"I've ordered the typewriter," said Dorothy, brightly, "and some nice new
note-paper, and a seal. I've just been reading about making virtue out of
necessity, so I've ordered 'At the Sign of the Jack-o'-Lantern' put on our
stationery, in gold, and a yellow pumpkin on the envelope flap, just above
the seal. And I want you to make a funny sign-board to flap from a pole,
the way they did in 'Rudder Grange.' If you could make a wooden
Jack-o'-Lantern, we could have a candle inside it at night, and then the
sign would be just like the house. We can get the paint and things down in
the village. Won't it be cute? We're farmers, now, so we'll have to
pretend we like it."
Harlan repressed an exclamation, which could not have been wholly inspired
by pleasure.
"What's the matter?" asked Dorothy, easily. "Don't you like the design for
the note-paper? If you don't, you won't have to use it. Nobody's going to
make you write letters on paper you don't like, so cheer up."
"It isn't the paper," answered Harlan, miserably; "it's the typewriter."
Up to the present moment, sustained by a false, but none the less
determined pride, he had refrained from taking his wife into his
confidence regarding his finances. With characteristic masculine
short-sightedness, he had failed to perceive that every moment of delay
made matters worse.
"Might I inquire," asked Mrs. Carr, coolly, "what is wrong with the
typewriter?"
"Nothing at all," sighed Harlan, "except that we can't afford it." The
whole bitter truth was out, now, and he turned away wretchedly, ashamed to
meet her eyes.
It seemed ages before she spoke. Then she said, in smooth, icy tones:
"What was your object in offering to get it for me?"
"I spoke impulsively," explained Harlan, forgetting that he had never
suggested buying a typewriter. "I didn't stop to think. I'm sorry," he
concluded, lamely.
"I suppose you spoke impulsively," snapped Dorothy, "when you asked me to
marry you. You're sorry for that, too, aren't you?"
"Dorothy!"
"You're not the only one who's sorry," she rejoined, her cheeks flushed
and her eyes blazing. "I had no idea what an expense I was going to be!"
"Dorothy!" cried Harlan, angrily; "you didn't think I was a millionaire,
did you? Were you under the impression that I was an active branch of the
United States Mint?"
"No," she answered, huskily; "I merely thought I was marrying a gentleman
instead of a loafer, and I beg your pardon for the mistake!" She slammed
the door on the last word, and he heard her light feet pattering swiftly
down the hall, little guessing that she was trying to gain the shelter of
her own room before giving way to a tempest of sobs.
Happy are they who can drown all pain, sorrow, and disappointment in a
copious flood of tears. In an hour, at the most, Dorothy would be her
sunny self again, penitent, and wholly ashamed of her undignified
outburst. By to-morrow she would have forgotten it, but Harlan, made of
sterner clay, would remember it for days.
"Loafer!" The cruel word seemed written accusingly on every wall of the
room. In a sudden flash of insight he perceived the truth of it--and it
hurt.
"Two months," bethought; "two months of besotted idleness. And I used to
chase news from the Battery to the Bronx every day from eight to six!
Murders, smallpox, East Side scraps, and Tammany Hall. Why in the
hereafter can't they have a fire at the sanitarium, or something that I
can wire in?"
"The Temple of Healing," as Dorothy had christened it in a happier moment,
stood on a distant hill, all but hidden now by trees and shrubbery. A
column of smoke curled lazily upward against the blue, but there was no
immediate prospect of a fire of the "news" variety.
Harlan stood at the window for a long time, deeply troubled. The call of
the city dinned relentlessly into his ears. Oh, for an hour in the midst
of it, with the rumble and roar and clatter of ceaseless traffic, the
hurrying, heedless throng rushing in every direction, the glare of the sun
on the many-windowed cliffs, the fever of the struggle in his veins!
And yet--was two months so long, when a fellow was just married, and
hadn't had more than a day at a time off for six years? Since the "cub
reporter" was first "licked into shape" in the office of _The Thunderer_,
there had been plenty of work for him, year in and year out.
"I wonder," he mused, "if the old man would take me back on my job?
"I can see 'em in the office now," went on Harlan, mentally, "when I go
back and tell 'em I want my place again. The old man will look up and say:
'The hell you do! Thought you'd accepted a position on the literary
circuit as manager of the nine muses! Better run along and look after 'em
before they join the union.'
"And the exchange man will yell at me not to slam the door as I go out,
and I'll be pointed out to the newest kid as a horrible example of
misdirected ambition. Brinkman will say: 'Sonny, there's a bloke that got
too good for his job and now he's come back, willing to edit The Mother's
Corner.'
