The Main Chance Part 17

The organ was throbbing again; the ma.s.sive figure had gone from the pulpit; the people were stirring in their seats. The young minister who had read the service repeated the offertory sentences, and the voice of a boy soprano stole tremulously over the congregation. Raridan had left the pew and was pa.s.sing the plate. The tinkle of coin rea.s.sured Wheaton; the return to mundane things brought him relief and restored his confidence. His spirit grew tranquil as he looked about him. The pleasant and graceful things of life were visible again.

The voice of the bishop rose finally in benediction. The choir marched out to a hymn of victory; people were talking as they moved through the aisles to the doors. The organ pealed gaily now; there was light and cheer in the world after all. At the door Wheaton became separated from Raridan, and as he stood waiting at the steps Evelyn and her friends detached themselves from the throng on the sidewalk and got into their carriage. Mr. Porter, snugly b.u.t.toned in his frock coat, and with his silk hat tipped back from his forehead, stood in the doorway talking to General Whipple, who was, as usual in crowds, lost from the more agile comrade of his marches many. Wheaton hastened down to the Porter carriage, where the smiles and good mornings of the occupants gave him further benediction. Evelyn and Miss Warren were nearest him; as he stood talking to them, Belle Marshall espied Raridan across his shoulders.

"Oh, there's Mr. Raridan!" she cried, but when Wheaton stood aside, Raridan had already disappeared around the carriage and had come into view at the opposite window with a general salutation, which included them all, but Miss Marshall more particularly.

"I'm sure that sermon will do you good, Mr. Raridan," the Virginia girl drawled. She was one of those young women who flatter men by a.s.suming that they are very depraved. Even impeccable youngsters are susceptible to this harmless form of cajolery.

"Oh, I'm always good. Miss Porter can tell you that."

"Don't take my name in vain," said Evelyn, covertly looking at him, but turning again to Wheaton.

"You see your witness has failed you. Going to church isn't all of being good."

Wheaton and Evelyn were holding a lively conversation. Evelyn's animation was for his benefit, Raridan knew, and it enraged him. He had been ready for peace, but Evelyn had snubbed him. He was, moreover, standing in the mud in his patent leather shoes while another man chatted with her in greater dignity from the curb. His chaff with Miss Marshall lacked its usual teasing quality; he was glad when Mr. Porter came and took his place in the carriage.

Raridan had little to say as he and Wheaton walked homeward together, though Wheaton felt in duty bound to express his pleasure in the music and, a little less heartily, in the sermon. Raridan's mind was on something else, and Wheaton turned inward to his own thoughts. He was complacent in his own virtue; he had made the most of the talents G.o.d had given him, and in his Sunday evening lectures Doctor Morningstar had laid great stress on this; it was the doctor's idea of the preaching office to make life appear easy, and he filled his church twice every Sunday with people who were glad to see it that way. As Wheaton walked beside Raridan he thought of the venerable figure that had leaned out over the congregation of St. Paul's that morning, and appealed in his own mind from Bishop Delafield to Doctor Morningstar, and felt that the bishop was overruled. As he understood Doctor Morningstar's preaching it dealt chiefly with what the doctor called ideality, and this, as near as Wheaton could make out, was derived from Ruskin, Emerson and Carlyle, who were the doctor's favorite authors. The impression which remained with him of the morning at St. Paul's was not of the rugged old bishop's sermon, which he had already dismissed, but of the novel exercises in the chancel, the faint breath of perfumes that were to him the true odor of sanct.i.ty, and what he would have called, if he had defined it, the high-toned atmosphere of the place. The bishop was only an occasional visitor in the cathedral; he was old-fas.h.i.+oned and a crank; but no doubt the regular minister of the congregation preached a cheerfuller idea of life than his bishop, and more of that amiable conduct which is, as Doctor Morningstar was forever quoting from a man named Arnold, three-fourths of life.

When Wheaton reached his room he found an envelope lying on his table, much soiled, and addressed, in an unformed hand, to himself. It contained a dirty sc.r.a.p of paper bearing these words:

"Jim: I'll be at the Occidental Hotel tonight at 8 o'clock. Don't fail to come.

BILLY."

CHAPTER XIII

BARGAIN AND SALE

That is a disastrous moment in the history of any man in which he concludes that the problems of life are easy of solution. Life has been likened by teachers of ethics to a great school, but the comparison is not wholly apt. As an educational system, life is decidedly not up to date; the curriculum lacks flexibility, and the list of easy electives and "snap" courses is discouragingly brief. A reputable poet holds that "life is a game the soul can play"; but the game, it should be remembered, is not always so easy as it looks. It could hardly be said that James Wheaton made the most of all his opportunities, or that he had mastered circ.u.mstances, although his biography as printed in the daily press on the occasion of his succession to the mock throne of the Knights of Midas gave this impression with a fine color of truth, and with no purpose to deceive.

