BONNIE MAY SEES TWO FACES AT A WINDOW
It was at luncheon, and Baron was down-stairs for the first time since
his accident.
“It’s just like having Johnny come back from the war,” observed Bonnie
May, as the family took their places at table. Baron, Sr., was not
there. He usually spent his midday hour at his club.
“From the war?--Johnny?” replied Baron. He stood by his chair an
instant, putting most of his weight on one foot.
“I mean, you can think of so many delicious things. We might believe
you were wounded, you know, coming home to see your wife and daughter.
As if the sentries had allowed you to come in for a little while. They
would be outside now, watching. Men with dirty faces and heavy boots.”
“Yes, if I had a wife and daughter,” suggested Baron.
“Oh, well--Flora and I. Anyway, you’ve got a mother, and that’s the
real thing when there’s any soldier business.”
“It’s a real thing, anyway,” observed Mrs. Baron.
“Yes, of course,” admitted the child. She sighed deeply. How was any
one to get anywhere, with so many literal-minded people about? She
remembered the man in the play who said, “If we are discovered, we are
lost,” and the other who replied, “No, if we are discovered, we are
found.”
It was Mrs. Baron who returned to prosaic affairs.
“I’m going out this afternoon,” she said briskly. “I’ve been tied up
here in the house three Thursdays. There are people I simply must call
on.”
Bonnie May did not know why her heart should have jumped at this
announcement. Still, there seemed to be no end to the possibilities
for enjoyment in a big house when there wasn’t anybody to be saying
continuously: “You must,” or “You mustn’t.”
She wandered up-stairs as soon as luncheon was over, and in Baron’s
room she was overcome by an irresistible impulse.
She heard the houseman moving about in the next room, and the thought
occurred to her that she had never seen the houseman’s room. She had
never even spoken to the houseman. There was something quite mysterious
about the fact that he always kept to himself.
Mrs. Shepard had assured her on one occasion that Thomason never had a
word to say to anybody--that he was a perverse and sullen creature.
Now it occurred to her that possibly Mrs. Shepard’s estimate might lack
fairness. Anyway, it would be interesting to find out for herself. It
would be a kind of adventure.
She tapped lightly on Thomason’s door.
After an interval of silence, during which one might have thought
that the room itself was amazed, there was the sound of heavy feet
approaching.
The door opened and Thomason stood on the threshold. Bonnie May had
never been near enough to him really to see him before. Now she
discovered that he had quaint creases about his mouth and eyes, and
that his eyes were like violets. It was as if you had dropped some
violets accidentally, and they had fallen in a strange place. There was
a childish expression in Thomason’s eyes, and it occurred to Bonnie May
that possibly he was afraid of people.
It seemed to her quite shocking that the little man should remain by
himself always, because he was afraid of mingling with people.
Thomason’s eyes were very bright as he looked at her. Then he winked
slowly, to facilitate thought. He was thinking: “She’s the one who does
whatever she pleases.” Despite his habits of seclusion, Thomason was by
no means oblivious to the life that went on in the mansion.
“May I come in?” asked Bonnie May. She did not worry about the absence
of a spontaneous welcome. “It’s an adventure,” she was thinking.
Thomason laboriously turned about, with a slight list to leeward, and
ambled to the middle of the room, where he sat down on a bench. He
took up a pair of steel-rimmed glasses from which one temple had been
broken and replaced by a piece of twine. He slipped the twine over his
head and adjusted the glasses on his nose. It seemed necessary for him
to sit quite still to keep this contrivance in place. When he reached
around to his bed for a coat, which he had evidently been mending, he
held his head and body as rigid as possible.
Bonnie May advanced into the room, her hands clasped before her, her
eyes quite freely surveying her surroundings.
“What a quaint setting!” she observed.
Thomason jerked his needle through a tough place and pulled it out to
arm’s length, holding his head with painful sedateness, on account of
the glasses. He seemed afraid to glance to left or right. He made no
reply at all.
“I’ve been learning to use a needle, too,” she confided, thinking that
he did not do it very skilfully.
Thomason held his head as far back as possible and closed one eye. He
was thus handicapping himself, it appeared, in order to get a better
view of the work he held on his knee.
“Would you like me to hold it, while you go across the room to look?”
she asked.
Thomason suddenly became quite rigid. It was as if his works had run
down. He was thinking about what Bonnie May had said.
Then, “Women!” he muttered, and the works seemed to have been wound up
again.
[Illustration: Thomason jerked his needle through a tough place and
pulled it out to arm’s length.]
This seemed a somewhat indefinite and meagre return for so much
cheerful effort, and Bonnie May decided not to try any more just then.
She went to the gable window and looked out. She was almost on a
level with the fourth story of the building next door, which had been
remodelled for use as a boarding-house. And looking up into the window
nearest her, she suddenly became animated in the most extraordinary
manner.
A man was looking down at her, and in his eyes there was a puzzled
expression to match the puzzled expression in her own.
