Time's Jests, and now the Perfect Apology, to stand a
Lifetime in Brick and Stone; concluding with a Little Scene,
which she will remember while she lives.
She had called him untruthful once for speaking the truth about the
Works. Now she would make her apology due, to stand a lifetime in brick
and stone. This Cally did for the man of the slums to-day; and this she
meant him to understand without much speech, since speech, in the
circumstances, would be somewhat difficult.
But then, of course, she could know nothing of those colloquies Mr. V.V.
had had in his time with O'Neill, the hard-joking Commissioner, of inner
conflicts he had had of late all by himself. Nor did she even take it in
how far her advancing thought of him, and of all this subject, had
outrun anything she had ever put into word or deed before. So she was
far from imagining what a miracle she made for him this afternoon, like
a midsummer dream come true; far from guessing how he, with his strange
unconsciousnesses, would think of it all as just a beautiful but
detached happening, a glorious coincidence....
He wore for this meeting, not his holiday raiment of blue, with the
sprigged waistcoat that his Uncle Armistead might have left him, but
that selfsame suit she had seen upon him all last year; including that
other memorable day in her life when she had come clicking down the
stairs to find the tall outlander standing here in her familiar
background. Only there was no feeling in her now that he was an alien in
the Heth drawing-room. No, here V. Vivian seemed to belong to-day, the
best and worthiest thing in the room.
To her, that was; but it was not so with others. The one speck in the
perfect balm was that, to have this man here at all, she had had to
manage it secretly, as if it were something discreditable....
The greetings were over; they were seated; he was advised that it was
about a building matter that she desired his help; and even when, as
talk progressed, she placed her building lot for him at Seventeenth and
Canal Streets, the doctor's manner, which was quite eager and interested
and pleased at being summoned for help, showed no signs of
understanding.
"Seventeenth and Canal Streets," he repeated, alert and businesslike.
"Yes? It's to be a business building, then?"
"There's a building there now, but I'm going to pull that one down,"
said Cally. "I don't like it."
And at this moment it was that she saw consciousness burst into the
unconscious; burst with the strong suddenness of an explosion.
"_Seventeenth and Canal Streets_!... That's the Heth Works corner!"
"That's the building I'm going to pull down. I--I've taken a dislike to
it."
The tall young man came to his feet, slowly, as if hoisted from above by
an invisible block and tackle. All in a moment, his face had become
quite pale.
"What do you mean?" he asked, in a queer clipped voice.
"I mean ... I don't think you will have to say anything about my father
in your articles.... We're going to build a new Works--_now_!"
He stood staring a second like a man of stone; and then turned abruptly
from her and walked away. But in that second she saw that his
petrifaction was already scattering, and his face wore the strangest
look, like a kind of glory....
So Cally thought that he understood now; and that was all the reward she
wanted. Sitting silent, she looked after his retreating back. She
perceived, with a queer little twitching in her heart, that the polished
spaces upon Mr. V.V.'s right elbow had thinned away into an unmistakable
darning. And then it came over her quite suddenly that the reason he
wore this suit to-day was probably that he had given his blue suit away,
to one of his sick. She seemed quite sure that that was it. And oh, how
like him, and like nobody else in the world, to give away his best one,
and keep the patches for himself....
And the first thing that he said, returning to her after his
thunderbolt surprise, seemed also beautifully characteristic of his
strange faiths.
"Well, it's wonderful," said he, in quite a natural voice. "Of course,
the greatest thing that will ever happen to me.... And yet--it may seem
strange to you--but I've felt all along--I've _felt_--that something
like this might probably happen any time."
Moved as she was, Cally could have smiled at that. But when she saw the
intense honesty of his face, which still wore that half-startled yet
shining look, the look of a man with a sudden secret all his own, she
did not smile, and her own thought was given quite a new course.
"Perhaps you're a nice sort of mind-reader," said she, gently, "for you
were right to feel that way, at least as far as my father is concerned.
I specially wanted you to know about that. Papa has been planning for
six years to put up a new building--only last month he had arranged to
spend quite a lot of money in repairs. I just came to understand all
this to-day. The trouble has been," said Cally, looking up at the old
family enemy with no sense of hesitation or reluctance--"I've always
been too expensive, you see. I've never left him any money to carry out
his plans...."
She would not say anything about horse-leech's daughters, not, of all
things, wanting to embarrass him to-day. But possibly his mind filled in
a hiatus here, and there was no mistaking that what she said about her
father impressed him profoundly.
"I ... I really seem to have known. You might call it a sort of--of
premonition--if you wanted to ... Though you'll naturally not think I've
acted that way."
