Chapter 8

A question that he now asked himself was: "Do women snore?" And: "If people cannot travel in drawing-rooms, why do they travel at all?" The safety of his nine hundred dollars worried him; he knelt up to look in the inside pocket of his jacket, and bumped his head, a dull, solid bump. Pale golden stars, shaped like the enlarged pictures of snow-flakes, streamed across his consciousness. But the money was safe.

Already his nostrils were irritable with cinders; he attempted to blow them clear, and failed. He was terribly thirsty. He wished very much to smoke. Whichever way he turned, the frogs on the uppers of his pajamas made painful holes in him. He woke at last with two coarse blankets wrapped firmly about his head and shoulders and the rest of him half-naked, gritty with cinders, and as cold as a well curb. Through the ventilators (tightly closed) daylight was struggling with gas-light. The car smelled of stale steam and man. The car wheels played a headachy tune to the metre of the Phoebe-Snow-upon-the-road-of-anthracite verses. David cursed Phoebe Snow, and determined that if ever God vouchsafed him a honey-moon it should be upon the clean, fresh ocean.

There had been wistaria in Aiken. There was snow in New York. There was a hurricane in Chicago. But in the smoker bound West there was a fine old gentleman in a blue-serge suit and white spats who took a fancy to David, just when David had about come to the conclusion that nothing in the world looked friendly except suicide.

If David had learned nothing else from Miss Tennant, he had learned to speak the truth. "Any employer that I am ever to have," he resolved, "shall know all that there is to be known about me. I shall not try to create the usual impression of a young man seeking his fortune in the West purely for amusement." And so, when the preliminaries of smoking-room acquaintance had been made--the cigar offered and refused, and one's reasons for or against smoking plainly stated--David was offered (and accepted) the opportunity to tell the story of his life.

David shook his head at a brilliantly labelled cigar eight inches long.

"I love to smoke," he said, "but I've promised not to."

"Better habit than liquor," suggested the old gentleman in the white spats.

"I've promised not to drink."

"Men who don't smoke and who don't drink," said the old gentleman, "usually spend their time running after the girls. My name is Uriah Grey."

"Mine is David Larkin," said David, and he smiled cheerfully, "and I've promised not to make love."

"What--never?" exclaimed Mr. Grey.

"Not until I have a right to," said David.

Mr. Grey drew three brightly bound volumes from between his leg and the arm of his chair, and intimated that he was about to make them a subject of remark.

"I love stories," he said, "and in the hope of a story I paid a dollar and a half for each of three novels. This one tells you how to prepare rotten meat for the market. This one tells you when and where to find your neighbor's wife without being caught. And in this one a noble young Chicagoan describes the life of society persons in the effete East."

"Whom he does not know from Adam," said David.

"Whom he does not distinguish from Adam," corrected Mr. Grey. "But I was thinking that I am disappointed in my appetite for stories, and that just now you made a most enticing beginning as--'I, Roger Slyweather of Slyweather Hall, Blankshire, England, having at the age of twenty-two or thereabouts made solemn promise neither to smoke nor to drink, nor to make love, did set forth upon a blustering day in April....'"

"Oh," said David, "if it's my story you want, I don't mind a bit. It will chasten me to tell it, and you can stop me the minute you are bored."

And then, slip by slip and bet by bet, he told his story, withholding only the sex of that dear friend who had loaned him the five thousand dollars, and to whom he had bound himself by promises.

"Well," said Mr. Grey, when David had finished, "I don't know your holding-out powers, Larkin, but you do certainly speak the truth without mincing."

"That," said David, "is a promise I have made to myself in admiration of and emulation of my friend. But I have had my little lesson, and I shall keep the other promises until I have made good."

"And then?" Mr. Grey beamed.

"Then," said David, "I shall smoke and I shall make love."

"But no liquor."

David laughed.

"I have a secret clause in my pledge," said he; "it is not to touch liquor except on the personal invitation of my future father-in-law, whoever he may be." But he had Dolly Tennant's father in his mind, and the joke seemed good to him.

"Well," said Mr. Grey, "I don't know as I'd go into apple-growing. You haven't got enough capital."

"But," said David, "I intend to begin at the bottom and work up."

