 | CHAPTER I.
A BIG BOY. A woman in armor |  |
1. CHAPTER I.
A BIG BOY.
STANTHORNE looked out of his den and
saw a rainy night settling upon Little
Boston.
He was a lithe man, so compacted as to express
both delicacy and strength, like a fine machine.
Neither puffy muscle nor protruding
bone marred his slight outline. His face was
the face of a thinker and enthusiast; eyes sometimes
filmed with absent-mindedness, sometimes
intense as burning coals, again leaping and
laughing like rain-drops on water.
Stanthorne's den was a high room in a brick
block, where he gathered astonishing traps,
delved into ink-bottles and scribbled when the
day's earlier work was done. The day's earlier
work was a newspaper.
Within these walls he had a museum of pictures,
skulls, Indian axes, books, shells, pieces
of furniture with no kinship, Chinese gods, statuettes,
and cobwebs. The writing-table ran
over with papers into the waste-basket, and the
waste-basket spread a lake of them upon the
floor. No natty, methodical habits of composition
had my young gentleman. He charged
a subject on snorting quill; scattered leaves
like the autumn blast. When he finished he let
the pen stable itself, left the leaves till the
spring-time of counting pages, and turned his
attention elsewhere.
Little Boston, though given to glowering under
coal-smoke at all times, was not ugly in the
rain. She stretched before Stanthorne's eye
away to east and west, her pavements shining,
her streets full of wet vehicles and draggled
hats.
Little Boston had a history. Like that favored
juvenile in Watts's hymn, she thanked the
goodness and the grace which on her birth had
smiled. She was not born, as thousands of
towns are, the child of railroads, and cradled in
pine-board houses. No; again she rendered
thanks and took airs; her parents were stalwart
pioneers from Massachusetts, who hewed her
out of an Ohio wilderness. They gave her the
sanctified odor of exclusiveness, and left her in
the hands of their descendants to be held against
all the world. Schools were born unto her. An
her hills. Thus would Little Boston have continued—mother
of learning and conserver of the
past—had not labor and the rushing age forced
themselves upon her. Manufactories blackened
her outskirts; big blocks crowded her squares;
cottages stared in at the windows of those mansions
where her beloved stock luxuriated; coal-carts,
omnibuses, horse-cars, invaded those
avenues where the elect were wont to take a
silent and stately airing. A foreign population
—why, the whole world! cried Little Boston,
holding her nose—pushed into her atmosphere.
So, since it could not be helped, she made up
her mind to prosperity; consented to divide her
natural advantages among a larger family of
children. But favor her chosen Isaac and set
aside barbarous Ishmael she always would!
Umbrellas, like processions of little shining
domes, paraded under Stanthorne's eye. Street
cars were filled to the steps, and each drawn by
a sad and solitary mule, convinced one on the
evidence of his eyes that large mountains may
be moved by little magnets.
From the medley of passers he singled one
woman whom he followed with half-attentive
eye. A pliant column of water-proof was all
her umbrella revealed until she turned into a
music-store. Stanthorne waited her reappearance
with the ridiculous interest we sometimes
lavish on trifles.
“By the law of symmetry there ought to be a
pretty head at the top. Wonder whether she's
light or dark? Young, of course, with that
quick motion. There she is! Lifts her face to
look at the weather—that's a fine face! Up
goes the umbrella!”
Stanthorne planted an elbow on the sill and
watched her down-street, describing her as if
she were one of his paper heroines.
“Hair part tucked under her hat and part
clustering on her neck. Turned her head like a
bird. Forehead white and rising—a Clyte forehead.
I should think it must look like marble
when a fellow's close enough to see the polish of
it. I like a fine white front! Doesn't she
walk! Used to it probably. Talk of a boat
beside a motion like that! There's none of your
avenue hobbling, and none of your Indian squaw
jogging! Wonder who she is? Alas, that
corner!”
He stretched over the sill a minute after her
disappearance, his great eyes lighted with fancy;
then leaned back, put his heels on a cabinet, and
gave himself up to twilight and the rainfall.
If I were writing a novel I might finely hint
here that the big healthy muscle under Stanthorne's
left ribs was thrilled with emotion; that
he tried to grasp a lock of his close-shorn fleece
by which to tether himself to the outside of his
skull, because the inner Stanthorne was borne
away. But this is no novel. Is only a record of
behaving.
Had Stanthorne fermented enthusiasm over
this floating woman's umbrella, it would have
been no new thing for him, however. For he
was a dreamer and had always an ideal. Its
migrations were endless. When he was a very
little juvenile it abode in the person of a damsel,
his mother's handmaid, whom he proposed to
marry as soon as he was promoted from aprons.
But ere that happy period the ideal removed and
shone upon him from the eyes of a little playmate,
at whose feet he laid all his sweets, well
licked and moistened by his own longing tongue
and palms.
Once he fell in love with his school-mistress,
and sighed secretly until she thumped his head
soundly for dropping a hazel-nut on the floor,
when the inflammation retreated in a flash from
his pericardium to his pericranium!
Thus fled Stanthorne's vision from one vestment
to another, for many more shrines had he.
But latterly it had come to him in robes less
tangible but more appropriate. It was far off
and called him. It dropped suddenly on his
breast and shot a whisper into his ear. It sometimes
gave him a laughing glance through the
leaves of a magazine. It was lovelier than
woman—nearer than a friend. It both separated
him from his kind and gave him more unto his
kind. He followed it over long white roads half
muscle of his manhood. You know I mean the
Art of Letters.
Stanthorne's mind darted unscathed from the
floating woman with the umbrella to fragments
of his own affairs. He wondered if that washerwoman
had sewed his buttons on this week;
whether Slow were going to prove a good general
reporter; what the senior would remark on
to-day's editorial; whether his sketch in this
month's Buncombe Gazette would receive as
much attention as the last; how he should outline
his historical paper for the New York Review;
what the dickens that woman down at
his boarding-house would do if codfish were to
become extinct; what the state of the country
indicated; whether there was any more boot-polish
left in that bottle; how all his relations
were faring; and if he should make a success of
that “book.”
When thought touched “that book,” he
turned a phosphorescent eye toward his table.
Darkness surrounded it as darkness yet swaddled
his work.
“I'll light the gas presently, which will bring it
out clearly enough. Will it come out as clearly
in the broad day glare to the eyes of men?
“Easy enough to write a book,” soliloquized
Stanthorne, as he felt for matches and turned on
the gas. “No trick at all. Anybody can write
read it!”
He picked up his manuscript and sat down to
review it. Over some pages he chuckled as
fondly as his mother had chuckled over him.
Others he frowned at and stabbed with reeking
pen; and a few leaves he clenched into balls and
threw at his Chinese gods.
Then diving into the ink he wrote again. His
watch lay by him, and its hands travelled up toward
the stem, passed the symbol XII, and began
to count the hours over, while the inky
young man ceased not to write.
| CHAPTER I.
A BIG BOY. A woman in armor | |