Five years! It was a long time. Johnny, standing in the railroad
station, his heart beating high with pride and joy, couldn’t help
crying out when he saw her:--
“Why, how you’ve growed, Annie! Bless my heart, if you ain’t
growed!” But his eyes were misty, so perhaps it was that made
his little Annie look so tall. He had not recognized her for a
moment,--this lady who, with the tears trembling in her eyes, came
up to him and took his hands and cried out, “Father!” Afterward he
said he didn’t know why he had taken her for a lady, for, sakes
alive, her clothes were plain enough. He was quite distressed about
her clothes.
“You’ve stinted yourself, Annie,” he reproached her as they went
home in the street cars. “You ought to be havin’ a silk dress,
lookin’ the way you do. Why, I took you for a lady, Annie. You
ought to have fine clothes, my pretty; we’ll take some money out of
the bank and get you a regular silk dress,” he told her, scolding
her and loving her, and bursting with pride, and taking up their
intercourse just where it had paused, five years ago. She was a
pretty girl and a great learner, Johnny thought; but she was just
his Annie.
It was late when they got home. He had left the kitchen fire clear
and ready for the steak Annie would broil, and the gas was flaring
wide from new burners, and Johnny had bought a long plush scarf for
the top of the mantelpiece over the kitchen range. When Annie was
fairly in the house, and the door was shut, it seemed as though
the happiness of heaven had come into the little kitchen. Johnny
laughed, and drew the back of his hand across his nose, and sniffed
and blinked, and the tears ran freely down his little cheeks. He
walked round and round Annie in critical inspection; and ran her
from room to room, even up to Dave Duggan’s attic, to show her how
unchanged everything was. He made her come into the parlor and
showed her the faded ribbons and tottering plush frames.
“I dusted ’em every Sunday, Annie,” he said. And then he told her
how he had turned out the person to whom he had rented her old
room. “Well, now, he was set on stayin’,” Johnny said; “he was
always sayin’ he wanted to see you, but I guess Dave Duggan was
just as well pleased not to have him round. Dave ain’t married yet,
Annie.” Then Johnny laughed very much, and added, winking at his
own joke, that he guessed Dave had forgotten her, she’d been away
so long.
The wonderful thing about it all, and the beautiful thing about it
all, was that this little man did not in the least care that his
Annie was an educated woman; he did not even know it.
It seemed as if Annie could not enough show the tenderness that
made her heart ache with its swelling. She sat beside him, holding
his work-roughened hands in hers, and told him over and over about
these five years which he had given her; she knew, and she was
feeling as she spoke, how every joy of study, and every pang of
the happiness of appreciation had come from these patient, loving,
grimy old hands. “You’ve given me everything,” her heart was
saying, “and I love you! I can never say how much.” But it seemed
as though it were saying, also, “Why, why did you put me where I
was to learn that you were you, and I was I?”
One looks on at such a situation and says, “If it could stop here,
it might be possible.” But it cannot stop there. It is not the
adjustment of the relations between parents and child which is
the difficult thing. The acceptance of a different point of view
by these three may even come without much pain. No; it is the
outsiders who make the situation impossible--the father’s cronies,
the mother’s friends, the acquaintances of the untaught girlhood.
The impossibility revealed itself that very night when Dave Duggan
came in to welcome her home. Annie gave him her hand, flushing and
paling at his familiarity, his boisterous, facetious “Hollo, Annie!
How you was?” In him, after that easy greeting, the first note of
the difference made for all time was struck; for he grew conscious
and uneasy, and scuffled his feet, and cleared his throat, and
laughed in a silly way. Yet all the old admiration spoke in his
eyes. Johnny was full of significant jokes, and kept elbowing Annie
and winking; and Dave’s loud rebukes of his host’s “fun” were even
more meaning.
At nearly midnight Annie went upstairs, tired, white, smiling; and
lay open-eyed until dawn.
* * * * *
Dick Temple’s intention of “passing through South Bend in a
fortnight” was a little delayed. Cousin Kate’s vague misgivings
took the form of a postscript in a casual note to his mother; there
was no more than a word or two about Dick’s _tendresse_ for a
pretty college-girl who had been the children’s governess during
the last three summers while they were out of town; that was all.
