before I go crazy; I'm all in. See you to-morrow at the-- Oh, damn!
Goodnight."

                 *        *        *        *        *

...His own words, "See you to-morrow at the--" recurred to Hatcher as
he and seven other young men, "friends of the family", carried what was
left of Harry Aldrich out of the room where was Harry's beflowered
closed piano and through the lily-scented dim hall toward the flaring
light of the opened front door. They moved solemnly between two lines of
middle-aged men who stood with heads bowed, and Hatcher was aware of his
father and his uncle, members of this formally stricken assembly. For a
moment his glance met Victor's and seemed to say, "Yes; well, here we
are at the--" as if it made things easier to avoid the word "funeral" in
connection with jovial Harry Aldrich.

Hatcher realized that his uncle wouldn't omit the word; middle-aged
people, it seemed, could bear such words and what they meant.
Middle-aged people could say terrible things and do them; they could go
about everywhere, laughing and being hail-fellow-well-met with
everybody, and then without warning they could shut themselves up in a
room and kill themselves. Young people, too, could kill themselves
sometimes, of course; but Hatcher'd never known any young person who'd
done it. Middle-aged people could do it almost as if it were all in the
day's work; and then their middle-aged most intimate friends could stand
up in two decorous files and, not weeping, see them carried out to be
slid into a horrible hearse. Hatcher bitterly thought he hoped that he'd
never live to be middle-aged; it seemed to him that probably he was the
only person except Mrs. Aldrich and Dorcy--and that spitfire little
Lennie--who'd ever really cared about Harry Aldrich.

During this dismal passage he had other thoughts, too, without realizing
that they were inconsistent. The rooms on both sides of the hall were
filled with people so motionless that no faintest rustling was heard
from them; but, passing the open doorways in their view, Hatcher felt a
certain distinction in his present position. He couldn't help feeling a
little pride that he had been chosen for it, and he became slightly
self-conscious. Sarah Florian, he thought, was certainly among the
mourning throng, since she was a next-door neighbor and the Aldriches
had so recently given a dinner for her. Though propriety didn't permit
him to turn his eyes to look for her, it was gratifying, in a way, to
know that she must be seeing him and that the sad office he was
performing might be to a certain extent impressive. He was sure he felt
her dark and glowing gaze upon him and that she understood all about his
being the one who was suffering the most for Harry Aldrich, in spite of
the stoic face that had to be worn.

On the way to the cemetery, disappointingly, he was forced to abandon
this illusion of his. Looking forth from the window of his car in the
funeral procession, he saw Sarah Florian. Behind her mulatto chauffeur,
she was coming rapidly from the opposite direction, unquestionably not
from the ceremony Hatcher'd been undergoing; and his fleeting glimpse of
her made him hope that she wasn't thinking of him just then. Never more
beautiful, she was looking straight ahead; his swift impression was of a
lovely face set in a determination that carried with it, vividly, an air
of resentment. Hatcher, badly let down, had the plaintive idea that
during her drive this afternoon she'd happened to see poor old George
somewhere and was brooding upon him, the murderer of her flowers.

Even Sarah Florian was swept from Hatcher's thoughts, however, a few
minutes later; and, when his final duties for the day had been
performed, and the pallbearers' car had set him down at his own gate,
his mind's eye could see nothing but the racked black figures of Eleanor
Aldrich and Dorcy clinging together above a sinking coffin. He'd had to
turn his head from them--and he'd kept his eyes upon the frostbitten sod
upon which he walked as the funerary party left the grave. He was aware
that Erdvynn Wilson moved from his place among the pallbearers and went
to Dorcy, and that Erdvynn helped her into the car that bore her and her
mother away; but, at the time, this didn't seem to mean anything. Now,
at home, Hatcher shambled into the house, coughing, and, relieved to
find the others not yet returned from the cemetery, went upstairs and
washed his face in cold water. Then, not freed of a smarting of the
eyes, he moved aimlessly about in the upper hallway, waiting--waiting
for something unknown that was coming. He'd often asked for it; but, now
that he knew it was coming, he was afraid he couldn't stand it.

He heard the front door closing, heard his mother and Aunt Ada begging
his father to go to his room and lie down, heard his father sharply
refusing.

"_Now_ it's coming," Hatcher thought.

He was near the head of the stairway; he stood there, listening, and for
a while heard nothing more. When his mother called him from below, her
voice wasn't loud; but he started.

"Hatcher, are you there?"

"Yes, Mother."

"Come down, please, dear. Your father wants to talk to you."

"Does he? All right."

Hatcher descended as slowly as he could without pausing on every step.
He thought of Sarah Florian--what did anything else matter so long as
her beauty was in the world?--and yet he felt that he moved toward the
sheerly unbearable.




CHAPTER XXIII


In the small library, as he entered, his father stood
looking out of a window. Mrs. Ide was beside him with her hand upon his
shoulder, and Aunt Ada, in an old brown leather armchair, seemed to have
treated herself to a condition of pale collapse. The light through the
windows was failing, and, when Frederic Ide turned to speak to Hatcher,
the son couldn't see the father's face distinctly.

"You--you want to talk to me, Father?"

"No, I don't want to. I've got to."

Hatcher had a slight sense of relief. His father's tone was crisp,
unexpectedly steady, not weakened or desperate. It was, in fact, the
tone of a man of affairs who meets a crisis practically when it finally
arrives, no matter how shattering its approach has been.

"Well, I'm here to be talked to," the son said. "I think it's about
time, probably. You and Mother have seemed to think everything tough had
to be kept from--" Hatcher's voice trembled, though he tried to hearten
himself with a little bumptious sarcasm "--from Frances and me, on
account of our tender years."

"No." Frederic Ide shook his head. "I wish it had been on account of
your youth, Hatcher. It wasn't. If Harry and I could have raised enough
money in the short time we had to do it in, I think we could have kept
our difficulty to ourselves permanently. I had to tell your mother some
time ago because she began to guess it; but if Harry and I'd had a
little better luck nobody but the three of us--your mother and he and
I--need ever have known. Now, of course, all that's blown up. I mean
it's just about to."

"Yes, sir; I think I get you. You mean this family's on the skids and
got to take it, don't you?"

"We've got to face a painful adjustment, Hatcher; and I'm afraid that
means you too, Ada, and that poor Alice won't be able to come here with
her children. Harriet, she'll have to be written to and--"

"I see," Hatcher interrupted, and tried to speak roughly. "Janey's got
to quit college and we're practically on our way to Uncle Victor's
boarding-house. Well, what's going to happen to Dorcy Aldrich and her
mother? I suppose the whole town's practically certain by now that Harry
didn't pass out with any heart failure."

"If it isn't certain, it ought to be!" Aunt Ada spoke suddenly and
shrilly. "Everybody ought to know it. When a man brings ruin on his best
friends and then takes his own life because he can't stand up and face
what he's done, I think the whole world ought to know it! For my part, I
blame Eleanor as much as I do Harry. She's gone on all this time living
like a perfect sultana, leading him into every extravagance and crazy--"

"Ada, that's cruel!" Harriet Ide said. "Eleanor's light-hearted and
loved the easy life they led; but she didn't know. I don't think he ever
spoke a word of business to her in his life. Eleanor's no more to be
blamed than a--"

"Blame?" Frederic interposed. "What's the use of blaming? If you've got
to pin the blame upon anything, it would be upon something usually
thought good--a man's love for his wife and their happiness together.
Harry just couldn't bear to let Eleanor down. She'd got used to living
in a kind of whirl of gayety and luxury--oh, they both had--and he
didn't know how to stop it. It's harder to stop than most people
understand, and for such a man as Harry it was impossible. It sounds
crazy; but only a month ago he signed for his usual big subscription to
the Community Chest. He kept up their way of living on somebody else's
money, Hatcher. He used securities we held in trust."

"Yes, sir." Hatcher's hands were trembling; so he put them in his
pockets. "You see things like that in the newspapers right along; but
you--you hardly think they'd ever happen in connection with--with a firm
like Ide and Aldrich. I think I know when you began to suspect it, sir;
that day you were sick--"

"No; I never did suspect it, Hatcher. Harry's spending bothered me at
times; but he often laughed to me about what a show they were making on
practically nothing and he said Eleanor was a wonderful manager. I
didn't quite see it; but he was probably the most convincing man in the
world; I just went on bothering vaguely to myself and didn't press it.
Then Harry found he'd got himself into such a jam he had to tell me the
truth. What made me sick was getting that in the face without having
suspected." Frederic Ide sat down, sickened anew. "Harry saw the day
coming on him suddenly when we'd have to account for the securities he'd
used."

"Yes, sir." Hatcher trembled more. "Whose--whose securities were they,
sir? A number of people's?"

"Sarah Florian's."

"Sarah's!" Ada spoke suddenly and shrilly again. "Yes, they'd have to be
hers! Of all people!"

"They'd come to her from her grandfather," Frederic said. "Old Sheffley
Lash thought a great deal of Harry, and Harry got him to let Ide and
Aldrich handle about a sixth of the Lash investments. That's what it
amounts to--something like a sixth of Sarah's holdings. Harry'd brought
in the Lash account and from the first he had the managing of it; so it
came to be our habit that though he'd usually consult me he had charge
of it pretty completely. She got the income from it regularly and let it
stay; but the war made her decide to come back here to live, and she
notified Harry from Paris that when she arrived she'd expect him to have
the whole account in shape to go over with her. That was when Harry woke
up to find himself living in hell and had to tell me what danger we--"

"Poor Harry!" Mrs. Ide had begun to cry. "Ah--and poor you!"

"Poor all of us!" her husband said; then showed a pathetic flicker of
business vanity. "I don't believe any other two men could have come
nearer doing an impossible thing than Harry and I did, trying to raise
that money. He was only sixty-five thousand dollars short--about a tenth
of what Sarah had with us--and, if it hadn't been for the Depression and
our already having had to scrape and borrow our damndest, we could have
done it. Up to the year 'Thirty-three, of course, it would have been a
trifle. As things are, it's been just twenty-two thousand dollars too
much for us. That's all--twenty-two thousand!--because by working
miracles during these few weeks since Harry told me, we did raise
forty-three thousand; but that was the utmost possible limit to what we
could get. It's this last twenty-two thousand dollars that's finished
Harry and sunk us."

His wife sat beside him, caught his hand in hers; but his sister was
inspired with a desperate hope. "Fred!" she cried. "If that's all,
couldn't you even yet--"

"No, Ada. Time's up and we squeezed every single last thing so dry the
dust choked us. The one expensive thing Eleanor'd never cared for was
real jewelry--she likes stage necklaces and gewgaws--and Harry was even
two installments behind on the new car he got her this year. He owed
everybody. He'd been putting Sarah off from the day she got here; and
those parties we gave to placate her a little--well, they didn't get
very far with _her_! Oh, yes, she thanked us nicely--but precisely when
did we propose to have the Lash accounts for her inspection? Poor Harry
kept his nerve and talked his jolliest to her; but last Saturday morning
when I was out, George Clise called at the office and notified him he
was acting as Sarah's attorney, and at ten o'clock Monday morning he'd
bring her downtown to see exactly what we held for her--or else!"

"'Or else'!" Ada jumped up, and her echo of the phrase was a sharp
outcry. "You needn't think I've been completely in the dark all this
time; I've known more than you and Harriet think I did. If you care to
learn the truth, I was half way down the stairs when you and Harry came
out of this room on Sunday, and I was absolutely certain you'd had a
terrible quarrel. You can try to defend Harry all you please; but you
can't deny that just then you'd been telling him what you really thought
of him and--"

"No, no!" Ide said. "He knew what he'd done; he thought worse of himself
than I did. On Sunday he asked me to do something I couldn't do; but he
didn't really expect it. I see now it was just a despairing, automatic
gesture to relieve the pressure in those last few hours. If I'd known
his life hung upon it--"

"No, you couldn't!" His wife clung more tightly to his hand. "One thing
I can't bear, Fred, is any more reproaching of yourself." She spoke
angrily to her sister-in-law. "Sit down, Ada, and stop making it worse.
It wasn't a quarrel; they were both just suffering. Harry told Fred that
legally they'd go down together, the one just as much as the other--as
if Fred didn't know it and as if poor Harry didn't know Fred knew
it!--and he said Fred would have to join him in juggling some of their
other clients' securities to get that last twenty-two thousand dollars
so that Sarah'd be satisfied. Of course Fred couldn't do that and--Ada,
won't you please sit down!"

"No, I won't!" Ada cried, and she stamped her foot. "I've been
suspecting something ever since that woman came home because she'd have
to pay too much taxes in France. I knew something was wrong and I was
sure she had to do with it; but I didn't know just what. Now that I do
know, I'll thank you not to tell me to sit down!"

