A Little Visit to the Birthplace of the Family; how Cally thinks Socialism and almost faints, and Hugo's Afternoon of Romance ends Short in the Middle.
The car came to a standstill, and Cally was reminded of another afternoon, long ago, when she and Hen Cooney had encountered Mr. V.V. upon this humming corner. This time, she knew which way to look.
"There it is.... Confess, Hugo, you're surprised that it's sosmall!"
But Hugo helped no new-thoughter to belittle honest business.
"Unlike some I could mention, I've seen factories before," quoth he. "I've seen a million dollar business done in a smaller plant than that."
Actually Cally found the Works bigger than she had expected; reaction from the childish marble palace idea had swung her mind's eye too far. But gazing at the weather-worn old pile, spilling dirtily over the broken sidewalk, she was once more struck and depressed by something almost sinister about it, something vaguely foreboding. To her imagination it was a little as if the ramshackle old pile leered at her: "Wash your hands of me if you will, young lady. I mean you harm some day...."
But then, of course, she wasn't washing her hands of it; her hands had never been in it at all.
"You'll get intensely interested and want to stay hours!" said she, with the loud roar of traffic in her ears. "Remember I only came for a peep--just to see what a Works is like inside."
Hugo, guiding her over the littered sidewalk to the shabby little door marked "Office," swore that she could not make her peep too brief for him.
She had considered the possibility of encountering her father here; had seen the difficulties of attributing this foray to Hugo's insatiable interest in commerce, with Hugo standing right there. However, in the very unpretentious offices inside--desolate places of common wood partitions, bare floors, and strange, tall stools and desks--she was assured by an anæmic youth with a red Adam's apple that her father had left for the bank an hour earlier, which was according to his usual habit. She inquired for Chas Cooney, who kept books from one of those lofty stools, but Chas was reported sick in bed, as Cally then remembered that Hen had told her, some days since. Accordingly the visitors fell into the hands of Mr. MacQueen, whom Carlisle, in the years, had seen occasionally entering or leaving papa's study o' nights.
MacQueen was black, bullet-headed, and dour. He had held socialistic views in his fiery youth, but had changed his mind like the rest of us when he found himself rising in the world. In these days he received a percentage on the Works profits, and cursed the impudence of Labor. As to visitors, his politics were that all such had better be at their several homes, and he indicated these opinions, with no particular subtlety, to Miss Heth and Mr. Canning. He even cited them a special reason against visiting to-day: new machines being installed, and the shop upset in consequence. However, he did not feel free to refuse the request out-right, and when Canning grew a little sharp,--for he did the talking, generously enough,--the sour vizier yielded, though with no affectation of a good grace.
"Well, as ye like then.... This way."
And he opened a door with a briskness which indicated that Carlisle's expressed wish "just to look around" should be carried out in the most literal manner.
The opening of this door brought a surprise. Things were so unceremonious in the business district, it seemed, that you stepped from the superintendent's office right into the middle of everything, so to speak. You were inspecting your father's business a minute before you knew it....
Cally, of course, had had not the faintest idea what to expect at the Works. She had prepared herself to view horrors with calm and detachment, if such proved to be the iron law of business. But, gazing confusedly at the dim, novel spectacle that so suddenly confronted her, she saw nothing of the kind. Her heart, which had been beating a little faster than usual, rose at once.
Technically speaking, which was the way Mr. MacQueen spoke, this was the receiving-and stemming-room. It was as big as a barn, the full size of the building, except for the end cut off to make the offices. Negroes worked here; negro men, mostly wearing red undershirts. They sat in long rows, with quick fingers stripping the stems from the not unfragrant leaves. These were stemmers, it was learned. Piles of the brown tobacco stood beside each stemmer, bales of it were stacked, ceiling-high, at the farther end of the room, awaiting their attentions. The negroes eyed the visitors respectfully. They were heard to laugh and joke over their labors. If they knew of anything homicidal in their lot, certainly they bore it with a fine humorous courage.
Down the aisle between the black rows, Cally picked her way after Hugo and Mr. MacQueen. Considering that all this was her father's, she felt abashingly out of place, most intrusive; when she caught a dusky face turned upon her she hastily looked another way. Still, she felt within her an increasing sense of cheerfulness. Washington Street sensibilities were offended, naturally. The busy colored stemmers were scarcely inviting to the eye; the odor of the tobacco soon grew a little overpowering; there were dirt and dust and an excess of steam-heat--"Tobacco likes to be warm," said MacQueen. And yet the dainty visitor's chief impression, somehow, was of system and usefulness and order, of efficient and on the whole well-managed enterprise.
"If there's anything the matter here," thought she, "men will have to quarrel and decide about it ... Just as I said."
The inspecting party went upward, and these heartening impressions were strengthened. On the second floor was another stemming-room, long and hot like the other; only here the stemming was done by machines--"for the fancy goods"--and the machines were operated by negro women. They were middle-aged women, many of them, industrious and quite placid-looking. Perhaps a quarter of the whole length of the room was prosaically filled with piled tobacco stored ready for the two floors of stemmers. The inspection here was brief, and to tell the truth, rather tame, like an anti-climax. Not a trace or a vestige of homicide was descried, not a blood-spot high or low....
Cally had been observing Hugo, who looked so resplendent against this workaday background, and felt herself at a disadvantage with him. He had not wanted to come at all, but now that they were here, he exhibited a far more intelligent interest in what he saw than she did or could. Oddly enough, he appeared to know a good deal about the making of cigars, and his pointed comments gradually elicited a new tone from MacQueen, who was by now talking to him almost as to an equal. Several times Cally detected his eyes upon her, not bored but openly quizzical.
"Learning exactly how a cheroot factory ought to be run?" he asked,sotto voce, as they left the second floor.
"Oh, exactly!... For one thing, I'd recommend a ventilator or two, shouldn't you?"
She felt just a little foolish. She also felt out of her element, incidental, irresponsible, and genuinely relieved. Still, through this jumble of feelings she had not forgotten that they were yet to see that part of the Works which she had specially come to peep at....
Progress upward was by means of a most primitive elevator, nothing but an open platform of bare boards, which Mr. MacQueen worked with one hand, and which interestingly pushed up the floor above as one ascended. As they rose by this quaint device, Carlisle said:
"Is this next the bunching-room, Mr. MacQueen?"
"It is, Miss."
"Bunching-room!" echoed Hugo, with satiric admiration. "Youarean expert...."
The lift-shaft ran in one corner of the long building. Debarking on the third floor, the visitors had to step around a tall, shining machine, not to mention two workmen who had evidently just landed it. Several other machines stood loosely grouped here, all obviously new and not yet in place.
Hugo, pointing with his stick, observed: "Clearing in new floor-space, I see."
