Part 1

THE LAY ANTHONY

A Romance

By Joseph Hergesheimer

New York & London

Mitchell Kennerley 1914

“_... if in passing from this deceitful world into true life love is not forgotten,... I know that among the most joyous souls of the third heaven my Fiametta sees my pain. Pray her, if the sweet draught of Lethe has not robbed me of her,... to obtain my ascent to her._”

--Giovanni Boccaccio

TO

DOROTHY

THIS

FIGMENT OF A PERPETUAL FLOWERING

THE LAY ANTHONY

I--A ROMANCE

NOT for the honor of winning the Vanderbilt Cup, nor for the glory of pitching a major league baseball team into the world's championship, would Tony Ball have admitted to the familiar and derisive group in the drugstore that he was--in the exact, physical aspect of the word--pure. Secretly, and in an entirely natural and healthy manner, he was ashamed of his innocence. He carefully concealed it in an elaborate assumption of wide worldly knowledge and experience, in an attitude of cynical comprehension, and indifference toward _girls_.

But he might have spared himself the effort, the fictions, of his pose--had he proclaimed his ignorance aloud from the brilliantly lighted entrance to the drugstore no one who knew him in the midweek, night throng on Ellerton's main street would have credited Anthony with anything beyond a thin and surprising joke. He was, at twenty, the absolute, adventurous opposite of any conscious or cloistered virtue: the careless carriage of his big, loose frame; his frank, smiling grey eyes and ample mouth; his very, drawling voice--all marked him for a loiterer in the pleasant and sunny places of life, indifferent to the rigors of a mental or moral discipline.

The accumulated facts of his existence fully bore this out: the number of schools from which, playing superlative baseball, he had been still obliged to leave, carrying with him the cordial good will of master and fellow, for an unconquerable, irresponsible laxity; the number and variety of occupations that had claimed him in the past three years, every one of which at their inception certain, he felt confident, to carry him beyond all dreams and necessity of avarice; and every one, in his rapidly diminishing interest, attention, or because of persistent, adverse conditions over which, he asseverated, he had no control, turning into a fallow field, a disastrous venture; and, conclusively, the group of familiars, the easy companions of idle hours, to which he had gravitated.

He met his mates by appointment at Doctor Allhop's drugstore, or by an elaborate system of whistled formulas from the street, at which he would rise with a muttered excuse from the dinner table and disappear.--He was rarely if ever sought outright at his father's house; it was quite another sort of boy who met and discoursed easily with sisters, who unperturbed greeted mothers face to face.

It would have been useless, had he known it, to protest his virtue inside the drugstore or out; a curious chain of coincidents had preserved it. Again and again he had been at the point of surrendering his involuntary Eden, and always the accident, the interruption, had befallen, always he had retired in a state of more or less orderly celibacy. On the occasion of one of those nocturnal, metropolitan escapades by which matured boys, in a warm, red veil of whiskey, assert their manhood and independence, he had been thrust in a drunken stupor into the baggage car of the “owl” train to Ellerton. Instances might be multiplied: life, in its haphazard manner, its uncharted tides and eddies sweeping arbitrarily up and down the world, had carelessly preserved in him that concrete ideal which myriads of heroic and agonized beings had striven terribly and in vain to ward.

And so it happened, when Doctor Allhop turned with an elaborate impropriety from the pills he was compounding in a porcelain pestle, that Anthony's laugh was loudest, his gusto most marked, in the group gathered at the back of the drugstore. A wooden screen divided them, hid the shelves of bottles, the water sink, and the other properties and ingredients of the druggist's profession, from the glittering and public exhibition of the finished article, the marble slab and silver mouths of the sodawater fountain, the uninitiated throng.

He was sitting on a case of prepared food, his legs thrust out before him, and a thread of smoke coiling bluely from the cigarette held in his broad, scarred hand. There was a little gay song on his lips, and a roving, gay glint in his direct gaze. At frequent intervals he surveyed with approbation maroon socks and a pair of new and shining pumps; the rest of his apparel was negligent.

