WARRICK RARIDAN
The Clarkson Club was, during most of the day, the loneliest place in town. Only a few of the sleeping rooms were occupied regularly, and luncheon was the one incident of the day that drew any considerable number of men to the dining-room. The antlered heads of moose and elk were hung in the hall, and colored prints of English hunting scenes and bad oil portraits traits of several pioneers were scattered through the reading and lounging rooms. There was a room which was referred to flatteringly as the library, but its equipment of literature consisted of an encyclopedia and of novels which had been contributed by members at times coincident with housecleaning seasons at home. Clarkson business men who maintained non-resident memberships in Chicago or St. Louis clubs, said, in excusing the poor patronage of the Clarkson Club, that Clarkson was not a club town, like Kansas City or Denver, where there were more unattached men with money to spend.
Saxton was not over-sensitive, but the stiffness and hardness of the club house were not without their disagreeable impression on him as he sat at dinner toward the close of his first day in Clarkson. Two of the men to whom Porter had introduced him at noon proved to be fellow lodgers, and they exchanged greetings with him from the table where they sat together. They unsociably read their evening papers as they ate, and left before he finished. He had lighted a cigar over his coffee, and was watching the fading colors of a brilliant sunset when a young man appeared at the door, and after a brief inspection of Saxton's back walked over to him.
"Aren't you Mr. Saxton? I thought you must be he. My name is Raridan. Don't let me break in on your meditations," he added, taking the chair which the waiter drew out for him. "I met Mr. Porter a while ago, and he adjured me on penalties that I won't name to be good to you. I don't know whether this is obeying orders,"—he broke off in a laugh,—"that depends on the point of view." He had produced a cigarette case from his pocket and rolled a white cylinder between his palms before lighting it. As the flame leaped from the match, Saxton noted the young man's thin face, his thick, curling dark hair, his slight mustache, the slenderness of his fingers. The eyes that lay back of rimless glasses were almost too fine for a man; but their gentleness and kindliness were charming.
"You are guilty of a very Christian act," Saxton said. "I was just wondering whether, after the sun had gone down behind that ridge over there, the world would still be going round."
"The world never stops entirely here," returned Raridan, "but the motion sometimes gets very slow. Mr. Porter tells me that you're to be one of us. Let me congratulate us,—and you!"
"I'm not so sure about you," rejoined Saxton. "At my last stopping place in the West they had a way of getting rid of undesirable members of the community, and I've never got over being nervous. But that was Wyoming. I'm sure you're more civilized here."
"Not merely civilized; we are civilization! You see I'm a native, and devoted to the home sod. My father was one of the first settlers. I never knew why," he laughed again—it was a pleasant laugh—"but I've tried to live up to my duties as one of the first Caucasians born in the county. Some day I'll be exhibited at the State Fair and little children will look at me with awe and admiration."
"That makes me feel very humble. I'm almost afraid to tell you that I'm a native of Boston, with a long line of highly undistinguished and terribly conventional ancestors back of me. My father was never west of Albany; my mother was never in a sleeping-car. But I'm not a tenderfoot. I rode the initiating bronco in Wyoming through all the degrees; and a cowboy once shot at me on his unlucky day."
"Oh, your title's clear. That record gives you all the rights of a native."
Raridan waved away the waiter who had been hovering near, and who now went over to the electric switch and threatened them with light.
"That's too good to lose," Raridan said, nodding toward the west in explanation.
Warrick Raridan was, socially speaking, the most available man in the Clarkson Blue Book. He was a graduate in law who did not practise, for he had, unfortunately, been left alone in the world at twenty-six, with an income that seemed wholly adequate for his immediate or future needs. He maintained an office, which was fairly well equipped with the literature of his profession, but this was merely to take away the reproach of his busier fellow citizens; it was not thought respectable to be an idler in Clarkson, even on reputable antecedents and established credit. But Raridan's office was useful otherwise than in providing its owner with a place for receiving his mail. It was the rendezvous for a variety of committees to which he was appointed by such unrelated bodies as the Clarkson Dramatic Club and the Diocesan Board of Missions of the Episcopal Church. He had never, by any chance, been pointed to as a model young man, but religious matters interested him sporadically, and he was referred to facetiously by his friends, when his punctilious religious observances were mentioned, as a fine type of the "cheerful Christian." He appeared every Sunday at the cathedral, which was the fashionable church in Clarkson, where he passed the plate for the alms and oblations of the well-dressed congregation; and he said of himself, with conscious humor, that he thought he did it rather well.
