David Vallory

DAVID VALLORY

I

In the Green Tree

DAVID VALLORY’S train, to make which he had precipitately thrown down pencil and mapping-pen in the drafting room of the Government harbor-deepening project on the Florida coast two days earlier, was an hour late arriving at Middleboro; and in this first home-coming from the distant assignment, the aspect of things once so familiar seemed jarred a trifle out of focus. It was not that the June fields were less green, or the factory suburb through which the long train was slowing more littered and unsightly. But there was a change, and it was in a manner depressive.

“Your home town?” inquired the traveler in the opposite half of the Pullman section, as Vallory began to assemble his various belongings.

“Yes,” said David, adding, as if in some sort of justification: “I was born here in Middleboro.”

The man who had occupied the upper berth


 looked aside reflectively, taking in and appraising the country-town tritenesses as the open car windows passed them in review.

“A man may be born anywhere,” he remarked; then, with the appraisive glance directed at the fair-haired, frank-faced young man kneeling to strap an over-filled suit case; “It’s a safe bet that you’ll not die in Middleboro—unless you should chance to be killed in an accident.”

Vallory, soberly preoccupied, looked up from the strapping.

“Why do you say that?”

The older man smiled with a rather grim widening of the thin lips half hidden by a cropped beard and mustaches.

“You are young, and youth is always impatient of the little horizons. Let me make another guess. You have been away for some time, and this is your first return. You are finding it a bit disappointing. Am I right?”

“Not exactly disappointing,” Vallory denied.

“Well, then, different, let us say. You may not realize it yet, but you have outgrown the home town. I know, because, years ago, I had precisely the same experience myself. Do your people live here?”

The train had been halted in the yard by a


 dropped semaphore arm, and for the moment Vallory was at the mercy of his chance traveling companion. Yet he told himself that there was no good reason why he should be churlish.

“Yes,” he conceded; “my father and sister live here. And I have lived here all my life except for the four years in college, and the past two years in Florida.”

“College—to be sure,” the inquisitor agreed half absently. “What course, if I may ask?”

“Engineering.”

At this the bearded man exhibited a tiny fob charm made in the shape of a simple trestle bent and extended a hand individualized by the spatulate thumb and square-ended fingers of the artist-artisan.

“Shake!” he exclaimed, with something more than Middle-Western informality. “I happen to be one of the same breed. Now I am quite certain you won’t die here in—Middletown?—is that the name?—always making an exception in favor of the untoward accident, of course.”

“Middleboro,” David corrected. Then to the repetition of the prophecy: “You are probably right. I found that I had to leave home to get my first job. I have been on Government work in Florida—rivers and harbors.”


“Government work? A deep grave and a safe one. Would you mind telling me just why you chose to bury yourself in it?”

Vallory’s smile was still good-natured. For so young a man he was singularly free from the false dignity which so often is made to pass for the real.

“I don’t mind in the least. I did what most college men do; took the first reasonably decent thing that offered. It wasn’t at all what I wanted, but my own particular line was rather dull two years ago. I majored in railroad building.”

“Railroad building, eh? That’s my trade, too,” said the other. Then, with an overlooking glance that was too frankly a renewal of the appraisive summing-up to be mistaken for anything else: “You’ll go far, my young friend—if you’re not too good.”

David Vallory’s smile broadened into a laugh.

“Thanks,” he said. “But what do you mean by ‘too good’?”

“Precisely what I say; no more and no less. You can take it from a total stranger, can’t you? You have a good jaw, and I shouldn’t care to get in your way if you had any reason to wish to beat me up. But your eyes tell another story.”

Vallory had a telegram in his pocket, the brief


 summons which, two days earlier, had caused him to drop pen and pencil in the Florida office and hasten to catch the first northbound train. There was nothing in the wording of the message to breed alarm; but the mere fact that his father had telegraphed him to come home had awakened disturbing qualms of anxiety. Wondering if he were still youthful enough to advertise the disquietude so plainly that a stranger might read the signs of it, he said:

“Well, go on; what do my eyes tell you?”

“This: that in spite of your twenty-five, six, or seven years, whatever they may be, you are still sufficiently youthful and unspoiled to take things at their face value. You believe good of a man or a woman until the evil is proved, and even then you change reluctantly. You hold your word as binding as your oath. In short, you are still generous enough to believe that the world is much better than the muckrakers would make it out to be. Isn’t this all true?”

“I should be sorry if I had to contradict you,” said Vallory soberly. “At that, you are only accusing me of the common civilized humanities. The world has been very decent to me, thus far. Doesn’t it occur to you that a man usually finds what he looks for in life?—that, as a general


 proposition, he gets just about what he is willing to give?”

The bearded man shook his head, as one too well seasoned to argue with unvictimized youth.

“Four years in college, and two in a Government service which taught you absolutely nothing about life as it is lived in a world of men and women and sharply competitive business,” he scoffed gently. “Ah, well; we’ll let it go with a word of advice—advice from a man whose name you don’t know, and whom you will most likely never meet again. When you come to take the plunge; the real plunge into the sure-enough puddle of life as it is lived by most men and not a few women; don’t tie up too hard with any man or set of men, or yet to those old-fashioned principles which you have been taught to regard as law and Gospel. If you do, you won’t succeed—in the only sense in which the world measures success.”

The train was moving on again, and Vallory was not sorry. Being healthily suspicious of cynicism in any of its forms, he was glad that his critical section mate had not chosen to begin on him at the dining-car breakfast, where they had first met. None the less, at the station stop he shook hands with the volunteer prophet of evil.

“Good-by,” he said. “I’d like to hear your estimate


 of the next man with whom you happen to share a Pullman section. But part of your prediction will doubtless come true. I have definitely broken away from the Government job, and I shall probably not stay very long in Middleboro.”

As he left the train he glanced at his watch. It was past nine; therefore his father would be at the bank. With only a hand-bag for encumbrance he walked rapidly up the main street with the well-remembered home town surroundings still making their curiously depressive appeal.