Part 16

He had merely invited her, very politely, to a dance to be given by the Coyote Club that evening. He worked very hard all day as a mechanic in a garage. In addition to building up a fine physique and broadening his mind by reading, he was taking a correspondence course in mechanical draftsmanship; and the Coyote Club, of which he was treasurer, was his one frivolity.

Every week they engaged a pianist, a saxophonist, and a drummer, and had a dance in a hall over a restaurant on Eighth Avenue. There was no “rough stuff.” It was a seemly and refined entertainment--Madeline ought to have known that. Ritchie only meant that some of the girls brought by some of the Coyotes were jazz babies. The remark was not intended as personal, and she shouldn’t have taken it as such.

“Don’t know much about girls, don’t I?” he reflected angrily.

Nothing could have been more galling, especially as it was true. Ritchie had noble ideas about girls, though. He was not exactly in a position to marry at the present moment; but later on, when his heroic efforts began to show results, he intended to have a home, a garden, and a wife whom he would venerate and take to lectures and concerts.

He did not care to admit that that wife must be Madeline or no one. He was far too proud to acknowledge how much he cared for a girl with her silly ideas; but unhappily he was not clever enough to conceal it, and Madeline knew only too well.

These were her silly ideas. Knowing herself to be rare and seductive, she intended to marry a millionaire. She was weary and disgusted with her present condition. She wanted a life of exquisite refinement and languor. She hated the restaurant, she hated her home, her uniform. She turned up her delicate nose at everything about her, including Ritchie. Not that he wasn’t “refined,” for he surely was, and she secretly admired him; but it was not the right, the princely, sort of “refinement,” and she would have none of him.

Still, she felt a pang of regret when he went out. A girl as attractive as she, alone in the world, could not well help learning to appreciate the chivalry and restraint of Mr. Ritchie. He never “said anything,” and never would, until encouraged. He came every night to Compson’s for his dinner, and of late he had fallen into the habit of being on the corner when she came out, at ten o’clock. He never said that he was waiting for her, and she had manners enough to be surprised every time. He walked home with her, both of them conversing with the utmost formality.

He had never invited her anywhere, except to this dance at the Coyote Club. He had never so much as shaken hands with her. She knew very well that the reason for this was his severe sense of respect for her. While she admired this, she would have been better pleased with a little more impetuosity.

Still, it was no use denying that he left a gap. Madeline missed him. Even when she was busy, she had found comfort in the sight of his head bent over one of his little books.

“Now he’s mad,” she reflected. “He won’t come back. All right! I don’t care! Let him go to his old dance and have a good time with the jazz babies!”

She consoled herself by imagining the balls she would go to in the future, when the millionaire arrived--balls like those she saw in the movies. She herself would wear a long, swathed dress and carry a feathered fan. She would be languid and scornful, and would flirt in a refined manner impossible to one who was at present a waitress in Compson’s Chophouse.

II

By eight o’clock the room was growing empty. As a hint to possible intruders, each time a table was left vacant the lights near it were turned out. A few solitary men still ate, in bright oases, but they had a hasty and guilty air; they knew that their tardiness was resented.

One by one the waitresses disappeared into the little back room where they changed into their street clothes, and returned, crossing the restaurant with eager steps, until there remained only Madeline and Miss Sullivan. Miss Sullivan remained because her customer was a pig-headed old gentleman and refused to hurry; but Madeline was there because Mr. Compson had great confidence in her, and allowed her the privilege of turning out the lights and locking the door.

The proprietor himself had gone, with the cash box. Madeline would have the responsibility of guarding, until morning, whatever sum the pig-headed old gentleman might pay.

“Gosh, I could stick a pin in him!” murmured Miss Sullivan. “Twenty past! There goes that dishwasher, even!”

“I’ll look after him,” said Madeline. “You can go, if you like.”

Toward her own sex Madeline was not haughty, but quite good-natured.

“I’ll do as much for you some day,” declared Miss Sullivan, like a creature in a fable, and off she went.

The room was very still. At intervals the elevated trains went by with a thundering roar, leaving behind a sort of vacuum of quietness. The old gentleman looked up.

“Piece lemon meringue pie,” he said briefly.

“Kitchen’s closed,” Madeline replied, with equal brevity.

This annoyed him very much; but in view of the fact that he was known never to leave more than a nickel for a tip, his annoyance never caused much concern in Compson’s. He got up, folded his newspaper, felt in all his pockets, and very slowly took down his overcoat.

Madeline, leaning against the wall in a careless attitude, refused to show signs of impatience. Indeed, when she saw him struggling into the tight sleeves of his shabby old coat, she felt an impulse of scornful pity, and came to his aid. He didn’t thank her. Apparently he preferred to consider it her fault that he was old and slow and stiff, and couldn’t enjoy his dinner.

After he had gone, she began turning off the few remaining lights. The place was nearly in darkness when the door opened and two men came in.

“Closed!” said Madeline.

But the taller of the two led his companion to a table and pushed him into a chair.

