Tales of Men and Ghosts

THERE had been only one condition attached to the transaction:  Millner was to speak to Draper about the Bible Class.

The condition was easy to fulfil.  Millner was confident of his power to deflect his young friend’s purpose; and he knew the opportunity would be given him before the day was over.  His professional duties despatched, he had only to go up to his room to wait.  Draper nearly always looked in on him for a moment before dinner:  it was the hour most propitious to their elliptic interchange of words and silences.

Meanwhile, the waiting was an occupation in itself.  Millner looked about his room with new eyes.  Since the first thrill of initiation into its complicated comforts—­the shower-bath, the telephone, the many-jointed reading-lamp and the vast mirrored presses through which he was always hunting his scant outfit—­Millner’s room had interested him no more than a railway-carriage in which he might have been travelling.  But now it had acquired a sort of historic significance as the witness of the astounding change in his fate.  It was Corsica, it was Brienne—­it was the kind of spot that posterity might yet mark with a tablet.  Then he reflected that he should soon be leaving it, and the lustre of its monumental mahogany was veiled in pathos.  Why indeed should he linger on in bondage?  He perceived with a certain surprise that the only thing he should regret would be leaving Draper. ...

It was odd, it was inconsequent, it was almost exasperating, that such a regret should obscure his triumph.  Why in the world should he suddenly take to regretting Draper?  If there were any logic in human likings, it should be to Mr. Spence that he inclined.  Draper, dear lad, had the illusion of an “intellectual sympathy” between them; but that, Millner knew, was an affair of reading and not of character.  Draper’s temerities would always be of that kind; whereas his own—­well, his own, put to the proof, had now definitely classed him with Mr. Spence rather than with Mr. Spence’s son.  It was a consequence of this new condition—­of his having thus distinctly and irrevocably classed himself—­that, when Draper at length brought upon the scene his shy shamble and his wistful smile, Millner, for the first time, had to steel himself against them instead of yielding to their charm.

In the new order upon which he had entered, one principle of the old survived:  the point of honour between allies.  And Millner had promised Mr. Spence to speak to Draper about his Bible Class. ...

Draper, thrown back in his chair, and swinging a loose leg across a meagre knee, listened with his habitual gravity.  His downcast eyes seemed to pursue the vision which Millner’s words evoked; and the words, to their speaker, took on a new sound as that candid consciousness refracted them.

“You know, dear boy, I perfectly see your father’s point.  It’s naturally distressing to him, at this particular time, to have any hint of civil war leak out—­”

Draper sat upright, laying his lank legs knee to knee.

“That’s it, then?  I thought that was it!”

Millner raised a surprised glance. “_ What’s_ it?”

“That it should be at this particular time—­”

“Why, naturally, as I say!  Just as he’s making, as it were, his public profession of faith.  You know, to men like your father convictions are irreducible elements—­they can’t be split up, and differently combined.  And your exegetical scruples seem to him to strike at the very root of his convictions.”

Draper pulled himself to his feet and shuffled across the room.  Then he turned about, and stood before his friend.

“Is it that—­or is it this?” he said; and with the word he drew a letter from his pocket and proffered it silently to Millner.

The latter, as he unfolded it, was first aware of an intense surprise at the young man’s abruptness of tone and gesture.  Usually Draper fluttered long about his point before making it; and his sudden movement seemed as mechanical as the impulsion conveyed by some strong spring.  The spring, of course, was in the letter; and to it Millner turned his startled glance, feeling the while that, by some curious cleavage of perception, he was continuing to watch Draper while he read.

“Oh, the beasts!” he cried.

He and Draper were face to face across the sheet which had dropped between them.  The youth’s features were tightened by a smile that was like the ligature of a wound.  He looked white and withered.

“Ah—­you knew, then?”

Millner sat still, and after a moment Draper turned from him, walked to the hearth, and leaned against the chimney, propping his chin on his hands.  Millner, his head thrown back, stared up at the ceiling, which had suddenly become to him the image of the universal sounding-board hanging over his consciousness.

“You knew, then?” Draper repeated.

Millner remained silent.  He had perceived, with the surprise of a mathematician working out a new problem, that the lie which Mr. Spence had just bought of him was exactly the one gift he could give of his own free will to Mr. Spence’s son.  This discovery gave the world a strange new topsy-turvyness, and set Millner’s theories spinning about his brain like the cabin furniture of a tossing ship.

“You knew,” said Draper, in a tone of quiet affirmation.

