Part 11

“‘Beady,’ God A’mighty says to me, and it was just as if I’d heard His voice, ‘if a man don’t have no one to think about but hisself he becomes the selfishest of all things under the sun. I’m God,’ says He, ‘with nothin’ to do but enj’y myself; and yet if I didn’t have you and the other things I make to care for and think about I wouldn’t have nothin’. I’ve just got to have ’em, for if I didn’t I’d go crazy. So I make beautiful worlds, and grand men, and noble women, and pretty kids, and strong animals, and sweet birds to sing, and nice flowers to bloom, and everything like that. I don’t make nothin’ ugly nor nothin’ bad, nor no sickness nor sufferin’ nor poverty. You guys does all that for yourselves, and I don’t take no rest day nor night tryin’ to show you how not to. Listen to me, Beady,’ says He. ‘Stop thinkin’ about yourself and that awful hulk of a body, and what it wants to eat and especially to drink. Don’t pay no more attention to it than you can help. Say, you’re my son, and you’re just like me. What you want is not the booze; it’s somethin’ outside yourself to think about. I’ve given you a wife and three fine youngsters. Now get out and get after them. Cut out livin’ for yourself and live for them. You must lose your life to find it; and the quickest way to lose your life is not to think about your beastly cravings at all.’

“Well, by gum! boys, if I didn’t take God A’mighty at His word. I says to myself, I’ll prove this thing or bust—and if I was to bust there’d be some explosion. When you fellows had kept me here long enough to let me be pretty nigh sure of myself I went and looked up the wife, and—well, there! I needn’t say no more. Some of you dubs has been up to my little place and you know that Whatever spoke to me that day in that back room is in my little tenement in the Bronx if He ever was anywhere—and that brings me at last to my p’int.

“I’m speakin’ to you blue-star men because you’ve showed pretty well by this time the stuff you’re made of. As long as you was in danger of slippin’ back I wouldn’t say this to you at all. But, say, you’ve weathered the worst of it, so it’s time for me to speak.

“Has any of you a wife? Then go back to her. Have you kids? Then go back to ’em. Have you a father or a mother? Then for God’s sake let them know that you’re doin’ well. Go to ’em—write to ’em—call ’em up on the ’phone—send ’em a telegraph—but don’t let ’em be without the peace o’ mind that’ll come from knowin’ that you’re on your two feet. One of the most mysterious things in this awful mysterious life is the way somebody is always lovin’ somebody. Here in these two rooms is a hundred and sixty-three by actual count of the seediest and most gol-darned boobs that the country can turn out. As we look at each other we can’t help askin’ if any one in their tarnation senses could care for the likes of us. And yet for every bloomin’ one of us you can foot up to eight or ten that’ll have us in their hearts as if we was gold-headed cherubs.

“Say, boys, I’ll tell you somethin’ confidential like, and don’t think I’m braggin’. The furniture-movin’ business is the grandest one there is. For a man that’s mastered it there don’t seem anything in the world left for him to learn. He’s ready to command a army or to run a ocean liner. But there’s one thing I’ll be hanged if even a furniture-mover knows anything about—and that’s love. I’ve thought about it and thought about it—and it gets me every time. I don’t know what it is, or where it comes from, or how they brew the durned thing in hearts like yours and mine. All I know is that it’s there—and that this old world goes round in it. I’m buttin’ into it all the time, and it kind o’ turns me shy like. My own little home is so full of it that sometimes it makes me choke. If I try to get away from it and come down here—well, I’m blest if some bloke don’t begin ladlin’ it out to me when he don’t hardly know what he’s doin’. The furniture-movin’ business is that shiny with it when you know how to see it— But I’ll not say no more. You’d laff. You’re laffin’ at me now, and I don’t blame you. All I’ve wanted to do is to put some of you boys wise. If there’s a blue-star man who knows any one in the world that’s fond of him—then for Christ’s sake get after ’em! And do it not later than to-night.”

And so I did it. Before going to bed I wrote a long letter to my father, giving him such details of my history during the past three years as I thought he would like to know. I hinted that if he or my mother would care for a visit from me I could go home for a few days.

Then I waited.

In a week I got my reply. It read:

MY DEAR FRANK,—I am glad to receive your letter, but sorry that it should ever have been necessary for you to write it. That you should be doing well no one could be more thankful for than I. I have given your messages to your mother, and she wishes me to send you her love. I consider it my duty to add, however, that no messages can withdraw the sword you have thrust into her heart—and mine.

Your affectionate father,

EDWARD MELBURY.

_CHAPTER XIII_

After that my work took me to Atlantic City, though not before I had had a number of meetings with Regina Barry, each of which, with one exception, took me by surprise.

The exception was the first. Cantyre urged me so strongly to come with him to call on Mrs. Barry and her daughter that in the end I yielded.

