Chapter IV (1)

As he left the Place of the wonderful lights and shades and colours and perfumes, he realized that he could not have been perfectly happy in it. He could not have been _perfectly_ happy, because he now perceived that by the mere act of leaving it behind he had become still happier, and that perfect happiness could only be his when he reached “home” and beheld his loved ones.

When he had been taken from his home to the hospital the buds on the pear trees had been on the point of bursting. The pear trees would be in full bloom now. When he had been taken away the shutters of the house had been taken from their hinges, painted a pleasant apple green and stood in the old carriage house to dry. They would be back on their hinges now, vying in smartness with the two new coats of white paint which the painters had been spreading over the low rambling house itself. How sweet the house would look among the fresh young greens of spring! Perhaps the peewees who came every year had already begun to build in the veranda eaves.

The little river which tumbled over the old mill dam and for a mile flowed tranquilly on with little slipping rushes through his farm, would be very full of water now. It would be roaring and foaming among the rocks at the foot of the dam. The elms which shaded the bridge and the ford beside it would be at their best, before the leaves became worm-eaten and cobwebby. Perhaps one of the cars would be in the ford to its hubs getting washed, with one of the children sitting in the front seat. The dark blue roadster with the special body looked especially gay and sporty in the ford under the shadow of the elms.

He had no more than time to think these things before he had come to the end of his journey.

Home had never looked so sweet or inviting. The garden was bounded on the south by a little brook; and beyond this was a little hill planted with kalmia and many species of native ferns.

It was on the top of this hill that he lighted, and here he paused for a while and filled his eyes with the humble beauty of the home which his earth mind had conceived and achieved.

Beyond the garden carpeted with jonquils and narcissuses between and above graceful pyramids of pear blossoms, the house, low and rambling, with many chimneys, gleamed in the sunlight. It was a heavenly day.

From the hill he could see not only the house, but to the left the garage and beyond that the stable. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, and it seemed queer to him that at that hour and at that season there should be no sign of life anywhere. Surely the gardener and his assistant ought to be at work. He turned a puzzled and indignant glance back upon the garden, and he observed a curious phenomenon.

A strip of soil in the upper left hand corner of the garden was being turned and broken by a spade. Near by a fork was taking manure from a wheelbarrow and spreading it over the roots of a handsome crab apple.

Both the spade and the fork appeared to be performing these meritorious acts without the aid of any human agency.

And Derrick knew at once that McIntyre, the gardener, and Chubb, his assistant, must, since his departure, have sinned in their own eyes, so that they could now no longer show themselves to him, or he to them.

He started anxiously toward the house, but a familiar sound arrested him.

The blue roadster, hitting on all its cylinders, came slowly out of the garage and descended the hill and crossed the bridge and honked its horn for the mill corner and sped off along the county road toward Stamford _all by itself_.

There was nobody in the roadster. He could swear to that.

And this meant, of course, that Britton, the chauffeur, had done something which he knew that he ought not to have done, and was for ever separated from those who had gone beyond.

When Derrick reached the house he was in an exceedingly anxious state of mind. He stepped into the entrance hall and listened. And heard no sound. He passed rapidly through the master’s rooms downstairs and upstairs. In the sewing room a thread and needle was mending the heel of a silk stocking, but there did not seem to be anybody in the room.

He looked from the window and saw two fishing poles and a tin pail moving eagerly toward the river. The boys, perhaps. Oh, what _could_ they have done to separate themselves from him? The window was open and he called and shouted, but the fishing poles and the tin pail kept on going.

He went downstairs, through the dining room and into the pantry.

His heart stood still.

On tiptoe on the seat of a chair stood his little girl, Ethel. Her hair shone like spun gold. She looked like an angel. And his heart swelled with an exquisite bliss; but before he could speak to her and make himself known, she had reached down something from the next to the top shelf and put it in her mouth.

At that instant she vanished.

He lingered for a while about the house and gardens, but it was no use. He knew that. They had all sinned in some way or other, and therefore he was indeed dead to them, and they to him.

Back of the stables were woods. From these woods there came a sudden sound of barking. The sound was familiar to Derrick, and thrilled him.

“If I can hear Scoop,” he thought, “Scoop can hear me.” He whistled long and shrill.

Not long after a little black dog came running, his stomach to the ground, his floppy silk ears flying. With a sob, Derrick knelt and took the little dog in his arms.

* * * * *

“Oh, Mumsey!” called Ethel. “Do come and look at Scoopie. He’s doing all his tricks by himself, just as if somebody was telling him to do them.”

The two looked from a window, and saw the little dog sit up and play dead and roll over--all very joyously--and jump as if through circled arms. Then they saw his tail droop and his head droop and his left hind leg begin to scratch furiously at his ribs. He always _had_ to do that when anyone scratched his back in a particular place.

* * * * *

When Derrick returned to the Place of the wonderful lights and shadows he was very unhappy and he knew that he must always be unhappy.

“Instead of coming to this Place,” he said to himself, “knowing what I know now, I might just as well have gone to Hell.”

A voice, sardonic and on the verge of laughter, answered him.

“That’s just what you did.”

