LOT & COMPANY

BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

Lot & Company
Red Fleece
Midstream
Down Among Men
Fatherland

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NEW YORK

Lot & Company

BY

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

AUTHOR OF “RED FLEECE,” “MIDSTREAM,” “DOWN AMONG
MEN,” “ROUTLEDGE RIDES ALONE,”
ETC., ETC.

NEW YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1915,
By George H. Doran Company

TO
JANE

CONTENTS

PART ONE
THE JADE: I

1

All would have happened differently for Bellair had he been drowsy as usual on this particular Sunday afternoon. The boarding-house was preparing for its nap; indeed already half enveloped, but there came to Bellair’s nostrils a smell of carpets that brought back his first passage up stairs five years before. The halls were filled with greys—dull tones that drove him forth at last. It was November, and the day didn’t know what to do next. Gusts of seasonable wind, wisps of sunshine, threats of rain, and everywhere Bellair’s old enemy—the terrifying Sabbath calm, without which the naked granite soul of New York would remain decently hid. Sundays had tortured him from the beginning. It was not so bad when the garment was on—the weave of millions.

He walked east with an umbrella, thinking more than observing, crossed to Brooklyn and followed the water-front as closely as the complication of ferries, pier-systems and general shipping would permit. Finally he came to a wooden arch, marked Hatmos & Company, the gate of which was open. Entering, he heard the water slapping the piles beneath, his eyes held in fascination to an activity ahead. In the wonder of a dream, he realised that this was a sailing-ship putting forth. On her black stern, he read

Jade of Adelaide

printed in blue of worn pigment.

A barkentine, her clipper-built hull of steel, her lines satisfying like the return of a friend after years. Along the water-line shone the bright edge of her copper sheathing; then a soft black line smooth as modelled clay where she muscled out for sea-worth, and covered her displacement in the daring beauty of contour. Still above was the shining brass of her row of ports on a ground of weathered grey, and the dull red of her rail. Over all, and that which quickened the ardour of Bellair’s soul, was the mystery of her wire rigging and folded cloths against the smoky horizon, exquisite as the frame of a butterfly to his fancy.

His emotion is not to be explained; nor another high moment of his life which had to do with a flashing merchantman seen from the water-front at San Francisco—square-rigged throughout, a cloud of sail-cloth, her royals yet to be lifted, as she got underweigh. He knew that considerable canvas was still spread between California, Australia and the Islands, but what a well-kept if ancient maiden of the Jade’s species was doing here in New York harbour, A. D. Nineteen hundred and odd, was not disclosed to Bellair until afterward, and not clearly then.

He knew her for a barkentine, and in the intensely personal appeal of the moment he was a bit sorry for the blend. To his eyes the schooner-rig of mizzen and main masts was not to be compared for beauty to the trisected fore. Still he reflected that square-rigged throughout, she would be crowded with crew to care for her, and that her concession to trade was at least not outright. Schooner, bark and brig—he seemed to know them first hand, not only from pictures and pages of print, though there had been many long evenings of half-dream with books before him—books that always pushed back impatiently through the years of upstart Steam into Nature’s own navigation, where Romance has put on her brave true form in the long perspective. Ships that really sailed were one of Bellair’s passions, like orchards and vined stone-work—all far from him apparently and out of the question—loved the more because of it.... He watched with rapt eyes now, estimated the Jade’s length at one-seventy-five and was debating her tonnage when a huge ox of a man appeared from the cabin (while the Jade slid farther out), waddled aft as if bare-footed, spoke to an officer there, and then held up two brown hairy, thick-fingered hands, palms extended to the pier—as if to push Brooklyn from him forever.... The officer’s voice just reached shore, but not his words. A Japanese woman appeared on the receding deck.

“Jade of Adelaide,” muttered Bellair, moments afterward.

A tug was towing her straight toward Staten. He thought of her lying off the glistening white beach of a coral island two months hence, surrounded by native craft, all hands helping the big man get ashore.... At this moment a young man emerged from the harbour-front door of the Hatmos office, locking it after him. Bellair came up from his dream. Such realities of the city man are mainly secret. It was the worn surface that Bellair presented to the stranger, a sophisticated and imperturbable surface, and one employed so often that its novelty was gone.

“Where’s she going?” he asked.

“Who?”

Bellair smiled at the facetiousness.

“The Jade,” he said gently.

“Just as far from here as she can get.”

“Round the world?”

“I doubt if she’ll come back.”

“You don’t see many of them any more——”

“No,” replied the other agreeably enough, “this old dame and two or three sisters are about all that call here. Hatmos & Co. get ’em all.”

“Will you have a little drink?” Bellair inquired. “That is, if you know a place around here. I’m from across.”

The other was not unwilling. They walked up the pier together. A place was found.

“Does the Jade belong to the Hatmos people?” Bellair asked.

“No. We’re agents for Stackhouse. By the way, he’s aboard the Jade—just left the office a half hour ago. The Hatmos son and heir went home in a cab, like his father used to, when Stackhouse blew in from the South Seas——”

“The big man who stood aft as the ship cleared?” Bellair suggested.

“Hairy neck—clothes look like pajamas?”

“Yes.”

“That must have been Stackhouse. He’s the biggest man in Peloponasia——”

Bellair wondered if he meant Polynesia. “You mean in size?”

“Possibly that, but I meant—interests. Owns whole islands and steam-fleets, but hates steam. Does his pleasure riding under canvas. Comes up to New York every third year with a new Japanese wife. Used to spend his time drinking with old Hatmos—now he’s trying to kill off the younger generation. Lives at the Florimel while in New York, and teaches the dago barboys how to make tropical drinks. If he had stayed longer, he would have got to me. Young Hatmos is about finished.”

Bellair breathed deeply, strangely alive. “Where does the Jade call first after leaving here?”

“Savannah—then one or two South American ports—then around the Horn and the long up-beat to the Islands.”

“Why, that might mean four months.” Bellair spoke with a touch of wistfulness.

They emerged to the street at length, and the New Yorker started shyly back to the pier. The Hatmos man laughed.

“You fall for the sailing-stuff, don’t you?”

“Yes, it’s got me. Do they take passengers?”

“Sure, if you’re in no hurry. Here and there, some one like you—just for the voyage. Two or three on board from here.... One a preacher. He’d better look out. Stackhouse hates to drink alone.”

“Thanks. Good-bye.”

The Jade, far and very little among the liners, had turned south to the Narrows and was spreading her wings.... The world began to shut Bellair in, as he crossed the river again. Sunday night supper at the boarding-house was always a dismal affair; by every manner and means it was so to-night. The chorus woman of the Hippodrome was bolting ahead of the bell, to hurry away to rehearsal. Nightly she came up out of the water.... He tried three sea-books that night—“Lady Letty,” “Lord Jim” and “The Phantom,” but couldn’t get caught in their old spell. A new and personal dimension was upon him from the afternoon. He fell to dreaming again and again of the Jade—the last misty glimpse of her at the Narrows, and the huge brown hands pushing Brooklyn away.... There is pathos in the city man’s love and need for fresh air. Bellair pulled his bed to the window at last, surveying the room without regard. Long afterward he dreamed that he was out on the heaving floor of the sea, and that a man-monster came down from the deck in pajamas, and pressing his hands against the walls of the cabin, made respiration next to impossible for the inmate. There was a key to this suffocation, for the air in his room was still as a pool. A lull had fallen upon the city before a gusty storm of wind and rain.

PART TWO
LOT & COMPANY: I

1

Bellair regarded himself as an average man; and after all perhaps this was the most significant thing about him. He was not average to look at—the face of a student and profoundly kind—and yet, he had moved in binding routine for five years that they knew of at Lot & Company’s. His acquaintances were of the average type. He did not criticise them; you would not have known that he saw them with something of the same sorrow that he regarded himself.

Back of this five years was an Unknowable. Had you possessed exactly the perception you might have caught a glimpse of some extraordinary culture that comes from life in the older lands, and personal contacts with deeper evils—the culture of the great drifters, the inimitable polish of rolling stones. As a usual thing he would not have shown you any of this. At Lot & Company’s offices, men had moved and talked and lunched near and with him for years without uncovering a gleam of a certain superb equipment for life which really existed in a darkened room of his being.

Perhaps he was still in preparation. We have not really completed the circle of any accomplishment until we have put it in action. Certainly Bellair had not done that, since the Unknowable ended. He had made no great friends among men or women; though almost thirty, he had met no stirring love affair, at least in this period. He had done the most common duties of trade, for a common reward in cash; lived in a common house—moved in crowds of common men and affairs. It was as if he were a spy, trained from a child, but commanded at the very beginning of his manhood, not only to toil and serve in an insignificant post—but to be insignificant as well. It was by accident, for instance, that they discovered at Lot & Company’s that Bellair was schooled in the Sanscrit.

