THE NIGHT BROUGHT COUNSEL
Mr. Britt, left with the father and mother, got his voice first because
he had been pricked most deeply; furthermore, the girl's method of
expression had touched him on the spot which had been abraded by Prophet
Elias's daily rasping.
The suitor drove his fist down on the center table with a force that
caused the model of Mr. Harnden's doors to jump and snap. “By the
joo-dinged, hump-backed Hosea, I've just about got to my limit in this
text business!”
“The dear girl is all wrought up. She don't realize what she's saying.
I'll run up to her room and reason with her. Don't mind what a girl says
in a tantrum, Mr. Britt,” Mrs. Harnden pleaded.
Mr. Britt, left with the father, began to stride back and forth across
the room. The title of the book jeered up at him from the carpet where
he had tossed the volume; he kicked the book under the table.
“The wife said a whole lot just now,” affirmed Mr. Harnden, soothingly.
“Consider where the girl has been this evening, Tasper! Off elocuting
dramatic stuff! Comes back full of high-flown nonsense. Gets off
something that was running in her head. Torched on by that fly-by-night
who'll be getting out of town and who'll be forgotten inside a week.
Where's your optimism?” He reached up and slapped Britt's back when the
banker passed him.
“She is in love with him,” complained the suitor; his anger was
succeeded by woe; his face “squizzled” as if he were about to weep a
second time that day.
“Piffle! She's a queer girl if she didn't have the usual run of childish
ailments, along with the whooping cough and the measles. I have always
known how to manage my womenfolks, Tasper. Not by threats and by
tumulting around as you have been doing! You've got a lot to learn.
Listen to me!”
Mr. Britt paused and blinked and listened.
Mr. Harnden plucked out a pencil and made believe write a screed on the
palm of his hand while he talked. “'By the twining tendrils of their
affections you can sway 'em to and fro,' as the poet said, speaking of
women. I am loved in my home. I have important prospects, now that you
are backing me.”
Mr. Britt blinked more energetically, but he did not dispute.
“Another poet has said that's it's all right to lie for love's sake--or
words to that effect. I know the right line of talk to give Vona. And
I won't have to lie such a great lot to make her know how bad off I am
right now. She has always had a lot of sympathy for me,” declared Mr.
Harnden, complacently. “I may as well cash in on it. She won't ruin a
loving father and a happy home when she wakes up after a good cry on the
wife's shoulder and gets her second wind and understands where she's at
in this thing. Tasper, you sit down there in a comfortable chair and let
me rub on some optimism anodyne where you're smarting the worst.”
When Mrs. Harnden came into the room a half hour later she looked
promptly relieved to find Mr. Britt in such a calm mood; when she had
hurried out he was acting as if he were intending to kick the furniture
about the place.
“A good cry--and all at peace, eh?--and a new view of things in the
morning?” purred the optimist in the way of query.
“She didn't cry,” reported the mother, with a disconsolateness that did
not agree with the cheering words of the reports.
“Oh, very well,” remarked Mr. Harnden, optimism unspecked. “That shows
she is taking a common-sense view and is using her head. What says she?”
“I may as well post you on how the matter stands, Mr. Britt. By being
honest all 'round we can operate together better.”
Britt agreed by an emphatic nod.
After an inhalation which suggested the charging of an air gun, Mrs.
Harnden pulled the verbal trigger. “Vona says she is all through at the
bank.”
“Oh, I know my girl,” said Mr. Harnden, airily. “I'll handle her when
morning's light is bright, and forgotten is the night!”
“I thought I knew my girl, too,” the mother declared, gloomily. “But I
guess I don't. I never saw her stiffen up like this before. She sat
and looked at me, and I felt like a cushion being jabbed by a couple of
hatpins--if there's any such thing as a cushion having feelings.”
Mrs. Harnden, settling her flounces, a soft and sighing example of “a
languishing Lydia,” was as unfortunate in her metaphor as Britt had been
when he mentioned a bitter medicine.
“Tell her that I'll pay her ten dollars more a week,” said President
Britt, looking desperate. “She mustn't leave me in the lurch.”
