Chapter 15

When he came to go about in the town, as he did daily after the pleasant occupation of refurnishing his study and bed-room was a pleasure past, he found that in some mysterious manner his fame had preceded him. Everybody seemed to know who he was; to be able to place him as a New Yorker, as an author in search of health, or local color or environment or some other technical quality not to be found in the crowded cities; to be able to place him, also, as Miss Margery Grierson's friend and beneficiary--which last, he surmised, was his best passport to the good graces of his fellow-townsmen.

Coincidently he discovered that, in the same mysterious manner, everybody seemed to know that he was, in the Wahaskan phrase, "well-fixed." Here, again, he guessed that something might be credited to Margery. Beyond a hint to Raymer, he had told no one of the comfortable assurance against want lying snugly secure in the small strong-box in the Farmers' and Merchants' safety vault, and he was reasonably certain that Raymer could not have passed the hint so fast and so far as the town-wide limits to which the fact of the "well-fixed" phrase had spread.

All this was very nourishing, not to say stimulating, to the starved soul of a proletary. Not in any period of the past had he so fully understood that an acute appreciation of the wrongs of the race is no bar to an equally acute hungering and thirsting after the commonplace flesh-pots, or to a very primitive and soul-satisfying enjoyment of the same when they were to be had. Nevertheless, the reaction into self-indulgence proved to be only temporary. God had been good to him, enabling him to realize in miraculous fulfilment the ideal environment and opportunity: therefore he would do his part, proclaiming the holy war and fighting, single-handed if need be, the battle of the weak against the strong.

So ran the renewed determination, dusted off and re-pedestaled after many days. As to the manner of conducting the war against inequality and the crime of plutocracy, the plan of campaign had been sufficiently indicated in that white-hot moment of high resolves on the cargo-deck of the _Belle Julie_. For the propaganda, there was his book; for the demonstration, he would put the sacred fund into some industry where the weight of it would give him the casting vote in all questions involving the rights of the workers. It was absurdly simple, and he wondered that none of the sociological reformers whose books he had read had anticipated him in the discovery of such an obviously logical point of attack.

With the re-writing of the book fairly begun, he was already looking about for the practical opportunity when the growing friendship with Edward Raymer promised to offer an opening exactly fulfilling the experimental requirements. Raymer had over-enlarged his plant and was needing more capital. So much Griswold had gathered from the talk of the street; and some of Raymer's half-confidences had led him to suspect that the need was, or was likely to become, imperative. It was only the finer quality of friendship that had hitherto kept him from offering help before it was asked, and thus far he had contented himself with hinting to Raymer that he had money to invest. From every point of view a partnership with the young iron-founder promised to afford the golden opportunity. The industry was comparatively small and self-contained; and Raymer was himself openly committed to the cause of uplifting. Griswold waited patiently; he was still waiting on the Wednesday afternoon when Raymer called him over the telephone and made the appointment for a meeting at the house in Shawnee Street.

"Your 'pair of minutes' must have found something to grow upon," laughed the patient waiter, when Raymer, finding Mrs. Holcomb's front door open, had climbed the stair to the newly established literary workshop. "I've had time to smoke a pipe and write a complete paragraph since you called up."

Raymer flung himself into a chair at the desk-end and reached for a pipe in the curiously carved rack which had been one of Griswold's small extravagances in the refurnishing.

"Yes," he said; "Margery Grierson drove up while I was unhitching, and I had to stop and talk to her. Which reminds me: she says you're giving Mereside the go-by since you set up for yourself. Are you?"

"Not intentionally," Griswold denied; and he let it stand at that.

"I shouldn't, if I were you," Raymer advised. "Margery Grierson is any man's good friend; and pretty soon you'll be meeting people who will lift their eyebrows when you speak of her. You mustn't make her pay for that."

"I'm not likely to," was the sober rejoinder. "My debt to Miss Grierson is a pretty big one, Raymer; bigger than you suspect, I imagine."

"I'm glad to hear you put the debt where it belongs, leaving her father out of it. You don't owe him anything; not even a cup of cold water. There's a latter-day buccaneer for you!" he went on, warming to his subject like a man with a sore into which salt has been freshly rubbed. "That old timber-wolf wouldn't spare his best friend--allowing that anybody could be his friend. By Jove! he's making me sweat blood, all right!"

"How is that?" asked Griswold.

"I've been on the edge of telling you two or three times, but next to a quitter I do hate the fellow who puts his fingers into a trap and then squawks when the trap nips him. Grierson has got me down and he is about to cut my throat, Griswold."

"Tell me about it," said the one who had been patiently waiting to be told.

"It begins back a piece, but I'll brief it for you. I suppose you've been told how Grierson came here a few years ago with a wad of money and a large and healthy ambition to own the town?"

Griswold nodded.