The West makes much of its self-made men, and points to them with pride, whenever the self-making includes material gain. The G.o.d Success is enthroned on a new Olympus, and all are slaves to him; and when public teachers thunder at him, his humblest subjects smile at one another, and say that it is, no doubt, well enough to be reminded of such things occasionally, but that, after all, nothing succeeds like success. Life is a series of hazards, and we are all looking for the main chance.

James Wheaton's code of morals was very simple. Honesty he knew to be the best policy; he had learned this in his harsh youth, but he had no instinct for the subtler distinctions in matters of conduct. Behind gla.s.s and wire barricades in the bank where he had spent so many of his thirty-five years, he had known little real contact with men. He knew the pains and penalties of overdrafts; and life resolved itself into a formal kind of accountancy where the chief thing was to maintain credit balances. His transfer from a clerical to an official position had widened his horizon without giving him the charts with which to sail new seas. Life had never resolved itself into capital letters in his meditations; he never indulged in serious speculation about it. It was hardly even a game for the soul to play with him; if he had been capable of a.n.a.lyzing his own feelings about it he would have likened it to a mechanical novelty, whose printed instructions are confusingly obscure, but with a little fumbling you find the spring, and presto! the wheels turn and all is very simple.

He tore up the note with irritation and threw it into the waste paper basket. He called the Chinese servant, who explained that a boy had left it in the course of the morning and had said nothing about an answer.

The Bachelors' did not usually muster a full table at Sunday dinner. All Clarkson dined at noon on Sunday, and most of the bachelors were fortunate enough to be asked out. Wheaton was not frequently a diner out by reason of his more slender acquaintance; and to-day all were present, including Raridan, the most fickle of all in his attendance. It had pleased Wheaton to find that the others had been setting him apart more and more with Raridan for the daily discipline they dealt one another. They liked to poke fun at Raridan on the score of what they called his mad social whirl; there was no resentment about it; they were themselves of sterner stuff and had no patience with Raridan's frivolities; and they were within the fact when they a.s.sumed that, if they wished, they could go anywhere that he did. It touched Wheaton's vanity to find himself a joint target with Raridan for the arrows which the other bachelors fired at folly.

The table cheer opened to-day with a debate between Caldwell and Captain Wheelock as to the annual cost to Raridan of the carnation which he habitually wore in his coat. This, in the usual manner of their froth, was treated indirectly; the aim was to continue the cross-firing until the victim was goaded into a scornful rejoinder. Raridan usually evened matters before he finished with them; but he affected not to be listening to them now.

"I was reading an article in the Contemporary Review the other day that set me to thinking," he said casually to Wheaton. "It was an effort to answer the old question, 'Is stupidity a sin?' You may not recall that a learned Christian writer--I am not sure but that it was Saint Francis de Sales,--holds that stupidity is a sin."

The others had stopped, baffled in their debate over the carnation and were listening to Raridan. They never knew how much amus.e.m.e.nt he got out of them; they attributed great learning to him and were never sure when he began in this way whether he was speaking in an exalted spiritual mood and from fullness of knowledge, or was merely preparing a pitfall for them.

Warry continued:

"But while this dictum is very generally accepted among learned theologians, it has nevertheless led to many amusing discussions among men of deep learning and piety who have striven to define and a.n.a.lyze stupidity. It is, however, safe to accept as the consensus of their opinions these conclusions." He made his own salad dressing, and paused now with the oil cruet in his hand while he continued to address himself solely to Wheaton: "Primarily, stupidity is inevitable; in the second place it is an offense not only to Deity but to man; and thirdly, being incurable, as"--nodding first toward Wheelock and then toward Caldwell--"we have daily, even hourly testimony, man is helpless and cannot prevail against it."

"Now will you be good?" demanded Wheaton gleefully. He had an air of having connived at Raridan's fling at them.

"Oh, I don't think!" sneered Caldwell. "Don't you get gay! You're not in this."

"In the name of the saints, Caldwell, do give us a little peace," begged Raridan.

Wheelock turned his attention to the Chinaman who was serving them, and abused him, and Wheaton sought to make talk with Raridan, to emphasize their isolation and superiority to the others.

"That's good music they have at the cathedral," he said.

Brown now took the scent.

"Did you hear that, Wheelock? Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned. See here, Wheaton, where are you at anyhow? We've been looking on you as one of the sinners of this house, but if you've joined Raridan's church, I see our finish."