MacQueen nodded. "Knocked out a cloak-room. Our fight here's for space. Profits get smaller all the time...."
"H'm.... You figured the strain, I suppose. Your floor looks weak."
"Oh, it'll stand it," said the man, shortly. "This way."
Carlisle wondered if the weak floor was what her friend Vivian had meant when he said, in his extreme way, that the Works might fall down some day. She recalled that she had thought the building looked rather ricketty, that day last year. But these thoughts hardly entered her mind before the sight of her eyes knocked them out. The visitors squeezed around the new machines, and, doing so, stepped full into the bunching-room. And the girl saw in one glance that this was the strangest, the most interesting room she had ever seen in her life.
Her first confused sense was only of an astonishing mass of dirty white womanhood. The thick hot room seemed swarming with women, alive and teeming with women, women tumbling all over each other wherever the eye turned. Tall clacking machines ran closely around the walls of the room, down the middle stood a double row of tables; and at each machine, and at every possible place at the tables, sat a woman crowded upon a woman, and another and another.
Dirt, noise, heat, and smell: women, women, women. Conglomeration of human and inhuman such as the eyes of the refined seldom look upon.... Was this, indeed, the pleasantest place to work in town?...
"Bunchin' and wrappin'," said MacQueen. "Filler's fed in from that basin on top. She slips in the binder--machine rolls 'em together.... Ye can see here."
They halted by one of the bunching-machines, and saw the parts dexterously brought together into the crude semblance of the product, saw the embryo cigars thrust into wooden forms which would shape them yet further for their uses in a world asmoke....
"Jove! Watch how her hands fly!" said Hugo, with manlike interest for processes, things done. "Look, Carlisle."
Carlisle looked dutifully. It was in the order of things that she should bring Hugo to the Works, and that, being here, he should take charge of her. But, unconsciously, she soon turned her back to the busy machine, impelled by the mounting interest she felt to see bunching, not in detail, but in the large.
Downstairs the workers had been negroes; here they were white women, a different matter. But Cally had a closer association than that, in the girl she had just been talking to, Corinne, who had worked three years in this room. It wasn't so easy to preserve the valuable detached point of view, when you actually knew one of the people....
"Three cents a hundred," said MacQueen's rugged voice.
There was a fine brown dust in the air of the teeming room, and the sickening smell of new tobacco. Not a window in the place was open, and the strong steam heat seemed almost overwhelming. The women had now been at it for near nine hours. Damp, streaked faces, for the most part pale and somewhat heavy, turned incessantly toward the large wall-clock at one end of the room. Eyes looked sidewise upon the elegant visitors, but then the flying fingers were off again, for time is strictly money with piecework ... How could they stand being socrowded, and couldn't they have anyair?
"Oh, five thousand a day--plenty of them."
"Five thousand!--how do they do it?"
"We had a girl do sixty-five hundred. She's quit ... Here's one down here ain't bad."
The trio moved down the line of machines, past soiled, busy backs. Close on their left was the double row of tables, where the hurrying "wrappers" sat like sardines. Cally now saw that these were not women at all, but young girls, like Corinne; girls mostly younger than she herself, some very much younger. Only they seemed to be girls with a difference, girls who had somehow lost their girlhood. The rather nauseating atmosphere which enveloped them, the way they were huddled together yet never ceased to drive on their tasks, the slatternly uncorseted figures, stolid faces and furtive glances; by something indefinable in their situation, these girls seemed to have been degraded and dehumanized, to have lost something more precious than virtue.
Yet some of them were quite pretty, beneath dust and fatigue; one, with a quantity of crinkly auburn hair, was very pretty, indeed. The girl Corinne, after three years here, was both pretty and possessed of a certain delicacy; a delicacy which forbade her to tell Mr. Heth's daughter what she really thought about the Works. For that must have been it....
"This 'un can keep three wrappers pretty busy when she's feelin' good. Can't yer, Miller?... Ye'll see the wrappers there, in a minute."
This 'un, or Miller, was a tall, gaunt, sallow girl, who handled her machine with the touch of a master, eliminating every superfluous move and filling a form of a dozen rough cheroots quickly enough to take a visitor's breath away. No doubt it was very instructive to see how fast cheroots could be made. However, the stirring interest of the daughter of the Works was not for mechanical skill.
Cally stood with a daintily scented handkerchief at her nostrils, painfully drinking in the origins of the Heth fortune. The safeguarding sense of irresponsibility ebbed, do what she might. Well she knew that this place could not be so bad as it seemed to her; for then her father would not have let it be so. For her to seem to disapprove of papa's business methods was mere silly impertinence, on top of the disloyalty of it. But none of the sane precepts she had had two weeks to think out seemed to make any answer to the disturbing sensations she felt rising, like a sickness, within her....
Her sense was of something polluting at the spring of her life. Here was the soil that she was rooted in, and the soil was not clean. It might be business, it might be right; but no argument could make it agreeable to feel that the money she wore upon her back at this moment was made in this malodorous place, by these thickly crowded girls.... Was it in such thoughts that grew this sense of some personal relation of herself with her father's most unpleasant bunching-room? Was it for such reasons that V. Vivian had asked her that day at the Settlement why didn't she go to the Works some day?...
She heard Hugo's voice, with a note of admiration for visible efficiency: "How do they keep it up at this clip nine hours?"
"Got to do it, or others will."
"You expect each machine to produce so much, I suppose?"
And Cally, so close to her lordly lover that her arm brushed his, was seeing for the first time in her life what people meant when they threw bricks at papa on election night, or felt the strong necessity of attacking him in the papers. By processes that were less mental than emotional, even physical, she was driven further down a well-trod path and stood dimly confronting the outlines of a vast interrogation.... What particular human worth had she, Cally Heth, that the womanhood of these lower-class sisters should be sapped that she might wear silk next her skin, and be bred to appeal to the highly cultivated tastes of a Canning?...
If there are experiences which permanently extend the frontiers of thought, it was not in this girl's power to recognize one of them closing down on her now. But she did perceive, by the growing commotion within, that she had made a great mistake to come to this place....
"Now, here's wrapping," said MacQueen. "Hand work, you see."
But his employer's daughter, it appeared, had seen enough of cigar-making for one day. At that moment she touched Canning's well-tailored arm.
"Let's go.... It's--stifling here."
Hugo, just turning from the bunching-machine, regarded her faintly horrified face with some amusement. And Carlisle saw that he was amused.
"I was wondering," said he, "how long your sociology would survive this air...."
The peep was meant to end there, and should have done so. But unluckily, at just that juncture, there came a small diversion. The gaunt girl Miller, by whose machine the little party stood, took it into her head to keep at it no longer.