“She'll do it! Nothing to worry about!” affirmed the father. “And I'll
grab in as cashier till my bigger projects get started. I've got a
natural knack for handling money, Tasper.”
The banker winced.
“We can make it all snug, right in the family,” insisted Harnden.
He jumped up, opened the door into the hallway, and called. He kept
calling, his tones growing more emphatic, till the girl replied from
abovestairs.
“She's coming down,” reported the general manager of the household,
taking his stand in front of the fireplace. He pulled on a chain and
dragged out a bunch of keys and whirled them like a David taking aim
with a sling.
Vona came no farther than the doorway, and stood framed there.
“What's this last nonsense--that you won't go to your work in the
morning?”
“Your pay is raised ten dollars a week, starting to-morrow,”
supplemented Britt, appealingly.
But there was no compromise in the girl's mien. “Mr. Britt, I realize
perfectly well that I ought to give you due notice--the usual two weeks.
That would be the honorable business way. But you have set the example
of disregarding business methods, in your treatment of Mr. Vaniman. You
mustn't blame others for doing as you're doing. Therefore I positively
will not come into the bank, as conditions are. As I feel to-night I
shall feel to-morrow! If you, or my father and mother, think you can
change my mind on the matter, you'll merely waste your arguments.”
That time she did not run away. She surveyed them in turn, leisurely
and perfectly self-possessed. Even the optimist recognized inflexibility
when he was bumped against it hard enough! She stepped backward,
challenging reply, but they were silent, and she went upstairs.
“Still, nobody knows what the morning may bring forth,” persisted
Harnden, after waiting for somebody else to speak. “As I have said, I
have a knack--”
“Of blowing up paper bags and listening to 'em bust!” snarled the
banker, permitting himself, at least, to express his real opinion of
a man whom he had always held to be an impractical nincompoop. “If you
count cash the way you count chickens before they're hatched, you'd make
a paper bag out of my bank. I'll bid you good night!”
He wrenched away from Harnden's restraining hands and shook himself
under the shower of the optimist's pattering words, as a dog would
shake off rain. In the hall he pulled on his overcoat and turned up the
collar, for the words still pattered. He went out into the night and
slammed the door.
Britt began his program of general anathema by shaking his fist at the
Harnden house after he had reached the street. He shook his fist at the
other houses along the way as he went tramping in the middle of the road
toward his home. He even brandished his fist at his own statue in the
facade of Britt Block. The moonlight revealed the complacent features;
the cocky pose of serene confidence presented by the effigy affected the
disheartened original with as acute a sense of exasperation as he would
have felt if the statue had set thumb to nose and had wriggled the stone
fingers in impish derision.
“Gid-dap” Jones and a few citizens who could not make up their minds to
go to bed till they had sucked all the sweetness out of an extraordinary
evening in Egypt, were walking up and down the tavern porch, cooling
off. Mr. Britt, tramping past, shook his fist at them, too.
“Hope you enjoyed the music!” suggested Jones, wrought up to a pitch
where he would not be bull-dozed even by “Phay-ray-oh.”
“Yes, and I hope we'll have some more to-morrow night,” retorted the
banker. “You still have the poorhouse, the cattle pound, and the lockup
to serenade.”
“All right! Which one of 'em do you expect to be in?” inquired Jones.
“We wouldn't have you miss a tune for the world!”
When Britt arrived in the shadows of his own porch he stood and looked
out over Egypt and cursed the people, in detail and in toto. He had
become a monomaniac. He had set himself to accomplish one fell purpose.
In his office, earlier that day, he had resolved upon revenge; but
his natural caution had served as a leash, and he had pondered on no
definite plans that might prove dangerous. Now only one fear beset
him--the fear that he would not be able to think up and put through a
sufficiently devilish program.
He banged his door behind him and lighted a lamp which he kept on a
stand in the hall. He creaked upstairs in the lonely house. His sense of
loneliness was increased when he reflected that Vona would not be at her
desk in the morning.
The village watchman noted that the reflector lamp shone all night on
the door of the vault in the Egypt Trust Company; it was the watchman's
business to keep track of that light. But he noted also, outside of his
regular business, that there was a light for most of the night in Tasper
Britt's bedroom.