Quin Part 20

"I've already got it," Quin said. "Mr. Bangs told me to-day that I was to start in as shipping clerk Monday morning. But he'd let me off nights if I'd put it up to him. Old Chester says----"

Miss Enid's Pre-Raphaelite brows contracted slightly. "Don't you think it would be more respectful----"

"Sure," agreed Quin; "I didn't mean any harm. I like Mr. Chester. He asked me to come up to his rooms some night and see his collection of flutes."

"That was like him," Miss Enid said warmly. "He's always doing kind things like that. I know his reputation for being diffident and hard to get acquainted with, but once you get beneath the surface----"

Quin was not in the least interested in Mr. Chester's surface. He sat on the edge of the table, swinging his foot and staring off into s.p.a.ce, wholly absorbed in the idea of cultivating that newly discovered intellect of his.

"Say, Miss Enid," he said, impulsively interrupting her eulogy of Mr.

Chester's neglected virtues, "I wish you'd sort of take me in hand. _You_ know what I need better than I do. If you'll get a line on that school business, I'll start right in, if I have to start in the kindergarten.

Hand out the dope and I'll take it. And whenever you see me doing things wrong, or saying things wrong, I'd take it as a favor if you'd jack me up."

Miss Enid smiled ruefully. "Why, Quinby, that is just what we have all been doing ever since you came. If you weren't the best-natured----"

"Not a bit of it," disclaimed Quin. "Queen Vic lets me have it in the neck sometimes, but that's nothing. I've learned more since I've been in this house than I ever learned in all my life put together. Why, sometimes I don't hardly know myself!"

"Two negatives, Quinby, make an affirmative," suggested Miss Enid primly; and thus his higher education began.

Miss Enid was right when she said his mind was above the average. Its one claim to superiority lay in the fact that it had received the little training it had at first hand. What he knew of geography he knew, not from maps, but from actual observation in many parts of the world. Higher mathematics were unknown to him, but through years of experience he had learned to solve the most difficult of all problems--that of making ends meet. He had learned astronomy from a Norwegian sailor, as they lay on the deck of a Pacific transport night after night in the southern seas.

He had even tackled literature during his six months in hospital, when he had plowed through all the books the wards provided from Dante's "Inferno" to "Dere Mable."

Soon after his talk with Miss Enid he decided to call upon Mr. Chester, not because Mr. Chester was an enlivening companion, but because he was so touchingly grateful for the casual friendship that Quin bestowed upon him.

"He's so sort of lonesome," Quin told Miss Leaks. "When he looks at me with those big dog eyes of his, I feel like scratching him back of his ear."

Mr. Chester, in his small but tastefully furnished bachelor apartment, outdid himself in his efforts to be hospitable. He insisted upon Quin taking the best chair, gave him a good cigar, showed him some rare first editions, displayed his collection of musical instruments, and struggled valiantly to establish a common footing. But there was only one subject upon which they could find anything to say, and they came back again and again to the affairs of the Bartlett family.

"Why don't you ever come around and see the folks?" Quin asked hospitably. "They get awful lonesome with so few people dropping in."

Mr. Chester in evident embarra.s.sment flicked the ash from his cigar and answered guardedly:

"I used to be there a great deal in the old days. Unfortunately, Madam Bartlett and I had a misunderstanding. As a matter of fact, I have not crossed that threshold in--let me see--it must be fifteen years! It was a party, I remember, given for Eleanor, the little granddaughter, on her fifth birthday."

"Oh, yes!" said Quin, finding Mr. Chester for the first time interesting.

"They've got a picture of her taken with Miss Enid in her party dress."

"I suppose you mean this?" Mr. Chester reached over and took from his desk a somewhat faded photograph, in a silver frame, of a little girl leaning against a big girl's shoulders, both enveloped in a cloud of white tulle.

"Gee, but she was pretty!" exclaimed Quin, devouring every detail of Eleanor's chubby features.

"A beautiful woman," sighed Mr. Chester--and Quin, looking up suddenly, surprised a look in his host's eyes that was anything but numerical.