"Please do!" her brother groaned. "I wish to God you would, Ada. Haven't
we got enough other--"

"I'll not!" Ada said fiercely. "I'll not sit down for anybody! So it was
all 'so that _Sarah'd_ be satisfied', was it? This family's to go to the
poorhouse, and the Aldrich family with 'em, and our father's and
grandfather's firm wiped out, and you'll be tried in a court of law,
Fred, and Harry Aldrich killed himself--all 'so that Sarah'd be
satisfied'! My God!"

"Ada--for heaven's sake!" her brother begged.

"No; you can't stop me! She gets everything back that you and Harry had
of hers--all but this bit of money that means just nothing to her, not a
hundredth of what she owns--and we're all to die for it. What'd you
waste your time and money on giving her those crazy teas and dinners
for? Why didn't you ask _me_? I could have told you she'd sick her
lawyers on you just the same. Oh, yes, by the time she kicked old George
out, you _all_ began to understand she hadn't changed or softened one
whit; but _I_ could have told you so before then. I know that woman like
a book! I know--"

"Ada!" Her sister-in-law put forth this useless effort. "Ada, _please_
have a little self-control. Fred's trying to tell us--"

"What's that to _me_?" Ada cried. Beside herself, she didn't care, this
once in her life, what Hatcher heard. "I guess you and Fred remember
Foster Early, Harriet. When I was twenty-nine and she was twenty-one she
noticed that Foster Early was taking me about a little; and she got him
over there to her disgusting Gothic oratory and candlelight, and kissed
him--and thank God I had too much pride to bear the sight of him when he
came back and wanted to tell me all about it after she'd thrown him over
for Victor! Oh, yes, Harriet, you needn't think I haven't seen what
you've been hoping Victor'd do since she came home! You needn't think--"

"Ada! Ada!" Frederic begged. "Please--"

"What do I care?" Ada was not to be silenced. "If you'd asked me,
Harriet, I could have told you Victor's got too much sense. You thought
that woman had come back here just to get Victor, and so you depended--"

"I did not!" Mrs. Ide protested lamentably. "I didn't think she'd come
back for any such reason; but--but after she was here and saw him again
I thought-- Yes, I _did_ think that her old feeling about him returned,
and it did. You could see it. I was right. I--"

Ada was scornful. "Yes; you hoped he'd marry her--I know you did! You
hoped so because you thought if he did you could go crawling to her and
even _she_ wouldn't send her new husband's brother-in-law to the
penitentiary. Harriet, I believe on my soul you're still hoping that
when Victor understands he's the only life-saver left he'll leap in and
deliver us by selling his soul to Sarah Lash. For my part, I'd rather
die in disgrace than see her get him. She's the--"

"She is not!" This was the best that poor Hatcher could do. Speechless
during the tumult of his aunt's fury, he now found part of his voice,
though all of his mind failed him. "She is not!"

Ada turned upon him. "You defend her? Why, you poor little softie, don't
you know yet that your mother's right and Sarah's been after your uncle
again ever since she got home? Can't you see she's let you play around
her just to keep tabs on him and because she never could let any male
idiot alone that's over sixteen? _You_ standing up for her! Harry
Aldrich'd be alive this minute if it wasn't for her. Don't you know what
she'll have her lawyers do to your own father?"

"Nothing! She wouldn't dream of--"

"Oh, wouldn't she!" Ada said. "Ask him!"

"I will! Father, do you believe--"

"Hatcher!" Mrs. Ide was feebly indignant. "You'll have to begin to try
to be a little older. George Clise called your father up this morning to
notify him to be ready with all the Lash Estate accounts to-night at
Sarah's."

"There!" Ada cried. "_To-night_--because all the effect on her of what
Harry did was that she turned more suspicious she might lose a dime. She
could hardly wait till he was buried. There's the truth for you, my fine
young man!"

"Let the boy alone, Ada," Hatcher's father said. "It's Sarah's money.
She's got a right to it."

"Yes--if it kills all the rest of us!" Ada still faced Hatcher. "_Now_
you see, don't you? She'll have the last drop of blood out of--"

"You shan't say it!" The disordered hair over Hatcher's pallid brow was
damp; he shook from head to foot. "It's all false. She's been slandered
and slandered and slandered, and I'm going to stop it. She wouldn't do a
damn thing that wouldn't be--wouldn't be from the highest motives. I'm
going to prove it!"

"Prove it!" His aunt uttered a scream of laughter. "Prove it, you poor
thing? Oh, dear me!"

"I will!" he shouted. "You insult her; you try to put everything on her,
every falsity and cruelty and meanness there is! Do you think I'll stand
for it? Do you think I'll let _her_ stand for it?" He swung to the door
and jerked it open. "You stay here, by God, till I bring her answer to
you!"

With that, disregarding his mother's cries of entreaty and the
protestive commands called after him by his father, Hatcher ran out of
the door, through the hall and out of the house.

In the library Frederic Ide put his hand on his wife's shoulder. "Let
him go. What's it matter? She'll only know it an hour or so earlier.
It's all up anyhow, Harriet."

Ada laughed again. "Harriet doesn't think so. She's still counting on
Victor's saving us. But she's wrong; she doesn't know her own brother.
Victor'd die a thousand deaths before he'd marry that woman!"




CHAPTER XXIV


Lost in thought, a pale slight gentleman in black was
approaching the front door as Hatcher plunged out of it. Victor Linley
beheld without any evidence of surprise the impetuous rush of his
nephew; but, pausing, inquired mildly: "Can I be of use to you,
Hatcher?"

"_You?_" Hatcher shouted, passing him at a run. "Hell, no!"

Mr. Linley remarked the contemptuous implication of this violence; but
his expression showed no resentment. The direction of Hatcher's flight,
however, increased the avuncular thoughtfulness. Hatcher ran across the
lawn and disappeared among the leafless thick shrubberies that separated
it from the "Lash place". His uncle, staring after him, hesitated,
seemed to debate with an impulse to follow--then dismissed the idea and
entered the house somewhat hurriedly. Hatcher, by that time, was ringing
at Sarah Florian's door.

As upon the other occasion when he'd come unbidden she kept him waiting;
but this time she did not prepare him with a distant musical expression
of her mood: there was no piano prelude to her appearance in the Louis
XV room. The big house seemed all silent except for Hatcher's footsteps
as he paced the parquetry floor; his breathing, too, was noisy enough to
sound as a disturbance in that still apartment where the long rose-gray
curtains, closed, softly repudiated what was left of the light of day.

Crystal, porcelain, gilt cabriole legs, _petit point_ and Aubusson
weavery intruded upon him as a background unfit for this interval. The
delicate shapes and tints, though but faintly revealed by newly lighted
candles, seemed unendurably artificial presences in a scene of such
suspense and preparation; for he was strugglingly preparing himself to
speak up roughly and say what his anguish pressed him to say. Her delay
by no means gave him time to cool off; but did permit a particular
realization--that in emotional moments with older people he'd seldom
said what he meant. He hadn't been man enough to ask even his uncle a
vitally important question; he'd never come anywhere near saying to
Sarah Florian what he'd burned to say. Every time--every single
time!--he'd fumbled it.

With Dorcy or Mary Gilpin, or with other contemporaries, he could be in
almost any kind of a stew, yet could and did speak out freely in their
own and his own language. He made them understand him; he was not to be
manipulated or verbally baffled--but with a grown woman, thirty-four
years old, he'd made a flop of everything he'd ever tried to say to her.
That appeared to be one of the disadvantages of being young; but
youthfulness wasn't going to balk him now. No, and he wasn't so darned
young any more; he'd lived enough lately--yes, and suffered enough!--to
add youth-destroying years to twenty-two, and _this_ time he'd say his
say!

He looked at himself in the dim mirror over the suave marble mantelpiece
and swore he'd say his say. As he swore it, he saw how his hair looked;
did hurried brushy work upon it with one hand and adjusted his tie with
the other.

"Yes?"

Sarah Florian spoke from the other end of the room. She hadn't come
through the doorway he'd kept in view in the mirror.

"Oh, _gosh_!" Hatcher said despairingly as he dropped his hands and
turned to her. She seemed more beautiful than he'd ever seen her, and,
at the same time, taller and colder; her face, non-committal
unencouragingly, expressed nothing divinable. "Yes, you _would_ come
just then!" he cried. "I've _always_ got to look a fool to you--even now
when I'm going insane."

"Are you really?" she asked, but didn't seem interested to hear details.
"I'm sorry to've kept you waiting; but I've quite a lot of things to
attend to to-day. I'd have told them to say I wasn't at home, except
that I want a word with you. It's only this: I'm afraid that something's
going to happen so that presently we mayn't be as good friends as we
have been; but I'd like you to bear in mind that it's not my fault."

"Your fault?" Hatcher stepped toward her. "I came here to tell you that
you haven't any faults--that you're perfect!--and that you never did
anything they say you did and that you never will."

"Oh?" she said. "So that's why you came?"

"Yes, it is." He began to speak loudly, sometimes brokenly; but he felt
that at least he was speaking out at last. "You're--you're a _grand_
woman! You're everything that's brave and strong and--and generous
and--and loyal--and they lie about you! Well, I don't intend to let them
lie about you any longer; but you've got to help me. You've got to hear
what they say and give me the--the authority--to show them it's all
lies."

"I'm afraid just now I haven't much time," she said, and might less
painfully have dashed a little vitriol upon him.

"You--you haven't _time_? Not after what I've just said to you?"

"I fear I haven't."

"You're too busy! Oh, my God!" He struck his forehead with his clenched
right hand, and immediately disavowed the gesture. "There I go! I try to
speak my feelings and right away begin to act like a screen idol! I
don't do that with other people and I don't believe I've often done it
with you; but as soon as I make up my mind to tell you what I've got to,
that's the way I do it! I'm a mess--I'm a terrible mess and I know
it--but I'm going ahead and you'll have to listen whether you've got
time or not. I want to talk to you calmly. Let me get my thoughts
together. You see I'm in torture, don't you?"

"Torture?" She seemed indulgent, though her air of being pressed for
time wasn't relinquished. "Rather a pushed word, isn't it? At your
age--"

"Now for both our sakes," he begged, "don't start me making theater
gestures again. My age! Don't you suppose I've stood enough about that
already? I didn't come here to talk about my age. I came here to get
your answer to questions that are killing me. I came here to--"

"_Hush!_" she said; and at that, and her imperative gesture, he stopped
short.

One of her Philippine Islanders stood in the corridor doorway. "Mista
Lidley," he announced.

Sarah Florian's eyes dilated; her mouth opened, and she stared at the
man as widely as Hatcher was staring at her. "Who?" she asked, with a
break in her voice that made two syllables of the word. Then she
repeated it sharply. "Who?"

Victor Linley appeared from behind the Islander and came in
apologetically.

"If you'll forgive me--" he began; but got no further.

"Forgive you?" Sarah Florian spoke loudly and haughtily. She wholly
disregarded Hatcher; the unfortunate young man, gasping, perceived that
so far as she was concerned--and right in the midst of his utmost
tragedy--he was no longer even present. "Forgive you?" she said. "You
condescend to come into my house at last to ask me that, do you?"

Mr. Linley's face flushed a little; but he smiled politely. "Yes,
indeed! I mean that if you'll forgive me I've taken the liberty of
looking in for a moment to tell my nephew he's rather pressingly wanted
at home. His mother thought that if I'd just step over and bring him--"

"Bring him?" she said. "You're on a hurried errand? You've come for him
and are going with him? That's why you came?"

"Why, yes."

"How damnable!" She reached Victor in one of her graceful long strides,
and with her open right hand struck him hard upon his unflinching chin.
"How hateful!" she cried. "It's you that ought to have killed yourself.
Whatever Harry Aldrich has done to me, you've done a thousand times
worse. You keep me waiting, waiting, waiting, and then when you do deign
to step into my house, at last, it's to tell a boy his mother wants
him!"

"I'm extremely sorry," Victor began. "I most deeply regret--"

"Most deeply!" She mocked him. "Is that tone a continuance of the
condoling you've been doing with the bereaved Aldrich family? Don't
bring it around here. I don't care for it."

"Yes," Victor said gently. "I'll take it away. Hatcher, if you'll come
now I think we'd better--"

"No, you don't!" As he turned to the door, Sarah caught his arm and
swung him round. Her voice had lost its accustomed deep richness; had
suddenly become high-pitched, raw and genuine. "I'll have it out with
you now! You won't slide away from it. No man ever treated a girl as you
did me. No, and no man's ever treated me as you have since I came back
here. You don't get away with it so easily, my friend. You're going to
listen!"

"Indeed, yes," he said. "That is--if Hatcher doesn't mind returning home
ahead of me. Hatcher, your mother said--"

"I won't!" Hatcher spoke fiercely. "I'm over five years old, damn it,
thank you! I'm going to say what I came here to, whether _you_ stay and
listen or not. I came here to--"

"I know, I know," his uncle said soothingly. "Another time may be
better, though. If you--"

Sarah laughed aloud. "Do you think I'd be more tractable if he weren't
here, Victor?" Hatcher perceived that she was again aware that he lived.
"What do I care?" she cried. "Indeed I'm quite willing to have one of
your family here to listen!"