Before usual he was astir that Monday morning, but late at the office for all that. A drop of consciousness somewhere between shoe-buttons, and a similar trance between collar and tie. In these lapses a half hour was lost, and queerly enough afterward the old purports of his life did not hold together as before. A new breath from somewhere, a difference in vitality, and the hum-drum, worn-sore consciousness given to his work with Lot & Company, had become like an obscene relative, to be rid of, even at the price of dollars and the established order of things. It had been very clear as he drank his coffee that he must give quit-notice at the office, yet when he reached there, this was not so easy, and he was presently at work as usual in his cage with Mr. Sproxley, the cashier.

The Quaker firm of Lot & Company was essentially a printing establishment. During the first half of the period in which Bellair had been connected, though he was not stupider than usual, he had not realised the crooked weave of the entire inner fabric of the house. Lot & Company had been established for seventy-five years and through three generations. Its conduct was ordered now like a process of nature, a systematised tone to each surface manner and expression. All the departments were strained and deformed to meet and adjust in the larger current of profit which the cashier had somehow bridged without scandal for twenty-seven years. Personally, so far as Bellair knew, Mr. Sproxley was an honest man, though not exactly of the manner, and underpaid.

The cashier’s eyes were black, a black that would burn you, and unquestionably furtive, although Bellair sat for two years at a little distance from the cashier’s desk before he accepted the furtiveness, so deeply laid and set and hardened were his first impressions. They were hard eyes as well, like that anthracite which retains its gleaming black edge, though the side to the draft is red to the core.

Mr. Sproxley’s home was in Brooklyn, an hour’s ride from the office—a little flat in a street of little flats, all with the same porches, brickwork and rusty numerals. An apartment for two, and yet Mr. and Mrs. Sproxley had not moved, though five black-eyed children had come to them. The cashier of Lot & Company was a stationary man—that was his first asset.... A hundred times Bellair had heard the old formula, delivered by firm members to some caller at the office:

“This is our cashier, Mr. Sproxley. He has been with us twenty-seven years. We have found him the soul of honour”—the last trailing off into a whisper—a hundred times in almost the same words, for the Lots and the Wetherbees bred true. The visitor would be drawn off and confidently informed that Mr. Sproxley would die rather than leave a penny unaccounted; indeed, that his zeal on the small as well as large affairs was frequently a disturbance to the office generally, since everything stopped until the balance swung free. Bellair knew of this confidential supplement to the main form, because he had taken it into his own pores on an early day of his employment. The lift of that first talk (in Bellair’s case it was from the elder Wetherbee, an occasional Thee and Thou escaping with unworldly felicity) was for Bellair sometime to attain a similar rock-bound austerity of honour.... Always the stranger glanced a second time at Mr. Sproxley during the firm-member’s low-voiced affirmation of his passionate integrity.

Passing to the second floor, the visitor would meet Mr. Hardburg, head of the manuscript and periodical department, for Lot & Company had found a good business in publishing books of story and poetry at the author’s expense. Here eye and judgment reigned, Mr. Hardburg’s, on all matters of book-dress and criticism; yet within six or seven minutes, the formula would break through for the attention of the caller, thus:

“Lot & Company is a conservative House—that’s why it stands—a House, sir (one felt the Capital), that has stood for seventy-five years on a basis of honour and fair dealing, if on a conservative basis. Lot & Company stands by its agents and employés first and last. Lot & Company does not plunge, but over any given period of time, its progress is apparent and its policy significantly successful.”

Mr. Hardburg’s eyes kindled as he spoke—grey tired eyes, not at all like Mr. Sproxley’s—but the light waned, and Mr. Hardburg quickly relapsed into ennui and complaint, for he was a living sick man. The impression one drew from his earlier years, was that he had overstrained as an athlete, and been a bit loose and undone ever since.... Now Mr. Hardburg would be called away for a moment, leaving the stranger in the office with Miss Rinderley, his assistant. With fluent and well directed sentences, this lady would outline the triumphs of Mr. Hardburg from college to the mastery of criticism which he was now granted professionally.

“But what we love best about him,” Miss Rinderley would say, glancing at the enlarged photograph above his desk, “is the tireless way he helps young men. Always he is at that. I have seen him talk here for an hour—when the most pressing matters of criticism and editorial responsibility called—literally giving himself to some one needing help. Very likely he would miss his train for the country. Poor Mr. Hardburg, he needs his rest so——”

The caller would cry in his heart, “What a superb old institution this is!” and cover his own weaknesses and shortcomings in a further sheath of mannerism and appreciation—the entire atmosphere strangely prevailing to help one to stifle rather than to ventilate his real points of view.

So the establishment moved. The groups of girls going up and down the back stairs—to count or tie or paste through all their interesting days—counted the heads of their respective departments as their greatest men; spoke of them in awed whispers, in certain cases with maternal affection, and on occasion even with playful intimacy on the part of a few—but always as a master-workman, the best man in the business, who expressed the poorest part of himself in words, and had to be lived with for years adequately to be appreciated and understood.

Mr. Nathan Lot, the present head of the firm, was a dreamer. It was Mr. Sproxley who had first told Bellair this, but he heard it frequently afterward, came to recognise it as the accepted initial saying as regarded the Head, just as his impeccable honour was Mr. Sproxley’s and unerring critical instinct Mr. Hardburg’s titular association. Mr. Nathan was the least quarrelsome man anywhere, the quietest and the gentlest—a small bloodless man of fifty, aloof from business; a man who had worn and tested himself so little that you would imagine him destined to live as long again, except for the lugubrious atmospheres around his desk, in the morning especially, the sense of imperfect ventilation, though the partitions were but half-high to the lower floor and there was a thousand feet to draw from. The same was beginning in Jabez, the son, something pent, non-assimilation somewhere. However Jabez wasn’t a dreamer; at least, dreaming had not become his identifying proclivity. He was a head taller than his father with a wide limp mouth and small expressionless brown eyes—twenty-seven, and almost as many times a millionaire.

Jabez was richer than his father, who was the direct heir of the House of Lot, but his father’s dreaming had complicated the flow of another huge fortune in the familiar domestic fashion—Jabez being the symbol and centre of the combination; also the future head of the House of Lot and Company—up and down town.

Bellair wondered a long time what the pervading dream of the father was. He had been in the office many months, had never heard the senior-mind give vent to authoritative saying in finance, literature, science or prints; and while this did not lower his estimate at all—he was sincerely eager to get at the sleeping force of this giant. Mr. Sproxley spoke long on the subject, but did not know. Mr. Hardburg said:

“I have been associated with Mr. Nathan for eleven years now. The appeal of his worth is not eager and insinuating, but I have this to say—that in eleven years I have found myself slipping, slipping into a mysterious, a different regard, a profounder friendliness—if one might put it that way—for Mr. Nathan, than any I have known in my whole career. The fact is I love Mr. Nathan. He is one of the sweetest spirits I ever knew.”

Bellair was interested in dreamers; had a theory that dreaming was important. When he heard that a certain child was inclined to dreaming, he was apt to promise a significant future off-hand. He reflected that even Mr. Hardburg had forgotten to tell him of the tendency in Mr. Nathan’s case, but determined not to give up.... Once in the lower part of the city, he passed the firm-head—a studious little man making his way along at the edge of the walk. Bellair spoke before he thought. Mr. Nathan started up in a dazed way, appeared to recognise him with difficulty, as if there was something in the face that the hat made different. He cleared his voice and inquired with embarrassment:

“Are you going to the store?”

After Bellair had ceased to regret speaking, he reflected upon the word “store.” The president of a great manufacturing plant, content to be known as a tradesman—an excellent, a Quaker simplicity about that.

Bellair’s particular friend in the establishment was Broadwell of the advertising-desk, a young man of his own age who was improving himself evenings and who aspired to be a publisher. But even closer to his heart was Davy Acton, one of the office-boys, who had been tested out and was not a liar. A sincere sad-faced lad of fifteen, who lived with his mother somewhere away down town. He looked up to Bellair as to a man among men, one who had achieved. This was hard to bear on the man’s part, but he was fond of the youngster and often had him over Sundays, furnishing books of his own and recommending others. Davy believed in him. This was the sensation.

The only voices that were ever raised in the establishment were those of the travelling salesmen. The chief of this department, Mr. Rawter, was loud-voiced in his joviality. That was his word—“Mr. Rawter is so jovial.”

