The Main Chance Part 16

"Yes," said Captain Wheelock, "I suppose that show last night bored you nearly to death."

"I'm always glad to see these fellows sacrifice themselves for the public good," said Brown. "Wheaton's a martyr now, with a nice pink halo."

"Well, it doesn't go here," said the army officer severely. "We've got to take him down a peg if he gets too gay."

"Why, we've already got one sa.s.siety man in the house," said Caldwell, "and that's hard enough to bear." He referred to Raridan, who was breakfasting in his room.

They were addressing one another, rather than Wheaton, whose presence they affected to ignore.

"I suppose there'll be no holding him now," said Caldwell. "It's like the taste for strong drink, this society business. They never get over it. It's ruined Raridan; he'd be a good fellow if it wasn't for that."

"Humph! you fellows are envious," said Wheaton, with an effort at swagger.

"Oh, I don't know!" said Brown, with rising inflection. "I suppose any of us could do it if we'd put up the money."

"Well," said Wheaton, "if they let you off as cheaply as they did me, you may call it a bargain."

"Oh, he jewed 'em down," persisted Caldwell, explaining to the others, "and he has the cheek to boast of it. I'll see that Margrave hears that."

"Yes, you do that," Wheaton retorted. "Everybody knows that Margrave's an easy mark." This counted as a palpable hit with Brown and Wheelock.

Margrave was notorious for his hard bargains. Wheaton gathered up his papers and went out.

"He takes it pretty well," said Caldwell as they heard the door close after Wheaton. "He ought to make a pretty good fellow in time if he doesn't get stuck on himself."

"Well, I guess Billy Porter'll take him down if he gets too gay,"

exclaimed Brown.

"Porter may leave it to his daughter to do that," said Caldwell, shaking out the match with which he had lighted his cigar, and dropping it into his coffee cup.

"It'll never come to that," returned Brown.

"You never can tell. People were looking wise about it last night," said Captain Wheelock, who was a purveyor of gossip.

"Don't trouble yourself," volunteered Caldwell, who read the society items thoroughly every morning and created a social fabric out of them.

"I guess Warry will have something to say to that."

At the bank Wheaton found that the men who came in to transact business had a knowing nod for him, that implied a common knowledge of matters which it was not necessary to discuss. A good many who came to his desk asked him if he was tired. They referred to the carnival ball as a "push" and said it was "great" with all the emphasis that slang has imparted to these words.

Porter came down early and enveloped himself in a cloud of smoke. This in the bank was the outward and visible sign of a "grouch." When he pressed the b.u.t.ton to call one of the messengers, he pushed it long and hard, so that the boys remarked to one another that the boss had been out late last night and wasn't feeling good.

Porter did not mention the ball to Wheaton in any way, except when he threw over to him a memorandum of the bank's subscription to the fund, remarking: "Send them a check. That's all of that for one year."

Wheaton made no reply, but did as Porter bade him. It was his business to accommodate himself to the president's moods, and he was very successful in doing so. A few of the bank's customers made use of him as a kind of human barometer, telephoning sometimes to ask how the old man was feeling, and whether it was a good time to approach him. He attributed the president's reticence this morning to late hours, and was very careful to answer promptly when Porter spoke to him. He knew that there would be no recognition by Porter of the fact that he had partic.i.p.ated in a public function the night before; he would have to gather the glory of it elsewhere. He thought of Evelyn in moments when his work was not pressing, and wondered whether he could safely ask her father how she stood the night's gaiety. It occurred to him to pay his compliments by telephone; Raridan was always telephoning to girls; but he could not quite put himself in Raridan's place. Warry presumed a good deal, and was younger; he did many things which Wheaton considered undignified, though he envied the younger man's ease in carrying them off.

One of Porter's callers asked how Miss Porter had "stood the racket," as he phrased it.

"Don't ask me," growled Porter. "Didn't show up for breakfast."

William Porter did not often eat salad at midnight, but when he did it punished him.

As Wheaton was opening the afternoon mail he was called to the telephone-box to speak to Mrs. Jordan, a lady whom he had met at the ball. She was inviting a few friends for dinner the next evening to meet some guests who were with her for the carnival. She begged that Mr.

Wheaton would pardon the informality of the invitation and come. He answered that he should be very glad to come; but when he got back to his desk he realized that he had probably made a mistake; the Jordans were socially anomalous, and there was nothing to be gained by cultivating them. However, he consoled himself with the recollection of one of Raridan's social dicta--that a dinner invitation should never be declined unless smallpox existed in the house of the hostess. He swayed between the disposition to consider the Jordans patronizingly and an honest feeling of grat.i.tude for their invitation, as he bent over his desk signing drafts.

