Several interviews with Freeman had resulted in an arrangement by which Bruce was to enter the architect’s office immediately. As Henderson had predicted, Mrs. Freeman was a real power in her husband’s affairs. She confided to Bruce privately that, with all his talents, Bill lacked tact in dealing with his clients and he needed someone to supply this deficiency. And the office was a place of confusion, and Bill was prone to forgetfulness. Bruce, Mrs. Freeman thought, could be of material assistance in keeping Bill straight and extricating him from the difficulties into which he constantly stumbled in his absorption in the purely artistic side of his profession. Bruce was put to work on tentative sketches and estimates for a residence for a man who had no very clear idea of what he wanted nor how much he wanted to spend.
Bruce soon discovered that Freeman disliked interviews with contractors and the general routine necessary to keep in touch with the cost of labor and materials. When he was able to visualize and create he was happy, but tedious calculations left him sulky and disinclined to work. Bruce felt no such repugnance; he had a kind of instinct for such things, and was able to carry in his head a great array of facts and figures.
On his first free evening after meeting Millicent Harden at the Country Club he rang the Harden doorbell, and as he waited glanced toward the Mills’ house in the lot adjoining. He vaguely wondered whether Franklin Mills was within its walls.
He had tried to analyze the emotions that had beset him that night when he had taken the hand of the man he believed to be his father. There was something cheap and vulgar in the idea that blood speaks to blood and that possibly Mills had recognized him by some sort of intuition. But Bruce rejected this as preposterous, a concession to the philosophy of ignorant old women muttering scandal before a dying fire. Very likely he had been wrong in fancying that Mills had taken any special note of him. And there was always his mother’s assurance that Mills didn’t know of his existence. Mills probably had the habit of eyeing people closely; he shouldn’t have permitted himself to be troubled by that. He was a man of large affairs, with faculties trained to the quick inspection and appraisment of every stranger he met....
The middle-aged woman who opened the door was evidently a member of the household and he hastily thrust into his pocket the card he had taken out, stated his name and asked if Miss Harden was at home.
“Yes, Millie’s home. Just come in, Mr. Storrs, and I’ll call her.”
But Millicent came into the hall without waiting to be summoned.
“I’m so glad to see you, Mr. Storrs!” she said, and introduced him to her mother, a tall, heavily built woman with reddish hair turning gray, and a friendly countenance.
“I was just saying to Doctor Harden that I guessed nobody was coming in tonight when you rang. You simply can’t keep a servant in to answer the bell in the evening. You haven’t met Doctor Harden? Millie, won’t you call your papa?”
Millicent opened a door that revealed a small, cozy sitting-room and summoned her father—a short, thick-set man with a close-trimmed gray beard, who came out clutching a newspaper.
“Shan’t we all go into the library?” asked Millicent after the two men had been introduced and had expressed their approval of the prolonged fine weather.
“You young folks make yourselves comfortable in the library,” said Mrs. Harden. “I told Millie it was too warm for a fire, but she just has to have the fireplace going when there’s any excuse, and this house does get chilly in the fall evenings even when it’s warm outside.”
Harden was already retreating toward the room from which he had been drawn to meet the caller, and his wife immediately followed. Both repeated their expressions of pleasure at meeting Bruce; but presumably, in the accepted fashion of American parents when their daughters entertain callers, they had no intention of appearing again.
Millicent snapped on lights that disclosed a long, high-ceilinged room finished in dark oak and fitted up as a library. A disintegrating log in the broad fireplace had thrown out a puff of smoke that gave the air a fleeting pungent scent.
The flooring was of white and black tiles covered with oriental rugs in which the dominant dark red brought a warmth to the eye. Midway of the room stood a grand piano, and beyond it a spiral stair led to a small balcony on which the console of an organ was visible. Back of this was a stained glass window depicting a knight in armor—a challenging, militant figure. Even as revealed only by the inner illumination, its rich colors and vigorous draughtsmanship were clearly suggested. And it was wholly appropriate, Bruce decided, and altogether consonant with the general scheme of the room. Noting his interest, Millicent turned a switch that lighted the window from a room beyond with the effect of vitalizing the knight’s figure, making him seem indeed to be gravely riding, with lance in rest, along the wall.
