Back Aa

Empty Sack

<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2> That Bob Collingham was at ease in his conscience as to sailing to South America and leaving behind him an unacknowledged wife will hardly be supposed; but the true situation did not present itself to him till after he and Jennie had said their good-bys. He had tried to see her again on the following day to take counsel as to the immediate publication of their marriage, and only her refusal to meet him had frustrated that intention. But the more he pondered the more the thing he had done seemed little to his credit. On the morning of the day on which he sailed, he rose with the resolve to tell the whole truth to his father. Had he known the facts, that Jennie had actually been to Collingham Lodge, that his mother knew of the marriage, that his father, without knowing of the marriage, was aware of his infatuation, he would have made a clean breast of it. But the habit of domestic life being strong, it seemed impossible to spring the confession in the middle of a peaceful breakfast. His mother had come down to the table for this parting meal and was already half in tears; his father concealed a genuine emotion behind the morning paper; Edith said she wondered what would happen to them all before they met again. The possibilities evoked were so significant that the mother said, sharply: "I hope it may be God's will that we shall meet exactly as we are—a united family." "We could still be a united family," Edith ventured, "and not meet exactly as we are." "Edith—please!" her mother had begged, and Bob felt it out of the question to add to her distress. Edith having driven to the dock with his father and himself, there was only the slightest opportunity for a private word between the father and the son. That came at a minute when Edith was talking to Mr. and Mrs. Huntley on the deck of the Demerara. "Dad," Bob asked, awkwardly and abruptly, "do you feel quite at ease in your mind as to old man Follett?" Passengers and their friends were pushing and jostling. Collingham was obliged to brace himself against the rod running along the line of cabins before he could reply. "Why do you ask?" "Because I don't." "You don't with regard to my stand—or with regard to your own?" The boy looked his father in the eyes. "With regard to yours, dad." "That's very kind of you, Bob; but may I suggest that you'll have all you can do in repenting of your own sins without trying, in addition, to repent of mine?" Nevertheless, when the minute came the parting was affectionate. Neither father nor son was satisfied with a handshake. Throwing their arms about each other, they kissed as in the days when Bob was a little boy. Perhaps it was the warmth of this farewell that induced the father, on arriving at the bank, to ask Miss Ruddick to invite Mr. Bickley to the private office in case he should look round that afternoon. Mr. Bickley did look round that afternoon and was accordingly ushered in. He was a delicately built man whose appearance produced that effect of accuracy you get from a steel trap. Constructed to do a certain kind of work, it can do that work and no other. Two minutes after Bickley had looked at a man, he knew both his weak points and his aptitudes, and could tell to a nicety the job it was best to put him to. Forehead, nose, jaw, lips, eyes, and ears were to him as the letters of the alphabet. More than once he had transferred a teller to the accounting department, or made an accountant a detective by his reading of facial lines. Having put his man in an armchair and given him one of the Havanas he kept for social intercourse, Collingham waited for the mellow moment when the cigar was smoked to half its length. "Do you know, Bickley," he said then, "I've never been quite at ease in my mind about the way we shelved that old fellow, Follett. It seems to me we showed—well, let us call it a want of consideration." Bickley's eyes measured what was left of his cigar as he held it out before him horizontally. "Consideration for whom, Mr. Collingham?" "For the old man himself." "Oh, I didn't know but what you were going to say for your stockholders." Before the banker could parry this thrust, the expert went on: "I looked in yesterday at the court room where they were trotting out that fellow Nicholson of the Wyndham National. If they'd ever asked me, I could have told them long ago that they'd lose money by him in the end." "Oh, but Follett isn't in that box." "He is, if you drop money by him. I'm speaking not of the ways you drop money by a man, but only of the fact that you drop it. Your business, I suppose, Mr. Collingham, is to make money for your shareholders and yourself. It's to help out that, I take it, that you send for me and go by my advice." "Then you'd class Follett and Nicholson together?" "I don't class them at