Chapter IV: Part II: Strange (1)

VII

Dressed in overalls that had once been white, he was superintending the stacking of wool in a long, brick-walled, iron-roofed shed in Buenos Aires when the thought came to him how easy it had all been. He paused for a minute in his work of inspection--standing by an open window, where a whiff of fresh air from off the mud-brown Rio de la Plata relieved the heavy, greasy smell of the piles of unwashed wool--just to review again the past eighteen months. Below him stretched the noisy docks, with their row of electric cranes, as regular as a line of street lamps, loading or unloading a mile of steamers lying broadside on, and flying all flags but the Stars and Stripes. Wines, silk, machinery, textiles were coming out; wheat, cattle, hides, and beef were pouring in. In the confusion of tongues that reached him he could, on occasions, catch the tones of Spaniard, Frenchman, Swede, and Italian, together with all the varieties of English speech from Highland Scotch to Cockney; but none of the intonations of his native land. The comparative rarity of anything American in his city of refuge, while it added to his sense of exile, heightened his feeling of security. It was still another of the happy circumstances that had helped him.

The strain under which he had lived during this year and a half had undoubtedly been great; but he could see now that it had been inward strain--the mental strain of unceasing apprehension, the spiritual strain of the new creature in casting off the old husk, and adapting itself not merely to new surroundings, but to a new life. This had been severe. He was not a rover, and still less an adventurer, in any of the senses attached to that word. His instincts were for the settled, the well-ordered, and the practical. He would have been content with any humdrum existence that permitted his peaceable, commercially gifted soul to develop in its natural environment. The process, therefore, by which Norrie Ford became Herbert Strange, even in his own thoughts, had been one of inner travail, though the outward conditions could not have been more favorable. Now that he had reached a point where his more obvious anxieties were passing away, and the hope of safety was becoming a reality, he could look back and see how relatively easy everything had been.

He had leisure for reflection because it was the hour for the men's midday meal and siesta. He could see them grouped together--some thirty-odd--at the far end of the shed--sturdy little Italians, black-eyed, smiling, thrifty, dirty, and contented to a degree that made them incomprehensible to the ambitious, upward-toiling American set over them. They sat, or lounged, on piles of wood, or on the floor, some chattering, most of them asleep. He had begun like them. He had stacked wool under orders till he had made himself capable of being in command. He had been beneath the ladder; and though his foot was only on the lowest rung of it even now, he was satisfied to have made this first step upward.

He could not be said to have taken it to his own surprise, since he had prepared himself for it, and for other such steps to follow it, knowing that they must become feasible in time. He had been given to understand that what the Argentine, in common with some other countries, needed most was neither men nor capital, but intelligence. Men were pouring in from every corner of the globe; capital was keen in looking for its opportunity; but for intelligence the demand was always greater than the supply.

The first intimation of such a need had come to him on the _Empress of Erin_, in mid-Atlantic, by a chance opportunity of the voyage. It was on one of the first days of liberty when he had ventured to mix freely with his fellow-passengers. Up to the present he had followed the rule of conduct adopted at the little Canadian station of Saint Jean du Clou Noir. He went into public when necessary, but no oftener. He did then what other people did, in the way to attract the least attention. The season favored him, for amid the throngs of early autumn travellers, moving from country back to town, or from seaside resorts to the mountains he passed unnoticed. At Quebec he was one of the crowd of tourists come to see the picturesque old town. At Rimouski he was lost among the trainful of people from the Canadian maritime provinces taking the Atlantic steamer at a convenient port. He lived through each minute in expectation of the law's tap on his shoulder; but he acquired the habit of nonchalance. On shipboard it was a relief to be able to shut himself up in his cabin--his suite!--feigning sickness, but really allowing his taut nerves to relax, as he watched first the outlines of the Laurentides, and then the shores of Anticosti, and lastly the iron-black coast of Labrador, follow each other below the horizon. Two or three appearances at table gave him confidence that he had nothing to fear. By degrees he allowed himself to walk up and down the deck, where it was a queer sensation to feel that the long row of eyes must of necessity be fixed upon him. The mere fact that he was wearing another man's clothes--clothes he had found in the cabin trunk that had come on board for him--produced a shyness scarcely mitigated by the knowledge that he was far from looking grotesque.

Little by little he plucked up courage to enter the smoking-room where the tacit, matter-of-course welcome of his own sex seemed to him like extraordinary affability. An occasional word from a neighbor, or an invitation to "take a hand at poker," or to "have a cocktail," was like an assurance to a man who fancies himself dead that he really is alive. He joined in no conversations and met no advances, but from the possibilities of doing so he would go back to his cabin smiling.

The nearest approach to pleasure he allowed himself was to sit in a corner and listen to the talk of his fellow-men. It was sometimes amusing, but oftener stupid; it turned largely on food, with irrelevant interludes on business. It never went beyond the range of topics possible to the American or Canadian merchants, professional men, politicians, and saloon-keepers, who form the rank and file of smoking-room society on any Atlantic liner; but the Delphic worshipper never listened to Apollo's oracle with a more rapt devotion than Ford to this intercommunion of souls.

