The Second Generation Part 2

Yours ain't used to tandem, but I guess I can manage 'em."

"That style of hitching's new to these parts," continued Hiram.

Arthur felt the queerness of his father's tone. "Two, side by side, or two, one in front of the other--where's the difference?"

True, reflected Hiram. He was wrong again--yet again unconvinced.

Certainly the handsome son, so smartly gotten up, seated in this smart trap, did look attractive--but somehow not as he would have had _his_ son look. Adelaide came; he helped her to the lower seat. As he watched them dash away, as fine-looking a pair of young people as ever gladdened a father's eye, this father's heart lifted with pride--but sank again. Everything _seemed_ all right; why, then, did everything _feel_ all wrong?

"I'm not well to-day," he muttered. He returned to the porch, walking heavily. In body and in mind he felt listless. There seemed to be something or some one inside him--a newcomer--aloof from all that he had regarded as himself--aloof from his family, from his work, from his own personality--an outsider, studying the whole perplexedly and gloomily.

As he was leaving the gate a truck entered the drive. It was loaded with trunks--his son's and his daughter's baggage on the way from the station.

Hiram paused and counted the boxes--five huge trunks--Adelaide's beyond doubt; four smaller ones, six of steamer size and thereabouts--profuse and elegant Arthur's profuse and elegant array of canvas and leather.

This ma.s.s of superfluity seemed to add itself to his burden. He recalled what his wife had once said when he hesitated over some new extravagance of the children's: "What'd we toil and save for, unless to give them a better time than we had? What's the use of our having money if they can't enjoy it?" A "better time," "enjoy"--they sounded all right, but were they _really_ all right? Was this really a "better time"?--really enjoyment? Were his and his wife's life all wrong, except as they had contributed to this new life of thoughtless spending and useless activity and vanity and splurge?

Instead of going toward the factories, he turned east and presently out of Jefferson Street into Elm. He paused at a two-story brick house painted brown, with a small but brilliant and tasteful garden in front and down either side. To the right of the door was an un.o.btrusive black-and-gold sign bearing the words "Ferdinand Schulze, M.D." He rang, was admitted by a pretty, plump, Saxon-blond young woman--the doctor's younger daughter and housekeeper. She looked freshly clean and wholesome--and so useful! Hiram's eyes rested upon her approvingly; and often afterwards his thoughts returned to her, lingering upon her and his own daughter in that sort of vague comparisons which we would not entertain were we aware of them.

Dr. Schulze was the most distinguished--indeed, the only distinguished--physician in Saint X. He was a short, stout, grizzled, spectacled man, with a nose like a scarlet b.u.t.ton and a mouth like a b.u.t.tonhole; in speech he was abrupt, and, on the slightest pretext or no pretext at all, sharp; he hid a warm sympathy for human nature, especially for its weaknesses, behind an uncompromising candor which he regarded as the duty of the man of science toward a vain and deluded race that knew little and learned reluctantly. A man is either better or worse than the manner he chooses for purposes of conciliating or defying the world. Dr. Schulze was better, as much better as his mind was superior to his body. He and his motherless daughters were "not in it" socially.

Saint X was not quite certain whether it shunned them or they it. His services were sought only in extremities, partly because he would lie to his patients neither when he knew what ailed them nor when he did not, and partly because he was a militant infidel. He lost no opportunity to attack religion in all its forms; and his two daughters let no opportunity escape to show that they stood with their father, whom they adored, and who had brought them up with his heart. It was Dr.

Schulze's furious unbelief, investing him with a certain suggestion of Satan-got intelligence, that attracted Saint X to him in serious illnesses--somewhat as the Christian princes of mediaeval Europe tolerated and believed in the Jew physicians. Saint X was only just reaching the stage at which it could listen to "higher criticism" without dread lest the talk should be interrupted by a bolt from "special Providence"; the fact that Schulze lived on, believing and talking as he did, could be explained only as miraculous and mysterious forbearance in which Satan must somehow have direct part.

"I didn't expect to see _you_ for many a year yet," said Schulze, as Hiram, standing, faced him sitting at his desk.

The master workman grew still more pallid as he heard the thought that weighted him in secret thus put into words. "I have never had a doctor before in my life," said he. "My prescription has been, when you feel badly stop eating and work harder."

"Starve and sweat--none better," said Schulze. "Well, why do you come here to-day?"

"This morning I lifted a rather heavy weight. I've felt a kind of tiredness ever since, and a pain in the lower part of my back--pretty bad. I can't understand it."

"But I can--that's my business. Take off your clothes and stretch yourself on this chair. Call me when you're ready."

