Henry Sydnor Harrison

“ A passionate wish to mother the little Doctor tugged at her heart.
"You know what you need, Mr. Queed? Friends—lots of good friends—"
He winced as from a blow. "I assure you—"
"Yes—you—DO!" said Fifi, with surprising emphasis for so weak a little voice. "You need first a good girl friend, one lots older and better than me—one just like Sharlee. O if only you and she would be friends!—she'd be the very best in the world! And then you need men friends, plenty of them, and to go around with them, and everything. You ought to like men more, Mr. Queed! ”

“ It was Queed's lifelong habit never to look back with vain regrets; and he needed all of his resolution now.
He stood in front of the man whose terrible secret he had surprised, and outwardly he was as calm as ever.
"Professor Nicolovius," he said, with a faint emphasis upon the name, "all this is as though it had never passed between us. And now let's go and get some supper."
Surface rose to his height and took Queed's hand in a grip like iron. His eyes glistened with sudden moisture.
"God bless you, boy! You're a man!" ”

“ Yet in the same breath, he had allowed his former chief to foist off that dishonesty upon his own clean shoulders, and borne the detestable burden without demand for sympathy or claim for gratitude. And this was the measure of how, as Queed had climbed by his honesty, his whole nature had been strengthened and refined. For if he had begun as the most unconscious and merciless of egoists, who could sacrifice little Fifi to his comfort without a tremor, he had ended with the supreme act of purest altruism: the voluntary sacrifice of himself to save a man whom in his heart he must despise. ”

“ Queed," said Sharlee, "why are you honest in every way but one? Why won't you admit that you have thought of this school because you would like to do something to help in the life of this town?"
"Because I am not doing anything of the sort! Why will you harp on that one string? Good heavens! Aren't you yourself the author of the sentiment that a sociologist ought to have some first-hand knowledge of the problems of society?" ”

“ All night, while the roses heard the flute, violin, bassoon, none in all the gay company had been gayer than Sharlee. Past many heads in the dining-room, West had watched her, laughing, radiant, sparkling as the wine itself, a pretty little lady of a joyous sweetness that never knew a care. In the dance, for he had watched her there, too, wondering, as she circled laughing by, whether she felt any lingering traces of pique with him, she had been the same: no girl ever wore a merrier heart. ”

“ That he still had glimmerings, he had shown this very hour, in wanting to make a gift to his sick little fellow-lodger. His resentment over his dismissal from the Post, too, was an unexpectedly human touch in him. But in the same breath with these things the young man had showed himself at his worst: the glimmerings were so overlaid with an incredible snobbery of the mind, so encrusted with the rankest and grossest egotism, that soon they must flutter and die out, leaving him stone-blind against the sunshine and the morning. No scratch could penetrate that Achilles-armor of self-sufficiency. ”

“ Queed resumed his seat. His face was a little pale, but otherwise just as usual. Inwardly, after the moment of critical uncertainty, he was shaken by a tempest of fierce exultation. His club, after all, was going to be strong enough; the old man would give up the money rather than give up him.
Surface picked up his cigarette. All his storm signals had disappeared as by magic.
"I did manage," began the old man, flicking off his ash with an admirable effect of calm, "to save a small nest-egg from the wreck, to keep me from the poorhouse in my old age. ”

“ Fifi laughed and coughed. "There's a big difference—isn't there? Why, it's just like the exercise, Mr. Queed. Before you began it you were just not sick; now you are very well. That's the difference between content and happiness. Now I," she ran on, "am very, very happy. I wake up in the mornings so glad that I'm alive that sometimes I can hardly bear it, and all through the day it's like something singing away inside of me! Are you like that?"
No, Mr. Queed must confess that he was not like that. ”

“ Sharlee had thought the whole thing out, and made up her mind. Gentle raillery, which would do everything necessary in most cases, would be wholly futile here. She must doff all gloves and give the little Doctor the dressing-down of his life. She must explode a mine under that enormously exaggerated self-esteem which swamped the young man's personality like a goitre. Sharlee did not want to do this. She liked Mr. Queed, in a peculiar sort of way, and yet she had to make it impossible for him ever to speak to her again. ”

“ Sharlee smiled tolerantly, and immediately resumed: "When you sit down at the office to write an article, whom do you think you are writing for? A company of scientists? An institute of gray-bearded scholars? An academy of fossilized old doctors of laws? There are not a dozen people of that sort who read the Post. Has it never occurred to you to call up before your mind's eye the people you actually are writing for? You can see them any day as you walk along the street. Go into a street car at six o'clock any night and look around at the faces. ”

