orchards going right up over them...."
"I know," she nodded. "I guess it's them I been smelling ... or
laylocks."
"Things coming up in the garden," Peter contributed: "peonies, and long
rows of daffodils...." He did not realize it, but he had described to
her no place that he had known but the way to the House. The girl cut
him off.
"Don't!" she said sharply. "You know," she half apologized, "you kind of
remind me of somebody ... a boy I knew up country. It was him that got
me here----" She made her little admission quietly, the horror of it
long worn down to daily habit. "That first time I saw you, it seemed
almost as if it was him ... I ain't never blamed him--much. He didn't
mean to be bad, but when the trouble came he couldn't help none.... I
guess real help is about the hardest thing to find there is."
"I guess it is."
"Oh, well, we gotta make the best of it." She glanced at Peter with her
head on one side as she twiddled her fingers across the cloth to the
tune of the orchestra.
They went out at last and walked in the least frequented streets, and
Peter held her hand; the warmth of it ran with a pleasant tingling in
his veins. He seemed to have touched in her palm the point at which the
city came alive to him. They walked and walked and yet it seemed that
something lacked to bring the evening to a finish; it was incredible to
Peter that after all his loneliness he should have to let her go.
"We could go up to my place," Ethel suggested. "It's up here." He hadn't
suspected that she had been guiding him.
"I guess not to-night." Peter's blood was singing in his ears. In the
dark of the unfrequented street he could feel her young body leaning
toward his.
"Say, you know I ain't after the money the way some girls are; I like
you ... honest----"
"I guess I'd better go home." But they went on up the side street a
little farther. "Good-bye," he said, but he did not let her go.
She shook her hand free at last.
"Oh, well, of course, if you don't want to...." He felt her soft hands
fumbling at his face; she drew him down to a kiss. Suddenly she sprang
away, laughing. "Go, you silly!"
"Ethel!" he cried, but he lost her in the dark. He should have let her
go at that; he knew he should. In spite of her paying half, his dinner
had cost him more than two ordinary dinners ... and besides.... He
couldn't help, however, walking around by the viaduct for several
evenings the next week, and at last he saw her. She was going by without
speaking, but he got squarely in front of her.
"Ethel!"
She pretended just to have recognized him.
"Oh, you here? I thought you'd gone back to the country!"
"You aren't mad with me about ... the other night?" He did not quite
know how to express the quality of his desertion.
"Who? Me?" airily. "Oh, I guess there's just as good fish in the
sea----" She changed all at once under his young hunger for
companionship. "You're good," she said; "you're the real thing."
"You're good, too," he was certain, "when you're with me."
"Oh, it rubs off. Say, kid, I guess you got folks at home you're sending
money to and all that, and you got to get ahead in the world. Well, you
don't want to have nothing to do with my kind, and that's straight." The
deviltry she put on toward him failed pitifully. "Chase yourself, kid; I
just ain't good for you any more." Nevertheless they moved along the
parapet to the dark interval between the lights and there they kissed
again, this time with no undercurrent.
"Good-bye, Ethel."
"Good-bye, boy." The little spark was out.
PART THREE
IN WHICH PETER
BECOMES A BACHELOR
PART THREE
IN WHICH PETER BECOMES A BACHELOR
I
The day before leaving for his summer vacation Peter was notified that
he was wanted in his private office by the younger Siegel Brother.
Though he couldn't quite fall in with the dark prognostications of
Blinders that he was about to be mulcted of his salary by a plot which
had been plainly indicated by the marked partiality of our Mr. Croker,
the incident gave him some uneasiness. The young Siegel Brother must
have been younger than somebody of course, though it couldn't have been
by more than a scratch, and he might have been any age without betraying
it, so deeply was he sunk in the evidence of the surpassing quality of
the grocery department. However, there was something surprisingly young
looking out at Peter from the junior brother's red and white rotundity,
at which he took heart immensely.
"Weatheral, Peter, canned goods, recommended by Mr. Greenslet," Siegel
Brother ticked him off from a manilla envelope. "Just a little
honorarium, Mr. Weatheral, we are in the habit of distributing to such
of our employees as make practical suggestions to the advantage of the
business." Contriving to make his hands meet in front of him by clasping
them very high up on his chest, Siegel Brother assumed that he had
folded his arms, and waited to see what Peter would do about it.
