Chapter Twenty-Nine I
The blow which Robert got between the eyes when he saw Janet and St. Hilaire together had left him shunned. And he was on the train speeding to Fontainebleau before he began coming to, a painful process of returning sensibility, beside which the pins and needles of a limb that had been asleep would have seemed the merest child’s play.
The wild nomadic images that chased one another across the field of his consciousness! They racked his brain, his world-reforming brain, and limited his feverish introspection to one discovery, the startling discovery of how very much he was in love.
Rather an awkward plight, he told himself, for a young man who had purposed the moral regeneration of mankind and in pursuit of this purpose had sworn to spurn fate, scorn death, and set his hopes above happiness and love. Especially love! Didn’t all the Dick Dudgeons and Devil’s Disciples begin by renouncing love? Indeed, didn’t they make this renunciation a cardinal point of honor?
To think that even Cornelia had cautioned him against making an utter ass of himself about Janet! Cautioned him in vain. And Janet, too, had tried her hardest to warn him off by jibing at his poverty. This cruel kindness had almost worked; almost, but not quite. The poet, the lunatic, the lover—they were the embodiments of diseases (Shakespeare had said it!), diseases that resisted the most desperate remedies.
Of course she preferred St. Hilaire to himself. Why not? According to his own theories, he should be the first to dub her an imbecile if she didn’t. When she needed sex to gratify desire, she had taken Claude by preference. Now that she needed a position, she would take St. Hilaire. And rightly so.
He had nothing to offer her but his brains.
Brains and no money! And that in the twentieth century, the triumphant mechanical century, in which any fool with a little low cunning and a good thick skin could make money by the bushel.
What on earth had possessed Mark Pryor to start him on this trail? Confound it! It had all grown out of a chance encounter with Pryor in Charlotte Beecher’s studio one fatal afternoon. The fellow had taken him aside and poured out a harrowing story of Janet’s miseries coupled with a picture of her dependence on Cornelia! But for that rencontre, he wouldn’t have gone on this wild-goose chase from Geneva to Paris to rescue Janet from a gilded cage.
A gilded cage! No, by heaven! He might be living in a gilded cage himself (the gilt being drawn from Charlotte Beecher’s gilt-edged securities), instead of in one-third of a model tenement flat in Kips Bay. To think that Pryor, the transcendently practical Pryor, should have been the instigator of this fatuous proceeding! Hang the fellow for his unwarranted meddling and plausible tongue!
He reached Fontainebleau in a drizzling rain and voted it a sleek and stupid place. In the chilly Hotel de Londres he had ample leisure to reflect on his folly. Sightseeing! His business in the world was to create new sights not to see old ones. A fat lot he cared for chateaux in which the greasy Bourbons had entertained their mistresses and in which streams of tourists would be sure to blink in awe at vulgarly showy decorations or childishly ornamented bric-a-brac, not to mention the celebrated, idiotic insipidities painted by Boucher and David.
Merely to read about these “sights” in the guidebook made him sick. Why hadn’t he followed his own nose instead of letting Cornelia map, or rather, Baedeker, his course for him?
“What dire offence from trivial causes springs,” he silently quoted. His present plight was the result of putting Cornelia into a bad temper at the breakfast table that morning. Afterwards, he had gone to pacify her, a feat he had so often accomplished before. So often, in fact, that it seemed to him rather a joke to watch Cornelia’s stony heart melt into abject sentimentality. A double-edged joke, now he came to think it over, in his present plight.
Well, on this occasion she had not been as wax in his hands. Nor had she been sentimental. True, she had apparently let herself be mollified as of old. But he was so absorbed in Janet that he failed to be struck by her unusual manner. In retrospect it stood out. Cornelia had become playful: it was the playfulness of the panther.
She had begged him to go to Fontainebleau, pointing out that everybody went at least once in a lifetime, and that he could oblige her by doing his duty to himself and performing a service for her at one and the same time. The service (it would save Harry a journey!) was to give a commission for a special Paulette design to an artist who had an open-air studio in the famous Fontainebleau forest.
On his way from Paulette’s to the Gare de Lyon he had wondered whether Janet wouldn’t be mightily piqued by his unannounced absence of two days. Two days cut clean out of a visit that was not scheduled to be a long one! Well, if she was piqued, so much the better.
