I
Mr. Petersen rode along in the choking dust, considering the problem
with perplexity but with good-humour. After all, it was absurd.... He
wanted to be kind, but he didn’t want to be ridiculous.
In spite of himself, a grin came over his face. He was remembering his
last visit to the old lady. He had ridden out to the miserable old farm
and very politely introduced himself as her new landlord. He had bought
the place for next to nothing, and, considering this, and the
dilapidated state it was in, his sensitive conscience required that he
should reduce the rent. But he never got so far as to propose this.
The old lady received him with lofty affability and invited him to sit
down in her parlour, then left him there for a long time while she
prepared refreshments. He had waited awkwardly enough, touched by the
shabbiness of the place and its evident decline. Old mahogany furniture,
ugly in style, but _good_--once very good--and now so battered, arms
gone, legs gone, splinters torn off, cushions disgorging hair, springs
sagging. His skilful fingers longed to be at it.
She came in again, with a plate of cookies and a jug of lemonade, and
sat down at a little table to dispense them, with a regal air.
“Well!” she said, with a grim smile, “I suppose you’ve come about the
rent, Mr. Petersen. I might as well be frank. I haven’t got it. I’ve
had orders for some preserves, so perhaps I’ll have it next month. I
hope so, I’m sure. But you can’t draw blood from a stone, Mr. Petersen.”
He had gone away that time utterly defeated, and he was returning now
without much hope. What was one to do in such a case? Impossible to turn
out the poor little old woman of seventy, alone on earth. He didn’t need
the money from the house, he was quite able to permit her to live there
free for the rest of her life, but that would be, he saw, a ridiculous
thing to do. Unbusinesslike. Fantastic. _She_ would laugh at him, and so
would everyone else. People would be sure to find out, and his
reputation as a shrewd and sensible man would suffer. And although he
was a Socialist, and opposed to the paying of rents, his common-sense
forbade exceptions. Either no one must pay rent, or everyone must.
He pulled up his horse and wiped his face, for the house was in sight
and he was anxious to look well in the eyes of the queenly and provoking
old lady. She was a Defoe, and married to a cousin Defoe, and this was,
to her, a fact of immense significance. From it she derived her
superiority to everyone else. She regarded Mr. Petersen as nobody at
all, and a foreigner at that. He was aware of her attitude, and not at
all pleased, for he had his own modest pride.
He even went so far as to take out a small pocket mirror and smooth his
moustache--a long yellow moustache, standing out fiercely like a cat’s.
His appearance was at no time satisfactory to him; it was rather too
Socialistic. He was an enormous fellow of five and thirty, with huge
hands and a blunt red face, handsome in a way, but certainly lacking in
distinction, certainly not an exterior to commend itself to a Defoe.
He was quite correctly dressed in riding breeches and a linen jacket,
all fitting very well, but all the more offensive to a Defoe because of
their excellence. In Brownsville Landing people of Mr. Petersen’s class
didn’t ride horseback under any circumstances; above all, not in clothes
designed for such a purpose. It was presumptuous and it was foreign.
The old lady saw him from the window, cantering along the almost
obliterated driveway, and by the time he had dismounted and tied his
horse to an old apple tree, she was standing in the doorway, in the
attitude of a tenant insolvent but unbowed.
“Good day!” she said. “Step in, Mr. Petersen!”
So once again he went into that parlour, dim and cool, aged and forlorn
like herself, and once more sat down to wait for the cookies and the
lemonade which he detested.
But this time it was not the old lady who brought them in. It was
Minnie. Minnie, until that instant unknown to him, unimagined, but
predestined to his ruin....