"It'd be about the same in the other offices, too," he thought. "'Sorry,
nothing to-day, but there might be next month. Drop in again sometime
after six weeks or so and meanwhile I'll let you know if anything turns
up. Yes, I can remember your address. Don't slam the door as you go out.
Most people seem to have been born in a barn.'
"Besides," he continued to himself, fiercely, "what is there in it?
They'll take your youth, all your strength and energy, and give you a
measly living in exchange. They'll fill you with excitement till you're
never good for anything else, any more than a cavalry horse is fitted to
pull a vegetable wagon. Then, when you're old, they've got no use for
you!"
Before his mental vision, in pitiful array, came that unhappy procession
of hacks that files, day in and day out, along Newspaper Row, drawn by
every instinct to the arena that holds nothing for them but a meagre,
uncertain pittance, dwindling slowly to charity.
"That's where I'd be at the last of it," muttered Harlan, savagely, "with
even the cubs offering me the price of a drink to get out. And
Dorothy--good God! Where would Dorothy be?"
He clenched his fists and marched up and down the room in utter despair.
"Why," he breathed, "why wasn't I taught to do something honest, instead
of being cursed with this itch to write? A carpenter, a bricklayer, a
stone-mason,--any one of 'em has a better chance than I!"
And yet, even then, Harlan saw clearly that save where some vast cathedral
reared its unnumbered spires, the mason and the bricklayer were without
significance; that even the builders were remembered only because of the
great uses to which their buildings were put. "That, too, through print,"
he murmured. "It all comes down to the printed page at last."
On a table, near by, was a sheaf of rough copy paper, and six or eight
carefully sharpened pencils--the dull, meaningless stone waiting for the
flint that should strike it into flame. Day after day the table had stood
by the window, without result, save in Harlan's uneasy conscience.
"I'm only a tramp," he said, aloud, "and I've known it, all along."
He sat down by the table and took up a pencil, but no words came.
Remorsefully, he wrote to an acquaintance--a man who had a book published
every year and filled in the intervening time with magazine work and
newspaper specials. He sealed the letter and addressed it idly, then
tossed it aside purposelessly.
"Loafer!" The memory of it stung him like a lash, and, completely
overwhelmed with shame, he hid his face in his hands.
Suddenly, a pair of soft arms stole around his neck, a childish, tear-wet
cheek was pressed close to his, and a sweet voice whispered, tenderly:
"Dear, I'm sorry! I'm so sorry I can't live another minute unless you tell
me you forgive me!"
* * * * *
"Am I really a loafer?" asked Harlan, half an hour later.
"Indeed you're not," answered Dorothy, her trustful eyes looking straight
into his; "you're absolutely the most adorable boy in the whole world, and
it's me that knows it!"
"As long as you know it," returned Harlan, seriously, "I don't care a hang
what other people think."
"Now, tell me," continued Dorothy, "how near are we to being broke?"
Obediently, Harlan turned his pockets inside out and piled his worldly
wealth on the table.
"Three hundred and seventy-four dollars and sixteen cents," she said, when
she had finished counting. "Why, we're almost rich, and a little while ago
you tried to make me think we were poor!"
"It's all I have, Dorothy--every blooming cent, except one dollar in the
savings bank. Sort of a nest egg I had left," he explained.
"Wait a minute," she said, reaching down into her collar and drawing up a
loop of worn ribbon. "Straight front corset," she observed, flushing,
"makes a nice pocket for almost everything." She drew up a chamois-skin
bag, of an unprepossessing mouse colour, and emptied out a roll of bills.
"Two hundred and twelve dollars," she said, proudly, "and eighty-three
cents and four postage stamps in my purse.
"I saved it," she continued, hastily, "for an emergency, and I wanted some
silk stockings and a French embroidered corset and some handmade lingerie
worse than you can ever know. Wasn't I a brave, heroic, noble woman?"
"Indeed you were," he cried, "but, Dorothy, you know I can't touch your
money!"
"Why not?" she demanded.
"Because--because--because it isn't right. Do you think I'm cad enough to
live on a woman's earnings?"
"Harlan," said Dorothy, kindly, "don't be a fool. You'll take my whole
heart and soul and life--all that I have been and all that I'm going to
be--and be glad to get it, and now you're balking at ten cents that I
happened to have in my stocking when I took the fatal step."
"Dear heart, don't. It's different--tremendously different. Can't you see
that it is?"
"Do you mean that I'm not worth as much as two hundred and twelve dollars
and eighty-three cents and four postage stamps?"