"When I was a youngster," said Mr. Grey, "I began at the bottom of an apple tree and worked my way to the top. There I found a wasp's nest. Then I fell and broke both arms. That was a lesson to me. Don't go up for your pile, my boy. Go down. Go down into the beautiful earth, and take out the precious metals."

"Good Heavens!" exclaimed David; "you're _the_ Mr. Grey of Denver."

"I have a car hitched on to this train," said the magnate; "I'd be very glad of your company at dinner--seven-thirty. It's not every young man that I'd invite. But seeing that you're under bond not to make love until you've made good, I can see no objection to introducing you to my granddaughter."

"Grandpa," said Miss Violet Grey, who was sixteen, spoiled, and exquisite, "make that poor boy stop off at Denver, and do something for him."

"Since when," said her grandfather, "have you been so down on apples, miss?"

"Oh," said she with an approving shudder, "all good women fear them--like so much poison."

"But," said Mr. Grey (Mr. "Iron Grey," some called him), "if I take this young fellow up, it won't be to put him down in a drawing-room, but in a hole a thousand feet deep, or thereabouts."

"And when he comes out," said she, "I shall have returned from being finished in Europe."

"Don't know what there is so attractive about these young Eastern ne'er-do-weels," said the old gentleman, "but this one has got a certain something...."

"It's his inimitable truthfulness," said she.

"Not to me," said her grandfather, "so much as the way he says _w_ instead of _r_ and at the same time gives the impression of having the makings of a man in him...."

"Oh," she said, "make him, grandpa, do!"

"And if I make him?" The old gentleman smiled provokingly.

"Why," said she, "then I'll break him."

"Or," said her grandfather, who was used to her sudden fancies and subsequent disenchantments, "or else you'll shake him."

Then he pulled her ears for her and sent her to bed.

In one matter David was, from the beginning of his new career, firmly resolved. He would in no case write Miss Tennant of his hopes and fears. If he was to be promoted she was not to hear of it until after the fact; and she should not be troubled with the sordid details of his savings-bank account. As to fears, very great at first, these dwindled, became atrophied, and were consumed in the fire of work from the moment when that work changed from a daily nuisance to a daily miracle, at once the exercise and the reward of intelligence. His work, really light at first, seemed stupendous to him because he did not understand it. As his understanding grew, he was given heavier work, and behold! it seemed more light. He discovered that great books had been written upon every phase of bringing forth metal from the great mother earth; and he snatched from long days of toil time for more toil, and burned his lamp into the night, so that he might add theory to practice.

I should like to say that David's swift upward career owed thanks entirely to his own good habits, newly discovered gifts for mining engineering, and industry; but a strict regard for the truth prevents. Upon his own resources and talents he must have succeeded in the end; but his success was the swifter for the interest, and presently affection, that Uriah Grey himself contributed toward it. In short, David's chances came to him as soon as he was strong enough to handle them, and were even created on purpose for him; whereas, if he had had no one behind him, he must have had to wait interminably for them. But the main point, of course, is that, as soon as he began to understand what was required of him, he began to make good.

His field work ended about the time that Miss Violet Grey returned from Europe "completely finished and done up," as she put it herself, and he became a fixture of growing importance in Mr. Grey's main offices in Denver and a thrill in Denver society. His baby _w_'s instead of rolling _r_'s thrilled the ladies; his good habits coupled with his manliness and success thrilled the men.

"He doesn't drink," said one.

"He doesn't smoke," said another.

"He doesn't bet," said a third.

"He can look the saints in the face," said a fourth; and a fifth, looking up, thumped upon a bell that would summon a waiter, and with emphasis said:

"And we _like_ to have him around!"

Among the youngest and most enthusiastic men it even became the habit to copy David in certain things. He was responsible for a small wave of reform in Denver, as he had once been in Aiken; but for the opposite cause. Little dialogues like the following might frequently be heard in the clubs:

"Have a drink, Billy?"

"Thanks; I don't drink."

"Cigar, Sam?"

"Thanks (with a moan); don't smoke."

"Betcherfivedollars, Ned."

"Sorry, old man; I don't bet."

