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Page 3
Breede halted to consult a document. Bean glanced up with his look of
respectful waiting. Then he glanced down at his notes and wrote two
other lines of shorthand. Breede might have supposed these to record the
last sentence he had spoken, but one able to decipher the notes could
have read: "That is one rotten suit of clothes. For God's sake, why not
get some decent shoes next time--"
The letter was resumed. It came to its end with a phrase that almost won
the difficult respect of Bean. Of a rumour that the C. & G.W. would
build into certain coveted territory Breede exploded: "I can imagine
nothing of less consequence!" Bean rather liked the phrase and the way
Breede emitted it. That was a good thing to say to some one who might
think you were afraid. He treasured the words; fondled them with the
point of his pencil. He saw himself speaking them pithily to various
persons with whom he might be in conflict. There was a thing now that
Gordon Dane might have hurled at his enemies a dozen times in his
adventurous career. Breede must have something in him--but look at his
shiny white cuffs with the metal clasps, on the desk at his elbow!
Bean had lately read of Breede in a newspaper that "Conservative judges
estimate his present fortune at a round hundred million." Bean's own
stipend was thirty dollars a week, but he pitied Breede. Bean could
learn to make millions if he should happen to want them; but poor old
Breede could never learn to _look_ like anybody.
There you have Bunker Bean at a familiar, prosaic moment in an afternoon
of his twenty-third year. But his prosaic moments are numbered. How few
they are to be! Already the door of Enchantment has swung to his scared
touch. The times will show a scar or two from Bean. Bean the prodigious!
The choicely perfect toy of Destiny at frolic! Bean the innocent--the
monstrous!
* * * * *
Those who long since gave Bean up as an insoluble problem were denied
the advantages of an early association with him. Only an acquaintance
with his innermost soul of souls could permit any sane understanding of
his works, and this it is our privilege, and our necessity, to make, if
we are to comprehend with any sympathy that which was later termed his
"madness." The examination shall be made quickly and with all decency.
Let us regard Bean through the glass of his earliest reactions to an
environment that was commonplace, unstimulating, dull--the little wooden
town set among cornfields, "Wellsville" they called it, where he came
from out of the Infinite to put on a casual body.
Of Bean at birth, it may be said frankly that he was not imposing. He
was not chubby nor rosy; had no dimples. His face was a puckered protest
at the infliction of animal life. In the white garments conventional to
his age he was a distressing travesty, even when he gurgled. In the nude
he was quite impossible to all but the most hardened mothers, and he was
never photographed thus in a washbowl. Even his own mother, before he
had survived to her one short year, began to harbour the accursed
suspicion that his beauty was not flawless nor his intelligence supreme.
To put it brutally, she almost admitted to herself that he was not the
most remarkable child in all the world. To be sure, this is a bit less
incredible when we know that Bean's mother, at his advent, thought far
less highly of Bean's father than on the occasion, seven years before,
when she had consented to be endowed with all his worldly goods. In the
course of those years she came to believe that she had married beneath
her, a fact of which she made no secret to her intimates and least of
all to her mate, who, it may be added, privately agreed with her. Alonzo
Bean, after that one delirious moment at the altar, had always
disbelieved in himself pathetically. Who was he--to have wed a Bunker!
When little Bean's years began to permit small activities it was seen
that his courage was amazing: a courage, however, that quickly
overreached itself, and was sapped by small defeats. Tumbles down the
slippery stairway, burns from the kitchen stove, began it. When a prized
new sailor hat was blown to the centre of a duck-pond he sought to
recover it without any fearsome self-communing. If faith alone could
uphold one, Bean would have walked upon the face of the waters that day.
But the result was a bald experience of the sensations of the drowning,
and a lasting fear of any considerable body of water. Ever after it was
an adventure not to be lightly dared to cross even the stoutest bridge.
And flying! A belief that we can fly as the birds is surely not
unreasonable at the age when he essayed it. Nor should a mere failure to
rise from the ground destroy it. One must leap from high places, and
Bean did so. The roof of the chicken house was the last eminence to have
an experimental value. On his bed of pain he realized that we may not
fly as the birds; nor ever after could he look without tremors from any
high place.
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