His Great Adventure - free ebook by Robert Herrick

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His Great Adventure

Robert Herrick

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HIS GREAT ADVENTURE

HIS GREAT ADVENTURE

BY ROBERT HERRICK AUTHOR OF “TOGETHER,” “ONE WOMAN’S LIFE” “THE COMMON LOT,” ETC. WITH FRONTISPIECE New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1913 All rights reserved Copyright , 1912, By THE FRANK A. MUNSEY COMPANY. Copyright , 1913, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1913. FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY NEW YORK. N. Y., U.S.A....

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I

I

It was dusk of an April day, and Fifth Avenue was crowded. A young man, who had emerged from a large hotel, stood in the stream of traffic and gazed irresolutely up and down the thoroughfare. He wore a long, cheap rain-coat, and his head was covered by a steamer-cap of an old design, with two flaps tied in a knot across the top, behind which an overabundant crop of dull black hair pushed forth. His thin, sallow face was unshaven, and his eyes were rimmed by round steel spectacles that gave him

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II

II

It was very still in that back room. No step sounded in the hall, and the noise from the street came muffled. In the stillness, the sick man’s desperate efforts to breathe filled the little room with painful sounds. Brainard felt the stifling approach of death, and opened the window wide to get what air would come in from the small court outside. He studied the figure on the lounge more closely. The thick, red under lip curled over the roots of the gray beard. A short, thick nose gave the f

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III

III

When Brainard opened the door of his room, he heard the rustle of papers on the floor, blown about by the draft from the window. He lighted his lamp and picked up the loose sheets, which were the typewritten leaves of his last play—the one that he had finally got back that very afternoon from a famous actor-manager, without even the usual note of polite regret from the secretary. The absence of that familiar note had dejected him especially. He shoved the rejected play into his table drawer in

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IV

IV

It was a very different person, in appearance, who seated himself on the observation platform of the Overland Limited that evening. Only the round steel spectacles were left as a memento of Brainard’s former condition. He had had no scruples in helping himself freely from the store of bills in the wallet. What lay before him to do for the sick man would probably be difficult, in any event, and it would be foolish to handicap himself by presenting a suspicious appearance at Krutzmacht’s office

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V

V

As Brainard entered the smoking compartment of the “club car,” he observed that his interesting fellow traveler was in close conversation with a new arrival, who had taken the section opposite Brainard at Ogden. He had already noted this grizzled, thickset person, about sixty years old, who wore a black frock coat, had a large seal ring and a massive Masonic charm. When the newcomer opened his grip to extract a black skull cap, he had seen that the remaining contents of the bag were a mass of

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VI

VI

“Do you know who that man is?” Brainard asked the old miner as the gentleman under bonds to return to California strolled out of the smoking room. “Why, that’s Eddie Hollinger.” “And who is Mr. Hollinger?” “Say, young feller, don’t you ever read the papers where you live? Why, he’s the boss of the prize ring business here on the Coast,—the ‘fight trust,’ as they call it. Made lots of money. Mighty fine feller Ed is, too. He’s having his troubles these days the same as the rest of us. They’r

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VII

VII

The Overland was several hours late; it was nearly four o’clock of a foggy April afternoon before Brainard emerged from the ferry station with his big valise in his hand. His first intention had been to go to a hotel and there deposit his bag and make inquiries. The miner had urged him to accompany him to the old “Palace.” “They say it’s finer than ever since the quake.” But Brainard, reflecting that it was Saturday afternoon and considering that a few hours’ delay might mean the loss of two

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VIII

VIII

At that moment a low, confidential knock came on the door of the outer office, followed by a discreet rattling of the knob. “There he is at last!” thought Brainard, with a sense of relief. He hurried to unbolt the door; but instead of Peters’s mild face, a chubby, spectacled young fellow, wearing his derby hat pushed far back on a round, bald head, confronted him. “Who are you?” Brainard demanded, trying to close the door. The man grinned back: “And who are you?” He had shoved his right leg into

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IX

IX

When Brainard awoke the next morning the train was moving through the Mojave desert. He lay for some time in his berth trying to collect himself and realize all that had brought him thither. It was intensely hot in the narrow compartment that he had taken, and when he raised the window curtains the sunlight reflected from the desert was blinding. As he drew down the curtain, his eyes fell upon the large bag beside him, and with a start the adventure of the previous day came over him. He laug

