William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
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see there's something you won't tell me. But I shall find it out." She threatened him half playfully.
"I wish you could," he answered. "Then perhaps you'd let me know." She opened the door for him now, and as he passed out he said gently, "I am tired, but I sha'n't begin to rest till I have had this talk with Atherton. I had better go."
"Yes," Olive assented, "you'd better." She added in banter, "You're altogether too mysterious to be of much comfort at home."
The family heard him close the outside door behind him after Olive came back to them, and she explained, "He's gone out to talk it over with Mr. Atherton."
His father gave a laugh of relief. "Well, if he leaves it to Atherton, I guess we needn't worry about it."
"The child isn't at all well," said his mother.
XXXIII
Halleck met Atherton at the door of his room with his hat and coat on. "Why, Halleck! I was just going to see if you had come home!"
"You needn't now," said Halleck, pushing by him into the room. "I want to see you, Atherton, on business."
Atherton took off his hat, and closed the door with one hand, while he slipped the other arm out of his overcoat sleeve. "Well, to tell the truth, I was going to mingle a little business myself with the pleasure of seeing you." He turned up the gas in his drop-light, and took the chair from which he had looked across the table at Halleck, when they talked there before. "It's the old subject," he said, with a sense of repetition in the situation. "I learn from Witherby that Hubbard has taken that money of yours out of the Events, and from what I hear elsewhere he is making ducks and drakes of it on election bets. What shall you do about it?"
"Nothing," said Halleck.
"Oh! Very well," returned Atherton, with the effect of being a little snubbed, but resolved to take his snub professionally. He broke out, however, in friendly exasperation: "Why in the world did you lend the fellow that money?"
Halleck lifted his brooding eyes, and fixed them half pleadingly, half defiantly upon his friend's face. "I did it for his wife's sake."
"Yes, I know," returned Atherton. "I remember how you felt. I couldn't share your feeling, but I respected it. However, I doubt if your loan was a benefit to either of them. It probably tempted him to count upon money that he hadn't earned, and that's always corrupting."
"Yes," Halleck replied. "But I can't say that, so far as he's concerned, I'm very sorry. I don't suppose it would do her any good if I forced him to disgorge any balance he may have left from his wagers?"
"No, hardly."
"Then I shall let him alone."
The subject was dismissed, and Atherton waited for Halleck to speak of the business on which he had come. But Halleck only played with the paper cutter which his left hand had found on the table near him, and, with his chin sunk on his breast, seemed lost in an unhappy reverie.
"I hope you won't accuse yourself of doing him an injury," said Atherton, at last, with a smile.
"Injury?" demanded Halleck, quickly. "What injury? How?"
"By lending him that money."
"Oh! I had forgotten that; I wasn't thinking of it," returned Halleck impatiently. "I was thinking of something different. I'm aware of disliking the man so much, that I should be willing to have greater harm than that happen to him,—the greatest, for what I know. Though I don't know, after all, that it would be harm. In another life, if there is one, he might start in a new direction; but that isn't imaginable of him here; he can only go from bad to worse; he can only make more and more sorrow and shame. Why shouldn't one wish him dead, when his death could do nothing but good?"
"I suppose you don't expect me to answer such a question seriously."
"But suppose I did?"
"Then I should say that no man ever wished any such good as that, except from the worst motive; and the less one has to do with such questions, even as abstractions, the better."
"You're right," said Halleck. "But why do you call it an abstraction?"
"Because, in your case, nothing else is conceivable."
"I told you I was willing the worst should happen to him."
"And I didn't believe you."
Halleck lay back in his chair, and laughed wearily. "I wish I could convince somebody of my wickedness. But it seems to be useless to try. I say things that ought to raise the roof, both to you here and to Olive at home, and you tell me you don't believe me, and she tells me that Mrs. Hubbard thinks me a saint. I suppose now, that if I took you by the button-hole and informed you confidentially that I had stopped long enough at 129 Clover Street to put Bartley Hubbard quietly out of the way, you wouldn't send for a policeman."
"I should send for a doctor," said Atherton.
"Such is the effect of character! And yet out of the fulness of the heart, the mouth speaketh. Out of the heart proceed all those unpleasant things enumerated in Scripture; but if you bottle them up there, and keep your label fresh, it's all that's required of you, by your fellow-beings, at least. What an amusing thing morality would be if it were not—otherwise. Atherton, do you believe that such a man as Christ ever lived?"
"I know you do, Halleck," said Atherton.
"Well, that depends upon what you call me. It what I was—if my well Sunday-schooled youth—is I, I do. But if I, poising dubiously on the momentary present, between the past and future, am I, I'm afraid I don't. And yet it seems to me that I have a fairish sort of faith. I know that, if Christ never lived on earth, some One lived who imagined him, and that One must have been a God. The historical fact oughtn't to matter. Christ being imagined, can't you see what a comfort, what a rapture, it must have been to all these poor souls to come into such a presence and be looked through and through? The relief, the rest, the complete exposure of Judgment Day—"
"Every day is Judgment Day," said Atherton.
"Yes, I know your doctrine. But I mean the Last Day. We ought to have something in anticipation of it, here, in our social system. Character is a superstition, a wretched fetish. Once a year wouldn't be too often to seize upon sinners whose blameless life has placed them above suspicion, and turn them inside out before the community, so as to show people how the smoke of the Pit had been quietly blackening their interior. That would destroy character as a cult." He laughed again. "Well, this isn't business,—though it isn't pleasure, either, exactly. What I came for was to ask you something. I've finished at the Law School, and I'm just ready to begin here in the office with you. Don't you think it would be a good time for me to give up the law? Wait a moment!" he said, arresting in Atherton an impulse to speak. "We will take the decent surprise, the friendly demur, the conscientious scruple, for granted. Now, honestly, do you believe I've got the making of a lawyer in me?"
"I don't think you're very well, Halleck," Atherton began.
"Ah, you're a lawyer! You won't give me a direct answer!"
"I will if you wish," retorted Atherton.
"Well."
"Do you want to give it up?"
"Yes."
"Then do it. No man ever prospered in it yet who wanted to leave it. And now, since it's come to this, I'll tell you what I really have thought, all along. I've thought that, if your heart was really set on the law, you would overcome your natural disadvantages for it; but if the time ever came when you were tired of it, your chance was lost: you never would make a lawyer. The question is, whether that time has come."
"It has," said Halleck.
"Then stop, here and now. You've wasted