When the roaring joviality of Mr. Rawter boomed through the lower floor, old Mr. Wetherbee, the vice-president, would look up from his desk, and remark quietly to any one who happened near, “Mr. Rawter is forced to meet the trade, you know.” It was doubtless his gentle Quaker conception that wine-lists, back-slapping and whole-souled abandonment of to-morrow, were essentials of the road and trade affiliation. From the rear of the main floor, back among the piles of stock, reverberating among great square monuments of ledgers and pamphlets were the jovial voices of the other salesmen, Mr. Rawter’s seconds, the Middle-west man, and the Coast-and-South man—voices slightly muffled, as became their station, but regular in joviality, and doubtless as boom-compelling afield as their chief’s, considering their years.

Otherwise the elder Mr. Wetherbee—Mr. Seth—presided over a distinguished silence for the main. His desk was open to the floor at large. He was seventy, and one of the first to arrive in the morning—a vice-president who opened the mail, and had in expert scrutiny such matters as employment, salaries, orders and expenses of the travelling men on the road. Mr. Seth was not a dreamer; at least not on week-days—a millionaire, who gave you the impression that he was constantly on his guard lest his heart-quality should suddenly ruin all. The love, the very ardour of his soul was to give away—to dissipate the fortunes of his own and the firm-members, but so successfully had he fought all his life on the basis of considering the justice to his family and his firm, that Lot & Company now relied upon him, undoubting. Thus often a man born with weakness develops it into his particular strength....

The son, Eben Wetherbee, was harder for Bellair to designate. He seemed a different force, and called forth secret regard. A religious young man, who always occurred to Bellair’s mind as he had once seen him, crossing the Square a summer evening, a book under his arm, his short steps lifted and queerly rounded, as if treading a low-geared sprocket; toes straight out—the whole gait mincing a little. Eben was smileless and a great worker. He had no more to do or say with his father during working hours than any of the others.

Such was the firm: Mr. Nathan Lot and his son Jabez; Mr. Seth Wetherbee and his son Eben, and Mr. Rawter who had been given a nominal quantity of stock after thirty-five years’ service. In due course Mr. Sproxley would qualify for this illumination.... And yet not all. Staring down from the arch over the president’s door was a dour, white, big-chinned face, done in oils long ago—almost yellow-white, the black shoulder deadening away into the background; small eyes, wide mouth, but firmly hung—grandfather to Mr. Nathan, but no dreamer; great grand-sire to Mr. Jabez, but nothing loose-mouthed about the face of this, the original Jabez Lot,—organising genius of the House, and its first president, spoken of with awe and reverence; the first millionaire of the family and builder of its Gramercy mansion.... Suddenly, it had come to Bellair that this was the spirit of the Store, this picture was its symbol, that the slow strangulation of the souls of all concerned had begun in that white head, the planting of this bed of crooked canes.

2

One morning when Bellair was well into his third year with the printing-firm, the silence was broken on the lower floor. He was shaken that day into the real secret of the house. A certain Mr. Prentidd had been in conversation with Mr. Rawter some moments. The jovial voice of [Pg 33]the head-salesman was without significance to those near his partition—a part of the routine. Mr. Prentidd had invented a combination ledger and voucher-file that was having some sale in America, being manufactured and distributed by Lot & Company. Mr. Rawter on a recent trip abroad had been empowered to dispose of the English rights. The result, it now appeared, did not prove satisfactory to the inventor. The voice of the latter was raised. One felt the entire building subside into a quivering hush.

“I tell you, sir, I don’t trust you. I have heard in fact that the only way you could hurt your reputation here in New York or on the road would be to tell the truth.”

To Bellair there was something deeply satisfying in that remark of the inventor’s—something long awaited and very good. He saw Mr. Seth arise, his chin moving in a sickly fashion, a very old pathetic Mr. Seth. He realised that Mr. Rawter had laughed—that something had been burned from that laugh. Mr. Prentidd was hurried forth, and the nullifying system began. Mr. Jabez emerged from his father’s office and turning to Broadwell at the advertising-desk, said in a tone universally penetrative:

“What a pity that Mr. Prentidd drinks. There are few men finer to deal with when he is himself.”

Mr. Seth, in his chair again, sitting frog-like and gasping, remarked to Mr. Sproxley across the distance: “I really must ask Mr. Prentidd to come to us earlier in the day. He’s far too worthy a man to disgrace himself in this way.”

Bellair wondered that the point of Mr. Prentidd’s remark seemed entirely lost. As for himself he counted it worthy of regard. The episode was but begun. The inventor returned immediately, just as Mr. Rawter was stepping out. The two men met in the main corridor. It appeared that Mr. Prentidd repeated a certain question, for the head-salesman replied, the roundness of the joviality gone from his voice:

“I tell you, Mr. Prentidd, the situation has changed. I could not dispose of the English order at a better figure to save my soul. I extracted every cent for you and for the House.”

“I don’t believe you. Other matters of the same kind do better. If you speak the truth, you made a very bad bargain for yourself and what is more important, for me——”

The least like an inventor imaginable, a most physical person, Mr. Prentidd, with a fiery sense of his own rights and a manner as soft as his voice was penetrating. He turned a leisurely look of scorn at Mr. Rawter, half-stare and half-smile, then appeared to perceive the elder Mr. Wetherbee for the first time. The old man arose. Bellair felt the agony of expectancy far back among the stock-piles. The inventor shot straight at the vice-president:

“You’re an old man. I’ll trust your word. You’re an old man and a Quaker—yes, I’ll take your word. Your man, Rawter, says he could get only seven and one-half cents’ royalty for me on my Nubian file from England. I say it’s only half what I should get. Is it true—remember you’re old. Is it true?”

Prentidd’s face had power in it, exasperation and the remains of a laugh. It appeared that he was content to take a gambler’s chance and close the ugly business on Mr. Seth’s word.

The old man’s eye roved. He looked sick and shaken. He found the eyes of his son Eben which were full of terror and pity and hope.

“Answer me. Could Lot & Company get no more than fifteen cents altogether on the English patents?”

Mr. Wetherbee’s lips moved. “That’s all we could get, Mr. Prentidd. I’m sorry,” he said.

For an instant Mr. Prentidd stood there. It was evident that he had expected a different answer. True to his promise to take the old man’s word, however, he turned on his heel and walked out.

On the high sloping desk before Bellair’s eyes, a big ledger lay open. He had turned during the talk to the transaction of Prentidd—Lot & Company. The English disposal had been arranged for at twenty-five cents the file, royalty. Apparently Mr. Prentidd had agreed upon an even split, but Lot & Company had taken seventeen and the fraction.

Bellair was ill. The nausea crept down through his limbs, and up to his throat. The thing had worked out before him with such surety and clarity. The head of Mr. Sproxley moved about as if on a swivel, his body in writing position still. Presently he stepped down from his high stool, and came to Bellair’s side. Placing his pen behind his ear, he lifted the ledger from under Bellair’s eyes, his lips compressed with the effort. Then he placed it on his own desk to close it tenderly, after which it was taken to its niche in the vault.

The office was silent. Just now Bellair’s eyes turned as if subtly attracted to the place where Eben Wetherbee sat. The young man’s smileless eyes, almost insane with apprehension and sadness, were turned with extraordinary intent upon the place where his father sat. Bellair’s followed. The old man sat plumped in his chair; he gulped, tried to turn. His face looked as if he heard a ghost whispering. Yet he seemed unable to trust himself, hardly daring to meet the eyes that awaited. His hands lifted to the papers before him, but did not feel properly. He seemed a man of eighty. Mr. Eben came forward at last and asked Mr. Sproxley if he might look at the Prentidd transaction.

“It isn’t posted yet, Mr. Eben,” said the cashier.

At the side door at closing time, Bellair happened to pass a party of young women coming down from the bindery. One was saying:

“... and Mr. Prentidd was quite helpless after the scene—so that they had to call a taxi-cab for him. Isn’t it dreadful he drinks so?”

There was a personal result for Bellair, which he at no time misunderstood.

“We have considered creating a position for you next to Mr. Sproxley,” said the elder Mr. Wetherbee, the second morning following.

Bellair bowed.

“Since you have been with us less than three years, this is very good comment on the character of your services and our hope for your future with us——”

“What additional salary goes with the position?” Bellair had asked.

“If I followed my own inclination, it would be considerable. I have been able to secure for you, however, but a slight increase——”

This was one of Mr. Seth’s little ways. He added hopes of fine quality. There was a further point:

“You will at times handle considerable money and we must insist upon your putting in trust for us the sum of two thousand dollars.”

“I haven’t two thousand dollars, Mr. Wetherbee,” Bellair said.

