His name was John Smith, but he was not otherwise unworthy of notice.
Out of her vast, tempestuous experience Blanche Slattery admitted this as she swept into the offices and looked down at the boy, noting the curl in his hair which speaks of the hidden vein of vanity, the wide blue eyes which told of a stratum of mysticism, the unsubdued brawn of hand and wrist which reminded her more of harvests than of field-meets, the mouth closely shut in purposeful attention to one Mr. Thompson's _Commentaries on the Law of Corporations_.
He thought her the stenographer and kept his eyes on the page. She laid a card on his desk--a card at which he looked with some attention before rising to meet her eyes with his own, which dilated in a sort of horror, as she thought. Her cheek actually burned, though it grew no redder, as she turned aside with the crisp statement of her business.
"I want to see Judge Thornton," she said.
Without a word John Smith pushed a button and listened at a telephone.
The judge took his time as usual, and John gazed at the Slattery person with the receiver pressed against his ear. She was powdered and painted; the full corsage of her dress glittered with passementerie; in her form the latest fad was exaggerated into a reminiscence of medieval torturing-devices. Through the enamel of her skin dark crescents showed under her great black eyes, the whites of which were mottled here and there with specks of red. The once sweet lips had lost their softness of curve with their vermeil tincture and had fallen into hard repose.
John knew her profession and how she dominated her world of saddest hilarity--a world which through all mutations of time and institutions persists as on that day when Samson went to Gaza. He felt that there emanated from her a sort of authority, like a sinister manifestation of the atmosphere surrounding men of power and sway--as though by dark and devious ways this soul, too, had carved out a realm in which it darkly reigned. She wondered, when he spoke, whether the softness in his voice were for her or whether it were merely a thing of habit.
"Judge Thornton is sorry that he can not see you this morning," he said.
"Between ten and eleven to-morrow if it is convenient for you--"
"All right," she said. "I'll be here at half-past ten. Good morning!"
The perfume of her presence, the rustling of her departure, the husky depth of her voice haunting his memory, the vast vistas through which the mind of the country boy fared forth venturesomely, impelled by the new contacts of this town in which he had undertaken to scale the citadel of professional success--all these militated against the sober enticements of the law of corporations; and when Judge Thornton entered unheard, John Smith started as though detected in some offense.
"The law," said the judge, launching the hoary quotation, "is a jealous mistress."
John Smith blushed, but saw no lodgment for a denial where there was no accusation. He had been allowing his thoughts to go wool-gathering; but now he began questioning the judge on the doctrine of the rights of minority stock-holders. The judge condescended to a five-minute lecture which would have been costly had it been given for a client before the court. In the midst of the talk there bustled in a young man--a boy, in fact, who accosted the lawyer familiarly.
"Just a minute, Judge. About that mass-meeting Tuesday--I'm Johnson of the _News_, you know. Will you speak?"
"I don't think the readers of the _News_ are lying awake about it,"
answered the judge, looking at the boy amusedly. "But my present intentions go no further than to attend the meeting."
"What about the movement for cheaper gas?" asked the reporter. "Will the meeting start anything?"
"The meeting," said the judge, "will be a law unto itself."
"Sure," replied Johnson of the _News_. "But a word from you as to the extortions of the gas company--"
"Will be addressed to the meeting--if I have any," said the judge.
"I--"
"Oh, all right!" interrupted the boy. "That's what I wanted! Good-by!"
John Smith's amazement at the boy's self-possession and ready, impudent effrontery, passed away in a visualization of Judge Thornton's big, strong figure at the meeting, fulminating against oppression--the oppression of to-day--as did Patrick Henry and James Otis against the wrongs of their times. Now, as of old, thought John Smith, the lawyer is a public officer, charged with public duties, alert to do battle with any tyrant or robber. He flushed with pleasure at this conception of the greatness of the profession.
"As a science," said the judge, as though in answer to John's thought, "it's the greatest field of the intellect. It's the practice that's laborious and full of compromises."
"Yes," said John Smith, lamenting the interrupted lecture on the rights of minority stock-holders. Judge Thornton had donned his coat and his hat.
"I'm off for the day. Good day to you--oh, I almost forgot. Do you want to hear a paper on _King Lear_ to-night? Nellie thought you might. Poor paper--but you'll meet people, and that's a part of the game."
"Oh, yes!" cried John. "I'd be glad to!"
"Come to the house about eight," said the judge, "and go with Nellie and me."
Ah, this was living! Why, at home he knew scarcely a person who had read more of Shakespeare than the quarrel scene in the Fifth Reader. Surely it was good fortune that had made his father and Judge Thornton playmates in boyhood. And to go with Nellie Thornton, too!
"Paint out that sign!" he heard some one say. "And what goes in the place of it, sir?" asked the painter. "'Thornton & Smith,'" replied the judge's voice. "My son-in-law, Mr. Smith, has been taken into the firm."