Yes, but mightn’t she suppose him deeply wounded by her wantonly taunting shot at his impecunious, ineligible pretentions? Possibly. But, as a matter of fact, he had been deeply wounded. A taunt from her lips, at such a moment, and in such a style! It was horribly unlike the Janet he had known in Kips Bay. Had she really become calculating to her finger tips in accordance with the law of the evolution of the Lorillardian female? Did her rapturous return of his kisses mean nothing to her?
Oh, well, after a tremendous love affair like hers with Claude, a young lady was probably as much thrilled by a kiss of rapture now and then, as by an extra slice of toast at breakfast.
So he had reasoned as he was about to jump on a bus running to the Lyon station. He had stopped and retraced his steps to the Maison Paulette, telling himself that as a sane and sensible citizen of the world it would be much better to bid her a brief good-bye.
Here in Fontainebleau his memory retraced these steps for the fiftieth time. Cornelia had been in the exhibition room, thank heaven. So he had hurried upstairs to the gymnasium, stopping to glance in at the private office on his way. That was how he had come to swing open the door and burst incontinently upon Janet and St. Hilaire.
Certainly, there was nothing like a smasher in the face for making you feel things you had been innocent of feeling before.
“Let the pain do the work!” said Robert, quoting to himself the oldest and most respected maxim known to the medical profession. Then he went to bed.
A sleepless night followed.
II
The weather next morning was brisk and clear. Under its inspiration Robert began to recover from the depression of the night before and, for a time at least, to drive away the misgivings that had tormented him. He yielded to the beauty of the forest of Fontainebleau, a fact which made the discharge of his mission for Cornelia much less tedious than he had dreaded.
During his return through wooded walks to the town, he so far regained his self-confidence that he was able to laugh at yesterday’s morbid speculations and nightmarish fancies. What a bother he had made about a crisis that ought to have been foreseen, and a sequel that ought to have been taken for granted!
And, as a pure point of information, could he be absolutely sure that Janet really did mean to marry St. Hilaire?
This startling query, coming like a whisper from the void, crystallized a decision towards which he had unconsciously been groping. He would return posthaste to Paris and level the invisible wall that had sprung up between Janet and himself. “An invisible wall!” To suppose that a figment like that could separate two people endowed with good will, quick wit, and flexible tongues, was to insult his intelligence.
Parks, palaces, gardens, and all the other sights of Fontainebleau could go hang!
He tingled with shame as he reflected that now, more than at any other moment since the dissolution of the firm of Barr and Lloyd, Janet might need the friendly counsel or the sympathetic ear that he had pressed upon her with unlimited enthusiasm in their Kips Bay workshop. Yet this was the moment he had chosen in which to act like the screen hero who advances his money or his time to the heroine in amounts arithmetically proportioned to the exact quantity of amorous response from the lady’s side. True, this sordid barter was the popular American conception of the course of true love. But did he propose to fall in with this conception? Was he ready to prostitute his gifts to the worship of the great Atlantic bitch-goddess, Success?
If only he had been in a position to make Janet a tolerably acceptable offer of marriage!
Still, no need to blink the fact that he was now better circumstanced than at any time since leaving the Evening Chronicle. Hadn’t the Confederated Press given him this assignment at Geneva, the most responsible assignment in its province? He flattered himself that he had reported the proceedings of the Labor Congress with a color, vividness, trenchancy, and fire none too common in American journalism. It ought to make people at home sit up and take notice; it might lead to a much more profitable commission. Look where Hutchins Burley’s articles on the Colorado mine strike had carried him, chock-full of rhetorical clap-trap and maudlin pathos though the beggar’s work had been!
A pity that the Confederated Press served chiefly radical newspapers with a limited circulation! It kept your tenure on quicksand. He might have to yield to temptation and falsify his better self by sinking into one of the fat jobs that the plutocratic press would now be sure to offer him.
For the sake of marrying Janet? No, no, it wouldn’t do at all. Not even if she were insane enough to be willing to take the plunge. He pictured himself and her together in the marital state, saw the cramped Harlem flat in which they’d be boxed up. Both working of course! No conveniences, no facilities for either sociability or solitude, no children (on less than ten thousand a year birth control would be imperative), no health. And the economies they’d have to practice! They’d have to deny themselves freedom of movement, shun social and professional contacts, and take refuge in an isolation paralyzing to their talents.
