CHAPTER II

In the very air and life that prevailed in the office of the _Torch_ there was, as one may suppose, something strange, and at first repugnant to Dick Lancaster. To one of his bringing up, his earnest intentions, his thirst for real things, it seemed that all this was very like a gaudy sham, a bubble of pretense, of surface prattle. He could scarcely believe that the flippancy of these men was serious with them; their talk, their point of view astonished and horrified him. If they were to be believed, life was nothing but a skimming of more or less uneven surfaces; the only thing to be tried for was pleasure, and there was no moral line at all. And then again he rebuked himself for being, perhaps, a homesick young idiot, overgiven to morbid speculation. That was not what he had come to town for; he was going to do some good work and make a name and fame for himself.

He had found, very early in his career, that in order to get upon the first steps of the ladder he must become an illustrator. If he had had the means that would have enabled him to wait through studio-work, a trip to Paris, and the dreary years ere orders came from dealers, he would have clung to paint at any risk; but he saw himself forced to earn some bread-and-butter even while he waited for his dreams to come true. So, with some slight reluctance at first, to be sure, but afterwards with all his energy, he applied himself to pen and ink work. In course of time, as we have seen, he became the staff-artist of the Torch, He was making a very fair living for so young a man, and he made a great many acquaintances. And life every day showed him a new aspect.

One of the men he had so far taken the greatest liking to was Belden, the artist, who had, to all intents and purposes, put him into his present position with the _Torch_, Belden, whose name was Daniel Grant Belden, but whom his friends chaffingly called, on account of the similarity of the initials, Dante Gabriel, was one of the most happy-go-lucky individuals that ever breathed. His mania for art books kept him more or less hard-up; yet he undoubtedly had one of the finest collections, in that sort, in town. He got orders for work from a publisher; he took the manuscript that he was to illustrate home with him; he kept it three weeks; then, without having read it, he returned it saying he was too busy to attempt the commission. And if ever there was one in this present day of ours, he was a Bohemian. The peculiar part of it was that in addition to being a Bohemian by instinct, he was one by intention. He read Henri Murger with avidity, and thought of him always. On the street he was a curious object; his overcoat was a trifle shiny, and his hat was always an old, or at least, a misused one; his trousers were too tight at the knees; his boots rarely polished. He usually walked with a long, quick stride; and a long, peculiar cigar, of the sort the Wheeling people call "stogy," was almost always in his mouth. You rarely saw him on the Elevated except with an armful of books and papers. He would come home at one in the morning and sit down at his wide drawing table and work until dawn. Then, with not much more than his coat hastily thrown off, he would fling himself on the couch and be fast asleep in an instant. Often, too, he would go fast to sleep while his pen was traveling over the paper; in ten minutes, or sometimes half an hour, he would wake up and continue the stroke that had been interrupted; his pen would have not spilled a single drop. He did all his own cooking, and marvelous were the meals that resulted. He liked nothing better than to fill his rooms with a number of choice, congenial souls. They would talk art-shop for hours, or listen to music; he knew a great many clever young fellows who were gifted in playing the piano, the flute or the violin; and while his own musical tastes were barbaric, and called, chiefly, for the spirited rendition of darky-minstrelsies, he gave the rest of his company the freedom of their choice, also, and sat patiently through the most beautiful of operatic strains. Sunday was the day singled out more especially for those pleasant little "evenings" at Belden's flat.

Dick Lancaster had been asked up to these evenings a great many times before he ever went. For long, he could not make up his mind to it; in spite of all the thousand and one laxities that he saw in the daily life around him, to devote oneself to anything in the nature of sheer pleasure, on Sunday, still seemed to him a decided mis-step.

But one day, toward the beginning of winter, Belden, who had been in to call on his young protégée at the _Torch_ office, said to him,

"Look here, Dick, why don't you come up some Sunday evening and join our gang? Goodness, you can't afford to be as straight-laced as all that, in this town. Besides, we don't do anything that's against the law and the prophets, you know. We talk a little shop, and some man reads something, perhaps, and Stanley plays a thing or two on the violin. Then we go out and help ourselves to whatever I may happen to have in the larder. And then you go home, or you bunk up there, and where's the harm done? Look at it sensibly, my boy; we are all slaves in the same bondage, in this town, and Sunday is our one off-day; you don't mean to say we're heathens and creatures of the devil if we seek the sweetest rest we can on that day? To some men, rest means church; to me and most of the men you know, it means relaxation, and relaxation means recreation. The others get their music in church, I get mine at home. Now, Dick, say you'll come up next Sunday."

And Dick, looking at Belden as if to make out whether that artist were an emissary of the Evil One or merely a man of the present day, coughed a little, and then said, rather sheepishly, "Very well, I'll come--to please you, Belden." He felt, the next minute, as if he had slipped and fallen; he grew a little faint; he thought he could hear the sound of the church bells as they used to come singing over the meadows in Lincolnville; he saw himself and his mother sitting side by side in the old pew, listening to the pleasant voice of Mr. Fairly droning out his prayer; then he shook himself together and blushed at his fancies. Belden had gone already, but Dick felt as if he would run after him and tell him, "No, no, I cannot, must not come!" He ran to the door; the corridor was empty; Belden was half way down the next block by this time. Then he solaced himself with the thought, "Surely it can be no great harm after all--besides, I have promised!"

