Aunt Cal stopped suddenly.
“This is all very well, young man,” she said sternly; “but since you have so many sides to you, how do we know that in one of your off moments you aren’t the murderer who’s hiding out on the Point?”
“The murderer?” asked Van Tyne blankly. “What murderer?”
“Ah, I can explain that, Miss Marsden.” Doctor Gallup smiled apologetically. “As a matter of fact, there wasn’t any murderer.”
“No murderer?” Aunt Cal looked at him sharply.
“No, I invented the bank robbery and the escaped murderer and all. I was merely applying a form of strong medicine to your niece.”
Aunt Cal looked at him scornfully and turned to her sister. “All your modern ideas are not so successful as mah-jongg,” she remarked significantly.
The fog had blown back to sea, and as they came in sight of the house the lamps were glowing out into the darkness. On the porch waited an immaculate girl in a gleaming white dress, strung with beads which glistened in the new moonlight.
“The perfect man,” murmured Aunt Jo, flushing, “is, of course, he who will make any sacrifice.”
Van Tyne did not answer; he was engaged in removing some imperceptible flaw, less visible than a hair, from his elbow, and when he had finished he smiled. There was now not the faintest imperfection anywhere about him, except where the strong beating of his heart disturbed faintly the satin facing of his coat.
— ◆ —
John Jackson’s Arcady.
(The Saturday Evening Post, 26 July 1924)
The first letter, crumpled into an emotional ball, lay at his elbow, and it did not matter faintly now what this second letter contained. For a long time after he had stripped off the envelope, he still gazed up at the oil painting of slain grouse over the sideboard, just as though he had not faced it every morning at breakfast for the past twelve years. Finally he lowered his eyes and began to read:
“Dear Mr. Jackson: This is just a reminder that you have consented to speak at our annual meeting Thursday. We don’t want to dictate your choice of a topic, but it has occurred to me that it would be interesting to hear from you on What Have I Got Out of Life. Coming from you this should be an inspiration to everyone.
“We are delighted to have you anyhow, and we appreciate the honor that you confer on us by coming at all.
“Most cordially yours,
“ANTHONY ROREBACK,
“Sec. Civic Welfare League.”
“What have I got out of life?” repeated John Jackson aloud, raising up his head.
He wanted no more breakfast, so he picked up both letters and went out on his wide front porch to smoke a cigar and lie about for a lazy half hour before he went downtown. He had done this each morning for ten years—ever since his wife ran off one windy night and gave him back the custody of his leisure hours. He loved to rest on this porch in the fresh warm mornings and through a porthole in the green vines watch the automobiles pass along the street, the widest, shadiest, pleasantest street in town.
“What have I got out of life?” he said again, sitting down on a creaking wicker chair; and then, after a long pause, he whispered, “Nothing.”
The word frightened him. In all his forty-five years he had never said such a thing before. His greatest tragedies had not embittered him, only made him sad. But here beside the warm friendly rain that tumbled from his eaves onto the familiar lawn, he knew at last that life had stripped him clean of all happiness and all illusion.
He knew this because of the crumpled ball which closed out his hope in his only son. It told him what a hundred hints and indications had told him before; that his son was weak and vicious, and the language in which it was conveyed was no less emphatic for being polite. The letter was from the dean of the college at New Haven, a gentleman who said exactly what he meant in every word:
“Dear Mr. Jackson: It is with much regret that I write to tell you that your son, Ellery Hamil Jackson, has been requested to withdraw from the university. Last year largely, I am afraid, out of personal feeling toward you, I yielded to your request that he be allowed another chance. I see now that this was a mistake, and I should be failing in my duty if I did not tell you that he is not the sort of boy we want here. His conduct at the sophomore dance was such that several undergraduates took it upon themselves to administer violent correction.
“It grieves me to write you this, but I see no advantage in presenting the case otherwise than as it is. I have requested that he leave New Haven by the day after tomorrow. I am, sir,
“Yours very sincerely,
“AUSTIN SCHEMMERHORN
“Dean of the College.”
What particularly disgraceful thing his son had done John Jackson did not care to imagine. He knew without any question that what the dean said was true. Why, there were houses already in this town where his son, John Jackson’s son, was no longer welcome! For a while Ellery had been forgiven because of his father, and he had been more than forgiven at home, because John Jackson was one of those rare men who can forgive even their own families. But he would never be forgiven any more. Sitting on his porch this morning beside the gentle April rain, something had happened in his father’s heart.
“What have I had out of life?” John Jackson shook his head from side to side with quiet, tired despair. “Nothing!”
He picked up the second letter, the civic-welfare letter, and read it over; and then helpless, dazed laughter shook him physically until he trembled in his chair. On Wednesday, at the hour when his delinquent boy would arrive at the motherless home, John Jackson would be standing on a platform downtown, delivering one hundred resounding platitudes of inspiration and cheer. “Members of the association”—their faces, eager, optimistic, impressed, would look up at him like hollow moons—“I have been requested to try to tell you in a few words what I have had from life——”
Many people would be there to hear, for the clever young secretary had hit upon a topic with the personal note—what John Jackson, successful, able and popular, had found for himself in the tumultuous grab bag. They would listen with wistful attention, hoping that he would disclose some secret formula that would make their lives as popular and successful and happy as his own. They believed in rules; all the young men in the city believed in hard-and-fast rules, and many of them clipped coupons and sent away for little booklets that promised them the riches and good fortune they desired.
“Members of the association, to begin with, let me say that there is so much in life that if we don’t find it, it is not the fault of life, but of ourselves.”
The ring of the stale, dull words mingled with the patter of the rain went on and on endlessly, but John Jackson knew that he would never make that speech, or any speeches ever again. He had dreamed his last dream too long, but he was awake at last.
“I shall not go on flattering a world that I have found unkind,” he whispered to the rain. “Instead, I shall go out of this house and out of this town
