Through one administrati.., p.7
Through One Administration, page 7
The professor gave him a little impetus forward with the hand he still kept on his shoulder.
“Walk on with me,” he said. “What I like is the deserted look of things, and the silence. There is nothing more silent and deserted than such a street as this at night. There is a quiet and emptiness about it which impress themselves on you more than the stillness of a desert. Perhaps it is the sleep around you in the houses, — the people who have lost their hold on the world and life for the time being. They are far enough away by this time, most of them, and we are no more certain where they are than we shall be after they have lain down for the last time. How did you find Bertha?”
His voice changed as he asked the question, dropping its key somewhat; and, quiet though its tone was, Tredennis thought he recognized a faint suggestion of consciousness in it.
“She looked very well,” he answered; “ and was very bright.”
“She is generally that,” said the professor. “Who was there?”
“A Mr. Arbuthnot.”
“Arbuthnot! Yes; to be sure. He generally is there. He is a relative of Richard’s. They are fond of him. I was to have been there myself, but I had a previous engagement. And I suppose they made light of each other, as usual?”
“You mean”— began Tredennis.
“Arbuthnot and Bertha. They always do it, and Richard looks on and enjoys it. He is a queer fellow.”
“Mr. Amory?” Tredennis questioned, uncertainly.
“No, no; Arbuthnot. He is a queer fellow, Arbuthnot.”
Tredennis laughed.
“That is what they said in the house,” he responded.
“Well, it’s true,” said the professor, reflectively, “ and there is no denying it.”
“They said that, too,” said Tredennis. “And Mrs. Amory added that it was a habit they had.”
“I don’t know,” said the professor, still keeping his hand on Tredennis’ shoulder, and seeming to study the pavement as he walked, — “I don’t know what the man has done with his past, and I don’t know what he is going to do with his future. I don’t think he knows about the future himself.”
“It struck me,” said Tredennis, — “I don’t know why, — that he did not care.”
“That’s it,” said the professor. “He doesn’t care.”
They walked a few steps in silence, and then he went on:
“He never will care,” he said, “unless something happens to rouse him.”
“I am obliged to confess,” said Tredennis, “that I am afraid I am prepared to underrate him. And it seemed to me that there wasn’t much in him to rouse.”
“Oh, you’ll underrate him,” returned the professor, “at first. And you may never get over it; but there are also ten chances to one that you do. I did.”
“You began by underrating him?”
“I don’t overrate him now,” said the professor. “I don’t know that I am particularly fond of him, though there have been moments — just moments — when I have been threatened with it. But I have come to the conclusion that there is something in him to rouse, and that it wouldn’t be the wisest thing in the world to rouse it.”
“Do you mean,” said Tredennis, slowly, “that it would take a woman to rouse it?”
“Yes,” answered the professor, just as slowly, “it would take a woman. And there are circumstances under which it would be better for the woman if she let what she might rouse lie and sleep.”
“For instance?” said Tredennis, with a fierce leap of every pulse in his body.
“If,” said the professor, deliberately, — “if she were not free to give what his feeling for her demanded.”
He paused to turn Tredennis round.
“Confound him!” he said, with a curiously irritable seriousness. “If he once reached a white heat, — that fellow with his objectless follies, and his dress-coat, and his white necktie, and his opera hat under his arm, — if he once forgot them and himself, it would be her fate to remember him as long as her life should last.”
“Her fate?” said Tredennis.
“I said it would have to be a woman,” said the professor. “I should not like it to be a woman I felt an interest in. We have reached the end of the block. Let us walk back again.”
When he spoke again it was of Richard Amory, not of Arbuthnot.
“You went upstairs into the Museum, as Bertha calls it?” he said.
“Yes,” answered Tredennis; “ and into the workroom.”
“And saw the models, and the collections, and the books?”
“Yes.”
“He has a good many enthusiasms, Richard,” said the professor. “They might form a collection of themselves. He won’t tire of life easily. He is a fine contrast to — the other.”
They were nearing the house again by this time, and he glanced up at its front.
“There is a light in the nursery window,” he said. “It must be one of Janey’s restless nights.”
“Yes,” said Tredennis. “Mrs. Amory was with her when we came downstairs, and she told us that the child was nervous and needed her.”
“She has wonderful patience with them,” said the professor, “and a sort of genius for understanding their vague young needs and desires. She never does them an injustice for want of thought, and never fails them. I have seen her spend half an hour half-kneeling, half-sitting on the nursery floor, by one of them, with her arm round it, questioning it, and helping it to tell its own story, in a way that was very motherly. There is a great deal of the maternal instinct in her.”
Tredennis made no reply, but there rose before his mental vision the picture before the nursery fire, and he saw again the soft, close clasp of the fair hand and arm.
“It’s curious how seldom we speak of paternal instinct,” the professor went on. “It is always maternal instinct. Well, it is a great thing. And it is a great safeguard where — where life is not satisfactory. And as one grows older one sees a good deal of that. It is pitiful sometimes, when one finds it, as one so often does, in young things who haven’t got over their desperate mental insistence on their right to be happy.”
