SILK STOCKINGS AND BLUE OVERALLS
One night in this same June, Harwood was directed by the city editor of the "Courier" to find Mr. Edward G. Thatcher. Two reporters had failed at it, and it was desirable to verify reports as to certain transactions by which Thatcher, in conjunction with Morton Bassett, was believed to be effecting a merger of various glass-manufacturing interests. Thatcher had begun life as a brewer, but this would long since have been obscured by the broadening currents of fortune if it had not been for his persistent dabbling in politics. Whenever the Republican press was at a loss for something to attack, Thatcher's breweries—which he had concealed in a corporation that did not bear his name were an inviting and unfailing target. For years, though never seeking office, he had been a silent factor in politics, and he and Bassett, it was said, controlled their party. Mrs. Thatcher had built an expensive house, but fearing that the money her husband generously supplied was tainted by the remote beer vats, she and her two daughters spent most of their time in Europe, giving, however, as their reason the ill-health of Thatcher's son. Thatcher's income was large and he spent it in his own fashion. He made long journeys to witness prize fights; he had the reputation of being a poor poker player, but "a good loser"; he kept a racing-stable that lost money, and he was a patron of baseball and owned stock in the local club. He was "a good fellow" in a sense of the phrase that requires quotation marks. Mrs. Sally Owen, whose opinion in all matters pertaining to her fellow citizens is not to be slighted, fearlessly asked Thatcher to dinner at her house. She expressed her unfavorable opinion of his family for deserting him, and told him to his face that a man who knew as little about horses as he did should have a guardian.
"He's in town somewhere," said the city editor; "don't come back and tell me you can't find him. Try the Country Club, where he was never known to go, and the University Club, where he doesn't belong, and all the other unlikely places you can think of. The other boys have thrown up their hands."
Dan had several times been fortunate in like quests for men in hiding, and he had that confidence in his luck which is part of the good reporter's endowment. He called all the clubs and the Thatcher residence by telephone. The clubs denied all knowledge of Edward G. Thatcher, and his residence answered not at all; whereupon Harwood took the trolley for the Thatcher mansion in the new quarter of Meridian Street beyond the peaceful shores of Fall Creek. A humorist who described the passing show from the stern of a rubber-neck wagon for the instruction of tourists announced on every round that "This is Edward G. Thatcher's residence; it contains twelve bath-rooms, and cost seventy-five thousand dollars four years ago. The family have lived in it three months. Does it pay to be rich?"
As Harwood entered the grounds the house loomed darkly before him. Most of the houses in this quarter were closed for the summer, but Dan assumed that there must be some sort of caretaker on the premises and he began patiently punching the front-door bell. Failing of any response, he next tried a side door and finally the extreme rear. He had begun to feel discouraged when, as he approached the front entrance for a second assault, he saw a light flash beyond the dark blinds. The door opened cautiously, and a voice gruffly bade him begone.
"I have a message for Mr. Thatcher; it's very important—"
"Mr. Thatcher not at home; nobody home," growled a voice in broken English. "You get right off dis place, quick!"
Dan thrust his walking-stick into the small opening to guard against having the door slammed in his face and began a parley that continued for several minutes with rising heat on the part of the caretaker. The man's rage at being unable to close the door was not without its humor; but Dan now saw, beyond the German's broad shoulders, a figure lurking within, faintly discernible from the electric lamps in a bronze sconce on the wall.
The reporter and the caretaker were making no progress in their colloquy and Dan was trying to catch a glimpse of the other man, who leaned against the wall quite indifferent to the struggle for the door. Dan supposed him to be another servant, and he had abandoned hope of learning anything of Thatcher, when a drawling voice called out:—
"Open the door, Hans, and let the gentleman in: I'll attend to him."
