Quin Part 16

"You bet I see!" said Quin sympathetically as he hurried out to inform the senior member of the firm that the junior member awaited his pleasure.

What happened at that interview was recounted to him by Miss Leaks, the little drab-colored stenographer, who had returned from lunch when the storm was at its height.

"It's a wonder Mr. Ranny don't kill that old man for the way he sneers at him," she said indignantly to Quin, "Why, _I_ wouldn't take off him what Mr. Ranny does! But then, what can he do? His mother keeps him here for a mouth-piece for her, and Mr. Bangs knows it. It's no wonder he drinks, hitched up to a cantankerous old hyena like that. He never can stand up for himself, but he stood up for you all right."

"For me?" repeated Quin. "Where did I come in?"

"Why, he said it was a shame for a man like you to be doing the work you are doing, and that he for one wouldn't stand it. He talked right up to the boss about patriotism and our duty to the returned soldier, until he made the old tyrant look like ten cents! And then he come right out and said if Mr. Bangs couldn't offer you anything better he could."

"What did he say to that?" asked Quin.

"He curled up his lip and asked Mr. Ranny why he didn't engage you for a private secretary, and if you'll believe me Mr. Ranny looked him straight in the eye and said it was a good idea, and that he would."

"A private secretary!" Quin exclaimed. "But I don't know a blooming thing about stenography or typewriting."

"Don't you let on," advised Miss Leaks. "Mr. Ranny doesn't have enough work to amount to anything, and he's so tickled at carrying his point that he won't be particular. I can teach you how to take dictation and use the typewriter."

The following week found Quin installed in the smaller of the two private offices, with a t.i.tle that in no way covered the duties he was called upon to perform. To be sure, he got Mr. Ranny's small affairs into systematic running order, and, under Miss Leaks's efficient instruction, was soon able slowly but accurately to hammer out the necessary letters on the typewriter. He was even able at times to help Mr. Chester, the melancholy bookkeeper whom the other clerks called "f.a.n.n.y."

Through working with figures all his life Mr. Chester had come to resemble one. With his lean body and drooping oval head, he was not unlike the figure nine, an a.n.a.logy that might be continued by saying that nine is the highest degree a bachelor number can achieve, the figures after that going in couples. It was an open secret that the tragedy of Mr. Chester's uneventful life lay in that simple fact.

In addition to Quin's heterogeneous duties at the office, he was frequently pressed into service for more personal uses. When Mr. Ranny failed to put in an appearance, he was invariably dispatched to find him, and was often able to handle the situation in a way that was a great relief to all concerned.

One day, after he had been with the firm several weeks, he was dispatched with a budget of papers for Madam Bartlett to sign. It was the first time he had entered the house since the night of the accident, and as he stood in the front hall waiting instructions, he looked about him curiously.

The lower floor had been "done" in peac.o.c.k blue and gold when Miss Enid made her debut twenty years before, and it had never been undone. An embossed dado and an even more embossed frieze encircled the walls, and the ceiling was a complicated mosaic of color and design. The stiff-backed chairs and ma.s.sive sofas were apparently committed for life to linen strait-jackets. Heavy velvet curtains shut out the light and a faint smell of coal soot permeated the air. Over the hall fireplace hung a large portrait of Madam Bartlett, just inside the drawing-room gleamed a marble bust of her, and two long pier-gla.s.ses kept repeating the image of her until she dominated every nook and corner of the place.

But Quin saw little of all this. To him the house was simply a background for images of Eleanor: Eleanor coming down the broad stairs in her blue and gray costume; Eleanor tripping through the hall in her Red Cross uniform; Eleanor standing in the doorway in the moonlight, telling him how wonderful he was.

He had written her exactly ten letters since her departure, but only two had been dispatched, and by a fatal error these two were identical. After a superhuman effort to couch his burning thoughts in sufficiently cool terms, he had achieved a partially successful result; but, discovering after addressing the envelope that he had misspelled two words, he laboriously made another copy, addressed a second envelope, then inadvertently mailed both.

