The Law-Breakers and Other Stories Part 7

Harrington read aloud: "'Look at that man; he is taking notes. Oh, he will describe them in his newspaper as a leading society girl and a well-known club man, and they will turn in their graves. If you love me, stop it.'"

There was a brief pause. The reporter pondered, visibly chagrined and disappointed. The silence was broken by Dryden. "Do you not understand?" he inquired.

"Frankly, I do not altogether. I--I thought they'd like it."

"Of course you did, my dear fellow; there's the ghastly humor of it; the dire tragedy, rather." As he spoke he struck his closed hand gently but firmly on the table, and regarded the reporter with the compressed lips of one who is about to vent a long pent-up grievance.

"He was in four clubs; I looked him up," Harrington still protested in dazed condition.

"And they seemed to you his chief t.i.tle to distinction? You thought they did him honor? He would have writhed in his grave, as Miss Mayberry said. Like it? When the cheap jack or the social climber dies, he may like it, but not the gentleman or lady. Leading society girl? Why, every shop-girl who commits suicide is immortalized in the daily press as 'a leading society girl,' and every deceased Tom, d.i.c.k, or Harry has become a 'well-known club man.' It has added a new terror to death. Thank G.o.d, my friends will be spared!"

Harrington felt of his chin. "You object to the promiscuity of it, so to speak. It's because everybody is included?"

"No, man, to the fundamental indignity of it. To the baseness of the metal which the press glories in using for a social crown."

Harrington drew himself up a little. "If the press does it, it's because most people like it and regard it as a tribute."

"Ah! But my friends do not. You spoke just now of your point of view.

This is ours. Think it over, Mr. Harrington, and you will realize that there is something in it." He sat back in his chair with the air of a man who has pulled victory out of the jaws of defeat and is well content.

Harrington meditated a moment. "However that be, one thing is certain--it has got to come out. It will come out. You may rest a.s.sured of that, Mr. Dryden." So saying he reached for his note-book and proceeded to run a pencil through the abnoxious paragraph.

"You have won your bet and--and the young lady, too, Sir Knight, I trust. You seem to have found your niche." Which goes to prove that the reporter was a magnanimous fellow at heart.

Dryden forbore to commit himself as to the condition of his hopes as he thanked his late adversary for this expression of good-will. Ten minutes later they were sitting in the rehabilitated motor-car and speeding rapidly toward New York. When they reached the city Dryden insisted on leaving the reporter at his doorsteps, a courtesy which went straight to Harrington's heart, for, as he expected would be the case, his wife and son Tesla were looking out of the window at the moment of his arrival and saw him dash up to the curbstone. His st.u.r.dy urchin ran out forthwith to inspect the mysteries of the huge machine.

As it vanished down the street Harrington put an arm round Tesla and went to meet the wife of his bosom.

"Who is your new friend, Paul?" she asked.

It rose to Harrington's lips to say--an hour before he would have said confidently--"a well-known club man"; but he swallowed the phrase before it was uttered and answered thoughtfully:

"It was one of the funeral guests, who gave me a lift in his motor, and has taught me a thing or two about modern journalism on the way up. I got stung."

"I thought you knew everything there is to know about that," remarked Mrs. Harrington with the fidelity of a true spouse.

To this her husband at the moment made no response. When, six months later, however, he received an invitation to the wedding of Walter Dryden and Miss Florence Mayberry, he remarked in her presence, as he sharpened his pencil for the occasion: "Those swells have trusted me to write it up after all."

THE ROMANCE OF A SOUL

When Marion Willis became a schoolmistress in the Glendale public school at twenty-two she regarded her employment as a transient occupation, to be terminated presently by marriage. She possessed an imaginative temperament, and one of her favorite and most satisfying habits was to evoke from the realm of the future a proper hero, s.h.i.+ning with zeal and virtue like Sir Galahad, in whose arms she would picture herself living happily ever after a sweet courts.h.i.+p, punctuated by due maidenly hesitation. This fondness for letting her fancy run riot and evolve visions splendid with happenings for her own advancement and gladness was not confined to matrimonial day-dreams.