Until death did them part—
Thousands of childless couples in every big city existed thus. And the lives they led were hell.
In spite of which solemn conclusion Robert had no sooner reached his hotel than he prepared to desert the spacious freedom of Fontainebleau. And he actually took the first afternoon train back to Paris with the express purpose of seeking Janet out for a heart-to-heart talk.
The perfection of French “system,” so extensively advertised on paper, is also realized on paper, and there only. This truth was once more brought home to Robert when, grimy with soot, he reached the capital long after his train was due. He decided to skip the supper at Paulette’s, partly from a desire to avoid Cornelia, partly from a hope that he might find Janet alone after Harry Kelly and his wife had left, as they often did, for an evening’s entertainment.
A bus to the American Express Company enabled him to get his mail just before the office closed. He kept the dozen-odd letters in his pocket, intending to read them whilst taking a snack in a quaint, spotless little dairy restaurant (the a toute heure shop, as he and Janet called it, in allusion to its boast of never closing) in the Boulevard Montmartre.
The waitress having taken his order, he rapidly sorted out his letters, seven or eight of which had official or commercial headings that at once betrayed the enclosures as mere announcements or bills. These he stuffed back unread into his pocket. Of the remaining few, the first one proved to be from the London agent of the Confederated Press. This was the man under whose orders he worked while in Europe. A grudging, carping cuss! Robert hoped that the fellow had at last seen the light (of Robert’s merit), and that handsome amends were forthcoming.
The message ordered him home to New York at once!
So much for the recognition and advancement which his gorgeous accounts of the Labor Congress were to bring him. Had the ironical shafts, tipped with caustic wit and aimed at the rancor and obstructiveness of some of the labor leaders, given mortal offence to his own side?
With a horrible sense of the insecurity of life, and with a nameless dread more invasive and powerful than any he had ever known before, he reached the Maison Paulette about an hour later. He met one of the principal manikins at the door.
“Mademoiselle Janet? Hadn’t he heard the tragic news? C’est si triste. The whole Maison was in mourning. Mademoiselle had departed that very noon with Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, the great rich lady without a heart. Ah, comme c’est triste!”
III
The “Touraine” had been two days out from Havre in weather decidedly rough, before Robert got his sea-legs back again. Others on board were doubtless still deploring the pit of instability that lurks beneath the surface of things. But as a rule their reflections had an origin that was strictly physical. Robert, on his first brisk walk around the second-class deck, reasoned from premises of a very different nature.
For he had reached a point where he felt constrained to take a sort of inventory of himself, a mental stock-listing of his reverses, his prospects, and his altered outlook on affairs.
Not that his theories had changed in substance.
From first to last, his mind had been filled with a fierce impatience of the stupidity of man today and an unquenchable faith in a sanity to come. Evil; as he conceived it, was a by-product of human growth, and not, as Shelley conceived it, something imposed on man by a malignant external power on the fall of which the race would at once become perfect. In short, he believed that the incessant conflict of life was largely a struggle between high and low desires, with money and numbers on the side of Satan, and high-spirited intelligence on the side of the angels.
In America, to be sure, where achievements not open to a flat cash interpretation are passed by with a shrug or a vulgar joke, Robert’s view of life had excited as much interest as a whisper in the wind. The few who gave his philosophy a brief attention had hastily dismissed it as a matter for milksops or imbeciles; on the fool who preached this philosophy they had bestowed a cynical pity, and on the failure who practised it, an amused contempt.
The failure who practised it! Robert knew that, judged by every standard save his own, he was a failure, a complete, incurable failure. He did not try to dodge this unanimous judgment. He despised it as much as he exulted in his own faith. To be exact, as much as he had exulted in his own faith.
For the blow that had knocked him galley-west in the office of the Maison Paulette had seriously shaken his self-confidence.
A review of his recent conduct led him straight to a very unpalatable verdict. He had behaved as stupidly towards Janet as any average man of stone-age instincts. Because she had made one risky experiment in the field of sex and had almost been tempted to make an even riskier experiment in the field of subsistence, he had displayed in turn his pique, jealousy, anger and scorn. The childish resentment that had mastered him! And this when he owed Janet unbounded gratitude for her wisdom in frightening him off from a suicidal offer of marriage. In his varied exhibition of neolithic folly, where was the high-spirited intelligence he boasted of possessing?