Mr. V.V. stood by a spindly table, carefully examining a small but
costly vase, the property of Mr. Heth, of the Cheroot Works; and now he
went on with a kind of diffident resolution, the air of one who gives a
confidence with difficulty, but must do so now, for his honor.
"You may remember my telling you once that I was--was sorry to write the
factory articles you just mentioned. The truth is I've hated to write
them--especially as to--as to the Works.... It's just the sort of thing
I've wanted for a long time to write, too. I had the argument thought
out down to the bone. Oh, they're good.... I--I was going to send the
first lot to the 'Chronicle' this week.... And yet--well, it's been
pulling against the grain somehow, every line of the way. It seemed
strange.... And now I see that I must have felt--known--all along....
But," said the strange young man, setting down the vase and hurriedly
running his fingers through his hair, "I--I realize that this must sound
most unconvincing to you. Probably foolish. No matter...."
But Cally felt by now that she understood him better than he understood
himself.
"No, I think I understand," said she. "And if you hadn't felt that
way--don't you see?--it never would have happened."
He turned on her another strange look, at once intensely interested and
intensely bewildered. But she glanced away from it at once, and would
give him no chance to ask her what that might mean.
"I've got so much I want to tell you, so much I want to ask your advice
and help about," said she, rising, with a change to what she regarded as
an excellent business voice and manner. "Perhaps we ought to go into
executive session at once--and let's go into the library, too! I know
you're awfully busy, but I do hope you've come prepared to make a good
long visit."
The article-writer neglected to reply at all, moving after her with his
queer, startled look....
So these two passed from the Heth drawing-room to the Heth library, to
talk about business: the new Heth Works, in fine. They came into a room
which was intimately and poignantly associated with Hugo Canning.
Memories of the departed greeted Cally upon the threshold, and
thereafter; only they were not poignant now. Hugo's face kept rising
mistily beside the so different visage of the man he had instinctively
disliked, his ancient hoodoo....
This was to be a meeting like none other Cally had ever had with the
stranger in her house, a _happy_ meeting, troubled by no shadow. They
sat down across the great table from each other, in good business style,
as she considered; and then she began to talk eagerly, recounting to him
without any embarrassment, though of course with some judicious
expurgation, what had been going on in her mind, and out of it, during
the last five days; beginning with the afternoon she had seen him at the
Cooneys', and culminating with the long talk she had had with her father
at, and after, luncheon to-day.
And he, the only confidant she had ever had, sitting with his patched
elbow on her father's table, and his chin in his cupped hand, attended
every word with his singular quality of interest. He was unique among
all the people she had known, in that the things he seemed to care most
about were never things for himself at all....
"So that's how it stands now," said Cally, presently. "My father was
naturally surprised at first, as I've never shown any interest in his
work before, and of course he said he wouldn't do it,--wouldn't take my
money, I mean, though it's really his all the time. But at last I did
get him to talking about it seriously, and then he grew more and more
interested.... Oh, I know he's going to do it! I _know_ it!--That's all
settled! And I do think he'll let me have a hand in really planning
it--that is, if I can show him that I--I know anything about it....
Well, of course I _don't_, you see--nothing, nothing!--and that's where
my problem begins. I've got to learn everything, from the very start,
and do it quickly.... Do you think I possibly can?--"
"_Books_!" he cried, throwing out both hands. "What're they for but to
teach us everything, _right away_?..."
In fact, her problem there was really no problem at all, it seemed. Pond
himself had at hand a fine little general library on all these subjects;
there was the State Library; there were the bookstores of the world: all
waiting for her, all packed with meaty information. Perhaps, just as a
starter, she would let him make out a sort of preliminary check-list
to-night, out of catalogues, out of some bully advertisements in the
backs of Pond's works....
"Oh, you _are_ nice!" exclaimed Cally. "You can't guess what it means
to be encouraged!... I do so want to go into it seriously."
He talked further, indicating the procedure: first her own idea of what
she wanted; then an architect to sketch some plans; then a builder to
figure after the architect. The thing began to shape up, rapidly,
definitely. She found him an inspiriting soul....
"I ought to say," she explained, quite excited, "that I mentioned fifty
thousand dollars only because that was the sum I happened to have, in a
lump. But we're going to make it _good_, no matter what it costs. I have
a little more money of my own," said she, "about eight thousand dollars,
and of course I'll put that in, too. And I know my father will feel the
same way."
