The Window-Gazer | Page 7

surprising that they could wiggle at all.
He lifted himself slowly--and sank back with a relieved sigh. It would
have been embarrassing, he thought, had he not been able to get up.
All men have their secret fears and Professor Spence's secret fear was
embodied in a story which his friend and medical adviser (otherwise
"Old Bones") had seen fit to cite as a horrible example. It concerned a
man who had sciatica and who didn't take proper care of him-self. One
day this man went for a walk and fell suddenly upon the pavement
unable to move or even to explain matters satisfactorily to a heartless
policeman who insisted that he was drunk. The doctor had laughed over
this story; doctors are notoriously inhuman. The professor had laughed
also, but the possible picture of him-self squirming helplessly before a
casually interested public had terrors which no enemies' shrapnel had
ever been able to inspire.
Well, thank heaven it hadn't happened yet! The professor confided his

satisfaction to an inquisitive squirrel which swung, bright eyed, from a
branch which swept the window, and, sitting up, prepared to take stock
of the furnishings of his room. A grim smile signalled his discovery
that there were no furnishings to take stock of. Save for his camp bed,
an affair of stout canvas stretched between crossed legs, the room was
beautifully bare. Not a chair, not a wash-stand, not a table cumbered
it--unless a round, flat tree stump, which looked as if it might have
grown up through the floor, was intended for both washstand and table.
It had served the latter purpose at any rate as upon it rested the
candle-stick containing the solitary candle by which he had got himself
to bed.
"Single room, without bath," murmured the professor. "Oh, if my Aunt
Caroline could see me now!"
Oddly enough, something in the thought of Aunt Caroline seemed to
have a reconciling effect upon Aunt Caroline's nephew. He lay back
upon his one thin pillow and reviewed his position with surprising
fortitude. After all, Aunt Caroline couldn't see him--and that was
something. Besides, it had been an adventure. It was surprising how he
had come to look for adventures since that day, five years ago, when
the grim adventure of war had called him from the peace-filled
beginnings of what he had looked forward to as a life of scholarly
leisure. He had been thirty, then, and quite done with adventuring. Now
he was thirty-five and--well, he supposed the war had left him restless.
Presently he would settle down. He would begin his great book on the
"Psychology of Primitive Peoples." Everything would be as it had been
before.
But in the meantime it insisted upon being somewhat different--hence
this feeling which was not all dissatisfaction with his present absurd
position. He was, he admitted it, a badly sold man. But did it matter?
What had he lost except money and self-esteem? The money did not
matter and he was sure that Aunt Caroline, at least, would say that he
could spare the self-esteem. Besides, he would recover it in time. His
opinion of himself as a man of perspicacity in business had recovered
from harder blows than this. There was that affair of the South

American mines, for instance,--but anybody may be mistaken about
South American mines. He had told Aunt Caroline this. "It was," he
told Aunt Caroline, "a financial accident. I do not blame myself. My
father, as you know, was a far-sighted man. These aptitudes run in
families." Aunt Caroline had said, "Humph!"
Nevertheless it was true that the elder Hamilton Spence, now deceased,
had been a far-sighted man. Benis had always cherished a warm
admiration for the commercial astuteness which he conceived himself
to have inherited. He would have been, he thought, exactly like his
father--if he had cared for the drudgery of business. So it was a habit of
his, when in a quandary, to consider what his parent would have done
and then to do likewise--an excellent rule if he had ever succeeded in
applying it properly. But there were always so many intruding details.
Take the present predicament, for instance. He could scarcely picture
his father in these precise circumstances. To do so would be to
presuppose actions on the part of that astute ancestor quite out of
keeping with his known character. Would Hamilton Spence, senior,
have crossed a continent at the word of one of whom he knew nothing,
save that he wrote an agreeable letter? Would he have engaged (and
paid for in advance) board and lodging at a place wholly supposititious?
Would he have neglected to ask for references? Hamilton Spence,
junior, was forced to admit that he would not.
But those letters of old Farr had been so blamed plausible!