"I don't want to," Hatcher said. "I didn't come here to listen to this.
I came here to say--"

"Look at him!" Sarah swept to Hatcher, apparently to use him as a
rostrum, for she pointed and looked at his deprecatory uncle. "See that
man! I'll tell you a little about him, my boy, and how he treats women
who trust him! When he first made love to me I was a girl--I was a
devoted little idiot--and wasn't he a maiden's dream, though!" She
laughed again; then sobbed, but without interrupting herself. "Oh, but
he was a sweet thing with his hero limp and exquisitely adult calm--and
all the girls keeping dead flowers from him in their desks--"

"Sarah!" Victor said in mild remonstrance. "I don't recall that any such
testimonials--"

"The same old pretended modesty!" she cried. "Still working the same old
affectation? Do the ladies find it as fascinating as of yore?"

"I'm afraid not as of anything, Sarah. I'm afraid they never did."

"Poseur! You _are_! You've _always_ been one; there was never a natural
or impulsive drop of blood in your body--and think of what you dared to
call _me_!" She appealed passionately to Hatcher, as if, for an instant,
he represented Justice. "He did! He called me horrible things--and just
before we were going to announce our engagement! Would anybody believe
it of him, seeing him stand there so smugly? Almost in so many words he
called me a self-indulgent egoist, a man-collector, spoiled, and he said
I wasn't even truthful with myself. That wasn't the worst: he said I was
stingy--except with myself! Yes, stingy! I! At first I thought he was
joking--" She sobbed again.

"Hatcher, really!" Mr. Linley sent an urgently suggestive glance from
his nephew to the door. "Don't you think you might--"

"I won't!" Hatcher said. "I'm staying."

Sarah ignored this hasty clash of ideas. "He _meant_ it?" she cried.
"There we were--going to be married--and that's what he said to me! I
told him if he didn't take it back I was through with him, and he said
he was sorry--'sorry'!--but that was what he thought. So I showed him
what _I_ thought of _him_--what I thought of the kind of lover he was!
There were others, I let him discover."

"Discover? No," Victor said, with neither reproach nor satire. "Dear
Sarah, it was always apparent that there were others, naturally."

"Do you hear him?" She appealed tragically to Hatcher. "He didn't _mind_
the others! That was flattering, wasn't it? I didn't stay to see how
much he minded my marrying one of them; I let him think _that_ out at
his leisure."

"I didn't need the leisure, Sarah. I understood immediately."

"You didn't!" she cried. "You probably thought I was 'repenting at
leisure'!"

"No, no. I never--"

"You did! That's just what you were thinking in your infernal,
insufferable self-conceit. You were never more mistaken, Victor Linley!
I forgot you. I lived a full life and there were whole years when you
weren't twice in my thoughts."

"Of course, Sarah. I had no idea you'd--"

"Stop interrupting me! I forgot you, I tell you; but when I came back
here and saw you again I thought you'd at least have the grace to try to
make up to me for the old insults and--"

"Insults? Indeed they weren't meant to be. You asked me for the honest
truth and I merely--"

"Shame!" She seemed about to strike him again. "Shame on you for
your--for everything that you are! Do you think that any woman--any such
woman as I!--would _let_ herself be treated so? You didn't come to see
me; you didn't let yourself be caught alone with me. If I wanted to talk
to you I had to drag you from your villainous boarding-house and out to
the public street! That was nice for a woman of any pride, wasn't it?
You hide away in a third-rate _pension_--"

"No, I don't," Victor said; and he smiled suddenly. "I moved early this
morning."

"What?"

"I've taken a room in the old Linley house."

Upon that, it was as if she'd had physical blow for blow from him; she
wavered back from him. "You-- You're as poverty-stricken as that?"

He smiled again, amiably. "I'm afraid so."

Sarah Florian stood straight and her breath came fast. "Then I've
received the worst of all your insults, and let me tell you it'll be the
last!"

"You mustn't see it so," he protested. "I needn't be uncomfortable
there. After all, the old house is solid and rather--"

"Now damn you!" she said. "You've made it clear enough, I think. I'm
through with you, this time for good and all--through with you and your
whole hateful family. This boy's made it pretty plain to me how some of
your relatives talk about me!"

"Ah, Hatcher!" the uncle murmured. "What have you done?"

"Not half!" the desperate Hatcher said. "Not half what I came here to
do. I--"

"Plain indeed!" Sarah Florian, now, in voice and look, was bitter with
more than Victor. A natural vindictiveness, most human, distorted the
features habitually held calm for the preservation of their beauty.
"This boy's come straight from home before this, filled up with lies and
poison and scandal about me--straight from your malevolent female
relatives, Victor Linley. I know that, though I don't know in what
_other_ way your sanctimonious family has been despoiling me--with Harry
Aldrich's help. But I intend to know--yes, this very night!"

Hatcher uttered indistinguishable sounds, strange ones, in his throat,
before he became coherent. "You--you warn us?" he asked, and with both
hands undid the arrangement of his hair he'd accomplished before the
mirror. "I can't stand this. I got so I didn't care if you'd been
engaged to my uncle; but if you're still in love with him--or again in
love with him--"

"I? _Now?_" Sarah strode away from him, laughing. "You little utter
fool!"

"I am not," poor Hatcher said. "I have been; but I'm not. You talk at
him as if I weren't here. When he comes in, you don't pay any attention
to me at all except to use me to get an effect on him. Well--all
right--but from what you say it sounds as if you'd like to be even with
him because he isn't falling for you. That'd be pretty unworthy, I
think. One of the things I came here to say was that I knew you were too
high-minded to do what they said you would. I told 'em I knew you
better; you wouldn't do such a thing."

"What 'such a thing'?" she said.

"To my fa--" Hatcher began; but paused abruptly. His uncle had stepped
between him and Sarah Florian. A whisper reached Hatcher's ears, but not
hers--a whisper so commanding, so poignant that it was paralyzingly
effective.

"_Shut up!_"

Hatcher was silent. His uncle turned about with a gesture of apologetic
explanation. "He's naturally a little confused and we've interrupted you
long enough, Sarah. His mother really does want him rather urgently. If
you--" He made a little bow. "If you don't mind, I think we'll be--"

"Go on!" she said passionately. "I'm sick of you! Be off with you! Both
of you!"

She didn't stay to see them out of the room, but turned to the door by
which she'd entered, passed through, and closed it clashingly behind
her.




CHAPTER XXV


Outdoors, the compassionate uncle limped as fast as he
could, to keep up with the striding nephew. There was still a little
daylight sieved through the woody groves west of Butternut Lane; the
scrambled tips of old forest trees didn't merge with the sky but rose
against it as if scrawled in brown ink with a haphazard pen. This effect
went unseen by the younger of the two hurrying across Sarah Florian's
frozen lawn; but the elder remarked it with a melancholy eye and the
thought that it was being repeated above a sylvan enclosure of marble
shapes where to-day he'd left forever the semblance of an old friend.

Hatcher stopped suddenly in the shrubbery of the boundary. The bow
window of the living-room at home had just become visible, and its
springing into shape with a flare of warm light was what checked him. "I
don't want to go in there." As he spoke he turned his back upon his
uncle, and his utterance was impeded as by a cold in the head. "You go
ahead. I'm not coming."

"You wouldn't rather I'd wait with you, Hatcher?"

"No, I wouldn't." Hatcher used his handkerchief as furtively as he could
and tried not to speak huskily. "You--you're one hell of an old bird, it
seems to me. You certainly must have had your own way of being engaged
to a woman. If you didn't care for her, what'd you ever tell her you did
for?"

"What for?" his uncle said. "I was in love with her."

"What?"

"Why, naturally, Hatcher. Overwhelmingly in love with her."

"Then in God's name what did you say those things to her for?"

"Why, she asked me," Victor Linley said in his mild way. "I hadn't
expected to be happy with her, of course, because I knew no one could be
that; and, though I was so deeply in love with her, I can't say that I
ever admired her or liked her, Hatcher. You know it's sometimes possible
to be in love with a person you dislike, don't you? When she asked me
for my honest opinion of her I thought she had a right to it. At least
it would put our relationship on a firmer base for the future--and,
fortunately for us both, it did."

"But--" Hatcher was still turned away. "But she--she's been after you
ever since she came home. She wanted you back--up to just now. Up till
you practically told her you'd rather live in that old ruin downtown
than--than with her, it looks as if she's been wanting to--to actually
marry you."

"Oh, perhaps, perhaps," his uncle said lightly. "Some such thing may
have been in her mind since her return. She may have felt that it was
due to herself. I dare say. Nothing to do with me, of course."

At this, Hatcher faced him. "Nothing to do with _you_! What on earth do
you think you're telling me?"

"Why, that she's had no feeling _for_ me, Hatcher--one rather against
me, in fact. You see, when she came home and found me still wobbling
about, an old half-buried protest against me must have flared up. She
couldn't endure that I shouldn't at last be so dependently in her
possession--at least for a time--that I'd be sorry I was ever critical
of her. She felt she had to make me feel that; she had to reduce me. In
what I am, except in relation to her, she hasn't had the slightest
interest--never did have."

"What! Why, when you came in that room she was like somebody I'd never
seen before. Me--she treated me as if I'd been part of the wall. No
interest in you? That's a hot one!"

"No," Victor said. "She isn't capable of any, Hatcher. One doesn't blame
her for it because she was born so, and, what intensified it, she was
helped to grow up that way. She isn't interested in anything except in
its relation to herself, and she never will be. Most of us are more or
less like that, even in our love affairs; so there have to be some
extreme cases, of course. She's one of 'em; that's all. You'll
understand it better when you're a little older, Hatcher."

Hatcher fell back upon mere profanity as the expression of his weariness
of this eternal repetition. When he more controlled himself he made a
bitter gesture. "How old do you have to _be_ before all the damn
gray-haired naggers on earth stop telling you that?"

"I don't know," Mr. Linley answered. "I'm still telling it pretty often
to myself."

"Well--" Hatcher paused, sunk in miserable thought. Then he asked
faintly, "What do you think life is?"

"I haven't an idea."

"You haven't? Not at your age? Then what do you think we get from it?
What's the use of it? Old enough to have an idea about that?"

"Yes--a vague one," the uncle answered slowly. "So far as I can gather,
the thing to learn is how to gain some slight bits of information on
your subject--'life'--from adversity."

"How nice! A pleasant prospect to dangle before an infant of twenty-two!
The best we can look forward to is tough times, then; and the tougher
they are the more we'll know about something that nobody can know
anything about. Thanks, Uncle. Wait!" Hatcher held up a forbidding hand.
"Don't tell me I'll understand all these advantages better when I'm
older! I want to ask you something that maybe you can answer more
practically. When I was going to tell her I hadn't believed she'd set
her damn lawyer on my father, why did you yell 'Shut up!' at me?"

"I only whispered it, Hatcher. I was careful that she shouldn't hear."

"I asked you why--"

"Yes, I know." Mr. Linley's manner had once more become apologetic. "I
don't wish to increase your feeling that I take a somewhat uncharitable
view of her; but the truth is, Hatcher, she's rather sharp in her own
interest."

"Yes; so you once told her, I believe! Go ahead."

"Yes, Hatcher. She's possibly almost too sharp where her money's
concerned. The way she got rid of old George, for instance. I've been a
little uneasy for some time; and last Sunday your mother came to see me
in the morning and--well, I needn't go into it; but she might as well
have told me she was in fear of Sarah. I heard your father and Harry
being pretty strenuous later in the day, and when poor Harry took
himself off that night the whole thing was only too suddenly clear to
me. Of course for anybody who knows Sarah it's plain what suspicions
Harry's death would intensify in her and what she'd do about them. She's
always been rather too ready to think somebody's cheating her.
Apparently that goes with such a nature as hers, Hatcher."

"Does it? I suppose when you were telling her the other things you told
her that, too?"

"No, I'd said enough, I thought. I'm explaining why I had to tell you to
cut the reference to your father, Hatcher. You see, she's always been a
bit inclined to even up scores with people, and she seemed to have
gathered from you that your mother and aunt weren't in the habit of
admiring her--"

"Thanks for keeping me reminded!"

"I'm sorry," Victor said; "but it's unfortunately pertinent to your
inquiry. You see, she had that injury--the unfavorable opinion held of
her in our family--and also the fancied old and new slights from myself
to brood upon. If you'd come out with it that there'd been a shortage in
her account with your father and Harry--"

"If I what?" Hatcher half-choked. "Why, my God, it wouldn't have been
telling her anything she hasn't already practically guessed! She's had
her lawyer notify Father he's got to bring the account to her house
to-night. She'll know it _then_, won't she?"

