A CONFIDENTIAL CHAT
"I believe," said young Mr. Thompson, "that I've been owing you a
little bill for some weeks, Miss Dale. It had completely slipped my
mind."
He looked old and worn, Persis thought, more like the man who must
settle for the spring finery of a family of grown daughters, than a
complacent young husband paying for his wife's first new gown since the
wedding. There was a flatness in his voice that matched the weariness
in his eyes, and forthwith a dozen questions raced through her alert
brain.
"Well, Mr. Thompson, I hope you like the dress. I always tell my
customers that I'm as anxious to please their husbands as I am to
please them. 'Tain't fair, from my point of view, to ask a man to pay
out good money for clothes he just despises."
Evasion is an art possessed in its perfection by few of the sterner sex.
"Mrs. Thompson hasn't worn the dress yet," explained Mrs. Thompson's
husband. "I dare say it's very pretty." He had taken a little roll of
bills from his pocket, but his absent air showed conclusively that he
was thinking neither of them nor of his answer.
Persis lowered her voice confidentially.
"If I was you, Mr. Thompson, I wouldn't encourage her in that way of
doing. Maybe it seems like prejudiced advice, coming from a
dressmaker, so, but I never could see there was any saving in hanging a
dress away in the closet and not getting any wear out of it, till it
was clear out of style. You know how it is with young wives. They've
got their hearts so set on having their husbands praise 'em for being
saving that they make those little mistakes. You just tell her that
you'd rather spend a little more money, if it came to that, and see her
look her prettiest."
"Mrs. Thompson is not--" began the young husband and broke off
uncertainly. His troubled eyes went to the kind resolute face
opposite, and the little roll of greenbacks dropped to the floor
unheeded. "Fact is," said the young fellow, carried away by that
impulse toward confidence which the sight of Persis was likely to
inspire in the least communicative, "fact is we're having the deuce of
a time."
Persis nodded understandingly. "That ain't strange the first year or
so. After the honeymoon's over, then comes the getting acquainted. I
don't care how well folks have known each other beforehand, they've got
to start all over again after they're married. But don't worry; it
don't take long as a rule."
"You don't quite get my idea." Young Mr. Thompson scowled at the
floor. "It's worse than you think. I'm in a fix, a devil of a fix.
Part of it I'm to blame for. I'm one of those guys with a sense of
humor, you know. I'm the regular George Cohan kind, and between my
practical jokes and some interfering old maids--I--I beg your pardon."
"I'm not partial to 'em myself," smiled Persis reassuringly.
There was an instant of understanding silence. "Well, anyway," groaned
the young man, "with a little outside help, I've queered myself for
good. And that's tough on a chap not a year married, believe me."
He stared at the floor gloomily and when he lifted his eyes, she saw
the whole story on its way. "You wouldn't call Thompson an unusual
name, would you?"
"One of the commonest, I should say."
"And there's nothing so strange about 'W. Thompson' that you'd strain
your neck getting another look at it on a sign. Half the men you meet
are named William, to say nothing of the Walters and the Warrens, and
the new crop of Woodrow Wilsons."
Persis' murmur of agreement was admirably calculated to encourage the
flow of confidence, not to check it.
"Look at that." Young Mr. Thompson pulled a letter from his pocket and
slammed it down on the table. "There's the proof that I'm a hound and
a blackguard and that hanging would be too good for me. At least
that's what all the women tell my wife. And take it from me, they
know."
Persis picked up the envelope and studied the superscription. It had
originally been addressed to Mr. W. Thompson, Hollenden Hotel,
Cleveland, Ohio, and later redirected in another hand to the firm by
which Mr. Thompson was employed. The unhappy husband explained:
"Our men generally stop at the Hollenden when they are in Cleveland. I
never was there in my life. But Hudson, one of our fellows, blew in
one night and noticing a letter directed to W. Thompson, he knew, of
course, it must be for me. That's just the sort of 'buttinski' that
Hudson is. If he'd run across a tombstone with W. Thompson on it, he'd
have expressed it to me before he'd eaten his dinner. So he told the
clerk he knew me and sent the letter on to the main office. Now,
perhaps you'll appreciate the rest of my story better, if you'll read
the letter."