"We have also a little savings bank for the benefit of our employees
which pays 3 per cent., yet I believe we have you not among our
depositors." There was the slightest possible burr to his speech as
though it were blunted by so much fatness.
"Well, you see, sir--there's a mortgage." Peter was afraid he should
damage himself by the admission, but the firm heard him out.
"How much?"
"It was a thousand, but we've got it down to seven hundred--six hundred
and sixty," Peter corrected himself with a glance at his honorarium.
"And the farm, it is worth----" Siegel Brother parted his hands slightly
to admit of any valuation.
"Two thousand."
"So! Well, Mr. Weatheral, that is not so bad, and if I were you, when I
had occasion to speak of it I would say, not 'I am paying a mortgage,'
that is dead work, Mr. Weatheral, but 'I am buying a farm.' It goes
easier so."
"Thank you, sir, I'll remember." He supposed his employer was done with
him, but as he turned to go he heard his name again.
"You will report to our Mr. Croker when you return, Mr. Weatheral; he
thinks he can use you."
Two weeks later when he came back rested from Bloombury, Peter found
himself visible to at least ten persons, all of whom pertained to the
boarding-house of the exclusive Mrs. Blodgett, where, by the advice of
J. Wilkinson Cohn, he engaged a small room on the third floor with a
window opening some six feet from the rear wall of a wholesale
stationery, and one electric light discreetly placed to discourage the
habit of reading in bed.
From this time on he was visible to Mrs. Blodgett and Aggie and Miss
Thatcher, whom he already knew as the pure food demonstrator in dairy
products, to two inconsiderable young women from the wholesale
stationer's, and a gentleman from a shoe store, the whole of whose
physiognomy appeared to be occupied with the effort to express an
engaging youthfulness which the crown of his head explicitly denied. He
was occasionally visible to the representative of gentlemen's outfitters
who was engaged to Aggie and took Sunday dinners with them, and he was
particularly and pleasingly visible to J. Wilkinson Cohn and Miss Minnie
Havens. The rest of his fellow boarders were so much of a likeness, a
kind of family likeness that spread all over Siegel Brothers and such
parts of the city as Peter had been admitted to, that it was a relief to
Peter to realize from his profile that J. Wilkinson's last name probably
ought to have been spelled Cohen. The determinedly young gentleman
explained to him that J. Wilkinson's intrusion into the exclusiveness of
Blodgett's was largely a concession to Aggie's being as good as married
and not liable to social contamination, and to the fact that the little
Jew was amusing and pretty near white, anyway.
Miss Minnie Havens did typewriting and stenography in a downtown office
and was understood to be in search of economic independence, rather than
under the necessity of making a living. She had a high fluffy pompadour
and a half discoverable smile which could be brought to a very agreeable
laugh if one spent a little pains at it. J. Wilkinson Cohn appeared to
find it worth the pains.
The particular advantage of Blodgett's, besides the fact that you could
have two helps of everything without paying extra for it, was that it
was exclusive and social. Mrs. Blodgett had collected her family of
boarders on the principle of not having anybody who wasn't a suitable
companion for Aggie. There was also a pianola which gave the place a
tone.
There was fire and light in the dining-room at Blodgett's from seven to
nine always, and in the parlour with the pianola on Saturday evening
and all day Sunday. Sometimes, even on week days after supper, J.
Wilkinson would open the door into the darkened room, push away the
pianola and sing topical songs to his own accompaniment until his
stiffened fingers clattered on the keys. Other times he would give
imitations of popular stage celebrities until Blodgett's shouted with
laughter. At all times they appeared to have a great many engagements.
