Chapter 25

"As I say, I sacrificed everything to reason," continued Queed, obviously struggling against embarrassment, "and yet pure reason was never my ideal. I have impressed you as a thoroughly selfish person--you have told me that--and so far as my immediate environment is concerned, I have been, and am. So it may surprise you to be told that a life of service has been from the beginning my ambition and my star. Of course I have always interpreted service in the broadest sense, in terms of the world; that was why I deliberately excluded all purely personal applications of it. Yet it is from a proper combination of reason with--the sociologist's 'consciousness of kind'--fellow-feeling, sympathy, if you prefer, that is derived a life of fullest efficiency. I have always understood the truth of this formula as applied to peoples. It seems that I--rather missed its force as to individuals. I--I am ready to admit that an individual life can draw an added meaning--and richness from a service, not of the future, but of the present--not of the race but ... well, of the unfortunate on the doorstep. Do you understand," he asked abruptly, "what I am trying to tell you?"

She assured him that she understood perfectly.

A slow painful color came into his face.

"Then you appreciate the nature and the size of the debt I owe you."

"Oh, no, no, no! If I have done anything at all to help you," said Sharlee, considerably moved, "then I am very glad and proud. But as for what you speak of ... no, no, people always do these things for themselves. The help comes from within--"

"Oh, _don't_ talk like that!" broke from him. "You throw out the idea somehow that I consider that I have undergone some remarkable conversion and transformation. I haven't done anything of the sort. I am just the same as I always was. Just the same.... Only now I am willing to admit, as a scientific truth, that time given to things not in themselves directly productive, can be made to pay a good dividend. If what I said led you to think that I meant more than that, then I have, for once, expressed myself badly. I tell you this," he went on hurriedly, "simply because you once interested yourself in trying to convince me of the truth of these views. Some of the things you said that night managed to stick. They managed to stick. Oh, I give you that. I suppose you might say that they gradually became like mottoes or texts--not scientific, of course ... personal. Therefore, I thought it only fair to tell you that while my cosmos is still mostly Ego--I suppose everybody's is in one way or another--I have--made changes, so that I am no longer wholly out of relation with life."

"I am glad you wanted to tell me," said Sharlee, "but I have known it for--oh, the longest time."

"In a certain sense," he hurried on--"quite a different sense--I should say that your talk--the only one of the kind I ever had--did for me the sort of thing ... that most men's mothers do for them when they are young."

She made no reply.

"Perhaps," he said, almost defiantly, "you don't like my saying that?"

"Oh, yes! I like it very much."

"And yet," he said, "I don't think of you as I fancy a man would think of his mother, or even of his sister. It is rather extraordinary. It has become clear to me that you have obtained a unique place in my thought--in my regard. Well, good-night."

She looked up at him, without, however, quite meeting his eyes.

"Oh! Do you think you must go?"

"Well--yes. I have said everything that I came to say. Did you want me to stay particularly?"

"Not if you feel that you shouldn't. You've been very good to give me a whole evening, as it is."

"I'll tell you one more thing before I go."

He took another turn up and down the room, and halted frowning in front of her.

"I am thinking of making an experiment in practical social work next year. What would be your opinion of a free night-school for working boys?"

Sharlee, greatly surprised by the question, said that the field was a splendid one.

He went on at once: "Technical training, of course, would be the nominal basis of it. I could throw in, also, boxing and physical culture. Buck Klinker would be delighted to help there. By the way, you must know Klinker: he has some first-rate ideas about what to do for the working population. Needless to say, both the technical and physical training would be only baits to draw attendance, though both could be made very valuable. My main plan is along a new line. I want to teach what no other school attempts--only one thing, but that to be hammered in so that it can never be forgotten."

"What is that?"

"You might sum it all up as the doctrine of individual responsibility."

She echoed his term inquiringly, and he made a very large gesture.

