Angela's Business Part 46

Mary had not remained at the Flowers' interminably, after all. She had entered the High School before Charles Garrott had arrived at Olive Street, and had been upstairs for half an hour, when Charles, following on to help her, strode through the great bronze doors. Nevertheless, she was a full hour behind the time mentioned to Mr. Johnson Geddie over the telephone, and this increased her hope that her only too obliging successor would not be found waiting for her. However, Mr. Geddie was found waiting for her; very much so, in fact. Nothing could have exceeded the exuberance of his courtesy, and nothing could have been less welcome.

The new a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al was a plump, white person, in whose face a reddish mustache and gold-rimmed spectacles--his own personal addenda, as it were--were the only salient features. Not brilliant, he was rising by character, evinced in an unconquerable optimism. "Keep a-smiling, brother--it costs you nothing!"--so Mr. Geddie's roguish eyes seemed continually to say. But perhaps they seemed to say it more than normally to-day, by way of striking a happy average with the quite unsmiling late inc.u.mbent.

Mary, during her brief tenancy, had stored here a long acc.u.mulation of printed matter, chiefly duplicate files of "The New School," with sundry a.s.sorted leaflets of the Education Reform League. Her task to-day was to go through these files, destroy what was no longer useful to her, and pack the rest for removal. Her successor had thoroughly prepared for her. There on the floor was the packing-case, there on the floor was a table to sit at, there against the wall stood a stepladder. But Mr.

Geddie would not weary in well-doing. The moment he understood what the proposition was, as he termed it, he said that, of course, he would help Miss Wing. Refusals drowned in a sea of smiles. Allow Miss Wing to climb that rickety ladder, and lift down those heavy stacks of magazines?

Positively, she must not ask him that. Trouble? A pleasure, Miss Wing; a genu-wine pleasure.

He had his way, as people of strong sunny character always do. Mary, having overcome the impulse to make an excuse and abandon the enterprise, sat at the little table. Kind Mr. Geddie went up and down the ladder, fetching her dusty armfuls to sort over. In the intervals, for he had the shorter end of the job, he was down on his knees beside her, brightly stacking discarded "New Schools" into piles against the wall.

The work went forward steadily, on the woman's part almost in silence.

That, however, made no difference. It was the man's power to be able to talk more than enough for two, and he did. As the old a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al grew steadily more quiet, the new one seemed increasingly buoyant. And it seemed to Mary that she had been listening to his conversation for a long, long time, at the moment when she heard him suddenly exclaim, from the ladder:--

"Well, well! Look who's here! Come for the spring-cleaning, Mr. Garrott?

Ha, ha!"

She, in her inner absorption, had failed to hear the approaching feet.

But at that she raised her head, with a kind of jerk.

"Don't mind the dust, Mr. Garrott--it eats all right! Ha, ha! Walk in!"

Mr. Garrott stood silent in the office door, looking at Miss Wing. The eyes of the old friends briefly met. Something in the young man's appearance vaguely arrested Mary Wing. She had noted, as her glance lifted, the torn glove on his right hand. Now she was remotely aware that the face looking back at her so intently appeared somehow subtly changed: there was something faintly wrong with it, it seemed. But such details Mary's consciousness hardly registered at all. All in one flash, she wondered how he happened to be here, thought how good it was of him to come, and knew that she had never been less glad to see anybody in her life.

"Good-afternoon," said she.

"How'do, Miss Mary?" said Charles; and then started forward. "How are you, Mr. Geddie? I seem to be rather late to help with the good work."

"Yes, sirree!--Can't come in at the eleventh hour and take our credit away! Can he, Miss Wing?--ha, ha! All over but the applause!"

However, Mr. Geddie did not know himself for a tactful man for nothing.

Observing that Miss Wing continued to drop magazines on the floor in silence, and that her young man there didn't seem to know what to do with himself, he gracefully adopted a new position. From the third round of the ladder, he made a roguish address, the meat of which was that there was a whole corner left of the bottom shelf, and if Mr. Garrott insisted, etc.

"I'll relieve you with pleasure," said Charles, coldly.

So Mr. Geddie lumbered down from the ladder, wiped his hands on his pocket-handkerchief and re-attached his cuffs. He implored Miss Wing to make herself absolutely at home in his office, a.s.sured her, not once but three times, that John the porter, on the floor below, would be positively gratified to do any service for her, however small. In the moment of parting, he volunteered a new civility.

