Supper with the Cooneys: Poor Relations, but you must be Nice to them; of Hen Cooney's friend V.V., as she irritatingly calls him; also relating how Cally is asked for her Forgiveness, and can't seem to think what to say.
The Heths' poor relations, the Cooneys, lived in a two-story frame house on Centre Street, four doors from a basement dry-cleaning establishment, and staring full upon the show-window of an artificial-limb manufactory, lately opened for the grisly trade.
The interval between the families of Heth and Cooney was as these facts indicate. If Thornton Heth had married an ambitious woman, and he had, his sister Molly had displayed less acumen. The Cooney stock, unlike the Thompson as it was, deplorably resembled a thousand other stocks then reproducing its kind in this particular city. The War had flattened it out, cut it half through at the roots, and it had never recovered, as economists count recovery, and wouldn't, for a generation or two at the least. Accursed contentment flowed in the young Cooneys' blood. They had abilities enough, but the sane acquisitive gift was not in them. They were poor, but unashamed. They were breezy, keen, adventurous, without fatigue. They claimed the gasoline-cleaning establishment as their private garage, challenging any car under six thousand dollars to beat the expensive smell. A large and very popular group of family jokes centred about the plant of the legman.
Carlisle Heth "came to supper" with the Cooneys, as agreed, on the Thursday following the magic afternoon at Willie's apartment. The week intervening had been, as it chanced, one of the most interesting and titillating periods of her life; by the same token, never had family duty seemed more drearily superfluous. However, this periodic, say quarterly, mark of kinsman's comity was required of her by her father, a clannish man by inheritance, and one who, feeling unable to "do" anything especial for his sister's children, yet shrank from the knocking suspicion of snobbery. In the matter of intermealing, reciprocity was formally observed between the two families. Four times per annum the Cooneys were invited in a body to dine at the House of Heth, Mrs. Heth on these occasions speaking caustically of her consort's relatives, and on Christmas sending gifts of an almost offensively utilitarian nature.
The noisy cousins filled the dingy little parlor to overflowing; this, though Mrs. Cooney and Hen, having rushed out for the welcome, had at once rushed back to the preparations for supper. For it appeared that Hortense was absent once again, having asked to "git to git" a night off, to see her step-daughter allianced to a substitute Pullman porter. The two ladies, however, were only gone before, not lost, and through the portières joined freely in the conversation, which rattled on incessantly in the Cooney style.
Carlisle sat on the rusty sofa, listening absently to the chatter. Her unaspiring uncle-in-law, the Major, who was vaguely understood to be "in insurance" at present, parted his long coat-tails before the Baltimore heater, and drifted readily to reminiscence. Louise and Theodore (as the family Bible too stiffly knew Looloo and Tee Wee) sat together on a divan, indulging in banter, with some giggling from Looloo--none from grave Theodore. Chas informally skimmed an evening paper in a corner, with comments: though the truth was that precious little ever appeared in any newspaper which was news to the keen young Cooneys....
"And I said to Hen," observed Major Cooney to his fashionable niece, having now got his short history of the world down as far as the '80s--"now stop your whining around me, Miss. If you've got to whine, go down to the cellar and stand in the corner. Well--"
"Why could she whine in the cellar, father? That point isn't clear, sir," said Tee Wee's deep voice.
"Because it was a whine-cellar!" cried Hen, through the portières.
There was mild laughter at this, rather derisive on the part of all but the Major; but when Chas, glancing up from his paper, remarked crisply: "Aw, Miss Mamie! Like to speak to you a minute, please!"--the merriment seemed mysteriously to acquire a more genuine ring. Carlisle politely inquired who Miss Mamie was.
Looloo, who alone seemed the least bit awed by the presence of her dazzling cousin, undertook to explain.
"She's Mamie Willis, Cally,--I don't believe you know her. Well, you see she's always making the most atrocious puns, and is very proud of them--thinks she's quite a wit. So, you see, when anybody makes an awfully bad pun, like Hen's--"
"Brightest thing I've heard to-night," screamed Hen, defiantly, through the curtains.
"Aw, Loo!" came her mother's soft voice from the unseen. "Run upstairs and get half a dozen napkins, my child. The wash is in the basket on my bed."
"We always pretend like we're repeating it to Miss Mamie, just for fun," concluded Looloo. "Yes'm, mother!"
"Oh! I see," said Carlisle.
She had donned for the coming to supper a plain house-dress of soft dark-green silk, two summers old and practically discarded. ("This old thing, my dear! Why, it positively belongs in therag-bag!") She never dressed much for the Cooneys. Also, by wholly mechanical processes of adjustment to environment, her manner and air became simpler, somewhat unkeyed: she unconsciously folded away her more shining wings. Nevertheless, there was about her to-night a fleeting kind of radiance which had caught the notice of more than one of her cavalier cousins, notably of pretty little Looloo, who had kissed the visitor shyly (for a Cooney) at greeting, and said, "Oh, Cally! You do looksolovely!" Cally herself was aware of an inner buoyance oddly at variance with the drab Cooneymilieu. Recent progress in the great game had more than blotted out all memory of little mishaps at the Beach....