The sole chair was occupied by the plump bulk of Thomas Addington Meredith, to whom a sharp nose in a moonlike countenance lent an expression of constant inquiry and foxy caution. He was elaborately apparelled in a suit which boasted a waistcoat draped with the gold chain of an authentic timepiece; while, closing a silver cigarette case scrolled large with his initials, a fat finger bore a ruby that, rumor circulated, had been the gift of a married woman.

Lounging against a shelf Alfred Craik gazed absently at his blackened and broken fingernails, his greasy palms. He was Anthony's partner in the current industry of a machine shop and garage, maintained in a dilapidated stable on the outskirts of Ellerton. It was a concern mainly upheld by a daily levy on the Ball family for necessary tools and accessories. He was, as always, silent, detached.

But William Williams amply atoned for any taciturnity on the part of the others; he had returned a short while before from two checkered years in the West; and, a broad felt hat cinched with a carved leather hand pushed back from his brow, and waving the formidable stump of a cigar, he expiated excitedly on the pleasures of that far, liberal land.

“Why,” he proclaimed, “I owe a saloon keeper in San Francisco sixty-five dollars for one round of drinks--the joint was full and it was up to me... nothing but champagne went, understand! He knows he'll get it. Why, I collared ten dollars a day overseeing sheep. I cleaned up three thousand in one little deal; it was in Butte City; it lasted nine days. But 'Frisco's the place--all the girls there are good sports, all the men spenders.”

“What did you come back East for?” Alfred Craik demanded; “why didn't you stay right with it?”

“I got up against it,” William grinned; “the old man wouldn't give me another stake.” The thought of the glories he had been forced to relinquish started him afresh. “I cleaned up enough in a week at billiards,” he boasted, “to keep me in Ellerton a year.”

“Didn't Bert Dingley take four bits from you last night at Hinkle's?” Anthony lazily asked.

“That farmer!” the other scoffed; “I had a rank cue; they are all rank at Hinkle's. I'll match him in a decent parlor for any amount.”

“How much will you put up?” Meredith demanded; “I will back Bert.”

“How much have you got?” William queried.

“How much have you?”

“If this was San Francisco I could get a hundred.”

“What have you got in real coin, Bill?” Tony joined in.

“Three nickles,” William Williams admitted moodily.

“I've got thirty-five cents,” Thomas added. “I wish I could get a piece of change.”

“How's the car?” Anthony turned to hiss partner in the lull that followed. The “car,” their sole professional charge, had been placed in their hands by an optimistic and benevolent connection of the Balls.

“I had the differential apart again to-day,” Alfred responded, “but I can't find that grinding anywhere. It will have to be all torn down,” he announced with sombre enthusiasm.

“You have had that dam' thing apart three times in the last four weeks, and every time you put it together it's worse,” Anthony protested; “the cylinder casing leaks, and God knows what you did to the gears.”

“I wish I had a piece of change,” Thomas Meredith repeated, in a manner patently mysterious.

“A temporary sacrifice of your tin shop--” Doctor Allhop suggested, tinning from the skilful moulding of the pills on a glass slab.

“Not a chance! the family figurehead announced that he had taken my watch 'out' for the last time.”

“He wants to plaster it on some Highschool skirt,” Alfred announced unexpectedly.

“This robbing the nursery makes me ill,” William protested. “Out in Denver there are real queens with gold hair--”

His period was lost in a yapping chorus from the west-wearied circle. “Take it to bed with you,” he was entreated.

“Nothing in the Highschool can reach these,” Meredith assured them, “this is the real thing--an all night seance. They have just moved in by the slaughter house; a regular pipe--their father is dead, and the old woman's deaf. Two sisters... one has got red hair, and the other can kick higher'n you can hold your hand. The night I went I had to leave early, but they told me to come hack... any night after nine, and bring a friend.”

“I'll walk around with you,” William Williams remarked negligently.

“Not on three nickles. They told me to fetch around a couple of bottles of port wine, and have a genuine party.”

Anthony Ball listened with rapidly growing attention, while he fingered three one dollar bills wadded into the bottom of his pocket. He felt his blood stir more rapidly, beating in his ears: vague pictures thronged his brain of girls with flaming hair, dexterous, flashing limbs, white frills, garters. With an elaborate air of unconcern he asked:

“Are they goodlookers?”