"No," Victor said. "I don't want to be hard on her; but I'm afraid she's
in a mood to damage your father and all of us in any way she can. Well,
we're all safe from her; but if you'd given it away to her that there's
been a shortage she'd at least have told it all over town pretty
ruinously. Since you didn't say what you intended, she can't."

"_Why_ can't she?"

"Because there isn't any shortage, Hatcher. She's in for a pleasant
surprise, or an unpleasant one--depending upon which view of her you
take. Another reason I was so rude to you: I thought your father might
as well continue to have the benefit of her account. I know her pretty
well, and I believe she may see advantages to herself in leaving it with
him. Investments are difficult nowadays, and the old firm--"

"I think you're stark crazy," Hatcher said. "Or else you just don't
know! I tell you they raised everything they could with their last
heart's blood but there's--"

"Yes, I know. Twenty-two thousand, three hundred and sixty-two dollars.
It's all right, Hatcher. Your father has it."

"He has not!"

"Yes. Go in and see."

"I don't--" Hatcher began; but broke off and pressed through the
crackling bushes, moving toward the house.

His mother was standing outside the front door, peering into the dusk.
When she saw the two figures, the taller one ahead and the slighter
limping behind, she came running. It was not to her son that she ran;
she swerved round him, and, weeping, threw her arms about her brother.




CHAPTER XXVI


Hatcher went into the house and met Frances in the
hall. "I had to go to my friend Bettina Burney's after school," she
said. "I bet they made me on account of Uncle Harry Aldrich's funeral.
Mother and everybody seems to be kind of crying or something around here
now, and you, Hatch-- Why, look at you! You look as if--"

"I do not. Where's Father?"

"If I promise to tell you, will you play backgammon with me first?"

"I will not. Where is he?"

"In the lib'ary. After he tells you please go somewhere else, the way he
did me, then will you come and play--" She stared after him, displeased.
He was already out of her sight and within the library.

His father sat writing at the heavy mahogany table; but set down his pen
and looked up at Hatcher anxiously. "Did your uncle get there in time?"

Hatcher dropped floppingly into the chair that stood farthest from the
desk lamp. "I get you," he said. "You mean did he get there in time to
keep me from blowing the lid off by telling her I refused to believe she
wouldn't give you time to try to fix up the last of what Harry Aldrich
did to her damned stocks and bonds? Yes. Uncle Victor got there in time
to stop me."

The tired man at the desk rubbed his forehead with a thin hand, closed
his eyes and uttered a long and heavy sigh. "Well--thank God for that
much!"

"Yes, for that much," Hatcher said. "It takes Him to keep me from being
an additional curse to everybody. Uncle Victor's haywire; he says you've
got the money. Do funny things in his head, persuade him he brought it
to you himself? It wouldn't strike me as very likely--not unless he
hurried from the cemetery and held up a bank."

"No; he had it, Hatcher."

"How could he? Where'd he get it?" Hatcher sat up, leaned forward, and
expressed a strong incredulity. "And if he had it, why in God's name
didn't you and Harry Aldrich ask him for it before Harry--"

"Ah, that's hindsight; but wouldn't anybody think it!" Ide said. "One
doesn't ask a man out of work for his last cent, Hatcher, not even when
he's a close friend or a brother-in-law. That's one reason. Another is
that neither Harry nor I had any idea that Victor's last cent would be
enough. It's a miracle, you see, that it just covers the hole. Victor's
a reticent man and the truth is I had a sneaking idea that maybe Harry
was quietly lending him a bit from time to time--just to keep him going.
I haven't a doubt now that Harry thought I was putting up the little
that Victor needed. Another reason is that it was sheer instinctive
self-preservation not to speak of the shortage even to Victor. No, as a
financial savior Victor just didn't occur to either of us. Pretty
horribly ironical to think of, that he's a savior too late for Harry,
isn't it?"

"Yes; if it does save us, Father."

"It stops her," his father said, not needing to be more explicit. "When
Victor had to give up his old way of living, he appears to have done it
just in time to have something under twenty-four thousand dollars left
in municipal bonds. They brought him in the taxes he's had to pay on
that old nightmare of a house he insists on holding, and just barely
enough besides to keep him in his cheap boarding-house." Frederic rubbed
his forehead again; his hand drooped to his eyelids, and the tips of his
fingers remained upon them. "No, even if we'd known he had it I don't
believe either of us could have asked him for it, Hatcher. I think
Harry'd have died before he'd do a thing like that--and, as a matter of
fact, that's just what he did."

"So he had it in his pocket," Hatcher said. "I mean Uncle Victor. I ran
into him as I was starting to-- I mean when I started over there. He
must have been just bringing that last cent of his to you then. He asked
me if he could be of service to me and I said, 'You? Hell, no!'"

"Yes, he was bringing it then, Hatcher. He'd been afraid it wouldn't be
enough, of course; and when I told him that by God's own mercy it was,
he said it would help us keep the truth from Eleanor and Dorcy, because
Sarah'd never know it and so couldn't tell it--and I had to say I was
afraid you were--were--"

"Spilling it," Hatcher said. "You had to say I was over there spilling
it. So he came on the run to stop me. You must be pleased to have such a
serviceable son."

"But apparently you didn't do any harm, Hatcher."

"No, I was prevented."

His father looked at him gently. "I don't think you need reproach
yourself for a thing you can't help."

"You think not, sir? Not for being too damned young? I differ with you.
I think I need. Being young, I'm naturally likely to be harmful. Doesn't
it follow that I'd better begin to be old enough to despise myself?"

"No. Self-reproach isn't much use at any age, Hatcher, and the people
who ought to feel it seldom do. If any of us is to be haunted by it, I'm
the one. All I needed to do, at the last, was to talk to Victor, and
Harry'd be alive. Why didn't I? Well, I've told you--but there it is!
You see if I go into the 'if-I-only-hads' I'm lost. If I'd watched Harry
more closely and if I'd talked to Eleanor--in time!--and if I'd done
this, and if I'd done that! All the 'ifs' slid past me, and Harry's dead
and I'm letting my wife's brother go flat broke to save me. No, the
older we are, the less we dare dwell on the 'if-I-hads', Hatcher. You
have fewer of them, being young."

"They're beginning to be a bit sharp, though," Hatcher said. "It's
pretty tough on all of us to think we have to accept--"

"Yes." His father shook his head unhappily. "Victor had one argument I
couldn't have resisted even if his others failed with me. He's always
cared a great deal for Harry and Harry's little family, as he has for
us. I knew what he felt when he spoke of his not having understood in
time--in time for Harry, Hatcher--and I couldn't answer him when he said
that every suspicion must be met; and this does it. No one can say now
that Harry's death wasn't an accident, not even--" Frederic Ide's weary
voice stiffened in the moment of bitterness "--not even Sarah Florian."

Hatcher slumped in his chair; but he didn't speak, and his mother came
into the room just then. "I tried to keep him," she said. "He wouldn't
stay. He'd told old George he'd take him to dinner at a cafeteria."

"Old George?" Hatcher looked up. "What's he--"

"They're fellow-lodgers," Mrs. Ide said. "You know where your uncle's
gone to live, don't you?"

"Yes, he spoke of having left his boarding-house. He mentioned--"

"He's where he and I were born, Hatcher--the most dreadful house on this
earth."

"It looks it," Hatcher said. "Mrs. Schapp is one of my--"

His mother had begun to weep again, though quietly. "I told and told him
we wanted him to live with us here," she murmured through her
handkerchief. "I told him we none of us could bear it if he didn't
come."

"Why wouldn't he, Mother?"

"I was a fool the other day," she said. "I told him we were going to
have to take in Alice and her children and that I didn't know how we'd
find room--and I was complaining of having no maids to do the housework!
Of course he wouldn't come after that; but I didn't dream-- If I could
have foreseen--"

"But at least he ought to've gone to some better place than that old
mess of a Linley house," Hatcher protested. "Why didn't he? There are
plenty other--"

"He went there because he'll not have to pay anything. That awful woman
owes him so much he says he could have a room there the rest of his life
and just charge it against her debt to him. Do you know how much money
he has left now?"

"Well, it must be over a thousand dollars, Mother."

"Yes!" Mrs. Ide cried. "'Enough to take care of an emergency,' he told
me. He meant if he got sick or died. He meant he wouldn't let anybody
else pay his funeral expenses!"

"Oh, see here, Mother! Don't go piling it on."

"He did mean that! Don't you know him yet, Hatcher? When I told him we'd
all work to pay him back he said that if we brought Janey home from
college he'd never forgive us, and of course now, after what he's done,
we _won't_ have to write Alice not to come and bring the children,
because the business'll go on and--and--" Harriet Ide sobbed aloud.
"He's saved everything but himself."

"Oh, see here!" Hatcher became practical and began to remonstrate. "He
isn't going to starve. He's asked out a lot, and naturally he'll come
here for meals, anyhow most of 'em. As for where a person just sleeps,
that isn't a thing to make a fuss about. For my part I'd just as soon--"

"No, you wouldn't!" his mother cried. "Not in that house! Not if you'd
grown up in it when it was beautiful and had dear lovely people happy in
it! Not if every inch of it reminded you of their laughter and their
singing--and of how they died. What crueler place could a sensitive man
go to--because he had nowhere else on earth to go? What worse torture
for him than to see it every minute all about him, dirty and bedraggled
and insulted, and with grimy people sprawling and squalling over it--"

"Harriet! Harriet!" her husband groaned. "It's not forever. We'll get
him out of it. It's only a loan, you know. Just give us a little
_time_."

"Yes, for God's sake, Mother!" Hatcher said. "In the first place, Uncle
Victor's more philosophic than most people, and, in the second, Father's
right: we'll pay him back. He's not going to be there forever. Now, for
heaven's sake, stop crying and listen--"

"I can't!"

"Yes, you can." Hatcher continued to plead with her and to present his
uncle's misfortune in its best aspect for her solacing, and for his
father's and also for his own. He needed some such bracing, himself. The
warm and comfortable house where he sat was a little shabby, perhaps;
but he had a sense of meanness in remaining an occupant of it when he
thought of his dainty uncle as one of Mrs. Schapp's roomers. Victor's
boarding-house had been pretty tough; but that blackened old Linley
relic down in the smog--! Hatcher's voice lost conviction, grew feeble;
he decided that he wasn't bringing much comfort to his mother or to
anybody, and stopped trying.

Before him, floating in the shadows of the lamplit room, the beautiful
hurting face of Sarah Florian began to be displaced by the pale, neat
features of a middle-aged gentleman whose eyes seemed to regard him
reproachfully.

                 *        *        *        *        *

...It wasn't late in the evening when Frederic Ide returned from the
examination next door. He hadn't needed much time to prove that Mrs.
Florian's account with Ide and Aldrich was intact and in order, and that
when she and her lawyer would look over her securities with him at the
bank, next day, they'd find nothing missing.

"She leaves it with me--with the firm--as previously," he told his wife
and sister and son when he came into the living-room. He uttered a short
sound that was the hint of a dry laughter. "She was openly
surprised--somewhat invidiously so! We hold about a sixth of her fortune
for her; I got the impression she'd have been almost willing to find a
little of it gone for the sake of seeing justice done to herself. Her
manner was--well, call it annoyed."

Aunt Ada glanced at Hatcher; but he sat expressionless. "Then why in the
world does she leave the account with you, Fred?"

Ide answered with an increased dryness. "When it came to us it amounted
to about five hundred thousand dollars. Harry and I did better with it
than with any other--incomparably better than with anything of our own.
We got it up to over six hundred thousand. That's where it is now."

Ada began to babble. "And she'd have had you indicted and tried--and
Harry died!--for twenty-two thousand! That woman! She--"

Hatcher was conscious of his aunt's voice as it went into more elaborate
denunciation; but the words carried little meaning to him. He was
thinking principally of his uncle, Victor Linley, and engaged in a brief
calculation. Six times six hundred thousand equalled thirty-six hundred
thousand--something like four million dollars, then.

Hatcher thought of his uncle and old George returning from their dinner
at the cafeteria and going upstairs in Mrs. Schapp's rooming-house,
through sounds and smells--and Mrs. Schapp probably yelling to know if
they'd shut the front door... and the mahogany railing of the dirty
fine old stairway reminding Uncle Victor of all the delicate hands that
had touched it--Victor's mother's hands--his dead sister's hands--

Hatcher rose suddenly from his chair and left the room; something heavy
seemed to be heaving upward within him, from his stomach to his throat.
It seemed to be not a substance but a thought--the increasingly weighty
realization that Uncle Victor had saved the Ides and the Aldriches, and
the firm of Ide and Aldrich, from ruin and disgrace; and that there'd
been two ways in which Uncle Victor could have done it. Uncle Victor'd
had a choice. He was really a sentimental man, sensitive and highly
susceptible to the torture of old memories; and yet, without hesitation,
he'd chosen that haunted wreck of the home of his fathers--Mrs. Schapp's
rooming-house--in preference to Sarah Florian.




