Chapter VIII

Mary had been eating her heart out for a week in Florida, when they finally released Thomas Patrick. He was very weak; he seemed, moving in the crowd, more than ever just a part of it, and even a humbler and more inconspicuous part of it than before. He hurried, as well as he could. Not an extra minute now must be added to Mary’s torture. Because his mind was so eager and his feet so slow, he was slightly bent forward as he moved.

When he found the house locked, and the shutters closed, he was too exhausted for coherent thought. He sat down on the steps and wiped his clammy hands with his handkerchief.

“And I wanted a drink of water,” he muttered to himself. “I wanted a drink of water.”

After a time he got up and moved about the premises, and Mrs. Tufts, seeing him, raised her kitchen window.

“Your key’s here,” she said.

“Where’s Mary?”

“You’re a fine one to be asking that!” she said, and disappeared. When she returned she held out the key, and he took it.

“Has she gone away, Mrs. Tufts?”

“She has that. And right good sense she showed.” Then she slammed down the window.

He felt very weak again, and very thirsty. He unlocked the kitchen and got some water; then he sat down and looked about him. Mary had left him. Mary!

He got up after a while and wandered about the house. Before the self-rocker he stood for some time. “Darned good chair,” he muttered to himself, absently. It would have to be crated to go to Washington. But then they weren’t going to Washington. At last he went upstairs and crawled into bed.

He had a slight return of the fever that night, preceded by a chill, and when he went to a closet for an extra blanket, there was Mary’s fur coat, staring him in the face.

For the first time he broke down. He stood there, in his pajamas an absurd, tragic figure, and cried into it.

The next day he resigned his position. He had thought it all out, and this seemed the only thing to do. But he decided to say nothing about Mary having left him. The Chief might somehow hold it against Mary, and anyhow, he had troubles enough of his own.

“I haven’t any quarrel with anybody, you understand,” he explained painfully. “I guess it was the only way to fix it. But the way I see it, a good many folks know about it, and—” he smiled faintly—“I’d sort of be a liability. Just now, anyhow.”

“I’ll take that risk,” said the Chief grimly. “You did the biggest thing for me one man can do for another. I’m not forgetting that.”

But he made no impression on Thomas Patrick, who remained gently obdurate. He began to wonder if Thomas Patrick suspected the reason for Mary’s absence, and he decided, in that case, to make a clean breast of it. The boy’s face rather alarmed him.

“How’s Mary?” he asked.

Thomas Patrick paled a trifle but his eyes were steady.

“She’s all right,” he said.

“It—didn’t make any difference to her?”

“She understands me, and I understand her,” said Thomas Patrick. “I guess she knows I never cared for anybody else.”

He declined any help in getting another position and went away, leaving the Chief puzzled and baffled. He could not see that what Thomas Patrick had done for him was only honourable by being beyond price, even the price of a job. But he did begin to see, dimly, that one who climbs high may have to do so on the bent shoulders of the defeated.

The next day Thomas Patrick established his vigil. He brought in some groceries and began to keep house, being very careful to wash out the dish cloths and keep everything very tidy, against Mary’s possible return. Now and then he went out, but always he hurried back, for fear he would miss her.

The Tufts would have nothing to do with him, and he was very lonely, so after a while he took to pretending Mary was there. Alone at the table he would sometimes talk to her, and he liked to think that she was just beyond the door, in the kitchen. He would even call to her.

“Honest to God,” Mrs. Tufts said one night, after she had had the dog out, “I think the boy’s daft. He’s sitting in there talking to himself out loud.” And later that night she said to Mr. Tufts: “Maybe we’ve been a bit hard on the lad. I don’t want him on my everlasting soul.”

“Hard on him!” said Mr. Tufts. “If it wasn’t for that boss of his and his dirty political pull he’d be on the end of a rope by now, and you know it.”

As election day drew near however, he was stronger, and he had given up this childish pretence. The sense, too, of her presence in the little house was departing. But he was still waiting. At night, after the Tufts had gone to bed, he would sit out on the front steps and smoke and watch. And sometimes he fell asleep there, to waken stiff and a trifle chilly hours later.

The patrolman on the beat roused him more than once.

One night he wakened himself, and he had a curious feeling that the Chief was very near, looking at him. He started up and looked about. But of course the Chief was not there, and he went inside feeling rather sheepish.