It was in this way that he chanced one day to hear a man speaking of the Argentine. The remarks were casual, choppy, and without importance, but the speaker evidently knew the ground. Ford had already noticed him, because they occupied adjoining steamer-chairs--a tall, sallow Englishman of the ineffectual type, with sagging shoulders, a drooping mustache, and furtive eyes. Ford had scarcely thought of the Argentine since the girl in the cabin had mentioned it--- now ten or twelve days ago; but the necessity of having an objective point, and one sufficiently distant turned his mind again in that direction.

"Did I hear you speaking yesterday of Buenos Aires?" he ventured to ask, on the next occasion when he found himself seated beside his neighbor on deck.

The Englishman drew his brier-root pipe from his mouth, glanced sidewise from the magazine he was reading, and jerked his head in assent.

"What kind of place did it seem to you?"

"Jolly rotten."

Pondering this reply, Ford might have lost courage to speak again had he not caught the eye of the Englishman's wife as she leaned forward and peeped at him across her husband's brier-root. There was something in her starry glance--an invitation, or an incitement--that impelled him to continue.

"I've been told it's the land of new opportunities."

The Englishman grunted without looking up. "I didn't see many."

"May I ask if you saw any?"

"None fit for a white man."

"My husband means none fit for a--gentleman. I liked the place."

From the woman's steely smile and bitter-sweet tones Ford got hints of masculine inefficiency and feminine contempt which he had no wish to follow up. He knew from fragments of talk overheard in the smoking-room that they had tried Mexico, California, and Saskatchewan in addition to South America. From the impatience with which she shook the foot just visible beneath the steamer-rug, while all the rest of her bearing feigned repose, he guessed her humiliation at returning empty to the land she had left with an Anglo-Saxon's pioneering hope, beside a husband who could do nothing but curse luck. To get over the awkward minute he spoke hurriedly.

"I've heard of a very good house out there--Stephens and Jarrott. Do you happen to know anything about them?"

"Wool," the Englishman grunted again. "Wool and wheat. Beastly brutes."

"They were horribly impertinent to my husband," the woman spoke up, with a kind of feverish eagerness to have her say. "They actually asked him if there was anything he could do. Fancy!"

"Oh, I know people of that sort put a lot of superfluous questions to you," Ford said. But the lady hurried on.

"As to questions, there are probably fewer asked you in Argentine than anywhere else in the world. It's one of the standing jokes of the place, both in Buenos Aires and out in the Camp. Of course, the old Spanish families are all right; but when it comes to foreigners a social catechism wouldn't do. That's one of the reasons the place didn't agree with us. We wanted people to know who we'd been before we got there; but that branch of knowledge isn't cultivated."

"More beastly Johnnies in the Argentine passin' under names not their own," said the man, moved to speak, at last, "than in all the rest of the world put together. Heard a story at the Jockey Club--lot of beastly native bounders in the Jockey Club--heard a story at the Jockey Club of a little Irish Johnny who'd been cheatin' at cards. Three other asses kicked him out. Beggar turned at the door and got in his lick of revenge. 'Say boys, d'yez know why they call me Mickey Flanagan out here? Because it's me na-ame.' Beggar 'd got 'em all there."

Ford nerved himself to laugh, but made an excuse for rising.

"Oh, there's lots of cleverness among them," the lady observed, before he had time to get away. "In fact, it's one of the troubles with the country--for people like us. There's too much competition in brains. My husband hit the right nail on the head when he said there was no chance for any beastly Johnny out there, unless he could use his bloomin' mind--and for us that was out of the question."

Ford never spoke to them again, but he meditated on their words, finding himself at the end of twenty-four hours in possession of a new light. "I've got to use my bloomin' mind." The words seemed to offer him the clew to life. It was the answer to the question, "What should I do _there_?" which positively asked itself, whenever he thought of seeking a refuge in this country or in that. It came as a discovery that within himself was the power that would enable him to make the best of any country, and the country to make the best of him.

He could hardly have explained how his decision to try Argentina had become fixed. Until he saw whether or not he should get successfully ashore at Liverpool there was a paralysis of all mental effort; but once on the train for London his plans appeared before him already formed. The country where few questions were asked and the past had no importance was clearly the place for him. Within a fortnight he was a second-class passenger on board the Royal Mail Steam Packet _Parana_, bound for Buenos Aires--thus fulfilling, almost unexpectedly to himself, the suggestion made by the girl in the Adirondack cabin, whose star, as he began to believe, must rule his fate.

He thought of her now and then, but always with the same curious sense of remoteness--or unreality, as of a figure seen in a dream. Were it not for the substantial tokens of her actuality he possessed she would have seemed to him like the heroine of a play. He would have reproached himself for disloyalty if the intensity of each minute as he had to meet it had not been an excuse for him. The time would come when the pressure of the instant would be less great, and he should be able to get back the emotion with which he left her. Perhaps if she had been "his type of girl," her image would not have faded so quickly.

