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The Law Breakers and Other Stories

R >> Robert Grant >> The Law Breakers and Other Stories




"Your point of view? What is your point of view?"

Before Harrington had time to begin to put into speech the statement
of his principles there was a sudden loud explosion beneath them like
the discharge of a huge pistol, and the machine came abruptly to a
stop. So unexpected and startling was the shock that the reporter
sprang from the car and in his nervous annoyance at once vented the
hasty conclusion at which he arrived in the words: "I see; this is a
trap, and you are a modern highwayman whose stunt will make good
Sunday reading in cold print." He wore a sarcastic smile, and his
sharp eyes gleamed like a ferret's.

Dryden regarded him humorously with his steady gaze. "Gently there;
it's only a tire gone. Do you suspect me of trying to trifle with the
sacred liberties of the press?"

"I certainly did, sir. It looks very much like it."

"Then you agree that I chose a very inappropriate place for my
purpose. 'The Old Homestead' there is furnished with a telephone, a
livery-stable, and all the modern protections against highway robbery.
Besides, there is a cold chicken and a bottle of choice claret in the
basket with which to supplement the larder of our host of the inn. We
will take luncheon while my chauffeur is placing us on an even keel
again, and no time will be lost. You will even have ten minutes in
which to put pen to paper while the table is being laid."

Harrington as a nervous man was no less promptly generous in his
impulses when convinced of error than he was quick to scent out a
hostile plot. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Dryden. I see I was mistaken."
He thrust out a lean hand by way of amity. "Can't I help?"

"Oh, no, thank you. My man will attend to everything."

"You see I got the idea to begin with and then the explosion following
so close upon your offer----"

"Quite so," exclaimed Dryden. "A suspicious coincidence, I admit." He
shook the proffered fingers without a shadow of resentment. "I dare
say my dust-coat and goggles give me quite the highwayman effect," he
continued jollily.

"They sort of got on my nerves, I guess." Under the spell of his
generous impulse various bits of local color flattering to his
companion began to suggest themselves to Harrington for his article,
and he added: "I'll take advantage of that suggestion of yours and get
to work until luncheon is ready."

Some fifteen minutes later they were seated opposite to each other at
an appetizing meal. As Dryden finished his first glass of claret, he
asked:

"Did you know Richard Upton?"

"The man who was killed? Not personally. But I have read about him in
the society papers."

"Ah!" There was a deep melancholy in the intonation which caused the
reporter to look at his companion a little sharply. For a moment
Dryden stirred in his chair as though about to make some comment, and
twisted the morsel of bread at his fingers' ends into a small pellet.
But he poured out another glass of claret for each of them and said:

"He was the salt of the earth."

"Tell me about him. I should be glad to know. I might----"

"There's so little to tell--it was principally charm. He was one of
the most unostentatious, unselfish, high-minded, consistent men I ever
knew. Completely a gentleman in the finest sense of that overworked
word."

"That's very interesting. I should be glad----"

Dryden shook his head. "You didn't know him well enough. It was like
the delicacy of the rose--finger it and it falls to pieces. No offence
to you, of course. I doubt my own ability to do him justice, well as I
knew him. But you put a stopper on that--and you were right. My kind
regards," he said, draining his second glass of claret. "The laborer
is worthy of his hire, the artist must not be interfered with. It was
an impertinence of me to ask to do your work."

Harrington's eyes gleamed. "It's pleasant to be appreciated--to have
one's point of view comprehended. It isn't pleasant to butt in where
you're not wanted, but there's something bigger than that involved,
the----"

"Quite so; it was a cruel bribe; and many men in your shoes would not
have been proof against it."

"And you were in dead earnest, too, though for a moment I couldn't
believe it. But the point is--and that's what I mean--that the
public--gentlemen like you and ladies like the handsome one who looked
daggers at me this morning--don't realize that the world is bound to
have the news on its breakfast-table and supper-table, and that when a
man is in the business and knows his business and is trying to do the
decent thing and the acceptable artistic thing, too, if I do say it,
he is entitled to be taken seriously and--and trusted. There are
incompetent men--rascals even--in my calling. What I contend is that
you'd no right to assume that I wouldn't do the inevitable thing
decently merely because you saw me there. For, if you only knew it, I
was saying to myself at that very moment that for a funeral it was the
most tastefully handled I ever attended."

"It is the inevitable thing; that's just it. My manners were bad to
begin to with, and later--" Dryden leaned forward with his elbows on
the table and his head between his hands, scanning his eager
companion.