On the morning when she entered the school-house door for the first time the eyes of her mind saw the curtain which veils the years divide, and she beheld herself a famous educator, still young, but long since graduated from primary teaching. She forgot the vision of her Sir Galahad there. Nor were the circ.u.mstances of her several day-dreams necessarily consistent in other respects. It sufficed for her spiritual exaltation that they should be merely a fairy-like manifestation in her own favor. But though she loved to give her imagination rein, the fairy-like quality of these visions was patent to Miss Willis, for she possessed a quiet sense of humor as a sort of east-wind supplementary to the sentimental and poetic properties of her nature. She had a way of poking fun at herself, which, when exercised, sent the elfin figures scattering with a celerity suggestive of the departure of her own pupils at the tinkle of the bell for dismissal. Then she was left alone with her humor and her New England conscience, that stern adjuster of real values and enemy of spiritual dissipation. This same conscience was a vigilant monitor in the matter of her school-teaching, despite Miss Willis's reasonable hope that Sir Galahad would claim her soon. The hope would have been reasonable in the case of any one of her s.e.x, for every woman is said to be given at least one opportunity to become a wife; but in the case of Miss Willis nature had been more than commonly bounteous. She was not a beauty, but she was sweet and fresh-looking, with clear, honest eyes, and a cheery, gracious manner such as is apt to captivate discerning men. She was one of those wholesome spirits, earnest and refined, yet p.r.o.ne to laughter, which do not remain long unmated in the ordinary course of human experience. But her conscience did not permit her to dwell on this advantage to the detriment of her scholars.

Miss Willis lived at home with her mother. They owned their small house. The other expenses were defrayed from the daughter's salary; hence strict economy was obligatory, and the expenditure of every five-dollar bill was a matter of moment. Miss Willis's father had died when she was a baby. The meagre sum of money which he left had sufficed to keep his widow and only child from want until Marion's majority. All had been spent except the house; but, as Miss Willis now proudly reflected, she had become a breadwinner, and her mother's declining years were s.h.i.+elded from poverty. They would be able to manage famously until Sir Galahad arrived, and when he came one of the joys of her surrender would be that her mother's old age would be brightened by a few luxuries.

Glendale, as its name denotes, had been a rustic village. When Miss Willis was engaged (to teach school, not to be married) it was a thriving, bustling, overgrown, manufacturing town already yearning to become a city. By the end of another five years Glendale had realized its ambition, and Miss Willis was still a teacher in its crowded grammar-school. How the years creep, yet how they fly, when one is busy with regular, routine employment! The days are such a repet.i.tion of each other that they sometimes seem very long, but when one pauses and looks back one starts at the acc.u.mulation of departed time, and deplores the swiftness of the seasons.

Five years had but slightly dimmed the freshness of Miss Willis's charms. She was as comely as ever. She was a trifle stouter, a trifle less girlish in manner, and only a trifle--what shall we call it?--wilted in appearance. The close atmosphere of a school-room is not conducive to rosiness of complexion; and the constant strain of guiding over forty immature minds in the paths of knowledge will weigh upon the flesh, though the soul be patient and the heart light. Miss Willis's cla.s.s comprised the children whose average age was twelve to thirteen--those who had been in the school three years. There were both boys and girls, and they remained with her a year. She had begun with the youngest children, but promotion had presently established her in this position.

Forty immature minds--minds just groping on the threshold of life--to be watched, shaped, and helped for ten months, and their individual needs treated with sympathy and patience. For ten months--the school term,--then to be exchanged for a new batch, and so from year to year.

Glendale's manufacturing population included several nationalities, so that the little army of scholars which sat under Miss Willis's eye included Poles, Italians, negroes, and now and then a youthful Chinaman, as well as the sons and daughters of the merchant, the tailor, the butcher, and baker, and other citizens whose t.i.tle as Americans was of older date. It was not easy to keep the atmosphere of such a school-room wholesome, for the apparel of the poorest children, though often well darned, was not always clean, and the ventilating apparatus represented a political job. But it was Miss Willis's pride that she knew the ident.i.ty of every one of her boys and girls, and carried it by force of love and will written on her brain as well as on the desk-tablets which she kept as a safeguard against possible lapses of memory. She loved her cla.s.ses, and it was a grief to her at first to be obliged to pa.s.s them on at the end of the school year. But habit reconciles us to the inevitable, and she presently learned to steel her heart against a too sensitive point of view in this respect, and to supplement the bleeding ties thus rudely severed with a fresh set without crying her eyes out. Yet though faithful teachers are thus schooled to forget, they rarely do, and Miss Willis found herself keeping track, in her mind's eye, of her little favorites--some of them youthful reprobates--in their progress up the ladder of knowledge and out into the world.