Though nobody had noticed it, this girl had been in trouble for the last five minutes. The presence of the visitors, or of the superintendent, had evidently made her nervous; she kept looking half-around out of the darting corners of her eyes. Three times, as the men watched and talked about her, she had raised a hand in the heat and brushed it hurriedly before her eyes. And then, just as the superintendent turned from her and all would have been well again, her overdrawn nerve gave out. The hands became suddenly limp on the machine they knew so well; they slid backward, at first slowly and then with the speed of a falling body; and poor Miller slipped quietly from her stool to the floor, her head actually brushing the lady's skirt as she fell.
Cally stifled a little cry. Hugo, obvious for once, said, "Why, she's fainted!"--in an incredulous voice. Considerably better in action were the experienced Works people. MacQueen sprang for a water-bucket with a celerity which strongly suggested practice. A stout, unstayed buncher filled a long-felt want by flinging open a window. One from a neighboring machine sat on the floor, Miller's head on her lap. Two others stood by....
Carlisle, holding to the silenced machine with a small gloved hand, gazed down as at a bit of stage-play.
They had formed a screen about the fallen girl, under MacQueen's directions, to cut her off from the general view. The superintendent's gaze swept critically about. However, the sudden confusion had drawn the attention of all that part of the room, and concealment proved a too optimistic hope. The moment happened to be ripe for one of those curious panics of the imagination to which crowded womanhood is psychologically subject. Knowledge that somebody was down ran round the room as if it had been shouted; and on the knowledge, fear stalked among the tired girls, and the thing itself was born of the dread of it.
So it was that Carlisle, gripping fast to poor Miller's machine, heard an odd noise behind her, and turned with a sickening dropping of the heart. Five yards away a girl gave a little moan and flopped forward upon her machine. She was a fine, strapping young creature, and it is certain that two minutes before nothing had been further from her mind than fainting. It did not stop there. Far up the room a "wrapper" rose in the dense air, took her head in both hands and fell backward into the arms of the operative next her. In the extreme corner of the great room a little stir indicated that another had gone down there. Work had almost ceased. Many eyes stared with sudden nervous apprehension into other eyes, as if to say: "Am I to be the next?..."
MacQueen's voice rang out--a fine voice it was, the kind that makes people sit down again in a fire-scared theatre:
"Take your seats, every one of you.... Nothing's going to happen. You're all right, I say. Go on with your work.Sit down. Get to work...."
"Air," said Cally Heth, in a small colorless voice.
Hugo wheeled sharply.
"Great heavens!--Carlisle!... Do you feel faint?"
He had her at the open window in a trice, clasping her arm tight, speaking masculine encouragement.... "Hold hard, my dear!... I should have watched you.... Now, breathe this.... Gulp it in, Cally...."
His beloved, indeed, like the work-sisters, had felt the brush of the black wing. For an instant nothing had seemed surer than that the daughter of the Works would be the fifth girl to faint in the bunching-room that day; she had seen the floor rise under her whirling vision....
But once at the window the dark minute passed speedily. The keen October air bore the gift of life. Blood trickled back into the dead white cheeks.
"I ... was just a little dizzy," said Cally, quite apologetically....
And, though the visitors departed then, almost immediately, all signs of the sudden little panic in the bunching-room were already rapidly disappearing. Work proceeded. The gaunt girl Miller, who had earned MacQueen's permanent dislike by starting all the trouble, was observed sitting again at her machine, hands and feet reaching out for the accustomed levers.
It made an amazing difference simply to be outdoors again. The last few minutes in the Works had been like a waxing nightmare. But the sunshine was bright and sane; the raw clean winds blew the horrors away. Carlisle, realizing that she had been swept along toward something like hysterics, struggled with some success to recapture poise and common sense.
But she could not now quite strike the manner of one who has merely paused for an irresponsible peep. Hugo was aware of a change in her, before they were fairly in the car again. He had occasion to reflect anew, not without irritation, what an unfortunate turn she had given to the afternoon of romance, over his own plainly expressed wishes....
Yet nothing could have exceeded his solicitousness. He seemed to feel that he had been neglectful upstairs, that she would not have felt faint if he had properly presided over her movements. Cally had to assure him half a dozen times in as many blocks that she felt quite herself again.
And, meantime, he conscientiously gave himself to relieving her mind of the effects of her own feminine foolishness. That queer and undoubtedly upsetting bit of "crowd psychology" they had seen--that, he pointed out, had come merely from the unusual heat, the control of the steam-pipes happening to be out of whack to-day. Such a thing didn't happen once in six months; so that surly fellow MacQueen had said. Of course, producing wealth was a hard business at best, let none deny it. Everybody would like to see factories run on the model theory, like health resorts, but the truth was that those ideas were mostly wind and water, and had never worked out yet. An owner must think of his profits first, unfeeling as that might seem; else he would have to shut up shop, and then where would those girls be for a living? They needn't work for her father unless they wanted to, of course....
"You should look into a cannery some day, for sights--by which I mean that you shouldn't do anything of the sort!... Oh, get us to some quieter street there, Frederick!... But it was my fault for agreeing to go with you. I knew, as you couldn't, that a going factory's no place for a girl delicately brought up. Those women don't mind. That is, as a rule ..."
Carlisle responded to this sensible treatment with what lightsomeness she could muster; but the odd truth was that she hardly listened to Hugo. Heaven knew that she needed the strong sane arguments, heaven knew that he could state them all unanswerably. And yet, just as she was aware that her woman's feelings about the bunching-room would have no weight with Hugo, so she was curiously aware that Hugo's arguments produced no effect at all upon her. If she had relied upon him as a demolishing club against Vivian, the over-sympathetic, it appeared that his strength was not equal to the peculiar demand. And all at once she seemed to have gotten to know her lover very well; there were no more surprises in him. She suddenly perceived a strange and hitherto unsuspected likeness between Hugo and mamma, in that you could not talk over things with either of them....
"Remember, Cally," he said, summing up, "this is the first factory you've ever seen in your life. You've nothing at all to judge by, in a business matter of this sort--"
Something in his tone flicked her briefly out of her resolve not to argue; but she spoke lightly enough.
"Yes, I judge by the way it made me feel. I judge everything that way."
"That's natural, of course," said he, with a slight smile, "but after all it's rather a woman's way of judging things than a sociologist's. Isn't it?"
"But I am a woman."
The car shook off the dust of the business district, mounted a long hill, bowled into streets fairer than Canal. Hugo's sense of a grievance deepened. Granted that she had nearly fainted, as a consequence of her own foolish perversity, it was surely now due to him that she should begin to be her sweet natural self again.
