AN ERROR IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION
Before he was thirty, he discovered that there was no one to play with him. Though the wealth of three toilsome generations stood to his account, though his tastes in the matter of books, bindings, rugs, swords, bronzes, lacquer, pictures, plate, statuary, horses, conservatories, and agriculture were educated and catholic, the public opinion of his country wanted to know why he did not go to office daily, as his father had before him.
So he fled, and they howled behind him that he was an unpatriotic Anglomaniac, born to consume fruits, one totally lacking in public spirit. He wore an eyegla.s.s; he had built a wall round his country house, with a high gate that shut, instead of inviting America to sit on his flower-beds; he ordered his clothes from England; and the press of his abiding city cursed him, from his eye-gla.s.s to his trousers, for two consecutive days.
When he rose to light again, it was where nothing less than the tents of an invading army in Piccadilly would make any difference to anybody. If he had money and leisure, England stood ready to give him all that money and leisure could buy. That price paid, she would ask no questions. He took his cheque-book and acc.u.mulated things--warily at first, for he remembered that in America things own the man. To his delight, he discovered that in England he could put his belongings under his feet; for cla.s.ses, ranks, and denominations of people rose, as it were, from the earth, and silently and discreetly took charge of his possessions.
They had been born and bred for that sole purpose--servants of the cheque-book. When that was at an end they would depart as mysteriously as they had come.
The impenetrability of this regulated life irritated him, and he strove to learn something of the human side of these people. He retired baffled, to be trained by his menials. In America, the native demoralises the English servant. In England, the servant educates the master. Wilton Sargent strove to learn all they taught as ardently as his father had striven to wreck, before capture, the railways of his native land; and it must have been some touch of the old bandit railway blood that bade him buy, for a song, Holt Hangars, whose forty-acre lawn, as every one knows, sweeps down in velvet to the quadruple tracks of the Great Buchonian Railway. Their trains flew by almost continuously, with a bee-like drone in the day and a flutter of strong wings at night. The son of Merton Sargent had good right to be interested in them. He owned controlling interests in several thousand miles of track,--not permanent way,--built on altogether different plans, where locomotives eternally whistled for grade-crossings, and parlor-cars of fabulous expense and unrestful design skated round curves that the Great Buchonian would have condemned as unsafe in a construction-line. From the edge of his lawn he could trace the chaired metals falling away, rigid as a bowstring, into the valley of the Prest, studded with the long perspective of the block signals, b.u.t.tressed with stone, and carried, high above all possible risk, on a forty-foot embankment.
Left to himself, he would have builded a private car, and kept it at the nearest railway-station, Amberley Royal, five miles away. But those into whose hands he had committed himself for his English training had little knowledge of railways and less of private cars. The one they knew was something that existed in the scheme of things for their convenience.
The other they held to be "distinctly American"; and, with the versatility of his race, Wilton Sargent had set out to be just a little more English than the English.
He succeeded to admiration. He learned not to redecorate Holt Hangars, though he warmed it; to leave his guests alone; to refrain from superfluous introductions; to abandon manners of which he had great store, and to hold fast by manner which can after labour be acquired. He learned to let other people, hired for the purpose, attend to the duties for which they were paid. He learned--this he got from a ditcher on the estate--that every man with whom he came in contact had his decreed position in the fabric of the realm, which position he would do well to consult. Last mystery of all, he learned to golf--well: and when an American knows the innermost meaning of "Don"t press, slow back, and keep your eye on the ball," he is, for practical purposes, denationalised.
His other education proceeded on the pleasantest lines. Was he interested in any conceivable thing in heaven above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth? Forthwith appeared at his table, guided by those safe hands into which he had fallen, the very men who had best said, done, written, explored, excavated, built, launched, created, or studied that one thing--herders of books and prints in the British Museum; specialists in scarabs, cartouches, and dynasties Egyptian; rovers and raiders from the heart of unknown lands; toxicologists; orchid-hunters; monographers on flint implements, carpets, prehistoric man, or early Renaissance music. They came, and they played with him. They asked no questions; they cared not so much as a pin who or what he was. They demanded only that he should be able to talk and listen courteously. Their work was done elsewhere and out of his sight.
There were also women.
"Never," said Wilton Sargent to himself, "has an American seen England as I"m seeing it"; and he thought, blushing beneath the bedclothes, of the unregenerate and blatant days when he would steam to office, down the Hudson, in his twelve-hundred-ton ocean-going steam-yacht, and arrive, by gradations, at Bleecker Street, hanging on to a leather strap between an Irish washerwoman and a German anarchist. If any of his guests had seen him then they would have said: "How distinctly American!" and--Wilton did not care for that tone. He had schooled himself to an English walk, and, so long as he did not raise it, an English voice. He did not gesticulate with his hands; he sat down on most of his enthusiasms, but he could not rid himself of The Shibboleth.
