RAFAEL PROPOSES
MADELINE worked on her play with the furious industry of the “digs” she
had always ridiculed. The floor of her room was littered with dusty
sheets of manuscript, which she mysteriously informed her landlady
must not be touched, or “the world and all would be lost.” She took
long, solitary walks, sat for hours at her desk or the Tally-ho’s,
alternately staring hopelessly into space, or frantically covering
reams of papers with her pretty illegible writing. Occasionally she
emerged from her closely-guarded solitude and gave a tea-drinking for
the B. C. A.’s, at which she adroitly turned the conversation to the
strangest topics; or she bundled some long-suffering friend off with
her on an endless shopping tour or trolley ride, during which she
listened in complete absorption to chance bits of dialogue, coming home
with a delicious new monologue for which she insisted on an immediate
audience, “to test the note of reality,” she explained vaguely.
One day just before Christmas she was caught by Mary Brooks in a mellow
mood and dragged off to dinner, to give Dr. Hinsdale a practical
demonstration of some of the idiosyncrasies of genius. And after Dr.
Hinsdale had gone to his study, over the second round of coffee by the
open fire, she explained her newest literary device to the bewildered
Mary.
“When I do stunty pageants for my friends to act and footless little
playlets that don’t matter,” she began, “I just dash them off without
thinking and they turn out beautifully. But somehow the idea of writing
seriously for publication stiffens me all up inside and muddles my
ideas. Heroine always turns into a freak or a prig on my hands. Hero
gets hysterical when I try to make him earnest. But now when things
begin to go wrong, I calmly tear up what I’ve written, and go out and
make my little pals talk off the next scene to me, or at least recall
to my mind how real conversation sounds. The awfully romantic, lover-y
parts I either have to overhear or extract from people who don’t know
me. The girl at Cannon’s who is the model for my heartless coquette
little guesses her proud mission in life.”
“I should call that just cold-blooded cribbing,” declared Mary
indignantly.
“Cold-blooded cribbing from life is the very top notch of art,”
Madeline assured her. “My play is a slice from life. I suppose it’s
because I’m young and inexperienced that I have to keep stopping to
refer to life so often as I go along.”
“Am I in it anywhere?” demanded Mary eagerly.
“You and the girl at Cannon’s and Fluffy Dutton and Betty are the
principal ingredients in the heroine,” explained Madeline. “But I defy
you to have discovered it for yourself, and I swear you to eternal
secrecy, because people would misunderstand. Life with a big ‘L’ is the
kind I’m cribbing; I should scorn, of course, to put my friends and
their petty affairs into a play.”
Mary drew her smooth brows into a puzzled frown. “I suppose I shall
understand all that when I see the play,” she said with a sigh.
“George Garrison Hinsdale would better be saving up for a trip to New
York before long, including a box party to the first night of your
slice from life.”
“You’ll have to wait till the second night if you want a box,” Madeline
told her calmly. “All the boxes are spoken for on the first night, and
there will be several parties in the seats, besides.”
This calm assumption of success made Mary gasp and engage her husband,
later in the evening, in an intricate discussion of the distinction
between the serene self-assurance of genius and the ordinary man’s
unjustified conceit.
* * * * *
Eleanor Watson wanted to join Jim in New York. He was sure of being
there for several months, he wrote her, and equally sure of being sent
off to “some miserable hole” in the early spring.
“Beating the firm’s time-limit on Morton Hall,” he wrote, “is about the
unluckiest thing I ever did. They’ve written me down for a hustler, and
slated me for all the forlorn hopes. Remind Betty that she owes me a
good long letter for that.”
The thing that kept Eleanor at Harding was of course the devotion of
the Terrible Ten to her and to education under her auspices. In vain
she had introduced other story-tellers; the evenings that she stayed
away to give Mr. Thayer’s most promising candidates a trial were
tumultuous revolts, or, after she had patiently explained to the class
how unhappy their disorderly conduct made her, spiritless sessions,
endured because the smouldering fire in Rafael’s eyes commanded outward
submission from the Ten.
“But if you really leave I’m afraid they’ll all backslide again,” said
Mr. Thayer, “and you see they’re on probation now to the very end of
their course. Did Rafael tell you that he’d had another raise? That
boy does the work of two men, in spite of his bad hand--runs the most
difficult machine in the factory, and makes repairs that we used to
have to get a man up from Boston to attend to.”
“How old is he?” asked Eleanor idly.
“Eighteen, he thinks. They’re all older than they look or act.”
Eleanor sighed. “They won’t be able to meet the reading requirements
of the factory law for six weeks yet, and they ought to be induced to
keep on all winter--certainly the ones who are bright enough at their
work to have any future before them. But it does seem absurd for me to
stay on here just because ten young Italians listen to my stories and
eat my peanuts.”