all. Whether a man steals the bank's money or you give it to him as a gift isn't to the point. My job is over when I tell you that he gets what he doesn't earn. The rest, Mr. Collingham, is up to you—or the district attorney, as the case may be." "I'm afraid I don't see it that way." "It's your affair, Mr. Collingham, not mine. I only venture to remind you that we've had this little tussle over almost every man we've ever bounced. It does great credit to your kindness of heart, and if you want to go on supporting Follett and his family for the rest of your life—" Collingham winced at this hint that his kindness of heart was greater than his business capacity. It was a point at which he always felt himself vulnerable. "Speaking of Follett's family," he said, gliding away from the main topic, "we've got that boy of his here. How is he getting on?" "Ah, there you have a horse of another color. My first report on him was not so favorable; but now that we've knocked the high jinks out of him—" "Oh, we've done that, have we?" "He's on the way to become a valuable boy. Good worker, cheery, likable. If he can get over his one defect, he'll be worth hanging on to." "And his one defect is—" "Liable to get excited and lose his head. Type to see red in a fight, and do something dangerous." <hr class="docutils"/> Unaware of the effort which his former employer's good will was vainly putting forth on his behalf, Josiah arrived in front of his pair of grassplots in Indiana Avenue. It was a trim little place, meeting all the wishes for a roof above his head which his soul had ever formed. He stood and looked at it, thinking of the days when little Gladys used to play "house" beneath one of the umbrella-shaped hydrangea bushes. That was not so long ago—only six or eight years. It was nine since he had bought Number Eleven, paying out three thousand dollars that had come to him from a matured twenty years' endowment policy, together with another thousand Lizzie had inherited from an aunt. They had thought it a good investment because, if the worst ever came to the worst—and they didn't know what they meant by that—they would always have a home. Now the home was in danger because he couldn't raise a hundred and forty-seven dollars and sixty-three cents. He had been everywhere trying to borrow more, and he had failed. He had got to the point where his acquaintances in the different offices were putting him down as an "old bum." To Josiah, knowing all the shades of meaning in the term, it was a dreadful name as applied to himself; and he had heard it that very afternoon. An old friend, who had promised to lend him five of the hundred and fifteen already raised, had said on seeing him approach: "Here comes that old bum again." Josiah had turned about there and then. Giving up trying any more to raise the hundred and forty-seven, he had wandered home. He, Josiah Follett, an old bum! Having hidden her three volumes under the bed, Jennie looked out and saw him. He didn't look specially dejected, yet she knew he was. She knew it by the way he stared at the hydrangea bush, or by the fact that he had renounced his search for another job so early in the afternoon. Like herself, he seemed thrown on his own resources for company, finding little or nothing there. She ran down to meet him. She would do that rare thing in the Follett family, take him for a walk. He turned with her obediently. It was a relief to him not to be obliged to go in at once and tell Lizzie he had no good news. Lizzie was still his great referee, as he was hers. The children were still the children, not to be taken into confidence till there was nothing else to be done. But this afternoon life, for the first time, looked different. It was as if, unaided, he couldn't carry the burden any more. There were younger shoulders than his, and perhaps it was time now to call on them to share the task. "I'm an old man, Jennie," he said, as they began to move slowly toward Palisade Walk. "I haven't felt old till lately; but now—now I'm all in. I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to do a day's work again." When she rallied him on this, he told her the story of his day, omitting the "old bum" incident. He must spare his children that, even if he couldn't have been spared himself. This tale, delivered without emphasis, was more terrible to Jennie than all the pangs of conscience. Had she but been true to the promises made to Mrs. Collingham, she could have said, "Father dear, you'll never have to worry any more." Two hours earlier, twenty-five thousand dollars had been within her grasp, and she had let it go. "All that money," she sighed to herself, "and love!" But since it would be within her grasp to-morrow, a new thought came to her. The hundred dollars she would ultimately return to Bob need not be in exactly the same bills. There was no