CHAPTER XIV

A SATURDAY AFTERNOON

I

The sight of a certain old gentleman as he walked along the shady side of Twenty-second Street about two o’clock on a broiling Saturday afternoon in midsummer was one not easily to be forgotten.  A younger man, tall and vigorous, clad in a thin suit of blue serge, walked by his side.  They were followed by a shouting troop of small boys who overran the pavements, and some of whom were armed with baseball bats.  The big trolley car was hailed by a dozen dirty little hands.

Even the grumpy passengers were disarmed.  The conductor took Mr. Bentley’s bill deprecatingly, as much as to say that the newly organized Traction Company—­just out of the receivers’ hands—­were the Moloch, not he, and rang off the fares under protest.  And Mr. Bentley, as had been his custom for years, sat down and took off his hat, and smiled so benignly at those around him that they immediately began to talk, to him.  It was always irresistible, this desire to talk to Mr. Bentley.  If you had left your office irritated and out of sorts, your nerves worn to an edge by the uninterrupted heat, you invariably got off at your corner feeling better.  It was Phil Goodrich who had said that Horace Bentley had only to get on a Tower Street car to turn it into a church.  And if he had chosen to establish that ‘dernier cri’ of modern civilization where ladies go who have ‘welt-schmerz’ without knowing why, —­a sanitarium, he might have gained back again all the money he had lost in giving his Grantham stock to Eldon Parr.

Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he could have emptied Dalton Street of its children.  In the first place, there was the irresistible inducement to any boy to ride several miles on a trolley without having this right challenged by the irate guardian of the vehicle, without being summarily requested to alight at twenty-five miles an hour:  in the second place, there was the soda water and sweet biscuit partaken of after the baseball game in that pavilion, more imposing in one’s eyes than the Taj Mahal.  Mr. Bentley would willingly have taken all Dalton Street.  He had his own ‘welt-schmerz’, though he did not go to a sanitarium to cure it; he was forced to set an age limit of ten, and then establish a high court of appeal; for there were boys whose biographies, if they are ever written, will be as hazy as those of certain world-wide celebrities who might be mentioned concerning the date and exact spot of the entrance of their heroes into the light.  The solemn protestations, the tears, the recrimination even, brought pangs to the old gentleman’s heart, for with all the will in the world he had been forced in the nature of things, to set a limit.