Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 1
THE conversation was taking place in Henry Harrington's law office—a not particularly prosperous-looking law office, with the usual sheepskin volumes rather meager upon the shelves. The room boasted one window. Against the side of this window Harrington leaned, a tall half-indolent figure in a gray serge suit which fitted loosely yet revealed the army training of the frame beneath.
The Harrington features were regularly chiseled and inclined to leanness, with a streak of humor showing in the mouth and a play of it in the keen gray eyes that looked out under bushy brows which beetled slightly; while the nose and chin both indicated force enough when the nature behind them was roused. Just now it was quite unroused. Not one of the brown hairs in the Harrington head was out of place; the long white line of the part upon the left stood neat and perfectly ordered, thus completing the contrast between a rather immaculate personal appearance and the general untidiness of desk and office.
"It's quite a show, Henry," urged Charlie Clayton.
Harrington's lip curled, half-humorously, half-cynically, and a far-away look got into his eye while his gesture seemed to dismiss the whole world and even life itself from consideration. "There never was but one big show, Charlie, in the history of the whole world," he said, "and I was in that, thank God!"
"And it's ruined you, Henry!" accused Clayton. "Here you are, a young fellow with all sorts of stuff in you, mooning around, going stale on life because you think you've seen all of life there is—all the emotions, all the thrills—and that everything is now anticlimax. You make me sick, Henry; you do for a fact. Your men, they tell me, used to call you 'Hellfire' Harrington; but you're tame as a pussycat now, feeding yourself up on this all-in-the-past stuff. I tell you, old man, these three towns are full of good fights right now if you'd only wake up and hop into a few of them. Why, you could win in a walk from this assembly district, and with me from the other and Madden in the senate, we could form a little triumvirate that would take care of the three towns like an old maid taking care of her cat. Besides, it's a big show, I tell you—this state legislature; out of it come the governors, the congressmen and senators—jobs that lead to the biggest show."
"You're right, old-timer, no doubt," admitted Harrington wearily, "but I can't seem to help it. My emotions have been pumped out so they don't come back. God! it's an awful feeling to realize that at thirty everything's behind you."
Clayton laughed satirically and tried another bait.
"Well, if you won't consider the legislature, let's abandon practical things and consider esthetic ones. Let's consider woman—and the fairest of her kind!"
"I'm off of 'em!" Harrington declared.
"Billie Boland is coming home today—prettiest girl west of the Rockies!" tantalized Clayton.
Billie Boland? Daughter of John Boland, of course. Harrington turned his glance out the window and the name of Boland smote him every where. His eyes were peering into the busiest street of a harbor town on the west coast of the United States. The street was wide. Upon its left-hand side as Harrington gazed, were two- and three-floor store and office buildings, while upon the other was a line of wharves and docks with long warehouses squat upon them and here and there smoke-stacks and masts sticking up above, with the gleam of a tidal stream behind.
Across this stream was a line of sawmills with vast acres of log booms, broken into at intervals by areas of wharfing upon which piles of lumber or shingles gleamed yellow or glowed dull red in the sunshine.
This was the town of Edgewater that Henry Harrington looked out upon—Edgewater which called itself a city, for was it not hustling and bustling with the energies of twenty thousand souls and pregnant with the harnessed industries of a group of great corporations—the John Boland corporations?
There was the Boland Mill and Lumber Company which operated the lumber mills; there was the Boland Cedar Company, which made the shingles; there was the Boland Logging Company which operated railroads that went nosing up into the hills and snaked out the raw material of both the lumber and the shingles.
There was the Boland Fisheries Corporation that gathered salmon from the nearby waters and cod from far-off Alaska and smoked or packed them on the wharves; there was the Boland Navigation Company that carried Boland products to the distant corners of the globe and operated as well the busy ferryboats upon the tidal stream; there were also the interurban trolley line and other minor tributaries and feeders to the larger corporations. There was finally the huge parent corporation called Boland General.
And last of all, dominating all, creating and energizing all, was John Boland himself, a man in the later fifties with a brow like Napoleon and recessed peering eyes, whose boast it was that where one of his corporations went in, two blades of grass began at once to grow where one had grown before. He boasted this so many times that his intimates began to speak of him humorously at first and afterwards affectionately, as "Old Two Blades."
And the people of the three towns, Edgewater, Socatullo and Wahpeetah—his towns that he had created—were proud of him also. Was he not their patron saint? Was he not first in every good work in the community—the public libraries, the hospitals, the community centers, with gymnasium and playground and athletic field attachments, all to keep the people, young and old, amused and entertained and contented and out of mischief—were they not all in a large sense monuments to his generosity and foresight? They were.
