V. V.'s Eyes Part 19

The young man hurried on:

"I've had it on my mind ever since, and have wanted very much to tell you.... I've felt that--what I--I said to you was all wrong--most unjust...."

He hesitated; and the gold-and-black lashes, so piquant and gay, fell.

"Take your jump! Take your jump!" called Major c.o.o.ney in the dining-room. You could hear him plainly, straight through the folding doors. And young V. Vivian, who was merciless as a social philosopher but somewhat trusting as a man, took his jump with a will.

"I was much upset about it that night--and excited, I suppose. I can't account for--for what I said in any other way. I've hoped for the opportunity to tell you.... Why, of course I don't believe that at all.... It was all so confused and mixed up; that was the trouble. But of course I know that you--that you wouldn't have said anything that--that wasn't entirely consistent with the facts...."

He paused, expectantly it seemed; but there came no reply.

Cally Heth, indeed, stood in a dumbness which she seemed powerless to break. Well she knew what sort of reply she ought to make to these remarks: what was the man saying but what she had already said a hundred times to herself? He was simply making tardy admission that her position had been exactly right all along; that was all. Yet somehow the sane knowledge did not seem to help much against this sequence of unique sensations she was at present experiencing,--odd, tumultuous, falling sensations, as of bottoms dropped out....

"I suppose," said the man's faraway voice, sounding a sudden loss of confidence, "it's rather too much to hope that--that you can forget...."

Again his words dropped into the brief, expectant silence.... It seemed that he had happened to say the one thing to which no reply was possible. And somehow the effect of it was worse, even, than the never-forgotten moment in the summer-house.

"And forgive," finished the voice.... "I've felt--"

And then, in good season, there sounded welcome footsteps, Hen's, in the hall. They broke at a stroke, the strange petrifying numbness which Carlisle had felt mysteriously closing over her. She murmured the name of Henrietta, and turned away. And her voice was the voice of Lucknow, as the friendly columns poured in....

Hen came walking in, saying something lively and c.o.o.neyesque, and glancing with an air of interested expectancy from her friend V.V. to her cousin Cally. But Cally only said once more that she must be going, and asked where Aunt Molly was. She then let fall the word good-night for Hen's caller, while looking at a point some ninety degrees removed from his whereabouts: by which the caller understood that his forgiveness was problematical, to say the least of it.

IX

Concerning an Abandoned Hotel, and who lived there; also of an Abandoned Youth, who lived somewhere else, Far Away; how a Slum Doctor dressed for a Function, such as involved Studs; and how Kern Garland wishted she was a Lady.

Mrs. Garland, catching sight of Doctor as he came up the decayed grand-stairway, cried out, well, she never, just in the nig of time!

Why, the words was no more'n out of her mouth that the stoo was just done to a hair, she did declare, and Kern she said, quick as anything, what, a hair in the stoo, now, mommer, that'd never do....

The clocks of the city had just struck six for the last time that year.

Dr. Vivian, having placed his suitcase and overcoat on the second-hand operating-table in the office, washed face and hands, brushed his coat-collar with a whisk whose ranks had been heavily thinned in wars with dust and lint, and, repairing in sound spirits to the Garland combination dining-and living-room, with the kitchen in the corner, made his interesting confidence relative to the suitcase. He made it in mouth-filling phrases, with many teasing generalizations about the ways of the world and the evils of modern society, which was only his gempman's way when playful. But by close application his auditors soon got at the heart of his meaning, to wit: Doctor actually was going uptown to his swell Uncle Beirne's swell Noo Year's reception to-night in Mr. O'Neill's fulldressuit.

Naturally the Garlands were much interested and excited by the tidings, which brought them so close to great events that, practically speaking, they themselves became members of the fash'nable set: and Mrs. Garland publicly thanked G.o.d that she was not as other women were, lazying and keeping back their gentlemen's shirts till Sat.u.r.day night, or worse.

Laid away tidy in the second bureau drawer, her shirts were. The doctor himself seemed not a little enlivened by the evening's prospect. It is imaginable that the Dabney House grew a little lonely at times....

"And to think your swell uncle wants you so special, sir!" said Mrs.

Garland, in her harsh, inflectionless voice. "A compliment, I'm sure.

And his party all a fizzle unless you come, and his gai'ty a mockery! Well!"

Such indeed was the way in which Vivian had been pleased to depict his fashionable uncle's att.i.tude. He smiled slightly, sipped his feeble coffee and said:

"Bear in mind that he's a bad, bad (though personally not displeasing) old man, ridden by ruinous ideas about the almightiness of the dollar, or lucre as we term it.... I have observed for some time that he desires to corrupt me with his Persian luxuries."

"Persian! Well, I never!"

Mrs. G., a stout woman and a dress-reformer by the look of her, got hot corn m.u.f.fins from the kitchenette in the corner, and added:

"Them rugs is beautiful."

"He said lux'ries, mommer, like lowneg dresses, and tchampagne, and ice-cream all like animals," said Kern.