“ All autumn and early winter the Post had been pounding without surcease upon two great issues: first, the reform of the tax-laws, and, second, the establishment of a reformatory institution for women. It was palpably the resolve of the paper that the legislature should not overlook these two measures through lack of being shown where its duty lay.
To the assistant editor had been assigned both campaigns, and he had developed his argument with a deadly persistence. A legislature could no more ignore him than you could ignore a man who is pounding you over the head with a bed-slat. ”

“ They live to warn away the most casual evolutionist from the theory that intellectual supremacy necessarily means supremacy of type. Where, then, you may ask, does lie the principle of triumphant evolution? Here we stand at the innermost heart of every social scheme. Let us glance a moment," said Mr. Queed, "at Man, as we see him first emerging from the dark hinterlands of history."
So, walking through the sweet autumn woods with the one girl he knew in all the world—barring only Miss Miller—Queed spoke heartily of the rise and fall of peoples and the destiny of man. ”

“ Fifi dallied with her algebra, hoping and praying that she would not have to cough. She had been very happy all that day. There was no particular reason for it; so it was the nicest kind of happiness, the kind that comes from inside, which even the presence of the little Doctor could not take away from her. Heaven knew that Fifi harbored no grudge against Mr. Queed, and she had not forgotten what Sharlee said about being gentle with him. But how to be gentle with so austere a young Socrates? Raising her head upon the pretext of turning a page, Fifi stole a hurried glance at him. ”

“ But it was not in the least all right for one man to live with another, pretending to believe in him, when in reality he was doubting and questioning him at every move. The want of candor involved in his present relations with Nicolovius continually fretted Queed's conscience. Ought he not in common honesty to tell the old man that he could not believe the Irish biography, leaving it to him to decide what he wanted to do about it?
Nicolovius, tramping in only a few minutes behind Queed, greeted his young friend as blandly as ever. ”

“ The moral responsibility was none of his; and as for a name, Queed was as good as any other. X or Y was a good enough name for a real man, whose life could demonstrate his utter independence of the labels so carefully pasted upon him by environment and circumstance.
Still, if he were to die, he felt that his father, if yet alive, should come forward and weep for him, even as Mrs. Paynter was weeping for Fifi down in the Second Front. He should stand out like a man and take from Buck's hand the solemn ceremonies of cremation. ”

“ In the hall, it occurred to Queed that perhaps he had misled his chief a little, though speaking the literal truth. The fall that some body had gotten was indeed nothing much, for people's bodies counted for nothing so long as they kept them under. But the fall that this body's self-esteem had gotten was no such trivial affair. It struck the young man as decidedly curious that the worst tumble his pride had ever received had come to him through his body, that part of him which he had always treated with the most systematic contempt. ”

“ Public life—he rejected the term political life—was of all things what he was preeminently fitted for. How else could a man so fully serve his fellows?—how so surely and strongly promote the uplift? And Plonny Neal had served notice on him that he stood to-day on the crossroads to large public usefulness. The czar of them all, the great Warwick who made and unmade kings by the lifting of his finger, had told him, as plain as language could speak, that he, West, was his imperial choice for the mayoralty, with all that that foreshadowed.... ”

“ But to-night his pencil labored and dragged. What he wrote he saw was not good. He could do harder things than force himself to sit at a table and put writing upon paper; but over the subtler processes of his mind, which alone yields the rich fruit, no man is master. In an hour he put out his lamp, undressed in the dark, and went to bed.
He lay on his back in the blackness, and in all the world he could find nothing to think about but Sharlee Weyland. ”

“ Queed, unaffectedly interested, asked the usual question—could not the girls be taught at home the dangers of such acquaintances?—and Buck pulverized it in the usual way.
"Who in blazes is goin' to teach 'em? Don't you know anything about what kind of homes they got? Why, man, they're the sisters of the little blaggards!"
He painted a dark picture of the home-life of many of these girls: its hard work and unrelenting poverty; its cheerlessness; the absence of any fun; the irresistible allurement of the flashily-dressed stranger who jingles money in his pocket and offers to "show a good time." ”