I found Mrs. Barry a charming invalid lady, keeping to the background and allowing her daughter to take all the initiative. From her as well as from Regina I got the reflex action of their liking for Jack. Mrs. Barry had seen him only once, but had preserved the memory of the pleasure which the meeting had given her. She repeated the statement, which had already grown familiar, that she thought Jack different from other men. Perhaps he was, though I could never see it. Perhaps she thought I was, myself, though she didn’t say so in words.

In any case, the call was followed by an invitation to dinner, and not long after that Annette placed me next to Miss Barry at lunch. Mrs. Grace did the same, and so did Cantyre when he insisted on my joining a party he gave at a theater. Two or three other meetings were accidental, and if I say that in all of them Miss Barry herself made the advances it is only to emphasize my nervousness. I had no right to be meeting her; I had no business to be allowing her to talk to me and show that—well, that she didn’t dislike me. The revolver was still in my desk and I began to ask myself if it wasn’t my duty to make use of it. True, she had not accused me with her eyes, but she was in some ways doing worse. What was to be the end of it?

I welcomed the work at Atlantic City, then, for more reasons than one. It took me away from New York; it kept me out of danger. Cantyre having confided to me the fact that his hopes were not dead, it left the field free to him. Never for a moment did he suspect that in my heart there was anything that could interfere with him; nor did he so much as dream that in hers....

It is curious that in proportion as the craving for drink diminished its place was taken by another craving for what I knew I couldn’t have. There was every reason why I couldn’t have it, why I could never have it. Atlantic City offered me, therefore, the readiest means of flight.

When that should be over I was planning a still further retirement. Sterling Barry was in California, directing the first stages of the erection of a block of university buildings in which he took great pride. Coningsby himself had suggested that when the Atlantic City job was finished there would be an opening for me there if I cared to make a bid for it. I did so care, and he promised to speak for me. Once I reached the Pacific, I was resolved not to come back for years, and perhaps never to come back at all.

It is lucky for me that I am temperamentally inclined to look forward. The retrospective view in my case would very soon have led me back to Greeley’s Slip, but I was rarely inclined to dwell on it. Once when I was crossing the Atlantic as a small boy our steamer had run on the rocks at Cape Clear. To enable us to get off her before she slipped back into the water and went down, long rope ladders were lowered to us from the top of the cliff, and up them we had to climb. This we did in a foggy Irish dawn, seeing just the rope rung ahead of us. Had we been able to look farther up the face of the cliff my mother and sisters would hardly have had the nerve for the ascent. As it was, they could see that single rung and no more, and so could keep their gaze upward without fear.

In the same way I kept my own gaze forward. I tried not to look ahead of the day, and at Atlantic City the days, even in November, were bearable enough. The booming of the long miles of breakers acted on me as a sedative. They dulled memory; they dulled pain; at the same time they incited me to work as the piercing wail of the bagpipes incites the Highlander to fight. I got companionship from them and a sense of timelessness. In their roll and tumble and crash I could hear the _poluphoisboio thalasses_ in which Homer put the sound of breakers forever into speech.

So November went by, and a great part of December. Christmas was approaching, and I was eager to have it over. Not that it mattered to me; but the sense that there was a gay companionship in the world from which I was excluded got slightly on my nerves. Cantyre, who came down to spend a week-end with me whenever he could, having to go for that season to his relatives in Ohio, I looked for nothing more festal than a merry meal with Lovey.

The late afternoon on the day before Christmas Eve was both windy and foggy, with a dash of drizzle in the air. The men had knocked off working, and as I left the half-finished building I stood for a minute to get the puffs of wet wind in my face. The lights along the Board Walk were reflected on the wet planks as in a blurred mirror. Here and there a pedestrian beat his way against the wind, and an occasional rolling-chair—the jinrikisha of Atlantic City—disappeared into the aureole of the sea-front.

As I came down our rickety temporary steps I became aware that a woman’s figure darted out of the shelter of a pavilion on the shore edge and walked rapidly across toward me. She wore an ulster and a tam-o’-shanter cap, and made a gallant little figure in the wind. More than that I did not take time to notice, as I had no suspicion that she could have anything to do with me.

I was, in fact, turning southward toward the house where I was staying when she managed to beat her way in front of me.

“Don’t you know me?”

I stopped in astonishment.

“Why—why, what are you doing here?”

“I was waiting for you.”

I could think of nothing better to say than, “On an evening like this?”

“Oh, I don’t mind that. We arrived only this afternoon. You see, my father can’t get back from California, and mother wouldn’t spend Christmas in town. We’re not going to have any Christmas, and so—”

We struggled across the walk to the pavilion, which, though open on all sides, afforded at least an overhead protection.

