The resolution helped him through the summer. It was a pleasant summer,
and yet a trying one. It was the first time he had ever done work of
which the essence lay in satisfying individuals. In his market jobs the
job had been the thing. Even if done at somebody's order, it was judged
by its success, or by its lack of it. His work at the inn-club brought
him hourly into contact with men and women to whom it was his duty to
be specially, and outwardly deferential. He sprang to open the door
for them when they entered or left the car; he touched his hat to them
whenever they gave him an order. His bearing, his manner of address,
formed a part of his equipment only second to his capacity to drive.
To this he had no objection. It only seemed odd that while it was his
business to be courteous to others it was nobody's business to be
courteous to him. Some people were. They used toward him those little
formalities of "Please" and "Thank you" which were a matter of course
toward one another. They didn't command; they requested. Others, on the
contrary, never requested. If their nerves or their digestions were not
in good order, they felt at liberty to call him a damn fool, or if they
were ladies, to find fault foolishly. Whatever the injustice, it was
his part to keep himself schooled to the apologetic attitude, ready to
be held in the wrong when he knew he was in the right. Though he had
never heard of the English principle that you may be rude if you choose
to your equals, but never rude to those in a position lower than your
own, he felt its force instinctively. His humble place in the world's
economy entitled him to a courtesy which few people thought it worth
their while to show.
Apart from this he had nothing to complain of. He made good money, as
the phrase went, his wages augmented by his tips. He took his tips
without shame, since he did much to please his clients beyond what he
was paid for. His relation with them being personal, he could see well
enough that only in tips could they make him any recognition. With the
staff in the house he got on very well, especially with the waitresses,
all six of them girls working their way through Radcliffe, Wellesley,
or Vassar. They chaffed him in an easy-going way, one of them calling
him her Hercules, another her Charlemagne because of his height, while
to a third he was her Siegfried. When he had no work in the evenings,
and their dining-room duties were over, he took them for drives among
the mountains. Writing to Honey, he said that what with the air, the
food, the fun, and the outdoor life, he was never before in such
splendid shape.
Honey was his one anxiety, though an anxiety which troubled him only
now and then.
"Go to it, lad," had been his response when Tom had told him of Mr.
Ansley's proposition. "With eighty dollars a month for all summer, and
yer keep throwed in, yer ought to save two hundred."
"You're sure you won't be lonesome, Honey?"
Honey made a scornful exclamation. "Lord love yer, Kid, if I was ever
goin' to be lonesome I'd 'a begun before now. Lonesome! Me! That's a
good 'un!"
And yet on the Sunday of his departure Tom noticed a forced strain in
Honey's gayety. It was a Sunday because Tom was to drive the car up to
New Hampshire in the afternoon to begin his first week on the Monday.
Honey was in clamorous spirits, right up to an hour before the boy left.
Then he seemed to go flat. Pump up his humor as he would, it had no
zest in it. When it came to the last handshake he grinned feebly, but
couldn't, or didn't, speak. Tom drove away with a question in his mind
as to whether or not, in Honey's professions of a steeled heart, there
was not some bravado.
In driving through Nashua he saw Maisie. It had been agreed that she
should meet him by the roadside, at the end of the town toward Lowell,
and go on with him till he struck the country again. They not only did
this, but got out at a druggist's to spend a half hour over ice-cream
sodas.
Picking up the dropped threads of intercourse was not so easy as they
had expected. It was hard for Tom to make himself believe that in this
pretty little thing, all in white with pink roses in her hat, he was
talking to his future wife. Since the fervor of his first love letter
there had been a slight shift in his point of view. Without being able
to locate the change, he felt that the new interests--the car, the
inn-club, the variety of experience--had to some small degree crowded
Maisie out. She was not quite so essential as she had seemed on the
afternoon when he had learned of her departure. Neither was she quite
so pretty. He thought with a pang that Honey's predictions might be
coming true. Because they might be coming true, his pity was so great
that he told her she was looking lovelier than ever.
"Gee, that's something," Maisie accepted, complacently. "With
four brats to look after, and all the cooking and washing, and
everything--if my father don't marry again soon I'll pass away." She
glanced at his chauffeur's uniform. "You look swell."
He felt swell, and told her so. He told her of his wages, of the
economies he hoped to make.
"Gee, and you talk of goin' to college, a fellow that can pull in all
that money just by bein' a shofer. Why, if you were to go on bein' a
shofer we could get married as soon as I got the family off my hands."
