Kitabı oku: «The Helpers», sayfa 3

CHAPTER VI

During the week following the day of repentance and backsliding, Jeffard's regression down the inclined plane became an accelerated rush. In that interval he parted with his watch and his surveying instruments, and made a beginning on his surplus clothing. It was a measure of the velocity of the descent that the watch, with the transit and level, brought him no more than seven knife-and-fork meals and an occasional luncheon. But the clothing being transmutable in smaller installments, did rather better.

Before the week was out, a bachelor's apartment in a respectable locality became an incongruous superfluity; and having by no means reached the philosophical level in his descent, he hid himself from all comers in a dubious neighborhood below Larimer Street.

The second week brought sharper misery than the first, since it enforced the pitiful shifts of vagrancy before he could acquire the spirit-breaking experience which makes them tolerable. But before many days the poor remnants of pride and self-respect gave up the unequal struggle, leaving him to his own devices; after which he soon learned how to keep an open and unbalanced meal-and-cigar account with his few unmercenary friends.

In a short time, however, the friendly tables began to grow scarce. Bartrow went back to his mine, and with his going the doors of the St. James's dining-room opened no more to the proletary. Then came the return of John Pettigrew, whose hospitality was as boundless as the range whereon his herds grazed, and who claimed kinship with Jeffard because both chanced to be transplanted New Englanders. While Pettigrew stayed in Denver, Jeffard lived on the fat of the land, eating at his friend's table at the Albany, and gambling with the ranchman's money at odd hours of the day and night. But after Pettigrew left there was another lean interval, and Jeffard grew haggard and ran his weight down at the rate of a pound a day.

In the midst of this came a spasm of the reformative sort, born of a passing glimpse of Stephen Elliott's daughter on one of her charitable expeditions. The incident brought him face to face with a fact which had been unconsciously lending desperation to despair. Now that the discovery could be no more than an added twist of the thumbscrew, he began to realize that he had found in the person of the sweet-faced young woman with the far-seeing eyes the Heaven-born alchemist who could, if she so willed, transmute the flinty perverseness of him into plastic wax, shaping it after her own ideals; that it was the unacknowledged beginning of love which had found wings for the short-lived flight of higher hopes and more worthy aspirations. The day of fasting and penitence had set his feet in the way leading to reinstatement in his own good opinion; but the meeting with Constance was answerable for a worthier prompting, – a perfervid determination to fight his way back to better things for righteousness' sake, knowing that no otherwise could he hope to stand with her on the Mount of Benediction.

It was against this anointing of grace that he had sinned; and it was in remorseful memory of it that he brushed his clothes, put on an ill-fitting air of respectability, and tramped the streets in a fruitless search for employment until he was ready to drop from fatigue and hunger. Nothing came of it. The great public, and notably the employing minority of it, is no mean physiognomist; and the gambler carries his hall-mark no less than the profligate or the drunkard.

At the close of one of these days of disheartenment, a day wherein a single cup of coffee had been made to stand sponsor for breakfast, luncheon, and dinner, Jeffard saw a familiar figure standing at the counter in one of the newspaper offices. Knowing his man, Jeffard stopped on the sidewalk and waited. If Lansdale had but the price of a single meal in his pocket, two men would share that meal that night.

There were two entrances to the newspaper office, and Jeffard watched beaglewise lest his chance of breaking his fast should vanish while he tarried. Presently Lansdale came out, and Jeffard fell upon him before he could latch the door.

"Salaam! Jeffard, my son," said the outcomer. "I saw you waiting for me. How goes the world-old struggle for existence?"

"Don't remind me of it, Lansdale; do you happen to have the price of a meal about you?"

Lansdale smiled, and gravely tucking Jeffard's arm under his own, steered diagonally across the street toward the open doors of a café.

