A COPYIST
The old study of David Warne was a square, austerely furnished room on
the second floor of the manse, opposite the sleeping-room now occupied
by Mr. Jefferson. It contained several plain bookcases, filled mostly
with worn old volumes in dingy yellow calf or faded cloth. An ancient
table served for a desk, with a splint-bottomed chair before it. On the
walls hung several portrait engravings, that of Abraham Lincoln
occupying the post of honour among them. The floor was covered with a
rag carpet of pleasantly dimmed colours, and an old Franklin stove, with
widely opening doors and a hearth with a brass rail, completed the
furnishing of the room.
This was the place now swept and dusted and warmed for the joint labours
of the writer of books and his new assistant. Mr. Jefferson had moved
the materials of his craft to the new working quarters: he had brought
up wood for the fire and had made that fire himself, according to the
custom he had inaugurated soon after his arrival. The day and hour for
the beginning of that which James Stuart insisted on designating as a
partnership had arrived. At ten o'clock that April morning, when
Georgiana's housework should have reached a stage when she could safely
leave it for a more or less extended period, the study door was to close
upon the two and shut them away undisturbed for the first details of
their affair in common.
Georgiana had been up since before daybreak, planning and executing a
system which should make all this possible. Now, at a quarter before
ten, with all well in hand, she flew to her room for certain personal
touches which should transform her from housewife to secretary. Two
minutes before the clock struck she surveyed herself hurriedly in her
small mirror.
"You really look very trim and demure," she remarked to her image. "Your
colour is a bit high, but that's exercise, not excitement. Still, you
are a little excited, you know, my dear, and you must be very careful
not to show it. It's a calm, cool, business person the gentleman wants,
George, not a blushing schoolgirl. It would spoil it at once if you
should look conscious or coquettish. So now--remember. And forget--for
the love of your new occupation--forget that Miles Channing is coming
again to-night--again, after one short week! What does it matter if he
is? Run along and be good!"
Half a minute left in which to run downstairs, kiss Father Davy on his
white forehead, and receive his warm "Bless you, dear, and bless the new
work. May you be very happy in it!" and to walk quietly upstairs again
and knock at the door of the study. It opened under Mr. Jefferson's
hand, and to the cheerful sound of snapping wood on the open hearth of
the old Franklin stove he bade her enter.
His smile was very pleasant, his steady eyes seemed to take note of
everything about her in one quick glance, as he said with a wave of his
hand: "Welcome to my workshop! You see I've swept up all the chips, but
we'll soon make more."
"You manage to keep your workshop remarkably free from chips," she
commented. "You must have a great system of order."
"Pretty fair. I should be hopelessly lost if I let this mass of material
become disordered. Will you take this chair? Must we begin at once or
may we talk a little first?"
"I think we had better begin. You know there are just two free hours
before I must be back downstairs, if you are to eat, this noon."
He laughed and she noted, as she had noted many times before, how young
he looked at such moments, grave as his face could be when in repose.
"Very well," he agreed. "I have no doubt you will work at this task as
you do at the loom, with all your might, and I shall have to lengthen
my stride to keep up with you. But that promises well. One is likely to
fall into habits of soldiering when one works alone. You have no idea
how carefully I have to keep certain favourite books out of sight when I
want to accomplish big stretches of work. And in this room--hard
luck!--I see so many old treasures that I'm going to have a bit of
trouble in resisting temptation."
His eyes led hers to the old bookcases. She nodded. "It's a shabby old
collection, but it's very dear to father's heart."
"It well may be. Gibbon, Hume, Froude, Parton--Lamb, Johnson,
Carlyle--Hugo, Thackeray, Reade, and Trollope--Keats, Shelley, and the
rest. What matters the binding? Some time I must read you a passage in
good old Christopher North that appeals to me tremendously. No, not now,
Miss Warne; I see I must fall upon my task without delay or you will be
slipping away on the plea of bad faith on my part. Well----"
He turned his chair toward the table and took up a notebook. His face
settled instantly into an expression of serious interest.
"I am going to ask you first," said he, "to copy in order upon a fresh
sheet each reference which you find marked with a red cross, so that the
references may be all together. Be very exact, please, and very
legible. German and French words are easily misread by the typist who
will put this work finally into copy for the printer."
Georgiana, glancing at the first marked reference, found cause to credit
this statement, for it read:
Cagnetto: Zur Frage der Anat. Beziehung zwischen Akromegalie u.
Hypophysistumor, Virchow's Archiv., 1904, clxxvi., 115. Neuer
Beitrag. f. Studium der Akromegalie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung
der Frage nach dem zusammenhang der Akromegalie mit
Hypophysenganggeschwulste, Virchow's Archiv., 1907, lxxxvi., 197.
"It would be best to print the words as clearly as I can, wouldn't it?"
she suggested, suppressing her desire to laugh.
"That depends on your handwriting. Try a line and let me see, please."
When she had shown him a specimen of the peculiarly readable script
which she had cultivated in college, he signified his approval with a
hearty "Good! That's a splendid hand for work, the hand of a workman, in
fact. I congratulate myself. Go ahead with the jaw-breakers, only
verifying each reference before you leave it."
Thus the new task began, and thus it continued day after day--not always
quite the same, for Georgiana soon recognized that her employer was
diversifying her labours as much as he consistently could by changing
the nature of the copying. Now and then he refreshed her endurance and
rested her tired hand by asking her to read aloud to him several just
finished pages of his own writing, walking the floor meanwhile or
sitting tipped back in his chair with closed eyes while he listened with
ears alert for error of statement or infelicity of phrase, and she
wondered at the character of the words she read.