SHADOWED

BY MARY SYNON

From _Red Book_

All the way down from the Capitol, Stroude knew that he was being followed. From the moment he had come out of the Senate office building upon the plaza, fragrant with forsythia in the March moonlight, he had been conscious of the man who trailed his sauntering footsteps. He had led him down a winding way past the Marshall statue and into the deserted wideness of Pennsylvania Avenue. He had thought to lose him when he stepped into the lobby of a big hotel, pausing for a word there with men he knew, men who made their greetings casual or portentous, according to their knowledge of the turning of the inner wheels of Washington; but he found the other man some twenty paces behind him as he crossed Lafayette Square, and his amused acceptance of the situation curdled to annoyance at the possibility of having to deal with an irresponsible crank determined on an interview.

The day had been more than ordinarily difficult, one of the hardest Stroude had known since the turmoiled times of war. He had suffered under the sense of impending crisis knowing that his future hung on to-morrow’s balance; and his temper, always drawn like a taut bow, had been ready to snap a hundred times through the afternoon’s battle in the Senate chamber. Now, at the doorway of his house, that limestone palace of Georgian severity which loomed in stately classicism among the older residences of the neighbourhood, he poised the arrow of his wrath as he turned to confront the man behind him. “What do you want?” he snapped at him.

The man came nearer. By the dim light of the hall lantern Stroude saw his shambling listlessness, and his hand went to his pocket with a thought of relief that the other sought only alms. The man, seeing the gesture, put up his hand arrestingly. “Remember me?” he inquired, almost too nonchalantly. His voice for all its soft slurring of the consonants, was threaded with a fibre of steel which edged the menace of his quiet poise.

“Why not?” Stroude asked sharply, his shoulders lifting as if for defence.

“Then I reckon you’re none too glad to see me?”

“You haven’t come here to ask me that. You might as well tell me first as last what you want from me.”

“Nothing you’ll call the sheriff about,” the man told him. He faced the Senator squarely, revealing even in the half-darkness a certain racial resemblance to him which made them equals on the instant. For all Stroude’s grooming and the stranger’s shabbiness, they were strangely akin in their antagonism, bound not by family ties but by broader, more basic associations. Each of them, tall, thin, lithe, gazed on the other with unflinching blue eyes. Each of them kept watch with wildcat tenacity. From each of them emanated the recklessness of personal courage that takes no count of law beyond its own code. In their sudden springing to guard, the predominant characteristics of the two men, the Senator and the shambling shadower, flared up stronger than their setting, and although the lights of the White House gleamed golden across the Square, they were mountaineers facing each other in the hate of vendetta. The years and the place fell away from Stroude, leaving him stripped to the bone of his clan’s creed.

“We’ve settled our own affairs before,” Stroude said. “We can do it now.”

As if the words gave him advantage, the other man seized them swiftly. “Let’s do it, then,” he replied. “I’ve come here to get you to do something you won’t want to do. Will you fight me for it?”

“Not till I know the stake.”

“Didn’t you get her letter?”

“Whose?”

“There’s only one woman I’d be coming to you about, I reckon.”

“I’ve never heard from her since the day she went back to you. That was twenty-six years ago last May.”

“The fourteenth.”

“Why should she have written me now?”

“She’s dying.” The man’s voice sounded in a softer timbre. “A month ago the doctor from the moonlight school told her that she had only a little while to live. She’s been pining ever since, not about dying, for she’s brave as any man, but for something I couldn’t guess until she told me. She wants to see _you_. She wrote you a letter, but she was afraid you might not get it, and so she sent me. ‘Tell him,’ she said, ‘that I won’t rest easy in my grave over there on the side of Big Stony, if he don’t come to me before I die. He told me once,’ she said, ‘that he’d come when I’d call. I’m calling now.’ That’s her message.” His tone lifted from its softer depth. “Are you coming to her?”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve a thousand duties. I’ve---- It’s ridiculous.”

“Then you’re not coming?”

“How can I, Martin? I’m not my own man. I’m here for my state, for my country. I have work to do. I can’t let any personal obligation interfere with it. Besides----”

“It couldn’t hurt your wife, not even if she knew it. And Dell’s dying.”

“I’m sorry, Martin. I am, honestly. Will you tell Dell that I----”

“I’ll tell her nothing but that you wouldn’t come. Nothing else matters. And I think you owe her that, at least.”

“But----”

The other man turned away, crossed the street, and walked back across the Square. Stroude could see him swinging on between the bushes, and the remembrance of another trail which Boyce Martin would climb rushed over him. More plainly than the crocus-bordered path to the White House shone the moonlit path up to the cabin on Pisgah where Dell Martin used to wait for his own coming, the cabin where she now waited for death. The memory of that way, twisting among laurel and rhododendrons, stabbed him more sharply than had Boyce Martin’s words; but with the old habit of setting aside disturbing thoughts, he tried to thrust the memory from his brain as he unlocked the door of his house.

A servant, coming forward at the sound of his key in the lock, gave him a message with a careful precision which bespoke respect for the executive management that directed his tasks. “Mrs. Stroude wishes you to be told, sir, that she is at the theatre and will see you when she comes in. And she made an appointment, sir, for Senator Manning and two other gentlemen to see you to-night on their way from the Pan-American dinner. She said it was very important.”

