The Vinegar SaintILEGS
The Vinegar Saint
THE young man of twenty-three was not a clever tennis player, but his partner and his opponents, men of forty, were obviously less clever. The Mount Airy Club courts were sought chiefly by two sorts of players, boys too uncourageous for baseball, and men of impending girth; secluded by fine old ragged trees and off an unused road, it had no gallery of experts to disturb the timid.
The young man belonged to neither class, but he found his Saturday afternoon game of tennis with perspiring business-men just the thing to put him in tone for his own week’s business of research among revered but defunct Elizabethans. Besides, he often had the joys of victory hard won.
At present, he was fighting it out with a butter-and-egg middleman. Years of handling a fragile and perishable commodity had made the middleman self-conscious in the presence of so egg-like an object as a tennis ball. He puzzled his opponents, therefore, as theinexperienced whist player so often does, by unaccountable delicacy when one naturally expected a smashing drive, and at other times by reckless lobbing—as if he had just condemned a bad shipment!—when the safe return was a gentle touch.
A wife or two sat sewing in the lee of a cherry tree. They often stopped their mild chatter to watch some contested point—sometimes the ball stayed in play unaccountably long; a quarter of the returns was accidental!—at such times the repartee on the courts was equally compelling. A “professor” is by instinct talkative, and the enforced reticence of butter-and-egg middlemen unloosens sudden outbursts of speech—the figure has an unfortunate but truthful suggestion—like dammed things.
All this was a generation ago—June 17, 1888, to be exact—a period when tennis in America was an exclusive sport like lacrosse or cricket. But the game had already made great headway toward being an American thing. Mount Airy players had long ago dug out the English “lawn” to make a “skin court”; they had twisted the English “thank you” into a technical and not always polite order to return stray balls, and had adopted the usual American system of “badgering.” Anyone could see that the young chap was trying to “talk” his opponent into error. In the American code, the man loses caste who cannot stand the steady grind of talk directed persistently at every weakness.
An accidental shot to the middleman’s left hand, and an apt remark about left-handedness in general, had unnervedthe professor’s opponent for the moment, causing a deposit of several easy balls in the net. Further well-placed banter encouraged the irritated middleman to take out a little private revenge on the ball; result, a walloping “three-bagger” over toward the Mount Airy sky line.
“Hard luck!” the young man murmured in mock politeness, gazing satirically after the ball, but the middleman seemed to view that terrific flight with deep satisfaction. His partner, however, scolded and advised him to be “steady.”
The game stood “four all.” It was the middleman’s service. That looked like a sure win for the young professor’s side; that is, unless the middleman grew cautious and canny. Tennis is a game requiring great strength and equally great delicacy. The middleman had been brought up in the produce business. For ten years he had assisted, between two o’clock in the morning and sunrise, in the transportation of hundreds of cases of eggs, than which there are few occupations requiring more combined strength and delicacy.
The middleman settled down to business. Balls were served with the wizard-like dexterity of a juggler. There was absolutely no “breakage”—a clean, fine shipment; score, 5-4.
At the same time the professor suddenly slumped.
He missed easy shots and fouled his partner. A young person sitting cross-legged on the side-lines—it was one of the many Levering girls, although one could not be sure without one’s glasses—had been forsome time deliberately making fun of him, and in a very stealthy fashion, too. His private and original twists of chin, arm, head, even the crinkling of the eyes to avoid the glare, these had been sedulously imitated. The professor put the left palm to his chin—a thoroughly characteristic attitude; the young lady, squatting like a tailor, put her left palm to her chin and wiggled the fingers in some subtle token of derision. The professor played with a twisted lock at the very crown of his head; the young lady elevated a gorgeous bunch of her own brown hair.
This mirror-like mimicry got on his mind and caused some extraordinary tennis. Yes, she was one of the “Leverings”—a familiar name in that locality—but for a time he could not precisely place her. Ah! Those Leverings with the outlandish names, Regina?—Juanita?—
“Hard luck!” grunted the middleman, with a sharp tinge of vengeance in his tone. The professor had served a monstrous “out.”
