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Empty Sack

<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2> During the next few days, Wray snapped his fingers twice, and on each occasion Jennie ran to him like a dog, as she had foreseen she would. The first time was in response to a telegram. The telegram said, simply: <blockquote><div> Studio Thursday, 3 P.M. </div> </blockquote> There was no signature, but Jennie knew what it meant. By one o'clock she was dressing feverishly; by two, she had said good-by to her mother and was on her way. She was not thinking of her twenty-five thousand dollars now, or of any offering up of herself. Her one objective was to drive that woman from the Byzantine chair so that Hubert shouldn't look at her again. But she had not got out of Indiana Avenue on her way to the trolley car when something happened which had never happened in her life before. She received another telegram, the second in one day. The messenger boy, who was a neighbor's son, had hailed her from across the street. "Hello, Jennie! Are you Miss Jane Scarborough Follett? That's a name and a half, ain't it?" Her first thought was that Hubert was wiring to put her off because he wanted the other woman, after all. Her second, that he had already addressed her as "Miss Jennie Follett," and she doubted if he knew her full baptismal name. Only in one connection had it been used of late, and that recollection made her tremble. This message, too, was unsigned, and, being so, it puzzled her: <blockquote><div> Always close to you in spirit and loving you. </div> </blockquote> That wasn't like Hubert—and Bob was on the sea. She walked slowly, reading it again and again, till her eyes caught the address in a corner—Havana. She remembered then that the Demerara was to touch at that port, and understood. Crushing the telegraphic slip into the bottom of her handbag, she made her way to the square and took her place in the car. As she jolted down the face of the cliff she wished that this message hadn't come till after her return from the studio. Then it wouldn't have mattered. It would have been too late to matter. Not that it mattered now—only, that the way in which Bob expressed himself made her feel uneasy. "Always close to you in spirit." She didn't want him to be close to her in any way, but in spirit least of all. Latterly, she had heard Mrs. Weatherby, a convert to some school of New Thought, discourse on the unreality of separations and the bridging power of spirit, and while these ideas made no appeal to her, they endued Bob's telegram with a ghostly creepiness. If he was close to her in spirit on an errand like the present one.... So she turned back from the very studio door. She couldn't go in. She couldn't so much as put her hand on the knob. Knowing that Hubert was within a few yards of her, eager to be hers as she was to be his, she crept guiltily down the stairs. She cried all night from humiliation and repentance. It was as if Bob had laid a spell on her. Unless she could break it, her life would be ruined. But the opportunity to break it came no later than the very next day. Chancing to look out into Indiana Avenue, she saw Hubert scanning Number Eleven from the other side of the street. He must indeed want to see her, since he had taken this journey into the unknown. Picking up a sunshade, she went out and spoke to him. He refused to come in, but begged her to take a little walk. "Jennie, what's your game?" he asked, roughly, as they sauntered down the avenue toward the edge of the cliff. "Why don't you come to the studio when I ask you? What are you afraid of?" "I did come—the other day—but—" "Why didn't you stay? I thought you would. Brasshead wouldn't have minded it, and you could have seen how the thing is done." "What's the good of seeing how it's done when—when you've got some one else?" "But, good Lord! Jennie, this is not the only picture of the kind I shall ever paint! Even if I go on using Emma for this, I shall want you for another one—and I'm not sure that I shall go on using Emma. Do you see?" She was so perturbed that she launched on a question without knowing what she meant to ask. "Isn't she—" "Oh, she's all right as far as the figure goes. Features coarse. Not a bit what I'm trying to get. Have to keep toning down and modifying to give her the spiritual look that you've got, Jennie, to throw away. I keep thinking of you all the time I'm doing it. Look here, if you'll come to-morrow, I'll pay Brasshead off and you shall have the job." By the time they reached Palisade Walk the business was settled on a business basis. Not once did he depart from the professional side of the affair, and not once did she allude to the scene in her dressing-room. But what was understood was understood, not less certainly for its being by passionate mental vibration, without a word, or a glance, or a pressure of the hand. But the next day, as Jennie was leaving the house to keep her appointment, Josiah, who had gone out as usual to look for work, had dragged himself home and fainted at the door. "I'm all in," he mumbled, on his return to consciousness. "I don't suppose I shall ever get a chance to do a day's work again." Jennie was so much alarmed that she forgot to telephone her inability to go to the studio till after her father had been put to bed and the doctor had come and gone. "Oh, it's all right," Hubert had said, listlessly. "I didn't expect you. I knew that if it wasn't one excuse, it would be another—" "But I will come," Jennie had interrupted, tearfully. "Do just as you like about that. Emma's here, and, as you're so uncertain, I've decided to go on and finish the picture without making a change." He put up the receiver on saying this, so that Jennie was left all in the air with her love and her distress. When Teddy appeared that evening, it was she who told him of their father's