IX
Relapsings
Given his choice between the two, Smith would cheerfully have facedanother hand-to-hand battle with the claim-jumpers in preference to evenso mild a dip into the former things as the dinner at Hillcrestforeshadowed. The reluctance was not forced; it was real. The primitiveman in him did not wish to be entertained. On the fast auto drive downto Brewster, across the bridge, and out to the Baldwin ranch Smith'shumor was frankly sardonic. Dinners, social or grateful, were suchchildish things; so little worth the time and attention of a real manwith work to do!
It mattered nothing that he had lived twenty-five years and more withoutsuspecting this childishness of things social. That door was closed andanother had been opened; beyond the new opening the prospect was as yetrather chaotic and rugged, to be sure, but the color scheme, if somewhatraw, was red-blood vivid, and the horizons were illimitable. Smith satup in the mechanician's seat and straightened the loose tie under thesoft collar of his working-shirt, smiling grimly as his thought leapedback to the dress clothes he had left lying on the bed in hisLawrenceville quarters. He cherished a small hope that Mrs. Baldwinmight be shocked at the soft shirt and the khaki. It would serve herright for taking a man from his job.
The colonel did not try to make him talk, and the fifteen-mile flightdown the river and across into the hills was shortly accomplished. Atthe stone-pillared portal he got out to open the gates. Down the road alittle distance a horseman was coming at a smart gallop--at least, therider figured as a man for the gate-opener until he saw that it wasCorona Baldwin, booted and spurred and riding a man's saddle.
Smith let the gray car go on its way up the drive without him and heldthe gates open for the horse and its rider.
"So you weakened, did you? I'm disappointed in you," was Miss Baldwin'sgreeting. "You've made me lose my bet with Colonel-daddy. I said youwouldn't come."
"I had no business to come," he answered morosely. "But your fatherwouldn't let me off."
"Of course, he wouldn't; daddy never lets anybody off, unless they owehim money. Where are your evening clothes?"
Smith let the lever of moroseness slip back to the grinning notch. "Theyare about two thousand miles away, and probably in some second-hand shopby this time. What makes you think I ever wore a dress suit?" He hadclosed the gates and was walking beside her horse up the driveway.
"Oh, I just guessed it," she returned lightly, "and if you'll hold yourbreath, I'll guess again."
"Don't," he laughed. "You are going to say that at some time in my lifeI knew better than to accept anybody's dinner invitation undecorated.Maybe there was such a time, but if so, I am trying to forget it."
Her laugh was good-naturedly derisive.
"You'll forget it just so long as you are able to content yourself in aconstruction camp. I know the symptoms. There are times when I feel asif I'd simply blow up if I couldn't put on the oldest things I've gotand go and gallop for miles on Shy, and other times when I want to puton all the pretty things I have and look soulful and talk nonsense."
"But you've been doing that--the galloping, I mean--all your life,haven't you?"
"Not quite. There were three wasted years in a finishing school backEast. It is when I get to thinking too pointedly about them that I haveto go out to the stable and saddle Shy."
They had reached the steps of the pillared portico, and a negrostable-boy, one of the colonel's importations from Missouri, was waitingto take Miss Baldwin's horse. Smith knew how to help a woman down from aside-saddle; but the two-stirruped rig stumped him. The young woman sawhis momentary embarrassment and laughed again as she swung out of hersaddle to stand beside him on the step.
"The women don't ride that way in your part of the country?" shequeried.
"Not yet."
"I'm sorry for them," she scoffed. And then: "Come on in and meet mamma;you look as if you were dreading it, and, as Colonel-daddy says, it'salways best to have the dreaded things over with."
Smith did not find his meeting with the daughter's mother much of atrial. She was neither shocked at his clothes nor disposed to behysterically grateful over the railroad-crossing incident. A large,calm-eyed, sensible matron, some ten or a dozen years younger than thecolonel, Smith put her, and with an air of refinement which wasreflected in every interior detail of her house.
Smith had not expected to find the modern conveniences in a Timanyoniranch-house, but they were there. The room to which the Indian house-boyled him had a brass bedstead and a private bath, and the rugs, if nottrue Tabriz, were a handsome imitation. Below stairs it was much thesame. The dining-room was a beamed baronial hall, with a rough-stonefireplace big enough to take a cord-wood length, and on the hearthandirons which might have come down from the Elizabethan period. It wasmid-June and the fireplace was empty, but its winter promise was sohospitable that Smith caught himself hoping that he might stay out ofjail long enough to be able to see it in action.
