WARRY'S REPENTANCE
Saxton dined alone at the Clarkson Club, as he usually did, and went afterward to his office, which he still maintained in the Clarkson National Building. He had been studying the report of an engineering expert on a Colorado irrigation scheme and he was trying to master and correct its weaknesses. As he hung over the blue-prints and the pages of figures that lay before him, the flashing red wheels of Mabel Margrave's trap kept interfering; he wished Warry had not turned up just as he had. He thought he understood why his friend had been so occupied in his office of late; but whether Warry and Evelyn Porter were engaged or not, Warry ought to find better use for his talents than in amusing Mabel Margrave. John lighted his pipe to help with the blue-prints, and while he drew it into cozy accord with himself, the elevator outside discharged a passenger; he heard the click of the wire door as the cage receded, followed by Raridan's quick step in the hall, and Warry broke in on him. "Well, you're the limit! I'd like to know what you mean by roosting up here and not staying in your room where a white man can find you." He stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his top-coat, and glared at Saxton, who lay back in his chair and bit his pipe. "I wish by all the gods I could rattle you once and shake you out of your damned Harvard aplomb!" Raridan did not usually invoke the gods, and he rarely damned anything or anybody.
"That's a very pretty coat you have on, Mr. Raridan. It must be nice to be a plutocrat and wear clothes like that."
"The beastly thing doesn't fit," growled Raridan, throwing himself into a chair. "I don't fit, and my clothes don't fit, and—"
"And you're having a fit. You'd better see a nerve specialist." Warry was pounding a cigarette on the back of his case.
"I say, Saxton," he said calmly.
"Well! Has Vesuvius subsided?" Saxton sat up in his chair and watched Raridan breaking matches wastefully in a nervous effort to strike a light.
"John Saxton, what a beastly ass I am! What a merry-go-round of a fool I make of myself!" Warry blew a cloud of smoke into the air.
"Yes," said John, pulling away at his pipe.
"As I'm a living man, I had no more intention of driving with that girl than I had of going up in a balloon and walking back. You know I never knew her well; I don't want to know her, for that matter; not on your life!"
"Is this a guessing contest? I suppose I'm the goat. Well, you didn't care for Miss Margrave's society; is that what you're driving at? She shan't hear this from me; I'm as safe as a tomb. Moreover, I don't enjoy her acquaintance. Go ahead now, full speed."
"And it was just my infernal hard luck that I got caught this afternoon," continued Warry, ignoring him. "Sometimes it seems to me that I'm predestined and foreordained to do fool things. I've been working like blue blazes on that washerwoman's suit against the Transcontinental,—running their switch through her back yard,—and I had put away all kinds of temptation and was feeling particularly virtuous; but here came the Margrave nigger with that girl's note, and I went up the street in long jumps to meet her, and let her drive me all over town and all over the country, and order me a highball on the Country Club porch, and generally make an ass of me. I wish you'd do something to me; hit me with a club, or throw me down the elevator, or do something equally brutal and coarse that would jar a little of the folly out of me. Why," he continued, with utter self-contempt, through which his humor glimmered, "I ought to have turned down Mabel's invitation as soon as I saw the monogram on her note paper. Three colors, and letters as big as your hand! My instinctive good taste falters, old man; it needs restoring and chastening."
"I quite agree with you, sir. But it's more gallant to abuse yourself than Miss Margrave's stationery—that is, if I am correctly gathering up the crumbs of your thought. I believe you had reached the highball incident in your recital. Was it rye or Scotch? This is the day of realism, and if I'm to give you counsel, or sympathy, or whatever it is you want, I must know all the petty details."
"Don't be foolish," said Raridan, staring abstractedly; then he bent his eyes sharply on Saxton.
"See here, John," he said quietly, folding his arms. He had never before called Saxton by his first name; and the change marked a further advance of intimacy.
"Yes."
"You know I'm a good deal of a fool and all that sort of thing—"
"Chuck that and go ahead."
