Let us make love deathless, you and I, going together to death. What do we lose? Nothing! This world is an empty shell! Come with me, love, and we'll meet death together!» «Oh, I want to do such a lot of things first,» I exclaimed. «Death's empire is eternal, but this brief task of life, the adventure of it, the change of it, the huge possibilities of it beckon me. I can't leave it.» «The change!» she cried with dilating nostrils, while her eyes darkened, «the change!» «You are determined to misunderstand me,» I cried. «Is not every day a change?» «I am weary,» she cried, «and beaten. I can only beg you not to forget your promise to come-ah!» and she caught and kissed me on the mouth. I shall die with your name on my lips,» she said, and turned to bury her face in the sofa cushion. I went: what else was there to do? I saw them off at the station.
Lorna had made me promise to write often, and swore she would write every day, and she did send me short notes daily for a fortnight. Then came gaps ever lengthening: «Denver society was pleasant and a Mr.
Wilson, a student, was assiduous: he comes every day,» she wrote.
Excuses finally, little hasty notes, and in two months her letters were formal, cold; in three months they had ceased altogether.
The break did not surprise me. I had taught her that youth was the first requisite in a lover for a woman of her type. She had doubtless put my precepts into practice: Mr. Wilson was probably as near the ideal as I was, and very much nearer to hand. The passions of the sense demand propinquity and satisfaction and nothing is more forgetful than pleasures of the flesh. If Mrs. Mayhew had given me a little, I had given her even less of my better self.
Chapter XII. Hard Times and New Loves
So far I had had more good fortune than falls to the lot of most youths starting in life; now I was to taste ill luck and be tried as with fire. I had been so taken up with my own concerns that I had hardly given a thought to public affairs; now I was forced to take a wider view. One day Kate told me that Willie was heavily in arrears: he had gone back to Deacon Conklin's to live on the other side of the Kaw River and I had naturally supposed that he had paid up everything before leaving. I found that he owed the Gregorys sixty dollars on his own account, and more than that on mine.
I went across to him really enraged. If he had warned me, I should not have minded so much; but to leave the Gregorys to tell me made me positively dislike him, and I did not know then the full extent of his selfishness. Years later my sister told me that he had written time and again to my father and got money from him, alleging that it was for me and that I was studying and couldn't earn anything.
«Willie kept us poor, Frank,» she told me, and I could only bow my head; but if I had known this fact at the time, it would have changed my relations with Willie. As it was, I found him in the depths.
Carried away by his optimism, he had bought real estate in 1871 and 1872, mortgaged it for more than he gave, and as the boom continued, he had repeated this game time and again till on paper and in paper he reckoned he had made a hundred thousand dollars. This he had told me and I was glad of it for his sake, unfeignedly glad. It was easy to see that the boom and inflation period had been based at first on the extraordinary growth of the country through the immigration and trade that had followed the Civil War. But the Franco-German war had wasted wealth prodigiously, deranged trade, too, and diverted commerce into new channels. First France and then England felt the shock:
London had to call in moneys lent to American railways and other enterprises. Bit by bit even American optimism was overcome, for immigration in 1871 1872 fell off greatly and the foreign calls for cash exhausted our inks. The crash came in 1873; nothing like it was seen again in these states till the slump of 1907, which led to the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank. Willie's fortune melted almost in a moment: this mortgage and that had to be met and could only be met by forced sales, with no buyers except at minimum values.
When I talked to him, he was almost in despair; no money; no property: all lost; the product of three years' hard work and successful speculation all swept away. Could I help him? If not, he was ruined.
He told me he had drawn all he could from my father: naturally I promised to help him; but first I had to pay the Gregorys, and to my astonishment he begged me to let him have the money instead. «Mrs.
Gregory and all of 'em like you,» he pleaded. «They can wait, I cannot; I know of a purchase that could be made that would make me rich again!» I realized then that he was selfish through and through, conscienceless in egotistic greed. I gave up my faint hope that he would ever repay me: henceforth he was a stranger to me and one that I did not even respect, though he had some fine, ingratiating qualities. I left him to walk across the river and in a few blocks met Rose. She looked prettier than ever and I turned and walked with her, praising her beauty to the skies, and indeed she deserved it; short green sleeves, I remember, set off her exquisite, plump, white arms. I promised her some books and made her say she would read them; indeed, I was astonished by the warmth of her gratitude. She told me it was sweet of me, gave me her eyes, and we parted the best of friends, with just a hint of warmer relationship in the future.
That evening I paid the Gregorys Willie's debt and my own and did not send him the balance of what I possessed, as I had promised, but instead a letter telling him I had preferred to cancel his debt to the Gregorys. Next day he came and assured me he had promised moneys on the strength of my promise, had bought a hundred crates, too, of chickens to ship to Denver, and had already an offer from the mayor of Denver at double what he had given. I read the letters and wire he showed me and let him have four hundred dollars, which drained me and kept me poor for months; indeed, till I brought off the deal with Dingwall, which I am about to relate, and which put me on my feet again in comfort. I should now tell of Willie's misadventure with his carload of chickens: it suffices here to say that he was cheated by his purchaser and that I never saw a dollar of all I had loaned him. Looking back, I understand that it was probably the slump of 1873 that induced the Mayhews to go to Denver; but after they left, I was at a loose end for some months. I could not get work, though I tried everything: I was met everywhere with the excuse, «Hard times!
Hard times!» At length I took a place as waiter in the Eldridge House, the only job I could find that left most of the forenoon free for the university. Smith disliked this new departure of mine and told me he would soon find me a better post; and Mrs. Gregory was disgusted and resentful-partly out of snobbishness, I think. From this time on I felt her against me, and gradually she undermined my influence with Kate. I soon knew I had fallen in public esteem, too, but not for long. One day in the fall Smith introduced me to a Mr. Rankin, the cashier of the First National Bank, who handed over to me at once the letting of Liberty Hall, the one hall in the town large enough to accommodate a thousand people: it had a stage, too, and so could be used for theatrical performances. I gave up my work in the Eldridge House and instead used to sit in the box office of the hall from two every afternoon till seven, and did my best to let it advantageously to the advance agents of the various traveling shows or lecturers. I received sixty dollars a month for this work and one day got an experience which has modified my whole life, for it taught me how money is made in this world and can be made by any intelligent man.
One afternoon the advance agent of the Hatherly Minstrels came into my room and threw down his card. «This old one-hoss shay of a town,» he cried; «should wear grave-clothes.» «What's the matter?» I asked. «Matter!» he repeated scornfully. «I don't believe there's a place in the hull God d-d town big enough to show our double-crown bills! Not one: not a place. I meant to spend ten thousand dollars here in advertising the great Hatherly Minstrels, the best show on earth. They'll be here for a hull fortnight, and, by God, you won't take my money. You don't want money in this dead and alive hole!» The fellow amused me: he was so convinced and outspoken that I took to him. As luck would have it, I had been at the university till late that day and had not gone to the Gregorys for dinner: I was healthily hungry. I asked Mr. Dingwall whether he had dined. «No, Sir,» was his reply. «Can one dine in this place?»