reason why she should not use this amount and restore it from the wealth to come. Bob couldn't possibly tell the difference between the paper that made up one sum of a hundred dollars and the paper that made up another. She would have preferred to hand it back without touching it, but, in view of the family need, fastidiousness was out of place. As they emerged into Palisade Walk and the vast panorama lay below them, she slipped her arm through his. "Daddy," she said, caressingly, "what should you say if you saw me with a hundred dollars?" To Josiah, it was the kind of question children ask when their imaginations go off on flights. It would have been the same thing had she said a thousand or a million. Nevertheless, he replied, more gravely than she had expected: "What should I say, my dear? I should say you couldn't have come by it honestly." "Oh, but if I could?" "It's no use talking about that, my dear, because I know you couldn't. If you had a hundred dollars, some man would have given it to you, and no man would give it to you unless—" He didn't finish the sentence, because she hurried on ahead. He reached her only when she stood still, looking down on the river, to spring the question prepared on second thoughts. "But, daddy, if I had a hundred dollars, you'd use it for the taxes—wouldn't you?—even if I hadn't got it honestly." A spasm crossed his face. He laid his hand on her shoulder roughly. She could think of nothing but the stern father of a wayward girl as she had seen him pictured in the movies. She hadn't supposed that such dramatic parents existed off the screen. "Jennie, you haven't got a hundred dollars! Tell me you haven't! Don't let me think that the worst thing of all has overtaken us." Amazed as she was, her feminine quick-wittedness came to her aid. "Oh, you funny daddy!" she laughed, drawing his hand from her shoulder and again slipping it through her arm. "You're not a bit good at making pretend." "Excuse me, my dear," he said, humbly, as they strolled on once more. "I'm a little nervous. I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to do a day's work again." Jennie, too, was a little nervous, though she did her best to hide the fact. She had not expected him to take this tragically moral point of view. It made so many new complications as to her twenty-five thousand that she didn't know where she stood. Her mother might agree with him. Teddy and the girls might agree with her. To act in opposition to them all was outside her sphere of contemplation. Indiana Avenue was indeed not so primitive but that the subject of ladies who chose their own way was frequently under discussion, and Jennie had never heard much condemnation of this liberty except where the associations were considered "low." Where, on the contrary, the situation was on a large financial scale and carried with a lordly hand, opinion, while not approving, was in a measure deferential. It was no secret that Mrs. Inglis had a sister, mysteriously known as "Mrs. Deramore," whose career had been of the most romantic; and whenever her limousine drove up to the Inglis door, as it did perhaps twice a year, all the women crowded to the windows to see the fair occupant get in and out. On one occasion Jennie had heard her mother say to their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Weatherby, "After all, with the kind of world we've got to-day, why shouldn't she?" Jennie had not thought of herself as a second Mrs. Deramore. She had hardly thought of herself at all. The combination of Hubert, love, and the family deliverance from penury had precluded speculation as to what she might become. She made no attempt to call up this vision even now. The irony of a situation in which she had a small fortune tucked away in the glove-and-handkerchief box in her top bureau drawer, and yet was helpless to make use of it, was enough for her to deal with. Palisade Walk is protected by a row of small, irregular, upright boulders like the dragon's teeth. At a spot where a low flat stone forms a seat between two granite cones Jennie sat down sidewise to the river, to think her situation out. Josiah, too, came to a standstill, leaning on the stick which lifelong British habit put into his hands whenever he went out-of-doors, and gazing at a scene whose very mightiness smote him through and through with a sense of his futility. It was a view of New York which few New Yorkers know to exist, and which those who know it to exist mainly ignore. Rio from the Pão d'Assucar, Montreal from Mount Royal, Quebec from the St. Lawrence, San Francisco from the Golden Gate, are all of the earth, earthy. Manhattan as viewed from the Hudson's western bank is like the city which rose when Apollo sang, or that beheld in the Apocalypse of John. From the dragon's teeth, the precipice broke in terraces and shelves hung with