Gratified by the permission, for young Mr. Thompson had succeeded in
piquing her curiosity, Persis drew the enclosure from the envelope and
for an instant studied the monogram at the head of the sheet. When her
gaze dropped to the address, her eyebrows lifted.
"Yes, I know," murmured young Mr. Thompson. "'Tommy darling.' Tommy
is short for Thompson, I suppose. Tommy-rot, I call it. You might
read it aloud if you don't mind. It'll help me to have a realization
of what I'm up against."
Persis complied.
"Tommy darling:
"Here I am writing you again for all I promised myself that I
wouldn't--not ever. It makes me feel so dishonorable when I think of
Her. And then, dear, I think of you and everything else is forgotten
for a little while.
"That lovely, sad, happy, heart-breaking afternoon together! I've
lived on the memory of it ever since. I thought when we said good-by
that it was for the last time. I really meant it, dear. But now the
thought of never seeing you again is like a great black wall shutting
out everything bright and beautiful. I'm not brave enough to bear it.
"Tell me when and where we can see each other, Tommy. I'm not going to
think of Her, but only of you and me and the joy of loving and being
loved.
"Enid."
"She seems," observed Persis Dale, folding the letter carefully, "to be
of a real affectionate disposition." Young Mr. Thompson passed the
comment over without remark.
"They gave me the letter at the office. It was pretty near a month
after it was written and I judged the two of them had seen each other
before that, and one lost letter wouldn't matter. And then it occurred
to me that I'd have a little fun with Molly. Get me?"
Persis' look indicated understanding rather than approval.
"You can't think worse than I've said to myself a thousand times. I
put the letter in my pocket, and I had it all figured out how she'd
find it and ask me about it, and then read it and be angry for about
half a minute. And I took it for granted that I was going to be right
there to explain and that I'd have the laugh on her before she had the
chance to get to feeling real bad. It looked awful funny to me. It's
a great thing to have a man-size sense of humor."
Persis was too interested to smile.
"Then the weather got warm and I changed to another suit and forgot to
change the letter. I'd laid several little plots to help her to find
it, like sending her to my pocket for postage stamps, but she didn't
fall to 'em, and finally the letter got to be an old story. I pretty
nearly forgot all about it. When she did find it, I was off on a trip
and she'd talked the thing over with all the old women in the
neighborhood before I got back." He ran his fingers through his hair.
"Explain! Well, she thinks it's a mighty slim story, and the deuce of
it is that she's right. Any dam fool could make up a better one."
"I b'lieve you could have done better yourself," Persis suggested
smoothly, "if you'd been in the story business."
The young fellow looked at her, and a quick flush swept to the roots of
his hair.
"That sounds," he began breathlessly, "that sounds as if you took stock
in me in spite of the way things look."
"I've lived long enough to know that looks are deceiving whether you're
talking about women or just things." Persis studied the address again
and compressed her lips. "See that this letter don't get lost, strayed
or stolen," she directed, with that instinctive assumption of authority
which is the badge of the competent. "We might find it useful in
clearing things up."
The young man's ruddy color rose again. "Then you think--" he faltered
and broke off.
"I think that when folks act fair and square, their lives ain't going
to be ruined by a little mistake. Of course it's going to be cleared
up. Careful, Mr. Thompson. You seem to be stepping on a lot of money.
And it must belong to you, because I can't afford to carpet my room
with greenbacks."
His answering laugh showed the contagion of her optimism. Young Mr.
Thompson picked up his money and paid his bill, "I'm going home and
coax Molly into putting on that new dress," he declared boyishly.
"It's the first dress I ever bought for her, and I'm crazy to see how
she looks in it."
Persis approved the suggestion. "But don't be discouraged if she needs
a lot of coaxing. It's as natural for women to primp and fuss and fix
their hair up pretty ways when they're feeling happy as 'tis for plants
to put out leaves in the spring. But heavy hearts are like winter
weather. If you want any blossoms in December, you've got to work for
'em." She wrote "received payment" beneath Mr. Thompson's bill and
went to the secretary for the change. Young Mr. Thompson pocketed his
forty-five cents and detained the hand that tendered it.
"Look here, Miss Dale," he said, "you've braced me up wonderfully. I
feel more like a man and less like a feather-bolster than I did when I
came in. I wonder if you couldn't--" He hesitated and pressed her
fingers persuasively. "Couldn't you manage to drop a hint to Molly
about appearances being deceptive, you know."
