not seem to you, for instance, that turkey would be infinitely
more chic than--than corned beef?"
Quite regardless of his possible negative she turned quickly
and summoned a heavy-faced waitress to her.
"Behold it is now a dinner party!" she confided blithely to
the perfectly indifferent woman. "The soup, the turkey, the
best of your salads, the blackest of your coffee! Everything
very chic!"
"Very what?" queried the waitress.
"Very quick!" interposed the Young Doctor.
Once again without a flicker of expression the dark eyes and
the blue challenged each other across the narrow width of
white table cloth.
Then the owner of the blue eyes reached out and drained her
glass of ice water at a single draught.
"Ah!" she shivered. "I also am in more hurry than you. But it
would not seem to me polite to nag about it."
"Oh, I beg your pardon," stammered the Young Doctor, and
retreated in turn to his own glass of ice water. It was not
until the soup course was almost over that he succumbed to
any further conversational impulse, and even then indeed it
was formality rather than sociability that drove him to the
effort. "Seeing that you are so kind," he succeeded in
enunciating. "And so--so trusting," he relaxed ever so
slightly, "the least I can do certainly is to identify
myself. My name is Sam Kendrue. And I am a doctor."
"So-o?" conceded the girl without enthusiasm. Quite frankly
she made it clear that the waitress approaching with the
turkey was the only fact in the world that concerned her at
that immediate moment. Yet as one who would conscientiously
acknowledge on second thought that no honest bit of information
was ever really to be scoffed at, she laid down her knife and
fork presently and surveyed the Young Doctor with a slightly
reviving interest. "Sam? Sam Kendrue?" she repeated painstakingly.
"My name is Solvei Kjelland!" she announced with brisk
matter-of-factness, and resumed her eating.
"Your name is--what?" puzzled the Young Doctor.
"Solvei Kjelland," she smiled ever so faintly. "S-o-l-v-e-i,"
she spelled out as one quite familiarly accustomed to such a
task. "K-j-e-l-l-a-n-d. I am a Norwegian!" she flared up
suddenly with the ecstatic breathlessness of one who confides
a really significant surprise.
"A Norwegian?" rallied the Young Doctor. For the first time,
behind the quick shield of his hand, a little teasing smile
began to twitch. "Really, you--you surprise me!" he recovered
with an almost instantly forced gravity. "From your accent
now, I had supposed all along that you were--er--Celtic!"
"Celtic?" queried the girl. Then with one shrewd glance at
the Young Doctor's immobile face she burst out laughing. It
was not a loud laugh. It was indeed a very little laugh, and
most distinctly musical. But in that instant the whole
attention of the room seemed to focus itself suddenly on that
one helpless little table.
"Is there anything specially peculiar looking about us, I
wonder?" bristled the Young Doctor. "Or rather, about me, I
should say?" he corrected himself quickly. "Even that--that
philanthropic woman," he fumed, "who vacated this table for
us! Well, of course I wouldn't say exactly that she was
climbing up on the rungs of her chair, but----"
"Oh, that's nothing," said the girl with unruffled nonchalance.
"She's been staring at us all of the evening. Everybody's been
staring at us all of the evening," she added amiably. Very
daintily, but none the less expeditiously, as she spoke, she
began to turn her attention to the crisp green salad at her
plate. "It is because we are both so tall and fine," she
confided without an atom of self-consciousness.
"Oh, well, really, speak for yourself!" flushed the Young Doctor.
"For myself?" she repeated a bit speculatively. Once again,
in a moment of temporary arrestment, she laid down her knife
and fork to scrutinize the Young Doctor's face. "Oh, no," she
reassured him almost at once. "You are most tall and fine
too! And so brune to my blonde!" she confided as she took up
her fork again. "Certainly it is most striking of us," she
mused at last more to the lettuce than to the Young Doctor.
"But that poor womans over there?" she rallied transiently.
"Everywhere one goes it is the same. 'Old--old maid' is it
that you call her? So sad! So neglected! So 'romanticks' is
it that you say? Everybodys she sees she thinks it is young
lovers! But personally," said the girl, "I am still very
hungry. Let us take what dessert is proffered."
"Oh, of course," acquiesced the Young Doctor. "If I've got to
be--if we've got to be--stared at, I mean, it would certainly
be quite as comfortable to have something to do."