Dan found himself face to face with a young man of about his own age, a slender young fellow, clad in blue overalls and flannel shirt. He lounged forward with an air of languor that puzzled the reporter. His dress was not wholly conclusive as to his position in the silent house; the overalls still showed their pristine folds, the shirt was of good quality and well-cut. The ends of a narrow red-silk four-in-hand swung free. He was clean-shaven save for an absurd little mustache so fair as to be almost indistinguishable. His blond hair was brushed back unparted from his forehead. Another swift survey of the slight figure disclosed a pair of patent-leather pumps. His socks, revealed at the ankles, were scarlet. Dan was unfamiliar with the ménage of such establishments as this, and he wondered whether this might not be an upper servant of a new species peculiar to homes of wealth. He leaned on his stick, hat in hand, and the big blue eyes of the young man rested upon him with disconcerting gravity. A door slammed at the rear upon the retreating German, whom this superior functionary had dispatched about his business. At a moment when the silence became oppressive the young man straightened himself slightly and spoke in a low voice, and with amusement showing clearly in his eyes and about his lips,—
"You're a reporter."
"Yes; I'm from the 'Courier.' I'm looking for Mr. Thatcher."
"Suppose, suppose—if you're not in a great hurry, you come with me."
The pumps, with the scarlet socks showing below the overalls, turned at the end of the broad hall and began ascending the stairs. The young man's manner was perfectly assured. He had not taken his hands from his pockets, and he carried himself with an ease and composure that set Dan's conjectures at naught. In the absence of the family, a servant might thus conduct himself; and yet, if Thatcher was not at home, why should he be thus ushered into the inner sanctities of the mansion by this singular young person, whose silk hose and bright pumps were so utterly out of harmony with the rest of his garb. There might be a trick in it; perhaps he had intruded upon a burglarious invasion,—this invitation to the upper chambers might be for the purpose of shutting him in somewhere until the place had been looted. It was, in any case, a novel adventure, and his curiosity was aroused by the languid pace with which, without pausing at the second floor, the young man continued on to the third. Through an open door Dan saw a bedroom in order for occupancy; but the furniture in the upper and lower halls was draped, and a faint odor of camphor hung upon the air. It had occurred to Harwood that he might be stumbling upon material for a good "story," though just what it might prove to be was still a baffling question. His guide had not spoken or looked at him since beginning the ascent, and Harwood grasped his stick more firmly when they gained the third floor. If violence was in the programme he meant to meet it gallantly. His conductor passed through a spacious bedroom, and led the way to a pleasant lounging- and reading-room with walls lined with books. Without pausing he flung open a door that divulged a shop, with a bench and tools. The litter of carpentry on the bare floor testified to the room's recent use.
"Sit down, won't you, and have a cigar?"
Dan hesitated. He felt that he must be the victim of a practical joke, and it was time that his dignity asserted itself. He had accepted a cigar and was holding it in his fingers, still standing. His strange guide struck a match and held it, so that Dan perforce took advantage of the proffered flame; and he noticed now for the first time the young fellow's slender, nervous hands, which bore no marks of hard toil. He continued to watch them with interest as they found and filled a pipe. They were amazingly deft, expressive hands.
"Have a chair! It's a good one; I made it myself!"
With this the young gentleman jumped lightly upon the workbench where he nursed his knees and smoked his pipe. He was a graceful person, trimly and delicately fashioned, and in this strange setting altogether inexplicable. But Dan's time was important, and he had not yet learned anything as to Edward G. Thatcher's whereabouts. This languid young gentleman seemed wholly indifferent to the reporter's restlessness, and Dan's professional pride rebelled.
"Pardon me, but I must see Mr. Thatcher. Where is he, please?"
"He's gone, skipped! No manner of use in looking for him. On my honor, he's not in town."
"Then why didn't you say so and be done with it?" demanded Dan angrily.
"Please keep your seat," replied the young fellow from the workbench. "I really wish you would."