But no, V.V.'s belief was that the sum she mentioned would be far more
than necessary. She could get a rough sort of estimate at once, if
desired, given the dimensions of the lot and a general idea of the style
of building she wanted. His friend, Jem Noonan, he who was just now
starting out as a contractor, would be only too delighted to do some
figuring on it.
"Of course the best way of all to gather ideas at the start," said he,
staring through her, "is to go to the Works--go often.... There's no
other such way of seeing what the actual needs are."
"Yes ... Yes, of course that's true," said Cally.
But what she felt like saying was that she didn't want to go to the
Works at all, unless he could go with her.
"I want to get _your_ ideas now, please," she added--"everything you can
think of. You can't have any notion how ignorant I am.... But--oh,
there's one thing I wanted to speak to you about first. I suppose--even
at the best--it would be some time before the new building could begin?"
Oh, a few months, no doubt, before all plans would be ready, and her
father's arrangements made to move.
"Do you think the floors in this old building are very _strong_? The man
who was with me the day I went there didn't seem to think so--and I
didn't either! And some very heavy-looking new machines were being put
in the bunching-room, and I believe some more are going to be put in
to-morrow."
"Oh!... You mean you think they might overload the floor?"
"Don't you?"
"Well--it's possible," admitted Mr. V.V., slowly, and one could see that
he didn't altogether like the idea of anybody's criticizing Mr. Heth's
conduct of his business. "But--ah--really I don't--"
"Couldn't we fix it, in some simple way--brace up the floor somehow?"
"Oh, yes. You'd have no trouble in fixing it.... Far as that goes."
"Don't you think you could manage to say _we_ once?"
"Oh!" said Mr. V.V., pleased. "I could that!... I didn't know, you see,
how far you cared to let me in."
Cally smiled at him over the library table.
"Hasn't it occurred to you that you are in it, that you've been right in
the middle of it all along?"
He gave her one of his original looks, and said: "Well, I can't say it
had.... But it's where I'd rather be than anywhere else in the world."
"You can make nice speeches, at any rate.... Do you know you're the
strangest man, I believe, that ever lived?"
"No, that's news. Am I?... Well, in what way am I so strange?"
"Oh, it's a long, long story. But I'm going to tell it all to you some
day.... Do go on and help me about the floors. Papa won't. He didn't
seem to like my speaking about them at all. He says they'd hold hundreds
more machines if he only had the room--"
"Well, he _knows_.... He's--he's had the strain figured out. Of course."
So had Time, the master-humorist, reversed positions between Heths and
Vivians. The old Arraigner, for his part, seemed to feel now that, to
all intents and purposes, papa _had_ put up the building six
years ago....
But Cally explained how floors and machines had got upon her nerves.
This was, she said, _our_ first point to settle. And thereupon the young
man at once addressed himself to the question of remedies; sketching
with his finger on the table-top, till she got note-paper and pencils
from mamma's desk in the corner, switched light into a reading-lamp, and
came and sat down beside him. On the paper V.V. obligingly produced an
outline of the three floors of the present factory, accurately locating
stairway and elevator shaft; even the point where the cloak-room was to
be knocked out to give the space needed for the new machines....
"How in the world do you know so much about the Works?"
"Oh--well, you see, the shipping clerk there is quite a friend of mine,"
said V.V. "A very nice fellow, sort of a Lithuanian, named Dolak. Don't
be offended, but I--I've been down there once or twice at night."
However, he seemed stumped as to the best method of support, admitting
that it was not so simple as it seemed. And presently, when he had tried
and condemned columns from floor to floor, the girl said, hesitatingly:
"Dr. Vivian, do you think props--outside--would do any good?"
He turned his intent gaze upon her; he was frowning absorbedly and
looking rather doubtful about it all.
"I mean iron braces running from the ground on each side of the
building," said Cally--"and holding up girders, or whatever you call
them, under the bunching-room floor?"
He gazed a moment, and then exclaimed:
"Oh--good! _Oh, that's good_!... That would do it--do it perfectly!..."
He proceeded with eagerness to sketch in her square-arch braces under
his bunching-room floor, and he said again: "Perfect solution!... Why,
you ought to have been a builder!"
"Oh, I--just happened to see a picture of something like that in the
encyclopædia this afternoon."
Her tone was depreciatory, not suggesting that she had looked some time
before she happened to see that picture. But within she was feeling the
strangest, the most exhilarating thrills.... Oh, the clearness of being
a _fellow-worker_; of praise that had nothing to do with a candidacy for
matrimony!...
"But the difficulty," she said, "is to persuade papa to let me do it. Of
course, I've no right to expect him to take me seriously.... I know
_you_ could persuade him."
