Mr. Opp, absorbed in the great scheme which was taking definite form in
his mind, did not discover until he reached the steps that some one was
lying in a hammock on the porch.
It was a dark-haired girl in a pink dress, with a pink bow in her hair
and small bows on the toes of her high-heeled slippers--the very kind of
person, in fact, that Mr. Opp was most desirous of avoiding.
Fortunately she was asleep, and Mr. Opp, after listening in vain at the
door for sounds of Mrs. Gusty within, tiptoed cautiously to the other
end of the porch and took his seat on a straight-backed settee.
Let it not for a moment be supposed that Mr. Opp was a stranger to the
fascinations of femininity. He had been inoculated at a tender age, and
it had taken so completely, so tragically, that he had crept back to
life with one illusion sadly shattered, and the conviction firm within
him that henceforth he was immune. His attitude toward the subject
remained, however, interested, but cautious--such as a good little boy
might entertain toward a loaded pistol.
As he sat very straight and very still on the green settee, he tried to
compose his mind for the coming interview with Mrs. Gusty. Directly
across the road was Aker's old carpenter-shop, a small, square,
one-story edifice, shabby, and holding out scant promise of journalistic
possibilities. Mr. Opp, however, seldom saw things as they were; he saw
them as they were going to be. Before five minutes had elapsed he had
the shop painted white, with trimmings of red, new panes in the windows,
ground glass below and clear above, an imposing sign over the door, and
the roadway blocked with eager subscribers. He would have to have an
assistant, of course, some one to attend to the general details; but he
would have charge of everything himself. He would edit a paper,
comprehensive in its scope, and liberal in its views. Science, art,
religion, society, and politics would all be duly chronicled. Politics!
Why, his paper would be an organ--an organ of the Democratic Party!
At the thought of being an organ, Mr. Opp's bosom swelled with such
pride that his settee creaked, and he glanced apprehensively toward the
other end of the porch.
The young lady was still asleep, with her head resting on her bare arm,
and one foot hanging limply below her ruffled petticoat.
Suddenly Mr. Opp leaned forward and viewed her slipper with interest. He
had recognized the make! It was xxx-aa. He had carried a sample exactly
like it, and had been wont to call enthusiastic attention to the curve
of the instep and the set of the heel. He now realized that the effect
depended entirely on the bow, and he seriously considered writing to the
firm and suggesting the improvement.
In the midst of his reflections the young lady stirred and then sat up.
Her hair was tumbled, and her eyes indicated that she had been indulging
in recent tears. Resting her chin on her palms, she gazed gloomily down
the road.
Mr. Opp, at the other end of the porch, also gazed gloomily down the
road. The fact that he must make his presence known was annihilated by
the yet more urgent fact that he could think of nothing to say. A
bumblebee wheeled in narrowing circles above his head and finally
lighted upon his coat-sleeve. But Mr. Opp remained immovable. He was
searching his vocabulary for a word which would gently crack the silence
without shattering it to bits.
The bumblebee saved the situation. Detecting some rare viand in a crack
of the porch midway between the settee and the hammock, and evidently
being a bibulous bee, it set up such a buzz of excitement that Mr. Opp
looked at it, and the young lady looked at it, and their eyes met.
"Excuse me," said Mr. Opp, rather breathlessly; "you was asleep, and I
come to see Mrs. Gusty, and--er--the fact is--I'm Mr. Opp."
At this announcement the young lady put her hand to her head, and by a
dexterous movement rearranged the brown halo of her hair, and twisted
the pink bow into its proper, aggressive position.
"Mother'll--be back soon,"--she spoke without embarrassment, yet with
the hesitation of one who is not in the habit of speaking for
herself,--"I--I--didn't know I was going to sleep."
"No," said Mr. Opp; then added politely, "neither did I." Silence again
looming on the horizon, he plunged on: "I think I used to be in the
habit of seeing you when you was--er--younger, didn't I?"
"Up at the store." She smiled faintly. "You bought me a bag of pop-corn
once with a prize in it. It was a breastpin; I've got it yet."
Mr. Opp scowled slightly as he tried to extract an imaginary splinter
from his thumb. "Do you--er--attend school?" he asked, taking refuge in
a paternal attitude.
"I'm finished," she said listlessly. "I've been going to the Young
Ladies' Seminary at Coreyville."
"Didn't you taken to it?" asked Mr. Opp, wishing fervently that Mrs.
Gusty would return.