Starting aloft for the napkins, Looloo was adroitly tripped by Tee Wee, and fell back upon him with a little shriek. Instead of checking the tumult that followed, Major Cooney, including Carlisle in the proceedings with a mischievous wink, called out: "Give it to him, Loo! Give it to him!" Loo, having got her small hand in his hair, gave it to him, good-fashion. Tee Wee moaned, and Chas made a fairly successful effort to gag him with the newspaper. In the midst of the uproar, Mrs. Cooney's gentle voice could be heard calling, "Supper, supper," and Hen, entering with a large dinner-bell, conceived the whimsey of ringing it loudly in everybody's ear.
Presently, after much noise and confusion, they were seated at the antique mahogany, with the dent near one edge where a Yankee cavalryman had rested his spurred foot too carelessly once upon a time. It was then observed that Hen, having silenced her great clapper, was unobtrusively gone from the midst. The circumstance proved of interest to the younger Cooneys.
"She's nursing a little bunch of violets she got three days ago," Tee Wee explained to Carlisle. "Says she's going to wear 'em to the Masons' to-morrow, though anybody can see they can't possibly live through the night."
"I thought I saw a purple box in the front window as I drove up," said Carlisle. "Is it a secret who sent them?"
"'Bout forty," said Chas, making a fine one-hand catch of a napkin. "You'd hardly call 'em a bunch, Tee Wee--more like a nosegay."
"Pass this coffee to Cally, son."
"Bob Dunn sent 'em, Cally, down at the bookstore," said Looloo, sweetly. "And he wrote Hen a love-letter Thanksgiving beginning, 'Darling Miss Cooney.'"
"That so?" said Tee Wee, who was just home from the University for Christmas and not up on all the news yet. "How'd he sign it--'Your loving Mr. Dunn'?"
"'Ave some werry nice 'am, Cally?"
"Yes--thank you. But do go on and tell me about Mr. Dunn. Does Hen like him?"
"No, but she loves violets," said Tee Wee. "Made me sit up half of last night, fanning 'em for her."
"Loo, pass Charles's plate, daughter."
Carlisle surveyed the noisy table as from some lofty peak. She knew that the Cooney habit of monopolizing all conversation, and dashing straight through every topic, was only their poor-but-proud way of showing off: sometimes it was a little irritating, but to-night only rather fatiguing to the ear-drums. The children came two years apart, as regular as some kind of biannual publication; Looloo, seventeen, being the youngest, and also the best-looking and the most popular in the family. But then all the Cooneys were good-looking, including the Major, and all were popular in the family. In fact, they were more like a house-party than a family at all: and in some ways they rather resembled a queer little secret fraternity, enjoying strange delights and responding with shrieks to unintelligible catchwords.
To-night the talk was more than usually disjointed, owing to the regrettable absence of Hortense. There was constant jumping up, infinite "passing." Mr. Tee Wee, manipulating the water-pitcher from the side-table, complained aside to his mother at the universal thirst. Chas, it seemed, had charge of the heating-up of the later crops of biscuits: he kept springing off to the kitchen, now and then returning with a heaping platter of what he called his little brown beauties.
In the midst of the confusion, Hen strode in, looking somewhat defiant, and instantly drew the fires of all.
"How're the little patients, Hen? Number 9 looked pretty sick to me this--"
"Best thing I know is running 'em up and down the hall, and then brisk massage--"
"Gargled 'em yet, Hen?"
Hen, laughing wildly, stood her ground.
"That's all right!" she retorted to the last sally, which happened to be Chas's. "There are swains in this town who might boost their standing a little if onlythey'dpatronize the florist once in a while!"
This drew loud approbation, and Chas (who was understood to be very attentive to a Miss Leither--Leither!--of the Woman's Exchange), laughing with the majority, threw up his hands, saying, "Hellup! Hellup!"
He fled to the kitchen to look after his little brown beauties. The noisy supper proceeded. Presently Major Cooney, the easy-going and reminiscent, gave the conversation a new tack.
"And where are your violets, Cally, my dear?" he asked, directing one of his mischievous winks at Looloo. "You must have a flower-shop full at home, if what we hear is true."
Carlisle, on the point of saying something slightly caustic about Chas as a swain, found the tables abruptly turned. All the Cooneys were looking at her. She said with equanimity that, on the contrary, she got so few flowers that when she did have any, she sat up at night with them just like Hen.
"And I'll wear 'em to the Masons' to-morrow night, too!" said Hen, throwing round a look which challenged contradiction.
"Now, cousin, what's the use?" said Chas, reëntering with his platter. "The Visitor is giving you the rush of your young life, and we're all on. Take a handful of my beauties."
"You mean Mr. Canning? My dear Chas, if he only were!"
There was no rebuffing the Cooneys. They began their little third-degree system.
"He called on you last Thursday afternoon, didn't he, Cally?" said Looloo, laughing, with a little face for her daring.
