Held to Answer/Chapter 7
For an hour and a half at dinner, and for another hour sunk in the depths of a great leather chair in the lounging room of the Pacific Union Club, William N. Scofield had searched the soul of Hampstead, who had not only been led to talk rapturously of his stage ambition but to reveal the metes and bounds of his interest in and knowledge upon many subjects.
"Gad, but you know a lot," ejaculated Scofield, with unfeigned amazement. "Where'd you get it all?"
"I have read a good deal," confessed John, trying to appear much more modest than in his heart he felt; for it was a part of Scofield's whim or of his campaign to flatter him enormously, and he had succeeded.
But for a time now, the Traffic Manager was silent, puffing meditatively at his cigar and staring at the ceiling through loafing rings of smoke in which, as if they were floating letters, he seemed to read the transcript of his thought,—the thought that if, beside employing this enormously able young man, he could also enlist in behalf of the railroad as an institution his capacity for fanatical devotion to an ideal, the prize was one worth bidding high for, high enough to win!
"People like you, Hampstead," Scofield broke out presently, and in his most ingratiating vein. "We all felt that down at the office. You did a difficult thing without making an enemy of one of us. Therefore what your personality can do interests me even more than what you know."
The railroad man interrupted his speech to shoot an exploratory glance from under veiling lids and went on calculatingly:
"The railroad business is going to change. Now we tell the Railroad Commission what to do. The time is coming when it will tell us what to do, and we will do it. But the public attitude toward the railroad has also got to change." Scofield's tone had taken on new emphasis. "You would make the type of executive that could change it! The successful transportation man of the future has got to be a sort of ambassador of the railroad to the people, and the man who best serves the people tributary to his road will best serve his stockholders."
"Do you know who gave me that point?" the Traffic Manager asked, turning from the vision he was contemplating in the clouds of smoke over his head and looking sharply at Hampstead.
"Naturally not," admitted the younger man.
"Bob Mitchell," said Scofield, and paused while his thin lips coaxed persistently at the cigar which appeared to have gone out. "Bob Mitchell! And I reviled him for his sagacity, told him he was an altruistic fool. But after a while I saw he was right. Then I tried to get him for us, but I didn't succeed. He wasn't as sensible as I hope you will be. Besides, I am going to offer you more than I offered him."
More than he offered Mitchell! There was a sudden jolt somewhere in John's breast, and he wet a dry, parched lip, but did not speak.
"Yes," breathed Scofield softly, almost as if he had been interrupted. "I am going to offer you more. Hampstead!" and the voice was raised quickly, "I want you to be our General Freight Agent!"
If Scofield had leaned over and kissed him, John would not have been more surprised, nor have known less what to say.
"General Freight Agent!" he croaked hoarsely.
"Yes," affirmed the other coolly, almost icily, while he flicked the ashes from his cigar and enjoyed the sensation his proposal had produced.
"At my age?" stumbled John, still groping, but trying to see himself in the position.
"Why, yes," reassured Scofield suavely. "You tell me you're past twenty-five. Paul Morton was Assistant General Freight Agent of the Burlington at twenty-one. Look where he is to-day—in the cabinet of the President of the United States. The salary," Scofield added casually, by way of finally clinching the argument, "will be twelve thousand a year."
Hampstead's lips silently formed the words—twelve thousand! But he did not utter them. They dazed him. They rushed him headlong. They made rejection impossible. No man had a right to throw away such a fortune as that. One thousand dollars a month! He felt himself yielding, helplessly, irresistibly.
And then, suddenly as the photographer's bomb lights up every lineament of every face in the darkened room, for one single moment Hampstead saw things clearly and in their true proportions. This Schofield was not a man. He was a grinning devil, with horns and a barb on his tail. He was tempting, trapping, buying him. He would not be bought. "No, Mrs. Mitchell, I would not sell myself," he had said, not, however, meaning at all what that lady meant.
Leaning back stubbornly, his fist smiting heavy blows upon the cushioned arm of the chair, John muttered through clenched teeth:
"No! No! No—I'll never do it. No, Mr. Scofield, I cannot accept your offer. I thank you for it; but I cannot accept it. The stage is to be the place of my achievement. Why, why, Mr. Scofield, the wonderfully flattering offer you have made to me to-night has come because of the training incident to the cultivation of a stage ambition. If it can bring me so much with so little devotion, is it not reasonable to suppose that it will bring me more—very much more? I will not be so disloyal to that which has been so generous with me."