CHAPTER XXVII


When Hatcher came back to the living-room his Aunt Ada
was there alone. She was standing at the other end of the room, near the
fireplace, but had no difficulty in perceiving his instinctive movement
to retire just after he stepped through the doorway.

"No!" she said commandingly. "You'll come all the way in, if you please.
I've a thing or two to say to you."

He advanced a hesitant step or two. "I was only looking for something,
Aunt Ada, and--"

She came forward. "You haven't apologized to me, Hatcher."

"I haven't what?"

"You haven't apologized for the language you used to me this afternoon."

"When?"

"When you screamed and swore you'd prove that woman next door a traduced
saint and me a slanderer. Just before you galloped off, raving, to tell
her what your mother and father and I thought of her. Have you forgotten
the terms you used to me? I should think that under the circumstances
the least you'd feel is that as a gentleman you owe me an apology."

"Do I?" Hatcher hung his head. Of the scene to which his aunt referred,
his memory now brought him only semblances of explosion and concussion,
fireworks in his head. He had indeed forgotten the terms he'd used to
her, and also the worse ones she'd used to him. "Well--all right. I'm
afraid I was excited. I apologize. I beg your pardon, Aunt Ada, if it
does you any good."

Ada's severity wasn't eased. After long suppressions, old wrongs and new
burned within her; and, once this heat had burst into expression, she
couldn't turn the damper upon it. Hatcher had been a partisan of the
enemy, and, even though he now stood helpless, he could still be
punished for having been of the wrong party. "There are one or two
things I want to tell you, young man," Ada said. "I imagine you remember
I once informed you that your uncle was never in love with that woman,
and you probably think, now, you have reason to believe that once he
was. You'd be very much mistaken. Nobody was ever in love with
her--nobody! For a while they just got caught; but it never lasted long,
because they couldn't help seeing what she was--and that's all that
happened to your uncle. Nobody with any sense would call it being in
love. I told you the truth. Do you understand?"

"I'd rather not talk about it, Aunt Ada."

"No!" she returned shrewishly. "I guess not; I should think you
wouldn't! Not when you think things over and look about you and see what
you've done."

He was humble. "What I've done?"

"Yes! What you've done to yourself, for one thing." Aunt Ada was never
much given to relenting, and her emotions were now well out on an
unlimited spree. "At the supper table last Sunday evening you may recall
I warned you what might happen to you, Mr. Hatcher!"

"You did?" he asked blankly. "No, I don't--"

"What! You don't remember my telling you that you'd better change your
manner or Dorcy'd be wondering what was the matter with you? Well, you
didn't change and she did more than wonder. Oh, no; you wouldn't listen
to me! Just gave me a black look for my pains! And before that
unpleasant evening was over, she knew perfectly _well_ what was the
matter with you. Breaking your neck to get to that telephone the way you
did! You think Dorcy didn't see why? Of course she did! So did everybody
else. I suppose you understand that _now_, don't you?"

"I don't even understand what you're talking about, Aunt Ada. You
needn't tell me, though."

"Oh, needn't I? I suppose you saw what Erdvynn Wilson did this
afternoon, didn't you?"

"I don't care what he did, Aunt Ada."

"That's how it looked then," Aunt Ada said. "It looked as if you didn't
care. When Dorcy and her mother were going to leave the cemetery,
Erdvynn Wilson left the rest of you and went to Dorcy and talked
comfortingly to her and helped to put her in her car--while you just
stood there. I suppose you were thinking about how soon you could get
back to that woman next door. Well, you know better now; but I can tell
you--look out! All these things you've done are going to count against
you with Dorcy Aldrich; and you needn't expect they won't."

"I don't expect anything, Aunt Ada."

Hatcher's tone was as lifeless as were his attitude and facial
expression; Ada, still on her spree, wasn't getting much satisfaction
out of him. He might as well have been a piano upon which she had an
uncontrollable urge to play a particular tune; but the keys wouldn't
sound, so, naturally, she pounded harder.

"Oh, so you don't 'expect anything', Hatcher Ide?" She tried to mimic
the flatness with which he'd spoken. "You 'don't expect anything', don't
you? You won't put that over on me, young man, so don't waste your
breath. You do, too, 'expect'! Your head's probably so full of
happy-ending movies you think you can treat a girl like Dorcy as you've
treated her and then be taken back. I think you're mistaken! Dorcy
wouldn't any more let a man drop her for a creature like Sarah Florian
and then come creeping back to be welcomed home and get his bruises all
petted up--she wouldn't do it any more than I did, myself! A good many
things have changed in these modern days; but I think you'll find that
girls haven't entirely lost their pride. No, and there's another thing
you may have to take into consideration--"

"You haven't finished, Aunt Ada?"

"Just about!" she said triumphantly. "Dorcy's got to take care not only
of herself now but of her mother, too, hasn't she? You've been setting
her quite an example, haven't you--showing your preference for driving
about town in French limousines?" Hatcher turned abruptly toward the
door; but as he left the room his overwrought aunt called after him.
"You'd better look out! When you go to pay your call of condolence at
the Aldriches' you may find Erdvynn Wilson there before you!"

                 *        *        *        *        *

...When Hatcher paid his "call of condolence", the last afternoon of
that week, Ada's prophecy was fulfilled. He and Erdvynn Wilson said
hello to each other gravely, just outside the front door; then Erdvynn
went on toward the car he'd left in the driveway, and Hatcher didn't
need to ring the bell, for the door had not quite closed.

Dorcy opened it wider. Her face looked thin; but she was composed and
not in black. "Harry always hated mourning clothes," she said, as she
took Hatcher through the doorway at the right--not into the room where
stood Harry's closed piano. "He wouldn't have wanted us to wear
black--he'd have abhorred it for us--but I can't persuade Mother. I'm
afraid I'll never get her out of it. You won't mind if I don't go and
ask her to come down? She's going to be pretty shot for a long time, I'm
afraid. Won't you sit down, Hatcher?"

"Thank you," he said, sat, and felt queer.

She took a chair facing him; and, with her eyes downcast, folded her
hands in her lap and sat looking at them. He'd never seen her do
anything like this, and felt queerer. "You've been very kind, Hatcher,
and Mother told me that when you came I must be sure to thank you for
her as well as for myself. We're very grateful to you for staying so
long at the telephone. I'm afraid it was very tiring for you."

"No, no; not at all, Dorcy. I was only too glad to-- That is, I mean
I--"

"Everyone has been so kind," she said. "The whole town loved Harry, and
the letters have been pouring in--so many from people he'd helped and
Mother and I'd never heard of. It makes us even prouder of him than we
always were."

Hatcher's heart was wrung. "Yes, of course you'd be. Yes, of course
everybody loved him, Dorcy. He--"

"There's something I want to straighten out with you." Dorcy didn't seem
to hear Hatcher's murmurings. "I'm afraid you may have thought I'd got a
wrong idea about something, partly because of how foolish I was, being
frightened that night I sent for you to help me find him. I'm afraid
that after--after what's happened--you may have thought that Mother and
I were afraid he'd--that Harry had-- I can't say it. In the shock, at
first, we--we were tormented by ideas that maybe something was terribly
wrong downtown and that your father was keeping something back from us;
but since then he's showed us that the firm isn't even bankrupt, so we
know now that we never needed to have the dreadful thought about Harry
hanging over us."

"No--of course you needn't--"

"No," she said. "I want you to know what a blessing it's been to be
certain it was an accident. I want you to forget it if you ever thought
we might have imagined that it--that it wasn't."

"Yes, I will. I didn't really think--"

"There's another thing," she said. "I don't want you ever to believe
that Mother and I haven't appreciated the kindness that you and all your
family have shown us. We've been close neighbors so many years--and when
that's changed and we're not here any more in this house, and you
naturally won't be seeing us so often, why, Mother and I both hope--"

"Not in this house, Dorcy?"

"No; we can't keep it," she said. "Mother and I are both so happy to
think that Harry never dreamed what would happen to us if he should die
suddenly. We're grateful that he never had such a thought. There's
really almost nothing at all left, you see. Your father's explained it
to us several times; and Mother asked your Uncle Victor to go over it
with her, too, so that she'd understand better, and he made it as clear
as he could. Of course Mother and I neither of us know really much about
business--it's so involved and confusing; but one thing at least seems
certain: that though the firm's all right what Mother and I'll have
coming to us out of Harry's share in it will be just barely enough--now
that he isn't there, himself--just barely enough for Mother to take a
tiny flat somewhere. Your uncle insisted that your father's figures
about our probable income from the firm were right; so of course they
are."

"Why, yes." Hatcher felt still queerer. "Of course my father--"

"Yes. Mother and I know, of course," Dorcy said, and her eyes had a
strangely distant expression. "We know that your father'd never be
anything except fair, even generous; but we'd always had the idea that
Harry was the one who brought most of the business into the firm. It's
all so mixed up I don't suppose Mother and I'll ever get the details
really straight in our heads. We know it's all correct, though, of
course." Dorcy paused; then she said, "Still--" and paused again.

"'Still'?" Hatcher repeated the word. "Still what, Dorcy?"

"Nothing. I just wanted to have you understand that Mother and I
appreciate the kindness you've all shown us--and there's one other
thing, Hatcher."

"Yes, Dorcy?"

"It's this." She was looking down at her folded hands again. "I've
always wanted to have my closest friends like each other--and to bring
them closer together. For instance, you and Mary Gilpin for a long time
have been my two closest friends, and I've always wanted both of you to
like each other as much as--"

"But I do, Dorcy." He was puzzled. "I like Mary top-hole. I think she's
a--"

"Yes, I know you do; but there's someone else I want you to like that
much, too, Hatcher. He's somebody I don't think any of us ever
appreciated enough. I know I really didn't, myself, until--until just
lately, when I've begun to appreciate his deeper qualities. He doesn't
show them until something brings them to the surface, Hatcher. You know
I mean Erdvynn, don't you? I want you to appreciate and like him very
much. Will you?"

"Why--if you do, of course, Dorcy."

"I didn't think anybody _could_ ever be as loyal and sweet to me as he
has," she said, and, looking up for just an instant, let him see eyes
liquidly brightened by her thought of Erdvynn. "I never knew that
anybody could be so considerate and so understanding and thoughtful as
he's been all along, and most of all during this terrible time, Hatcher.
The instant he heard about Father he came straight to me. That very
morning, that awful morning, he came--and Lennie Aldrich wasn't going to
let him upstairs; but he pushed by her and found me, and he said just
the right things to help me. I could never forget that, of course."

"No--of course you wouldn't." Hatcher felt not only queer but clumsy. He
thought he ought to try to explain something he'd better have let alone.
"I--I had the feeling probably you didn't want to see anybody just then,
Dorcy. I-- Well, the way it happened, Mary grabbed me just after I got
into the house and she put me on that telephone job, and after that I
really didn't have a chance to do anything else. I-- It never occurred
to me you'd want me to come up and--"

"No, no, no!" Dorcy separated her hands from each other long enough to
lift one of them in a slight gesture. "I didn't mean that you ought
to've come, Hatcher. I never thought of it. You were busy every minute
being as unselfishly kind as you could be. Please don't think I meant
that. Please don't!"

"Well, I hope not, Dorcy. I was trying to be some help. I thought I--"

"But indeed you were," she said. "You couldn't have been more. I just
wanted to tell you-- You see, nobody knows it yet except Mother and Mary
and his father and mother; but I thought I ought to tell anybody that's
as old a friend of mine as you are, Hatcher."

"Yes, Dorcy. You want me to know you're going to be married to Pink--to
Erdvynn Wilson."

"Yes. It'll be some time toward the end of month after next, Hatcher,
and of course very quietly with nobody here but Mother, and his mother
and father, and Mary; so don't tell anybody, please."

"No, of course I won't."

She looked up again, this time with a fluttering little shyness, and she
smiled. "I know I could never make anybody understand what it's meant to
me to find out how dear he is, Hatcher. I know you couldn't believe--"

"Yes, I could, Dorcy. I do."

"No." She shook her head, still smiling. "I want you and Mary to like
him terribly much; but there's only one person that'll ever really know
how dear he is, and that's me. I like it that way; I think I'd rather be
the only one. Do you know when I began to understand how I really felt
about him?"

"When you began-- No, I don't."

"It was after we'd been to your house to supper last Sunday night,
Hatcher. He brought me home and then came in, and we talked until Mother
and--and Harry--got back from their party. I don't think Erdvynn and I'd
ever had a really serious talk before, Hatcher, and when I saw what
depths there were in his nature that I hadn't known were there, why,
almost all at once something bright and beautiful seemed to open up
before me. It--it all practically happened then, Hatcher."

"Then?" Hatcher said. "Last Sunday night?"

