Part 19

Dick laughed. "Some picture, Tommy. And a lot you know about it. Why don't you get married and try it out?"

Tommy, who was tall and ruddy and forty, plus a year or two, gave a short laugh. "I might find somebody to cook the sausages, but there's only one that I'd care to kiss."

"So that's it. She turned you down, Tommy?"

"She did, and we won't talk about it."

"Oh, very well. Good-night, Tommy."

"Good-night."

So Dick passed on, and Tommy Jackson beat his hands against his breast as he made his way through the whirling snow, his footsteps deadened by the frozen carpet which the storm had spread.

Mary Barker was delighted when Nannie told of her engagement to Dick. She talked it over with Mrs. Ashburner. "It will be the best thing for her."

Mrs. Ashburner was not sure. "I've drudged all my life and I hate to see her drudge."

"She won't have it as hard as you have had it," Mary said. "Dick will always make a good income."

"She will have a harder time than you've had, Mary," said Mrs. Ashburner, and her eyes swept the pretty room wistfully. "Many a time when I've been down in my steaming old kitchen I have thought of you up here in your blue coat and your pretty slippers, with your hair shining, and I've wished to heaven that I had never married."

"Things haven't been easy for you," said Mary gently.

"They have been harder than nails, Mary. You've escaped all that."

"Yes." Mary's eyes did not meet Mrs. Ashburner's. "I have escaped--that."

Nannie and her mother slept in the back parlor of the boarding-house. They had single beds and it was in the middle of the night that Mrs. Ashburner said: "Are you awake, Nannie?"

"Yes, I am."

"Well, I can't seem to get to sleep. Maybe it's the coffee and maybe it's because I have you on my mind. I keep thinking that I hate to have you get married, honey."

"Oh, mother, don't you like Dick?"

"Yes. It ain't that. But it's nice for you in the office and you don't have to slave."

Nannie sat up in bed, and the light from the street lamp shone in and showed her wide-eyed, with her hair in a red glory. "I shan't slave," she said. "I told Dick."

"Men don't know." Mrs. Ashburner spoke with a sort of weary bitterness. "They'll promise anything."

"And I am not going to be married in a hurry, mother. Dick's got to wait for me if he wants me."

It sounded very worldly-minded and decisive and Mrs. Ashburner gained an envious comfort in her daughter's declaration. She had never set herself against a man's will in that way. Perhaps, after all, Nannie would make a success of marriage.

But Nannie was not so resolute as her words might have seemed to imply. Long after her mother slept she lay awake in the dark and thought of Dick, of the break in his voice when he had made his plea, the light in his eyes when he had won a response, his flaming youth, his fine boy's reverence for her own youth and innocence. It would be--rather wonderful, she whispered to her heart, and fell asleep, dreaming.

The next morning was very cold, and Nannie, coming early into Kingdon Knox's office to take his letters, was in a glow after her walk through the snowy streets. Her cheeks were red, her eyes sparkled, and the ring on her finger sparkled.

Knox at once noticed the ring. "So that's it," he said, and leaned back in his chair. "Let's talk about it a little."

They talked about it more than a little, and the burden of Kingdon Knox's argument was that it was a pity. She was too young and pretty to marry a poor man and live in a funny little flat and do her own work and spoil her nails with dishwashing. "Personally, I think it's rather dreadful. A waste of you, if you want the truth."

Poor Nannie, listening, saw her castles falling. It would be rather dreadful--dishwashing and a gas stove and getting meals.

"He is awfully in love with me," she managed to say at last.

"And you?" He leaned forward a little. Nannie was aware of the feeling of excitement which he could always rouse in her. When he spoke like that she saw herself as something rather perfect and princesslike.

"Wait--for Prince Charming," he said.

Nannie was sure that when Prince Charming came he would be like Mr. Knox; younger perhaps, but with that same lovely manner.

"Of course," Mr. Knox said gently, "I suppose I ought not to advise, but if I were you"--he touched the sparkling ring--"I should give it back to him."

So after several absorbing talks with her employer on the subject, Nannie gave the ring back, and when poor Dick passed his friend the policeman on his way home he stopped and told his story.

"They are all like that," Tommy said, "but if I were you I wouldn't take 'no' for an answer."

Dick brightened. "Wouldn't you?"

"Not if I had to carry her off under my arm," said Tommy between his teeth.

"But I can't carry her off, Tommy--and she won't go."

"She'll go if you ain't afraid of her," Tommy told him with solemn emphasis. "I was afraid."

They were under the street lamp, and Dick stared at him in astonishment. "I didn't know you were afraid of anything."

