Mr. Fisbee twisted up another sheet, and employed his eyes in following the course of a crack in the plaster, a slender black aperture which staggered across the dusty ceiling and down the dustier wall to disappear behind a still dustier map of Carlow County. “That’s the trouble!” exclaimed Parker, observing the other’s preoccupation. “Soon as you get to writing a line or two that seems kind of promising, you begin to take a morbid interest in that blamed crack. It’s busted up enough copy for me, the last eight days, to have filled her up twenty times over. I don’t know as I ever care to see that crack again. I turned my back on it, but there wasn’t any use in that, because if a fly lights on you I watch him like a brother, and if there ain’t any fly I’ve caught a mania for tapping my teeth with a pencil, that is just as good.”
To these two gentlemen, thus disengaged, reentered (after a much longer absence than Miss Selina’s quatrain justified) Mr. Ross Schofield, a healthy glow of exertion lending pleasant color to his earnest visage, and an almost visible laurel of success crowning his brows. In addition to this imaginary ornament, he was horned with pencils over both ears, and held some scribbled sheets in his hand.
“I done a good deal down there,” he announced cheerfully, drawing up a chair to the desk. “I thought up a heap of things I’ve heard lately, and they’ll fill up mighty well. That there poem of Miss Seliny’s was a kind of an inspiration to me, and I tried one myself, and it didn’t come hard at all. When I got started once, it jest seemed to flow from me. I didn’t set none of it up,” he added modestly, but with evident consciousness of having unearthed genius in himself and an elate foreknowledge of the treat in store for his companions. “I thought I’d ort to see how you liked it first.” He offered the papers to Mr. Parker, but the foreman shook his head.
“You read it, Ross,” I said. “I don’t believe I feel hearty enough to-day. Read the items first — we can bear the waiting.”
“What waiting?” inquired Mr. Schofield.
“For the poem,” replied Parker, grimly.
With a vague but not fleeting smile, Ross settled the sheets in order, and exhibited tokens of that pleasant nevousness incident to appearing before a critical audience, armed with literature whose merits should delight them out of the critical attitude. “I run across a great scheme down there,” he volunteered amiably, by way of preface; “I described everything in full, in as many words as I could think up; it’s mighty filling, and it’ll please the public, too; it gives ’em a lot more information than they us’ally git. I reckon there’s two sticks of jest them extry words alone.”
“Go on,” said the foreman, rather ominously.
Ross began to read, a matter necessitating a puckered brow and at times an amount of hesitancy and ruminating, as his results had already cooled a little, and he found his hand difficult to decipher. “Here’s the first,” he said:
“‘The large and handsome, fawn-colored, two years and one-half year old Jersey of Frederick Bibshaw Jones, Esquire — —’”
The foreman interrupted him: “Every reader of the ‘Herald’ will be glad to know that Jersey’s age and color! But go on.”
“‘ — Frederick Bibshaw Jones, Esquire,’” pursued his assistant, with some discomfiture, “‘ — Esquire, our popular and well-dressed fellow-citizen — —’”
“You’re right; Bib Jones is a heavy swell,” said Parker in a breaking voice.
“‘ — Citizen, can be daily seen wandering from the far end of his pasture-lot to the other far end of it.’”
“‘His!’” exclaimed Parker. “‘His pasture-lot?’ The Jersey’s?”
“No,” returned the other, meekly, “Bib Jones’s.”
“Oh,” said Parker. “Is that the end of that item? It is! You want to get out of Plattville, my friend; it’s too small for you; you go to Rouen and you’ll be city editor of the ‘Journal’ inside of a week. Let’s have another.”
Mr. Schofield looked up blankly; however, he felt that there was enough live, legitimate news in his other items to redeem the somewhat tame quality of the first, and so, after having crossed out several of the extra words which had met so poor a reception, he proceeded:
“‘Whit Upton’s pigs broke out last Wednesday and rooted up a fine patch of garden truck. Hard luck, Whit.’
“‘Jerusalem Hawkins took a drive yesterday afternoon. He had the bay to his side-bar. Jee’s buggy has been recently washed. Congratulations, Jee.’”
