Queed Part 38

If he had a pa.s.sion in his scientist's bosom, it was for exact and unflinching veracity. Even to keep the _Post_ silent had been something of a strain upon his instinct for truth, for a voice within him had whispered that an honest journal _ought_ to have some opinion to express on a matter so locally interesting as this. To publish this editorial would strain the instinct to the breaking point and beyond. For it would be equivalent to saying, whether anybody else but him knew it or not, that he, the present editor of the _Post_ approved and endorsed West's position, when the truth was that he did nothing of the sort.

At eight o'clock that night, he succeeded, after prolonged search of the town on the part of the switchboard boy, in getting West to the telephone.

"Mr. West," said Queed, "I am very sorry, but I don't see how I can print your article."

"Oh, Lord!" came West's untroubled voice back over the wire. "And a man's enemies shall be those of his own household. What's wrong with it, Mr. Editor?"

Queed explained his reluctances. "If that is not satisfactory to you,"

he added, at the end, "as it hardly can be, I give you my resignation now, and you yourself can take charge immediately."

"Bless your heart, no! Put it in the waste-basket. It doesn't make a kopeck's worth of difference. Here's a thought, though. Do you approve of the tactics of those _Chronicle_ fellows in the matter?"

"No, I do not."

"Well, why not show them up to-morrow?"

"I'll be glad to do it."

So Queed wrote a stinging little article of a couple of sticks' length, holding up to public scorn journalistic redshirts who curry-combed the ma.s.ses, and preached cla.s.s hatred for the money there was in it. It is doubtful if this article helped matters much. For the shameless _Chronicle_ seized on it as showing that the _Post_ had tried to defend the president, and utterly failed. "Even the West organ," so ran its brazen capitals, "does not dare endorse its darling. And no wonder, after the storm of indignation aroused by the _Chronicle's_ fearless exposures."

West kept his good humor and self-control intact, but it was hardly to be expected that he enjoyed venomous misrepresentation of this sort. The solidest comfort he got in these days came from Sharlee Weyland, who did not read the _Chronicle_, and was most beautifully confident that whatever he had done was right. But after all, the counselings of Miss Avery, of whom he also saw much that spring, better suited his disgruntled humor.

"They are incapable of appreciating you," said she, a siren in the red motor. "You owe it to yourself to enter a larger field. And"--so ran the languorous voice--"to your friends."

The trustees met on Sat.u.r.day, with the _Chronicle_ still pounding away with deadly regularity. Its editorial of the afternoon before was ent.i.tled, "We Want A College President--Not A Cla.s.s President," and had frankly urged the trustees of old Blaines to consider whether a change of administration was not advisable. This was advice which some of the trustees were only too ready to follow. James E. Winter, coming armed cap-a-pie to the meeting, suggested that Mr. West withdraw for a time, which Mr. West properly declined to do. The implacable insurgent thereupon launched into a bitter face-to-face denunciation of the president's conduct in the hazing affair, outpacing the _Chronicle_ by intimating, too plainly for courtesy, that the president's conduct toward Jones was characterized by duplicity, if not wanting in consistent adherence to veracity. "I had a hard time to keep from hitting him," said West afterwards, "but I knew that would be the worst thing I could possibly do." "Maybe so," sighed Mr. Fyne, apparently not with full conviction. Winter went too far in moving that the president's continuance in office was prejudicial to the welfare of Blaines College, and was defeated 9 to 3. Nevertheless, West always looked back at this meeting as one of the most unpleasant incidents in his life. He flung out of it humiliated, angry, and thoroughly sick at heart.

West saw himself as a persecuted patriot, who had laid a costly oblation on the altar of public spirit only to see the base crowd jostle forward and spit upon it. He was poor in this world's goods. It had cost him five thousand a year to accept the presidency of Blaines College. And this was how they rewarded him. To him, as he sat long in his office brooding upon the darkness of life, there came a visitor, a tall, angular, twinkling-eyed, slow-speaking individual who perpetually chewed an unlighted cigar. He was Plonny Neal, no other, the reputed great chieftain of city politics. Once the _Post_, in an article inspired by West, had referred to Plonny as "this notorious grafter." Plonny could hardly have considered this courteous; but he was a man who never remembered a grudge, until ready to pay it back with compound interest.

West's adolescent pa.s.sion for the immediate reform of politics had long since softened, and nowadays when the whirligig of affairs threw the two men together, as it did not infrequently, they met on the easiest and friendliest terms. West liked Plonny, as everybody did, and of Plonny's sincere liking for him he never had the slightest doubt.

In fact, Mr. Neal's present call was to report that the manner in which a lady brushes a midge from her summering brow was no simpler than the wiping of James E. Winter off the board of Blaines College.

That topic being disposed of, West introduced another.

"Noticed the way the _Chronicle_ is jumping on me with all four feet, Plonny?" he asked, with rather a forced laugh. "Why can't those fellows forget it and leave me alone?"

By a slow facial manoeuvre, Mr. Neal contrived to make his cigar look out upon the world with contemptuousness unbearable.

"Why, n.o.body pays no attention to them fellers' wind, Mr. West. You could buy them off for a hundred dollars, ten dollars down, and have them praising you three times a week for two hundred dollars, twenty-five dollars down. I only take the paper," said Mr. Neal, "because their Sunday is mighty convenient f'r packin' furniture f'r shipment."

The _Chronicle_ was the only paper Mr. Neal ever thought of reading, and this was how he stabbed it in the back.

