The ambition of Mark Truitt

Contents

CHAPTBK TAGM

I Dreams 1

II The Path of Youth 21

Chapter I

HE drifted into the delectable land that lies between sleep and waking, tasting the fleeting savor of his dreams — the epic visions of full-blooded youth. They had passed just beyond memory, leaving a confused yet glowing sense of sharp combats waged, of victories won. A golden haze enveloped him. Through it filtered a dwindling resonance, as of some noble processional sung by a departing far-distant choir.

A wave of delight rippled over him. Then the thought that, not sharing his slumber, had painted his colorful dreams, worked to the surface.

"My last day here !"

He awoke slowly. Before him, seen through the unshuttered window, lay a world somber enough to one tugging against its restraints, lovely when it was to be left behind. He saw the September sun peep over the hills at the head of the valley, rise majestically and swing clear, a golden disk hung in the sky, symbol of the reward of men's struggles; its radiance, streaming into the little room, dispelled shabbiness with a mellow glow he could almost feel.

i

Purplish shadows rested on the eastern slopes — the hue that is the badge of conquest. The breeze brought its offering, a rich earthy fragrance that he inhaled eagerly. The matin sounds arose, according finely with the lingering echoes of his dream music. He reveled in a new perception.

He was twenty years old.

He was not one to loll. He sprang from bed and stood naked : supple beautiful youth, too slender for great strength but with the unconscious grace of the wild animal. Something animal-like, too, was the pleased look that played over his face, as he breathed in the fragrance of the morning. It was an odd face, swarthy from the summer sun, neither weak nor strong but unset : the countenance of youth untried. Yet it was not without its promise. He would do or be nothing negative, this youth ; the dark restless eyes, deep-set and wide apart, proclaimed intensity, primitive passion.

He dressed and stood by the window in the attitude of a listener. Intently he sought to define the faint other-world resonance that still seemed to vibrate about him. But the theme eluded him.

His illusion was effectually shattered. Into the subdued melody of the Sabbath morning thrust a profane intruder, the jerky wheezing notes of a cabinet organ in the day's hymns, played by some one who aspired beyond endowment.

He frowned, then threw back his head and laughed silently — a trick he had sometimes — at the absurd anticlimax.

"I'm still in Bethel. It's a long way from here to — there." He drew a long deep breath.

A question halted him. "There — where?"

He shook his head vigorously, as though to throw off the query, and went down to the kitchen.

The odor of frying ham saluted his nostrils ; he sniffed it hungrily. A man, apparently old, was placing heavy, chipped ironware dishes on the table. He nodded briefly in response to the youth's blithe greeting.

"I'll be ready," he said in a dull flat voice, "time ye're back from the stable," and continued his slow precise setting of the table.

In a few minutes the other returned, the horses fed and his own hands and face scrubbed in cold water from the cistern. They sat down without speaking. The youth ate eagerly, gulpingly.

When the first keenness of appetite was gone, burning to talk of the great hour at hand, he broke the silence. "Well, father, this is my last day in Bethel."

The old man merely nodded, keeping his eyes on his plate.

Boyishly the son began to set forth his plans and hopes and expectations; they were not small. But the old man maintained his silence. The youth conceived him to be an unsympathetic audience.

"Guess you're not interested," he said a trifle sulkily.

"Yes, I'm intrusted, Mark," the father answered, "but there ain't anything to say." He raised his glance to the window. "Guess I couldn't say anything that'd help much."

The sweep of youth's anticipation faltered before a quality in the old man's words. Old, "old Simon" : so his neighbors called him. Yet he was not really old, but in the noonday of life wore the gray mantle of age. For he, too, had dreamed his big golden dreams. Below the village stood a dismantled rotting forge, monument to their futility. Most men have in them only one big battle; of them was Simon Truitt. After his failure he had returned to his shop and trade, shoeing his neighbors' horses, mending their wagons and plows, a dull-eyed, taciturn, spiritless plodder. A hint of the tragedy of failure, bread of the majority, came to the young man. A cloud had passed across the sun. They finished the meal in heavy silence.