He would ask for the Worcestershire sauce: even Howard, his immaculate butler, could not break him of this.
It was decreed that he should complete his education in a wild and wonderful manner, and, further, that I should be in at that death.
Wilton had more than once asked me to Holt Hangars, for the purpose of showing how well the new life fitted him, and each time I had declared it creaseless. His third invitation was more informal than the others, and he hinted of some matter in which he was anxious for my sympathy or counsel, or both. There is room for an infinity of mistakes when a man begins to take liberties with his nationality; and I went down expecting things. A seven-foot dog-cart and a groom in the black Holt Hangars livery met me at Amberley Royal. At Holt Hangars I was received by a person of elegance and true reserve, and piloted to my luxurious chamber. There were no other guests in the house, and this set me thinking.
Wilton came into my room about half an hour before dinner, and though his face was masked with a drop-curtain of highly embroidered indifference, I could see that he was not at ease. In time, for he was then almost as difficult to move as one of my own countrymen, I extracted the tale--simple in its extravagance, extravagant in its simplicity. It seemed that Hackman of the British Museum had been staying with him about ten days before, boasting of scarabs. Hackman has a way of carrying really priceless antiquities on his tie-ring and in his trouser pockets. Apparently, he had intercepted something on its way to the Boulak Museum which, he said, was "a genuine Amen-Hotepa queen"s scarab of the Fourth Dynasty." Now Wilton had bought from Ca.s.savetti, whose reputation is not above suspicion, a scarab of much the same scarabeousness, and had left it in his London chambers. Hackman at a venture, but knowing Ca.s.savetti, p.r.o.nounced it an imposition. There was long discussion--savant versus millionaire, one saying: "ut I know it cannot be"; and the other: "But I can and will prove it." Wilton found it necessary for his soul"s satisfaction to go up to town, then and there,--a forty-mile run,--and bring back the scarab before dinner. It was at this point that he began to cut corners with disastrous results.
Amberley Royal station being five miles away, and putting in of horses a matter of time, Wilton had told Howard, the immaculate butler, to signal the next train to stop; and Howard, who was more of a man of resource than his master gave him credit for, had, with the red flag of the ninth hole of the links which crossed the bottom of the lawn, signalled vehemently to the first down-train; and it had stopped. Here Wilton"s account became confused. He attempted, it seems, to get into that highly indignant express, but a guard restrained him with more or less force--hauled him, in fact, backyards from the window of a locked carriage. Wilton must have struck the gravel with some vehemence, for the consequences, he admitted, were a free fight on the line in which he lost his hat, and was at last dragged into the guard"s van and set down breathless.
He had pressed money upon the man, and very foolishly had explained everything but his name. This he clung to, for he had a vision of tall head-lines in the New York papers, and well knew no son of Merton Sargent could expect mercy that side the water. The guard, to Wilton"s amazement, refused the money on the grounds that this was a matter for the Company to attend to. Wilton insisted on his incognito, and, therefore, found two policemen waiting for him at St. Botolph terminus.
When he expressed a wish to buy a new hat and telegraph to his friends, both policemen with one voice warned him that whatever he said would be used as evidence against him; and this had impressed Wilton tremendously.
"They were so infernally polite," he said. "If they had clubbed me I wouldn"t have cared; but it was, "Step this way, sir," and, "Up those stairs, please, sir," till they jailed me--jailed me like a common drunk, and I had to stay in a filthy little cubby-hole of a cell all night."
"That comes of not giving your name and not wiring your lawyer," I replied. "What did you get?"
"Forty shillings, or a month," said Wilton, promptly,--"next morning bright and early. They were working us off, three a minute. A girl in a pink hat--she was brought in at three in the morning--got ten days. I suppose I was lucky. I must have knocked his senses out of the guard. He told the old duck on the bench that I had told him I was a sergeant in the army, and that I was gathering beetles on the track. That comes of trying to explain to an Englishman."
"And you?"
"Oh, I said nothing. I wanted to get out. I paid my fine, and bought a new hat, and came up here before noon next morning. There were a lot of people in the house, and I told "em I"d been unavoidably detained, and then they began to recollect engagements elsewhere. Hackman must have seen the fight on the track and made a story of it. I suppose they thought it was distinctly American--confound "em! It"s the only time in my life that I"ve ever flagged a train, and I wouldn"t have done it but for that scarab. "T wouldn"t hurt their old trains to be held up once in a while."
