Held to Answer/Chapter 2
In the dusk of the early winter's night in that land where winter hints its presence but slightly in any other way, two children dashed out of a rambling shell of a cottage that sprawled rather hopelessly over an unkempt lot, screaming: "Uncle John! Uncle John!"
Roused from castled, starry dreams, the big stenographer, who had been enjoying the feel of the dark upon his eyes, and the occasional happy fragrance of orange blossoms in his nostrils, greeted each with a bear hug, and the three clattered together up the rickety steps into a tiny hall. On the left was an oblong room, and beyond it, through curtains, appeared a table set for dinner. Light streaming in from this second room revealed the first as a sort of parlor-studio, where a piano, a lounge, easels, malsticks, palettes, and stacks of unframed canvases jostled each other indifferently. An inspection would have shown that these pictures were mostly landscapes, with now and then a flower study in brilliant colors; and to the practised eye a distressing atmosphere of failure would have obtruded from every one.
From somewhere beyond the dining room came the odor of cooking food, and the sound of energetic but heavy footsteps.
"Hello, Rose," called John cheerily.
At the moment a woman came into view, bearing a steaming platter. She was large of frame, with gray eyes, with straight light hair, fair wide brow, and features that showed a general resemblance to Hampstead's own. Her face had a weary, disturbed look, but lighted for a moment at the sight of her brother.
Depositing the platter upon the table, the woman sank heavily into a chair at the end, where she began immediately to serve the plates. The children, a girl and a boy, sat side by side, with John across from them. This left a vacant chair opposite Rose, and before this a plate was laid.
For a time the family fell upon its food in silence. The girl was eleven years old perhaps, with eyes of lustrous hazel, reddish-brown hair massed in curls upon her shoulders and hanging below, cheeks hopelessly freckled, mouth large, and nose also without hope through being waggishly pugged. The boy, whose sharp, pale features exhibited traces of a battle with ill health begun at birth and not yet ended, had eyes that were like his mother's, clear and gray, and there was a brave turn to his upper lip that excited pity on a face so pale. He looked older but was probably younger than his sister. Hero-worship, frank and unbounded, was in the glance with which the two from time to time beamed upon their uncle.
After a considerable interval, John, glancing first at the empty chair and then at his sister, asked with significant constraint in his tone: "Any word?"
His sister's head was shaken disconsolately, and the angular shoulders seemed to sink a little more wearily as her face was again bowed toward her plate.
After another interval, Hampstead remarked: "You seem worried to-night, Rose."
"The rent is due to-morrow," she replied in a wooden voice.
"Is that all?" exclaimed John, throwing back his head with a relieved laugh. At the same time a hand had stolen into his pocket, and he drew out a twenty-dollar gold piece and tossed it across the table.
"The rent is $17.50," observed Rose, eyeing the coin doubtfully.
"Keep the change," chuckled John, "and pass the potatoes."
But the woman's gloom appeared to deepen.
"You pay your board promptly," she protested. "This is the third month in succession that you have also paid the rent. Besides, you are always doing for the children."
"Who wouldn't, I'd like to know?" challenged John, surveying them both proudly; whereat Dick, his mouth being otherwise engaged, darted a look of gratitude from his great, wise eyes, while Tayna reached over and patted her uncle's hand affectionately. "Tayna" was an Indian name the girl's father had picked up somewhere.
"Besides," went on John, "Charles is having an uphill fight of it right now. It's a pleasure to stand by a gallant fellow like him. He goes charging after his ideal like old Sir Galahad."
But the face of his sister refused to kindle.
"Like Don Quixote, you mean," she answered cynically. "I haven't heard from him in three weeks. He has not sent me any money in six. He sends it less and less frequently. He becomes more and more irresponsible. You are spoiling him to support his family for him, and," she added, with a choke in her voice, while a tear appeared in her eye, "he is spoiling us—killing our love for him."
The boy slipped down from his chair and stood beside his mother, stroking her arm sympathetically.
"Poppie's all right," he whispered in his peculiar drawl. "He'll come home soon and bring a lot of money with him. See if he don't!"
"Oh, I know," confessed Rose, while with one hand she dabbed the corner of her eye with an apron, and with the other clasped the boy impulsively to her. "I know I should not give way before the children. But—but it grows worse and worse, John!"