"Perfectly," smiled the girl. "So as we wait for the ices and
the pies let us see what is survived of the toys." And before
the Young Doctor could dissuade her she had lifted her awkwardly
retied bundle to the level of the table, and was earnestly
studying out the relative damages of the green-feathered parrot
and the tiny tin railroad train. To confirm apparently what was
her own suspicion in the matter she handed the railroad train
to the Young Doctor for investigation.
And because the Young Doctor was naturally and sincerely
inquisitive about anything that was broken he bent his dark
head to the task with a sudden real gasp of relief, and for
the next five minutes at least all possible awkwardness
between them seemed merged, then and there, into the easy
give-and-take argument of a thoroughly familiar and accustomed
association.
Once again their small table became the cynosure of all eyes.
The dark Young Doctor alone was quite sufficiently striking
looking. And the girl in her Norse glow and blondness would
have been a marked figure anywhere. But together? And now? At
this very minute? So anxious, so painstaking, so brooding? If
the room had thought them shy "young lovers" a scant half
hour before, goodness knows what it thought them now!
The woman in the corner had most certainly reconstructed her
original impressions. On the way out from her own unsocial
supper she stopped impulsively just behind the Young Doctor's
chair to watch his rather surprising manipulation of the
fractured toy engine wheel. Her face was by no means unpleasant,
but almost exaggeratedly friendly in a plaintive, deprecating
sort of way.
From their focus on the Young Doctor's hands her pale eyes
lifted suddenly to the girl's glowing face, and she held out
a small paper bagful of pink-frosted cakes.
"Take those home," she said, "instead of the poor broken toys!"
"Why--why, thank you!" laughed the girl.
"How--how old are your little ones?" asked the woman quite
irrelevantly.
"Eh?" jerked the Young Doctor. From his joggled hands the little
tin railroad train crashed down into his plate.
With her hands clapped playfully to her ears the girl looked
thoughtfully up at her accoster.
"Why, Lisa is four," she said quite simply. "And Jonathan is six,
and----"
"Oh, have you got a 'Jonathan'?" kindled the woman. Her sallow
face was suddenly quite transfigured with light. "And does he
look like you?" she cried. "Or," sweeping the table with
another deprecating glance, "or does he take after his father?"
"Take after his father?" repeated the girl in frank perplexity.
Her own sweeping glance of her companion's face did not seem
somehow to elucidate the mystery. "'Take?' 'Take after his father?'"
she flamed. "I do not know the idiot--the idio--the--idiom!" she
corrected herself triumphantly.
A little bit perplexed herself, the amiable stranger began
suddenly to button up her coat. "Well, good night!" she
beamed. "Good night! Good night! I hope you may both live to
enjoy to the uttermost the full merits of your little family!"
"Eh?" jumped the Young Doctor. White as a sheet he was suddenly
on his feet, and for the first time that evening a real-looking
smile had twisted itself across at least one side of his
thin-lipped mouth.
"Madam!" he bowed, "neither this young lady here nor I have ever
laid eyes on each other before! Nor is it remotely probable
indeed that in the normal course of events we should ever lay
eyes on each other again! But if you persist so," he bowed,
with a purely nervous glance at his watch, "but if you persist
so--in your--in your--" he floundered futilely. "We shall
doubtless be lying in the same grave by midnight!"
Without even a gasp then he snatched up the girl's purse, her
suitcase, her hat box, his own coat and hat, and bolted for
the cashier's desk.
Close behind him, clasping her scattered toys as best she
might to her breast, followed the blonde Norse girl.
Even when they had finally reached the electric light post on
the farthest corner of the street, the color was only just
beginning to flush back into the Young Doctor's cheek bones.
"If you will now give me the address," he said tersely, "to
which I can forward the supper money, I will put you on a
street car."
"Oh, the address of course is of perfect simplicity," conceded
the girl. "But I do not care for you to put me on a street car,
thank you!"
"Why, certainly I shall put you on a street car!" insisted the
Young Doctor. He was really quite sharp about it. "Almost
everything goes by here--if you only wait long enough," he
shifted a bit uneasily, as he set down both box and suitcase
with a most decided thump.
Silently then for what seemed to him an interminable time they
stood there on the icy, wind-swept curbstone staring out into
the passing green, red, yellow, lights.
"Pretty, is it not!" commented the girl at last.