“Can’t you manage a cup of coffee?” he entreated. “My friend’s ill.”

Madeline was not very credulous. She snapped on the nearest light, so that she might look at the alleged invalid.

One look was enough. She hadn’t lived twenty years without learning something, and she knew at once what ailed the fellow; but she didn’t care. She felt instinctively that he was a victim. He had been led astray, very likely by this burly ruffian with him.

“Poor feller!” she said softly.

His curly head was thrown back, his eyes were closed, and he seemed sunk in innocent slumber. Not only was he singularly handsome and engaging, but he wore a dinner jacket. Never had Madeline seen one so close at hand before. It invested the suffering hero with a high, romantic interest. It thrilled her. He was a creature strayed from another world. He was helpless and abandoned, and not for anything on earth would she have forsaken him.

“I’ll get him some coffee,” she said.

She said it rudely, because she hated the other man, and knew it was all his fault.

There was a little left in the coffee urn, and it was still warm. She brought it promptly, but the sufferer could not be roused to drink.

“Good Lord!” said the other impatiently. “I don’t know what to do with the young idiot! Pour water on him.”

“I never!” cried Madeline, with passionate indignation. “And get his nice clothes all wet?”

“Well, do something with him,” said the other. He showed an alarming tendency to shift the responsibility for his unconscious companion to Madeline’s shoulders. “I can’t take him home with me. Lock him in here till the morning, and let him sleep it off!”

“I never!” she said again. “Just suppose he waked up all alone in the dark, and couldn’t get out! Don’t you know where he lives?”

“Of course I know, but he wouldn’t thank any one for sending him home in this state. He’s the only son of wealthy and respectable parents,” the other answered, in a flippant tone that was obnoxious to Madeline. “It would bring their gray--or dyed--hair to the grave in one swoop. This fellow, my dear girl, is young Benny Bradley!”

“I don’t care who he is, he’d ought to be took care of. He’s got to be!” Madeline said sternly.

“Not by me,” returned the other. He rose, and looked at Madeline with a smile. “It’s time for me to clear out.”

“You can’t!” the girl protested.

“I shall,” said the man. “I make you a present of Benny Bradley.”

He was actually going, but she caught him by the sleeve.

“Oh!” she cried. “You ought to be ashamed! What ever can I do?”

“I don’t know. Why not call the police?” said he.

He unclasped her fingers, and, raising his hat gallantly, went out.

“Oh, my!” cried Madeline, in despair. “Oh, my! What ever will I do with the poor feller?”

She dipped a folded napkin in water, and laid it on his forehead. A glance in the mirror startled her. In her white uniform, wasn’t she just like a trained nurse with a wounded hero? The vision inspired her. She felt that she must be calm, brave, resourceful.

Somewhat timidly she lifted his limp, white hand, to feel his pulse; but, having little idea how a pulse should behave, she gained no reassurance.

“Poor feller!” she repeated. “Anyway, I’m not going to leave you, if I have to sit here the whole night!”

She would have done that, and would have faced Mr. Compson and her sister workers the next morning undaunted, if she had not been saved by the entrance of Mr. Ritchie.

III

To the casual observer there was nothing heroic in Ritchie’s coming, but truly it was heroic. It had cost him a horrible effort to subdue his outrageous pride, to forego the Coyotes’ dance, and to return here for the ungracious Madeline. And how did he find her? Bending over a strange man in evening dress, all alone, long after the place should have been closed!

“Well!” he said. “What’s all this?”

With vehement indignation Madeline told him the story of the base desertion of the helpless sufferer.

“And what am I going to do with him?” she ended. “It’s the worst I ever heard--going off and leaving him like this!”

“Well, send for the police,” said Mr. Ritchie, but he regretted his words when he saw her eyes blaze.

“Shame on you!” she cried. “The state he’s in!”

“Well, now, see here,” said Ritchie. “I guess you don’t know what’s the matter with him. He’s not sick; he’s just--”

“Hush up!” she interrupted fiercely. “I guess I do know! It isn’t his fault--he got in with bad comp’ny.”

“How do you know?” he inquired.

“I _do_ know,” she replied firmly. “Never you mind how! And I’m going to see he gets taken care of till he’s all well again.”

All this did not contribute to Mr. Ritchie’s happiness. Wasn’t it just like a woman, he thought, to be captious and haughty to a devoted young man of blameless life, and an angel of compassion to this unknown profligate?

Nevertheless, in spite of his jealous alarm and his pain and his distrust, it was Ritchie’s sure instinct to behave generously. Heaven knows where he got his magnanimity. He hadn’t learned it in the mean and sordid little home of his childhood. He hadn’t been taught it in school, and it had been a part of his nature long before he had read a line of those improving little books.

His sallow face flushed.

“Well!” he said. “I’ll take him home with me.”

Madeline didn’t know how to be gracious, but she appreciated this.

“He can’t walk,” was all she said.

“All right!” said Ritchie grandly. “I’ll call a taxi.”