"Don't mention it. You see, it was a matter of pride with me. And now
it's up to me to state that if there's anything in particular you'd
like me to mention about the deceased gentleman or lady----"

Dryden sighed at the reminder, "One of the loveliest and most
pure-hearted of women."

"That shall go down," said the reporter, mistaking the apostrophe for
an answer, and he drew a note-book from his side pocket.

Dryden raised his hand by way of protest. "I was merely thinking
aloud. No, we must trust you."

Harrington bowed. He hesitated, then by way of noticing the plural
allusion in the speech added: "It was your young lady's look which
wounded me the most. And she said something. I don't suppose you'd
care to tell me what she said? It wasn't flattering, I'm sure of that,
but it was on the tip of her tongue. I admit I'm mildly curious as to
what it was."

Dryden reflected a moment. "You've written your article?" he asked,
indicating the note-book.

"It's all mapped out in my mind, and I've finished the introduction."

"I won't ask to see it because we trust you. But I'll make a compact
with you." Dryden held out a cigar to his adversary and proceeded to
light one for himself. "Supposing what the lady said referred to
something which you have written there, would you agree to cut it
out?"

Harrington looked gravely knowing. "You think you can tell what I have
written?" he asked, tapping his note-book.

Dryden took a puff. "Very possibly not. I am merely supposing. But in
case the substance of her criticism--for she did criticise--should
prove to be almost word for word identical with something in your
handwriting--would you agree?"

Harrington shrugged his shoulders. "Against the automobile as a stake,
if it proves not to be?" he inquired by way of expressing his
incredulity.

"Gladly."

"Let it be rather against another luncheon with you as agreeable as
this."

"Done. I will write her exact language here on this piece of paper and
then we will exchange copy."

Harrington sat pleasantly amused, yet puzzled, while Dryden wrote and
folded the paper. Then he proffered his note-book with nervous
alacrity. "Read aloud until you come to the place," he said jauntily.

Dryden scanned for a moment the memoranda, then looked up. "It is all
here at the beginning, just as she prophesied," he said, with a
promptness which was almost radiant, and he read as follows: "The dual
funeral of Miss Josephine Ward, the leading society girl, and Richard
Upton, the well-known club man, took place this morning at--" He
paused and said: "Read now what you have there."

Harrington flushed, then scowled, but from perplexity. He was seeking
enlightenment before he proceeded further, so he unfolded the paper
with a deliberation unusual to him, which afforded time to Dryden to
remark with clear precision:

"Those were her very words."

Harrington read aloud: "'Look at that man; he is taking notes. Oh, he
will describe them in his newspaper as a leading society girl and a
well-known club man, and they will turn in their graves. If you love
me, stop it.'"

There was a brief pause. The reporter pondered, visibly chagrined and
disappointed. The silence was broken by Dryden. "Do you not
understand?" he inquired.

"Frankly, I do not altogether. I--I thought they'd like it."

"Of course you did, my dear fellow; there's the ghastly humor of it;
the dire tragedy, rather." As he spoke he struck his closed hand
gently but firmly on the table, and regarded the reporter with the
compressed lips of one who is about to vent a long pent-up grievance.

"He was in four clubs; I looked him up," Harrington still protested in
dazed condition.

"And they seemed to you his chief title to distinction? You thought
they did him honor? He would have writhed in his grave, as Miss
Mayberry said. Like it? When the cheap jack or the social climber
dies, he may like it, but not the gentleman or lady. Leading society
girl? Why, every shop-girl who commits suicide is immortalized in the
daily press as 'a leading society girl,' and every deceased Tom, Dick,
or Harry has become a 'well-known club man.' It has added a new terror
to death. Thank God, my friends will be spared!"

Harrington felt of his chin. "You object to the promiscuity of it, so
to speak. It's because everybody is included?"

"No, man, to the fundamental indignity of it. To the baseness of the
metal which the press glories in using for a social crown."

Harrington drew himself up a little. "If the press does it, it's
because most people like it and regard it as a tribute."

"Ah! But my friends do not. You spoke just now of your point of view.
This is ours. Think it over, Mr. Harrington, and you will realize that
there is something in it." He sat back in his chair with the air of a
man who has pulled victory out of the jaws of defeat and is well
content.

Harrington meditated a moment. "However that be, one thing is
certain--it has got to come out. It will come out. You may rest
assured of that, Mr. Dryden." So saying he reached for his note-book
and proceeded to run a pencil through the abnoxious paragraph.