"Well, he has come pretty close to making a go of it. What he doesn't own or control wouldn't make much of a town by itself. A year ago he tried to get a finger into my little pie. He wanted to reorganize the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and offered to furnish the additional capital and take fifty-one per cent of the reorganization stock. Naturally, I couldn't see it. My father had left the plant as an undivided legacy to my mother, my sister, and myself; and while we haven't been getting rich out of it, we've managed to hold our own and to grow a little. Don't let me bore you."

"You couldn't do that if you should try. Go on."

"This spring Wahaska began to feel the boost of the big crop year. Everything was on the upward slant, and I thought we ought to move along with other people. Before the snow was off the ground we had hit the capacity limit in the old plant and the only thing to do was to enlarge. I borrowed the money at Grierson's bank and did it."

"And you can't make the enlarged plant pay?"

"Oh, yes, it's paying very well, indeed; we're earning dividends, all right. But in the money matter I simply played the fool and let Grierson cinch me. As I've told you more than once, I'm an engineer and no finance shark. My borrow at the bank was one hundred thousand dollars, and there was a verbal understanding that it was to be repaid out of the surplus earnings, piecemeal. I told Grierson that I should need a year or more, and he didn't object."

"This was all in conversation?" said Griswold: "no writing?"

Raymer made a wry face.

"Don't rub it in. I'm admitting that I was all the different kinds of a fool. There was no definite time limit mentioned. I was to give my personal notes and put up the family stock as collateral. A day or two later, when I went around to close the deal, the trap was standing wide open for me and a baby might have seen it. Grierson said he had proposed the loan to his directors, and that they had kicked on taking the stock as collateral. He said they wanted a mortgage on the plant."

Griswold nodded. "Which brought on more talk," he suggested.

"Which brought on a good bit more talk. Really, it didn't make any intrinsic difference. Stock collateral or property collateral, the bank would have us by the throat until the debt should be paid. But you know how women are: my mother would about as soon sign her own death warrant as to put her name on a mortgage; so there we were--blocked. Grierson was as smooth as oil; said he wanted to help me out, and was willing to stretch his authority to do it. Then he sprung the trap."

"Having got you just where he wanted you," put in the listener.

"Yes; having got me down. The new proposition was apparently a mere modification of the first one. I was an accredited customer of the bank, like other business men of the town, and as such I could ask for an extension of credit on accommodation paper, and Grierson, as president, was at liberty to grant it if he saw fit. He offered to take my paper without an endorser if I would cover his personal risk with my stock collateral, assigning it, not to the bank, but to him. I fell for it like a woolly sheep. The stock transfers were made, and I signed a note for one hundred thousand dollars, due in sixty days; Grierson explaining that two months was the bank's usual limit on accommodation paper--which is true enough--but giving me to understand that a renewal and an extension of time would be merely a matter of routine."

Griswold was shaking his head sympathetically. "I can guess the rest," he said. "Grierson is preparing to swallow you whole."

"He has as good as done it," was the dejected reply. "The note falls due to-morrow; and, as I happened to be uptown this afternoon, I thought I would drop in and pay the discount and renew the paper. To tell the truth, I'd been getting more nervous the more I thought of it; and I didn't dare let it go to the final moment. Grierson shot me through the heart. He gave me a cock-and-bull story about some bank examiner's protest, and told me I must be prepared to take up the paper to-morrow. He knew perfectly well that he had me by the throat. I had checked out every dollar of the loan, and a good bit of our own balance in addition, paying the building and material bills."

"Of course you reminded him of his agreement?"

"Sure; and he sawed me off short: said that any business man borrowing money on accommodation paper knew that it was likely to be called in on the expiration date; that an extension is really a new transaction, which the bank is at liberty to refuse to enter. Oh, he gave it to me cold and clammy, sitting back in his big chair and staring up at me through the smoke of a fat black cigar while he did it!"

"And then?" prompted Griswold.

"Then I remembered the mother and sister, Kenneth, and did what I would have died rather than do for myself--I begged like a dog. But I might as well have gone outside and butted my head against the brick wall of the bank."

Griswold forgot his own real, though possibly indirect, obligation to Jasper Grierson.

"That is where you made a mistake: you should have told him to go to hell with his money!" was his acrid comment. And then: "How near can you come to lifting this note to-morrow, Raymer?"

"'Near' isn't the word. Possibly I might sweep the corners and gather up twelve or fifteen thousand dollars."

"That will do," said the querist, shortly. "Make it ten thousand, and I'll contribute the remaining ninety."

Raymer sprang out of his chair as if its padded arms had been suddenly turned into high-voltage electrodes.