“How did you know where to find me?” I asked, stupidly.

“Ralph Coningsby told me—and the time you would be coming out. I—I’ve something—something rather special to—to say to you.”

I stood looking down at her. In the wooden ceiling above our heads there was an electric light that shed its beams through the whirl of mist right into her upturned face. There was a piteous quiver in the scarlet lips, and to the eyes had returned that mingling of compassion and amazement with which she had watched me when I pulled out her trinkets and threw them on the desk. It was the first time I had seen it since that night.

As I look back we seem to have gazed at each other in this way for an immeasurably long while, but I suppose it was only for some seconds. I knew why she was there. The truth had dawned on her at last, and she had come to tell me it wouldn’t make any difference.

But it would.

I had left the revolver in my desk in town; but I reminded myself that there was a train between eight and nine and that I should have plenty of time to catch it.

_CHAPTER XIV_

For my own sake, rather than for Regina Barry’s, I made an effort to escape from the pitiless pavilion light overhead.

“You’ll need to go back to your hotel. Sha’n’t we walk along? Then you can tell me as we go.”

The tramp through the gale and spray would have been exhilarating were it not that confidential things had to be thrown out into the tempest. As we left the pavilion, however, a voice floated toward me from the semi-darkness.

“Chair, boss?”

Another minute and we were seated side by side in the odd little vehicle—something between a baby’s perambulator and a touring-car—with the leather curtains buttoned to protect us, and a view through the wind-shield of a long line of lights shining into fog. There was a minute of surprise in the fact that, involuntarily expecting to go at a heightened speed, we found ourselves literally creeping at the snail’s pace which was the customary gait of our pusher.

But that was only subconscious. I took note of it without taking note of it, to remember it when I pieced the circumstances together on returning home. The one thing of which I was really aware was that in this curious conveyance I was seated at her side, and able, as she sat half turned toward me, to look her in the eyes.

Now that we were there, she lost some of her self-possession. After the months in which I had been afraid of her she seemed suddenly to have become afraid of me. Crouching back into her corner of the chair, she grew small and apologetic.

“Mother made me come. She said some one ought to tell you.”

It was like a little cry—the cry of a child confessing before it is accused. I could follow her mental action. She wanted me to understand that nothing but _force majeure_ would have induced her to waylay a man as he was coming home from work and take him in a kind of ambush.

Having once already talked with her at cross-purposes, I was careful to let her state her message before betraying my conviction of what it was to be.

“It’s very kind of Mrs. Barry,” I began, vaguely.

“You see, she likes you,” she broke in, impulsively. “If you had any one belonging to you in this country I dare say she—But she’s awfully maternal, mother is; and when Annette told her—”

“What did Annette tell her?”

“That’s it. Oh, Mr. Melbury, I’m so sorry that I should be the one to bring the news.”

“If it’s bad news,” I said, encouragingly, “I’d rather have you to share it with me than any one else in the world.”

She asked, abruptly, “Have you heard anything from home—lately?”

I had once more the sensation of the blood rushing back to my heart and staying there. All I could do was to shake my head.

“That’s what Annette thought. We told her she ought to write to you.”

In my excitement I clutched her by the hand, but I think she was hardly aware of the act any more than I.

“But what is it?”

“It’s—it’s about your father.”

“He’s not—he’s not—dead?”

She fell back again into her corner of the chair, withdrawing her hand. I, too, fell back into my corner, staring out through the wind-shield. Knowing that by not saying no she was really saying yes, I was obliged not only to get possession of the fact, but to control my sense of it.

I may say at once that it was the first sudden shock of my life. Every other trial had come to me by degrees—I had more or less seen it on the way and had been ready to meet it. This was something I had hardly ever thought of. That it might happen some time had been vaguely in the back of my mind, of course; but I had never considered it as an event of the day and hour. Now that it had occurred, my mental heavens seemed to fall.

I have told you so little of my family life that you hardly realize the degree to which my father was its center and support. My memory cannot go back to the time when he was not an important man, not only in the estimation of his children, but in that of the entire country. One of the youngest of that group of men who in the ’sixties and ’seventies took the scattered colonies of Great Britain lying north of the border of the United States and welded them into a gigantic, prosperous whole, he had outlived all but the sturdiest of his contemporaries. With Macdonald, Mount Stephen, Strathcona and a few others he had had the vision of a new white man’s empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Arctic, and through good times and evil he had never let it go. That there were evil times as well as good ones is a matter of history; but however dark the moment, my father was one of those who never lost for a fraction of an instant his belief in ultimate success. In helping to build up the vast financial system of the Canadian Pacific Railway there was no door, in Europe or America, where money could be borrowed at which he did not knock. There were days when the prospect was so hopeless and the treasury so empty that he was obliged to pledge everything he possessed, and after that to use nothing but his honor and his name. The winning out is one of the fairy-tales of the modern world. He had begun to reap his reward just as my memory of him opens. Of his days of struggle I knew only by hearsay. By the time I was five he was already a man of considerable wealth, honored throughout the Dominion, honored in Great Britain, and one of the eight or ten Canadian baronets created by the Queen.