Schulze withdrew into what smelled like a laboratory. Hiram could hear him rattling gla.s.s against gla.s.s and metal, could smell the fumes of uncorked bottles of acids. When he called, Schulze reappeared, disposed instruments and tubes upon a table. "I never ask my patients questions,"

he said, as he began to examine Hiram's chest. "I lay 'em out here and go over 'em inch by inch. I find all the weak spots, both those that are crying out and those worse ones that don't. I never ask a man what's the matter; I tell him. And my patients, and all the fools in this town, think I'm in league with the devil. A doctor who finds out what's the matter with a man Providence is trying to lay in the grave--what can it be but the devil?"

He had reached his subject; as he worked he talked it--religion, its folly, its silliness, its cruelty, its ignorance, its viciousness. Hiram listened without hearing; he was absorbed in observing the diagnosis. He knew nothing of medicine, but he did know good workmans.h.i.+p. As the physician worked, his admiration and confidence grew. He began to feel better--not physically better, but that mental relief which a courageous man feels when the peril he is facing is stripped of the mystery that made it a terror. After perhaps three quarters of an hour, Schulze withdrew to the laboratory, saying: "That's all. You may dress."

Hiram dressed, seated himself. By chance he was opposite a huge image from the Orient, a hideous, twisted thing with a countenance of sardonic sagacity. As he looked he began to see perverse, insidious resemblances to the physician himself. When Schulze reappeared and busied himself writing, he looked from the stone face to the face of flesh with fascinated repulsion--the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike.

Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the eccentric physician's--his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his ironic jeer at the superst.i.tions of Saint X.

"There!" said Schulze, looking up. "That's the best I can do for you."

"What's the matter with me?"

"You wouldn't know if I told you."

"Is it serious?"

"In this world everything is serious--and nothing."

"Will I die?"

Schulze slowly surveyed all Hiram's outward signs of majesty that had been denied his own majestic intellect, noted the tremendous figure, the shoulders, the forehead, the ma.s.sive brow and nose and chin--an _ensemble_ of unabused power, the handiwork of Nature at her best, a creation worth while, worth preserving intact and immortal.

"Yes," he answered, with satiric bitterness; "you will have to die, and rot, just like the rest of us."

"Tell me!" Hiram commanded. "Will I die soon?"

Schulze reflected, rubbing his red-b.u.t.ton nose with his stubby fingers.

When he spoke, his voice had a sad gentleness. "You can bear hearing it.

You have the right to know." He leaned back, paused, said in a low tone: "Put your house in order, Mr. Ranger."

Hiram's steadfast gray eyes met bravely the eyes of the man who had just read him his death warrant. A long pause; then Hiram said "Thank you," in his quiet, calm way.

He took the prescriptions, went out into the street. It looked strange to him; he felt like a stranger in that town where he had spent half a century--felt like a temporary tenant of that vast, strong body of his which until now had seemed himself. And he--or was it the stranger within him?--kept repeating: "Put your house in order. Put your house in order."

CHAPTER II

OF SOMEBODIES AND n.o.bODIES

At the second turning Arthur rounded the tandem out of Jefferson Street into Willow with a skill that delighted both him and his sister. "But why go that way?" said she. "Why not through Monroe street? I'm sure the horses would behave."

"Better not risk it," replied Arthur, showing that he, too, had had, but had rejected, the temptation to parade the crowded part of town. "Even if the horses didn't act up, the people might, they're such jays."

Adelaide's estimate of what she and her brother had acquired in the East was as high as was his, and she had the same unflattering opinion of those who lacked it. But it ruffled her to hear him call the home folks jays--just as it would have ruffled him had she been the one to make the slighting remark. "If you invite people's opinion," said she, "you've no right to sneer at them because they don't say what you wanted."

"But _I_'m not driving for show if _you_ are," he retorted, with a testiness that was confession.

"Don't be silly," was her answer. "You know you wouldn't take all this trouble on a desert island."

"Of course not," he admitted, "but I don't care for the opinion of any but those capable of appreciating."

"And those capable of appreciating are only those who approve," teased Adelaide. "Why drive tandem among these 'jays?'"

"To keep my hand in," replied he; and his adroit escape restored his good humor.

"I wish I were as free from vanity as you are, Arthur, dear," said she.

"You're just as fond of making a sensation as I am," replied he. "And, my eye, Del! but you _do_ know how." This with an admiring glance at her most becoming hat with its great, gracefully draped _chiffon_ veil, and at her dazzling white dust-coat with its deep blue facings that matched her eyes.

She laughed. "Just wait till you see my new dresses--and hats."

"Another shock for your poor father."

"Shock of joy."

"Yes," a.s.sented Arthur, rather glumly; "he'll take anything off you.