The Memoirs of an American Citizen Part 12

We went into a saloon, and I set up a bottle of champagne.

"You're all right," Carmichael said to me when we had drunk to my good luck. "You couldn't have run that place much longer. The big ones would have eaten you up, hide and all."

"I knew that!" I said calmly.

Carmichael looked at me with considerable respect, and that was one of the pleasantest moments of my life.

CHAPTER X

LOVE

_A poor stenographer--The positive young lady under altered circ.u.mstances--Miss Gentles's story--A hard road for tender feet--Social and sentimental--A misunderstanding--Which is made right in the only way--My boss invites us to dinner--Another kind of woman--A woman's shrewdness--The social gift--At the opera--Business and pleasure--Sarah on Mrs. Dround_

It was a hot day in August three years after the trial; I was sitting in Carmichael's office trying to get a breath of fresh air from his west windows. I called old Peters and asked him to send me up a stenographer.

"Haven't a good one in the place, Mr. Harrington," he said. "All the smart ones are off on their vacation. There's Miss Gentles, though--the old man generally keeps her for himself, but he's gone home by this time."

"Send up anything so long as it can write!"

"Well, she _ain't_ much good," Peters replied.

I had my head down behind my desk when the stenographer came in, and I began to dictate without looking up. These stenographer ladies were all of a piece to me,--pert, knowing misses,--all but Miss Harben: she was fifty and sour, and took my letters like biting off thread. This one evidently wasn't in her cla.s.s, for pretty soon she sang out:--

"Please wait! I can't go so fast."

So I waited, and looked up to see what I had to do with. This young woman was a good-looking, ladylike person, with a ma.s.s of lovely brown hair and long brown eyelashes. She was different from the other girls in the office, and yet it seemed to me I had seen her before. She was dressed in black, a sort of half mourning, I judged. Pretty soon she got stuck again and asked me to repeat. This time she looked at me imploringly.

"I am not very good," she said with a smile.

"No, you are not," I replied.

She laughed at my blunt answer--laughed pleasantly, like a lady who knows how to turn off a harsh truth, not flirtatiously, like most of her profession.

"Been long at it?" I asked the next time she broke down.

"Not so very. I graduated from the school about six months ago, and I have always worked for Mr. Dround since then. He doesn't talk as fast as you do, not nearly."

She smiled again at me, frankly and naturally. Suddenly I remembered where I had seen that face before, and when she looked up again I said:--

"Did you ever find that purse, Miss Gentles?"

She looked puzzled at first; then a light spread over her face, and she stammered:--

"Why, of course, you are _the_ Mr. Harrington who--But you have changed!"

"Rather, I hope! And the light wasn't good in the police station that morning."

Miss Gentles leaned back in her chair and laughed, a blush spreading prettily over her face.

"It's all so funny!" she exclaimed.

"Funnier now than it was then," I admitted.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_Why, of course, you are the Mr. Harrington who--But you have changed!_"]

"I am very glad to meet you again. No, I never found that purse. The judge still twits me, when he sees me, about changing my mind. He thinks--" Then she stopped in embarra.s.sment, and it was some time before I found out what the judge did think.

"Have you been back to that place in Indiana?" she asked. And we had quite a chat. She talked to me like a young lady who was receiving a caller in her father's house. It took a long time to finish the few letters I had started to write. When she went, I got up and opened the door for her. I had to.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Harrington," she said, holding out her hand. "I am so glad to have met you again."

Old Peters, who was in the outer office, looked at us in considerable surprise. When Miss Gentles had gone he remarked in a gossiping way:--

"So you know the young woman?"

"I met her once years ago," I admitted. "How did she land here? She doesn't seem to have had much experience as a stenographer."