Obligingly relinquishing his application of the p.r.o.noun for Mr.

Chester's, he said:

"She certainly thinks a lot of you!"

"How do you know?" demanded Mr. Chester.

"From the way she talks. She says people are barking up the wrong tree when they think you are cold and indifferent and all that; says you've got one of the n.o.blest natures _she_ ever knew."

Quin was appalled at the effect of these words. Mr. Chester's eyes got quite red around the rims and his lips actually trembled.

"Poor Enid!" he said. Then he remembered himself, or rather forgot himself, and became a Number Nine again, and bored Quin talking business until ten o'clock.

At parting they shook hands cordially, and Mr. Chester urged him to come again.

"I wonder if you would care to use one of my tickets for the Symphony Orchestra next week?" he asked.

Quin looked embarra.s.sed. He had accepted a similar invitation the week before, and had confided to Rose Martel afterward that he "never heard such a bully band playing such b.u.m music." But Mr. Chester's intention was so kind that he could run no risk of offending him.

"I'll go if I can," he said, leaving himself a loophole.

"Here is the ticket," said Mr. Chester, "and in case you do not use it, perhaps you will so good as to pa.s.s it on to some one who can."

This suggestion afforded Quin an inspiration.

"Say, Miss Enid," he said the next morning at breakfast. "I want to give you a ticket to the Symphony Orchestra next Friday night. Will you go?"

"But, my dear boy," she protested greatly touched, "I cannot go by myself."

"You don't have to. I'm going to take you and come for you. You ain't going to turn me down, are you?"

"Have you got the ticket?"

"Right here. Now you will go, won't you?"

It would have taken a less susceptible heart than Miss Enid's to resist Quin's persuasive tones, and in spite of Miss Isobel's disapprobation she agreed to go.

Just what happened on that opening night of the Fine Arts Series, when two old lovers found themselves in embarra.s.sing proximity for the first time in fifteen years, has never been told. But from subsequent events it is safe to conclude that during the long program they became much more interested in their own unfinished symphony than in Schubert's, and when Quin came to take Miss Enid home, he found them in a corner of the lobby, still so engrossed in conversation that he obligingly walked around the block to give them an additional five minutes.

CHAPTER 13

Quin's desire for self-improvement soon became an obsession. With Miss Enid's a.s.sistance he got into a night course at the university, and proceeded to attack his ignorance with something of the fierce determination he had attacked the Hun the year before in France. He plunged through bogs of history, got hopelessly entangled in the barbed wire of mathematics, had hand-to-hand struggles with belligerent parts of speech, and more than once suffered the sh.e.l.l-shock of despair. But his watchword now, as then, was, "Up and at 'em!" And before long he had the satisfaction of seeing his enemy gradually giving way.

Having taken his small public into his confidence in regard to his belated ambition to get an education, he was surprised to find how ready everybody was to help him. Mr. Chester not only a.s.sisted him with his mathematics, but insisted upon taking him to hear good music, in the vain effort to reclaim an ear hopelessly attuned to jazz and rag-time. Mr.

Martel devoted Sunday afternoons to making him read aloud from the cla.s.sics, with great attention to precise enunciation. Miss Isobel still looked after his moral welfare, and Miss Enid continued to devote herself to his social improvement. But it remained for Madam Bartlett to render him the service of which he was most in need. Whenever the bubble of his self-esteem threatened to carry him away, she always took pains to puncture it.

"Don't let them make a fool of you, Graham," she said one day, as she leaned heavily upon his arm in a painful effort to walk without her crutches--an experiment that she allowed neither one of her daughters to share, as they invariably limped with her and got frightened when she stumbled. "They all treat you like a puppy that has learned to walk on its hind legs. Remember that you belong on your hind legs. You are only doing what most boys in your position do in their teens. If you were as smart as they claim, you would have got an education long ago. But young people these days have no sense! Just look at my granddaughter, for instance."

There being no direction in which he was more eager to look, Quin gave her his undivided attention.

"I've spent thousands of dollars on that girl's education," Madam continued, "and what do you suppose she elected to specialize in?