The Valiants of Virginia

by Hallie Erminie Rives

With every nerve of his six feet of manhood in rebellion, he rose and strode to the half-opened window, through which sifted the smell of growing things—for the great building fronted the square—and the soft alluring moistness of early spring. “Failed!” he repeated helplessly, and the echo seemed to go flittering about the substantial walls like a derisive India-rubber bat on a spree.

The bulldog sat up, thumping the rug with a vibrant tail. There was some mistake, surely; one went out by the door, not by the window! He rose, picked up the Panama in his mouth, and padding across the rug, poked it tentatively into his master’s hand. But no, the hand made no response. Clearly they were not to go out, and he dropped it and went puzzledly back and lay down with pricked ears, while his master stared out into the foliaged day.

How solid and changeless it had always seemed—that great business fabric woven by the father he could so dimly remember! His own invested fortune had been derived from the great corporation the elder Valiant had founded and controlled until his death. With almost unprecedented earnings, it had stood as a very Gibraltar of finance, a type and sign of brilliant organization. Now, on the heels of a trust’s dissolution which would be a nine-days’ wonder, the vast structure had crumpled up like a cardboard. The rains had descended and the floods had come, and it had fallen!

The man at the desk had wheeled in his revolving chair and was looking at the trim athletic back blotting the daylight, with a smile that was little short of a covert sneer. He was one of the local managers of the Corporation whose ruin was to be that day’s sensation, a colorless man who had acquired middle age with his first long trousers and had been dedicated to the commercial treadmill before he had bought a safety-razor. He despised all loiterers along the primrose paths, and John Valiant was but a decorative figurehead.

The bulldog lifted his head. The ghost of a furred throaty growl rumbled in the silence, and the man at the desk shrank a little, as the hair rippled up on the thick neck and the faithful red-rimmed eyes opened a shade wider. But John Valiant did not turn. He was bitterly absorbed with his own thoughts.

Till this moment he had never really known how proud he had always been of the Corporation, of the fact that he was its founder’s son. His election to high office in the small coterie that controlled its destinies he had known very well to be but the modern concrete expression of his individual holdings, but it had nevertheless deeply pleased him. The fleeting sense of power, the intimate touching of wide issues in a city of Big Things had flattered him; for a while he had dreamed of playing a great part, of pushing the activities of the Corporation into new territory, invading foreign soil. He might have done much, for he had begun with good equipment. He had read law, had even been admitted to the bar. But to what had it come? A gradual slipping back into the rut of careless amusement, the tacit assumption of his prerogatives by other waiting hands. The huge wheels had continued to turn, smoothly, inevitably, and he had drawn his dividends ... and that was all. John Valiant swallowed something that was very like a sob.

As he stood trying to plumb the depth of the calamity, self-anger began to stir and buzz in his heart like a great bee. Like a tingling X-ray there went stabbing through the husk woven of a thousand inherent habits the humiliating knowledge of his own uselessness. In those profitless seasons through which he had sauntered, as he had strolled through his casual years of college, he had given least of his time and thought to the concern which had absorbed his father’s young manhood. He, John Valiant—one of its vice-presidents! waster, on whose expenditures there had never been a limit, who had strewn with the foolish free-handedness of a prodigal! Idler, with a reputation in three cities as a leader of cotillions!

“Fool!” he muttered under his breath, and on the landscape outside the word stamped itself on everything as though a thousand little devils had suddenly turned themselves into letters of the alphabet and were skipping about in fours.

Valiant started as the other spoke at his elbow. He, too, had come to the window and was looking down at the pavement. “How quickly some news spreads!”

For the first time the young man noted that the street below was filling with a desultory crowd. He distinguished a knot of Italian laborers talking with excited gesticulations—a smudged plasterer, tools in hand,—clerks, some hatless and with thin alpaca coats—all peering at the voiceless front of the great building, and all, he imagined, with a thriving fear in their faces. As he watched, a woman, coarsely dressed, ran across the street, her handkerchief pressed to her eyes.