"I didn't know it either," was Tommy's grim response, "until I met her. But I've known it ever since."

"Well, it's hard luck."

"It is hardest at Christmas time," said Tommy, "and my beat ain't the best one to make me cheerful. There are too many stores. And dolls in the windows. And drums. And horns. And Santa Claus handing out things to kids. And I've got to see it, with money just burning in my pocket to buy things and to have a tree of my own and a turkey in my oven and a table with some one who cares at the other end. And all I'll get out of the merry season is a table d'hôte at Nitti's and a box of cigars from the boys."

"Ain't women the limit, Tommy?"

"Well"--Tommy's tone held a note of forced cheerfulness--"that little redhead must have had some reason for not wanting you, Dick. Maybe we men ain't worth it."

"Worth what?"

"Marrying. A woman's got a square deal coming to her, and she doesn't always get it."

"She'd get it with you, and she'd get it with me; you know that, Tommy."

"She might," said Tommy pessimistically, "if the good Lord helped us."

Nannie on the day after her break with Dick was blushingly aware of the bareness of her third finger as she took Kingdon Knox's dictation. When he had finished his letters, Knox smiled at her. "So you gave it back," he said.

"Yes."

"Good little girl. You'll find something much better if you wait. And I don't want you wasted." He opened a drawer and took out a long box. He opened it and lifted a string of beads. They were of carved ivory, and matched the cream of Nannie's complexion. They were strung strongly on a thick thread of scarlet silk, and there was a scarlet tassel at the end.

"They are for you," he said. "It is my first Christmas present to you; but I hope it won't be the last."

Nannie's heart beat so that she could almost hear it. "Oh, thank you," she said breathlessly; "they're so beautiful."

But she did not know how rare they were, nor how expensive until she wore them in Mary's room that night.

"Where did you get them, Nannie?"

"Mr. Knox gave them to me."

There was dead silence, then Mary said: "Nannie, you ought not to take them."

"Why not?"

"They cost such an awful lot, Nannie. They look simple, but they aren't. The carving is exquisite."

"Well, he gave you beads, Mary."

Mary's face was turned away. "It was different. I have been such a long time in the office."

"I don't think it is much different, and I don't see how I can give them back, Mary."

Mary did not argue, but when a little later Nannie told of her broken engagement, Mary said sharply: "But, Nannie--why?"

"Well, mother doesn't care much for the idea. She--she thinks a girl is much better off to keep on at the office."

Mary was lying in her long chair under the lamp. She had a cushion under her head, and her hand shaded her eyes. "Did--Mr. Knox have anything to do with it?"

"What makes you ask that, Mary?"

"Did he?"

"Well, yes. You know what I told you; he thinks I'd be--wasted."

"On Dick?"

"Yes."

Mary lay for a long time with her hand over her eyes; then she said: "If you don't marry Dick, what about your future, Nannie?"

"There's time enough to think about that. And--and I can wait."

"For what?"

Nannie blushed and laughed a little. "Prince Charming."

After that there was a silence, out of which Nannie asked: "Does your head ache, Mary?"

"A little."

"Can't I get you something?"

"No. After I've rested a bit I'll take a walk."

Mary's walk led her by the lighted shop windows. The air was keen and cold and helped her head. But it did not help her heart. She had a sense of suffocation when she thought of Nannie.

She stopped in front of one of the shops. There were dolls in the window, charming, round-eyed, ringleted. One of them was especially captivating, with fat blond curls, fat legs, blue silk socks and slippers, crisp frills and a broad blue hat.

"How I should have loved her when I was a little girl," was Mary's thought as she stood looking in. Then: "How a child of my own would have loved her."

She made up her mind that she would buy the doll--in the morning when the shop opened. It was a whimsical thing to do, to give herself a doll at her time of life. But it would be in a sense symbolic. She had no child to which to give it; she would give it to the child who was once herself.

She came home with a lighter heart and with the knowledge of what she had to do. She put on her blue house coat and sat down to her desk with its embossed leather fittings, and there under the lovely, lamp which Kingdon Knox had given her she wrote to Nannie.

She gave the letter to Nannie the next morning. "I want you to read it when you are all alone. Then tear it up. It must always be just between you and me, Nannie."

Nannie read the letter in the lunch hour. She got her lunch at a cafeteria and there was a rest room. It was very quiet and she had a corner to herself. She wondered what Mary had to say to her, and why she didn't talk it out instead of writing about it.

But Mary had felt that she could not trust herself to speak. There would have been Nannie's eyes to meet, questions to answer; and this meant so much. Paper and pen were impersonal.