Look how Janet had stuck to her guns! As he might have foreseen (if he hadn’t been a perfect donkey!), she was going to make a glorious fight of it, on her own. She had given to Caesar the things that were Caesar’s; and for the rest, she had kept her integrity intact.
Incidentally, there was a grain of comfort in the fact that she hadn’t accepted M. St. Hilaire after all. A grain! Say rather, several tons.
Suspending this train of thought, Robert turned to his other great problem, his work in the labor movement. He asked himself whether he, like Janet, had kept his integrity intact. Two weeks ago he would have shouted out a triumphant yes. But now the thin edge of doubt had entered his soul. This incorruptible, critical gift—the gift above all others that he prized—was he justified in pushing its exercise to the furthest limit? He had always rejoiced in the uncompromising candor with which he had exposed and flayed the special weaknesses of the radical leaders, the general deficiencies of his own side. But when candor compelled you to smite people in the fifth rib in order to save their souls, weren’t you carrying virtue a little too far?
Well, his employers on the Confederated Press thought so. And that they were not alone in their opinion was evident from his several failures. He counted them up: the Evening Chronicle, the Guild movement, the attempt to unionize the mercantile workers, the Labor Party publicity, and now this latest debacle. Not to mention his friendships!
He retained the hearty confidence of nobody.
Ought a successful honest man, then, to show as much discretion in the practice of candor as a successful knave shows in the practice of deceit? It would seem so. Plainly, he who would change the moral standards of his kind could not afford to be one thing to all men. Not a specialist or an extremist, in short.
How to be an aggressive revolutionist and at the same time a progressive evolutionist—this was the paradox that every effective radical had to embody in his own life.
It was clear that he would have to begin again at the bottom of the ladder.
This being so, the first thing to do was to ascertain his liabilities, material no less than spiritual.
Here Robert was reminded abruptly of the half dozen letters—bills, circulars, and the like, as he surmised—which he had rammed into his coat pocket at the a toute heure restaurant. The coat in question was in his stateroom and he would look for the letters when he went below.
Half an hour later he found them. One of the first envelopes bore the heading: Simons and Hunt, Attorneys-at-Law, 150 Broadway. It had two enclosures. The first one he opened read:
..vspace:: 2
My Dear Nephew:
About a year ago you wrote to me suggesting that I do something handsome by you. In your own delicate words you asked me to subsidize your imagination, a quality you believed of sufficient value to your fellow men to be worth preserving. As a proof that you possessed this quality, you provided me with an outline of your career in all its ups and downs, chiefly downs. You were also good enough to favor me with copies of your several articles on social and industrial reform.
As I am in receipt of some ten thousand requests for money every year, it is obviously impossible for me to comply with them all. And I am bound to say that I saw no reason for complying with your request, the more so in that its tone of mockery and sly derision led me to doubt whether it was made in entire good faith. The claim of kinship which you advanced (somewhat belatedly I thought) had little weight with me. You know what family ties are amongst the Lloyds! I was but a youngster of fourteen when my father and my elder brother (your father) ripped up my gilded dreams of a future as an artist and hashed my romantic plans by a single practical act. They pitched me out of the house into the street. There I remained to live on my own wits, and this fate I have had little occasion to complain of.
But to return to your letter. It did not win me to your way of thinking. Nor, to be candid, did your articles on “the collapse of modern society.” I will admit that your attacks on land speculators (like myself) were witty, if not wise. And when you sailed into the monopoly on land values, you wrote with astonishing authority; indeed the only flaw I could find in your otherwise perfect qualifications for solving the economic problem of land was the trifling fact that you had never owned a foot of it.
This might have passed. Not so your observations on the distribution of the country’s wealth and other related iniquities. Here you repeated the usual flub-dub with the usual fine flourish of the man who imagines he has made a startling discovery. Thus, you solemnly pointed out that there are only two kinds of people on earth: those who prey and those who are preyed upon. You announced that you had never seen the profiteer forsaken, nor the preying man begging his bread. And you informed the world that the intensified every year, the sheep being now more securely muzzled and more efficiently fleeced than ever before.