"One call, my dear child!"
"You went motoring with him on Friday," said Theodore, gravely, "and stopped for tea at the Country Club at 6.20, you taking chocolate--"
"One motor-ride!"
"You dined with him at the Arlington on Monday night, table decorations being small diamond necklaces--"
"Good heavens!" laughed Carlisle, coloring a little. "All this is terribly circumstantial! I had no idea my movements were--"
"Movement is useless--don't move, lady! We have you covered--"
"There, there, children!--stop showing your jealousy," laughed Mrs. Cooney; and her eyes rested with a brief wistfulness on the shining niece who plumed eagle's feathers for flights where her daughters would never follow. "You'd all give your eye-teeth to be half as pretty and attractive as Cally ..."
"Yes'm," said Chas. "Well, then, Cally, have one more sardine,please. Nothing on earth for the complexion like these fat saline fellows that mother catches fresh every morning with her little hook and line.--Mind,Loo! You're joggling The Bowl."
Carlisle was hardly to be overwhelmed by the Cooneys' teasing, nor perhaps was she seriously displeased by it. Even less did the detail of her eccentric cousins' knowledge surprise her. If there was a fight or a fire, abon motlaunched or a heart broken, money made or a death died, it invariably happened that one of the Cooneys was "just passing."...
In the middle of the table stood an object of shiny green crockery, which seemed to be a cross between a fruit-dish and a vase. Most of the table service was quite familiar to Carlisle, not a little of it having started life as Christmas presents from the Heths. But this crockery piece was new, and, upon Chas's admonition, its shiny hideousness caught and riveted her attention.
"Aunt Rose Hopwood's parting gift," said Tee Wee, softly, following her fascinated gaze. "Oh, Cally, ain't it boo'ful!"
"Theodore," said his mother, quite sharply, "I don't think your stay at the University has improved your manners."
Theodore colored abruptly and deeply. "Why, I--I was only funning, mother."
"I think that's a very poor sort of funning. And this applies to you, too, Charles."
"Yes'm," said Charles, starting.
The eldest-born made no other reply to his mother, nor did Theodore: meekness under parental reproof being another of the odd Cooney characteristics. Conversation seemed about to languish; but Mrs. Cooney, as if to show that the episode was closed, said equably:
"By the way, Cally, Cousin Martha Heth is coming next week to make us quite a visit. If you are not too busy, do try to come in some time, and cheer her up. She is going to take treatment for her nose and also for flatfoot, and I fear is very miserable."
After supper Carlisle sat on the sofa, feeling rather sardiney, and had an irritating talk with Aunt Molly, the subject being Chas's affair with his Leither, for the furtherance of which he was reported to be even now arraying himself upstairs. The complacence with which Aunt Molly regarded the threatened alliance--all possible objections being answered in her mind by a helpless, "If she is the girl he loves?"--was most provokingly characteristic of the Cooneys' fatal shiftlessness. And they were popular, too, in their way, and Chas might easily have married some socially prominent girl with money, instead of bringing a nameless saleslady into the family. It was impossible for Carlisle not to contrast her aunt's flabby sentimentalism with her own and her mother's sane, brilliant ambitiousness. If nothing succeeds like success, how doubly true it was that nothing fails like failure.
Carlisle had reached a point where she longed to shake her aunt, when Hen, who had been "scrapping up" with Looloo, came in, putting an end to the futile talk.
To her mother's demand if they had stayed to wash the dishes, Hen replied that they thought they might just as well: there weren't many, and the water was nice and hot. And Chas, hearing the clatter from aloft, had slipped down the backstairs in his suspenders, and lent a hand with the wiping. Mrs. Cooney chided, saying the dishes should have been left for Hortense, to-morrow morning before breakfast. She asked Hen whether Chas knew that his white vest had come in with the wash, and though Hen was pretty sure he did, Aunt Molly presently made an excuse and slipped away upstairs. She was a great hand for being by when the children were dressing to go out, and no one in the family, not even Chas, could tie a white lawn bow half so well as mother....
Looloo lingered in the dining-room, the family sitting-room of evenings, where Theodore had engaged his father at checkers. Hen, dropping into a chair by the sofa as if she were rather tired, asked Cally for gossip of the gay world, but Cally answered briefly out of regard for the chasm between: how contract the name and fame of Mr. Canning to fit this shabby little "parlor"? Hen was thin, colorless, and sweet-faced, and was known in the family (for the Cooneys, strange to say, knew of enormous individual differences among themselves) as the most thoughtful and considerate of the children, and as alone possessing the real Ambler nose. She rather suggested some slender pale flower, made to look at its slenderest and palest beside her cousin's rich blossom. Still, Hen was accounted a fine stenographer: they paid her sixty dollars a month at the bookstore, where she earned double at least.