There was but one thing for which he was not grateful to her. She had fixed the name of Herbert Strange upon him in such a way that he was unable to shake it off. His own first name was the unobjectionable monosyllable John--though he had always been known by his less familiar middle name, Norrie--and as John Ford he could have faced the world with a certain amount of bluff. He meant to begin the attempt immediately on reaching London, but the difficulty of appearing in a hotel under one name while everything he brought with him bore another was patent to him at once. Similarly, he could not receive the correspondence incidental to his outfit and his passage under the name of Ford in a house where he was known as Strange. Having applied for his passage as Strange, he knew it would create comment if he asked to be put down in the books as Ford. Do what he would he was obliged to appear on the printed list of second-cabin passengers as Herbert Strange, and he had made at least one acquaintance who would expect to call him so after they reached land.

This was a little, clean-shaven man, in the neighborhood of sixty, always dressed at sea as he probably dressed on shore. He wore nothing but black, with a white shirt and a ready-made black bow-tie. He might have been a butler, an elderly valet, or a member of some discreet religious order in street costume. Ford had heard a flippant young Frenchman speak of him as an "ancien curé, qui a fait quelque bêtise"; and indeed there was about him that stamp of the ecclesiastic which is sometimes ineffaceable.

"I call myself Durand," he said to Ford, using the conveniently ambiguous French idiom, "je m'appelle Durand."

"Et je m'appelle Strange, I call myself Strange," Ford had replied, claiming the name for the first time without hesitation, but feeling the irrevocable nature of the words as soon as he had uttered them.

Out of the crowd of second-rate Europeans of all races who made up the second cabin, the man who called himself Strange had selected the man who called himself Durand by some obscure instinct of affinity. "He looks like an old chap who could give one information," was Strange's own way of putting it, not caring to confess that he was feeling after a bit of sympathy. But the give and take of information became the basis of their friendship, and imparted the first real stimulus to the young man's awkward efforts to use his mind.

Monsieur Durand had been thirty years in the Argentine, observing the place and the people, native and foreign, with the impartial shrewdness only possible to one who sought little for himself. It was a pleasure to share the fruits of his experience with one so eager to learn, for young men were not in the habit of showing him deference. He could tell Mr. Strange many things that would be to his advantage--what to do--what to avoid--what sort of place to live in--what he ought to pay--and what sort of company to keep.

Yes, he knew the firm of Stephens and Jarrott--an excellent house. There was no Mr. Stephens now, only a Mr. Jarrott. Mr. Stephens had belonged to the great days of American enterprise in the southern hemisphere, to the time of Wheelwright, and Halsey, and Hale. The Civil War had put an end to that. Mr. Jarrott had come later--a good man, not generally understood. He had suffered a great loss a few years ago in the death of his brother-in-law and partner, Mr. Colfax. Mrs. Colfax, a pretty little woman, who hadn't old age in her blood either--one could see that--had gone back to the United States with her child--but a child!--blond as an angel--altogether darling--_tout à fait mignonne_. Monsieur Durand thought he remembered hearing that Mrs. Colfax had married again, but he couldn't say for certain. What would you? One heard so many things. He knew less of the family since the last boy died--the boy to whom he gave lessons in Spanish and French. Death hadn't spared the household--taking the three sons one after another and leaving father and mother alone. It was a thousand pities Mrs. Colfax had taken the little girl away. They loved her as if she had been their own--especially after the boys died. An excellent house! Mr. Strange couldn't do better than seek an entry there--it is I who tell you so--_c'est moi qui vous le dis_.

All this was said in very good English, with occasional lapses into French, in a soft, benevolent voice, with slow benedictory movements of the hands, more and more suggestive of an ecclesiastic _en civile_--or under a cloud. Strange stole an occasional glance into the delicate, clear-cut face, where the thin lips were compressed into permanent lines of pain, and the sunken brown eyes looked out from under scholarly brows with the kind of hopeful anguish a penitent soul might feel in the midst of purifying flames. He remembered again that the flippant young Frenchman had said, "Un ancien curé, qui a fait quelque bêtise." Was it possible that some tragic sin lay under this gentle life? And was the four-funnelled, twin-screwed _Parana_ but a ghostly ship bearing a cargo of haunted souls into their earthly purgatory?

"But listen, monsieur," the old man began next day. But listen! There would be difficulties. Stephens and Jarrott employed only picked men, men with some experience--except for the mere manual labor such as the Italians could perform. Wouldn't it be well for Mr. Strange to qualify himself a little before risking a refusal? Ah, but how? Monsieur Durand would explain. There was first the question of Spanish. No one could get along in the Argentine without a working knowledge of that tongue. Monsieur Durand himself gave lessons in it--and in French--but in the English and American colonies of Buenos Aires exclusively. There were reasons why he did not care to teach among Catholics, though he himself was a fervent one, and he hoped--repentant. He pronounced the last word with some emphasis, as though to call Strange's attention to it. If his young friend would give him the pleasure of taking a few lessons, they could begin even now. It would while away the time on the voyage. He had his own method of teaching, a method based on the Berlitz system, but not borrowed from it, and, he ventured to say, possessing its own good points. For example: _el tabaco--la pipa--los cigarillos. Que es esto? Esto es la pipa_. Very simple. In a few weeks' time the pupil is carrying on conversations.