"I'll say more than that before I'm done with her," Persis promised
briskly. And they shook hands over again, and young Mr. Thompson
departed with an alert step that argued a corresponding lightness of
heart. And because Persis Dale was a woman of action, she sat down at
the secretary and penned a letter to a total stranger, to Mr. W.
Thompson, care of the Hollenden Hotel, Cleveland. The letter itself
was brief and to the point.
"Dear Sir:
"I should like to know if you are expecting word from a young woman
named Enid. In case you are, kindly communicate with the undersigned.
"Yours truly,
"Persis Dale."
Brief as the letter was its composition took some little time. The
deftness which characterized Persis in most of her work, did not extend
to her epistolary efforts. She was still puckering her forehead over
the page when Thomas Hardin knocked. The door was ajar and glancing
over her shoulder, she called to him to enter.
"You'll excuse me for not getting up, Thomas. When once I sit down to
an ink bottle, I stick to it till I finish. I'm in a hurry to get this
letter off to-night." She wrote the address and dried the ink by
moving the paper gently back and forth.
Thomas' face showed relief. He had come prepared to make a painful
disclosure and the brief period of waiting was as welcome as similar
postponement to the possessor of an aching tooth who calls at the
dentist's office and finds the practitioner busy. But as Persis
immediately proceeded to fold the letter and seal the envelope, his
respite was brief.
"Persis, did you know there was insanity in my family?"
Persis, applying a crumpled stamp to the tip of her tongue, started
violently. "Good gracious, Thomas, no! I never heard it mentioned."
"I thought maybe 'twas my duty to speak to you about it. It was my
great-uncle, Captain Silas Hardin. He was my father's uncle, and he--"
"Why, I know all about him, Thomas. How he was shipwrecked off in the
Indian Ocean somewhere and floated around on a raft, and the different
ones got crazy with the heat and thirst and all and jumped overboard.
And it was an English ship that found the old captain, and he was just
raving when they took him aboard. I can remember him when I was a
little girl. There was a blue anchor tattooed on his hand, and I
thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world. But then he was
as sensible as anybody."
"Yes, he was all right in his later days, but when he first came home
from England, he had lots of queer ways about him, I've heard my mother
say. And as long as he lived, he'd stand off and stare at the corner
of the room where there wasn't nothing with his eyes kind of fixed, and
it was enough to make your hair rise up to look at him."
"I don't wonder, poor soul. I guess if we'd seen what he had, there'd
be times when it would all come back to us. By the way, Thomas, seeing
as you go right past the post-office, I'll ask you to mail this letter.
I want it to be sure to get off the first mail."
Thomas tacitly accepted the commission by holding out his hand for the
letter. Then he read the superscription. "W. Thompson! Why, there's
a W. Thompson in Clematis."
"This," replied Persis, and the confidence of her tone would have
warmed the heart of young Mr. Thompson, "this is a different one."
Thomas waited to hear more, but no further particulars were vouchsafed.
He felt mildly aggrieved. "Didn't know you had acquaintances in
Cleveland," he suggested by way of a stimulus to confidence.
"I haven't many." Persis compressed her lips, and Thomas looked again
at the envelope. The sense of elation due to the discovery that Persis
was disposed to regard the insanity of Captain Silas Hardin lightly,
was eclipsed by a new anxiety. Persis had friends of whose existence
he was unaware. She corresponded with men in distant cities. These
apparently trivial facts took on greater import as he mused. His own
chances to win her, dishearteningly small at the best of times in view
of his checkered record, suddenly sank below the level of
insignificance and ceased to exist.
He looked across at Persis on the other side of the table. She had
picked up a piece of sewing, but her look of absorption showed that her
trained fingers were doing their work without the supervision of the
brain. Nor could he flatter himself that her thoughts were of him. He
was a modest man, but for the moment he resented with bitterness the
self-evident fact that she was temporarily oblivious to his presence.
He got to his feet, pushing back his chair noisily. "Maybe I'd better
be going, so's your letter will be dead sure to get to the post-office
on time," he said, his voice harsh with disappointment.
Persis stooped to bite a thread. "Thank you, Thomas," she answered
placidly. "I'll be easier in my mind when I know it's mailed."