But it was enough. And Mrs. Paul felt she had done her duty.
“And perhaps prevented Dick from doing his,” her husband commented
grimly.
“If he can be prevented, he’d better be; for he wouldn’t be good
enough for Annie Graham!” cousin Kate declared with much spirit,
and immediately became, in her own mind, the champion of the
incipient love affair.
Her letter was passed on by Dick’s mother to Dick’s father, who
said good-naturedly that the boy was a jackass.
“The young lady is probably too good, for him,” said Mr. Henry
Temple, “but I’m not going to have that boy marrying John Paul’s
governess without a few remarks from me.”
Mr. Temple telegraphed his son not to leave town on the day he had
arranged, as he wished to see him; and then he came all the way
from Old Chester for the purpose of making the remarks, which, of
course, were to be general; it would give the matter too much
importance to treat it as particular or probable. So, in a casual
way, he referred to cousin Kate’s letter, and enjoined his son
not to be a fool. Dick’s instantly aggressive attitude and skill
in “answering back” were most surprising to Mr. Temple. A man is
always surprised at his son’s ability in this direction; it is
as though his own hand or foot suddenly acquired individuality.
Furthermore, Richard was very sentimental, and had much to say of
his father’s un-American point of view and of his own readiness
to marry a “woman he loved” (if she’d have him) if she were a
washerwoman.
“As for Miss Graham,” said Dick, “I’ve no right even to speak of
her; but she’s a lady, and an angel”--
“Oh, Lord!” groaned Mr. Temple. “I wonder if I ever was as young as
you, Dickon?”
But he was really disturbed, and wrote to a friend who owned the
great South Bend Rolling and Smelting Furnaces, and might be
expected to know who and what the Grahams were.
Meantime, Dick Temple, twice as much in earnest for his father’s
not unreasonable expostulation, packed his things and started for
the West. It was a hot July afternoon when he arrived in South
Bend; he was fretted by the heat and his own impatience and the
stupidity of the landlord of the hotel in being unable to tell him
where Mr. Graham lived.
“There’s no family by that name on the hill, sir,” he said.
“Graham--Graham--there’s some Grahams here in the directory; what’s
the gentleman’s business, sir?”
“I don’t know,” Dick said, fuming. “What sort of a place is this,
anyhow, that you don’t know where people live? It’s small enough
for you to know everybody”--
“We’ve twenty thousand inhabitants, young man,” said the landlord
with much offense. “The only Graham I know is Johnny; he’s a
gasfitter, and does odd jobs here once in a while”--
“Have your clerk copy all those Graham addresses,” said
Dick coldly. “I’ll go round till I find the person I wish.
Unfortunately I don’t know the gentleman’s first name. Have you got
any kind of conveyance in this place? Just have a hack called, will
you?”
He spoke with the insolence of tone peculiar to well-bred young
men, and he walked to the open door and stood waiting for the
carriage and frowning out at the passers-by. There was a red glare
from the furnaces on the other side of the river, shifting and
fading on the coils of black smoke which lay motionless in the
still, hot air. The street was the narrow unlovely street of the
small manufacturing town of the West.
“It’s a beastly place,” Dick said to himself with an irritation
which had its root in some formless apprehension; and he got into
the lumbering, rattling hack and slammed the door with vicious
emphasis. “What on earth does her father live here for, anyhow?” he
said to himself.
The carriage drew up first at a small market, where piles of faded
vegetables, flanked by glass cases of meats, jutted out upon the
pavement; a man in a dirty white butcher’s frock leaned against
the door-post, and two jets of gas flared and flickered from long
iron stand-pipes.
The driver leaned down from his box and called out in friendly
tones to know if this was the place.
“Idiot!” said Dick under his breath. “Of course not. Try the next
address.”
This was a forlorn, untidy-looking house on a side street. Lodgers’
heads were thrust out of the windows as Dick climbed the steps and
inquired whether Miss Annie Graham lived there? He was conscious
of a distinct relief when he went back again to the carriage. They
went to two other houses, but there was no Miss Annie Graham.
“I guess,” said the hackman, “we’ll have to cross over to the other
side of the river. There’s a Graham over there, at Jack’s Corners.
Jack’s Corners is a fine suburb, sir.”
Dick’s heart rose.