But what of Sir Galahad? He had dallied, but about this time--the sixth year of her life as a teacher--he appeared. Not as she had imagined him--a lover of great personal distinction, amazing talents, compelling virtues, and large estates; yet, nevertheless, a presentable being in trousers, whose devotion touched her maidenly heart until it reciprocated the pa.s.sion which his lips expressed. He was a young bookkeeper in a banker's office, with a taste for literary matters and a respectable gift for private theatricals. A small social club was the medium by which they became intimate. Sir Galahad was refined in appearance and bearing, a trifle too delicate for perfect manliness, yet, as Miss Willis's mother justly observed, a gentle soul to live with. He had a taste for poetry, and a sentimental vein which manifested itself in verses of a Wordsworthian simplicity descriptive of his lady-love's charms. No wonder Marion fell in love with him, and renounced, without even a sigh of regret, her vision of a husband with lordly means. Sir Galahad had only his small means, which were not enough for a matrimonial venture. They would wait in the hope that some opportunity for preferment would present itself. So for three years--years when she was in the heyday of her comeliness--they attended the social club as an engaged couple, and fed their mutual pa.s.sion on the poets and occasional chaste embraces. Marion felt sure that something would happen before long to redeem the situation and establish her Sir Galahad in the seat to which his merit ent.i.tled him.

Her favorite vision was of some providential catastrophe, even an epidemic or wholesale maiming, by which the partners of the banking-house and all in authority over her lover should be temporarily incapacitated, and the entire burden of the business be thrown on his shoulders long enough to demonstrate his true worth. As a sequel she beheld him promptly admitted to partners.h.i.+p and herself blissfully married.

The course of events did not respect her vision. After they had been engaged nearly four years Sir Galahad came to the conclusion one day that the only hope of establis.h.i.+ng himself in business on his own account was (to repeat his own metaphor) to seize the bull by the horns and go West. Marion bravely and enthusiastically seconded his resolution, and fired his spirit by her own prophecy as to his rapid success. Western real estate for Eastern investors was the line of business to which Sir Galahad decided to fasten his hopes. He set forth upon his crusade protesting that within a twelvemonth he would win a home for Marion and her mother in the fas.h.i.+onable quarter of St.

Paul, Minn., and carrying in his valise a toilet-case tastefully embroidered by his sweetheart, in a corner of which were emblazoned two hearts beating as one.

Marion returned to her scholars more than ever convinced that her employment was but a transient occupation. What followed was this: Sir Galahad put out his sign as a broker in Western real estate for Eastern investors, and fifteen months slipped away before he earned more than his bare living expenses. He had carried with him his poetic tastes and his gift for private theatricals. The first of these he exercised in his fond letters home; the second he employed for the entertainment of the social club in St. Paul, to which he presently obtained admittance. By the end of the second year he was doing better financially, but his letters to Marion had become less frequent and less frank in regard to his own circ.u.mstances and doings. There came a letter at last from Sir Galahad--a letter of eight pages of soul stress and sorrow, as he would have called it, and of disingenuous wriggling, as the world would call it--in which he explained as delicately as was possible under the circ.u.mstances that his love for Miss Willis had become the love of a brother for a sister, and that he was engaged to be married to Miss Virginia Crumb, the only daughter of Hon. Cephas I. Crumb, owner and treasurer of the Astarte Metal Works, of Minnesota. Exit Sir Galahad! And following his perfidy Marion's imagination evoked a vision of revenge in which she figured as the plaintiff in a breach-of-promise suit, and had the fierce yet melancholy joy of confronting him and his new love face to face before a sympathizing judge and jury. But her New England conscience and her sense of humor combined disposed of this vision in a summary fas.h.i.+on, so that she let Sir Galahad off with the a.s.surance that it was a happiness to her that he had discovered how little he cared before it was too late. Then her New England conscience bade her settle down to her teaching with a grim courage, and be thankful that she had never been unfaithful to her work. Also her sense of humor told her that she must not a.s.sume all men to be false because Sir Galahad had been. It was then, when she needed him sorely, that destiny introduced on the scene Jimmy.

