Chapter 14

I almost jumped, but it was only a memory, helped on by my vivid fancy. I had tried to picture the peaceful pastoral life, but all that responded was the echo of that distant summons. Jessica, however, was explaining that we would come--soon, very soon--next week--yes, Tuesday, of course. Jessica subsequently inquired of me, with the strong resentment of the person who is in the wrong, how I expected her to get us out of it. It was something that had to be done. Obviously, she said, it was one of those things to do and have done with.

She discoursed languidly about Katrina in the interval between the promise and the visit.

"Well! Of course she's well," drawled Jessica. "She's the kind that wouldn't know it if she wasn't well. For the rest, she's phlegmatic, has no aspirations, and evidently no sensitiveness. All she asks is to wait on that man and his children, and from our glimpse of Hans we can safely surmise that he is still gratifying that simple aspiration. Heavens! don't let's talk about it! It's too horrible!"

Tuesday came, and we made our second visit to Katrina's--fourteen years to a month from the time of our first. Again the weather was perfect, but the years and professional cares had done their fatal work, and our lagging spirits refused to respond to the jocund call of the day. Again we approached, with an absurd shrinking, the bleak old house. The bleak old house was not there; nay, it was there, but transformed. It was painted red. Blossoming vines clambered over it; French windows descended to meet its wide verandas; striped awnings sheltered its rooms from the July sun. The lawns, sloping down to a close-clipped hedge, were green and velvety. The iron dog was gone. A great hammock swung in the corner of the veranda, and in it tumbled a fat, pink child and a kitten. The fat child proved that all was not a dream. It was Katrina reborn--the Katrina of that first day in school, twenty years and more ago. Rather unsteadily we walked up the gravel path, rather uncertainly we rang the bell. A white-capped maid ushered us in. Yes, Frau von Heller was at home and expecting the ladies. Would the ladies be gracious enough to enter? The ladies would. The ladies entered.

The partition between two of the rooms had been taken down and the entire floor made over. There was a wide hall, with a great living-room at the right. As we approached it we heard the gurgle of a baby's laugh, Katrina's answering ripple, and the murmur of a bass voice buzzing like a cheerful bumblebee. Our footsteps were deadened by the thick carpet, and our entrance did not disturb for a moment the pleasing family tableau on which we gazed. The professor was standing with his baby in his arms, his profile toward the door, facing his wife, who was laughing up at him. The infant had grasped a handful of his father's wavy gray hair and was making an earnest and gratifyingly successful effort to drag it out by the roots. Von Heller's face, certainly ten years younger than when we saw it last, was alight with pride in this precocious offspring. Seeing us, he tossed the baby on his shoulder, holding it there with one accustomed arm, and came to meet us, his wife close by his side. They reached us together, but it was the professor who gave us our welcome. This time he needed no introduction.

"My wife's friends, Miss Lawrence and Miss Gifford, is it not?" He smiled, extending his big hand to each of us in turn, and giving our hands a grip the cordiality of which made us wince. "It is a pleasure. But you will excuse this young man, is it not?" He lowered the baby to his breast as he spoke, while his wife fell upon our necks in hospitable greeting. "He has no manners, this young man," added the father, sadly, when Katrina had thus expressed her rapture in our arrival. "He would yell if I put him down, and he has lungs--ach, but he has lungs!"

He busied himself drawing forth chairs for us, apparently quite unhampered by his small burden. We contemplated the baby and said fitting things. He had cheeks like beefsteaks and eyes that stuck out of his head with what appeared to be joyful interest in his surroundings Katrina exclaimed over a sudden discovery:

"But you haven't taken off your hats!" she cried. "Hans, give the baby to Gretchen and take my friends' wraps and hats up to the guest-room. I don't want Miss Lawrence to climb stairs."

The professor obediently summoned the nurse, dropped the baby, burdened himself with our garments, and ambled off with the tread of a peaceful elephant. When he returned, with the eager look of a retriever waiting for another stick, his wife promptly met his hopes.

"Arrange the easy-chair for Miss Lawrence, dear," she said, comfortably, "and put an ottoman under her feet. I want her to rest while she is here."

