The Book of Susan Part 14

"Granted. But I must place you. I won't accept you as an onlooker.

Either you'll fight me or help me--or clear out. Is that plain?"

"You're worse than rude," said Lucette; "you're a beast! I always wondered why Gertrude couldn't live with you. Now I know."

"That's better," I hazarded. "We're beginning to understand each other.

Now let's lay all our cards face up on the table?"

Lucette stared at me a moment, her lips pursed, dubious, her impenetrable blue eyes holding mine.

"I will, if you will," she said finally. "Let's."

It was dangerous, I knew, to take her at her word; yet I ventured.

"I've a weak hand, Lucette; but there's one honest ace of trumps in it."

"There could hardly be two," smiled Lucette.

"No; I count on that. In a pinch, I shall take the one trick essential, and throw the others away." I leaned to her and spoke slowly: "There is no reason, affecting her honor or rights, why Gertrude may not return to her home--if she so desires. I think you understand me?"

"Perfectly. You wish to protect Miss Blake. You would try to do that in any case, wouldn't you? But I'm rather afraid you're too late. I'm afraid Miss Blake has handicapped you too heavily. If so, it was clever of her--for she must have done it on purpose. You see, Ambrose, it was she who sent for Gertrude."

"Susan!"

"Susan. Telegraphed her--of all things!--either to come home to you or set you free. The implication's transparent. Especially as I had thought it my duty to warn Gertrude in advance--and as Mr. Phar sent her, by messenger, a vague but very disturbing note this morning."

"Maltby?"

"Yes. His note was delivered not five minutes ahead of Susan's wire.

Gertrude caught the next train. And there you are."

Well, at least I began to see now, dimly, where Maltby was, where Susan was, where we all were--except, possibly Gertrude. Putting enormous constraint on my leaping nerves, I subdued every trace of anger.

"Two more questions, Lucette. Do you believe me when I say, with all the sincerity I'm capable of, that Susan is slandered by these suspicions?"

"Really," answered Lucette, with a little worried frown, as if anxiously balancing alternatives, "I'm not, am I, in a position to judge?"

I swallowed hard. "All right," I managed to say coldly. "Then I have placed you. You're not an onlooker--you're an open foe."

"And the second question, Ambrose?"

"What, precisely, does Gertrude want from me?"

"I'm not, am I, in a position to judge?" repeated Lucette. "But one supposes it depends a little on what you're expecting--from her?"

"All I humbly plead for," said I, "is a chance to see Gertrude alone and talk things over."

"Don't you mean talk _her_ over?" suggested Lucette. "And aren't you,"

she murmured, "forgetting the last straw?"

VII

My confusion of mind, my consternation, as I left the Egyptian tomb, was pitiable. One thing, one only, I saw with distinctness: The being I loved best was to be harried and smirched, an innocent victim of the folly and malignity of others.

"Never," I muttered, "Never--never--never!"

This was all very grim and virile; yet I knew that I could grit my teeth and mutter Never! from now till the moon blossomed, without in any way affecting the wretched situation. Words, emotional contortions, att.i.tudes--would not help Susan; something sensible must be done--the sooner the better. Something sensible and decisive--but what? There were so many factors involved, human, incalculable factors; my thought staggered among them, fumbling like a drunken man for the one right door that must be found and opened with the one right key. It was no use; I should never be able to manage it alone. To whom could I appeal? Susan, for the time being, was out of the question; Maltby had maliciously betrayed a long friendship. Phil? Why of course, there was always Phil?

Why hadn't I thought of him before?

I turned sharply and swung into a rapid stride. With some difficulty I kept myself from running. Phil seemed to me suddenly an intellectual giant, a man of infinite heart and unclouded will. Why had I never appreciated him at his true worth? My whirling perplexities would have no terrors for him; he would at once see through them to the very thing that should at once be undertaken. Singular effect of an overwhelming desire and need! Faith is always born of desperation. We are forced by deep-lying instincts to trust something, someone, when we can no longer trust ourselves. As I hurried down York Street to his door, my sudden faith in Phil was like the faith of a broken-spirited convert in the wisdom and mercy of G.o.d.

Phil's quarters were on the top floor of a rooming-house for students; he had the whole top floor to himself and had lived there simply and contentedly many years, with his books, his pipes, his papers, and his small open wood fire. Phil is not dest.i.tute of taste, but he is by no means an aesthete. His furniture is of the ordinary college-room type--Morris chair of fumed oak, and so on--picked up as he needed it at the nearest department store; but he has two or three really good framed etchings on the walls of his study; one Seymour Haden in particular--the _Erith Marshes_--which I have often tried to persuade him to part with.

There is a blending of austerity and subtlety in the work of the great painter-etchers that could not but appeal to this austere yet finely organized man.