Jimmy was no Sir Galahad. He was a chunky, round-faced school-boy with brown hair, which, when it had not been cut for a month, blossomed into close, curly tangles. At first sight Jimmy was dull-eyed, and in the cla.s.s his mental processes were so slow that he had already acquired among his mates the reputation of being stupid. The teacher who had taught him last confided to Miss Willis that she feared Jimmy was hopeless. Hopeless! Somehow the word went to Marion's heart. Not that she was hopeless; far from it, she would have told you. But her sense of humor did not conceal from her that in spite of her grin-and-bear-it mien, she was far from happy. At any rate, the suggestion that Jimmy was hopeless awoke a sympathetic chord in her breast, so that she looked at him more tenderly on the day after she had been told. Jimmy was slow of speech and rather dirty as to his face. There were warts on his hands, and his sphinx-like countenance was impa.s.sive almost to the point of stolidity. Somehow, though, Miss Willis said to herself, in her zeal to characterize him fairly, the little thirteen-year-old product of democracy (Jimmy was the son of a carpenter and a grocer's daughter) suggested power; suggested it as a block of granite or a bull-dog suggests it. His compact, st.u.r.dy frame and well-poised head, with its close, brown curls, seemed a protest in themselves against hopelessness. On the third day he smiled; it was in recess that she detected him at it. An organ-grinder's monkey in the school-yard called it forth, a sweet, glad smile, which lit up his dense features as the sun at twilight will pierce through and illuminate for a few minutes a sullen cloud-bank. Miss Willis saw in a vision on the spot a refuge from hopelessness. Behind that smile there must be a winsome soul. That spiritless expression was but a veil or rind hiding the germs of sensibility and reason. This was discovery number one. After it came darkness again, so far as outward manifestation was concerned. Jimmy's att.i.tude toward his lessons appeared to be one of utter density. He listened with blank but slightly lowered eyes. When questioned he generally gurgled inarticulately, as though seeking a response, then broke down.

Occasionally he essayed an answer, which revealed that he had understood nothing. Oftener he sought refuge in complete silence. But hope had been stimulated in Miss Willis's breast, and she relaxed neither scrutiny nor tenderness. One day matters were brought to a head by the thoughtless jest of a cla.s.smate, a flaxen-haired fairy, who, in the recess following one of Jimmy's least successful gurgles, crept up behind him and planted upon his curls a brown-paper cap, across which the little witch had painted "DUNCE" in large capital letters.

Jimmy did not know what had happened. For a moment he thought, perhaps, that he had been introduced to some new game. But the jeers of the children checked the rising smile and led him to pluck at his forehead. As he gazed at the fool's-cap in his hand a roar of merciless laughter greeted his discovery. Miss Willis had realized the fairy's deed too late to prevent the catastrophe. The sharp tap of her ruler on the desk produced a silence interjected with giggles. The fairy was a successful scholar, and would not have harmed a fly willingly. It was a case of fun--the rough expression of an indisputable fact. Jimmy was such a dunce that he ought really to wear the brand as a notice to the world. What Miss Willis said by way of reproof to the fairy is immaterial. If Jimmy heard it he gave no sign.

He dropped his head upon his desk and was sobbing audibly. The bewildered children hearkened to the protest against cruelty with that elfin look which mischievous youth dares a.s.sume, while the culprit stood with a finger in her mouth, not quite understanding the enormity of her conduct. In a moment more they were in the school-yard, and Miss Willis was beside Jimmy's desk patting his tangled head. He wept as though his heart would break.

"No matter, Jimmy; it was only a thoughtless jest. She didn't mean to hurt your feelings."

Her words and variations on the same theme called forth successive bursts of sobs. Only silence diminished their intensity. When at last they had become only quiverings of his shoulders he looked up and said, with a wail of fierce despair, but with a grasp upon self which was a fresh revelation:

"It's true; it's true! She did it because I'm so stupid!"

Thereupon his shoulders shook again convulsively, and he burst into fresh grief.

Marion's arms were about him in an instant. "Jimmy, Jimmy, it is not true! You are not stupid! You and I will fight it out together! Will you trust me, Jimmy?"

He sobbed, but she could perceive that he was listening. Had her hope become his? Surely they were words he had never heard before.

"Jimmy, listen to me. I have found out something, and all owing to that ridiculous dunce-cap. It is I who have been stupid. I never knew until now how much you wish to learn and to improve. You are not stupid, Jimmy. I am sure of it. You are slow, but you and I will put our heads together and make the best of that. Will you try with me, Jimmy?"