"I want to see if I can teach boys that they are not individuals--not unrelated atoms in a random universe. Teach them that they live in a world of law--of evolution by law--that they are links, every one of them, in a splendid chain that has been running since life began, and will run on to the end of time. Knock into their heads that no chain is stronger than its weakest link, and that _this means them_. Don't you see what a powerful socializing force there is in the sense of personal responsibility, if cultivated in the right direction? A boy may be willing to take his chances on going to the bad--economically and socially, as well as morally--if he thinks that it is only his own personal concern. But he will hesitate when you once impress upon him that, in doing so, he is blocking the whole magnificent procession. My plan would be to develop these boys' social efficiency by stamping upon them the knowledge that the very humblest of them holds a trusteeship of cosmic importance."

"I understand.... How splendid--not to practice sociology on them, but to teach it to them--"

"But could we get the boys?"

She felt that the unconsciousness with which he took her into partnership was one of the finest compliments that had ever been paid her.

"Oh, I think so! The Department has all sorts of connections, as well as lots of data which would be useful in that way. How Mr. Dayne will welcome you as an ally! And I, too. I think it is fine of you, Mr. Queed, so generous and kind, to--"

"Not at all! Not in the least! I beg you," he interrupted, irritably, "not to go on misunderstanding me. I propose this simply as an adjunct to my own work. It is simply in the nature of a laboratory exercise. In five years the experiment might enable me to check up some of my own conclusions, and so prove very valuable to me."

"In the meantime the experiment will have done a great deal for a certain number of poor boys--unfortunates on your doorstep...."

"That," he said shortly, "is as it may be. But--"

"Mr. Queed," said Sharlee, "why are you honest in every way but one? Why won't you admit that you have thought of this school because you would like to do something to help in the life of this town?"

"Because I am not doing anything of the sort! Why will you harp on that one string? Good heavens! Aren't you yourself the author of the sentiment that a sociologist ought to have some first-hand knowledge of the problems of society?"

Standing, he gazed down at her, frowning insistently, bent upon staring her out of countenance; and she looked up at him with a Didymus smile which slowly grew. Presently his eyes fell.

"I cannot undertake," he said, in his stiffest way, "to analyze all my motives at all times for your satisfaction. They have nothing whatever to do with the present matter. The sole point up for discussion is the practical question of getting such a school started. Keep it in mind, will you? Give some thought as to ways and means. Your experience with the Department should be helpful to me in getting the plan launched."

"Certainly I will. If you don't object, I'll talk with Mr. Dayne about it, too. He--"

"All right. I don't object. Well, good-night."

Sharlee rose and held out her hand. His expression, as he took and shook it, suddenly changed.

"I suppose you think I have acquired the habit," he said, with an abrupt recurrence of his embarrassment, "of coming to you for counsel and assistance?"

"Well, why shouldn't you?" she answered seriously. "I have had the opportunity and the time to learn some things--"

"You can't dismiss your kindness so easily as that."

"Oh, I don't think I have been particularly kind."

"Yes, you have. I admit that. You have."

He took the conversation with such painful seriousness that she was glad to lighten it with a smile.

"If you persist in thinking so, you might feel like rewarding me by coming to see me soon again."

"Yes, yes! I shall come to see you soon again. Certainly. Of course," he added hastily, "it is desirable that I should talk with you more at length about my school."

He was staring at her with a conflict of expressions in which, curiously enough, pained bewilderment seemed uppermost. Sharlee laughed, not quite at her ease.

"Do you know, I am still hoping that some day you will come to see me, not to talk about anything definite--just to talk."

"As to that," he replied, "I cannot say. Good-night."

Forgetting that he had already shaken hands, he now went through with it again. This time the ceremony had unexpected results. For now at the first touch of her hand, a sensation closely resembling chain-lightning sprang up his arm, and tingled violently down through all his person. It was as if his arm had not merely fallen suddenly asleep, but was singing uproariously in its slumbers.

"I'm so glad you came," said Sharlee.

He retired in a confusion which he was too untrained to hide. At the door he wheeled abruptly, and cleared himself, with a white face, of evasions that were torturing his conscience.