For five minutes the talk between these two girls, of about the same age and blood but, it seemed, almost without a point of contact, was considerably perfunctory. Then, by an odd chance and in the wink of an eye, it took on a very distinct interest. Carlisle inquired if Hen had ever heard of a man named V. Vivian, said to be a nephew of Mr. Beirne; and Hen, with a little exclamation, and a certain quickening of countenance, replied that she had been raised with him. Moreover, she referred to him as V.V....
Though the Cooneys knew everybody, as well as everything, and though Carlisle had thought before now of putting an inquiry to Hen or Chas in this particular direction, the manner of her cousin's reply was a decided surprise to her, and somehow a disagreeable surprise.
"Oh! Really?" said she, rather coldly. "I understood--some one told me--that the man had just come here to live."
"He's just comeback," explained Hen, with interest. "Why, he was born here, Cally, three doors from where we used to live down on Third Street--remember? Well, Dr. Vivian lived right there till he was sixteen or seventeen--"
"Why do you call him Dr. Vivian?"
"Well, that's what he is, you see. He's a doctor--medical man."
"He doesn't look in the least like a medical man to me," said Carlisle, as if that ought to settle something.
"Oh! You know him, then?"
"I have spoken to him," replied Carlisle, her gaze full on Hen's face. "You see a great deal of him, I suppose?"
"No, we don't," said Hen, with an odd air, suggestive of regret. "He keeps so terribly busy. Besides being sort of a missionary doctor, he's always working on dozens of grand schemes of one sort or another. His latest is to raise about a million dollars and buy the Dabney House for a Settlement! How's that for a tall one? He just mentioned it to me this morning,en passant, and says I must help him raise the million--"
"I suppose you didn't know that one of his grand schemes was to write a terrible article in the paper attacking papa and the Works?"
"Oh!" said Hen, plucking a thread from her old black skirt. "Oh, that letter in the 'Post,' long ago, you mean? Yes, I--knew about that; I wanted to speak to you about it at the time. Did you read it, Cally?"
"I glanced at it," said Cally, shortly.
Full of the interest of thundering feet as the week had been since Willie and mamma had given her the connecting link, Carlisle had in fact made a point of getting hold of a copy of the old paper containing that particular piece. Not being at all familiar with Works and newspapers, she had found the process involved with considerable perplexity and trouble, but she had felt amply rewarded in the end. The piece came to her hand like a weapon, against any possible remeeting with its remembered author.
Now she regarded Hen with steadily rising annoyance.
"What was your friend's idea in writing such outrageous stuff, do you know? Is he really crazy, as they say, or is he just an ordinary notoriety seeker?"
Colorless Hen looked rather hard at her pretty cousin. She allowed a perceptible pause to fall before she said:
"I thought you said you knew him."
"No; I said that I barely spoke to him once."
"If you only said good-morning to him--if you onlylookedat him once, on the street--I don't see how you could possibly imagine.... Why, Cally, he's about the least self-seeking human being that ever lived. He's so absolutely un-self-seeking that he gives away every single thing he's got, to anybody that comes along and wants it. In the first place, he's giving away his life.... Some of his ideas may be visionary or mistaken, but--"
"I should think so, after glancing at his article. Whatwashis object, then, my dear?"
"Well, that's simple, I should think. He went to the Works, and thought that conditions there were bad, and being what would be called the reformer type, I suppose he thought it his duty to tell people so, so that the conditions would be corrected--"
"Well, really, Hen! Don't you know, if conditionswerebad at the Works,--whatever that may mean, and I for one have never felt that working-girls were entitled to Turkish baths and manicures,--don't youknowpapa would correct what was wrong without being called a homicide by--by eccentric medical men?"
Hen hesitated, and then began: "Well, business is hard, Cally, and men in business--"
"Why doesn't your friend try attending to his own, then, the medical business, instead of interfering all the time with other people's?"
The Cooney answered quite easily: "You see, he'd say thiswashis business." Then she smiled a little, thoughtfully, and said: "He'd say, Cally, that the world's all one family, and everybody's responsible for everybody else. The cute part about it is that he absolutely believes it.... And it worries him that people aren't as happy as they ought to be, the poor because they haven't anything to be happy with, the rich because they have too much. He and Mr. Beirne argue about that for hours. He's absolutely the only person I ever saw who really doesn't care for--"
"Why, mydear!" interrupted Carlisle, smiling rather dangerously. "You'll make me believe that youadmirethe man immensely."
Hen laughed, and replied enigmatically: "Well, it's nice to feel free to admire what's admirable, don't you think so?"
"You do admire him very much?"
"I think he's perfectly precious," said Henrietta Cooney.
A peal of triumph from the rear room indicated that Major Cooney had reached the king-row in the teeth of bitter opposition. The peal came from Looloo, who should have been reading "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" with a big dictionary instead of hanging over her father's shoulder. Footsteps above suggested that Chas and Aunt Molly were making a careful toilet indeed for his call upon the obscure inamorata.