"Darling, you're worth more than all the rest of the world put together.
Don't talk to me like that. But I can't touch your money, truly, dear, I
can't; so don't ask me."
"Idiot," cried Dorothy, with tears raining down her face, "don't you know
I'd go with you if you had to grind an organ in the street, and collect
the money for you in a tin cup till we got enough for a monkey? What kind
of a dinky little silver-plated wedding present do you think I am, anyway?
You----"
The rest of it was sobbed out, incoherently enough, on his hitherto
immaculate shirt-front. "You don't mind," she whispered, "if I cry down
your neck, do you?"
"If you're going to cry," he answered, his voice trembling, "this is the
one place for you to do it, but I don't want you to cry."
"I won't, then," she said, wiping her eyes on a wet and crumpled
handkerchief. In a time astonishingly brief to one hitherto unfamiliar
with the lachrymal function, her sobs had ceased.
"You've made me cry nearly a quart since morning," she went on, with
assumed severity, "and I hope you'll behave so well from now on that I'll
never have to do it again. Look here."
She led him to the window, where a pair of robins were building a nest in
the boughs of a maple close by. "Do you see those birds?" she demanded,
pointing at them with a dimpled, rosy forefinger.
"Yes, what of it?"
"Well, they're married, aren't they?"
"I hope they are," laughed Harlan, "or at least engaged."
"Who's bringing the straw and feathers for the nest?" she asked.
"Both, apparently," he replied, unwillingly.
"Why isn't she rocking herself on a bough, and keeping her nails nice, and
fixing her feathers in the latest style, or perhaps going off to some fool
bird club while he builds the nest by himself?"
"Don't know."
"Nor anybody else," she continued, with much satisfaction. "Now, if she
happened to have two hundred and twelve feathers, of the proper size and
shape to go into that nest, do you suppose he'd refuse to touch them, and
make her cry because she brought them to him?"
"Probably he wouldn't," admitted Harlan.
There was a long silence, then Dorothy edged up closer to him. "Do you
suppose," she queried, "that Mr. Robin thinks more of his wife than you do
of yours?"
"Indeed he doesn't!"
"And still, he's letting her help him."
"But----"
"Now, listen, Harlan. We've got a house, with more than enough furniture
to make it comfortable, though it's not the kind of furniture either of us
particularly like. Instead of buying a typewriter, we'll rent one for
three or four dollars a month until we have enough money to buy one. And
I'm going to have a cow and some chickens and a garden, and I'm going to
sell milk and butter and cream and fresh eggs and vegetables and chickens
and fruit to the sanitarium, and----"
"The sanitarium people must have plenty of those things."
"But not the kind I'm going to raise, nor put up as I'm going to put it
up, and we'll be raising most of our own living besides. You can write
when you feel like it, and be helping me when you don't feel like it, and
before we know it, we'll be rich. Oh, Harlan, I feel like Eve all alone in
the Garden with Adam!"
The prospect fired his imagination, for, in common with most men, a
chicken-ranch had appealed strongly to Harlan ever since he could
remember.
"Well," he began, slowly, in the tone which was always a signal of
surrender.
"Won't it be lovely," she cried ecstatically, "to have our own bossy cow
mooing in the barn, and our own chickens for Sunday dinner, and our own
milk, and butter, and cream? And I'll drive the vegetable waggon and you
can take the things in----"
"I guess not," interrupted Harlan, firmly. "If you're going to do that
sort of thing, you'll have people to do the work when I can't help you.
The idea of my wife driving a vegetable cart!"
"All right," answered Dorothy, submissively, wise enough to let small
points settle themselves and have her own way in things that really
mattered. "I've not forgotten that I promised to obey you."
A gratified smile spread over Harlan's smooth, boyish face, and,
half-fearfully, she reached into her sleeve for a handkerchief which she
had hitherto carefully concealed.
"That's not all," she smiled. "Look!"
"Twenty-three dollars," he said. "Why, where did you get that?"
"It was in my dresser. There was a false bottom in one of the small
drawers, and I took it out and found this."
"What in--" began Harlan.
"It's a present to us from Uncle Ebeneezer," she cried, her eyes sparkling
and her face aglow. "It's for a coop and chickens," she continued,
executing an intricate dance step. "Oh, Harlan, aren't you awfully glad we
came?"
Seeing her pleasure he could not help being glad, but afterward, when he
was alone, he began to wonder whether they had not inadvertently moved
into a bank.
"Might be worse places," he reflected, "for the poor and deserving to move
into. Diamonds and money--what next?"
V