He read the papers carefully, first the personal column, and then the political part, for news of the two people he loved best in all the world. Over one of the Chief’s speeches he pored breathlessly: “This great nation, founded upon an ideal, and that ideal the sanctity of the home—”

“That’s right,” he thought, thrilling a little. “That’s the stuff. The home. That’s—that’s America.”

He went into his deserted house that night, still exalted.

But, more and more, he began to feel that election day was to mark a period of some sort. At first it was vague. If Mary wasn’t back by election day he would do something. He still felt that to do anything before the Chief was elected would amount to desertion. But as time went on the “something” became increasingly definite. And, as election day approached, he began to lay his plans.

He rang the Tufts’ door-bell one night, and Mrs. Tufts opened the door. He looked so thin and worried that her heart was touched.

“Come in,” she said. “Tufts is at the theatre.”

“I guess I’d better not,” he said, uncomfortably. “I have a little package here, for Mary. If she happens to come back any time, and—I’m not around, I wish you’d give it to her.”

“I’ll do it, sure. You’re not going away, are you?”

“No,” he said. “That is, not right away.”

He turned to go, hesitated.

“You might hide it somewhere, if you don’t mind. It’s money.”

Long after he had gone, Mrs. Tufts stood with the package in her hands. It was fairly bulky. She took it upstairs and hid it under a corner of the spare room rug.

It contained, had she known it, the seven hundred dollars from the safe deposit vault.

One day, too, about that time he met Stuart on the street. Thomas Patrick tried to slip by, but Stuart stopped him.

“Understand you’re not working for the Chief any more?”

“I’ve been kind of weak, since that jail fever you fellows gave me!”

“How’s the wife?”

“She’s all right,” said Thomas Patrick, craftily.

Stuart eyed him.

“Most women would have lit out,” he said. “You’re pretty lucky.”

“Yes, I’m pretty lucky,” said Thomas Patrick, and went on.

He bought a revolver that day.

Election day passed very slowly. Once he slipped down town, and looked at the bulletin boards; certain districts he and the Chief had counted on seemed to be wavering, and his face puckered with anxiety. But others, doubtful before, seemed certainties now. When there was cheering he joined in it, and he carried home a newspaper and pored over it.

In the afternoon he cleaned up the yard, and burned the dead leaves. Now and then he stopped and inspected the street. A girl with a suit case sent him dizzy, until he saw it was not Mary. Now and then he looked at his watch.

He ate no supper, and in the evening he went down town again. The Chief was leading now, and the crowds were taking his election for granted. Thomas Patrick sat on a fire plug and watched; he felt lethargic, and very tired, like a runner who has won the goal and is too weary for triumph.

Home once more, he made the round of the house. It was all in order. He got out the revolver and loaded it. Then an odor of burning leaves coming through the window attracted his attention, and he went downstairs and filling a pail with water, carried it out and extinguished the smoulder.

He did not go in at once. He knew now that Mary was not coming back, but he had agreed to give her to election day, and the day was not over. After a time he dozed, to be wakened at midnight by the touch of the patrolman’s hand on his arm. He roused and smiled.

“All right, Sweeney,” he said. “Kinda cold to-night, isn’t it?”

Then he looked again. It was the Chief, and beside him was Mary.

* * * * *

Half an hour later the Chief went away. Thomas Patrick took him to the door, and helped him into his overcoat, as he had done so often before.

“It was awfully good of you to come, sir,” he said. “I—I appreciate it.”

The Chief looked down at him grimly.

“Is that all you’ve got to say, Pat?”

Thomas Patrick reflected. What had he forgotten?

“Oh, I’m sorry!” he said. “I guess I’ve been pretty much excited. My congratulations, Senator.”

The new Senator pulled his hat over his eyes, and opened the front door. “Thanks,” he said, and his voice was slightly hoarse. He went out on the doorstep, the odor of wet, smouldering wood was still thick in the air—and hesitated there.

“But you won’t come to Washington?”

Thomas Patrick lowered his voice.

“Well, you heard what she said. She doesn’t want to go,” he said apologetically. “She seems to think—well she’s been kind of worried. And she likes this house.”

The Chief drove away. He had left the old life behind him, with its weaknesses, and to-morrow was a new day. But he had also left behind him Thomas Patrick, and the new day seemed strangely empty.

As the car turned a corner he glanced back. Thomas Patrick was still on his step, staring after him. . . .