"I will not say that a probable benefit to the boys _never_ entered into my thoughts about the school. Nor do I say that my next visit will be _wholly_ to talk about definite things, as you put it. For part of the time, I daresay I should like--just to talk."

Sharlee went upstairs, and stood for a long time gazing at herself in the mirror. Vainly she tried to glean from it the answer to a most interesting conundrum: Did Mr. Queed still think her very beautiful?

XXV

_Recording a Discussion about the Reformatory between Editor West and his Dog-like Admirer, the City Boss; and a Briefer Conversation between West and Prof. Nicolovius's Boarder._

About one o'clock the telephone rang sharply, and Queed, just arrived for the afternoon work and alone in the office, answered it. It was the Rev. Mr. Dayne, Secretary of the Department of Charities; he had learned that the reformatory bill was to be called up in the house next day. The double-faced politicians of the machine, said Mr. Dayne, with their pretended zeal for economy, were desperately afraid of the Post. Would Mr. Queed be kind enough to hit a final ringing blow for the right in to-morrow's paper?

"That our position to-day is as strong as it is," said the kind, firm voice, "is due largely to your splendid work, Mr. Queed. I say this gladly, and advisedly. If you will put your shoulder to the wheel just once more, I am confident that you will push us through. I shall be eternally grateful, and so will the State. For it is a question of genuine moral importance to us all."

Mr. Dayne received assurance that Mr. Queed would do all that he could for him. He left the telephone rather wishing that the assistant editor could sometimes be inspired into verbal enthusiasm. But of his abilities the Secretary did not entertain the smallest doubt, and he felt that day that his long fight for the reformatory was as good as won.

Hanging up the receiver, Queed leaned back in his swivel chair and thoughtfully filled a pipe, which he smoked nowadays with an experienced and ripened pleasure. At once he relapsed into absorbed thought. Though he answered Mr. Dayne calmly and briefly according to his wont, the young man's heart was beating faster with the knowledge that he stood at the crisis of his longest and dearest editorial fight. He expected to win it. The whole subject, from every conceivable point of view, was at his fingers' ends. He knew exactly what to say; his one problem was how to say it in the most irresistible way possible.

Yet Queed, tilted back in his chair, and staring out over the wet roofs, was not thinking of the reformatory. He was thinking, not of public matters at all, but of the circumstances of his curious life with Henry G. Surface; and his thoughts were not agreeable in the least.

Not that he and the "old professor" did not get along well together. It was really surprising how well they did get along. Their dynamic interview of last June had at once been buried out of sight, and since then their days had flowed along with unbroken smoothness. If there had been times when the young man's thought recoiled from the compact and the intimacy, his manner never betrayed any sign of it. On the contrary, he found himself mysteriously answering the growing dependence of the old man with a growing sense of responsibility toward him, and discovering in the process a curious and subtle kind of compensation.

What troubled Queed about Nicolovius--as the world called him--was his money. He, Queed, was in part living on this money, eating it, drinking it, sleeping on it. Of late the old man had been spending it with increasing freedom, constantly enlarging the comforts of the joint ménage. He had reached, in fact, a scale of living which constantly thrust itself on Queed's consciousness as quite beyond the savings of a poor old school teacher. And if this appearance were true, where did the surplus come from?

The question had knocked unpleasantly at the young man's mind before now. This morning he faced it, and pondered deeply. A way occurred to him by which, possibly, he might turn a little light upon this problem. He did not care to take it; he shrank from doing anything that might seem like spying upon the man whose bread he broke thrice daily. Yet it seemed to him that a point had now been reached where he owed his first duty to himself.

"Come in," he said, looking around in response to a brisk knock upon his shut door; and there entered Plonny Neal, whom Queed, through the Mercury, knew very well now.

"Hi there, Doc! Playin' you was Horace Greeley?"

Mr. Neal opened the connecting door into West's office, glanced through, found it empty, and shut the door again. Whether he was pleased or the reverse over this discovery, his immobile countenance gave no hint; but the fact was that he had called particularly to see West on a matter of urgent private business.