“Of course, we trust you. It is a form—a form, nevertheless, upon which a valuable relation of this kind should be placed on a business basis.”

Bellair repeated.

“But you have friends——”

“Not with two thousand dollars’ surety for me—no friend like that.”

“Banks insist upon this—among those employés who handle much money——”

“I know—but that amount cannot be arranged.”

“How much can you put in trust available to Lot & Company in event of your departure——”

“I have slightly less than one thousand dollars——”

“Could you raise one thousand dollars?”

“With some effort.”

“Of course, it will draw interest for you——”

“I understand these affairs.”

The matter was referred to the next day when it was decided to accept Bellair’s amount of one thousand dollars, which Lot & Company could not touch without his consent, except in the event of his departure with company funds; and which Bellair could not draw without written statement from Lot & Company to the effect that he was leaving with a balanced account.

Thereafter he was one with Mr. Sproxley in the financial management, under the eye of Seth Wetherbee. One by one he learned the points of the system. Wherever the accounts had run over a series of years, there were byways of loot. These pilferings were not made at once, on the same basis that a gardener does not cut asparagus for market from young roots. The plants were encouraged to establish themselves. After that the open market was supplied with a certain output, the rest belonging to Lot & Company’s table. It frequently occurred to Bellair with a sort of enveloping darkness that he had the institution in his power; and with a different but equal force that he had a life position in all naturalness; that his life would be spent with slowly increasing monetary reward for juggling the different accounts—the field of crooked canes which was the asparagus-bed of Lot & Company. He did not like it. He was not happy; and yet he realised that the adjustments his nature had already made to the facts, suggested an entire adjustment later, the final easy acceptance.

3

Bellair had thought many times of getting out from under the die, but it never came to [Pg 40]him with quite the force as on that Monday morning, after watching the Jade fare forth from the Brooklyn water-front. Something had turned within him as a result of that little pilgrimage, something that spurred to radicalism and self-assertion. At no time had Bellair credited himself with a fairer honesty than most men. He had never given it a large part of thinking. Roughly he had believed that to be honest is the common lot. The corruption in the office which he could not assimilate had to do with extensive ramifications, its lying to itself. The instant seizing upon Mr. Prentidd’s alleged weakness on the part of the younger Lot and the elder Wetherbee; the action of Mr. Sproxley with the ledger; the subtle will-breaking and spiritual blinding of all the employés in a process that never slept and was operative in every thought and pulse of the establishment—the extent and talent of these, and the untellable blackness of it all, prevailed upon Bellair with the force of a life-impression.

Bellair’s present devil was a kind of inertia. Granting that the Unknowable had been charged with periods of intense action of several kinds, the recent half-decade might be regarded as its reflex condition. There is an ebb and flow to all things, and it is easier to adjust Bellair’s years at Lot & Company as a sort of resting period for his faculties, than to accept a constitutional inertia in his case, for subsequent events do not quite bear that out. He doubtless belonged to that small class of down town men who do their work well enough, but without passion, who have faced the modern world and its need of bread and cake, and who have compromised, giving hours in exchange for essential commodities, but nothing like the full energies of their lives. It is a way beset with pitfalls, but the unavoidable result of a system that multiplies products and profits and minimizes the chances for fine workmanship on every hand. Moreover in Bellair’s case there is a philosophical detachment to be considered. The aims and purports of the printing establishment were coldly and absolutely material. These did not challenge him to any fine or full expenditure of his powers; and if he had touched that higher zone of philosophy which makes a consecration of the simplest and the heaviest tasks, he had at least found it impracticable to make it work among the systems of Lot & Company’s business.

The two years or more since he was made assistant cashier had brought many further items and exhibits. He was now used on the left hand side of the throne, developed in the darkness-department already overworked, the eye of which was Mr. Seth and the hand, Mr. Sproxley. For as yet Bellair believed that even Eben Wetherbee had only suspicions. This was the bite of the whole drama. There were men in the building who would have died for their conviction that the House was honest. You might have told these men that Lot & Company was a morgue of conservatism; that having existed under a certain policy for seventy-five years, was the chief reason for its changing; that free, unhampered genius never found utterance through that House—and any of a dozen clerks would have laughed, spoken proudly of unerring dividends and uncanny stability, granting the rest. But that Lot & Company was structurally crooked was incredible except to the few who performed the trick. Bellair knew, for instance, that his best friend in the office, Broadwell, head of the advertising, was innocent....

Monday passed without his giving notice. He quailed before the questions that would be asked. If it were not for the one thousand dollars, he would have escaped with a mere “Good-night,” though a panic would have started until the Company was assured of the innocence of his departure. As for a panic, Lot & Company had that coming, he thought. Now he knew that he would not be able to get his surety-deposit until all was made certain in his regard by the firm....

Bellair wasn’t greedy, nor caught in any great desire for wealth. He had fallen into the Down town Stream, but did not belong. Every month had weakened him. He disliked to lose his beginnings toward competence; all the subtle pressures of Lot & Company worked upon him not to change. There was no other way open. He had been touched by the fear of fear—a sort of poorhouse horror that dogs men up into the millions and down to the grave. In a way, he had become slave to the Job. He even had the suspicion that more men maim their souls by sticking to their jobs than by any dissipation. This is the way to the fear of fear—the insane undertow of modern materialism.

He had tried to find peace outside his work in music and different philanthropies, but the people he met, their seriousness, perhaps more than anything else, and the vanity of their intellectualism, aroused his sense of humour. Bellair believed in the many, but was losing belief in himself. Often he had turned back to evenings in the room, and realised that the days were draining him too much for his own real expression of any kind. Always he felt that Lot & Company was too strong for his temper, that his edge was dulled in every contact. From his depressions, he saw ahead only two ways—a life of this, or a moment in which he had Lot & Company in his power unequivocably. The last was poisonous, and he knew it. He would have to fall considerably to profit by this sort of thing, but the inevitable conclusion of the whole matter, was that the life with Lot & Company was slowly but surely getting him down.

On Tuesday noon, Mr. Seth asked him to take to lunch a certain young stationer from Philadelphia, named Filbrick. They were made acquainted in the corridor. Passing out, Bellair and his companion met the smile of Mr. Sproxley. Bellair began the formula of the cashier’s absolute and autocratic integrity. He did not really hear himself, until he reached this part:

“I happen to be in the financial department. Two or three times each year, the whole office is thrown into a mess over some little strayed account——”

He stopped. It was less that he was saying this, than that he had come so far without a nudge from within. They had passed the big front doors, and met the wind of the street before he realised how deep the mannerism of the establishment had prevailed upon him. The process had passed almost into fulfilment before the truth within him had stirred from its sleep.... A very grey day. All through that luncheon he had found himself at angles from his companion, in strategic hollows, never in the level open. It wasn’t that he was different from usual, but that he was watching himself more shrewdly. His inner coherence was repeatedly broken, though the outer effects were not. He had never perceived before with such clarity that a man cannot be square and friendly to another man, when his mind and critical faculties are busy appraising him, while his eyes and lips approved and assuaged. Bellair that day realised his moral derangement—that he must be ripped open and his displaced organs corrected once for all, if anything decent was to come from him ever again.... He was still thinking in mid-afternoon, in the very trance of these thoughts, when he happened to look into Mr. Sproxley’s face. It seemed to him that there was a movement of most pitiful activities back of the red and black of Mr. Sproxley’s eyes.

There was much mental roving on Bellair’s part that week; moments in which the Monday morning abandon returned, and his self-amazement of the Tuesday luncheon, upon discovering how deeply his thoughts were imbedded in the prevailing lie. New York and the salary clutched him hard at intervals; so that he saw something of what was meant to give it up; also he saw that dreams are dreams.... Thousands of other young men would be glad to do his work, even his dirty work.

He had just returned from lunch on Friday when he started, to perceive the ruddy face and powerful frame of Mr. Prentidd darken the front door—which he had not done since his voice was last raised. Bellair was conscious of Seth Wetherbee hitching up his chair and a peculiar gasping cough from the old man, but his own eyes did not turn from the caller’s face—which moved slowly about, the pale little exchange-miss behind the first barrier, attentive to catch the stranger’s eye and answer his question. The inventor glanced slowly among desks and doors. His eye sought Sproxley, and the furtive black eyes of the latter shot down to his ledger as if crippled on the wing. His eyes held Bellair and the young man felt the scorn of ages burn through his veins—something new to his later life, yet deep in his heart, something he had known somewhere before, as if he had betrayed a good king, and his punishment had been to look that king in the eye before he died. Bellair had never hated himself as at that moment, and certainly never before felt himself identified body and soul with modern corruption, as now with scorn like a fiery astringent in his veins. The eyes of Mr. Prentidd finally settled upon the figure of Mr. Seth Wetherbee, their rays striking him abeam as it were. The old man hunched closer if anything, but did not raise his head.

