Chapter 4

When he came near a glade in the wood he heard the chatter of the voices of a merry party and he saw picnickers, men and women, gathered about hampers. Automobiles were parked at a little distance, and he made a detour to avoid the scene.

He emerged upon an animated tableau of modern nymph and modish satyr in a close-by forest aisle. The girl was flushed and disheveled and was resisting a young man who had pushed aside her veil and was kissing her with ardor. She beat him back with her gloved hands and eluded him, but he caught her to him with more of rough passion than tender affection.

“We are engaged to be married,” he insisted. “Why shouldn't I kiss you? Don't be a prude!”

She thrust her protesting palms against him and set her arms rigidly and held her head away, not with coyness, but with indignation and fierce rebellion.

“I love you! My God, can't you understand?” he gasped. “I can't keep my hands off you. You can't handle a man as you're trying to handle me. I must have some affection from you!”

“Richard! I'll not endure this! I am insulted!”

“My kisses an insult? I'm no ice-water lover. You set me crazy. I can't help myself.”

She wrenched herself from his grasp and faced him, her face filled with outraged fury.

Farr had started to leave the scene. He stopped. The girl was the girl of the red lips and the dark eyes.

“Don't touch me!” she cried. “The only promise you have had from me, Richard, is the one my mother has fairly forced from me. I am trying honestly to like you. I will please my mother and you if I can.”

“That's a devil of a thing to say to a man who loves you as I do,” he declared, with anger.

“That is all I can say just now. But if you use me again as you would pull and haul a girl of the streets, I'll despise you. I give you warning.”

“What sort of books have you been reading, Kate?” he asked, sarcastically. “Where did you get your idea of what love-making is? They don't sing serenades under windows these days. They don't kiss finger-tips and write mush poems. I am going to tell you a few things you ought to know, as a girl engaged to be married.”

Farr stood close by them and in plain sight, but their absorption in their struggle had left them attention only for each other. He knew that if he started away while they were talking his presence would be promptly noted and undoubtedly misjudged.

He set his finger between the leaves of his book and took his hat in his hand.

“Your pardon!” he pleaded. “I stumbled here quite by accident. Please suspend conversation on private matters until I can walk out of earshot.”

He stared straight into the eyes of the girl and once more received from her that frank and wondering gaze which had touched him so strangely when he had seen her first on the broad highway. His face was white under the tan. His hands trembled as he replaced his hat. In his heart he was saying farewell to her and his eyes expressed some of his emotion.

“You may take your own time, sir,” said the girl. “This gentleman and I have finished our conversation.” She passed Farr, looking him up and down with increasing curiosity and dawning recognition, and when her escort called to her impatiently, she caught her skirts around her and ran toward the glade where the others of the party were chattering over their hampers.

The lover started away slowly and sullenly on her trail, with only a glance at this blundering stranger.

“No, they do not sing serenades under windows any more--nor has the stone age returned with its love-making manners,” remarked Farr, his lips trembling and his emotion still in his eyes. “There are some manners which were worse, however, than knocking maidens down with clubs.”

The other man snapped himself around on his heels.

“Damn you, you're that fresh hobo! I don't forget a man who shoots off low-down sneers at me. Here! You come back here! I want to ask a few questions, my man.”

Farr continued on his way, opening his book.

“If I ever see you again--” blustered the lover.

“I sincerely hope that will never happen,” remarked the stranger, without turning his head. “Instinct of the purely animal sort tells me that if our paths cross in this life it will be very bad for one or the other.”

When Farr was in the highway he fumbled in his pocket and found the withered rose. He tossed it away among the roadside bushes.

But after he had gone on his way for some distance he retraced his steps and hunted in the bushes for a long time on his hands and knees until he found the poor little keepsake.

He put it carefully into the deepest pocket he could find in his newly acquired habiliments and trudged on down the world.

VI

A MAN ON FOOT AND A MAN IN HIS CHARIOT

A blatant orator, haranguing passionately, attracted two new auditors.

A tall young man sauntered to the edge of the little group in the square and listened with a smile which indicated cynical half-interest.

