The Lovely Lady
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Mary Austin >> The Lovely Lady
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"If you have walked over from Bloombury you must be tired," she said,
"and chilled, perhaps. Come nearer the fire."
"No, thank you," Peter had managed, "I am quite warm," as in fact he
was, and a little flushed. He sat down provisionally on the edge of the
chair and looked at Mr. Dassonville.
"I came on business. I don't know if you will mind its being Sunday, but
I couldn't get away from the store on other days."
"Quite right, quite right." Mr. Dassonville had lost his place in the
book and laid it on his knee. "Private business? My dear, perhaps----"
"Oh, no--no," protested Peter handsomely. "I'd rather she stayed. It
isn't. At least ... I don't know if you will consider it private or
not."
"Go on," urged Mr. Dassonville.
"I just came to ask you," Peter explained, "if you don't mind telling
me, how you got rich?"
"But bless you, young man," exclaimed Mr. Dassonville, "I'm not rich."
This for a beginning, was, on the face of it, disconcerting. Peter
looked about at the rows of books, at the thick, soft carpet and the
leather-covered furniture, and at the rings on Mrs. Dassonville's hand.
If Mr. Dassonville were not rich, how then--unless----
"I beg your pardon, sir, but I thought--that is, everybody says you are
the richest man in these parts."
"As to that, well, perhaps, I have a little more money than my
neighbours."
Peter breathed relief. The beautiful Mrs. Dassonville's rings were paid
for, then.
"But as to being _rich_, why, when you come to a really rich man all
I've got wouldn't be a pinch to him." Mr. Dassonville illustrated with
his own thumb and fingers how little that would be. "We don't have
really rich men in a place like Harmony," he concluded. "You have to go
to the city for that."
"You've got everything you want, haven't you?"
Mr. Dassonville looked over at his wife, and the smile bloomed again; he
smiled quietly to himself as he admitted it. "Yes, I've got everything I
want."
They were quiet, all of them, for a little while, with Peter turning his
hat over in his hands and Mr. Dassonville laying the tips of his fingers
together before him, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair.
"I wish," said Peter at last, "you would tell me how you did it."
"How I got more money than my neighbours? Well, I wasn't born with it."
This was distinctly encouraging. Neither was Peter.
"No two men, I suppose, make money in the same way," went on the man who
had, "but there are three or four things to be observed by all of them.
In the first place one must be very hard-working."
"Yes," said Peter.
"And one must never lose sight of the object worked for. Not"--as if he
had followed the boy's inward drop of dismay--"that a man should think
of nothing but getting money. On the contrary, I consider it very
essential for a man to have some escape from his business, some change
of pasture to run his mind in. He comes fresher to his work so. What I
mean is that _when_ he works he must make every stroke count toward the
end he has in view. Do you understand?"
"I think so." The House and the Shining Walls were safe, at any rate.
"And then," Mr. Dassonville checked off the points on his fingers, "he
must always save something from his income, no matter how small it is."
"I try to do that," confessed Peter, "but what with Ellen's back being
bad, and the interest on the mortgage, it's not so easy."
"Is there a mortgage? I am sorry for that, for the next thing I was
going to say is that he must never go into debt, never on any account."
"My father was sick; it was an accident," Peter protested loyally.
"So! I think I remember. Well, it is unfortunate, but where there is a
debt the only thing is to reduce it as steadily as possible, and if this
mortgage teaches you the trick of saving it may not be such a bad thing
for you. But when a man works and saves for a long time without getting
any sensible benefit, he sometimes thinks that saving and working are
not worth while. You must never make that mistake."
"Oh, no," said Peter. It seemed to him that they were getting on very
well indeed.
"There is another thing I should like to say," Mr. Dassonville went on,
"but I am not sure I can put it plainly. It is that you must not try to
be too wise." He smiled a little to Peter's blankness. "I believe in
Harmony it is called looking on all sides of a thing, but there is
always one side of everything like the moon which is turned from us. You
must just start from where you are and keep moving."
"I see," said Peter, looking thoughtfully into the fire, in imitation of
Mr. Dassonville. And there being no more advice forthcoming he began to
wonder if he ought to sit a while from politeness, as people did in
Bloombury, or go at once. Mrs. Dassonville got up and came behind her
husband's chair.
