Chapter 33

Presently she returned to him; asked him to sit down again; and, still standing herself, began speaking in a quiet kind voice which, nevertheless, rang ominously in his ears from her first word.

"I remember," said Sharlee, "when I was a very little girl, not more than twelve years old, I think, I first heard about you--about Charles Gardiner West. You were hardly grown then, but already people were talking about you. I don't remember now, of course, just what they said, but it must have been something very splendid, for I remember the sort of picture I got. I have always liked for men to be very clean and high-minded--I think because my father was that sort of man. I have put that above intellect, and abilities, and what would be called attractions; and so what they said about you made a great impression on me. You know how very young girls are--how they like to have the figure of a prince to spin their little romances around ... and so I took you for mine. You were my knight without fear and without reproach ... Sir Galahad. When I was sixteen, I used to pass you in the street and wonder if you didn't hear my heart thumping. You never looked at me; you hadn't any idea who I was. And that is a big and fine thing, I think--to be the hero of somebody you don't even know by name ... though of course not so big and fine as to be the hero of somebody who knows you very well. And you were that to me, too. When I grew up and came to know you, I still kept you on that pedestal you never saw. I measured you by the picture I had carried for so many years, and I was not disappointed. All that my little girl's fancy had painted you, you seemed to be. I look back now over the last few years of my life, and so much that I have liked most--that has been dearest--has centred about you. Yes, more than once I have been quite sure that I was in love with you. You wonder that I can show you my heart this way? I couldn't of course, except--well--that it is all past now. And that is what seems sad to me.... There never was any prince; my knight is dead; and Sir Galahad I got out of a book.... Don't you think that that is pretty sad?"

West, who had been looking at her with a kind of frightened fascination, hastily averted his eyes, for he saw that her own had suddenly filled with tears. She turned away from him again; a somewhat painful silence ensued; and presently she broke it, speaking in a peculiarly gentle voice, and not looking at him.

"I'm glad that you told me--at last. I'll be glad to remember that ... and I'm always your friend. But don't you think that perhaps we'd better finish our talk some other time?"

"No," said West. "No."

He pulled himself together, struggling desperately to throw off the curious benumbing inertia that was settling down upon him. "You are doing me an injustice. A most tremendous injustice. You have misunderstood everything from the beginning. I must explain--"

"Don't you think that argument will only make it all so much worse?"

"Nothing could possibly be worse for me than to have you think of me and speak to me in this way."

Obediently she sat down, her face still and sad; and West, pausing a moment to marshal his thoughts into convincing form, launched forth upon his defense.

From the first he felt that he did not make a success of it; was not doing himself justice. Recent events, in the legislature and with reference to Meachy T. Bangor, had greatly weakened his confidence in his arguments. Even to himself he seemed to have been strangely "easy"; his exposition sounded labored and hollow in his own ears. But worse than this was the bottomless despondency into which the girl's brief autobiography had strangely cast him. A vast mysterious depression had closed over him, which entirely robbed him of his usual adroit felicity of speech. He brought his explanation up to the publication of the unhappy article, and there abruptly broke off.

A long silence followed his ending, and at last Sharlee said:--

"I suppose a sudden change of heart in the middle of a fight is always an unhappy thing. It always means a good deal of pain for somebody. Still--sometimes they must come, and when they do, I suppose the only thing to do is to meet them honestly--though, personally, I think I should always trust my heart against my head. But ... if you had only come to us that first morning and frankly explained just why you deserted us--if you had told us all this that you have just told me--"

"That is exactly what I wanted and intended to do," interrupted West. "I kept silent out of regard for you."

"Out of regard for me?"

"When I started to tell you all about it, that night at Mrs. Byrd's, it seemed to me that you had brooded over the matter until you had gotten in an overwrought and--overstrung condition about it. It seemed to me the considerate thing not to force the unwelcome topic upon you, but rather to wait--"

"But had you the right to consider my imaginary feelings in such a matter between yourself and ...? And besides, you did not quite keep silent, you remember. You said something that led me to think that you had discharged Mr. Surface for writing that article."

"I did not intend you to think anything of the kind. Anything in the least like that. If my words were ambiguous, it was because, seeing, as I say, that you were in an overstrung condition, I thought it best to let the whole matter rest until you could look at it calmly and rationally."

She made no reply.

"But why dwell on that part of it?" said West, beseechingly. "It was simply a wretched misunderstanding all around. I'm sorrier than I can tell you for my part in it. I have been greatly to blame--I can see that now. Can't you let bygones be bygones? I have come to you voluntarily and told you--"

"Yes, after six weeks. Why, I was the best friend he had, Mr. West, and--Oh, me! How can I bear to remember what I said to him!"

She turned her face hurriedly away from him. West, much moved, struggled on.