Why, not even a butcher's boy in any of the three towns could display talent in business but the Boland corporations sought him out, attached him to their enterprises and hung glittering baits before him—gave him a chance, an incentive to rise. And they were hanging glittering baits before Henry Harrington this morning. Some argus eye of Boland General had noted Henry and coveted him.
But Charlie Clayton, handy messenger of the Boland interests, had failed entirely to excite the cupidity of his friend. Chagrined, he sought revenge by tantalizing him with a gust of his own enthusiasm for Billie Boland, of whom Harrington, but two years resident of the community, could be presumed to know nothing.
"Billie's smart, you know," he was blurbing, "got sense—common sense, I mean—business sense. She'll inherit the old man's millions and she'll know how to handle 'em too. She handles everybody, Billie does. Grew up in Edgewater—a typical darling of the town. Off in Europe since the war closed. Democratic to the heels, Billie is. She used to be a good deal of a tomboy and if she's anything like the old Billie, with all the tricks she's learned abroad and probably with two or three counts and dukes trailing at her heels, she'll give this town the thrill of its young life from the moment she strikes it. There's a reception for her at the Country Club this afternoon. You better horn in. Everybody's welcome."
This speech drew Henry away from the window but the expression on his face was one of mild annoyance. "For one thing I especially dislike managing women," he frowned; "and for another"—he waved his hand with that same gesture of dismissal which he had employed before—"I've seen 'em all."
"Not till you've seen Billie Boland, you haven't," challenged Clayton as he rose to his feet.
Henry's answer was a shrug. "Your idea is to marry her, I suppose," he commented, casually, filling his pipe.
Clayton became suddenly serious. "I'd jump at the chance. All those good looks—all those millions!"
"I wish you luck, Charlie, old man," smiled Henry, offering a hearty hand.
"Thanks, Henry, you good old stiff," said Clayton, and then, laying a hand affectionately upon Harrington's shoulder as his glance swept the room, presumed to give some serious advice. "Let me tell you something, Henry, pal of mine. You ought to be more thrifty. Youth is slipping along. You're not making money enough. You're wasting pretty decent talent on a lot of rag-tag and bob-tailed cases."
"Oh, I don't know." Harrington's expression was thoughtful again. "I make enough for my wants," he defended, slipping down in his chair. "I'm lazy, you know, along with the rest. I've made the supreme physical effort of my life along with the emotional. I shall never get over being tired. I don't want to work hard. I don't want to get on. I only want to get by, Charlie, and I take only the kind of cases that—well, I couldn't tell you why I take a single darned one of them." He confessed this, looking quite surprised with himself. "I couldn't really."
Clayton, pushing and practical, gazed a moment perplexed, and then his features broke up in hearty laughter. "You win, Henry," he cried. "You're just the most truthful darned soul in the world and the most modest. That's why people like you so and they see through your modesty; they know you're a lot bigger and better man than you think you are."
Henry looked puzzled by this speech and embarrassed. "You don't mean, Charlie" he began to inquire, and then stopped as if perceiving that vanity was about to trick him into reprehensible loquacity. "How about a little game of draw tonight?" he asked.
"Fine," ejaculated Clayton, his face lighting with instant acquiescence.
"About eight-thirty?"
"You're on. Shows that even if you won't go to the legislature with me, at least you'll play poker with me."
"And thereby sadly deplete your campaign fund," smiled Henry.
Clayton laughed also and passed out through the anteroom where a man with a silver button in his lapel, with one trouser-leg pinned up and a crutch at his side, sat before a typewriter. Several persons were waiting in this anteroom; two were young men, one of these a cripple, the other tubercular; each wore the Loyal Legion button; each eyed wistfully the door Clayton had closed behind him. But besides these two there was a meek, worried-looking man of Scandinavian type with an expression of mild wonder in his blue eyes.
"Not a fifty-dollar fee in the lot," Charles was commenting, and then his roving eye halted, wavered and retreated before the innocent, appraising glance of a young woman.
"What a pippin!" he blurted, once outside. "Gosh! If a dream like her needs legal advice why didn't somebody hand her my card?"
Harrington, crowding more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and refraining from touching the button that would tell Sergeant Thorpe he was ready to receive clients, was meditating what Charlie had said to him. It was true that life was running along, true that he was unthrifty; that his luck—or his disposition—did not run to making money. He did not get that kind of case somehow.
The poor, the outclassed, the financially unimportant it was who had the habit of dragging their causes like foundlings to his door; and he had a habit of taking them when something about the prospective client moved his pity, or something in the issue outraged his sense of justice, rather than because of any prospect of gain.