The professor did it, while we gazed. He also inquired feelingly as to the state of Jessica's health, showed a sympathy almost human in her replies, and placed a pillow behind her back. Subsequently, during that call, he did these things:

He answered the telephone half a dozen times, faithfully repeating to his wife the messages of her various friends, and carrying hers back, as she declined to be torn from us long enough to talk to them herself.

He rounded up the remaining two children and presented them for our inspection, straightening his son's shoulders with an experienced hand, and tying with consummate skill the bow on his little girl's hair.

He went to the stable and ordered the family carriage, that we might drive later in the afternoon.

He searched for and found the morning newspaper, thoughtlessly dropped in the waste-paper basket by the maid, and he read aloud to us a paragraph to which Katrina had referred chronicling the achievements of a classmate of ours. He brought to Katrina, at different times and from remote parts of the house, one white shawl, six photographs of the children, an essay written by their son, aged ten, two books, a bib to meet a sudden need of the baby, and Katrina's address-book. He did these things, and he did them cheerfully, and with the unmistakable ease of frequent repetition. I glanced at Jessica. The expressions of incredulity and amazement to which she had freely yielded during the first half-hour of our call had given way to a look of deep reflection.

Subsequently Katrina showed us her home. The room that had been the professor's study was now part of the large general living-room. The laboratory was now Katrina's personal sitting-room. Through its French windows we saw Katrina's garden blossoming like the rose. Jessica asked the present location of the professor's study and laboratory. She subsequently admitted to me that she should not have done it, but that to leave the house without the information would have been a physical and moral impossibility. Katrina looked at her vaguely, as one seeking to recall a fleeting moment of the long-dead past; but the professor responded with gratified alacrity.

"But you shall see them!" he cried. "Surely, yes;" and like a jovial school-boy he led us up to the third floor. There, indeed, was his study--a hall bedroom, much crowded by his desk and easy-chair; and off it, in a closet, were his beloved bottles and chemicals. I felt a throb of sympathy for the professor, but he was evidently blissfully ignorant of any reason for such a sentiment.

"The _Mutterchen_ and the babies need the rest," he smiled, complacently. "They must not climb too many stairs--no;" and he led the way back to comfort with unconsciousness of the painful contrast between past and present conditions that made Jessica and me carefully refrain from meeting each other's eyes. The children, when they espied him upon our return, uttered shrieks of joy. The baby sprang to his arms, the little boy swarmed up his leg. The picture of Professor von Heller as a perfectly trained husband and father was complete.

In silence, after our prolonged farewells, Jessica and I left the house. In silence we entered the trolley-car; in silence we rode home. At last I voiced a sudden suspicion.

"Do you think," I asked, hopefully, "that it was all a--a--well, that she persuaded him to do it just this once, for our edification?"

Jessica shook her head.

"I thought so, at first," she conceded, slowly. "That in itself would have been a miracle--one I'd never believe if I hadn't seen it with these eyes. But everything disproves the theory. Do you think she could have trained those children to advance and retreat like a Casino ballet? On the contrary, it's evident that they literally live on him. They've worn the creases off his trousers! Didn't you notice where the creases left off and the sliding-place of the babies began?"

I reluctantly admitted that this detail had escaped my observation. Jessica sighed.

"Incredible as it is," she summed up, "it's all true. It's the real thing."

"It opens quite a vista," I observed, thoughtfully. "If you would like Professor Adams's present address, I can give it to you. He is in the Adirondacks with his sister Mollie, and I had a letter from her this morning."

Jessica looked at me and urged me not to be vulgar. Her thoughtful expression did not lift.

"If Katrina can do _that_ with _that_ man," I murmured, reflectively, as we entered the house, "I really believe you could work wonders with Adams. He would probably do the cooking and marketing--"

"If you're so impressed," remarked Jessica, in incisive tones, "I wonder you don't yield to the prayers and tears of your editor man."

My reply made Jessica sink into a hall chair which was fortunately at hand.

"I am going to," I said, placidly. And I did.