"Oh, yes," said his companion, earnestly. "I love it; I was a special. I
took music and botany and painting. I was in four concerts last year and
played in the double duets at the commencements." During the pause that
followed, Mr. Opp considered various names for his newspaper. "Mother
isn't going to let me go back," the soft, drawling voice continued; "she
says when a girl is nineteen she ought to settle down. She wants me to
get married."
Mr. Opp laid "The Cove Chronicle" and "The Weekly Bugle" aside for
further consideration, and inquired politely if there was any special
person whom Mrs. Gusty desired for a son-in-law.
"Oh, no," said the girl, indifferently; "she hasn't thought of anybody.
But I don't want to get married--yet. I want to go back to the seminary
and be a music teacher. I hate it here, every bit of it. It's so
stupid--and lonesome, and--"
A break in her voice caused Mr. Opp to postpone a decision of the day on
which his paper was to be published, and to give her his undivided
attention. Distress, even in beauty, was not to be withstood, and the
fact that she was unusually pretty had been annoying Mr. Opp ever since
she had spoken to him. As she turned her head away and wiped her eyes,
he rose impulsively and moved toward her:
"Say, look a-here now, you ain't crying, are you?" he asked.
She shook her head in indignant denial.
"Well--er--you don't seem exactly happy, as you might say," suggested
Mr. Opp, boldly.
"I'm not," she confessed, biting her lip. "I oughtn't to talk to you
about it, but there isn't anybody here that would understand. They think
I'm stuck up when I talk about books and music and--and other kind of
people. They just keep on doing the same stupid things till they get old
and die. Only mother won't even let me do stupid things; she says I
bother her when I try to help around the house."
"Can't you sew or make mottoes or something?" asked Mr. Opp, very vague
as to feminine accomplishments.
"What's the use?" asked the girl. "Mother does everything for me. She
always says she'd rather do it than teach me how."
"Don't you take to reading?" asked Mr. Opp.
"Oh, yes," she said; "I used to read all the time down at school; but
there never is anything to read up here."
The editor-elect peopled the country with similar cases, and he
immediately saw himself as a public benefactor supplying starved
subscribers with a bountiful repast of weekly news.
"Won't you sit down?" asked the girl, interrupting his reflections. "I
don't know what can be keeping mother."
Mr. Opp looked about for a chair, but there was none. Then he glanced at
his companion, and saw that she was holding aside her pink skirt and
evidently offering him a seat beside her in the hammock. He advanced a
step, retreated, then weakly capitulated. Sitting very rigid, nursing
his hat on his knees, and inserting his forefinger between his neck and
his collar as if to breathe better, he remarked that it was getting
warmer all the time.
"This isn't anything to what it will be later," said the girl; "it keeps
on getting hotter and dustier all the time. I don't believe there's such
a stupid, poky, little old place anywhere else in the world. You ought
to be mighty glad you don't live here."
Mr. Opp cleared his throat with some dignity. "I expect to remain here
permanent now. I--well--the truth is, I have decided to operate a
newspaper here."
"No!" cried the girl, incredulously. "Not in the Cove!"
"In the Cove," repeated Mr. Opp, firmly. "There's great need here for a
live, enterprising newspaper. It's a virgin field, you might say. There
never was a place that needed a public voice more. My paper is going to
be a voice that hears all sides of a question; it's going to appeal to
the aged and the young and all them that lies between."
"It will be mighty grand for us!" said his companion, with interest.
"When is it going to start?"
Definite plans being decidedly nebulous, Mr. Opp wisely confined himself
to generalities. He touched casually on his remarkable fitness for the
work, his wide experience, his worldly knowledge. He hinted that in time
he expected to venture into even deeper literary waters--poetry, and a
novel, perhaps. As he talked, he realized that for the second time that
day he was looked upon with approval. Being accepted at his own estimate
proved a new and exhilarating sensation.
It was pleasant on the wide porch, with the honeysuckle shutting out the
sun, and the long, yellow blossoms filling the air with fragrance. It
was pleasant to hear the contented chuckle of the hens and the sleepy
hum of the bees, and the sound of his own voice; but most of all it was
pleasant, albeit disconcerting, to glance sidewise occasionally and find
a pair of credulous brown eyes raised to his in frank admiration. What
if the swing of the hammock was making him dizzy and one foot had gone
to sleep? These were minor considerations unworthy of mention.
"And just to think," the girl was saying, "that you may be right across
the road! I won't mind staying at home so much if you'll let me come
over and see you make the newspaper."
"You might like to assist sometime," said Mr. Opp, magnanimously, at the
same time cautiously removing a fluttering pink ribbon from his knee. "I
could let you try your hand on a wedding or a 'bituary, or something
along that line."
