Youth Challenges Part 15

True, he sought relief. Malcolm Lightener had become his fast friend--a sort of life preserver for his soul. In spite of his youth and Lightener's maturity there was real companionship between them....

Lightener knew what was going on, and in his granite way he tried to help the boy. Bonbright was not interested in his own business, so Lightener awakened in him an interest in Lightener's business. He discussed his affairs with the boy. He talked of systems, of efficiency, of business methods. He taught Bonbright as he would have taught his own son, half realizing the futility of his teaching. Nor had he question as to the righteousness of his proceeding. Because a boy's father follows an evil course the parenthood does not hallow that course.... So Bonbright learned, not knowing that he learned, and in his own office he made comparisons. The methods of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, he compared with the methods of Malcolm Lightener. He saw where modern business would make changes and improvements--but after the first few trampled-on suggestions he remained silent and grew indifferent.

Once he suggested the purchase of dictating machines.

"Fol-de-rol," said his father, brusquely--and the matter ended.

In Lightener's plant he saw lathes which roughed and finished in one process and one handling. In his own plant castings must pa.s.s from one machine to another, and through the hands of extra and unnecessary employees. It was economic waste. But he offered no suggestion. He saw time lost here, labor lavished there, but he was indifferent. He knew better. He knew how it should be done--but he did not care.... The methods of Bonbright Foote I not only suited his father, but were the laws of his father's life.

Not only had Bonbright established sympathetic relations with Malcolm Lightener, but with Lightener's family. In Mrs. Lightener he found a woman whose wealth had compelled the so-called social leaders of the city to accept her, but whose personality, once she was accepted, had won her a firm, enduring position. He found her a woman whose sudden, almost magical, change from obscurity and the lower fringe of salary-drawers to a wealth that made even America gasp, had not made her dizzy. Indeed, it seemed not to have affected her character at all.

Her dominant note was motherliness. She was still the housewife. She continued to look after her husband and daughter just as she had looked after them in the days when she had lived in a tiny frame house and had cooked the meals and made the beds.... She represented womanhood of a sort Bonbright had never been on terms of intimate friendship with....

There was much about her which gave him food for reflection.

And Hilda.... Since their first meeting there had been no reference to the desire of their mothers for their marriage. For a while the knowledge of this had made it difficult for Bonbright to offer her his friendship and companionship. But when he saw, as the weeks went by, how she was willing to accept him unaffectedly as a friend, a comrade, a chum, how the maternal ambition to unite the families seemed to be wholly absent from her thoughts, they got on delightfully.

Bonbright played with her. Somehow she came to represent recreation in his life. She was jolly, a splendid sportswoman, who could hold her own with him at golf or tennis, and who drove an automobile as he would never have dared to drive.

She was not beautiful, but she was attractive, and the center of her attractiveness was her wholesomeness, her frankness, her simplicity.

... He could talk to her as he could not talk even to her father, yet he could not open his heart fully even to her. He could not show her the soul tissues that throbbed and ached.

He was lonely. A lonely boy thrown with an attractive girl is a fertile field for the sowing of love. But Bonbright was not in love with Hilda.... The idea did not occur to him. There was excellent reason--though he had not arrived at a realization of it, and this excellent reason was Ruth Frazer.

He had ventured to accept Ruth's impulsive invitation to come to see her. Not frequently, not so frequently as his inclinations urged, but more frequently than was, perhaps, wise in his position.... She represented a new experience. She was utterly outside his world, and so wholly different from the girls of his world. It was an attractive difference.... And her grin! When it glowed for him he felt for the moment as if the world were really a pleasant place to spend one's life.

He learned from her. New ideas and comprehensions came to him as a result of her conversations with him. Through her eyes he was seeing the other side. Not all her theories, not even all her facts, could he accept, but no matter how radical, no matter how incendiary her words, he delighted to hear her voice uttering them. In short, Bonbright Foote VII, prince of the Foote Dynasty, was in danger of falling in love with the beggar maid.

So, many diverse forces and individualities were at work upon the molding of Bonbright Foote. One, and one only, he recognized, and that was the stern, ever-apparent, iron-handed wrenching of his father.

There were times, which grew more and more frequent, when he fancied he had surrendered utterly to it and had handed over his soul to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. He fancied he was sitting by apathetically watching the family tradition squeeze it into the desired form....

After a wretched day he had called on Ruth. The next morning soft-footed Rangar had moved shadowlike into his father's office, and presently his father summoned him to come in.

"I am informed," said the gentleman who was devoting his literary talents to a philosophical biography of the Marquis Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds, friend of Liberty and Equality, "that you have been going repeatedly to the house of that girl who formerly was your secretary--whose mother runs a boarding house for anarchists."

The suddenness, the unexpectedness of attack upon this angle, nonplussed Bonbright. He could only stand silent, stamped with the guilty look of youth.

"Is it true?" snapped his father.

"I have called on Miss Frazer," Bonbright said, unsteadily.

Mr. Foote stood up. It was his habit to stand up in all crises, big or little.

"Have you no respect for your family name?... If you must have things like this in your life, for G.o.d's sake keep them covered up. Don't be infernally blatant about them. Do you want the whole city whispering like ghouls over the liaison of my son with--with a female anarchist who is--the daughter of a boarding-house keeper?"

Liaison!... Liaison!... The foreign term beat again and again against Bonbright's consciousness before it gained admission. Used in connection with Ruth Frazer, with his relations with Ruth Frazer, it was dead, devoid of meaning, conveyed no meaning to his brain.

"Liaison, sir!... Liaison?" he said, fumblingly.

"I can find a plainer term if you insist."

