The Empty Sack Part 24

"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 cla.s.s Follett and Nicholson together?"

"I don't cla.s.s 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."

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 gra.s.splots 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 b.u.m." 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 b.u.m 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 b.u.m!

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 b.u.m" 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 a.s.sociations 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 Po d'a.s.sucar, 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 b.u.t.tercup 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 ta.s.sels down to where the chimneys cl.u.s.tering 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.