It would be an incalculable advantage to Mr. Strange if he could enter on his Argentine life with some command of the vernacular. It might even be well to defer his search for permanent employment until he could have that accomplishment to his credit. If he possessed a little money--even a very little--Oh, he did? Then so much the better. He need not live on it entirely, but it would be something to fall back on while getting the rudiments of his education. In the mean time he could learn a little about wool if he picked up jobs--Oh, very humble ones!--they were always to be had by the young and able-bodied--at the Mercado Central, one of the great wool-markets of the world. He could earn a few pesetas, acquire practical experience, and fit himself out in Spanish, all at the same time.

And he could live with relative economy. Monsieur Durand could explain that too. In fact, he might get board and lodging in the same house as himself, with Mrs. Wilson who conducted a modest home for "gentlemen only." Mrs. Wilson was a Protestant--what they called a Methodist, he believed--but her house was clean, with a few flowers in the patio, very different from the frightful conventillos in which the poor were obliged to herd. If Mr. Strange thought it odd that he, Monsieur Durand, should be living beneath a Protestant roof--well, there were reasons which were difficult to explain.

Later on, perhaps, Mr. Strange might take a season on some great sheep estancia out in the Camp, where there were thousands of herds that were thousands strong. Monsieur Durand could help him in that too. He could introduce him to wealthy proprietors whose sons he had taught. It would be a hard life, but it need not be for long. He would live in a mud hut, dirty, isolated, with no companionship but that of the Italian laborers and their womenkind. But the outdoor existence would do him good; the air over the pampas was like wine; and the food would not be as bad as he might expect. There would be an abundance of excellent meat, chiefly mutton, it was true, which when cooked _à_ la guacho--_carne concuero_, they called it in the Camp--roasted in the skin so as to keep all the juices in the meat--! A gesture of the hands, accompanied by a succulent inspiration between the teeth, gave Strange to understand that there was one mitigation at least to life on an Argentine estancia.

To come into actual contact with the sheep, to know Oxfords, Cheviots, Leicesters, and Black-faced Downs, to assist at the feedings and washings and doctorings and shearings, to follow the crossings and recrossings and crossings again, that bred new varieties as if they were roses, to trace the processes by which the Argentine pampas supply novel resources to the European manufacturer, and the European manufacturer turns out the smart young man of London or New York, with his air of wearing "the very latest"--all this would not only give Strange a pleasing sense of being at the root of things, but form a sort of apprenticeship to his trade.

* * * * *

The men had not yet finished their hour of siesta, but Strange himself was at work. Ten minutes were sufficient for his own snack, and he never needed rest. Moreover, he was still too new to his position to do other than glory in the fact that he was a free being, doing a man's work, and earning a man's wage. Out in the Camp he had been too desolate to feel that, but here in Buenos Aires, at the very moment when the great city was waking to the knowledge of her queenship in the southern world--when the commercial hordes of the north were sweeping down in thousands of ships across the equator to outdo each other in her markets, it was an inspiring thing merely to be alive and busy. He was as proud of Stephens and Jarrott's long brick shed, where the sun beat pitilessly on the corrugated iron roof, and the smell of wool nearly sickened him, as if it had been a Rothschild's counting-house. His position there was just above the lowest; but his enthusiasm was independent of trivial things like that. How could he lounge about, taking siestas, when work was such a pleasure in itself? The shed of which he had the oversight was a model of its kind, not so much because his ambition designed to make it so, as because his ardor could make it nothing else.

The roar of dock traffic through the open windows drowned everything but the loudest sounds, so that busily working, he heard nothing, and paid no attention, when some one stopped behind him. He had turned accidentally, humming to himself in the sheer joy of his task, when the presence of the stranger caused him to blush furiously beneath his tan. He drew himself up, like a soldier to attention. He had never seen the head of the firm that employed him, but he had heard a young Englishman describe him as "looking like a wooden man just coming into life," so that he was enabled to recognize him now. He did look something like a wooden man, in that the long, lean face, of the tone of parchment, was marked by the few, deep, almost perpendicular folds that give all the expression there is to a Swiss or German medieval statue of a saint or warrior in painted oak. One could see it was a face that rarely smiled, though there was plenty of life in the deep-set, gray-blue eyes, together with a force of cautious, reserved, and possibly timid, sympathy. Of the middle height and slender, with hair just turning from iron-gray to gray, immaculate in white duck, and wearing a dignified Panama, he stood looking at Strange--who, tall and stalwart in his greasy overalls, held his head high in conscious pride in his position in the shed--as Capital might look at Labor. It seemed a long time before Mr Jarrott spoke--the natural harshness of his voice softened by his quiet manner.

"You're in charge of this gang?"

"Yes, sir."

There was an embarrassed pause. As though not knowing what to say next, Mr. Jarrott's gaze travelled down the length of the shed to where the Italians, rubbing their sleepy eyes, were preparing for work again.

"You're an American, I believe?"

"Yes, sir."

"How old are you?"

"Not quite twenty-six."

"What's your name?"

"Herbert Strange!"

"Ah? One of the Stranges of Virginia?"

"No, sir."

There was another long pause, during which the older man's eyes wandered once more over the shed and the piles of wool, coming back again to Strange.