Or, in a lowered voice:

"Say, let's drop round to----"

"I've (chillingly) cut out all that sort of thing."

Platonic friendships became the rage. David himself, as leader, maintained a dozen such, chiefest of which was with the newly finished Miss Grey. At first her very soul revolted against a friendship of this sort. She was lovely, and she knew it; with lovely clothes she made herself even lovelier, and she knew this, too. She was young, and she rejoiced in it. And she had always been a spoiled darling, and she wished to be made much of, to cause a dozen hearts to beat in the breast where but one beat before, to be followed, waited on, adored, bowed down to, and worshipped. She wished yellow-flowering jealousy to sprout in David's heart instead of the calm and loyal friendliness to which alone the soil seemed adapted. She knew that he often wrote letters to a Miss Tennant; and she would have liked very much to have this Miss Tennant in her power, and to have scalped her there and then.

This was only at first, when she merely fancied David rather more than other young men. But a time came when her fancy was stronger for him than that; and then it seemed to her that even his platonic friendship was worth more than all the great passions of history rolled into one. Then from the character of that spoiled young lady were wiped clean away, as the sponge wipes marks from a slate, vanity, whims, temper, tantrums, thoughtlessness, and arrogance, and in their places appeared the opposites. She sought out hard spots in people's lives and made them soft; sympathy and gentleness radiated from her; thoughtfulness and steadfastness.

Her grandfather, who had been reading Ibsen, remarked to himself: "It may be artistically and dramatically inexcusable for the ingenue suddenly to become the heroine--but _I_ like it. As to the cause----" and the old gentleman rested in his deep chair till far into the night, twiddling his thumbs and thinking long thoughts. Finally, frowning and troubled, he rose and went off to his bed.

"Is it," thought he, "because he gave his word not to make love until he had made good--or is it because he really doesn't give a damn about poor little Vi? If it's the first reason, why he's absolved from that promise, because he has made good, and every day he's making better. But if it's the second reason, why then this world is a wicked, dreary place. Poor little Vi--poor little Vi ... only two things in the whole universe that she can't get--the moon, and David--the moon, and David----"

About noon the next day, David requested speech with his chief.

"Well?" said Uriah. The old man looked worn and feeble. He had had a sorrowful night.

"I haven't had a vacation in a year," said David. "Will you give me three weeks, sir?"

"Want to go back East and pay off your obligations?"

David nodded.

"I have the money and interest in hand," said he.

Mr. Grey smiled.

"I suppose you'll come back smoking like a chimney, drinking like a fish, betting like a book-maker, and keeping a whole chorus in picture-hats."

"I think I'll not even smoke," said David. "About a month ago the last traces of hankering left me, and I feel like a free man at last."

"But you'll be making love right and left," said Mr. Grey cheerfully, but with a shrewd eye upon the young man's expression of face.

David looked grave and troubled. He appeared to be turning over difficult matters in his mind. Then he smiled gayly.

"At least I shall be free to make love if I want to."

"Nonsense," said Mr. Grey. "People don't make love because they want to. They do it because they have to."

Again David looked troubled, and a little sad, perhaps.

"True," said he. And he walked meditatively back to his own desk, took up a pen, meditated for a long time, and then wrote:

Best friend that any man ever had in the world! I shall be in Aiken on the twenty-fifth, bringing with me that which I owe, and can pay, and deeply conscious of that deeper debt that I owe, but never can hope to pay. But I will do what I can. I will not now take back the promises I gave, unless you wish; I will not do anything that you do not wish. And if all the service and devotion that is in me for the rest of time seem worth having to you, they are yours. But you know that.

DAVID.

This, looking white, tired, and austere, he reread, folded, enveloped, stamped, sealed, and addressed to Miss Tennant.

Neither the hand which Miss Tennant laid on his, nor the cigarette which she lighted for him, completely mollified Mr. Billy McAllen. He was no longer young enough to dance with pleasure to a maiden's whims. The experience of dancing from New York to Newport and back, and over the deep ocean and back, and up and down Europe and back with the late Mrs. McAllen--now Mrs. Jimmie Greenleaf--had sufficed. He would walk to the altar any day with Miss Tennant, but he would not dance.

