Chapter XVI With an Ear Turned Toward the Door
Mrs. Elbridge met Howard and the preacher in the hall. She told them that the girls had gone to a meeting of the Epworth League, a short distance away. They had gone to a religious gathering held in the interest of the young, but the preacher felt a deadening sense of disappointment. “They will be back soon,” said Mrs. Elbridge, seeming to divine the effect her information had made upon him. Howard heard his father and Uncle William talking in the office. “We will wait for the girls in here,” he said, leading the way into the drawing room. Mrs. Elbridge went in to tell the Judge, and shortly afterward entered the drawing room with him. The old gentleman paid no attention to Howard, but warmly shook hands with Bradley, as if he had not seen him only a few hours before.
“Delighted to see you, Mr. Bradley.”
Howard glanced at his mother and she read a communication in his eye. It was that in the old man’s enthusiasm there was added evidence of mental weakness. The Latin may express delight at seeing one a dozen times a day, but with an Anglo-Saxon more than one “delight” within twenty-four hours is an extreme.
Bradley looked embarrassed. He said that he was glad to see the Judge, which was hardly true, as he was not prepared at that moment to be glad or even pleased. His heart had gone over to the Epworth League, not to worship God, but one of God’s creatures, which, after all, is a pardonable backsliding. He remarked that he and Howard had encountered quite an adventure, giving it in detail, but to avoid any moralizing, having had enough of that for one evening, hastened to change the subject, asking if Mr. William had become any nearer settled as to his dates. This brought a flow of good humor. The Judge looked toward the door. “He has so far improved,” said he, “as to admit that at times he may possibly be wrong. I asked him if it were possible to be right, and then we had our battle to fight over again.” He offered the preacher a cigar, but ignored his son. The mother noticed it and sighed. Howard smiled at her sadly, and shook his head. Bradley took the cigar abstractedly and after holding it for a time, offered it to Howard, who declined it. The Judge glanced at him but said nothing. William came in. “John,” said he, after speaking to Bradley, “I saw old Bodsford this morning.”
“Not old Bill Bodsford.”
“Yes, sir, old Bill.”
“I thought he died years ago.”
“No, he has been out in Colorado. I haven’t seen him since seventy-eight.”
“Are you sure?” the Judge asked, winking at Bradley.
“I ought to know. I met him in St. Louis in seventy-eight—seventy-eight or seventy-nine—in July, about the fifth.”
“About the fifth. How can a date be about the fifth?”
“I mean that it was either the fourth, fifth or sixth. He told me then that he was on his way to New Orleans, by boat. It was during that intensely hot weather when so many people were sun—but that was in seventy-nine, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t remember,” said the Judge, winking at Howard by mistake and then frowning to undeceive him.
“Yes, I think it was.”
“Seventy-nine,” said the preacher, at a venture.
“Then I couldn’t have seen old Bill in seventy-eight. But I saw him today—and he looks like a grizzly bear. And he didn’t seem to be in very good circumstances. But the last time I saw him before that—”
“In seventy-nine,” interrupted the Judge.
“Well, I’m not so sure about that, John. Let me see. I was in St. Paul and went from there directly to St. Louis. Yes. Now, I haven’t been in St. Paul but once since seventy-eight and that was year before last. Went directly to St. Louis. It must have been seventy-eight, John. Yes, it was.”
“Well, go ahead with your story,” said the Judge.
“Oh, it’s no story. I was simply telling you when I met old Bill the last time.”
“And is that all there is to it?”
“All! Isn’t it enough? I didn’t start to tell a story and you know it well enough. Look here, Howard,” he added, turning upon the young lawyer, “are you fixing to jump on me, too?”
“Not at all, Uncle Billy.”
“Oh, Uncle Billy, is it? Then I know you’ve got it in for me. Mr. Bradley, I studied for the ministry—not very hard, I admit—but I studied, and I am sorry sometimes that I didn’t go so far as to put on the cloth. It would have at least protected me from ridicule.”