At length Simon Truitt rose and began to clear the table. The son moved toward the door. There he paused, vaguely sensible of a sorrow to which some soothing word was to be said. But the word would not come to lips unschooled in such tender office. He went slowly out into the sunshine.

In the stable he curried the horses, lingering over the pretty brown mare — latest and finest trophy of his horse-trading — until her coat shone satiny. This labor of love ended, he lighted a pipe and sat in the stable doorway. The warm sun beat upon him; the shadow cast by a glimpsed shipwreck lifted.

He sat there until from across the town came a flat unmusical clamor, the cracked church bell calling the faithful — that is to say, all Bethel save one — to worship. He rose reluctantly. Soon he emerged from the little house, shaved to the blood and clad in the discomfort of Sunday clothes. The lithe animal-like grace had departed.

Always on warm Sabbath mornings Simon Truitt was to be found sitting on the stoop, and always facing the north; the dismantled forge lay to the south. He was that one for whom the cracked bell tolled in vain ; he was supposed to be an atheist.

"Goin' to church?" he asked in the expressionless tone that was his habit.

"I guess so," answered Mark. "Unless," with sudden understanding, "you'd like me to stay."

Simon hesitated, then shook his head. "No, ye'd better go same as always. Courtney'd want ye to."

"I owe him a lot."

Simon nodded. "More'n to — any one else here. Think a good deal o' him, don't ye ?"

"Yes. Sometimes he's kind o' queer, though."

Simon nodded again. "D'ye," he asked unexpectedly, "d'ye believe what he preaches?"

"Why, yes!" said Mark. "Yes, I s'pose so," he amended.

The dull glance momentarily sharpened. "Not very much, I expect. Better believe it hard — or not at all. It's most time fur church."

Mark swung heavily down the path. The father's eyes followed him wistfully. One might even have said that the pity which a few hours before had dwelt in the son's glance now crept into the father's.

Mark joined the straggling procession that moved, stiffly decorous, toward the house of worship. Once, during the short journey, a spring wagon overtook and passed him; a girl in the rear seat turned and nodded. A wave of red surged into his dark face. Until the wagon drove into the churchyard, his glance clung to the mass of yellow hair under the pink hat. Unconsciously his step quickened.

He found an empty pew near the door, and entering, leaned back, half closing his eyes. A solemn hush fell ; the service began. He followed the congregation as it rose and sat in hymn and prayer and lesson ; but he moved mechanically, without thought of worship. To him had come again that vague sense cf battles fought and won, the faint blurred echoes of distant music. The man in the pulpit, feebly struggling against a sense of futility, was preaching to him. But the dreaming youth did not understand; the gentle, sometimes plaintive voice could not dispel his vision. Often his glance sought the far corner where a shaft of morning sunshine had set a mass of yellow hair ashimmering. The sight and his dreams gave him a new and daring resolve. The hour sped swiftly.

"Unto Him ... be glory and majesty, dominion and power. . . . Amen!"

The solemn stately words died away in a whisper. Again fell the brief reverent hush.

The youth awoke to the fact that the congregation was beginning to disperse. He went quietly from the church; in the yard he took a station by which the farmer folk must pass to their vehicles and there, as he had resolved, boldly, in the eyes of all, he waited for her. Young farmers, on their way to hitch up, saw the eager figure and passed sly comment. He was not disturbed. The spell was still upon him ; for these heavy-witted jokers he had but the explorer's contempt for timid unimaginative stay-at-homes.

She appeared, a slender girl who, as she moved slowly around the church, wove a spell over the betrousered portion of Bethel, even where she had not the subtle aid of dreams. She was not small but, neatly made, gave an effect of daintiness not characteristic of the maids of that valley. Heavy flaxen braids — almost lifeless in the shadow, burnished gold in the sunlight — framed a dainty face, not regular in feature but clear-cut as a cameo and of a coloring so delicate as to seem almost pallor; a spirited face, girlish, and when occasion called, appealing. Dainty, too, were the white muslin dress, the pink hat with its nicely knotted ribbons, and at least in advance of the fashions regnant in Bethel ; over her shoulder, at graceful angle, slowly twirled a small white parasol.