In the Cooney parlor, the two girls looked at each other. Carlisle tried hard to stare Hen down, and failed. In this moment she felt that she positively disliked her commonly negligible cousin. She had proved and re-proved to her own almost complete satisfaction that the man who had spoken the affronting words to her in the summer-house was a virulent religious fanatic, or (since she had read the piece) a crazy Socialist, like the man who had thrown the brick at papa, or both; almost certainly both. She was, it might be said, deeply and irrevocably committed to these beliefs: they settled and explained everything, and no more need to think or worry. It was simply not to be endured that Henrietta Cooney should cheekily sit there and try to unsettle everything, pretending....
"But understand me, Cally," Henrietta was saying, with provoking calm. "Of course I didn't like that letter a bit. You see--Heth wasn't any more than a name to V.V., a sort of symbol, when he wrote it. But I think it was a mistake all through, and I scolded him well at the time--"
"Oh, did you?" said Cally, her cheeks very pink. "I imagined you thought it perfectly precious of him to call papa a shameless homicide."
"Why, you know I never thought anything of the sort, Cally dear," answered Hen....
She seemed surprised by the signs of her cousin's displeasure (which really did seem excessive for a business controversy nearly two months old) and went on in what was evidently intended to be quite a soothing manner:
"You know, men are always hammering each other over things like this--it's really not nearly so awful as it sounds!... And honestly, Cally, that letter wasn't at all representative of V.V.--even though he probably thought it was! I mean ... he may talk in that fierce way about whole classes, but when it comes down to people--individuals--he's about the kindest person. What he really thinks is--well, thateverybody's good.... Here's what I mean, Cally," said Hen, laughing a little, but with a certain eagerness too, as if it were of some importance for Cally to see what she meant.... "You know him, you say--slightly, of course. Well, instead of writing any more letters about the Works, do you know what it would be exactly like him to do now?"
"Throw a bomb in at papa's office-window?"
"No, speak toyouabout it!" laughed Henrietta, unabashed--"some time when he sees you at Mr. Beirne's or somewhere--ask you in the nicest, most natural way to ask Uncle Thornton if he won't build a new Works! And you'd see from the way he looked at you that he was perfectlysureyou were going to do it, too!"
Cally gazed at Hen silently for at least ten seconds.
"I'd enjoy immensely having him try it," said she slowly. "Immensely!I--I've wanted for some time to say a few words to him...."
At that moment the broken Cooney doorbell rang feebly, and within one minute V. Vivian came walking into the little parlor.
Supping at the Cooneys was not usually so interesting as this.
When the bell rang, Looloo, springing up from the Major's side in the dining-room, hurriedly pulled shut the folding-doors between. She apologized to her cousin through the diminishing crack, saying that it was probably awful Bob Dunn, and Cally could come hide in there with them if she'd rather. But Cally said briefly that she was not afraid, and had to go home in a little while anyway.
In the same moment Carlisle heard the voice of the caller in the hall, for whom Hen had just opened the door. She recognized this voice at the first word. And she involuntarily rose in the Cooney parlor, feeling the oddest, suddenest, most unreasoning impulse to go at once into the dining-room, after all, and be with Looloo, and watch them play checkers for a little while....
It was the surprise of it; nothing more. And Carlisle overcame that impulse. She remained standing motionless, reconsidering as by lightning flashes the quite complicated point of etiquette that so suddenly confronted her. What was a lady's proper attitude toward a nobody who has called her father a shameless homicide and herself a God-pitiful poor little thing? There was no experience to guide here. But clearer and clearer it seemed to become to Cally that to hold any converse with such an one could only be, after all, essentially debasing. Icy indifference was the stingingest rebuke....
Henrietta came through the door, with the lame medical man behind her. Without looking at him, Cally gathered that the man found the sight of her properly disquieting.
"You know my cousin, Miss Heth, I believe--DoctorVivian, Cally."
"Oh!... How do you do!" said the doctor.
Carlisle, not advancing from the sofa-side, said:
"I remember Dr. Vivian."
"Well, sit down, both of you," said Hen.
And then Henrietta, with that audacious forwardness which the Cooneys mistook for humor, smiled treacherously at her cousin over the caller's shoulder, and said:
"And entertain each other a moment, won't you? I havegotto speak to mother...."
On that Hen left them. Through some bias in its ancient hinges, the parlor door swung to behind her. It shut with a loud click. From behind the other closed doors, the merry voices of the checker-players and rooter grew very audible.
Despite the hostess's cordial injunction, the two young people in the shut Cooney parlor did not immediately sit down and begin to entertain each other. Both remained standing exactly where Hen had left them, and there ensued a hiatus of entertainment just long enough to be quite distinctly appreciable.
Then the absurdity of her--Miss Heth's--feeling constraint before this Mr.--no, Dr.--Vivian, this friend of the Cooneys and malicious attacker of the Cooneys' relatives' characters, rushed over the girl inspiritingly. Then it occurred to her simply to incline her head coldly, and leave the man without a word: dignified that, yet possibly open to misconstruction. So, taking one graceful step toward the door, Carlisle said, with a sufficiency of distant hauteur:
"You can entertain yourself, I hope? I am going."