"Don't worry about your finish, Brown. It'll be a scorcher all right,"

said Raridan, "and while you wait your turn you might pa.s.s the salt."

There was no common room at The Bachelors', and the men did not meet except at the table. They loafed in their rooms, and rarely visited one another. Raridan was the most social among them and lounged in on one or the other in his easy fas.h.i.+on. They in turn sought him out to deride him, or to poke among his effects and to ask him why he never had any interesting books. The books that he was always buying--minor poems and minor essays, did not tempt them. The presence of _L'Ill.u.s.trazione Italiana_ on his table from week to week amused them; they liked to look at the pictures and they had once gone forth in a body to the peanut vender at the next corner, to witness a test of Raridan's Italian, about which they were skeptical. The stormy interview that followed between Raridan and the Sicilian had been immensely entertaining and had proved that Raridan could really buy peanuts in a foreign tongue, though the fine points which he tried to explain to the bachelors touching the differences in Italian dialects did not interest them. Warry himself was interested in Italian dialects for that winter only.

Wheaton went to his room and made himself comfortable. He re-read the Sunday papers through all their supplements, dwelling again on the events of the carnival. He had saved all the other papers that contained carnival news, and now brought them out and cut from them all references to himself. He resolved to open a kind of social sc.r.a.p book in which to preserve a record of his social doings. The joint portraits of the king and queen of the carnival had not been very good; the picture of Evelyn Porter was a caricature. In Raridan's room he had seen a photograph of Evelyn as a child; it was very pretty, and Wheaton, too, remembered her from the days in which she wore her hair down her back and waited in the carriage at the front door of the bank for her father. She had lived in a world far removed from him then; but now the chasm had been bridged.

He had heard it said in the last year that Evelyn and Warry were undoubtedly fated to marry; but others hinted darkly that some Eastern man would presently appear on the scene.

All this gossip Wheaton turned over in his mind, as he lay on his divan, with the cuttings from the Clarkson papers in his hands. He remembered a complaint often heard in Clarkson that there were no eligible men there; he was not sure just what const.i.tuted eligibility, but as he reviewed the men that went about he could not see that they possessed any advantages over himself. It occurred to him for the first time that he was the only unmarried bank cas.h.i.+er in town; and this in itself conferred a distinction. He was not so secure in his place as he should like to be; if Thompson died there would undoubtedly be a reorganization of the bank and the few shares that Porter had sold to him would not hold the cas.h.i.+ers.h.i.+p for him. It might be that Porter's plan was to keep him in the place until Grant grew up. Again, he reflected, the man who married Evelyn Porter would become an element to reckon with; and yet if he were to be that man--

He slept and dreamed that he was king of a great realm and that Evelyn Porter reigned with him as queen; then he awoke with a start to find that it was late. He sat up on the couch and gathered together the newspaper cuttings which had fallen about him. He remembered the imperative summons which had been left for him during the morning; it was already six o'clock. Before going out he changed his clothes to a rough business suit and took a car that bore him rapidly through the business district and beyond, into the older part of Clarkson. The locality was very shabby, and when he left the car presently it was to continue his journey in an ill-lighted street over board walks which yielded a precarious footing. The Occidental Hotel was in the old part of town, and had long ago ceased to be what it had once been, the first hostelry of Clarkson. It had descended to the level of a cheap boarding house, little patronized except by the rougher element of cattlemen and by railroad crews that found it convenient to the yards. Over the door a dim light blinked, and this, it was understood in the neighborhood, meant not merely an invitation to bed and board but also to the Occidental bar, which was accessible at all hours of the day and night, and was open through all the spasms of virtue with which the city administration was seized from time to time. The door stood open and Wheaton stepped up to the counter on which a boy sat playing with a cat.

"Is William Snyder stopping here?" he asked.

The boy looked up lazily from his play.

"Are you the gent he's expecting?"

"Very likely. Is he in?"

"Yes, he's number eighteen." He dropped the cat and led Wheaton down a dark hall which was stale with the odors of cooked vegetables, up a steep flight of stairs to a landing from which he pointed to an oblong of light above a door.

"There you are," said the boy. He kicked the door and retreated down the stairs, leaving Wheaton to obey the summons to enter which was bawled from within.

William Snyder unfolded his long figure and rose to greet his visitor.

"Well, Jim," he said, putting out his hand. "I hope you're feelin' out of sight." Wheaton took his hand and said good evening. He threw open his coat and put down his hat.

"A little fresh air wouldn't hurt you any," he said, tipping himself back in his chair.

"Well, I guess your own freshness will make up for it," said Snyder.