"Yes, practically. Of course all these deeply thoughtful things he's
done ever since then have made me all the surer; but, yes, it really
happened then, Hatcher, last Sunday night--before our terrible loss came
upon Mother and me. I wish I'd told Father that night before he went
upstairs; it would have pleased him--he always liked Erdvynn. Next day
it was too late, and so now I--" Dorcy rose suddenly and gave Hatcher
her hand. "I must stop myself from thinking of all these things I wish
I'd done, and stop Mother. I'm afraid I'd better be going up to her now.
It was dear of you to come, Hatcher. You won't forget about liking and
appreciating Erdvynn the way I want you to, will you?"

Hatcher said that indeed he wouldn't, and, with a humming head, went
forth to outdoors.




CHAPTER XXVIII


Through his college years, and here at home, he'd been
a rather frequent patron of the movies, as his aunt had intimated; but
his interest in them was often skeptical. Ada, trying to sting him, had
been mistaken when she'd insisted that his intelligence was so feeble as
to be influenced to believe that love in life follows the pattern of
love in the cinema. Hatcher hadn't even wished it to do so; he'd spoken
the truth when he'd said that he didn't "expect anything", and he knew
that he could never have been in love with Dorcy Aldrich. Had she ever
been in love with him--really? he asked, as he left her house, putting
the inquiry to his recent impressions. Well, if she ever had--a
little--she wasn't any more. There'd been a telling difference in her,
just now, whenever she'd spoken the name "Erdvynn". She'd worn an
unmistakable look and there'd been a confessional softness in her voice
when she talked of Pinkie Wilson's tender thoughtfulness of her, and of
those depths in Pinkie's nature.

Hatcher knew that she wished him to feel the contrast between his
devotion to the telephone and Pinkie's tactful ardor for herself. In
spite of her denials she'd made it clear that she found Hatcher
wanting--derelict in things he should have done. Evidently she blamed
him, her friend, for not having done what Pinkie, her accepted lover,
did. Yet which was harder: sticking it out at a telephone for forty
hours or trotting upstairs to do a little soothing and petting now and
then? Hatcher didn't find himself blameworthy in this matter. Why, then,
the renewed sense of guiltiness, accompanied ridiculously by the feeling
that injustice was being done him? To feel guilty and at the same time
to be resenting injustice seemed as inconsistent as it did to be not in
love with a girl and yet finding something lacking in her because she'd
fallen in love with another man. Hatcher had this jumble of feelings and
was sure of only one thing: that he was as great a failure at love as he
was in everything else.

Having once more made this discovery, he began to mull over other
saliences in Dorcy's talk. She'd pressed the point that she'd become
"practically" engaged to Pinkie last Sunday night--before Harry died.
Hatcher comprehended her insistence;--naturally she wanted it understood
that she'd begun to care for Pinkie before she knew how useful being in
love with him might be. Eleanor Aldrich wouldn't be long in a "tiny
flat", and Pinkie'd have to be a generous son-in-law; but Hatcher
already knew that Dorcy wasn't a girl who'd marry "just for money", so
she needn't have pushed that point about Sunday night so hard--no, nor
have shown him so punitively why and how much she really did care for
Pinkie. Hatcher'd have believed her without all those comparisons.

A grim thought turned into a grimmer question. Dorcy had become
virtually engaged to Pinkie that night when Harry Aldrich came
home--came home with what he had in mind to do. Suppose Dorcy _had_ told
him that she'd just about made up her mind to be the wife of the richest
boy in town? Probably girls didn't often tell their parents so promptly
as that--but suppose Dorcy had? Evidently, Pinkie was one of the
possible salvations Harry'd hoped for--and it was another of the
touching things to remember about him that he'd never openly urged it
upon his daughter. If Dorcy'd told him that night, would it have saved
him--at the eleventh hour? It might have done so, alas! it might. Then
there were two things that could have saved Harry's life, if he'd known
them. If he'd known that his friend, Victor Linley, had twenty-two
thousand dollars, or if he'd known that Dorcy was going to marry Wilson,
Hatcher might have been walking away from the Aldriches' house, right
now, with the sound of Harry's piano and Harry's hearty baritone
following him.

Then Harry was uselessly dead. Worse than that, he was senselessly dead.
There was supposed to be some sort of Plan working out the destinies of
mankind, wasn't there? Something from on High was supposed to have an
eye on people, to be shaping their courses and seeing to it that right
and justice and mercy should prevail on earth; so Hatcher'd always
understood. He'd understood it a little vaguely, perhaps; but at least
he'd taken for granted a kind of symmetry in life, something suggestive
of Design and Law and Order. Now here was Harry Aldrich's death directly
contradicting any such possibility, making fantastic Hatcher's previous
conception of life as something probably governed. He'd long since
perceived, even at twenty-two, that expropriation of other people's
property doesn't inevitably bring on a punishment. "Thou shalt not
steal"--quite right; but Harry hadn't killed himself because he'd
stolen; he'd killed himself because he didn't know that Pinkie Wilson
would soon be his son-in-law or that Uncle Victor had twenty-two
thousand dollars. When you faced such a fact, how could you see any
Design? There couldn't be any. There was only senseless scrawl,
meaningless tangle; and the old suggestion that Nature disregards the
individual didn't untangle it.

No, and blind-ending love affairs and Harry's death weren't the only
examples Hatcher saw before him of a meandering purposelessness in life.
His cheek began to burn resentfully when he thought of one of Dorcy's
implications. Mrs. Aldrich and Dorcy'd "always had the idea that Harry
was the one who brought most of the business into the firm";
nevertheless, they had accepted Frederic Ide's explanation of the
littleness of their inheritance, so Dorcy said--then she'd paused and
added the word "_still_" in a tone that sharpened in significance as it
continued to repeat itself in Hatcher's aural memory.

The gist of it seemed to be that the widow and the daughter, knowing
themselves to be inexperienced in business, couldn't help doubting that
they were getting an entirely square deal from the dead man's partner.
Harry's defalcation was being covered up by Frederic Ide at hard cost to
himself--and to Uncle Victor!--and, in addition to this, as Hatcher'd
just gathered, his father was going to try to wring from his exhausted
resources what would be really a pension for Mrs. Aldrich. It would have
to be small, naturally; but under the circumstances the act was one of
almost heroic generosity. The reward for it was that the beneficiaries
had some doubt of the benefactor's scrupulousness. They even weren't
quite sure of Uncle Victor's! He was living in the old Linley house
partly on their account, and yet the two bereft women innocently
suspected that Victor, being a man, had endorsed his brother-in-law's
confusing explanations instead of seeing right done to the defenceless.

What seemed most crazily ironic in this patternless scrawl was that
nobody could ever tell Dorcy and her mother the truth. Hatcher didn't
believe in fairy godmothers or the romantic movies, and he no longer
even hoped that human affairs grooved neatly toward idealized sequels;
but it is of the essence of youth to cling to one lingering tenet of
romance: that for even the loneliest deeds of greatness involving
self-sacrifice there shall be at last, in the end, at least a little
appreciation. The mangled hero, one of thousands, should know in his
dying vision that he is to be the Unknown Soldier, and it is inevitable
that Jean Valjean should receive in his death scene the remorseful
gratitude of Marius and Cosette. Noble deeds done in secret ought to
remain secret, of course--but not absolutely forever. In the midst of
other disturbances of equilibrium, Hatcher was seriously jolted by his
comprehension that Eleanor Aldrich and Dorcy would really never know
what his father and his uncle had done for them. Instead, to and through
their dying days, the two ladies would think it possible that in their
saddest hours they hadn't been treated quite honorably in money matters
by Frederic Ide and Victor Linley.

                 *        *        *        *        *

...To Hatcher, upon consideration, this seemed particularly hard on
Uncle Victor who already began to look as if his new lodging gave him
pretty tough going. "His face is so white!" Harriet Ide said to her son
and her husband, some hours after Hatcher returned from his call of
condolence. Uncle Victor had just departed with a false briskness,
having dined with his relatives. "His complexion's always been naturally
pale, but not like this--and there's that drawn look about his mouth
when he doesn't think anybody's noticing. Oh, it does seem as if we've
_got_ to do something!"

"Something?" Hatcher rose from an easy chair. "Mother, we'll do plenty."

"How?" she asked, meaning that the best intended answer would be
foolish.

"All right," Hatcher said. "I know how it sounds to you. Just the boy's
drivel, of course! But before I've half finished the job I'll prove to
you and Father that it's simple horse sense."

"What is?" Frederic Ide asked, and looked up at his son.

"Fresh paint!" Hatcher said. He spoke out roundly; for, as he stood
before his parents, with something like defiance in his attitude, his
spirit found the vigor that was in him because it had been in the
resolute stock from which he sprang. That heritage made some things
impossible: he couldn't sit softly and accept the sacrifice an older and
better man had made; he could no longer sit softly and accept anything.
"Anyhow, for once in my life," he said, "I'm going to say my say."

His mother only sighed; but his father's eyes, fixed upon him, were
thoughtful. "Yes; go ahead, Hatcher. What about paint?"

"Yes, sir. When I tried to get Mother cheered up over Uncle Victor, I
think the effect on you both was to make you believe I was just too
flitter-minded a colt to understand how it would keep hurting him to
live down there with everything that's past hitting him in the face with
no let-up at all. I told Mother it didn't matter much where a person
just sleeps, and I don't think it does _if_ you sleep; but Uncle Victor
looks as if he hadn't been doing much of that. Well, we aren't just
going to lie down while he takes the rap for us. I bought a used bicycle
yesterday for eleven dollars and--"

"You did?" Ide asked. "What about paint?"

"Just this, sir. With a bicycle I can probably do my collecting in a day
and a half. That'll give me the rest of my week to put in working at
painting and renovating along with the others I've got at it. Father,
you still own over thirty vacant houses in this town. Except a couple or
so I've had two little squads working on, those houses are all run down
and sooty, the color of smoke inside and out; and every one of 'em's
mortgaged. They ought to be bringing in at the very least a thousand
dollars a month, net; and they could. They can do it pretty soon, at
that."

"They couldn't!" Mrs. Ide looked at her husband. "They couldn't, could
they, Frederic?"

"I don't know," he said. "Hatcher has ideas about fresh paint. I'd never
have thought it worth while trying--against the smoke--but there are
some signs that the city's over-housing slack's about taken up, and
maybe--"

"Ask old Barley!" Hatcher said. "Ask him how long it took to rent the
first of those houses we renovated. I've got _him_ convinced, anyhow.
Father, if we can put it over, couldn't half the new rents go to paying
off the old loans and the other half to Uncle Victor till we've settled
with him? Father, if you can possibly stand just the few small bills for
paint and a few people's low wages just a few more weeks, why,
absolutely I'll prove to you--"

"Prove! That's quite a word, Hatcher."

"Yes, sir; and I'm pretty dumb; but I swear I know at least one small
fact in this world. It's that if you show people a bright, clean-looking
thing among a lot of horrible dirty ones, they'll go after it."

Ide was serious. "You think so?"

"_Think_ so?" Hatcher cried. "Why, we can show this city how that whole
dead section could be redeemed! Of course you've got to use the right
colors or you'll be repainting all the time; but we've been working that
out and I think we've got it, because there's a special kind of brownish
gray with a special green trim-- But you'd have to see 'em to understand
what I mean. If you could just somehow spare the time to go down there
with me and take a look at what we've already done--"

"Yes, Hatcher. Monday morning on our way downtown."

"Good boy!" Hatcher exclaimed, and, this point gained, dared to go
further. He began to put before his father plans (suggested by the more
ingenious of the two colored women) for modernizing kitchens at
virtually no expense. Harriet Ide, foreseeing nothing but good money
cast after bad, went desolately away, leaving the father and son
absorbed.

...During the talk with his father Hatcher's concentration upon
business was complete; and afterward, for an hour or so, his mind was an
orderly arrangement of facts, theoretical figures and computations. He
was determined to keep it so, to think of nothing other than his work;
but there came the intrusion he couldn't longer exclude: the pursuing
vision of Sarah Florian. Sometimes he'd been able to keep Sarah away by
thinking of Uncle Victor; but she persistently returned into the air
about him, always with an increasing loveliness. In spite of everything
he knew of her, her spirit seemed to hover, whispering, "Oh you of
little faith!" This was nonsense, he knew; yet found no means to banish
it. Her glow--her ineffable glow--fell warmly upon him, and in the
darkly shining eyes that glanced from anywhere he saw a strange,
beckoning tenderness.

What would he feel when he saw her beautiful actual self again? He
didn't know; but his heart beat faster when he thought of a meeting.
What would she do, and what would he? Would she only look at him while
he'd say, "I'm older now, Sarah Florian. I know you and at last I know
myself, too. I think you're rather terrible; but with that glow of yours
upon me I know that never, never can I escape!" Or would she, when they
met, murmur the one word, "Forgive?" and would he say, "I know you now,
Sarah--yes, too thoroughly!--but I'm not like my uncle; I seem to be sap
enough to love you, anyhow."

