"But what for? There's no harm done. I thought I made it all right with you?"

"You did--with me. But then you're pretty dangerous on these roads and I'll have to turn you in so that they can be looking out for you."

Claybrook sullenly complied. And then, throwing the car into gear, they slipped quickly out of sight. After they had rounded the curve, he turned suddenly to Mary Louise. "That's a new one on me. I tipped him for helping me get the car out, and then he turns and takes my name. You can't count on anybody these days--ever since the war."

"I think he has a sense of humour," she replied, laughing softly.

As they pa.s.sed the road-house he suggested once again that they stop for a bite to eat, but upon her refusal he made no comment. The night was no longer clear; gathering clouds on the western horizon were gradually spreading across the sky, and as they crossed the line on to the asphalt paving again, it began to rain, a few scattering drops. At which she teased him about his altered driving. He laughed but made no answer.

But the shower did not come and directly they drew up at the curb outside her apartment.

"Don't stop," she said. "Don't bother. You must get in before the rain." She felt singularly good humoured.

"I'm sorry I made such a mess of things," he began clumsily, "and--and--you were pretty decent about it." It was a concession, but she could see he was rankled about something.

"I hope they won't fine you too much," she called after him as he started off. And then she walked thoughtfully into the hallway and stepped into the elevator and was carried swiftly upward.

"You've got to make allowances for them all," she decided mentally.

"Yes," she added force to that decision, half aloud.

"What d'you say, Miss Mac?" inquired the elevator boy.

"I said, 'Seventh,'" she smiled at him.

She was met at the door by Maida with her hair in curl papers and a most prodigious yawning and rubbing of eyes. The ideal night life for Maida was that spent comfortably in bed.

"Thought you'd eloped," she ventured sleepily and then turned and shuffled off to the inner room. At the door she called over her shoulder, "There's a note someone left for you--about two hours ago."

Mary Louise looked on the table and, lying on a pile of magazines and newspaper supplements, was a plain, thin, white envelope. She picked it up and looked at it curiously, wondering from whom it could be.

There was no address. She tore it open and read, and as she read she reached over one hand and steadied herself against the table. The note was from Joe, and laconic:

"They phoned me this evening your Aunt Susie had had another stroke. They said you had better come."

That was all it said. There was no expression of regret. There was no offer of help. She had a sudden rush of anxiety. But behind the anxious feeling was one of wonder and a tiny one of hurt. She laid the letter down upon the table and slowly and thoughtfully took off her hat.

CHAPTER V

Things had changed for Joe. It was as though he had been told that he had not amounted to much, that what he had come from had not amounted to much, and that in all probability he would never amount to much.

Just how much had actually been suggested to him, and how much he had supplied out of the whole cloth of his imagination it is doubtful if even he could have said.

It was not the weather certainly. For the morning of the second day of May opened wide with promise. There was a lightness about the air and a clarity as Joe emerged from his lodging house from the ready-made breakfast which they doled out as though breakfasts were just like linen and towels and soap. The day would have made countless insinuations to a normal man. To some, it said golf; to others, a motor trip out to where a plethora of such bounties as it suggested might be available; and to others less fortunate--why, there was the "Ferry" just opening to hesitant crowds, with its band stand, its scenic railway, its forty-five minutes of vaudeville that was anything but mentally exhausting. It was an eloquent morning. But Joe turned a deaf ear.

His walk to the factory lay for a short distance along a pretty little park where, when the weather was proper, squirrels and babies and numerous other smaller, crawly things were wont to mingle together in democratic unconcern. But to him, this morning, it was just so much pavement.

He punched the time clock viciously as he pa.s.sed through the office lobby and barely escaped collision with Mr. b.o.n.e.r as he turned the corner of the part.i.tion en route to his desk. Mr. b.o.n.e.r merely grunted. He bore in his hand a sheaf of orders for the mailing desk.

He believed in getting an early start.

Joe sat down before his desk and gazed listlessly out of the window.

The day arose before him in prospect, drab, desolate, and dreary. High up overhead, through the dingy panes, he could see the little fleecy clouds floating about in peaceful unconcern. May was a slack month.

And at its end came June--June, with its four weeks' inventory period wherein each stick and stone of the entire plant, each ten-penny nail, each carriage bolt, would have to be listed, valued, and carried into an imposing total. It meant working late into the night under a pitiless glare with handkerchief tied about one's neck like a washer.