Jessica's nature being less womanly and yielding than mine, her surrender was a matter of longer time. In the interval I quite forgot her unimportant affairs, being wholly absorbed in the really extraordinary values of my own. Two weeks before the reopening of college, my reformed yellow journalist, who had come West to spend his brief vacation with me, was seated by my side one evening studying the admirable effect of a ring he had just placed on my finger. It is singular how fraught with human interest such moments can be, and Edward and I failed to hear Jessica as she opened the door. She looked over our heads as she spoke to me, Her face was rather red, but her voice and manner expressed a degree of indifference which I am convinced no human being has ever really felt on any subject.

"Did you say that you could give me Mollie Adams's address?" asked Jessica.

XI

BART HARRINGTON, GENIUS

The assistant Sunday editor of the New York "Searchlight" was busy. This was not an unusual condition, but it frequently included unusually irritating features. His superior, Wilson, the Sunday editor, was a gentleman with a high brow and a large salary, who, having won a reputation as "a Napoleon of Journalism," had successfully cultivated a distaste for what he called "details." His specialty was the making of suggestions in editorial council, in cheery expectation that they would be carried out by his associates--an expectation so rarely realized that Mr. Wilson's visage had almost a habit of hurt wonder. "Details" continued to absorb the activity of the Sunday "Searchlight" office, and Maxwell, the assistant editor, attended to them all, murmuring bitterly against his chief as he labored.

On this special morning, moreover, he was receiving telephoned bulletins of the gradual disintegration of his biggest "special," scheduled for the coming Sunday edition, which was to tell with sympathetic amplitude of a beautiful French maiden who had drowned herself because some young man no longer loved her. The active reporter assigned to the case had telephoned first his discovery that the girl never had a lover, but cheerily suggested that this explained her suicide as well as the earlier theory, and wasn't so hackneyed, sagely adding that he would get the story anyhow. Subsequently he had rung up the office to report, with no slight disgust, that there was no suicide to explain, as the girl was not dead. She had merely gone to visit friends in the country, and the people in the house, missing her, had decided that the peaceful waters of the Hudson--

Maxwell hung up the receiver with a few crisp remarks addressed to space, and absorbed in awestruck silence by a young woman at the other end of the room who eased her type-writing labor by pausing to hear them fully. It was at this inauspicious moment that the card of Mr. Bart Harrington was brought in by an office boy. Maxwell surveyed it with strong disfavor.

"Who is he?" he asked, regarding the office boy severely.

The office boy avowed deprecatingly that he didn't know.

"He 'ain't never been here before," he submitted, in extenuation. "He says he's got a Sunday story."

Maxwell resigned himself to the waste of five minutes of precious time.

"Show 'm in," he commanded, testily. He sat down at his desk and turned toward the door an expression that reminded callers of the value of time and the brevity of life. Mr. Harrington, who had followed the boy through the door with conviction of these two things, dropped into a chair beside the editor's desk and surveyed Maxwell with a smile so young, so trustful, and withal so engaging, that unconsciously the stern features of that functionary relaxed. Nevertheless, he was not jarred out of his routine.

"Got your story with you, Mr. Harrington?" he asked, briskly, holding out his hand for the manuscript. "If you'll leave it, I'll read--" Harrington interrupted him with an impressive shake of his head. Then he settled back in his chair, crossed one leg comfortably over the other, plunged his hands deep in the pockets of his very shabby overcoat, and continued to regard the editor with his singularly boyish, dimpling smile. With one swift glance Maxwell took him in, from the broken boot on the foot he was gently swinging to and fro to the thick, curly locks on his handsome head. He had a complexion like a girl's, a dimple in each cheek, and a jaw like a bull-dog's. He was all of six feet tall, and his badly made clothes could not wholly conceal the perfect lines of his figure. He was about twenty-two years old, Maxwell decided, and, notwithstanding his dimples, his complexion, his youth, and his smile, he conveyed a vivid impression of masculinity and strength. He was wholly self-possessed, and his manner suggested that the business which had brought him where he was was of such urgent value and importance that the busy world itself might well hush its noisy activities long enough to hear of it. To his own great surprise, Maxwell waited until his caller was prepared to speak.