Scofield's countenance had suddenly and impressively changed. It became a mask of stone, a sphinx-like thing, the brow a knot, the nose a beak, the mouth a stitched scar. The beady gleam of the eyes from beneath drawn lids was sinister. This fanatical young fool was escaping him, and Scofield did not like any one to escape him.
But the young man refused to be swerved by frowns.
"Not to manage railroads," he declared enthusiastically, "but to mould human character is to be my life-work; to depict the virtues and the vices, the weaknesses and the strengths of life, to make men laugh and love and—forget."
Scofield's eyes twinkled, and his mouth became less a scar, but John thought this was a very fine phrase really, and he rushed along:
"Life looks like a tangle, like a mess—drudgeries, disappointments, injustices—the wrong man prospering—the wrong girl suffering! The drama composes life. It grabs out a few people and follows them, compressing into the action of two hours the eventualities of a lifetime and shortening perspectives till men can see the consequences of their acts, whether for good or for ill. The stage teaches the doctrine of the conservation of moral energy—and of immoral energy—that sustained effort, conserved effort is never cheated; it gets its goal at last."
"Say!" broke in Scofield; but John would not be denied what he felt was a final smashing generalization.
"To figure the tariff on human conduct, to grade and classify the acts of life, to quote the rates on happiness and misery in trainload lots. That's what I'm going to do," he concluded, with a glow upon his face.
But by this time a smile of cynic pity had appeared upon the face of the railroad man.
"Hampstead," he exclaimed sharply, with a mimic shudder and a shrug of relief as if he had just escaped something, "you're not an actor. You're a preacher!"
John gasped.
"You're a moralist," asserted Scofield accusingly, "a puritanical, Sunday-school, twaddling moralist. I have misjudged you. I wouldn't want you around at all."
With a look akin to disgust upon his face, the railroad man made a motion with his fingers in the air as if ridding them of something sticky, and arose, not abruptly but decisively, making clear that the interview had proved disappointingly unprofitable and was therefore at an end.
John also arose, bewildered by the sudden change in Scofield's attitude—a change which he resented, and also the ground of it. He a preacher? The idea was ridiculous.
Besides, it makes an astonishing difference when one has been stubbornly refusing an offer to have the offer coolly and decisively withdrawn. Something subtly psychological made him want the offer back. The door of opportunity had been closed behind him with a snap so vicious that he wanted to turn and kick it open.
But the thin, talon-like hand of Scofield was hooking the young man's rather flaccid palm for a moment.
"Remember what I tell you," he barked out in parting. "You're not an actor. You're not a railroad man. You're a preacher!"
The last word was flung bitingly, like an epithet.
John, feeling uncomfortable, walked out and along one side of Union Square, casting a momentary wondering eye on the stabbing, twin towers of the Hotel St. Francis, many windowed and many-lighted; then turned on down Geary into Market and along that wide and cobbled thoroughfare to the doors of the old Palace Hotel. By the time he was in bed, he realized that Scofield had shaken him terribly. His decision was all to make over again.
However, Bessie would be there for three days to help him, and with this thought he felt comforted.
········
"It's been a great three days," sighed John, on the following Tuesday. Bessie also sighed.
They had clambered down from the parapet below the Cliff House and sat watching the seals at play upon the rocks a stone's throw out from beneath their feet. Their position marked the southern portal of the famous Golden Gate, through which a mile-wide stream of liquid blue was running. Across the Gate rose the sheer gray cliffs of Marin County and beyond those the rugged greens and blues of the mountains, spiked in the center by the peak of Tamalpais.
Before their faces, the ocean, in swells and scoops of ever grayer gray, ran out to catch the horizon as it fell, illumined in its lower reaches by the sun, which was sinking into the haze above the waters like a lustrous orange ball.
Southward, beyond the green head of Golden Gate Park, the yellow gray of the sand dunes and the blue gray of the sea met in a lingering, playful kiss that swept back and forth in a long shimmering line which ran on sinuously, growing fainter and fainter, till lost in the shadow of the distant cliffs.