He bent down over the drawing-board once more, but he could no longer chain his thoughts to the work before him. They flew round and round in a curious circling way about this new life that he had become a part of. It was, he was forced to admit to himself, not as beautiful a thing as he had expected; but it was certainly novel, and it interested him immensely, it kept his curiosity excited, it touched his senses. As he began to consider that quiet country village that he had left, out yonder on the plains, and this busy beehive of a metropolis, he came, also, to consider the men he was beginning to know. He leaned back in the chair, smiling a little. The office was nearly empty at this time; it was during the noon hour, and Dick was alone in the outer office. He passed over, in his thoughts, the men that he was thrown with in the _Torch_ office. There was Wooton himself: tall, thin, with a face that was all profile--a wonderfully pure profile--with a mouth almost too small for a man, a nose that bent a little like those of the Cæsars. Dick did not know, yet, what to make of Wooton. The man had a wonderful charm; he could talk most entertainingly, most logically and he had some curiously interesting theories. There was a sort of _laisser-aller_ negligence in his manner; his manners were admirable, and there was some occult fascination about him that one could scarcely define. As Dick considered him, he remembered that on several occasions, he had listened to Wooton's dissertations on subjects that otherwise would have offended him, merely because the man's charm of person and speech were so alluring. As to whether it was genuine or a mere veneer, well, how could one tell as soon as this? Time, which tells so many things, would doubtless tell that too.

Then Vanstruther! He had a blonde beard that came to a point, and he always wore glasses. For the rest, Dick knew but little of him save what he had heard. Vanstruther "did" the more important of the society events for the _Torch_, and himself moved and had his nightly being in the smartest circles in town. The peculiar part of it was that he was married, and had several children; barring the hour or so a day that he spent in the office of the _Torch_ he was the most devoted husband and father in the world, and spent the most of his day at home, where in his little study-room he sat in front of a typewriter stand and manufactured at lightning speed--what do you suppose?--dime novels. This was, among the man's intimates, a more or less open secret; but to the world at large, and particularly the world of society, he was known merely as a delightful person, socially, and something of a flaneur, intellectually.

As for Stanley--the man's full name was Laurence Stanley--Dick had somehow taken a dislike to him. He knew little of him except that he was a professional do-nothing, who lived off his wife's money, speculated occasionally, and appeared a great deal in society. No one ever saw his wife, who was an invalid. He talked with inveterate cynicism; it was this that made him repugnant to young Lancaster. He had a sneer and a cigarette always with him, and Dick hated both.

The tip-tapping of a light foot-step over the oil-cloth brought Dick back from the land of day-dreams. It was rather a pretty woman that stood before him, and she was gowned in a manner that even with his inexperience he knew to be distinctly up-to-date, and that he certainly admitted as attractive from an artistic standpoint. She looked past him into the inner office, lifted her eyebrows a trifle and inquired: "Is Mr. Wooton not in?"

"Not just now," responded Dick, getting up, "but he will be back in a very little while. If you would care to wait--" He took hold of the back of a revolving chair that stood close by.

"No," she declared, "I only had a minute. Will you tell him Mrs. Stewart was up? Or, stay; I'll write him a line."

Dick gave her some letterheads, and pen and ink; she sat down at his desk and began writing, with a good deal of scratching and scraping. "There," she said when she had addressed the envelope, "If you will please give him that as soon as he comes in. Thank you. Do you do this?" She pointed with one gloved finger to the drawing he had been busy on. He bowed silently. She looked at him with a quick, comprehensive glance, smiled a trifle, and swept out of the door.

"So that is Mrs. Annie McCallum Stewart!" was Dick's first mental exclamation, "well, she's certainly not an ordinary woman. Wonder if I'll ever get to know her?"

With which speculation he turned to his work. When Wooton returned, and had read the note, he broke into a low chuckle, "That's like her! Just like her. What do you suppose she says?"

Dick was the only other person in the outer office, so he was forced to take the question as addressed to himself. "I have no idea," he declared.

"She says she is getting awfully tired of her present lot of young men, and wants me, for goodness sake, to bring down some one different, and bring him soon. She says she is tired to death of the man who has lived and seen and heard everything, and she is dying for a man who is as like Pierrot as two peas!" Wooton tore the letter up mechanically, and put the pieces into the waste-basket. "Well," he went on, "I wish I could--" he stopped and looked at Dick, breaking out the next instant into a broad grin, "Jupiter!" he added, "you're just the man! Do you want to join the noble army of martyrs in ordinary to the extraordinary Annie? She'll do you lots of good; she'll be a pocket education in the philosophy of today, and she'll put you through all manner of interesting paces. Seriously, she's a woman who can do a man a lot of good, socially. And society never does a man much harm; it broadens him, and gives him finish. Now, you're just the sort of youth she'll like immensely; and yet she'll soon find out that you've heard about her and her ways. Never mind; she won't like you any the worse for that; she's too much a woman of the world. What do you think? The next time I go down to tea at her house I'll take you along, eh? All you've got to do is to be clever and amusing and different to the others; Mrs. Stewart is like the rest of society in that she demands something of the people she takes up, but she doesn't demand such impossibilities. I'll write and tell her I've got the very man!" He went on into the inner office, before Dick had time to say anything in reply. And, to tell the truth, the idea rather interested him. He had seen her, and had felt interested in her; he had heard so much about her; and now he was going to meet her! As to being clever and amusing, he thought he was likely to fail miserably; but he might, unconsciously perhaps, succeed in being what Wooten called "different."

Just then Wooton gave a sudden exclamation. "This is Wednesday, isn't it? Well, that is her afternoon. You'd better shut up your desk for today; go up to your rooms and get an artistic twirl or two to your locks, and then come down to the smoking-room of the Cosmopolitan Club about quarter to four; I'll be there waiting for you. Then we'll go on down to Mrs. Stewart's together."