Harrington shook his head again slowly. Then he tapped his forehead with the second finger of his right hand.

"I have it heah," he said, slowly, referring evidently to the brow he had indicated, and speaking with a slight drawl and the strongly marked accent of the Southern mountaineer. "I 'lowed I wouldn't write it till I knew you-all wanted it. I'd like to tell it. Then if--"

Maxwell nodded, and glanced at his watch.

"Fire away," he said, elegantly. "But be as quick as you can, please. This is closing day and every minute counts."

Harrington smiled his ingenuous smile. It was a wistful smile--not a happy one--but it seemed, somehow, to illumine the office. Maxwell reflected irritably that there was something unusually likable about the fellow, but he wished he'd hurry up and get out. From force of habit his fingers grasped a blue pencil on his desk, and he began to fumble nervously among the manuscripts that lay before him. Harrington settled back more firmly in his chair, and the swinging of his torn boot was accelerated a trifle, but his voice when he spoke was full of quiet confidence.

"It's a good thing, suh," he said, "and I can tell you-all about it in a sentence. I'm goin' to commit suicide to-day, an' I agree to write the experience foh you, up to the last minute, if you-all will have me buried decently. I don't cayah to be shovelled into the Pottah's Field."

Maxwell dropped the blue pencil and wheeled to look at him. Then his face hardened.

"It's a pretty bad joke," he said, "or a bum sort of bid for charity. In either case you can't waste any more of my--"

But Harrington had sprung to his feet, his blond young face black with passion.

"Damn you!" he hissed, thrusting his head down close to the other's and clinching his fists. "How dahe you-all say I lie o' ask charity? I'd see you-all in hell befoah I'd take a cent of youah damned money. 'Ain't you got brains enough in youah haid to see that I've got to the end of mah rope?"

Maxwell was a clever man, educated in the world's university. He knew truth when he met it, and he knew human nature.

"Sit down," he said, quietly, "and tell me about it. I'm sorry I spoke as I did, but you must admit that your proposition was rather startling."

Harrington sat down, still breathing hard in his excitement, but evidently making a resolute effort to control himself.

"That's why I brought it heah," he said, answering the other's last words, "You-all like stahtlin' things, don't you? That's what you print. I'm offerin' you a straight bahgain, suh--a business proposition. If you-all don't want it, say so."

Maxwell smiled in his turn, but there was nothing ironic in the smile, nor in the look he turned on his fellow-man.

"It's not quite as simple as you seem to think," he explained, gently. "But tell me more about it. What led to this decision? What makes you think suicide is the only way out of your troubles? That's a part of the story, you know. Let me have that first, in a few words.

"It can be told, suh, in three," said the Southerner. His smile had returned. His voice was the cool voice of one who discussed abstract things. "I'm a failyuh. This wold 'ain't no use foh failyuhs. I've given myself all the time and chances I dese'ved, but I cayn't win out, so I've got to _git_ out. The's no one to ca'e. I've no kin, no ons dependin' on me in any way. As foh me, I'm ti'ed; life ain't wuth the effo't."

Maxwell regarded him.

"You don't look like a quitter," he said, thoughtfully.

The boy's face blazed again, but he kept his temper.

"To quit means to give somethin' up," he said, doggedly. "I ain't givin' anythin' up. I 'ain't got anythin' to give up. Life without wo'k, o' interest, o' fren's, o' ambition, o' love--that ain't livin'! If you-all evah tried it, you'd know. I 'ain't been so chee'ful in yeahs as I've been sence I made up my mind to 'quit,' as you-all call it."

"You've got health, haven't you?" demanded Maxwell. "Yes."

Maxwell brought his hand down on the desk with an air of finality.

"Then you've got everything. Do you mean to tell me that a fellow like you can't earn enough to support himself? If you do, you're talking rot."

Harrington took this with his wide, guileless grin. He was not offended now, for he felt the friendly interest and sympathy under the other's words. His voice when he replied was gentler.