"Now that is what our forefathers called Providence, and what we, being so much wiser in our own generation, call luck," he declared. "I had just got a check out of the post-office for a bit of work sent months ago to an editor whose name is unhasting. When you saw me I was closing a negotiation, by the terms of which the cashier of the 'Coloradoan' becomes my banker. Behold, now, the mysteries of – shall we say Providence? At any time within the six months I would have sworn that the opportune moment for the arrival of this bit of money-paper had come; nevertheless Providence, and the slow-geared editor, get it here just in time to save two men from going to bed supperless. Why don't you say something?"

They were at the door of the café, and Jeffard gripped his companion's arm and thrust him in. "Can't you see that I'm too damned hungry to talk?" he demanded savagely; and Lansdale wisely held his peace until the barbarian in his guest had been appeased.

When the soup and fish had disappeared, Jeffard was ashamed of himself, and said as much.

"You mustn't mind what I said," he began, by way of making amends. "I used to think I was a civilized being, but, God help me, Lansdale, I'm not! When I've gone without food for twenty-four hours on end, I'm nothing more or less than a hungry savage."

Lansdale smiled intelligence. "I know the taste of it, and it's bad medicine – for the soul as well as for the body," he rejoined. "There is reason to suspect that Shakespeare never went hungry, else he wouldn't have said, 'Sweet are the uses of adversity.' They're not sweet; they're damnably bitter. A man may come forth of the winepress with bones unbroken and insight sharpened to the puncturing point; but his capacity for evil will be increased in just proportion."

"I don't want to believe that," said Jeffard, whose despair was not yet proof against a good meal in good company.

"You needn't, but it's true. The necessities breed a certain familiarity with evil. Moral metes and bounds have a trick of disappearing in the day of physical dearth. When hunger has driven a man over the ethical boundary a few times, the crossing becomes easy; and when hunger drops the whip, inclination is very likely to take it up."

Jeffard laughed. "'The words of Agur the son of Jakeh,'" he quoted. "I believe you'd moralize if you were going to be hanged, Lansdale."

"Perhaps I should. What possible contingency could offer better opportunities? And am I not going to be hanged – or choked, which amounts to the same thing?"

Jeffard looked up quickly and saw what the myopia of hunger had hitherto obscured: that his companion's smooth-shaven face seemed gaunter than usual, and that his hands were unsteady when he lifted the knife and fork.

"Colorado isn't helping you, then," he said.

"No; but it isn't altogether Colorado's fault. The Boston medicine man said change of climate, plenty of outdoor indolence, nutritious food at stated intervals. I have all any one could ask of the first, and as little of either of the others as may be."

"But you do good work, Lansdale. I've always believed you could make it win, in time. Hasn't the time come yet?"

"No. What I can do easiest would bring bread and meat, if I could sell it; but a literary hack-writer has no business in Colorado – or anywhere else outside of the literary centres. In Boston I could always find an odd job of reviewing, or space-writing, or something that would serve to keep body and soul together; but here they won't have me even in the newspapers."

"Overcrowded, I suppose, like everything else in this cursed country."

"That's the alleged reason; but the fact is that I'm not a journalist. Your thoroughbred newspaper man has more or less contempt for a fellow who can't or won't write journalese."

They had attained to the dessert, and the waiter was opening a modest bottle of claret for them. Jeffard turned his wineglass down.

"What! Is that the way you flout a man's hospitality?" demanded Lansdale, in mock displeasure.

"No; I don't mean to do that. But I'm drunken with feasting now, and if I put wine into me I shall pawn the coat off my back before midnight for a stake to play with."

Lansdale smiled. "I'll see that you don't have to. Turn up your glass."

But Jeffard was obstinate, and sat munching raisins while Lansdale sipped his wine. When the waiter brought the cigars he came out of his reverie to say, "You want to live, don't you, Lansdale?"

The potential man of letters took time to think about it. "I suppose I do; else I shouldn't be starving to death in Denver," he admitted finally.