After a time Thomas Patrick went inside and closed the door. In the hall he coughed, to clear a tension in his throat, and then he went back to where Mary awaited him in the parlour, a loving, penitent Mary, but still with that look of fear in her eyes.

“Are you going with him?” she asked.

“No, honey. I told him.”

Mary came to him, and put her arms around him.

“You’ll not be sorry, Pat,” she whispered. “I’ll make it up to you. We’ll just be happy, and forget him.”

“Yes,” said Thomas Patrick sturdily. “We’ll just be happy.”

He took Mary around, and showed her the dish cloths, and the inside of the coffee pot! He even made her some coffee, and stood over her in the dining room while she drank it.

“How are the Tufts?” she inquired.

“They’re fine,” he said cheerfully.

And it was as if, in re-discovering Mary, he had rediscovered the little house, too.

“Didn’t make any mistake in this dining room furniture, did we?” he asked.

“I got sort of homesick to see it again, Pat.”

“_Did_ you, honey?”

But long after Mary was apparently asleep that night he lay there in the darkness, staring at the ceiling. Well, a man couldn’t have everything. He had Mary. He put his arm over her, and she moved and spoke.

“Pat,” she said, “what was the revolver doing in the spare room?”

He hesitated. Then he told her his third and last lie.

“Oh, that!” he said. “It belongs to the Chief. I’ll take it down to him to-morrow.”

* * * * *

Some months later Thomas Patrick Finnerty got out of the train, and took his first view of the nation’s capital. He had sat up all night in the day coach of the excursion train—“See Washington. Round trip five dollars”—but in the washroom he had changed his collar, and he was now prepared to face the day.

The dome on Capitol Hill towered before him. He knew it at once, and directed his steps toward it. He was too excited to eat. He was going to see the Chief again; hear him, too. For to-day the Chief was to deliver his first speech in the Senate.

It was still early. He wandered about, closely inspecting the Grant monument so as to be able to describe it to Mary later, and so when the doors finally opened he was the first in the visitors’ gallery. He sat in the front row, inspecting each senator as he went to his desk, until the Chief came in. After that he saw nobody else.

Men came in and went out. The galleries slowly filled. Bored reporters wandered into the press gallery, glanced down, yawned, and went out again. The Chief sat shuffling papers on his desk. After awhile he rose to his feet. Thomas Patrick’s collar felt suddenly very tight; he ran his finger around inside it to loosen it.

It was not a great speech, as such things go, but to Thomas Patrick it was surpassing.

“He’s got Henry Clay and Daniel Webster beat a mile,” he muttered. “Those old birds, they couldn’t touch him.”

He did not understand why the Senate did not rise in acclaim when the Chief sat down. He resented the indifference of the Vice-President on his rostrum, and the lethargy of the galleries. He was so excited that he had to wipe his clammy hands with his handkerchief.

When the Senate recessed he went down the staircase into the rotunda and waited there. Now and then he glanced at its hideous statues, but only for a second. He did not want to miss the Chief. In the centre there had once lain the body of the unknown soldier, and all the nations of the world had brought wreaths and placed them against the bier. Some poor kid, sacrificed that government might live.

It never occurred to him that there was a certain analogy there. He blinked a little as he stared up into the dizzy height of the dome.

Then he heard the Chief’s voice. His heart raced; he stepped forward, a small nervous figure, just like any other of the tourists who wandered about, only perhaps a trifle more humble, a size smaller than most of them. So humble, so small and inconspicuous was he that the Chief never saw him. He passed between two other great men, and went on.

Late that night Thomas Patrick sat in the day coach again. He was making notes of what he had seen, to take them back to Mary: The Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Over this last entry his head drooped. He was very tired.

He leaned back against the back of the seat and thought things over, but mainly he thought of the Chief and of the speech he had made that day.

“The country’s safe with him,” he reflected. “He’s a great man. Any way you look at it, he’s a great man.”

III
CYNARA: The Sculptor

I

I was looking once again at Sidney Bush’s Cynara in the Metropolitan, when Courtney Valentine’s wife touched me on the arm.

“So you come, too!” she said. “Do you know there is nearly always some man or other here, staring at it?”

“I didn’t know it. But I can understand it.”

She eyed me. “I suppose every man has been true to somebody, after his fashion. Even you!”

“Where is he? I haven’t heard of him for a dozen years. Not since—”

“Nor I. Come and see me, Maurice, won’t you? I had no idea you were in town.”

She wandered off, and I stood gazing at the Cynara.