"You should pick up a little Spanish."

"I've been studying it. Hablo Español, pero no muy bien."

Mr. Jarrott looked at him for a minute in surprise.

"So much the better--tanto mejor," he said, after a brief pause, and passed on.

VIII

He was again thinking how easy it had been, as he stood, more than three years later, on the bluffs of Rosario, watching the sacks of wheat glide down the long chute--full seventy feet--into the hold of the _Walmer Castle_. The sturdy little Italians who carried the bags from the warehouse in long single file might have been those he had superintended in the wool-shed in Buenos Aires in the early stages of his rise. But he was not superintending these. He superintended the superintendents of those who superintended them. Tired with his long day in the office, he had come out toward the end of the afternoon not only to get a breath of the fresh air off the Parana, but to muse, as he often did, over the odd spectacle of the neglected, half-forgotten Spanish settlement, that had slumbered for two hundred years, waking to the sense of its destiny as a factor of importance in the modern world. Wheat had created Chicago and Winnipeg Adam-like from the ground; but it was rejuvenating Rosario de Santa Fé Faust-like, with its golden elixir. It interested the man who called himself Herbert Strange--resident manager of Stephens and Jarrott's great wheat business in this outlet of the great wheat provinces--to watch the impulse by which Decrepitude rose and shook itself into Youth. As yet the process had scarcely advanced beyond the early stages of surprise. The dome of the seventeenth-century Renaissance cathedral accustomed for five or six generations to look down on low, one-storied Spanish dwellings surrounding patios almost Moorish in their privacy, seemed to lift itself in some astonishment over warehouses and flour-mills; while the mingling of its sweet old bells with the creaking of cranes and the shrieks of steam was like that chorus of the centuries in which there can be no blending of the tones.

Strange felt himself so much a part of the rejuvenescence that the incongruity gave him no mental nor æsthetic shock. If in his present position he took a less naïve pride than in that of three years ago, he was conscious none the less of a deep satisfaction in having his part, however humble, in the exercise of the world's energies. It gave him a sense of oneness with the great primal forces--with the river flowing beneath him, two hundred miles to the Atlantic, with the wheat fields stretching behind him to the confines of Brazil and the foothills of the Andes--to be a moving element in this galvanizing of new life into the dormant town, in this finding of new riches in the waiting earth. There was, too, a kind of companionship in the steamers moored to the red buoys in the river, waiting their turns to come up to the insufficient quays and be loaded. They bore such names as _Devonshire_, _Ben Nevis_, and _Princess of Wales_. They would go back to the countries where the speech was English, and the ideals something like his own. They would go back, above all, to the north, to the north that he yearned for with a yearning to which time brought no mitigation, to the north which was coming to mean for him what heaven means to a soul outside the scope of redemption.

It was only on occasions that this sentiment got possession of him strongly. He was generally able to keep it down. Hard work, assisted by his natural faculty for singleness of purpose and concentration of attention, kept him from lifting the eyes of his heart toward the unattainable. Moreover, he had developed an enthusiasm, genuine in its way, for the land of his adoption. The elemental hugeness of its characteristics--its rivers fifty to a hundred miles in width, its farms a hundred thousand acres in extent, its sheep herds and cattle herds thousands to the count--were of the kind to appeal to an ardent, strenuous nature. There was an exhilarating sense of discovery in coming thus early to one of the world's richest sources of supply at a minute when it was only beginning to be tapped. Out in the Camp there was an impression of fecundity, of earth and animal alike, that seem to relegate poverty and its kindred ills to a past that would never return; while down in the Port the growth of the city went on like the bursting of some magic, monstrous flower. It was impossible not to share in some degree the pride of the braggart Argentine.

It was difficult, too, not to love a country in which the way had been made so smooth for him. While he knew that he brought to his work those qualities most highly prized by men of business, he was astonished nevertheless at the rapidity with which he climbed. Men of long experience in the country had been more than once passed over, while he got the promotion for which they had waited ten and fifteen years. He admired the way in which for the most part they concealed their chagrin, but now and then some one would give it utterance.

"Hello, grafter!" a little man had said to him, on the day when his present appointment had become known among his colleagues.

The speaker was coming down the stairs of the head office in the Avenida de Mayo as Strange was going up. His name was Green, and though he had been twenty years in Argentine, he haled from Boston. Short and stout, with gray hair, a gray complexion, a gray mustache, and wearing gray flannels, with a gray felt hat, he produced a general impression of neutrality. Strange would have gone on his way unheeding had not the snarling tone arrested him. He had ignored this sort of insult more than once; but he thought the time had come for ending it. He turned on an upper step, looking down on the ashy-faced little man, to whom he had once been subordinate and who was now subordinate to him.

"Hello--what?" he asked, with an air of quiet curiosity.

"I said, Hello, grafter," Green repeated, with bravado.

"Why?"

"I guess you know that as well as I do."

"I don't. What is it? Out with it. Fire away."

His tranquil air of strength had its effect in overawing the little man, though the latter stood firm and began to explain.

"A grafter is a fellow with an underground pull for getting hold of what belongs to some one else. At least that's what I understand by it--"

"It's very much what I understand by it, too. But have I ever got hold of anything of yours?"