"And there is nothing but the lack of a little ready money that keeps you from giving the Boston doctor's prescription a fair trial. If I had the money I believe I'd change places with you; that is, I'd give you the money in exchange for your good chance of being able to shuffle off mortality without the help of extraneous means. I think I've had enough of it."

"Do you? That proves how little a man has learned when he thinks he has arrived. Now pull yourself together, and tell me what you really would do if you became suddenly rich."

"How rich?"

"Oh, make it a comfortable figure; say eight or ten thousand a month for an income."

"I'd do what I said I should, – change places with you; only I suppose that wouldn't be possible. Failing that" – He pondered over it for a moment, balancing his fork on the edge of his plate the while. "A few weeks ago I should have mapped out a future worth talking about. I had a lucid day, in which the things that make for ambition of the better sort had their inning. If you had asked me such a question then, I should doubtless have told you that I should try to realize the ideals of other days; to walk uprightly, and to hold great wealth as it should be held – in trust for the good of one's kind; to win the love of the ideal woman, perhaps; and, having won it, to sit at her feet until I had learned how to be God's almoner."

Lansdale's smile was not wholly cynical. "But now?" he queried.

"But now I know my own limitations. I think I should go back to the old farm in the Berkshire Hills, and try to make it earn me bread and meat."

"But you couldn't spend ten thousand a month on an abandoned farm, though I grant you it would be a pretty expensive luxury. What would you do with the lave of it?"

Jeffard's lips tightened, and his face was not pleasant to look upon. "I'd let it go on accumulating, piling up and up till there was no shadow of possibility that I should ever again come to know what it means to be without money. And even then I should know I could never get enough," he added.

This time Lansdale's smile was of incredulity. "Let me prophesy," he suggested. "When your lucky day overtakes you, you will do none of these things. Jeffard the fool may be heard of wherever the Associated Press has a wire or a correspondent; but Jeffard the miser will never exist outside of your own unbalanced imagination. Let's go out and walk. It's fervidly close in here."

Arm in arm they paced the streets until nearly midnight, talking of things practical and impracticable, and keeping well out of the present in either the past or the future. When Lansdale said good-night, he stuffed a bank-note into Jeffard's pocket.

"It's only a loan," he protested, when Jeffard would have made him take it back. "And there are no conditions. You can go and play with it, if that's what you'd rather do."

The suggestion was unfortunate, though possibly the result would have been the same in any event. Five minutes after parting from Lansdale, Jeffard had taken his place in the silent group around the table in the upper room; and by the time the pile of counters under his hand had increased to double the amount of Lansdale's gift, he was oblivious to everything save the one potent fact – that after so many reverses his luck had turned at last.

Five hundred and odd dollars he had at one time in that eventful sitting, and his neighbor across the corner of the table, a grizzled miner with the jaw of a pugilist and eyes that had a trick of softening like a woman's, had warned him by winks, nods, and sundry kicks under the table to stop. Jeffard scowled his resentment of the interference and played on, losing steadily until his capital had shrunk to fifty dollars. Then the miner rose up in his place, reached across, and gave Jeffard an open-handed buffet that nearly knocked him out of his chair.

"Dad blame you!" he roared; "I'll learn you how to spile my play! Stan' up and fight it out like a man!"

The game stopped at once. The dealer held his hand, and the banker reached for his revolver.

"You two gen'lemen cash in and get out o' here," he commanded. "This is a gen'leman's game, and we don't run no shootin'-gallery – leastwise, not unless I have to take a hand in it. Pass in your chips."

They both obeyed; the miner with maledictory reluctance, and Jeffard in a tremulous frenzy of wrath. When they reached the sidewalk, Jeffard flung himself savagely upon his assailant, only to learn that abstinence is a poor trainer, and that he was little better than a lay-figure in the grasp of the square-jawed one with the melting eyes. The big man thrust him into a corner and held him there until he listened to reason.