Peter was advised to join this or that organization, and to enter upon
social occasions that unfortunately presented themselves in the light of
occasions to spend money. Apparently there were no dragons tracking the
path of Blodgett's boarders. Miss Havens did better than any of them for
him. She explained to him how to get books from the circulating library,
and let him read hers until he could arrange for a card. She said it was
a pleasure to think there was going to be somebody in the house who was
congenial. It wasn't that she had anything against Miss Thatcher and the
rest of them--they just didn't have the same tastes. She thought a
person ought to spend some of the time improving their minds. Although
the expression was ambiguous, it served as a sort of sedative to the
aching vacuity of the hours which Peter spent away from Siegel Brothers.
He found himself spending as many as possible of them with Miss Havens.
She had a way of making the frivolling talk of the supper table appear a
warrantable substitute for the things that Peter knew, even while he
echoed her phrases, that he wasn't getting. He found himself skidding on
the paths of self-improvement and the obligations of seeing life, along
the edges of desolation. He immersed himself as far as possible in the
atmosphere of Blodgett's in order that he needn't have any time left in
which to consider how far it fell short of what he had come to find. For
this reason he was usually the last at the supper table, but there were
occasions when he found it discreet to slip away as early and quietly as
possible.
It was one evening about two months after his instalment at Blodgett's.
Peter was sitting in his room when he heard them yammering at his door
with so much hilarious insistence that he found himself getting up to
open it, without giving himself time to put down the book he was reading
or to take off the overcoat he had put on for want of a fire, and
finding himself in some embarrassment because of the misapprehension
which this fact involved.
"Ready, Peter?"
"Come along, Peter!"
"I ... I'm not going," said Peter.
"What? Not going to the rink with us to-night? Why, you said----" The
bright group of his fellow boarders hung upon the narrow landing like
bees at the threshold of a hive.
"I said I'd go if I could--" protested Peter, "and I can't."
"Gee! What's the matter with you?"
"Don't be a beastly stiff!"
"Come on, fellows, we'll miss the car. Let him be a stiff if he wants
to."
Peter heard their feet retreating on the stairs, and then he saw that
Minnie Havens still hesitated at the landing. She had on her best silk
waist and her blond pompadour was brushed higher than ever. Her eyes,
which were blue, were fixed directly on him with something in the
meeting that gave him the impression, gaspingly, of being about to step
off into space. He seemed suddenly to see a path opening directly
through the skating rink and the Saturday Social Club to the House of
the Shining Walls, and Minnie Havens walking in it beside him. He
wrenched his mind away forcibly from that and fixed it on the figure of
his weekly salary.
"Couldn't you?" she persuaded.
"No," said Peter. "I'm much obliged to you, but I really couldn't."
But before he had time to take up his reading, which somehow he was not
able to do immediately, he heard Mrs. Blodgett, who made a point of
being as kind to her boarders as she could afford to be, tapping at his
door.
"I thought you'd be going to the rink to-night."
"No," said Peter.
"You don't think it's wrong, or anything?"
"Oh, no, not in the least."
"Well, Mr. Weatheral, I've seen a power of young folks, comin' and
goin', in my business and it don't pay for 'em to get too stodgy like.
They need livenin' up." She hung upon the door as Peter waited for her
to go. "Miss Havens is a nice girl," she ventured.
Peter admitted it. "I've my mother and sister to think of," he told her,
and presently he found he had told her a great deal more.
"Well," commented Mrs. Blodgett, "you do have a lot to carry.... Was you
readin' now, Mr. Weatheral? ... because it's warmer down in my sittin'
room, and there's only Aggie and me sewin'.... Besides," she argued
triumphantly, "it's savin' light."
First and last he heard a great deal about saving at Blodgett's. Aggie,
who was making up her white things, had something to tell every evening
almost, about the price of insertion. But it was saving for a purpose;
they were in the way, most of them, of being investors. J. Wilkinson had
sixty dollars in his brother's cigar stand on Fifty-fourth street. He
used to let his brother off for Sunday afternoons with quite a
proprietary air. The shoe gentleman, whose very juvenile name was Wally
Whitaker, didn't believe in such a mincing at prosperity. He talked
freely about tips and corners and margins and had been known to make
twenty-seven dollars in copper once. He offered Peter some exclusive
inside information in B and C's before he had been in the house a month.