"I was on the floor and thought I'd say howdy," he remarked pleasantly. "Say, Doc, I been readin' them reformatory drools of yours. Me and all the boys."

"I'm glad to hear it. They are certain to do you good."

Queed smiled. He had a genuine liking for Mr. Neal, which was not affected by the fact that their views differed diametrically on almost every subject under the sun.

Mr. Neal smiled, too, more enigmatically, and made a large gesture with his unlighted cigar.

"I ain't had such good laughs since Tommy Walker, him that was going to chase me out of the city f'r the tall timber, up and died. But all the same, I hate to see a likely young feller sittin' up nights tryin' to make a laughin' stock of himself."

"The last laughs are always the best, Mr. Neal. Did you ever try any of them?"

"You're beat to a pappyer mash, and whistlin' to keep your courage."

"Listen to my whistle day after to-morrow--"

But the door had shut on Mr. Neal, who had doubtless read somewhere that the proper moment to terminate a call is on some telling speech of one's own.

"I wonder what he's up to," mused Queed.

He brought his chair to horizontal and addressed himself to his reformatory article. He sharpened his pencil; tangled his great hand into his hair; and presently put down an opening sentence that fully satisfied him, his own sternest critic. Then a memory of his visitor returned to his mind, and he thought pleasurably:

"Plonny knows he is beaten. That's what's the matter with him."

Close observers had often noted, however, that that was very seldom the matter with Plonny, and bets as to his being beaten were always to be placed with diffidence and at very long odds. Plonny had no idea whatever of being beaten on the reformatory measure: on the contrary, it was the reformatory measure which was to be beaten. Possibly Mr. Neal was a white-souled patriot chafing under threatened extravagance in an economy year. Possibly he was impelled by more machine-like exigencies, such as the need of just that hundred thousand dollars to create a few nice new berths for the "organization." The man's motives are an immaterial detail. The sole point worth remembering is that Plonny Neal had got it firmly in his head that there should be no reformatory legislation that year.

It was Mr. Neal's business to know men, and he was esteemed a fine business man. Leaving the assistant editor, he sallied forth to find the editor. It might have taken Queed an hour to put his hand on West just then. Plonny did it in less than six minutes.

West was at Semple's (formerly Semple & West's), where he looked in once a day just to see what the market was doing. This was necessary, as he sometimes explained, in order that the _Post_'s financial articles might have that authoritativeness which the paper's position demanded. West enjoyed the good man-talk at Semple's; the atmosphere of frank, cheery commercialism made a pleasant relief from the rarer altitudes of the uplift. He stood chatting gayly with a group of habitués, including some of the best known men of the town. All greeted Plonny pleasantly, West cordially. None of our foreign critics can write that the American man is a moral prude. On two occasions, Plonny had been vindicated before the grand jury by the narrow margin of one vote. Yet he was much liked as a human sinner who had no pretenses about him, and who told a good story surpassingly well.

Ten minutes later Mr. Neal and Mr. West met in a private room at Berringer's, having arrived thither by different routes. Over a table, the door shut against all-comers, Mr. Neal went at once to the point, apologizing diffidently for a "butting in" which Mr. West might resent, but which he, Mr. West's friend, could no longer be restrained from. The _Post_, he continued, had been going along splendidly--"better'n under Cowles even--everybody says so--" and then, to the sorrow and disappointment of the new editor's admirers, up had come this dashed old reformatory business and spoiled everything.

West, whose thoughts had unconsciously run back to his last private talk with Plonny--the talk about getting in line--good-naturedly asked his friend if he was really lined up with the wire-pulling moss-backs who were fighting the reformatory bill.

"You just watch me and see," said Plonny, with humorous reproachfulness. "No charge f'r lookin', and rain checks given in case of wet grounds."

"Then for once in your life, anyhow, you've called the turn wrong, Plonny. This institution is absolutely necessary for the moral and social upbuilding of the State. It would be necessary if it cost five times one hundred thousand dollars, and it's as sure to come as judgment day."