"You blamed idjit! you hain't got sense enough to go in when it rains! Hold still, 'r I'll bump your head ag'inst the wall! As I was sayin', you don't know enough to pound sand. Every single time I've been in this dive, you've been here, too, a-blowin' yourself like you had a wad as big as a feather bed, and you know danged well you hain't got nothin'. And you wouldn't 'a' kep' a dern cent to-night, if I hadn't thumped you and raised a row. Now you go and hunt you a place to sleep while you've got dust enough to pay for it; and don't you come round here ag'in till you've put a whole grub-stake inside of you. Savez?"

CHAPTER VII

From the beginning of the cannibalistic stage of the journey down the inclined plane, Jeffard had determined that, come what might, he would keep enough of his wardrobe to enable him to present an outward appearance of respectability. With a vague premonition of the not improbable end of the journey he recoiled at the thought of figuring before a coroner's jury as a common vagrant.

This resolution, however, like all others of a prideful nature, went down before the renewed assaults of the allies, hunger and dementia. Whereby it speedily came to pass that he retained only the garments he stood in, and these soon became shabby and wayworn. Since, in his own estimation, if not in that of others, the clothes do make the man to a very considerable extent, Jeffard gradually withdrew from his former lounging-places, confining himself to the less critical region below Larimer Street during the day, and avoiding as much as possible the haunts of his former associates at all hours.

It was for this cause that Bartrow, on his return from Chaffee County, was unable to find Jeffard. Meeting Lansdale when the search had become unhopeful, the large-hearted man of the altitudes lamented his failure after his own peculiar fashion.

"When was it you saw him last?" he inquired of the transplanted Bostonian.

"It was about a week ago. To be exact, it was a week Tuesday. I remember because we dined together that evening."

"Now doesn't that beat the band? Here I've gone and got him a soft snap up on the range – good pay, and little or nothing to do – and he's got to go and drop out like a monte man's little joker. It's enough to make a man swear continuous!"

"I don't think he would have gone with you," Lansdale ventured.

"Wouldn't, eh? If I can find him I'll take him by the neck and make him go; savez? How do you put it up? Runaway? or a pile of bones out on the prairie somewhere?"

"It's hard to say. Jeffard's a queer combination of good and not so good, – like a few others of us, – and just now the negative part is on top. He was pretty low the night we were together, though when we separated I thought he was taking himself a little less seriously."

"Didn't talk about getting the drop on himself, or anything like that?"

"N – no, not in a way to leave the impression that he was in any immediate danger of doing such a thing."

Bartrow chewed the end of his cigar reflectively. "Hasn't taken to quizzing the world through the bottom of a whiskey-glass?"

"No, I should say not. Thus far, I think he has but the one devil."

"And that's the 'tiger,' of course. I knew about that; I've known it all along. The Lord forgive me! I don't know but I was the ring-master in that show. You know we chased around a good deal together, along at the first, and it's as likely as not I showed him a whole lot of things he'd better not have seen."

The half-cynical smile lightened upon Lansdale's grave face. "That is one of my criticisms of Western manners," he commented. "When you get hold of a stranger, you welcome him with open arms – and proceed to regale him with a near-hand view of the back yards and cesspools. And then you swear piteously when he goes back East and tells his friends what an abandoned lot you are."

Bartrow took the thrust good-naturedly, as he did most of his chastenings. "That's right; that's just about what we do. But you've been here long enough now to know that it's meant for hospitality. It's a way we've got into of taking it for granted that people come out here more to see the sights than for any other purpose."

"Oh, it's good of you – I don't deny that; only it's a little rough on the new-comer, sometimes. Take Jeffard's case, for example. He came to Denver with good introductions; I know, for I saw some of them. But a man in a strange city doesn't often go about presenting his social credentials. What he does is to make a few haphazard acquaintances, and let them set the pace for him. That is what Jeffard did, and I'll venture to say there have been nine evil doors open to him to one good one. You've known him longer than any one else – how many times have you invited him to spend a rational evening with you in the company of respectable people?"

