If the window-washing did not become an actuality, it was due to the
weather rather than to any clemency on the part of Mr. Bangs. He seemed
bent upon testing Quin's mettle, and required tasks of him that only a
man used to the discipline of the army would have performed.
Quin, on his part, carried out instructions with a thoroughness and
dispatch that upset the entire office force. He had been told to clean
things up, and he took an unholy joy in interpreting the order in
military terms. Never before had there been such a drastic overhauling of
the premises. He did not stop at cleaning up; he insisted upon things
being kept clean and orderly. In a short time he had instituted reforms
that broke the traditions of half a century.
"Who moved my desk out like this?" thundered Mr. Bangs on the second day
after Quin's arrival.
"I did, sir," said Quin. "You can get a much better light here, and no
draught from the door."
"Well, when I want my desk moved I will inform you," said Mr. Bangs.
But a day's trial of the new arrangement proved so satisfactory that the
desk remained in its new position.
Other innovations met with less favor. The clerks in the outer office
objected to the windows being kept down from the top, and Mr. Bangs was
constantly annoyed when he found that his papers were disturbed by a
daily dusting and sorting. Quin met the complaints and rebuffs with easy
good humor, and went straight on with his business. The moment his
energies were dammed at one point, they burst forth with fresh vigor at
another.
The only object about the office that was left undisturbed was Minerva, a
large black cat which the stenographer told him belonged to Mr. Randolph
Bartlett. Quin was hopelessly committed to cats in general, and to black
cats in particular, and the fact that this one met with Mr. Bangs's
marked disfavor made him champion her cause at once. One noon hour, in
his first week, he was sitting alone in the inner office, scratching
Minerva's head in the very spot behind the ear where a cat most likes to
be scratched, when a lively voice from the doorway demanded:
"Well, young man, what do you mean by making love to my cat in my
absence?"
"She flirted with me first," said Quin. Then he took a second look at the
stranger and got up smiling. "You are Mr. Bartlett, I believe?"
"Yes. Are you waiting for Mr. Bangs?"
"No, sir," said Quin; "he's waiting for me. I'm to let him know as soon
as you come in. I am the new office-boy."
He grinned down on the shorter man, who in his turn laughed outright.
"Office-boy? What nonsense! Where have I seen you before? What is your
name?"
"Quinby Graham, sir."
"Drop the sir, for heaven's sake. I'm no officer. Where in the dickens
have I met you? Oh! wait a second, I've got it! Sunday night. We were out
somewhere together----"
"Hold on there," said Quin. "_You_ were out together, but I was out by
myself. We met at your door."
"So you were the chap that played the good Samaritan? Well, it was damned
clever of you, old man. I'm glad of a chance to thank you. I hadn't
touched a drop for six weeks before that, but you see----"
Mr. Bangs's metallic voice was heard in the outer office, and the two
younger men started.
"You bet I see!" said Quin sympathetically as he hurried out to inform
the senior member of the firm that the junior member awaited his
pleasure.
What happened at that interview was recounted to him by Miss Leaks, the
little drab-colored stenographer, who had returned from lunch when the
storm was at its height.
"It's a wonder Mr. Ranny don't kill that old man for the way he sneers at
him," she said indignantly to Quin, "Why, _I_ wouldn't take off him what
Mr. Ranny does! But then, what can he do? His mother keeps him here for a
mouth-piece for her, and Mr. Bangs knows it. It's no wonder he drinks,
hitched up to a cantankerous old hyena like that. He never can stand up
for himself, but he stood up for you all right."
"For me?" repeated Quin. "Where did I come in?"
"Why, he said it was a shame for a man like you to be doing the work you
are doing, and that he for one wouldn't stand it. He talked right up to
the boss about patriotism and our duty to the returned soldier, until he
made the old tyrant look like ten cents! And then he come right out and
said if Mr. Bangs couldn't offer you anything better he could."
"What did he say to that?" asked Quin.
"He curled up his lip and asked Mr. Ranny why he didn't engage you for a
private secretary, and if you'll believe me Mr. Ranny looked him straight
in the eye and said it was a good idea, and that he would."
"A private secretary!" Quin exclaimed. "But I don't know a blooming thing
about stenography or typewriting."
"Don't you let on," advised Miss Leaks. "Mr. Ranny doesn't have enough
work to amount to anything, and he's so tickled at carrying his point
that he won't be particular. I can teach you how to take dictation and
use the typewriter."
The following week found Quin installed in the smaller of the two private
offices, with a title that in no way covered the duties he was called
upon to perform. To be sure, he got Mr. Ranny's small affairs into
systematic running order, and, under Miss Leaks's efficient instruction,
was soon able slowly but accurately to hammer out the necessary letters
on the typewriter. He was even able at times to help Mr. Chester, the
melancholy bookkeeper whom the other clerks called "Fanny."
Through working with figures all his life Mr. Chester had come to
resemble one. With his lean body and drooping oval head, he was not
unlike the figure nine, an analogy that might be continued by saying that
nine is the highest degree a bachelor number can achieve, the figures
after that going in couples. It was an open secret that the tragedy of
Mr. Chester's uneventful life lay in that simple fact.
In addition to Quin's heterogeneous duties at the office, he was
frequently pressed into service for more personal uses. When Mr. Ranny
failed to put in an appearance, he was invariably dispatched to find him,
and was often able to handle the situation in a way that was a great
relief to all concerned.