“Do pardon me!” Bruce murmured, standing just inside the door and glancing about with frank enjoyment of the room’s spaciousness. The outer lines of the somewhat commonplace square brick house had not prepared him for this. The room presented a mingling of periods in both architecture and furnishing, but the blending had been admirably done.
“Forgive me for staring,” he said as he sat down on a divan opposite her with the hearth between them. “I’m not sure even yet that I’m in the twentieth century!”
“I suppose it is a queer jumble; but don’t blame the architect! He, poor wretch, thought we were perfectly crazy when we started, but I think before he got through he really liked it.”
“I envy him the fun he had doing it! But someone must have furnished the inspiration. I’m going to assume that it was mostly you.”
“You may if you’ll go ahead and criticize—tear it all to pieces.”
“I’d as soon think of criticizing Chartres, Notre Dame, or the hand that rounded Peter’s dome!” Bruce exclaimed. “Alas that our acquaintance is so brief! I want to ask you all manner of questions—how you came to do it—and all that.”
“Well, first of all one must have an indulgent father and mother. I’m reminded occasionally that my little whims were expensive.”
“I dare say they were! But it’s something to have a daughter who can produce a room like this.”
He rose and bowed to her, and then turning toward the knight in the window, gravely saluted.
“I’m not so sure,” he said as he sat down, “that the gentleman up there didn’t have something to do with it.”
“Please don’t make too much of him. Everyone pays me the compliment of thinking him Galahad, but I think of him as the naughty Launcelot. I read a book once on old French glass and I just had to have a window. And the organ made this room the logical place for it. Papa calls this my chapel and refuses to sit in it at all. He says it’s too much like church!”
“Ah! But that’s a tribute in itself! Your father realizes that this is a place for worship—without reference to the knight.”
She laid her forefinger against her cheek, tilted her head slightly, mocking him with lips and eyes.
“Let me think! That was a pretty speech, but of course you’re referring to that bronze Buddha over there. Come to think of it, papa does rather fancy him.”
When she smilingly met his gaze he laughed and made a gesture of despair.
“That was a nice bit of side-stepping! I’m properly rebuked. I see my own worshiping must be done with caution. But the room is beautiful. I’m glad to know there’s such a place in town.”
“I did have a good time planning and arranging it. But there’s nothing remarkable about it after all. It’s merely what you might call a refuge from reality—if that means anything.”
“It means a lot—too much for me to grasp all at once.”
“You’re making fun of me! All I meant was that I wanted a place to escape into where I can play at being something I really am not. We all need to do that. After all, it’s just a room.”
“Of course that’s just what it isn’t! It’s superb. I’ve already decided to spend a lot of time here.”
“You may, if you won’t pick up little chance phrases I let fall and frighten me with them. I have a friend—an awful highbrow—and he bores me to death exclaiming over things I say and can’t explain and then explaining them to me. But—why aren’t you at the Claytons’ party?”
“I wasn’t asked,” he said. “I don’t know them.”
“I know them, but I wasn’t asked,” she replied smilingly.
“Well, anyhow, it’s nicer here, I think.”
Bruce remembered what Henderson had said about the guarded social acceptance of the patent medicine manufacturer and his family; but Millicent evidently didn’t resent her exclusion from the Claytons’ party. Social differentiations, Bruce imagined, mattered little to this girl, who was capable of fashioning her own manner of life, even to the point of building a temple for herself in which to worship gods of her own choosing. When he expressed interest in her modeling, which Dale Freeman had praised, Millicent led the way to a door opening into an extension of the library beyond the knight’s window, that served her as a studio. It was only a way of amusing herself, she said, when he admired a plaque of a child’s profile she confessed to be her work. The studio bore traces of recent use. Damp cloths covered several unfinished figures. There was a drawing-board in one corner and scattered among the casts on the wall were crayon sketches, merely notes, she explained, tacked up to preserve her impressions of faces that had interested her.