He had had quite enough of this irrational invasion of his afternoon; and so, having said just a word or two in reply to her last remark, he banished the matter from the conversation.
"Now," said he, "to fresh woods and pastures new, and a song of the open road!... Which way shall we go?"
Cally hesitated.
"I'm sorry, Hugo--but I think I should like to go home, if you don't mind."
"Home?"
"I really don't feel quite like a drive now. I'm very sorry--"
Canning gazed down at her in dismay.
"I knew you didn't feel quite yourself yet. You couldn't deceiveme... But don't let's gohome!Why, this air is the very thing you need, Carlisle. It will set you up in no time."
But no, she seemed to think that was not what she needed, nor were her doubts removed by several further arguments from him.
Canning sat back in the care with an Early Christian expression. She had said, not five minutes ago, that she felt perfectly well; perfectly well she looked. Was it imaginable that she really took seriously the absurd little smatterings of new-womanism she had picked up, God knew where, while waiting for love to come?...
"Carlisle," he began, patiently, "I understand your feelings perfectly, of course, and natural enough they are to a girl brought up as you've been. At the same time, I'm not willing to leave you feeling disgusted with your father's methods of--"
"Disgusted with papa!" exclaimed Cally, quite indignantly. But she added, in a much more tempered tone: "Why, Hugo--how could you think such a thing?... I assure you I'm disgusted with nobody on earth but myself."
At that the annoyed young man gave a light laugh.
"I'm evidently about fifty years before the war, as you say down here. I can't understand, to save me, how--"
"I know it, Hugo. You never understand how I feel about things, and always assume that I'll feel the way you want me to."
Carlisle spoke quietly, almost gently. Yet Canning's feeling was like that of a man who, in the dark, steps down from a piazza at a point where steps are not. The jolt drove some of the blood from his cheek. But his only reply was to poke his hired driver in the back with his stick and say, distantly: "Nine hundred and three Washington."
The hired car rolled swiftly, in sun and wind, toward the House of Heth. Cobblestones were left behind; the large wheels skimmed the fair asphaltum. Three city blocks they went with no music of human speech....
"But I didn't mean to seem rude," said Cally, in a perfectly natural manner, "and Iamreally very sorry to--to change the afternoon's plans. I don't feel quite well, and I think perhaps I ought to rest--just till dinner-time. You remember you are dining with us to-night."
The apology, the pacific, non-controversial tone, unbent the young man instantly. Small business for the thinking sex to harbor a grudge against an irrational woman's moment of pique. Moreover, whatever this woman's foibles, Hugo Canning chanced to find himself deep in love with her. He met her advance with only a slight trace of stiffness. By the time they arrived at the Heth house, mamma's two young people were chatting along almost as if nothing had happened....
However, back at home, Cally seemed unresponsive to Hugo's overture in the direction of his lingering awhile in the drawing-room. It became evident that the afternoon was ruined beyond repair. He paused but a moment, to see whether any telegrams or telephone calls had been sent up for him from the hotel.
It proved that there was nothing of the sort. The lover looked relieved. He wished his lady a refreshing rest, apropos of the evening. Beneath his feeling that he was an ill-used man, there had risen in Canning the practical thought that he had let this wild sweet thing get too sure of him....
"I shall see you then," said he, at the door, "at seven-thirty."
"Yes, indeed.... I'll be quite myself again then. Au revoir!"
She stood alone, in the dim and silent hall. The house was sweet with Hugo's flowers. Cally, standing, picked a red rose slowly to pieces. She could pursue her own thoughts now, and her struggle was against thinking ill of her father. If it was the extreme of sympathy with the poor to regard the Works as a homicidal place, then her present impulse was plainly toward such extremity. But she dared not allow that impulse its head, fearful of the far-reaching consequences that would thereby be entailed. Yet, even from the cheeriest view, it was clear that the Works were a pretty bad place--Hugo himself had tacitly admitted that by the arguments he employed,--and if that was so, what was to be said for papa? Possibly she and mamma did have some connection with the business, but it would be simply foolish to say that they wereresponsiblefor the overcrowding in the bunching-room. How could she be--howcouldshe?--she, to whom her father had never spoken seriously in his life, who had never even seen the Works inside till to-day? No, it was papa's business. He was responsible; and it was a responsibility indeed....
It was quarter-past five. So, presently, the tall hall-clock said, on its honor as a reliable timepiece.... Only an hour since she and Hugo had met in front of Morland's....
Still the girl did not hurry up to her rest-chamber. She wandered pointlessly from empty hall to silent drawing room. There had descended upon her that sense of loneliness in the great world, to which in the spring and summer she had been no stranger. She felt listless and oddly tired. Presently, when she had thought about it a little, she was certain that she felt quite unwell; almost ill. The strong probability was that she had a bad sick headache coming on; small wonder, either, after nearly fainting with poor Miller and others at the Works....
Cally considered whether she did not owe it to her health to dine from a tray this evening, giving Hugo to-morrow morning instead. Even as she revolved this thought--with especial reference to explaining it to mamma--there came her humble admirer, Flora Johnson, col'd, saying that Mr. Canning begged to speak to her a minute at the telephone.
"Mr.Canning?"
Flora said yas'm, and flashed her dazzling teeth. Her mistress ascended the stairs in surprise, wondering what reason Hugo would assign for wanting to come back.
However, Hugo's intentions were the contrary. His unhappy request was to be excused from dinner this evening.
The young man's voice over the wire was at once regretful, annoyed, and (somewhat) apologetic. There was, it seemed, the devil to pay over certain entanglements of the rate-case matter. He had found Mr. Deming, of his law firm, waiting for him at the hotel. Mr. Deming had come for a conference which could not be postponed; he had to get back to Washington by the nine-thirty train. Would Carlisle make his excuses to Mrs. Heth, and know for herself how disappointed he was?
He spoke in loverly vein, and Cally was able to answer soothingly. She mentioned that she would probably withdraw from the dinner, too; so that even mamma's table would not be upset at all. He would be much missed, of course. The suggestion emerged, or perhaps it was merely in the air, that Hugo was to come in, if he could, in the later evening.
Cally was at the telephone some three minutes. Turning away, she did not go at once to rest, though now halfway to her room. If she was not going to dinner, there was more time, of course. Or possibly her head had taken a slight turn for the better. The girl leaned against the banisters in the quiet upper hall, full of depression. And then she said aloud, with a resolution that was perhaps not so sudden as it seemed:
"I'll go and see Hen Cooney!"
One Hour, in which she apologizes twice for her Self, her Life and Works; and once she is beautifully forgiven, and once she never will be, this Side of the Last Trump.
The Cooneys' door was opened, after the delay usual with the poor, by Henrietta herself, this moment returned from the bookstore. Hen wore her hat, but not her coat, and it was to be observed that one hand held a hot-water bottle, imperfectly concealed behind her back.