“There’s thrilling information!” shouted the foreman. “That’ll touch the gentle reader to the marrow. The boss had to use some pretty rotten copy himself, but he never got as low as that. But we’ll use it; oh, we’ll use it! If we don’t get her out he’ll have a set-back, but if they show her to him it’ll kill him. If it doesn’t, and he gets well, he’ll kill us. But we’ll use it, Ross. Don’t read any more to us, though; I feel weaker than I did, and I wasn’t strong before. Go down and set it all up.”
Mr. Schofield rejoined with an injured air, and yet hopefully: “I’d like to see what you think of the poetry — it seemed all right to me, but I reckon you ain’t ever the best judge of your own work. Shall I read it?” The foreman only glanced at him in silence, and the young man took this for assent. “I haven’t made up any name for it yet.”
“‘O, the orphan boy stood on the hill,
The wind blew cold and very chill—’”
Glancing at his auditors, he was a trifle abashed to observe a glaze upon the eyes of Mr. Parker, while a purple tide rose above his neck-band and unnaturally distended his throat and temples. With a placative little laugh, Mr. Schofield remarked: “I git the swing to her all right, I reckon, but somehow it doesn’t sound so kind of good as when I was writing it.” There was no response, and he went on hurriedly:
“‘But there he saw the little rill—’”
The poet paused to say, with another amiable laugh: “It’s sort of hard to git out of them ill, hill, chill rhymes once you strike ’em. It runs on like this:
“‘ — Little rill
That curved and spattered around the hill.’
“I guess that’s all right, to use ‘hill’ twice; don’t you reckon so?
“‘And the orphan he stood there until
The wind and all gave him a chill;
And he sickened—’”
That day Ross read no more, for the tall printer, seemingly incapable of coherent speech, kicked the desk impotently, threw his arms above his head, and, his companions confidently looking to see him foam at the mouth, lost his balance and toppled over backward, his extensive legs waving wildly in the air as he struck the floor. Mr. Schofield fled.
Parker made no effort to rise, but lay glaring at the ceiling, breathing hard. He remained in that position for a long time, until finally the glaze wore away from his eyes and a more rational expression settled over his features. Mr. Fisbee addressed him timidly: “You don’t think we could reduce the size of the sheet?”
“It would kill him,” answered his prostrate companion. “We’ve got to fill her solid some way, though I give up; I don’t know how. How that man has worked! It was genius. He just floated around the county and soaked in items, and he wrote editorials that people read. One thing’s certain: we can’t do it. We’re ruining his paper for him, and when he gets able to read, it’ll hurt him bad. Mighty few knew how much pride he had in it. Has it struck you that now would be a precious good time for it to occur to Rod McCune to come out of his hole? Suppose we go by the board, what’s to stop him? What’s to stop him, anyway? Who knows where the boss put those copies and affidavits, and if we did know, would we know the best way to use ’em? If we did, what’s to keep the ‘Herald’ alive until McCune lifts his head? And if we don’t stop him, the ‘Carlow County Herald’ is finished. Something’s got to be done!’”
No one realized this more poignantly than Mr. Fisbee, but no one was less capable of doing something of his own initiation. And although the Tuesday issue was forthcoming, embarr
assingly pale in spots — most spots — Mr. Martin remarked rather publicly that the items were not what you might call stirring, and that the unpatented pages put him in mind of Jones’s field in winter with a dozen chunks of coal dropped in the snow. And his observations on the later issues of the week (issues which were put forth with a suggestion of spasm, and possibly to the permanent injury of Mr. Parker’s health, he looked so thin) were too cruelly unkind to be repeated here. Indeed, Mr. Fisbee, Parker, the luckless Mr. Schofield, and the young Tipworthy may be not untruthfully likened to a band of devoted mariners lost in the cold and glaring regions of a journalistic Greenland: limitless plains of empty white paper extending about them as far as the eye could reach, while life depended upon their making these terrible voids productive; and they shrank appalled from the task, knowing no means to fertilize the barrens; having no talent to bring the still snows into harvests, and already feeling-in the chill of Mr. Martin’s remarks — a touch of the frost that might wither them.
