Читать книгу The Lay Anthony - Joseph Hergesheimer - Страница 3

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NOT for the honor of winning the Vanderbilt Cup, nor for the glory of pitching a major league baseball team into the world's championship, would Tony Ball have admitted to the familiar and derisive group in the drugstore that he was—in the exact, physical aspect of the word—pure. Secretly, and in an entirely natural and healthy manner, he was ashamed of his innocence. He carefully concealed it in an elaborate assumption of wide worldly knowledge and experience, in an attitude of cynical comprehension, and indifference toward girls.

But he might have spared himself the effort, the fictions, of his pose—had he proclaimed his ignorance aloud from the brilliantly lighted entrance to the drugstore no one who knew him in the midweek, night throng on Ellerton's main street would have credited Anthony with anything beyond a thin and surprising joke. He was, at twenty, the absolute, adventurous opposite of any conscious or cloistered virtue: the careless carriage of his big, loose frame; his frank, smiling grey eyes and ample mouth; his very, drawling voice—all marked him for a loiterer in the pleasant and sunny places of life, indifferent to the rigors of a mental or moral discipline.

The accumulated facts of his existence fully bore this out: the number of schools from which, playing superlative baseball, he had been still obliged to leave, carrying with him the cordial good will of master and fellow, for an unconquerable, irresponsible laxity; the number and variety of occupations that had claimed him in the past three years, every one of which at their inception certain, he felt confident, to carry him beyond all dreams and necessity of avarice; and every one, in his rapidly diminishing interest, attention, or because of persistent, adverse conditions over which, he asseverated, he had no control, turning into a fallow field, a disastrous venture; and, conclusively, the group of familiars, the easy companions of idle hours, to which he had gravitated.

He met his mates by appointment at Doctor Allhop's drugstore, or by an elaborate system of whistled formulas from the street, at which he would rise with a muttered excuse from the dinner table and disappear.—He was rarely if ever sought outright at his father's house; it was quite another sort of boy who met and discoursed easily with sisters, who unperturbed greeted mothers face to face.

It would have been useless, had he known it, to protest his virtue inside the drugstore or out; a curious chain of coincidents had preserved it. Again and again he had been at the point of surrendering his involuntary Eden, and always the accident, the interruption, had befallen, always he had retired in a state of more or less orderly celibacy. On the occasion of one of those nocturnal, metropolitan escapades by which matured boys, in a warm, red veil of whiskey, assert their manhood and independence, he had been thrust in a drunken stupor into the baggage car of the “owl” train to Ellerton. Instances might be multiplied: life, in its haphazard manner, its uncharted tides and eddies sweeping arbitrarily up and down the world, had carelessly preserved in him that concrete ideal which myriads of heroic and agonized beings had striven terribly and in vain to ward.

And so it happened, when Doctor Allhop turned with an elaborate impropriety from the pills he was compounding in a porcelain pestle, that Anthony's laugh was loudest, his gusto most marked, in the group gathered at the back of the drugstore. A wooden screen divided them, hid the shelves of bottles, the water sink, and the other properties and ingredients of the druggist's profession, from the glittering and public exhibition of the finished article, the marble slab and silver mouths of the sodawater fountain, the uninitiated throng.

He was sitting on a case of prepared food, his legs thrust out before him, and a thread of smoke coiling bluely from the cigarette held in his broad, scarred hand. There was a little gay song on his lips, and a roving, gay glint in his direct gaze. At frequent intervals he surveyed with approbation maroon socks and a pair of new and shining pumps; the rest of his apparel was negligent.

The sole chair was occupied by the plump bulk of Thomas Addington Meredith, to whom a sharp nose in a moonlike countenance lent an expression of constant inquiry and foxy caution. He was elaborately apparelled in a suit which boasted a waistcoat draped with the gold chain of an authentic timepiece; while, closing a silver cigarette case scrolled large with his initials, a fat finger bore a ruby that, rumor circulated, had been the gift of a married woman.

Lounging against a shelf Alfred Craik gazed absently at his blackened and broken fingernails, his greasy palms. He was Anthony's partner in the current industry of a machine shop and garage, maintained in a dilapidated stable on the outskirts of Ellerton. It was a concern mainly upheld by a daily levy on the Ball family for necessary tools and accessories. He was, as always, silent, detached.

But William Williams amply atoned for any taciturnity on the part of the others; he had returned a short while before from two checkered years in the West; and, a broad felt hat cinched with a carved leather hand pushed back from his brow, and waving the formidable stump of a cigar, he expiated excitedly on the pleasures of that far, liberal land.