Whence this dainty blossom amid the less comely if more florid daughters of Bethel?

Into the valley, three years before, had strayed a plausible gentleman who discussed education;

in particular, education as dispensed at Miss Smith's Seminary for Young Ladies, an institution of Concord, forty miles away. And so glowing was his eloquence that Squire Martin, measuring cube roots and Latin declensions against his hard won dollars, sent his youngest daughter to acquire what he had not; what could the honest squire know of those higher things discussed and learned in seminaries for young ladies ? There had been born an intimate acquaintance with The Ladies' Home Journal and kindred magazines.

And for the rest, there were her hands, white and soft; her sisters', to take no wider example, were rough and red. For Unity was supposed to be "delicate", hence was spared those arduous tasks that leave so little time to study of beauty hints and fashions. If there were some to suggest that "Squire Martin's family let Unity make fools of 'em," at least no males were among these critics.

Self-conscious to the finger-tips but not betraying it, she picked her dainty way among the gossiping groups, tossing gay little smiles to this and that intoxicated youth, blissfully deaf to an occasional feminine titter in her wake. As with that mythological being who by her walk stood revealed a very goddess, so Unity's languid ladylike air proclaimed her finer clay. Unity would have been the first to admit that, though an unkindly fate had set her in Bethel, she was not of it.

And so she came to a halt beside Mark, looking up with a smile that made him forget curious observers. The parasol continued to twirl lazily; he thought of a butterfly alighting only to fly away again.

"Good morning, Mark!"

"Unity !" His voice was low, tense, as though he announced some tragic happening.

She continued to smile; a family group, frank curiosity in their gaze, was passing. "Wasn't Doctor Courtney's sermon fine this morning! I thought — " The group had passed. "What is it?"

"I'm going away to-morrow."

The parasol stopped suddenly in the tightened clasp. The pose fell from her; the vivacity from her face, leaving it very serious. One saw then that her extreme girlishness was only an effect, that she was at least as old as he. One saw, too, in the thin line of her lips and the set little chin why her hands were white and soft and her sisters' otherwise.

"To the city? For good?"

"To the city. For good."

"I am glad."

"Glad!" he stammered. "I thought — I wanted you to be sorry."

"Yes," she nodded emphatically. "I'm glad — for you," she added more softly.

He remained silent, an unreasoning, indefinite disappointment lingering. Something he wanted — he could not say what — was lacking in her words.

"Aren't you glad?"

to THE AMBITION OF MARK TRUITT

"Yes, but — " He dismissed the doubt. His eagerness returned. "I'm going driving this afternoon."

She became girlish again. "Is that an invitation?" with a demure little smile.

"If you want to go."

"Of course, Mister Solemn! Aren't you — " She stopped, apparently overcome with confusion for her boldness.

"Say it !" he besought thirstily.

There was a delicious moment of uncertainty, a breathless little laugh.

"My lover. There! I'll be waiting for you, just after dinner." And the butterfly fluttered away.

He went from the churchyard and followed the street past the point where it returned to its native state of dusty, weed-flanked, country pike. He came to a place where the road rose sharply and fell again. Mounting to the crest, he threw himself on the roadside and waited; thither Richard Courtney would come on the after-service walk that was his custom.

Before him lay the valley, a great wide basin encircled by a broken rampart of hills as yet unravished of their first growth. From its placid river, slender relic of the flood that had cut this fertile valley out of the rock, glanced the sheen of midday. A few billowing masses of snow-white vapor hung overhead; their shadows drifted lazily over hill and meadow. The breeze had fallen; through a heavy languorous stillness came the ceaseless song of the distant rapids. It was an hour of peace, of rest.

DREAMS ii

But youth thinks not upon peace, asks not rest. Sweep of valley, play of color on the hills, shining river and majestic frigates of the sky were to him but the background for a girlish figure that tripped lightly before him, looked up to him with alluring eyes. Youthlike, he invested her with charms ineffable, witting not that she whom he loved was but the creature of his own desire. Pride swelled within him — was not she, so much finer made than other women, to be his? Unworded but wonderful thoughts of her stirred. She fused with his dreams of the morning, interpreted them for him. For her he would endure the shock of battle, bring home the trophies.