"But don't you see--I didn't know it! I never dreamed of such a thing. The moment I heard how matters stood--"

"Did it never occur to you in all this time that it might be assumed that Mr. Surface, having written all the reformatory articles, had written this one?"

"I did not think of that. I was short-sighted, I own. And of course," he added more eagerly, "I supposed that he had told you himself."

"You don't know him," said Sharlee.

A proud and beautiful look swept over her face. West rose, looking wretchedly unhappy, and stood, irresolute, facing her.

"Can't you--forgive me?" he asked presently, in a painful voice.

Sharlee hesitated.

"Don't you know I said that it would only make things worse to talk about it to-night?" she said gently. "Everything you say seems to put us further and further apart. Why, there is nothing for me to forgive, Mr. West. There was a situation, and it imposed a certain conduct on you; that is the whole story. I don't come into it at all. It is all a matter between you and--your own-"

"You do forgive me then? But no--you talk to me just as though you had learned all this from somebody else--as though I had not come to you voluntarily and told you everything."

Sharlee did not like to look at his face, which she had always seen before so confident and gay.

"No," said she sadly--"for I am still your friend."

"_Friend!_"

He echoed the word wildly, contemptuously. He was just on the point of launching into a passionate speech, painting the bitterness of friendship to one who must have true love or nothing, and flinging his hand and his heart impetuously at her feet. But looking at her still face, he checked himself, and just in time. Shaken by passion as he was, he was yet enough himself to understand that she would not listen to him. Why should he play the spendthrift and the wanton with his love? Why give her, for nothing, the sterile satisfaction of rejecting him, for her to prize, as he knew girls did, as merely one more notch upon her gun?

Leaving his tempestuous exclamation hanging in mid-air, West stiffly shook Sharlee's hand and walked blindly out of the room.

He went home, and to bed, like one moving in a horrible dream. That night, and through all the next day, he felt utterly bereft and wretched: something, say, as though flood and pestilence had swept through his dear old town and carried off everything and everybody but himself. He crawled alone in a smashed world. On the second day following, he found himself able to light a cigarette; and, glancing about him with faint pluckings of convalescent interest, began to recognize some landmarks. On the third day, he was frankly wondering whether a girl with such overstrained, not to say hysterical ideals of conduct, would, after all, be a very comfortable person to spend one's life with.

On the evening of this day, about half-past eight o'clock, he emerged from his mother's house, light overcoat over his arm in deference to his evening clothes, and started briskly down the street. On the second block, as luck had it, he overtook Tommy Semple walking the same way.

"Gardiner," said Semple, "when are you going to get over all this uplift rot and come back to Semple and West?"

The question fell in so marvelously with West's mood of acute discontent with all that his life had been for the past two years, that it looked to him strangely like Providence. The easy ways of commerce appeared vastly alluring to him; his income, to say truth, had suffered sadly in the cause of the public; never had the snug dollars drawn him so strongly. He gave a slow, curious laugh.

"Why, hang it, Tommy! I don't know but I'm ready to listen to your siren spiel--now!"

In the darkness Semple's eyes gleamed. His receipts had never been so good since West left him.

"That's the talk! I need you in my business, old boy. By the bye, you can come in at bully advantage if you can move right away. I'm going to come talk with you to-morrow."

"Right's the word," said West.

At the end of that block a large house stood in a lawn, half hidden from the street by a curtain of trees. From its concealed veranda came a ripple of faint, slow laughter, advertising the presence of charming society. West halted.

"Here's a nice house, Tommy; I think I'll look in. See you to-morrow."

Semple, walking on, glanced back to see what house it was. It proved to be the brownstone palace leased for three years by old Mr. Avery, formerly of Mauch Chunk but now of Ours.

Sharlee, too, retired from her painful interview with West with a sense of irreparable loss. Her idol of so many years had, at a word, toppled off into the dust, and not all the king's horses could ever get him back again. It was like a death to her, and in most ways worse than a death.

She lay awake a long time that night, thinking of the two men who, for she could not say how long, had equally shared first place in her thoughts. And gradually she read them both anew by the blaze lit by one small incident.

She could not believe that West was deliberately false; she was certain that he was not deliberately false. But she saw now, as by a sudden searchlight flung upon him, that her one-time paladin had a fatal weakness. He could not be honest with himself. He could believe anything that he wanted to believe. He could hypnotize himself at will by the enchanting music of his own imaginings. He had pretty graces and he told himself they were large, fine abilities; dim emotions and he thought they were ideals; vague gropings of ambition, and when he had waved the hands of his fancy over them, presto, they had become great dominating purposes. He had fluttered fitfully from business to Blaines College; from the college to the _Post_; before long he would flutter on from the _Post_ to something else--always falling short, always secretly disappointed, everywhere a failure as a man, though few might know it but himself. West's trouble, in fact, was that he was not a man at all. He was weakest where a real man is strongest. He was merely a chameleon taking his color from whatever he happened to light upon; a handsome boat which could never get anywhere because it had no rudder; an ornamental butterfly driving aimlessly before the nearest breeze. He meant well, in a general way, but his good intentions proved descending paving-stones because he was constitutionally incapable of meaning anything very hard.