"You have so many secrets with yourself," he complained, "and I'm so very reasonable."

"True, Billy," said Miss Tennant. "But if I put up with your secrets, you should put up with mine."

"I have none," said he, "unless you are rudely referring to the fact that I gave my wife such grounds for divorce as every gentleman must be prepared to give to a lady who has tired of him. I might have contracted a pleasant liaison; but I didn't. I merely drove up and down Piccadilly with a notorious woman until the courts were sufficiently scandalized. You know that."

"But is it nothing," she said, "to have me feel this way toward you?" And she leaned and rested her lovely cheek against his.

"At least, Dolly," said he, more gently, "announce our engagement, and marry me inside of six months. I've been patient for eighteen. It would have been easy if you had given a good reason...."

"My reason," said she, "will be in Aiken to-morrow."

"You speak with such assurance," said he, smiling, "that I feel sure your reason is not travelling by the Southern. And you'll tell me the reason to-morrow?"

She shook her head.

"Not to-morrow, Billy--now."

He made no comment, fearing that she might seize upon any as a pretext for putting him off. But he slipped an arm around her waist.

"Tighter if you like," she said. "I don't mind. My reason, Billy, is a young man. Don't let your arm slacken that way. I don't see any one or anything beyond you in any direction in this world. You know that. There is nothing in the expression 'a young man' to turn you suddenly cold toward me. Don't be a goose.... Not so tight." They laughed happily. "I will even tell you his name," she resumed--"David Larkin; and I was a little gone on him, and he was over ears with me. You weren't in Aiken the year he was. Well, he misbehaved something dreadful, Billy; betted himself into a deep, deep hole, and tried to float himself out. I took him in hand, loaned him money, and took his solemn word that he would not even make love until he had paid me back. There was no real understanding between us, only----"

"Only?" McAllen was troubled.

"Only I think he couldn't have changed suddenly from a little fool into a man if _he_ hadn't felt that there was an understanding. And his letters, one every week, confirm that; though he's very careful, because of his promise, not to make love in them.... You see, he's been working his head off--there's no way out of it, Billy--for me.... If you hadn't crossed my humble path I think I should have possessed enough sentiment for David to have been--the reward."

"But there _was_ no understanding."

"No. Not in so many words. But at the last talk we had together he was humble and pathetic and rather manly, and I did a very foolish thing."

"What?"

"Oh," she said with a blush, "I sat still."

"Let me blot it out," said McAllen, drawing her very close.

"But I can only remember up to seven," said she, "and I am afraid that nothing can blot them out as far as David is concerned. He will come to-morrow as sure that I have been faithful to him as that he has been faithful to me.... It's all very dreadful.... He will pay me back the money, and the interest; and then I shall give him back the promises that he gave, and then he will make love to me...."

She sighed, and said that the thought of the pickle she had got herself into made her temples ache. McAllen kissed them for her.

"But why," he said, "when you got to care for me, didn't you let this young man learn gradually in your letters to him that--that it was all off?"

"I was afraid, don't you see," said she, "that if the incentive was suddenly taken away from him--he might go to pieces. And I was fond of him, and I am proud to think that he has made good for my sake, and the letters.... Oh, Billy, it's a dreadful mess. My letters to him have been rather warm, I am afraid."

"Damn!" said McAllen.

"Damn!" said Miss Tennant.

"If he would have gone to pieces before this," said McAllen, "why not now?--after you tell him, I mean."

"Why not?" said she dismally. "But if he does, Billy, I can only be dreadfully sorry. I'm certainly not going to wreck our happiness just to keep him on the war-path."

"But you'll not be weak, Dolly?"

"How!--weak?"

"He'll be very sad and miserable--you won't be carried away? You won't, upon the impulse of the moment, feel that it is your duty to go on saving him?... If that should happen, Dolly, _I_ should go to pieces."

"Must I tell him," she said, "that I never really cared? He will think me such a--a liar. And I'm not a liar, Billy, am I? I'm just unlucky."

"I don't believe," said he tenderly, "that you ever told a story in your whole sweet life."