He thanked the man and went upstairs to the library, switching on light after light to dispel its shrouding gloom. He tried to read, but the pages of the periodicals he took up ran into dullness. He chewed his cigar savagely, finding it flavourless. He strove to concentrate on his impending interview with Manning and his companions, realizing its portent, but he could not focus his attitude. Impatiently he thrust away the work which always waited his attention on his homecoming--findings of committees, digests of newspaper editorials, confidential reports on public interests in various measures, letters from men who had constituted themselves his captains. He frowned at the framed photograph of his wife, the only decoration she had placed upon his table; and he grimaced at the portrait of himself which Rhoda had set above the immaculate mantel. He was weary with work, he told himself, crossing the room and flinging wide open the windows which looked down on the Square.

The thrill of the night wind, prematurely warm as it crossed the Potomac, and burdened with elusive odours of a Southern March, caught him unawares. For a moment he stood drinking deeply of the immortal beauty of the recurrent springtime. Memories he had thought long dead and buried went over him. Pictures more vivid than those on the walls framed themselves in the darkened greenery of the little park: a girl in a faded gingham dress waving him welcome on a hill road, a girl with eyes brighter than mountain stars telling him her love, flinging away all thought or care of herself, giving him everything and glorying in the gift, even to the last sacrifice of her departure from him. Not as she was now, Boyce Martin’s wife dying in that far-away little community of his native hills, but as she had been when she had defied their little world to come to him, Stroude saw her. In the thought of what she had been to him, he flung out his arms. “After all these years,” he muttered, “after all these years!” And as if drawn by a power stronger than his will, he crossed to the table, and picking up the telephone, called the information desk of the Union Station. “What time does the Mountain Mail on the C. & O. go out now?” he asked. “One o’clock? One-fifteen.” He hung up the receiver and saw again the photograph of his wife.

He studied it with suddenly arrested attention. What would she think of his desire to leave Washington at a time when, according to her fundamental ideas, his presence was imperative for the fulfillment of his ambition? Or was it her ambition? He gazed at the pictured countenance, seeing the determination of the uplifted chin, meeting the challenge in the steady eyes. Rhoda was certainly her father’s daughter. Old Peter Armond’s indomitable will and shrewdly calculating brain lived on in her. For the fourteen--or was it fifteen?--years of their marriage she had managed Stroude’s career as cleverly as ever her father had directed one of his lieutenants, and he had acknowledged his debt to her with a certain attitude of amusement. Now, facing the last triumphal stage of its development, he felt an angry distaste of Rhoda’s manœuvring. It might bring him, he conceded, to the goal but he wished he might have travelled a simpler path.

He had been an obscure Congressman of fiery political rectitude when he had met Rhoda Armond. She, and her group, and the circumstances the Armond connection had conjured for him, had made him into a statesman. Or was it only that they had made it possible for him to plant his own standards on the heights? At any rate, he owed her something, he thought. She was his wife, even though her attitude toward him was that of a director of destinies. She had given him, after all, what he had desired from her. She had made the upward road smooth, and she had dowered him with loyal faith in his ability. It wasn’t fair to compare her attitude toward him with Dell’s. He had never given to Rhoda what he had given Dell. Poor little Dell! But what good could he do her now by going to her? Twenty-five years would have changed her as they had changed him. They had had their day, and the sun of it had set long since. “I won’t go; I can’t,” he said, and turned back to the work on his desk, not looking up until his wife entered the room.

She came, a tall, consciously beautiful woman, bringing with her an aroma of power as subtle and as pervasive as the perfume of her toilet. She gave to Stroude the greeting of a perfunctory kiss on his brow, and stood off for his admiration. It was, however, not the product of her personality as much as her satisfaction in the work which struck him as he watched her. Rhoda’s thought of herself as well as of him was that of a sculptor of his masterpieces. Stroude accepted it with the affectionate tolerance of a long marital relationship, feeling somehow sorrier for Rhoda than she would ever feel for herself, since she would never know what she had missed from life. “I was playing your game to-night,” she told him.

“Isn’t it yours too?” he smiled.

“In a way, yes,” she acknowledged, “but this involved real sacrifice and I want reward. I went to the theatre with the Covingers.”

“Was the play deadly?”

“No, but the Covingers are.”

“He isn’t a bad sort, and----”

“Oh, I know that he’ll have the delegation from his state, and that it’s one of the big states; but oh, my dear, have you ever had to listen to his wife?”

“She isn’t so terrible, Rhoda.”

“Oh, of course, if you will look at people as characters rather than as social factors, you won’t see the awfulness of the Mrs. Covingers of Washington. But really----”

“Did Manning hint at why he had to see me to-night?”

“At nothing but the importance of seeing you. He is bringing he said, Mr. Laflin and Senator Wilk.”

“He probably said Senator Wilk and Mr. Laflin, but you know the field well enough to put them in the order of their importance. Laflin’s the new factor, a shrewd wolf raised in a wild forest.”

“Does it mean”--she leaned forward, tapping the table with her fan in eagerness--“that they are going to ask you to take the nomination?”

“They haven’t the entire giving of it, my dear.”

“Don’t be silly, Burton. You know that they are the architects of presidential nominations.”

“But even architects----”

“Oh, Burt, don’t quibble. You know that you’re the logical man for the place. You’re squarely based in party policies----”

“Safe, and steady.” His tone was whimsical.

“But picturesque enough to be a good campaigner.”

“Barefoot boy from the mountains. Good American stock with fine traditions. Reads rhetorically, doesn’t it?”