"Don't you think you ought to tell him, David, that there are other
things worth having besides money; better worth?"
"You, perhaps." Mr. Dassonville took the hand of his wife laid on his
shoulder and held it against his cheek; it brought out for Peter
suddenly, how many years younger she was, and what he had heard of Mr.
Dassonville having married her from among the summer folk who came to
Harmony for the pine woods and the sea air. "Ah, but I'm not sure I'd
have you without a great deal of it. It takes money to raise rare plants
like you. But I ought to say," still holding his wife's hand to his
cheek and watching Peter across it, "that I think it is a very good sign
that you are willing to ask. The most of poor men will sit about and
rail and envy the rich, but hardly one would think to ask how it is
done, or believe if he were told. They've a notion it's all gouging and
luck, and you couldn't beat that out of them if you tried. Very few of
them understand how simple success is; it isn't easy often, but it is
always simple."
Peter supposed that he really ought to go after that, though he did not
know how to manage it until Mrs. Dassonville smiled at him over her
husband's shoulder and asked him what sort of work he did. "Oh, if you
know about gardens," she interrupted him, "you can help a little. There
are such a lot of things coming up in mine that I don't know the names
of."
It flashed out to Peter long afterward that she had simply provided an
easy way for him to get out of the house now that his visit was
terminated. She held the white fold of her shawl over her head with one
hand and gathered the trailing skirts with the other. They rustled as
she moved like the leaves of the elms at night above the roof, as she
led him along the walk where little straight spears of green and blunt
flower crowns faintly tinged with colour came up thickly in the borders.
So by degrees she got him down past the hyacinth beds and the nodding
buds of the daffodils to the gate and on the road again, walking home in
the chill early twilight with the pricking of a pleasant excitement in
his veins.
It was that, perhaps, and the sense of having got so much more out of it
than any account of his visit would justify, that kept Peter from saying
much to his mother that night about his talk with the rich man; he asked
her instead if she had ever seen Mrs. Dassonville.
"Yes," she assured him. "Mr. Dassonville drove her over to Mrs.
Tillinghurst's funeral in October. They had only been married a little
while then; she is the second Mrs. Dassonville, you know; the first died
years ago. I thought her a very lovely lady."
"A lovely lady," Peter said the phrase under his breath. The sound of it
was like the soft drawing of silken skirts.
His mother looked at him across the supper table and was pleased to see
the renewal of cheerfulness, and then, motherlike, sighed to think that
Peter was getting so old now that if he didn't choose to tell her things
she had no right to ask him. "Your walk has done you good," was all she
said, and it must have been the case, for that very night as soon as his
head had touched the pillow he was off again, as he hadn't been since
Ellen fell ill, to the House of the Shining Walls. It rose stately
against a blur of leafless woods and crocus-coloured sky. The garden
before it was all full of spring bulbs and the scent of daffodils. The
Princess came walking in it as before, but she was no Princess now,
merely a woman with her dark hair brushed up in a half moon from her
brow and her skirts drawing after her with a silken rustle; her face was
dim and sweet, with only a faint, a very faint, reminder of Ada, and her
name was the Lovely Lady.
PART TWO
IN WHICH PETER
BECOMES INVISIBLE ON THE
WAY TO GROWING RICH
PART TWO
IN WHICH PETER BECOMES INVISIBLE ON
THE WAY TO GROWING RICH
In the late summer of that year Peter went up to the city with Mr.
Greenslet to lay in his winter stock and remained in canned goods with
Siegel Brothers' Household Emporium. That his mother had rented the
farming land for cash was the immediate occasion of his setting out, but
there were several other reasons and a great many opinions. Mr.
Greenslet had a boy of his own coming on for Peter's place; Bet, the
mare, had died, and the farm implements wanted renewing; in spite of
which Mrs. Weatheral could hardly have made up her mind to spare him
except for the opportune appearance of the cash renter. With that and
the chickens and the sewing, she and Ellen could take care of themselves
and the interest, which would leave all that Peter could make to count
against the mortgage.