"Why, here, Mr. Garrott!" he hastily exclaimed, "your coat's all dusty in the back! That won't do! Just a minute while I get my whisk--"

But Miss Wing's young man interrupted him rudely.

"No, I'm not dusty at all! Thanks--don't trouble."

Another person who didn't know the value of a smile, clearly. And the man _was_ dusty, of course. Well, no affair of his, of course. Mr.

Geddie kept a-smiling.

"Well, good people!" said he. "Olive oil!"

When he had got a polite distance down the hall, Miss Wing's young man shut the office door upon him. So at last came privacy. For the first time, since the unforgotten afternoon last month, Charles Garrott stood alone with his admirable heroine.

He moved toward her, deliberating.

Downstairs there, he had been having five of the most engrossing, the most completely satisfying, minutes of his life. Being able to come upstairs at all, he had come in the spiritual state of his stimulating experience. Over all that was unsettled and unhappy, there persisted in him a fierce young elation. By the oddest luck, he was not here empty-handed, after all: he came with something rather better than a hope to give. And doubtless--since he was incurably a sentence-maker--there had already come into his head discreet phrases with which to communicate the hope, at least: phrases which, though gallantly suppressing his own exploits, might yet be somewhat tinged with a protector's strength.

But all this dropped from Charles's mind in the instant when Mary raised her head over the table, and looked at him.

He had seen his friend for a few minutes on Friday, her first day up and about. But that pa.s.sing glimpse, it seemed, could hardly have counted.

For now her gaze had an unexpected power for him: the sight of her came on him with a sort of impact, as if this were some one he had heard about often, but never before seen. Undoubtedly, that small phenomenon was due to the amount he had been thinking about her of late, behind her back, as it were. But beyond all this, the particular look of Mary's face had made him instantly certain that, whatever she had gone to struggle with Angela about to-day, she had, indeed, been routed. And that he had not miscalculated the effect of this upon her, he was also certain from the first sound of her voice....

Mary did not look up as her helper advanced, or cease the work of her hands. But it was she who spoke first:--

"How did you happen to come here?"

"I've been to your house. Your mother told me you were here."

She said, with a curious stilted politeness: "It was very good of you to come. But really you must not wait for me, please. I have a good deal more to do--a great deal more--and it is work of a sort that I have to do alone."

"Miss Mary," said Charles, "your mother told me, at my request, what has happened this afternoon."

Mary flinched, just perceptibly. But her voice, when she spoke, seemed harder than before.

"Well, it's the fact. That's all there is to say. There isn't anything more to discuss."

"I don't mean to discuss it, of course. There was just one thing I thought of--a--sort of suggestion."

Finding himself neither questioned nor forbidden, he continued: "Do you think it would be such a bad way out of the--the difficulty, if Donald were just to go on here for a while?"

Still Mary waited, hardly encouraging him, examining a "New School,"

silently laying it down in the packing-case at her feet.

"I know you feel," said Charles, inspecting the top of her hat, "that settling down to this consulting work, in a city that offers so many distractions all the time, won't be a good thing for Donald--from any point of view. Staying here won't take the place of the chance with Gebhardt he's throwing away, of course--that's pretty serious. Still, there ought to be plenty of good work for him to do here--isn't there?--for a few months, a year or two, if necessary. That would give him--and you--a little time to adjust things to--the new conditions.

And then from the point of view of the Flowers, too,--of Mrs. Flower, in fact,--it occurred to me it mightn't be a bad sort of working compromise.... What do you think?"

"I think it is very sensible," she replied, with the same labored courtesy. "It is what I suggested, too."

"Oh," said Charles, and paused. "But Donald didn't want to give up Blake & Steinert, I suppose?"

"I haven't suggested it to Donald."

That brought a considerable silence.

"It's--settled, then?"

"It was settled last week."

A curious let-down feeling took possession of the young man. He pressed his hand to his forehead; and then for the first time was aware that his head ached furiously. In the same moment, his eye was unpleasantly caught by his burst-out gloves. Having stared at his hands for a second, he silently stripped off the gloves, balled them, and pitched the ball into a waste-basket near by.

"I'll just have a look into this closet for myself," said he, turning away. "I don't believe Geddie--"

"No!--please don't!--don't trouble! I really don't need any help, thank you. I don't ..."