Now, my dear nephew, there is nothing new in your “discovery.” Since the days of Plato all prudent men have been of one opinion respecting the class war, but no prudent man has ever admitted it. Conscious of this, I was unmoved by your ringing call to the sheep that they had nothing to lose but their muzzles; and your desire to see them organize for the purpose of destroying the wolves by mass action, left me cold. A world of sheep—and nothing but sheep—would not be to my taste. For the wolves, whatever else we may say of them, at least vary the drab monotony here below. Besides, I suspect that your indignation in the matter of the muzzles is largely shandygaff. It is not necessary to muzzle sheep!
In fine, your credentials did not greatly impress me. Your writings, it is true, were clever, witty, imaginative.
But what is imagination without matter or money to work upon? Like a spark without tinder on a wet day in the woods. At all events, I could scarcely overlook the fact that, whereas I had made a fortune by my real estate speculation, you were unable to make so much as a bare living by your real estate denunciation.
Have patience a little longer with the garrulity of a dying man. A few weeks ago, I was taken ill with a fatal dilatation of the aorta, and the end may come in a day, a month, a year. What to do with my investments became an immediately pressing problem. The charities I had named in my last will were administered, as I well knew, by a host of charity-mongers even more distasteful to me than kith and kin.
In this painful dilemma I read your letter again, thinking that my reaction to it, a year ago, had been hasty or unfair. Perhaps the wish was father to the thought; perhaps my infirmity has softened my brain. Whatever the cause, one passage in your letter struck me. My eyes were opened and I saw, or believed I saw, that you were a chosen vessel to bear my name and fortune before the American people. Accordingly I revoked all charitable bequests and appointed you as my principal heir and assign.
The passage that took my fancy was the one in which you declared that it is nobler to spend a fortune than to make one. Unhappily, I have never been able to practice this sentiment in full. Not that I have failed to try. I have spent millions in my time. Indeed I feel justified in saying that I have been a constant and deliberate spendthrift in the most literal sense of the word. But, like you, I have an imagination (although, unlike you, I have always prudently given my imagination the wherewithal to work upon). Thus, in the teeth of a free and incessant expenditure, my mind has always produced far more than my body could possibly consume or my hands give away. And so I come at last to the most tragic moment in a rich man’s life: that in which he arranges for others to spend what he himself has earned.
But spent it must be. And when I consider your Lloyd heredity, your childlike ignorance of the ease with which money is made, and your crushing innocence of the difficulty with which it is spent, I feel I can hardly put my future in better hands than yours. God bless you, my dear nephew, and may your efforts at noble disbursement be attended by success.
Your affectionate uncle, Allan D. Lloyd.
Robert’s feelings beggared expression.
Half dazed, he took out the second enclosure, a brief communication from Messrs. Simons and Hunt, his uncle’s attorneys. This notified him of Mr. Lloyd’s death, and confirmed the fact of his designation as the residuary legatee. After putting an estimate of two million dollars on the minimum value of the estate, Messrs. Simons and Hunt placed their services at the disposal of the heir and announced their readiness to receive his instructions.
Followed a blank in Robert’s consciousness. Slowly, very slowly, this was replaced by the sound of the steamer throbbing its way across the Atlantic.
IV
The day after landing, Robert paid Messrs. Simons and Hunt a visit, with the result that, on leaving their offices in lower Broadway, he was a little less haunted by the suspicion that the reality was a dream. A most reassuring item was tucked away in his pocket in the shape of an advance of cold cash amounting to two thousand dollars, a sum far larger than any he had ever been in possession of before.
On the theory that excess of joy, like excess of sorrow, had better be skimmed off by a long, brisk walk, Robert trusted to his two legs to get him back to Kips Bay. He had planned no change in his habits as yet; hence he still shared part of a model flat with the sporting editor of one of the evening newspapers.
He had just turned from the open court of the Lorillard tenement block into the rather dark entrance, when what appeared to be a shadow on the wall assumed solidity and life, stepped alertly forward, and tapped him on the shoulder.
“The one man in New York I particularly want to see,” cried Mark Pryor, in his cool, staccato tones.
“The one man in New York I particularly want to avoid,” retorted Robert, not ill-naturedly, but with a lively remembrance of Pryor as the engineer of his Parisian misadventures. “How in thunder did you know I was back?”
“I didn’t. Luck simply drifted my way.”
His cordial handshake accelerated Robert’s returning sense of the reality of earthly affairs. Pryor might be slim and wiry enough to slip in or out of the most impossible places. He might be as elusive as a ghost. But there was nothing weak or spirituelle about his grasp of one’s hand or his grip on life. As for his voice, which had a ring of decency and good intent always attractive to Robert, it dispelled fanciful grudges and installed common sense.