Whatwasthe name? He cocked an eye aloft and sucked in both cheeks—an attitude of cogitation; the Levering young lady twisted her head and neck into a Pre-Raphaelite Pièta. He had danced with her many times. He had played tennis with her at—ah! Manheim! Manheim Levering! That was it. No! Manheim was the name of a street.... Some absurd family name. What was it? A bad return threw the game into deuce. He clapped his hand over his mouth as a sign of apology; the Levering person—first namenot yet recalled—immediately hid her face with a spread-out palm and peeped out between the fingers, a sign of utter shame over the bad play. Keyser! That was it! Keyser Levering. Of all the absurd names to give a girl! The Keysers had come over with Pastorius; that was enough to justify the maltreating of a young woman who—gracious!—she was pulling her nose, stroking it gently! Extraordinary conduct! Perhaps the name had affected her in some way. Names do react upon the owners; few Percys ever become valiant; Percy Hotspur was only a glorious exception. Pulling the nose was one of the young professor’s really bad habits; he had struggled all his life to stop it; the very thought of stopping gave him an uncontrollable itching. There! he was doing it again. And she? She was polishing vigorously with little finger upraised. The minx!
The professor suddenly doubled-up and rubbed his belt. He had caught a stabbing blow “in the wind,” as they say in boxing.
“Game and set!” exulted the middleman, and then offered satiric apologies for the knock-out; but the young man heard not; he was busy getting his breath and watching Miss Levering mimicking a gentleman doubled-up with a tennis ball in his stomach. A man may do some things, he thought as he pressed his lips and tried not to wince, that a lady should under no circumstances do. The young woman was certainly not herself that morning. Besides, he had borne the blow like a soldier, and had only passed a hand lightly overthe burning spot, while she—she was pantomiming like a child with the colic.
His memory of her conduct on other occasions gave no hint of this. He recalled a quiet, lady-like person, mature, solicitous of the latest news of Elizabethan playwrights. The miss before him, sitting tailor-fashion on the grass, was carrying on—why, she was puckering her lips like a—but so was he!
And now she was flirting with him, one eye deliberately closed, the other looking up mischievously. Could it be the heat?
Finally he marched over and accused her of losing his game.
“You sat there telling me all my faults in sign language,” he told her. “I got so interested I forgot how to play.”
“Just when did you learn?” she inquired mildly.
“Well!” he looked at her. Without doubt he was an erratic player, brilliant and simply bad alternately, the sort that never improves; but he had not the least ambition to do better, so the satire had no sting for him. “Well!” he retorted. “It wasn’t yesterday.”
“No!” she speculated. “No! It couldn’t have been yesterday; it must have been this morning—after luncheon.”
Her right hand made a vigorous swish through the air; her eyes followed an imaginary ball which obviously sailed high out of bounds; her left had come clap over the mouth in clear chagrin. In a flash the professorhad himself dramatically presented at his worst, but her cheerful laughter saved the mimicry from anything but good-natured raillery.
Then she told him how to hold his racket for certain plays, and instructed him in the theory of the angles of incidence and refraction upon which both tennis and billiards are founded.
“Yes!” he would say, and “Really, now!”; or “Why, we learned all that in physics, but I never saw any use for it!” But his main interest was in watching the bright, eager face, the frank, brown eyes which looked straight into him steadily and explored him; and without the slightest gleam of—well, there is no word for it—the sort of mature awareness that is rarely absent when a woman looks steadily into the eyes of a man. There was health in her face and a dominant egoism like a man’s. The last time he had talked with her she had been timid, and clinging, and feminine; a thing that had frightened him off. He remembered that he had likened her to a young aunt—visited rarely—who used to throw her arms about him without notice and kiss him back of the ear. After much practice he had learned finally to sense the beginning of the aunt’s attack and so, in a measure, defend himself. A pathetic lookup of the eyes, dog-like and reverent, was the unfailing sign; just so, at their last meeting, this Levering lady had regarded him as they walked together. Unconsciously he had kept one arm ready to ward off a possible pounce.
Miss Levering had not the shadow of a pounce about her now. She was talking tennis like a sporting editor. Somehow, the professor felt sorry. His strongest wish at that moment was to be attacked.
And he wasn’t listening at all to her harangue.