“All right; go on,” he said. “Can’t you hurry those beasts of yours
up?”
And so it was that, about seven o’clock, the cabman drew up before
a small, detached frame house on the Mill Road. It was so hot
that the kitchen windows were wide open, and one could see the
table drawn up between them, and a little man in his shirt-sleeves
eating his supper. Opposite him, by the other window, was a girl
with a fan in her hand, and between them were two other persons,
for Johnny was entertaining that night. Dave Duggan, uncomfortable,
he knew not why (although it certainly was not the weather, for
he had, with great good sense, removed his coat), sat on Annie’s
left; and next to him, beside Johnny, was an enormously fat woman,
in a sort of loose white sack. This was Mrs. Pugsley, who was one
of those neighboring ladies of thwarted stepmother potentialities.
“But you never know what’ll happen,” Mrs. Pugsley often remarked,
and dropped in this hot July night in a friendly way to see if
Annie was making her father comfortable. It was Mrs. Pugsley’s
opinion that all this learning wasn’t no good. “Better know how
to dish a meal’s victuals,” said Mrs. Pugsley, “than be readin’
story papers all the time. That’s what them high-school girls does
mostly.”
The room was faintly lighted by a kerosene lamp on the mantelpiece;
but the real radiance was in Johnny’s face, as he looked across a
bunch of roses in the middle of the narrow table at his Annie.
“Annie walked out two miles to get them flowers,” he said.
“Must ’a’ wanted something to do,” said Mrs. Pugsley.
“I’d ’a’ got ’em for you, Annie,” Dave said bashfully, “if I’d
a-known you wanted ’em.” And it was just then that the carriage
drew up at the door.
Dick, hot and disappointed and disgusted at the coachman’s
stupidity in bringing him into this obviously mechanic’s suburb,
leaned out to say, “Drive on!” And then he saw her.
There was a flutter in the tenement at seeing a hack draw up.
Johnny Graham rose, seeing in a burst of fancy an important and
hasty job, and a carriage sent to convey him to a wilderness of
leaks or broken tips. Mrs. Pugsley conceived the hack to be a
summons from a lady friend who had expected to need her services
on a felicitous occasion, and was instantly agitated, and got up
panting, and saying:--
“Goodness! they’ve sent!”
But Annie knew.
One wonders if she flinched, there in the twilight. She rose at
once and went to the front door, her hand outstretched in pleased
welcome.
“Why, Mr. Temple! This is very pleasant,” she said. “Father, dear,
this is Mr. Temple.”
Dick’s face was white. He took Johnny Graham’s hand and bowed, with
some murmured reference to pleasure.
“This is my friend, Mr. Duggan, Mr. Temple,” Annie went on
placidly, “and Mrs. Pugsley.”
Dick bowed twice. He saw dimly, in the dusky kitchen interior, two
other figures, one of which, assisted by the other, was struggling
into a coat.
“Why, now set down, sir,” Johnny said joyously; “take a seat and
set down. Annie, now, can’t you make room there by Dave? We
was just setting out to eat our tea, sir; it’s so hot, we was
late,--but it’s the style to be late, I hear! I guess we ain’t eat
up everything, have we, Annie? I guess there’s something left for
your gentleman friend.”
“You’re very kind,” Dick protested feebly; but he sat down, too
bewildered to find any excuse.
Annie put a plate before him, and told him he must have some iced
tea.
“It’s the only thing that makes life possible in this weather,” she
said; “but I can’t make father believe it; he takes his boiling.”
“Well, sir,” said Johnny, “you had quite a jaunt to get out here,
hadn’t you? But I don’t mind the walk myself, back and forth from
my work, for it’s fresher out here.”
“I didn’t know your address,” Dick said, not looking at Annie;
“I’ve been driving round”--
“When I saw that carriage drive up,” Mrs. Pugsley said, still
panting, “I thought a lady friend of mine had sent for me; it give
me such a start!”
“Tell me how you left Mrs. Paul,” Annie asked.
“Oh, thanks, very well,” Dick assured her; and there was a moment’s
pause. Mrs. Pugsley and Dave were blankly silent. Annie talked
against time.
“It was so nice to get home. Just think, I had been away five
years,” she said; “that’s a pretty long time not to see one’s
father; father didn’t know me when he met me at the station;--now,
I would have known you anywhere!” she reproached Johnny, with a
loving look.