"Hurrah!--Cally!" cried she. "We were talking of you at dinner to-day, wondering what had become of you. Come into the house, and don't mind a bit if this bottle leaks all over you. Such troubles!"
"How is Chas to-day? I just heard that he hadn't been at work for a week."
"Chas?... Chas is better--Cousin Martha's worse--father's just the same--Looloo's dancing the floor with a toothache." Hen recited this in the manner of a chant, and added, as she ushered her Washington Street cousin into the little parlor: "But for that, we're all doing nicely--thank you!"
"Gracious, Hen! I'd no idea you had such a hospital. Why, what's the matter with Uncle John?"
"Oh, just his lumbago. He's complaining, but out and about--fighting over the Seven Days around Richmond with an old comrade somewhere, I doubt not.... Sit down, my dear," added Hen, who had been looking at Cally just a little curiously, "and excuse me while I run upstairs. I forgot to explain that this bottle is for mother, who's down with a splitting headache. Back in a jiffy...."
Thus Miss Cooney, not knowing that for one moment, at least, her society had been preferred above that of a Canning. Such was the odd little development. Carlisle, having been more with Henrietta in the past five weeks than she had commonly been in a year, had discovered her as undoubtedly a person you could talk things over with--the only person in the world, perhaps, that you could talkthisover with....
Possibly Hen, being a lynx-eyed Cooney, had somehow gathered that her lovely cousin had not dropped in merely to "inquire"; for when she returned to the parlor, having doubtless put her hot-water bottle where it would do the most good, she did not expend much time on reporting upon her invalids, or become involved in the minor doings of the day. Very soon she deflected, saying:
"But you don't look particularly fit yourself, Cally. What's wrong with the world?"
Cally, being still uncertain how far she cared to confide in Hen, met the direct question with a tentative lightness.
"Oh!... Well, Ididjust have a rather unpleasant experience, though I didn't know I showed it in my face!... We happened to look in at the Works for a few minutes--Mr. Canning and I--and I certainly didn'tenjoyit much ..." And then, the inner pressure overcoming her natural bent toward reserve, she spoke with a little burst: "Oh, Hen, it was the most horrible place I ever saw in my life!"
The little confidence spoke straight to the heart, as a touch of genuine feeling always will. Quite unconsciously, Henrietta took her cousin's hand, saying, "You poor dear ..." And within a minute or two Cally was eagerly pouring out all that she had seen in the bunching-room, with at least a part of how it had made her feel.
Hen listened sympathetically, and spoke reassuringly. If her "arguments" followed close in the footsteps of Hugo,--for Hen was surprisingly well-informed in unexpected ways,--it must have been some quality in her, something or other in her underlying "attitude," that invested her words with a new horsepower of solace. And Saltman's best stenographer actually produced an argument that Hugo had altogether passed by. She thought it worth while to point out that these things were not a question of abstract morals at all, but only of changing points of view....
"When Uncle Thornton learned business," declared Hen, "there wasn't a labor law in the country--no law but supply and demand--pay your work-people as little as you could, and squeeze them all they'd stand for. Nobody everthoughtof anything different. In those days the Works would have been a model plant--nine-hour day, high wages, no women working at night, no children...."
If Cally was not wholly heartened by words like these, she knew where the lack was. And perhaps Hen herself was conscious of something missing. For, having defended her uncle's Works at least as loyally as she honestly could, she gave the talk a more personal tone, skirting those phases of the matter so new-thoughty that they had never even occurred to Hugo Canning.
"Cally, are you going to speak to Uncle Thornton about it--about your going there, I mean?"
"No, no!" cried Cally, hastily. "How could I? Of course I--realize that that's the way business must be--as you say. What right have I, an ignorant little fool, to set up as papa's critic?"
"Not at all--of course," said Hen, giving her hand a little squeeze. "What I--"
"You surely can't think that I ought to go and reprove papa for the way he runs his business--do you, Hen?... That I--I'mresponsiblein any way!"
Hen noted her cousin's unexplained nervousness, and it may be she divined a little further. She answered no, not a bit of it. She said she meant to speak to him, not as a business expert, but only as his daughter. It was always a mistake to have secrets in a family, said Hen.
Good advice, undoubtedly. Only Hen didn't happen to know the most peculiar circumstances....
The two girls sat side by side on a sofa that sorely needed the ministrations of an upholsterer. Hen was sweet-faced, but habitually pale, usually a little worn. Her eyes and expression saved her from total eclipse in whatever company; otherwise she would have been annihilated now by the juxtaposition of her cousin. Cally's face was framed in an engaging little turn-down hat of gold-brown and yellow, about which was carelessly festooned a long and fine brown veil. Hen, gazing rather wistfully, thought that Cally grew lovelier every year.
"I'll tell you, Cally!" she said, suddenly. "Do you know what you ought to do? Talk to V.V. about all this!"
Cally repressed a little start; though the thought, to speak truth, was far from being a new one. But how could she possibly talk to V.V. without the ultimate disloyalty to papa?...
"No," she said, quietly, after a brief pause. "I could hardly do that."
"Why not? He's thought out all these things further than anybody I know. And he'll--"
"Hen, have you forgotten what he wrote in the paper about papa last year--what he's going to write next month. Don't you see my position?"
"I don't care what he writes in the papers!... When it comes to people, there's nobody so kind--and wise. And--"
"He's the one person," said Cally, resolutely, "I could not possibly talk to about it."
Henrietta, falling back on the thought she had set out with, laughed good-naturedly.
"Then, I suppose, you'll want to fly at once. He's due here at any minute, you know--in fact, he's half an hour late now--"
"Here!... Is he coming here this afternoon?"
This time her start was without concealment. Hen looked genuinely surprised.
"He's our doctor--I told you the other day ... But he doesn't bite, my dear! You look as if I'd said that a grizzly bear and three mad ogres were loping down the steps."
"I never think of him as a doctor somehow," said Cally, recovering, with a little laugh. "So I couldn't imagine--"
"Second largest practice in town--only I'll admit that his not charging any fees has something to do with it. In fact V.V.'s patients usually borrow anything that's loose, including his hats, suits, and shoes ... Cally, it's like a play, for I believe there he is now ..."
True enough, a firm but unequal footstep just then sounded on the Cooneys' wooden steps outside. But Hen sat still, a far-away look in her eyes.
"Did you hear what Pond said, Cally, the first time he saw V.V.?--'Who's that man with the face like a bishop that never grew up?'... Do you know, I never look at him without remembering mean things I've done and said, and wishing I hadn't ..."
She rose as the bell rang, started toward the door, hesitated, turned in the middle of the floor.