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X

X

“Only a bridge gone,” was the word disgustedly handed back from mouth to mouth. There had been an unusual fall of rain in the arid country to the north, and for a few hours one of the arroyos had become a boiling flood, which had swept away a substantial new bridge. The passengers straggled forward to the scene of trouble. In the curious half light of the sun sinking into the desert behind and illuminating all the vast high plain with a brilliant reddish light, the huddle of passengers along t

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XI

XI

Brainard did not follow the old plainsman’s advice to stick to the railroad for his travels. Instead, he induced Gunnison to leave his dugout and guide his chance guest across the Mexican border. It was not as easy as it looks on the map in the railroad folder to get from Phantom, Arizona—which was the name of the water tank where he had dropped from the train—into the State of Chihuahua; but Brainard did not feel pressed for time. Indeed he judged it might be as well for him to remain out of

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XII

XII

The next day Brainard entered the City of Mexico, lean and brown and hard, with a very much travel-stained valise. So far as he could learn from the few American newspapers he had come across, there had been no further excitement over Krutzmacht’s death, and the robbery of his safe. If a pursuit had been undertaken, the fact had been carefully kept from the press; and he felt confident that by this time either it had been given up, or the persons interested were watching the wrong places. Ther

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XIII

XIII

If there was a spot on the round earth where a somewhat weary fugitive might spend a few quiet days in absolute retirement, undisturbed by inquisitive intruders, it must surely be the little Mexican town of Jalapa. Situated on a gentle hill not far from the snowy dome of Orizaba, about midway between the hot coast and the lofty central plateau, Jalapa is a mass of green verdure and possesses a delightful climate. All about on the slopes of Orizaba and in the green valleys are extensive coffee

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XIV

XIV

Very early the next morning after the usual deep cup of chocolate Brainard joined Hollinger and Major Calloway, and the little party set forth on horseback. They rode through the silent town, between high walls jealously guarding the privacy of large gardens, out into the fields which were drenched with a heavy dew like rain. The birds sang in the arching trees above the road. The sun came up from a golden mist in the lowlands below and touched the hoary crest of Orizaba. Brainard had never

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XV

XV

Brainard stood without moving until his muscles ached. Then he dropped to the floor, crawled over to the bed, and felt beneath the bolster, where he had taken the precaution to conceal his bag when he had left that morning. It was still there. The room had been casually searched, or possibly his pursuers had only just arrived by a delayed train. At any rate, he had until the next morning. The woman and her companion would not be likely to make a disturbance that night, feeling that they had

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XVI

XVI

The Transatlantique line steamer Toulouse lay off the breakwater of Vera Cruz, smoking fiercely, anchor up, passengers all aboard, ready to sail for Havre. Her departure had been delayed nearly eighteen hours by a fierce “norther,” which had not yet exhausted its fury. They had been anxious hours for Brainard, who had gone aboard the night before, in the expectation of sailing immediately. Now the black smoke pouring from the funnel indicated that the captain had decided to proceed, and Brain

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XVII

XVII

Three hours later the passengers of the Toulouse were aboard a special train for Paris, and in a first-class compartment Brainard was seated, facing his valise, and looking out upon the pleasant landscape of the Loire valley, a contented expression on his brown young face. He had already formulated to himself the exact plot of his movements from the moment he reached Paris. From the pleasant Frenchwoman who had been his neighbor at the ship’s table he had learned the address of a little hotel i

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XVIII

XVIII

When a servant had ushered Brainard into a private salon of the old Bible Hotel, and discreetly closed the door, an alert, middle-aged German with grizzled hair and close-trimmed beard rose from a table and advanced with outstretched hand. “Mr. Brainard, I presume?” he said in fluent English. “I am Adolf Schneider.” “So it’s important enough for the old boy to come himself!” Brainard thought as they shook hands. Herr Schneider cast a quick look at the small bag which the servant had taken from

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XIX

XIX

Five days later Brainard stood chatting with Herr Adolf Schneider and Herr Nathan Schneider on the broad granite steps of the Crédit Lyonnais in Paris. The transfer of all Krutzmacht’s papers, except the packages of bonds, had just been completed within the bank, and receipts for them had been given to the young American, together with drafts on New York for two millions of dollars. “May I inquire what you intend to do now?” Herr Nathan asked, simple curiosity on his broad face. “I’m going to p

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XX

XX

To get to that pin-prick on the map called Monument, Arizona, you drop off the railroad at Defiance, which is somewhere east of the water tank named Phantom, and then follow an old post road across the lofty plateau in the direction of the mountains to the southwest. After something more than twenty miles, the trail strikes a deeply sunk river bed that winds like a gigantic serpent over the desert toward the declining sun. In one of the coils of this dead river serpent lies what is left of the

