He had passed 331 and 341 and 351 and his heart began to beat more rapidly. This was almost as exciting as a Christmas stocking in the Fauntleroy days. His eyes were searching 63 among the numbers; there was a four-story office building (335) and an automobile agency (339) ... and next to that––.... Henry halted, and the laugh dried up in his throat. He had been prepared for anything but the reality. The ark of his fortunes was a shabby little motion-picture theatre.
Gasping, he looked up again at the number, and when he realized that he had made no mistake, his knees turned to gelatine, and he stood staring, fascinated, numbed. His eyes wandered blankly from the crumbling ticket-booth to the unkempt lobby and back to the lurid billing––the current attraction was a seven-reel thriller entitled “What He Least Expected,” but Henry missed the parallel. With trembling fingers he produced a cigarette, but in his daze he blew out two matches in succession. He crushed the cigarette in his palm, and moved a few steps towards the lobby. Great Heaven, was it possible that John Starkweather had condemned Henry the fashionable, Henry the clubable, Henry the exclusive to a year of this? Was this his punishment for the past? Was 64 this the price of his future? This picayune sordidness, and vulgarity and decay? Evidently, it was so intended, and so ordered.
His power of reason was almost atrophied. He struggled to understand his uncle’s purpose; his uncle’s logic. To break down his class prejudice, and teach him the dimes in a dollar, and put him on the level of a workingman? All that could have been accomplished by far less drastic methods. It could have been accomplished by a tour of duty with Bob. To be sure, Mr. Starkweather had promised him the meanest job in the directory, but Henry had put it down as a figure of speech. Now, he was faced with the literal interpretation of it, and ahead of him there was a year of trial, and then all or nothing.
He succeeded in lighting a fresh cigarette, but he couldn’t taste it. Previously he had paid his forfeits with the best of good-nature, but his previous forfeits hadn’t obliged him to declass himself. They hadn’t involved his wife. He hadn’t married Anna to drag her down to this. It would stand them in a social pillory, targets for those who had either admired them 65 or envied them. It would make them the most conspicuous pair in the whole community: older people would point to them as an illustration of justice visited on blind youth, and would chuckle to observe Henry in the process of receiving his come-uppance: the younger set would quake with merriment and poor jokes and sly allusions to Henry’s ancient grandeur. Even Bob Standish would have to hide his amusement; why, Bob himself had made society and success his fetiches. And Anna––Anna who was so ambitious for him––how could she endure the status of a cheap showman’s wife?
And even if she had been willing to ally himself with such a business, how could he conceivably make ten thousand dollars out of it in a single year? Ten? It would take a genius to make five. An inexperienced man, with luck, might make two or three. He couldn’t afford to hire a trained man to manage it for him: the place was too small to support such a man, and still to net any appreciable profit. Mr. Starkweather had undoubtedly foreseen this very fact––foreseen that Henry couldn’t sit back as a magnate, and pile responsibility on a paid 66 employé. To reach his quota, Henry would have to get in all over, and act as his own manager, and take the resulting publicity and the social isolation. But the business was impossible, the quota was impossible, the entire project from first to last was unthinkable. His uncle, whether by accident or design, had virtually disowned him. There was no other answer.
His laugh came back to him, but there was no hilarity in it. It was merely an expression of his helplessness; it was tragedy turned inside out. Yet he felt no resentment towards his uncle, but rather an overwhelming pity. He felt no resentment towards his friend Standish, who had bought out the perfectly respectable business which Mr. Starkweather might so easily have left to Henry. Mr. Starkweather had schemed to bring about a certain reaction, and he had overplayed his hand. Instead of firing Henry with a new ardour for success, he had convinced him of the futility of endeavour. He had set a standard so high, and chosen a medium so low, that he had defeated his own object.
The next step––why, it was to chart his life all over again. It was to dispose of this ridiculous property, and begin to make a living for Anna. And there was no time to lose, either, for Henry’s checking balance was about to slide past the vanishing point.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to meet the gravely sympathetic eyes of Mr. Theodore Mix.