He was capable of quixotism of the most whimsical sort. He had, for a year, taken his meals at a cheap boarding-house in order that he might maintain two Indian boys in school. He was not at all aggrieved when, at the end of the first year, they ran away and resumed tribal relations with their brethren. He chaffed himself about it to his friends.
"It was wrong for me," he would say, "to try to pervert the tastes of those young savages. I nearly ruined my own digestion to buy them white man's luxuries; I wore out my old clothes that they might not go naked; and all they learned was to smoke cigarettes."
It was not enough to say that Warry Raridan could lead a german or tie an Ascot tie better than any other man on the Missouri River; for he was also the best informed man in that same strenuous valley concerning the traditions of the English stage, and was a fairly good actor himself, as amateurs go. He had an almost fatal cleverness, which made him impatient of the restraints of college; and he left in his sophomore year owing to difficulties with the mathematical requirements. Good books had abounded in his father's house, and he was from boyhood a persistent, though erratic reader. He threw himself with enthusiasm into the study of the rise of monastic orders; and from this he changed lightly to the newest books on psychology. There were many ways in which he could be entertaining. He had a slight literary gift, which he cultivated for his own amusement. His humor was fine and keen, and he occasionally wrote screeds for the local papers, or mailed, apropos of something or nothing, pleasant jingles to his intimate friends.
No Clarkson hostess felt that a visiting girl had received courteous attention unless she carried home a portfolio of verses written in her honor by Warry Raridan. He gave, indeed, an impression of great frivolity, but there were people who took him seriously, and lawyers who knew him well said that he might win success in his profession if he would apply himself. He had once appeared for the people in a suit to compel the street-railway company to pave certain streets, as provided by the terms of its franchise, and had gained his point against the best lawyers in the state. This accomplished, he refused an appointment as local counsel for a great railway, and with characteristic perverseness spent the following summer managing an open-air mission for poor children.
Saxton was greatly amused and entertained by Raridan. Even those of his fellow townsmen who did not wholly approve Warry Raridan, admitted his entertaining qualities; and Saxton, who was painfully conscious of his own shortcomings and knew that he had not usually been considered worth cultivating, found himself responding with unwonted lightness to Raridan's inconsequential talk. Few people had ever thought it necessary to take pains with John Saxton, and he greatly enjoyed the novelty of this intercourse with a man of his own age who was not a bore. The bores, as Saxton remembered from his college days, had taken advantage of his good nature and marked him for their own; and with a keen realization of this he had often wondered in bitterness whether they did not classify him correctly.
"I'll wager that if you stay here a year you'll never leave," said Raridan, as they went downstairs together. "I've been about a good deal, and know that we who live here miss a lot of comfort and amusement which go as a matter of course in older towns. But there's a roominess and expansiveness about things out here that I like, and I believe most men who strike it early enough like it, and are lonesome for it if they go away. These people here think I stay because my few business interests are here. The truth is that I've tried running away, but after I've spent a week east of the Alleghanies, I'm sated with the fleshpots and pine for the wilderness. Why, I go to the stockyards now and then just to see the train-loads of steers come in. I get sensations out of the rush and drive of all this that I wouldn't take a good deal for."
"I think I understand how you feel about it," said Saxton, looking more closely at this young man, who was not ashamed to mention his sensations of sentiment to a stranger. "There were times in Wyoming when Western life seemed pretty arid, but when I went back to Boston I was homesick for Cheyenne."
"That's a far cry, from Boston to Cheyenne," said Raridan, laughing. He began again volubly: "A good deal depends, I suppose, on which end you cry from. There's a lot of talk these days about the nouveaux riches by people who haven't any more French than that. We are advised by a fairly competent poet that men may climb on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things; but if they climb on the pickled remains of the common or garden pig I don't see anything ignoble about it. I'd a lot rather ascend on a pyramid of Minnehaha Hams than on my dead self, which I hope to avoid using for step-ladder purposes as long as possible. The people here are human beings, and they're all good enough to suit me. I'd as lief be descended from a canvased ham as an Astor peltry or a Vanderbilt steamboat. And I'm tired of the jokes in the barber-shop comic weeklies, about the rich Westerners who make a vulgar display of themselves in New York. If we do it, it's merely because we're doing in Rome as the Romans do. These same shampoo and hair-cut humorists are unable to get away from their jests about the homicidal tendencies of Western barkeepers and the woolliness of the cowboys. Those anemic commuters down there know no higher joy than a Weber & Fields matinee or a Rogers Brothers on the Bronx first-night. Sometimes I feel moved to grow a line of whiskers and add my barbaric yawp to the long howl of the Populist wolf. But, you know," he added, suddenly lowering his voice, "I reserve the right to abuse my fellow citizens when I love them most. I tore Populism to tatters last fall in a few speeches they let me make in the back counties. Our central committee hadn't anything to lose out there. That's why they sent me!"