An automobile halted on the opposite side of the group. A big man sat alone in the tonneau.

He began to scowl as he listened.

The young man continued to smile.

The big man was plainly a personality. He was cool and crisp in summer flannels--as immaculate as the accoutrements of his car.

In face and physique the young man was plainly not of that herd near which he stood.

His glance crossed that of the man in the car; he met the scowl with his smile.

Like a kiln open to the hot glare from a brassy sky or an oven where the July caloric blazed like a blast from the open mouth of a retort--such that day seemed Moosac Square in the heart of the cotton-mill city. High buildings closed in its treeless, ill-paved, dirty area. The air, made blistering by the torch of the sun, beat back and forth between the buildings in shimmering waves.

In the center of the square the blatant orator balanced himself on a stone trough which was arid and dust-choked. He harangued the group of unkempt men; sweating, blinking, apathetic men; slouchy men; men who were ticketed in attire and demeanor with all the squalid marks of idlers, vagrants, and the unemployed.

The man on the trough was of the ilk of the men who surrounded him. His face was flaming with the heat and with his vocal efforts. Perspiration streamed into his eyes, his voice was hoarse with shouting, but he had the natural eloquence of the demagogue. He was delivering the creed of the propaganda of rebellious poverty, the complaints of the dissatisfied, the demands of the idle agitators. He spiked his diatribe with threats flavored by anarchy. He pointed to policemen who had taken refuge in strips of shade which had been cast grudgingly by the high buildings. He reminded his hearers that those policemen had just driven them out of the tree-shaded parks. There the selfish rich folks were loafing under the trees. Poor folks were herded down the street and were forced to hold this meeting in that Gehenna, so he averred.

The man in the automobile muttered impatient words. Then he shouted, breaking in on the impassioned anathema which the orator addressed to the rich: “Stop lying to these men--stirring them up. The parks are for the people. You can go there--all you men can go there--if you'll go without making a disturbance.”

“If men in these days open their mouths to speak for their human rights it's a disturbance,” retorted the demagogue. “If we go up to the park and sit there and tremble like rabbits you rich men will let us stay there--perhaps! But we don't have as many rights there as the rabbits, for the rabbits are allowed to step on the grass.”

“You've got to obey the law like other citizens--you will not be allowed to disturb decent and respectable people. You and men like you must stop putting foolish notions in the heads of loafers in this city.”

“Then put something into our mouths--give us food. Why are we loafers?”

“Because you won't go to work. I'll give every able-bodied man here all the work he wants. Apply at the office of the Consolidated Water Company--now.”

“What's the work?” inquired a man in the crowd.

“Digging trenches for water-pipes. How many men want that work? Hold up hands.”

“It ain't work for human beings in this weather,” snarled the man who had inquired. No hands were raised.

“That's your style!” blazed the big man. The policemen had sauntered into the square and their presence was reassuring. He stood up and began to lecture them.

“And them's the kind of lord dukes that's running this country to-day--own it and run it,” growled a slouchy fellow who stood near the tall young man. “They ain't willing to give a poor man a show.”

“He has just offered you a show--all of you,” stated the young man.

“Yes, a Guinea job for white men.”

“You're picking a poor excuse for being a loafer, my friend.”

“Who says I'm a loafer?”

The young man shot out his hands and grasped the fellow's elbow and hand. The arm was flabby, the palm was soft. He doubled back the fingers and exhibited the palm to the crowd.

“I don't find any labor medals here, men. Is there anybody in the crowd who can show some?” He released the struggling, cursing captive.

“What's labor medals?” inquired a bystander.

The big man was still denouncing them from his car, but the group paid little attention now.

“Callous spots in the place where a working-man ought to wear them. And that place isn't on the tongue.”

“Are you sneering at us because we can't get a job?”

“You're a loafer yourself, and anybody can see it,” declared another.

The young man raised his arms, showing them his palms.

“I carry a few labor medals,” he returned, curtly.

“Why ain't you on your job? The lord dukes won't give you one?”

“_When_ I work and _where_ I work is my own business, so long as I don't beg food at back doors.”