He drew on his pipe for a moment, and Dan, curiously held by his look and manner and arrested by the gentleness of his voice, awaited further developments. He had no weapons with which to deal with this composed young person in overalls and scarlet hose. He swallowed his anger; but his curiosity now clamored for satisfaction.
"May I ask just who you are and why on earth you brought me up here?"
"Those are fair questions—two of them. To the first, I am Allen Thatcher, and this is my father's house. To the second—" He hesitated a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and laughed. "Well, if you must know,—I was so devilish lonesome!"
He gazed at Harwood quizzically, with a half-humorous, half-dejected air.
"If you're lonesome, Mr. Thatcher, it must be because you prefer it that way. It can't be necessary for you to resort to kidnapping just to have somebody to talk to. I thought you were in Europe."
"Nothing as bad as that! What's your name, if you don't mind?"
When Dan gave it, Thatcher nodded and thanked him.
"College man?"
"Yale."
"That's altogether bully. I envy you, by George! You see," he went on easily, as though in the midst of a long and intimate conversation, "they took me abroad, and it never really counted. They always treated me as though I were an invalid; and kept me for a year or two squatting on an Alp on account of my lungs. It amused them, no doubt; and it filled in my time till I was too old to go to college. But now that I'm grown up, I'm going to stay at home. I've been here a month, having a grand old time; a little lonesome, and yet I'm a person of occupations and Hans cooks enough for me to eat. I haven't been down town much, but nobody knows me here anyhow. Dad's been living at the club or a hotel, but he moved up here to be with me. Dad's the best old chap on earth. I guess he liked my coming back. They rather bore him, I fancy. We've had a bully day or two, but dad has skipped. Gone to New York; be back in a week. Wanted me to go; but not me! I've had enough travel for a while. They gave me a dose of it."
These morsels of information fell from him carelessly. His "they," Dan assumed, referred to his mother and sisters somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic; and young Thatcher spoke of them in a curiously impersonal and detached fashion. The whimsical humor that twinkled in his eyes occasionally was interesting and pleasing; and Dan imagined that he was enjoying the situation. Silk socks and overalls were probably a part of some whim; they certainly added picturesqueness to the scene. But the city editor must be informed that Edward G Thatcher was beyond his jurisdiction and Dan rose and moved toward the door. Allen jumped down and crossed to him quickly.
"Oh, I say! I really wish you wouldn't go!"
There was no doubt of the pleading in his voice and manner. He laid a hand very gently on Dan's arm.
"But I've got to get back downtown, if your father has really gone and isn't hidden away here somewhere."
"I've cut you a slice right out of the eternal truth on that, old man. Father will be in New York for breakfast in the morning. Search the house all you please; but, do you know, I'd rather like you to believe me."
"Of course, I believe you; but it's odd the office didn't know you were here. They told me you and your mother and sisters were abroad, but that your father was in town. A personal item in the 'Courier' this morning said that you were all in the Hartz Mountains."
"I dare say it did! The newspapers keep them all pretty well before the public. But I've had enough junketing. I'm going to stay right here for a while."
"You prefer it here—is that the idea?"
"Yes, I fancy I should if I knew it; I want to know it. But I'm all kinds of crazy, you know. They really think I'm clear off, simply because their kind of thing doesn't amuse me. I lost too much as a kid being away from home. They said I had to be educated abroad, and there you see me—Dresden awhile, Berlin another while, a lot of Geneva, and Paris for grand sprees. And my lung was always the excuse if they wanted to do a winter on the Nile,—ugh! The very thought of Egypt makes me ill now."
"It all sounds pretty grand to me. I was never east of Boston in my life."
"By Jove! I congratulate you," exclaimed the young man fervidly. "And I'll wager that you went to school at a cross-roads school-house and rode to town in a farm wagon to see a circus that had lions and elephants; and you probably chopped wood and broke colts and went swimming in an old swimmin'-hole and did all the other things you read about in American biographies and story books. I can see it in your eye; and you talk like it, too."