"'Pretty?'" shivered the Young Doctor. "Why, yes, of course,
suppose so. But which car?" he laughed impatiently. "For Heaven's
sake, don't you know where you want to go?"
"Of course I know where I want to go!" flared the girl. With a
little light touch on his sleeve she pointed off to another
electric light post on a side street. "There!" she said. "That
little pleasant fifth house from the end! That is where I am at
boarding!"
"Well, why didn't you say so!" flushed the Young Doctor. Very
vehemently once more he snatched up her suitcase and her hat box.
With a shrug of her fine athletic shoulders the girl laughed right
out loud into his frowning eyes.
"When a man is of such a positiveness as you are," she confided
impishly, "it is a privilege to reduce his national characteristics.
Ever for one single instant do you ask me, 'Have you finish your
food?' or, 'Do you want to be put on a car?' But always at your
first wish you hurry out and scoot, crying, 'I put you on a car!
I put you on a car!'" With a little sniff of scorn she turned
on her heel and started off at a fine stride toward the house
to which she had just pointed.
It was the Young Doctor now who followed precipitously after.
The street was certainly a quaint, old-fashioned one, and the
boarding house in question by no means lacking in a fine though
dingy sort of dignity.
But the doorbell that the girl rang and rang brought no reassuring
answer. Fumbling anxiously in her purse for a moment, she threw
out her hands with a little gesture of dismay.
"It is that I must also have mislaid my key," she frowned. Then
like a flash of pale sunshine her smile seemed to drive every
possible shadow from her mind. "Oh, well," she cried. "It is
after all only a scarce seven o'clock. Some one in not many
minutes will surely come. And meanwhile," she glowed. "Of such
a fine night! I will just sit down here very happy and take the
air!"
"Take the air?" gasped the Young Doctor. Quite unconsciously as
he spoke he reached up and drew his fur collar a little bit
closer about his neck.
But already the girl had dropped casually down on the top step
and opened the throat of her own dark-fur red coat as one who
was fairly thirsting for air.
"Good night!" she said briskly.
"Good-by!" said the Young Doctor. Before he had even reached
the lower step he was congratulating himself that the incident
was now safely ended,--"comfortably ended," he meant, instead
of awkwardly, as it might so easily have been. "Foreigners were
often so irrational," he considered. Even as he considered, he
turned in spite of himself to investigate the sudden unmistakable
rustle of a paper bag. His suspicion was frankly confirmed.
"See!" brandished the girl triumphantly. "The little pink cake
of the foolish woman!" With an unmistakable chuckle of joy her
white teeth met through the treasure.
In the flash of a second, the perfectly idiotic impulse of a
joke, the Young Doctor lifted a warning finger at her.
"You realize of course that you are eating a--a misapprehension?"
he admonished her with really terrifying severity.
"A misapprehension?" jumped the girl. Very painstakingly then
and there she began to explore the remaining piece of cake in
her hand, tugging at its sponginess, peering under its frostedness.
Then suddenly with a little quick gasp of relief she popped the
sweet morsel into her mouth and smacked her lips upon it "Oh,
no," she beamed. "It tastes perfectly all right to me!"
Like a word slipping hopelessly down a poem toward whatever chosen
rhyme its Poet has already in mind, the Young Doctor suddenly
found himself bumping rather perilously close to the one big wild
hoot of laughter that had evidently been lurking for him in the
situation even from the very first. In a really desperate effort
to fend himself as long as possible from such an undignified
disaster he hastened in all sincerity to rewrap himself in his
stiffest professional manner.
"Well, what about this 'Lisa' and 'Jonathan' business?" he
questioned with unmistakable reproach.
"Oh, shucks!" shrugged the girl. "This tiresome Lisa and Jonathan,
their whole parents are bakers! But as for me," she lowered her
voice, and thrust out her hands with a soft, appealing gesture.
"But as for me, until to-night, for four whole weeks I cry such
salt into my food I cannot eat! Homesickness, yes!" she nodded
with a quick little catch of her breath. "In all the world no
one to speak with except one fat lady and one thin lady and Lisa
and Jonathan and Peter, and--" In an extra impulse of confidence
not unmixed evidently with a certain flare of pride she slid
forward a little on the step. "I am Montessori!" she said.
"What?" snapped the Young Doctor. "Why, what nonsense!" he said.
