Part 60 (1/2)

”I'd been having a pretty bad time one day. Strangeways had been worse--a darned sight worse--just when I thought he was better. I'd been trying to help him to think straight; and suddenly I made a break, somehow, and must have touched exactly the wrong spring. It seemed as if I set him nearly crazy. I had to leave him to Pearson right away. Then it poured rain steady for about eight hours, and I couldn't get out and `take a walk.' Then I went wandering into the picture-gallery and found Lady Joan there, looking at Miles Hugo. And she ordered me out, or blamed near it.”

”You are standing a good deal,” said the duke.

”Yes, I am--but so is she.” He set his hard young jaw and nursed his knee, staring once more at the velvet shadows. ”The girl in the book I picked up--” he began.

”The first book? ” his host inquired.

Tembarom nodded.

”The very first. I was smoking my pipe at night, after every one else had gone to bed, and I got up and began to wander about and stare at the names of the things on the shelves. I was thinking over a whole raft of things--a whole raft of them--and I didn't know I was doing it, until something made me stop and read a name again. It was a book called `Good-by, Sweetheart, Good-by,' and it hit me straight. I wondered what it was about, and I wondered where old Temple Barholm had fished up a thing like that. I never heard he was that kind.”

”He was a cantankerous old brute,” said the Duke of Stone with candor, ”but he chanced to be an omnivorous novel-reader. Nothing was too sentimental for him in his later years.”

”I took the thing out and read it,” Tembarom went on, uneasily, the emotion of his first novel-reading stirring him as he talked. ”It kept me up half the night, and I hadn't finished it then. I wanted to know the end.”

”Benisons upon the books of which one wants to know the end!” the duke murmured.

Tembarom's interest had plainly not terminated with ”the end.” Its freshness made it easily revived. There was a hint of emotional indignation in his relation of the plot.

”It was about a couple of fools who were dead stuck on each other-- dead. There was no mistake about that. It was all real. But what do they do but work up a fool quarrel about nothing, and break away from each other. There was a lot of stuff about pride. Pride be d.a.m.ned!

How's a man going to be proud and put on airs when he loves a woman?

How's a woman going to be proud and stick out about things when she loves a man? At least, that's the way it hit me.”

”That's the way it hit me--once,” remarked his grace.

”There is only once,” said Tembarom, doggedly.

”Occasionally,” said his host. ”Occasionally.”

Tembarom knew what he meant.

”The fellow went away, and neither of them would give in. It's queer how real it was when you read it. You were right there looking on, and swallowing hard every few minutes-- though you were as mad as hops.

The girl began to die--slow --and lay there day after day, longing for him to come back, and knowing he wouldn't. At the very end, when there was scarcely a breath left in her, a young fellow who was crazy about her himself, and always had been, put out after the hard-headed fool to bring him to her anyhow. The girl had about given in then. And she lay and waited hour after hour, and the youngster came back by himself. He couldn't bring the man he'd gone after. He found him getting married to a nice girl he didn't really care a darn for. He'd sort of set his teeth and done it--just because he was all in and down and out, and a fool. The girl just dropped her head back on the pillow and lay there, dead! What do you think of that?” quite fiercely. ”I guess it was sentimental all right, but it got you by the throat.”

”'Good-bye, Sweetheart, Good-bye,”' his grace quoted. ”First-cla.s.s t.i.tle. We are all sentimental. And that was the first, was it?”

”Yes, but it wasn't the last. I began to read the others. I've been reading them ever since. I tell you, for a fellow that knows nothing it's an easy way of finding out a lot of things. You find out what different kinds of people there are, and what different kinds of ways.

If you've lived in one place, and been up against nothing but earning your living, you think that's all there is of it--that it's the whole thing. But it isn't, by gee!” His air became thoughtful. ”I've begun to kind of get on to what all this means”--glancing about him--”to you people; and how a fellow like T. T. must look to you. I've always sort of guessed, but reading a few dozen novels has helped me to see WHY it's that way. I've yelled right out laughing over it many a time.

That fellow called Thackeray--I can't read his things right straight through-- but he 's an eye-opener.”

”You have tried nothing BUT novels?” his enthralled hearer inquired.

”Not yet. I shall come to the others in time. I'm sort of hungry for these things about PEOPLE. It's the ways they're different that gets me going. There was one that stirred me all up--but it wasn't like that first one. It was about a man ”--he spoke slowly, as if searching for words and parallels --”well, I guess he was one of the early savages here. It read as if they were like the first Indians in America, only stronger and fiercer. When Palford was explaining things to me he'd jerk in every now and then something about 'coming over with the Conqueror' or being here 'before the Conqueror.' I didn't know what it meant. I found out in this book I'm telling about. It gave me the whole thing so that you SAW it. Here was this little country, with no one in it but these first savage fellows it'd always belonged to. They thought it was the world.” There was a humorous sense of illumination in his half-laugh. ”It was their New York, by jings,” he put in. ”Their little old New York that they'd never been outside of! And then first one lot slams in, and then another, and another, and tries to take it from them. Julius Caesar was the first Mr. b.u.t.tinski; and they fought like h.e.l.l. They were fighters from Fightersville, anyhow. They fought each other, took each other's castles and lands and wives and jewelry--just any old thing they wanted. The only jails were private ones meant for their particular friends. And a man was hung only when one of his neighbors got mad enough at him, and then he had to catch him first and run the risk of being strung up himself, or have his head chopped off and stuck up on a spike somewhere for ornament. But fight! Good Lord! They were at it day and night. Did it for fun, just like folks go to the show. They didn't know what fear was. Never heard of it. They'd go about shouting and bragging and swaggering, with their heads hanging half off. And the one in this book was the bulliest fighter of the lot. I guess I don't know how to p.r.o.nounce his name. It began with H.”

”Was it Hereward the Wake, by chance?” exclaimed his auditor.

”Hereward the Last of the English?”

”That's the man,” cried Tembarom.