“Do _we_?”

They had crowded around him and menaced him with murmurings and glowering gaze.

“I should say so,” he replied, giving them an indifferent going-over with his cold eyes. “You carry all the marks.”

Then he shouldered his way out from among them, displaying the air of one who found further discourse unprofitable.

He strolled leisurely in the direction of the big man in the car. The crowd he had left stared after him without presuming to voice taunt or reply; there was something compelling about him.

As Farr approached the automobile its owner stopped talking and stared at the tall stranger with some apprehension. Then the big man beckoned unobtrusively to a policeman. It was evident that Farr was not of the same sort as the ruck of men from among whom he had just emerged, nevertheless he had come from among them. The lordly man in the car had observed him moving in the group, for Farr had loomed above the heads of the others; what he had been saying to the malcontents the big man had not been able to hear, but he guessed.

“Some sort of sneak has been stirring up the fools in this city lately,” the aristocrat informed the officer who came promptly to the side of the car. “Who is this fellow coming?”

“I never saw him before, Colonel Dodd.”

“Stand by! He is going to tackle me and make a grand-stand play in front of his gang. His clothes give him away--a loafing demagogue!”

But the tall man did not pause at the car or even glance at the dignitary who occupied it. He seemed to have lost all interest in the occasion. He yawned as he passed the automobile and started away across the square.

“Here, you! You big chap!” called Colonel Dodd, promptly emboldened.

Farr halted and turned, his countenance showing mild inquiry.

“What do you mean by coming into a peaceable city and stirring up labor troubles?”

“Have I done so?”

“You have just been mixing and mingling with those men, talking to them. I know your kind.”

“Ah, a gentleman of keen discernment!”

“I have seen you before--you fellows with long-tailed coats and short-horned ideas. We don't want your kind in this city!”

“I seem to have made a prompt sensation without trying to do so,” returned Farr, meekly. “I have been in your city less than fifteen minutes, sir!”

“You're a traveling labor-agitator, aren't you?”

“No, sir.”

“But I just saw you circulating among those men. Your rig-out shows your character!”

“You mean these garments I wear?”

“Certainly! A frock-coat helps out your pose before an ignorant public.”

“He stole that coat from me,” squeaked a fat man, standing at a little distance, scrubbing a torn sleeve over his grimy, sweat-streaked face. “He picked it fair off'n my back. I have follered him to show him up as a robber and a fake. That's so help me!”

Riotous laughter from all the listeners followed that declaration; a glance at the tubby tramp and survey of the tall young man whose contours fitted the garments made the fat man's assertion seem like a huge joke.

“I can prove it!” squalled the vagrant.

“Beat it! Get out of this city!” commanded a policeman. “If you don't we'll have you on the rock-pile. What ye mean by such guff?” He flourished his stick and the tramp hurried away.

“It's no use,” he whined. “Grab and bluff! Him what can do it best always wins. That's the way the world goes!”

“When I took these clothes off the back of my vanishing friend I felt that they would make a change in my life,” stated Farr, with a smile which provoked more laughter. “But I did not dream that they would bring me such prominence in so short a time.” He bowed to the man in the car.

But Colonel Dodd was angry and insistent and did not join in the merriment.

“I say you are a labor-agitator. Any man who won't go to work himself has no right to be stirring up other workers against their own interests. You may as well own up to me, my man. These men standing around here know what you are--you have been talking with them. Outside of stirring trouble, you don't work, do you?”

“Oh yes, my lord!”

There was smiling mockery in the tone, almost insolence. He seemed to be willing to display to the rich man the same lack of respect he had displayed to the poor men who stood near and listened to this colloquy.

“Oh, you do?” Colonel Dodd raised his voice. “Listen sharp, my men! Do you want to be led around by the noses by a man who doesn't work? This gentleman is going to tell us what his job is!” He sneered when he said it.

“I am an assiduous toiler in my profession, your excellency. I am surprised that as an employer you do not recognize a real worker when you see one.”

This tone of raillery and this stilted manner of speech promptly caught the fancy of the throng. The men crowded more closely and the orator on the trough was silent.