"Good Lord, Lansdale; for Heaven's sake don't begin to open up that lead! We're all miserable sinners, and I'm the medicine-man of the tribe. I never asked the poor devil to go visiting with me but once, and that was after he was down."

"And then he wouldn't go, as a matter of course. But that is neither here nor there. I'll find him for you, if I can, and leave word for you at the St. James."

"You're a brick, Lansdale; that's about what you are. I'll get square with you some day. By the way, can't you come up to Steve Elliott's with me this evening and meet some good people?"

Lansdale laughed outright. "You're a good fellow, Bartrow, but you're no diplomat. When I go a-fishing into your mentality you'll never see the hook. Make my apologies to your friends, and tell them I'm an invalid."

And Bartrow, being densely practical, and so proof against irony of whatsoever calibre, actually did so that evening when he called upon Miss Elliott and her cousin.

"But your friend wasn't promised to us, Mr. Bartrow," objected Miss Van Vetter. "Why should he send excuses?"

"I'm blessed if I know," said honest Dick, looking innocently from one to the other of them. "But that's what he told me to do, and I've done it."

Constance laughed softly. "You're too good for any use, Dick. He was making game of you. Tell us how he came to say it."

Bartrow did that, also; and the two young women laughed in chorus.

"After you've had your fun out of it I wish you'd tell me, so I can laugh too," he said. "I can't see where the joke comes in, myself."

Constance enlightened him. "There isn't any joke – only this: he had just been scolding you about your inhospitality, and then you turn on him and ask him to go calling with you. Of course, he couldn't accept, then; it would have been like inviting himself."

"Well, what of it? I don't see why he shouldn't invite himself, if he felt like it. He's a rattling good fellow." And from thence the talk drifted easily to Jeffard, who was, or who had been, another good fellow.

At the mention of Jeffard's name, Constance borrowed the mask of disinterest, and laid her commands on Bartrow. "Tell us about him," she said.

"There isn't much to tell. He came here from somewhere back East, got into bad company, lost his money, and now he's disappeared."

"How did he lose his money?" Constance would have asked the question, but her cousin forestalled her.

"Gambled it," quoth Bartrow placidly.

Constance looked sorry, and Miss Van Vetter was plainly shocked. "How very dreadful!" said the latter. "Did he lose much?"

"Oh, no; you couldn't call it much – only a few thousands, I believe. But then, you see, it was his stake; it was all he had, and he couldn't afford to give it up. And now he has gone and hid out somewhere just when I have found a place for him. It makes me very weary."

"Can't you find any trace of him?" queried Constance. "That is singular. I should think he would have left his address."

Bartrow grinned. "Well, hardly. Man don't leave his address when he wants to drop out. That's the one thing he's pretty sure to take with him. But we'll run him down yet, if he's on top of earth. Lansdale has seen more of him lately than I have, and he is taking a hand. He and Jeffard used to flock together a good deal when the shoe was on the other foot."

Miss Van Vetter looked mystified; and Bartrow deemed it a matter for self-congratulation that he was able to comprehend the query in her eyes without having it hurled at him in so many words.

"That was while Jeffard had money, and Lansdale was trying to starve himself to death," he explained. "You see, Lansdale is a queer fish in some ways. When he's down he won't let anybody touch him on his money side, so we used to work all kinds of schemes to keep him going. Jeffard would study them up, and I'd help him steer them."

This was practical benevolence, and Connie's interest bestirred itself in its charitable part. "What were some of the schemes?" she asked.

"Oh, there were a lot of them. Lansdale can see farther into a millstone than most people, and we had to invent new ones as we went along. One time, Jeffard bought a common, every-day sort of a pocketbook, and rumpled it up and tramped on it till it looked as if it might have come across the plains in Fifty-nine. Then he put a twenty-dollar bill and some loose silver in it, and dropped it on the sidewalk where I was walking Lansdale up and down for his health. After a while, when he'd actually stumbled over it four or five times, Lansdale saw the wallet and picked it up. Right there the scheme nearly fell down. You see, he was going to make me take charge of it while he advertised it. I got out of it, somehow, but I don't believe he used a nickel of the money for a month."

