Mary Wing was considered a reliable person. When she announced that she
would clean out an office closet on a certain day, you could make your
plans on the thing's being done. And to-day--if her usual principles
might have weakened a little--Mary was further bound by the definite
engagement she had made. As Charles had reflected, a demoted
grammar-school teacher could not walk in and out of a principal's office
like one who had some rights there.
Mary had not remained at the Flowers' interminably, after all. She had
entered the High School before Charles Garrott had arrived at Olive
Street, and had been upstairs for half an hour, when Charles, following
on to help her, strode through the great bronze doors. Nevertheless, she
was a full hour behind the time mentioned to Mr. Johnson Geddie over the
telephone, and this increased her hope that her only too obliging
successor would not be found waiting for her. However, Mr. Geddie was
found waiting for her; very much so, in fact. Nothing could have
exceeded the exuberance of his courtesy, and nothing could have been
less welcome.
The new assistant principal was a plump, white person, in whose face a
reddish mustache and gold-rimmed spectacles--his own personal addenda,
as it were--were the only salient features. Not brilliant, he was rising
by character, evinced in an unconquerable optimism. "Keep a-smiling,
brother--it costs you nothing!"--so Mr. Geddie's roguish eyes seemed
continually to say. But perhaps they seemed to say it more than normally
to-day, by way of striking a happy average with the quite unsmiling late
incumbent.
Mary, during her brief tenancy, had stored here a long accumulation of
printed matter, chiefly duplicate files of "The New School," with sundry
assorted leaflets of the Education Reform League. Her task to-day was to
go through these files, destroy what was no longer useful to her, and
pack the rest for removal. Her successor had thoroughly prepared for
her. There on the floor was the packing-case, there on the floor was a
table to sit at, there against the wall stood a stepladder. But Mr.
Geddie would not weary in well-doing. The moment he understood what the
proposition was, as he termed it, he said that, of course, he would help
Miss Wing. Refusals drowned in a sea of smiles. Allow Miss Wing to climb
that rickety ladder, and lift down those heavy stacks of magazines?
Positively, she must not ask him that. Trouble? A pleasure, Miss Wing; a
genu-wine pleasure.
He had his way, as people of strong sunny character always do. Mary,
having overcome the impulse to make an excuse and abandon the
enterprise, sat at the little table. Kind Mr. Geddie went up and down
the ladder, fetching her dusty armfuls to sort over. In the intervals,
for he had the shorter end of the job, he was down on his knees beside
her, brightly stacking discarded "New Schools" into piles against the
wall.
The work went forward steadily, on the woman's part almost in silence.
That, however, made no difference. It was the man's power to be able to
talk more than enough for two, and he did. As the old assistant
principal grew steadily more quiet, the new one seemed increasingly
buoyant. And it seemed to Mary that she had been listening to his
conversation for a long, long time, at the moment when she heard him
suddenly exclaim, from the ladder:--
"Well, well! Look who's here! Come for the spring-cleaning, Mr. Garrott?
Ha, ha!"
She, in her inner absorption, had failed to hear the approaching feet.
But at that she raised her head, with a kind of jerk.
"Don't mind the dust, Mr. Garrott--it eats all right! Ha, ha! Walk in!"
Mr. Garrott stood silent in the office door, looking at Miss Wing. The
eyes of the old friends briefly met. Something in the young man's
appearance vaguely arrested Mary Wing. She had noted, as her glance
lifted, the torn glove on his right hand. Now she was remotely aware
that the face looking back at her so intently appeared somehow subtly
changed: there was something faintly wrong with it, it seemed. But such
details Mary's consciousness hardly registered at all. All in one flash,
she wondered how he happened to be here, thought how good it was of him
to come, and knew that she had never been less glad to see anybody in
her life.
"Good-afternoon," said she.
"How'do, Miss Mary?" said Charles; and then started forward. "How are
you, Mr. Geddie? I seem to be rather late to help with the good work."
"Yes, sirree!--Can't come in at the eleventh hour and take our credit
away! Can he, Miss Wing?--ha, ha! All over but the applause!"
However, Mr. Geddie did not know himself for a tactful man for nothing.
Observing that Miss Wing continued to drop magazines on the floor in
silence, and that her young man there didn't seem to know what to do
with himself, he gracefully adopted a new position. From the third round
of the ladder, he made a roguish address, the meat of which was that
there was a whole corner left of the bottom shelf, and if Mr. Garrott
insisted, etc.
"I'll relieve you with pleasure," said Charles, coldly.
So Mr. Geddie lumbered down from the ladder, wiped his hands on his
pocket-handkerchief and re-attached his cuffs. He implored Miss Wing to
make herself absolutely at home in his office, assured her, not once but
three times, that John the porter, on the floor below, would be
positively gratified to do any service for her, however small. In the
moment of parting, he volunteered a new civility.
"Why, here, Mr. Garrott!" he hastily exclaimed, "your coat's all dusty
in the back! That won't do! Just a minute while I get my whisk--"
But Miss Wing's young man interrupted him rudely.
"No, I'm not dusty at all! Thanks--don't trouble."
Another person who didn't know the value of a smile, clearly. And the
man _was_ dusty, of course. Well, no affair of his, of course. Mr.
Geddie kept a-smiling.
"Well, good people!" said he. "Olive oil!"
When he had got a polite distance down the hall, Miss Wing's young man
shut the office door upon him. So at last came privacy. For the first
time, since the unforgotten afternoon last month, Charles Garrott stood
alone with his admirable heroine.
He moved toward her, deliberating.
