Over the Pass
Page 23
XXIII
LABELLED AND SHIPPED
Behold Jack clad in the habiliments of conventional civilization takenfrom the stock of ready-made suitings in an El Paso store! They were ofthe Moscowitz and Guggenheim type, the very latest and nattiest, asadvertised in popular prints. The dealer said that no gentleman could bewell dressed without them. He wanted to complete the transformation witha cream-colored Fedora or a brown derby.
"I'll wait on the thirty-third degree a little longer," said Jack,fondling the flat-brimmed cowpuncher model of affectionate predilection.Swinging on a hook on the sleeper with the sway of the train, its companywas soothing to him all the way across the continent.
The time was March, that season of the northern year when winter growingstale has a gritty, sticky taste and the relief of spring seems yet faraway. After the desert air the steam heat was stifling and nauseating.Jack's head was a barrel about to burst its hoops; his skin drying like amummy's; his muscles in a starchy misery from lack of exercise. He feltboxed up, an express package labelled and shipped. When he crawled intohis berth at night it was with a sense of giving himself up toasphyxiation at the whim of strange gods.
If you have ever come back to town after six months in the woods, sixmonths far from the hysteria of tittering electric bells, the brassyhonk-honk of automobiles, the clang of surface cars and the screech oftheir wheels on the rails, multiply your period of absence by ten, add acertain amount of desert temperament, and you will vaguely understand howthe red corpuscles were raising rebellion in Jack's artery walls on themorning of his journey's end. From the ferryboat on the dull-green bosomof the river he first renewed his memory of the spectral and forbiddingabysses and pinnacles of New York. Here time is everything; here man hasdone his mightiest in contriving masses to imitate the architecturalchaos of genesis. A mantle of chill, smoky mist formed the dome ofheaven, in which a pale, suffused, yellowish spot alone bespoke theexistence of a sun in the universe.
In keeping with his promise to Dr. Bennington he had wired to his father,naming his train; and in a few minutes Wingfield, Sr. and Wingfield, Jr.would meet for the first time in five years. Jack was conscious of afaster beating of his heart and a feeling of awesome expectancy as thecrowd debouched from the ferryboat. At the exit to the street a biglimousine was waiting. The gilt initials on the door left no doubt forwhom it had been sent. But there was no one to meet him, no one after hislong absence except a chauffeur and a footman, who glanced at Jacksharply. After the exchange of a corroborative nod between them thefootman advanced.
"If you please, Mr. Wingfield," he said, taking Jack's suit case.
"What would Jim Galway think of me now!" thought Jack. He put his headinside the car cautiously. "Another box!" he thought, this time aloud.
"You have the check for it, sir?" asked the footman, thinking that Jackwas using the English of the mother island for trunk.
"No. That's all my baggage."
In the tapering, cut-glass vase between the two front window-panels ofthe "box" was a rose--a symbol of the luxury of the twenty millions,evidently put there regularly every morning by direction of their master.Its freshness and color appealed to Jack. He took it out and pressed itto his nostrils.
"Just needs the morning sun and the dew to be perfect," he said to theamazed attendants; "and I will walk if you will take the suit case tothe house."
He kept the rose, which he twirled in his fingers as he sauntered acrosstown, now pausing at curb corners to glance back in thoughtful survey,now looking aloft at the peaks of Broadway which lay beyond the foothillsof the river-front avenues.
"All to me what the desert is to other folks!" he mused; "desert, withoutany cacti or mesquite! All the trails cross one another in a maze. Aboxed-up desert--boxes and boxes piled on top of one another! Everybodyin harness and attached by an invisible, unbreakable, inelastic leash toa box, whither he bears his honey or goes to nurse his broken wings!--soit seems to me and very headachy!"
At Madison Square he was at the base of the range itself; and halting onthe corner of Twenty-third Street and the Avenue he was a statue as aloofas the statue of Farragut from his surroundings. Salt sea spray everwhispers in the atmosphere around the old sailor. How St. Gaudenscreated it and keeps it there in the heart of New York is his secret.Possibly the sculptor put some of his soul into it as young MichaelAngelo did into his young David.
It is a great thing to put some of your soul into a thing, whether it isdriving a nail or moulding a piece of clay into life. There are men whopause before the old Admiral and see the cutwater of men-of-war's bowsand hear the singing of the signal halyards as they rise with the commandto close in. Perhaps the Eternal Painter had put a little of his soulinto the heart of Jack; for some busy marchers of the Avenue trail asthey glanced at him saw the free desert and heard hoof-beats in the sand.Others seeing a tanned Westerner kissing his hand to Diana of MadisonSquare Garden probably thought him mad. Next, performing anothersentimental errand for the Doge of Little Rivers, his gaze rose along thecolumn of the Metropolitan tower. Its heights were half shrouded in mist,through which glowed the gold of the lantern.
"Oh, bully! bully!" he thought. "The only sun in sight a manufacturedone, shining on top of a manufactured mountain! It is a big businessbuilding a mountain; only, when God Almighty scattered so many ready-madeones about, why take the trouble?" he concluded. "Or so it seems to me,"he added, sadly, in due appreciation of the utterly reactionary mood of aman who has been boxed up for a week.