West had had everything in the beginning except money; and he had the faculty of making all of that he wanted. Queed--she found that name still clinging to him in her thoughts--had had nothing in the beginning except his fearless honesty. In everything else that a man should he, he had seemed to her painfully destitute. But because through everything he had held unflinchingly to his honesty, he had been steadily climbing the heights. He had passed West long ago, because their faces were set in opposite directions. West had had the finest distinctions of honor carefully instilled into him from his birth. Queed had deduced his, raw, from his own unswerving honesty. And the first acid test of a real situation showed that West's honor was only burnished and decorated dross, while Queed's, which he had made himself, was as fine gold. In that test, all superficial trappings were burned and shriveled away; men were made to show their men's colors; and the "queer little man with the queer little name" had instantly cast off his resplendent superior because contact with his superior's dishonesty was degrading to him. Yet in the same breath, he had allowed his former chief to foist off that dishonesty upon his own clean shoulders, and borne the detestable burden without demand for sympathy or claim for gratitude. And this was the measure of how, as Queed had climbed by his honesty, his whole nature had been strengthened and refined. For if he had begun as the most unconscious and merciless of egoists, who could sacrifice little Fifi to his comfort without a tremor, he had ended with the supreme act of purest altruism: the voluntary sacrifice of himself to save a man whom in his heart he must despise.

But was that the supreme altruism? What had it cost him, after all, but her friendship? Perhaps he did not regard that as so heavy a price to pay.

Sharlee turned her face to the wall. In the darkness, she felt the color rising at her throat and sweeping softly but resistlessly upward. And she found herself feverishly clinging to all that her little Doctor had said, and looked, in all their meetings which, remembered now, gave her the right to think that their parting had been hard for him, too.

Yet it was not upon their parting that her mind busied itself most, but upon thoughts of their remeeting. The relations which she had thought to exist between them had, it was clear, been violently reversed. The one point now was for her to meet the topsy-turveyed situation as swiftly, as generously, and as humbly as was possible.

If she had been a man, she would have gone to him at once, hunted him up this very night, and told him in the most groveling language at her command, how infinitely sorry and ashamed she was. Lying wide-eyed in her little white bed, she composed a number of long speeches that she, as a man, would have made to him; embarrassing speeches which he, as a man, or any other man that ever lived, would never have endured for a moment. But she was not a man, she was a girl; and girls were not allowed to go to men, and frankly and honestly say what was in their hearts. She was not in the least likely to meet him by accident; the telephone was unthinkable. There remained only to write him a letter.

Yes, but what to say in the letter? There was the critical and crucial question. No matter how artful and cajoling an apology she wrote, she knew exactly how he would treat it. He would write a civil, formal reply, assuring her that her apology was accepted, and there the matter would stand forever. For she had put herself terribly in the wrong; she had betrayed a damning weakness; it was extremely probable that he would never care to resume friendship with one who had proved herself so hatefully mistrustful. Then, too, he was evidently very angry with her about the money. Only by meeting for a long, frank talk could she ever hope to make things right again; but not to save her life could she think of any form of letter which would bring such a meeting to pass.

Pondering the question, she fell asleep. All next day, whenever she had a minute and sometimes when she did not, she pondered it, and the next, and the next. Her heart smote her for the tardiness of her reparation; but stronger than this was her fear of striking and missing fire. And at last an idea came to her; an idea so big and beautiful that it first startled and dazzled her, and then set her heart to singing; the perfect idea which would blot away the whole miserable mess at one stroke. She sat down and wrote Mr. Surface five lines, asking him to be kind enough to call upon her in regard to the business matter about which he had written her a few weeks before.

She wrote this note from her house, one night; she expected, of course, that he would come there to see her; she had planned out exactly where they were each to sit, and even large blocks of their conversation. But the very next morning, before 10 o'clock, there came a knock upon the Departmental door and he walked into her office, looking more matter-of-fact and businesslike than she had ever seen him.

XXXII

_Second Meeting between a Citizen and the Great Pleasure-Dog Behemoth, involving Plans for Two New Homes._

And this time they did not have to go into the hall to talk.

No sooner had the opening door revealed the face of young Mr. Surface than Mr. Dayne, the kind-faced Secretary, reached hastily for his hat. In the same breath with his "Come in" and "Good-morning," he was heard to mention to the Assistant Secretary something about a little urgent business downtown.

Mr. Dayne acted so promptly that he met the visitor on the very threshold of the office. The clergyman held out his hand with a light in his manly gray eye.

