The Portygee Part 57

"But you said it would be twenty-five cents, not fifteen," protested Olive. "In your letter when the book was first talked about you said so."

Albert smiled. "Did I?" he observed. "Well, I said a good many things in those days, I'm afraid. Fifteen cents for a first book, especially a book of verse, is fair enough, I guess. But eighteen thousand SOLD! That is what gets me."

"You mean you think it ought to be a lot more. So do I, Albert, and so does Rachel. Why, we like it a lot better than we do David Harum. That was a nice book, but it wasn't lovely poetry like yours. And David Harum sold a million. Why shouldn't yours sell as many? Only eighteen thousand--why are you lookin' at me so funny?"

Her grandson rose to his feet. "Let's let well enough alone, Grandmother," he said. "Eighteen thousand will do, thank you. I'm like Grandfather, I'm wondering who on earth bought them."

Mrs. Snow was surprised and a little troubled.

"Why, Albert," she said, "you act kind of--kind of queer, seems to me.

You talk as if your poetry wasn't beautiful. You know it is. You used to say it was, yourself."

He interrupted her. "Did I, Grandmother?" he said. "All right, then, probably I did. Let's walk about the old place a little. I want to see it all. By George, I've been dreaming about it long enough!"

There were callers that afternoon, friends among the townsfolk, and more still after supper. It was late--late for South Harniss, that is--when Albert, standing in the doorway of the bedroom he nor they had ever expected he would occupy again, bade his grandparents good night. Olive kissed him again and again and, speech failing her, hastened away down the hall. Captain Zelotes shook his hand, opened his mouth to speak, shut it again, repeated both operations, and at last with a brief, "Well, good night, Al," hurried after his wife. Albert closed the door, put his lamp upon the bureau, and sat down in the big rocker.

In a way the night was similar to that upon which he had first entered that room. It had ceased raining, but the wind, as on that first night, was howling and whining about the eaves, the shutters rattled and the old house creaked and groaned rheumatically. It was not as cold as on that occasion, though by no means warm. He remembered how bare and comfortless he had thought the room. Now it looked almost luxurious. And he had been homesick, or fancied himself in that condition. Compared to the homesickness he had known during the past eighteen months that youthful seizure seemed contemptible and quite without excuse. He looked about the room again, looked long and lovingly. Then, with a sigh of content, drew from his pocket the two letters which had lain upon the sitting-room table when he arrived, opened them and began to read.

Madeline wrote, as always, vivaciously and at length. The maternal censorship having been removed, she wrote exactly as she felt. She could scarcely believe he was really going to be at home when he received this, at home in dear, quaint, queer old South Harniss. Just think, she had not seen the place for ever and ever so long, not for over two years. How were all the funny, odd people who lived there all the time?

Did he remember how he and she used to go to church every Sunday and sit through those dreadful, DREADFUL sermons by that prosy old minister just as an excuse for meeting each other afterward? She was SO sorry she could not have been there to welcome her hero when he stepped from the train. If it hadn't been for Mother's poor nerves she surely would have been. He knew it, didn't he? Of course he did. But she should see him soon "because Mother is planning already to come back to New York in a few weeks and then you are to run over immediately and make us a LONG visit. And I shall be so PROUD of you. There are lots of Army fellows down here now, officers for the most part. So we dance and are very gay--that is, the other girls are; I, being an engaged young lady, am very circ.u.mspect and demure, of course. Mother carries The Lances about with her wherever she goes, to teas and such things, and reads aloud from it often. Captain Blanchard, he is one of the family's officer friends, is crazy about your poetry, dear. He thinks it WONDERFUL. You know what _I_ think of it, don't you, and when I think that _I_ actually helped you, or played at helping you write some of it!

"And I am WILD to see your war cross. Some of the officers here have them--the crosses, I mean--but not many. Captain Blanchard has the military medal, and he is almost as modest about it as you are about your decoration. I don't see how you CAN be so modest. If _I_ had a Croix de Guerre I should want EVERY ONE to know about it. At the tea dance the other afternoon there was a British major who--"

And so on. The second letter was really a continuation of the first.