One day, after he had been with the firm several weeks, he was dispatched
with a budget of papers for Madam Bartlett to sign. It was the first time
he had entered the house since the night of the accident, and as he stood
in the front hall waiting instructions, he looked about him curiously.
The lower floor had been "done" in peacock blue and gold when Miss Enid
made her début twenty years before, and it had never been undone. An
embossed dado and an even more embossed frieze encircled the walls, and
the ceiling was a complicated mosaic of color and design. The
stiff-backed chairs and massive sofas were apparently committed for life
to linen strait-jackets. Heavy velvet curtains shut out the light and a
faint smell of coal soot permeated the air. Over the hall fireplace hung
a large portrait of Madam Bartlett, just inside the drawing-room gleamed
a marble bust of her, and two long pier-glasses kept repeating the image
of her until she dominated every nook and corner of the place.
But Quin saw little of all this. To him the house was simply a background
for images of Eleanor: Eleanor coming down the broad stairs in her blue
and gray costume; Eleanor tripping through the hall in her Red Cross
uniform; Eleanor standing in the doorway in the moonlight, telling him
how wonderful he was.
He had written her exactly ten letters since her departure, but only two
had been dispatched, and by a fatal error these two were identical. After
a superhuman effort to couch his burning thoughts in sufficiently cool
terms, he had achieved a partially successful result; but, discovering
after addressing the envelope that he had misspelled two words, he
laboriously made another copy, addressed a second envelope, then
inadvertently mailed both.
He had received such a scoffing note in reply that his ears tingled even
now as he thought of it. It was only when he recalled the postscript that
he found consolation. "How funny that you should get a position at
Bartlett & Bangs's," she had written. "If you should happen to meet any
member of my family, for heaven's sake don't mention my name. They might
link you up with the Hawaiian Garden, or the trip to the camp that night
grandmother was hurt. Just let our friendship be a little secret between
you and me."
"'You and me,'" Quin repeated the words softly to himself, as he stood
there among the objects made sacred by her one-time presence.
"Madam Bartlett wishes you to come upstairs and explain the papers before
she signs them," said a woman in nurse's uniform from the stair landing,
and, cap in hand, Quin followed her up the steps.
At the open door of the large front room he paused. Lying in royal state
in a huge four-poster bed was Madam Bartlett, resplendent in a purple
robe, with her hair dressed in its usual elaborate style, and in her ears
pearls that, Quin afterward assured the Martels, looked like moth-balls.
"You go on out of here and stay until I ring for you," she snapped at the
nurse; then she squinted her eyes and looked at Quin. She did not put on
her eye-glasses; they were reserved for feminine audiences exclusively.
"What do they mean by sending me this jumble of stuff?" she demanded,
indicating the papers strewn on the silk coverlid. "How do they expect me
to know what they are all about?"
"They don't," said Quin reassuringly, coming forward; "they sent me to
tell you."
"And who are you, pray?"
"I am Mr. Randolph's er--er--secretary."
For the life of him he could not get through it without a grin, and to
his relief the old lady's lips also twitched.
"Much need he had for a secretary!" she said, then added shrewdly:
"Aren't you the soldier that put the splint on my leg?"
Quin modestly acknowledged that he was.
"It was a mighty poor job," said Madam, "but I guess it was better than
nothing."
"How's the leg coming on?" inquired Quin affably.
"It's not coming on at all," Madam said. "If I listen to those fool
doctors it's coming off."
Quin shook his head in emphatic disapproval.
"Don't you listen to 'em," he advised earnestly.
"Doctors don't know everything! Why, they told a fellow out at the
hospital that his arm would have to come off at the shoulder. He lit out
over the hill, bath-robe and all, for his home town, and got six other
doctors to sign a paper saying he didn't need an amputation. He got back
in twenty-four hours, was tried for being A. W. O. L., and is serving his
time in the prison ward to-day. But he's still got his arm all right."
"Good for him!" said Madam heartily; then, recalling the business in
hand, she added peevishly: "Well, stop talking now and explain these
papers."
Quin went over them several times with great patience, and then held the
ink-well while she tremblingly signed her name.
"Kinder awkward doing things on your back," he said sympathetically, as
she sank back exhausted.
"Awkward? It's torture. The cast is bad enough in itself; but having to
lie in one position like this makes me sore all over."
"You don't have to tell me," said Quin, easing up the bed-clothes with
quite a professional air; "I was six months on my back. But there's no
sense in keeping you like this. Why don't they rig you up a pulley, so's
you can change the position of your body without disturbing your leg?"
"How do you mean?"
"Like this," said Quin, taking a paper-knife and a couple of spoons from
the table and demonstrating his point.
Madam listened with close attention, and so absorbed were she and Quin
that neither of them were conscious of Miss Isobel's entrance until they
heard her feeble protest:
"I would not dare try anything like that without consulting Dr. Rawlins."
"Nobody wants you to dare anything," flared out her mother. "What the boy
says sounds sensible. He says he has fixed them for the soldiers at the
hospital. I want him to fix one for me."
"When shall I come?" Quin asked.
"Come nothing. You'll stay and do it now. Telephone the factory that I am
keeping you here for the morning. Isobel, order him whatever he needs.
And now get out of here, both of you; I want to take a nap."
Thus it was that, an hour later, the new colored butler was carrying the
papers back to Bartlett & Bangs's, and Mr. Randolph's new secretary was
sawing wood in Madam Bartlett's cellar. It was a humble beginning, but he
whistled jubilantly as he worked. Already he saw himself climbing, by
brilliant and spectacular deeds, to a dazzling pinnacle of security in
the family's esteem.