"I'd naturally ask him in here, Cally, while I went up to see if things are ready for him upstairs. Of course, if you'd rather not see him ..."
Cally had risen too. The two girls stood looking at each other.
"No," said Cally, "I'd like to see him. Only I can't speak to him about the Works. I cannot."
"No, no--of course not, dear, if you don't feel like it."
Hen went out to open the door. Greetings floated in....
Cally stood at the parlor window, staring out into the shabby street. Over the way was the flaring sign of an unpained dentist, making promises never to be redeemed, and two doors away the old stand of the artificial limb-maker. Cally looked full at a show-window full of shiny new legs; but she did not see the grisly spectacle, so it did not matter.
The unexpected encounter was deeply disturbing to her. There stirred in her the memory of another night when she had similarly met the slum doctor in this room, between engagements with Hugo Canning. That night he had asked her forgiveness for calling her a poor little thing, which she was, and she had charged him with wicked untruthfulness for calling the Works homicidal, which--she said it in her secret heart--they were.... How history repeats itself, how time brought changed angles! Strange, strange, that in the revolving months it had now come her turn to apologize to Mr. V.V. in the Cooney parlor. Only she could not make her apology, no matter how much she might want to....
"... Stop a minute," Hen was heard to say, "and pass the time of day ..."
Unintelligible murmuring, and then: "D'you know who it was that invented stopping and passing the time of day?" said the nearing voice of Mr. V.V., gayer than Cally Heth had ever heard it. "Take my word, 't was a woman."
"To make things pleasant for some man!--and we've been doing it ever since.... Cally Heth's here ..."
The two came in. Cally, turning, held out her hand to the Cooneys' physician, with a sufficiently natural air and greeting....
They had not met since the afternoon at the Woman's Club, a day which had brought a strange change in their relations. But then, each of their meetings seemed marked by some such realignment, and always to his advantage. Again and again she had put this man down, at first with all her strength; and each time when she turned and looked at him again, behold he had shot up higher than ever.
So Cally had just been thinking. But now that V. Vivian stood in the room, and she looked at him, she was suddenly reminded that he was her good friend nevertheless. And something like ease came back to her.
When Hen had disappeared to make the sick-room ready (or for whatever purpose she went), Cally said:
"I hope Chas isn't really going to be ill?"
"Oh, there's no trouble at all with him," replied the young man, "but to make him stay in bed. It's all come down to a touch of sore throat, a little sort of quinsy. We were rather afraid of diphtheria, the other night."
"My cousins are having more than their share, just now. So many, many invalids.... I hope you've been well, since I saw you last?"
"Oh, thank you!--I've the health of a letter-carrier. At least, I assume they're naturally healthy, though as a matter of fact I've had three or four postmen on my list ... I'm afraid I interrupted you and Henrietta?"
"Oh, no!--Or rather, I imagine she was only too glad to be interrupted.... I was telling her all my troubles, you see."
"Have you troubles? I'm sorry."
The man spoke in a light tone, such as is suitable for friendships. Yet he must have felt a throe then, remembering his articles: now so soon to go to the "Chronicle" office and the print that cried aloud. And the girl's case, had he but known it, was like his own, only more so. Beneath the cover of her casual talk, she was aware of thought coursing like a palpitating vein under a fine skin, threatening to break through at any minute....
"Oh, so many," said Cally.
They had remained standing, for to ask the doctor to sit down had not occurred to her. The girl glanced toward the window.
"And what do you suppose Hen's prescription was?... That I should take them all to you."
There was the briefest silence.
"But, of course, you didn't want to do that?"
She hesitated, and said: "Yes, I do want to ... But I can't."
That was the utmost that she meant to say. But then, as she glanced again at the lame alien whom time had so beautifully justified, more of her inner tide overflowed suddenly into speech.
"Do you know--I feel that I could tell you almost anything--things I wouldn't tell Hen, or anybody.... Oh, I could, I don't know why. You don't know for what a long time I've thought of you as my confidant, my friend.... Only, you see--these troubles aren't all my own...."
She stopped rather precipitately, turned away a little; stood twisting a glove between her fingers, and doing her best to show by her look that she had not said anything in particular....
The thoughts of these two were over hills and dales apart; and yet, by the nature of what was between them, they followed hard on the same trail. V.V. was far from possessing the Cooneys' detective gift. He saw only that this girl was troubled about something; and if his own thought never left the Heth Works, it was only because this was the point where his connection with her troubles cut him deep.
So in his ears chirped the voice of his now familiar: "Who appointedyoua judge of people like this? Who knows better than you that they're doing the best they can? Tear up that stuff!..."
But aloud he said only: "I understand that, of course. And I'm grateful for the rest you say."
And Cally, five feet away from him, was learning that in some matters the business logic of it didn't help very much, that what counted was how you felt about them in your heart. If something terrible should happen at the Worksnow, if the building did fall down some day, collapsing with all those girls--did she think she could look again into this man's eyes and say: "Well,Ihad nothing to do with it?..."
But neither were her thoughts for publication; and she bridged the brief gap in the conversation with a not particularly successful smile, designed to show that of course nobody was taking all this very seriously.
"But why expect to do what we want? No one can," said she. "You don't mind my fidgeting about the room this way, do you? I seem a little out of humor to-day--not myself at all, as I was told just now...."
V.V. said that he did not mind.
"I wonder," she went on, "if you remember something you said in your speech the other day?--about being free.... It seemed strange to me then, that you should have happened to say just that, for I--I've come to realize that, in a kind of way, that's always been a wild dream of my own.... Don't you think--where there are so many things to think about, things and people--that it's pretty hard to be free?"
"Hard?... There's nothing else like it on earth for hardness."
V.V. stood grasping the back of an ancient walnut chair. It was seen that he belonged in this room, simple home of poverty; different from the girl, who was so obviously the rich exotic, the transient angel in the house.
He added: "But it's always seemed to me worth all the price of trying."
"Oh, it is--I'm sure. And yet.... It seems to me--I've thought," said Cally, somewhat less conversationally, "that life, for a woman, especially, is something like one of those little toy theatres--you've seen them?--where pasteboard actors slide along in little grooves when you pull their strings. They move along very nicely, and you--you might think they were going in that direction just because they wanted to. But they never get out of their grooves.... I know you'll think that a--a weak theory."
"No, I know it's a true theory."
Surely the girl could not have been thinking only of her father's business as she went on, more and more troubled in voice:
"So much seems to be all fixed and settled, before one's old enough to know anything about it--and then there's a great deal of pressure--and a great deal of restraint--in so many different ways.... Don't you think it's hard ever to get out of one's groove?"
"It's heroic."
