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 so _small_!"
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. "You _are_ an
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 so _crowded_, and couldn't they
have any _air_?
"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 deceive
_me_ ... But don't let's go _home!_ 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 I _am_ really 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 were _responsible_ for
the overcrowding in the bunching-room. How could she be--how _could_
she?--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!"