From: Arden Town (1913; Unpublished MS)
Author: Scott Nearing
Published:
Arriving in town, Fred Allen went straight to his office and set to work—to work at anything that would make him forget. His brain seethed with the conflicting emotions which the past week had aroused. Was it possible that on the previous Friday he, a care-free, happy man, had started for the shore with a good friend, intent upon completing the arrangements incident to a satisfactory marriage? Could that be the same care-free individual, who now worked fervently over an index system to determine the labor cost on a recent shipment of brass goods? He worked madly. His brain was on fire. In two hours he had brushed aside the accumulated correspondence of a week. Then he sank back in his desk chair, and locking his fingers behind his head, gazed wearily up at the ceiling.
“It’s no use,” he muttered. “It’s no use. There she is again.”
He was looking vacantly at white glazed plaster, but his mind projected on the void a face which had looked at him out of every letter, bill, and specification which he had turned over that morning. With all of his might he had worked. Never before had he felt a keener power over business detail, yet during the hours which he had spent there, each thought and decision had been haunted by the face and voice of Ruth Wade.
“It’s no use,” he said again. “I’m beaten.”
Fred Allen’s relations with Eleanor Treat had always been of the easiest. Did he love her? Of course he did—why shouldn’t he? Yet he had lost neither sleep nor appetite over the matter. He had taken it for granted that in their relations, his should be the dominant, hers the subject mind. No one had ever hinted to him that such was not the universal relation of men and women. He had scrutinized, accepted, and disposed of her as he would of any satisfactory business proposition. Their marriage would be the outcome of a calm decision. What an awakening came in the form of Ruth Wade: With a mind which he felt to be deeper than his own, with a penetrating sense of the relations of men and things, Ruth Wade had mastered him as he had mastered Eleanor Treat. She had overthrown his economics, shamed his inartistic concepts, and revolutionized his whole ideal of woman and her capabilities. If she had exploded a bomb in his path, robbing him of sight and hearing, she could not have disturbed his equilibrium more completely. He sat for more than an hour, staring vacantly.
“At least,” said Fred Allen aloud, “it’s all over with Eleanor, and I am going to Arden in less than a month—poor Eleanor!”
There was a knock on his closed office door, and in response to his impatient “Come in,” Miss Fisher entered.
“Mr. Allen, you are wanted on long distance phone—Atlantic City is calling.”
Fred Allen snatched the receiver.
“Well—well—well—”
He beat the floor with his foot and drummed on his desk—waiting. At last the connection was made.
“Hello, Sam—that you? Yes, very particular business. Been rushing hard all morning. No, I hardly think I’ll get down again this week—things are so piled up here—”
He looked furtively at his bare desk
“You must go to Washington? I do hope that I was not responsible for breaking up the party, but there are things—You know, you think you have things all settled up for a time, but others crop up. Is—is your cousin—I mean Miss Wade, coming up with you? I’ll send my machine down to the train—could hardly make it myself. That will relieve you of Miss Wade. You’ll stop on your way back from Washington. Make it Saturday, and we’ll spend Sunday at the Country Club. Yes, good-bye.”
Again he turned in his chair.
“Miss Fisher,” he called, “please have my machine meet the five—the one I usually come on. Mr. Bennett and his cousin are coming up.”
Fred Allen drew a sheet of letter paper from his desk, and wrote in his careful, orderly hand,—
“Dear Miss Wade: I should very greatly enjoy a trip to Arden in the near future. Could you arrange accommodations for a week, beginning the 28th of this month?
“I am looking forward to the visit—I have heard so many favorable reports about the place.”
He addressed and sealed an envelope, handed it to the office boy with instructions to mail it immediately, took up his hat, and summoned his stenographer.
“Please have my bag sent home, Miss Fisher. I am going out, and will probably not be back all day.”
It was lunch time, but Fred Allen took a car headed for the suburbs.
At eight o’clock that evening, dirty and travel-stained, he boarded a train at a suburban station eighteen miles from the trolley terminus. He had been walking and thinking for seven hours.
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