"Oh," she cried, "I _do_ love you when you say things like that to me.... Let's not talk about horrid things any more, and mistakes, and bugbears.... If we're going to show up at the golf club tea.... It's Mrs. Carrol's to-day and we promised her to come."

"Oh," said McAllen, "we need not start for ten minutes.... When will you marry me?"

"In May," she said.

"_Good_ girl," said he.

"Billy," she said presently, "it was _all_ the first Mrs. Billy's fault--wasn't it?"

"No, dear," said he, "it wasn't. It's never all of anybody's fault. Do you care?"

"No."

"Are you afraid?"

"No."

"Do you love me?"

"Yes."

"How much?"

"So much," and she made the gesture that a baby makes when you ask, "How big's the baby?"

"What's your name?"

"Dolly."

"Whose girl are you?"

"I'm Billy McAllen's girl."

"All of you?"

She grew very serious in a moment.

"All of me, Billy--all that is straight in me, all that is crooked, all that is white, all that is black...."

But he would not be serious.

"How about this hand? Is that mine?"

"Yours."

He kissed it.

"This cheek?"

"Yours."

"And this?"

"Yours."

"These eyes?"

"Both yours."

He closed them, first one, then the other.

Then a kind of trembling seized him, so that it was evident in his speech.

"This mouth, Dolly?"

"Mumm."

And so, as the romantic school has it, "the long day dragged slowly on."

David may have thought it pure chance that he should find Dolly Tennant alone. But it was not. She had given the matter not a little strategy and arrangement. Why, however, in view of her relations with McAllen, she should have made herself as attractive as possible to the eye is for other women to say.

It was to be April in a few days, and March was going out like a fiery dragon. The long, broad shadow of the terrace awning helped to darken the Tennants' drawing-room, and Venetian blinds, half-drawn, made a kind of cool dusk, in which it came natural to speak in a lowered voice, and to move quietly, as if some one were sick in the house. Miss Tennant sat very low, with her hands clasped over her knees; a brocade and Irish lace work-bag spilled its contents at her feet. She wore a twig of tea olive in her dress so that the whole room smelled of ripe peaches. She had never looked lovelier or more desirable.

"David!" she exclaimed. Her tone at once expressed delight at seeing him, and was an apology for remaining languidly seated. And she looked him over in a critical, maternal way.

"If you hadn't sent in your name," she said, "I should never have known you. You stand taller and broader, David. You filled the door-way. But you're not really much bigger, now that I look at you. It's your character that has grown.... I'm _so_ proud of you."

David was very pale. It may have been from his long journey. But he at least did not know, because he said that he didn't when she asked him.

"And now," she said, "you must tell me all that you haven't written."

"Not quite yet," said David. "There is first a little matter of business...."

"Oh--" she protested.

But David counted out his debt to her methodically, with the accrued interest.

"Put it in my work-bag," she said.

"Did you ever expect to see it again?"

"Yes, David."

"Thank you," he said.

"But I," she said, "I, too, have things of yours to return."

"Of mine?" He lifted his eyebrows expectantly.

She waved a hand, white and clean as a cherry blossom, toward a claw-footed table on which stood decanters, ice, soda, cigarettes, cigars, and matches.

"Your collateral," she said.

"Oh," said David. "But I have decided not to be a backslider."

"I know," she said. "But in business--as a matter of form."

"Oh," said David, "if it's a matter of form, it must be complied with."

He stepped to the table, smiling charmingly, and poured from the nearest decanter into a glass, added ice and soda, and lifting the mixture touched it to his lips, and murmured, "To you."

Then he put a cigarette in his mouth, and, after drawing the one breath that served to light it, flicked it, with perfect accuracy, half across the room and into the fireplace.

Still smiling, he walked slowly toward Miss Tennant, who was really excited to know what he would do next.

"Betcher two cents it snows to-morrow," said he.

"Done with you, David," she took him up merrily. And after that a painful silence came over them. David set his jaws.

"I gave you one more promise," he said. "Is that, too, returned?"

"Of course," she said, "all the promises you gave are herewith returned."

"Then I may make love?" he asked very gently.

She did not answer for some moments, and then, steeling herself, for she thought that she must hurt him:

"Yes, David," she said slowly, "you may--as a matter of form."