“And appreciate the tact and understanding that you bestow so
generously, mixed with the peanuts and the stories,” added Mr. Thayer
soberly.
That night Eleanor went to Mr. Thayer’s office after the class to have
one more consultation with him about its future. When she came back for
her coat and hat a stealthy figure slipped past her in the hall.
“Did you forget something, Rafael?” she asked, recognizing her favorite
pupil.
Rafael muttered something unintelligible and hurried off, but his
return was explained when Eleanor found a neatly folded note tucked in
the sleeve of her coat.
“Der Mis”--it began, “I luv yu. i haf nuther raz. I keep you good lik
lada. Wil yu haf me to mary, if not I die
“Yur RAFAEL.
“I tak 1 hor a day for wik to make thiz note rite.”
* * * * *
Eleanor read the pathetic little missive through with growing dismay.
He had misunderstood her kindness--the pictures she had given him to
brighten the dark little hovel where he and his family lived, the
Thanksgiving dinner she had sent them, the special smile she always had
ready when he appeared at the club. She started to show her note to Mr.
Thayer, then changed her mind.
After all, Rafael was in earnest, and she would treat his proposal like
any other. It should be a secret between them. She would think out for
herself some kindly way of explaining that she could not “haf” him “to
mary,” and that he must not die of a broken heart.
The next evening when the class met she smiled at him just as usual,
and catching his eye early in the evening slipped a note, folded as his
had been, under his cap.
In it she had printed, in short easy words that Rafael could read, how
sorry she was to disappoint him, how she liked him for a friend, how
he must forget what he had written and work hard to make the Italian
girl whom he would love some day proud and happy and comfortable.
“I can’t treat it as absurd,” she had decided, “and I can’t be cross to
him. He means it all, and he doesn’t dream how comical it is. I only
hope he won’t be too excited to read what I’ve written.”
Evidently he was not, for just as Eleanor, having said good-night
to the Harding girls who had walked up the hill with her from their
classes, was turning in at her own door, Rafael glided out from the
shadow of the house and stood in her path.
“Der is no hope?” he demanded tragically, standing bareheaded before
her.
“Oh, Rafael,” Eleanor remonstrated, “I always speak the truth to you,
don’t I? I wrote you a note because you wrote me one; and now you
ask me if I mean it. Why, dear boy, I’m almost old enough to be your
mother.”
“I love you,” Rafael told her stoutly.
“Then please me by acting sensible. You’re much too young to think
about marrying and I----”
“You luf anodder,” broke in Rafael accusingly.
Eleanor flushed pink under cover of the darkness. Hardly to herself
even did she admit the part that Richard Blake played in her thoughts.
Indeed so skilfully had she concealed it that Dick Blake, working day
and night to push “The Quiver” to the top of the magazine world, was
wont to smile scornfully to himself when he thought how little he and
his valiant efforts meant to the girl who, in all his hopes and plans
and dreams, was to share his future.
But in a swift moment’s consideration Eleanor decided that the best
way to cure this sentimental little Italian boy of his infatuation was
to let him know that he had indeed a successful rival. Telling Rafael
was different from admitting it to anyone else--because Rafael was
foolishly in love too.
She stretched out her hand impulsively and patted his shoulder. “Yes,
Rafael,” she whispered softly, “I’m in love with somebody else. But he
doesn’t know it yet, and I’m not sure that he cares for me. Nobody
knows it but you, and I’m telling you because I----”
“Good-bye, lovely lada, good-bye.” Rafael caught the hand that lay on
his shoulder, kissed it in his passionate, foreign fashion, and glided
away into the darkness.
Eleanor stood looking after him with the curious sensation of being
the heroine of a pretty old-time romance that belonged in a fairy
world of magic and moonlight, and ought to be set to the tinkling
music of guitars. And just as she had put out her light and gone
to bed, still smiling at the whimsicality of the whole affair, and
particularly of her having confided to Rafael her carefully-secreted
feeling for Dick--who would do beautifully for the brave young prince
of the fairy-tale the music came. The Terrible Ten were grouped under
the window singing soft, crooning Italian songs to their Lovely Lada.
Giuseppi had traveled with his father one summer in a troupe of street
musicians; it was his fingers that picked a bit uncertainly at the
guitar’s strings, and little Nicolo’s wonderful voice, rising sweet and
true above the others, that led the chorus. But Rafael stood in the
centre of the half circle, his angelic face touched with light from
a down-stairs window, and the sob and the thrill in the music, that
brought a lump to Eleanor’s throat and a mist over her eyes, was all in
Rafael’s voice, singing out his love and longing to the cruel lady who
would not “haf” him “to mary.”
Eleanor had a bunch of red roses on her table that the adoring Eugenia
Ford had sent her, and she tossed them down to the singers, who laughed
and cheered in most unromantic boy fashion, and finally departed,
leaving Eleanor to wonder how Rafael had explained the serenade to his
followers, and how he would treat her at the next club meeting. She
little guessed what would happen before then.