“Oh, Boy! they have got that hidden fascination.”

Anthony made a swift reckoning of the price of port; it would wipe out the sum he was getting together for badly needed baseball shoes.--Red hair!--He could count on no further assistance from his father that month; the machine shop at present was an expense.

“Got any coin?” Meredith demanded.

“A few.”

The other consulted with importance the ostentatious watch. “Just the minute,” he announced. “Come along; we can get the port at the Eagle; we'll have a Paris of a time.”

Doctor Allhop offered an epigrammatic parallel between two celebrated planets.

“I need new ball shoes,” Anthony temporized; “I ripped mine the last game.”

Meredith rose impatiently. “Charge them to the family,” he ejaculated. “But if you don't want to get in on this, there are plenty of others. Two or three dollars are easy to raise in a good cause. Why, the last night I spent in the city cost me seventeen bucks.”

“I guess I'll come.” Anthony instinctively barred his sudden eagerness from his voice. He rose, and was surprised to find that his knees were trembling. His face was hot too.--he wondered if it was red? if it would betray his inexperience? “If they hand me any Sundayschool stuff,” he proclaimed bigly, “I'll step right on it; I'm considerably wise to these dames.”

“This is the real, ruffled goods.” Meredith settled a straw hat with a blue band on his sleek head, and Anthony dragged a faded cap from his pocket, which he drew far over his eyes. William Williams regarded them enviously. Craik's thoughts had wandered far, his lips moved silently. And Doctor Allhop had disappeared into the front of the drugstore.

II.

LET'S get along,” Anthony said in a a thick, strange voice. He stumbled forward; his eyes were hot, blurred; he tried in vain to wink clear his vision. Suddenly his elbow struck sharply against a shelf, and there was an answering crash, the splintering of glass smashing upon the floor. Doctor Allhop hurried in to the scene of the disaster. “You young bull among the bottles!” he exclaimed in exasperated tones; “a whole gross of perfume, all the white lilac, lost.”

Anthony Ball stood motionless, embarrassed and annoyed by the accident; and great, heavy coils of the scent rose about him; they filled his nostrils with wave on wave of pungent odor, and stung his eyes so that he shut them. The scent seemed to press about him, to obstruct his breathing, weigh upon his heart; he put out a hand as if to ward it off. It seemed to him that great masses of the flower surrounded him, shutting him with a white, sweet wall from the world. He swayed dizzily; then vanquished the illusion with an expression of regret for the damage he had wrought.

The Doctor was on his knees, brushing together the debris; William Williams guffawed; and Craik smiled idly. Meredith swore, tapping a cigarette on his silver case. “You're a parlor ornament, you are,” he told Anthony.

A feeling of impotence enveloped the latter, a sullen resentment against an occurrence the inevitable result of which must descend like a shower of cold water upon his freshly-stirred desires. “I am sorry as hell, Doctor,” he repeated; “what did that box cost you?”

“Six seventy,” Allhop shot impatiently over his shoulder.

Anthony produced his three dollars, and, smoothing them, laid the sum on a table. “I will stop in with the rest to-morrow morning,” he said. The Doctor rose and turned, partly mollified; but, to avoid the argument which, he felt, might follow, Anthony strode quickly out into the drugstore. There at the white marble sodawater fountain a bevy of youth was consuming colorific cones of ice cream, drinking syrupy concoctions from tall, glistening glasses. They called him by name, but he passed them without a sign of recognition, still the victim of his jangling sensibilities.

III

BAY STREET was thronged; the shops displayed broad, lighted windows filled with their various merchandise; in front of a produce store a row of chickens hung bare, bright blue and yellow, head down; from within came the grinding of a coffee machine, the acrid voices of women bargaining. The glass doors to the fire-engine house stood open, the machines glimmering behind a wide demilune of chairs holding a motley assemblage of men. Further along, from above, came the shuffle of dancing feet, the thin, wiry wail of violins. At the corners groups of youths congregated, obstructing the passerby, smirking and indulging in sudden, stridulous hursts of laughter.