The tall young man removed his gaze from the blank space left by Hen's exit, with a kind of start, and said hurriedly:
"I hope you aren't lettingmedrive you away? I--I merely stopped a moment in passing, on a--a professional matter...."
"Why should you imagine that I am anxious to avoid you?"
He said, with gratifying embarrassment: "I naturally couldn't hope that--you would wish to see me--"
And then suddenly all her just and fortifying resentment seemed to return to her, and she said with frosty calm:
"Yes, I've rather wanted to see you again. I didn't quite place you when--I had this opportunity before...."
The man regarded the floor. He looked as if he knew what was coming.
"I've recently read your letter in the 'Post' about my father. Tell me, what pleasure do you find in writing such wicked untruths about people who've never harmed you?"
In her mind it had seemed exactly the thing to say, the rebuke which would put him finally in his place on all scores, show him up completely to himself. But the moment it was out, it acquired somehow the wrong sound, jangling and a little shrewish and somewhat common, and she rather wished she hadn't said it. She had never seen anybody turn pale so suddenly....
The man wore the same clothes he had worn in the summer-house, she thought; indubitably the same large four-in-hand, floating the fat white painted shad, or perch. He was rather better-looking in the face than she had supposed; and in this light she observed more clearly the rather odd expression he wore about the eyes, a quality of youthful hopefulness, a sort of confidingness: not the look of a brick-thrower, unless you happened to know the facts in the case. All this, of course, was his own lookout. If he wanted to say and do outrageous things, he had no right to appear so pained when he got his merited punishment. He had no right to put on that appealing look. He had no right to be lame....
"It is perfectly natural for you to say and think that," he was saying with an odd air of introspection, quite as if he were reassuring somebody inside of him. "I don't think there was anything untrue in that letter, but--no doubt it must have seemed so. And of course ... Idon'tsuppose you can go to the Heth Works much, or be very familiar--"
"It isn't necessary for me to go to the Works to learn that my father is not a homicide."
Her voice had lost something of its first ringing assurance. It seemed to shake a little, like an indignant child's.
The young man said hurriedly:
"No, no! Of course not! I--indeed, I think you misunderstood what I meant to say in--in that letter. I must have expressed myself badly. I did not intend so much a--a criticism of individuals, as of society, for--"
"Oh, please don't apologize. That's always rather silly, I think. I like to see people with the courage of their convictions, no matter how wrong they are. Good-evening."
"Don't go," said the slum physician, instantly, much as Mr. Canning had said at a similar yet totally different moment--"that is--mustyou--go at once? I--there is something I've wanted very much to tell you."
She stopped still; stood in silence gazing at Dalhousie's friend, the shabby author of the two Severe Arraignments. Undoubtedly there was a sinking feeling within her, unsteadying in its way. But she was spirited, and into her eyes had come a hostile challenge. Passionately she dared this man to ask God to pity her again....
Her eyes were oval and lifted the least bit at the outer corners. The bow of her upper lip drew up a little most engagingly at the middle (like Teresa Durbeyfield's), an irregularity more endearing to the eye than any flawlessness. There was the possibility of tenderness in this mouth; more than the promise of strength in the finely cut chin. Her thick lashes began pure gold, but changed their minds abruptly in the middle, and finished jet black....
She was the loveliest thing this man's eyes had ever rested upon. And as at the Beach, he seemed to begin with a plunge:
"Jack Dalhousie's gone away, Miss Heth--gone to Weymouth, Texas, to live. I had a letter from him, day before yesterday. He's got work there, on a stock-farm--among strangers. He hasn't taken a drink since--October. He's making a new start, with nothing to remind him of what's past. I ... hope he will be happy yet."
Carlisle's breast rose and fell. "Why do you tell this to me?"
"Because," said Vivian, "I've felt I--did you such a wrong--that night...."
Under the flickering Cooney gas, the two stood staring at each other. The young man hurried on:
"I've had it on my mind ever since, and have wanted very much to tell you.... I've felt that--what I--I said to you was all wrong--most unjust...."
He hesitated; and the gold-and-black lashes, so piquant and gay, fell. "Take your jump! Take your jump!" called Major Cooney in the dining-room. You could hear him plainly, straight through the folding doors. And young V. Vivian, who was merciless as a social philosopher but somewhat trusting as a man, took his jump with a will.
"I was much upset about it that night--and excited, I suppose. I can't account for--for what I said in any other way. I've hoped for the opportunity to tell you.... Why, of course I don't believe that at all.... It was all so confused and mixed up; that was the trouble. But of course I know that you--that you wouldn't have said anything that--that wasn't entirely consistent with the facts...."
He paused, expectantly it seemed; but there came no reply.
Cally Heth, indeed, stood in a dumbness which she seemed powerless to break. Well she knew what sort of reply she ought to make to these remarks: what was the man saying but what she had already said a hundred times to herself? He was simply making tardy admission that her position had been exactly right all along; that was all. Yet somehow the sane knowledge did not seem to help much against this sequence of unique sensations she was at present experiencing,--odd, tumultuous, falling sensations, as of bottoms dropped out....
