The Empty Sack Part 28

"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 compa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d. 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 gla.s.sy 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 princ.i.p.al 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.