The sky was infinitely remote, intensely, tenderly blue, the stars white as milk; from the immediately surrounding countryside came the scented breaths of early summer--the trailing sweetness of locust blooms, of hidden hedges of honeysuckle, of June roses, and all the pungent aroma of growing grasses, leaves, of fragile and momentary flowers.

Anthony made his way brusquely through the throng, nodding shortly to the countless salutations that marked his progress. The youths all knew him, and the majority of the men; women stopped in their sharp haggling to smile at him; garlands of girls gay in muslins “Mistered” him with pretty propriety, or followed him more boldly over their shoulders with inviting eyes.

He impatiently disregarded his facile popularity: the tumult within him settled into a dull, unreasoning anger against the universe at large. He still owed Doctor Allhop four dollars and seventy cents; he had told the Doctor that he would pay to-morrow; and he would have to go to his father. The latter was a rigorously just man, Anthony gladly recognized, the money would be instantly forthcoming; but he was not anxious to recall the deficiencies of his present position to his father just then. He had passed twenty, and--beyond his ability to cause a baseball to travel in certain unexpected tangents, and a limited comprehension of the conduct of automobiles--he was totally without assets, and without any light on the horizon.

He had been willing to work, he reminded himself resentfully, but bad luck had overtaken him at every turn. The venture before the machine shop--a scheme of squabs, the profits of which, calculated from an advertisement, soared with the birthrate of those prolific birds, had been ruined by rats. The few occasions when he had neglected to feed the pigeons, despite the frank and censorious opinion of the family, had had little or nothing to do with that misfortune. And, before that, his kennel of rabbit dogs had met with an untimely fate when a favorite bitch had gone mad, and a careful commonwealth had decreed the death of the others. If his mother could but be won from the negative she had placed upon baseball as a professional occupation, he might easily rise through the minor leagues to a prideful position in the ranks of the national pastime--“Lonnie This” was paid fourteen hundred yearly for his prowess with the leather sphere, “Hans That's” removal from one to another club had involved thousands of dollars.

He heard his name pronounced in a peremptory manner, and stopped to see the relative whose automobile had been placed in his care cross the street.

“What in the name of the Lord have you young dunces done to my car?” the older man demanded.

“We have been trying to locate that grinding,” Anthony told him in as conciliatory manner as he could assume.

“Well,” the other proceeded angrily, “you have ruined it this time; the gears slid around like a plate of ice cream.”

“It was nothing but a pile of junk when we took it,” Tony exploded; “why don't you loosen up and get a real car?”

“I took it to Feedler's. You can send me a bill to-morrow.”

“There will be no bill. I'm sorry you were not satisfied, Sam.”

“You are the most shiftless young dog in the county,” the other told him in kindlier tones; “why don't you take hold of something, Anthony?”

Anthony swung on his heel and abruptly departed. He had taken hold, he thought hotly, times without number, but everything broke in his grasp.

The stores on Bay Street grew more infrequent, the rank of monotonous brick dwellings closed up, family groups occupied the steps that led to the open doors. The crowd grew less, dwindling to a few aimless couples, solitary pedestrians. He soon stopped, before his home. Opposite the gaunt skeleton of a building operation rose blackly against the pale stars. The aged lindens above him, lushly leaved, cast an intenser gloom, filled with the warm, musty odor of the sluiced pavement, about the white marble steps. The hall, open before him, was a cavern of coolness; beyond, from the garden shut from the street by an intricate, rusting iron fence, he heard the deliberate tones of his sister Ellie. Evidently there was a visitor, and he entered the hall noiselessly, intent upon passing without notice to his room above. But Ellie had been watching for him, and called before he had reached the foot of the stairs.

IV

HE made his way diffidently through a long window to the lawn; where he saw his sister, a glimmering, whitish shape in the heavily overgrown garden, conversing with a figure without form or detail, by a trellis sagging beneath a verdurous weight.

“Oh, Tony!” she called; “here's Mrs. Dreen.”

He leaned forward awkwardly, and grasped a slim, jewelled hand. “I didn't know you were back from France,” he told the indistinct woman before him.