"It isn't easy to talk such things out, Nannie. I should never have written this if I had not realized last night that your feet were following the path which my own have followed for fifteen years. And I knew that you were envying me and wanting to be like me; and I am saying what I shall say in this letter so that I may save you, Nannie.

"When I first came into Mr. Knox's office I was young like you, and I had a lover, young and fine like Dick, and he satisfied me. We had our plans--of a home and the happiness we should have together. If I had married him, I should now have sons and daughters growing up about me, and when Christmas came there would be a tree and young faces smiling, and my husband, smiling.

"But Mr. Knox talked to me as he talked to you. He told me, too, to wait--for Prince Charming. He told me I was too fine to be wasted. He hinted that the man I was planning to marry was a plain fellow, not good enough for me. He talked and I listened. He opened vistas. I saw myself raised to a different sphere by some man like Mr. Knox--just as well groomed, just as distinguished, just as rich and wonderful.

"But such men don't come often into the lives of girls like you and me, Nannie. I know that now. I did not know it then. But Mr. Knox should have known it. Yet he held out the hope; and at last he robbed me of my future, of the little home, my fine, strong husband. He robbed me of my woman's heritage of a child in my arms.

"And in return he gave me--nothing. I have found in the years that I have been with him that he likes to be admired and looked up to by pretty women. He likes to mold us into something exquisite and ornamental, he likes to feel that he has molded us. He likes to see our blushes. All these years that I have been with him, he has liked to feel that I looked upon him as the ideal toward which all my girlish dreams tended.

"He is not in love with me, and I am not in love with him. But he has always known that if he had been free and had wooed me, I should have felt that King Cophetua had come to the beggar maid. Yet, too late, I can see that if he had been free he would never have wooed me. His ambition would have carried him up and beyond anything I can ever hope to be, and he would have sought some woman of his own circle who would have contributed to his material success.

"And now he is trying to spoil your life, Nannie--to make you discontented with your future with Dick. You look at him and see in your life some day a Prince Charming. But I tell you this, Nannie, that Prince Charming will never come. And after a time all you will have to show for the years that you have spent in the office will be just a pretty room, a few bits of wood and leather and bronze in exchange for warm, human happiness, clinging hands, a husband like Dick, who adores you, who comes home at night, eager--for you!

"You can have all this--and I have lost it. And there isn't much ahead of me. I shan't always be ornamental, and then Mr. Knox will let me drop out of his life, as he has let others drop out. And there'll be loneliness and old age and--nothing else.

"Oh, Nannie, I want you to marry Dick. I want you to know that all the rest is dust and ashes. I feel tired and old; and when I think of your youth, and beauty, I want Dick to have it, not Mr. Knox, who will flatter and--forget.

"Tear this letter up, Nannie. It hasn't been easy to write. I don't want anybody but you to read it."

But Nannie did not tear it up.

She tucked it in her bag and went to telephone to Dick.

And would he meet her on the corner under the street lamp that night when she came home from the office? She had something to tell him.

Dick met Nannie, and presently they pursued their rapturous way. A little later Tommy Jackson passed by. Something caught his eye.

A bit of white paper.

He stooped and picked it up. It was Mary's letter to Nannie. Nannie had cried into her little handkerchief while she talked to Dick, and in getting the handkerchief out of the bag the letter had come with it and had dropped unnoticed to the ground.

It had been years since Tommy had seen any of Mary's writing. A sentence caught his eye, and he read straight through. After all, there are things permitted an officer of the law which might be unseemly in the average citizen.

And when he had read, Tommy began to say things beneath his breath. And the chances are that had Kingdon Knox appeared at that moment things would have fared badly with him.

But it was Mary Barker who came. She had under her arm in a paper parcel the fat doll with the blond curls and the blue socks. She did not see Tommy until she was almost upon him.

Then she said: "What are you doing here, Tommy?"

"Why shouldn't I be here?"

"This isn't your beat."

"It has been my beat since two weeks ago. I've seen you go by every night, Mary."

She stood looking up at him. And he looked down at her; and so, of course, their gaze met, and something that she saw in Tommy's eyes made Mary's overflow.

"Mary, darling," said Tommy tenderly.

"You said you wouldn't forgive me."

"That was fifteen years ago."

"Tommy, I'm sorry."

Tommy stood very straight as became an officer of the law with, the eyes of the world upon him.

"May," he said, "I just read your letter to Nannie. She dropped it. If I'd known the things in that letter fifteen years ago I'd have stayed on my job until I got you. But I thought you didn't care."

"I thought so too," said Mary.

