The Turn of the Balance. Brand Whitlock
hair and a small mustache curled upward at the corners in a foreign way. His cheeks were ruddy; he carried a light cane and smoked a cigar. When he saw that Gusta had noticed him he smiled and Gusta blushed. Then he came up to her and took off his hat.
"Are you taking a walk?" he asked.
"I was going home," Gusta replied. She wondered how she could get away without hurting the young man's feelings, for he seemed to be pleasant, harmless and well meaning.
"It's a fine day," he said. "There's lots o' people out."
"Yes," said Gusta.
"Where 'bouts do you live?"
"On Bolt Street."
"Oh, I live out that way myself!" said the young man. "It's quite a ways from here. Been out to see some friends?"
"Yes." Gusta hesitated. "I had an errand to do out this way."
"Don't you want to go in the park and see the zoo? There's lots of funny animals back there." The young man pointed with his little cane down one of the gravel walks that wound among the trees. Gusta looked, and saw the people–young couples, women with children, and groups of young men, sauntering that way. Then she looked at the street-cars, loaded heavily, with passengers clinging to the running-boards; she was tempted to go, but it was growing late.
"No, thanks," she said, "I must be going home now."
"Are you going to walk or take the car?" asked the young man.
"I'll walk, I guess," she said; and then, lest he think she had no car fare, she added: "the cars are so crowded."
She started then, and was surprised when the young man naturally walked along by her side, swinging his cane and talking idly to her. At first she was at a loss whether to let him walk with her or not; she had a natural fear, a modesty, the feminine instinct, but she did not know just how to dismiss him. She kept her face averted and her eyes downcast; but finally, when her fears had subsided a little, she glanced at him occasionally; she saw that he was good-looking, and she considered him very well dressed. He had a gold watch chain, and when she asked him what time it was he promptly drew out a watch. Their conversation, from being at the first quite general, soon became personal, and before they had gone far Gusta learned that the young man's name was Charlie Peltzer, that he was a plumber, and that sometimes he made as much as twenty dollars a week. By the time they parted at the corner near Gusta's home they felt very well acquainted and had agreed to meet again.
After that they met frequently. In the evening after supper Gusta would steal out, Peltzer would be waiting for her at the corner, and they would stroll under the trees that were rapidly filling with leaves. Once, passing Policeman Crowley, Gusta saw him looking at them narrowly. There was a little triangular park not far from Gusta's home, and there the two would sit all the evening. The moon was full, the nights were soft and mild and warm. On Sundays they went to the park where they had met, and now and then they danced in the public pavilion. But Gusta never danced with any of the other men there, nor did Peltzer dance with any of the other girls; they danced always together, looking into each other's eyes. Now she could endure the monotony and the drudgery at home, the children's peevishness, her mother's melancholy, her father's querulousness. Even Archie's predicament lost its horror and its sadness for her. She had not yet, however, told Peltzer, and she felt ashamed of Archie, as if, in creating the possibility of compromising her, he had done her a wrong. She went about in a dream, thinking of Peltzer all the time, and of the wonderful thing that had brought all this happiness into her life.
Gusta had not, however, as yet allowed Peltzer to go home with her; he went within half a block of the house, and there, in the shadow, they took their long farewell. But Peltzer was growing more masterful; each night he insisted on going a little nearer, and at last one night he clung to her, bending over her, looking into her blue eyes, his lips almost on hers, and before they were aware they were at her door. Gusta was aroused by Crowley's voice. Crowley was there with her father, telling him again the one incident in all his official career that had distinguished him for a place in the columns of the newspapers. He was just at the climax of the thrilling incident, and they heard his voice ring out:
"An' I kept right on toowards him, an' him shootin' at me breasht four toimes–"
He had got up, in the excitement he so often evoked in living over that dramatic moment again, to illustrate the action, and he saw Gusta and Charlie. Peltzer stopped, withdrew his arm hurriedly from Gusta's waist, and then Crowley, forgetting his story, called out:
"Oh-ho, me foine bucko!"
Then Koerner saw Gusta, and, forgetting for a moment, tried to rise to his feet, then dropped back again.
"Who's dot feller mit you, huh? Who's dot now?" he demanded.
"Aw, tut, tut, man," said Crowley. "Shure an' the girl manes no harm at all–an' the laad, he's a likely wan. Shure now, Misther Koerner, don't ye be haard on them–they're that young now! An' 'tis the spring, do ye moind–and it's well I can see the phite flower on the thorn tra in me ould home these days!"
Gusta's heart and Peltzer's heart warmed to Crowley, but old Koerner said:
"In mit you!"
And she slipped hurriedly indoors.
But nothing could harm her now, for the world had changed.
XV
Archie Koerner served his thirty days in the workhouse, then, because he was in debt to the State for the costs and had no money with which to pay the debt, he was kept in prison ten days longer, although it was against the constitution of that State to imprison a man for debt. Forty days had seemed a short time to Bostwick when he pronounced sentence; had he chosen, he might have given Archie a sentence, in fine and imprisonment, that would have kept him in the workhouse for two years; he frequently did this with thieves. These forty days, too, had been brief to Marriott, and to Eades, and they had been brief to Elizabeth, who had found new happiness in the fact that Mr. Amos Hunter had given Dick a position in the banking department of his Title and Trust Company. These forty days, in fact, had passed swiftly for nearly every one in the city, because they were spring days, filled with warm sunshine by day, and soft and musical showers by night. The trees were pluming themselves in new green, the birds were singing, and people were happy in their release from winter; they were busied about new clothes, with riding and driving, with plans for summer vacations and schemes for the future; they were all imbued with the spirit of hope the spring had brought to the world again. To Gusta, too, in her love, these days had passed swiftly, like a hazy, golden dream.
But to Archie these forty days had not been forty days at all, but a time of infinite duration. He counted each day as it dragged by; he counted it when he came from his bunk in the morning; he counted it every hour during the long day's work over the hideous bricks he could find no joy in making; he counted it again at evening, and the last thing before he fell asleep. It seemed that forty days would never roll around.
They did pass finally, and a morning came when he could leave the comrades of his misery. He felt some regret in doing this; many of them had been kind to him, and friendships had been developed by means of whispers and signs, but more by the silent influence of a common suffering. He had quarreled and almost fought with some of them, for the imprisonment had developed the beast that was in them, and had made many of them morose, ugly, suspicious, dangerous, filling them with a kind of moral insanity. But he forgot all these enmities in the joy of his release, and he bade his friends good-by and wished them luck. In the superintendent's office they gave him back his clothes, and he went out again into the world.
It was strange to be at liberty again. His first unconscious impulse was to take up his life where he had left it off, but he did not know how to do this. For behind him stretched an unknown time, a blank, a break in his existence, which refused to adjust itself to the rest of his life; it bore no relation to that existence which was himself, his being, and yet it was there. The world that knew no such blank or break had gone on meanwhile and left him behind, and he could not catch up now. He was like a man who had been unconscious and had awakened with a blurred conception of things; it was as if he had come out of a profound anæsthesia, to find that he had been irrevocably maimed by some unnecessary operation in surgery.
Archie