The curly head was raised again. His tear-stained eyes looked out at her shyly, but with a beam of astonished grat.i.tude. From his quivering lips fell a low but resolute "Yes, ma'am!"

"We will begin to-day. We need each other, Jimmy."

As a work of art grows slowly from confusion and lack of form to coherence and symmetry to the moral joy of its maker, so her experience in human plastic enterprise filled the heart of Miss Willis with a vital happiness. For two years--day in and day out--she never flagged in her task of giving sight to the eyes and ears to the mind of the unshaped clay which fate had put into her hands for making or marring. How patient she had to be! How ingenious, vigilant, and sympathetic! Through working upon the souls of Jimmy's father and mother by pathetic appeal she obtained permission to keep him an hour after school each day and drill him step by step, inch by inch. She brought her midday meal and shared it with him. In the evening she framed cunning devices to lure his budding intelligence. And from the very first she beheld her figure of human ignorance respond to her gentle moulding. Jimmy's soul was first of all a hot-spring of ambition; the evidences of which, when once recognized, were ever paramount. But how blocked and intricate were the pa.s.sages through which this yearning for fame sought to express itself! Sometimes it seemed even to her as though she would never dissipate the fog-bank which tortured his intelligence. But Jimmy was patient, too, and his bull-dog features were but the reflex of a grim tenacity of purpose.

At the end of the first year she reported that he was unfit to be promoted, in order that she need not lose him just when he needed her most. She was able to make clear to Jimmy that this was not a disgrace, but a sign of progress. But when the end of the second year came she pa.s.sed him on with only the qualm of love parting with its own. Her task was done. The dull, clouded brow was clear with the light of eager reason; the still struggling faculties had begun to understand that in slowness there was the compensation of power, and were resolute with hope.

"Good-by, Miss Willis. I'm going to be at the head of my cla.s.s next year; see if I'm not!"

So said Jimmy as he left her. She hesitated a moment, then stooped and kissed him. It made her blush, for she had never kissed a pupil before, nor any one but her mother since Sir Galahad. It made Jimmy blush, too, for he did not know exactly what to make of it. So they parted, and Jimmy went up the ladder of knowledge for two years more at that school. He was not the head of his cla.s.s; he was number five the first year and number three the second. When he graduated he promised to write; but, boylike, he never did, so he vanished into the open polar world, and was lost to the eyes of the woman who had grown gray in his service.

Yes, Miss Willis had grown gray. That is, there were more or less becoming threads of silver in her maiden tresses, and the dignity of middle age had added inches to her waist and a few interesting lines to her forehead. There was no new Sir Galahad on the horizon even of her day-dreams, and her mother was in failing health. Mrs. Willis continued now to fail for five years--years which taxed her daughter's strength, though not her affection. Pupils came and went--pupils to whom she gave herself with the faithfulness of her New England conscience--but no one exactly like Jimmy. He remained unique, yet lost in the maze of life. When her mother died she settled down as an incorrigible old maid, and her daydreams knew no more the vision of a love coming from the clouds to possess her. Nor did the years bring with them realization of that other vision--herself enthroned in the public mind as a wonderful educator to whom the world should bow. She was only Miss Marion Willis, the next to the oldest and the most respected teacher of the Glendale grammar-school. So she found herself at the end of twenty-five years of continuous service. It did occur to her as a delightful possibility that the authorities or scholars or somebody would observe this quarter-centennial anniversary in a suitable manner, and a vision danced before her mind's eye of a surprise-party bearing a pretty piece of silver or a clock as a memorial of her life-work. But the date came and pa.s.sed without comment from any source, and Marion's sense of humor made the best of it by drinking her own health on the evening of the day in question, and congratulating herself that she loved her work and was happy. At that supper there was no guest save Jimmy's tintype, which she fetched from the mantelpiece and leaned against the cake-basket on the table.

Jimmy stood now not only for himself, but for a little army of struggling souls upon whom her patient intelligence had been freely lavished.

Of course, Jimmy was found. Miss Willis had always felt sure that he would be. But ten years more had slipped away before he was brought to light. One day she discovered his name in the newspaper as a rising political constellation, and she was convinced, without the least particle of evidence to support her credulity, that the James in question was her Jimmy. His name had suddenly become prominent in the political firmament on account of his resolute conduct as the mayor of a Western city. The public had been impressed by his strength and pluck and executive ability, working successfully against a gang of munic.i.p.al cutthroats, and his name was being paraded over the country.