The hour was five o'clock. At eight that night John was to leave for Los Angeles. His vacation—the only vacation of his hard-driven life—was to end, and an epoch in his existence was also nearing its end. The past was clear as the land behind him; the future was an area of tossing uncertainty. Nothing appeared,—no track, no wake, no sail, no sun even. Only far over, beyond the curve of the horizon, was a kind of strange, unearthly glow, and on this his eye was set.
For three days his soul had ebbed and flowed like that lip of foam upon the beach, now stealing far up on the land,—for him the backward track; now turning and running far out to sea,—for him the way of adventure and advance.
But now the ultimate decision was to be made. Bessie saw it rising like a tide upon that face which once had seemed not to fit, a rapt look which snuggled in the hills and hollows and then began to harden like setting concrete. No one would call that face homely now. Interesting, most likely, would have been the word.
The gray eyes burned brighter, the lips grew tighter. The chin advanced, moved out to sea a little, as it were.
"Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly, though a look of pain momentarily touched her whitening lips. "I shall despise you if you do not."
"The decision is made," John replied solemnly, "and you, Bessie, have helped to make it."
Bessie did not reply; she only looked.
Silence fell between them. Silence, too, was in the heavens; the sun, the waves, the restless wind for the moment appeared to stand still. All nature had paused respectfully. A man, young, inexperienced, but potential, had cast the horoscope of life beyond the power of gods or men to intervene,—and with it had cast some other horoscopes as well.
Hampstead felt the spell his act of will had wrapped about them, but he felt also the substance of his resolution framing like granite in his soul and making him strong with a new kind of strength.
But soon the sun was descending again, the clouds were drifting once more, and a gust of wind nipped sharply, causing the skirts of John's overcoat to flap lustily. Bessie twitched her fur collar closer about the neck, and thrust both hands deep into the pockets of her gray ulster. Hampstead passed his own hand through the curve of the girl's elbow, gripped her forearm possessively, selfishly, absently, and drew her toward him.
Indeed Bessie was closer to him than she had ever been before; and yet she had never felt so far away.
"Oh, but it's great to have a woman by you in a crisis," John chuckled happily.
Bessie looked up startled. John had called her woman. But she recovered from the start,—he had also called her a woman.
"Come to understand each other pretty well, haven't we?" John observed, still looking oceanward, but giving the arm of Bessie what was intended for a meaningful squeeze.
"Not at all," sighed Bessie, also still looking oceanward.
Hampstead, his thoughts bowling rapidly forward, continued motionless until a white-winged, curious-eyed gull sailed between his line of vision and the water. Then, as if abruptly conscious that Bessie's answer was not what it should have been, he turned, and at the same time boldly swung her body round till they stood facing each other. Bessie met this gaze unblinkingly for a moment, with her face set and sober; then something in John's mystified glance touched her keen sense of humor, and she laughed,—her old, roguish laugh,—and flirted the stupid in the face with the end of her boa.
"You great big egoist!" she smiled. "There, that's the first chance I've had to use that word. I only learned the difference between it and another last week."
"Indeed!" retorted Hampstead. "And when did you learn the difference between me and the other word?"
"Well, I'm not sure that there is a difference," she sparred. "Being polite, I just concede it."
"Oh," he chuckled. "But," and he was serious again, "you say we don't understand each other?"
"Nonsense; I was only joking. I do understand you; you great, big, egoistical egotist! You are just now absolutely self-centered—and all, all ambition! And I am secretly—secretly, you understand—proud of you!"
"And you," said Hampstead, drawing her close again, "are just the truest, most understanding friend a man ever, ever had. You know, Bessie, a fellow can talk to you just like a sister,—a pretty little sister!" he subjoined, when Bessie looked less pleased than he thought she should.
"You've changed a lot, too, in a year," he conceded, studying her face critically. "When you came into the hotel that night, you struck fear into my heart, and then kind of made it flutter. I said to myself, 'She's gone—the old Bessie, that could be played with. But here's a young woman, a handsome young woman, taking her place.'"
"Did you say that?" asked Bessie happily.
"An exceedingly beautiful woman," went on John, as if stimulated by the interruption. "By George, a very corker of a woman—look at those eyes, those lips, those dimples. Same old dimples, girl!" he laughed emotionally. "And I said, 'Now, here's a woman, a ripe, wonderful woman, to be made love to—'"
"John!"