For the next morning before she was dressed an apologetic parlor-maid
escorted a weeping Italian girl to Eleanor’s door. It was Pietro’s
flashing-eyed sister, her beauty tear-stained and her proud confidence
quite vanished.
“Rafael’s hurt,” she sobbed. “Black Hand maybe, we think. He don’t know
nothing, but he moan your name with his eyes shut. Would you come?”
Of course she would come. She hurried the maid off after the best
doctor in Harding, and she and the beautiful Maria went at once to
Rafael, who lay tossing in delirium on his blood-stained bed, a
terrible gash across his throat, which had been roughly bandaged by an
old Italian herb doctor. Nobody, it seemed, guessed what had really
happened, though when some one found a tiny dagger under the bed Pietro
and Nicolo interchanged curious glances. They had recognized it as the
one with which Rafael had struck terror to the hearts of the Ten and
compelled their rigid obedience.
Eleanor installed a trained nurse, made the doctor promise to give the
case his best attention, and went off to find her unfailing stand-by in
troublous times, Betty Wales. For Rafael was beyond knowing anybody,
perhaps for all time, and she felt like a criminal when his mother
kissed her sleeve in gratitude for all she had done and Maria clung to
her, sobbing out her love for Rafael who never had “eyes for any girl”
and declaring that if he died she would enter a convent. She couldn’t
bring herself to tell them the dreadful truth.
But, “If he dies I shall be a murderer,” she told Betty bitterly.
“I’ve always been so vain and frivolous. Now when I want to take life
seriously and do things for other people, as you do, I only make a mess
of it, and bring dreadful trouble where I wanted most to help. I shall
never, never try to do anything more. I wish I were----”
“No, you don’t,” Betty assured her hastily. “Just because you did the
best you could for those boys and this silly one had his head full of
sentimental nonsense doesn’t make you responsible. It’s a dreadful
thing, of course, but I’m sure he’ll get well. Didn’t the doctor think
so?”
The doctor hadn’t said.
“Then I’ll leave word for him to telephone you here of any change
either way,” Betty decreed. “Mrs. Post is going to make German
Christmas cakes this morning for the girls. She wanted me to help
her, but I’ve got to go to the Tally-ho before chapel and then to the
office, so you simply must help instead. I suppose you haven’t had any
breakfast, have you now?”
Eleanor didn’t want any.
“Of course you do. I’ll send some up by a maid, and Mrs. Post will tell
you when she’s ready to begin on the cakes. Remember, the telephone
messages will come here, so you must stay till I get back.”
Six times that morning Betty left an accommodating friend in charge
of her office, and in the short intervals between clients rushed over
to inquire for the cakes, Eleanor, and Rafael. At noon she snatched a
moment before luncheon to tell Mr. Thayer all about it--Eleanor had
declared she never could do that--so that he could explain what was
necessary to the authorities and avoid a futile search for non-existent
Black Hand plots and family feuds. Mr. Thayer had seen Rafael and the
doctor, and the doctor had been very encouraging. Betty flew back to
assure Eleanor that he had not been deceiving her--that he had said
the very same things to Mr. Thayer--and to beg her assistance that
afternoon at the Tally-ho workshop. For Madeline had come out of her
dramatic eclipse long enough to design some Christmas dinner-cards,
and there was a small fortune in them if only they could be put on sale
in time. Secretly Eleanor thought that Betty had grown just a little
bit selfish and very commercial since they had left college; but she
could not well refuse, after the dainty breakfast on a tray and all the
calls and the arranging with Mr. Thayer, to help with the Christmas
dinner-cards.
Next day Rafael was worse. The doctor looked serious and suggested a
night-nurse and a consultation. At noon Eleanor declared that the air
of the little workshop stifled her, and Betty gave up office-hours--an
unheard-of proceeding--to go for a long tramp, during which she planned
all sorts of delightful things that Eleanor should do for Rafael when
he got well.
The next day the boy was better, the day after that worse. But at the
end of a nerve-racking week of alternating hopes and fears the doctor
pronounced him out of danger. That very afternoon Jim telegraphed
that he was sick with a cold and needed Eleanor. Jim had always
hated coddling, Eleanor commented wonderingly, and failed to notice
Betty’s dimple flashing out in a tiny smile that was at once sternly
suppressed. For Jim had written her that he only hoped he could
preserve “the faded shadow of a suspicion of a snuffle” until Eleanor’s
arrival. “After that,” he concluded, “I count on my new bull pup,
suitors galore, and the diversions of little old New York to blow away
any remaining relics of melancholy. When the poor little chap is well
enough dad and I will see him through the best trade-school we can find
and give him every chance that’s coming to him. Adoring some girls is a
thing no fellow can or ought to help.”