The inventor was a physical person; his morals of a physical nature; his Nubian file of the same dimension and method of mind—a strong man who had to do with pain and pleasure of the flesh; his ideas of possessions were of the world. He moved softly, a soft, dangerous smile upon his lips, to the desk of the vice-president and jerked up a chair. The old man had to raise his head. It was as if the scene of three years ago was now to be continued, for Bellair saw the sorrowful, lengthened face of Mr. Eben turn from his desk in the other room and bend toward his father, whose face was intensely pathetic now in its forced smile of greeting.

“You’re not looking well—in fact, you’re looking old, Mr. Wetherbee, as if you would die pretty soon.”

“I’m not so strong as I was, Mr. Prentidd.”

Bellair couldn’t have done it, as the inventor did. Had the man stolen and ruined him—he could not have pushed on after the pathos of that.

“You’re a dirty old man—and you’ll die hard and soon—for you lied to me when I trusted you. I suppose you have lied to everybody, all your life——”

Thus he baited Mr. Seth feature by feature, pointing out the disorder of liver, kidney-puffs, the general encroachments of death, in fact. Then he pictured the death itself—all of a low literary strength as was Mr. Prentidd’s cold habit. The answer of Mr. Seth was an incoherent helplessness, his lips moving but with nothing rational under the sun, as if he had been called by some inexorable but superior being to an altitude where he was too evil to breathe, and begged piteously to be allowed to sink back and die. It was Mr. Eben who stopped it, coming forward quietly, his steps rounded, his shoulders bent, his face seeming brittle as chalk in its fixity. The thing that he said was quite absurd:

“You really mustn’t, Mr. Prentidd. It is too much.”

The inventor turned to him. His look was that of a man who turns a large morsel in his mouth.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said with a slow laugh. “There is this delicacy to old liars. Come give me my check—and I will go.”

“Your check——” Mr. Eben repeated.

“Yes, now—the check for the difference which your father’s lie cost me three years ago. I have seen the English books——”

Now young Mr. Jabez Lot came forward:

“Of course, if there has been error or any breach of contract—of course, you see a check off hand such as you ask is out of the question——”

The elder Mr. Wetherbee sank back to his desk; and now the dreamer, Mr. Nathan Lot, appeared with a frightened word of amelioration. Mr. Eben stood by the caller to the last moment. The latter was not at his best in this period—his threats and anger amounted to the usual result. Lot & Company refused to deal further, referring him to its attorney. The strangest part of it all was the gathering of three around Mr. Seth Wetherbee’s desk—Mr. Jabez and his father with Mr. Eben. Yet the concern of the Lots, father and son, had nothing to do with dangerous exhaustion of the vice-president.

“We have beaten him,” the dreamer said softly.

“Yes, Mr. Jackson will do the rest,” said Mr. Jabez. Mr. Jackson was the attorney.

Bellair, even with his training, had to take it slowly. “Beaten him”—that meant that the money had not passed to Mr. Prentidd. It was now with the law and the years—millions against a mere inventor. The psychic slaughtering of the old vice-president did not count—nothing of words counted. The firm had won, because the firm had not been knocked down and its pockets rifled—that would have meant loss. Not having been forced to pay, they had won.... Even as Bellair thought this out in full, the system of salving had begun from all the firm-heads for the benefit of those who heard. It was simply arranged and stated.... Their worst fears were realised: Mr. Prentidd was insane.... Mr. Seth went home early. Bellair knew that Mr. Eben had not been able to turn all responsibility to Mr. Jackson.... That afternoon Bellair reached his decision—in fact, he found it finished within him after the scene.

Yet he could not walk out at once, since he must have the amount of his surety, the item of interest and salary due. A certain project in his mind prevented the possibility of waiting several days for this amount to be detached from Lot & Company. Especially now after the final scene, they would make themselves very sure of his accounts and intentions. Late that Friday afternoon, it happened that considerable cash came in after banking hours. Bellair’s custom was to put this in a safety-vault until the following day. This time he held out the amount of his deposit and two years’ interest, together with the amount of his salary to date, locking up with the balance his order of release to the account of the Trust company. He determined to write a letter to Nathan Lot at once....

4

The City had a different look to him that night in his new sense of detachment. There were moments at dinner in which he felt as if he were already forgotten and out of place. Bellair had only known the one landlady in his five years of New York; yet he knew this one no better now than at the end of the first month. Perhaps there was nothing more to learn. She was anæmic of body, and yet did prodigious tasks, very quiet, very grey; and days to her were like endless rooms of the same house, all grim and uniform. She had her little ways, her continual suspicions, but all her faith was gone. Without church, without friends, without any new thought or gossip, her view of the world was neither magnified nor diminished, but greatly shortened, her eyes were almost incredibly dim. There was nothing to love about her. She was not excessively clean, nor excellent in cooking. She was like wax-work, a little dusty, her mind and all. Bellair paid her for the week, and added a present:

“Which I forgot on your birthday,” he said.

She held it in her hand. It did not seem hers. The apathy extended to all that was not actually due; all expectancy dead.

“You mean you are giving this to me?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bellair,—perhaps you will want it some time again.”

He wrote the letter to Mr. Nathan, but decided not to mail it until the last thing. He was restless over the irregularity in the money affair—had to assure himself again and again that he was taking not a cent that did not belong to him. The boarding-house was in the upper Forties between Broadway and Sixth avenue, and though he usually turned eastward for pleasure, this night he went among his own people, where even a nickle was medium of exchange. A stimulant did not exactly relieve his tension. His sense was that of loneliness, as he chose a table in Brandt’s indoor garden.

A mixed quartette presently broke into song behind him. Bellair’s thoughts were far from song. He was not expectant of music that would satisfy. Still something tugged him—again and again—until he really listened, but without turning. It was the voice of the contralto that was making an impression deep where his need was. There seemed an endless purple background to it, like a night of stars and south wind; the soft, deep volume rolled forth for him, and found itself expressed without amazement or travail. He turned now. The one voice was from the throat of a girl, just a girl, and though it was a gusty November, she was still wearing her summer hat.

The face was merely pretty, but the voice was drama; flame of poppies in the presence of a fabulous orchid. Bellair’s heart may have been particularly sensitive to impression that night. The big brilliant den known as Brandt’s did not seem to have been cast into any enchantment; and yet it was likely that Bellair knew as much about music natively and by acquisition as any one present. In fact, he had reached the state of appreciation which dares to enjoy that which appeals and to say so, having endured for several winters a zeal which rushed him from one to another musical event, intolerant of all save classic symphonies. It wasn’t the music that held him now—a high flowery operatic matter not particularly interesting nor well-done—but the contralto was just a little girl, and the round girlish breast which held nothing miraculous for the many, was sending forth tones that quivered through Bellair, spine and thigh, and thrilling his mind with a profound passion to do something for the singer—an intrinsic and clean emotion, but one which made him ashamed. For an instant, he felt himself setting out on the great adventure of his life, the faintest aroma of its romance touching his senses; something akin to his dreams in the prison of Lot & Company, and which he had not sensed at all since his departure, until this instant. Quickly it passed; yet he had the sense that this great romance had to do with the little singer.

At once he wanted to take her from the other three; dreamed of working for her, so that she might have the chance she craved. Of course, she wanted something terribly; passionate want always went with such a voice. He saw her future alone. Some vampire of a manager would hear her. She would tie up—the little summer hat told him that. She would tie up, and New York would take her bloom before the flower matured—would take more than her little song. Here she was in Brandt’s already, and singing as if for the angels.

Bellair was four-fifths undiscovered country, as are all men but the very few, who dare to be themselves. Already the world was calling to him sharply for this first step aside from the worn highways of the crowd. He had not been normal to-night, even in his room; and his present adventure had already summoned forth all the hateful reserves of his training, as Prentidd’s departure had started the lies through the floors and halls of Lot & Company. His heart was calling out to the little singer, that here was a friend, one who understood and wanted nothing but to give; yet all that he had learned from the world was beating him back into the crowd.

He saw that the music had hardly penetrated the vast vulgar throng. New York is so accustomed to be amused, to dine to music and forget itself in various entertainments, that the quartette barely held its own against the routine of eating and drink and the voices of rising stimulation. It was Bellair who started the little applause when the first number was over. He hated to do it. The clapping of hands drew to himself eyes that he did not care to cultivate, but it seemed the only way just then to help her to make good.