“And a border state gives you strategic advantage.”

“Some one has coached you well.”

“I was coached before I ever knew you, Burt dear. My father taught us politics as religiously as my mother taught us sewing. It wasn’t as practical, perhaps, as yours, but----”

“There haven’t been many men more practical in their politics than Peter Armond,” Stroude said dryly.

“Even if he did grow wealthy,” his daughter defended, “you know how high he kept his standards.”

“I can guess,” Stroude said, but his tone gave her no handle to catch for controversy, and she swung into off-side statement. “Mrs. Covinger let slip something that may be vital to us,” she told him.

“If it’s vital, she let it slip with due deliberation,” he declared. “Don’t underestimate her brains, Rhoda, even if she wasn’t raised by the Armond code. What did she say?”

“I don’t believe I’ll tell you.”

“Yes, you will.”

“We do run in double harness, don’t we? Well, she said that Covinger wasn’t going back to New York until to-morrow night, as there was a tremendously important conference at noon to-morrow. Seven men will be there, and they will decide the fate of the nation. That’s exactly what she said. She’s bombastic, you know.”

“Seven? Then they’re letting Covinger in?”

“You knew about it?”

“Not that it would be to-morrow.”

“Is that why Senator Manning is coming to-night?”

“Probably.”

“Then that means----” Her voice broke in excitement.

“That our fate hangs in the balance.”

“Does it?”

“It looks like it.” He smiled at her through the smoke of his cigar. Her eyes shone with myriad points of light. “Not planning what you’ll wear at the inauguration, are you?” he teased her.

“No,” she said, “but wondering what you’ll say. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

“Don’t count your chickens yet, Rhoda,” he warned her. “We, both of us, know the thousand slips between the cup of consideration and the lip of nomination. We’ve gone through it all for other offices.”

“But we’ve won every time,” she said solemnly. “You’ve never been beaten, Burt. Don’t you see what an advantage that is, now? You’ve been going up, and up, and up.”

“The Senate’s a rather high plateau, at that.”

“But not the high mountain. Oh, Burt, think of it! It seems almost unbelievable, and yet I’ve always known you were destined for it. I knew you’d be great. Why, even in those first days here, you promised it. You knew it, too. You had the look of a man who was dedicated to something beyond the immediate, the look of one who is going to travel far and high. I believe that was one of the reasons why I loved you. And you----” She leaned over the table, and spread out the brilliant feathers of her fan, gazing at their splendour and not at her husband as she went on: “Did you love me when you married me?”

“Why else do men marry women?” he countered, letting the smoke veil his eyes.

“To put other women out of their lives, sometimes,” she said.

“Well?” He drew hard on the cigar.

“I never knew until to-day who she was,” she said. “I opened a letter by mistake. You may see from the envelope how easy it was for me to think it was addressed to me when I found it in my mail. It was directed merely to Washington, and the post office sent it to the house here.”

“I quite understand,” he said, and held out his hand for Dell Martin’s letter.

His wife drew it from the gay bag she had borne, and gave it to him. For a moment he looked at the pitiful missive, contrasting it with the appointments of the table before him.

“She’s dying,” Rhoda said, “and she asks you to go to her.”

“Yes,” he said, “I know it.”

“But----”

“How did I know? Her husband followed me down from the Hill to-night. He demanded that I return with him.”

“Then she married, after----”

“She was married,” he said, “when I met her.”

“Oh!” She snapped shut the great fan, twisting its tortoise-shell handle between her lithe fingers. “When was that?”

“Before I knew you.” He sank down into his chair, staring forward as if he were a judge considering a decision. “I was twenty-two years old, teaching school in the mountains and studying law with old Judge McLaurin, when I met Dell Martin. She had been married to Boyce against her will, as plenty of the girls in the hills are married. She was lonely and wretched, and lovelier than a wild rose. I was young and reckless. I fell in love with her and I made her love me. Boyce found it out. He drew me into a fight and I won it. He shot me then. Dell came to nurse me and I wouldn’t let her go. Boyce wouldn’t get a divorce and she couldn’t, but she stayed with me. We had two years of utter happiness. I’d have gone through hell to win them.”

A stick of the tortoise-shell handle of the fan broke in Rhoda’s hands. “But you left her?”

“No,” he said. “She left me. She saw before I did that it couldn’t go on. She saw in me the ambition that I thought I had buried in my love for her. She knew that if I stayed with her, I’d never be anything but a miserable shyster, living from hand to mouth, despising myself and all I did, coming perhaps in time to hate her because she had been the cause of my degradation. She went to Judge McLaurin, and asked him to tell her the truth. He told her, old Covenanter that he was. Then she went up the mountain to Boyce and asked him if he wanted her to come back to him. She knew that it was the only action I’d consider final. He told her to come. She told me that she was leaving me. I pleaded with her all that night, but she went with the dawn. I couldn’t hold her. I went up Pisgah with her till we came to the trail to Boyce’s cabin. We could see the wood smoke curling up above the masses of shining green leaves and pink clusters of the laurel. ‘You’re going away from me,’ she said, ‘far away, and you’ll climb a higher mountain than Pisgah.’ I begged her to come with me, but she shook her head. ‘I’m giving you up for your sake,’ she told me. ‘But you need me,’ I pleaded. ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘But some day I shall, and then I’ll call you. And no matter where you are, you’ll come, won’t you, Burt?’ I promised her that I would. The last I saw of her was as she climbed the trail to Boyce’s cabin. From that day to this”--he touched the crumpled little white letter--“she has sent me no word.”