"I'm sincerely glad to see you, Mr. Queed, to have the chance--"

"Surface, please."

Mr. Dayne gave his hand an extra wring. "Mr. Surface, you did a splendid thing. I'm glad of this chance to tell you so, and to beg your forgiveness for having done you a grave injustice in my thoughts."

The young man stared at him. "I have nothing to forgive you for, Mr. Dayne. In fact, I have no idea what you are talking about."

But Mr. Dayne did not enlighten him; in fact he was already walking briskly down the hall. Clearly the man had business that would not brook an instant's delay.

Hat in hand, the young man turned, plainly puzzled, and found himself looking at a white-faced little girl who gave back his look with brave steadiness.

"Do you think you can forgive me, too?" she asked in a very small voice.

He came three steps forward, into the middle of the room, and there halted dead, staring at her with a look of searching inquiry.

"I don't understand this," he said, in his controlled voice.

"What are you talking about?"

"Mr. West," said Sharlee, "has told me all about it. About the reformatory. And I'm sorry."

There she stuck. Of all the speeches of prostrate yet somehow noble self-flagellation which in the night seasons she had so beautifully polished, not one single word could she now recall. Yet she continued to meet his gaze, for so should apologies be given though the skies fall; and she watched as one fascinated the blood slowly ebb from his close-set face.

"Under the circumstances," he said abruptly, "it was hardly a--a judicious thing to do. However, let us say no more about it."

He turned away from her, obviously unsteadied for all his even voice. And as he turned, his gaze, which had shifted only to get away from hers, was suddenly arrested and became fixed.

In the corner of the room, beside the bookcase holding the works of Conant, Willoughby, and Smathers, lay the great pleasure-dog Behemoth, leonine head sunk upon two massive outstretched paws. But Behemoth was not asleep; on the contrary he was overlooking the proceedings in the office with an air of intelligent and paternal interest.

Between Behemoth and young Henry Surface there passed a long look. The young man walked slowly across the room to where the creature lay, and, bending down, patted him on the head. He did it with indescribable awkwardness. Certainly Behemoth must have perceived what was so plain even to a human critic, that here was the first dog this man had ever patted in his life. Yet, being a pleasure-dog, he was wholly civil about it. In fact, after a lidless scrutiny unembarrassed by any recollections of his last meeting with this young man, he declared for friendship. Gravely he lifted a behemothian paw, and gravely the young man shook it.

To Behemoth young Mr. Surface addressed the following remarks:--

"West was simply deceived--hoodwinked by men infinitely cleverer than he at that sort of thing. It was a manly thing--his coming to you now and telling you; much harder than never to--have made the mistake in the beginning. Of course--it wipes the slate clean. It makes everything all right now. You appreciate that."

Behemoth yawned.

The young man turned, and came a step or two forward, both face and voice under complete control again.

"I received a note from you this morning," he began briskly, "asking me to come in--"

The girl's voice interrupted him. Standing beside the little typewriter-table, exactly where her caller had surprised her, she had watched with a mortifying dumbness the second meeting between the pleasure-dog and the little Doctor that was. But now pride sprang to her aid, stinging her into speech. For it was an unendurable thing that she should thus tamely surrender to him the mastery of her situation, and suffer her own fault to be glossed over so ingloriously.

"Won't you let me tell you," she began hurriedly, "how sorry I am--how ashamed--that I misjudged--"

"No! No! I beg you to stop. There is not the smallest occasion for anything of that sort--"

"Don't you see my dreadful position? I suspect you, misjudge you--wrong you at every step--and all the time you are doing a thing so fine--so generous and splendid--that I am humiliated--to--"

Once again she saw that painful transformation in his face: a difficult dull-red flood sweeping over it, only to recede instantly, leaving him white from neck to brow.

"What is the use of talking in this way?" he asked peremptorily. "What is the good of it, I say? The matter is over and done with. Everything is all right--his telling you wipes it all from the slate, just as I said. Don't you see that? Well, can't you dismiss the whole incident from your mind and forget that it ever happened?"

"I will try--if that is what you wish."

She turned away, utterly disappointed and disconcerted by his summary disposal of the burning topic over which she had planned such a long and satisfying discussion. He started to say something, checked himself, and said something entirely different.

"I have received your note," he began directly, "asking me to come in and see you about the matter of difference between the estates. That is why I have called. I trust that this means that you are going to be sensible and take your money."

"In a way--yes. I will tell you--what I have thought."

"Well, sit down to tell me please. You look tired; not well at all. Not in the least. Take this comfortable chair."

Obediently she sat down in Mr. Dayne's high-backed swivel-chair, which, when she leaned back, let her neat-shod little feet swing clear of the floor. The chair was a happy thought; it steadied her; so did his unexampled solicitousness, which showed, she thought, that her emotion had not escaped him.

"I have decided that I would take it," said she, "with a--a--sort of condition."