“Well, but now, you’d growed, Annie; that’s what I said when I saw
her. I says, ‘Why, Annie, you’ve growed!’ Dave, here, don’t see no
change in her. But I do,” Johnny ended proudly.
“You must have missed your daughter very much,” Mr. Temple murmured.
“Well, indeed, an’ he did,” Mrs. Pugsley said resentfully; “but she
would be studyin’. She’s that set on it.”
“Miss Graham is devoted to mathematics,” Dick began miserably,
“and--and that sort of thing”--
He stopped so abruptly that Mrs. Pugsley’s hoarse whisper to Dave
Duggan was audible to all,--
“Say, is he Annie’s feller?”
“Hush!” said Dave Duggan.
Dick drank his tumbler of iced tea with violent haste, and even
Johnny looked disconcerted. Annie said something about the roses.
“The thing I miss most in South Bend are the gardens,” she said.
“You know we are all working people on this side of the river, and
there are no old houses, so there are no beautiful big gardens. I
had to walk far out into the country for those.”
“Won’t you have anything more?” Johnny inquired hospitably. “Take
another helping of something? You won’t? Oh, now, take a taste of
this! No? Well, let’s go into the parlor, Annie.”
If Annie held back, no one saw it. They went into the best room,
where Johnny set all the gas burners flaring, that the full glories
of the decorations might strike the visitor, who, indeed, saw
nothing but Annie’s set face.
“Miss Graham,” he said, “you are coming East again in September,
aren’t you?”
“I think not; I think I must never leave father again. He is not
very strong, and I want to be with him.”
“Oh, yes, quite so,” Dick answered, “but”--
“But what, Mr. Temple?”
“Oh, nothing; I only thought--I thought you were to teach in the
college, and”--
He did not know how to end his sentence; he caught Dave Duggan’s
eyes glowering at him, and Johnny’s rather obsequious smile. Johnny
had the true American veneration for wealth, and he felt that this
gentleman who kept a hack waiting for an hour was a rich man.
“I shall never leave my father,” Annie said, in a low voice.
Now Richard Temple was not a mean or unworthy man; he was a
well-born, well-bred, well-educated young American gentleman; but
he had been placed suddenly at a cruel disadvantage; his presence
of mind deserted him--he was bewildered and confounded. His plans
and hopes were all adrift. He could not meet Annie Graham’s eyes
again; he said good-night, at first effusively, and then haughtily;
and sneaked out to his carriage, anxious only to escape from an
intolerable situation.
“Hope you’ll come again and talk over old times with Annie, sir,”
Johnny said, shaking Dick’s hand all the time that he was speaking;
“you’ll call again, sir?”
“Oh, certainly, yes, of course,” Dick answered wretchedly.
But Annie knew better.
* * * * *
Dave Duggan had watched Annie’s visitor with burning eyes. He
followed the conversation with painful intentness, and a sense of
speed which made him breathless. He wished to join in it,--and kept
moistening his lips and clearing his throat, but he never found the
courage to speak. His shyness probably prevented him from being
rude; for his feeling about Dick was rage, pure and simple.
“He’s a blamed dude,” he thought to himself again and again; but he
could think of nothing to say which would convey this opinion, and
yet fit into the conversation. But when Dick had slunk back to his
carriage Dave’s feelings burst forth. For a few moments, indeed,
the little group (except Annie) talked, in their excitement, all
together.
“Ain’t he handsome!” Johnny said proudly; he was proud of anything
connected with Annie.
“He’s real rich, Annie, ain’t he? Ridin’ in hacks?” Mrs. Pugsley
demanded.
“He’s a blamed dude; that’s what he is,” Dave said fiercely.
“I thought he was your feller, Annie,” Mrs. Pugsley declared,
panting and fanning herself.
“Well, now, he’s none too good to be,” Johnny announced, chuckling.
“Father, dear, wouldn’t it be nicer to sit out on the steps, where
it’s cooler? I’ll put the tea things away, and then I’ll come,
too. Please--_go!_” she ended. Johnny looked at her in surprise,
sensitive to every change in her voice.
“Why, now--Annie?” he faltered.