"I dare say I do!" laughed Dan. "They've always told me that my voice sounds like a nutmeg grater."
"They filed mine off! Mother was quite strong for the Italian a, and I'm afraid I've caught it, just like a disease."
"I should call it a pretty good case. I was admiral of a canal boat in New Jersey one summer trying to earn enough money to carry my sophomore year in college, and cussing the mules ruined my hope of a reputable accent. It almost spoiled my Hoosier dialect!"
"By George, I wonder if the canal-boat people would take me! It would be less lonesome than working at the bench here. Dad says I can do anything I like. He's tickled to death because I've come home. He's really the right sort; he did all the horny-handed business himself—ploughed corn, wore red mittens to a red school-house, and got licked with a hickory stick. But he doesn't understand why I don't either take a job in his office or gallop the Paris boulevards with mother and the girls; but he's all right. We're great pals. But the rest of them made a row because I came home. For a while they had dad's breweries as an excuse for keeping away, and my lungs! Dad hid the breweries, so their hope of a villa at Sorrento is in my chest. Dad says my lungs have been their main asset. There's really nothing the matter with me; the best man in New York told me so as I came through."
His manner of speaking of his family was deliciously droll; he yielded his confidences as artlessly as a child.
"They almost got a steam yacht on me last year," he went on. "Hired a Vienna doctor to say I ought to be kept at sea between Gibraltar and the Bosphorus. And here, by George, is America the dear, bully old America of Washington, Franklin, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln! And they want to keep me chasing around among ruins and tombs! I say to you, Mr. Harwood, in all solemnity, that I've goo-gooed my last goo-goo at the tombs of dead kings!"
They stood near the shop door during this interchange. Dan forgot, in his increasing interest and mystification, that the "Courier's" city editor was waiting for news of Thatcher, the capitalist. Young Thatcher's narrative partook of the nature of a protest. He was seriously in rebellion against his own expatriation. He stood erect now, with the color bright in his cheeks, one hand thrust into his pocket, the other clenching his pipe.
"I tell you," he declared, "I've missed too much! Life over here is a big thing!—it's wonderful, marvelous, grand, glorious! And who am I to spend winters on the dead old Nile when history is being made right here on White River! I tell you I want to watch the Great Experiment, and if I were not a poor, worthless, ignorant ass I'd be a part of it."
Dan did not question the young fellow's sincerity. His glowing eyes and the half-choked voice in which he concluded gave an authentic stamp to his lament and pronouncement. A look of dejection crossed his face. He had, by his own confession, asked Dan into the house merely to have some one to talk to; he was dissatisfied, unhappy, lonely; and his slender figure and flushed cheeks supported his own testimony that his health had been a matter of concern. The Nile and the Alps against which he had revolted might not be so unnecessary as he believed.
The situation was so novel that Harwood's mind did not respond with the promptness of his heart. He had known the sons of rich men at college, and some of them had been his friends. It was quite the natural and accepted order of things that some children should be born to sheltered, pampered lives, while others were obliged to hew their own way to success. He had observed in college that the sons of the rich had a pretty good time of it; but he had gone his own way unenviously. It was not easy to classify young Thatcher. He was clearly an exotic, a curious pale flower with healthy roots and a yearning for clean, free air. Dan was suddenly conscious that the young fellow's eyes were bent upon him with a wistfulness, a kind of pleading sweetness, that the reporter had no inclination to resist. He delayed speaking, anxious to say the right word, to meet the plea in the right spirit.
"I think I understand; I believe I should feel just as you do if I were in your shoes. It's mighty interesting, this whole big scheme we're a part of. Over there on the other side it's all different, the life, the aims, and the point of view. And here we've got just what you call it—the most wonderful experiment the world ever saw. Great Scott!" he exclaimed, kindling from the spark struck by Thatcher's closing words, "it's prodigious, overwhelming! There mustn't be any question of losing!"