“It’s strange, isn’t it,” Rhoda said, her voice not quite steady, “that a woman may live with a man through long years and never really know him at all?”

“Should I have told you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I’d have married you, even if you had. It’s not deception, perhaps, when you’ve never seen her nor written to her since you married me; and yet---- Are you going to her, Burt?”

“To-morrow’s the conference. I must be there if I am to be the man chosen.”

“Do you want to go?”

“I wonder,” he mused, “if you’ll understand me when I tell you that, other things being equal, I should go to-night. It’s with no sense of failing you, and with no idea of helping her, but I promised her--that I’d come if she called.”

“Even if there weren’t the conference,” Rhoda said, “you’re a marked man now. You couldn’t go back to a little village in the mountains without it being known and the reason for it blazoned. It wouldn’t do, would it?” She could not quite succeed in making her tone judicial. Her own eagerness palpitated back of the assumed impartiality. “You’ve wanted the presidency too long to throw away the chance of it.”

“I’ve never wanted it,” he said.

“You don’t mean,” she demanded, her vexation rising into view, “that I’ve urged you to seek something you haven’t desired?”

“It’s more complex than that,” he shrugged. “I suppose it’s simply that I married the Armond hope as well as you. Old Peter set a standard for your family which has kept you all up on your toes. If the dead see, he must chuckle sometimes over its way of working.”

“Why?” she flared, letting her annoyance catch at a point of difference less vital than the main issue. “He gave his whole service to his country. He was one of the really great men of his generation, wasn’t he? You’ve never known my father as I knew him. You’ve always let yourself be influenced by the demagogic attacks on him. You’ve thought that because he made a great fortune he couldn’t be an idealist. Haven’t you seen that, if he had been a materialist, he wouldn’t have trained his family as he did? Why, it’s been his torch that I’ve tried to keep alight, and if I have done anything for you, Burton, it has been by that torch’s flame.”

“You’ve done a very great deal, Rhoda,” he said. “I’m not questioning the number or the brightness of the candles you’ve burned in my game. I’m only questioning the value of the game itself. Power’s like money. If you give up all else to possess it, then it possesses you.”

“But----”

“I know. I should have chosen long ago. I’m not turning back now. I owe you that, I think. If I’m anything at all beyond a struggling lawyer in a little city----” He broke off suddenly as the young servant came to the library curtains.

“Senator Manning and two other gentlemen,” he announced.

They came almost on his heels, three men with the aspect of dignitaries: Manning tall, thin, almost cadaverous, with the eye and the hand of a Richelieu; Wilk heavy, ponderous, inscrutable as a great Buddha; Laflin, a blend of college professor and Wall Street lawyer, hiding a predatory keenness behind horn-rimmed spectacles. Characteristically, Stroude felt, they fell into place, Wilk into the nearest easy chair, Manning into an Italian seat which put him in the centre of a softly lighted stage, and Laflin back in the shadows. After a moment of casual conversation Rhoda rose to leave them. Stroude halted her. “I have an idea,” he said, “that these gentlemen have come to me on an errand which concerns you as well as myself.--Do you mind if she stays?”

“Not at all,” said Manning suavely. Laflin nodded, and old man Wilk grunted assent. Rhoda went over beyond Laflin as far outside the group as she could, and just out of her husband’s line of vision; but he turned his chair a little, that he might encompass her in his sight as Manning began to speak.

“It makes it a little easier for us,” he said, “that you have guessed something of our mission.”

“I couldn’t help knowing,” Stroude swung back, “when every other man in the Senate has known it for days.”

“Not definitely,” boomed Wilk. “There’s always talk, of course, and often more smoke than fire.”

“Sometimes it’s only a screen for the protection of a real issue,” Manning went on, “but in this case the fire is burning. You know, I am sure, that the conference to determine the best candidate for the next term of the presidency is to be held here in Washington to-morrow.”

“At noon,” smiled Stroude.

“Your information,” Manning said, “is speedy as well as accurate. The time was not determined until seven o’clock this evening. Seven men know it.”

“And their wives,” cut in Laflin, peering at Rhoda.

“We have canvassed the field thoroughly before coming to you,” Manning continued with his air of authoritative spokesmanship. “We have eliminated, for one reason or another, all the men who have been under consideration. Bannister is too old. Maxwell is too radical. Vandringham is too theatrical. Stearns is too variable. Durham is too light. Landreau lacks the necessary tradition. Penn comes from the wrong location. Jarvis jumped the party. The process brings us to you.”

“How about Corliss?”

“I don’t mind telling you,” Manning said, “that Carmichael is fighting desperately for Corliss, and that, without Covinger’s help, he _might_ be able to swing the conference. Mr. Laflin, Senator Wilk, and I have never swerved from our determination to have you. Carmichael has Bennett and Franklin with him. Covinger is the determining vote. You have him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certain. He’s attending on Parker’s proxy. We won that point this afternoon. He’s solidly with you.”

“Even against Corliss? Corliss is from his state.”

“Even against him.”

“Why?”