                 *        *        *        *        *

Such was not the outcome. Though Mrs. Florian was close at hand when he
next saw her, neither of them said anything at all to the other. She got
out of her car, in crowded downtown, to go into a shop, just as Hatcher
was passing on his way to take up a providential bargain in paint. When
she'd stepped to the pavement she turned her head to speak over her
shoulder to a companion, a darkly harmonious young man who remained in
the car. "Five minutes at the longest!" she said in her well-remembered
voice. The dark young man, protesting "I can't bear it!" leaned toward
her with humorous coquetry. He was known to the pedestrian, a
contemporary, and in their boyhood had been looked upon as too esthetic.
"My gosh!" Hatcher thought. "Sissy Pittinger! Running around with that
gigolo already! Oh, my gosh, listen to _me_ calling _him_ a gigolo!"

Sarah crossed the pavement to the glass doors of the shop, saw Hatcher,
gave him an absent nod, and swept gracefully from his sight.

Hatcher had the impression that he'd never before seen her in a really
good light. Something seemed to have happened to her face--a little as
something had seemed to happen to Dorcy's when he first saw Sarah's,
only more seemed now to have happened to Sarah's. There wasn't an
ineffable glow; there wasn't any glow at all. It hadn't departed because
she was driving now with Sissy Pittinger; it would have been absent had
she been alone.

What Hatcher felt was a dismal amazement. Whence had come that glow and
where had it gone? If Andrea del Sarto had ever been able to look with a
matter-of-fact scrutiny upon his sordid wife, he might have discovered
that her loveliness had been all in his paint and his mind's eye.
Hatcher, in this mystifying moment, asking himself where Sarah's looks
had gone, was like a traveler who returns to view a scene, once an
enchantment, and stands wondering why its beauty's lost, since the
landscape itself is the same.

Hatcher walked on, startled by the untrustworthiness of sound eyes. If
Sarah Florian had actually changed, the alteration was pretty sudden!
No, it seemed to be the fact that if she didn't look interested in you,
and if you noticed details, especially around under the chin, her face
was almost--almost kind of oldish.

Before he'd gone two blocks he found that with the eyes of his
imagination he could again see the glowing picture of her that had been
in his head, and at the same time he could place beside it the Sarah
Florian he'd just passed on the street. The contrast wasn't short of
appalling; it proved to him that some tricky picture-painting talent of
his own had betrayed him into being in love with the colored glow that
it had made at the "you-and-I" bidding of Sarah Florian. She would bid
no more; and the illusory enrichment wouldn't clothe her if she did.

Hatcher felt injuredly vacant; the whole world seemed just a vacancy.

He thought of big drinks he seemed to need; and a handsome girl,
approaching among the sidewalk crowd, gave him fixedly a responsive
gaze. "Sorry!" Hatcher's expression said to her, as she almost stopped
and he went on. His pace had slackened after he met Mrs. Florian; now he
made it brisker.

"Nothing on earth's any use," he thought. "But I've got to hurry.
Somebody else might get hold of that paint."




CHAPTER XXIX


The alteration in Victor Linley, being actual and not
merely the disglamoring of his nephew's eye, caused warrantable
apprehension among his kinsfolk and friends. He grew thinner rapidly,
began to look a little withered, and he leaned more dependently upon his
malacca stick, which he now often found a necessary prop even indoors.
When persuaded forth from his grotesque lodging he was as dainty in his
dress as ever, listened to ladies, as always, with the same responsive
attention he'd shown in his regretted boarding-house when Mr. Boerl or
any of the other boarders became animatedly vocal. At his sister's he
sometimes made merry. Mrs. Upham had arrived with her two homely little
boys, whose unruliness was a trial to the decorous young Frances; and
with these three Uncle Victor could become even frolicsome. At such
times, his sisters laughed too; but afterward when he'd limped away,
waving his stick and calling jocose farewells to small pursuers, the two
ladies were all the sadder. They knew his liveliness for braggadocio and
heard the mourner's undertone within his laughter.

The ghosts in his old house wore upon him, for he more and more keenly
lived with them. "What a dear place it's been!" his dying sister, Nancy,
said to him whenever he came up the dirty outer steps, and always, as he
climbed the broad stairs within, he heard from below the rippling
accompaniment of his mother's piano to the thin sound of a dead 'cello,
his father's. Nights in Victor's room at Mrs. Schapp's were long.

...Martyrdoms, however, of their own nature cannot last forever: the
torture stops or the victim's heart does; and Mr. Linley proved to be a
mere transient of three months' tenancy at Mrs. Schapp's. With the end
of February he became the lessee of two rooms in an apartment house far
out on Sheridan Avenue where the smoke grew a little thinner. Moreover,
architecture was feebly alive again. Victor had a country-house to build
for the lady who'd given him Locksie--or perhaps this timely idea should
be defined as a commission from her husband. In prospect, too, were
several smaller possibilities.

"I'm afraid you feel just out of Purgatory," his nephew said to him, the
day after the removal to the apartment house. Victor, among
packing-cases, was placing old books upon new shelves when Hatcher came
in. "You told me once that we learn mainly through misery. If that's
true, you must be one of the wisest men in the world."

"No. I've never been miserable enough to become very wise, Hatcher; and
there's a paradox to be added. It's that to the mind of an entirely wise
person there'd be no such thing as misery."

"Not even when he's in it?" Hatcher said, and with his handkerchief
removed some drops of melted snow from his sleeve. "I see. Here's March
not bringing us spring but a snow that's just put me in misery because I
can't use my bicycle. You mean if I were entirely wise I'd be singing
something about it's not snowing snow, it's snowing violets. I don't see
it; but I'll snow a cheque on you." He brought forth a notebook and from
between two of its pages removed a cheque, which he placed upon his
uncle's drawing-table. "Father told me to deliver it on my way home.
Don't go buying big cars, though; it's only another soupon."

Victor put the cheque away. "Your soupons have begun to come in pretty
regularly."

"Yes--begun a bit late," Hatcher said, and, having made a scribble in
the notebook, returned it to his pocket and glanced at a blueprint
thumbtacked to the drawing-table. "That's your big house for Mrs.
Azbrouck--I mean for Mr. and Mrs. Azbrouck--is it?"

"Yes."

"Good job it happened," Hatcher said. "Got you out of Mrs. Schapp's."

"No, it didn't, Hatcher; commissions aren't paid that early in the
transaction. I began to see that I'd made a good investment with Ide and
Aldrich, not a reckless loan. It's these soupons from you and your
father that got me out."

"From Father, not from me," Hatcher said; nevertheless, he looked
pleased. Then his gaze returned to the blueprint, absently. "They like
size, all right, don't they? I understand there's to be another chteau
put up out that way--about a mile farther along Silver Creek."

"Yes; so I've heard, Hatcher. A competitor of mine has that job--if you
mean the house for the Erdvynn Wilsons. Young Erdvynn likes glass, I'm
told; wants windows that 'bring the landscape indoors'."

"Does he?" Hatcher still looked at the blueprint. "I haven't happened to
see the bride and groom since they got back from their trip last month;
but Amy Murray tells me it's one of these cases of complete bliss that
you read about. Almost embarrassing to spectators, Amy reports. I
suppose you haven't happened to run into 'em?"

"Yes, I've seen them," Victor said. "Eleanor asked me to dinner and--"

Hatcher's brief laughter interrupted him. "They ask you to dinner, do
they?--but not to do their new house for 'em. Who was there?"

"Only the bride and groom and Lennie Aldrich and her mother and Eleanor
and I. Amy's right, I should say. I've seldom seen more bridely radiance
and devotion."

Hatcher looked up, sardonic. "Radiance? What a mess it all is!"

"Not at all, Hatcher. It's not uncommon for marriage to have that effect
upon brides who've previously seemed rather matter-of-fact."

"Radiance!" Hatcher said again. "Was Mrs. Aldrich radiant, too?"

"Eleanor? No, not radiant. She's still looking rather shattered; but
she's able to be pleased with her daughter's happiness, of course."

"That's what I mean," Hatcher explained. "Dorcy radiantly blissful and
her mother pleased! Harry Aldrich ruining himself for 'em, then killing
himself, and now, no more than a few months later--radiance and
pleasure!"

"It doesn't mean heartlessness, Hatcher."

"Oh, I know! It's good Sunday-school to prattle that if we devote our
lives to mourning, the business of the world won't go on; but I say it's
a mess. One reason is that this 'business of the world' you hear so much
about _doesn't_ go on. Just look at it! All winter I've had more than
half a mind to get to Finland if I could--I ski and I can shoot
some--but I didn't dare leave the job here. Then there are the British
bombers dropping leaflets over Germany, and a sit-down strike on the
Maginot line and the Siegfried line, and this nation all in a stew over
who can promise the most money the most economically to the most voters
and go on crippling the country and get to be nominated for President!
Do you still claim there's any sense to anything, Uncle Victor?"

"Yes." There was a fire in the room, though the day wasn't Sunday, and
Mr. Linley took from a packing-case an old cushion, placed it before the
hearth for Locksie. The golden spaniel, fatter than when Hatcher'd first
met him, accepted this attention complacently. "Yes, I believe there's
some sense to things in spite of my suspicion that the 'sit-down strike'
along the Maginot line mayn't last much longer, Hatcher. In fact, it may
end in explosion and great despairs."

"Fine!" Hatcher said. "Great killings and then peace filled with great
bankruptcies! Mother didn't get me to church much after I was fifteen;
but I had a lingering sort of impression that there was direction and
shaping to the universe. Of course the last vestiges of _that_ notion
are all out of me!"

"They are, Nephew? Why?"

"Oh, look at the whole business! War liable to be forced on everybody in
the world--and, for a detail, what about Harry Aldrich? Wouldn't the way
he died convince anybody that if there are such things as divine shaping
and direction, they're entirely too slipshod to consider?"

"No; not anybody," the uncle said. "In a moment of stress you asked me
what I thought life is. Of course I still haven't an idea, Hatcher. I
suspect, though, that's because I have no understanding of the nature of
death. We don't know what's really been happening to Harry Aldrich or to
the victims of war. We assume that death is the worst of calamities; but
scientifically we don't know, and from the mystic view it may be very
pleasant. Combatants inflict it but are unaware of what they inflict.
The materialist thought is that the slain--and Harry Aldrich--have
finished with pain. So we comfort ourselves without knowledge."

Hatcher stared, surprised. "But that's terrible! Uncle Victor, I thought
you thought--"

"Yes; I do," Victor said. "Knowledge of death might give us better
comfort or none; that's still beyond us. Another reason for our
befuddlement is that the present day is always confusing to the human
mind. We can't read the present--not while we're in it--and so of course
we're never sure of even the immediate future; but the past is different
because we can make at least a stab at reading it. History appears to
show a colossal kind of shaping and direction, doesn't it? So we suspect
that the shaping's here even now. Probably nothing's haphazard but only
seems so."

"Just a good old optimist, after all!" Hatcher regarded him indulgently.
"I think the reason you're that way, Uncle Victor, is because, if the
dope's right, it's in childhood that we get our lasting impressions, and
yours was spent in the Golden Age."

Mr. Linley gave this idea a wistful consideration. "Maybe so. The last
of horse-and-buggy days may have been the last of the Golden Age and so
my boyhood had the last glimpse of it. No wars to frighten us, no
depressions that weren't readily met, no 'ideologies', no slaughter from
gas engines, no universal jitters. At least so it seems looking back
upon it, and I'm sorry that youth now can't know what it was to live in
the kind and easy world that gave me my constitutional hopefulness.
Golden Age or not, it's gone like a breath, and yet youth may be all the
stronger in these harder times. The upward spiral we infer from the past
is discernible. I mean the spiral man ascends as he grows wiser through
adversity."

Hatcher's laughter was again brief. "You do stick to it! Tough luck
makes wisdom and so, being wiser, we've ascended no matter how rotten we
feel! Maybe I oughtn't to cite my individual case against you; but I
don't seem to experience any upward spiral under my feet."

"You don't?"

"I do not."

Victor laughed, too. "At least your wisdom's ascended, hasn't it? Don't
you think you know more than you did when you came home last September?"

"Ouch!" Color rose in Hatcher's cheeks. "Got me there! I didn't know
enough to be let wander about loose. I was one of these boy Hamlets full
of cursed spite because somebody else had got the world out of joint. I
couldn't see any way to set it right; all I could do was to blame your
generation for it. All wrong--it was too great a compliment to pay to
any one generation--but why'd I find it necessary to blame you? Why do
we always have to blame somebody for whatever goes wrong with us? Just
trying to relieve ourselves by kicking the furniture we run into in the
dark? Oh, yes; I was a little fool all right."

"No, you weren't."

"I was. I wonder you didn't slap my ears down." Hatcher went to a window
and looked out into the whirl of March snow. It fell so thickly that the
buildings across the street had no perspective, seemed to be only planes
of white-dotted gray. "I was so busy being a sap used by a dame because
I was your nephew I didn't know what I was doing. One day I overheard
our colored cook saying that some time I'd turn out to be the 'man of
the family.' I swelled up like a poisoned toad--and shortly afterward
I'd have been the simple ruin of the family if you hadn't stopped me.
You say I'm not a little fool? Where do you get your information?"

