CHAPTER X
MR. WALSH MEETS MRS. CRAIGHILL
WINGFIELD was mistaken when he announced at the Allequippa Club, apropos of Walsh’s purchase of a controlling interest in the Wayne-Craighill Company, that Roger Craighill had never appreciated Walsh’s services. Colonel Craighill not only valued Walsh highly, but he took occasion to express, in a statement given to the newspapers, his “deep sense of loss upon the retirement of my faithful chief of staff, who after years of painstaking labour, reaps the reward of his own industry and fidelity.” More than this, Colonel Craighill made Walsh’s passing the occasion for a dinner to all the employees in his office and to the managers of the mines and coking plants in which he was interested. Walsh was thus used as an illustration of the qualities that make for honourable success. This banquet, provided at a leading hotel toward the end of October, was memorable on many accounts, and not least for the address delivered to the company by the head of the table—an utterance marked by noble sentiment and expressing the highest ideals of conduct in commercial life. Wingfield characterized this somewhat coarsely as “hot air” when he read it in the newspapers; the Colonel was, he averred, the Prince of the Platitudinous.
“The Colonel thinks he is looking through the windows of his soul upon Humanity,” remarked Wingfield to a shrewd, skilful occulist with whom he shared such heresies; “but the windows of his soul are all mirrors.” But Wingfield was almost the only man in town who refused to accept Roger Craighill at rather more than face value.
Wayne, glancing a few days later at Mrs. Blair’s list of persons to be invited to her reception in their stepmother’s honour, suggested that Walsh ought to be asked.
“Why Walsh?” asked Mrs. Blair bluntly. “When I pass him in the park driving his beautiful horses and with a long black cigar in his mouth, he makes me shudder.”
“When he takes up a list of accounts payable and runs his eye down the column, all the people who owe money anywhere on earth shudder. He’s a sphinx, but I like him. He’s been mighty good to me and if you don’t mind I’ll say that he will be missed at the office more than the Colonel knows.”
“Oh, tush, Wayne! Father has always said that no man is indispensable, and he wouldn’t have lost Walsh if he had needed him. Father’s proud that an old subordinate can go out of the office into a business of his own.”
“Maybe,” persisted Wayne, “maybe Walsh isn’t the subordinate.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Walsh has been, far more than the Colonel knows, the deus ex machina of our affairs. Father has not known the details of his various interests for years—not since I went into the office. He sees only the results and, thanks to Walsh, they have been very satisfactory. When there was a nasty trip to take in a hurry to head off a strike, or to see why we weren’t making the usual tonnages, old Walsh slipped out of town and looked after it without a word. Father thinks he did it all; probably thinks it honestly; and Walsh let him think it. That’s Walsh’s way. When father went out in his private car and found all the properties in bang-up shape he thought he was looking at the results of his own management; but in fact Walsh’s eagle eye and iron grip had done the real work.”
“You mustn’t talk so of father, Wayne; you have grown bitter toward him and can’t judge him fairly. But if you think Mr. Walsh ought to be asked to the reception I’ll send him a card. There isn’t any Mrs. Walsh, I believe?”
“No. He’s married happily to his horses and cigars. Don’t take this too hard; Walsh has never manifested any interest in social fusses yet and he’ll hardly begin now. I can’t see him in a dress suit! He won’t come to your party but it would be decent to send him a ticket.”
“Certainly, Wayne; not because Mr. Walsh has been father’s brains but because you ask it.”
“Oh, never mind that! Walsh has always been bully to me. I’m keeping my stock in the mercantile company just because I like him. When we closed that deal the other day and I told Tom I was going to hold on to my stock he came as near being affected as I suppose is possible in such a hardy old plant. The name of the corporation isn’t to be changed and he said he hoped I’d come to see him occasionally to help his credit. He was really a good deal tickled over it.”