Now he turned toward a quarter which he had, thus far, kept out of thecompass of observation. He looked up the jagged range of Broadway where,over a terra-cotta pile, floated a crimson flag with "John Wingfield" inbig, white letters.
"My mountain! My box! My millions!" he breathed half audibly.
How the people whom he passed, their faces speaking city keenness ofambition, must envy his position! How little reason they had to envy him,he thought, as he walked around the great building and saw his nameglaring at him in gilt letters over the plate-glass windows and on allthe delivery wagons, open-mouthed for the packages being wheeled outunder the long glass awning.
"A whole block now! Yes, the doctor was right. It must be thirty insteadof twenty millions!" he concluded, as his vision swept the straight-line,window-checkered mass of the twelve stories. "And I do wish we had atower! If one could go up on top of a tower and look out over the rangenow and then and breathe deep, it would help."
When he entered the main door he paused in a maze, gazing at the acreageof counters manned by clerks and the aisles swarming with shoppers underthe glare of the big, electric globes, and listening to the babble ofshrill talk, the calls of the elevator boys, the coughing of thepneumatic tubes and the clang of the elevator doors. It was all like somedevilishly complicated dream from which he would never awake. He musthave a little time in order to orient himself before he could thinkrationally. The roar of the train still obsessed him; the air in thestore seemed more stifling than that of the sleeper.
So he decided that, rather than be shot up into The Presence by theelevator, he would gradually scale the heights. Ascending stairway afterstairway, he ranged back and forth over the floors, a stranger in hisown wonderland. When he reached the eleventh floor, with only one more tothe offices, the whole atmosphere seemed suddenly to turn rare withexpectancy; a rustle to run through all the goods on the counters; thevery Paris gowns among which he was standing to be called to martialattention.
"The boss!" he heard one of the model girls say.
Turning to follow her nod toward the stairway, Jack saw, two-thirds ofthe way up the broad flight, a man past middle age, in dark gray suit andneutral tie, rubbing his palms together as he surveyed a stratum of hisprincipality. The sight of him to Jack was like the touch of a myriadelectric needles that pricked sharply, without exhilaration.
"The boss is likely to run up that way any time of the day," said themodel girl to a customer; "and what he don't see don't count!"
"Not much older; not much changed!" thought Jack; and his realization ofthe disinterestedness of his observation tipped the needles with acid.
In the sharpness of the master's button-counting survey there was swiftfinality; and his impressions completed, analyzed, docketed forreference, he ran on up the flight with light step, still rubbing thepalms of his hands in the unctuously well-contained and appreciativesense of his power. To Jack he was a fascinating, grand, distant figure,this of his own father, yet mortally near.
If the model girl had had the same keenness of observation for what isborne in the face as for what is worn on the back, she could not havefailed to note the strong family resemblance between the young manstanding near her and the man who had paused on the stairway. Thisglimpse of his father's mastery of every detail of that organizationwhich he had built, this glimpse of cool, self-centered authority, onlyreminded Jack of his own ignorance and flightiness in view of all thatwould be expected of him. He knew less than one of the cash girls abouthow to run the store. A duel with Leddy was a simple matter beside thisbattle he had to wage.
He mounted the last flight of stairs into an area of glass-paneled doors,behind which the creative business of the great concern was conducted.Out of one marked "Private," closing it softly and stepping softly, camea round-shouldered, stooping man of middle age, with the apprehensive andpalliating manner of a long-service private secretary who has many thingsto remember and many persons to appease with explanations. It was evidentthat Peter Mortimer had just come from The Presence. At sight of Jack hedrew back in a surprise that broke into a beaming delight which playedover his tired and wrinkled features in ecstasy.
"Jack! Jack! You did it! You did it!" he cried.
"Peter!" Jack seized the secretary's hands and swung them back and forth.
"You've got a grip of iron! And tanned--my, how you're tanned! You didit, Jack, you did it! It hardly seems credible, when I think of the lasttime I saw you."
It was then that the secretary had seen a Jack with his eyes moist; aJack pasty-faced, hollow-cheeked; and, in what was a revolutionaryoutburst for a unit in the offices, Peter Mortimer had put his arm aroundthe boy in a cry for the success of the Odyssey for health which theheir was about to begin. And Mortimer's words were sweet, while the wordsof the farewell from the other side of the glass-paneled door marked"Private" were acrid with the disappointed hopes of the speaker.
"You have always been a weakling, Jack, and I have had little to sayabout your rearing. Go out to the desert and stay--stay till you arestrong!" declared the voice of strength, as if glad to be freed of thesight of weakness in its own image.
"Father did not come to meet me?" Jack observed questioningly nowto Mortimer.
"He was very busy--he did not feel certain about the nature of yourtelegram--he--" and Mortimer's impulses withdrew into the shell of theprofessional private secretary.
"I wired that he should see for himself if I were well. So he shall!"said Jack, turning toward the door.
"Yes--that will be all right--yes, there is no one with him!"
Mortimer, in the very instinct of long practice, was about to go in toannounce the visitor, but paused. As Jack entered, whatever else may havebeen in his eyes, there was no moisture.