"Nonsense!" rebuked her brother. "You're only tired and run down. You need a rest, by Hokey! that's what you need. Charles is liable to sell that Grand Canyon canvas of his any time, and when he does, you'll get a month in Catalina, that's what you will!"
The wife was silently busy with her apron and her eyes.
"Do you know, Rose," John continued with forced enthusiasm, "my admiration for Charles grows all the time. He follows his star, that boy does!"
"And forgets his family—leaves it to starve!" reproached the sister bitterly, while the sag of her cheeks became still more noticeable.
"Ah, but that's where you do Charles an injustice," insisted John. "He knows I'm here. We have a sort of secret understanding; that is," and he gulped a little at going too far—"that is, we understand each other. He knows that while he is following his ideal, I won't see you starve. He's a genius; I'm the dub. It's a fair partnership. His eye is always on the goal. He will get there sure—and soon, now, too."
"He will never get there!" blurted out the dejected woman, as if with a sudden disregardful loosing of her real convictions. "For thirteen years I have hoped and toiled and believed and waited. A good while ago I made up my mind. He has not the vital spark. For five years I have pleaded with him to give it up—to surrender his ambition, to turn his undoubted talent to account. He has had the rarest aptitude for decorating. We might be having an income of ten thousand a year now. Instead he pursues this will-o'-the-wisp ambition of his. He is crazy about color, always chasing a foolish sunset or some wonderful desert panorama of sky and cloud and mountain—seeing colors no one else can see but unable to put his vision upon the canvas. That's the truth, John! I have never spoken it before. Never hinted it before the children! Charles Langham is a failure. He will never be anything else but a failure!"
The words, concluded by the barely successful suppression of a sob, fell on unprotesting silence. Who but this life-worn woman had so good an opportunity to know if they were true, so good a right to speak them if she believed them true? John looked at his plate, Tayna and Dick looked at each other. It required a stout heart to break the oppressive quiet, and for the moment no one in this group had that heart. The break came from the outside, when some one ran swiftly up the steps and threw open the front door. Instant sounds of collision and confusion issued from the hall, followed immediately by a masculine voice, thin and injured in tone, calling excitedly:
"Well, for the love of Michael Angelo! What do you keep stuffing the hall so full of furniture for? Won't somebody please come and help me with these things?"
The dinner table was abruptly deserted; but quick as John and the children were, Rose was ahead of them, and when they reached the hallway, a thin man of medium height, with an aquiline nose, dark eyes, and long loose hair, was helplessly in the embrace of the laughing and crying woman.
"Oh, Charles, you did come home; you did come home, didn't you?" she was crying.
Charles broke in volubly. "Well, I should say I did. What did you expect? Have I ever impressed you as a man who would neglect his family?" After which, with the look of one who has put his accusers in the wrong, he rescued himself from his wife's emphatic embraces, held her off for a moment with a look of real fondness, and then brushed her with his lips, first on one cheek and then upon the other.
"Dad-dee!" clamored the children in chorus. "Dad-dee!" Yet it was noticeable that they did not presume to rush upon their father, but flung their voices before them, experimentally, as it were.
"Well, well, las ninas" (las ninas being the Spanish for children), the father exclaimed, his piercing dark eyes upon them with delight and displeasure mingling. "Aren't you going to give me a hug? Your mother nearly strangles me, and you stand off eyeing me as if I were a new species."
At the open arms of invitation, both of the children plunged unhesitatingly; but their reception was brief.
"Run away now, father is tired," the nervous-looking man proclaimed presently, straightening his shoulders, while he sniffed the atmosphere. "Dinner, eh? Gods and goats, but I am hungry!"
Rose led the little procession proudly back to the table, drawing out her husband's chair for him, hovering over him, smoothing his hair, unfolding his napkin, and stooping to place a fresh kiss upon his fine, high, but narrow brow.
"That will do now; that will do now," he chided, with an air of having indulged a foolishly doting woman long enough. "For goodness' sake, Rose, give me something to eat."
His wife, still upon her feet, carried him the platter from which the family had been served. Charles condemned it with a glance.