That, spoken impulsively, she hurriedly covered up in conversation;
begging him to go on at once and give her his ideas of what the new
building should be like. She had gathered by now, that, whatever he
considered wonderful in all this, it was not the fact that he, she, and
her father should be, so to say, planning it shoulder to shoulder. But
this fine unconsciousness of his she herself could not match; not at
least till she had had more time to smooth things over with her
father....
However, talk of mere temporary repairs in condemned old buildings was
quickly swallowed in plannings for the splendid new. Here the man from
the outskirts indubitably shone; he bristled with illuminating ideas.
He, it seemed, was for a four-story building, brick, with concrete
floors. Much he had to say on the subject of fire-escapes and
patent-doors, lunch-rooms and rest-rooms with lockers, enclosed
stairways and elevator shafts; shower-baths, too, if one simply must
have the best and never mind the expense. And then his pencil began
unconsciously to work as he went along; and presently there emerged upon
a fresh sheet of mamma's best note-paper the first visible presentment
of the Works that would be. There it actually _was_, for you to gaze at,
dream over; the perfect apology: the front and side elevation of a fine,
dignified, businesslike building, plain yet undeniably handsome, very
substantial and roomy, very full of airy windows. Not like a marble
palace, after all; but a child could see that nobody was ever crowded in
there, nobody ever the least faint. Nothing homicidal here, Mr. V.V.,
look where you will....
"You can _draw_, too!"
"Straight lines," said V.V., modestly. But he regarded his handiwork
with passionate approbation, and finished it off gallantly with a flag
flying from the roof and two stately motor-trucks (so he said) wheeling
by the door.
"Oh, how beautiful!" cried Cally Heth.
And it was all so curiously exciting to her, so intensely interesting.
No prospect in her life, it seemed, had ever stirred her like this
strange one; a new cigar-factory, born of her purse and heart....
Once, about at this point, the young man threw out with mysterious
delight:
"I'll like to see old Sam O'Neill's face, when he hears about this."
In the midst of the animated talk came Annie, the parlormaid--and Cally
started at the sound of the approaching feet, and hated herself for
it--to say that Dr. Vivian was wanted at the telephone. The doctor
seemed annoyed by the summons, though not surprised; he had had to take
the liberty, he explained as he rose, of leaving word at his office
where he could be found, in case of necessity--words of this sort being
left, as we know, with his paid assistant, Mrs. Garland, the world's
biggest office-boy.
So V. Vivian was led away by Annie to the downstairs telephone in the
butler's pantry; whence he was back in a moment, looking relieved, and
assuring Miss Heth that it was nothing in the least urgent or important.
There was no hurry at all, it seemed. But Cally felt that the business
talk was drawing to a close, with a good deal still left unsaid....
Returning with eager interest to his drawing, Mr. V.V. fell to planting
shade-trees of the best quality all down the Seventeenth Street side of
the new building. So engaged, he observed suddenly:
"Don't worry any more about those floors, please--will you? That's all
going to work out very nicely.... I'll get a figure from Jem Noonan
right away on that plan of yours. And I'll see that it's a low figure,
too,--it's got to be low!... Good heavens!" said V.V., eyeing his
drawing with a queer little introspective smile. "We can't be expected
to spend anything much on a building that's going to come down in a
couple of months, you know."
She looked, smiling a little, too, at his unconscious face, fine, to
thinness, which had once made Mr. Pond think of a bishop who never grew
up. And her look became suddenly full of tenderness....
"I don't worry," said Cally, "now that I've got you to help me."
The man from the Dabney House spoke again:
"I was just thinking, out there at the telephone, that if there's no
further business before the house, you might feel like beginning that
long story you--you spoke of just now."
That took her by surprise. She seemed to be less and less at her ease.
But now surely had come her moment to take her courage in her hands, and
render him his due.
"I believe I ought to," said she, lightly--"a chapter or two, at least.
For I don't think you'll ever work it out for yourself.... And I'm glad
you're that way."
He made no reply, going on carefully with his arbor-day practice.
"When you said just now that this was wonderful," said Cally, beginning
to lose the light touch already--"you meant that it was a wonderful
happening, didn't you? Your idea seems to be that all this just
happened."
But no, Mr. V.V. denied that vigorously, and stated his logical theory:
that her father had chanced to postpone his intentions, merely through
the well-known fact that men get accustomed to conditions that they
constantly see; but that she, going there with fresh eyes....
"I might have gone there a hundred times, but I'd never have thought of
it as having anything to do with me--don't you know it?--if it hadn't
been for you."