“You must watch the other fellow’s swing. If he ‘cuts’ up you mustn’t ‘cut’ down. The ball is turning round and round, this way,” she illustrated by swinging circles. “If you spin it the way it’s going it will drop dead.”
The professor was watching her animated face with the most open delight; and he followed her minute instructions absolutely not at all. Simple admiration beamed from him.
“My dear young lady! My dear young lady!” he was saying over and over to himself. “I will never call you ‘Keyser.’ It is the name of an emperor and a dog, but not of a bit of humanity like your delightful self. Wonder of wonders! Cosmos and chaos! Who can understand, O Lord, thy marvelous doings.... Male and female created He them.... Eyes, smiles, voice, gestures inimitable; soul, being, essence—what are they?... I don’t know anything.... Saw her for hours at a time and never noticed her till now.... Could we live on $600 salary and the rent of six small dwellings, not always rented, and the income of the D. & W. R. R., if it ever pays dividends? Glory be to Peter, what are eyes made of? And flesh and blood? Marvelous!... The Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep Thy law!... Talk on!...I’m not listening! It’s great! Oh, what a wonderful—”
Then he spoke aloud, ejaculating as if he had been stung by a green fly.
“Great Jupiter!” he shouted, and “Bless my soul!”
She had stood to show him how to swing his racket for a “Lawford,” in those days a rare stroke among amateurs.
“Bless my soul!” he exclaimed, staring at her feet.
The young lady’s dresses stopped at her knees! As she swung about, a long braid of hair became visible for the first time, tipped with a dainty bow of crimson ribbon.
“Say!” he clutched her by the arm. “How old are you?”
“Thirteen,” she replied, wondering at his excitement.
“What’s your name?” he demanded.
“Gorgas Levering. Same as it always was.”
“Thirteen! Jupiter Pluvius! Arrest me, somebody! Are you sure your name isn’t Keyser?”
“Keyser is my sister.”
“Thank goodness for that. Gorgas! Bad enough. But Keyser—ugh!—Are you named after a street?”
“No; family. What’s the matter? What are you looking at me that way for? Counting my freckles? Anything wrong with my feet?”
The professor dropped on the grass and laughed himself into exhaustion.
“Your—legs,” he got forth finally, but quietly, so the wives on the benches could not hear. “Legs—gave me—fright. They saved you, though. Hadn’t been—for—legs, I might have asked—you to—marry me.... Thirteen!... Gracious!...” He sobered up suddenly and remarked to the spirits of the air, as it were, “There ought to be a law against me.”
Miss Gorgas Levering sat down again cross-legged. She pulled her short skirts over her knees. Then she wound her long braid about her head and fastened it with a sharp twig. Demurely she looked at him, as her elder sister might have done.
“As you were saying, Professeh Blynn,” she mimicked one of her sister’s college friends. “Don’t let me interrupt a pro-po-sal. Small offehs of marriage cheerfully received. First come, first served.”
“Your face is quite old enough,” Professor Blynn speculated.
Her features were as womanly as they ever would be. Some young girls achieve that sort of maturity early; it is only a question of lengthened skirts and twisted hair and they grow up over night. Her vocabulary was strikingly mature, too; sure sign of much reading; and it was streaked with dashes of vigorous young thinking. Her strong coloring heightened the illusion.
“I’m an out-of-doors girl,” she explained. “I play tennis, you know—really play,” she laughed; “and I skate and climb trees and ride.” Then she told him, with comical gravity, that she was the beginning of anew species, and asked if he had read Gardiner’s “The Femine?” “It’s an English book; sort of pamphlet. It tells about the coming woman. She will be strong, first of all. He didn’t convert me. I was always that.”
The instinctive teacher in him brought him quickly to her level. He did not make fun of her, nor patronize. Just the right word or two he said, as he lolled on the grass and deliberately stuffed a brier pipe, enough to take her off the defensive, a position which every intelligent child must assume in the presence of superior elders, and led her to communicate naturally. He talked to her of modern ideas about woman; although his own ideas on the subject were not at all formed. “A Doll’s House” had just been translated into English and was already creating no end of stir. He told her about it. The story of Nora and her vain sacrifice caught hold of her active young mind. He promised her some books, forgetting completely her years as he had done in the beginning; and recommended a lot of German “new thought” just emerging into translations, rather shocking reading in those days, even for males.