"You have won your bet and--and the young lady, too, Sir Knight, I
trust. You seem to have found your niche." Which goes to prove that
the reporter was a magnanimous fellow at heart.

Dryden forbore to commit himself as to the condition of his hopes as
he thanked his late adversary for this expression of good-will. Ten
minutes later they were sitting in the rehabilitated motor-car and
speeding rapidly toward New York. When they reached the city Dryden
insisted on leaving the reporter at his doorsteps, a courtesy which
went straight to Harrington's heart, for, as he expected would be the
case, his wife and son Tesla were looking out of the window at the
moment of his arrival and saw him dash up to the curbstone. His sturdy
urchin ran out forthwith to inspect the mysteries of the huge machine.
As it vanished down the street Harrington put an arm round Tesla and
went to meet the wife of his bosom.

"Who is your new friend, Paul?" she asked.

It rose to Harrington's lips to say--an hour before he would have said
confidently--"a well-known club man"; but he swallowed the phrase
before it was uttered and answered thoughtfully:

"It was one of the funeral guests, who gave me a lift in his motor,
and has taught me a thing or two about modern journalism on the way
up. I got stung."

"I thought you knew everything there is to know about that," remarked
Mrs. Harrington with the fidelity of a true spouse.

To this her husband at the moment made no response. When, six months
later, however, he received an invitation to the wedding of Walter
Dryden and Miss Florence Mayberry, he remarked in her presence, as he
sharpened his pencil for the occasion: "Those swells have trusted me
to write it up after all."




THE ROMANCE OF A SOUL


When Marion Willis became a schoolmistress in the Glendale public
school at twenty-two she regarded her employment as a transient
occupation, to be terminated presently by marriage. She possessed an
imaginative temperament, and one of her favorite and most satisfying
habits was to evoke from the realm of the future a proper hero,
shining with zeal and virtue like Sir Galahad, in whose arms she would
picture herself living happily ever after a sweet courtship,
punctuated by due maidenly hesitation. This fondness for letting her
fancy run riot and evolve visions splendid with happenings for her own
advancement and gladness was not confined to matrimonial day-dreams.
On the morning when she entered the school-house door for the first
time the eyes of her mind saw the curtain which veils the years
divide, and she beheld herself a famous educator, still young, but
long since graduated from primary teaching. She forgot the vision of
her Sir Galahad there. Nor were the circumstances of her several
day-dreams necessarily consistent in other respects. It sufficed for
her spiritual exaltation that they should be merely a fairy-like
manifestation in her own favor. But though she loved to give her
imagination rein, the fairy-like quality of these visions was patent
to Miss Willis, for she possessed a quiet sense of humor as a sort of
east-wind supplementary to the sentimental and poetic properties of
her nature. She had a way of poking fun at herself, which, when
exercised, sent the elfin figures scattering with a celerity
suggestive of the departure of her own pupils at the tinkle of the
bell for dismissal. Then she was left alone with her humor and her New
England conscience, that stern adjuster of real values and enemy of
spiritual dissipation. This same conscience was a vigilant monitor in
the matter of her school-teaching, despite Miss Willis's reasonable
hope that Sir Galahad would claim her soon. The hope would have been
reasonable in the case of any one of her sex, for every woman is said
to be given at least one opportunity to become a wife; but in the case
of Miss Willis nature had been more than commonly bounteous. She was
not a beauty, but she was sweet and fresh-looking, with clear, honest
eyes, and a cheery, gracious manner such as is apt to captivate
discerning men. She was one of those wholesome spirits, earnest and
refined, yet prone to laughter, which do not remain long unmated in
the ordinary course of human experience. But her conscience did not
permit her to dwell on this advantage to the detriment of her
scholars.

Miss Willis lived at home with her mother. They owned their small
house. The other expenses were defrayed from the daughter's salary;
hence strict economy was obligatory, and the expenditure of every
five-dollar bill was a matter of moment. Miss Willis's father had died
when she was a baby. The meagre sum of money which he left had
sufficed to keep his widow and only child from want until Marion's
majority. All had been spent except the house; but, as Miss Willis now
proudly reflected, she had become a breadwinner, and her mother's
declining years were shielded from poverty. They would be able to
manage famously until Sir Galahad arrived, and when he came one of the
joys of her surrender would be that her mother's old age would be
brightened by a few luxuries.