"Yes, confound you! You've taken my job--the job I've waited for ever since 1885."

"Did waiting for it make it yours? If so, you would have come by it more easily than I did. I worked for it."

"Worked for it? Haven't I worked for it, too? Haven't I been in this office for going on seventeen years? Haven't I done what they've paid me for--?"

"I dare say. But I've done twice what they've paid me for. That's the secret of my pull, and I don't mind giving it away. You mayn't like it--some fellows don't; but you'll admit it it's a pull you could have had, as well as I. Look here, Green," he continued, in the same quiet tone, "I'm sorry for you. If I were in your place, I dare say I should feel as you do. But if I _were_ in your place, I'll be hanged if I shouldn't make myself fit to get out of it. You're not fit--and that's the only reason why you aren't going as resident manager to Rosario. You're labelled with the year '1885,' as if you were a bottle of champagne--and you've forgotten that champagne is a wine that gets out of date. You're a good chap--quite as good as your position--but you're not better than your position--and when you are you won't be left in it any longer."

In speaking in this way the man who had been Norrie Ford was consciously doing violence to himself. His natural tendency was to be on friendly terms with those around him, and he had no prompting stronger than the liking to be liked. In normal conditions he was always glad to do a kindness; and when he hurt any one's feelings he hurt his own still more. Even now, though he felt justified in giving little Green to understand his intoleration of impertinence, he was obliged to fortify himself by appealing to his creed that he owed no consideration to any one. Little Green was protected by a whole world organized in his defence; Norrie Ford had been ruined by that world, while Herbert Strange had been born outside it. With a temperament like that of a quiet mastiff, he was forced to turn himself into something like a wolf.

In spite of the fact that little Green's account of the brief meeting on the stairs presented it in the light of the castigation he had administered to "that confounded upstart from nobody knows where," Strange noticed that it made the clerks in the office, most of whom had been his superiors as Green had been, less inclined to bark at his heels. He got respect from them, even if he could not win popularity--and from popularity, in any case, he had been shut out from the first. No man can be popular who works harder than anybody else, shuns companionship, and takes his rare amusements alone. He had been obliged to do all three, knowing in advance that it would create for him a reputation of an "ugly brute" in quarters whence he would have been glad to get good-will.

Finding the lack of popularity a safeguard not only against prying curiosity, but against inadvertent self-betrayal, it was with some misgiving that he saw his hermit-like seclusion threatened, as he rose higher in the business and consequently in the social--scale. In the English-speaking colony of Buenos Aires the one advance is likely to bring about the other--especially in the case of a good-looking young man, evidently bound to make his mark, and apparently of respectable antecedents. The first menace of danger had come from Mr. Jarrott himself, who had unexpectedly invited his intelligent employee to lunch with him at a club, in order to talk over a commission with which Strange was to be intrusted. On this occasion he was able to stammer his way out of the invitation; but when later, Mr. Skinner, the second partner, made a like proposal, he was caught without an excuse, being obliged, with some confusion, to eat his meal in a fashionable restaurant in the Calle Florida. Oddly enough, both his refusal on the one occasion and his acceptance on the other obtained him credit with his elders and superiors, as a modest young fellow, too shy to seize an honor, and embarrassed when it was thrust upon him.

To Strange both occurrences were so alarming that he put himself into a daily attitude of defence, fearing similar attack from Mr. Martin, the third member of the firm. He, however, made no sign; and the bomb was thrown by his wife. It came in the shape of a card informing Mr. Strange that on a certain evening, a few weeks hence, Mrs. Martin would be at home, at her residence in Hurlingham. It was briefly indicated that there would be dancing, and he was requested to answer if he pleased. The general information being engraved, his particular name was written in a free bold hand, which he took to be that of one of the daughters of the family.

Though he did his best to keep his head, there was everything in that bit of pasteboard to throw him into a state of something like excitement. Not only were the doors of the world Norrie Ford had known being thrown open to Herbert Strange, but the one was being moved by the same thrill--the thrill of the feminine--that had been so powerful with the other. He was growing more susceptible to it in proportion as it seemed forbidden--just as a man in a desert island may dream of the delights of wine.

He had looked at the Misses Martin, but had never supposed they could fling a glance at him. He had seen them at the public gathering-places--in their box at the opera, in the grand stand at the Jockey Club, in their carriage at Palermo or in the Florida. They were handsome girls--blonde and dashing--whose New York air was in pleasant contrast to the graceful indolence or stolid repose of the dark-eyed ladies of the Argentine, too heavily bejewelled and too consciously dressed according to the Paris mode. Strange said of the Misses Martin, as he had said of Wild Olive, that they were "not his type of girl"--but they were girls--they were American girls--they were bright, lively girls, representing the very poetry and romance of the world that had turned him out.

It was a foregone conclusion that he should decline their invitation, and he did so; but the mere occasion for doing it gave his mind an impetus in the direction in which he had been able hitherto to check it. He began again to think of the feminine, to dream of it, to long for it. For the time being it was the feminine in the abstract--without features or personality. As far as it took form at all it was with the dainty, nestling seductiveness that belonged to what he called his "type"--a charm that had nothing in common with the forest grace of the Wild Olive or the dash of the Misses Martin.