They put it hopefully to one another so, as they sat about the kitchen
stove, all three of them holding hands, on the evening before his
departure. But the opinions, which were rather thicker at Bloombury than
opportunities, were by no means so confident as Peter could have wished
if he had known them. Mr. Greenslet thought it couldn't be much worse
than Peter's present situation, and the neighbours were sure it wasn't
much better. The minister had a great deal to say of the temptations of
a young man in the city, which was afterward invalidated by the city's
turning out quite another place than he described it.
It was left for Ellen and Mrs. Jim Harvey to make the happy
prognostication. "You can trust Peter," Ada was confident.
"But you got to be mighty cute to get in with those city fellows," her
husband warned her, "and Peter's so dashed simple; never sees anything
except what's right in front of him. Now a man"--Jim assumed this estate
for himself in the right of being three months married--"has got to look
on all sides of a thing."
As for Ellen, she hadn't the slightest doubt that Peter was shortly to
become immensely wealthy and she was to go up and keep house for him.
"There'll be gold chairs in the parlour and real Brussels," she
anticipated. Peter affected to think it unlikely that she could be
spared by the highly mythical person who was to carry her off to keep
house for himself. Somehow Peter could never fall into the normal
Bloombury attitude of thinking that if you had hip disease, your life
was bound to be different from everybody's and you might as well say so
right out, flat-footed, and be done with it.
With all this, finally he was got off to the city in the wake of Mr.
Greenslet, and the first discovery he made there was that outside of
Siegel Brothers, and a collarless man with a discouraged moustache who
appeared in the hall of his lodging-house when the rent was due, he was
practically invisible. As he went up and down the stairs sodden with
scrub water which never by any possible chance left them scrubbed,
nobody spoke to him. Nobody in the street saw him walking to and fro in
his young loneliness. There were men passing there with faces like Mr.
Dassonville's, keen and competent, and lovely ladies in soft becoming
wraps and bright winged hats--such hats! Peter would like to have hailed
some of these as one immeasurably behind but still in the way, seized of
that precious inward quality which manifests itself in competency and
brightness. He would have liked to feel them looking on friendlily at
his business of becoming rich; but he remained, as far as any word from
them was concerned, completely invisible. He came after a while to the
conclusion that most of those who went up and down with him were in the
same unregarded condition.
The city appeared quite habituated to this state of affairs; hordes of
them came and went unconfronted between banked windows of warmth and
loveliness, past doors from which light and music overflowed into the
dim street in splashes of colour and sound, where people equally under
the prohibition lapped them up hungrily like dogs at puddles. Sometimes
in the street cars or subways he brushed against fair girls from whom
the delicate aroma of personality was like a waft out of that country
of which his preferences and appreciations acknowledged him a native,
but no smallest flutter of kinship ever put forth from them to Peter.
The place was crammed full of everything that anybody could want and
nobody could get at it, at least not Peter, nor anybody he knew at
Siegel Brothers. And at the lodging house they seemed never to have
heard of the undiminished heaps of splendour that lay piled behind plate
glass and polished counters. It was extraordinary, incredible, that he
wasn't to have the least of them.
As the winter closed in on him, the restrictions of daily living rose so
thick upon him that they began to prevent him from his dreams. He could
no longer get through them to the House with the Shining Walls. Often as
he lay in his bed trying to believe he was warm enough, he would set off
for it down the lanes of blinding city light through which the scream of
the trolley pursued him, only to see it glimmer palely on him through
impenetrable plate glass, or defended from him by huge trespass signs
that appeared to have some relation to the fact that he was not yet so
rich as he expected to be. Times when he would wake out of his sleep,
it would be to a strange sense of severances and loss, and though he did
not know exactly what ailed him, it was the loss of all his dreams.
After a while the whole city seemed to ache with that loss. He would lie
in his narrow bed and think that if he did not see his mother and
Bloombury again he would probably die of it.