Glendale, as its name denotes, had been a rustic village. When Miss
Willis was engaged (to teach school, not to be married) it was a
thriving, bustling, overgrown, manufacturing town already yearning to
become a city. By the end of another five years Glendale had realized
its ambition, and Miss Willis was still a teacher in its crowded
grammar-school. How the years creep, yet how they fly, when one is
busy with regular, routine employment! The days are such a repetition
of each other that they sometimes seem very long, but when one pauses
and looks back one starts at the accumulation of departed time, and
deplores the swiftness of the seasons.

Five years had but slightly dimmed the freshness of Miss Willis's
charms. She was as comely as ever. She was a trifle stouter, a trifle
less girlish in manner, and only a trifle--what shall we call
it?--wilted in appearance. The close atmosphere of a school-room is
not conducive to rosiness of complexion; and the constant strain of
guiding over forty immature minds in the paths of knowledge will weigh
upon the flesh, though the soul be patient and the heart light. Miss
Willis's class comprised the children whose average age was twelve to
thirteen--those who had been in the school three years. There were
both boys and girls, and they remained with her a year. She had begun
with the youngest children, but promotion had presently established
her in this position.

Forty immature minds--minds just groping on the threshold of life--to
be watched, shaped, and helped for ten months, and their individual
needs treated with sympathy and patience. For ten months--the school
term,--then to be exchanged for a new batch, and so from year to year.
Glendale's manufacturing population included several nationalities, so
that the little army of scholars which sat under Miss Willis's eye
included Poles, Italians, negroes, and now and then a youthful
Chinaman, as well as the sons and daughters of the merchant, the
tailor, the butcher, and baker, and other citizens whose title as
Americans was of older date. It was not easy to keep the atmosphere of
such a school-room wholesome, for the apparel of the poorest children,
though often well darned, was not always clean, and the ventilating
apparatus represented a political job. But it was Miss Willis's pride
that she knew the identity of every one of her boys and girls, and
carried it by force of love and will written on her brain as well as
on the desk-tablets which she kept as a safeguard against possible
lapses of memory. She loved her classes, and it was a grief to her at
first to be obliged to pass them on at the end of the school year. But
habit reconciles us to the inevitable, and she presently learned to
steel her heart against a too sensitive point of view in this respect,
and to supplement the bleeding ties thus rudely severed with a fresh
set without crying her eyes out. Yet though faithful teachers are thus
schooled to forget, they rarely do, and Miss Willis found herself
keeping track, in her mind's eye, of her little favorites--some of
them youthful reprobates--in their progress up the ladder of knowledge
and out into the world.

But what of Sir Galahad? He had dallied, but about this time--the
sixth year of her life as a teacher--he appeared. Not as she had
imagined him--a lover of great personal distinction, amazing talents,
compelling virtues, and large estates; yet, nevertheless, a
presentable being in trousers, whose devotion touched her maidenly
heart until it reciprocated the passion which his lips expressed. He
was a young bookkeeper in a banker's office, with a taste for literary
matters and a respectable gift for private theatricals. A small social
club was the medium by which they became intimate. Sir Galahad was
refined in appearance and bearing, a trifle too delicate for perfect
manliness, yet, as Miss Willis's mother justly observed, a gentle soul
to live with. He had a taste for poetry, and a sentimental vein which
manifested itself in verses of a Wordsworthian simplicity descriptive
of his lady-love's charms. No wonder Marion fell in love with him, and
renounced, without even a sigh of regret, her vision of a husband with
lordly means. Sir Galahad had only his small means, which were not
enough for a matrimonial venture. They would wait in the hope that
some opportunity for preferment would present itself. So for three
years--years when she was in the heyday of her comeliness--they
attended the social club as an engaged couple, and fed their mutual
passion on the poets and occasional chaste embraces. Marion felt sure
that something would happen before long to redeem the situation and
establish her Sir Galahad in the seat to which his merit entitled him.
Her favorite vision was of some providential catastrophe, even an
epidemic or wholesale maiming, by which the partners of the
banking-house and all in authority over her lover should be
temporarily incapacitated, and the entire burden of the business be
thrown on his shoulders long enough to demonstrate his true worth. As
a sequel she beheld him promptly admitted to partnership and herself
blissfully married.

The course of events did not respect her vision. After they had been
engaged nearly four years Sir Galahad came to the conclusion one day
that the only hope of establishing himself in business on his own
account was (to repeat his own metaphor) to seize the bull by the
horns and go West. Marion bravely and enthusiastically seconded his
resolution, and fired his spirit by her own prophecy as to his rapid
success. Western real estate for Eastern investors was the line of
business to which Sir Galahad decided to fasten his hopes. He set
forth upon his crusade protesting that within a twelvemonth he would
win a home for Marion and her mother in the fashionable quarter of St.
Paul, Minn., and carrying in his valise a toilet-case tastefully
embroidered by his sweetheart, in a corner of which were emblazoned
two hearts beating as one.