The four of the quartette looked at him curiously, appraising his value as a critic, perhaps. Was he drunk or really appealed to? Was he worth considering? Applause at any price is dearly to be had. They took him in good faith, since he was not without desirable appearance. The young girl and the tenor arose and sang:

“Oh, that we two were Maying——”

The old song was a kind of fulfilment for Bellair, and preciously wrung his heart. He had never been Maying; wasn’t sure what sort of holidays were pulled off in regular Mayings; but he liked the song, and for all he knew the familiar sentiment was evoked bewitchingly. Many others now caught the thrall. These things are infectious. From hatred, he came to love Brandt’s—as if he had come home, and had been long away hungering—as if this were life, indeed.... They sang the last verse again, and sat down for hurried refreshment. The four were very near. The young girl caught Bellair’s eye, regarded him shyly for an instant, and turned to whisper to the bass, who seemed in charge of the four.

“... Yes, but hurry back. We’ve got to pull out of here.”

Bellair wasn’t dangling. Never had he been more intent to be decent and helpful. No one knew this. Even the girl was far from expectant. ... She sat down beside him.

“Hello,” she said. “You don’t live in New York, do you?”

“Yes, why?”

“Oh, you looked so homesick—when we sang.”

Bellair’s heart sank.

“I think I was homesick. What may I order for you?”

“A little Rhine wine—it’s very good here—and a sandwich——”

The waiter was standing by. Bellair had to clear his voice before ordering. He was distressed—up to his eyes in gloom that was general and without name.

5

“Do you sing in other places to-night?”

“Oh, yes, we’re just beginning. We’re on Broadway at eleven.”

“Where?”

“First at Pastern’s, then at the Castle.”

These places were just without the orbit of extravagance. She knew her answer was not exactly a stock-raiser, and added:

“But I expect to be on the road in the Spring——”

“Who with?”

She mentioned a light opera troupe that was just short of broad and unqualified approval—like Brandt’s and Pastern’s—an institution as yet without that mysterious toppiness which needs no props and meets sanction anywhere. These things are exactly ordered.

“But you are so good—you should be with people who would help you.”

She looked at him a little scornfully, something of weather and stress under the summer hat. She decided to be agreeable. “They all say that,” she said wearily.

“I’m sorry. I said just what I thought.”

“Study—a girl without a cent!” She lowered her voice: “Go with better people—before one is invited? Swing to the top of the opera before one is sufficiently urged?... Why, singing isn’t all. One must do more than sing——”

“I don’t believe that——”

“You should try. Singing won’t get you across. You’ve got to act, for one thing.”

He was relieved that she did not discuss the angel business, which is forgotten in so few stories of struggle and failure.

“I tell you, all that one has to do is to sing—when one sings as you do.”

“I have heard that many times,” she said bitterly, “from people not in the fight. They didn’t come to New York on their nerve—as I did. I made up my mind not to be afraid of wolves or bears or cars—to take what I could get, and wait until somebody beckoned me higher. Meanwhile Pastern’s and the Castle and here——”

“I wish I could do something for you.”

Her eyes gleamed at him.

“You need money?” he asked.

“I need money so terribly—that it’s almost a joke—but what do you want?”

Bellair rubbed his eyes, and smiled a little. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but I want to do something for you. At least, I did want just that.”

“What happened?”

“It isn’t a thing to talk or think about, I’m afraid. One starts thinking, and ends by wanting something—and I didn’t at first. What I said at first I meant—nothing more nor less.”

Her lips tightened. “If you mean just that——”

It raked him within. He did not help her by speaking. Somehow he had expected her to see that he had meant well. It was always a mystery to him how anything fine could be expected of men, if women were not so.

“Of course, I have to understand,” she added. “I can do with a poor room and poor food, but I can’t get anywhere without clothes.... I must go now.”

“I want you to excuse me if I’ve given you the idea of my being rich. I’m not, but I might help you some. How late do you work?”

“One o’clock.”

“Where are you last?”

“At the Castle.”

“And what time do you get there?”

“About eleven-thirty.”

“I’ll be there. Sing ‘Maying’ for an encore——”

She made believe that she trusted him.

“We’ll sing it at the Castle the last thing,” she said, leaving hastily.

No ease had come to him. His thoughts now were not the same as those which had come during the singing. He tried to put them away. He didn’t like the idea of giving her money. He knew that she didn’t expect to see him again; also that if he did come she would accept the service of a stranger, and give in return as little as she could. How explicit she was, already touched with the cold stone of the world. He did want to help her, and it had been pure at first. Talk as usual had broken the beauty of that. Sophistication and self-consciousness had come; her face changing more and more as the moments passed after the song. New York had taught them each their parts. It had been her thought from the first that he was looking for prey, but it had been very far from his.

Bellair was not without imagination. He saw himself following this girl in a future time, playing the part he had despised in other men—the dumb, slaving, enduring male; she continually expectant of his services, petulant, unreasonable without them. For the first time the question came to him: Is there not a queer sort of conquest in the lives of such men?... She was for herself; had it all planned out, the waiting, and what she would give on the way up, beside her song. It would not be much; as little as possible, in fact; but as much as was absolutely demanded. Bellair in the present state of mind seemed to object to all this less than what she wanted of the world—praise and fame.

“She’s just a little girl after all,” he muttered. “She ought to have her chance.”

He added (easing the conception a little for his own peace) that she was only franker and more outspoken than other women he had known; that they all wanted money and place, and wanted men who could furnish such things. Suddenly it occurred that the incident automatically supplied the final break with Lot & Company and New York. He laughed aloud.... He might borrow enough in time to make up the amount he gave her for morning, but that would certainly be a betrayal of the fiery urge that had whipped him all week to cross over into a new life and burn the last bridge.

He took his bags down to the station, arranging with the landlady to have his goods stored for the present. After that he rambled, a grateful freshness in the cool wind. His steps led through darker streets, where he startled the misery from the faces of the forbidden who took a chance on him. Their voices would whine; they couldn’t help it, and all they wanted in the world was money.... He was at the Castle before the quartette came.... They sang and Bellair dreamed.

He had never made pretence of other than the commonest lot; yet he conned now an early manhood that made later years utterly common. He followed the enticements of the sea, of the future, the singing-girl never far away, the rest shadows and sadness.... He must do something for her.... Rich natural tones winged forth from the breast of a maid, from shoulders so delicate and white. He would make and keep her great; here was something to do, to work for. It was like finding the ultimate secret. He knew now what had been the matter all the time—nothing to work for.... He would stand between her and all that he knew was rotten—the crowds like this at the Castle, the blurred face of the tenor which was both sharp and soft, the tired, tawdry soprano, the stupid animal of a bass. And Bellair, in the magnanimity of his heart’s effusion, included himself among the forces of destruction. He would keep her from the worst of himself, by all means.... She kept her promise, and arose with the tenor at last:

“Oh, that we two were Maying——”

... New York and all the rest reversed again in his mind. It wasn’t rotten, but lavish to furnish everything for money—so much that men and women were lost in the offerings, and did not know what to choose. Yet it was man’s business to choose. Bellair listened as one across the world; as if he had been gone a year and was thirsting and starving to get back. He was literally longing for New York, with its ramifications all about him—yet the thing he wanted, he could not touch. It was like a sick stomach that infested his whole nature with desire, while everything was at hand but the exact nameless thing desired.... She was like a saint, as she stood there, her mouth so pure, her features so pretty, her voice so brave and tireless—starry to Bellair, a night-voice with depths and heights and dew-fragrance. She was coming to him.

“You look just the same. I wouldn’t take you for a New Yorker.... Yes, I am through for to-night.”

“I should think you’d love to sing,” he said.

The remark was fatuous to her. She didn’t know that a year ago Bellair wouldn’t have dared to say anything so commonplace, but that he had come back to this simplicity from the complication of classics she had never heard of.

“Tell me, what do you want most?” he asked earnestly. “I don’t mean the need of clothes. We’ve covered that——”

“I want all that a voice will bring.”

“Great salaries, noise wherever you go, a continual performance of newspaper articles?”

“Yes.”

“A score of men praying for favours?”

She sipped warily.

“Don’t mind my question. It isn’t fair. But tell me, doesn’t it do something to you—to get even a man like me going, for instance,—to make him all different and full of pictures that haven’t anything to do with the case?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He stared at her. “You ought to. You do it. I’m not talking of art or soul, or any of that stuff. That isn’t it. I mean just what your singing amounts to in my case. It means New York, but not the routine New York—possibly the New York that might be. It means Maying—whatever that is——”

“You must have been drinking a lot, since I left Brandt’s,” she said merrily.