Bradley smiled upon him in a lonesome sort of way, with his ear turned toward the front door, listening for the coming of Agnes. The family joke, so eternally green for the Judge, was but dry grass to him. His soul was panting for the sweet waters of love, the babbling brook of a girl’s delightful mischief. But the mind can talk shop while the soul is panting. “You no doubt would have added strength to our profession,” he said. “I call it profession in want at the present moment of a better term. Why did you give up your intention? Not want of faith, I hope.”
Mrs. Elbridge shook her head as if to imply that there could be no want of faith in one connected with her family. “Well, I don’t know,” said William. “But the scheme, if I may so express it, struck me as being not exactly useless, but, let us say, hopeless.”
“Hopeless,” echoed the preacher.
“Yes. The warfare has been going on nearly two thousand years, and the victory is not yet in sight.”
“At what date did it begin?” the Judge asked.
William began to puff up. “Now, look here, John, this is a serious discussion. Is it possible that there is nothing serious except in the law, in the names of your old clients? Do you keep everything serious shut up in your safe?”
The Judge’s countenance changed, like the sudden turning down of a light, and he made a distressful gesture. “Don’t, William; don’t say that.”
“Why, what did I say to shock you so?”
The Judge got up and slowly walked back into his office. William looked at Mrs. Elbridge. “Rachel, did I say anything?”
“He isn’t well, William, and we never know what is going to displease him. But he means nothing by it, Mr. Bradley,” she added. “Sometimes he begins to joke in its old way, but it has been long since we heard his laugh in its old heartiness. I wish you would talk to him, Mr. Bradley. I know he is not well, but he won’t permit a doctor to come near him.”
The preacher assured her that he would. He did not believe that there was any serious trouble; it was the strain of former years now claiming its debt of his constitution. “Nature does not forget,” said he. “But nature may be humored. I have noticed a change in him, but I am inclined to think that he is gradually improving.”
Howard was silent, though the minister looked at him at the conclusion of his speech as if expecting some sort of reply. “He doesn’t forget about my dates, no matter how much of a change he has undergone,” said William. “But, as to our discussion: I read some little in those days, and my mind led me into bogs and swamps—into doubts, if I may say so. It seemed to me that the whole plan was marked out and couldn’t be changed. I remember having come across this startling question: ‘If man can make his own destiny; if he can, by his own free will, arrest the accomplishment of the general plan, what becomes of God?’ That struck me, sir, like a knockout blow.”
“And yet,” said Howard, “you say that the French have a slop which they call literature.”
“What! I said so? Well, what if I did?”
“You have quoted Balzac.”
“Have I? But, sir, do you appoint yourself to preside over my conscience?”
“I didn’t say anything about your conscience, Uncle Billy.”
“Oh, no, but you Uncle Billy me into a broil, that’s what you do.”
The preacher’s mind had caught the quotation, relating as it did to the shop, and he smiled as he said: “I am afraid, Uncle William, that the young man has read too much for us. In an argument he is a porcupine with sharp quills.”
“A pig with the bristles of impudence,” said William, and smiled an apology to the mother.
“Nevertheless,” remarked the preacher, returning to the subject, “I don’t see how the eye of faith could have been dimmed by such a mote. Conscience—”
“Meaning education,” Howard interrupted.
The minister bowed to Howard, but continued to address himself to William. “Conscience ought to have pointed out the good you could do. You could at least have gone to a foreign country—”
“Or off Van Buren Street,” said Howard.
Bradley braced himself for a debate. Alone with Howard he might have said, “let it pass,” but in the presence of a woman, a believer in his faith, a preacher must not shun a controversy. It would be an acknowledgment of the strength of the doubt and of the weakness of faith. So he braced himself against the wall of creed, and with polemic finger raised was about to proceed when he heard the front door open.
“The girls,” said Mrs. Elbridge, glad enough to break in.