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XXI

XXI

In the morning, when he descended to the bar-room of the Waldorf in search of nourishment, the old miner greeted him. “I thought,” he said suggestively, “maybe you’d like to see the mine. The Limited don’t reach Defiance until evenin’. The mine ain’t but a little ways out from here. You might be interested in lookin’ it over.” “All right!” Brainard exclaimed. “Let’s see the mine.” He had been so much preoccupied with Melody, the girl, that he had altogether forgotten about Krutzmacht’s inte

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I

I

“So that’s why I missed you in San Francisco four years ago!” Brainard exclaimed. “Because you wanted to write a play!” He threw back his head and laughed as if the idea was peculiarly ironical. “Yes!” the ex-reporter Farson replied, with an echo of Brainard’s irony. “You see I had always meant to be a playwright and took to reporting to make a living. When you came along and gave me that five hundred for helping you crack the safe and get away with the contents, I chucked the newspaper job a

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II

II

It was a curious figure that entered the room. The Scotsman was short, thick-set, about fifty years old, with a round, bald head fringed with white hair. He was dressed with an evident attempt at youthful smartness, and dangled a small cane. Between his thick lips was the end of a black cigar. His large face, portentous brows, and mild blue eyes looked as if he had started as Falstaff and ended as a Scottish Hamlet. MacNaughton bowed profoundly, and said in deep, measured tones, that were re

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III

III

The new secretary had some difficulty in convincing Brainard of the importance of what he called “publicity.” His own varied experience as a newspaper and magazine writer had given him a deep faith in this modern method of propaganda. He constituted himself at once the publicity agent of the new undertaking. “It’s the only way to do things in this country. You must scatter your idea about in the newspapers and magazines, get people to talk about it and read about it, or it is dead before you

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IV

IV

Mrs. Donnie Pearmain, as everybody knows, is the only daughter of old Joseph P. Barton, the founder of the milk trust, and derived her very ample personal fortune from that famous financier’s successful manipulation of the milk market. Starting as a plain New Jersey farmer, who peddled his own milk, Barton organized the great trust, and when he died was its largest individual stockholder. It was he, too, who first generally introduced the use of the small glass bottle instead of the large tin

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V

V

It was very nearly a year from the day of the disastrous luncheon at Mrs. Pearmain’s before the new theater was ready for rehearsal of the first play. The year, as Brainard had foreseen, had been replete with education, if nothing else. To find a suitable site for a popular playhouse, to erect thereon a pleasing building, commodious and attractive in design, and to engage a competent body of actors, would not seem a tremendous task. It had been done before; in fact, Messrs. Einstein &amp;

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VI

VI

At last, amid turmoil and excitement, the opening day came. Brainard and Farson had been at the theater since early morning, doing what they could to bring order out of chaos. About lunch time MacNaughton rushed up to them, his face white with excitement. “A telegram from Miss Leroy!” he gasped. “Doctor thinks she’s got appendicitis. She’s got Einsteinitis, all right,—that’s what is the matter with her! We can’t raise an actress in New York who knows Cordelia’s lines, let alone having rehea

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VII

VII

The pleasant drawing-room and the library of the theater, which were on the second floor above the foyer, had been thrown open after the performance, and a few well-wishers of the enterprise lingered there to examine the new playhouse and to meet the shamefaced members of the company, to whom Brainard was giving a supper. Miss Delacourt did not appear with the others. “She’s probably gone home, poor girl,” Farson said, as Brainard started to find her. He went directly to the dressing rooms and

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VIII

VIII

When Brainard confided to Farson the plan he had formed for Louisiana Delacourt’s education, the younger man looked sharply at him for one moment as if he also suspected ulterior motives in this unexpected interest in the young woman, who had given the People’s Theater such dubious notoriety by her performance of Cordelia. In that rapid interchange of glances between the two men, Brainard felt for the first time a slight antagonism to his cheerful and companionable secretary. Why should Farson

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IX

IX

After the inglorious failure of Lear , they tried She Stoops to Conquer , with Cecilia Pyce, an English actress of advancing years and a large and bony physique, whom MacNaughton much vaunted. Brainard suspected that Cissie, as Mac called her, had been the Scotsman’s sweetheart in her palmier days, and thus he was now paying his sentimental debts by giving her a lucrative position at his patron’s expense. However, nothing better offered at present, and Miss Pyce at least knew how to act in the