For a moment Bonbright felt curiously calm, curiously cold, curiously detached from the scene. He regarded the other man.... This man was his father. His FATHER! The laws of life and of humanity demanded that he regard this man with veneration. Yet, offhand, without investigation, this man could jump to a vile conclusion regarding him. Not only that, but could accuse him, not of guilt, but of failing to conceal guilt!...

Respectability! He knew he was watching a manifestation of the family tradition. It was wrong to commit an unworthy act, but it was a sin unspeakable to be caught by the public in the commission.

His mind worked slowly. It was a full half minute before the thought bored through to him that HE was not the sole nor the greatest sufferer by this accusation. It was not HE who was insulted. It was not HE who was outraged.... It was HER!

His father could think that of her--casually. The mere fact that she was poor, not of his station, a wage-earner, made it plain to the senior Foote that Ruth Frazer would welcome a squalid affair with his son.... The Sultan throwing his handkerchief.

Bonbright's calm gave place to turmoil, his chill to heat.

"It's not true," he said, haltingly, using feeble words because stronger had not yet had time to surge up to the surface.

"Bosh!" said the father.

Then Bonbright blazed. Restraints crumbled. The Harvard manner peeled off and lay quivering with horror at his feet. He stepped a pace closer to his father, so that his face was close to his father's face, and his smoldering eyes were within inches of his father's scornful ones.

"It's a lie," he said, huskily, "a d.a.m.ned, abominable, insulting lie."

"Young man," his father shipped back, "be careful...."

"Careful!... I don't know who carried this thing to you, but whoever did was a miserable, sneaking mucker. He lied and he knew he lied. ...

And you, sir, you were willing to believe. Probably you were eager to believe.... I sha'n't defend Miss Frazer. Only a fool or a mucker could believe such a thing of her.... Yes, I have been to see her, and I'll tell you why.... I'll tell you why, good and plenty! ... My first day in this place she was the only human, pleasant thing I met. Her smile was the only life or brightness in the place.... Everything else was dead men's bones. The place is a tomb and it stinks of graveclothes.

Our whole family stinks of graveclothes. Family tradition!... Men dead and rotten and eaten by worms--they run this place, and you want me to let them run me.... Every move you make you consult a skeleton.... And you want to smash and crush and strangle me so that I'll be willing to walk with a weight of dead bones.... I've tried. You are my father, and I thought maybe you knew best.... I've submitted. I've submitted to your humiliations, to having everything that's ME--that is individual in me--stamped out, and stuff molded to the family pattern rammed back in its place. ... She was the only bright spot in the whole outfit--and you kicked her out.... And I've been going to see her--just to see her smile and to get courage from it to start another day with you....

That's what my life has been here, and you made it so, and you will keep on making it so.... Probably you'll grind me into the family groove. Maybe I'm ground already, but that doesn't excuse what you've just said, and it doesn't make it any less an abominable lie, nor the man who reported it to you any less a muck-hearted sewer..."

He stopped, pale, panting, quivering.

"How dare you!... How dare--"

"Dare!"... Bonbright glared at his father; then he felt a great, quivering emotion welling up within him, a something he was ashamed to have the eye of man look upon. His lips began to tremble. He swung on his heel and ran staggeringly toward his door, but there he stopped, clutched the door frame, and cried, chokingly, "It's a lie. ... A lie.... A slimy lie!"

CHAPTER XI

Mr. Foote stood motionless, staring after his son as he might have stared at some phenomenon which violated a law of nature; for instance, as he might have stared at the sun rising in the west, at a stream flowing uphill, at Newton's apple remaining suspended in air instead of falling properly to the ground. He was not angry--yet. That personal and individual emotion would come later; what he experienced now was a FAMILY emotion, a staggering astonishment partic.i.p.ated in by five generations of departed Bonbright Footes.

He was nonplussed. Here had happened a thing which could not happen. In the whole history of the Foote family there had never been recorded an instance of a son uttering such words to his father or of his family.

There was no instance of an outburst even remotely resembling this one.

It simply could not be.... And yet it was. He had witnessed it, listened to it, had been the target at which his son's hot words had been hurled.

For most occurrences in his life Mr. Foote could find a family precedent. This matter had been handled thus, and that other matter had been handled so. But this thin--it had never been handled because it had never happened. He was left standing squarely on his own feet, without aid or support.

Mortification mingled with his astonishment. It had remained for him--who had thought to add to the family laurels the literary achievement of portraying philosophically the life of the Marquis Lafayette--to father a son who could be guilty of thinking such thoughts and uttering such words. He looked about the room apprehensively, as if he feared to find a.s.sembled there the shades of departed Bonbrights who had been eavesdropping, as the departed are said to do by certain psychic persons.... He hoped they had not been listening at his keyhole, for this was a squalid happening that he must smother, cover up, hide forever from their knowledge.

These sensations were succeeded by plain, ordinary, common, uncultured, ancestorless anger. Bonbright Foote VI retained enough personality, enough of his human self, to be able to become angry. True, he did not do it as one of his molders would have done; he was still a Foote, even in pa.s.sion. It was a dignified, a cultured, a repressed pa.s.sion... but deep-seated and seething for an outlet, just the same. What he felt might be compared distantly to what other men feel when they seize upon the paternal razor strop and apply it wholesomely to that portion of their son's anatomy which tradition says is most likely to turn boys to virtue.... He wanted to compel Bonbright to make painful reparation to his ancestors. He wanted to inflict punishment of some striking, uncommon, distressing sort....

His anger increased, and he became even more human. With a trifle more haste than was usual, with the studied, cultured set of his lips less studied and cultured than ever they had been before, he strode to his son's door. Something was going to happen. He was restraining himself, but something would happen now. He felt it and feared it. ... His rage must have an outlet. Vaguely he felt that fire must be fought with fire--and he all unaccustomed to handling that element. But he would rise to the necessities....