Albert read them both and, after the reading was finished, sat for some time in the rocking chair, quite regardless of the time and the cold, thinking. He took from his pocketbook a photograph, one which Madeline had sent him months before, which had reached him while he lay in the French hospital after his removal from the German camp. He looked at the pretty face in the photograph. She looked just as he remembered her, almost exactly as she had looked more than two years before, smiling, charming, carefree. She had not, apparently, grown older, those age-long months had not changed her. He rose and regarded his own reflection in the mirror of the bureau. He was surprised, as he was constantly being surprised, to see that he, too, had not changed greatly in personal appearance.

He walked about the room. His grandmother had told him that his room was just as he had left it. "I wouldn't change it, Albert," she said, "even when we thought you--you wasn't comin' back. I couldn't touch it, somehow. I kept thinkin', 'Some day I will. Pretty soon I MUST.' But I never did, and now I'm so glad."

He wandered back to the bureau and pulled open the upper drawers. In those drawers were so many things, things which he had kept there, either deliberately or because he was too indolent to destroy them. Old dance cards, invitations, and a bundle of photographs, snapshots. He removed the rubber band from the bundle and stood looking them over.

Photographs of school fellows, of picnic groups, of girls. Sam Thatcher, Gertie Kendrick--and Helen Kendall. There were at least a dozen of Helen.

One in particular was very good. From that photograph the face of Helen as he had known it four years before looked straight up into his--clear-eyed, honest, a hint of humor and understanding and common-sense in the gaze and at the corners of the lips. He looked at the photograph, and the photograph looked up at him. He had not seen her for so long a time. He wondered if the war had changed her as it had changed him. Somehow he hoped it had not. Change did not seem necessary in her case.

There had been no correspondence between them since her letter written when she heard of his enlistment. He had not replied to that because he knew Madeline would not wish him to do so. He wondered if she ever thought of him now, if she remembered their adventure at High Point light. He had thought of her often enough. In those days and nights of horror in the prison camp and hospital he had found a little relief, a little solace in lying with closed eyes and summoning back from memory the things of home and the faces of home. And her face had been one of these. Her face and those of his grandparents and Rachel and Laban, and visions of the old house and the rooms--they were the substantial things to cling to and he had clung to them. They WERE home. Madeline--ah! yes, he had longed for her and dreamed of her, G.o.d knew, but Madeline, of course, was different.

He snapped the rubber band once more about the bundle of photographs, closed the drawer and prepared for bed.

For the two weeks following his return home he had a thoroughly good time. It was a tremendous comfort to get up when he pleased, to eat the things he liked, to do much or little or nothing at his own sweet will.

He walked a good deal, tramping along the beach in the bl.u.s.tering wind and chilly sunshine and enjoying every breath of the clean salt air. He thought much during those solitary walks, and at times, at home in the evenings, he would fall to musing and sit silent for long periods. His grandmother was troubled.

"Don't it seem to you, Zelotes," she asked her husband, "as if Albert was kind of discontented or unsatisfied these days? He's so--so sort of fidgety. Talks like the very mischief for ten minutes and then don't speak for half an hour. Sits still for a long stretch and then jumps up and starts off walkin' as if he was crazy. What makes him act so? He's kind of changed from what he used to be. Don't you think so?"

The captain patted her shoulder. "Don't worry, Mother," he said. "Al's older than he was and what he's been through has made him older still.

As for the fidgety part of it, the settin' down and jumpin' up and all that, that's the way they all act, so far as I can learn. Elisha Warren, over to South Denboro, tells me his nephew has been that way ever since he got back. Don't fret, Mother, Al will come round all right."

"I didn't know but he might be anxious to see--to see her, you know."

"Her? Oh, you mean the Fosd.i.c.k girl. Well, he'll be goin' to see her pretty soon, I presume likely. They're due back in New York 'most any time now, I believe... . Oh, hum! Why in time couldn't he--"

"Couldn't he what, Zelotes?"

"Oh, nothin', nothin'."

The summons came only a day after this conversation. It came in the form of another letter from Madeline and one from Mrs. Fosd.i.c.k. They were, so the latter wrote, back once more in their city home, her nerves, thank Heaven, were quite strong again, and they were expecting him, Albert, to come on at once. "We are all dying to see you," wrote Mrs. Fosd.i.c.k. "And poor, dear Madeline, of course, is counting the moments."