He was struck by her freedom from pretense; when he touched on something of which she was ignorant or about which she was indifferent, she did not scruple to say so. Her imaginative, poetical side expressed itself with healthy candor and frequent flashes of girlish enthusiasm. She was wholly natural, refreshingly spontaneous in speech, with no traces of pedantry or conceit even in discussing music, in which her training had gone beyond the usual amateur’s bounds.
“You haven’t been to see Leila yet? She asked you to call, and if you don’t go she’ll think it’s because of that little unpleasantness on the river. Leila’s altogether worth while.”
Bruce muttered something about having been very busy. He had determined never to enter Franklin Mills’s house, and he was embarrassed by Millicent’s intimation that Leila might take it amiss that he ignored her invitation.
“Leila’s a real person,” Millicent was saying. “Her great trouble is in trying to adjust herself to a way of life that doesn’t suit her a little bit.”
“You mean——” he began and paused because he didn’t know at all what she meant.
“I mean that living in a big house and going to teas and upholding the dignity of a prominent and wealthy family bores her to distraction. Her chief trouble is her way of protesting against the kind of life she’s born to. It’s screamingly funny, but Leila just hates being rich, and she’s terribly bored at having so much expected of her as her father’s daughter.”
“His standard, then, is so high?” Bruce ventured, curious as to what further she might say of her neighbor.
“Oh, Mr. Mills is an interesting man, and he worships Leila; but she worries and puzzles him. It isn’t just the difference between age and youth——” She paused, conscious perhaps of the impropriety of discussing her neighbor with a comparative stranger, but Bruce’s gravely attentive face prompted her to go on. “He’s one of those people we meet sometimes who don’t seem—how can one put it?—they don’t seem quite at ease in the world.”
“Yes,” he said slowly, “but—where all the conditions of happiness are given—money, position, leisure to do as you please—what excuse has anyone for not finding happiness? You’d conclude that there was some fundamental defect——”
“And when you reach that conclusion you’re not a bit better off!” she interrupted. “You’re back where you started. Oh, well!” she said, satisfied now that she had said quite enough about her neighbor and regretting that she had mentioned him at all, “it’s too bad happiness can’t be bought as you buy records to play on a machine and have nothing to do but wind it up and listen. You have to do a little work yourself.”
“We’ve all got to play in the band—that’s the idea!” he laughed, and to escape from the thought of Mills, asked her whether she ever played for an ignorant heathen like himself.
“You’re probably a stern critic,” she replied, “but I’ll take a chance. If you don’t mind I’ll try the organ. Papa and Mamma always like me to play some old pieces for them before they go to bed. Afterwards I’ll do some other things.”
In a moment she was in the balcony with the knight towering above her, but he faded into the shadows as she turned off the lights in the studio below. Bruce’s eyes at once became attentive to her golden head and clearly limned profile defined by the lamp over the music rack. She seemed suddenly infinitely remote, caught away into a world of legendary and elusive things. The first reedy notes of the organ stole eerily through the room as though they too were evoked from an unseen world.
The first things she played were a concession to her parents’ taste, but she threw into them all the sentiment they demanded—the familiar airs of “Annie Laurie,” “Ben Bolt,” and “Auld Lang Syne.” She played them without flourishes, probably in deference to the preferences of the father and mother who were somewhere listening. To these she added old revival songs—“Beulah Land,” and “Pull for the Shore”—these also presumably favorites of the unseen auditors. He watched her aureoled head, the graceful movement of her arms and shoulders as she gave herself to her task with complete absorption. She was kind to these parents of hers; possibly it was through her music that she really communicated with them, met them on ground of their simpler knowledge and aspirations.
He was conscious presently of the faint ring of a bell, followed by the murmur of voices in the hall. Someone entered the room and sat down quietly behind him. Millicent, who had paid no heed to him since mounting to the organ, was just beginning the Tannhäuser overture. She followed this with passages from Lohengrin and Parsifal and classical liturgical music touched with a haunting mystery....