"I ain't sayin' I can't keep body an' soul together, foh maybe I can," he conceded. "But I'm sayin' _that_ ain't _life_. I'm sayin' I ain't been fitted fo' wo'k. I 'ain't been educated. I've lived in a log-cabin down in the Virginia mountains all man life. I left thah six weeks ago, after mah mother died. She was the last of ouah family but me. I 'ain't never been to school. She taught me to read in the Bible, an' to write. I 'ain't nevah read anotheh book except the Bible and Mistah Shakespeah's poems, an' Mistah Pluta'ch's _Lives of Great Men_. I know them by hea't. I don't know whe' she got them o' whe' she came from. She was different from othah mountain women. I've been No'th six weeks, and I've tried ha'd to find a place whah I could fit in, but th' ain't none. Men must be trained fuh wo'k; I ain't trained. I cayn't go back, foh the's no one thah, an' I hate the mountains."

Maxwell's reply was brief and to the point.

"Think you could learn to run our elevator without killing us all?" he inquired. "Well, you've got to. You've been talking awful guff, you know. Now you're going to work, right here. We need a new man. The one we have has been drunk three days. You're going to run the elevator and get fifteen dollars a week to begin with. Here's your first week's salary in advance. I'll arrange about the job with the superintendent. I'll give you some books, and you can educate yourself. When you're above elevator work we'll give you something better. You'll probably have my job inside of a year," he ended, jocosely.

The hand of the mountaineer stretched out to him trembled as Maxwell grasped it.

"You ah the only white man I've found in the No'th," said the Southerner, breathlessly. "I'll make good, as they say up heah. But I don't know how I can thank you."

"Don't try," said Maxwell, brusquely. "Be here at eight in the morning. By nine there will be a few callers I may want you to throw down the shaft."

Thus began the connection between the _Searchlight_ and Bart Harrington, subsequently its most popular employe. Before the week was over all the reporters and most of the editors had casually sought from Maxwell some details concerning his protege, but had received few. Harrington was a new man, and he came from the Virginia mountains, and was most obliging and altogether engaging. This was all the information acquired even by the indefatigable Miss Mollie Merk, whose success in extracting from individuals information it was their dearest desire to conceal had made her a star member of the _Searchlight's_ staff. It was to Miss Merk, however, that Harrington announced his first important discovery. Leaning across her desk one evening after his successor had taken the "car," the new elevator man touched a subject much upon his mind.

"I got wet the othah day," he began, conversationally, "an' mah landlady let me go to the kitchen to dry mah clothes. I obse'ved as I sat by huh stove that the lid of the wash boilah kept liftin' up, all by itself, an' then I saw 'twas raised by the steam of the hot watah inside. I kep' thinkin' 'bout it, an' it seems to me thah's an idea thah, a soht of ene'gy, you know, that might be used in big ways. I mus' think it out."

Mollie Merk looked at him, vague memories of one James Watts stirring uneasily in her brain.

"There's a good deal written about steam," she said, sympathetically. "I'll bring you a book on it."

She did, for Harrington was already high in her regard; and quite possibly the volume killed in that youth's aspiring soul the germ of a beautiful hope. But he was to the fore very soon with a discovery of equal weight. This time his confidant was Maxwell.

"Why is it," he asked that busy citizen one evening, "that when I get in the bathtub the water rises highah? Ain't the' some principle the' that is impo'tant? As I think it ovah--"

Maxwell hurriedly assured him that there was, and the volume on steam was followed by a treatise on specific gravity, which gave Mr. Harrington food for reflection for several days. Nevertheless, the discovery that others had been before him did not depress him in the least. He gave the Sunday editor an insight into his views on one occasion when that gentleman was able to convince him that Isaac Newton and not Bart Harrington had discovered the law of gravitation while watching an apple fall from a tree.

"I obse'ved it, too, suh," argued Harrington, sturdily, defending his position as a scientific discoverer. "Of co'se I see the fo'ce of you'h rema'k that the othah man was _first_. That is unfo'tunate foh me. But does it affect the value of _my_ discovery? It does not, suh."