The dinner was strictly a family meal, with the great mahogany tableshortened to make it convenient for four. There were cut glass andsilver and snowy napery, and Smith was glad that the colonel did most ofthe talking. Out of the past a thousand tentacles were reaching up todrag him back into the net of the conventional. With the encompassmentsto help, it was so desperately easy to imagine himself once more the"debutantes' darling," as Westfall had often called him in friendlyderision. When the table-talk became general, he found himself joiningin, and always upon the lighter side.
By the time the dessert came on, the transformation was complete. It wasJ. Montague, the cotillon leader, who sat back in his chair and toldamiable little after-dinner stones, ignoring the colonel's heartinesses,and approving himself in the eyes of his hostess as a dinner guest ofthe true urban quality. Now and then he surprised a look in the youngerwoman's eyes which was not wholly sympathetic, he thought; but thetemptation to show her that he was not at all the kind of man she hadbeen taking him for was too strong to be resisted. Since she had seenfit to charge him with a dress-clothes past he would show her that hecould live up to it.
Contrary to Smith's expectations, the colonel did not usurp himimmediately after dinner. A gorgeous sunset was flaming over the westernTimanyonis and there was time for a quiet stroll and a smoke under thesilver-leafed cottonwoods with his hostess for a companion. In thelittle talk and walk, Smith found himself drawn more and more to thecalm-eyed, well-bred matron who had given a piquant Corona to anotherwise commonplace world. He found her exceedingly well-informed;she had read the books that he had read, she had heard the operas thathe had always wanted to hear, and if any other bond were needed, hefound it in the fact that she was a native of his own State.
Under such leadings the relapse became an obsession. He abandonedhimself shamelessly to the J. Montague attitude, and the events crowdingso thickly between the tramp-like flight from Lawrenceville and thepresent were as if they had not been. Mrs. Baldwin saw nothing of therude fighter of battles her daughter had drawn for her, and wondered alittle. She knew Corona's leanings, and was not without an amusedimpression that Corona would not find this later Smithsonian phasealtogether to her liking.
A little later the daughter, who had been to the horse corral with herfather, came to join them, and the mother, smiling inwardly, saw herimpression confirmed. Smith was talking frivolously of _thes dansants_and dinner-parties and club meets; whereat the mother smiled and MissCorona's lip curled scornfully.
Smith got what he had earned, good measure, pressed down, shakentogether and running over, a few minutes after Mrs. Baldwin had gone in,leaving him to finish his cigar under the pillared portico with Coronato keep him company. He never knew just what started it, unless it washis careful placing of a chair for the young woman and hisdeferential--and perfectly natural--pause, standing, until she wasseated.
"Do, for pity's sake, sit down!" she broke out, half petulantly. Andwhen he had obeyed: "Well, you've spoiled it all, good and hard.Yesterday I thought you were a real man, but now you are doing your
bestto tell me that you were only shamming."
Smith was still so far besotted as to be unable to imagine wherein hehad offended.
"Really?" he said. "I'm sorry to have disappointed you. All I need nowto make me perfectly happy is to be told what I have done."
"It isn't what you've done; it's what you are," she retorted.
"Well, what am I?" he asked patiently.
Her laugh was mocking. "You are politely good-natured, for one thing;but that wasn't what I meant. You have committed the unpardonable sin byturning out to be just one of the ninety-nine, after all. If you knewwomen the least little bit in the world, you would know that we arealways looking for the hundredth man."
Under his smile, Smith was searching the Lawrenceville experiencerecords minutely in the effort to find something that would evenremotely match this. The effort was a complete failure. But he wasbeginning to understand what this astonishingly frank young woman meant.She had seen the depth of his relapse, and was calmly deriding him forit. A saving sense of humor came to remind him of his own sardonicmusings on the silent drive from the camp with the colonel; how he hadrailed inwardly at the social trivialities.
"You may pile it on as thickly as you please," he said, the good-naturedsmile twisting itself into the construction-camp grin. Then he added: "Imay not be the hundredth man, but you, at least, are the hundredthwoman."
"Why? Because I say the first thing that asks to be said?"
"That, and some other things," he rejoined guardedly. Then, with maliceaforethought: "Is it one of the requirements that your centennial manshould behave himself like a boor at a dinner-table, and talk shop andeat with his knife?"
"You know that isn't what I meant. Manners don't make the man. It's whatyou talked about--the trumpery little social things that you found yourkeenest pleasure in talking about. I don't know what has ever taken youout to a construction camp and persuaded you to wear khaki. Perhaps itwas only what Colonel-daddy calls a 'throw-back.' I don't believe youever did a day's hard work in your life before you came to theTimanyoni."
Smith looked at his hands. They were large and shapely, but the onlycallouses they could show were accusingly recent.
"If you mean manual labor, you are right," he admitted thoughtfully."Just the same, I think you are a little hard on me."