“I’ll be through with the dishes in a few minutes, father, dear,”
she said; and so Johnny led the way to the front door and placed a
chair on the hard, black earth at the foot of the steps for Mrs.
Pugsley, and told Dave to take off his coat again.
“It’s that hot,” Johnny said, “there’s no good wearin’ coats.”
“Now that dude’s gone, I suppose there’s no harm being
comfortable,” Dave agreed angrily.
They sat there in the dusk, Johnny and Mrs. Pugsley talking the
visit over. They could hear Annie moving about in the kitchen,
washing the dishes. After a while Dave Duggan got up and with
painstaking and elaborate efforts not to attract attention went,
with creaking, clumsy steps, into the kitchen. Annie stood by the
sink, with her back to him. He heard her draw in her breath in a
broken sob; and then he saw--he saw that tears were running down
her face.
“Annie!” he said; “oh, now, Annie, don’t, don’t mind, Annie, dear!”
He put out his hands beseechingly, his face red and wincing with
feeling. Annie turned her shoulder toward him, and set her teeth.
She drew her wrist across her eyes.
“It’s that dude’s hurt your feelin’s, Annie--darn him! but never
you mind, he ain’t worth”--
“Oh, please go away, Dave,” Annie said; “you don’t know what you
are talking about! Please go back to father.”
“Annie,” he burst out, “look here: he ain’t worth it. I say, Annie,
will you take up with me?”
“I really don’t know what you are talking about. Mr. Temple--if you
are referring to him--has not hurt my feelings in the least. I--I
had something on my mind, and”--
“Oh, Annie,” poor Dave said, “what I’m wanting to know”--He stood
there in his shirt-sleeves beside the sink, his voice trembling,
one big red hand opening and shutting the hot-water spigot. “I’m
just wanting to know if you’ll marry me, Annie. Say, now, will you?”
She shrank from him, a sort of horror in her face.
“_You?_”
“You ain’t mad?” he entreated.
“It is quite impossible,” she answered hoarsely; “quite, quite!
Never speak to me of such a thing”--Her face was stinging, her
voice was broken, as a woman’s might be to whom some insulting
thing had been said. “You will go, if you please,” she ended, her
head high, and with a certain gesture that confounded him.
“But look a-here,” he insisted, following her as she moved away
from him; “Annie, look a-here; that fellow ain’t a-goin’ to marry
anybody but a rich lady; his kind ain’t goin’ to marry you.”
“Well, I shan’t marry my kind, then! You can just understand that,”
she cried, with a sudden almost coarse fury. “There’s no use for
you to think of such a thing. Don’t ever dare to spake to me that
way again!”
* * * * *
This is as far as Annie Graham has lived her story. She and Dave
practically summed the matter up between them: “His kind will not
marry you;” and “I will not marry my kind.”
The story is unfinished; one waits to see what will happen.
There are three things open to Annie: She may live out her life
in South Bend; teaching, perhaps, in the public school, gradually
refining the terrible little house, rejoicing Johnny’s heart, and
never interfering, merely for her own æsthetic necessities, with
the unlovely habits of Johnny’s fifty years of unlovely living; she
may learn to accept his intimates as her acquaintances, his Mrs.
Pugsleys and Dave Duggans as household friends, starving all the
while for the companionship of her equals. Or--
She may shake off these intolerable surroundings which make her
shrink as instinctively as an open eye shrinks from dust; she
may turn her back on South Bend, and the tenement house, and the
painted snow-shovel, and her father’s shirt-sleeves, and her
father’s tender heart, and go out into the world to live her own
strong, refined, intellectual life, perhaps as a teacher in her
old college; marrying, after a while, some one who has never seen
her father, and coming into the soul-destroying possession of that
skeleton in the American closet--the vulgarity of the preceding
generation. Or--
She may, because of sheer misery in the struggle between the new
and the old, and for the dreadful suffocating comfort of it, fall
back into the pit whence she was digged and try to forget the upper
air.
What is the child’s duty? To live her own life, or to live some one
else’s life? Is she to accept success or failure, fulfillment or
renunciation?
People differ as to what constitutes success; some go so far as
to say that the highest fulfillment lies in renunciation; and
certainly there was once a life that might have been called a
failure because it ended upon a cross on Calvary.