He found the Jordans very cordial. He was their star, and they made much of him; he was pleased that they showed him a real deference; when he spoke at the table, the others paused to listen. He knew the other young men slightly; one was a clerk in a railway office, and the other was the a.s.sistant manager of the city's largest dry goods house. The guests were young women from Mrs. Jordan's old home, in Piqua, Ohio.

(Mrs. Jordan always gave the name of the state.) Wheaton realized that these young women were much easier to get on with than Miss Porter and other young women he had known latterly; they were more pointedly interested in pleasing him.

After a few days the carnival seemed to be forgotten; Wheaton's fellows at The Bachelors' stopped joking him about it. Raridan had never referred to it at all. On Sunday the newspapers printed a resume of the social features of the carnival, and Wheaton read the familiar story, and all the other social news in the paper, in bed. He noticed with a twinge an item stating that Mrs. J. Elihu Jordan had entertained at dinner on Thursday evening for the Misses Sweetser, of Piqua, but was relieved to find that neither paper printed the names of the guests. The bachelors were very lazy on Sunday morning, excepting Raridan, who attended what he called "early church." This practice his fellow-lodgers accepted in silence as one of his vagaries. That a man should go to church at seven o'clock and then again at eleven, signified mere eccentricity to Raridan's fellow-boarders, who were not instructed in catholic practices, but divided their own Sunday mornings much more rationally between the barber shop, the post-office and their places of business.

It was a bright morning; the week just ended had been, in a sense, epochal, and Wheaton resolved to go to church. It had been his habit to attend services occasionally, on Sunday evenings, at the People's Church, whose minister frequently found occasion to preach on topics of the day or on literary subjects. Doctor Morningstar was the most popular preacher in Clarkson; the People's Church was filled at all services; on Sunday evenings it was crowded. Doctor Morningstar's series of lectures on the Italian Renaissance, ill.u.s.trated by the stereopticon, and his even more popular course of lectures on the Victorian novelists, had appealed to Wheaton and to many; but the People's Church was not fas.h.i.+onable; he decided to go this morning to St. Paul's, the Episcopal Cathedral. It was the oldest church in town, and many of the first families attended there. All fas.h.i.+onable weddings in Clarkson were held in the cathedral, not because it was popularly supposed to confer a spiritual benefit upon those who were blessed from its altar, but for the more excellent reason that the main aisle of this Gothic edifice gave ample s.p.a.ce for the free sweep of bridal trains, and the chancel lent itself charmingly to the decorative purposes of the florist.

Wheaton found Raridan breakfasting alone, the others of the mess not having appeared. Raridan's good morning was not very cordial; he had worn a gloomy air for several days. Whenever Raridan seemed out of sorts, Caldwell always declared solemnly that Warry had been writing poetry.

"Going to church as usual?" Wheaton asked amiably.

Every Sunday morning some one asked Raridan this question; he supposed Wheaton was attempting to be facetious.

"Yes," he answered patiently; and added, as usual, "better go along."

"Don't care if I do," Wheaton replied, carelessly.

Raridan eyed him in surprise.

"Oh! glad to have you."

They walked toward the cathedral together, Wheaton satisfied that his own hat was as s.h.i.+ny and his frock coat as proper as Raridan's; their gloves were almost of the same shade. There was a stir in the vestibule of the cathedral, which many people in their Sunday finery were entering. Wheaton had never been in an Episcopal church before; it all seemed very strange to him--the rambling music of the voluntary, the unfamiliar scenes depicted on the stained gla.s.s windows, the soft light through which he saw well-dressed people coming to their places, and the scent of flowers and the faint breath of orris from the skirts of women.

The boy choir came in singing a stirring processional that was both challenge and inspiration. It was like witnessing a little drama: the procession, the singing, the flutter of surplices as the choir found their stalls in the dim chancel. Raridan bowed when the processional cross pa.s.sed him. Wheaton observed that no one else did so.

A young clergyman began reading the service, and Wheaton followed it in the prayer book which Raridan handed him with the places marked. He felt ashamed that the people about him should see that the places had to be found for him; he wished to have the appearance of being very much at home. He suddenly caught sight of Evelyn Porter's profile far across the church, and presently her father and their guests were disclosed. He soon discovered others that he knew, with surprise that so many men of unimpeachable position in town were there. Here, then, was a stage of development that he had not reckoned with; surely it was a very respectable thing to go to church,--to this church, at least,--on Sunday mornings. The bewilderment of reading and chanting continued, and he wondered whether there would be a sermon; at Doctor Morningstar's the sermon was the main thing. He remembered Captain Wheelock's joke with Raridan, that "the Episcopal Church had neither politics nor religion;"

but it was at least very aristocratic.