The Blair house lent itself well to large entertainments. At ten o’clock the hostess breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that her party was a success. The representative people of the Greater City were there. Men and women who, in Mrs. Blair’s phrase, “stood for something,” had passed in review before Mrs. Roger Craighill. Mrs. Blair was catholic-minded in social matters. The wide advertisement of her city through the coarse social exploits of some of her citizens during the Great Prosperity had aroused her bitter resentment, and she had summoned for this occasion many who, able to declare themselves guiltless of wealth, proved in their own lives and aspirations that something besides vulgarity and greed emerge from the seething caldron to which the Greater City may be likened. It was Mrs. Blair’s delight to discover, and as far as lay in her power, to stimulate and reward ambition in the arts and sciences. She had promoted the fortunes of a long line of young physicians, placing them on hospital boards and sending them influential patients. Poor artists were sure to find sitters if she took them up; the young girl seeking countenances to immortalize in miniature would, if satisfactorily weighed in Mrs. Blair’s balance, find herself embarrassed with clients. John McCandless Blair could never tell, when he went home to dinner, what new musical genius would be enthroned in the music room—young men in flowing black scarfs, or, rather more delectable, young girls of just the right type to look well at the harp, and who, no matter what strains might be evoked by their fingers, yet possessed in the requisite degree what Mrs. Blair capitalized as Soul.
Mrs. Blair’s reception drew a wide circle within which Mrs. Craighill made the acquaintance of her husband’s fellow-townsmen. Curiosity proved stronger in most cases than fealty to the dead, even among the first Mrs. Craighill’s friends. The obvious answer to any invidious question as to the wife’s previous history was that a man standing as high as Colonel Craighill, and as careful as he of his honour and good name, was unlikely to make a marriage that would jeopardize his position.
There were, however, absences that expressed the resentment of certain old friends of the family who had, in Mrs. Blair’s phrase, “taken a stand.” These were fewer than Mrs. Blair had hoped for but Mrs. Wingfield did not appear; the pastor emeritus of Memorial Church, a gentleman who had been favoured by fortune and was in no wise dependent on Craighill patronage, had declined earlier an invitation to dine and a request for the honour of his presence at the reception; and a retired general of the army, who sat with Roger Craighill among the elders of Memorial, not only scorned these overtures but expressed discreetly his feeling that the marriage had been an act of disloyalty to the Craighill children. There were not more than half a dozen of these instances, and while they were not, to be sure, of great importance, Mrs. Blair magnified their significance and took pains to thank the absentees later for their attitude. Dick Wingfield, keen in such matters, found upon analysis that those who, like his own mother, rejected the newcomer, were persons who had nothing whatever to lose by incurring the disfavour of Roger Craighill. His mother was rich and an independent spirit if ever one existed; the old minister’s income could not be disturbed by Roger Craighill or anyone else; the retired general had, as a lieutenant, invested his scant savings in Omaha and Seattle town lots, and checks from Washington were only an incident of his income. Nobody, in fact, whom Roger Craighill could possibly reach, no one likely to need his help in any way whatever, had joined in this tame rebellion.
Wingfield, not easily astonished by anything, was nevertheless amazed to meet Walsh at Mrs. Blair’s reception. He imagined that he knew Walsh pretty well, but their acquaintance had been a matter of contact at the Club, warmed into friendliness during a period in which Wingfield had, as he put it, “affected horse.” Wingfield was looking for the youngest débutante when he came upon Walsh stolidly smoking in the Blair library. Walsh in a white waistcoat was something new under the sun. It occurred to Wingfield that he had never seen him in anyone’s house before. He stopped to smoke a cigarette that he might, if possible, analyze Walsh’s emotions in this alien air.
“So you’ve quit the Colonel—taken over the Wayne-Craighill Company. If you have any stock to sell I’d like to have a slice. I’ve always thought the grocery business must be entertaining. Its ethnological relations would appeal to me. I understand that these people who pile themselves on our social dump—the riff-raff of Europe—bring their delectable appetites with them, and that your cellars are as savoury as a Chinese stinkpot with the bouquet of finnan haddie and such epicurean delights. So Wayne’s going to stay in, is he?”
Walsh took the cigar from his mouth and nodded.
“Yes; Wayne’s vice-president of the company now.”
“That’s good. You and I are the only people hereabouts who really appreciate Wayne. There are things that Wayne can do.”
Walsh nodded again. He settled himself back in his chair comfortably and looked at Wingfield with liking. A bronze Buddha, a striking item of the lares and penates of the Blair home, gazed down upon them benevolently.
“Wayne,” said Walsh deliberately, “was born to be a man of power. He was built for big transactions.”
