The office of Dwight Herbert Deacon, Dentist, Gold Work a Speciality
(sic) in black lettering, and Justice of the Peace in gold, was above a
store which had been occupied by one unlucky tenant after another, and
had suffered long periods of vacancy when ladies' aid societies served
lunches there, under great white signs, badly lettered. Some months of
disuse were now broken by the news that the store had been let to a
music man. A music man, what on earth was that, Warbleton inquired.
The music man arrived, installed three pianos, and filled his window
with sheet music, as sung by many ladies who swung in hammocks or kissed
their hands on the music covers. While he was still moving in, Dwight
Herbert Deacon wandered downstairs and stood informally in the door of
the new store. The music man, a pleasant-faced chap of thirty-odd, was
rubbing at the face of a piano.
"Hello, there!" he said. "Can I sell you an upright?"
"If I can take it out in pulling your teeth, you can," Dwight replied.
"Or," said he, "I might marry you free, either one."
On this their friendship began. Thenceforth, when business was dull, the
idle hours of both men were beguiled with idle gossip.
"How the dickens did you think of pianos for a line?" Dwight asked him
once. "Now, my father was a dentist, so I came by it natural--never
entered my head to be anything else. But _pianos_--"
The music man--his name was Neil Cornish--threw up his chin in a boyish
fashion, and said he'd be jiggered if he knew. All up and down the
Warbleton main street, the chances are that the answer would sound the
same. "I'm studying law when I get the chance," said Cornish, as one who
makes a bid to be thought of more highly.
"I see," said Dwight, respectfully dwelling on the verb.
Later on Cornish confided more to Dwight: He was to come by a little
inheritance some day--not much, but something. Yes, it made a man feel a
certain confidence....
"_Don't_ it?" said Dwight heartily, as if he knew.
Every one liked Cornish. He told funny stories, and he never compared
Warbleton save to its advantage. So at last Dwight said tentatively at
lunch:
"What if I brought that Neil Cornish up for supper, one of these
nights?"
"Oh, Dwightie, do," said Ina. "If there's a man in town, let's know it."
"What if I brought him up to-night?"
Up went Ina's eyebrows. _To-night_?
"'Scalloped potatoes and meat loaf and sauce and bread and butter,"
Lulu contributed.
Cornish came to supper. He was what is known in Warbleton as dapper.
This Ina saw as she emerged on the veranda in response to Dwight's
informal halloo on his way upstairs. She herself was in white muslin,
now much too snug, and a blue ribbon. To her greeting their guest
replied in that engaging shyness which is not awkwardness. He moved in
some pleasant web of gentleness and friendliness.
They asked him the usual questions, and he replied, rocking all the time
with a faint undulating motion of head and shoulders: Warbleton was one
of the prettiest little towns that he had ever seen. He liked the
people--they seemed different. He was sure to like the place, already
liked it. Lulu came to the door in Ninian's thin black-and-white gown.
She shook hands with the stranger, not looking at him, and said, "Come
to supper, all." Monona was already in her place, singing under-breath.
Mrs. Bett, after hovering in the kitchen door, entered; but they forgot
to introduce her.
"Where's Di?" asked Ina. "I declare that daughter of mine is never
anywhere."
A brief silence ensued as they were seated. There being a guest, grace
was to come, and Dwight said unintelligibly and like lightning a generic
appeal to bless this food, forgive all our sins and finally save us. And
there was something tremendous, in this ancient form whereby all stages
of men bow in some now unrecognized recognition of the ceremonial of
taking food to nourish life--and more.
At "Amen" Di flashed in, her offices at the mirror fresh upon
her--perfect hair, silk dress turned up at the hem. She met Cornish,
crimsoned, fluttered to her seat, joggled the table and, "Oh, dear," she
said audibly to her mother, "I forgot my ring."
The talk was saved alive by a frank effort. Dwight served, making jests
about everybody coming back for more. They went on with Warbleton
happenings, improvements and openings; and the runaway. Cornish tried
hard to make himself agreeable, not ingratiatingly but good-naturedly.
He wished profoundly that before coming he had looked up some more
stories in the back of the Musical Gazettes. Lulu surreptitiously
pinched off an ant that was running at large upon the cloth and
thereafter kept her eyes steadfastly on the sugar-bowl to see if it
could be from _that_. Dwight pretended that those whom he was helping a
second time were getting more than their share and facetiously landed on
Di about eating so much that she would grow up and be married, first
thing she knew. At the word "married" Di turned scarlet, laughed
heartily and lifted her glass of water.
"And what instruments do you play?" Ina asked Cornish, in an unrelated
effort to lift the talk to musical levels.
"Well, do you know," said the music man, "I can't play a thing. Don't
know a black note from a white one."
"You don't? Why, Di plays very prettily," said Di's mother. "But then
how can you tell what songs to order?" Ina cried.