They went to lunch together in a favorite restaurant of Pryor’s, a little Austrian place in one of the side streets east of the Pershing Square district.
“A fine scrape you got me into with your tip about Paris!” began Robert, as soon as they were served.
“I’ve never seen you in better spirits,” returned Pryor, cool as a cucumber. “Are you engaged to marry Janet?”
Robert stared at him.
“No,” he said emphatically.
“Then you’re not the man I took you for.”
“I’m not,” said Robert, chuckling.
So Pryor knew nothing of the inheritance! And if Pryor knew nothing, who would know? He had rather supposed that the news would create something of a stir. The Lorillard tenements and Kips Bay generally should, in all conscience, have been agog with it. But so far not a word had been said by anybody he had met.
Clearly, it took a good deal to ripple the pachydermatous surface of this monster city of New York!
Well, he would volunteer nothing. It was just as well to keep one or two cards up your sleeve, especially when you matched your wits against a clever man like Pryor.
Meanwhile Pryor did the talking. Did Robert mean to sit there and tell him that he had missed the opportunity of a lifetime? He’d be blessed if he ever threw him a chance like that again.
“A chance!” interrupted Robert. “Are you sure it wasn’t a noose?”
“Don’t talk through your hat, Lloyd,” said Pryor, affecting indignation. “Janet’s a girl in a million. Whoever marries her is a made man.”
“You are a cool hand,” said Robert, lost in admiration. “I don’t know what in thunder your game is. Let me say this, though. As a man of mystery you may be as superb a demon as Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger. But as a matchmaker you’re a hopeless old blunderbuss.”
He briefly outlined his recent experiences in Paris, including the tableau of himself in the act of stumbling upon Janet and M. St. Hilaire; he also sketched the sequel to this climax.
Pryor’s restless eyes remained singularly still during this recital. At its close, he offered one enigmatic remark:
“If Janet’s coming to New York, we may yet be able to pull the chestnuts out of the fire.”
In response to further questions, Robert gave a few intimate word pictures of unpublishable incidents at the Geneva Labor Congress. He also touched rather pepperily on his recall by the Confederated Press.
“Serve you right,” said Pryor. “To a plain man like me reformers who try to change moral standards, whether for better or for worse, are a nuisance. Too many obstacles cannot be put in their path.”
“All I did was to tell the truth about my own side,” said Robert indignantly.
“What! Peach on your own side? Why, even the yeggmen consider that bad form.”
Robert smiled in spite of himself.
“Nonsense,” he said. “Facts are facts. The truth is, Americans habitually act like feeble-minded weaklings in the way they receive criticism. And we radicals share the national infirmity. Let the least suggestion of disapproval be levelled at Columbia, the gem of the ocean, and all America foams at the mouth. This is a joke to foreigners; it’s a tragedy to us. I tell you, Pryor, unless Americans learn to stand up to criticism like men and to tolerate dissent as the English, the Germans, and even the French do, they’ll stand where they are—at the tail end of the procession of nations. Don’t you agree with me?”
“Lord, yes! Have it your own way. Pull your fellow radicals to pieces if necessary. Treat ’em rough. But don’t slaughter ’em. Remember they’re the only leaven in the slimy dough.”
“For an avowed conservative, Pryor, that’s going pretty far.”
“Oh, I’ll go farther than that. I’ll say that if the Confederated Press were to come to grief—which Heaven forbid!—I should have no means of getting at the real news of the world. None whatever. Unless I could sneak into some private whispering gallery in Washington, D.C., or in Wall Street, N.Y.”
“You perverse standpatter, what do you mean by sticking up for my side? It looks fishy to me. What’s your little game now, I wonder?”
“Lloyd, the time has come to give you a straight answer to that question. I’m an agent of the Secret Service; at present, I’m detailed to help the Department of Justice.”
“The deuce you are!”
“My game has been to watch the most dangerous radicals in New York—some five hundred of them—whose names are listed in the department’s books. You are one of the five hundred.”
“Really! I hope I’ve been a source of ample diversion? As a friend, I’m always glad to oblige.”