“So soon?” remarked Bradley, looking at his watch and meaning so late. Florence and Agnes came in, laughing. Bradley got up with a bow. “You here?” said Agnes, and then corrected herself by saying that she was pleased to see him there. “I never know how anything is going to sound,” she continued, throwing her hat on a sofa. “It’s all improvisation with me. I never saw as awkward a man in my life—” Bradley looked at her with such a start that she hastened to exclaim: “Oh, not you, Mr. Bradley—the young man who walked home with us. I couldn’t for the life of me get it out of my head that he wasn’t on stilts.” She sat down on the sofa. Bradley made bold to go over and sit down beside her, taking up her hat, looking about for some place to put it and ending by holding it on his knees, awkwardly pressing them together. He felt that Howard was laughing at him; he knew that Agnes was. But she didn’t offer to take the hat. Florence, however, relieved him, and then everyone laughed except William. The preacher had been placed in an awkward position, though anyone might have made a grace of it—anyone but a man whom custom almost forces to adopt solemnity as a badge of office; and William gave Howard credit for it all. In certain humors he would have charged the young man with a rainy day, a frost or a cold wind. He looked at him in his reproachful way and cleared his throat.
“What is it now, Uncle William?” Howard asked.
“Oh, don’t ask me. You ought to know.”
“But I don’t. I haven’t said a word or done a thing that you should give me the bad eye.”
“Rachel,” said the old man, “it seems to me that the more he reads the more slang he uses. The ‘bad eye!’ That belongs to the police court.”
“Then it is not a quotation from Balzac.”
“Never you mind about quotations. I have quoted before you were born—and I knew, sir, from what source. But I won’t stay to be browbeaten. I will leave you.”
“By the way,” Howard called after him, “if you want a pipe of good tobacco step into my room. You’ll find a fresh can on the table.”
“I don’t want any of your tobacco, sir; I don’t want anything you’ve got.”
Bradley might have thought that in this family the joke was overworked, that is, had he been prepared to think anything. But he was not. His mind was aglow from the light beside him, and his ideas, if at that moment he had any, were as gold fishes in a globe, swimming round and round.
Florence went to the piano. Howard stood beside her. Mrs. Elbridge went out. It was time, and she knew it. William appeared at the door. “I thought you said that your tobacco was on the table in your room. What right have you got—what cause have I ever given you to deceive me in that way?”
“You said you didn’t want any of my tobacco.”
“You said it was on the table. Of course I don’t want it—I wouldn’t have it.”
“You just wanted to see where it was.”
“I don’t care anything about it, sir. I want you to understand that as you go along.”
“All right, but the can of tobacco, I remember now, is in the closet on the shelf.”
William went away, and the young man knew that in the morning his tobacco can would be empty. Florence played the air of a slow, old love song, and between the notes fell the soft words, her own and Howard’s; they looked into each other’s eyes, eyes so familiar to both, eyes they could no more remember first seeing than we can remember the first sky, the first star—love as old as recollection and as young as the moment.
There is one thing we can always say, and Bradley said it: “I shall miss you when you are gone.”
“I’m not gone yet,” Agnes replied.
“I hope you are not getting tired of us.”
“Tired?” She raised her eyes and he looked into them, into the depth of their blue mystery. “No, I am having lots of fun.”
“Fun! Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough? That’s all I want.”
“But life is not all fun.”
“No?” She raised her eyes again.
“Life is serious,” he said. “The greatest joy is serious; the greatest happiness comes to the heart when the heart is solemn.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I cry when I’m serious.”
“There is joy in a tear.”
“Not in mine.”
He did not hear the front door open. For him all the world had come in. He did not hear a step at the door. Bodney came in. Florence left off playing and turned about on the stool. Bradley arose and shook hands with him, said that he was glad to meet him, and lied. He would not at that moment have been glad to see the glory promised to the faithful. But he lied, as we all of us are compelled to lie, for to lie at times is the necessary martyrdom of the conscience. Bodney’s face was bright and his laugh was gay. “You are as merry as a serenade,” said Florence.
“As happy as a lark,” he replied. The love-making was spoiled. Bradley said that it was time to take his leave. Bodney followed him to the door, and beneath the hall light handed him a bank note, apologizing for not having sooner returned the loan of ten dollars.
“But you have given me twenty,” said Bradley.
“Have I? Then give the extra ten to the church.”