Held to Answer/Chapter 34
Friday for John was a day of impatience, its tedious hours consumed in turning over and over in his mind the story he would tell upon the witness stand and the plea he would make to the court for a dismissal of the complaint against him; when the day was finished, John found his mind in a rather chaotic state, and it seemed to him that little had been accomplished.
But if little happened that day in Encina which was of moment to his cause, there was an interesting sequence of events transpiring in Chicago, which had at least some relation to the matter; for this was the day upon which the degrees were being conferred.
The assembly hall of the great university was large, and every seat was taken. The huge platform was decked, studded, draped and upholstered with professors, assistant professors and presidents, all in mortar boards and gowns, the somber black of the latter relieved by the rich colors of the insignia indicating the rank or character of their respective degrees.
The presence of all this banked and massed doctorial dignity made the atmosphere of the hall to reek with erudition. The vast number of individuals in front felt their puny intellects dwarfed to pigeon's brains. Hitherto some of them had rather congratulated themselves that they knew the multiplication table and the rule of three. Now their instinct was to grovel.
Yet not all of that assemblage were so impressed. Robert Mitchell was not. Huge of chest, thick-fingered, heavy-shouldered, amiable of his broad countenance, shrewd of eye, and growing thin of that curly brown thatch which had been one of Hibernia's gifts to his ensemble, he surveyed the scene with a critic's air.
Not that Mitchell scorned the pundits of learning. Being the vice-president of a transcontinental line of railroad and therefore necessarily a man of wide acquaintance and of wide employment of the talents of mankind, he knew there were occasions when even he must wait upon the pronouncements of some spectacled creature of the laboratory. Still, he could not help reflecting that he would like to see that pale, gangling pundit on the end try to calculate the exact instant in which to throw the lever to make a flying switch. He would like further to see that fellow with a dome that loomed like a water-tank on the desert try to pick up a string of car numbers as they ran by him on the track, and see how many he could carry in his head and carry right.
In fact, everything about the function expressed itself to Mitchell in terms of traffic. Quite a hall, this. The seats in it came from Grand Rapids, no doubt; or perhaps from Manitowoc. The rate from Grand Rapids was nineteen cents a hundred or thereabouts; from Manitowoc it was twenty,—practically an even basis. But on a transcontinental haul now, to San Francisco for instance, common point rates applied, and Manitowoc had an advantage of five cents a hundred unless—unless the Michigan roads rebated the Michigan manufacturers something of their share in the division of the through rate. Of course, rebates were illegal; but you never could exactly tell what an originating line might not do to keep a sufficient amount of business originating. Take his own line, now, for instance, and borax shipments from the Mojave Desert as against the Union Pacific with borax shipments from Death Valley.
Thus the mind of the great master of transportation roved on while professors rose and droned and presented round rolls to never-ending strings of candidates; but at length there appeared in the serpentine line going up for Master's degrees one presence which took the glaze of speculation from the eye of Mitchell.
The world at large has often noted the anomalous fact that a Doctor's cap and gown does not appear to detract greatly from the masculinity of a man. If anything, it makes a beard, a brow, or the pale, unprosperous furze upon a lip look more virile than otherwise; but that same cap and gown will deceitfully rob a woman of something of the indefinable air of her femininity. It gives her an ascetic cast, and asceticism is unwomanly. But there are exceptions. Some types of women's faces look just a little more fetchingly feminine and bewitchingly alluring under a mortar-board cap than beneath any other form of headdress.
The eye of the railroad man rested now with benevolence and satisfaction upon the shapely, ripened figure of such a woman. Glowing upon her features was a youth and a feminism so vital as to seem that nothing could overcome them. Her eyes were blue and bright; her hair was brown and crinkly; while dimples that refused to be subdued by the dignity of the occasion kept continually upon her features the suggestion of a smile about to break.
But with these evidences of sunny personality, there went stout hints of substantial character. The forehead was good and finely arched to stand for brains. The chin was perhaps a trifle wide to permit the finest oval to the countenance, but it suggested balance and power, and proclaimed that what the mind of this young lady planned, her will might be expected to accomplish. In fact, the young lady stood at this moment face to face with the consummation of a five years' programme, and five years is long for youth to hold a purpose.