breakdown. "The doctor says it's worry," she explained, "and lack of nutrition. He says he must stay in bed a week, and we've got to feed him up and not let him worry again." Teddy's face grew longer and longer. "Then we'll have to have more money." "You poor Ted, yes; but then you're making money on the side, aren't you?" Reminding himself, as he did a hundred times a day, that Nicholson had had five years in which to get away with it, Teddy passed on upstairs to his father's bedside. "It's all right, dad," he tried to smile. "Don't you worry. I'm here. I'll take care of ma and the girls. You just make your mind easy and give yourself up to getting well." Jennie's attendance at the studio was thus put out of the question for many days, and in the meantime she had a letter posted at Havana. Fearing that it would come and attract attention in the family, she watched the postman, getting it one morning before breakfast. Bob wrote: <blockquote><div> There is a love so big and strong and sure that separations mean nothing to it, because it fills the world. That's my kind of love, Jennie darling. You can't get out of it—I can't get out of it—even if we would. At this very minute I'm sailing and sailing; but I'm not being carried farther away from you. The love in which you and I are now leading our lives is wider than the great big circle made by the horizon. Don't forget that, dear. I'm always with you. Love doesn't recognize distance. Love isn't physical or geographical. It's force, power, influence. I love you so much that I know I can keep you safe even though I'm on the other side of the world. I can't fend troubles away from you, worse luck, but I can carry you through them. I know that till I come back you'll be having a hard time; but my love will hang round you like an enchanted cloak, and nothing will really get at you. You're always wearing that cloak, Jennie; you always walk with it about you. </div> </blockquote> While Jennie was reading this, Edith Collingham, at breakfast at Marillo Park, was springing a question on her father. She sprang it at breakfast because it was the only time she was sure of seeing him alone. "Father, how far are children obliged to marry or not to marry in deference to their parents' wishes, and how far have fathers and mothers the right to interfere?" Dauphin, who was on his haunches near his master's knee, removed himself to a midway position between the two ends of the table, as if he felt that in the struggle he perceived to be coming he couldn't throw his influence with either side. Through the open window Max could be seen in perpetual motion on the lawn, yet pausing every two minutes to look wistfully down the avenue in the hope of some loved approach. Without answering at once, Collingham tapped an egg with a spoon. The broaching of so personal a question between one of his children and himself was something new. It had been an established rule in the household that, however free the intercourse between the boy and the girl and their mother, the approach to their father was always indirect. Junia had made it her lifelong part to explain the children to their father and the father to his children, but rarely to give them a chance of explaining themselves to each other. Collingham had acquiesced in this for the reason that the duties of a parent were not those for which he felt himself, in his own phrase, specially "cut out." The duties for which he did feel himself cut out were those that had to do with the investment of money. On this ground, he spoke with authority; he was original, intuitive, inspired. When it came to a flair for the stock which was selling to-day at fifty and which to-morrow would be worth five hundred, he belonged to the illuminati. This being the highest use of intelligence known to man, he felt it his duty to specialize in it to the exclusion of everything else. As already hinted, there were two Collinghams. There was the natural man, a kindly, generous fellow who would never have made a big position in the world; and there was the other Collingham, standardized to the accepted, forceful, American-business-man pattern, and who, now that he was sixty-odd, was the Collingham who mainly had the upper hand. Mainly, but not completely. The natural Collingham often made timid attempts to speak and had to be stifled. He was being stifled while the standardized Collingham tapped his egg. It was the pupil of Junia, Bickley, and the business world who finally sought to gain time by asking a counter-question. "What do you want to know for?" Edith was prepared for this. "Because I may make a marriage that you and mother wouldn't like; and I think it possible that Bob may do the same." Whatever the natural Collingham might have said to this, the man who had been evolved from him could have but one response. "People who act on their own responsibility should be prepared to go the whole hog." Edith sipped her coffee while she worked out the significance of this. "Does that mean that you wouldn't give us any money?" "Rather that, being so extremely independent, you wouldn't ask for it." "Oh, ask for it—no; and yet—" "And yet you think I ought to hand it out." "I was thinking rather of a kind of noblesse oblige—" "In which all the noblesse must be mine." "Not exactly that. In which perhaps the noblesse should be ours. Even if I should marry a poor man, I can't help being a Collingham, a member of a family with large ideas and a large way of living." "Yes; but, you see, you'd be giving them up." "You can't give up what's been bred into you. And in my case I should be bringing the man—you must let me say it, dad—I should be bringing the man I—I love—so little—" "He's probably counting on a great deal. Poor men who marry rich men's daughters generally do." "I was going to say that while he'd be giving me so much, all I could offer him would be money; and if I