Wingfield was surprised into silence. He had never before heard Walsh express himself as to the character of any man and there was something akin to heartiness in this endorsement of Wayne Craighill. Wingfield forgot his quest of the débutante in his eagerness to hear the inscrutable Walsh’s opinions. Fearing that he might relapse into one of the silences for which he was famous, Wingfield applied the prod.
“The Colonel never understood Wayne,” he remarked leadingly.
“That is possible,” replied Walsh, after a moment of deliberation.
“Wayne could do anything he wanted to—lead forlorn hopes, command a battleship, preach a sermon, run a coal mine, or sell a gold brick. The Scotch in him is pretty sound yet. He’s a free spender, but he has his thrifty side.”
“Um—yes. Wayne has brains.”
“Why don’t you take him in hand, Walsh, and teach him how to work?”
After a prolonged silence Walsh asked dryly:
“Why?”
“Because the Colonel has failed at it.”
The two men looked at each other fixedly for a moment.
“He tried hard enough. He’s disappointed in Wayne.”
Walsh spoke as though he were repeating an accepted opinion rather than voicing his own thought. Wingfield caught him up.
“It pleases the Colonel to think that he possesses anything as well authenticated as a thankless child. The serpent’s tooth tickles the Colonel’s vanity. Resignation becomes the Colonel like a pale lavender necktie.”
“He may work his way out. Marriage might help him.”
“That’s not so easy. A bad marriage would send him clear to the bottom. You’ve got to find a particular sort of girl for his case.”
“I agree with you. The girls that are here to-night—the pretty daughters of best families—that kind would be no good for him; and besides, they’re not going to try it. Their papas and mamas wouldn’t let them if they wanted to.”
Wingfield was delighted to hear these expressions from Walsh. It was as though the sphinx, breaking the silence of centuries, had suddenly bent down and addressed a chance traveller on the topics of the day. Walsh spoke, moreover, with the quiet conviction of one who had thought deeply on the subject under discussion.
“You are quite right. I agree with you fully!” declared Wingfield, anxious to hear further from Walsh. “It would take a plucky girl to tackle Wayne.”
“Brains, common sense, patience! A good, sensible working-girl would be my choice.”
Walsh stroked his bald pate with his hand, and drew deeply upon his cigar. Wingfield was pondering Walsh’s words carefully, fully appreciating the flattery of the old fellow’s unwonted loquacity.
“How are we going to find her?”
“We are not going to find her. Wayne’s a lucky devil—such fellows are usually lucky—and his future must take care of itself.”
“So our prince must marry a pauper, the girl behind the glove counter, the angel whose nimble digits gambol merrily upon the typewriter, the low-voiced houri who trifles with the world’s good nature in the telephone exchange? Wayne is fastidious. How are you going to arrange the time and the place and the loved one altogether?” demanded Wingfield.
“I’m not a fool, Mr. Wingfield; I’m not going to arrange it at all! I’d look pretty in the matchmaking business,” concluded Walsh grimly.
“No; I guess not,” smiled Wingfield; but he was startled by Walsh’s next statement, delivered quietly and with his cigar in his mouth.
“I could hardly qualify as an expert on marriage, having failed at it myself.”
Walsh’s tone forbade inquiry. He had opened a door into some dark chamber of his past, then closed it tight and shot the bolt back into place. He rose, clumsily and lumberingly, and dropped his cigar into an ash tray. The long, blank surface of his bald head wrinkled as his brows lifted, and his eyes widened as though fixed on a horizon against which he had glimpsed the familiar outlines of some wave-washed and hopeless argosy. By a common impulse the men clasped hands silently.
“An election bet or what?” cried Mrs. Blair in the doorway. “With all the trouble there is about getting men, I should like to know what you two mean by hobnobbing here by yourselves. I shall punish you for this, Mr. Walsh, by making you take me in to supper.”
The guests were being served in the dining room and in the hall and conservatory adjoining. Mrs. Blair convoyed Walsh to a corner where Mrs. Craighill was seated at a table with the solidest bank president of the Greater City. This person was, however, slightly deaf, and as Mrs. Blair rose frequently, in her office of hostess, to assure herself of the comfort of the others who were straying in for supper, Walsh found opportunity for speech with Mrs. Craighill, whom he had observed only passingly in the drawing room.
“This is the most hospitable place! Everyone is so very kind,” murmured Mrs. Craighill.