Millner righted himself, and grasped the arms of his chair as if that too were reeling.  “About this blackguardly charge?”

Draper was studying him intently.  “What does it matter if it’s blackguardly?”

“Matter—?” Millner stammered.

“It’s that, of course, in any case.  But the point is whether it’s true or not.”  Draper bent down, and picking up the crumpled letter, smoothed it out between his fingers.  “The point, is, whether my father, when he was publicly denouncing the peonage abuses on the San Pablo plantations over a year ago, had actually sold out his stock, as he announced at the time; or whether, as they say here—­how do they put it?—­he had simply transferred it to a dummy till the scandal should blow over, and has meanwhile gone on drawing his forty per cent interest on five thousand shares?  There’s the point.”

Millner had never before heard his young friend put a case with such unadorned precision.  His language was like that of Mr. Spence making a statement to a committee meeting; and the resemblance to his father flashed out with ironic incongruity.

“You see why I’ve brought this letter to you—­I couldn’t go to him with it!” Draper’s voice faltered, and the resemblance vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

“No; you couldn’t go to him with it,” said Millner slowly.

“And since they say here that you know:  that they’ve got your letter proving it—­” The muscles of Draper’s face quivered as if a blinding light had been swept over it.  “For God’s sake, Millner—­it’s all right?”

“It’s all right,” said Millner, rising to his feet.

Draper caught him by the wrist.  “You’re sure—­you’re absolutely sure?”

“Sure.  They know they’ve got nothing to go on.”

Draper fell back a step and looked almost sternly at his friend.  “You know that’s not what I mean.  I don’t care a straw what they think they’ve got to go on.  I want to know if my father’s all right.  If he is, they can say what they please.”

Millner, again, felt himself under the concentrated scrutiny of the ceiling.  “Of course, of course.  I understand.”

“You understand?  Then why don’t you answer?”

Millner looked compassionately at the boy’s struggling face.  Decidedly, the battle was to the strong, and he was not sorry to be on the side of the legions.  But Draper’s pain was as awkward as a material obstacle, as something that one stumbled over in a race.

“You know what I’m driving at, Millner.”  Again Mr. Spence’s committee-meeting tone sounded oddly through his son’s strained voice.  “If my father’s so awfully upset about my giving up my Bible Class, and letting it be known that I do so on conscientious grounds, is it because he’s afraid it may be considered a criticism on something he has done which—­which won’t bear the test of the doctrines he believes in?”

Draper, with the last question, squared himself in front of Millner, as if suspecting that the latter meant to evade it by flight.  But Millner had never felt more disposed to stand his ground than at that moment.

“No—­by Jove, no!  It’s not that.”  His relief almost escaped him in a cry, as he lifted his head to give back Draper’s look.

“On your honour?” the other passionately pressed him.

“Oh, on anybody’s you like—­on yours!” Millner could hardly restrain a laugh of relief.  It was vertiginous to find himself spared, after all, the need of an altruistic lie:  he perceived that they were the kind he least liked.

Draper took a deep breath.  “You don’t—­Millner, a lot depends on this—­you don’t really think my father has any ulterior motive?”

“I think he has none but his horror of seeing you go straight to perdition!”

They looked at each other again, and Draper’s tension was suddenly relieved by a free boyish laugh.  “It’s his convictions—­it’s just his funny old convictions?”

“It’s that, and nothing else on earth!”

Draper turned back to the arm-chair he had left, and let his narrow figure sink down into it as into a bath.  Then he looked over at Millner with a smile.  “I can see that I’ve been worrying him horribly.  So he really thinks I’m on the road to perdition?  Of course you can fancy what a sick minute I had when I thought it might be this other reason—­the damnable insinuation in this letter.”  Draper crumpled the paper in his hand, and leaned forward to toss it into the coals of the grate.  “I ought to have known better, of course.  I ought to have remembered that, as you say, my father can’t conceive how conduct may be independent of creed.  That’s where I was stupid—­and rather base.  But that letter made me dizzy—­I couldn’t think.  Even now I can’t very clearly.  I’m not sure what my convictions require of me:  they seem to me so much less to be considered than his!  When I’ve done half the good to people that he has, it will be time enough to begin attacking their beliefs.  Meanwhile—­meanwhile I can’t touch his. ...”  Draper leaned forward, stretching his lank arms along his knees.  His face was as clear as a spring sky.  “I won’t touch them, Millner—­Go and tell him so. ...”