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Updated: June 6, 2025
Smith's care than they otherwise would have been; "and besides," added Mrs. Scott, "I really am afraid Marion will never get over John Telfer's loss, at least till something certain is heard of him. She often tells us she would feel much happier if she knew he was dead, than she does by being in such a state of uncertainty.
In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer's talk, and in Chicago and New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of the artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the long street he thought that he did understand. Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa.
"I will run factories and banks and maybe mines and railroads," he thought and his mind leaped forward so that he saw himself, grey, stern, and capable, sitting at a broad desk high in a great stone building, a materialisation of John Telfer's word picture "You will be a big man of dollars it is plain." And then into Sam's mind came another picture.
Mary Underwood ran through the rain to John Telfer's house and beat on the door with her fist until Telfer, followed by Eleanor, holding a lamp above her head, appeared at the door. With Telfer she went back through the streets to the front of Sam's house thinking of the terrible choked and disfigured man they should find there.
He was alone upon The Strip, in an overcoat, on the way to forty, not a sound, not a soul, and with that brooding sense of being upon the edge and threshold of something vast, dark, threatening, unfathomable. Down the steep hill flanked by masters' houses. Twilight merging now into darkness. Boys passing in and out of the gateways. Past Telfer's which had been his own house.
Oh, if only all the world, like you and Telfer and some of the others here, had an appreciation of the sense of privacy." Mary Underwood laughed quietly. "I was more than half right when, in the old days, I dreamed of making you a man at work upon the things of the mind," she said. "The sense of privacy indeed! What a fellow you have become! John Telfer's method was better than my own.
"May He go forth may He go forth with you, my dear bairn; and O, may He give you cause to say on your return, HIS name be praised!" "Farewell, mother! farewell, my dear sisters!" exclaimed Elliot, and rushed out of the house. Now horse and hattock, cried the Laird, Now horse and hattock, speedilie; They that winna ride for Telfer's kye, Let them never look in the face o' me. Border Ballad.
In the performance Sam had taken the role of a drummer boy killed on the field of battle by a swaggering villain in a grey uniform, and John Telfer, in the role of villain, had become so in earnest that, a pistol not exploding at a critical moment, he had chased Sam about the stage trying to hit him with the butt of the weapon while the audience roared with delight at the realism of Telfer's rage and at the frightened boy begging for mercy.
"I will go for Mary Underwood," he thought, his mind returning to the friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer's tirades against all women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his bare head. "We need a woman in our house," he kept saying over and over to himself. "We need a woman in our house."
Does she, while loving books, love also the very smell of human life?" In a way Telfer's attitude toward the kindly little school teacher became Sam's attitude. Although they walked and talked together the course of study she had planned for him he never took up and as he grew to know her better, the books she read and the ideas she advanced appealed to him less and less.
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