It meant cramped fingers, and hot dry eyes, and a back that ached when it didn't feel crawly with infinitesimal bugs, and bugs that b.u.mped and buzzed and then fell sprawling across one's paper. Each item had to be entered upon the sheet. Each item had to be valued. Discounts had to be figured, extensions had to be made, figures had to be checked meticulously, and the whole thing eventually bound up in six or eight huge volumes which were then allowed to languish in the Company safe. He had been through it before. And the thought of it was intolerable. This was June. June and inventory and Mr. b.o.n.e.r seemed to him to be cut from the same piece. For neither did Mr. b.o.n.e.r escape.

Instead, he came earlier, stayed later, and worked with more furious rapidity than ever. And he was Mr. b.o.n.e.r's successor--that is, if he hit the ball and worked hard enough to deserve it. The thought of the little boy whose mother gave him a nickle every time he took his castor oil manfully came to his mind as he sat and gazed out the window. When asked what he did with the nickles, the Spartan youth had replied: "Buy more castor oil with it." Joe wearily dragged one of his stock ledgers from the rack and opened it.

All that day, as he made his entries and checked his totals, came the thought, "Why am I doing this? What is it all for?" He was feeling the double edge of scorn no less keenly because only implied. Why wasn't he doing a man's work? Why was he humbly taking his turn in a servile and remote succession, where death's was the only hand that moved the p.a.w.ns? Why had he come back to it? He dared not confess the reason.

The best he could do was admit to himself he had been mistaken. The rose tints had vanished from his sky and the path he had chosen was disclosed in all its drab ugliness. He had chosen it fatuously. The rose tints had been of his own making. He viciously snapped his mind shut on the thought. For a while he would feverishly clamp his attention to his work, while outside the sky continued serenely blue, and the breeze that drifted through his window was languorous and soft. But the work was too light. There was not enough of it, nor was it of the nature that demanded his absorbed concentration. He thought of Mr. Mosby, the unwitting cause of it all. And yet he did not blame Uncle Buzz in the least. Rather he sided with him. They were both inferior animals--not to be mentioned in the same breath with progress, thrift, success.

Uncle Buzz had his troubles, too. He was bookkeeper of the general store in Bloomfield, but he had never got to the point where he was absolutely sure of his trial balances. Nor had Aunt Loraine ever got to the point where she was absolutely sure of him, and he had had only the slightest hand in the management of what was left of the farm. The farm was Aunt Loraine's. But she always took what was necessary from what Uncle Buzz got from the store to make both ends meet on the farm, and that was, of late, becoming an ever-increasing distance. Uncle Buzz felt a proprietor's interest. He liked to speak about it as "his farm." Uncle Buzz would have loved to raise horses, thoroughbreds and saddlers, but for obvious reasons that had been impossible. But he went his jaunty way, waxing his moustaches, squandering his money on fancy neckties, taking his surrept.i.tious nip with all the gay bravado of thirty years before, and getting seedier and seedier. He was a dandelion withering on the stalk. He had long since given up hope of being anything else but bookkeeper in the "Golden Rule," and indeed it was only the stock which he held in that inst.i.tution that insured him the place such as it was. For Uncle Buzz was with age becoming more unreliable. His mind would play queer tricks on him. The figures would occasionally a.s.sume a demonic elusiveness and he could no longer carry his liquor with his former a.s.surance. While outwardly he was the same suave, debonair old beau, he was beginning to have inner doubtings and despairs. And Joe, who had, as it were, taken up the pen when he had cast aside the sword, became for him a potential straw adrift on the downward current.

Uncle Buzz's message in the Rathskeller the night before had been cryptic to the others but plain enough to Joe. Uncle Buzz was in trouble again. Trial balance, maybe. There was no telling. As Joe finished footing up a long column of figures he smiled. It meant another trip to Bloomfield on Sat.u.r.day. And Sat.u.r.day was the day after to-morrow. Thus the day wore on.

On Sat.u.r.day, which was a day of the same pattern as its predecessors, at eleven o'clock Joe quietly rose from his desk, took his hat, and unostentatiously walked out of the office. He punched the time clock gently so that it would attract the attention of only the most observant of clerks, and hurried away, feeling that this repeated dereliction was bound to bring him some notice, even if the first offense had not. But for some reason he felt singularly indifferent.