"I do declare! Well, they do say the mawls of some of them swells is something nawful. Not alloodin' to your uncle now, well, of course, sir."

"I know a girl named Sadie Whirtle," continued Kern, "and there was a man named Toatwood made a lot of money, corntracting, and his wife she took some of the money and went to Europe in a steamer and stayed more'n two months buying clo'es. And one day Sadie Whirtle goes up to him and says, 'Mist' Toatwood, hear your wife's come home with some fine Parisian clo'es.' And Mist' Toatwood says, 'Shucks'--on'y he says somep'n worse'n shucks--'Shucks,' says he, 'why, my wife never been to Persia in her life.'"

Kern was eighteen, with six years of bread-winning behind her, but she told her story exactly in the manner of a child of eight. That is to say, she told it in a monotone without evincing, and clearly without feeling, the slightest amus.e.m.e.nt in it, and at the end, continuing quite grave, watched for its effect on others with a curious, staring interest. Her immobile, investigatory expression made the doctor laugh, which seemed, of late, to be the object in life of all Kern's anecdotes.

"Where'd you get that story, Corinne?"

His odd habit of so calling her had often been privately discussed between Kern and her mother, who had so long ago shortened their own original Kurrin that even that had pa.s.sed from memory. They had concluded that this was only one of his jokey gempman's ways.

"Off Sadie Whirtle," said Kern, rocking backward and forward in her chair. "On'y I don't see anything comical in it."

And then she giggled for some time.

The talk and stoo went forward cheerfully. Beside the Goldnagels, on the ground floor, these two women were the doctor's only fellow lodgers, for Mister Garland, of the wanderl.u.s.t, had not visited his family since the day in October, and so hardly counted. In the early weeks of the doctor's tenancy, which began only last September, he had walked three times a day to the Always Open Lunch Room, known among the baser sort as the Suicide Club, and had then become possibly the most discriminating judge of egg-sandwiches in all the city. Later, having made the better acquaintance of the Garlands, he had rightly surmised that the earnings derivable from a medical boarder might not be unacceptable in that quarter. The present modus vivendi, then worked out, had proved most satisfactory to all, from both the financial and the social viewpoints.

"I wisht I had a red satin dress, and a necklace all pearls, and was going to the party, too, and had a dark sad-faced man with a mustache and a neye-gla.s.s engaged to me, like a count. I wisht I was a Lady,"

said Kern.

"You don't need a red satin dress to be a lady."

"It'd come easier, kinder, with the dress, Mr. V.V. And I wisht I had a writin'-desk, too. And a founting pen."

"Lawk's sakes, Kern, an' I've asked you a hundred times what would you do with a writin'-desk, now?"

"Mommer, I'd set at it."

"An' what time you got for settin', I'd like to know? Fairy-dreamin'

again!"

"An' I'd keep notes in it in the pigeonholes. Like it says in my Netiquette."

"You don't get no notes."

Kern was silenced by her mother's addiction to actuality, but presently said: "I'd get notes if I was a lady, wouldn't I, Mr. V.V.?"

The doctor a.s.sured her that she would, and that all these things would come some day. He sighed inwardly and wondered, not for the first time, where the link could possibly lie between the matter-of-fact mother and the strange child of fancy. There was nothing to do but attribute the phenomenon to Mister, the whimsical knight of the open road. The boarder asked what he should bring Kern from the party: he feared they wouldn't have writing-desks, it not being at all a literary set. The girl thought a rapturous moment and then asked could she have three of them marrowgla.s.ses, all in curly white paper.

Vivian promised, and departed on his duties. First there was a call at the Miggses' down the block, where the little boy Tub lay with scarlet fever, very sick; and then there was his seven o'clock office hour for workers, in which one, a teamster with Bright's disease and seven children, remained long....

These matters occupied the doctor till eight o'clock: alone in his office he computed the fact roughly from his watch, a battered heirloom whose word was not to be taken literally. Good!--half an hour before time to dress. Leisure, being a scant commodity, was proportionally valued. The young man advanced to his secretary, before whose open face plain living and high thinking could be so freely indulged in.

The secretary was of fine mahogany, hand-made in Virginia in the year that Sir Edward Pakenham did not take New Orleans. It was the hero of so many travels that its present proprietor once called it a field-secretary, a pleasantry which would doubtless have convulsed Miss Mamie Willis, if only she had ever heard it. The great tall office, bare but for cheap doctorly paraphernalia, was even more storied. A bleak grandeur clung to it still. Decayed mouldings, it had aplenty: great splotches on wall and ceiling, where plaster had been tried through the year and found wanting; unsightlier splotch between the windows whence the tall gilt mirror had been plucked away for cash; broken chandelier, cracked panes, loose flooring, dismantled fireplace. But view the stately high pitch of the chamber, the majestic wide windows and private balcony without, the tall mantel of pure black marble, the still handsome walnut paneling, waist-high, the ma.s.sive splendid doors. No common suburban room, this: clearly a room with meaning, a past, soul.