Marion returned to her scholars more than ever convinced that her
employment was but a transient occupation. What followed was this: Sir
Galahad put out his sign as a broker in Western real estate for
Eastern investors, and fifteen months slipped away before he earned
more than his bare living expenses. He had carried with him his poetic
tastes and his gift for private theatricals. The first of these he
exercised in his fond letters home; the second he employed for the
entertainment of the social club in St. Paul, to which he presently
obtained admittance. By the end of the second year he was doing better
financially, but his letters to Marion had become less frequent and
less frank in regard to his own circumstances and doings. There came a
letter at last from Sir Galahad--a letter of eight pages of soul
stress and sorrow, as he would have called it, and of disingenuous
wriggling, as the world would call it--in which he explained as
delicately as was possible under the circumstances that his love for
Miss Willis had become the love of a brother for a sister, and that he
was engaged to be married to Miss Virginia Crumb, the only daughter of
Hon. Cephas I. Crumb, owner and treasurer of the Astarte Metal Works,
of Minnesota. Exit Sir Galahad! And following his perfidy Marion's
imagination evoked a vision of revenge in which she figured as the
plaintiff in a breach-of-promise suit, and had the fierce yet
melancholy joy of confronting him and his new love face to face before
a sympathizing judge and jury. But her New England conscience and her
sense of humor combined disposed of this vision in a summary fashion,
so that she let Sir Galahad off with the assurance that it was a
happiness to her that he had discovered how little he cared before it
was too late. Then her New England conscience bade her settle down to
her teaching with a grim courage, and be thankful that she had never
been unfaithful to her work. Also her sense of humor told her that she
must not assume all men to be false because Sir Galahad had been. It
was then, when she needed him sorely, that destiny introduced on the
scene Jimmy.

Jimmy was no Sir Galahad. He was a chunky, round-faced school-boy with
brown hair, which, when it had not been cut for a month, blossomed
into close, curly tangles. At first sight Jimmy was dull-eyed, and in
the class his mental processes were so slow that he had already
acquired among his mates the reputation of being stupid. The teacher
who had taught him last confided to Miss Willis that she feared Jimmy
was hopeless. Hopeless! Somehow the word went to Marion's heart. Not
that she was hopeless; far from it, she would have told you. But her
sense of humor did not conceal from her that in spite of her
grin-and-bear-it mien, she was far from happy. At any rate, the
suggestion that Jimmy was hopeless awoke a sympathetic chord in her
breast, so that she looked at him more tenderly on the day after she
had been told. Jimmy was slow of speech and rather dirty as to his
face. There were warts on his hands, and his sphinx-like countenance
was impassive almost to the point of stolidity. Somehow, though, Miss
Willis said to herself, in her zeal to characterize him fairly, the
little thirteen-year-old product of democracy (Jimmy was the son of a
carpenter and a grocer's daughter) suggested power; suggested it as a
block of granite or a bull-dog suggests it. His compact, sturdy frame
and well-poised head, with its close, brown curls, seemed a protest in
themselves against hopelessness. On the third day he smiled; it was in
recess that she detected him at it. An organ-grinder's monkey in the
school-yard called it forth, a sweet, glad smile, which lit up his
dense features as the sun at twilight will pierce through and
illuminate for a few minutes a sullen cloud-bank. Miss Willis saw in a
vision on the spot a refuge from hopelessness. Behind that smile there
must be a winsome soul. That spiritless expression was but a veil or
rind hiding the germs of sensibility and reason. This was discovery
number one. After it came darkness again, so far as outward
manifestation was concerned. Jimmy's attitude toward his lessons
appeared to be one of utter density. He listened with blank but
slightly lowered eyes. When questioned he generally gurgled
inarticulately, as though seeking a response, then broke down.
Occasionally he essayed an answer, which revealed that he had
understood nothing. Oftener he sought refuge in complete silence. But
hope had been stimulated in Miss Willis's breast, and she relaxed
neither scrutiny nor tenderness. One day matters were brought to a
head by the thoughtless jest of a classmate, a flaxen-haired fairy,
who, in the recess following one of Jimmy's least successful gurgles,
crept up behind him and planted upon his curls a brown-paper cap,
across which the little witch had painted "DUNCE" in large capital
letters.

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