"No, she hasn't. Her father died several years ago, and didn't leave a cent. He was a very popular doctor, though--a Southerner. They lived kind of high, I guess, while there was anything. The Drounds knew them in their better days, and when the doctor died Mrs. Dround tried to help the girl in one way and another. Then they fixed up this job for her. I guess Mr. Dround don't work her very hard. Sorry you were troubled with her. We'll see that you get a rattler the next time, Mr. Harrington," he ended. (The men in the office were pretty nice to "Mr. Harrington" these days!)

"Oh, she isn't so bad!" I said to Peters. For I rather looked forward to seeing the pretty, pleasant-mannered girl again. "I'd just as soon have Miss Gentles next week when Mr. Dround goes East, if no one else wants her."

Old Peters had a twinkle in his eyes as he answered:--

"Just as you say, Mr. Harrington."

So I came to see a good deal of Miss Gentles that summer while Mr.

Dround was away on his vacation. I can't say that the young lady developed much business ability. She forgot most things with a wonderful ease, and she was never very accurate. But she tried hard, and it seemed to worry her so when I pointed out her mistakes that I took to having in another stenographer in the afternoon to finish what she hadn't done.

Miss Gentles boarded with an old aunt of her mother's near where Sloc.u.m and I lived. I gathered that the aunt and her husband were not very kind to her. They thought she ought to marry, having good looks and no money.

Miss Gentles let me call on her, and before the summer was over we were pretty well acquainted. For a long time the thought of May had kept me from looking at a woman; I always saw that little white face and those searching eyes, and heard that mocking laugh. But Miss Gentles was so different from May that she never made me think of the woman I had once loved.

I took Sloc.u.m to call on my new acquaintance, but they didn't get on well together. She thought his old Yankee ways were hard, and I suppose he thought I was bound on the voyage of life with a pleasure-loving mate. He used to growl to me about tying myself to a woman, but I always said he needn't worry about me--I wasn't the marrying kind.

"Oh, you'll be wanting to get married the same as the rest of the world," Sloco would answer, "and have a wife and children to spend your money on and make you earn more!"

But I thought differently. A man of my sort, I replied to him, works and fights just the same without wife or child, because of the fight in him, because he can't help himself, any more than the man who wants to drink can keep his lips from the gla.s.s. It's in his blood and bone....

Miss Gentles had seen a good deal of society,--the best there was in the city in those early days. It was odd to hear her talking about people who were just big names to me, as if she had known them all her life. I must have struck her as pretty green. But she made me feel from the first like some one she had always known. She was proud enough, but simple, and not in the least reserved. She told me all about her people, the easy times and the hard times. And never a word of complaint or regret for all the parties and good things that were gone out of her life. She was one to take her beer with a joke when she couldn't have champagne. Of course, I told her, first and last, all my story. She made me take her to see the Hostetters at the old place on Van Buren Street.

Then the four of us went up the lake on a picnic one Sunday. Hillary, I remember, was sullen because Ed paid so much attention to Miss Gentles on this trip.

So we became good friends. Yet I never felt really intimate with her, as I had with Hillary, and when I tried to step past a certain line she had her own way of keeping me off, not haughtily or pertly, but like a lady who knew how people of the great world, where I had never been, behaved to one another. One day, I remember, I was fool enough to send her a little fancy purse with a gold eagle in it, and a line saying that it was time for me to make rest.i.tution, or something of the sort. My gift came back quick enough, with a clever little note tucked inside, saying she couldn't let me admit that I had taken her purse. It was a good lesson for me.

When Mr. Dround returned in the fall she reported to him for work, and I was not altogether sorry. I had plenty of chances to see her outside of the office now, and I was desperately busy. In a few days, however, when I happened to be in Mr. Dround's office on some matter, he began to talk about Miss Gentles. Peters had told him that I had had her as my stenographer during his absence, and Mr. Dround would like to have me continue, as she wasn't adapted to his needs. Then he spoke of her people, and how he and Mrs. Dround had held them in the highest esteem, and had tried to do something for this girl. But there had seemed to be nothing that she was really fitted to do.