“Dienst ist dienst, as the Germans say. While on duty, I had no friends; I merely had five hundred suspects to keep track of. In point of fact, my men have been through your effects several times. We found nothing treasonable, nothing seditious, nothing compromising, except a copy of the Declaration of Independence with the first eight lines underscored. I tried to have your name removed from the black list. But the damaging evidence aforesaid was the ground on which my recommendation was ignored.”
“Is this a joke?”
“No, it’s the gospel truth. But you needn’t feel as though you had been singled out for persecution. Not at all. I’m a marked man as much as you. If the Intelligence Service of the Government detects an atom of intelligence in one of its agents, it makes it a special point always to ignore that agent’s recommendations. Never mind. I wrote out my resignation this morning. Here it is. It goes to Washington at once.”
“Surely, Pryor, you have other reasons for resigning the job?”
“Ah, now you’re coming to it. For weeks past, I’ve been saturating my mind with radical literature. Tons of it. From professional motives solely, of course. After a studious and impartial consideration of facts and principles, I’ve come to a very curious pass.”
“You don’t mean to say that you’ve been converted!” said Robert, rising excitedly from his chair.
“Yes, I’ve been converted. Not to radicalism, mind. Personally, I’m a firm believer in the aristocratic state as championed by Plato, Ruskin, and Carlyle, the state in which the Government is carried on by those whose equipment best fits them to govern. We’ll reach this state—in about a thousand years. Meanwhile, I’ve been converted not to radicalism, but to the view that the radicals are right in theory and the Government wrong in practice; the former right in demanding a complete restoration of civil liberty and an enormous grant of industrial liberty, the latter wrong in thwarting these demands.”
After a few moments spent in digesting Pryor’s astonishing admissions, Robert said:
“One good surprise deserves another.”
“Fire away.”
“I’ve just inherited two million dollars!”
Pryor was stupefied.
“Where the blue blazes did you get it from?” he cried, his long neck rising telescopically out of his stand-up collar.
“That’s one piece of information that hasn’t drifted your way, at all events,” said Robert, taking a malicious pleasure in Pryor’s stupefaction.
A marked pause followed. Then Pryor, having congratulated Robert, said abruptly:
“As far as I can see, nothing now stands in the way of your marriage to Charlotte Beecher.”
“What do you mean?”
Searching glances were exchanged. Each recognized in the other a man of rare talent and unusual probity, and trusted him accordingly. Pryor took the plunge.
He remarked quietly that, during Robert’s absence abroad, he and Charlotte had become very good friends. He was well aware of her intense attachment to Robert. She had, in fact, talked about it freely and frankly to him. Thus he knew that she had taken the initiative in proposing marriage to Robert, a very natural step, inasmuch as she was in the vastly superior position. He knew, however that Robert had refused on the ground of the extreme inequality of their circumstances.
With the best will in the world, Robert found it difficult to reply. Habit and custom were strong against a ventilation of his refusal and of the real reasons underlying it.
“The truth is,” he said, after a second’s hesitation, “Charlotte and I would be very poor partners on a long dull grind, and this is what modern marriage has become. We’re excellent friends. We put a fine edge on each other’s faculties. When we meet, the blue sparks fly. In fact, they fly too much.”
“Say what you like, she could at least take you to art galleries and concerts, and count on you as a sympathetic companion. That’s where I failed her. I’m such a duffer in matters of art. And as for music! Lord, I hardly know the difference between Beethoven and a beet.”
“Don’t let that worry you. For all that Charlotte and I pull so well together, our points of agreement are mostly on the surface. True, we both get recreation from looking at pictures or sculpture and listening to music. But not from the same pictures or sculpture, nor from the same music. She’s all for chastity and restraint in art—Hellenism or aristocracy, you’d call it. She resents Strauss’s volcanic turbulence; Epstein’s rough-hewn symbolism merely disgusts her; the brutal abandon of Augustus John drives her mad. Yet I swear by these artists as she swears by the Donatellos, Brahmses, and Raphaels whose exhibitions of technical mastery bore me to extinction. We really have nothing in common except our recognition of honest craftsmanship and our joy in the clash of temperaments, instincts and opinions.”
“These differences that you speak of: how do you know that they matter?”
“Because they go so deep. Her hopes are not my hopes, her dreams are not my dreams, her gods are not my gods. These things are of the essence of comradeship, and comradeship is the soul of love.”