He checked himself with a faint laugh.
“I’m prosing, my boy,” he said. “I always do it when I take my saunter at night. It is a sort of safeguard against doing it in the day. And I find I am specially given to it when I talk of Bertha. It is the paternal instinct, if there is such a thing. You remember how we talked of her when she came home from school. Do you find her much changed?”
“She has changed from a girl — a child, almost — to a woman,” said Tredennis.
“Yes,” said the professor, “from a child to a woman. And yet, when you look back upon it, eight years is a very short time. Sometimes it seems only yesterday that she startled me at the dinner-table by saying that she expected me to classify and label her.”
“There have been times,” said Tredennis, “when it seemed only yesterday to me; but to-night it is something far away.”
The professor looked up at him quickly.
“Is it?” he said. “ Well, well,” rather vaguely, “it is a habit they have fallen into, that of making light of things. It is a kind of fashion nowadays. She did not treat things lightly then, did she? How she believed all that she believed — how frankly she impugned your veracity in argument, without being at all conscious of the incivility! How bright her eyes and lips were when she asked me if she could not have the label without the pin! I wish” —
He stopped suddenly once more.
“We have reached the end of the block again, my boy,” he said, “and I have walked long enough, and talked long enough. We must say good-night to each other.”
They were standing beneath a street-lamp, and having looked up at Tredennis to say this, he drew back a pace to look again, in whimsically gentle admiration of his stalwart proportions.
“What a soldierly fellow you are!” he said; “and how you stand out among the rest of us!” And then, with an odd change of manner, he drew nearer, and laid his hand on his shoulder once more. “I’ll say again,” he said, “what I have said before. I wish you had been a son of mine, my boy.”
And, as he said it, there fell upon the quiet of the street the sound of approaching footsteps ringing on the pavement, and, turning instinctively toward them, each saw an easily recognized masculine figure, which, reaching the house in which the Amorys lived, paused for a moment beneath the lighted window, and flung forth to the night, airily, and by no means unmusically, a few bars of one of the popular airs from a gay French opera, and then, crossing the street, applied a latch-key to the door of the opposite house, and, entering, closed it.
“The fellow has a pleasant voice,” said the professor. “It is a voice you like to hear. And that is one of his whims.”
“I thought I recognized the figure,” said Tredennis.
“It is”—
“Arbuthnot,” said the professor. “Arbuthnot.” And then they parted.
Chapter 7
To Tredennis the next three months were full of event. It was mostly quiet event, and yet, as day followed day, he was conscious that, in each twenty-four hours, he lived through some new mental experience which left its mark upon him. The first two weeks seemed to make his old regular, routine-governed life a thing of the far past, from which he was entirely separated by a gulf which it would be impossible to recross. He awakened to a recognition of this at the end of the second week, and told himself that the feeling was due to the complete novelty of his surroundings and their natural influences upon him. He found himself placed among people whose lives, ambitions, and interests were all new to him, and of a kind with which he had never before been thrown into close contact for a length of time sufficient to allow of analysis. In his first visit to Washington he had regarded its peculiarities merely as an amateur and a visitor; now he saw and studied them from a different stand-point. The public buildings were no longer mere edifices in his eyes, but developed into tremendous communities, regulated by a tremendous system for which there could be no medium or indefinite standing, but which must either be a tremendous credit or a tremendous discredit to itself and the power it represented. The human side of the place grew and impressed itself upon him. He began to feel the full significance of the stream of humanity which ebbed and flowed to and from these buildings at stated hours in the day. After a few afternoon walks on the Avenue he could recognize many a face that passed him, and comprehend something of what it typified. He could single out the young woman who supported her family upon her salary, and the young woman who bought her ribbons with it; the widow whose pay fed half-a-dozen children, and the husband whose earnings were appropriated by a wife of fashionable aspirations; the man of broken career, whose wasted ambitions and frustrated purposes were buried in the monotonous routine of a Government clerkship, and who asked and hoped for no greater boon than to be permitted to hold his place through as much of the future as remained to him. It was an orderly and respectably dressed crowd, as a rule; but there was many a sad face to be seen in it, and many an anxious and disappointed one. It never failed to interest Tredennis, and he took his afternoon walk so often at the same hour that the passers-by began to know his tall, soldierly figure and sunbrowned face, and rather expected to encounter them; and when the newspapers had referred to him on a dozen occasions or so, there were not a few who recognized him, and pointed him out to each other as something of a celebrity and a hero, and so worth seeing.