"I suppose," said the man's faraway voice, sounding a sudden loss of confidence, "it's rather too much to hope that--that you can forget...."
Again his words dropped into the brief, expectant silence.... It seemed that he had happened to say the one thing to which no reply was possible. And somehow the effect of it was worse, even, than the never-forgotten moment in the summer-house.
"And forgive," finished the voice.... "I've felt--"
And then, in good season, there sounded welcome footsteps, Hen's, in the hall. They broke at a stroke, the strange petrifying numbness which Carlisle had felt mysteriously closing over her. She murmured the name of Henrietta, and turned away. And her voice was the voice of Lucknow, as the friendly columns poured in....
Hen came walking in, saying something lively and Cooneyesque, and glancing with an air of interested expectancy from her friend V.V. to her cousin Cally. But Cally only said once more that she must be going, and asked where Aunt Molly was. She then let fall the word good-night for Hen's caller, while looking at a point some ninety degrees removed from his whereabouts: by which the caller understood that his forgiveness was problematical, to say the least of it.
Concerning an Abandoned Hotel, and who lived there; also of an Abandoned Youth, who lived somewhere else, Far Away; how a Slum Doctor dressed for a Function, such as involved Studs; and how Kern Garland wishted she was a Lady.
Mrs. Garland, catching sight of Doctor as he came up the decayed grand-stairway, cried out, well, she never, just in the nig of time! Why, the words was no more'n out of her mouth that the stoo was just done to a hair, she did declare, and Kern she said, quick as anything, what, a hair in the stoo, now, mommer, that'd never do....
The clocks of the city had just struck six for the last time that year. Dr. Vivian, having placed his suitcase and overcoat on the second-hand operating-table in the office, washed face and hands, brushed his coat-collar with a whisk whose ranks had been heavily thinned in wars with dust and lint, and, repairing in sound spirits to the Garland combination dining-and living-room, with the kitchen in the corner, made his interesting confidence relative to the suitcase. He made it in mouth-filling phrases, with many teasing generalizations about the ways of the world and the evils of modern society, which was only his gempman's way when playful. But by close application his auditors soon got at the heart of his meaning, to wit: Doctor actually was going uptown to his swell Uncle Beirne's swell Noo Year's reception to-night in Mr. O'Neill's fulldressuit.
Naturally the Garlands were much interested and excited by the tidings, which brought them so close to great events that, practically speaking, they themselves became members of the fash'nable set: and Mrs. Garland publicly thanked God that she was not as other women were, lazying and keeping back their gentlemen's shirts till Saturday night, or worse. Laid away tidy in the second bureau drawer, her shirts were. The doctor himself seemed not a little enlivened by the evening's prospect. It is imaginable that the Dabney House grew a little lonely at times....
"And to think your swell uncle wants you so special, sir!" said Mrs. Garland, in her harsh, inflectionless voice. "A compliment, I'm sure. And his party all a fizzle unless you come, and his gai'ty a mockery! Well!"
Such indeed was the way in which Vivian had been pleased to depict his fashionable uncle's attitude. He smiled slightly, sipped his feeble coffee and said:
"Bear in mind that he's a bad, bad (though personally not displeasing) old man, ridden by ruinous ideas about the almightiness of the dollar, or lucre as we term it.... I have observed for some time that he desires to corrupt me with his Persian luxuries."
"Persian! Well, I never!"
Mrs. G., a stout woman and a dress-reformer by the look of her, got hot corn muffins from the kitchenette in the corner, and added:
"Them rugs is beautiful."
"He said lux'ries, mommer, like lowneg dresses, and tchampagne, and ice-cream all like animals," said Kern.
"I do declare! Well, they do say the mawls of some of them swells is something nawful. Not alloodin' to your uncle now, well, of course, sir."
"I know a girl named Sadie Whirtle," continued Kern, "and there was a man named Toatwood made a lot of money, corntracting, and his wife she took some of the money and went to Europe in a steamer and stayed more'n two months buying clo'es. And one day Sadie Whirtle goes up to him and says, 'Mist' Toatwood, hear your wife's come home with some fine Parisian clo'es.' And Mist' Toatwood says, 'Shucks'--on'y he says somep'n worse'n shucks--'Shucks,' says he, 'why, my wife never been to Persia in her life.'"
Kern was eighteen, with six years of bread-winning behind her, but she told her story exactly in the manner of a child of eight. That is to say, she told it in a monotone without evincing, and clearly without feeling, the slightest amusement in it, and at the end, continuing quite grave, watched for its effect on others with a curious, staring interest. Her immobile, investigatory expression made the doctor laugh, which seemed, of late, to be the object in life of all Kern's anecdotes.
"Where'd you get that story, Corinne?"
His odd habit of so calling her had often been privately discussed between Kern and her mother, who had so long ago shortened their own original Kurrin that even that had passed from memory. They had concluded that this was only one of his jokey gempman's ways.