With swelling satisfaction the railroad man saw the president of the university now addressing his daughter. It was the same Latin formula that had been repeated scores of times already this morning; but now Mitchell made his first effort to grasp it, to reason out its meaning, all the while greatly admiring his daughter's unfaltering courage under the fire of these unintelligible phrases.
The somewhat irrepressible Miss Bessie was, indeed, doing very well. For a moment the dimples had actually composed themselves, and there was a light of high dignity in the eye, as the candidate extended her hand for the diploma and stood meekly while the silken collar was placed about her neck.
"That is a very able man, that Doctor Winton," remarked Mitchell to his wife. "He has got the same way as the rest of them when he talks; but what he says is sense."
Since Mitchell did not know at all what the university president had said, this remark showed that he had fallen back upon his intuitive judgment of men and had swiftly perceived in the university president something of the same practical qualities that go to the making of a business executive in any other walk.
But an excited whisper was just now coming from behind the white-gloved hand of Mrs. Mitchell. "Oh! look!" that lady exclaimed, "she's got her box lid on crooked!"
It was true that Miss Bessie by some restless twitch of her head or some rebellious outburst of a knot of that crinkly hair, had got her mortar board rakishly atilt. Of course, there were other mortar boards askew, but Bessie's was individualistically and pronouncedly listed far to port. And she didn't care. Bessie was so brimming and beaming with the happiness of life that her whole being was this morning recklessly atilt.
But that afternoon, at about the hour of three, in the ample suite of rooms high up on the lake side of the Annex, which had been occupied by the Mitchells for a week, there was nothing atilt at all about the soul of Bessie. Her spirits were all a-droop. One single glance around showed that the busy preparation for the European trip had been suspended. Wardrobe trunks stood about on end, their contents gaping, while dresses were draped over screens and chairs and laid out upon beds; but the packers had ceased their work. Mrs. Mitchell, distracted between parental love and the fulfillment of long cherished plans, as well as distressed at the exhibition of petulant and even tearful temper which her daughter had been displaying for an hour, walked restlessly from room to room.
"I tell you, it's California for mine!" that young lady affirmed in school-girlish vernacular, while an impatient foot stamped the floor, a dimpled hand smote wilfully upon the arm of a huge, brocaded satin chair, and the blue swimming eyes burned with a rebellious light.
Neither the language nor the mood would seem to become the beautiful Mistress of Arts; but each testified to the survival of the humanness of the young woman. In justice to her, however, it must be explained that she had not begun this upsetting of father's and mother's and her own cherished plan with impetuous defiances. She had begun gently, with sighs, with remarks about longing for California. She felt so tired; she wished she didn't have to travel now. If she could just go back and walk under the palms and orange trees in dear old Los Angeles; if she could get one great big bite of San Francisco fog, and see a little desert and a mountain or two, before starting out for this junky old Europe, she would be reconciled.
Otherwise, she would not be reconciled. Of course, she would go,—since they had planned it for so long, and since mamma's heart was set upon it;—but she would go unreconciled.
Reconciled! Mrs. Mitchell knew perfectly well what reconciled meant, but she did not know just what Bessie meant by dinging on that word.
After fifteen minutes it appeared that Bessie was through with hints. She had begun to boldly propose, and then earnestly to plead, and finally tearfully to demand that the European trip be postponed two weeks.
"But my child! The trip is all planned. The passages are paid for, everything is ready," protested Mrs. Mitchell.
"But what's the good of being the slave of your plans? You don't have to do a thing you don't want to just because you've planned."
Bessie's lip was full and ripe when she pouted and her voice was freighted heavily with protest and appeal. How pretty her eyelids were when there was a tear quivering on the lashes like a ball of quicksilver. And how really enchanting she looked, as with hair a bit disheveled and color heightening, she went on to argue impetuously:
"What's the good of having a private car? What's the good of being a vice-president's wife and daughter, if you can't change your mind and go galloping out to California when you feel like it? Back to your own home! Back to your own people! Back where the scenery is the grandest in the world! Back where the sky is high enough that you don't have to shoulder the zenith out of the way in the morning so that you can stand up straight and take a full breath."