"Isn't there something fresh you could give me? Something that hasn't been—pawed over?"
His tone was eloquent of sensibilities outraged, and his dark eyes, having first flashed a reproach upon his wife, swept the circle with a look of expected comprehension in them, as if he knew that all would understand the delicacies of the artistic temperament.
"Why, yes," admitted Rose, without a sign of resentment. "I can get you something fresh if you will wait a few minutes."
She slipped out to the kitchen from which presently the odor of broiling meat proceeded, while the artist coolly rolled his cigarette, and, surveying without touching the cup of coffee which John had poured for him, raised his voice to call: "Some fresh coffee, too, Rose, please!"
After this Langham leveled his eye on his brother-in-law and asked airily, "Well, John, how's everything with you?"
"Fine as silk, Charles," replied Hampstead. "How is it with you?"
"Never better," declared Langham. "Never saw such sunsets in your life as they are having up the Monterey coast. I tell you there never were such colors. There was one there in December,"—and he launched into a detailed description of it, his eyes, his face, his hands, his whole body laboring to convey the picture which his animated spirits proclaimed was still upon the screen of his mind.
As the description was concluded, Rose placed a platter before him, upon which, garnished with parsley, two small chops appeared, delicately grilled.
Abruptly ceasing conversation, Charles sank a knife and fork into one of them and transferred a generous morsel to his mouth.
"Thanks, old girl; just up to your topmost mark," he confessed ungrudgingly, after a few moments, during which, with half-closed eyes, he had been chewing vigorously and with a singleness of purpose rather rare in him.
"Sold any pictures lately?" asked John casually.
"No," said Langham abruptly, lowering his voice, while a look of annoyance shaded his brow. "I dropped in at the gallery first thing, but"—and he shrugged his shoulders—"Nothing doing! However," and he became immediately cheerful again, "Mrs. Lawson has been looking awfully hard at that Grand Canyon canvas. If she buys that, my fortune's made."
"And if she doesn't," observed Rose pessimistically.
"And if she doesn't?" her husband exclaimed with sudden irritation. "Well—it'll be made just the same. You see if it isn't! Oh, say!" and a light broke upon his face so merry that it immediately dissipated every sign of annoyance. "What do you think? I saw Owens to-day, the fellow who auctions alleged oil paintings at a minimum of two dollars each. You know the scheme—pictures painted while you wait—roses, chrysanthemums, landscapes even. Well, he offered me fifteen dollars a day to paint pictures for him. Think of it! To sit in the window before a gaping crowd painting those miserable daubs, a dozen or two a day, while he auctions them off. His impudence! If I had been as big as you are, Jack, I would have punched him."
"Fifteen dollars a day," commented Rose thoughtfully.
"Yes," laughed Langham, his little black eyes a-twinkle, as he clipped the last morsel from the first of his chops. "The idea!"
"Well, I hope you took it," his wife suggested.
"Rose!" exclaimed Langham, rising bolt upright at the table and looking into her face as if she had unwarrantably and unexpectedly hurled the blackest insult. "Rose! An artist like me!"
"It is the kind of a job for an artist like you," she rejoined stingingly, with a sarcastic emphasis on just the right words.
"Oh, my God! My God!" exclaimed the man sharply, turning from the table, while he threw his hands dramatically upward and clutched at the back of his head, after which he took a turn up and down the room as if beside himself with unutterable emotions.
John judged that this was the fitting moment for his withdrawal, but Langham's distress of mind was not too great for him to observe the movement and to follow. He overtook his brother-in-law in the studio-parlor, and his manner was coolly importunate.
"Say, old man!" he whispered, "could you let me have five? I'm a little short on carfare, and you'll be gone in the morning before I get up."
"Sure," exclaimed John, without a moment's hesitation, delving in the depths of the pocket from which he had produced the money for the rent, and handing out a five-dollar piece.
"Thanks, old chap," said Langham, seizing it eagerly and hastening away, after an affectionate slap on the shoulder of his bigger and as he thought baser metaled brother-in-law. He did not, however, say that he would repay the loan, and Hampstead did not remark that it was the last gold coin in his pocket and that he should have no more till pay day, ten days hence.