It was Fisbee who caught the first glimpse of a relief expedition clipping the rough seas on its lively way to rescue them, and, although his first glimpse of the jaunty pennant of the relieving vessels was over the shoulder of an iceberg, nothing was surer than that the craft was flying to them with all good and joyous speed. The iceberg just mentioned assumed — by no melting process, one may be sure — the form of a long letter, first postmarked at Rouen, and its latter substance was as follows:
“Henry and I have always believed you as selfish, James Fisbee, as you are self-ingrossed and incapable. She has told us of your ‘renunciation’; of your ‘forbidding’ her to remain with you; how you ‘commanded,’ after you had ‘begged’ her, to return to us, and how her conscience told her she should stay and share your life in spite of our long care of her, but that she yielded to your ‘wishes’ and our entreaty. What have you ever done for her and what have you to offer her? She is our daughter, and needless to say we shall still take care of her, for no one believes you capable of it, even in that miserable place, and, of course, in time she will return to her better wisdom, her home, and her duty. I need scarcely say we have given up the happy months we had planned to spend in Dresden. Henry and I can only stay at home to pray that her preposterous mania will wear itself out in short order, as she will find herself unfitted for the ridiculous task which she insists upon attempting against the earnest wishes of us who have been more than father and mother to her. Of course, she has talked volumes of her affection for us, and of her gratitude, which we do not want — we only want her to stay with us. Please, please try to make her come back to us — we cannot bear it long. If you are a man you will send her to us soon. Her excuse for not returning on the day we wired our intention to go abroad at once (and I may as well tell you now that our intention to go was formed in order to bring affairs to a crisis and to draw her away from your influence — we always dreaded her visit to you and held it off for years) — her excuse was that your best friend, and, as I understand it, your patron, had been injured in some brawl in that Christian country of yours — a charming place to take a girl like her — and she would not leave you in your ‘distress’ until more was known of the man’s injuries. And now she insists — and you will know it from her by the next mail — on returning to Plattville, forsooth, because she has been reading your newspaper, and she says she knows you are in difficulties over it, and it is her moral obligation — as by some wild reasoning of her own she considers herself responsible for your ruffling patron’s having been alone when he was shot — to go down and help. I suppose he made love to her, as all the young men she meets always do, sooner or later, but I have no fear of any rustic entanglements tor her; she has never been really interested, save in one affair. We are quite powerless — we have done everything; but we cannot alter her determination to edit your paper for you. Naturally, she knows nothing whatever about such work, but she says, with the air of triumphantly quelching all such argument, that she has talked a great deal to Mr. Macauley of the ‘Journal.’ Mr. Macauley is the affair I have alluded to; he is what she has meant when she has said, at different times, that she was interested in journalism. But she is very business-like now. She has bought a typewriter and purchased a great number of soft pencils and erasers at an art shop; I am only surprised that she does not intend to edit your miserable paper in water-colors. She is coming at once. For mercy’s sake don’t telegraph her not to; your forbiddings work the wrong way. Our only hope is that she will find the conditions so utterly discouraging at the very start that she will give it up and come home. If you are a man you will help to make them so. She has promised to stay with that country girl with whom she contracted such an incomprehensible friendship at Miss Jennings’s.
“Oh, James, pray for grace to be a man once in your life and send her back to us! Be a man — try to be a man! Remember the angel you killed! Remember all we have done for you and what a return you have made, and be a man for the first time. Try and be a man!
“Your unhappy sister-in-law,
“MARTHA SHERWOOD.”
Mr. Fisbee read the letter with a great, rising delight which no sense of duty could down; indeed, he perceived that his sense of duty had ceased to conflict with the one strong hope of his life, just as he perceived that to be a man, according to Martha Sherwood, was, in part, to assist Martha Sherwood to have her way in things; and, for the rest, to be the sort of man she persuaded herself she would be were she not a woman. This he had never been able to be.