He had received such a scoffing note in reply that his ears tingled even now as he thought of it. It was only when he recalled the postscript that he found consolation. "How funny that you should get a position at Bartlett & Bangs's," she had written. "If you should happen to meet any member of my family, for heaven's sake don't mention my name. They might link you up with the Hawaiian Garden, or the trip to the camp that night grandmother was hurt. Just let our friendship be a little secret between you and me."

"'You and me,'" Quin repeated the words softly to himself, as he stood there among the objects made sacred by her one-time presence.

"Madam Bartlett wishes you to come upstairs and explain the papers before she signs them," said a woman in nurse's uniform from the stair landing, and, cap in hand, Quin followed her up the steps.

At the open door of the large front room he paused. Lying in royal state in a huge four-poster bed was Madam Bartlett, resplendent in a purple robe, with her hair dressed in its usual elaborate style, and in her ears pearls that, Quin afterward a.s.sured the Martels, looked like moth-b.a.l.l.s.

"You go on out of here and stay until I ring for you," she snapped at the nurse; then she squinted her eyes and looked at Quin. She did not put on her eye-gla.s.ses; they were reserved for feminine audiences exclusively.

"What do they mean by sending me this jumble of stuff?" she demanded, indicating the papers strewn on the silk coverlid. "How do they expect me to know what they are all about?"

"They don't," said Quin rea.s.suringly, coming forward; "they sent me to tell you."

"And who are you, pray?"

"I am Mr. Randolph's er--er--secretary."

For the life of him he could not get through it without a grin, and to his relief the old lady's lips also twitched.

"Much need he had for a secretary!" she said, then added shrewdly: "Aren't you the soldier that put the splint on my leg?"

Quin modestly acknowledged that he was.

"It was a mighty poor job," said Madam, "but I guess it was better than nothing."

"How's the leg coming on?" inquired Quin affably.

"It's not coming on at all," Madam said. "If I listen to those fool doctors it's coming off."

Quin shook his head in emphatic disapproval.

"Don't you listen to 'em," he advised earnestly.

"Doctors don't know everything! Why, they told a fellow out at the hospital that his arm would have to come off at the shoulder. He lit out over the hill, bath-robe and all, for his home town, and got six other doctors to sign a paper saying he didn't need an amputation. He got back in twenty-four hours, was tried for being A. W. O. L., and is serving his time in the prison ward to-day. But he's still got his arm all right."

"Good for him!" said Madam heartily; then, recalling the business in hand, she added peevishly: "Well, stop talking now and explain these papers."

Quin went over them several times with great patience, and then held the ink-well while she tremblingly signed her name.

"Kinder awkward doing things on your back," he said sympathetically, as she sank back exhausted.

"Awkward? It's torture. The cast is bad enough in itself; but having to lie in one position like this makes me sore all over."

"You don't have to tell me," said Quin, easing up the bed-clothes with quite a professional air; "I was six months on my back. But there's no sense in keeping you like this. Why don't they rig you up a pulley, so's you can change the position of your body without disturbing your leg?"

"How do you mean?"

"Like this," said Quin, taking a paper-knife and a couple of spoons from the table and demonstrating his point.

Madam listened with close attention, and so absorbed were she and Quin that neither of them were conscious of Miss Isobel's entrance until they heard her feeble protest:

"I would not dare try anything like that without consulting Dr. Rawlins."

"n.o.body wants you to dare anything," flared out her mother. "What the boy says sounds sensible. He says he has fixed them for the soldiers at the hospital. I want him to fix one for me."

"When shall I come?" Quin asked.

"Come nothing. You'll stay and do it now. Telephone the factory that I am keeping you here for the morning. Isobel, order him whatever he needs.

And now get out of here, both of you; I want to take a nap."

Thus it was that, an hour later, the new colored butler was carrying the papers back to Bartlett & Bangs's, and Mr. Randolph's new secretary was sawing wood in Madam Bartlett's cellar. It was a humble beginning, but he whistled jubilantly as he worked. Already he saw himself climbing, by brilliant and spectacular deeds, to a dazzling pinnacle of security in the family's esteem.

CHAPTER 11