“What do you work at?”

“I am an architect, your gracious highness.”

“Less of that insolence in the way of names, my friend! An architect, eh? Well, what did you ever build?”

“I laid out Dream Avenue in the boom city of Expectation and built on that thoroughfare a magnificent row of castles in the air. If you had a bit more imagination I might try to sell you something in my line. But it is useless, I see! Farewell!”

He swept off his broad-brimmed hat with a deep bow, backed away a few steps, and bowed again and went on his way. The crowd guffawed. This baiting of the city's labor magnate had most agreeably scratched their itching sense of resentment.

“I don't know who that josher is, but I hate to lose him out of town,” confided the orator on the trough to those near him.

“I never saw that fellow before, but I'll pinch him if you say so, Colonel Dodd,” volunteered the policeman. “Do you make complaint?”

“No,” snapped the colonel, glowering on the broad back which was swinging across the square in retreat. He told his chauffeur to drive on.

When the car passed Farr the colonel flicked cigar ashes which alighted in a spray of dust on the sleeve of the frock-coat.

“Bah!” said the colonel, shooting the young man a scowl.

Farr gave in return a smile, but it was not a particularly genial smile.

The young man went on his way leisurely; by his gait, by his frequent and somewhat prolonged pauses at shop windows, by his indifferent starings at traffic and pedestrians, it was plain that he had little of moment on his mind.

He bought a penny glass of water at a corner kiosk.

“Do you mind telling me,” he asked the vender, “Who is Colonel Dodd of this city? I am a stranger and I have just overheard the name.”

The man grinned. “If it wasn't for Colonel Symonds Dodd I wouldn't be making much of a living here, selling spring-water. He is president of the Consolidated.”

“And that means?”

“Why, it means that he is boss of the water trust that owns the system in this city and in all the other cities and towns of this state. And they pump all of their water out of the rivers because the lakes are so far off, and nobody drinks that water unless he has to or don't know any better. Colonel Dodd? Why, he bosses the whole state, they tell me.”

“I gathered that he was important,” said the young man, and walked on.

He was held up in the passing crowd at a street corner for a few moments because a parade of some half-dozen automobiles whirled past. The cars were decorated with banners, and the wild flowers and other spoil of forest and field in the arms of the ladies indicated that this was a party returning from a picnic in the suburbs.

“Would you mind telling me,” asked Farr of the policeman who was guarding the corner, “who that young man is--the one there in the gray automobile?”

“With the bleached blonde and the pretty girl?” asked the officer. “Oh, that's Colonel Dodd's nephew--Dicky Dodd. Of course you know who the colonel is.”

“Yes,” said Farr. He opened his mouth to ask another question, for the policeman seemed to be of the obliging sort. Then he closed his lips resolutely and marched along.

“What's the use?” he muttered. “Two dark eyes and a red mouth--and I am almost forgetting how to be a philosopher.”

Farther down the city thoroughfare he met one who had claimed to be a philosopher. It was Jared Chick, stalking along the sidewalk in his home-made armor. He held a box of stove-polish in one hand and a brush in the other, and as he strolled he was giving his corselet and such parts of the armor as he could handily reach a glossy coat--a gleaming and burnished surface. On his helmet in place of a crest Knight Chick bore aloft a metal banneret inscribed, “Invincible Stove Polish.”

“And the mission?” asked Farr, halting his quondam companion, who had been too intent upon his business to pay heed to passers.

“I find thee changed, and no doubt thee, too, finds me changed,” sighed Mr. Chick.

The mouth of an alley between high buildings afforded a retreat and the breeze blew there fitfully, and Mr. Chick stepped to that oasis of shade in the glare of sunshine.

“I have been obliged to modify my mission in some degree. I must confess that to thee,” he said. “This is a strange and wicked world.”

“Didn't you know it before you gave up a good blacksmith business to go out in the hot sun and suffer torment, all for nothing?”

“It is very hard work,” acknowledged Chick, showing his flushed and streaming face under his vizor. “If I were not used to the fires of the forge I think I would fall down and die. But I must keep on.”