His books are wonderful--not for edition or binding--he is not a bibliophile; they are wonderful because he keeps nothing he has not found it worth while to annotate. There is no volume on his shelves whose inside covers and margins are not filled with criticism or suggestive comment in his neat spiderwebby hand; and Phil's marginal notes are usually far better reading than the original text. Susan warmly maintains that she owes more to the inside covers of Phil's books than to any other source; insists, in fact, that a brief note in his copy of Santayana's _Reason in Common Sense_, at the end of the first chapter, established her belief once for all in mind as a true thing, an indestructible and creative reality, destined after infinite struggle to win its grim fight with chaos. I confess I could never myself see in this note anything to produce so amazing an affirmation; but in these matters I am a worm; I have not the philosophic _flair_. Here it is:

"'We know that life is a dream, and how should thinking be more?'

Because, my dear Mr. Santayana, a dream cannot propagate dreams and realize them to be such. The answer is sufficient."

Well, certainly Susan, too, seemed to feel it sufficient; and perhaps I should agree if I better understood the answer.... But I have now breasted four flights to Phil and am knocking impatiently.... He opened to me and welcomed me cordially, all trace of his parting gruffness of the other evening having vanished, though he was still haggard about the eyes. He was not alone. Through the smoke haze of his study I saw a well-built youngster standing near the fireplace, pipe in hand; some college boy, of course, whom Phil was being kind to. Phil was forever permitting these raw boys to cut in upon his precious hours of privacy; yet he was at the opposite pole from certain faculty members, common to all seats of learning, who toady to the student body for a popularity which they feel to be a good business a.s.set, or which they find the one attainable satisfaction for their tottering self-esteem.

Phil, who had had to struggle for his own education, was genuinely fond of young men who cared enough for education to be willing to struggle for theirs. He had become un.o.btrusively, by a kind of natural affinity, the elder brother of those undergraduates who were seekers in any sense for the things of the mind. For the rest, the triumphant majority--fine, manly young fellows as they usually were, in official oratory at least--he was as blankly indifferent as they were to him.

"My enthusiasm for humanity is limited, fatally limited," he would pleasantly admit. "For the human turnip, even when it's a prize specimen, I have no spontaneous affection whatever."

On the other hand it was not the brilliant, exceptional boy whom he best loved. It was rather the boy whose interest in life, whose curiosity, was just stirring toward wakefulness after a long prenatal and postnatal sleep. For such boys Phil poured forth treasures of sympathetic understanding; and it was such a youth, I presume, who stood by the fireplace now, awkwardly uncertain whether my coming meant that he should take his leave.

His presence annoyed me. On more than one occasion I had run into this sort of thing at Phil's rooms, had suffered from the curious inability of the undergraduate, even when he longs himself to escape, to end a visit--take his hat, say good-by simply, and go. It doesn't strike one offhand as a social accomplishment of enormous difficulty; yet it must be--it so paralyzes the social resourcefulness of the young.

Phil introduced me to Mr. Kane, and Mr. Kane drooped his right shoulder--the correct att.i.tude for this form of a.s.sault--grasped my hand, and shattered my nerves--with the dislocating squeeze which young America has perfected as the high sign of all that is virile and sincere. I sank into a chair to recover, and to my consternation Mr.

Kane, too, sat down.

"Jimmy's just come to us," said Phil, relighting his pipe. "He pa.s.sed his entrance examinations in Detroit last spring, but he had to finish up a job he was on out there before coming East. So he has a good deal of work to make up, first and last. And it's all the harder for him, because he's dependent upon himself for support."

"Oh," said Jimmy, "what I've saved'll last me through this year, I guess."

"Yes," Phil agreed; "but it's a pity to touch what you've saved." He turned to me. "You see, Hunt, we're talking over all the prospects.

Aren't we, Jimmy?"

"Yes, sir," answered Jimmy. "Prof. Farmer thinks," he added, "that I may be making a mistake to try it here; he thinks it may be a waste of time.

I'm kind of up in the air about it, myself."

"Jimmy's rather a special case," struck in Phil, dropping into a Morris chair and thrusting his legs out. "He's twenty-two now; and he's already made remarkably good as an expert mechanic. He left his home here over six years ago, worked his way to Detroit, applied for a job and got it.

Now there's probably no one in New Haven who knows more than this young man about gas engines, steel alloys, shop organization, and all that.

The little job that detained him was the working out of some minor but important economy in the manufacture of automobiles. He suggested it by letter to the president of the company himself, readily obtained several interviews with his chief, and was given a chance to try it out.

"It has proved its practical worth already, though you and I are far too ignorant to understand it. As a result, the president of the company offered him a much higher position at an excellent salary. It's open to him still, if he chooses to go back for it. But Jimmy has decided to turn it down for a college education. And I'm wondering, Hunt, whether Yale has anything to give him that will justify such a sacrifice--anything that he couldn't obtain for himself, at much less expense, without three years waste of time and opportunity. How does it strike you, old man? What would you say, offhand, without weighing the matter?"