It was growing dark by this time, and the stars were coming out. Someone had turned the lights on in the room the windows of which openedupon the portico, and the young woman's chair was so placed that hecould still see her face. She was smiling rather more amicably when shesaid:
"You mustn't take it too hard. It isn't you, personally, you know; it'sthe type. I've met it before. I didn't meet any other kind during mythree years in the boarding-school; nice, pleasant young gentlemen, asimmaculately dressed as their pocketbooks would allow, up in all thelatest little courtesies and tea-table shop-talk. They were all men, Isuppose, but I'm afraid a good many of them had never found it out--willnever find it out. I've been calling it environment; I don't like toadmit that the race is going down-hill."
By this time the sardonic humor was once more in full possession and hewas enjoying her keenly.
"Go on," he said. "This is my night off."
"I've said enough; too much, perhaps. But a little while ago at thedinner-table, and again out there in the grove where you were walkingwith mamma, you reminded me so forcibly of a man whom I met just for apart of one evening about a year ago."
"Tell me about him," he urged.
"I was coming back from school and I stopped over in a small town in theMiddle West to visit some old friends of mamma's. There were youngpeople in the family, and one evening they gave a lawn-party for me. Imet dozens of the pleasant young gentlemen, more than I had ever seentogether at any one time before; clerks and book-keepers, and richfarmers' sons who had been to college."
"But the man of whom I am reminding you?"
"He was one of them. He drove over from some neighboring town in hisnatty little automobile and gave me fully an hour of his valuable time.He made me perfectly furious!"
"Poor you!" laughed Smith; but he was thankful that the camp sunburn andhis four weeks' beard were safeguarding his identity. "I hope you didn'ttell him so. He was probably doing his level best to give you a goodtime in the only definition of the term that the girls of his own sethad ever given him. But why the fury in his case in particular?"
"Just because, I suppose. He was rather good-looking, you know; and downunderneath all the airy little things he persisted in talking about itseemed as if I could now and then get tiny glimpses of something thatmight be a real man, a strong man. I remember he told me he was a bankcashier and that he danced. He was quite hopeless, of course. Withoutbeing what you would call conceited, you could see that the crust was sothick that nothing short of an earthquake would ever break it."
"But the earthquakes do come, once in a blue moon," he said, stillsmiling at her. "Let's get it straight. You are not trying to tell methat you object to decent clothes and good manners _per se_, are you?"
"Not at all; I like them both. But the hundredth man won't let eitherhis clothes or his manners wear him; he'll wear _them_."
"Still, you think the type of man you have been describing is entirelyhopeless; that was the word you used, I believe."
The colonel was coming out, and he had stopped in the doorway to light along-stemmed pipe. The young woman got up and fluffed her hair with theends of her fingers--a little gesture which Smith remembered, recallingit from the night of the far-away lawn-party.
"Daddy wants you, and I'll have to vanish," she said; "but I'll answeryour question before I go. Types are always hopeless; it's only thehundredth man who isn't. It's a great pity you couldn't go on whippingclaim-jumpers all the rest of your life, Mr. Smith. Don't you think so?Good night. We'll meet again at breakfast. Daddy isn't going to let youget away short of a night's lodging, I know."
Two cigars for Smith and four pipes for the colonel further along, thetall Missourian rose out of the split-bottomed chair which he had drawnup to face the guest's and rapped the ashes from the bowl of thecorn-cob into the palm of his hand.
"I think you've got it all now, Smith, every last crook and turn of it,and I reckon you're tired enough to run away to bed. You see just wherewe stand, and how little we've got to go on. If I've about talked an armoff of you, it's for your own good. I don't know how you've made up yourmind, or if you've made it up at all; but it was only fair to show youhow little chance we've got on anything short of a miracle. I wouldn'twant to see you butt your head against a stone wall, and that's aboutwhat it looks like to me."
Smith took a turn up and down the stone-flagged floor of the porticowith his hands behind him. Truly, the case of Timanyoni Ditch wasdesperate; even more desperate than he had supposed. Figuring as thelevel-headed bank cashier of the former days, he told himself soberlythat no man in his senses would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Then thelaughing gibes of the hundredth woman--gibes which had cut far deeperthan she had imagined--came back to send the blood surging through hisveins. It would be worth something to be able to work the miracle thecolonel had spoken of; and afterward....
Colonel Dexter Baldwin was still tapping his palm absently with thepipe when Smith came back and said abruptly:
"I have decided, Colonel. I'll start in with you to-morrow morning, andwe'll pull this mired scheme of yours out of the mud, or break a legtrying to. But you mustn't forget what I told you out at the camp. Rightin the middle of things I may go rotten on you and drop out."
The Real Man Page 9