“But you are simply an advertising-sign.”

“I have modified my mission. I have not given up, however. I will tell thee! I found a man beside the way--a man who had been drinking strong waters and whose pockets had been turned wrong side out. So I took him to a tavern and I sat with him through the night, and nursed him when he suffered, and revealed my mission when he awoke. 'I am out to do good to all men,' I told him, and he searched through his pockets with blasphemy, and he said that I had done him--and he haled me before the court, and the judge said that no man could publicly profess such disinterestedness and escape suspicion, because people in these days are all looking for the main chance. So he did not believe me and he sentenced me to the jail. But a good Samaritan interceded for me and took me from behind the bars, and now in the spirit of gratitude I am repaying him; he makes and sells this stove-polish.”

“That man is evidently shrewd in business and a good advertiser,” commented Farr.

“I find that I get along much better in the world,” asserted the knight-errant. “Now that I carry an advertising-sign my armor attracts no rude mobs. I can go abroad and do good to a foolish world; I can use the stipend my good benefactor allows to me for my work and I can help poor folks here and there. Therefore, I am content with my modified mission. Is thee more at peace with the world?”

“I ought to be, after hearing you say that _you_ are contented,” said Farr, with irony.

“Thee has manifestly improved thy condition, so I observe.”

“It often happens in this world, Friend Chick, that the sleeker we are on the outside, the more ragged we are within. I think I'll move on. I might say something to jar your sense of sublime content. I'd be sorry to do that. Real contentment is a rare thing and must be handled very carefully.”

“I fear thee loves thyself too much,” chided the Quaker. “Affection for somebody might make thee happy, my friend.”

Farr choked back the comment that occurred to him in regard to love and walked away.

VII

THE RAKE WHICH GROPED IN DARK WATERS

The afternoon was waning, but the hot bowl of the sky seemed to shut down over the city more closely.

Farr held to the shaded sides of the streets, and yearned for a patch of green and a tree and its shade.

At last he came into a section of the city where vast mills, one succeeding another in rows which vanished in the distance, clacked their everlasting staccato of hurrying looms, venting clamor from the thousands of open windows. A canal of slow-moving, turbid water intersected the city and fed its quota of power to each mill. The fenced bank of the canal was green; and elms, languid in the fierce heat, gave shade here and there with wilted leaves. The masses of brick which inclosed the toilers within the mills puffed off tremulous heat-waves and suggested that humanity must be baking in those gigantic ovens.

A high fence interposed between the canal and the street; the mill lawn which extended between the canal and the shimmering brick walls was also inclosed. Signs posted on the fence warned trespassers not to venture.

A bridge carried the street across the canal, and Farr stood there for a time and watched the swirl of the water below. Then he sauntered on and surveyed the expanse of mill lawn with appraising and envious gaze.

The young man climbed the canal fence, exhibiting more of his cool contempt for authority by helping himself over the sharp spikes with the aid of a “No Trespassing” sign. The sickly odor of raw cotton came floating to his nostrils from the open windows. He strolled to the head of a transverse canal which sucked water from the main stream. A sprawling tree shaded a foot-worn plank where an old man, with bent shoulders and a withered face, trudged to and fro, clawing down into the black waters with a huge rake. He was the rack-tender--it was his task to keep the ribs of the guarding rack clear of the refuse that came swirling down with the water, for flotsam, if allowed to lodge, might filch some of the jealously guarded power away from the mighty turbines which growled and grunted in the depths of the wheel-pits. With rake in one hand and a long, barbed pole in the other the old man bent over the bubbling torrent that the rack's teeth sucked hissingly between them. Bits of wood, soggy paper, an old umbrella, all manner of stuff which had been tossed into the canal by lazy folks up-stream, he raked and pulled up and piled at the end of his foot-bridge.

“Hy, yi, old Pickaroon!” came a child's shrill voice from a mill window. “There's a tramp under your tree.”

The old man raised his head from his work at the rack.

“You must not come on dis place,” he cried, with a strong French-Canadian accent.