"Oh, by the music houses. You go by the sales." For the first time it
occurred to Cornish that this was ridiculous. "You know, I'm really
studying law," he said, shyly and proudly. Law! How very interesting,
from Ina. Oh, but won't he bring up some songs some evening, for them to
try over? Her and Di? At this Di laughed and said that she was out of
practice and lifted her glass of water. In the presence of adults Di
made one weep, she was so slender, so young, so without defences, so
intolerably sensitive to every contact, so in agony lest she be found
wanting. It was amazing how unlike was this Di to the Di who had
ensnared Bobby Larkin. What was one to think?
Cornish paid very little attention to her. To Lulu he said kindly,
"Don't you play, Miss--?" He had not caught her name--no stranger ever
did catch it. But Dwight now supplied it: "Miss Lulu Bett," he explained
with loud emphasis, and Lulu burned her slow red. This question Lulu had
usually answered by telling how a felon had interrupted her lessons and
she had stopped "taking"--a participle sacred to music, in Warbleton.
This vignette had been a kind of epitome of Lulu's biography. But now
Lulu was heard to say serenely:
"No, but I'm quite fond of it. I went to a lovely concert--two weeks
ago."
They all listened. Strange indeed to think of Lulu as having had
experiences of which they did not know.
"Yes," she said. "It was in Savannah, Georgia." She flushed, and lifted
her eyes in a manner of faint defiance. "Of course," she said, "I don't
know the names of all the different instruments they played, but there
were a good many." She laughed pleasantly as a part of her sentence.
"They had some lovely tunes," she said. She knew that the subject was
not exhausted and she hurried on. "The hall was real large," she
superadded, "and there were quite a good many people there. And it was
too warm."
"I see," said Cornish, and said what he had been waiting to say: That he
too had been in Savannah, Georgia.
Lulu lit with pleasure. "Well!" she said. And her mind worked and she
caught at the moment before it had escaped. "Isn't it a pretty city?"
she asked. And Cornish assented with the intense heartiness of the
provincial. He, too, it seemed, had a conversational appearance to
maintain by its own effort. He said that he had enjoyed being in that
town and that he was there for two hours.
"I was there for a week." Lulu's superiority was really pretty.
"Have good weather?" Cornish selected next.
Oh, yes. And they saw all the different buildings--but at her "we" she
flushed and was silenced. She was colouring and breathing quickly. This
was the first bit of conversation of this sort of Lulu's life.
After supper Ina inevitably proposed croquet, Dwight pretended to try to
escape and, with his irrepressible mien, talked about Ina, elaborate in
his insistence on the third person--"She loves it, we have to humour
her, you know how it is. Or no! You don't know! But you will"--and more
of the same sort, everybody laughing heartily, save Lulu, who looked
uncomfortable and wished that Dwight wouldn't, and Mrs. Bett, who paid
no attention to anybody that night, not because she had not been
introduced, an omission, which she had not even noticed, but merely as
another form of "tantrim." A self-indulgence.
They emerged for croquet. And there on the porch sat Jenny Plow and
Bobby, waiting for Di to keep an old engagement, which Di pretended to
have forgotten, and to be frightfully annoyed to have to keep. She met
the objections of her parents with all the batteries of her coquetry,
set for both Bobby and Cornish and, bold in the presence of "company,"
at last went laughing away. And in the minute areas of her consciousness
she said to herself that Bobby would be more in love with her than ever
because she had risked all to go with him; and that Cornish ought to be
distinctly attracted to her because she had not stayed. She was as
primitive as pollen.
Ina was vexed. She said so, pouting in a fashion which she should have
outgrown with white muslin and blue ribbons, and she had outgrown none
of these things.
"That just spoils croquet," she said. "I'm vexed. Now we can't have a
real game."
From the side-door, where she must have been lingering among the
waterproofs, Lulu stepped forth.
"I'll play a game," she said.
* * * * *
When Cornish actually proposed to bring some music to the Deacons', Ina
turned toward Dwight Herbert all the facets of her responsibility. And
Ina's sense of responsibility toward Di was enormous, oppressive,
primitive, amounting, in fact, toward this daughter of Dwight Herbert's
late wife, to an ability to compress the offices of stepmotherhood into
the functions of the lecture platform. Ina was a fountain of admonition.
Her idea of a daughter, step or not, was that of a manufactured product,
strictly, which you constantly pinched and moulded. She thought that a
moral preceptor had the right to secrete precepts. Di got them all. But
of course the crest of Ina's responsibility was to marry Di. This verb
should be transitive only when lovers are speaking of each other, or the
minister or magistrate is speaking of lovers. It should never be
transitive when predicated of parents or any other third party. But it
is. Ina was quite agitated by its transitiveness as she took to her
husband her incredible responsibility.
"You know, Herbert," said Ina, "if this Mr. Cornish comes here _very_
much, what we may expect."
"What may we expect?" demanded Dwight Herbert, crisply.
Ina always played his games, answered what he expected her to answer,
pretended to be intuitive when she was not so, said "I know" when she
didn't know at all. Dwight Herbert, on the other hand, did not even play
her games when he knew perfectly what she meant, but pretended not to
understand, made her repeat, made her explain. It was as if Ina _had_ to
please him for, say, a living; but as for that dentist, he had to please
nobody. In the conversations of Dwight and Ina you saw the historical
home forming in clots in the fluid wash of the community.