Downstairs there, he had been having five of the most engrossing, the
most completely satisfying, minutes of his life. Being able to come
upstairs at all, he had come in the spiritual state of his stimulating
experience. Over all that was unsettled and unhappy, there persisted in
him a fierce young elation. By the oddest luck, he was not here
empty-handed, after all: he came with something rather better
than a hope to give. And doubtless--since he was incurably a
sentence-maker--there had already come into his head discreet phrases
with which to communicate the hope, at least: phrases which, though
gallantly suppressing his own exploits, might yet be somewhat tinged
with a protector's strength.
But all this dropped from Charles's mind in the instant when Mary raised
her head over the table, and looked at him.
He had seen his friend for a few minutes on Friday, her first day up and
about. But that passing glimpse, it seemed, could hardly have counted.
For now her gaze had an unexpected power for him: the sight of her came
on him with a sort of impact, as if this were some one he had heard
about often, but never before seen. Undoubtedly, that small phenomenon
was due to the amount he had been thinking about her of late, behind her
back, as it were. But beyond all this, the particular look of Mary's
face had made him instantly certain that, whatever she had gone to
struggle with Angela about to-day, she had, indeed, been routed. And
that he had not miscalculated the effect of this upon her, he was also
certain from the first sound of her voice....
Mary did not look up as her helper advanced, or cease the work of her
hands. But it was she who spoke first:--
"How did you happen to come here?"
"I've been to your house. Your mother told me you were here."
She said, with a curious stilted politeness: "It was very good of you to
come. But really you must not wait for me, please. I have a good deal
more to do--a great deal more--and it is work of a sort that I have to
do alone."
"Miss Mary," said Charles, "your mother told me, at my request, what has
happened this afternoon."
Mary flinched, just perceptibly. But her voice, when she spoke, seemed
harder than before.
"Well, it's the fact. That's all there is to say. There isn't anything
more to discuss."
"I don't mean to discuss it, of course. There was just one thing I
thought of--a--sort of suggestion."
Finding himself neither questioned nor forbidden, he continued: "Do you
think it would be such a bad way out of the--the difficulty, if Donald
were just to go on here for a while?"
Still Mary waited, hardly encouraging him, examining a "New School,"
silently laying it down in the packing-case at her feet.
"I know you feel," said Charles, inspecting the top of her hat, "that
settling down to this consulting work, in a city that offers so many
distractions all the time, won't be a good thing for Donald--from any
point of view. Staying here won't take the place of the chance with
Gebhardt he's throwing away, of course--that's pretty serious. Still,
there ought to be plenty of good work for him to do here--isn't
there?--for a few months, a year or two, if necessary. That would give
him--and you--a little time to adjust things to--the new conditions.
And then from the point of view of the Flowers, too,--of Mrs. Flower, in
fact,--it occurred to me it mightn't be a bad sort of working
compromise.... What do you think?"
"I think it is very sensible," she replied, with the same labored
courtesy. "It is what I suggested, too."
"Oh," said Charles, and paused. "But Donald didn't want to give up Blake
& Steinert, I suppose?"
"I haven't suggested it to Donald."
That brought a considerable silence.
"It's--settled, then?"
"It was settled last week."
A curious let-down feeling took possession of the young man. He pressed
his hand to his forehead; and then for the first time was aware that his
head ached furiously. In the same moment, his eye was unpleasantly
caught by his burst-out gloves. Having stared at his hands for a second,
he silently stripped off the gloves, balled them, and pitched the ball
into a waste-basket near by.
"I'll just have a look into this closet for myself," said he, turning
away. "I don't believe Geddie--"
"No!--please don't!--don't trouble! I really don't need any help, thank
you. I don't ..."
Her wish to be alone was all but woundingly plain to him. And still it
seemed to Charles physically impossible to turn now and walk out of the
door. So, not looking at her, he answered in a peculiarly mild manner
that, of course, this wasn't help at all, only a little indulgence of
himself, which she really mustn't refuse him. And while he yet spoke,
allowing no opportunity for such refusal, he hung his hat on Mr.
Geddie's hook, and all the forepart of him disappeared upward into the
closet.
After an interval rather longer than necessary, he re-emerged to view, a
few periodicals in one hand, a faded bundle of typewritten papers in the
other.
"Geddie's made a clean sweep. There's hardly another armful."
His manner was almost as cheery as Geddie's own. His "note" was to go
ahead as if nothing had happened.
"Put them here?" asked Charles.
Mary Wing's arms quivered a little on the table.
"Put them _anywhere_! It doesn't make the _least_ difference!"
So Charles laid his burden down on the table, and quietly went up the
ladder again. Here, for a space, he pretended to be impossibly busy over
nearly empty shelves.
And then, out of the silence behind him, he heard his friend's voice,
painfully stiff, somewhat strained.
"You see--you oughtn't to have come to see me to-day. I--I'm not fit for
society. I tried to warn you. I haven't had time--to get philosophical
yet."
The helper spoke into the dusty closet: "Well, you don't need to get
philosophical with me. I'm pretty mad myself--as far as that goes."
"I wasn't prepared for it--at all.... And then I've been beating my head
against it--like a fool--all afternoon."
Well he knew Mary's horror of weakness, her warranted confidence in her
own self-control. Well he understood her regret for that uniquely sharp
speech of hers. Was it this, a novel impulse to justify herself in his
eyes, that seemed to force her on, beyond his expectation and against
her own will?
"But don't suppose I went there expecting to have my own way about
everything--manage them around like children. I didn't. I went
respectfully. I went to beg. But it was no use."