He didn’t let it hurt him, and was miserable anyway. “The fact is, I didn’t take a drink since Sixth avenue, until a moment ago.”

He saw that she was debating the vital matter of the evening—whether he was a piker who must be shaken presently, or whether he would really make good on his offer to help in the essentials of career.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Bessie Brealt.”

“And where could I find you, if I wanted to write?”

He noted her swift disappointment. There was positive pain in the air. He knew well what she was thinking, though her sweet face covered well: that he was about to promise to send the money to her, that ancient beau business. She took a last chance, and mentioned a booking agency that might answer for a permanent address.

“I’ll want to write—I feel that. And here, Bessie, if you don’t mind my saying ‘Bessie,’ I can spare a hundred for that wardrobe. I’d like to do some really big thing for you.”

He saw tears start to her eyes, but was not carried out of reason by them. She had wanted the money fiercely and it had come.

“How are you going to get home?” he asked, to relieve the embarrassment.

She glanced up quickly.

“I don’t mean that I want to take you home,” he said, shocked by the ugliness of the world that had called this explanation so hastily. “My train needs me.... Say, Bessie, men haven’t supplied you with altogether pleasant experiences so far, have they?”

“I’ll get a car home.”

He gave her his card.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Better let me get you a cab to-night. It’s late.”

She thanked him again.... At the curb, as the driver backed in, Bessie put up her lips to him.

“... Dear singing-girl—I didn’t ask that.”

“It’s because you didn’t, I think. Really that’s it. Oh, thank you. Good-night.”

Bellair beckoned another cab, and sank back into the dark. All the way to the station, and through to the Savannah-Pullman, he was wrenching himself clear from something like a passion to turn about to New York. At the last moment, before the train moved, he recalled the letter to Mr. Nathan, and hailed a station porter from the step.

“Please mail this for me,” he said, bringing up silver with the letter.

PART THREE
THE JADE: II

1

Bellair had to wait less than two days in Savannah, for the Jade had made a pretty passage. Impressions rushed home too swift for his mind to follow, as he stepped aboard from the cotton dock; the number of impressions, he did not know, until he began the inventory in his cabin afterward. Last and first and most compelling, however, was the spectacle of Stackhouse, that David Hume figure of a man, reclining in his cane-chair of similar vast proportions just aft of the main-shrouds. A momentous hammock of canes, that steamer-chair, with gentle giving slopes for the calves and broad containers, polished with wear and tightly woven like armour, for the arms; a sliding basket for the head, suggestive of a guillotine’s grisly complement; the whole adjusted to Stackhouse and no other.

Humid heat in the harbour, a day of soft low clouds. The man who pushed Brooklyn from him, had discarded even more thoroughly the clothing of temperate climes. The vivid black of his hairy chest was uncovered, and there was a shining bar of the same, just above the selvage of white sock. Bellair thought he must be hairy as a collie dog.... But mainly that which weighted and creaked the chair seemed an enormous puddle of faded silks.

The bulky brown head (which arose plumb as a wall from the back of the neck) had slightly bowed as Bellair passed. There was something ox-like in the placidity of the brown eyes, but that was only their first beam, as it were. Much that was within and behind the eyes of Stackhouse, Bellair thought of afterward. Through a deep, queer process, it came to him that even the answer for his coming was in that indescribable background; and restless, too, in the pervading brown, a movement of sleek animals there. The Japanese woman had skuffed forward with drink for her lord.

Over all was the cloud of canvas and rigging, which Bellair had studied from the land, and which had forced him to a fine respect for the ruffian sailor-men who could move directly in such an arcanum, and command its service. Bellair had not found such labour on shore, having lost his respect for the many who did not learn even the commonest work.... There was a deep-sea smell about her, a solution of tar and dried fruit, paint and steaming coppers from the galley.

The very age of the Jade was a charm to him. Only her spine and ribs and plates were of steel—the rest a priceless woodwork that had come into its real beauty under the endlessly wearing hands of man. There seemed a grain and maturity to the inner parts, as if the strain and roughing of the seas had brought out the real enduring heart of the excellent fabric. The rose-wood side-board of his upper berth, for instance, placed for the full light from the port to fall upon it, was worth the price of the passage—sixteen inches wide, a full inch and one-half thick, worn to a soft lustre as if the human hands had hallowed it, and giving back to the touch the same answer from the years that a vine brings to stone-work and the bouquet to wine.... The Jade had known good care and answered. Floors, even of the cabins, were hollowed from much stoning; the hinges held and ferried their burdens in silence, and the old locks moved with soft contented clicks, the wards running in new oil.

A city man who had long dreamed of a country garden; or indeed, Bellair was a city man who had long dreamed of a full-rigged ship to fulfil in part the romance of his soul. The Jade had a dear inner life for him, satisfied him with her lines, her breathing, settling and repose. A fine hunger began to animate the length and breadth of the man.

There was a half hour of straight, clear thinking, of the kind that plumbs the outlook with the in, and mainly comes unawares. Bessie Brealt, of course, appeared and passed, in all the hardness of her life and the pity of it, but the days that had elapsed since the parting had not changed his unique desire to help her; nor did he lie to himself that he wanted her, too, as a man wants a woman. He loved her in a way, against his will. Possibly the kiss had fixed that. In the solution of the running thoughts, and without subtlety of mingling, was the face on deck, the dark, extraordinary face of Stackhouse.

They were a full day at sea, before Bellair was called to sit down before the great cane chair. There was a warm land wind; November already forgotten. The Jade had gathered up her skirts and was swinging along with a low music of her own. Stackhouse waddled back to his chair from the land-rail, a remarkable mass of crumpled silks, the canes marked in the general effusion of dampness along his back and legs, the silks caught up behind by a system of wrinkles and imprints, and one hitched pantaloon revealing the familiar muff of fur above the selvage of his fallen sock. Now Stackhouse was preparing to enter. Bellair was caught in the tension. The process, while prodigious, was not without its delicate parts. One hand was irrevocably occupied with a long-stemmed China pipe, a warm creamy vase, already admired by Bellair. Breath came in puffs and pantings of fragrant tobacco, but there were gurglings and strange stoppages of air that complained from deeper passages.

Creaking began at the corners; and a wallowing as if from the father of all boars. Now the centre of the chair caught the strain in full and whipped forth its remonstrance. One after another the legs gripped the deck, each with a whimper of its own; and the air was filled with sharp singing tension which infected the nerves of the watcher. Suddenly the torso seemed to let go of itself; and from the canes of the huge central hollow came a scream in unison. By miracle the whole found itself once more and the breathing of Stackhouse subsided to a whine.

“We are entering the latitude of rum,” said he. “Whoever you are, young man, drink the drink of nature, and you will brosper.”

The west was just a shore-line, the dusk rising like a tide. The hand of the owner pressed the silks variously about his chest, and at last located a loose match. Nerves were sparsely scattered in these thick, heavy-fleshed fingers. He had to stop all talk and memory to direct his feeling. The match at length emerged from his palm, and slithered over the fine canes of the arm. It was damp. Stackhouse rubbed the sulphur delicately in the hair at his temple and tried again. Fire leaped to the tip, and poured out from the great hand which pressed it to the pipe and mothered it from the wind. From the gurgling passages, smoke now poured as the sweetness in Sampson’s riddle.

Rum had come. The Japanese woman served them. The youth of her face chilled Bellair; the littleness of her, all the tints and delicacy of a miniature in her whitened face. Bright-hued silk, a placid smile, the skuffing of her wooden sandals and the clock-work intricacy of the coils of her black hair—these were but decorations of the tragedy which came home to the American where he was still tender.... But why should he burn tissue? She seemed happy. He knew that the Japanese women require very little to make them happy; but that little was denied this maiden. An hour a day to giggle with her girl-friends behind a lattice, and she might have borne twenty-three hours of hell with calmness and cheer, not counterfeit like this.

“You have no true drink of the soil in Ameriga,” said Stackhouse. “You do not make beer nor wine, so you make no music. The only drink and the only music that come from the States of Ameriga, are from the nigger-folk who do not belong there. They make music and corn whiskey. The rest is boison to the soul.”

The voice was rich and mellow. He must have known Teutonic beginnings, or enough association for the mannerisms to get into his blood. Stackhouse was not even without that softness of sentiment, though he was tender only for men. Except for a spellable word here and there, his accent was inimitable. He talked of little other than death, and with indescribable care—as if he had been much with men of another language or with men of slow understanding.... It may have been the drink, or the sunset over distant land; the Spanish Main ahead, or the dryness and pentness of the city-heart and its achievement of long-dreamed desire in a snug, sweet ship under the easy strain of sails with wind in them; in any event Bellair was drawn with exquisite passion—drawn southward as the Jade was drawn in the soft, irresistible strength of nature.

