The Valiants of Virginia

by Hallie Erminie Rives

Presently he took a check-book from his pocket and began to figure on the stub, looking up with a wry smile. “To come down to brass tacks,” he muttered, “when I’ve settled everything (thank heaven, I don’t owe my tailor!) there will be a little matter of twenty-eight hundred odd dollars, a passé motor and my clothes between me and the bread-line!”

Everything else he had disposed of—everything but the four-footed comrade there at his feet. At his look, the white bulldog sprang up whining and made joyful pretense of devouring his master’s immaculate boot-laces. Valiant put his hand under the eager muzzle, lifted the intelligent head to his knee and looked into the beseeching amber eyes. “But I’d not sell you, old chap,” he said softly; “not a single lick of your friendly pink tongue; not for a beastly hundred thousand!”

He withdrew his caressing hand and looked again at the check-stub. Twenty-eight hundred! He laughed bleakly. Why, he had spent more than that a month ago on a ball at Sherry’s! This morning he had been rich; to-night he was poor! He had imagined this in the abstract, but now of a sudden the fact seemed fraught with such a ghastly and nightmarish ridiculousness as a man might feel who, going to bed with a full thatch of hair, confronts the morning mirror to find himself as bald as a porcelain mandarin.

What could he do? He could not remember a time when he had not had all that he wanted. He had never borrowed from a friend or been dunned by an importunate tradesman. And he had never tried to earn a dollar in his life; as to current methods of making a living, he was as ignorant as a Pueblo Indian.

What did others do? The men he knew who joked of their poverty and their debts, and whose hilarious habit it was to picture life as a desperate handicap in which they were forever “three jumps ahead of the sheriff”, somehow managed to cling to their yachts and their stables. Few of his friends had really gone “smash”, and of these all but one had taken themselves speedily and decently off. He thought of Rod Creighton, the one failure who had clung to the old life, achieving for a transient period the brilliant success of living on his friends. When this ended he had gone on the road for some champagne or other. Everybody had ordered from him at the start. But this, too, had failed. He had dropped out of the clubs and there had at last befallen an evil time when he had come to haunt the avenue, as keen for stray quarters as any pan-handler. Where was Creighton now, he wondered?

Across the avenue was Larry Treadwell’s brokerage office. Larry had a brain for business; as a youthful scamp in knickerbockers he had been as sharp as a steel-trap. But what did he, John Valiant, know of business? Less than of law! Why, he was not fit to smirk behind a counter and measure lace insertion for the petticoats of the women he waltzed with! All he was really fit for was to work with his hands!

He thought of a gang of laborers he had seen that afternoon breaking the asphalt with crowbars. What must it be to toil through the clammy cold of winter and the smothering fur-heat of summer, in some revolting routine of filth and unredeemable ugliness? He looked down at his supple white fingers and shivered.

He rose grimly and dragged his chair facing the window. The night was balmy and he looked down across the darker sea of reefs, barred like a gigantic checker-board by the shining lines of streets, to where the flashing electric signs of the theater district laid their wide swath of colored radiance. The manifold calls of the street and the buzz of trolleys made a dull tonal background, subdued and far-away.

To be outside! All that light and color and comfort and pleasure would hum and sparkle on just the same, though he was no longer within the circle of its effulgence—slaving perhaps, he thought with a twisted smile, at some tawdry occupation that called for no experience, to pay for a meal in some second-rate restaurant and a pallet in some shabby-genteel, hall bedroom, till his clothes were replaced by ill-fitting “hand-me-downs”—till by wretched gradations he arrived finally at the status of the dime seat in the gallery and five-cent cigars!

There was one way back. It lay through the hackneyed gateway of marriage. Youth, comeliness and fine linen, in the world he knew, were a fair exchange for wealth any day. “Cutlet for cutlet”—the satiric phrase ran through his mind. Why not? Others did so. And as for himself, it perhaps need be no question of plain and spinstered millions—there was Katharine Fargo!