The moment of disappointment was forgotten.

Up the rise, village-bound, leisurely creaked an ancient top-buggy. In it slouched a middle-aged man upon whose face were written humor and patience, qualities of which he had great need just then. His horse labored heavily at its task, head hanging low; not the bellows in Simon Truitt's smithy puffed louder or harder. At the crest it stopped without urging. Mark frowned impatiently. Then he noted the sad state of the horse and a grin displaced the frown.

"Hear you're going away," "Doc" Hedges remarked. "For the good of the town?"

Mark nodded, the grin widening. "Maybe you'd like to help pay my fare?"

"I have helped," the doctor rejoined dryly. "Going to get rich, ain't you? They all think that."

"It happens sometimes."

"You might, though. Any man ought to get rich that could sell me this — would you call it a horse ?"

"Hmml" Mark considered the animal judicially. "Well, it has four legs."

"So's a billy goat," drawled the doctor. "Goat'd be more use to me, too."

"What did you buy it for, then?"

"I ain't squealing. Pretty slick customer, ain't you?"

The grin returned. "I can sell horses," Mark modestly admitted, "to some people."

"Humph! Only a fool'd buy 'em of you," the doctor agreed. "What'll you take for the brown mare ?"

"The brown mare isn't for sale."

"Any horse is for sale," the doctor insisted, "at the right price. Give you a hundred and fifty."

"I wouldn't sell her for two-fifty."

"You won't have the chance, either. I'll throw in Bucephalus" — thus he designated his steed — "for boot."

Mark shook his head with an air of finality. "I've got other uses for the mare."

"Mean that?"

Mark nodded. The doctor sighed and clucked to the weary horse.

As it laboriously got under way, he leaned out of the buggy to call back, "Saw you sparking Unity Martin the other night. Hope you get her. She'll make you a" — he grinned sardonically and raised his voice that his point might not miscarry— "a heap wise man, sonny."

Mark frowned again. The doctor was a distinctly discordant note.

Out of the dusty cloud trailing behind the creaky buggy emerged a tall stooping figure, clad in the rusty black of the country clergyman. He walked slowly, and when he came to the rise, with a slight effort ; evidently he was a frail man physically. At the crest he stopped, breathing hard.

"Taking a good-by look at it ?" he asked between breaths.

"No. Just waiting for you."

The preacher smiled faintly; the worn dispirited face lighted up a little. He turned his glance to the valley.

"It's worth a farewell. You'll be homesick for it sometimes — I hope. Shall we walk a bit farther?"

At his lagging pace they tramped along the road, constantly rising and descending but always reaching up toward a higher level. They kept the frank silence of those who have been companions often. Under cover of an apparent abstraction the preacher gravely scrutinized the youth, asking himself again the question that had been uppermost in his mind ever since he learned that the other was to take the path beaten by so many questing youths of Bethel.

Ten years before Richard Courtney had resigned the city congregation that was steadily withering under his ministry and had come to shepherd the little flock of Bethel. It proved to be a life sentence, but in the end he stayed, if not gladly, at least with such Christian fortitude as a quivering sensitive soul could summon; having found — so he put it — a need to which he could minister. In the early days of his new service he had discovered a neglected, unlettered, moody youngster suffering under the blight of his relation to Simon Truitt, who, for his supposed atheism, was accounted a little less than respectable. Some quality in the boy caught the preacher's fancy. Tactfully he sought to win into Mark's heart, not a very difficult task once the lad learned that ministerial conversation was not confined to graphic pictures of eternal torment. And then, not quite realizing how this new interest eked out the Christian fortitude just mentioned, he set about to make Mark over. From Richard Courtney the blacksmith's son had had his Vergil and Xenophon and Homer, his Euclid and Ouackenbos. What may have been best of all, he had had Richard Courtney.