"Stay as long as you feel like, Al," said the captain, when told of the proposed visit. "It's the dull season at the office, anyhow, and Labe and I can get along first-rate, with Issy to superintend. Stay as long as you want to, only--"

"Only what, Grandfather?"

"Only don't want to stay too long. That is, don't fall in love with New York so hard that you forget there is such a place as South Harniss."

Albert smiled. "I've been in places farther away than New York," he said, "and I never forgot South Harniss."

"Um-hm... . Well, I shouldn't be surprised if that was so. But you'll have better company in New York than you did in some of those places.

Give my regards to Fosd.i.c.k. So-long, Al."

CHAPTER XVI

The Fosd.i.c.k car was at the Grand Central Station when the Knickerbocker Limited pulled in. And Madeline, a wonderfully furred and veiled and hatted Madeline, was waiting there behind the rail as he came up the runway from the train. It was amazing the fact that it was really she.

It was more amazing still to kiss her there in public, to hold her hand without fear that some one might see. To--

"Shall I take your bags, sir?"

It was the Fosd.i.c.k footman who asked it. Albert started guiltily. Then he laughed, realizing that the hand-holding and the rest were no longer criminal offenses. He surrendered his luggage to the man. A few minutes later he and Madeline were in the limousine, which was moving rapidly up the Avenue. And Madeline was asking questions and he was answering and--and still it was all a dream. It COULDN'T be real.

It was even more like a dream when the limousine drew up before the door of the Fosd.i.c.k home and they entered that home together. For there was Mrs. Fosd.i.c.k, as ever majestic, commanding, awe-inspiring, the same Mrs.

Fosd.i.c.k who had, in her letter to his grandfather, written him down a despicable, underhanded sneak, here was that same Mrs. Fosd.i.c.k--but not at all the same. For this lady was smiling and gracious, welcoming him to her home, addressing him by his Christian name, treating him kindly, with almost motherly tenderness. Madeline's letters and Mrs. Fosd.i.c.k's own letters received during his convalescence abroad had prepared him, or so he had thought, for some such change. Now he realized that he had not been prepared at all. The reality was so much more revolutionary than the antic.i.p.ation that he simply could not believe it.

But it was not so very wonderful if he had known all the facts and had been in a frame of mind to calmly a.n.a.lyze them. Mrs. Fletcher Fosd.i.c.k was a seasoned veteran, a general who had planned and fought many hard campaigns upon the political battlegrounds of women's clubs and societies of various sorts. From the majority of those campaigns she had emerged victorious, but her experiences in defeat had taught her that the next best thing to winning is to lose gracefully, because by so doing much which appears to be lost may be regained. For Albert Speranza, bookkeeper and would-be poet of South Harniss, Cape Cod, she had had no use whatever as a prospective son-in-law. Even toward a living Albert Speranza, hero and newspaper-made genius, she might have been cold. But when that hero and genius was, as she and every one else supposed, safely and satisfactorily dead and out of the way, she had seized the opportunity to bask in the radiance of his memory. She had talked Albert Speranza and read Albert Speranza and boasted of Albert Speranza's engagement to her daughter before the world. Now that the said Albert Speranza had been inconsiderate enough to "come alive again," there was but one thing for her to do--that is, to make the best of it. And when Mrs. Fletcher Fosd.i.c.k made the best of anything she made the very best.

"It doesn't make any difference," she told her husband, "whether he really is a genius or whether he isn't. We have said he is and now we must keep on saying it. And if he can't earn his salt by his writings--which he probably can't--then you must fix it in some way so that he can make-believe earn it by something else. He is engaged to Madeline, and we have told every one that he is, so he will have to marry her; at least, I see no way to prevent it."

"Humph!" grunted Fosd.i.c.k. "And after that I'll have to support them, I suppose."

"Probably--unless you want your only child to starve."

"Well, I must say, Henrietta--"

"You needn't, for there is nothing more TO say. We're in it and, whether we like it or not, we must make the best of it. To do anything now except appear joyful about it would be to make ourselves perfectly ridiculous. We can't do that, and you know it."

Her husband still looked everything but contented.

"So far as the young fellow himself goes," he said, "I like him, rather.

I've talked with him only once, of course, and then he and I weren't agreeing exactly. But I liked him, nevertheless. If he were anything but a fool poet I should be more reconciled."