PAGE 5
The Blond Beast
by
“Ketch yer dog for yer, boss?” they grinned.
Millner consigned them to the devil, and stood sternly watching them till the first stage of the journey had carried them around the nearest corner; then, after pausing to look once more up and down the empty street, laid his hand on the railing, and vaulted over it into the grass-plot. As he did so, he reflected that, since pity for suffering was one of the most elementary forms of egotism, he ought to have remembered that it was necessarily one of the most tenacious.
II
“My chief aim in life?” Orlando G. Spence repeated. He threw himself back in his chair, straightened the tortoise-shell pince-nez, on his short blunt nose, and beamed down the luncheon table at the two young men who shared his repast.
His glance rested on his son Draper, seated opposite him behind a barrier of Georgian silver and orchids; but his words were addressed to his secretary who, stylograph in hand, had turned from the seductions of a mushroom souffle in order to jot down, for the Sunday Investigator, an outline of his employer’s views and intentions respecting the newly endowed Orlando G. Spence College for Missionaries. It was Mr. Spence’s practice to receive in person the journalists privileged to impart his opinions to a waiting world; but during the last few months–and especially since the vast project of the Missionary College had been in process of development–the pressure of business and beneficence had necessitated Millner’s frequent intervention, and compelled the secretary to snatch the sense of his patron’s elucubrations between the courses of their hasty meals.
Young Millner had a healthy appetite, and it was not one of his least sacrifices to be so often obliged to curb it in the interest of his advancement; but whenever he waved aside one of the triumphs of Mr. Spence’s chef he was conscious of rising a step in his employer’s favour. Mr. Spence did not despise the pleasures of the table, though he appeared to regard them as the reward of success rather than as the alleviation of effort; and it increased his sense of his secretary’s merit to note how keenly the young man enjoyed the fare which he was so frequently obliged to deny himself. Draper, having subsisted since infancy on a diet of truffles and terrapin, consumed such delicacies with the insensibility of a traveller swallowing a railway sandwich; but Millner never made the mistake of concealing from Mr. Spence his sense of what he was losing when duty constrained him to exchange the fork for the pen.
“My chief aim in life!” Mr. Spence repeated, removing his eye-glass and swinging it thoughtfully on his finger. (“I’m sorry you should miss this souffle, Millner: it’s worth while.) Why, I suppose I might say that my chief aim in life is to leave the world better than I found it. Yes: I don’t know that I could put it better than that. To leave the world better than I found it. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to use that as a head-line. ‘Wants to leave the world better than he found it.’ It’s exactly the point I should like to make in this talk about the College.”
Mr. Spence paused, and his glance once more reverted to his son, who, having pushed aside his plate, sat watching Millner with a dreamy intensity.
“And it’s the point I want to make with you, too, Draper,” his father continued genially, while he turned over with a critical fork the plump and perfectly matched asparagus which a footman was presenting to his notice. “I want to make you feel that nothing else counts in comparison with that–no amount of literary success or intellectual celebrity.”
“Oh, I do feel that,” Draper murmured, with one of his quick blushes, and a glance that wavered between his father and Millner. The secretary kept his eyes on his notes, and young Spence continued, after a pause: “Only the thing is–isn’t it?–to try and find out just what does make the world better?”