didn't bring that—" "Well? Go on." "If I didn't bring that, I should feel so humiliated before him—" He affected an ignorance which was not a fact. "Who is this paragon, anyhow?" "I thought mother might have told you. It's Mr. Ayling." "Oh, that teacher fellow!" "He's more than that, dad. He's a professor in one of our greatest universities. He's a writer beginning to be recognized as having ideas. He has a position of his own—" "Yes; but only an intellectual one." She raised her eyebrows. "'Only'?" He straightened himself and prepared for business. "Look here, Edith, don't kid yourself. An intellectual position in this country is no position at all. The American people have no use for the intellectual, and they've made that plain." She could hardly express her amazement. "Why, dad! There's no country in the world where people go in more for education, where there are more men who go to colleges—" "Yes—to fit them for making money, not to turn them into highbrows. You must have a spade to dig a garden, but it's the garden you're proud of, not the spade." "And the very President of the country—" "Is what you call an intellectual man; but that's a bit of chance. He's not President because he was a college professor, but because he was a politician. If he hadn't been a politician—something that the country values—he'd still be rotting in some two-by-three university. Listen, Edith!" He emphasized his point by the movement of his forefinger. "We've a rule in business which is the test of everything. So long as you stick to it you can't go wrong in your estimates. The value of a thing is as much money as it will bring. You know the value of the intellectual in American eyes the minute you think of what the American people is willing to pay for it. You say your intellectual man has a position of his own. Well, you can see how big the position is by what he earns. He doesn't earn enough decently to support a wife, and so long as the American people have anything to say to it, he never will. You can box the whole compass of fellows who live by their wits—teachers, writers, journalists, artists, musicians, clergymen, and the whole tribe of them. We don't want them in this country, except as you want a spade and a hoe in your tool-house. When they try to get in, we starve them out; and, Collingham as you are, once you've married this fellow you'll go with your gang." He pushed back his chair and rose. "That's all I've got to say. Think it over." As he passed out through the French window to the terrace beyond he snapped his fingers. "Dauphin, come along!" But, perhaps for the first time in his life, Dauphin didn't immediately follow him. Instead, he went first to Edith, laying his long nozzle in her lap. For five or ten minutes, as Collingham smoked his morning cigar while visiting the stables, the garage, and the kitchen garden, the natural man tried to raise his voice. "Why didn't you say, 'Marry your man, Edith, my child, and I'll give you ten thousand a year?' Poor little girl," this first Collingham went on, "she's so frank and true and high spirited! You've made her unhappy when you could so easily have made her glad." "You said what any other American father in your position would have said," the pupil of Bickley and Junia argued, on the other side. "True, you've made her unhappy, but young people often have to be made unhappy in order that the foolish dictates of the heart may be repressed. There are millions of people all over the world whose lives would have been spoiled if such early emotional impulses hadn't been thwarted." And, after all, it was true that the intellectual was not respected. The public pretended that it was, but when it came to the test of social and financial reward—the only rewards there were—the pretense was apparent. There were no intellectual people at Marillo Park; there were none whom he, Collingham, knew in business. There were men with brains; but to distinguish them from the intellectual they were described as brainy. Edith as the wife of an intellectual man would be self-destroyed; and it was his duty as her father to stop, if he could, that self-destruction. By the time he had reached the point in his morning ritual which brought him to Junia's bedside, he was standardized again, even though it was with a bleeding heart. He could more easily suffer a bleeding heart than he could the fear of not being an efficient man of business. "What use have you had for the twenty-five thousand I've paid in your account?" he asked, before he kissed her good-by. She concealed her anxiety that so many days had passed without a sign from Jennie under an air of nonchalance. "No use as yet, but I expect to have. I shall let you know when the time comes." But no sign could come from Jennie, for the reason that her father died in mid-July, and during the intervening weeks she was tied to his bedroom. As the eldest daughter and the only one at home, all her other functions were absorbed in those of nurse. Luckily, there was money in the house, for Teddy had been successful in his efforts "on the side," and Bob continued to transmit small sums to herself, which she added to the hundred dollars in the top bureau drawer. Bob, Hubert, Collingham Lodge, her ambition, and her love became unreal and remote as she watched the setting of the sun to which her being had been turned. In the eyes of others, Josiah might be feeble and a failure, but to Teddy and his sisters he was their father, the pivot of their lives, the nearest thing to a supreme being they had known. Lizzie's grief was different. Her heart didn't ache because he was dying. Life having become what it was, he was better dead. If she could have died herself, she would have gone to her rest gladly, had it not been for the children. For their sake, she remained sweet, calm, active, brewing and baking, sweeping and cleaning, sitting up at night