ash, sumach, and stunted oak. Wherever there was a hand's breadth of soil, a dandelion or a violet, a buttercup or a lady-fern, nestled in the keeping of the cliff as a bird's nest on a branch. Creepers and vines threw their tangles of tassels down to where the chimneys clustering along the river's brink blackened them with smoke. Small water-worn docks, sheltering nameless craft, battered, ancient, and grotesque, crept in and out among factories and coal yards, linking up with one another in a line of some twenty miles. Straight as the cut of a knife, the river clove its tremendous gash from Adirondacks to Atlantic—a leaden, shimmering, storied streak, too deep within its bed to catch the westering sunlight. The westering sunlight itself was silvered in the perpetual misty haze hanging over the island like an aureole, through which the city glimmered in mile after mile of gable and spire, of dome and cube, silent, suspended, heavenly. There is nothing in the world like this cloud-built vision garlanded along the sky. No sound breaks from it, no sign of our earth-born life. The steel-blue-gray of a gull's wing swooping above the water is gross as compared with its texture. The violet and the lady-fern are not so delicate as the substance of its palaces. It might be dream; it might be mirage; it might be the city which came down from God as a bride adorned for her husband. Beginning too far away for the eye to reach, and ending where the gaze can no longer follow, it is immense and yet aërial, a towered, battlemented, mighty thing, yet spun of the ether between the worlds. Though Jennie and her father had looked at this mystic wraith of a city so often that they hardly noticed it any more, they were never free from its ecstatic influence. That is, it moved them to aspirations without suggesting the objective to which they should aspire. Caught in the web of daily circumstance, entangled, enmeshed, helplessly captive amid hand-to-mouth necessities, their thoughts were rarely at liberty to wander from the definite calculation as to how to live. They didn't so wander even now. Even now, lifted up as they were among spiritual splendors, food, clothes, gas, taxes, and the mortgage were the things most heavily on their minds; but something else stirred in them with a sluggish will to live. "Jennie, do you believe in God?" For a minute Jennie gazed sidewise at the celestial city in the air and made no answer. Josiah himself hardly knew why he had asked the question unless it was because of vague new fears as to Jennie's associations. Of these he knew almost as little as the parent bird of its offspring's doings when the young have taken flight. This was the custom of the family, the custom of the country. But he had never been free from misgivings that Jennie's calling of artist's model was "not respectable," and now this mention of a hundred dollars, even though it were but in jest, roused some little-used sense of paternal responsibility. "I don't know that I do," Jennie said, at last. She added, after another minute's thought, "What's the good of God, anyhow?" "People say he can take you to heaven when you die, or send you to the other place." "I'm not worrying about what will happen when I die; I've got all I can attend to here. Can God help me about that?" It was the test question of Josiah's inner life. His faith stood or fell by it. He would have been glad to tell his child that she could be aided in her earthly problems, but, unlike Job, hadn't he himself served God for naught? "He don't seem able to do that, my dear," he sighed, as if the confession of unbelief forced its way out in spite of himself. "Well, then"—Jennie rose, wearily—"what's the use? If God can put me off till I die, I suppose I can put him off in the same way, can't I? Do you believe in him, yourself, daddy?" "I used to." And that was all he could say. As the sun sank farther into the west, the celestial city which had hitherto been of a luminous white was shot with rose and saffron. Within its heart lay Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, and the Bowery, shops, churches, brothels, and banks, all passions, hungers, yearnings, and ambitions, all national tendencies worthy and detestable, all human instincts holy and unclean, all loveliness, all lust, all charity, all cupidity, all secret and suppressed desire, all shameless exposure on the housetops, all sorrow, all sin, all that the soul of man conceives of evil and good—and yet, with no more than these few miles of perspective and this easy play of light translated into beauty, uplifting, unearthly, and ineffable. For a minute longer Jennie and her father looking on the vision as it melted from glory to glory in this pageantry of sky. Then, with arms linked as before, they turned their backs on it. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.