"But the letter told me that you wanted a husband's loving heart and a strong arm," said Tommy, "and, please God, you are going to have them, Mary. And now you run along, girl, dear. I can't be making love when I'm on duty. But I'll come and kiss you at nine."

So Mary ran along, and her heart sang. And when she got home she unwrapped the fat doll and kissed every curl of her, and she set her under the lovely lamp; and then she got a long box and put something in it and wrapped it and addressed it to Kingdon Knox.

And after that she went to the window and stood there, watching until she saw Tommy coming.

And the next morning when Kingdon Knox found the long box on his desk, addressed in Mary's handwriting, he thought it was a Christmas present, and he opened it, smiling.

But his smile died as he read the note which lay on top of a string of jade beads:

"I am sending them back, Mr. Knox, with my resignation. I should never have taken them. But somehow you made me feel that I was a sort of fairy princess, and that jade beads belonged to me, and everything beautiful, and that some day life would bring them. But life isn't that, and you knew it and I didn't. Life is just warm human happiness, and a home, and work for those we love. And so, after all, I am going to marry Tommy. And Nannie is going to marry Dick. In a way it is a happy ending, and in a way it isn't, because I've grown away from the kind of life I must live with Tommy, and I am afraid that in some ways I am not fitted for it. But Tommy says that I am silly to be afraid. And in the future I am going to trust Tommy."

And so Mary went out of Kingdon Knox's life. And on Christmas Day at the head of a great table, with servants to the right of him and servants to the left, he carved a mammoth turkey; and there was silver shining, and glass sparkling and lovely women smiling, all in honor of the merry season.

But Kingdon Knox was not merry as he thought of the jade beads and of Mary's empty desk.

BEGGARS ON HORSEBACK

I

With the Merryman girls economy was a fine art. Money was spent by them to preserve the family traditions. Nothing else counted. Everything was sacrificed to the gods of yesterday.

Little Anne Merryman had shivered all her short life in the bleakness of this domestic ideal.

"Why can't I have butter on my bread?" she had demanded in her long-legged schoolgirl days, when she had worn her fair hair in a fat braid down her back.

The answers had never been satisfying. Well-bred people might, Amy indicated, go without butter. Their income was not elastic, and there were things more important.

"What things? Amy, I'm so hungry I could eat a house."

It was these expressions of Anne's about food which shocked Amy and Ethel.

"I'd sell my soul for a slice of roast beef."

"Anne!"

"Well, I would!"

"I--I don't see how you can be so ordinary, Anne."

"Ordinary" in the lexicon of Amy and Ethel meant "plebeian." No one in the Merryman family had ever been so ordinary as Anne. Hitherto the Merrymans had been content to warm themselves by the fires of their own complacency, to feed themselves on past splendors; for the Merrymans were as old as Norman rule in England. They had come to America with grants from the king, they had family portraits and family silver and family diamonds, and now in this generation of orphaned girls, two of them at least were fighting the last battles of family pride. The fortunes of the Merrymans had declined, and Amy and Ethel, with their backs, as it were, to the wall, were making a final stand.

"We must have evening clothes, we must entertain our friends, we must pay for the family pew"; this was their nervous litany. The Merrymans had always dressed and entertained and worshiped properly; hence it was for lace or tulle or velvet, as the case might be, that their money went. It went, too, for the very elegant and exclusive little dinners to which, on rare occasions, their friends were bidden; and it went for the high place in the synagogue from which they prayed their pharisaical prayers.

"We thank thee, Lord, that we are not as others," prayed Amy and Ethel fervently.

But Anne prayed no such prayers. She wanted to be like other people. She wanted to eat and drink with the multitude, she wanted a warm, warm heart, a groaning board. She wanted snugness and coziness and comfort. And she grew up loving these things, and hating the pale walls of their old house in Georgetown, the family portraits, the made-over dinner gowns that her sisters wore, her own made-over party frocks.

"Can't I have a new one, Amy?"

"It's Ethel's turn."

So it was when Anne went to a certain diplomatic reception in a made-over satin slip, hidden by a cloud of snowy tulle, that Murray Flint first waked to the fact of her loveliness.

He had waked ten years earlier to the loveliness of Amy, and five years later to the beauty of Ethel.

And now here was Anne!

"She's different though," he told old Molly Winchell; "more spiritual than the others."

It was Anne's thinness which deceived him. It was an attractive thinness. She was pale, with red lips, and the fat fair braids had given way to a shining knot. She wore the family pearls, and the effect was, as Murray had said, spiritual. Anne had the look, indeed, of one who sees heavenly visions.