Queed Part 26

Into her eyes had sprung a tenderness which he was far from understanding. But he did not like the look of it in the least, and he extricated his hands from the gentle clasp with some abruptness.

From the safe distance of the door he looked back, and wondered why Fifi's great eyes were fixed so solemnly on him.

"Well--good-bye, again. Hurry up and get well--"

"Good-bye--oh, good-bye," said Fifi, and turned her head toward the open window with the blue skies beyond.

Did Fifi know? How many have vainly tortured themselves with that question, as they have watched dear ones slipping without a word down the slopes to the dark Valley! If this child knew that her name had been read out for the greater Graduation, she gave no sign. Sometimes in the mornings she cried a little, without knowing why. Sometimes she said a vague, sad little thing that brought her mother's heart, stone cold, to her mouth. But her talk was mostly very bright and hopeful. Ten minutes before Queed came in she had been telling Mrs. Paynter about something she would do in the fall. If sometimes you would swear that she knew there would never be another fall for her, her very next remark might confound you. So her little face turned easily to the great river with the shining farther sh.o.r.e, and, for her part, there would be no sadness of farewell when she embarked.

By marvelous work, Queed closed up the twenty-five minutes of time he had bestowed upon Fifi, and pulled into supper only three minutes behind running-time. After-wards, he sat in the Scriptorium, his face like a carven image, the sacred Schedule in his hands. For it had come down to that. Either he must at any cost hew his way back to the fastness of his early days, or he must corrupt the Schedule yet again.

Every minute that he took away from his book meant just that much delay in giving the great work to the world. That fact was the eternal backbone of all his consciousness. On the other balance of his personal equation, there was Buck Klinker and there was Fifi Paynter.

Klinker evidently felt that all bars were down as to him. It would be a hard world indeed if a trainer was denied free access to his only pupil, and Klinker, though he had but the one, was always in as full blast as Muldoon's. He had acquired a habit of "dropping in" at all hours, especially late at night, which, to say the least, was highly wasteful of time. It was Queed's privilege to tell Klinker that he must keep away from the Scriptorium; but in that case Klinker might fairly retort that he would no longer give the Doc free physical culture. Did he care to bring that issue to the touch? No, he did not. In fact, he must admit that he had a distinct need of Buck, a distinct dependence upon him, for awhile yet at any rate. So he could make no elimination of the non-essential there.

Then there was Fifi. In a week, or possibly two weeks, Fifi would doubtless reappear in his dining-room, and if she had no lessons to trouble him with, she would at any rate feel herself free to talk to him whenever the whim moved her. Had she not let out this very day that she considered that she had a kind of t.i.tle to his time? So it would be to the end of the chapter. It had been his privilege to tell Fifi that he could not spare her another minute of time till his work was finished.... Had been--but no longer was. Looking back now, he found it impossible to reconstruct the chain of impulse and circ.u.mstance which had trapped him into it, but the stark fact was that his own lips had authorized Fifi to profane at will his holy time. Not three hours before he had been betrayed into weakly telling her that he was her friend. He was a man of truth and honor. He could not possibly get back of that confession of friendship, or of the privileges it bestowed. So there was no elimination of the non-essential he could make there.

These were the short and ugly facts. And now he must take official cognizance of them.

With a leaden heart and the hands of lamentation, he took the Schedule to pieces and laboriously fitted it together again with a fire-new item in its midst. The item was Human Intercourse, and to it he allotted the sum of thirty minutes per diem.

It was a historic moment in his life, and, unlike most men at such partings of the ways, he was fully conscious of it. Nevertheless, he pa.s.sed straight from it to another performance hardly less extraordinary. From his table drawer he produced a little memorandum book, and in it--just below a diagram of a new chest-developing exercise invented last night by Klinker--he jotted down the things that Fifi said a man must do to be like other men.

A clean half-hour remained before he must go and call on the young lady with the tom-boy name, Charles Weyland, who knew "what the public liked." He spent it, he, the indefatigable minute-shaver, sitting with the head that no longer ached clamped in his hand. It had been the most disturbing day of his life, but he was not thinking of that exactly. He was thinking what a mistake it had been to leave New York. There he had had but two friends with no possibility of getting any more. Here--it was impossible to blink the fact any longer--he already had two, with at least two more determinedly closing in on him. He had Fifi and he had Buck--yes, Buck; the young lady Charles Weyland had offered him her friendship this very day; and unless he looked alive he would wake up some morning to find that Nicolovius also had captured him as a friend.

He was far better off in New York, where days would go by in which he never saw Tim or Murphy Queed. And yet ... did he want to go back?

XIII

_"Taking the Little Doctor Down a Peg or Two": as performed for the First and Only Time by Sharlee Weyland._

The Star that fought in its course for men through Sharlee Weyland was of the leal and resolute kind. It did not swerve at a squall. Sharlee had thought the whole thing out, and made up her mind. Gentle raillery, which would do everything necessary in most cases, would be wholly futile here. She must doff all gloves and give the little Doctor the dressing-down of his life. She must explode a mine under that enormously exaggerated self-esteem which swamped the young man's personality like a goitre. Sharlee did not want to do this. She liked Mr. Queed, in a peculiar sort of way, and yet she had to make it impossible for him ever to speak to her again. Her nature was to give pleasure, and therefore she was going to do her utmost to give him pain. She wanted him to like her, and consequently she was going to insult him past forgiveness. And she was not even sure that it was going to do him any good.

When her guest walked into her little back parlor that evening, Sharlee was feeling very self-sacrificing and n.o.ble. However, she merely looked uncommonly pretty and tremendously engrossed in herself. She was in evening dress. It was Easter Monday, and at nine, as it chanced, she was to go out under the escortage of Charles Gardiner West to some forgathering of youth and beauty. But her costume was so perfectly suited to the little curtain-raiser called Taking the Little Doctor Down a Peg or Two, that it might have been appointed by a clever stage-manager with that alone in mind. She was the haughty beauty, the courted princess, graciously bestowing a few minutes from her crowding fetes upon some fourth-rate dependant. And indeed the little Doctor, with his prematurely old face and his shabby clothes, rather looked the part of the dependant. Sharlee's greeting was of the briefest.

"Ah, Mr. Queed.... Sit down."

Her negligent nod set him away at an immense distance; even he was aware that Charles Weyland had undergone some subtle but marked change since the morning. The colored maid who had shown him in was retained to b.u.t.ton her mistress' long gloves. It proved to be a somewhat slow process. Over the mantel hung a gilt-framed mirror, as wide as the mantel itself. To this mirror, the gloves b.u.t.toned, Miss Weyland pa.s.sed, and reviewed her appearance with slow attention, giving a pat here, making a minor readjustment there. But this survey did not suffice for details, it seemed; a more minute examination was needed; over the floor she trailed with leisurely grace, and rang the bell.

"Oh, Mary--my vanity-box, please. On the dressing-table."

Seating herself under the lamp, she produced from the contrivance the tiniest little mirror ever seen. As she raised it to let it perform its dainty function, her glance fell on Queed, sitting darkly in his rocking-chair. A look of mild surprise came into her eye: not that it was of any consequence, but plainly she had forgotten that he was there.

"Oh ... You don't mind waiting a few minutes?"

"I do m--"

"You promised half an hour I think? Never fear that I shall take longer--"

"I did not promise half an hour for such--"

"It was left to me to decide in what way the time should be employed, I believe. What I have to say can be said briefly, but to you, at least, it should prove immensely interesting." She stifled a small yawn with the gloved finger-tips of her left hand. "However, of course don't let me keep you if you are pressed for time."

The young man made no reply. Sharlee completed at her leisure her conference with the vanity-box; snapped the trinket shut; and, rising, rang the bell again. This time she required a gla.s.s of water for her good comfort. She drank it slowly, watching herself in the mantel mirror as she did so, and setting down the gla.s.s, took a new survey of her whole effect, this time in a long-distance view.

"Now, Mr. Queed!"

She sat down in a flowered arm-chair so large that it engulfed her, and fixed him with a studious, puckering gaze as much as to say: "Let's see.

Now, what was his trouble?"

"Ah, yes!--the _Post_."

She glanced at the little clock on the mantel, appeared to gather in her thoughts from remote and brilliant places, and addressed the dingy youth briskly but not unkindly.

"Unfortunately, I have an engagement this evening and can give you very little time. You will not mind if I am brief. Here, then, is the case. A man employed in a minor position on a newspaper is notified that he is to be discharged for incompetence. He replies that, so far from being discharged, he will be promoted at the end of a month, and will eventually be made editor of the paper. Undoubtedly this is a magnificent boast, but to make it good means a complete transformation in the character of this man's work--namely, from entire incompetence to competence of an unusual sort, all within a month's time. You are the man who has made this extraordinary boast. To clear the ground before I begin to show you where your trouble is, please tell me how you propose to make it good."

Not every man feeling inside as the little Doctor felt at that moment would have answered with such admirable calm.

"I purpose," he corrected her, "to take the files of the _Post_ for the past few years and read all of Colonel Cowles's amusing articles. He, I am informed, is the editorial mogul and paragon. I purpose to study those articles scientifically, to a.n.a.lyze them, to take them apart and see exactly how they are put together. I purpose to destroy my own style and build up another one precisely like the Colonel's--if anything, a shade more so. In short I purpose to learn to write like an a.s.s, of a.s.ses, for a.s.ses."

"That is your whole programme?"

"It is more than enough, I think."

"Ah?" She paused a moment, looking at him with faint, distant amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Now, as my aunt's business woman, I, of course, take an interest in the finances of her boarders. Therefore I had better begin at once looking about for a new place for you after May 15th. What other kinds of work do you think yourself qualified to do, besides editorial writing and the preparation of thesauruses?"

He looked at her darkly. "You imagine that the _Post_ will discharge me on May 15th?"

"There is nothing in the world that seems to me so certain."

"And why?"

"Why will the Post discharge you? For exactly the same reason it promises to discharge you now. Incompetence."

"You agree with Colonel Cowles, then? You consider me incompetent to write editorials for the _Post_?"

"Oh, totally. And it goes a great deal deeper than style, I a.s.sure you.

Mr. Queed, you're all wrong from the beginning."

Her eyes left his face; went first to the clock; glanced around the room. Sharlee's dress was blue, and her neck was as white as a wave's foamy tooth. Her manner was intended to convey to Mr. Queed that he was the smallest midge on all her crowded horizon. It did not, of course, have that effect, but it did arrest and pique his attention most successfully. It was in his mind that Charles Weyland had been of some a.s.sistance to him in first suggesting work on the _Post_; and again about the roses for Fifi. He was still ready to believe that she might have some profitable suggestion about his new problem. Was she not that "public" and that "average reader" which he himself so despised and detested? Yet he could not imagine where such a little pink and white chit found the hardihood to take this tone with one of the foremost scientists of modern times.

"You interest me. I am totally incompetent now; I will be totally incompetent on May 15th; this because I am all wrong from the beginning.

Pray proceed."