She came down slowly into the room as though the spell of the music still held her.
“I shan’t say anything—it might be the wrong word,” he said as he went to meet her. “But it was beautiful—very beautiful!”
“You were a good listener; I felt that,” she replied.
He had forgotten that there had been another listener until she smilingly waved her hand to someone behind him.
“So I had two victims—and didn’t know it! Patient sufferers! Mr. Mills, you and Mr. Storrs have met—I needn’t introduce you a second time.”
It was Franklin Mills, then, exercising a neighbor’s privilege, who had arrived in the middle of the recital and taken a seat by the door.
“Mr. Storrs is a perfect listener,” Mills was saying as he shook hands with Bruce. “He didn’t budge all the time you were playing.”
Mills’s easy, gracious manners, the intimacy implied in his chaffing tone as he complained that she played better when she didn’t know he was in the house, irritated Bruce. He had been enjoying himself so keenly, the girl’s talk had so interested him and he had been so thrilled and lifted by her music that Mills’s appearance was like a profanation.
They were all seated now, and Millicent spoke of a book Mills had sent her which it happened Bruce had read, and she asked his opinion of it before expressing her own. Very likely Mills was in the habit of sending her books. She said that she hadn’t cared greatly for the book—a novel that discussed the labor question. The author evidently had no solution of his own problem and left the reader in the air as to his purpose.
“Maybe he only meant to arouse interest—stir people up and leave the solution to others,” Bruce suggested.
“That was the way I took it,” said Mills. “The fact is, nobody has any solution short of a complete tearing down of everything. And that,” he added with a smile and a shrug, “would be very uncomfortable.”
“For us—yes,” Millicent replied quickly. “But a good many of our millions would probably welcome a chance to begin over again.”
“What with,” Mills demanded, “when everything had been smashed?”
“Oh, they’d be sure to save something out of the wreck!” Millicent replied.
“Well,” Mills remarked, “I’m hoping the smash won’t come in my day. I’m too old to go out with a club to fight for food against the mob.”
“You want us to say that you’re not too old,” laughed Millicent; “but we’re not going to fall into that trap!”
“But—what is going to happen?” asked Bruce.
“Other civilizations!” Mills replied, regarding the young man with an intent look. “We’ve had a succession of them, and the world’s about due to slip back into chaos and perhaps emerge again. It’s only the barbarians who never change; they know they’ll be on top again if they just wait.”
“What an optimist you are!” cried Millicent. “But you don’t really believe such things.”
“Of course I do,” Mills answered with a broad smile.
She made it necessary for Bruce to assist her in combating Mills’s hopeless view of the future, though she bore the main burden of the opposition herself. Mills’s manner was one of good-natured indulgence; but Bruce was wondering whether there was not a deep vein of cynicism in the man. Mills was clever at fencing, and some of the things he said lightly no doubt expressed real convictions.
Bruce was about to take his leave when Mills with assumed petulance declared that the fire had been neglected and began poking the embers. Carefully putting the poker and tongs back in the rack, he lounged toward the door, paused halfway and said good-night formally, bowing first to one and then the other.
“Come in again sometime!” Millicent called after him.
“Is that impudence?” Mills replied, reappearing from the hall with his coat and hat. In a moment the door closed and they heard the sound of his stick on the walk outside.
“He’s always like that,” Millicent remarked after a moment of silence. “It’s understood that he may come in when I’m playing and leave when he pleases. Sometimes when I’m at the organ he sits for an hour without my knowing he’s here. It made me nervous at first—just remembering that he might be here; but I got over that when I found that he really enjoyed the playing. I’m sorry he didn’t stay longer and really talk; he wasn’t at his best tonight.”
Bruce made the merest murmur of assent, but something in Mills’s quizzical, mocking tone, the very manner of his entrance into the house, affected him disagreeably.
He realized that he was staying too long for a first call, but he lingered until they had regained the cheery note with which the evening began, and said good night.
