Tales of Men and Ghosts

IT had been almost too easy—­that was young Millner’s first feeling, as he stood again on the Spence door-step, the great moment of his interview behind him, and Fifth Avenue rolling its grimy Pactolus at his feet.

Halting there in the winter light, with the clang of the ponderous vestibule doors in his ears, and his eyes carried down the perspective of the packed interminable thoroughfare, he even dared to remember Rastignac’s apostrophe to Paris, and to hazard recklessly under his small fair moustache:  “Who knows?”

He, Hugh Millner, at any rate, knew a good deal already:  a good deal more than he had imagined it possible to learn in half an hour’s talk with a man like Orlando G. Spence; and the loud-rumouring city spread out there before him seemed to grin like an accomplice who knew the rest.

A gust of wind, whirling down from the dizzy height of the building on the next corner, drove sharply through his overcoat and compelled him to clutch at his hat.  It was a bitter January day, a day of fierce light and air, when the sunshine cut like icicles and the wind sucked one into black gulfs at the street corners.  But Millner’s complacency was like a warm lining to his shabby coat, and heaving steadied his hat he continued to stand on the Spence threshold, lost in the vision revealed to him from the Pisgah of its marble steps.  Yes, it was wonderful what the vision showed him. ...  In his absorption he might have frozen fast to the door-step if the Rhadamanthine portals behind him had not suddenly opened to let out a slim fur-coated figure, the figure, as he perceived, of the youth whom he had caught in the act of withdrawal as he entered Mr. Spence’s study, and whom the latter, with a wave of his affable hand, had detained to introduce as “my son Draper.”

It was characteristic of the odd friendliness of the whole scene that the great man should have thought it worth while to call back and name his heir to a mere humble applicant like Millner; and that the heir should shed on him, from a pale high-browed face, a smile of such deprecating kindness.  It was characteristic, equally, of Millner, that he should at once mark the narrowness of the shoulders sustaining this ingenuous head; a narrowness, as he now observed, imperfectly concealed by the wide fur collar of young Spence’s expensive and badly cut coat.  But the face took on, as the youth smiled his surprise at their second meeting, a look of almost plaintive good-will:  the kind of look that Millner scorned and yet could never quite resist.

“Mr. Millner?  Are you—­er—­waiting?” the lad asked, with an intention of serviceableness that was like a finer echo of his father’s resounding cordiality.

“For my motor?  No,” Millner jested in his frank free voice.  “The fact is, I was just standing here lost in the contemplation of my luck”—­and as his companion’s pale blue eyes seemed to shape a question, “my extraordinary luck,” he explained, “in having been engaged as your father’s secretary.”

“Oh,” the other rejoined, with a faint colour in his sallow cheek.  “I’m so glad,” he murmured:  “but I was sure—­” He stopped, and the two looked kindly at each other.

Millner averted his gaze first, almost fearful of its betraying the added sense of his own strength and dexterity which he drew from the contrast of the other’s frailness.

“Sure?  How could any one be sure?  I don’t believe in it yet!” he laughed out in the irony of his triumph.

The boy’s words did not sound like a mere civility—­Millner felt in them an homage to his power.

“Oh, yes:  I was sure,” young Draper repeated.  “Sure as soon as I saw you, I mean.”

Millner tingled again with this tribute to his physical straightness and bloom.  Yes, he looked his part, hang it—­he looked it!

But his companion still lingered, a shy sociability in his eye.

“If you’re walking, then, can I go along a little way?” And he nodded southward down the shabby gaudy avenue.

That, again, was part of the high comedy of the hour—­that Millner should descend the Spence steps at young Spence’s side, and stroll down Fifth Avenue with him at the proudest moment of the afternoon; O. G. Spence’s secretary walking abroad with O. G. Spence’s heir!  He had the scientific detachment to pull out his watch and furtively note the hour.  Yes—­it was exactly forty minutes since he had rung the Spence door-bell and handed his card to a gelid footman, who, openly sceptical of his claim to be received, had left him unceremoniously planted on the cold tessellations of the vestibule.

“Some day,” Miller grinned to himself, “I think I’ll take that footman as furnace-man—­or to do the boots.”  And he pictured his marble palace rising from the earth to form the mausoleum of a footman’s pride.

Only forty minutes ago!  And now he had his opportunity fast!  And he never meant to let it go!  It was incredible, what had happened in the interval.  He had gone up the Spence steps an unknown young man, out of a job, and with no substantial hope of getting into one:  a needy young man with a mother and two limp sisters to be helped, and a lengthening figure of debt that stood by his bed through the anxious nights.  And he went down the steps with his present assured, and his future lit by the hues of the rainbow above the pot of gold.  Certainly a fellow who made his way at that rate had it “in him,” and could afford to trust his star.

Descending from this joyous flight he stooped his ear to the discourse of young Spence.