An hour later he had forgotten it all. The dumpy accommodation train was b.u.mping itself along at a great rate, puffing stertorously up the long grade past "Sa.s.safras Hill," and then swinging itself around the curves that followed the river so desperately that pa.s.sengers and freight alike--for it was a combination train as well as accommodation--were like to be flung from it, hurled into s.p.a.ce as useless enc.u.mbrances to its desperate need of getting there. It would rush along madly for a mile or two, then give a wild shriek and stop, and after a great puffing and snorting, start up again.

It was such an enthusiastic train that Joe could not long escape the contagion of its enthusiasm. Ten miles out they came into a stretch of rolling meadow where the shadows of trees were like purple splotches upon the shimmering mist of the gra.s.s. A high wind had arisen that set the countless blades vibrating so that each bit of sun-swept meadow was naught but a silverish blurr, with the tree tops above it tossing wildly about. A little girl, holding open a gate for an old man in a buggy behind a placid old white horse, was all fluttering ribbon ends, and as they pa.s.sed, her sunbonnet was torn from her grasp and flung over the fence, far afield. Joe could see her running after it as they rounded a curve out of sight.

At twelve thirty-five they reached Guests where Joe alighted. He was the only pa.s.senger of like mind, and aside from the station master who made a hurried exchange of sundry small express packages and mail there was no one at the station but a fat little old man in a brown derby and a red sweater, and with a very dirty face. This latter gentleman accosted Joe with a warning gesture, lifting his arm and pointing to the sky, and at the same time giving him a significant look, and then scuttling over to a disreputable motor car that stood beside the station platform. Arriving there he twisted his fat neck half around to see if his prey was following him, and being thus a.s.sured, clambered in. The car was very aged and trembling from some violent internal disorder, while the top was bellying off sidewise with a great flapping of loose straps and curtain ends till it seemed doubtful if the whole thing might hold together for another minute.

"High wind," suggested the Jehu, in a fat wheezy voice as Joe crawled into the seat beside him. Joe agreed without qualification. The old man paused a minute, gave him a sober, reflective look of far-away intensity, and then suddenly turned and spat precariously into the wind.

"Bloomfield?" he suggested with increased lightness of manner.

"Bloomfield," Joe agreed again. It was a pleasant bit of procedure, invested with the dignity of a formula, for there was no other town within a radius of many miles and no other road over which such traffic was possible. Still it had to be gone through with.

They started with a rush, being ably seconded by a more severe gust of wind than usual, and for eight miles it was a stalemate between the wind and the motor as to which could make the most noise. But in spite of it all Joe was enjoying it. There was a freedom in the uproar, in the wildly tossing tree tops, in the white clouds that went scudding high overhead. He had an insane desire to fling his hat high up in the air, as they rolled along, and see how far the wind would carry it.

At length they arrived. Out of courtesy, perhaps, the wind abated; perhaps it was because nothing boisterous would be tolerated along those silent old streets. But as they pa.s.sed the tavern, one green shutter could be seen hanging by one hinge, moving softly to and fro, and against the iron stair railing of the meeting house an old, yellowing newspaper clung for a moment and then dropped to the pavement. A very old man in a linen suit, followed by an old hound, was going through the door as they pa.s.sed, and he pivoted on his stick and watched them. Here was the very essence of stability.

Reaching the central square, the driver swung his car in a majestic arc around the traffic post in the centre of the street and drew up at the curb in front of the post-office. There was a liberal sprinkling of small motors of the same general cla.s.sification as the one in which they were arriving, parked with their noses headed toward the curb, at an angle. Uncle Buzz's figure suddenly appeared, hurrying from behind one of these, his face set in an earnest frown. He had evidently seen them from the "Golden Rule," diagonally opposite, and had come the most direct route, through the traffic.

"Well, Joseph, this is a surprise."

This, thought Joe, might mean anything. Either his Aunt Loraine had not been apprised of his expected arrival, or perhaps the old man had already extricated himself from his trouble.

"Any bags?"

"No. No bags." Joe was still holding the out-stretched hand of welcome.

Uncle Buzz turned to the driver and dropped a coin in that worthy gentleman's greasy palm as it lay inertly on the seat, beside him.

"That will be all," he said with great dignity.

The driver gave him a long look, heavy lidded--a critical look, a deeply thoughtful look--sniffed, and then turned to Joe, "Goin' back?"

he asked shortly, as though there were nothing more now for any one to stay for.

"No," said Joe. "Not to-day."