Angela's Business Part 27

How was he to have any privacy of movement henceforward; how get from place to place?

Beside him, the girl was talking, with simple pleasure, of bridge. It appeared that she was thinking of having another party next week, in honor of Cousin Mary. Mr. Tilletts was very anxious to improve his game, she mentioned.

"And I think I'll invite you too," she said, with becoming coquetry--"even though you've never paid your party-call--for the other one!"

But why wasn't she sometimes at home, home-making? That was what he should like to know.

And aloud, he spoke with hard brightness of the weather.

Through her seemingly incessant practice, Angela drove better now; not efficiently or rapidly, but no longer with her first anxious air, stopping short when she saw a wagon a block away. This left her more freedom and enterprise for conversation. Mr. Garrott's meteorological comments soon petered out. Subtly, gently, her manner seemed to reprove him for wasting their time, as it were, on trivialities.

She said presently: "Did you ever read that book I lent you, Mr.

Garrott--'Marna'?"

The young man groaned inwardly. He could not understand why he had not returned the book last week as he had intended--with or without the blossoms--instead of dilly-dallying along this way, till some point was made of it. True enough, Angela interrupted his loquacious apologies:--

"Oh, it isn't that! I really don't want the book at all. But--"

She drove a few feet farther--an appreciable interval at four miles an hour--and ended, rather wistfully:--

"I wondered if you weren't keeping it--for another reason. I mean--just because you didn't want to come to return it."

"Why, what an idea! Ridiculous!--"

"Mr. Garrott, you know you _have_ seemed to--since--"

"You've no idea how overworked I am these days--never a minute to call my own! Why, there's your cousin, Mary Wing,--one of my best friends,--and I haven't so much as laid eyes on her--but once--since 'way before Christmas! Think of it! And that's--"

"You used to be willing to take a _little_ time for pleasure," said Angela, looking away from him, "before--we had that awful misunderstanding."

"It gets worse and worse all the time!" said Charles, hastily. "That's what I say! That's writing!--yes, indeed!--inexorable--once let it into your life, and it eats it all up--forcing a man to be a--a hermit for life, you might say. But there was something I was very anxious to tell you, Miss Flower. Let me see ... slipped me for the moment. Ah--oh, yes!--did you know Donald Manford's back again?"

"Oh! No, is he? I hadn't heard."

"Yes, old Donald got back Sunday, full of pride and honors...."

And then into the eyes of the worried young man there shot a faint gleam.

He had mentioned Donald absolutely at random, but the moment he heard the youth's name on the air, an idea exploded in his brain, leaving behind a dull hope. Unlike himself, Donald was a marrying man. Why, when you stopped to think of it, wasn't Angela the very girl for him? And why, then, shouldn't he, Charles, frankly reversing his purposes at the Helen Carson luncheon last month, bring together once more these two nice, simple cousins of the too-modern Mary, just as he had done that night at the Redmantle Club, when all the trouble had begun?

Of course, at the moment, Charles's "psychology" was not quite so elaborate as this. The thought, indeed, flashed through his brain in purely concrete form, thus: "_That's it! I'll put her on to Donald._"

Forthwith, he launched upon a voluble talk, an address, at once extolling Donald's character and throwing out suggestive commentaries upon it: how Donald had come home in the vein of a boy let out of school, seeming to feel that at last his playtime had come; how he (so different from himself, Charles) openly sought and hungered for pleasure now, was mad for some good times. And, observing closely, he thought that Miss Angela looked interested in his exposition, too, though hardly so interested as one might have liked, perhaps.

"Why, I didn't think he was that sort of person at all," said she.

"I've never seen a man change so--come out so--in my life! Landing this great job, you know!--it's taken a great weight off him. And then the thought that he has only a few weeks more at home, too--it's really revolutionized his character! Why, Miss Flower, the man's all but quit work! Really! He ..."

A knocking sense of disloyalty--to Mary's known plans--checked him, but briefly. What was that to him now? Had not Mary convinced him, once and for all, that she was more than competent to manage her own affairs?

Deliberately, the young man released his valuable information:--

"Why, he leaves his office every afternoon at four o'clock--rain or shine--and walks up Washington Street, absolutely hunting for somebody to come and give him a little fun! But who is there to do it? He's been out of things so long, he hardly knows anybody! And then, too, Donald, beneath that--ah--standoffish manner of his, is really a shy man. What he needs most, really, is encouragement...."

To all of which Angela's final reply--delivered after a slight silence--was: "You seem to love to talk about Mr. Manford to-day, Mr.

Garrott." And then she took the wind out of his sails completely by saying:--

"I don't think of Mr. Manford really as a friend of mine. You know--I often think you're the only real friend I've made, since we left Mitch.e.l.lton."

During the remainder of the drive, Charles thought it best to affect an amiable absent silence. But that gained him nothing, any more than his treachery to Donald and Miss Carson. Before she released him at the now too familiar corner near Berringer's, the girl said, simply and seriously:--

"Mr. Garrott--aren't you really _ever_ coming to see me again?"

Why again? When had he ever been to see her? And why all this talk of a misunderstanding? _He_ had never misunderstood anything.

"Why, yes!--yes, certainly!--when I ever find a minute to see anybody!

Ha, ha! But--when that'll be--"

It was her great merit in his eyes that she had never really reproached him. It seemed to cost her an effort to go on:--

"You've never forgiven me for--for saying what I did that night. You know you haven't! But if you'd ever come to see me--so that we could really have a talk--I feel I could make you understand that I--never really meant it!"