She put back her trailing motor-veil, and said: "And for a woman especially?"
"It would take the strength of all the gods!... I mean, of course--as women are placed, to-day. Perhaps in some other day--perhaps to-morrow--"
He broke off suddenly; a change passed over his face.
"And yet," he added, in a voice gentle and full of feeling--"some of them are doing it to-day."
What his thought might be, she had no idea; but his personal implication was not to be mistaken. The man from the slums, who had mistakenly put his faith in her once before in the Cooneys' parlor, conceived that she was or might be one of these strong he spoke of; little suspecting her present unconquerable weakness.
Cally was startled into looking at him, a thing she had been rather avoiding; and looking, she looked instantly away. In Mr. V.V.'s eyes, that strange trusting look, which had not been frequently observable there of late, had saluted her like a banner of stars....
"Certainly I was not meant to be one of them," said she, rather faintly.
He must have meant only a general expression of confidence, she was sure of that; only to be kind and comforting. But to her, grappling with new hard problems, that strange gaze came like a torch lit in a cave at night. Much she had wondered how Vivian could possibly hold her responsible for what her father did, or left undone. And now in a flash it was all quite clear, and she saw that he had not been holding her responsible at all. No, this simple and good man, who let the crows bring his raiment, or not, as they preferred, had only reposed a trust in her--in Cally Heth. It was as if, that day at the Settlement, he had said to her, by his eyes: "I knowyou. Onceyougo to the Works, you won't rest till you've made things better...."
But instead of this making things better for Cally Heth now, it seemed to make them worse at once. She became considerably agitated; knew that he must see her agitation, and did not mind at all. And suddenly she sat down on the sway-backed sofa between the windows....
"I'm the last woman in the world ever to think of getting out of my groove," said Cally, her cheek upon her hand.
And then, with no premeditation at all, there came strange words from her, words clothing with unlessoned ease thoughts that certainly she had never formulated for Hugo Canning.
"And yet I feel that it might have been different. I've felt--lately--as if I haven't had much of a chance.... I think I have a mind, or had one ... some--some spirit and independence, too. But I wasn't trained to express myself that way; that was all ironed down flat in me. I never had any education, except what was superficial--showy. I was never taught to think, or todoanything--or to have any part in serious things. No one ever told me that I ought to justify my existence, to pay my way. Nobody ever thought of me as fit to have any share in anything useful or important--fit for any responsibility.... No, life for me was to be like butterflies flying, and my part was only to make myself as ornamental as I could...."
V. Vivian, who wrote articles about the Huns in newspapers, stood at the Cooney mantel. He did not move at all; the man's gaze upon her half-averted face did not wink once. His own face, this girl had thought, was one for strange expressions; but she might have thought the look it wore now stranger than any she had ever seen there....
"Maybe, it's that way with all women, more or less--only it seems to have been always more with me.... Money!" said the low hurried voice--"how I've breathed it in from the first moment I can remember. Money, money, money!... Has it been altogether my fault if I've measured everything by it, supposed that it was the other name for happiness--taken all of it I could get? I've always taken, you see--never given. I never gave anything to anybody in my life. I never did anything for anybody in my life. I'm a grown woman--an adult human being--but I'm not of the slightest use to anybody. I've held out both hands to life, expecting them to be filled, kept full...."
She paused and was deflected by a fleeting memory, something heard in a church, perhaps, long ago....
"Isn't there," she asked, "something in the Bible about that?--horse-leech's daughters--or something?--always crying 'Give, give'?..."
There was a perceptible pause.
"Well--something of the sort, I believe...."
She had seemed to have the greatest confidence that, if anything of the sort was in the Bible, this man would know it instantly. However, his tone caught her attention, and she raised her eyes. Mr. V.V.'s face was scarlet.
"I see," said Cally, colorlessly, out of the silence, "you had already thought of me as one of those daughters.... Why not?"
"Of you! Not in my life," cried V.V.... "I ... it's--"
"Why shouldn't you? I know that's what I am. You're--"
"Don't.... I can't let things be put upside down like that."
His difficulties, in the unhappy moment, were serious. His skin had turned traitor to him, sold out his heart. And now, if he had the necessity of saying something, his was also the fear lest he might say too much....
"If I ... I appeared to look--conscious, when you asked me that, it was only because of the--the strange coincidence. I--you compel me to tell you--though it's like something from another life."
He paused briefly; and when he went on, his voice had acquired something of that light hardness which Cally had heard in it before now.
"Once, a year ago, when I had never so much as heard your name, Commissioner O'Neill and I happened to be talking about the local factory situation, about the point of view of the owners or,--to be exactly honest,--the owners' families. By chance--I did use those words. And O'Neill said I was a wild man to talk so, that if I knew any of these people, personally, I'd never judge them so--so unkindly.... It was a long time before I saw ... how right he might be.... And that's what I tried to say to you the other day--when I spoke ofknowing the people. I--"
"Yes, sometimes that makes a difference, I know." Had she not felt it only this afternoon? "But I'm afraid this isn't one of the times ..."
Cally rose, feeling that she desired to go. Nevertheless, glancing at his troubled face, she was suddenly moved by perhaps the most selfless impulse she had ever felt in her life.
"Please," she said, gently, "don't mind about that. I liked you better for it. I like people to say what they think. I've--"
"Do you? Then allow me to say that I'm not quite a bitter fool...."
The young man was advancing toward her, throwing out his hands in a quaint sort of gesture which seemed to say that he had had about as much of this as he could stand.
"For surely I don't think I am--I don't think I'm quite so dumb and blind as you must think me...." His repressed air was breaking up rapidly, and now he flung out with unmistakable feeling: "Do you suppose I could ever forget what you did last May! Not if I tried a thousand years!" said Mr. V.V.... "How could I possibly think anything of you, after that, but all that is brave and beautiful?..."
The two stood looking at each other. Color came into Cally's cheek; came but soon departed. The long gold-and-black lashes, which surely had been made for ornaments, fluttered and fell.
Out of the dead silence she said, with some difficulty:
"It's very sweet of you to say that."
Cally moved away from him, toward the door, deeply touched. She had wanted to hear such words as these, make no doubt of that. Among all her meetings with this man last year, she had only that May morning to remember without a stinging sense of her inferiority. And she supposed that he had forgotten....
"You see," she said, not without an effort, "I have been telling you my troubles, after all.... I--I'm afraid I've kept them waiting for you upstairs. I must go."
But she did not leave the parlor at once, even when Hen, hearing the door creak open, cried down that the infirmary was ready....
If Cally felt that she had somehow confessed her weakness to Mr. V.V.--about the Works, about life--and been forgiven by him, it seemed that even that did not quite settle it all. It must have been that one small corner of her mind refused to consider that all this was a closed episode.