John let his admiration for the assurance of Langham play for a moment, and then turned to the rear of the studio, opened a door, struck a match, and groped his way to a naked gas jet. The sudden flare of light revealed a lean-to room, meant originally for nobody knew what, but turned into a bedroom. The only article of furniture which piqued curiosity in the least was a table against the wall, across which a long plank had been balanced. Upon it and equilibrated as carefully as the plank itself, was a row of books of many shapes and sizes and in various stages of preservation. This plank was John's library.
Stuck about upon the walls were several large photogravures, portraying various stirring scenes in history, mostly Roman. They were unframed and fastened crudely to the wall with pins. Evidently this was the living place of an untidy man.
The tiny table, with its balanced over-load of books, was directly beneath the gas. John dropped heavily into the wooden chair before it and drew to him a number of sheets of paper, upon which, with much labor and many erasings, he began to fashion a sort of motto or legend. Satisfied at length with his work, he printed the finished legend swiftly in rude capital letters in the center of a fresh sheet, snatched down the picture of a Christian martyr which occupied the central space above his library, and with the same four pins affixed his motto in that particular spot, where it would greet him instantly upon opening the door, and where it would be the last thing upon which his eyes fell as he went to sleep and the first when he awakened in the morning.
Once it was in position, he stood off and admired it, reading aloud:
"Eternal Hammering is the Price of Success!"
"That's the stuff," he croaked enthusiastically.
"Eternal hammering!" And then he paused a moment, after which his reverie was continued aloud. "That actor was telling me to-day about technique. He said: 'There's a right way to do everything—to pitch a horseshoe even.' He's right. The fellow with the best technique will knock the highest persimmon. What makes me such a good stenographer? Technique. What makes me such a bum office flunkey? The lack of technique—no voice—no form—no self-confidence. I am a young-man-afraid-of-himself—that's who I am.
"Technique first and then—gravitation! That's the idea!"
By gravitation, however, Hampstead did not mean that law which keeps the heavenly bodies from getting on the wrong side of the street, but that process, which in his short life he had already observed, by means of which the man in the crowd who takes advantage of his opportunities and, by the dig of an elbow here, the insert of a shoulder there, and the stiff thrust of a foot and leg yonder, sooner or later arrives opposite the gateway of his particular desires.
Mere opportunism? That and a little more; a sort of conviction that fortune herself is something of an opportunist, that what a man wants to do, fortune, sooner or later, will help him to do, if he only wills himself in the direction of the want early enough and long enough to give the fickle jade her chance.
By way of proceeding immediately to hammer, Hampstead reached for a heavy calf-bound volume, bearing the imprint of the Los Angeles Public Library, and settled himself to read.
Most people in the railroad office were tired when they finished their day's work. They were done with effort. John, however, was just ready to begin. They thought of recreation; John thought only of hammering.
Since his scholastic education had been broken off in the middle by economic necessities, he had formed the plan of reading at night the entire written history of the world, from the first cuneiform inscription down to the last edition of the last newspaper. In pursuance of this plan, he had already traveled far down the centuries, and it was with eagerness that he adjusted his eye-shade to-night, because when he lifted the cover of his book he knew that he would swing open the doors on one of the greatest centuries in human history, the century in which the world discovered the individual. Hampstead was himself an individual. This was in some sense the story of his own discovery.
When John had been reading for perhaps half an hour, there came a bird-like tap at his door, accompanied by a suppressed giggle.
"Who comes there?" called the student in sepulchral tones, stabbing the page at a particular spot with his thumb, while his eyes were lifted.
The only audible sound was another giggle, but the door swung open mysteriously, revealing two small, white-robed figures silhouetted against the shadows in the studio.
"Enter, ghosts!" John commanded, in the same sepulchral voice, while his eyes fell again upon his pages. The ghosts chortled and advanced, but with great circumspection, to the little table with its dangerously balanced bookshelf, its miscellaneous litter of papers, and its silent, absorbed student.
Tayna, her long burnished curls cascading over the white of her nightgown, and her eyes shining softly, ducked her head and arose under one arm of her uncle, where presently she felt herself drawn close with an affectionate, satisfying sort of squeeze. The boy, approaching from the other side, laid an arm upon the shoulder of the man, and stood watching with fascination the eyes of his uncle in their steady sweep from side to side of the printed page.