Now and then he caught glimpses of it, but it was generally out of reach. Soft eyes, of the velvety kind that smote him most deliciously, would lift their light upon him through the casement of some old Spanish residence, or from the daily procession of carriages moving slowly along the palm avenue at Palermo or in the Florida. When this happened he would have a day or two of acting foolishly, in the manner of the Bonarense bucks. He would stand for hours of his leisure time--if he could get away from the office at the minute of the fashionable promenade--on the pavement of the Florida, or under a palm-tree in the park, waiting for a particular carriage to drive round again and again and again, while he returned the sweet gaze which the manners of the country allow an unknown lady to bestow, as a rose is allowed to shed its beauty. This being done, he would go away, and realize that he had been making himself ridiculous.

Once the incarnation of his dreams came so near him that it was actually within his grasp. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil dangled its fruit right before his eyes in the person of Mademoiselle Hortense, who sang at the Café Florian, while the clients, of whom he was sometimes one, smoked and partook of refreshments. She was just the little round, soft, dimpling, downy bundle of youth and love he so often saw in his mind's eye, and so rarely in reality, and he was ready to fall in love with any one. The mutual acquaintance was formed, as a matter of course, over the piece of gold he threw into the tambourine, from which, as she passed from table to table, she was able to measure her hearer's appreciation of art. Those were the days in which he first began to be able to dress well, and to have a little money to throw away. For ten days or a fortnight he threw it away in considerable sums, being either in love or in a condition like it. He respected Mademoiselle Hortense, and had sympathy with her in her trials. She was desperately sick of her roving life as he was of Mrs. Wilson's boarding-house. She was as eager to marry and settle down as he to have a home. The subject was not exactly broached between them, but they certainly talked round it. The decisive moment came on the night when her troupe was to sail for Montevideo. In the most delicate way in the world she gave him to understand that she would remain even at the eleventh hour if he were to say the word. She might be on the deck, she might be in her berth, and it still would not be too late. He left her at nine, and she was to sail at eleven. During the two intervening hours he paced the town, a prey to hopes, fears, temptations, distresses. To do him justice, it was her broken heart he thought of, not his own. To him she was only one of many possibilities; to her, he was the chance of a lifetime. She might never, he said to himself, "fall into the clutches of so decent a chap again." It was a wild wrestle between common sense and folly--so wild that he was relieved to hear a clock strike eleven, and to know she must have sailed.

The incident sobered him by showing him how near and how easily he could come to a certain form of madness. After that he worked harder than ever, and in the course of time got his appointment at Rosario. It was a great "rise," not only in position and salary, but also in expectations. Mr. Martin had been resident manager at Rosario before he was taken into partnership--so who could tell what might happen next?

The first intimation of the change was conveyed by Mr. Jarrott in a manner characteristically casual. Strange, being about to leave the private office one day, after a consultation on some matter of secondary import, was already half-way to the door, while Mr. Jarrott himself was stooping to replace a book in the revolving bookcase that stood beside his chair.

"By-the-way," he said, without looking up, "Jenkins is going to represent the house in New York. We think you had better take his place at Rosario."

Strange drew himself up to attention. He knew the old man liked his subordinates to receive momentous orders as if they came in the routine of the day.

"Very well, sir," he said, quietly, betraying no sign of his excitement within. Raising himself, Mr. Jarrott looked about uneasily, as if trying to find something else to say, while Strange began again to move toward the door.

"And Mrs. Jarrott--"

Strange stopped so still that the senior partner paused with that air of gentlemanly awkwardness--something like an Englishman's--which he took on when he had firmly made up his mind.

"Mrs. Jarrott," he continued, "begs me to say she hopes you will--a--come and lunch with us on Sunday next."

There was a long pause, during which the young man searched wildly for some formula that would soften his point-blank refusal.

"Mrs. Jarrott is awfully kind," he began at last to stammer, "but if she would excuse me--"

"She will expect you on Sunday at half-past twelve."

The words were uttered with that barely perceptible emphasis which, as the whole house knew, implied that all had been said.

* * * * *

In the end the luncheon was no formidable affair. Except for his fear, lest it should be the thin edge of the wedge of that American social life which it would be perilous for him to enter, he would have enjoyed this peep into a comfortable home, after his long exile from anything of the sort. In building his house at Palermo, Mr. Jarrott had kept, in the outlines at least, to the old Spanish style of architecture, as being most suited to the history and climate of the country, though the wealthy Argentines themselves preferred to have their residences look--like their dresses, jewels, and carriages--as if they had come from Paris. The interior patio was spacious, shaded with vines, and gay with flowers, while birds, caged or free, were singing everywhere. The rooms surrounding it were airy and cool, and adapted to American standards of comfort. In the dining-room mahogany, damask, crystal, and silver gave Strange an odd feeling of having been wafted back to the days and usages of the boyhood of Norrie Ford.