"To mention two sources only: from your father and from my own acute
gratitude."

"Your what?"

"Gratitude," said Uncle Victor. "Your harassed father couldn't pay me
these rescuing soupons if it weren't for an idea of yours, Hatcher--an
idea your father tells me that you've made effective with great and
persistent energy."

"My fresh paint, you mean?" Hatcher, still at the window, spoke
ruefully. "Looks like a case of big-talk-little-do on my part. I bragged
about it. Going to net a thousand dollars a month right away quick! I
thought by this time it'd be sure to. Gilp Murray's a star economist and
better than I am at keeping brightened up houses bright; but it costs
money not to take a licking from the smoke. I doubt if the net'll run
over six hundred a month by next summer." He sighed. "The firm's looking
up a bit on its other business, though; and I think Father gets anyhow a
glimpse now and then of some faraway time when it might be in the clear
again."

"Yes. He tells me you're a great encouragement to him."

"What?" Hatcher turned quickly to stare suspiciously at his uncle.
"Always got to have your little joke!"

"No, not this time. It's a good symptom that you think so, though; and
it's another that you look upon what you've done--your fresh paint--with
discontent. Hatcher, you're all right."

Hatcher couldn't think himself, or anything, "all right". His uncle
certainly wasn't. Mr. Linley had resumed the work with his books; and,
as he now stooped for one, the snowy light from the windows fell
revealingly upon his head, showing it grayer than when he'd gone to live
in the old Linley house. He was shorter of breath than he had been, and
careful not to speak while he was lifting one of the heavier books. The
old Linley house had thus hurt his uncle, Hatcher thought, because of a
confusion in human movements and emotions that had sent him there; and
the hurt had been forced upon him by a number of things that were
morally good and ought to have been harmless--and by one thing that was
at least legal. The good things that should have been harmless were
Frederic Ide's complete trust in his partner, the partner's love for his
wife, Uncle Victor's selflessness and great affection for his relatives
and friends; and the thing that was at least legal was Mrs. Florian's
right to her own property--a right that had created the necessity to
appease her. Looking down at his stooped uncle's graying head, and
hearing him pant a little, Hatcher thought that all these mixed-up
things had produced, among other unprofitable effects, the visible one
of a vengeance. Sarah Florian had avenged herself upon her old lover;
but hadn't the satisfaction of knowing it. She would never know it. So
even that wasn't of any use to anybody.

The whole business--"this life"--was a rigmarole that offered no
pointers to its meaning because it hadn't any. The nephew's mind again
refused the uncle's "upward spiral".

"What do you mean, I'm all right?" Hatcher asked. "Kidding or coddling?"

"Neither," his uncle said. "If you leave it to your father and your
mother and me, I think we'll go further than your cook did. Hatcher, if
you could bear it, I think we'd call you the pride of the family."

Hatcher, red again, was embarrassed--not so much by the compliment as by
the genuine view that his uncle might be falling into a dotage. Mr.
Linley had spoken quietly, seeming to mean what he said, and, after
speaking, bent to take another book from a packing-case. "Is Freddie
Upham over his cold yet?" he asked casually.

"Yes, he is, and Mother said to be sure and remind you that you're
expected for dinner this evening." Hatcher went to the outer door; but
paused beside it. "The children are looking forward to your being there.
I have rather a feud with them, and if you don't mind I hope you won't
say anything to them about who's the pride of the family."

"No, I won't, Hatcher. I think they already know it."

"Good _night_!" Hatcher said with loud emphasis, and went out, not
knowing what to make of such an uncle.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Left alone, Mr. Linley, pausing to rest now and then, slowly completed
the filling of his shelves; then he glanced at his watch and at the
white tumult whirling against his darkened windows. He decided to allow
himself and Locksie a taxicab. It was as well that he did so; otherwise
he might not have reached Butternut Lane that evening. What had begun as
a quiet last snow of the winter was become a blizzard and the cab
floundered threateningly at times; but it finally broke through the
drifts in the Ides' driveway and roaringly delivered its passenger.

He was admitted by three shouting children previously silhouetted
against a front window. Frances's voice could be more piercing than that
of either of the two Upham boys. "If you'll let me be the first to hold
Locksie, Uncle Victor, I'll whisper you what Hatcher said when Mother
made him wear Father's goloshes before she let him go out to go to the
dinner-dance he's gone to. He told Mother it wasn't a hundred yards away
and he wouldn't; but she made him, and he said it while he was putting
'em on. Can I hold Locksie all the time you play Who-Got-Murdered with
us? These Uphams always get too rough with him; he barks. After dinner
can I take him upstairs with me a while when they make me go to bed?"

After dinner, when bedtime came, all three children made trouble; but
Frances had her way and staggeringly carried the fat spaniel up with
her, to be surrendered within ten minutes whether she was asleep or not.
Mrs. Upham ascended to hear her sons' compelled evening prayers; and
Frederic Ide worked in his library. Aunt Ada had not appeared, being
confined to her room by the cold little Freddie'd sneezed to her; and
Victor was alone for a time with his sister Harriet.

"I'm sorry Hatcher misses this evening, or any evening, with you," she
said. "It always brightens him up when you're here and he seems to need
that so, poor boy!"

"Does he?" her brother asked. "Why?"

"I'm afraid because--because maybe he takes his feeling about that woman
next door more seriously than we thought he would. Sometimes I'm even
afraid he still has it."

"Still in love with Sarah, you think, Harriet?"

"No; don't look amused," she said. "Of course we have to admit that he
was pretty foolish about her."

"No," Victor said. "I don't think so. He was pretty fine about her."

"You feel so? Chivalrously idealizing her, I suppose you mean. They tell
me she's in Mexico, and I hear most people think she won't come back.
I'll be glad if she never does."

"But if she does I don't see how it would matter."

"It would to me. I couldn't bear ever to see her again. I--" Mrs. Ide
paused. Her color heightened and her voice was small. "I'm afraid you
feel that at one time I was willing to sacrifice you--when she wanted
you back."

"I doubt if she ever knew what she wanted," Victor said, and added, "Or
ever will. My dear sister, don't reproach yourself for that desperate
last little hope to save Fred. Simultaneously you can dismiss your
imagining that the boy's still in love."

"Then why is he so down?"

"Up and down," Victor explained. "He's only down on himself for a
while--at intervals. Thinks he made a public spectacle of himself over
poor Sarah; and at his age a young man can't hold that view of his own
recent behavior without developing intermittent pessimism. At twenty-two
pessimism about yourself includes pessimism about everything else; but
Hatcher's gloom isn't so deep-seated as it appears to be."

"What? But, Victor, if you listened as much as I do to what he thinks
and--"

"Yes, I'd hear what he often believes he thinks," Victor said.
"Hatcher's inner being doesn't reside in that. Hatcher is what he does;
we know him from his acts. He came home to be bewildered by a city in
Depression and a half-dead business that had no place for him. There
seemed to be no place at all for him anywhere. He's made one for himself
out of nothing. He's doing more: he's taking his friend Gilpin Murray up
with him and he's already made employment for others--ten, I believe, he
has working now. Hatcher and his kind are the best we've got, and our
best have always been equal to anything. They still are and ever shall
be."

Hatcher's mother, in spite of her persistent worry, couldn't help but be
pleased. "If you think so well of him, Victor, why don't you tell him
so? He needs--"

"I did," Victor said. "This afternoon I told him all he could stand. I
told him he was the pride of the family. If he could have borne it, or
could have listened without thinking me insane, I'd have said more. I'd
have told him he was the hope of the country. In fact, I'd have told him
he's the hope of the world."

"Would you, Victor?" Mrs. Ide was now flushed with pleasure, and yet a
distress clung to her. "It's lovely your having such a splendid idea of
him; but if it's true, why does he have to go through all this long
despondency?"

"Long?" her brother repeated, and smiled. "Did you ever know anything,
Harriet, that lasted very long?"

                 *        *        *        *        *

A howl of wind in the chimney made her murmured response inaudible. Mrs.
Upham came in to report that the rattling of windows had kept her from
hearing her sons' prayers properly; she suspected curtailment, and the
blizzard was becoming a fury. Victor said that if Locksie could now be
restored to him they'd best be leaving for home while the way was still
passable; but both of his sisters protested determinedly that he was
crazy even to dream of such a thing. He must stay the night, they
insisted--a little "doubling up" would easily make room for him--and,
after trying to telephone for a taxicab and finding that the wires were
down, he consented.

...With March whimsicality the storm stopped abruptly, soon after
midnight; and the cessation of outrageous noise wakened Victor to a
stillness in which the gentle snoring of his spaniel, on a cushioned
chair, was the only sound. The room, Harriet's, had two front windows
and another in the side wall toward the "Lash place". This third window,
and its shade, Victor had left partly raised; and through the aperture
his opening eyes beheld the sudden peace of clear moonlight. They saw,
too, the long stone house next door.

Shapes were all simple in the white of the moonlight on the white of the
snow. The elaborate house of Sarah Florian was staringly plain in this
clarity but did not stare; for windows and doors were solidly boarded,
and the patch of stained-glass in the nearer wing hid its colors behind
thick wood. The thoroughness of the closure of that house suggested no
return to it. "Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore!'" Mr. Linley whispered
sleepily to his pillow, sighed faintly to the glittering night, and
again slumbered.

                 *        *        *        *        *

When he woke in the morning a regularly intermittent sound of scraping
prevented a contemplated renewal of his slumber. It came from outdoors;
somebody was diligently shoveling snow from the long path to the front
gate, and this was somewhat surprising, as old Berry was surely
incapable of energy so brisk or so early. After a time, impelled by
curiosity, Mr. Linley got up, went to one of the two windows that faced
toward Butternut Lane, and raised the shade. Below him, roughly dressed,
two figures rhythmically bowed and straightened as they tossed great
shovelfuls of snow from the deeply covered brick path.

"Don't care if they wake up the whole neighborhood," Victor grumbled.
"Barely daylight!"

The shovelers were Hatcher and Gilpin Murray, and the watcher at the
window accurately comprehended their idea. They'd danced all night; and
then, thinking the hour too late for bed and desiring to keep awake till
breakfast-time, had devoted themselves to laborious service no matter
whom it might inconvenience: mutually helpful, they'd clear their front
paths.

They appeared to become dissatisfied with their method; for they stopped
work, and consulted. Then, walking side by side, they began to push the
shovels powerfully before them, after the manner of snowplows, as they
moved toward the distant gate. When they had gone the greater part of
the way they stopped again; but not to consult or to rest. What stopped
them were two hurled snowballs, one of which skilfully dispersed itself
upon Gilpin Murray's chin. Mr. Linley's eye, following the line of
flight, discovered lurking in the shrubberies along the street another
pair of figures--Amy Murray and Mary Gilpin, dressed as if for skiing
and provided with further snowballs held in the crooks of their left
arms. They, too, couldn't merely go to bed after dancing all night.

The shovelers didn't waste time making snowballs; they filled their
shovels heapingly with snow and strode toward the bushes from which the
two snowball-throwers courageously advanced, hurling as they came. In a
moment they stood whitened in cascades of white; the shovels were
dropped and the snow fight was on.

Instantly disorderly, it was not a struggle between the sexes or between
two parties; everyone was for himself. Gilpin Murray put his shoulders
into a hard push; Hatcher went over backward into the snow. Gilpin fled;
the two girls chased and threw him, and Hatcher, on his feet again,
overtook and fought all three of them. Beyond, in Butternut Lane, a
fifth person came into view--a fat and ruddy youth in evening black,
except for the silk scarf that sheltered his throat and upper linen.
With difficulty his dancing-shoes were making their way through the
highway drifts, and his recent history was plain: he'd been the last
guest at the party, possibly found somewhere and awakened during the
closing of the festal house. Disregarding his attire and delighted to
find friends still up, he immediately turned from the road and put
himself into the midst of the snow fight.

Through the dark trunks of trees across the way a clear day came
breaking; long stripes of blazing gold light and vaporous blue shadow
appeared upon the snow. Rosy-faced and shouting with laughter, the five
young people frolicked fantastically in that jubilant light. They
scuffled, fought, leaped, fell, fled and pursued. One, feet in air,
tried to walk on his hands, and did till overthrown. Then he rose
capering--young Hatcher Ide. The five rolled one another in the snow,
or, standing to it, sent fountains of white into the gold air to fall
upon the others suffocatingly. Then they'd shout, leap and run again.
They were like wild figures in a snow ballet, and they were like
children who'd never seen snow before.

To the mind of the pale gentleman at the window they were
children--children just now, though they'd begin their day's work when
the hour came.

"So it goes," Uncle Victor thought. "For them, there's nothing else in
the world but themselves and sunrise."






[End of The Heritage of Hatcher Ide, by Booth Tarkington]