"He'll fall in love with Di," said Ina.
"And what of that? Little daughter will have many a man fall in love
with her, _I_ should say."
"Yes, but, Dwight, what do you think of him?"
"What do I think of him? My dear Ina, I have other things to think of."
"But we don't know anything about him, Dwight--a stranger so."
"On the other hand," said Dwight with dignity, "I know a good deal about
him."
With a great air of having done the fatherly and found out about this
stranger before bringing him into the home, Dwight now related a number
of stray circumstances dropped by Cornish in their chance talks.
"He has a little inheritance coming to him--shortly," Dwight wound up.
"An inheritance--really? How much, Dwight?"
"Now isn't that like a woman. Isn't it?"
"I _thought_ he was from a good family," said Ina.
"My mercenary little pussy!"
"Well," she said with a sigh, "I shouldn't be surprised if Di did really
accept him. A young girl is awfully flattered when a good-looking older
man pays her attention. Haven't you noticed that?"
Dwight informed her, with an air of immense abstraction, that he left
all such matters to her. Being married to Dwight was like a perpetual
rehearsal, with Dwight's self-importance for audience.
A few evenings later, Cornish brought up the music. There was something
overpowering in this brown-haired chap against the background of his
negligible little shop, his whole capital in his few pianos. For he
looked hopefully ahead, woke with plans, regarded the children in the
street as if, conceivably, children might come within the confines of
his life as he imagined it. A preposterous little man. And a
preposterous store, empty, echoing, bare of wall, the three pianos near
the front, the remainder of the floor stretching away like the corridors
of the lost. He was going to get a dark curtain, he explained, and
furnish the back part of the store as his own room. What dignity in
phrasing, but how mean that little room would look--cot bed, washbowl
and pitcher, and little mirror--almost certainly a mirror with a wavy
surface, almost certainly that.
"And then, you know," he always added, "I'm reading law."
The Plows had been asked in that evening. Bobby was there. They were,
Dwight Herbert said, going to have a sing.
Di was to play. And Di was now embarked on the most difficult feat of
her emotional life, the feat of remaining to Bobby Larkin the lure, the
beloved lure, the while to Cornish she instinctively played the rôle of
womanly little girl.
"Up by the festive lamp, everybody!" Dwight Herbert cried.
As they gathered about the upright piano, that startled, Dwightish
instrument, standing in its attitude of unrest, Lulu came in with
another lamp.
"Do you need this?" she asked.
They did not need it, there was, in fact, no place to set it, and this
Lulu must have known. But Dwight found a place. He swept Ninian's
photograph from the marble shelf of the mirror, and when Lulu had placed
the lamp there, Dwight thrust the photograph into her hands.
"You take care of that," he said, with a droop of lid discernible only
to those who--presumably--loved him. His old attitude toward Lulu had
shown a terrible sharpening in these ten days since her return.
She stood uncertainly, in the thin black and white gown which Ninian had
bought for her, and held Ninian's photograph and looked helplessly
about. She was moving toward the door when Cornish called:
"See here! Aren't _you_ going to sing?"
"What?" Dwight used the falsetto. "Lulu sing? _Lulu_?"
She stood awkwardly. She had a piteous recrudescence of her old agony at
being spoken to in the presence of others. But Di had opened the "Album
of Old Favourites," which Cornish had elected to bring, and now she
struck the opening chords of "Bonny Eloise." Lulu stood still, looking
rather piteously at Cornish. Dwight offered his arm, absurdly crooked.
The Plows and Ina and Di began to sing. Lulu moved forward, and stood a
little away from them, and sang, too. She was still holding Ninian's
picture. Dwight did not sing. He lifted his shoulders and his eyebrows
and watched Lulu.
When they had finished, "Lulu the mocking bird!" Dwight cried. He said
"ba-ird."
"Fine!" cried Cornish. "Why, Miss Lulu, you have a good voice!"
"Miss Lulu Bett, the mocking ba-ird!" Dwight insisted.
Lulu was excited, and in some accession of faint power. She turned to
him now, quietly, and with a look of appraisal.
"Lulu the dove," she then surprisingly said, "to put up with you."
It was her first bit of conscious repartee to her brother-in-law.
Cornish was bending over Di.
"What next do you say?" he asked.
She lifted her eyes, met his own, held them. "There's such a lovely,
lovely sacred song here," she suggested, and looked down.
"You like sacred music?"
She turned to him her pure profile, her eyelids fluttering up, and said:
"I love it."
"That's it. So do I. Nothing like a nice sacred piece," Cornish
declared.
Bobby Larkin, at the end of the piano, looked directly into Di's face.
"Give _me_ ragtime," he said now, with the effect of bursting out of
somewhere. "Don't you like ragtime?" he put it to her directly.
Di's eyes danced into his, they sparkled for him, her smile was a smile
for him alone, all their store of common memories was in their look.
"Let's try 'My Rock, My Refuge,'" Cornish suggested. "That's got up real
attractive."
Di's profile again, and her pleased voice saying that this was the very
one she had been hoping to hear him sing.