Then along in the beginning of April somebody saw him. It was in the
dusk between supper and bed time, walking on the viaduct where he had
the park below him. There was a wash of blue still in the sky and a thin
blade of a moon tinging it with citron; here and there the light
glittered on the trickle of sap on the chafed boughs. It was just here
that he met her. She was about his own age, and she was walking oddly,
as though unconscious of the city all about her, with short picked
steps, and her hat with the tilt to it of a girl who knows herself
admired. She had a rose at her breast which she straightened now and
then, or smoothed a fold of her dress and hummed as she walked. Her
cheeks were bright even in the dusk, and some strange, quick fear kept
pace with her glancing. Peter was walking heavily himself, as the young
do when the dreams have gone out of them, and as they passed in the
light of the arc that danced delicately to the wandering air, the girl's
look skimmed him like a swallow. She must have turned just behind him,
for in a moment she drifted past his shoulder.
"Hello!" she said.
"Hello!" said Peter, but, in the moment it had taken to drag that up
from under his astonishment, she had passed him; her laugh as she went
brushed the tip of his youth like a swallow's wing. It remained with him
as a little, far spark; it seemed as if a dream was about to spin itself
out from it. He went around that way several times on his evening walks
in hopes that he might meet her again.
As though the spark had lightened a little of the blank unrecognition
with which the city met him, he was seen that day and in no unfriendly
aspect by "our Mr. Croker" of Siegel Brothers. The running gear of a
great concern like the Household Emporium pressed, in the days of
Peter's apprenticeship, unequally at times on its employees, and the
galled spot of the canned goods department was Blinders the bundle boy.
His other name was Horace and he was chiefly remarkable for pimples
which he seemed to think interesting, and for a state of active
resentment against anybody who gave him anything to do. The world for
Horace was a dark jungle full of grouches and pulls and privilege and
devious guile.
That the propensity which Peter had developed for inquiring every half
hour or so if he hadn't got that done yet, could be nothing else but a
cabal directed against Blinders' four dollars and a half a week, he was
convinced. In all the time that he could spare from his pimples, Horace
rehearsed a martyr's air designed to convey to Mr. Croker that though he
would suffer in silence he was none the less suffering. It being
precisely Mr. Croker's business to rap out grouches as an expert
mechanician taps defective cogs, it happened the day after Peter's
meeting with the girl that the worst hopes of Horace were realized.
"Aw, they're always a pickin' on me, Mr. Croker, that's what they are,
Mr. Croker," Horace defended himself, preparing to snivel if the
occasion seemed to demand it, by taking out his gum and sticking it on
the inside of his sleeve. "I can't handle 'em no faster, Mr. Croker."
"Not the way you go at it," Peter assured him. Anybody could have told
by the way he included Mr. Croker in his cheerfulness that there was
something between them. "You turn 'em over too many times and you use
too much paper and too much string." Suddenly Peter reddened with
embarrassment. "Not that that makes any difference to a big firm like
this," he apologized, "but in a small place every little counts." He
turned the package deftly and began to illustrate his method. "When
you're tying up calico with one hand and taking in eggs and butter with
the other and telling three people the price of things at the same
time," he explained, "you have to notice things like this."
"I see," said Mr. Croker. "You try it, Blinders."
"Aw, what's the matter with the way I was doin' it?" wailed Horace.
"If you don't feel quite up to it----" Mr. Croker hinted. Horace did, he
wrapped with alacrity and Peter showed him how to hold the string.
"You come along with me, Weatheral," Mr. Croker commanded. Horace took
his gum out of his cuff and made dark prognostication as to what was
probably to be done to Peter.
What Peter thought was that he should probably become very unpopular
with his fellow clerks. Croker took him across to dry goods, where girls
were tying bundles in little cages over the sales ladies' heads, and had
him repeat the method of handling string. Except that he thought he
should get to like Mr. Croker, the incident made no particular
impression on Peter--so dulled were all his senses for want of
dreams,--and passed wholly out of mind.
It was two or three days after that he saw the girl again, nearer the
end of the viaduct, where four or five streets poured light and
confusion into Venable Square. She was going on ahead, hurrying and
pretending not to hurry to overtake a man to whom she wished to speak.
She was quite close to him, she was speaking, and suddenly he gave a
little outward jerk with his elbow which caught hers unexpectedly and
whirled her back against the parapet. The little purse she was carrying
fell from her hand. The man gave a quick laugh over his shoulder and
ploughed his way across the street.