“But you read that Mr. Dreen had resigned the consulship at Lyons,” a delicate, rounded voice rejoined, “and you should have guessed that we would come home to Ellerton. My dear Ellie,” she turned to the girl, “you have no idea how delighted James is at being here once more. He has given the farmer notice, and insists that he is going to cultivate his own acres. He was up this morning at six; fancy, after France and his late _déjeuner._ And Eliza adores it; she spends the day with a gardener, planning flowerbeds.”

Anthony slipped into an easy posture on the thick, damp sod. Although he had not seen Mrs. James Dreen since his childhood, when she had accompanied her husband abroad to a consular post, he still retained a pleasant memory of her magnetic and precise charm, the memory of her harmonious personality, the beauty of her apparel and rings.

“How is Eliza?” he asked politely, and with no inward interest; “she must be a regular beauty by now.”

“No,” Mrs. Dreen returned crisply, “she is not particularly goodlooking, but she has always told me the truth. Eliza is a dear.” Anthony lit a cigarette, and flipped the match in a minute gold arc, extinguished in the night.

“I am decidedly uneasy about Eliza though,” she continued to Ellie; “to tell the truth, I am not sure how she will take over here. She is a serious child; I would say temperamental, but that's such an impossible word. She is absolutely and transparently honest and outspoken--it's _ghastly_ at times. The most unworldly person alive; with her thought and action are one, and often as not her thoughts are appalling. All that, you know, doesn't spell wisdom for a girl.”

“Yet James and I couldn't bear to... make her harder. A great deal of care... If she is my daughter, Ellie, she is exquisite--so sensitive, sympathetic...”

Anthony, absorbed in the misfortune that had overtaken the machine shop, the impending, inevitable interview with his father, so justly rigorous, hardly gathered the sense of Mrs. Dreen's discourse. Occasional phrases, familiar and unfamiliar terms, pierced his abstraction.--“Colombin's.” “James' siatica.” “Camille Marchais.” Then her words, centering about a statement that had captured his attention, became coherent, significant.

“Only a small affair,” Mrs. Dreen explained; “to introduce Eliza to Ellerton. Nothing on a large scale until winter.... Dancing, or rather what goes down for dancing to-day. I am asking our old intimates, and have written a few informal cards.”

An automobile drew up smoothly before the Balls; its rear light winked like an angry red eye through the iron fence. Mrs. Dreen rose. In the gloom her face was girlish; there was a blur of lace at her throat, a glimmer of emeralds. “Mind you come,” she commanded Ellie. “And you too, without fail,” to Anthony. “Now that Hydrangea House is open again we must have our friends about us. Heavens! Howard Ball's children and mine grown up!” She moved gracefully across to a garden gate. Anthony assisted her into the motorcar; the door closed with a snap.

Ellie had sunk back into her chair, and was idly twisting her fingers in the grass at her side. At her back the ivied wall of the house beyond stirred faintly with sparrows. A misshapen moon swung apparently up from and through the building frame opposite, and faint shadows unfolded on the grass. Anthony flung himself moodily by his sister.

“Sam's taken his car from us,” he informed her; “that will about shut up the shop.”

“Then perhaps you will bring back the screwdrivers.”

“To-morrow.”

“What are you going to do, Tony?”

“Tell me.”

“A big strong fellow... there mast be something.”

“Mother won't let me play ball in the leagues.”

“Perhaps she will; we'll talk to her; it's better than nothing.”

“I broke a box of rotten perfume at the drugstore, and owe the Doctor four seventy.”

“It's too bad--father is never free from little worries; you are always getting into difficulties. You are different from other boys, Anthony--there don't seem to be any place in life for you; or you don't make a place, I can't tell which. You have no constructive sense, and no feeling of responsibility. What do you want to do with yourself?”

“I don't know, Ellie, honestly,” he confessed. “I try like the devil, make a thousand resolutions, and then--I go off fishing. Or if I don't things go to the rats just the same.”

“Well,” she rose, “I'm going up. Don't bother father about that money, I'll let you have it. It's perfectly useless to tell you to return it.”

“I swear you will get it next week,” he proclaimed gratefully. “The baseball association owes me for two games.”

“Haven't you promised it?”

“That's so!” he exclaimed ruefully. She laughed and disappeared into the house.

V