"Off Sadie Whirtle," said Kern, rocking backward and forward in her chair. "On'y I don't see anything comical in it."
And then she giggled for some time.
The talk and stoo went forward cheerfully. Beside the Goldnagels, on the ground floor, these two women were the doctor's only fellow lodgers, for Mister Garland, of the wanderlust, had not visited his family since the day in October, and so hardly counted. In the early weeks of the doctor's tenancy, which began only last September, he had walked three times a day to the Always Open Lunch Room, known among the baser sort as the Suicide Club, and had then become possibly the most discriminating judge of egg-sandwiches in all the city. Later, having made the better acquaintance of the Garlands, he had rightly surmised that the earnings derivable from a medical boarder might not be unacceptable in that quarter. The present modus vivendi, then worked out, had proved most satisfactory to all, from both the financial and the social viewpoints.
"I wisht I had a red satin dress, and a necklace all pearls, and was going to the party, too, and had a dark sad-faced man with a mustache and a neye-glass engaged to me, like a count. I wisht I was a Lady," said Kern.
"You don't need a red satin dress to be a lady."
"It'd come easier, kinder, with the dress, Mr. V.V. And I wisht I had a writin'-desk, too. And a founting pen."
"Lawk's sakes, Kern, an' I've asked you a hundred times what would you do with a writin'-desk, now?"
"Mommer, I'd set at it."
"An' what time you got for settin', I'd like to know? Fairy-dreamin' again!"
"An' I'd keep notes in it in the pigeonholes. Like it says in my Netiquette."
"You don't get no notes."
Kern was silenced by her mother's addiction to actuality, but presently said: "I'd get notes if I was a lady, wouldn't I, Mr. V.V.?"
The doctor assured her that she would, and that all these things would come some day. He sighed inwardly and wondered, not for the first time, where the link could possibly lie between the matter-of-fact mother and the strange child of fancy. There was nothing to do but attribute the phenomenon to Mister, the whimsical knight of the open road. The boarder asked what he should bring Kern from the party: he feared they wouldn't have writing-desks, it not being at all a literary set. The girl thought a rapturous moment and then asked could she have three of them marrowglasses, all in curly white paper.
Vivian promised, and departed on his duties. First there was a call at the Miggses' down the block, where the little boy Tub lay with scarlet fever, very sick; and then there was his seven o'clock office hour for workers, in which one, a teamster with Bright's disease and seven children, remained long....
These matters occupied the doctor till eight o'clock: alone in his office he computed the fact roughly from his watch, a battered heirloom whose word was not to be taken literally. Good!--half an hour before time to dress. Leisure, being a scant commodity, was proportionally valued. The young man advanced to his secretary, before whose open face plain living and high thinking could be so freely indulged in.
The secretary was of fine mahogany, hand-made in Virginia in the year that Sir Edward Pakenham did not take New Orleans. It was the hero of so many travels that its present proprietor once called it a field-secretary, a pleasantry which would doubtless have convulsed Miss Mamie Willis, if only she had ever heard it. The great tall office, bare but for cheap doctorly paraphernalia, was even more storied. A bleak grandeur clung to it still. Decayed mouldings, it had aplenty: great splotches on wall and ceiling, where plaster had been tried through the year and found wanting; unsightlier splotch between the windows whence the tall gilt mirror had been plucked away for cash; broken chandelier, cracked panes, loose flooring, dismantled fireplace. But view the stately high pitch of the chamber, the majestic wide windows and private balcony without, the tall mantel of pure black marble, the still handsome walnut paneling, waist-high, the massive splendid doors. No common suburban room, this: clearly a room with meaning, a past, soul.
The look was not deceptive. Royalty had on a time sat in this room: here granted audience to the great's higher circle, of greatness; there, beyond that door, nowadays admitting ragged sufferers from a fourth-class "waiting-room," slept in state with doubtless royal snores. This, in fact, was the old Dabney House's famous "state suite," Vivian's office the culminating grand sitting-room, the building art's best in the '40s. A famous hostelry the Dabney House had been in its day, the chosen foregathering-place of notabilities now long dusted to the common level. Hither had trooped the gallant and the gay, the knight in his pride and beauty in her power, great statesmen and greater belles, their lovers and their sycophants. Here, in the memorable ball still talked of by silvered ladies of an elder day, the Great Personage had trod his measure with peerless Mary Marshall.
A great history had the Dabney House, and now nothing much else beside. Built upon a flouting of a common law, it had lived to see the westward course of progress, deaf to sentiment as ever, kick it far astern. Long since had the world of fashion deserted it to its memories. Desolate and mice-ridden stood the fading pile in a neighborhood where further decay was hardly possible, enveloped by failure and dirt and poverty, misery and sin and the sound of unholy revelry by night. 'The lion and the lizard keep the courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep.' And the vast moulded corridors, historied with great names, echoed to the feet of Garlands, Vivians, and Goldnagels, and over the boards once ennobled by the press of royal feet, a shabby young man sat writing into a book with a villainous pen, as follows: