Hidden Creek Part 27

"What are you reading?" The man slipped into the chair beside d.i.c.kie, put on his gla.s.ses, and looked at the fat book. "Poetry? Hmp! What are you copying it for?--letter to your girl?"

d.i.c.kie had all the Westerner's prejudice against questions, but he felt drawn to this patron of the "hash-hole," so, though he drawled his answer slightly, it was an honest answer.

"It ain't my book," he said. "That's why I'm copying it."

"Why in thunder don't you take it out, you young idiot?"

d.i.c.kie colored. "Well, sir, I don't rightly understand the workings of this place. I come by it on the way home and I kep' a-seein' folks goin'

in with books and comin' out with books. I figured it was a kind of exchange proposition. I've only got one book--and that ain't rightly mine--" the man looking at him wondered why his face flamed--"so, when I came in, I just watched and I figured you could read here if you had the notion to take down a book and fetch it over to the table and copy from it and return it. So I've been doin' that."

"Why didn't you go to the desk, youngster, and ask questions?"

"Where I come from"--d.i.c.kie was drawling again--"folks don't deal so much in questions as they do here."

"Where you came from! You came from Mars! Come along to the desk and I'll fix you up with a card and you can take an armful of poetry home with you."

d.i.c.kie went to the desk and signed his name. The stranger signed his--Augustus Lorrimer. The librarian stamped a bit of cardboard and stuck it into the fat volume. She handed it to d.i.c.kie wearily.

"Thank _you_, ma'am," he said with such respectful fervor that she looked up at him and smiled.

"Now, where's your diggings," asked Lorrimer, who had taken no hints about asking questions, "east or west?" He was a newspaper reporter.

"Would you be carin' to walk home with me?" asked d.i.c.kie. There was a great deal of dignity in his tone, more in his carriage.

"Yes. I'd be caring to! Lead on, Martian!" And Lorrimer felt, after he said that, that he was a vulgarian--a long-forgotten sensation.

"In Mars," he commented to himself, "this young man was some kind of a prince."

"What do you look over your shoulder that way for, d.i.c.k?" he asked aloud, a few blocks on their way. "Scared the police will take away your book?"

d.i.c.kie blinked at him with a startled air. "Did I? I reckon a feller gets into queer ways when he's alone a whole lot. I get kind of feelin'

like somebody was following me in this town--so many folks goin' to and fro does it to me most likely."

"Yes, a fellow does get into queer ways when he's alone a whole lot,"

said Lorrimer slowly. His mind went back a dozen years to his own first winter in New York. He looked with keenness at d.i.c.kie's face. It was a curiously charming face, he thought, but it was tight-knit with a harried, struggling sort of look, and this in spite of its quaint detachment.

"Know any one in this city?"

"No, sir, not rightly. I've made acquaintance with some of the waiters.

They've asked me to join a club. But I haven't got the cash."

"What pay do you draw?"

d.i.c.kie named a sum.

"Not much, eh? But you've got your tips."

"Yes, sir. I pay my board with my pay and live on the tips."

"Must be uncertain kind of living! Where do you live, anyway?

What? Here?"

They had crossed Washington Square and were entering a tall studio building to the south and east. d.i.c.kie climbed lightly up the stairs.

Lorrimer followed with a feeling of bewilderment. On the top landing, dimly lighted, d.i.c.kie unlocked a door and stood aside.

"Just step in and look up," he said, "afore I light the light. You'll see something."

Lorrimer obeyed. A swarm of golden bees glimmered before his eyes.

"Stars," said d.i.c.kie. "Down below you wouldn't hardly know you had 'em, would you?"

Lorrimer did not answer. A moment later an asthmatic gas-jet caught its breath and he saw a bare studio room almost vacant of furniture. There was a bed and a screen and a few chairs, one window facing an alley wall.

The stars had vanished.

"Pretty palatial quarters for a fellow on your job," Lorrimer remarked.

"How did you happen to get here?"

"Some--people I knowed of once lived here." d.i.c.kie's voice had taken on a certain remoteness, and even Lorrimer knew that here questions stopped.

He accepted a chair, declined "the makings," proffered a cigarette.

During these amenities his eyes flew about the room.

"Good Lord!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "is all that stuff your copying?"

There was a pile of loose and scattered ma.n.u.script upon the table under the gas-jet.

"Yes, sir," d.i.c.kie smiled. "I was plumb foolish to go to all that labor."

Lorrimer drew near to the table and coolly looked over the papers.

d.i.c.kie watched him with rather a startled air and a flush that might have seemed one of resentment if his eyes had not worn their impersonal, observing look.

"All poetry," muttered Lorrimer. "But some of it only a line--or a word." He read aloud,--"'Close to the sun in lonely lands--' what's that from, anyway?"

"A poem about an eagle by a man named Alfred Tennyson. Ain't it the way a feller feels, though, up on the top of a rocky peak?"

"Never been on the top of a rocky peak--kind of a sky-sc.r.a.per sensation, isn't it? What's all this--'An' I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, after my fashion'?"

d.i.c.kie's face again flamed in spite of himself. "It's a love poem. The feller couldn't forget. He couldn't keep himself from loving that-away because he loved so much the other way--well, sir, you better read it for yourself. It's a mighty real sort of a poem--if you were that sort of a feller, I mean."

"And this is 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' And here's a sonnet, 'It was not like your great and gracious ways'--? Coventry Patmore. Well, young man, you've a catholic taste."

"I don't rightly belong to any church," said d.i.c.kie gravely. "My mother is a Methodist."

Lorrimer moved; abruptly away and moved abruptly back.

"Where were you educated, d.i.c.k?"

"I was raised in Millings"--d.i.c.kie named the Western State--"I didn't get only to grammar school. My father needed me to work in his hotel."

"Too bad!" sighed Lorrimer. "Well, I'll bid you good-night. And many thanks. You've got a fine place here." Again he sighed. "I dare say--one of these days--"