The stenographer saw exaltation in his face as he closed the safe, bade her good night and went home.
As he sat beside Nellie that evening, he remembered the fancied colloquy between her father and the imaginary painter, and shuddered as he contemplated the possibility of thought-transference and of its ruinous potentialities. As a protection against telepathy he gave his whole attention to Judge Thornton's paper on _Lear_. The indescribable agony of the old king's frenzy, the whirling tempest of the tragedy in which he wandered to his doom clutched at the boy's heart. The wolfish Goneril and Regan, the sweet Cordelia, the bared gray head, the storm, the night--By some occult warning John Smith knew that Nellie was not pleased with his absorption, and that the discussion had begun.
"This treatment is _so_ original," said the lady president. "Everybody must be full of questions. Now let us have a perfectly free discussion--don't wait to be called upon, please!"
To John Smith the lady president seemed enthusiasm personified; yet only a few people rose, and these merely said how much they had enjoyed the paper. John Smith could see himself on his feet pouring forth comment and exposition, but he sat close, hoping that no adverse fate might direct the lady president's attention to him. The discussion was dragging; one could tell that from the increasing bubbliness of the lady president's enthusiasm as she strove conscientiously to fulfil her task of imposing culture upon society.
"I'm sure there must be something more," she said. "Perhaps the most precious pearl of thought of the evening awaits just one more dive. Mrs.
Brunson, can you not--"
"I always feel presumptuous," said Mrs. Brunson, hoarsening her voice to the pitch she always adopted in public speaking, "when I differ from other commentators. But I also feel that the true critic must put himself in the place of the character under examination. Isn't there a good deal of justification for Goneril and Regan? I do not see, personally, how Lear could be supposed to need all those hundred knights, with their drinking and roistering and dogs and--and all that.
I believe Lear's fate was of his own making, and--"
John Smith, the unsophisticated, was startled. The unutterable fate of "the old, kind king"--could this Olympian circle hold such treason?
"No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both, That all the world shall--I will do such things-- What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep; No, I'll not weep: I have full cause of weeping; but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws, Or ere I'll weep. O, fool, I shall go mad!"
The fiery denunciation rang in the boy's ears in answer to the words of this modern woman with her silks and plumes, standing here in a church and, in spite of the softening things of her heritage, sympathizing with these fierce sisters! Others rose and agreed with her. One read the words of Regan:
"O, sir, you are old; Nature in you stands on the very verge Of her confine: you should be ruled and led By some discretion that discerns your state Better than you yourself."
These, was the comment, were the really sane words regarding Lear.
"Oh, well!" said Judge Thornton as John broke his fast and the abstinence of a lifetime in the parlor, upon the cakes and wine served by Nellie. "It didn't surprise me a bit. Mrs. Brunson thinks she'd do as Goneril and Regan did with their father--and she would. She'd avoid the little peccadilloes with Edmund and so remain technically virtuous--the best people are the worst, in some things, John, never forget that. It will be useful to remember it. And the worst are nearly as good as the best--come into the office when that Slattery person comes in the morning, and you'll see what I mean. I'll give you some papers to draw for her."
The Slattery person swept into the private office with a rustle of stiffest silks, reminding the youth of the corn-husks at home in shucking-time, leaving behind her a whiff of all the Orient. John Smith walked into her presence, palpitating as at the approach to something terrible and daunting and mystically fateful to such as himself--as a sailor might draw warily near the black magnetic rocks, which, approached too closely, would draw the very nails from his ship and dissolve his craft in the billows. When Judge Thornton remarked by way of left-handed introduction that Mr. Smith would draw the papers, the woman paid John no attention other than to bow and look straight before her. The youth felt conscious of the same shuddering admiration for her that he might have felt for some gaudy, bright-eyed serpent.
"It's a simple matter, I guess," she said. "I want to make over some property so Abner Gibbs of Bloomington will get fifty dollars sure every month as long as he lives."
"Not so very simple," said the judge, "but quite possible. But why don't you remit it to him yourself?"
"I want to cinch it while I've the money. You see, it's this way. In--in my--business"--she looked into John Smith's girlish eyes and hesitated--"everything is uncertain. It's a feast or a famine. A wave of reform may strike the town to-morrow, and the lid goes on. The protection you pay for may be taken from you next week. You've no rights. You ain't human. So I fix the fifty a month for the old man while I can, see?"
"Gibbs--Gibbs!" said the judge. "Relation of yours?"
"In a way. Does it make any difference?"
"It goes to the consideration," said the lawyer. "Love and affection, you know."
"Well," said the Slattery person, "his son was my solid man--my side-partner--my husband. The last thing he said when he got his was, 'Blanche, old girl, take care of dad. You know his weakness. Don't let him starve!' And I ain't going to!"