“Well, it seems that Corliss has an old scandal against him which frightens Covinger. He’s afraid that it might make an election issue. By the way---- You’re not interested in these affairs, Mrs. Stroude?”

“Very vitally,” she said, “and there’s nothing you need fear to discuss before me.”

Manning cleared his throat, and old man Wilk stirred uneasily in his chair. Laflin’s mobile mouth twisted.

“Go on,” said Stroude. “What’s the charge?”

“Carmichael says,” Manning stated, “that there’s an old story back in your own state, Stroude, that might explode. We’ve all known you a good many years, all of us but Laflin, and we’ve never heard a whisper of it. I have told him that I do not believe it. So has Senator Wilk.”

“What’s the story?” Stroude’s fingers, lighting a match, did not tremble.

“Well, if you insist----”

“I do.”

“Carmichael says that you stole another man’s wife.”

“There was no theft about it. She came with me. Later she went back to her husband. I left the place, started to practise law, and married. My wife never heard the story until to-night.” He looked down at Dell Martin’s letter, not yet read by him, topping the documents on the table in front of him. “It’s an old story,” he said, “and one not likely to explode unless----”

“Unless what?” Laflin demanded from the gloom.

“Unless I choose to revive it by an overt act,” Stroude retorted. “It all happened more than twenty-five years ago in a tiny community in the mountains. I know the people there. They’re my kind, my stock. They won’t talk to strangers coming in. There’s only one way the newspapers could get the story. I’d have to lead them to it.”

“That’s true,” old man Wilk grunted. “I know the mountains.”

“Then it’s settled,” Manning said with evident relief. “I fancy a story as old as that, cut off altogether by the time between, could not be a very appalling Banquo’s ghost.” He arose a little wearily. “You’ll be at the conference to-morrow?” He named the time and place. “It’s necessary that you should be. Without you, Covinger may switch. You may have to combat Carmichael directly. You’ll be ready?”

“If I’m--if it’s necessary,” Stroude said.

The other two men stood up. Wilk unwieldily, Laflin with quick ease, smiling at Stroude as he held out his hand. “This was a real star-chamber session,” he said, “according to the best rules of old Peter Armond. Wouldn’t the old pirate have loved to sit in a ten-minute game of four men who decided the next president?”

“What do you mean?” Rhoda’s voice rang out in challenge, and Manning and Wilk rushed to speech to head off Laflin, but he went on in almost boyish unconcern: “Old Peter trained me, you know, and I’ve always had a soft spot for him in my heart, although I’ve known what a wolf in sheep’s clothing he was. We have to hand it to him, though, that with all his grafting and his materialism, he was a great party builder. He was the first of the Warwicks in American national life. We’re just rattling around in his shoes, but we’ll do our best to put you over.”

He moved off, almost pushed by Manning’s eagerness to depart, but his voice seemed to linger in the room after the three of them had gone. Stroude sat toying with a paper-knife. Rhoda, deep in the shadows, did not stir. A clock in the hall boomed twelve. Stroude, sighing, put his hand over Dell Martin’s letter. Then Rhoda spoke. “Is Mr. Laflin telling the truth about my father,” she asked Stroude, “or what he thinks is the truth?”

“The truth.”

“That he wasn’t an idealist--a patriot?”

“Well, if he was----”

“I understand. And you’ve known it always?”

“Since before I knew you.”

“Then do you mean”--she came back to the chair beside the table--“that through all these years my standards have meant nothing to you? That you have known them to be false?”

“They aren’t false,” he said. “The standards are true enough.”

“But the man who gave them to me wasn’t?”

“Well, he didn’t live up to the code.”

“Your own code?”

“I’ve tried to hold to it.”

“The one Judge McLaurin taught you?”

“The very one. The one Judge Foxwell taught _him_. He got it, I believe, from John Marshall. Don’t think about it, Rhoda. Those old boys lived in different days. Sometimes I think that I’m an anachronism.” He sought to smile at her, but the smile faded before her intensity. “Don’t let a chance word of Laflin’s bother you,” he counselled. “He didn’t know you, of course, as your father’s daughter, or he’d have cut out his tongue before saying what he did.”

“It doesn’t matter who said it,” she declared. “It’s not that alone that hurts; it’s the knowledge that I’ve meant so little to you that cuts deep--now. I used to think, Burt, even when I knew that you didn’t love me, that I was giving you something fine and splendid. I let myself believe that the Armond tradition was the beacon which was lighting your way. I thought that if I couldn’t give you anything else, I was at least giving you that torch. And now I find out that the light I was holding for you was only marsh fire. You’ve never needed me!” Her voice rose to accusation.

“Oh, yes,” he countered, but he could not put verity into his tone.

“No,” she said. “You don’t owe me anything for the playing of the game. I’ve loved that for itself.”

“But you thought you were giving me the other----”

“And I wasn’t. It’s really a joke, isn’t it? A buccaneer teaching his family the Golden Rule, and the family passing it on!”

“It isn’t a joke, Rhoda. I’ve always taken it in the measure of your intention.”

“And been sorry for me?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never sought pity.”

“None of us do.”

“It’s funny, isn’t it,” she mused, “that one woman who loved you set you free, so that another woman whom you didn’t love might take away that freedom?”