As the only guest he found himself seated on Mrs. Jarrott's right, and opposite Miss Queenie Jarrott, the sister of the head of the house. The host, as his manner was, spoke little. Miss Jarrott, too, only looked at Strange across the table, smiling at him with her large, thin, upward-curving smile, comic in spite of itself, and with a certain pathos, since she meant it to be charged with sentiment. Over the party at table, over the elderly men-servants who waited on them, over the room, over the patio, there was--except for the singing of the birds--the hush that belongs to a household that never hears the noise or the laughter of youth.

Mrs. Jarrott took the brunt of the conversation on herself She was a beautiful woman, faded now with the pallor that comes to northern people after a long residence in the sub-tropical south, and languid from the same cause. Her handsome hazel eyes looked as if they had been used to weeping, though they conserved a brightness that imparted animation to her face. A white frill round her throat gave the only relief to her plain black dress, but she wore many handsome rings, after the Argentine fashion as well as a brooch and earrings of black pearls.

She began by asking her guest if it was true, as Mr. Jarrott had informed her, that he was not one of the Stranges of Virginia. She thought he must be. It would be so odd if he wasn't. There _were_ Stranges in Virginia, and had been for a great many generations. In fact, her own family, the Colfaxes, had almost intermarried with them. When she said almost, she meant that they had intermarried with the same families--the Yorkes, the Endsleighs and the Poles. If Mr. Strange did belong to the Virginia Stranges, she was sure they could find relatives in common. Oh, he didn't? Well, it seemed really as if he must. If Mr. Strange came from New York, he probably knew the Wrenns. Her own mother was a Wrenn. She had been Miss Wrenn before she was Mrs. Colfax. He thought he had heard of them? Oh, probably. They were well-known people--at least they had been in the old days--though New York was so very much changed. She rarely went back there now, the voyage was so long, but when she did she was quite bewildered. Her own family used to be so conservative, keeping to a little circle of relatives and friends that rarely went north of Boston or south of Philadelphia; but now when she made them a visit she found them surrounded by a lot of people who had never been heard of before. She thought it a pity that in a country where there were so few distinctions, those which existed shouldn't be observed.

It was a relief to Strange when the sweet, languorous monologue, punctuated from time to time by a response from himself, or an interjectory remark from one of the others, came to an end, and they proceeded to the patio for coffee.

It was served in a corner shaded by flowering vines, and presided over by a huge green and gray parrot in a cage. The host and hostess being denied this form of refreshment took advantage of the moment to stroll arm in arm around the court, leaving Miss Jarrott in tête-à-tête with Strange. He noticed that as this lady led the way her figure was as lithe as a young girl's and her walk singularly graceful. "No one is ever old with a carriage like yours," Miss Jarrott had been told, and she believed it. She dressed and talked according to her figure, and, had it not been for features too heavily accentuated in nose and chin, she might have produced an impression of eternal spring-tide. As it was, the comic papers would have found her cruelly easy to caricature, had she been a statesman. The parrot screamed at her approach, croaking out an air, slightly off the key:

/P
"Up and down the ba-by goes,
Turning out its lit-tle ..."
P/

Tempted to lapse into prose, it proceeded to cry:

"Wa-al, Polly, how are you to-day? Wa-al, pretty well for an old gal," after which there was a minute of inarticulate grumbling. When coffee was poured, and the young man's cigarette alight, Miss Jarrott seized the opportunity which her sister-in-law's soft murmur at the table had not allowed her.

"It's really funny you should be Mr. Strange, because I've known a young lady of the same name. That is, I haven't known her exactly, but I've known about her."

Not to show his irritation at the renewal of the subject, Strange presumed she was one of the Stranges of Virginia, with right and title to be so called.

"She is and she isn't," Miss Jarrot replied. "I know you'll think it funny to hear me speak so; but I can't explain I'm like that. I can't always explain. I say lots and lots of things that people just have to interpret for themselves It's funny I should be like that, isn't it? I wonder why? Can you tell me why? And this Miss Strange--I never knew her really--not really--but I feel as if I had. I always feel that way about friends of friends of mine. I feel as if they were my friends, too. I'd go through fire and water for them. Of course that's just an expression but you know what I mean, now don't you?"

Having been assured on that point, she continued:

"I'm afraid you'll find us a very quiet household, Mr. Strange, but we're in mourning. That is, Mrs. Jarrott is in mourning; and when those dear to me are in mourning I always feel that I'm in mourning, too. I'm like that. I never can tell why it is, but--I'm like that. My sister-in-law has just lost her sister-in-law. Of course that's no relation to me, is it? And yet I feel as if it was. I've always called Mrs. Colfax my sister-in-law, and I've taught her little girl to call me Aunt Queenie. They lived here once. Mr. Colfax was Mrs. Jarrott's brother and Mr. Jarrott's partner. The little girl was born here. It was a great loss to my brother when Mr. Colfax died. Mrs. Colfax went back to New York and married again. That was a blow, too; so we haven't been on the same friendly terms of late years. But now I hope it will be different. I'm like that. I always hope. It's funny, isn't it? No matter what happens, I always think there's a silver lining to the cloud. Now, why should I be like that? Why shouldn't I despair, like other people?"

Strange ventured the suggestion that she had been born with a joyous temperament.