Even in early June, when Dalton, whose suburban home is next door, returns, tanned and clear-eyed from a week-end at the lake––there is but one lake to Dalton––and calls 281 him mysteriously back to the rear of the house, where, with a flourish, the cover is removed from a box the expressman has just delivered, to disclose a shining five-pound bass reposing upon its bed of packed ice––even then, hands in pockets, Sandford merely surveys and expresses polite congratulation. Certainly it is a fine fish, a noble fish, even; but for the sake of one like it––or, yes, granted a dozen such––to leave the office, the sanitary-tiled office, deserted for four whole days (especially when Dr. Corliss on the floor below is watching like a hawk)––such a crazy proceeding is not to be thought of.
Certainly he will not go along the next week end––or the next, either. The suggestion simply is unthinkable. Such digressions may be all right for the leisure class or for invalids; but for adults, live ones, strong and playing the game? A shrug and a tolerant smile end the discussion, as, hands still in his pockets, an after-dinner cigar firm between his teeth, Sandford saunters back across the dozen feet of sod separating his own domicile from that of his fallen and misguided neighbor. 282
“Dalton’s got the fever again, bad,” he comments to the little woman upon his own domain, whom he calls “Polly,” or “Mrs. Sandford,” as occasion dictates. She has been watching the preceding incident with inscrutable eyes.
“Yes?” Polly acknowledges, with the air of harkening to a familiar harangue while casting ahead, in anticipation of what was to come next.
“Curious about Dalton; peculiar twist to his mental machinery somewhere.” Sandford blows a cloud of smoke and eyes it meditatively. “Leaving business that way, chopping it all to pieces in fact; and just for a fish! Curious!”
“Harry’s got something back there that’ll probably interest you,” he calls out to me as I chug by in my last year’s motor; “better stop and see.”
“Yes,” I acknowledge simply; and though Polly’s eyes and mine meet we never smile, or twitch an eyelid, or turn a hair; for Sandford is observing––and this is only June.
So much for Dr. Jekyll Sandford, the Sandford of fifty-one weeks in the year.
Then, as inevitably as time rolls by, comes 283 that final week; period of mania, of abandon; and in the mere sorcerous passage of a pair of whirring wings, Dr. Jekyll, the exemplary, is no more. In his place, wearing his shoes, audaciously signing his name even to checks, is that other being, Hyde: one absolutely the reverse of the reputable Jekyll; repudiating with scorn that gentleman’s engagements; with brazen effrontery denying him utterly, and all the sane conventionality for which the name has become a synonyme.
Worst of all, rank blasphemy, he not only refuses to set foot in that modern sanitary office of enamel and tiling, at the corner of Thirteenth and Main, below which, by day and by night, the “L” trains go thundering, but deliberately holds it up to ridicule and derision and insult. 284