He explained to her that it was not the present, but the future for
which he was working. A chauffeur had only a chauffeur's possibilities,
whereas a man with an education....
"Just my luck to get engaged to a nut," Maisie commented, with forced
resignation. "Gee, I got to laff."
Some half dozen times that summer, when errands took him to Boston,
they met in the same way. Growing more accustomed to their new relation
to each other, he also grew more tender as he realized her limitations
and domestic cares. With his first month's wages in his hand, he could
bring her little presents on each return from Boston, so helping out
her never-failing joy in the flash of her big diamond. That at least
she had, when every other blessing was put off to a vague future.
* * * * *
In August, the Ansleys came flying back, driven by the war. It had
caught them at Munich, where their French chauffeur, Pierre, had been
interned as a prisoner. While taking driving lessons Tom had made
Pierre's acquaintance, and that he should now be a prisoner in Germany
made the war a reality. For the first few weeks it had been like a
battle among giants in the clouds; now it came down to earth as a
convulsion among men.
The Ansleys had come to the inn-club because their own house was
closed. With Guy and Hildred Tom found his relations changed by the
fact that he was a chauffeur. Guy talked to him freely enough, as one
young fellow to another, but Hildred had plainly received a hint to
mark the distance between them. If she passed him in the grounds, or if
he opened the car door for her, she gave him a faint, self-conscious
smile, but never spoke to him. Mrs. Ansley freely used the car and him,
always calling him Whitelaw.
Philip Ansley was much preoccupied by the international situation. A
small, dry man of slightly Mongolian features, and a skin which looked
like a parchment lampshade tinted with a little rose, he had made a
specialty of international law as it affected the great corporations.
New York and Washington both had need of him. When he couldn't go
there, those who wished his opinion came to him. Not a little of
Tom's work lay in driving him to Keene, the station for New York, to
meet the important men seeking his advice. Thus it happened that Tom
brought over from Keene, so late one night that he got no more than a
dim glimpse of the visitor, the man who was to leave on him the most
disturbing impression of the summer.
Having delivered his charge at the inn-club door, he drove his car to
the garage, climbed the stairs to his room, and turned into bed. Before
six next morning he was up for a plunge in the lake, this being the
only hour he could count on as his own.
It was one of those windless mornings late in summer which bring the
first hint of fall. The lake was so still that each throw of his arms
was like the smashing of a vast metallic mirror. Only a metallic
mirror could have had this shining dullness, faintly iridescent,
hardly catching the rays of the newly risen sun. Not leaden enough for
night, nor silvery enough for day, it kept the aloofness from man, as
well as from Nature's smaller blandishments, of its mighty companion,
Monadnock. It was an awesome lake, beautiful, withdrawn, because it
gave back the mountain's awesomeness, beauty, and remoteness.
Tom's thrust, as he paddled the water behind him, broke for no more
than a few seconds that which at once reformed itself. You would have
said that the darting of his body, straight as a fish's, clave the
water as a bird cleaves the air. After he had gone there was hardly a
ripple to tell that he had passed. Built to be a swimmer, loose limbed,
loose muscled, and not too bonily spare, he breathed as a swimmer,
deeply, gently, without spluttering or loss of his control. In the
limpid medium through which another might have sunk like a stone he
had that sense of natural support which helps man to his dominion. Now
on his right side, now on his left, he could skim like an arrow to its
mark for the simple reason that he knew he could.
He turned over on his back and floated. The quiet was that of a world
which might never have known the velocity of wind, the ferocity of
war. Above him the inviolate sky; around him the mountains nearly as
inviolate! And everywhere the living stillness, vibrating, dramatic,
with which Nature alone can quicken a dead calm!
Turning over again, he was abandoning the crawl for the forearm stroke,
to make his way back to the bathing cabins, when over the water came a
long "Ahoy!" Nearer the shore, and a little abeam, there was another
man swimming toward him. Tom gave back an "Ahoy!" and made in the
direction of the stranger. It was perhaps another chauffeur. Even if
it were a resident, or some resident's guest, the informality of sport
would put them on a level.
The newcomer had the sun behind him; Tom had it on his face. His
features were, therefore, the first to become visible. A strong voice
called out, in a tone of astonishment:
"Why, Tad! What are _you_ doing up here in New Hampshire?"