“I suppose so,” replied Walsh, his glance falling upon Roger Craighill, who was relating an anecdote to a circle of wrapt listeners near by. The financier was intent upon his salad, and Mrs. Craighill gave her whole attention to Walsh.
“Colonel Craighill has told me a great deal about you, Mr. Walsh. Let me see what it was that he said—you know how splendidly he puts everything—he said, ‘Mr. Walsh is a born trustee; you can trust him with anything.’”
“Those are strong words,” said Walsh, meeting her gaze quietly.
“But you are leaving him, and he is very glad when any of his men go away from him to do better for themselves. He feels that it’s a credit to him. I suppose it’s like the pride the colleges take in a successful graduate.”
Here obviously was an opportunity for Walsh to follow her line of thought and speak in praise of his alma mater; but he switched the subject abruptly.
“You are a stranger here, Mrs. Craighill?”
“Yes, I was! But I’m beginning to feel at home already. I suppose it will take me years to learn everything about this wonderful city.”
“I have been here twenty-five years and have it all to learn—I mean this sort of thing,” and Walsh glanced about as though to broaden into generalization his ignorance of society. “This is the first time I have ever crossed a threshold in this town.”
“How strange!” He was even more difficult than the deaf financier, this strange old fellow with the shiny pate and unsmiling countenance. “But,” she laughed, “I’m going to take this as personal to me—your coming to-night! You won’t grudge me the belief that I’m responsible for your appearance—your first appearance—if you really mean me to believe that it is the first!”
“There is no doubt of that. It’s what they call my début. I came”—and he smiled, a smile that was of the eyes rather than the thin lips—“I came for that. I came just to see you.”
He looked at her so fixedly that she shrugged her shoulders and turned away. This might be the privilege of an old friend of her husband, but his words fell harshly, as from lips unused to gracious speech. Very likely he was an eccentric character, who, from his own statement, was ignorant of social usage. His keen scrutiny made Mrs. Craighill uncomfortable for a moment.
“Now that you have seen me, Mr. Walsh, please tell me your verdict; spare nothing!”
“I think,” said Walsh bluntly, “that you are much nicer than I expected.”
He was trying to take a lump of sugar for his coffee with the tongs, but his hand shook.
“Fingers were made first! Allow me! You are smoking too much—that’s the answer,” she laughed. Walsh was annoyed by this evidence of weakness, for his nerves were usually steady, and he was vexed to be obliged to accept her help.
“Horses and cigars are your only diversions, I hear, Mr. Walsh.”
“Who told you that?”
“It was Wayne, I think.”
“Oh, yes; Wayne,” repeated Walsh, as though recalling the name with difficulty.
“Wayne and you are great friends.”
“Well, I don’t know that he would admit it,” and Walsh smiled. Mrs. Craighill reflected that there was something akin to tenderness just now in the face of this curious man.
“Oh, he told me about it! He spoke of you much more enthusiastically than Colonel Craighill did. It was not that Colonel Craighill didn’t say everything that was kind; but with Wayne, it was as though——”
“Well?”
“As though he loved you—there!”
The colour deepened in Walsh’s weather-beaten face, ruddy at all times from the park air, where he drove in every sort of weather; even his bald crown reddened. He was undoubtedly pleased; but he said, with an effort at lightness:
“That’s just like Wayne; he’s a great joker.”
Mrs. Blair flashed back upon them now, and charged them with treasonable confidences. The old banker had detached himself some time earlier and joined the circle which Colonel Craighill was addressing in his semi-oratorical key on the opposite side of the room. Mrs. Craighill and Walsh, having satisfied their own imaginary social hunger, remained with Mrs. Blair while she had her coffee.
“You must come up and see the dance. All the prettiest girls have come. You must go up to the ballroom, too, Mr. Walsh. And I’m going to tell you now, for fear I forget it, how pleased I am that you came.”
“You were kind to ask me. It has been a privilege to meet Mrs. Craighill.”
Walsh stood up abruptly, bowed with a quaint touch of manner to each of the ladies, pleaded an engagement downtown, and left them.
Mrs. Craighill was surprised to find herself turning her head to watch his burly figure through the door.