By some whimsy of fate, or by a failure of Karma (or, perhaps, by some triumph of Kismetic retribution), James Fisbee was born in one of the most business-like and artless cities of a practical and modern country, of money-getting, money-saving parents, and he was born a dreamer of the past. He grew up a student of basilican lore, of choir-screens, of Persian frescoes, and an ardent lounger in the somewhat musty precincts of Chaldea and Byzantium and Babylon. Early Christian Symbolism, a dispute over the site of a Greek temple, the derivation of the lotus column, the restoration of a Gothic buttress — these were the absorbing questions of his youth, with now and then a lighter moment spent in analytical consideration of the extra-mural decorations of St. Mark’s. The world buzzed along after its own fashion, not disturbing him, and his absorptions permitted only a faint consciousness of the despair of his relatives regarding his mind. Arrived at middle-age, and a little more, he found himself alone in the world (though, for that matter, he had always been alone and never of the world), and there was plenty of money for him with various bankers who appeared to know about looking after it. Returning to the town of his nativity after sundry expeditions in Syria — upon which he had been accompanied by dusky gentlemen with pickaxes and curly, long-barrelled muskets — he met, and was married by, a lady who was ambitious, and who saw in him (probably as a fulfilment of another Kismetic punishment) a power of learning and a destined success. Not long after the birth of their only child, a daughter, he was “called to fill the chair” of archaeology in a newly founded university; one of the kind which a State and a millionaire combine to purchase ready-made. This one was handed down off the shelf in a more or less chaotic condition, and for a period of years betrayed considerable doubt as to its own intentions, undecided whether they were classical or technical; and in the settlement of that doubt lay the secret of the past of the one man in Plattville so unhappy as to possess a past. From that settlement and his own preceding action resulted his downfall, his disgrace with his wife’s relatives, the loss of his wife, the rage, surprise, and anguish of her sister, Martha, and Martha’s husband, Henry Sherwood, and the separation from his little daughter, which was by far to him the hardest to bear. For Fisbee, in his own way, and without consulting anybody — it never occurred to him, and he was supposed often to forget that he had a wife and child — had informally turned over to the university all the money which the banks had kindly taken care of, and had given it to equip an expedition which never expedited. A new president of the in
stitution was installed; he talked to the trustees; they met, and elected to become modern and practical and technical; they abolished the course in fine arts, which abolished Fisbee’s connection with them, and they then employed his money to erect a building for the mechanical engineering department. Fisbee was left with nothing. His wife and her kinsfolk exhibited no brilliancy in holding a totally irresponsible man down to responsibilities, and they made a tragedy of a not surprising fiasco. Mrs. Fisbee had lived in her ambitions, and she died of heartbreak over the discovery of what manner of man she had married. But, before she died, she wisely provided for her daughter.
Fisbee told Parker the story after his own queer fashion.
“You see, Mr. Parker,” he said, as they sat together in the dust and litter of the “Herald” office, on Sunday afternoon, “you see, I admit that my sister-in-law has always withheld her approbation from me, and possibly her disapproval is well founded — I shall say probably. My wife had also a considerable sum, and this she turned over to me at the time of our marriage, though I had no wish regarding it one way or the other. When I gave my money to the university with which I had the honor to be connected, I added to it the fund I had received from her, as I was the recipient of a comfortable salary as a lecturer in the institution and had no fear of not living well, and I was greatly interested in providing that the expedition should be perfectly equipped. Expeditions of the magnitude of that which I had planned are expensive, I should, perhaps, inform you, and this one was to carry on investigations regarding several important points, very elaborately; and I am still convinced it would have settled conclusively many vital questions concerning the derivation of the Babylonian column, as: whether the lotus column may be without prejudice said to — but at the present moment I will not enter into that. I fear I had no great experience in money matters, for the transaction had been almost entirely verbal, and there was nothing to bind the trustees to carry out my plans for the expedition. They were very sympathetic, but what could they do? they begged leave to inquire. Such an institution cannot give back money once donated, and it was clearly out of character for a school of technology and engineering to send savants to investigate the lotus column.”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 19