with Josiah while they were asleep, and hiding the fact that instead of a heart she felt nothing within her but a stone. Her grief was not for Josiah; it was for the futility of the best things human beings could bring to life. Honesty, industry, thrift, devotion, ambition, and romance had been the qualifications with which Josiah Follett and Lizzie Scarborough had faced the world; and this was the best the world could do with them. "It isn't as if we ever faltered or refused or turned aside," she mused to herself, as she hurried from one task to another. "We've been absolutely faithful. We've had pluck in the face of every discouragement and eaten ashes as if it were bread, and, in the end, we come to this. It makes no difference that we didn't deserve it; we get it just the same." Josiah's wanderings as his mind grew feebler turned forever round one central theme: A job! a job! To be allowed to work! To have a chance to earn a living! It was his kingdom of heaven, his forgiveness of sins, his paradise of God. In the middle of night he would open his eyes and say: "I've got a job, Lizzie. Fifty a week!" "Yes, yes," Lizzie would say, drawing the sheet about his shoulders. "Yes, yes; you'll go to town in the morning. Now turn over, dear, and go to sleep again." These excitements were generally in the small hours of the morning. By day, he was less cheerful. "I'm all in, Jennie darling," he would say then. "I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to do a day's work again." But one hot afternoon in the middle of July he woke from a long sleep with a look that startled her. Jennie had never seen the approach of death, but, now that she did, she knew it could be nothing else. He had simply rolled over on his back, staring upward with eyes that had become curiously glassy and sightless. Jennie ran to the head of the stairs. "Momma! Momma! Come quick!" He said nothing till Lizzie had reached the bedside. Though he didn't move his head or look toward her, he seemed to know that she was there. "Here's mother, Lizzie." He raised his hands, while a look of glad surprise stole over his face. "There's a country," he stammered on, brokenly, "no, it isn't a country—it's like a town—they're working—they've got work for me—and—and they're never—they're never—fired." The hands fell, but the look of glad surprise was only shut out of sight by the coffin lid. Teddy paid for the lot in the cemetery, as well as the other expenses of the funeral, within a week of his father's death. "Now I'm through," he said to himself, with a long sigh of relief. "You darling Ted," was Jennie's commendation. "You must have given momma five hundred dollars at least. Now I hope you'll be able to save a little for yourself." At the bank, Teddy's younger colleagues were sympathetic, Lobley especially doing him kindly little turns. He asked him to supper one evening at a restaurant, where they talked of marksmanship, at which Teddy had been proficient in the navy. He was out of practice now, he said, to which Lobley had replied that it was a pity. He, Lobley, had an automatic pistol illegally at home, and if Teddy would like to borrow it he could soon bring himself back to his old form. Teddy did so like, and went back to Pemberton Heights with the thing secreted on his person. It went with him to the bank next day—and every day. For Teddy had begun to notice symptoms to which one less keenly suspicious would be blind. Nothing was ever said of money missing, and no hint thrown out that he himself was not trusted as before. He had nothing to go on except that Mr. Brunt became more taciturn than ever, and once or twice he thought he was being watched. The eyes of Jackman, the principal house detective, wandered often toward him, and twice he, Teddy, had seen Jackman in conference with Flynn. "They'll never get me alive," was his inner consolation, though immediate suicide suggested itself as an alternative, and flight, disappearance, an absolute blotting out was a third expedient. Yet nothing was sure; nothing was even remotely sure. By becoming too jumpy he might easily give himself away. Nicholson had had five years. In two years, in one, Teddy meant to be square with the bank again. But one afternoon, as he emerged into Broad Street on his way home, Jackman and Flynn were talking together on the opposite pavement. The boy jumped back, though not before he saw Jackman make a sign to Flynn which said as plainly as words, "There he is now." To Teddy, it was the end of the world. All the past, all the future, merged into this single second of terror. He looked across at them; they looked across at him. There was a degree of confession in the very way in which his blanched face stared at them through the intervening crowds. Jackman's lips formed half a dozen syllables, emphasized by a nod and a lifting of the brows. "That's the guy all righty," were the words Teddy practically heard. Like a startled wild thing, he had but one impulse—to run. Actual running in Broad Street at that hour of the day being out of the question, he dived into the procession mounting toward Wall Street, ducking, dodging, pushing, almost knocking people down, and mad with fear. "They'll never get me alive," he was saying to himself; but how in that crowd to find space in which to turn the pistol to his heart already puzzled him. At the corner of Wall Street he summoned courage to look over his shoulder. They might not be after him. If not, it would prove a false alarm, such as he had had before. But there they were—Jackman scrambling laboriously up the other side of Broad Street, and Flynn crossing it, picking his way among the vans and motor cars. Like a frightened rabbit, Teddy scurried on again, meaning to gain Nassau Street and somehow double on his tracks. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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