“ Don't you like to look at their faces and wonder what they're all doing and thinking and hoping and dreaming to make out of their lives?"
"Don't you think they're all hoping and dreaming just one thing?—how to make more money than they're making at present? All over the world," said Miss Weyland, "bright young men lie awake at night, thinking up odd, ingenious ways to take other people's money away from them. These young men are the spirit of America. ”

“ There are dancers in this world, and other dancers; but Sharlee was the sort that old ladies stop and watch. Of her infinite poetry of motion it is only necessary to say that she could make even "the Boston" look graceful; as witness her now. In that large room, detectives could have found men who thought Sharlee decidedly prettier than Miss Avery. Her look was not languorous; her voice was not provocative; her eyes were not narrow and tip-tilted; they did not look dangerous in the least, unless you so regard all extreme pleasure derived from looking at anything in the nature of eyes. ”

“ How much better to have sprung, as he once believed, from the honest loins of Tim Queed!
The young man averted his eyes from the detestable face of his father, and let his thoughts turn inward upon himself. For the first time in all his years, he found himself able to trace his own life back to its source, as other men do. A flying trip to New York, and two hours with Tim Queed, had answered all questions, cleared up all doubts. ”

“ And he, Queed, was this man's closest, his only friend, chosen out of all the world to live with him and minister to his declining years....
"It's true!" now broke through the concealing hands. "I am that man.... God help me!"
Queed looked unseeingly out of the window, where the sun was couching in a bed of copper flame stippled over with brightest azure. Why had he done it? What crazy prompting had struck from him that promise to yoke his destiny forever with this terrible old man? If Nicolovius, the Fenian refugee, had never won his liking, Surface, the Satan apostate, was detestable to him. ”

“ What sort of world was it that a man with a face of such shining honesty could stoop to such shabby dishonesty?—that a man who had looked at her as he had looked at her that night, could turn again and strike her such a blow? That Queed should have done this seemed as inconceivable as that West should have done it. There was the wild hundredth chance that neither had done it, that the article had been written by somebody else and published by mistake. ”

“ Here at his table, he passed all of the hours that he spent in the house, except after supper, when he did his work in the sitting-room with Nicolovius. He felt that, in honor, he owed some companionship, of the body at least, to the old man in exchange for the run of the house, and his evenings were his conscientious concession to his social duty. But sometimes he felt the surprising and wholly irrational impulse to concede more, to give the old man a larger measure of society than he was, so to say, paying for. ”

“ Deeper than the grind of the routine detail, was the constant opposition and adverse criticism to which his newspaper, like every other one, was incessantly subjected. It has long been a trite observation that no reader of any newspaper is so humble as not to be outspokenly confident that he could run that paper a great deal better than those who actually are running it. Every upstanding man who pays a cent for a daily journal considers that he buys the right to abuse it, nay incurs the manly duty of abusing it. Every editor knows that the highest praise he can expect is silence. ”

“ Queed was captain of his soul. But the fates were against him to-night. In half an hour, when the sting—they called this conflagration a sting!—was beginning to get endurable and the pencil to move steadily, the door opened and in strode Professor Nicolovius; he, it seemed, wanted matches. Why under heaven, if a man wanted matches, couldn't he buy a thousand boxes and store them in piles in his room?
The old professor apologized blandly for his intrusion, but seemed in no hurry to make the obvious reparation. ”

“ West halted.
"Here's a nice house, Tommy; I think I'll look in. See you to-morrow."
Semple, walking on, glanced back to see what house it was. It proved to be the brownstone palace leased for three years by old Mr. Avery, formerly of Mauch Chunk but now of Ours.
Sharlee, too, retired from her painful interview with West with a sense of irreparable loss. Her idol of so many years had, at a word, toppled off into the dust, and not all the king's horses could ever get him back again. It was like a death to her, and in most ways worse than a death. ”

“ He himself was simply Miss Weyland's friend, the least among many. If belief in his dishonesty had brought her pain—and he had her word for that—it was a hurt that would quickly pass. False friends are soon forgotten. But to West belonged the shining pedestal in the innermost temple of her heart. It would go hard with the little lady to find at the last moment this stain upon her lover's honor. ”

“ Through the science of Human Intercourse, he saw much more of people now than he had ever done before, and thus it had become driven home upon him that most people had two lives, their outer or practical lives, and their inner or personal lives. But he himself had but one life. He was a machine; a machine which turned out matchless work for the enlightenment of the world, but after all a machine. ”