The maiden's gaze at once embarra.s.sed and vastly depressed him. In it he read, as if spread upon a bill-board, her soft certainty that, though he himself might not realize it yet, he was her man....

In the restaurant, the four or five entirely masculine persons with whom Charles commonly lunched took note of his peculiar gloom. It was their whim to a.s.sume that a valued pupil had just discharged Charles without a character. Theirs was a crude and noisy wit. But the tutor ignored, hardly heard, their gibes. He sat withdrawn and silent over his chicken hash (for which Berringer had no less than fourteen different names).

And before his fascinated mind's eye there unrolled an endless vista of driving duets, with the gentle feminine pressure closing down ever more and more irresistibly upon him.

What to do, what to do? That was the question. There did not seem to be a corner of the city now where the Fordette did not go poking its ugly mug.

All very well to say: Be bold, be cold. Refuse under any conditions to get into the Fordette. That, to him, was simply not a possible line of conduct. Inability to be successfully rude to people, even under the most favorable circ.u.mstances, had long been recognized as the d.a.m.nable flaw in his character. And as to this very peculiar case--how could the roughest boor, the most thoroughgoing cad, repel and affront a nice young girl whom he voluntarily kissed but last month--one whose only fault, after all, was a fatal constancy?

Now he fairly confronted the two distinct and fundamental weaknesses in his position: the moral and the mechanical, the Kiss and the Fordette. A just thinker always, he would not deny, even now, that it was his own free-will act that had first altered everything. If he took the ground that he had kissed, with warmth, a girl he cared nothing on earth about, what sort of person did that make him? No better than a Frenchman, daft about La Femme. She, it could not be gain-said, really paid him a finer compliment, took the n.o.bler view of him, when she a.s.sumed that those salutes had signified something. She was not without right to her nave confidence. And now that she had this maidenly expectancy firmly mounted upon a gasoline engine--do what he would, he could not escape a ripening affection. She would get a call out of him yet. There would be another bridge-party, and he would be at it. And after the bridge-party....

Alone with his thoughts among his noisy companions, Charles drew a handkerchief across his brow. A Home was, indeed, a sweet and beautiful thing. But the positive fact was that he, Charles, did NOT want one made for him at present. And still, the soft advance that leads straight to Homes pressed resistlessly on.

Great Heavens, what a price to pay for one little kiss on a sofa!...

Well, two or three little bits of kisses, then. What a price! What was the reason of it, where the justice?

He spoke aloud, for almost the first time at his lunch, with sudden heat: "I believe I'll move away from this town!"

The remark elicited a shout of laughter. In the midst of it, the tutor rose and stalked intently away. It had just occurred to him that he might force a quarrel on Angela, on some trivial pretext: pretend that she had hurt his feelings in some way--about not returning that book of hers, perhaps--something like that. The old dodge: a million men must have worked it. But even as he dallied with the notion, Charles knew very well that the ruthless strength was not in him. Besides, his thought now had taken a cold retrospective turn, interesting in its way: the sight of Talbott Maxon, grinning there, had roused old a.s.sociations in him. Talbott was a good one to laugh! But the Oldmixon girls had had him laughing out of the other corner of his mouth.

How had he ever lost sight of _that_ little affair?

People like G. B. Shaw might go about pretending that they had invented the idea of Woman the Pursuer. But the fact was that he, Charles, had personally discovered the elementary truth before he was out of his teens. Experience, you would have said, had driven it home unforgettably. All the way up to the old lady's who was studying French, tucked away in an obscure corner of the street-car, Charles was soberly going back over the instructive time he and Talbott had had with a group of Temporary Spinsters--all of five years ago--and wondering how under the sun he had ever allowed its lessons to grow dim.

That old trouble had started casually, too--how sharply it all came back now! At a dance it was, when Talbott, who was also fatally kind-hearted (and was pushed by a chaperon from behind, besides), had invited Susie Oldmixon to abandon the wall for the waltz. Of course, he had been stuck for four dances for his pains: of course Miss Oldmixon--a womanly girl--had misconceived the character of that long set-to; of course she invited him to a party in a day or two. Then it was that Talbott, sensing how things were going, had introduced him, Charles, much as a cowardly conscript offers a subst.i.tute. But the base act had gained him nothing; the Oldmixons produced a friend of theirs, Sarah Freed,--how he came to loathe the sight of Sarah!--and upon the instant, he and Talbott found themselves caught up together in a literally endless chain of little engagements, usually thus: a party, a party-call, another party, etc. Naturally, they had early had the bright thought of breaking the chain by not paying any party-call; and at once, this very same kind of soft pressure was put upon their weak chivalrousness: "Ethel thinks you must be mad with her," one or the other of the loyal sisters would say.

"You know you've never paid your party-call." If they yielded, and went and paid their party-call, it was not considered that they had then discharged their duty like soldiers; no, by an inexplicable shift in the point of view, the call was straightway viewed as a personal "attention," and they were at once invited to another party. So it went: these girls had reduced to an intuitive science the feminine instinct for making one thing lead to another. Of course they were always offering to teach him and Talbott something, as auction or the Boston; always trying to lend them something--like "Marna"--which would have to be returned. And even if all the regulation pitfalls were fairly side-stepped, it really accomplished nothing, for in that case Sarah or the Oldmixons were sure to have a Visitor. Even Sarah Freed, of course, rather hesitated to ring you up on the telephone and say: "Please, please, come to see me! You know I haven't a thing in the world to do but sit and think about men, and you're the only man who has spoken politely to me since 1908." But none of the virgins minded at all ringing you up and saying, "Do come to see my Visitor."