Connie clapped her hands softly. "That was fine! Tell us some more."

"The next one was better, and it worked like a charm. Lansdale writes things for the papers, only the editors here wouldn't buy any of his work" —

"Why not?" interrupted Miss Van Vetter.

"I don't know; because it was too good, I guess. Anyway, they wouldn't buy it, so Jeffard went to work on that lead. I took him around and introduced him to Kershaw of the 'Coloradoan,' and he made Kershaw take fifty dollars on deposit, and got him to promise to accept some of Lansdale's stories. Kershaw kicked like the deu – like the mischief, and didn't want to do it; but we bullied him, and then I got Lansdale to send him some stuff."

"Mr. Jeffard is an artist in schemes, and I envy him," said Connie. "What happened to that one?"

"Kershaw upset it by not printing the stuff. Of course, Lansdale watched the 'Coloradoan,' and when he found he wasn't in it, he wouldn't send any more. We caught him the next time, though, for something worth while."

"How was that?" It was Miss Van Vetter who asked the question; and Bartrow made a strenuous effort to evade the frontier idiom which stood ready to trip him at every turn when Myra Van Vetter's poiseful gaze rested upon him.

"Why, I happen to have a played-out – er – that is, a sort of no-account mine up in Clear Creek, and I made Lansdale believe I was the resident agent for the property, authorized to get up a descriptive prospectus. He took the job of writing it, and never once tumbled to the racket – that is, he never suspected that we were working him for a – oh, good Lord, why can't I talk plain English! – you know what I mean; he thought it was all straight. Well, he turned in the copy, and we paid him as much as he'd stand; but he has just about worried the life out of me ever since, trying to get to read proof on that prospectus. That one was Jeffard's idea, too, but I made him let me in on the assessment."

Before Miss Van Vetter could inquire what the "assessment" was, Stephen Elliott came in and the talk became general. An hour later, when Bartrow took his leave, Constance went to the door with him.

"Don't you really know where Mr. Jeffard is, Dick?" she asked.

Something in her tone set him upon the right track. "No; do you?"

"I know that he left Denver quite a while ago; about the time you were down last."

"How do you know it?"

"He told me he was going."

"The mischief he did! Where did you get acquainted with him?"

"At Mrs. Calmaine's."

Honest Dick ground his heel into the door-mat and thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat. What was in his mind came out shorn of euphemism.

"Say, Connie, do you care anything about him?"

"What a question!" she retorted, not pretending to misunderstand its pointing. "I've met him only once – or twice, I should say, though I didn't even know his name the first time."

"What did he tell you? about his going away, I mean."

"He said – but you've no right to ask me, Dick. It wasn't exactly a confidence, but" —

"Yes, I have a right to ask; he was my friend a good while before he was yours. Tell me what he said."

"He gave me to understand that things hadn't been going quite right with him, and he said he was going to the mountains to – to try to make another start."

Bartrow tucked Connie's arm under his own and walked her up and down the long veranda twice before he could bring himself to say the thing that was.

"He didn't go, Connie; he's here now, if he hasn't gone out on the prairie somewhere and taken a pot shot at himself. Lansdale saw him only a week or so ago."

"Oh, Dick!"

"It's tough, isn't it?" He stood on the step and buttoned his coat. "But I'm glad you know him – or at least, know who he is. If you should happen to run across him in any of your charity trips, just set Tommie on him and wire me if you find out where he burrows."

"You said you had found a place for him. Will it keep?"

"I'll try to hold it open for him, and if you wire, I'll come down and tackle him. He's too good a fellow to turn down in his little day of witlessness. Good-night; and good-by – for a week or so. I've got to go back on the morning train."