When he reached the street Bruce decided to walk the mile that lay between the Hardens’ and his apartment. His second meeting with Franklin Mills had left his mind in tumult. He was again beset by an impulse to flee from the town, but this he fought and vanquished.
Happiness and peace were not to be won by flight. In his soldiering he had never feared bodily injury, and at times when he had speculated as to the existence of a soul he had decided that if he possessed such a thing he would not suffer it to play the coward. But this unexpected meeting at the Hardens’, which was likely to be repeated if he continued his visits to the house, had shaken his nerve more than he liked to believe possible. Millicent evidently admired Mills, sympathized with him in his loneliness, was flattered perhaps by his visits to her home in search of solace and cheer, or whatever it was Mills sought.
The sky was overcast and a keen autumn wind whipped the overhanging maples as Bruce strode homeward with head bent, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat. He hummed and whistled phrases of the Parsifal, with his thoughts playing about Millicent’s head as she had sat at the organ with the knight keeping watch above her. After all, it was through beautiful things, man-made and God-made, as his mother had taught him, that life found its highest realizations. In this idea there was an infinite stimulus. Millicent had found for herself this clue to happiness and was a radiant proof of its efficacy. It had been a privilege to see her in her own house, to enjoy contact with her questioning, meditative mind, and to lose himself in her entrancing music.
The street was deserted and only a few of the houses he passed showed lights. Bruce experienced again, as often in his night tramps during the year of his exile, a happy sense of isolation. He was so completely absorbed in his thoughts that he was unaware of the propinquity of another pedestrian who was slowly approaching as though as unheedful as he of the driving wind and the first fitful patter of rain. They passed so close that their arms touched. Both turned, staring blankly in the light of the street lamps, and muttered confused apologies.
“Oh, Storrs!” Franklin Mills exclaimed, bending his head against the wind.
“Sorry to have bumped into you, sir,” Bruce replied, and feeling that nothing more was required of him, he was about to go on, but Mills said quickly:
“We’re in for a hard rain. Come back to my house—it’s only half a dozen blocks—and I’ll send you home.”
There was something of kindly peremptoriness in his tone, and Bruce, at a loss for words with which to refuse, followed, thinking that he would walk a block to meet the demands of courtesy and turn back. Mills, forging ahead rapidly, complained good-naturedly of the weather.
“I frequently prowl around at night,” he explained; “I sleep better afterwards.”
“I like a night walk myself,” Bruce replied.
“Not afraid of hold-ups? I was relieved to find it was you I ran into. My daughter says I’m bound to get sandbagged some night.”
At the end of the first block both were obliged to battle against the wind, which now drove the rain in furious gusts through the intersecting streets. In grasping his hat, Mills dropped his stick, and after picking it up, Bruce took hold of his arm for their greater ease in keeping together. It would, he decided, be an ungenerous desertion to leave him now, and so they arrived after much buffeting at Mills’s door.
“That’s a young hurricane,” said Mills as he let himself in. “When you’ve dried out a bit I’ll send you on in my car.”
In response to his ring a manservant appeared and carried away their hats and overcoats to be dried. Mills at once led the way upstairs to the library, where a fire had been kindled, probably against the master’s return in the storm.
“Sit close and put your feet to the blaze. I think a hot drink would be a help.”
Hot water and Scotch were brought and Mills laughingly assured Bruce that he needn’t be afraid of the liquor.
“I had it long before Prohibition. Of course, everybody has to say that!”
In his wildest speculations as to possible meetings with his father, Bruce had imagined nothing like this. He was not only in Franklin Mills’s house, but the man was graciously ministering to his comfort. And Bruce, with every desire to resist, to refuse these courteous offices, was meekly submitting. Mills, talking easily, with legs stretched to the fire, sipped his drink contentedly while the storm beat with mounting fury round the house.
“I think my son said you had been in the army; I should say that the experience hadn’t done you any harm,” Mills remarked in his pleasant voice.
“Quite the contrary, sir. The knocking about I got did me good.”