"Ain't it funny!" mused Plonny. "Take a man like you, with fine high ideas and all, and let anything come up and pass itself off f'r a maw'l question and he'll go off half-cocked ten times out of ten."

"Half-cocked!" laughed West. "We've been studying this question three years."

"Yes, and began your studies with your minds all made up."

Plonny fastened upon the young man a gaze in which superior wisdom struggled unsuccessfully with overwhelming affection. "You know what it is, Mr. West? You've been took in, you've bit on a con game like a hungry pike. Excuse my speaking so plain, but I told you a long time ago I was mightily interested in you."

"Speak as plain as you like, Plonny. In fact, my only request at the moment is that you will speak plainer still. Who is it that has taken me in, and who is working this little con game you mention?"

"Rev. George Dayne of the Charities," said Plonny at once. "You mentioned wire-pulling just now. Lemme tell you that in the Rev. George you got the champeen wire-puller of the lot, the king politician of them all--the only one in this town, I do believe, could have thrown a bag as neat over _your_ head, Mr. West."

"Why, Plonny! Much learning has made you mad! I know Dayne like a book, and he's as straightforward a fellow as ever lived."

Mr. Neal let his eyes fall to the table-top and indulged in a slow smile, which he appeared to be struggling courteously, but without hope, to suppress.

"O' course you got a right to your opinion, Mr. West."

A brief silence ensued, during which a tiny imp of memory whispered into West's ear that Miss Weyland herself had commented on the Rev. Mr. Dayne's marvelous gifts as a lobbyist.

"I'm a older man than you," resumed Neal, with precarious smilelessness, "and mebbe I've seen more of practical poltix. It would be a strange thing, you might say, if at my time of life, I didn't know a politician when I passed him in the road. Still, don't you take my word for it. I'm only repeating what others say when I tell you that Parson Dayne wants to be Governor of this State some day. That surprises you a little, hey? You was kind of thinking that 'Rev.' changed the nature of a man, and that ambition never thought of keeping open f'r business under a high-cut vest, now wasn't you? Well, I've seen funny things in my time. I'd say that the parson wants this reformatory some f'r the good of the State, and mostly f'r the good of Mr. Dayne. Give it to him, with the power of appointing employees--add this to what he's already got--and in a year he'll have the prettiest little private machine ever you did see. I don't ask you to believe me. All I ask is f'r you to stick a pin in what I say, and see 'f it don't come true."

West mused, impressed against his will. "You're wrong, Plonny, in my opinion, and if you were ten times right, what of it? You seem to think that the _Post_ is advocating this reformatory because Dayne has asked for it. The _Post_ is doing nothing of the sort. It is advocating the reformatory because it has studied this question to the bottom for itself, because it knows--"

"Right! Good f'r you!" exclaimed Mr. Neal, much gratified. "That's just what I tell the boys when they say you're playin' poltix with the little dominie. And that," said he, briskly, "is just why I'm _for_ the reformatory, in spite of Rev. Dayne's little games."

"You're for it! You said just now that you were opposed to it."

"Not to the reformatory, Mr. West. Not at all. I'm only opposed to spending a hundred thousand dollars for it in a poverty year."

"Oh! You want the reformatory, but you don't want it now. That's where you stand, is it?"

"Yes, and everybody else that understands just what the situation is. I believe in this reformatory--the _Post_ converted me, that's a fact--and if you'll only let her stand two years, take my word for it, she'll go through with a whoop. But if you're going to hurry the thing--"

"What's your idea of hurry exactly? The war has been over forty years--"

"And look how splendid we've got along these forty years without the reformatory! Will you care to say, Mr. West, that we couldn't make it forty-two without bringing great danger to the State?"

"No, certainly not. But the point is--"

"The point is that if we spend all this money now, the people will kick the party out at the next election. I wouldn't admit this to many, 'cause I'm ashamed of it, but it's gospel truth. Mr. West," said Plonny, earnestly, "I _know_ you want the _Post_ to stand for the welfare of the party--"