"Why, what are you talking about? 'Montessori' is a--a system!
And she's an Italian, too, I mean."
"Yes, truly so," conceded the girl. "And in time if the homeache
can be assuaged I shall then learn the system--and remain yet a
Norwegian."
"Oh, you mean you are a Montessori student?" brightened the Young
Doctor.
"Even so," said the girl. "I cannot wait to learn everything.
From here, after I have duly studied little Lisa, little Peter,
and all the others, whose minds most happily are of a perfect
brightness, I must then go on to the sadder schools, and to that
most wonderful place in your Massachusetts where such first brain
work of all was made on the little children. It is that in Norway,"
she winced, "I have a little brother. Our father makes much money,"
she added with apparent irrelevance. "And spends much and gives
much. And once he married him a new wife, and there are many new
children. And one of them, this little little brother, so gold,
so blue, so pinky, all day long he sits and--isn't," she finished
perfectly simply.
"Why--why, that's too bad," said the Young Doctor.
"Yes, very bad," mused the girl. "But some of these ideas here are
of a great cleverness. I do not of course get any of it right yet,"
she acknowledged. "But some of it is quite sporting like a game.
With these toys, now," she pointed, "and all glad things like
industries, and the live cat, and the dog, and grasses and the
flowers, you leave the little child quite loose, it seems, only
watching him, watching him very close, one day, two days, a
hundred if it seems best. And wherever he shall in finality--in
finality--'gravitate,' is it that you say? to the sweet flowers,
or the wood blocks, or the gay, smoothen cat, _there_ it is that
the one big chance of his salvation will most surely be found.
But the engine, or the blocks or the smoothen cat must not be
forced on him, it is so you understand? Of such there would make
no message to his development. But out of _everything_, it is,
that he himself must gravitate to it!"
In the tense sweet earnestness of her up turned face, the eager,
unconscious nearness of her occasional gesture, the far remoteness
of her subject, the sting of the winter night, the glare of electric
light over all, it dawned on the Young Doctor a bit startlingly
that he was frowning down into the eyes of a particularly beautiful
woman, and for some quite unreasonable reason his cheeks began
suddenly to burn like fire. It was as though having all his life
long for one conscientious reason or another denied himself "wine
when it was red," he found himself now, most humiliatingly, with
_ice_ itself going to his head. And just because he was so thoroughly
unaccustomed to having anything go to his head, it went quite
uproariously in fact, changing for that one moment his whole facial
expression. And the instant his facial expression was changed of
course he looked like a different man. And the instant he looked
like a different man of course he began to act like a different man.
"And does this wonderful theory of yours apply only to poor little
children?" he asked with slightly narrowing eyes. "Or am I to
infer?" he laughed. "Or am I to infer that after a whole year of
flaunting city, a whole year of barren indifference to it, my
amazing gravitation to you this evening is positive Montessori
proof that with you and you only rests my life's best salvation?"
Then without the slightest intent of doing it, without even the
slightest warning to himself that he was going to do it, he swooped
down suddenly and kissed her on her lips.
With a little gasp of dismay the girl stumbled to her feet. There
was nothing blonde now about her. Towering up on the step just
above him she was like a young storm-cloud all flame and shadow!
"Oh, what have I done that you should act thus?" she demanded. With
the tears streaming down her face she lashed him with furious
accusations. "You are one of these devils!" she cried. "You are a
wild persons! Was it my fault?" she demanded, "that my bundles burst
from the car? Was it my fault," she demanded, "that restaurants
cannot block foolish women from their food? Was it my fault that
I paid for your stupid supper?"
Neither defending himself nor seeking relief in flight, but with
a face fully if not indeed more shocked than hers the Young Doctor
sank down on the step at her feet, and with his head in his hands
sat rocking himself to and fro.
"No, it isn't your fault!" he assured her and reassured her. "Nor
is it exactly my fault!" he insisted. "But the fault of that damned
piano!"
"The fault of that damned what?" quoted the girl a bit stridently.
But the face that lifted to hers was frankly the face of a
stricken man. Only a chill added to repentance could have altered
so any human countenance.
"On the honor of a man freezing to death!" he attested. "There is
no blame to be attached to anything in the world--except to a
grand piano."
"What is it that you mean?" puzzled the girl. "I am more furious
with you than devils. But I must hear everything."