I see him as tall, spare, and vigorous, with thin, clear-cut, clean-shaven features, a piercing eye, and a mouth that sagged at the corners not from dejection, but from determination. Spartan in his own life, he required his children to be Spartan in theirs. Though with our added means our manner of living increased in dignity, it gained little in the way of luxury; and many were the shifts to which my brothers and I were pushed to indulge the follies of young men.

My brothers did this no more than experimentally, covering their tracks and returning to right ways before their digressions could be noticed. I was invariably caught, coming in for some dramatic moments with my father, which increased in tension with the years. I have often wondered what his own youth could have been that he had so little mercy on what was at first not much worse than high spirits and boisterousness. Though I am far from blaming any one but myself for my ultimately going wrong, I have sometimes thought that a gentler handling might have led me aright when sheer repression only made me obstinate. That gentler handling my mother would have given me had not my father felt that it was weak. This knowledge only added to my perversity, the result being a state of continuous rebellion on my part and permanent displeasure on his.

“You’re getting in worse and worse with the old man,” my brother Jack warned me a few months before I left Montreal for good. “I heard him telling mother that if you didn’t turn over a new leaf he’d cut you out of his will.”

The information that he had so cut me out was the last form of appeal he ever made to me. I didn’t believe he meant it otherwise than as a bluff—a stroke of the pen could have reinstated me; but merely as a bluff it angered me. It implied that I might be induced to do for money what I hadn’t done for love or duty, and I was foolish enough to consider it part of my manhood to prove that any one who so judged me was mistaken. In that phase of my misguided life there was a kind of crazy, Cordelia-like attempt to show my father that it was not because of his money that I cared for him—or didn’t care for him; but all I succeeded in doing was to rouse the resentment of a man who had hardly ever been defied.

But I had repented of that kind of bravado long before I had repented of anything else. My letter to him in October had been quite sincere. To be cut out of his will had never meant anything to me but the loss of his affection. I was sorry for that loss, sorrier than any words I have could tell you. But when he wrote to me, in answer to my October letter, I knew from his tone that I had definitely killed whatever had once existed between him and me, and that all that was left for me was to bury it. I had been trying to bury it for the past eight weeks, and I do not deny that the effort was a bitter one.

You must understand that I had now come in for a set of emotions that had not belonged to me before I went to the Down and Out. I can explain it only on the ground that months of abstinence from anything that could inflame the senses or disturb the poise of the mind had induced a sanity of judgment to which I had been a stranger. In this new light I was really a prodigal son—not from any hope of a ring on my hand or the fatted calf, but genuinely from affection for the parents I had wronged.

To have this impulse to arise and go to my father thrown back on itself was the hardest thing in my experience. Somehow I had kept the conviction that if ever I repented that door would be open to my return. It had not really occurred to me that they wouldn’t say at home, “It is meet that we should make merry and be glad.” That my brothers might refuse to join in the chorus was a possibility. That my sister might not be over-enthusiastic in doing so I should be able to understand. But that my father and mother.... Throughout my stay in Atlantic City I had been saying to myself, “Well, if I’ve thrust a sword into your hearts, old dears, you’ve jolly well thrust one into mine; and so we’re quits.”

“When did it happen?” was the first question I was sufficiently master of myself to ask.

“Annette heard yesterday. I think it was the day before.”

“Do you know if—if he’d been ill?”

“He hasn’t been well for a long time, Annette says—not for two or three years; but the end was—well, it was heart failure. He was in his motor—going home. When the car drove up to the door they found him—”

It was the picture thus presented that made me put my hand to my forehead and bow my head. I was thinking of him seated in his corner of the car, stately, unbending, unpardoning, dead. I was thinking of the plight of my poor little mother when the man she had for so many years worshiped and obeyed was no longer there to give her his commands. I was thinking of the commotion in the family, of the stir of interest throughout the community. A prince and a great man would have fallen in Israel, and all our Canadian centers would be aquiver with the news. Jerry and Jack would cable to my sister in England, as well as to our uncles and aunts in that country and in the United States. There were cousins and friends who wouldn’t be forgotten. I alone was left out.

That was, however, more than I could believe. It was more, too, than I was willing to allow Regina Barry to suppose.

“There must be a telegram for me at my rooms in New York,” I managed to stammer, though I fear my tone lacked conviction.

To this she said nothing. She had, in fact, as Cantyre informed me later, already ascertained that up to the hour of her departure from New York there was none.