"Well, you see," Peter explained himself, "I'm buying a farm up our
way!" His fellow boarders laid down their forks to look at him; he could
see reflected from their several angles how he had placed himself by the
mere statement of his situation. He felt at once the resistance it gave
him, the sense of something to pull against, of having got his feet
under him. It was the point at which the conquest of the mortgage dragon
began to present itself to him as a thing accomplished rather than a
thing escaped.
It must have been this feeling of release which opened up for him, from
pictures that he saw occasionally with Miss Havens on Sundays, from
books he read and discussed with her, avenues that appeared to lead more
or less directly to the House. There were times when he found himself
walking in them with Miss Minnie Havens, and yet always curiously
expecting the Lovely Lady when they found her there, to be quite another
person. He came within an inch of telling her about it on the occasion
on which she presented him with an embroidered hat marker for Christmas,
and when he took her to the theatre with tickets the floor walker had
presented to him on account of Mrs. Floor Walker not feeling up to it.
It appeared, further, that Miss Havens had a way of falling into
profound psychological difficulties which required a vast amount of
talking over, and a great many appeals to Peter's disinterested judgment
to extract her, not without some subtle intimations of dizzying escapes
for himself. Peter supposed that was always the way with girls. It came
to a crisis later where Miss Havens' whole destiny hung upon the point
as to whether she could accept a situation offered her in her own town,
or should stay on in the city and see what came of it.
"You'd get more salary there, and be able to live cheaper?" Peter wished
to know.
"Oh, yes." The implication of her tone was that she didn't see what
that had to do with it. It was toward the end of June, and she was
looking very pretty in a white dress and a hat that set off her
pompadour to advantage, and there was no special reason, as they had the
afternoon before them, why they should not have taken some of the
by-paths that the girl perceived to lead out from the subject into
breathless wonder. She had ways, which were maidenly and good, of
opening up to Peter comfortable little garden plots of existence which,
though they lay far this side of the House and the Lovely Lady, had in
the monotony of the long climb up the scale of Siegel Brothers, moments
of importunate invitation.
"And you came up to the city," Peter went on in the gravelled walk of
fact, "just to improve yourself in shorthand so you could get such a
situation? I don't see why you hesitate."
Miss Havens could hardly say why herself.
"There were so many ways of bettering one's self in the city. I've a
great many friends here," she hinted.
"Not so many," Peter reminded her, "as you'd have where you were brought
up."
"You are staying in the city?" Miss Havens suggested.
"That's different. I have to." He had already told her about Ellen and
also about his mother.
"And are you always going to stay on here like this, working and working
and never taking any time for yourself? Aren't you ever going to ...
marry?"
"I know too much what poverty is like to ask any woman to share it,"
Peter protested.
"Suppose she should ask you?"
"They don't do that; the right sort."
"I don't see why ... if some girl ... cared ... and if she saw ...
anybody struggling along under burdens she would be glad to share, and
she knew because of that he didn't mean to ask her ... You think she
ought not to let him know?"
"I think it wouldn't be best," said Peter.
"You think the man would despise her?"
"Not that; but if he liked her a little ... he might consent to it ...
just because he liked her and was tired maybe ... and that wouldn't be
good for either of them."
"Well, anyway, it doesn't concern either of us," said Miss Havens.
The next evening as Peter was letting himself in at his own door--he had
moved to the second floor front by this time--Mrs. Blodgett stopped him.
"Miss Havens left her regards for you," she explained. "She went
to-day."
"Oh," said Peter, "wasn't it sudden?"
"Sort of. She'd been considerin' of it for some time, and last night she
made up her mind. But I did think," said Mrs. Blodgett, "that she'd have
said good-bye to _you_." And not eliciting anything by way of a reply,
she added: "Miss Havens is a nice girl. I hate to think of her slavin'
her life out in an office. She'd ought to get married."
"A girl has ever so many more chances in her home town," Peter offered
hopefully.
"Yes, I suppose so." Mrs. Blodgett sighed. "Is there anything I can do
for you, Mr. Weatheral?"
"Nothing, thank you." He was lingering still on the landing on Mrs.
Blodgett's account, but he found his finger slipping between the leaves
of the volume he had brought from the library.