"You will?--you'll do that for me, Griswold?" he said, with a queer stridency in his voice that made the word-craftsman, always on the watch for apt similes, think of a choked chicken. But Raymer was swallowing hard and trying to go on. "By Jove--it's the most generous thing I ever heard of!--but I can't let you do it. I haven't a thing in the world to offer you but the stock, and that may not be worth the paper it is printed on if Jasper Grierson has made up his mind to break me."

"Sit down again and let us thresh it out," said Griswold. "How much of a Socialist are you, Raymer?"

The young ironmaster sat down, gasping a little at the sudden wrenching aside of the subject.

"Why, I don't know; enough to want every man to have a square deal, I guess."

"Including the men in your shops?"

"Putting them first," was the prompt correction. "It was my father's policy, and it has been mine. We have never had any labor troubles."

"You pay fair wages?"

"We do better than that. A year ago, I introduced a modified plan of profit-sharing."

Griswold's eyes were lighting up with the altruistic fires.

"Once in awhile, Raymer, a thing happens so fortuitously as to fairly compel a belief in the higher powers that our fathers included in the word 'Providence'," he said, almost solemnly. "You have described exactly an industrial situation which seems to me to offer a solution of the whole vexed question of master and man, and to be a seed-sowing which is bound to be followed by an abundant and most humanizing harvest. Ever since I began to study, even in a haphazard way, the social system under which we sweat and groan, I've wanted in on a job like yours. I still want in. Will you take me as a silent partner, Raymer? I'm not making it a condition, mind you: come here any time after ten o'clock to-morrow, and you'll find the money waiting for you. But I do hope you won't turn me down."

Raymer was gripping the arms of his chair again, but this time they were not unpleasantly electrified.

"If I had only myself to consider, I shouldn't keep you waiting a second," he returned, heartily. "But it may take a little time to persuade my mother and sister. If they could only know you"--then, forgetting the crossed wire and his late overhearings--"why can't you come out to dinner with me to-night?"

"For the only reason that would make me refuse; I have a previous bidding. But I'll be glad to go some other day. There is no hurry about this business matter; take all the time you need--after you have made Mr. Grierson take his claws out of you."

Raymer had filled the borrowed pipe again and was pulling at it reflectively. "About this partnership; what would be your notion?" he asked.

"The simplest way is always the best. Increase your capital stock and let me in for as much as my ninety thousand dollars will buy," said the easily satisfied investor. "We'll let it go at that until you've had time to think it over, and talk it over with your mother and sister."

The iron-founder got up and reached for his hat.

"You are certainly the friend in need, Griswold, if ever there was one," he said, gripping the hand of leave-taking as if he would crack the bones in it. "But there is one thing I'm going to ask you, and you mustn't take offense: this ninety thousand; could you afford to lose it?--or is it your whole stake in the game?"

Griswold's smile was the ironmaster's assurance that he had not offended.

"It is practically my entire stake--and I can very well afford to lose it in the way I have indicated. You may call that a paradox, if you like, but both halves of it are true."

"Then there is one other thing you ought to know, and I'm going to tell it now," Raymer went on. "We do a general foundry and machine business, but a good fifty per cent of our profit comes from the Wahaska & Pineboro Railroad repair work, which we have had ever since the road was opened."

Griswold was smiling again. "Why should I know that, particularly?" he asked.

"Because it is rumored that Jasper Grierson has been quietly absorbing the stock and bonds of the road, and if he means to remove me from the map----"

"I see," was the reply. "In that case you'll need a partner even worse than you do now. You can't scare me off that way. Shall I look for you at ten to-morrow?"

"At ten to the minute," said the rescued plunger; and he went down-stairs so full of mingled thankfulness and triumph that he mistook Doctor Farnham's horse for his own at the hitching-post two doors away, and was about to get into the doctor's buggy before he discovered his mistake.

XXV

THE BRIDGE OF JEHENNAM

Doctor Farnham had been about to make his daily call upon old Mrs. Breda, two doors up the street from the Widow Holcomb's, when he had climbed the stair of literary aspirations to give the convalescent his dinner bidding.

Griswold had accepted gratefully on the spur of the moment; and it was not until after Raymer had come and gone that sober second thought began to point out the risk he would run in meeting Charlotte Farnham face to face under conditions which would give her the best conceivable opportunity to recognize him, if recognition were possible.

The more he thought of it, the more he regretted his haste in consenting to incur the risk. Reflectively weighing the chances for and against, he made sure that in characterizing the young woman whose life-thread had been so strangely tangled with his own he had not overrated her intelligence. Giving heredity its due, with the keen-witted little physician for her father she could scarcely fail to measure up to the standard of those whose gifts are apperceptive. For many days she had had ample opportunity to familiarize herself with all the little identifying individualities of the deck-hand: reasoning from cause to effect, it might be assumed that her crushing responsibility had driven her to make use of it. Having recognized him once, under conditions far less favorable than those he was about to hazard, was it not more than probable that she would be able to do it again?