Of course she discovered at once what was the general subject of the
book. No essay was this, no work of fiction, no "history of art," as
Stuart had scornfully suggested. It could be only the sternest of
research and experience which dictated such sentences as these:
The especial dangers to be contended with are that the ethmoid
cells may be mistaken for the sphenoids; that we may go too low and
enter the pons and medulla; that, laterally, we may enter the
cavernous sinus, and above, that we may injure the optic nerve.
It was all more or less of a puzzle to her, but it was one which her
taskmaster never explained further than the revelations of each day
explained it. She understood that he was a scientist, that he
undoubtedly had been an operator in some surgical field or was putting
into shape the work of another in that field, but what he now was
besides a writer of technical books she had no manner of idea.
"But I really enjoy it, Father Davy," she insisted, when she came down
to him one day with hotly flushed cheeks and shaking hand after a
particularly protracted siege of copying involved and incomprehensible
material. "It's monotonous in a way, but it's intensely interesting,
too. Mr. Jefferson is so absorbed in it, it's fun to watch him. To-day
he was as happy as a boy over a letter he had just received from a
Professor Somebody, a great authority in Vienna. It seemed it absolutely
confirmed some statement he had made in a monograph he wrote last year
which had been challenged by several scientists. The way he fell to
writing his next paragraph after he had read that letter made one
imagine he was writing it in his own heart's blood. He read it aloud to
me." She laughed appreciatively at the recollection.
"Could you make anything of it?" inquired Mr. Warne with interest.
"Not very much. It was about the pituitary body;--oh, I've come to have
a great awe of the pituitary body, it seems to be responsible for so
many things. He chuckled over it like a boy, and said to me, 'Forgive
these transports, Miss Warne, but this is food and drink to me. I wish I
could explain it to you so that you might rejoice over it with me. Some
day I will, when we are not so busy.' I hope he will. There's enough
that I do understand to make me interested."
"I see you are--and rejoice, my Georgiana. Do you remember what Max
Müller says, echoed by many another, '_Work is life to me; and when I am
no longer able to work, life will be a heavy burden?_'"
He smiled as he said it, but his daughter read the seldom-expressed
longing in the cheerful voice and laid her cheek for an instant against
his. "He's quite right. And you have your work, Father Davy, and you're
doing it all the time. I think you preach much more effectively now than
you did in the pulpit, even when you don't open your mouth. And when you
do open it angels couldn't compete with you!"
They laughed softly together, though Mr. Warne shook his head. "It's a
curious thing," he mused, "that the weaker the body gets the harder does
the mind have to strive to master it. But, thank God--'_so fight I, not
as one that beateth the air_.'"
"'Not as one that beateth the air,'" murmured the girl. "I should say
not, Father Davy. As one that delivereth hard blows on his own body, his
poor, tired body. Oh, if I had one tenth the self-control----"
At which she ran away, as was quite like her, when emotion suddenly got
the better of her. The darkest cloud on this girl's life was the frail
tenure of her father's existence. The rest could be endured.
The work in the upstairs study went steadily on, in spite of the fact
that James Stuart railed and that Miles Channing came at least once in
seven days, driving the sixty miles in a long, swiftly speeding car
which brought him to the door of the manse before the early May sunset,
and which took him back when the shadows lay black upon the silent road.
Two hours in the morning, three in the afternoon, Georgiana gave to the
rigid performance of the tasks Mr. Jefferson set her, while outside
below the windows at which she worked lay her garden, beloved of her
affection, beseeching her not to neglect it.
It was hard sometimes not to betray how she longed to be outside, as she
wrote on and on, copying the often difficult and uninteresting language
of the more technical part of her employer's construction. And one
afternoon, lifting her eyes to let them dwell on a great budding purple
lilac tree, with the warm breath of the breeze which had drifted across
the apple orchard fanning her cheek, and all the notes of rioting spring
in her ears, she did draw in spite of herself one deep sigh of longing
which she instantly suppressed--too late.
Her companion looked up quickly, noted the flush in the cheek and the
hint of a weary shadow under the dark eyes, and suddenly pushed aside
his paper. Then he drew it back, blotted it carefully, laid it with a
pile of others, and capped his pen. He wheeled about in his chair to
face his assistant.
"Put down your work, please," he commanded gently; "precisely where you
are. Don't finish that sentence."
Georgiana looked up, astonished. "Not finish the sentence?"
"No. Did you never stop in the middle of a sentence?"
"I'm afraid I have. But I didn't suppose you ever did."
"I don't. But I want you to. Please. That's right. You will know where
to start it again to-morrow."
"To-morrow?" In spite of herself her eyes had lighted as a child's
might.
"Even so. To-day we are going for a drive in all this beauty--if I can
find a horse and some kind of a vehicle, and you will go with me. It's
only three o'clock. We can have a long drive between now and the hour
when you invariably disappear to make magic for our appetites. How about
it?"
"I can keep on perfectly well, you know," she said, with pen still
poised above her paper.
"But I can't." He was smiling. "Now that the other plan has occurred to
me, I can't keep on."
"Did you see inside my mind?" queried Georgiana, putting away her
copying with rapid motions.
"Suddenly I did. I've been rather blind, a hard taskmaster. I've been
conscious of what was going on outside when I went for my walks, but the
work is absorbing to me and I have kept you too steadily at it. We both
need a rest," he added as she shook her head.