"But she means a whole lot to me. You know whom I mean." Saxton knew he did not mean Mabel Margrave. "You know," Raridan went on, "we were kids together up there on those hills. We both had our dancing lessons at her house, and did such stunts as that together."
"Yes," said Saxton.
"I want to work and show that I'm some good. I want to make myself worthy of her." He got up and walked the floor, while Saxton sat and watched him.
"I can't talk about it; you understand what I want to do. It has seemed to me lately that I have more to overcome than I can ever manage. I made a lot of fuss about that Knights of Midas rot. I ought to have helped her about that; it was hard for her, but I was too big a fool to know it, and I made myself ridiculous lecturing her. I forgot that she'd grown up, and I didn't know she felt as she did about it. I acted as if I thought she was crazy to pose in that fool show, when I might have known better. It was downright low of me." He stood at the window playing with the cord of the shade and looking out over the town. Saxton walked to the window and stood by him, saying nothing; and after a moment he put his hand on Raridan's shoulder and turned him round and grasped Warry's slender fingers in his broad, strong hand.
"I understand how it is, old man. It isn't so bad as you think it is, I'm sure. It will all come out right, and while we're making confessions I want to make one too. I feel rather foolish doing it—as if I were in the game—" and he smiled in the way he had, which brought his humility and patience and desire to be on good terms with the world into his face,—"but I want you to know about this afternoon—that—that just happened—my being with her. You see, I didn't know she was there, and she had—I guess she had broken her driver or something, and quit, and I was coming in and she picked me up, and I'm sorry, and—"
Raridan wheeled on him as if he had just caught the drift of his talk.
"Oh, come off! You howling idiot! Don't you talk that way to me again. Get your hat now and let's get out of this."
"I'm glad you're feeling better," said Saxton, and laughed with real relief.
John turned out the light, and while they waited for the elevator to come up for them Warry jingled the coins and keys in his pockets before he blurted:
"I say, John, I'm an underbred, low person, and am not worthy to be called thy friend, and you may hate me all you like, but one thing I'd like to know. Did she say anything about me when you passed us this afternoon—make any comment or anything? You know I despise myself for asking, but—"
Saxton laughed quietly.
"Yes, she did; but I don't know that I ought to tell you. It was really encouraging."
"Well, hurry up."
"She said, 'Miss Margrave has a lot of style; don't you think so?'"
"Is that all?" demanded Raridan, stepping into the car.
"That's all. It wasn't very much; but it was the way she said it; and as she said it she brushed a fly from the horse with the whip, and she did it very carefully."
In the corridor below they met Wheaton coming out of the side door of the bank. He had been at work, he said. Raridan asked him to go with them to the club for a game of billiards, but he pleaded weariness and said he was going to bed.
The three men walked up Varney Street together. Those spirits that order our lives for us must have viewed them with interest as they tramped through the street. They were men of widely different antecedents and qualities. Circumstances, in themselves natural and harmless, had brought them together. The lives of all three were to be influenced by the weakness of one, and one woman's life was to be profoundly affected by contact with all of them. It is not ordained for us to know whether those we touch hands with, and even break bread with, from day to day, are to bring us good or evil. The electric light reveals nothing in the sibyl's book which was not disclosed of old to those who pondered the mysteries by starlight and rushlight.
Wheaton left them at the club door and went on to The Bachelors', which, was only a step farther up the street.
"How do you like Wheaton by this time?" asked Raridan, as they entered the club.
"I hardly know how to answer that," Saxton answered. "He's treated me well enough. It seems to me I'm always trying to find some reason for not liking him, but I can't put my hand on anything tangible."
"That's the way I feel," said Raridan, hanging up his coat in the billiard room. "He's a rigid devil, some way. There's no let-go in him. I guess the law allows us to dislike some people just on general principles, and Jim likes himself so well that you and I don't matter. It's your shot.”