Griswold took a final look at himself in his dressing-case mirror before going to keep his evening appointment at the doctor's down-town office. It was comfortably reassuring. So far as he could determine, there was little in the clean-shaven, square-shouldered, correctly garmented young fellow who faced him in the mirror to suggest either the bearded outcast of New Orleans or the unkempt and toil-soddened roustabout of the _Belle Julie_. If only she had not made him speak to her: he had a sharp conviction that the greatest of all the hazards lay in the chance that she might remember his voice.

He found the cheery little doctor waiting for him when he had walked the few squares to the Main Street office.

"I was beginning to be afraid you were going to be fashionably late," said the potential host; and then, with a humorous glance for the correct garmenting: "Regalia, heh? Hasn't Miss Grierson told you that Wahaska is still hopelessly unable to live up to the dress-coat and standing collar? I'm sure she must have. But never mind; climb into the buggy and we'll let old Bucephalus take us around to see if the neighbors have brought in anything good to eat."

The drive was a short one, and it ended at the gate through which Matthew Broffin had preceded by only a few hours the man whose eventual appearance at the Farnham home he had so confidently predicted. As at many another odd moment when there had been nothing better to do, Broffin was once more shadowing the house in which, first or last, he expected to trap his amateur MacHeath; and when the buggy was halted at the carriage step he was near enough to mark and recognize the doctor's companion.

"Not this time," he muttered, sourly, when the two had passed together up the gravelled path and the host was fitting his latch-key to the front door. "It's only the sick man that writes books. I wonder what sort of a book he thinks he's going to write in this inforgotten, turkey-trodden, come-along village of the Reuben yaps!"

Griswold, waiting on the porch while Doctor Farnham fitted his key, had a nerve-tingling shiver of apprehension when the latch yielded with a click and he found himself under the hall lantern formally shaking hands with the statuesque young woman of the many imaginings. It gave him a curious thrill of mingled terror and joy to find her absolutely unchanged. Having, for his own part, lived through so many experiences since that final glimpse of her standing on the saloon-deck guards of the _Belle Julie_ at St. Louis, the distance in time seemed almost immeasurable.

"You are very welcome to Home Nook, Mr. Griswold; we have been hearing about you for many weeks," she was saying when he had relinquished the firm hand and was hanging his coat and hat on the hall-rack. And then, with a half-embarrassed laugh: "I am afraid we are dreadful gossips; all Wahaska has been talking about you, you know, and wondering how it came to acquire you."

"It hasn't acquired anything very valuable," was the guest's modest disclaimer, its readiness arising out of a grateful easing of strains now that the actual face-to-face ordeal had safely passed its introductory stage. "And you mustn't say a word against your charming little city, Miss Farnham," he went on. "It is the friendliest, most hospitable----"

The doctor's daughter was interrupting with an enthusiastic show of applause.

"Come on out to dinner, both of you," she urged; and then to Griswold: "I want you to say all those nice things to Aunt Fanny, and as many more as you can think of. She has never admitted for a single moment that Wahaska can be compared with any one of a dozen New Hampshire villages she could name."

In the progress to the cozy, home-like dining-room, Griswold found himself at once in an atmosphere of genuine comfort and refinement; the refinement which speaks of generations of good breeding chastened and purified by the limitations of a slender purse; in the present instance the purse of the good little doctor whose attempted charity in the matter of his own fee was fresh in the mind of the castaway. Griswold had the writing craftsman's ingathering eye: he saw that the furnishings were frugally well-worn, that the sitting-room rug was country-woven, and that the spotless dining-room napery was soft and pliable with age. The contrast between the Farnham home and the ornate mansion three streets away on the lake front was strikingly apparent; as cleanly marked as that between Margery Grierson and the sweetly serene and conventional young person who was introducing him to her aunt across the small oval dining-table.

So far, all was going well. Griswold, with a pleasant word for the frail little woman opposite and a retort in kind now and then for the doctor's raillery, still had time to be narrowly observant of the signs and omens. But a little later, when the Swedish maid was serving the meat course, he had his first warning shock. Through the bouillon and the fish the doctor had borne the brunt of the table-talk, joking the guest on his humiliating descent from Mereside and the luxuries to a country doctor's table, and laughing at Griswold's half-hearted attempts to decry the luxuries. What word or phrase or trick of speech it was that served to stir the sleeping memories, Griswold could not guess; but it became suddenly apparent that the memories were stirring. In the midst of a half-uttered direction to the serving-maid, Miss Farnham stopped abruptly, and Griswold could feel her gaze, wide-eyed and half-terrified, seemingly fixed upon him.

It was all over in the turning of a leaf: there had been no break in the doctor's genial raillery, and the breathless little pause at the other end of the table was only momentary. But Griswold fancied that there was a subtle change in the daughter's attitude toward him dating from the moment of interruptions.