Without any self-consciousness they explored each other’s faces as they talked. Certain of his little twists of mouth and eye—he had a habit of screwing up the left side of his face as he propounded, it seemed to assist him as he dug the idea up out of his mind and threw it from him—these she stored away without meaning to, along with his sudden wrinkling of brow, and the odd cock of the neck. Something dramatic inher had always been at work, seizing the high peculiarities of folks for the sake of later caricature. She did not miss that sly rubbing of the hand along the nose, nor his sudden display of white teeth when he smiled.
As a rule, he lost sight of his auditors when he spoke. His classes were always a blur, or rather, they merged into a single personality, which attended, squirmed, laughed as a complete organism. And in his successful dealings with very little children—they always received him into their intimacies without reserve—he had soon discovered that the best results were obtained when one does not in the beginning stare into their faces. You must look far off down the street as you parley with them, or they will catch the assumed interest or the lurking irony in your eye, and shy off.
So at first he only glanced up at her occasionally. The picture flashed upon his mind was not at all that of a child, but of a young woman of his own age, yet infinitely more self-absorbed and independent than any he could recall. The chin, grasped firmly in her hand as she leaned forward, the strong, searching eyes and the coiling braid and the absence of legs had their effect gradually of making him forget that he was dealing with a merely precocious youngster; so, as he warmed up to the tale of Helmer and Doctor Rank and Nora, he shifted about and watched her animated brown face.
The sun and the wind and the rain had toned her in shades of brown. The hair was black-brown, the eyessepia but lustrous and alive, the skin ruddy-brown like a young Indian. The fat, short-fingered hand that supported the chin was almost cedar.
The illusion of maturity was enhanced by a flashing interpolation or two.
“Women mustn’t imitate men,” she asserted. “That’s silly. Men have some fine things that don’t belong just to them; that’s all. Why shouldn’t I ride a bicycle? Why shouldn’t I play tennis and get tanned? Why shouldn’t I work hard, too, and get all there is out of the sport? I’m no jelly fish. Chinese womencanwalk; can’t they? Well, why shouldn’t they? I found that in Gardiner, but I thought of it myself, long before that.”
They discussed a possible Chinese woman who had revolted, and the consequences in community and family persecution. Then she hinted guardedly of some personal persecutions. The mother had misgivings. There was talk in the family of corralling and branding and fitting for market.
She had never been to school. She had fought against it; and they had given in. A nursery maid had taught her to read and figure, the rest had taken care of itself.
He admired her immensely then, she was so careful not to show a partisan spirit in a matter that so much concerned her happiness. The mother was quite right to wish her daughters to be alike, she admitted; but it is not given even loving mothers to understand all about their children. Sacrifice must be made by the children,she knew, for mothers must not suffer too much, even when they were unwisely restrictive or made laws just for the sake of making them. As she spoke thus soberly, the little lady seemed really older than the man before her.
Then the spell was shattered.
“I willneverwear a boned waist!” she broke in frankly.
In Mount Airy, twenty-five years ago, one did not speak openly of invisible clothing. In school one was taught to say limb, and not leg; and no young lady ever admitted any public knowledge of petticoats or stockings.
Then Miss Gorgas Levering yanked the twig from her braid, stood up, displayed two lithe young legs, shedding at once ten years of maturity.
He stood up, too. “Gorgas,” he began, and then stopped to look at her quizzically. “I can’t get used to that name,” he smiled. “With ‘Gorgas Lane’ just beyond the Unruh farm—” he waved a hand jokingly.
“But you!” she cried in defense—she knew all about him; he was “the professor” and a marked man. “‘Allen Blynn’—that’s a lane, too—Allen’s Lane! And that’s not so far away, either!”
Evidently the little lady was sensitive about her odd name.
“But Allen is a regular name,” he protested.
“So’s Gorgas!... And you’re ‘Allen L. Blynn,’ too; why, you’re areal‘lane’!”
“Oh, I dropped the ‘L’ long ago—when grandmother died.”