This general knowledge which people seemed to have of one another was one thing which struck him as peculiarly local. It was the rule, and not the exception, that in walking out he met persons he knew or knew of, and he found it at no time difficult to discover the names and positions of those who attracted his attention. Almost all noticeable and numerous unnoticeable persons were to be distinguished in some way from their fellows. The dark, sinewy man he observed standing on the steps of a certain family hotel was a noted New England senator; his companion was the head of an important department; the man who stood near was the private secretary of the President, or the editor of one of the dailies, or a man with a much-discussed claim against the Government; the handsome woman whose carriage drew up before a fashionable millinery establishment was the wife of a foreign diplomat, or of a well-known politician, or of a member of the Cabinet; the woman who crossed her path as she got out was a celebrated female suffragist, or female physician, or lawyer, or perhaps that much-talked of will-o’-the-wisp, a female lobbyist; and eight persons out of every ten passing them knew their names and not a little of their private history. So much was crowded within a comparatively limited radius that it was not easy for any person or thing worthy of note to be lost or hidden from the public eye.
By the most natural gradations Tredennis found the whole tenor of his existence changed in this atmosphere. His fixed habits of life gave way before the influences surrounding him.
One of the most subtle of these influences was that of his intimacy with the members of the Amory household, which grew as he had not at all anticipated that it would. He had thought of the acquaintance in the first place as one not likely to ripen into anything beyond its rather conventional significance. Perhaps, on the whole, he had been content to let it rest as it was, feeling only half-consciously that he should be in a quieter frame of mind and less liable to vague pangs and disappointments.
“It is all different,” he had said to himself. “And it is all over. It is better that it should remain as it is.”
But after his first visit Richard did not choose to lose sight of him. It was his fancy to seek him out and make much of and take possession of him, with an amiability and frank persistence in the chase which were at once complimentary and engaging.
“Look here!” he would say, having followed him up to reproach him. “You don’t suppose we intend to be treated in this manner? We won’t hear of it. We want you. Your stalwart solidity is what we have been needing to give us weight and balance. Only yesterday Bertha was holding you up to Arbuthnot as a model of steadfastness of purpose. We thought we were going to see you every other day, at least, and you have not been near us for a week. Bertha wonders what we have been guilty of.”
And then he would be carried up to luncheon or dinner, or to spend the evening; and each visit resulted in another and another, until it gradually became the most natural thing in the world that he should drop in at odd hours, because it seemed that he was always expected, and he appeared to have a place among them.
“Do you know what we shall do with you if you remain here a year?” Bertha had said to him at the outset. “We shall domesticate you. We not only domesticated Mr. Arbuthnot, but we appropriated him. We feel that we have invested largely in him, and that he ought to respect our rights and pay interest. Sometimes I wonder how he likes it, and just now it occurs to me to wonder how you would like it.”
“The question is,” Tredennis answered, “how you would like it.”
He was always conscious of a silent distaste for being compared to Mr. Arbuthnot, and he was also always conscious of the youthful weakness of the feeling.
“It is the kind of thing which belongs to a younger man,” he used to say to himself. “It is arrant folly; and yet I am not fond of the fellow.”
But, as Bertha had predicted, he became in a manner domesticated in the household. Perhaps the truth was that his natural tendency was toward the comfort and easy communion of home-life. He was a little surprised to find himself develop a strong fancy for children. He had never been averse to them, but he had known nothing of them, and had never suspected himself of any definite disposition to fondness for them. After he had watched Bertha’s during a few visits he began to like them, and to be oddly interested in their sayings and doings. He discovered Jack to be a decidedly sturdy and masculine little fellow, with rather more than his share of physical strength and beauty; and, making amicable advances toward him, was met half-way with a fearless readiness which was very attractive. Then he made friends with Janey, and found himself still more interested. Her childish femininity was even better worth studying than Jack’s miniature manhood. She was a small, gentle creature, with clinging hands and much faith, but also with a delightful sense of infantile dignity, and the friendship which established itself between them was a very absorbing sentiment. It was not long before it became an understood thing among the juvenile portion of the establishment that Tredennis was to be counted among the spoils. His incoming was greeted with rapture, his outgoing was regarded as a species of calamity only to be borne because it was unavoidable. He could tell stories of Indians and bears, and on more than one occasion was decoyed into the nursery, and found to be not entirely without resources in the matter of building forts with blocks, and defending them against aboriginal warriors with tin soldiers. His own sense of enjoyment of the discovery of these accomplishments in himself filled him with a whimsical pleasure. He began to carry toys in his pockets, and became a connoisseur of such dainties as were considered harmless to the juvenile constitution; and after having been reproved by Janey, on two or three occasions, for the severity of his air, he began also to have a care that the expression of his countenance should be less serious and more likely to win the approval of innocent small creatures, who considered gravity uncalled for and mysterious. At first he had seemed to learn but little of Bertha herself, notwithstanding that a day seldom passed without their meeting, and there were times when he fancied he had determined that there was but little to learn. The gayeties of the season over, she announced her intention of resting; and her manner of accomplishing this end was to inaugurate a series of small festivities, with a result of occupying each day until midnight. She gave small, informal dinners, suppers, and teas to the favored few who would be most likely to enjoy and find them exhilarating, and, when she did not give a dinner or tea, her evenings were bestowed upon Arbuthnot and half a dozen of the inner circle, whose habit it was to drop in and talk politics, literature, or entertaining nonsense.