“I envy you young fellows the experience; it was a ghastly business, but it must mean a lot in a man’s life to have gone through it.”
In response to a direct question Bruce stated concisely the nature of his service. His colorless recital of the bare record brought a smile to Mills’s face.
“You’re like all the young fellows I’ve talked with—modest, even a little indifferent about it. I think if I’d been over there I should do some bragging!”
Still bewildered to find himself at Mills’s fireside, Bruce was wondering how soon he could leave; but Mills talked on in leisurely fashion of the phenomenal growth of the town and the opportunities it offered to young men. Bruce was ashamed of himself for not being more responsive; but Mills seemed content to ramble on, though carefully attentive to the occasional remarks Bruce roused himself to make. Bruce, with ample opportunity, observed Mills’s ways—little tricks of speech, the manner in which he smoked—lazily blowing rings at intervals and watching them waver and break—an occasional quick lifting of his well-kept hand to his forehead.
It was after they had been together for half an hour that Bruce noted that Mills, after meeting his gaze, would lift his eyes and look intently at something on the wall over the bookcases—something immediately behind Bruce and out of the range of his vision. It seemed not to be the unseeing stare of inattention; but whatever it was, it brought a look of deepening perplexity—almost of alarm—to Mills’s face. Bruce began to find this upward glance disconcerting, and evidently aware that his visitor was conscious of it, Mills got up and, with the pretence of offering his guest another cigarette, reseated himself in a different position.
“I must run along,” said Bruce presently. “The storm is letting up. I can easily foot it home.”
“Not at all! After keeping you till midnight I’ll certainly not send you out to get another wetting. There’s still quite a splash on the windows.”
He rang for the car before going downstairs, and while he was waiting for the chauffeur to answer on the garage extension of the house telephone, Bruce, from the fireplace, saw that it must have been a portrait—one of a number ranged along the wall—that had invited Mills’s gaze so frequently. It was the portrait of a young man, the work of a painstaking if not a brilliant artist. The clean-shaven face, the long, thick, curly brown hair, and the flowing scarf knotted under a high turn-over collar combined in an effect of quaintness.
There was something oddly familiar in the young man’s countenance. In the few seconds that Mills’s back was turned Bruce found himself studying it, wondering what there was about it that teased his memory—what other brow and eyes and clean-cut, firm mouth he had ever seen were like those of the young man who was looking down at him from Franklin Mills’s wall. And then it dawned upon him that the face was like his own—might, indeed, with a different arrangement of the hair, a softening of certain lines, pass for a portrait of himself.
Mills, turning from the telephone, remarked that the car was on the way.
“Ah!” he added quickly, seeing Bruce’s attention fixed on the portrait, “my father, at about thirty-five. There’s nothing of me there; I take after my mother’s side of the house. Father was taller than I and his features were cleaner cut. He died twenty years ago. I’ve always thought him a fine American type. Those other——”
Bruce lent polite attention to Mills’s comments on the other portraits, one representing his maternal grandfather and another a great-uncle who had been killed in the Civil War. When they reached the lower floor Mills opened the door of a reception room and turned on the frame lights about a full-length portrait of a lady in evening dress.
“That is Mrs. Mills,” he said, “and an excellent likeness.”
He spoke in sophisticated terms of American portraiture as they went to the hall where the servant was waiting with Bruce’s hat and coat. A limousine was in the porte-cochère, and Mills stood on the steps until Bruce got in.
“I thank you very much, Mr. Mills,” Bruce said, taking the hand Mills extended.
“Oh, I owe you the thanks! I hope to see you again very soon!”
Mills on his way to his room found himself clinging to the stair rail. When he had closed the door he drew his hand slowly across his eyes. He had spoken with Marian Storrs’s son and the young man by an irony of nature had the countenance, the high-bred air of Franklin Mills III. It was astounding, this skipping for a generation of a type! It seemed to Mills, after he had turned off the lights, that his father’s eyes—the eyes of young Storrs—were still fixed upon him with a disconcerting gravity.