He knew that this would pass, that he could not continue to sense this rapport with the sea-board, but he loved it now, breathed deep, and saw Stackhouse as he was never to be seen again. There was enchantment in the eyes of the great wanderer, and a certain culture of its kind in its stories. Bellair listened and in the gleam of the broad, dark eyes, there seemed a glimpse of burning ships, shadowy caravans on moonlit sands and the flash of arms by night; low-lying lights of island ports, formless rafts, spuming breakers, mourning derelicts—just glimpses, but of all the gloom and garishness of the sea. He began a monologue that night, and though it is not this story, it was not interrupted except by meals and sleeping, for many days; and all the pauses in that story were the dramatic pauses of death:

“... I have travelled more than most travellers and have seen more than is good for one man. In New York I saw Brundage of Frisco, who asked me if I remembered Perry. I said I remembered very well, for Perry was a bartner of mine, before young Brundage came out to the Islands. He told me Perry was six weeks buried. That is the way now. When I was young, my combanions did not die in beds. They were killed. Eight months ago, I saw Emslie—waved at him going up the river to Shanghai. He was outward bound, and came home to us in Adelaide in a sealed box. Old Foster, who is richer than I, has married a little Marie in Manila and may die when he pleases now. The South Seas still run in and yonder among Island shores, but who buys wine for the Japanese girls in Dunedin, since Norcross was conscripted for the service we all shall know?...

“And thus you come to the Jade, and some time you will here them dell of Stackhouse. Who knows but you may dell the story—of a familiar face turned down like an oft-filled glass? And some one will say, ‘He has not laughed these many years.’ They used to say in the Smilax at Hong Kong, when the harbour was raving and the seas were trying to climb the mountain—they used to say that Stackhouse was laughing somewhere off the China coasts. But there are only so many laughs in a man, and they go out with the years. Most of those who said that thing of Stackhouse—yes, most of them, are dead as glacial drift.”

Such was the quality of his perorations, hunched ox-like just aft of the main-shrouds—the Japanese woman coming and going with the ship’s bells, bringing drinks day and night.

“It seared my coppers—that drinking in the States of Ameriga. It will not subdue,” said he. “One has a thirst for weeks after a few days of drinking in Ameriga. For one must be bolite.”

He was never stimulated, seldom depressed, but saturated his great frame twenty hours of the twenty-four, the Japanese woman seeming to understand with few or no words the whims of taste of which he was made. Just once in the small hours, Bellair heard her voice. The cane-chair had not been empty long, and the silence of soft rain was upon the deck. Bellair had opened a package of New York papers purchased on the last day in Savannah.... It was just one scream, but the scream of one not frightened by any human thing.... The roll of papers dropped down behind the bunk. Anyway, Bellair could not have read after that. Early in the morning after hours of torture of dreams, he was awakened as usual by the sluicing of the monster. Two Lascars who travelled with Stackhouse apparently for no other purpose, poured pails of salt water upon him in the early hour when the decks were washed; and often at midday as they neared the Line. It was given to Bellair more than once, as the voyage lengthened, to witness this hippodrome.

2

Her face was continually turned away. Bellair wondered as days passed if he should ever see her face to face—the silent, far-looking young woman with a nursing baby in her arms. On deck she stood at the rail, eyes lost oversea. Her contemplation appeared to have nothing to do with Europe or America, but set to the wind wherever it came from, as the strong are always turned up-stream. Sometimes she wore a little blue jacket, curiously reminding Bellair of school-days, and though she was not far from that in years, she seemed to have passed far into the world. The child cried rarely.

There was a composure about the mother, but he did not know if it were stolidity or poise. Certainly she had known poverty, but health was in her skin, and there was something in that white profile, that the sun had touched with olive rather than tan, that stopped his look. The perfection of it dismayed Bellair. He loved beauty, but did not trust it, did not trust himself with it. The presence of a beautiful face stimulated him as no wine could do, but it also started him to idealising that which belonged to it, and this process had heretofore brought disappointment. Bellair did not want this touch of magnetism now. Beauty was plentiful. He had seen the profiles of Italian girls in New York, that the Greeks would have worshipped, and which the early worship of the Greeks was doubtless responsible for—beauty with little beside but giggle and sham. He disliked the thing in a man’s breast that answers so instantly to the line and colour of a woman’s face; objected to it primarily, because it was one of the first and most obvious tricks of nature for the replenishment of species in man and below. Bellair fancied to answer the captivation, if any at all, of a deeper wonder in woman than the contour of her countenance.

He was aware that many a woman has a beautiful profile, whose direct look is a disturbing reconsideration. This kept his eyes down, when she was opposite in the dining cabin. We are strangely trained at table; at no time so merciful. The human dining countenance must be lovely, indeed, not to break the laws of beauty. Only outright lovers dare, and they are bewildered by each other, and see not. So he did not know the colour of her eyes.

She nursed her baby often on deck, sitting bare-headed in the wind and sun, sometimes singing to it. The singing was all her own; Bellair wished she wouldn’t. Her melodies were foreign, and sometimes it seemed to him as if they were just a touch off the key. Her low dissonances, he described vaguely as Russian, but retained the suspicion that she was tonally imperfect of hearing.

The singing and the picture of her was just as far as possible from Bessie Brealt, but she made Bellair think. In all likelihood this was the general objection. His eyes smarted in the dusks, as he thought of the other singer (as solitary in New York as this woman here), who was determined not to be afraid of the cars or the bears or the wolves. Every day Bessie’s first words returned to him:

“A little Rhine wine—it’s very good here.”

And always the devastation of that sentence was great. It was a street-woman’s inside familiarity, Brandt’s being one of her rounds; as she might speak of the beer at Holbeck’s or the chops at Sharpe’s. Yet Bessie was not greedy, and had no taste for wine. It was the glibness, the town mannerism, and the low, easy level which her acceptance of the common saying revealed; the life which she was willing to make her own, at least exteriorly. But after all, in the better moments, it seemed very silly to deny a great soul to the girl who could sing as Bessie sang. Some day she would feel her soul....

The preacher, third passenger on board the Jade, reported that the Faraway woman was returning to her home in New Zealand. Fleury didn’t know if her baby was boy or girl, but judged that it was very healthy, since it cried so little.

Fleury wasn’t promising to Bellair’s eyes. First of all it was the cloth; and then during the first three weeks at sea, Bellair spent innumerable hours in the periphery of the great cane-chair. He did not resist his prejudice. “A missionary going out with the usual effrontery,” he decided. The preacher’s face appeared placid and boyish.... Fleury, however, continued to observe cheerful good-mornings, to praise the fine weather, and to offer opportunities for better acquaintance—all without being obtrusive in the least. Hayti and Santo Domingo—names once remote and romantic to the city man’s mind—were now vanished shores, and as yet the voyage was but well begun.... The three passengers were served together in the cabin, except in cases when the Stackhouse narrative happened to be running particularly well. Bellair would then be called to dine with the owner. Captain McArliss would appear at this mess and disappear—the courses being brought to him one after another in a certain rapid form. The Captain seemed so conscious, that Bellair never quite dared to observe what happened to the food, but he was certain that McArliss did not bolt. His suspicion was that he tasted or sipped as the case might be, merely spoiling the offering. He was gone before Stackhouse was really started.

It was less what the giant ate, than the excessive formality and importance of his table sessions that prevailed upon the American. Dinner was the chief doing of the day. Bellair had never complained, even in thought, of the food served to him in the usual mess, but with Stackhouse everything was extra fine from the Chinese standpoint—all delicacies and turns of the art, all choice cuttings and garnishments, a most careful consideration of wines—so that from the first audible delectation of the contents of the silver tureen, to the choice of a cigar (invariably after a few deep inhalations from a cigarette “made in Acca by the brisoners”), there was formality and deep responsibility upon the ship; and a freedom afterward through the galleys that was pleasant to regard.

“There are many things in Belgium,” said the master. “There are wines and gookeries there; also in Poland there are gooks. In England there are gooks, but not in Ameriga—only think-they-are-gooks. However, there are gooks in China. I have one, as you shall see.”

Something like this at each mighty dining—and the promise had to do with the next course which Stackhouse invariably knew and served as a surprise for his guest, for he ordered his dinner with his coffee and fish in the morning. Bellair had often seen the Chinese emerge from the galley, as they came up from the dining saloon, little sparse patches of hair here and there on his fat face like willow clumps on the shore, these untouched by the razor, though his forehead was perfectly shaven to the queue circlet. This was Gookery John taking his breath after the moil and heat of the day.