“I’ve had as much freedom as most men,” he said, but his eyes went back to the crumpled missive. Rhoda’s glance, following his, saw its significance. “Read it,” she challenged him. He hesitated an instant, as if doubting his desire to read it before her watchfulness, then drew the letter from its envelope.

Pale tracing on common paper met his gaze. “_Burt_,” he read, “_you’re a great man now, and maybe you’ve forgotten me. I’ve never forgotten you. Every morning and every night I’ve prayed for you. Boyce has been good to me, better than I deserved; but oh, Burt, all that my life has been since I left you is just a hope that eternity will bring us together again. I used to believe it would, but I’m getting afraid, now that it’s coming near. Won’t you come to me for just one hour before I go? You told me once that hell wouldn’t keep you if I_----”

Before the pathos of the call something in Stroude’s soul trembled. He didn’t love Dell now, he told himself as he came to the end of the page. He hadn’t loved her in twenty years. There was no thrill of remembered passion rising from the white page to stir his heart, but there was something deeper, more poignant than romance in the plea which this woman in the mountains had sent him across time and distance. Through those long years she had never wavered in her belief in him and in the promise he had made to her. Out of the depths of his spirit he had told her that he would come to her if she should ever need him. It was a promise given not only to the woman who had heard and heeded it, but to the God of his faith and his fathers. If he failed to keep it, no matter what the cost, he would be violating more than an old love. He would be tearing down his own code. Through whatever glory might come to him he would know himself as a man who had failed in the one virtue on which he had always prided himself, the keeping of his word. It was an oath he had taken to Dell Martin, just as he would take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States if--if he climbed the mountain of Rhoda’s vision!

Realization of the immediacy of his problem came to him with the sight of his wife’s fan, broken, lying beyond the letter in his hand. He looked up to find Rhoda’s eyes studying him. But he must not fail her, he told himself, snatching at the straw of conventionality in the current of emotion. The very fact that he had not given her love put him under obligation to her. Because of her, because of the expectations she had harboured for him, because of the time and thought and labour she had spent for the advancement she had thought he sought, because of her very disillusionment now, he could not fail her. He must go to the conference, even if it meant the breaking of a vow he had made before the altar of his one great love. It was part of the price, he reasoned, that all men pay for power; but he felt that something within him was dying as he turned the page of Dell Martin’s letter.

“--_if I called for you_,” he picked up the thread. “_That was why I didn’t call when I needed you before, when our boy was born. I couldn’t let you know about him. You’d never have let me go if you’d known. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? And oh, Burt, I need you so! If you’ll only hold my hand again, I won’t fear the crossing. And perhaps when you come to die, you’ll find the going easier if you have the memory of this hour you’ll give me. Won’t you come?_” It was signed waveringly, “_Dell_.”

He folded it back into the envelope, and put it in his pocket. “You aren’t going?” Rhoda asked him, her voice strangely strained.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m going.”

“But to-morrow----”

“It’s the long years afterward I’m thinking of,” he told her.

“And the nomination----”

“Sometimes the things we put out of our lives,” he said, “are the only things we really keep.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I can’t understand you at all to-night, Burton. Why should a man give up the highest honour a nation can give him----”

“There are other kinds of honour, Rhoda.”

“To go to a woman he hasn’t seen for twenty-five years?”

“She is the----” he began, then halted quickly in the fear of the hurt his word might give her.

“I understand,” she said.

She picked up her broken fan, and moved toward the door, but before she reached it, turned back. Her face was stonily calm. “Shall I telephone Senator Manning in the morning that you will not be there?” she asked him.

“If you will,” he said.

As his car bore him past the shadowy white pile on the other side of the Square, Stroude sighed. A man does not live with a dream--even the dream of another--through season after season without catching some gleam of its radiance; but in Boyce Martin’s straight look as he met him at the train gate, Stroude began to drink of his justification.

“You Stroudes always kept your word,” the other man said.

“We aim to,” said Stroude, unconsciously slipping back into the vernacular of his youth. “It was her letter,” he explained. “I never knew about the boy.”

“I know,” said Martin. “I--I’ve loved him as if he’d been the child I’ve never had. That’s why I came for you.” He held out his hand and Stroude grasped it. “You’re one of us, after all.”

As the train slid past the Potomac and threaded the low pines of the Virginia river lands, Stroude pondered the mountaineer’s tribute. In the light of it he saw the path to Dell Martin’s cabin leading higher than the way across the Square. For the first time in many years he felt the surge of freedom rising in his soul. A thousand shackles fell away as the last lights of Washington slid down on the horizon.

THE ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL

BY BOOTH TARKINGTON

From _McCall’s_

The new one hundred dollar bill, clean and green, freshening the heart with the colour of springtime, slid over the glass of the teller’s counter and passed under his grille to a fat hand, dingy on the knuckles, but brightened by a flawed diamond. This interesting hand was a part of one of those men who seem to have too much fattened muscle for their clothes: his shoulders distended his overcoat; his calves strained the sprightly checked cloth, a little soiled, of his trousers; his short neck bulged above the glossy collar. His hat, round and black as a pot and appropriately small, he wore slightly obliqued, while under its curled brim his small eyes twinkled surreptitiously between those upper and nether puffs of flesh that mark the too faithful practitioner of unhallowed gaieties. Such was the first individual owner of the new one hundred dollar bill, and he at once did what might have been expected of him.