"I mean," sneezed the poor Young Doctor, "that I am looking for
a kind home for a grand piano!" Even to himself his words sounded
far away and altogether the words of a stranger. It was indeed as
though he had been thrust quite unrehearsed into the leading part
of a roaring farce which was already halfway through its evening
performance. A fearful spirit of bravado seemed really his one
chance of making any possible "get-away" with the whole mad
situation. But even an irate audience could not have misjudged
for a moment the acute distress and anxiety behind the bravado.
"It is just this way," he began all over again. "A perfectly
dreadful woman drove me out of my office to-night--with a grand
piano!" From the stony expression, however, in the girl's face
this did not seem to be just the cue that she was looking for.
In the wisest impulse of his life he decided suddenly to throw
himself upon her sense of mercy rather than upon her sense of
humor. "Truly it is this way!" He jumped up and implored her
to believe him. "I am as new as you almost, in this big city.
Equally with you perhaps I suffer what you call homeacheness!
It is very hard to get a good start in a strange place. Lots of
charity chances and all that. But very little money. I had a real
patient once, though!" he bragged ironically. "A very rich woman,
awfully nice and all that. But I hate her. Every chance that she
gets she torments me. She has a sort of theory, I think, that
tormenting is very stimulating to the nervous system. It certainly
is. We fight like young cats and dogs! And yet as I say she is
awfully nice. And when she went away she paid me not only justly
but mighty generously for my brief services. It cancelled almost
a year's debts. But she was horridly mad because I wouldn't go
with her,--as a kind of a trained, tame attendant you know. But
I told her I couldn't leave my office. So she sent me a grand
piano, the wretch!" he finished with flaming anger.
To the step just below him the girl tripped down and turning
about stood peering up into his face with a rather disconcerting
intensity.
"Here am I," she gasped, "who suffer and languish for a 'grand
piano' as you call it. And you?" As though in real pain she began
to wring her slim hands together. "And you? A lady gives you a
grand piano and you curse her as a wretchedness!"
"Yes, I know," deprecated the Young Doctor. "But you see there
isn't room in my office for both the piano and myself! My office
is too small, you see. And with the piano filling up the whole
center of the room? Why, it's absurd!" he quickened. "It's rotten!
Patients who come don't know whether they've come for a music lesson
or to be lanced! And besides," he added as his most culminative
grievance, "I don't know one note from another! And the woman knew
that I didn't! And worse than anything there are hordes of the most
indecent little cupids appliqued or something all over the front of
the thing!"
"Surely, something could be done," suggested the girl with a vague
sort of farawayness in her blue eyes.
"Yes, that's just it!" remarked the Young Doctor, flushing. "I've
already done it!"
Abjectly with his bared head bowed before her he stood as one
awaiting just sentence.
"Of a personally," said the girl with her own cheeks spotting
bright red. "Of a personally--I do not quite see the connection."
"Why the connection is perfectly clear!" insisted the Young
Doctor. "She sent me the piano on purpose to crowd me out of
my office! She wanted to crowd me out of my own office! She dared
to affirm even that I needed to be crowded out of my own office!
She tried to make me mad! She wanted to make me mad! She had the
cheek to suggest, I mean, that nothing really interesting ever
would happen to me until I once did get good and mad!" As though
temporarily exhausted by his tirade he sagged back for a moment
against the railing of the steps. His face did look a bit white
and his teeth were almost chattering. "Well, I certainly did get
good and mad this afternoon," he affirmed with a wry sort of
apology. "And because I was so blooming mad I dashed out for a
tremendous walk. And because I took such a tremendous walk I
developed an appetite like forty tigers. And because I developed
an appetite like forty tigers I rushed for the first restaurant I
could find. And because I rushed for the first restaurant I could
find I happened to see you at the exact moment when----"
"Oh, stop, stop, stop!" laughed the girl with her hands clapped
suddenly over her ears. "It is all too much like the--like 'The
House that the Jack-Man built!'"
"Well, at least," grinned the Young Doctor, "it seems to be 'The
Adventure that the Grand Piano Threatened.'"
"The--the Adventure?" puzzled the girl.
"Why, yes," insisted the Young Doctor. "That's what this Mrs. Tome
Gallien prophesied you know, that the piano would bring me an
adventure! So you, very evidently, are the----"