"Uncle John," asked Tayna shyly, burying her face in his neck as she put the question, "when will you be President?"
"When shall you be President?" corrected the boy, looking across at his sister with that same old-mannish expression which was a part of all he said and did.
Hampstead cuddled the girl closer, and his eye abandoned the page to look down the bridge of his nose into distance.
"Why?" he asked presently.
"Oh, because," said Tayna, with a little shiver of eagerness, "I can hardly wait."
Hampstead's eyes wandered to his motto on the wall. The eyes of the boy followed and spelled out the letters wonderingly, but in silence.
"We must be able to wait," said John, squeezing Tayna again. "It's a long, long way; but if we just keep on keeping on, why, after a while we are there, you know."
Tayna sighed and reached up a round, plump arm till it encircled Hampstead's neck, as she asked, still more shyly:
"And when you are President, every one will know just how good and great you are, and they won't call you awkward nor—nor homely any more, will they?"
A flush and a chuckle marked John's reception of this query, after which he observed hastily and a bit apprehensively:
"Say, you wet little goldfishes! Remember that you are never, never, now or any time, howsoever odd I bear myself, to breathe a word to anybody, not to a single soul, not to your mamma or your papa or your Sunday-school teacher or anybody, of all these nice little play secrets which we have between ourselves."
An instant seriousness came over the children's faces.
"Cross my heart," murmured Tayna, with a twitch of her slender finger across her breast.
"And hope to die," added Dick, with a funeral solemnity, as he completed Tayna's cross by a vertical movement of a stubby thumb in the direction of his own wishbone of a breast.
Hampstead looked relieved.
"But," affirmed Tayna stoutly, "they are not play secrets. They are real secrets. Aren't they?"
John looked up at his motto again.
"Yes," he said in a low, determined voice. "They are real secrets."
"And," half-declared, half-questioned Dick, "if you aren't President, you are going to be some other kind of a very great man?
"Aren't you?" the boy persisted, when Hampstead was silent.
"Tell you to-morrow," laughed John. "Good night, ghosts!" and with a swift assault of his lips upon the cheeks of either, he gently impelled them toward the door.
"Good night, your Excellency!" giggled Tayna.
"Good night, my counselors," responded Hampstead, reaching for his book.
An hour later Hampstead was still reading. Another hour later he was still reading. But something like a quarter of an hour beyond that, when it might have been, say, near half-past eleven, he was not reading. He was turning his head strangely from side to side and digging a knuckle into his eyes. A surprising thing had happened. He could no longer see the lines upon the page—nor the page itself—nor the book—nor anything!
His first impression was that the gas had gone out; but this swiftly gave way to the conviction that he had gone blind—stone blind!—and so suddenly that it happened right between the beheading of one of the queens of Henry the Eighth and the marrying of another. He was now tardily conscious that for some time his eyes had been giving him pain, that he had rubbed them periodically to clear away white opacities that appeared upon the page; but now there was no pain; they were suffused with moisture, and the room was dark.
After an interval he could make out the gaslight glowing feebly like the tiny glare of a candle visible in some distant pit of darkness, but he could discern no shapes about the room. Not one!
A horrible fear stole into his breast and chilled it. All of him had suddenly come to naught, and just as he was getting started. He turned futile, streaming orbs up to where his new-made motto should loom upon the wall. It was there, of course, mocking at him now; but he could not see it. He could not see the wall even. For fully five minutes he sat in darkness, his hands clasped above his bowed head. Then he arose and groped his way along the wall to the door and opened it, and stood facing out into the grotesque dark of the studio. He thought of trying to grope his way across it—of calling out—but decided to wait a few minutes.
He felt stricken, broken, overwhelmed. His life, his career, himself were ruined. He required time to get used to the sensation, time to adjust his mind to the extent of the calamity and to gather some elements of fortitude wherewith to face the world. Not even Rose must see him broken and shattered as he felt right now.
Turning back, he closed the door, felt his way to the gas, and turned it off. He had no need of gas now. Then he lay down, fully clothed, upon the bed, with a cold cloth upon his eyes, thinking flightily and feeling very sorry for himself.
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