I Walked in Arden

by Jack Randall Crawford

I got up and hunted for my tobacco. "The devil with you, Knowlton, is that every time I begin to imagine everything is all right, you have some infernal new anxiety to thrust under my nose."

"Shove your pipe under it instead and shut up," he laughed. "That's life, my boy. You can't sit it out in a rocking chair. If you try, they take away the front porch from under you when you aren't looking."

I filled my pipe and studied Knowlton's face as I did so. It came to me with a start that I had been taking him for granted for several months now. I no longer analysed him, or tried to, as I had done at first. Suppose Knowlton was not himself on the square and I had been careless? The idea was disturbing. There he sat, characteristically enough, with his legs crossed, the tips of his fingers together, a big cigar in his mouth, and his sharp eyes puckered at the corners with crows' feet. He was oblivious to my scrutiny, for he was turning over the new proposition in his mind. He could day dream in arithmetic as a poet could upon hearing the song of a lark. His face was hard, but there was a rugged honesty in it, a touch of the old Scots' stock from which he sprang, with the superimposed keenness and alertness of the trail-following American. Besides, I remembered his confidences to me that Christmas Eve out at the country club. He too was a sentimentalist—and such as we, who are sentimentalists, are apt to be dishonest only to ourselves or to those we love; the money form of dishonesty is abhorrent to an emotional man. Knowlton was of the common type who masked deep feeling by an outward hard glamour of efficiency. I must have gone on too long staring at him, for he suddenly turned around with a slight narrowing of the eyes.

"Wondering if I am big enough for the job, Ted?" he asked casually, as he tried to remedy the faulty burning of his cigar. "I wondered it about you. It's only fair for you to have your turn," he went on.

"I don't know," I answered. "I don't know whether either of us is. It's a big responsibility we are starting out to face."

"Everything is. It's a responsibility to buy a basketful of hot dogs and sell them at a street corner. It might rain," he countered.

"I know," I laughed. "Hotspur said the same thing."

"Shakespeare again?"

I nodded. He suddenly laid down his cigar. "By God, Ted," he exclaimed, "were you thinking I might not be on the square?"

I hesitated for a second, puzzled. Either he was a very clever man, or—I did not know what to think.