“I never had it!” she exulted.
“But the ‘L’ isn’t for ‘lane,’” he shook his head sadly. “It’s much worse—it’s for ‘Lafayette.’”
“Oh!” she gasped her delight.
“Much worse, eh?”
“I should say so!”
“I take it all back, Gorgas,” he dropped his bantering tone, and shook his head so humbly, and smiled so pleasantly that she was soon mollified. “We’re both named after families, I see—the kind of families that have streets named for them; but that ‘Lafayette’ of mine is worse than—worse than even ‘Keyser’!” Gorgas laughed; one’s own name is never funny, but how comic are other persons’! “When Lafayette paid Mount Airy the great visit in 1825,” he explained, “he made a very formal call on my grandmother—kissed her hand, I believe—well, she gave up the remainder of her life to bragging about it, and she hoped to perpetuate the event by naming me ‘Lafayette.’ Wasn’t that a dreadful calamity to put upon a young infant?”
“Awful!” she agreed heartily.
“While she lived I had to be ‘Allen L. Blynn,’” he smiled ruefully, “But ‘Lafayette’ died with her, bless her good old soul. At college when they asked me what the ‘L’ stood for, I used to say, ‘Just L.’ You don’t know how scared I was lest that crowd should discover all about that kiss-the-hand business!”
The middleman and his group came up just then and joked obviously about their prowess as players.
“Getting points from Gorgas?” inquired the middleman. “She took the junior cup, you know, and against some smart boys, too. At least they thought they were smart.”
The middleman had won both sets that afternoon, and could afford to expand. “You know, you tutors ought to be tutored before you take us on again. That might make you—”
“Astuter?” suggested the professor.
His grin was not at the jest. He was thinking of Gorgas, standing erect and brown as young Pocahontas, and looking very like that famous lady. The frown had not yet gone from her eyes. She would not wear—! Bless her! He could see her years later in all the tortures and disguises that women permit themselves to indulge in, including the ugly balloon sleeves, which were already enveloping very young girls; and pyramidal high-heeled shoes; perhaps even a “bustle.”
Someone asked the time.
“Jee-ru-salem!” whispered Gorgas. “I’ve got to cut it home.”
“Tell your mother I’m coming by on Wednesday afternoon. At about three. I’m looking over that Williams boy at two. It’s near you, you know.”
“Very good, Professor Blynn.”
“Mr.Blynn, if you don’t mind.”
“Very good, Mr. Blynn.”
“Stay around Wednesday, will you? I want to talk some more.”
“Verygood, Mr. Blynn.”
“Come around; you’ll find me in.”
The frown was entirely gone. She was smiling at her own “poetry” as she moved off.
“I’ll find you out, too, if I kin,” he threw back.
She walked two or three swift steps down the path before she retorted, without looking around:
“No, you won’t. You’ll simply ‘chin.’”
This was a pleasant blow at his profession. Hewasa talker. Only that very morning he had written in an “album”—it was a day of albums—answers to questions that bared him to the core.
What is your occupation? Deliverer of addresses.What would you rather be? Maker of speeches.What is your favorite game? Conversation.What game do you most dislike? Conversation of others.
What is your occupation? Deliverer of addresses.
What would you rather be? Maker of speeches.
What is your favorite game? Conversation.
What game do you most dislike? Conversation of others.
He watched her as she walked swiftly down the path. Good-looking youngsters do hold the eye! The suggestion of young Indian persisted, the ideal Indian maiden of Hiawatha: she was so brown; the hair fell in an enormous black braid; her form was almost curveless; and she strode along with all the motion in her gliding feet, her lithe body as steady and as straight as a young poplar.
She disappeared for a moment in the dip of a gully,then rose again and dwindled slowly down the long path across a field. With folded arms he stared after her, thinking of many things: of the beauty of young childhood, a wondrous, vanishing thing; of her active, mature mind, caged up in that child’s frame; of—at the end of the path she turned swiftly, as if she knew he was there, and shot a hand high in the air as a parting salute. He waved back instantaneously. He could watch her for two minutes longer, until she crossed the railroad. But she trudged sturdily on and did not look back again.