"Ah," she warned him, "readin' is an improvin' occupation, but there's a
book we hadn't any of us ought to miss, and that's the Book of Life, Mr.
Weatheral." And somehow with that ringing in his ears, Peter spent
several minutes walking up and down in his room before he could settle
to his book again.
II
It was a week or ten days after Miss Havens left, before Peter went down
to Bloombury for his midsummer vacation, a week in which he had the
greatest difficulty in getting back to the House of the Shining Walls.
He set out for it almost immediately with a feeling akin to the release
with which one returns to daily habit after the departure of an
unexpected guest. But his thought would no sooner strike into the
accustomed paths than Miss Minnie Havens would meet him there
unaccountably, to begin again those long intimate conversations which
led toward and about the House, but never quite to it. Peter found
himself looking out for those meetings with some notion of dodging them,
and yet once they were fairly off, he owned them a great relief from
Blodgett's. Now that it was withdrawn, he realized in the girl's bright
companionship the effect of the rose-red glow of the shade that Aggie
drew down over the front parlour lamp on the evenings when the
Gentlemen's Outfitter called. It had prevented his seeing until now,
that the chief difference between himself and his fellow boarders, was
that for most of them, this was a place where they had come to stay.
Having let Miss Havens go on alone to the place she was bound for, he
had moments of dreadful sinking, as it occurred to him to wonder if he
hadn't made a mistake in the nature of his own destination. Suppose,
after all, he should find himself castaway in some oasis of determined
sprightliness with Wally Whitaker in whose pocket pretenses of tips and
margins he began to discern a poorer sort of substitute for the House.
He was as much bored by the permanently young shoe-salesman after this
discovery as before it, but obliged to set a watch on himself lest in a
moment of finding himself too much in the same case, he should make the
mistake of inviting Wally to Bloombury for his vacation.
He was relieved, when at last he had got away without it, to be saved
from such a misadventure, for he found his mother not standing the heat
well, and Ellen anxious. He had never definitely shaped to himself the
idea that there could anything happen to his mother; she was as much a
part of his life as the aging apple trees and the hills that climbed,
with low, gnarled pines to the sky's edge beyond the marshes, a point
from which to take distance and direction. He began to note now the
graying hair, the shrunken breast and the worn hands, so blue veined for
all their brownness, and he could not sleep of nights because of the
sweat that was on his soul, for fear of what might come to her. He would
lie in the little room under the roof and hear the elms moving like the
riffle of silence into sound, thinking of his mother until at last he
would be obliged to rise and move softly about the place, as if by the
mere assertion of himself he could make her safer in it. He wished
nothing so much as not to disturb her, but she must have been lying
awake often herself, for the second or third time this happened, she
called to him. He came, half dressed as he was and drew the covers up
close about her shoulders, and was exceedingly gay and tender with her.
"There's nothing troubling you, son?"
"Nothing--except to be sure there's nothing troubling _you_."
She gave a little, low laugh like a girl.
"That's so like your father. I remember he would get up in the night
when you were little, and go prowling about ... he used to say he was
afraid the roof tree would fall in and kill you. And yet here you
are...." She reached out to give him a little pat, as if somehow to
reassure him. The low dropping moon made a square block of light on
the uncarpeted floor; outside, the orchard waited for the dawn, and
the fields brimmed life up to their very doors.
"You're like him in other ways," she went on. "Somehow it's brought him
back wonderfully the last two or three days, and especially at night
when I'd hear you creaking down the stair. There's a board there which
always does creak, and I'd hear you trying to remember which it was, the
same as _he_ used to----"
"I haven't meant to keep you awake, mother."
"I've been awake. When you're getting along like, you don't sleep much,
Peter. Sleep is for dreaming, some of it, and the old don't dream."
"You're not to go calling yourself old, mother!"
"And me with a son going twenty-three! We weren't so young either when
we were married, your father and I ... but I want you should sleep,
Peter, and dream when you can. You have pleasant dreams, son?"
"Any amount of them." He was going off into one of those bright
fantasies of what he should do when he was rich as he meant to be, with
which he had so often beguiled Ellen's pain, but she kissed him and sent
him to bed again lest Ellen should hear them.