"I don't want to b.u.t.t in, Mr. West," said he, rising, "and you can stop me if I am, but as a friend of yours--why are you botherin' yourself at all with this here kid's-size proposition?"

"What kid's-size proposition?"

"This little two-by-twice grammar school that tries to pa.s.s itself off for a college. And you ain't even boss of it at that! You got a gang of mossbacks sitting on your head who don't get a live idea among 'em wunst a year. Why, the archangel Gabriel wouldn't have a show with a lot of corpses like them! Of course it ain't my business to give advice to a man like you, and I'm probably offendin' you sayin' this, but someway you don't seem to see what's so plain to everybody else. It's your modesty keeps you blind, I guess. But here's what I don't see: why don't you come out of this little hole in the ground and get in line?"

"In line?"

"You're dead and buried here. Now you mention the _Evening Windbag_ that n.o.body pays no more attention to than kids yelling in the street. How about having a paper of your own some day, to express your own ideas and get things done, big things, the way you want 'em?"

"You mean the _Post?_"

"Well, the editor of the _Post_ certainly would be in line, whereas the president of Blaines Grammar School certainly ain't."

"What do you mean by in line, Plonny?"

Mr. Neal invested his cigar with an enigmatic significance. "I might mean one thing and I might mean another. I s'pose you never give a thought to poltix, did you?"

"Well, in a general way I have thought of it sometimes."

"Think of it some more," said Mr. Neal, from the door. "I see a kind of shake-up comin'. People say I've got infloonce in poltix, and sort of help to run things. Of course it ain't so. I've got no more infloonce than what my ballot gives me, and my takin' an intelligent public interest in what's goin' on. But it looks to an amatoor like the people are gettin' tired of this ring-rule they been givin' us, and 're goin'

to rise in their majesty pretty soon, and fill the offices with young progressive men who never heeled f'r the organization."

He went away, leaving the young president of Blaines vastly cheered.

Certainly no language could have made Neal's meaning any plainer. He had come to tell West that, if he would only consent to get in line, he, great Neal, desired to put him in high office--doubtless the Mayoralty, which in all human probability meant the Governorship four years later.

West sat long in rapt meditation. He marveled at himself for having ever accepted his present position. Its limitations were so narrow and so palpable, its possibilities were so restricted, its complacent provincialism so glaring, that the imaginative glories with which he had once enwrapped it seemed now simply grotesque. As long as he remained, he was an entombed nonent.i.ty. Beyond the college walls, out of the reach of the contemptible bigotry of the trustees of this world, the people were calling for him. He could be the new type of public servant, the clean, strong, fearless, idolized young Moses, predestined to lead a tired people into the promised land of political purity. Once more a white meadow of eager faces rolled out before the eye of his mind; and this time, from the buntinged hustings, he did not extol learning with cla.s.sic periods, but excoriated political dishonesty in red-hot phrases which jerked the throngs to their feet, frenzied with ardor....

And it was while he was still in this vein of thought, as it happened, that Colonel Cowles, at eleven o'clock on the first night of June, dropped dead in his bathroom, and left the _Post_ without an editor.

XIX

_The Little House on Duke of Gloucester Street; and the Beginning of Various Feelings, Sensibilities, and Att.i.tudes between two Lonely Men._

One instant thought the news of the Colonel's death struck from nearly everybody's mind: _He'll miss the Reunion_. For within a few days the city was to witness that yearly gathering of broken armies which, of all a.s.semblages among men, the Colonel had loved most dearly. In thirty years, he had not missed one, till now. They buried the old warrior with pomp and circ.u.mstance, not to speak of many tears, and his young a.s.sistant in the sanctum came home from the graveside with a sense of having lost a valued counselor and friend. Only the home to which the a.s.sistant returned with this feeling was not the Third Hall Back of Mrs.

Paynter's, sometimes known as the Scriptorium, but a whole suite of pleasant rooms, upstairs and down, in a nice little house on Duke of Gloucester Street. For Nicolovius had made his contemplated move on the first of May, and Queed had gone with him.

It was half-past six o'clock on a pretty summer's evening. Queed opened the house-door with a latch-key and went upstairs to the comfortable living-room, which faithfully reproduced the old professor's sitting-room at Mrs. Paynter's. Nicolovius, in his black silk cap, was sitting near the open window, reading and smoking a strong cigarette.

"Ah, here you are! I was just thinking that you were rather later than usual this evening."

"Yes, I went to Colonel Cowles's funeral. It was decidedly impressive."

"Ah!"

Queed dropped down into one of Nicolovius's agreeable chairs and let his eyes roam over the room. He was extremely comfortable in this house; a little too comfortable, he was beginning to think now, considering that he paid but seven dollars and fifty cents a week towards its support. He had a desk and lamp all his own in the living-room, a table and lamp in his bedroom, ease and independence over two floors. An old negro man looked after the two gentlemen and gave them excellent things to eat. The house was an old one, and small; it was in an unfashionable part of town, and having stood empty for some time, could be had for thirty-five dollars a month. However, Nicolovius had wiped out any economy here by spending his money freely to repair and beautify. He had had workmen in the house for a month, papering, painting, plumbing, and altering.

"Dozens of people could not get in the church," said Queed. "They stood outside in the street till the service was over."

Nicolovius was looking out of the window, and answered casually. "I daresay he was an excellent man according to his lights."

"Coming to know him very well in the past year, I found that his lights stood high."

"As high, I am sure, as the environment in which he was born and raised made possible."