And Richard Courtney had had Mark Truitt. Gradually the boy came to be the test of the preacher's service, the justification of his life which the shelved man craves. In the intense, imaginative, quick-brained lad he thought he discerned a rare spirit fitted to be a chevalier of the Lord, a fighter of others' battles, a bearer of others' burdens; thus we may read what Richard Courtney would have made his own life. He, the exile, had failed ; but in the larger life from which he had been banished he would live again and be felt through a fine strong man of his making. For ten years he had jealously surveyed the prospect, patiently toiled and prayed that it might be.

But now, when the day for which he had prepared was come, he was not happy. The question continually recurred. How well had he builded?

He was not, when he put aside the tinted glasses of hope, blinded by many illusions. He considered his work honestly: how incomplete, after all, it was; how vainly they strive who seek through parrot-wise repetition to impart the knowledge life alone can give, through much preaching and many books to give understanding. With suddenly clarified vision he beheld the youth at his side, raw, unshaped, the reaches of his soul as yet unlighted by purpose, unwarmed by inspiration. After ten years he was almost as Richard Courtney had found him.

"I have scoured the windows. I can not give the light," thought the preacher sadly.

They came to a moss-covered watering-trough that stood at the roadside. Mark went to it and leaned over to drink.

"Wait!'' commanded the preacher.

"But I'm thirsty."

"Wait!"

With a smile Mark obeyed. He was used to queer commands from this man. They went on, each busy with his own thoughts. Courtney's questions continued. Had he failed again completely? And why ?

He became aware that Mark had broken the silence. "I — I owe you a lot," he had said.

"Not very much," Courtney sighed. "I wish it were more — much more."

"Oh, yes, it is much. You've taught me to read and talk and — and think." Courtney repressed an unhappy smile. "You've made me — see big. You've got me ready to go away from here. I — I appreciate it."

"I'd rather you could see true. But must you go?" The plea was without spirit; he knew its uselessness. "There's a life to be lived here, even by a man who sees big. I wish you would stay, at least for a while."

"No, I must go now. I've a reason you don't know."

The preacher felt a jealous pang.

"I," he thought, "for ten years have been giving my best thought, my best prayers, to the making of this boy. ... A pretty face crosses his path, and in a moment my fine creation shrinks to this passionate young animal — merely shrewd where I would have him big, exulting in strength where I wanted him to rejoice in service, desirous where I have taught him to aspire. ... I have failed again."

After a while he said aloud, "Did you by any chance hear my sermon this morning ?"

Mark looked away, uncomfortable. "Only part of it. I was thinking pretty hard."

"Of yellow braids and a pretty complexion," Courtney said to himself bitterly.

Mark was frowning in an effort to recall and piece together detached phrases that had floated to him during the service and then, finding no welcome, floated away. "It was about," he said hesitatingly, "it was about a man finding his big idea."

"I am flattered." The dry droll inflection was a concealment.

"The big idea," said Mark vaguely, "does it mean —God?"

"It's His way of lifting the world forward. It's — " Courtney stopped abruptly, with a hopeless smile. He looked away across the hills.

Suddenly, with an oddly appealing gesture, he turned again to Mark. All the intense longing of the man who has dreamed and failed and yet clung to some fragment of his hope, painting his vision, breathed in his words.

"Some day you may remember I told you. It's the big purpose that sometimes comes to the big passionate man, to accomplish some work for its own sake; that grips him, drives him, makes him ruthless to his own desires, forgetful of his failures and blind to everything but his task; that transforms him into a narrow zealot, a fanatic, but a power — always a power, because he is his purpose incarnate. It is that without which the big man is wasted, because he is that dangerous useless thing, a force uncontrolled. . . . It's what I wanted you to have."

Mark stared. "I — I'm afraid I don't understand."

"And I," Courtney cried, "I can't make you understand! But you will know, when it comes to you." The fire began to die from his eyes and voice. "If it comes," he added.

"What is your big idea ?"

The man looked at him queerly.

"Ah! You shouldn't have asked that," he answered, in quick relapse to the odd dry inflection. "If I were not as I am, I should say — you."

And again Mark had to say, "But I don't understand."

Courtney did not try to enlighten him. "Let us go back," he said. They retraced their steps down the undulating road that led into the valley.