“My father’ll work you rather hard, you know:  but you look as if you wouldn’t mind that.”

Millner pulled up his inches with the self-consciousness of the man who had none to waste.  “Oh, no, I shan’t mind that:  I don’t mind any amount of work if it leads to something.”

“Just so,” Draper Spence assented eagerly.  “That’s what I feel.  And you’ll find that whatever my father undertakes leads to such awfully fine things.”

Millner tightened his lips on a grin.  He was thinking only of where the work would lead him, not in the least of where it might land the eminent Orlando G. Spence.  But he looked at his companion sympathetically.

“You’re a philanthropist like your father, I see?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”  They had paused at a crossing, and young Draper, with a dubious air, stood striking his agate-headed stick against the curb-stone.  “I believe in a purpose, don’t you?” he asked, lifting his blue eyes suddenly to Millner’s face.

“A purpose?  I should rather say so!  I believe in nothing else,” cried Millner, feeling as if his were something he could grip in his hand and swing like a club.

Young Spence seemed relieved.  “Yes—­I tie up to that.  There is a Purpose.  And so, after all, even if I don’t agree with my father on minor points ...”  He coloured quickly, and looked again at Millner.  “I should like to talk to you about this some day.”

Millner smothered another smile.  “We’ll have lots of talks, I hope.”

“Oh, if you can spare the time—!” said Draper, almost humbly.

“Why, I shall be there on tap!”

“For father, not me.”  Draper hesitated, with another self-confessing smile.  “Father thinks I talk too much—­that I keep going in and out of things.  He doesn’t believe in analyzing:  he thinks it’s destructive.  But it hasn’t destroyed my ideals.”  He looked wistfully up and down the clanging street.  “And that’s the main thing, isn’t it?  I mean, that one should have an Ideal.”  He turned back almost gaily to Millner.  “I suspect you’re a revolutionist too!”

“Revolutionist?  Rather!  I belong to the Red Syndicate and the Black Hand!” Millner joyfully assented.

Young Draper chuckled at the enormity of the joke.  “First rate!  We’ll have incendiary meetings!” He pulled an elaborately armorial watch from his enfolding furs.  “I’m so sorry, but I must say good-bye—­this is my street,” he explained.  Millner, with a faint twinge of envy, glanced across at the colonnaded marble edifice in the farther corner.  “Going to the club?” he said carelessly.

His companion looked surprised.  “Oh, no:  I never go there.  It’s too boring.”  And he brought out, after one of the pauses in which he seemed rather breathlessly to measure the chances of his listener’s indulgence:  “I’m just going over to a little Bible Class I have in Tenth Avenue.”

Millner, for a moment or two, stood watching the slim figure wind its way through the mass of vehicles to the opposite corner; then he pursued his own course down Fifth Avenue, measuring his steps to the rhythmic refrain:  “It’s too easy—­it’s too easy—­it’s too easy!”

His own destination being the small shabby flat off University Place where three tender females awaited the result of his mission, he had time, on the way home, after abandoning himself to a general sense of triumph, to dwell specifically on the various aspects of his achievement.  Viewed materially and practically, it was a thing to be proud of; yet it was chiefly on aesthetic grounds—­because he had done so exactly what he had set out to do—­that he glowed with pride at the afternoon’s work.  For, after all, any young man with the proper “pull” might have applied to Orlando G. Spence for the post of secretary, and even have penetrated as far as the great man’s study; but that he, Hugh Millner, should not only have forced his way to this fastness, but have established, within a short half hour, his right to remain there permanently:  well, this, if it proved anything, proved that the first rule of success was to know how to live up to one’s principles.

“One must have a plan—­one must have a plan,” the young man murmured, looking with pity at the vague faces which the crowd bore past him, and feeling almost impelled to detain them and expound his doctrine.  But the planlessness of average human nature was of course the measure of his opportunity; and he smiled to think that every purposeless face he met was a guarantee of his own advancement, a rung in the ladder he meant to climb.

Yes, the whole secret of success was to know what one wanted to do, and not to be afraid to do it.  His own history was proving that already.  He had not been afraid to give up his small but safe position in a real-estate office for the precarious adventure of a private secretaryship; and his first glimpse of his new employer had convinced him that he had not mistaken his calling.  When one has a “way” with one—­as, in all modesty, Millner knew he had—­not to utilize it is a stupid waste of force.  And when he had learned that Orlando G. Spence was in search of a private secretary who should be able to give him intelligent assistance in the execution of his philanthropic schemes, the young man felt that his hour had come.  It was no part of his plan to associate himself with one of the masters of finance:  he had a notion that minnows who go to a whale to learn how to grow bigger are likely to be swallowed in the process.  The opportunity of a clever young man with a cool head and no prejudices (this again was drawn from life) lay rather in making himself indispensable to one of the beneficent rich, and in using the timidities and conformities of his patron as the means of his scruples about formulating these principles to himself.  It was not for nothing that, in his college days, he had hunted the hypothetical “moral sense” to its lair, and dragged from their concealment the various self-advancing sentiments dissembled under its edifying guise.  His strength lay in his precocious insight into the springs of action, and in his refusal to classify them according to the accepted moral and social sanctions.  He had to the full the courage of his lack of convictions.