"Bessie Mitchell!" exclaimed her mother at this juncture, turning on her offspring accusingly. "What has got into you? Something has! You're up to something. What is it?"
Bessie brooked her mother's discerning glance and then dodged it, very much as if that lady had hurled at her the silver-backed hair brush she held in her hand.
"Why," she exclaimed with an air of injured innocence; "nothing has got into me. I was just taking one last look at the California papers, and it made me homesick."
She made a gesture toward a pile of papers that surrounded her chair. Mrs. Mitchell paused and cerebrated. Somewhere about two o'clock of the afternoon, Bessie had stepped to the telephone.
"Send me up the last week of San Francisco and Los Angeles papers," she ordered.
The papers came. She went through the Los Angeles papers first, turning their pages casually, with occasional comments to her mother. And then she started the San Francisco file, scanning this time more swiftly and more casually until upon the very last of them she became suddenly absorbed in uncommunicative silence; after which the musings and the sighings had begun, followed by this absurd proposal, this passionate outburst, and this deadlock of the two women behind entrenchments of newspapers on the one hand and barricades of trunks upon the other.
As between her strong-willed daughter and her strong-willed self, Mrs. Mitchell knew that she generally emerged defeated. So far now she had been defeated—at least to the extent of an armistice. The packers had been stopped, while the argument went on.
But in the meantime Mrs. Mitchell was violating the rules of war by bringing up reinforcements. Mr. Mitchell was on his way over from the Monadnock Building. He would soon settle Miss Bessie; that is, if he did not make a cowardly and instant surrender, because Mrs. Mitchell knew well enough he would rather sit on the rear platform of his private car and watch the miles of steel and cinder stream from under him for ten hours a day for the rest of his life than visit his native sod for five minutes.
When Mrs. Mitchell heard her husband's voice in the next room, she hurried out to fortify him.
Bessie also heard the voice and hurried to the bathroom to remove traces of tears; for tears were not powerful arguments with her father. Smiles went farther and faster. Kisses were the deciding artillery.
Father and mother, advancing cautiously upon daughter's position, found it unoccupied. But the papers were strewn about. Mitchell picked up the one which lay in the chair. His glance was entirely casual, but suddenly his blue eye started and then blazed.
"The hell!" he ejaculated, and read eagerly down the column.
"Well, I be damned!" was his next contribution to the silence.
Mrs. Mitchell stared at her husband in amazement. Then, seizing her reading glass, for a reading glass was so much better form than spectacles, she glanced over her husband's shoulder, read the headline and a few words following.
"The deceitfulness of that child!" she ejaculated, an expression of indignant amazement on her face, while the hand with the reading glass dropped to her hip, and her eyes were turned upon her husband.
"I always knew that boy's good-heartedness would get him into trouble some day," the good woman averred after a moment.
"Well," rejoined her husband, in tones sharp with emphasis, "I'd back up on a freight clear round the world to get him out. Our trip to Europe is off. We go west on nine to-night."
Mr. Mitchell started for the telephone, and Mrs. Mitchell's eye followed him approvingly, a look of sympathy and motherliness triumphing over every other expression upon her face.
Now there wasn't any particular obligation on the part of Robert Mitchell to John Hampstead. Hampstead had merely worked for Mitchell through eight years of faithfulness in small things, which was a way that Hampstead had. But as the Vice-President of the Great Southwestern looked back, those eight years of faithfulness bulked rather large, which, again, was a way that Robert Mitchell had.
As to Bessie! But that is a way that women have. The deeper and the more serious her attachment for John Hampstead had grown, the more guilefully she had concealed that fact from even the suspicion of her parents. Yet now her disguise was penetrated, she sobbed it all out on her mother's shoulder and got the finest, tenderest assurances of sympathy and enthusiastic connivance that could be vouchsafed by one woman to another. The Mitchells were that way. Let hearts and happiness be concerned, and all other considerations of life could ride on the brake-beams.