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X

X

They found the leading lady waiting for them on the darkened stage. She was dressed quite handsomely in her street costume, with the inevitable fur coat that seems the most characteristic mark of her profession. Without her makeup and stage costume she looked much older than Brainard remembered her to be and also stouter. But her dark face and flashing eyes still preserved an air of confident assurance in her good looks that had characterized Krutzmacht’s stenographer. “Good evening, Mr. Wilk

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XI

XI

At this point Hollinger and Farson returned to the room. Hollinger looked quickly at the position of the two, smiled placidly, and helped himself to another cigar from the box on the table. “Exchanging confidences?” he inquired. “Miss Walters persists in acting all the time,” Brainard replied. “She thinks this is a sequel to the play and wants me to hand over to her a lot of money.” “Sometimes,” Hollinger observed sententiously, “that’s the easiest way to square things, isn’t it?” Brainard loo

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XII

XII

Brainard carefully put out all the lights on the lower floor and then mounted the stairs to the room above. There he found Farson smoking a cigarette before the open fire and staring straight before him, as if his mind was occupied with a novel set of ideas. At sight of Brainard a curious smile crossed his face, and he looked interrogatively at his employer. “Well?” he murmured. “They are a pretty pair of—I was going to say crooks. But I don’t think my friend Hollinger is exactly that—I hope

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XIII

XIII

The perfectly correct New York lawyers to whom Brainard told his tale later that morning evinced no surprise. There was nothing in the heart or brain of man, they seemed to say, that could flutter a New York lawyer. “It would be advisable to find Miss Melody straightway,” they felt, and inquired what sort of title Brainard held to the Arizona mine. When he confessed that it was only a tax title, they remarked that under the Arizona laws any heirs of the dead German had a year more in which to

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XIV

XIV

Nevertheless, Brainard felt depressed as the time drew near when the doors of his theater would have to close, the windows be boarded up. Even should he win the case against the fraudulent claimants of the Melody, the great Idea could never be wholly perfected in all the splendid details that he had dreamed. No one man, were he Croesus incarnate, could create a national art. He had learned that. . . . On the afternoon of the first rehearsal of Her Great Adventure , Brainard came early to the

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XV

XV

As the big, pot-bellied steamship was being slowly pushed into her berth, Brainard, standing at the end of the pier, fancied that he could recognize two little figures on the upper deck. These feminine figures, rather eccentrically dressed, were evidently the knot of a laughing, joking circle of American men, all exhilarated by their approaching return to their beloved city. When the great black hull threw its shadow over the dock, one of the little figures waved both arms. “That’s Louisiana,

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XVI

XVI

If the young dramatist had been disappointed by Miss Delacourt’s apparent lack of interest in his play and in the part of Gertrude on the occasion of that first luncheon, he was quickly reassured by the energetic way in which, beginning with the next day, she threw herself into her work. As soon as she had time “to roll up her sleeves,” as she expressed it, she plunged into the rehearsals, an incarnation of work and enthusiasm. To be sure, she put the author through some uncomfortable hours whi

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XVII

XVII

Latterly the critics had completely ignored the existence of the People’s Theater. Its announcements aroused no more public interest than the program of an ethical culture society. Brainard, who had at last learned the real importance of publicity, feared lest this same contemptuous indifference on the part of the press might bury his young secretary’s play in hasty and undeserved oblivion. But as he sank into his seat on the following Monday night he was surprised and relieved at the size and

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XVIII

XVIII

As he had promised, Brainard attended to the business affairs of Melody’s estate. The lawyers easily obtained a stay of proceedings and a retrial. With the proof of Krutzmacht’s real marriage to the mother of the young actress, the case dropped like a cracked egg, before it got to court. Hollinger and the counsel, who had been “staking” Miss Walters in her attempt, foresaw dangerous consequences and withdrew precipitately from the case. After the smoke had cleared away, Brainard did not forg

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XIX

XIX

“And what shall we do with the theater?” Brainard asked, in a lucid interval, early in June. “Shall we sell it to Einstein &amp; Flukeheimer for vaudeville? Or shall we keep it for a certain American actress when she wearies of matrimony? Or shall we try to put new life into the great Idea, and keep on giving the dear Public what bores it, because it’s good for the dear Public to be bored?” “I never thought much of your great Idea,” Melody confessed candidly. “The trouble with it is that

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