"The skunk!" Peter's list of expletives was not extensive. He picked up
the flat little purse and handed it back to her. "Shall I go after him?
Did you know him?"
The girl was holding on to the parapet with a little choky laugh. "Oh,
yes, I know that kind. No, I don't want him!"
"He ought to have a good thrashing," Peter was convinced. The girl
looked up at him with a sudden curiosity.
"You're from the country, ain't you? I thought so the other night. I can
always tell."
"I guess you're from the country yourself," Peter hazarded. She was
prettier even than he had thought. Her glance had left his, however, and
was roving up and down the hurrying crowd as though testing it for some
plunge she was about to make.
"If you wanted me to see you home----" Peter hinted; he did not know
quite what was expected of him. She answered with a little sharp noise
which ended in a cough.
"I guess you're real kind," she admitted, "but I ain't goin' home just
yet. I got a date." She moved off then, and since it was in the
direction he was going, there was nothing for Peter to do but move with
her, on the other side of the wide pavement. At the turn she drifted
back to his side again; it seemed to Peter there was amusement in her
tone.
"You got anything to do Saturday about this time?" Peter hadn't. "Well,
I'll be here--savvy?" But before he could make her any assurance she
laughed again and slipped into the crowd.
Peter knew a great many facts about life. There were human failings even
in Bloombury, and what Peter didn't know about the city had been largely
made up to him by the choice conversation of J. Wilkinson Cohn, in
staples, at the next counter to him. Anybody who listened long enough
to J. Wilkinson's personal reminiscences would have found himself fully
instructed for every possible contingency likely to arise between a
gentleman of undoubted attractions and the ladies, but there are forces
in youth that are stronger than experience. It is a very old, old way of
the world for young things to walk abroad in the spring and meet one
another.
Peter strolled along the viaduct Saturday and felt his youth beat in him
pleasantly when he saw her come. She had on a different hat, and the
earlier hour showed him the shining of her eyes above the raddled
cheeks.
"We could go down in the park a piece," he suggested as they turned in
together along the parapet. There was a delicate damp smell coming up
from it on the night, like the Bloombury lanes.
"You're regular country, aren't you?" There was an accent of impatience
in her tone, "I haven't had my supper yet."
"Well, what do you say to a piece of roast beef and a cup of coffee?"
Peter had planned this magnificence as he came along fingering his pay
envelope. He knew just the place, he told her. The feeling of his proper
male ascendency as he drew her through the crowd was a tonic to him; the
man tossing pancakes in the window where he hesitated looking for the
ladies' entrance seemed quite to enjoy doing it, as though he had known
all along there was to be company.
"Oh, I don't care for any of these places." Peter felt her pull at his
elbow. "I'll show you." They went along then, brushing lightly shoulder
to shoulder until they came to one of those revolving doors from which
gusts of music issued. There was a girl standing up to sing as they sat
down and the whole air of the place was beyond even the retailed
splendour of J. Wilkinson. The girl threw back her wraps and began to
order freely. Peter, who had a glimpse of the card, stiffened.
"I--I guess I'm not so very hungry," he cautioned. She looked up from
the menu sharply and her face softened; she made one or two deft changes
in it.
"This is Dutch, you know," she threw out. "Oh, I know you invited me,
but you didn't think I was one of the kind that let a strange gentleman
pay for my dinner, did you?" Peter denied it, stricken with
embarrassment. She seemed in the light, to take him in more completely.
"Say, would you have licked that fellow the other night, honest?"
"Well, if he was disrespectful to a lady----" Peter began.
"Oh, _excuse_ me!" She turned her head aside for a moment in her long
gloves. "You _are_ country!" she said again, but it seemed not to
displease her. "I don't care so much for her voice, do you?" She turned
on the singer. They discussed the entertainment and the dinner. They
were a long time about it. The orchestra played a waltz at last, and
Ethel--she had told him to call her that--put her arms on the table and
leaned across to him, and though Peter knew by this time that her cheeks
were painted, he didn't somehow mind it.
"What's it like up in the country where you lived?" she wished to know.
"Hills mostly, little wooded ones, and high pastures, and the apple
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."
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