Saxton was walking beside Raridan in the lower hall. He felt an impulse to express gratitude for his rescue from the loneliness of the twilight; but Raridan, talking incessantly, and with hands thrust easily into his trousers' pockets, led the way into the reading-room.
"Hello, Wheaton, I didn't know you were at home," he called to a man who sat reading a newspaper, and who now rose on seeing a stranger with Raridan.
"This is Mr. Saxton, Mr. Wheaton."
"Oh, yes," said the man introduced as Wheaton. "I wondered whether I shouldn't see you here. Mr. Porter told me you had come."
"I've been bringing Mr. Saxton up to date in local history," said Raridan.
"Chiefly concerning yourself, I suppose," said Wheaton, with a smile that did not wholly succeed in being amiable.
"It isn't often I get a chance at a brand new man," Raridan ran on. "I've told the worst about you, so conduct yourself accordingly."
"Mr. Raridan's worst isn't very bad," said Saxton. "From his account of this town and its people, the place must be paradise and the inhabitants saints."
Raridan called for cigars, but Wheaton declined them.
"Remarkable fellow," said Raridan, busy with his match. "Paragon among our business men; exemplary habits, and so forth." He waved the smoking matchstick to imply virtues in Wheaton which it was unnecessary to mention.
Wheaton ignored Raridan's chaffing way. He seemed very serious, and had not much to say. He had just come home, from a tedious trip to the western part of the state, he said, on an errand for his bank. He was tall, slim and dark. There was a suggestion of sleepy indifference in his black eyes, though he had a well-established reputation for energy and industry. Saxton commented to himself that Wheaton's hands and feet were smaller than he thought becoming in a man.
"Mr. Porter told me you were quartered here. I hope they can make you comfortable. I'm personally relieved that you have come. Your Boston friends were getting very impatient with us. We shall do all in our power to aid you; but of course Mr. Porter has said all that to you." His smile was by a movement of the lips, and his eyes did not seem to participate in it. He did not refer again to possible business relations with Saxton, but turned the conversation into general channels. They sat together for an hour, Raridan, as was his way in any company, doing most of the talking. They seemed to have the club house to themselves. Now and then one of the negro servants came and looked in upon them sleepily. A clerk at the desk in the hall read in peace. A party of young people could be heard entering by the side door set apart for women; and muffled echoes of their gaiety reached the trio in the reading-room.
"That's back in the incurables' ward," said Raridan, in explanation to Saxton.
"It isn't nice of you to speak of the gentler sex in that way," admonished Wheaton.
"Oh, there are girls and girls," said Raridan wearily. "It does seem to me that Mabel Margrave is always hungry. Why can't she do her eating at home?"
"He's simply jealous," Wheaton remarked to Saxton. "He always acts that way when he hears a girl in the ladies' dining-room, and doesn't dare go back and break in on some other fellow's party."
"When you show signs of mental decay, it's time for us to go home, Wheaton." Raridan held out his hand to Saxton. "I'm glad you're here, and you may be sure we'll try to make you like us. Wheaton and I live in a barracks around the corner, with a few other homeless wanderers. An ill-favored thing,—but our own! I hope to see you there. Don't be afraid of the Chinaman at the door. My cell is up one flight and to the right."
"And don't overlook me there," Wheaton interposed. "I suppose we shall see you down town very often. Mr. Raridan is the only man in Clarkson who has no visible means of support. The rest of us are pretty busy; but that doesn't mean that we shan't be glad to see you at the Clarkson National."
"You see how intensely commercial he is," said Raridan. "He's talking for the bank, you notice, and not for himself."
"I'm sure he means both." Saxton had followed them to the front door, where they repeated their good nights; he then climbed slowly to his room. He had never before met a man so volatile and fanciful as Warrick Raridan. He felt the warmth and friendliness of Raridan's nature as people always did; Wheaton seemed cold and dull in comparison. Saxton unpacked his trunks and distributed his things about the room. His effects were simple, as befitted a man who was plain of mind and person. He had collected none of the memorabilia which young men usually have assembled at twenty-five. The furnishings of his dressing table and desk were his own purchases, or those of his sister, who was the only woman that had ever made him gifts. Having emptied his trunks and sent them to the storeroom above, he seated himself comfortably in a lounging chair and smoked a final pipe before turning in.