To a young man so untrammelled by prejudice it was self-evident that helpless philanthropists like Orlando G. Spence were just as much the natural diet of the strong as the lamb is of the wolf.  It was pleasanter to eat than to be eaten, in a world where, as yet, there seemed to be no third alternative; and any scruples one might feel as to the temporary discomfort of one’s victim were speedily dispelled by that larger scientific view which took into account the social destructiveness of the benevolent.  Millner was persuaded that every individual woe mitigated by the philanthropy of Orlando G. Spence added just so much to the sum-total of human inefficiency, and it was one of his favourite subjects of speculation to picture the innumerable social evils that may follow upon the rescue of one infant from Mount Taygetus.

“We’re all born to prey on each other, and pity for suffering is one of the most elementary stages of egotism.  Until one has passed beyond, and acquired a taste for the more complex forms of the instinct—­”

He stopped suddenly, checked in his advance by a sallow wisp of a dog which had plunged through the press of vehicles to hurl itself between his legs.  Millner did not dislike animals, though he preferred that they should be healthy and handsome.  The dog under his feet was neither.  Its cringing contour showed an injudicious mingling of races, and its meagre coat betrayed the deplorable habit of sleeping in coal-holes and subsisting on an innutritious diet.  In addition to these physical disadvantages, its shrinking and inconsequent movements revealed a congenital weakness of character which, even under more favourable conditions, would hardly have qualified it to become a useful member of society; and Millner was not sorry to notice that it moved with a limp of the hind leg that probably doomed it to speedy extinction.

The absurdity of such an animal’s attempting to cross Fifth Avenue at the most crowded hour of the afternoon struck him as only less great than the irony of its having been permitted to achieve the feat; and he stood a moment looking at it, and wondering what had moved it to the attempt.  It was really a perfect type of the human derelict which Orlando G. Spence and his kind were devoting their millions to perpetuate, and he reflected how much better Nature knew her business in dealing with the superfluous quadruped.

An elderly lady advancing in the opposite direction evidently took a less dispassionate view of the case, for she paused to remark emotionally:  “Oh, you poor thing!” while she stooped to caress the object of her sympathy.  The dog, with characteristic lack of discrimination, viewed her gesture with suspicion, and met it with a snarl.  The lady turned pale and shrank away, a chivalrous male repelled the animal with his umbrella, and two idle boys backed his action by a vigorous “Hi!” The object of these hostile demonstrations, apparently attributing them not to its own unsocial conduct, but merely to the chronic animosity of the universe, dashed wildly around the corner into a side street, and as it did so Millner noticed that the lame leg left a little trail of blood.  Irresistibly, he turned the corner to see what would happen next.  It was deplorably clear that the animal itself had no plan; but after several inconsequent and contradictory movements it plunged down an area, where it backed up against the iron gate, forlornly and foolishly at bay.

Millner, still following, looked down at it, and wondered.  Then he whistled, just to see if it would come; but this only caused it to start up on its quivering legs, with desperate turns of the head that measured the chances of escape.

“Oh, hang it, you poor devil, stay there if you like!” the young man murmured, walking away.

A few yards off he looked back, and saw that the dog had made a rush out of the area and was limping furtively down the street.  The idle boys were in the offing, and he disliked the thought of leaving them in control of the situation.  Softly, with infinite precautions, he began to follow the dog.  He did not know why he was doing it, but the impulse was overmastering.  For a moment he seemed to be gaining upon his quarry, but with a cunning sense of his approach it suddenly turned and hobbled across the frozen grass-plot adjoining a shuttered house.  Against the wall at the back of the plot it cowered down in a dirty snow-drift, as if disheartened by the struggle.  Millner stood outside the railings and looked at it.  He reflected that under the shelter of the winter dusk it might have the luck to remain there unmolested, and that in the morning it would probably be dead of cold.  This was so obviously the best solution that he began to move away again; but as he did so the idle boys confronted him.

“Ketch yer dog for yer, boss?” they grinned.

Millner consigned them to the devil, and stood sternly watching them till the first stage of the journey had carried them around the nearest corner; then, after pausing to look once more up and down the empty street, laid his hand on the railing, and vaulted over it into the grass-plot.  As he did so, he reflected that, since pity for suffering was one of the most elementary forms of egotism, he ought to have remembered that it was necessarily one of the most tenacious.