He stood and seated himself many times, bowing his head on the seat in front of him when the others knelt, and now the great figure of Bishop Delafield came from somewhere in the depths of the chancel and rose in the pulpit. The presence of the bishop reminded him unpleasantly of the Porters' sun-porch and of the disgraceful encounter there. The congregation resettled themselves in their places with a rustle of skirts and a rattling of books into the racks. It was not often that the bishop appeared in his cathedral; he was rarely in his see city on Sundays; but whenever he preached men listened to him. Wheaton was relieved to find that there was to be a cessation of the standing up and sitting down which seemed so complicated.

He now found that he could see the Porter pew easily by turning his head slightly. The roses in Evelyn's hat were very pretty; he wondered whether she came every Sunday; he concluded that she did; and he decided that he should attend hereafter. The bishop had carried no ma.n.u.script into the pulpit with him, and he gave his text from memory, resting one arm on the pulpit rail. He was an august figure in his robes, and he seemed to Wheaton, as he looked up at him, to pervade and possess the place. Wheaton had a vague idea of the episcopal office; bishops were, he imagined, persons of considerable social distinction; in his notion of them they ranked with the higher civil lawgivers, and were comparable to military commandants. In a line with the Porters he could see General Whipple's white head--all the conditions of exalted respectability were present.

_And he removed from thence, and digged another well; and for that they strove not: and he called the name of it Rehoboth; and he said, 'For now the Lord hath made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.'_

_For now the Lord hath made room for us._ The preacher sketched lightly the primal scene to which his text related. He knew the color and light of language and made it seem to his hearers that the Asian plain lay almost at the doors of the cathedral. He reconstructed the simple social life of the early times, and followed westward the campfires of the shepherd kings. He built up the modern social and political structure, with the home as its foundation, before the eyes of the congregation. A broad democracy and humanity dominated the discourse as it unfolded itself. The bishop hardly lifted his voice; he did not rant nor make gestures, but he spoke as one having authority. Wheaton turned uneasily and looked furtively about. He had not expected anything so earnest as this; there was a tenseness in the air that oppressed him. What he was hearing from that quiet old man in the pulpit was without the gloss of fas.h.i.+on; it was inconsonant with the spirit of the place as he had conceived it. Doctor Morningstar's discourses on Browning's poetry had been far more entertaining.

_For now the Lord hath made room for us._ The preacher's voice was even quieter as he repeated these words. "We are very near the heart of the world, here at the edge of the great plain. Who of us but feels the freedom, the ampler ether, the diviner air of these new lands? We hear over and over that in the West, men may begin again; that here we may put off our old garments and re-clothe ourselves. We must not too radically adopt this idea. I am not so sanguine that it is an easy matter to be transformed and remade; I am not persuaded that geography enters into heart or mind or soul so that by crossing the older borders into a new land we obliterate old ties. Here we may dig new wells, but we shall thirst often, like David, for a drink of water from the well by the gate of Bethlehem."

Wheaton's mind wandered. It was a pleasure to look about over these well-groomed people; this was what success meant--access to such conditions as these. The fragrance of the violets worn by a girl in the next pew stole over him; it was a far cry to his father's stifling harness shop in the dull little Ohio town. His hand crept to the pin which held his tie in place; he could not give just the touch to an Ascot that Warry Raridan could, but then Warry had practised longer.

The old bishop's voice boomed steadily over the congregation. It caught and held Wheaton's attention once more.

"It is here that G.o.d hath made room for us; but it is not that we may begin life anew. There is no such thing as beginning life anew; we may begin again, but we may not obliterate nor ignore the past. Rather we should turn to it more and more for those teachings of experience which build character. Here on the Western plains the light and heat of cloudless skies beat freely upon us; the soul, too, must yield itself to the sun. The spirit of man was not made for the pit or the garret, but for the open."

Wheaton stirred restlessly, so that Raridan turned his head and looked at him. He had been leaning forward, listening intently, and had suddenly come to himself. He crossed his arms and settled back in his seat. A man in front of him yawned, and he was grateful to him. But again his ear caught an insistent phrase.

"Life would be a simple matter if memory did not carry our yesterdays into our to-days, and if it were as easy as Cain thought it was to cast aside the past. A man must deal with evil openly and bravely. He must turn upon himself with reproof the moment he finds that he has been trampling conscience under his feet. An artisan may slight work in a dark corner of a house, thinking that it is hidden forever; but I say to you that we are all builders in the house of life, and that there are no dark corners where we may safely practise deceit or slight the task G.o.d a.s.signs us. I would leave a word of courage and hope with you.

Christianity is a militant religion; it strengthens those who stand forth bravely on the battle line, it comforts and helps the weak-hearted, and it lifts up those who fall. I pray that G.o.d may freshen and renew courage in us--courage not as against the world, but courage to deal honestly and fairly and openly with ourselves."