Wayne, roaming the house restlessly, drifted into the conservatory. It had been his sister’s habit to ignore what was practically ostracism as far as he was concerned socially. She realized the justice of his exclusion, but inwardly, with sisterly fidelity, resented it. There was a pathos in him that touched her; and as she saw him moving about alone, or joining some group where size minimized the danger of contamination, her heart ached for him. Wayne, as he lounged listlessly in the dining room door, saw Walsh in conversation with Mrs. Craighill a moment before Mrs. Blair rejoined them. Wayne stood just behind his father and several of Colonel Craighill’s auditors looked up and smiled, but without relaxing their attention.
“You young people,” Colonel Craighill was saying, “can’t be expected to love this town of ours as we old folks do, who, you might say, fought and bled for it. Even now,” he continued, adjusting his plate carefully upon his knee and lifting his eyes dreamily, “the Civil War period is as remote in the minds of the new generation as the Wars of the Roses.”
“Tell us a war story, Colonel!” cried a girl in the circle; “something really terrible—of how you led a forlorn hope, the flag lifted in one hand and your trusty sword in another, sprinting right over the ramparts at Saratoga or The Cowpens, or whatever the place was——”
Colonel Craighill joined in the laugh at his own expense, and appealed to the group:
“Doesn’t this prove what I was saying? You children know nothing of American history. I didn’t quite come over with Columbus, Julia. A few weeks ago I was talking to the president—I hadn’t really gone to Washington for the purpose but we got into it somehow——”
Wingfield, who had brought the prettiest of the débutantes down from the ballroom, paused a moment to catch the drift of the Colonel’s story. He was bound for the conservatory, where there were opportunities for the better study of his butterfly, who was a trifle awed by the attention of a grown man, one who had, in fact, been in her father’s class at Pennsylvania. Wayne, with something akin to a grin on his face, turned away abruptly out of hearing of his father’s voice, nodded to Wingfield and passed on. His friend, with the careless ease that distinguished him, had sighted a waiter and two chairs in a far corner of the conservatory and led the way thither.
“Did you hear Julia Morse sting the Colonel?” he asked the girl, as he unfolded his napkin. “I shall have to look her up; I’ve done her a cruel injustice. I supposed Julia was a stanch subscriber to the Craighill superstition, but she’s clearly deeper than I imagined. It’s odd I never knew Julia’s true worth; I’m annoyed by my own density. The salad—yes!”
“The Craighill superstition?” asked the girl, the knowledge and wisdom of Wingfield’s forty-three years towering over her youth and inexperience like a mighty cliff.
“Just that—quite that! The Colonel’s military greatness ranks with the ladder superstition, the Friday superstition, the thirteen at table superstition, and all those things.”
“But Colonel Craighill was a soldier in the Civil War—of course not in the Revolution, I know that.”
“Now really, if you won’t ever say I told you—if this can be a little confidence just between ourselves as old friends—I’ll tell you something. The Colonel was never a real colonel at all. But when General Lee started for Chicago by way of Gettysburg in the summer of 1863, Pittsburg was terribly frightened, so the old folks say—I wasn’t here, I assure you!—and Colonel Craighill bossed the men who dug entrenchments around the city to keep the Confederates out. He did it well. When your father and I were kids together—doesn’t it seem absurd that you and I can’t be contemporaries, instead?—oh, my, please forget that I began that sentence; it leads clear back to the time when the Indians camped where the Craighill building stands.
“Well, as I was saying, the Colonel was only a sort of home-guard trench-digger and that sort of thing. He helped the women manage fairs and did it very prettily, but ever since the War the Colonel’s stock as a red-handed slayer of his country’s foes has been rising. He ranks with Wellington and Grant, with a little dash of Sheridan thrown in.”
“I sit behind Colonel Craighill in church and it doesn’t seem possible that he would deceive anyone,” remarked the girl, half afraid to yield to her delight in these profane utterances.
“Ah! but he deceives himself; he really believes that he held up the pillars of the Union cause and who are we to question him? And he’s an ardent if cautious reformer; he’d rather cut the ten commandments to a scant six than mutilate the present tariff, which alone is holy to us Pennsylvanians. Do you know, this salad is really edible; I must congratulate Mrs. Blair on her cook. Of course we’re to see you everywhere now. Please don’t be running off all the time; it’s demoralizing. If we good people don’t stay at home, what, may I ask, will become of Pittsburg? We produce everything in Pennsylvania, as you may have noticed—everything but local pride!”