“Well, I’m as much in love with Charlotte as any normally sane man can be in love,” said Pryor, quizzically. “But on the points you mention, I don’t hit it off with her, either. Her Brahms and your Strauss are equally Greek to me, and I’d give up their collective compositions in a jiffy for half an hour of the “Mikado” or the “Gondoliers.”
He supposed he’d have to work backwards and find out what the essence of comradeship consisted in. He sincerely trusted that it was not bound up, in his case, with Charlotte’s money. As it was, she was terribly suspicious on that score. She was quite unshakable in the conviction that Robert was the only man she had ever known who was not a fortune hunter.
“You see the devilish harm you’ve done,” said Pryor, in conclusion, “with your reputation for disinterestedness.”
“Quite an undeserved one, too,” replied Robert, smiling. “Like most reputations it was founded on my deficiencies and not on my accomplishments. If I had known as much about money two years ago as I do now, Charlotte might have a very different opinion of my disinterested motives, as well as of me.”
He assured Pryor that he would do his level best to free Charlotte from her delusion. In return, Pryor was to keep secret the fact of Robert’s accession to a fortune.
“I’d like to enjoy the luxury of being a poor man with plenty of money in my pocket,” he said.
Nobody was to be told and, in particular, the news was to be kept from Janet. He didn’t expect to indulge this rather childish whim for more than a few days. All New York would be talking about his good luck by that time, no doubt.
“My dear fellow! A paltry two millions?” said Pryor with a short laugh. “A mere pebble on the beach. Why, the reigning plutocrats here hand out millions to charity as I’d give pennies to a beggar.”
They settled their bill.
On their way out, Robert said:
“Now tell me how you caught that blackguard Burley smuggling diamonds for the Fontaines.”
“Who told you I caught them? In the strict etiquette of the Secret Service, the names of the agents in specific cases are never made public.”
“Oh, the information just drifted my way,” said Robert, bantering him. “Even without it, though, I should have put two and two together. Nobody admires the richness and variety of your knowledge more than I do, Pryor. Yet I’m bound to say that your disguises seem puerile to me. Among the Outlaws, although we didn’t guess the Secret Service, we spotted you as a Pinkerton, or something of that sort, almost from the first.”
“Precisely what I wanted you to do, my friend. My game was to spread the truth broadcast. People simply will not believe the truth. Ask any detective worth his salt and he’ll tell you that being himself is the best of all possible disguises, one that saves no end of trouble in ‘make-up’ and character acting. It causes every suspect to feel that he and the sleuth are in each other’s confidence, as it were. And this puts people so much at their ease that they positively can’t help giving themselves away.”
“So that’s how you double crossed Hutchins Burley?”
“It’s a long, amusing story, Lloyd. I’ll keep the details for another day. The poor wretch is doing five years in a Federal prison. Mr. Rene Fontaine, for whom he was a mere tool, paid a fine of three million dollars (not your beggarly two million!) without turning a hair, and then decamped to England, where he lives in a regal villa somewhere in Essex.—Lord, it’s nearly three! I must make a move. Where are you bound for?”
“Home, now. California, the day after tomorrow.”
“California!”
Robert explained that all his uncle’s realty holdings were on the Pacific Coast. His mother, too, was there. What with one thing and another, his presence out West was imperative.
“I shall return in two months for a quest of quite another sort,” he added, significantly.
“Walk a few blocks towards the Subway with me,” said Pryor, “and I’ll show you one of the high lights of our low life.”
As they drew near the Grand Central Palace, the streets grew thick with people. Traffic along Lexington Avenue was suspended and a cordon of New York’s “finest” was drawn up in front of the Palace, with night sticks polished to a turn.
Robert and Mark Pryor had just reached the outskirts of the crowd, when several imposing motor cars drew up in front of the exhibition building.
“What on earth’s the matter now?” said Robert. “Has our Anglo-American Prince of Wales returned?”
A very handsome young man with two richly dressed young ladies alighted from the first car, whilst the moving picture brigade went into immediate action and the crowds thundered out cheers.
“It’s the first day of the great Allied Armies’ Bazaar,” said Pryor. “The Duchess of Keswick and Mr. and Mrs. Claude Fontaine are to open the affair at three o’clock. There they go now.”
“What a match for him!” murmured Robert, setting eyes for the first time on Marjorie Armstrong’s proud beauty.
“More than a match,” said Pryor, softly.