“Why,” he proclaimed, “I owe a saloon keeper in San Francisco sixty-five dollars for one round of drinks—the joint was full and it was up to me... nothing but champagne went, understand! He knows he'll get it. Why, I collared ten dollars a day overseeing sheep. I cleaned up three thousand in one little deal; it was in Butte City; it lasted nine days. But 'Frisco's the place—all the girls there are good sports, all the men spenders.”

“What did you come back East for?” Alfred Craik demanded; “why didn't you stay right with it?”

“I got up against it,” William grinned; “the old man wouldn't give me another stake.” The thought of the glories he had been forced to relinquish started him afresh. “I cleaned up enough in a week at billiards,” he boasted, “to keep me in Ellerton a year.”

“Didn't Bert Dingley take four bits from you last night at Hinkle's?” Anthony lazily asked.

“That farmer!” the other scoffed; “I had a rank cue; they are all rank at Hinkle's. I'll match him in a decent parlor for any amount.”

“How much will you put up?” Meredith demanded; “I will back Bert.”

“How much have you got?” William queried.

“How much have you?”

“If this was San Francisco I could get a hundred.”

“What have you got in real coin, Bill?” Tony joined in.

“Three nickles,” William Williams admitted moodily.

“I've got thirty-five cents,” Thomas added. “I wish I could get a piece of change.”

“How's the car?” Anthony turned to hiss partner in the lull that followed. The “car,” their sole professional charge, had been placed in their hands by an optimistic and benevolent connection of the Balls.

“I had the differential apart again to-day,” Alfred responded, “but I can't find that grinding anywhere. It will have to be all torn down,” he announced with sombre enthusiasm.

“You have had that dam' thing apart three times in the last four weeks, and every time you put it together it's worse,” Anthony protested; “the cylinder casing leaks, and God knows what you did to the gears.”

“I wish I had a piece of change,” Thomas Meredith repeated, in a manner patently mysterious.

“A temporary sacrifice of your tin shop—” Doctor Allhop suggested, tinning from the skilful moulding of the pills on a glass slab.

“Not a chance! the family figurehead announced that he had taken my watch 'out' for the last time.”

“He wants to plaster it on some Highschool skirt,” Alfred announced unexpectedly.

“This robbing the nursery makes me ill,” William protested. “Out in Denver there are real queens with gold hair—”

His period was lost in a yapping chorus from the west-wearied circle. “Take it to bed with you,” he was entreated.

“Nothing in the Highschool can reach these,” Meredith assured them, “this is the real thing—an all night seance. They have just moved in by the slaughter house; a regular pipe—their father is dead, and the old woman's deaf. Two sisters... one has got red hair, and the other can kick higher'n you can hold your hand. The night I went I had to leave early, but they told me to come hack... any night after nine, and bring a friend.”

“I'll walk around with you,” William Williams remarked negligently.

“Not on three nickles. They told me to fetch around a couple of bottles of port wine, and have a genuine party.”

Anthony Ball listened with rapidly growing attention, while he fingered three one dollar bills wadded into the bottom of his pocket. He felt his blood stir more rapidly, beating in his ears: vague pictures thronged his brain of girls with flaming hair, dexterous, flashing limbs, white frills, garters. With an elaborate air of unconcern he asked:

“Are they goodlookers?”

“Oh, Boy! they have got that hidden fascination.”

Anthony made a swift reckoning of the price of port; it would wipe out the sum he was getting together for badly needed baseball shoes.—Red hair!—He could count on no further assistance from his father that month; the machine shop at present was an expense.

“Got any coin?” Meredith demanded.

“A few.”

The other consulted with importance the ostentatious watch. “Just the minute,” he announced. “Come along; we can get the port at the Eagle; we'll have a Paris of a time.”

Doctor Allhop offered an epigrammatic parallel between two celebrated planets.

“I need new ball shoes,” Anthony temporized; “I ripped mine the last game.”

Meredith rose impatiently. “Charge them to the family,” he ejaculated. “But if you don't want to get in on this, there are plenty of others. Two or three dollars are easy to raise in a good cause. Why, the last night I spent in the city cost me seventeen bucks.”

“I guess I'll come.” Anthony instinctively barred his sudden eagerness from his voice. He rose, and was surprised to find that his knees were trembling. His face was hot too.—he wondered if it was red? if it would betray his inexperience? “If they hand me any Sundayschool stuff,” he proclaimed bigly, “I'll step right on it; I'm considerably wise to these dames.”

“This is the real, ruffled goods.” Meredith settled a straw hat with a blue band on his sleek head, and Anthony dragged a faded cap from his pocket, which he drew far over his eyes. William Williams regarded them enviously. Craik's thoughts had wandered far, his lips moved silently. And Doctor Allhop had disappeared into the front of the drugstore.