They had passed the watering-trough again before Mark noticed it. He stopped, pointing back to it.

"I think," he smiled, eager to soothe the disappointment he felt but could not explain in his mentor, "I understand that. I'd forgotten I was thirsty."

"You think so?" Courtney answered, almost roughly. "But you don't understand. Though that, at least, is something life will teach you — and before long. . . . You will forgive me if I am a bit sharp. I am a little disappointed to-day — in myself."

For a while Mark considered perplexedly this outburst. Then he dismissed it as one of the incomprehensible moments of a man whom, despite oddities, he liked very much. He returned to the thought that had led to the moment.

A little timidly he made the offer. "I'm going to leave the brown mare with you, if you'd like her."

But he needed not to fear. The moment had passed. The man who was big enough to suffer but not to achieve was gone; only the faded mild-mannered preacher remained.

"It's good of you to think of it. But you can sell her well. And you'll need the money."

"I know. But I want you to have her. I traded to get her for you."

Courtney would not spoil his pleasure. "Of course, I — " His acceptance halted. "No, give her to Doctor Hedges."

Mark shook his head. "I want you to have her."

"He needs a good horse. The one he has — "

"It was a fair trade," Mark asserted defensively.

A turn of the road brought them within sight of a great hill that stood across the valley. Over its level top swept breezes filtered pure through many leagues of forest. "Hedges Hill" the village called it, finding humorous matter therein.

Courtney pointed. "That is where the doctor wants to build his sanatorium for consumptives."

"I know. He's cracked over that. He'll never do it."

ao THE AMBITION OF MARK TRUITT

"Perhaps not. It would be too bad. It," Courtney added quietly, "is his big idea."

Mark looked long at the hill, as though from the site of the sanatorium in Spain might be gleaned some hint of the meaning of the "big idea."

After a while he said slowly, "Would you really rather he'd have the mare ?"

Chapter II

HAD Richard Courtney thought to look back to his own adolescence, he might have understood his failure.

Mark, whose life, the preacher supposed, was to be made over by many books and sermons on purpose, unselfishness and clean living, was in fact seeing a miracle of quite another sort unfold within him.

Companionship, once sought, had suddenly become distasteful. He was happy only when wandering alone in the woods, idle gun on shoulder, or drifting lazily in his canoe. In his wanderings river nook and forest were peopled, not as in former time by the bold fraternity called forth from his books, but by cloudy exquisite figures that danced before him and then whisked provokingly out of sight. To see a fluttering skirt in the distance or hear unexpectedly a ripple of girlish laughter was to put him in an inexplicable but delicious tremor. And no one taught him to understand the miracle.

Sometimes, shyly, ashamed without knowing why, he asked questions of Richard Courtney, but always he was put off with carefully inconclusive answers.

The unwisdom of maturity that seeks to blind budding youth to the first vital fact of its existence ! The knowledge — of the fact of an instinct, not of its relation— could not be denied him. He won it out of the air, from other boys beholding the same miracle, from chance sayings of the loafers around the stores. Once, left alone in Courtney's study, he strayed upon a volume of Arabian Nights from which no prudish hand had subtracted ; instinctively surreptitious, he carried it home.

The first ecstasy of sex knowledge passed. He added to his years and stature and was put to work in his father's shop. A while, for the most part, a new interest pushed his revelation into the background. The labor — not hard or prolonged — he liked. To swing hammer and sledge and feel them grow lighter in his grasp, to see the red iron taking form under his blows, were to him a joy, not a task. Congenial toil awoke another instinct: he wanted to "do something."

But the urgent first instinct, never quite asleep, stirred at capricious intervals, the more imperative for its lapses. At such times he would flee to the woods or river to feast his eyes and imagination upon the sensuous shadowy shapes his fancy conjured. And once, pretending a two days' hunt in the hills, he stole by a roundabout way, on passionate quest, to Concord. He returned, not ashamed but disappointed. And this, for him, was the interpretation of his miracle; he felt that a gross deception had been put upon him. In the reaction he renounced his miracle, utterly and forever — or so he thought.