He looked at her briefly; and she saw that his look was as bewildered as
a battle-ground.
"Oh!... Do you mean that you _are_ doing it because of--to--to avoid
the--that is, on account of the articles?"
"Oh, _not_ the articles!--_no_! That's just what I don't mean. I've
never thought of the articles! I don't think of you that way at all...."
She stopped precipitately, somehow divining that she was mysteriously
wounding him. And then suddenly she understood that that _was_ the way
he thought of himself, exactly; that he, who unconsciously moved
mountains by his gentleness, somehow saw himself only in the light of
his "terrible" (but still unpublished) articles. It was as if he
reckoned himself as either an article-writer, or nothing....
"Though it's true," said Cally, gently, with hardly any pause at all,
"that through most of the time I've known you I've thought of you ... as
a hard man ... terribly uncompromising."
His, it was clear, was not a tongue that spoke easily about himself. He
finished putting a flower-box into the window of the new Works,
before he said:
"I hope we needn't trouble now about anything at all that's past."
"That's what I hope, too ... more than you could. And besides--I've
always liked you best when you were gentle. And ... it's because of what
you've taught me--at those times--that I'm doing this to-day."
Again he turned his singularly lucid gaze full upon her; and now his
look was absolutely startled. Color was coming into his face. His short,
crisp hair, which had been parted so neatly an hour ago, stood rumpled
all over his head, not mitigating the general queerness of his
appearance. And yet his mouth wore a smile, humorous and disparaging.
"May I ask what you consider that I've taught you?"
"Everything I know," said Cally, lacing a pencil between her fingers.
"Why!... When we've never even had a real talk about it before!... I
told you once that you were more generous than--"
"No, I'm never generous enough. That's my trouble, among others.... But
if you think that it's a nice and happy thing for us to be putting up
this building, I want you please always to remember ... that you've done
it all yourself."
There was a tense silence, out of which his voice spoke, no longer with
any trace of humor.
"Don't be polite.... I couldn't quite stand it. Do you mean that?"
"It's all a failure if you won't believe that I do."
"Then I do believe it."
This time the silence ran somewhat longer, and again it was V.V.'s
voice, greatly stirred, that broke it.
"I don't understand, but I do believe it.... And it makes me pretty
proud. By George, pretty proud!... Why--I've talked a lot--but it's the
first thing I've ever accomplished! _The first thing_...."
His voice showed that his mind had swept away from her, over spaces; and
Cally raised her eyes and looked at him. He sat gazing wide-eyed into
the dull-green glow of her lamp, on his face a curious and moving look;
a look humbled yet exalted, gloriously wondering, and to her the
wistfullest thing she had ever seen in her life. He, who had given away
his patrimony, who was giving away his life every day with a will,
thought that this was the first thing....
All that was sweetest in the girl, all that was maternal and
understanding, rose fiercely within her, stormed her with a desire to
mother this man, to protect him from his own royal yet somehow
infinitely sad self-denials. For this moment she felt far stronger than
he. His hand, with the pencil in it, lay on the table close by her, and
Cally closed her slim fingers over it with a firm clasp.
"Ah, don't say that, Mr. V.V.--don't look that way. It hurts me, in my
heart.... Can't I make you believe that you've accomplished more than
anybody else in the world?..."
He did not move at the shock of her touch, at the sound of his little
name upon these unaccustomed lips. She was aware only of a subtle
contraction, a sort of tightening going on somewhere within him. So
Cally finished her small speech with her hand over his. But at just that
point, a stir seemed to shake through the man; he was seen to be turning
his head; and in the same breath, her moment of high strength broke
abruptly. The veins fluttered queerly in the forward hand; she felt a
quick flush rising somewhere within, spreading and tingling upward into
her face. So Cally rose hurriedly, her hand withdrawn, and moved away.
But she did her best, for her pride's sake, to envelop her movement
with a matter-of-fact air; and when she had got about four steps away
from him, she remarked, quite distinctly:
"Don't get up.... I ... want to get something."
And she did, in fact, go on to mamma's desk and attentively select three
more sheets of note-paper, which would no doubt come in handy for
something or other some day.
And out of the stillness behind her came Mr. V.V.'s voice, just a little
husky now:
"No one ever did anything so sweet to me before."
But that only made things worse, turning a white light, as it were, on
thoughts she had had before now of the loneliness of his life. So she,
finding herself not strong enough to be a comforter after all, said in a
resolute kind of way:
"I never like to hear my friends depreciated. So please don't do it any
more.... What was the name of that book about factories--the one you
said that Mr. Pond had?"