Queed Part 48

"Duty calls," said Byrd. "I'm going to walk home with Mr. Miller."

"Beverley--don't! You were quite horrid enough while he was here."

"But you spoiled it all by being so unnecessarily agreeable! It is my business, as your friend and well-wisher, to see that he doesn't carry away too jolly a memory of his visit. Take lunch downtown with me to-morrow, won't you, Mr. Queed--at the Business Men's Club? I want to finish our talk about the Catholic nations, and why they're decadent."

Queed said that he would, and Byrd hurried away to overtake Mr. Miller.

Or, perhaps that gentleman was only a pretext, and the young man's experienced eye had read that any attempt to outsit the learned a.s.sistant editor was foredoomed to failure.

"I'm so glad you stayed," said Sharlee, as Queed reseated himself. "I shouldn't have liked not to exchange a word with you on your first visit here."

"Oh! This is not my first visit, you may remember."

"Your first voluntary visit, perhaps I should have said."

He let his eyes run over the room, and she could see that he was thinking, half-unconsciously, of the last time when he and she had sat here.

"I had no idea of going," he said absently, "till I had the opportunity of speaking to you."

A brief silence followed, which clearly did not embarra.s.s him, at any rate. Sharlee, feeling the necessity of breaking it, still puzzling herself with speculations as to what had put it into his head to come, said at random:--

"Oh, do tell me--how is old Pere Goriot?"

"Pere Goriot? I never heard of him."

"Oh, forgive me! It is a name we used to have, long ago, for Professor Nicolovius."

A shadow crossed his brow. "He is extremely well, I believe."

"You are still glad that you ran off with him to live _tete-a-tete_ in a bridal cottage?"

"Oh, I suppose so. Yes, certainly!"

His frank face betrayed that the topic was unwelcome to him. For he hated all secrets, and this secret, from this girl, was particularly obnoxious to him. And beyond all that part of it, how could he a.n.a.lyze for anybody his periods of strong revolt against his a.s.sociation with Henry G. Surface, followed by longer and stranger periods when, quite apart from the fact that his word was given and regrets were vain, his consciousness embraced it as having a certain positive value?

He rose restlessly, and in rising his eye fell upon the little clock on the mantel.

"Good heavens!" broke from him. "I had no idea it was so late! I must go directly. Directly."

"Oh, no, you mustn't think of it. Your visit to me has just begun--all this time you have been calling on Beverley Byrd."

"Why do you think I came here to-night?" he asked abruptly.

Sharlee, from her large chair, smiled. "_I_ think to see me."

"Oh!--Yes, naturally, but--"

"Well, I think this is the call plainly due me from my Reunion party last year."

"No! Not at all! At the same time, it has been since that day that I have had you on my mind so much."

He said this in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice, but a certain nervousness had broken through into his manner. He took a turn up and down the room, and returned suddenly to his seat.

"Oh, have you had me on your mind?"

"Do you remember my saying that day," he began, resolutely, "that I was not sure whether I had got the better of you or you had got the better of me?"

"I remember very well."

"Well, I have come to tell you that--you have won."

He had plucked a pencil from the a.r.s.enal of them in his breast-pocket, and with it was beating a noiseless tattoo on his open left palm. With an effort he met her eyes.

"I say you were right," came from him nervously. "Don't you hear?"

"Was I? Won't you tell me just what you mean?"

"Don't you know?"

"Really I don't think I do. You see, when I used that expression that day, I was speaking only of the editors.h.i.+p--"

"But I was speaking of a theory of life. After all, the two things seem to have been bound together rather closely--just as you said."

He restored his pencil to his pocket, palpably pulled himself together, and proceeded:

"Oh, my theory was wholly rational--far more rational than yours; rationally it was perfect. It was a wholly logical recoil from the idleness, the lack of purpose, the slipshod self-indulgence under many names that I saw, and see, everywhere about me. I have work to do--serious work of large importance--and it seemed to me my duty to carry it through at all hazards. I need not add that it still seems so.

Yet it was a life's work, already well along, and there was no need for me to pay an excessive price for mere speed. I elected to let everything go but intellect; I felt that I must do so; and in consequence, by the simplest sort of natural law, all the rest of me was shriveling up--had shriveled up, you will say. Yet I knew very well that my intellect was not the biggest part of me. I have always understood that.... Still, it seems that I required you to rediscover it for me in terms of everyday life...."

"No, no!" she interrupted, "I didn't do that. Most of it you did yourself. The start, the first push--don't you know?--it came from Fifi."

"Well," he said slowly, "what was Fifi but you again in miniature?"

"A great deal else," said Sharlee.

Her gaze fell. She sunk her chin upon her hand, and a silence followed, while before the mind's eye of each rose a vision of Fifi, with her wasted cheeks and great eyes.

"As I say, I sacrificed everything to reason," continued Queed, obviously struggling against embarra.s.sment, "and yet pure reason was never my ideal. I have impressed you as a thoroughly selfish person--you have told me that--and so far as my immediate environment is concerned, I have been, and am. So it may surprise you to be told that a life of service has been from the beginning my ambition and my star. Of course I have always interpreted service in the broadest sense, in terms of the world; that was why I deliberately excluded all purely personal applications of it. Yet it is from a proper combination of reason with--the sociologist's 'consciousness of kind'--fellow-feeling, sympathy, if you prefer, that is derived a life of fullest efficiency. I have always understood the truth of this formula as applied to peoples.

It seems that I--rather missed its force as to individuals. I--I am ready to admit that an individual life can draw an added meaning--and richness from a service, not of the future, but of the present--not of the race but ... well, of the unfortunate on the doorstep. Do you understand," he asked abruptly, "what I am trying to tell you?"

She a.s.sured him that she understood perfectly.

A slow painful color came into his face.

"Then you appreciate the nature and the size of the debt I owe you."

"Oh, no, no, no! If I have done anything at all to help you," said Sharlee, considerably moved, "then I am very glad and proud. But as for what you speak of ... no, no, people always do these things for themselves. The help comes from within--"

"Oh, _don't_ talk like that!" broke from him. "You throw out the idea somehow that I consider that I have undergone some remarkable conversion and transformation. I haven't done anything of the sort. I am just the same as I always was. Just the same.... Only now I am willing to admit, as a scientific truth, that time given to things not in themselves directly productive, can be made to pay a good dividend. If what I said led you to think that I meant more than that, then I have, for once, expressed myself badly. I tell you this," he went on hurriedly, "simply because you once interested yourself in trying to convince me of the truth of these views. Some of the things you said that night managed to stick. They managed to stick. Oh, I give you that. I suppose you might say that they gradually became like mottoes or texts--not scientific, of course ... personal. Therefore, I thought it only fair to tell you that while my cosmos is still mostly Ego--I suppose everybody's is in one way or another--I have--made changes, so that I am no longer wholly out of relation with life."