She turned, with her hand on the knob.
"Shall you go to that meeting of Mr. Pond's next Wednesday--his meeting for workers? He has asked me to go."
The young man said that he would be at the meeting; that he hoped to see her there.
Cally hesitated again. Perhaps she thought of Hugo then; of perhaps the small unreconstructed corner of her mind grew more unrestful.
"I'm not sure that I'll be able to go," she said, slowly.... "Dr. Vivian--is your telephone number still the same--Meeghan's Grocery? I--I may want to speak to you some time."
Yes, it was just the same. Meeghan's Grocery.
V.V. stood looking at her from the middle of the floor, one hand raised to his hair in his characteristic gesture. His old-fashioned sort of face wore a faraway look, not so much hopeful now as wistful; a look which had been moving to Cally Heth, even in the days when she had tried to dislike him. But of this, the young man from the lonely outskirts was not aware; of the nature of his replies he had taken no note. In his ears whispered the subtlest of all his many voices: "She'll never speak to you, once that's printed. Tear it up. You've a right to your youth...."
"Good-bye," said Cally, "and thank you."
"Miss Heth," said Vivian, starting, hurriedly--"I--if I--if it should ever happen that I couldhelpyou in any way--it's not likely, of course, I understand that--but if itshouldever happen so--promiseme that you'll send for me."
But the girl did not make that promise then, her reply being: "Youhavehelped me--youmustknow that.... You're the one person in the world who has."
Cally walked home alone, in the dying effects of a lovely afternoon.
She had left the Cooney parlor in the vein of one emerging from strange adventures in undiscovered countries. This queer feeling would hardly last over the solid threshold of Home, whose atmosphere was almost notoriously uncongenial to eccentricities of that sort. But it did linger now, as Cally trod somewhat dreamily over streets that she had long known by heart. Four blocks there were; and the half-lights flickering between sky and sidewalk were of the color of the girl's own mood.
In this moment she was not troubled with thought, with the drawing of moral lessons concerning duty or otherwise. Now Mr. V.V.'s unexpected last speeches to her seemed wholly to possess her mind. She was aware that they had left her curiously humbled.... Strange it seemed, that this man could be so unconscious of the influence he had upon her, had clearly had even last year. Stranger yet that he, whom only the other day she had thought of as so narrow, so religiously hard, should prove himself absurdly over-generous in his estimate of her.... Or no, not that exactly. But, at least, it would have been absurd, if it had not been so sweet....
The revolting corner of her mind seemed now to have laid down arms. Perhaps the girl's vague thought was that the feelings roused in her in the bunching-room had, after all, been unreasonable, even hysterical, as Hugo had plainly enough stated, as Hen herself had partly argued. Perhaps it was merely that all that trouble would keep, to be quietly pondered over at a later time. But rather, it seemed as if a mist had settled down over the regions of practical thought, hiding problems from view. The Works had somehow been swallowed up in that apologia she had made, Cally Heth's strange apology to Mr. V.V. for herself and her life.
Cally walked slowly along the familiar street, her thoughts a thousand miles in the blue. If the words of the good young man had humbled her, they had also mysteriously stirred and uplifted. She thought of his too trusting tribute, she thought of what they had said about women, their strength and their hope of freedom; and the misty pictures in her mind were not of herself--for well she had felt her weaknesses this day--but rather they were of a dim emerging ideal, of herself as she might some day hope to be. Vague aspirations were moving in her; new reachings of the spirit; dreams that spoke with strange voices....
And, companied by these ethereal fancies, she came, before she was aware of it, to the substantial steps of Home, where began the snuggest of all snug grooves....
She arrived with the intention, already well formed, of retiring forthwith to her room, and--probably--spending the whole evening there. But here, as it chanced, interruption fell across her thought. Just at her own door, Cally almost ran into a man who was standing still upon the sidewalk, as if waiting for some one: a tall old gentleman standing and leaning upon his cane. Cally came out of her absorption just in time to escape collision.
"I beg your pardon!..." she began, with manner, stepping back.
But then her feet faltered, and her voice died suddenly away, as she saw that this silent old man was her neighbor, Colonel John B. Dalhousie, whom she had never spoken to in her life.
The Colonel was regarding her with frightening fixity. The girl's descent from the empyrean to reality had the stunning suddenness of a fall: she showed it in her blanching face. Now, as the two thus stood, the old man raised a hand and swept off his military hat in a bow of elaborate courtesy.
"An apology from Miss Heth," said he, in a purring voice, "is the last thing on earth one of my name would have ventured to expect."
Doubtless the meeting had been obliged to come some day: Cally had often thought of it with dread, once escaped it by a narrow margin. That it should have come now, in the gentler afterglow of this curiously disturbing day, seemed like the grimness of destiny.... No fear of over-generosity here; no gleam in these eyes of brave and beautiful things....
"But you ask my pardon," the smooth-cutting voice went on. "It is granted, of course, my dear. You took my son's heart, and broke it, but that's a bauble. You took his honor, and I kicked him out, but honor's a name in a printed book. You took his life, and I buried him, but sons, we know, cannot live forever. What is there here to make a father's heart grow hard?"
Cally raised her hand to her throat. She felt suffocating, or else a little faint. From life she seemed to have stepped into the house of dead men's bones; and here she could see at play old emotions not met before in her guarded life: shrivelling contempt, undying hatred, immortal unforgiveness. Nevertheless, the subtlest stroke in the naked confrontation was that something in the father's expression, distorted though it was, reminded her of the son, whose face in this world she should see no more.
She tried to move past the face of her Nemesis, appeared physically incapable of motion; tried to speak, and had little more success.
"I--I'm--very sorry--for--" she said, indistinctly, and her ears were mocked with her ghastly inadequacy. "I--I've--"
"Sorry? Why, of course you are. Doubtless the little unpleasantness has marred your happiness at times. But I am gratified to know that you have other young men for your amusement, now that my son has withdrawn himself from your reach."
The old Colonel stooped further, brought his stabbing gaze nearer her. There were heavy yellow pouches under his eyes; his lower lip, not hidden by the stained white mustaches, twitched spasmodically.
"God looked and repented him that he had made man. I might wish that he'd made you a man--for just five minutes. But what do you imagine he thinks when he contemplates you and your work, my dear? Eh?... little she-devil, pretty little hell-cat!..."
Cally smothered a little noise between a cry and a sob. She started away, by sheer strength of horror; somehow got away from the terrible old face, ran up her own steps. Glancing whitely over her shoulder from this secure coign, she saw that Jack Dalhousie's father still stood unmoving on her sidewalk, staring and leaning on his cane....
She closed the door quickly, shutting out the sight.