"That's right!" broke in Thatcher eagerly; "that's what I've been wanting somebody to say! It's so beautiful, so wonderful; the hope and promise are so immense! You believe it; I can see you do!" he concluded happily.
His hand stole shyly from the pocket that seemed to be its inevitable hiding-place, and paused uncertainly; then he thrust it out, smiling.
"Will you shake hands with me?"
"Let us be old friends," replied Dan heartily. "And now I've got to get out of here or I'll lose my job."
"Then I should have to get you another. I never meant to keep you so long. You've been mighty nice about it. I suppose I couldn't help you—I mean about dad? All you wanted was to see father or find you couldn't."
"I had questions to ask him, of course. They were about a glass-factory deal with Bassett."
"Oh, I dare say they bought them! He asked me if I didn't want to go into the glass business. He talks to me a lot about things. Dad's thinking about going to the Senate. Dad's a Democrat, like Jefferson and Jackson. If he goes to the Senate I'll have a chance to see the wheels go round at Washington. Perfectly bully for me!"
Harwood grinned at the youth's naïve references to Edward Thatcher's political ambitions. Thatcher was known as a wealthy "sport," and Dan had resented his meddling in politics. But this was startling news—that Thatcher was measuring himself for a senatorial toga.
"You'd better be careful! There's a good story in that!"
"But you wouldn't! You see, I'm not supposed to know!"
"Bassett and your father will probably pull it off, if they try hard enough. They've pulled off worse things. If you're interested in American types you should know Bassett. Ever see him?"
Allen laughed. His way of laughing was pleasant; there was a real bubbling mirth in him.
"No; but I read about him in the 'Courier,' which they always have follow them about—I don't know why. It must be that it helps them to rejoice that they are so far away from home; but I always used to read it over there, I suppose to see how much fun I missed! And at a queer little place in Switzerland where we were staying—I remember, because our landlord had the drollest wart on his chin—a copy of the 'Courier' turned up on a rainy day and I read it through. A sketch of Bassett tickled me because he seemed so real. I felt that I'd like to be Morton Bassett myself,—the man who does things,—the masterful American,—a real type, by George! And that safe filled with beautiful bindings; it's fine to know there are such fellows."
"Your words affect me strangely; I wrote the piece!"
"Now that is funny!" Allen glanced at Dan with frank admiration. "You write well—praise from Sir Hubert—I scribble verses myself! So our acquaintance really began a long time ago. It must have been last October that we were at that place."
"Yes; it was in the fall sometime. It's pleasant to know that anything printed in a newspaper is ever remembered so long. Bassett is an interesting man all right enough."
"It must be bully to meet men like that—the men who have a hand in the big things. I must get dad to introduce me. I suppose you know everybody!" he ended admiringly.
They retraced their steps through the silent house and down to the front door, continuing their talk. As Dan turned for their last words on the veranda steps he acted on an impulse and said:—
"Have supper with me to-morrow night—we won't call it dinner—at the Whitcomb House. I'll meet you in the lobby at six o'clock. The honorable state committee is in town and I'll point out some of the moulders of our political destiny. They're a joy to the eye, I can tell you!"
Allen's eager acquiescence, his stumbling, murmured thanks, emphasized Dan's sense of the forlorn life young Thatcher had described.
"So the old boy's skipped, has he?" demanded the city editor. "Well, that's one on us! Who put you on?"
"I kept at the bell until the door opened and then I saw Thatcher's son. He told me."
"Oh, the family idiot let you in, did he? Then there's no telling whether it's true or not. He's nutty, that fellow. Didn't know he was here."
"I believe he told me the truth. His father's on his way to New York."
"Well, that sounds definite; but it doesn't make any difference now. We've just had a tip to let the deal alone. For God's sake, keep at the law, Harwood; this business is hell." The city editor bit a fat cigar savagely. "You no sooner strike a good thing and work on it for two days than you butt into a dead wall. What? No; there's nothing more for you to-night."