There was in Bessie's sudden exclamation the surcharged sense of all the proprieties which their relationship involved.
"Oh, don't be alarmed," exclaimed Hampstead, suddenly very earnest and respectful. "I am not leading up to anything. I do not misunderstand the nature of your goodness to me. I am not presuming anything. I am only telling you what I said to myself."
"Oh," murmured Bessie noncommittally, though she shivered for a moment as if a gust of wind had come again. Hampstead, feeling this, drew her still closer and hunched his broad shoulder to shelter her more, as he explained further:
"But it was I, you know, and there was nothing for me to do but to fly. I was for jumping out the window. And then you suddenly made that wonderful speech about going to the circus with dear old John, and your mother let it out that you wanted me to run around with you here, and I saw that toward me you were the same old Bessie; that for a few days we could be once more just friendly, only two finer friends, because we're both grown up now."
"Yes," Bessie sighed, almost contentedly. "I did want you, John. A girl gets tired of society, of clubs and dances and things, even in High. You know, I get weary of the sight of these slim, pompadoured boys sometimes. I just wanted somehow to feel the arm of a real man, to hear him talk, even if he does nothing but talk about himself, and until this minute in three days has not confessed that I have dimples, and—and a heart."
"Slow, about some things, am I not?" confessed John. "Awfully, awfully slow!"
"I will agree with you," said Bessie, with a mournfulness that literally compelled him to perceive that she was some way disappointed in him.
"But," he inquired reproachfully, "aside from my usefulness as a social escort and a sort of masculine tonic, you do admire me a little, don't you?"
"Oh, yes," she answered frankly. "I admire you a lot."
"But you're disappointed about something?"
"Apprehension is the better word," she confessed soberly.
"Apprehension? Of what?" John was looking at her almost accusingly. Bessie avoided his glance. She could not tell him what she feared nor why she feared it.
"You think I'll fail?" John demanded.
"No," disclaimed Bessie seriously. "I think you will succeed!"
"You think so?" and Hampstead's face lighted brilliantly. "Oh, God bless you for that!" and again he shook her, this time tenderly and drew her closer till her breast was touching his, and she leaned her head far back to look up into his face.
"Yes," she breathed softly, "I think so!"
"And you do not think me silly for turning my back upon solid realities to follow my ideal?"
"No! No!" and she shook her head emphatically, "I honor you for it, John. You have inspired me, John, and thrilled me. I used to think—how good you are! Now I think—how noble you are! You have made my feeling for you one of worshipfulness almost."
The look in her face did express that, and Hampstead noticed it now.
"Ah," he murmured, pressing her arms against her sides, "you dear, impressionable little girl!"
Quite thoughtless of how unnecessarily close he was drawing Bessie, either to shelter her from the wind or for the purpose of conversation, or especially in the fulfillment of his duty to his charge as guide and protector, John was finding a pleasurable sensation in this position of intimacy, and was indeed, just upon the threshold of one very great discovery when he made another, perhaps equally surprising, but vastly less important. Looking into the upturned eyes, which after the canons of Delsarte, he was thinking expressed "devotion" perfectly, a shadow was seen to project itself downward from the upper lids across the iris, as if a storm were gathering on a placid lake. John watched the shadow curiously as it deepened, until it became clear that a mist was congealing in those swimming violet depths.
"Why, Bessie," he exclaimed, amazed, "you are going to cry!"
On the instant two tears trickled from the dark lashes and gleamed for a moment like solitaire diamonds in the setting of two ruby spots that had gathered unaccountably upon her upturned cheeks.
"You are crying," he charged straightly.
Bessie's expression never changed, but her smooth, round chin nodded a trembling and unabashed assent. A sudden impulse seized John. The position of his arms shifted.
"Bessie!" he murmured feelingly, "I am going to kiss you!"
Bessie did not appear half as surprised at this announcement as Hampstead at himself for making it.
"May I?" he persisted.
The expression of devotion in Bessie's swimming orbs remained unstartled, her pose unaltered. Only her lips moved while she breathed a single word: "Yes."
Instantly their ruby and velvet softness yielded to the pressure of John's, planted as tenderly and chastely as was his thought of her,—for that other discovery that he was on the verge of making had been fended off by the coming of the tear.