Moving away from the teller’s grille, he made a cylindrical packet of bills smaller in value--“ones” and “fives”--then placed round them, as a wrapper, the beautiful one hundred dollar bill, snapped a rubber band over it; and the desired inference was plain: a roll all of hundred dollar bills, inside as well as outside. Something more was plain, too: obviously the man’s small head had a sportive plan in it, for the twinkle between his eye puffs hinted of liquor in the offing and lively women impressed by a show of masterly riches. Here, in brief, was a man who meant to make a night of it, who would feast, dazzle, compel deference and be loved. For money gives power, and power is loved; no doubt he would be loved. He was happy, and went out of the bank believing that money is made for joy.

So little should we be certain of our happiness in this world. The splendid one hundred dollar bill was taken from him untimely, before nightfall that very evening. At the corner of two busy streets he parted with it to the law, though in a mood of excruciating reluctance and only after a cold-blooded threatening on the part of the lawyer. This latter walked away thoughtfully with the one hundred dollar bill, not now quite so clean, in his pocket.

Collinson was the lawyer’s name, and in years he was only twenty-eight, but already of the slightly harried appearance that marks the young husband who begins to suspect that the better part of his life was his bachelorhood. His dark, ready-made clothes, his twice soled shoes, and his hair, which was too long for a neat and businesslike aspect, were symptoms of necessary economy; but he did not wear the eager look of a man who saves to “get on for himself.” Collinson’s look was that of an employed man who only deepens his rut with his pacing of it.

An employed man he was, indeed; a lawyer without much hope of ever seeing his name on the door or on the letters of the firm that employed him, and his most important work was the collection of small debts. This one hundred dollar bill now in his pocket was such a collection, small to the firm and the client, though of a noble size to himself and the long-pursued debtor from whom he had just collected it.

The banks were closed; so was the office, for it was six o’clock and Collinson was on his way home when by chance he encountered the debtor: there was nothing to do but to keep the bill overnight. This was no hardship, however, as he had a faint pleasure in the unfamiliar experience of walking home with such a thing in his pocket; and he felt a little important by proxy when he thought of it.

Upon the city the November evening had come down dark and moist. Lighted windows and street lamps appeared and disappeared in the altering thicknesses of fog, but at intervals, as Collinson walked on northward, he passed a small shop, or a cluster of shops, where the light was close to him and bright, and at one of these oases of illumination he lingered a moment, with a thought to buy a toy in the window for his three-year-old little girl. The toy was a gaily coloured acrobatic monkey that willingly climbed up and down a string, and he knew that the “baby,” as he and his wife still called their child, would scream with delight at the sight of it. He hesitated, staring into the window rather longingly, and wondering if he ought to make such a purchase. He had twelve dollars of his own in his pocket, but the toy was marked “35 cents,” and he decided he could not afford it. So he sighed and went on, turning presently into a darker street.

When he reached home, the baby was crying over some inward perplexity not to be explained; and his wife, pretty and a little frowzy, was as usual, and as he had expected. That is to say, he found her irritated by cooking, bored by the baby, and puzzled by the dull life she led. Other women, it appeared, had happy and luxurious homes, and during the malnutritious dinner she had prepared she mentioned many such women by name, laying particular stress upon the achievements of their husbands. Why should she (“alone,” as she put it) lead the life she did in one room and a kitchenette, without even being able to afford to go to the movies more than once or twice a month? Mrs. Theodore Thompson’s husband had bought a perfectly beautiful little sedan automobile; he gave his wife everything she wanted. Mrs. Will Gregory had merely mentioned that her old Hudson seal coat was wearing a little, and her husband had instantly said: “What’ll a new one come to, girlie? Four or five hundred? Run and get it!” Why were other women’s husbands like that--and why, oh, why--was hers like _this_?”

“My goodness!” he said. “You talk as if I had sedans and sealskin coats and theatre tickets _on_ me! Well, I haven’t; that’s all!”

“Then go out and get ’em!” she said fiercely. “Go out and get ’em!”

“What with?” he inquired. “I have twelve dollars in my pocket, and a balance of seventeen dollars at the bank; that’s twenty-nine. I get twenty-five from the office day after to-morrow--Saturday; that makes fifty-four; but we have to pay forty-five for rent on Monday; so that’ll leave us nine dollars. Shall I buy you a sedan and a sealskin coat on Tuesday, out of the nine?”

Mrs. Collinson began to weep a little. “The old, old story!” she said. “Six long, long years it’s been going on now! I ask you how much you’ve got, and you say, ‘nine dollars,’ or ‘seven dollars,’ or ‘four dollars,’ and once it was sixty-five cents! Sixty-five cents; that’s what we had to live on! Sixty-five _cents_!”

“Oh, hush!” he said wearily.

“Hadn’t you better hush a little yourself?” she retorted. “You come home with twelve dollars in your pocket and tell your wife to hush! That’s nice? Why can’t you do what decent men do?”

“What’s that?”

“Why, give their wives something to live for. What do you give me, I’d like to know! Look at the clothes I wear, please!”

“Well, it’s your own fault,” he muttered.

“What did you say! Did you say it’s my fault I wear clothes any women I know wouldn’t be _seen_ in?”

“Yes, I did. If you hadn’t made me get you that platinum ring----”