HE senior partner had the reputation of being a hard man, and yet—or perhaps we should on that account—he had a sentimental streak in him. He was fond of poetry—and not good poetry either, and he would often cut out a piece of newspaper verse and carry it for months in his pocketbook with his railway passes, and if it wore well he would have it printed on a neat card and distributed to a few appreciative friends.
It was the title, The Revolt of the Bookkeeper, that had attracted him, for he himself had begun life as a bookkeeper. He had read the verses two days before on the back page of his evening paper, and he found that they kept coming back to him:
Funnily enough they were just the places Howieson had always wanted to go to, and their names on a printed page made him restless. He found he was asking himself that question which every successful business man—and Howieson was very successful—spends his waking hours trying to avoid, namely: Is business an end in itself or a means to an end, and if a means to an end, what is that end, and when is it reached?
“That's it,” he said to himself as he turned in through the revolving doors of his office building, and he so nearly said it aloud that the s sounded faintly sibilant. “I might die any day without having seen Peking or Delphi or Stamboul or the South Seas, I believe I'll just take a year or so off.”
He knew he would do nothing of the kind. His wife was not strong, his daughter was to be married in the spring, and his son, still in college, was giving him serious anxiety.
He was thinking about Delphi, Teneriffe and the midnight sun as he entered his office, but no one would have suspected it. Neat, inclined to be heavy, with a shrewd gray eye and an upper lip like a tombstone, no one would have believed that he was thinking of anything but bills of sale.
His secretary was opening and classifying the morning mail,
“Good morning, Miss Maulle,” he said.
He hung up his hat and coat, and took a quick glance at a large colored photograph of the Grand Cañon, all purples and pink, which hung over his desk.
“Good morning, Mr. Howieson,” said Miss Maulle without looking up. “I see you've cut out that poem of Jack Roe's.”
She had been with the firm for twenty-five years, and had been the recipient of more than one of her employer's favorite poems in her day.
“What's that?” said Mr. Howieson crossly. But his crossness only meant that he did not understand.
“Roe,” said Miss Maulle. “You know—that romantic-looking boy in the accounting department.”
“I did not know we had a poet in the accounting department or that you had an eye for romantic-looking boys,” said her employer; and he took the little clipping from under a paper weight where he had left it the night before, and read it all through again. The fellow certainly had an instinct for the right places. Cintra, now—that was a lovely spot. He'd been there himself. “You say he works for us?”
“He did. He's leaving today.” Miss Maulle spoke as one whose patience with mankind was almost exhausted.
“Where's he going?”
“Now, is there a place called Dominica?” said Miss Maulle. “Well, that's where. So silly, just as he gets a start with a firm like this one. I wish I might tell him from you that you think he's doing a silly thing.”
“I'll tell him myself,” said the senior partner. “Send him here when you've finished the mail.”
It was all very well, he thought, as he penciled memoranda and signed his name, for a successful man of fifty-five, with his work practically done, to think of slipping away on a voyage of discovery, but it was quite different for a youngster to throw away his chances at the beginning. It was the difference between a traveler and a tramp. Howieson grew a little angry thinking about it. Stamboul—just where was Stamboul? When Miss Maulle had gone he looked it up in the encyclopedia. Ah, yes: “More exactly, the older portions of Constantinople, southwest of the Golden Horn.”
The Golden Horn! He looked up. Roe was already in the room.
He did not look much over twenty; he was a slim boy, and yet he had evidently once been even slimmer, for his plain dark clothes were tight and too short in the sleeves. He had large dark eyes set so far apart that you saw too much of them in profile, as you see the eyes of an Egyptian bas-relief. He leaned against the door jamb as a faun might lean against a tree, looking as a poet ought to look.
“Ah, Roe,” said Howieson, “I've been reading your verses.”
Jack smiled a slow embarrassed smile to mitigate the fact that he was not in the least embarrassed.
“I suppose it seems pretty foolish to you,” he said.