She turned, with subdued excitement, to Thomason, sitting on his bench
near the middle of the room, with his bed and an old trunk for a shabby
background. If he would only go away!
She looked up at the man in the window opposite and smiled. In a
guarded tone she remarked: “It’s a very nice day!” and instantly
she turned toward Thomason again, so that he might believe she was
addressing him in the event of his looking up from his work.
But Thomason, believing this needless remark had been addressed to him,
had borne enough. He arose laboriously, grasping his coat in one hand
and his spectacles in the other, and left the room. At the door there
was a muttered “Women!”--and then a bang.
Bonnie May clasped her hands in delighted relief and drew closer to
the window. “It’s Clifton!” she exclaimed to the man in the window
opposite.
“It’s Bonnie May!” came back the eager response.
“Oh!” she moaned. She smiled up at the man across the open space
helplessly. Then she took her left hand into her right hand, and shook
it affectionately.
“You dear thing!” came back the word from Clifton. “Where have you
been?”
“Oh, why can’t I get at you?” was Bonnie May’s rejoinder, and she
looked down at the ground and shuddered at the abysmal depths.
The man she had called Clifton disappeared for a moment, and when he
stood at the window again there was some one close beside him, looking
out over his shoulder.
“And Jack, too!” she breathed eagerly, yet fearfully. It occurred to
her that some one must hear her, and drag her back into the tedious
realm of conventionality again. For the moment she was almost inclined
to regard herself as a kidnapped person, held apart from friends and
rescuers.
“If it isn’t the kid!” was the comment of the second man, and his eyes
beamed happily.
“You both rooming over there?” asked Bonnie May.
“Since yesterday. We’ve got an engagement at the Folly.”
“And to think of your being within--oh, I can’t talk to you this way! I
must get to you!”
“You and Miss Barry stopping there?”
“Why, you see, I’m not working just now. Miss Barry----”
She stopped suddenly, her eyes filling with terror. She had heard a
step behind her.
Turning, she beheld Baron in the doorway.
“I thought I heard you talking,” he said, in quite a casual tone. “Was
Thomason here?”
“I was talking--to Thomason. My back was turned. He seems to have gone
out.” She looked about the room, even under the bed. She didn’t want
Baron to see her eyes for a moment. “Such a quaint old gentleman--isn’t
he?” she commented. She had moved away from the window. She had almost
regained her composure now.
Baron’s brows contracted. He glanced toward the window at which she had
been standing. In the depths of the room beyond he thought he could
detect a movement. He was not sure.
“Do you and Thomason talk to each other--quite a little?” he asked. He
tried to make his tone lightly inconsequential.
“That wouldn’t express it, so far as he is concerned. He won’t talk to
me at all. I have to do all the talking.”
“And do you--feel quite confidential toward him?”
“Why, I think you might feel safe in talking to him. He doesn’t seem
the sort that carries tales.”
Baron went to the window and looked out. He could see nobody. But when
he confronted her again his expression was harsh, there was an angry
light in his eyes.
“Bonnie May, you were talking to some one in the other house. You were
mentioning Miss Barry. You weren’t talking to Thomason at all.”
She became perfectly still. She was now looking at him steadily. “I was
talking to Thomason until he went out,” she said. “Then, as you say, I
was ‘talking to some one in the other house.’ Why? Why not?”
The docility of the home life, the eagerness to be pliant and sweet,
fell from her wholly. An old influence had been brought to bear
upon her, and she was now Bonnie May the actress again. For the
moment benefits and obligations were forgot, and the old freedom was
remembered.
“We don’t know the people in that house,” retorted Baron.
“That isn’t my fault. I happen to know two of them. If you like I’ll
introduce you. Very clever people.” Her tone was almost flippant.
Baron was astounded. “You’ve found friends!” he said. He couldn’t help
speaking with a slight sneer.
“You don’t do it very well,” she said. “I could show you how, if you
cared to learn--though it’s rather out of date.”
“Bonnie May!” he cried reproachfully.
“You made me do it!” she said, suddenly forlorn and regretful. “I
didn’t do anything. That’s a rooming-house over there, and I happened
to see two old friends of mine at the window. They were glad to see me,
and I was glad to see them. That’s all.” Her expression darkened with
discouragement. She added: “And I wasn’t quite untruthful. I _had_ been
talking to Thomason.”
Baron meditatively plucked his lower lip between his finger and thumb.
“I was wrong,” he said. “I admit, I was in the wrong.” He tried
to relieve the situation by being facetious. “You know I’ve been
an invalid,” he reminded her. “And people are always patient with
invalids.”
“It’s all right,” she said. And he had the disquieting realization that
she had grown quite apart from him, for the moment at least, and that
it didn’t matter to her very much now whether he was disagreeable or
not.
She sighed and walked absent-mindedly from the room. She remembered
to turn in the doorway and smile at him amiably. But he felt that the
action was polite, rather than spontaneous.
And he reflected, after she had gone away, that she hadn’t volunteered
to say a word about the people she had talked to through the window.