"Well, it"s all over now," I said, choking a little. "And your name didn"t get into the papers. It is rather transatlantic when you come to think of it."
"Over!" Wilton grunted savagely. "It"s only just begun. That trouble with the guard was just common, ordinary a.s.sault--merely a little criminal business. The flagging of the train is civil, infernally civil,--and means something quite different. They"re after me for that now."
"Who?"
"The Great Buchonian. There was a man in court watching the case on behalf of the Company. I gave him my name in a quiet corner before I bought my hat, and--come to dinner now; I"ll show you the results afterwards." The telling of his wrongs had worked Wilton Sargent into a very fine temper, and I do not think that my conversation soothed him.
In the course of the dinner, prompted by a devil of pure mischief, I dwelt with loving insistence on certain smells and sounds of New York which go straight to the heart of the native in foreign parts; and Wilton began to ask many questions about his a.s.sociates aforetime--men of the New York Yacht Club, Storm King, or the Restigouche, owners of rivers, ranches, and shipping in their playtime, lords of railways, kerosene, wheat, and cattle in their offices. When the green mint came, I gave him a peculiarly oily and atrocious cigar, of the brand they sell in the tessellated, electric-lighted, with expensive-pictures of the nude adorned bar of the Pandemonium, and Wilton chewed the end for several minutes ere he lit it. The butler left us alone, and the chimney of the oak-panelled diningroom began to smoke.
"That"s another!" said he, poking the fire savagely, and I knew what he meant. One cannot put steam-heat in houses where Queen Elizabeth slept.
The steady beat of a night-mail, whirling down the valley, recalled me to business. "What about the Great Buchonian?" I said.
"Come into my study. That"s all--as yet."
It was a pile of Seidlitz-powders-coloured correspondence, perhaps nine inches high, and it looked very businesslike.
"You can go through it," said Wilton. "Now I could take a chair and a red flag and go into Hyde Park and say the most atrocious things about your Queen, and preach anarchy and all that, y" know, till I was hoa.r.s.e, and no one would take any notice. The Police d.a.m.n "em!--would protect me if I got into trouble. But for a little thing like flagging a dirty little sawed-off train,--running through my own grounds, too,--I get the whole British Const.i.tution down on me as if I sold bombs. I don"t understand it."
"No more does the Great Buchonian--apparently." I was turning over the letters. "Here"s the traffic superintendent writing that it"s utterly incomprehensible that any man should... Good heavens, Wilton, you have done it!" I giggled, as I read on.
"What"s funny now?" said my host.
"It seems that you, or Howard for you, stopped the three-forty Northern down."
"I ought to know that! They all had their knife into me, from the engine-driver up."
"But it"s the three-forty--the Induna--surely you"ve heard of the Great Buchonian"s Induna!"
"How the deuce am I to know one train from another? They come along about every two minutes."
"Quite so. But this happens to be the Induna--the one train of the whole line. She"s timed for fifty-seven miles an hour. She was put on early in the Sixties, and she has never been stopped--"
"I know! Since William the Conqueror came over, or King Charles hid in her smoke-stack. You"re as bad as the rest of these Britishers. If she"s been run all that while, it"s time she was flagged once or twice."
The American was beginning to ooze out all over Wilton, and his small-boned hands were moving restlessly.
"Suppose you flagged the Empire State Express, or the Western Cyclone?"
"Suppose I did. I know Otis Harvey--or used to. I"d send him a wire, and he"d understand it was a ground-hog case with me. That"s exactly what I told this British fossil company here."
"Have you been answering their letters without legal advice, then?"
"Of course I have."
"Oh, my Sainted Country! Go ahead, Wilton."
"I wrote "em that I"d be very happy to see their president and explain to him in three words all about it; but that wouldn"t do. "Seems their president must be a G.o.d. He was too busy, and--well, you can read for yourself--they wanted explanations. The stationmaster at Amberley Royal--and he grovels before me, as a rule--wanted an explanation, and quick, too. The head sachem at St. Botolph"s wanted three or four, and the Lord High Mukkamuk that oils the locomotives wanted one every fine day. I told "em--I"ve told hem about fifty times--I stopped their holy and sacred train because I wanted to board her. Did they think I wanted to feel her pulse?"
"You didn"t say that?"
"Feel her pulse"? Of course not."
"No. "Board her.""