"Oh, really?" she cried, her eyes brightening. "I'd just love to. I can
write compositions real nice, and you could help me a little."
"Yes," agreed Mr. Opp; "I could learn you to do the first draft, and I
could put on the extra touches."
So engrossed did they become in these plans that they did not hear the
click of the gate, or see the small, aggressive lady who came up the
walk. She moved with the confident air of one who is in the habit of
being obeyed. Her skirt gave the appearance of no more daring to hang
wrong than her bonnet-strings would have presumed to move from the exact
spot where she had tied them under her left ear. Her small, bright eyes,
slightly crossed, apparently saw two ways at once, for on her brief
journey from the gate to the porch, she decapitated two withered
geraniums on the right, and picked up a stray paper and some dead leaves
on the left.
"Guin-never!" she called sharply, not seeing the couple on the porch,
"who's been tracking mud in on my clean steps?"
The girl rose hastily and came forward. "Mother," she said, "here's Mr.
Opp."
Mrs. Gusty glanced up from one to the other, evidently undecided how to
meet the situation. But the hesitancy was not for long; Mr. Opp's
watch-fob, glittering in the sunlight, symbolized such prosperity that
she hastily extended a cordial hand of welcome.
"You don't mean to tell me Guin-never has been keeping you out here on
the porch instead of taking you in the parlor? And hasn't she given you
a thing to drink? Well, just wait till I get my things off and I'll fix
a pitcher of lemonade."
"Let me do it, Mother," said Guinevere, eagerly; "I often do it at
school."
"I'd hate to drink what you make," said Mrs. Gusty, waving her aside.
"You show Mr. Opp in the parlor. No; I'll open the shutters: you'd get
your hands dirty." She bustled about with that tyrannical capability
that reduces every one near it to a state of helpless dependence.
The parlor was cool and dark, and Mr. Opp felt around for a chair while
the refractory shutter was being opened. When at last a shaft of light
was admitted, it fell full upon a sable frame which hung above the
horse-hair sofa, and inclosed a glorified certificate of the births,
marriages, and deaths in the house of Gusty. Around these written data
was a border realistically depicting the seven ages of man and
culminating in a legend of gold which read
From the Cradle to the Grave.
While Mr. Opp was standing before this work of art, apparently deeply
interested, he was, in reality, peeping through a crack in the shutter.
The sunlight was still filtering through the honeysuckle vines, making
dancing, white patches on the porch, the bees were humming about the
blossoms, and Miss Guinevere Gusty was still sitting in the hammock, her
chin in her palms, gazing down the road.
When Mrs. Gusty returned, she bore a glass pitcher of lemonade, a plate
of crisp gingersnaps, and a tumbler of crushed ice, all of which rested
upon a tray which was covered with her strawberry centerpiece, a mark of
distinction which, unfortunately, was lost upon her guest.
Mr. Opp, being a man of business, plunged at once into his subject,
presenting the matter so eloquently and using so much more persuasion
than was necessary that he overshot the mark. Mrs. Gusty was not without
business sagacity herself, and when Mr. Opp met a possible objection
before it had ever occurred to her, she promptly made use of the
suggestion.
"Of course," said Mr. Opp, as a final inducement, "I'd be glad to run
in some of Mr. Gusty's poetical pieces from time to time."
This direct appeal to her sentiment so touched Mrs. Gusty that she
suggested they go over to the shop at once and look it over.
For a moment after the door of his future sanctum was thrown open Mr.
Opp was disconcerted. The small, dark room, cluttered with all manner of
trash, the broken window-panes, the dust, and the cobwebs, presented a
prospect that was far from encouraging; but after an examination of the
presses, his courage revived.
After a great deal of talk on Mr. Opp's part, and some shrewd bargaining
on Mrs. Gusty's, the stupendous transaction was brought to a close, to
the eminent satisfaction of both parties.
* * * * *
It was late that night before Mr. Opp retired. He sat in the open window
of his bedroom and looked out upon the river. The cool night air and the
quiet light of the stars calmed the turmoil in his brain. Gradually the
colossal schemes and the towering ambitions gave way to an emotion to
which the editor-elect was by no means a stranger. It was a little
white-faced Fear that lurked always in a corner of his heart, and could
be kept down only by brave words and aggressive deeds.
He sat with his trembling knees hunched, and his arms awkwardly clasped
about them, an absurd atom in the great cosmic order; yet the soul that
looked out of his squinting, wistful eyes held all the potentialities of
life, and embodied the eternal sadness and the eternal inspiration of
human endeavor.