He had never done this before. He hastened to a cab stand on Fifth Avenue, and it seemed to his proud soul that all the chauffeurs knew he had never used a taxi, and despised him. He was very truculent about it.

An infinitely greater humiliation was in store for him. When he returned to the restaurant, he couldn’t lift, or even move, the helpless young man. All those hours with the exerciser availed him nothing. His physique was shamefully deficient.

“Let me,” said Madeline. “I’m real strong.”

Without much trouble, she took the fellow under his arms and got him to his feet. He opened his eyes, then, and smiled a dreamy, innocent smile. Supported by Madeline and pushed by Ritchie, he made a sort of attempt at walking to the cab.

“I’d better go with you,” said she, “or you’ll never get him up the stairs.”

Sick with shame, Ritchie was obliged to consent. Neither of them for an instant contemplated asking the chauffeur’s assistance; and the chauffeur, being class conscious, did not volunteer it.

Ritchie had the worst fifteen minutes of his life during his first ride in a taxi. He felt himself a mean, contemptible, worthless thing, with his lack of bodily strength. He contrasted his worn, shabby suit with the stranger’s expensive clothes. He knew that Madeline must despise him. She would despise him far more when she saw his room, yet he could devise no way for preventing that.

When the cab stopped before his door, he paid the fare, torn between a certainty that his natural enemy, the chauffeur, was cheating him, and his desire to appear lordly before Madeline. Then, together, they began to get the stranger up the stairs.

The noise of the operation made Ritchie’s blood run cold. Suppose some one saw him with a drunken man and a girl? He hauled at the fellow’s arm in no very gentle manner.

At last, at the top of the house, he unlocked a door, and, supporting the stranger against the wall of the corridor, he brusquely said to Madeline:

“All right! You might as well go now.”

“I’d like to see him settled,” said she.

So Ritchie had to light the gas and had to let her in.

The room was a bleak, bare, cold little cell, with the exerciser fastened to the wall, and the window nailed open, to admit all the hygienically fresh air possible. On the bureau, instead of the little accessories of a fastidious gentleman, were a pair of military brushes, the vital library, all in a row, and a bottle of ink. On the table were an alarm clock and the apparatus of the correspondence course. There were no other visible articles personal to Ritchie, except a razor strop and six cakes of carbolic soap, economically unwrapped to dry.

He pushed the stranger down on his cot.

“All right!” he thought defiantly. “Now you can see just how I live--and I hope you’ll like it! Go on--laugh, if you want to!”

But she was not laughing.

“Oh, my, what a dusty towel!” she was thinking, in distress. “And no curtains. The woman that runs this house ought to be ashamed of herself!”

She turned to Ritchie without the least trace of haughtiness.

“Well, good night, Everard,” she said.

It was the first time she had used his name. He needed that assuagement to compensate for the lingering glance she gave to the prostrate unknown.

IV

Ritchie came home in a somewhat bitter humor, partly due to his having spent the night on a hard chair, and partly to other and finer causes. He hoped that drunken fellow would be gone. He wished never to see him again; but when Ritchie opened the door, there he was, lying on the bed and reading one of the little books.

“Hello!” he said, as joyously as if Ritchie were his heart’s dearest friend.

“Are you feeling better?” Ritchie curtly inquired.

Without waiting for a reply, he began to take off his grimy work clothes.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” the other went on. “Absolutely the whitest thing I ever heard of! I must have been pretty far gone last night--can’t remember a blamed thing.”

He was not discouraged by his host’s silence.

“I shan’t forget this, you know,” he continued. “You darned nearly saved my life. Can’t imagine what my people would have said, if I’d come home like that. You know how it is--”

“No, I don’t,” interrupted Ritchie. “I’m a teetotaler.”

“Shows sense,” said the other warmly. “I think I’ll have to be one myself. My name’s Bradley.” He waited. “What’s yours?” he asked.

“Ritchie,” responded the other. “And as good as Bradley any day,” he added mentally.

In some respects, however, honesty obliged him to admit that he was not so good as Bradley.

Bradley, after stretching, got up. He was in his shirt sleeves, and Ritchie surveyed his tall, slender figure with the eye of a connoisseur in physiques. The fellow was young yet, not fully developed, but certainly those shoulders, that solid neck, that broad chest, were promising--very promising.

“Well, he probably eats too much meat,” thought Ritchie, with dejection. “Living like he does, he won’t last!”

In order to show his perfect ease and indifference, he began to wash, whistling when the process permitted.

“I must be badly in your way,” said the other, in his good-humored manner. “I’ll clear out, I think. Got a spare overcoat? I don’t like to go out like this.”

Ritchie grew scarlet. His overcoat--certainly spare enough--was in that place where winter overcoats naturally go in the spring.

“No,” he said sullenly.

“Then I--” began Bradley.

There was a knock at the door. Ritchie flung it wide open, with the air of one who has nothing to conceal. In the hall stood two resplendent young heroes, broadly smiling.

“Still alive, Bradley?” said the taller and older of the two.

They both came into the room as if Ritchie did not exist. Trembling with resentment, he stood aside, collarless, in his cheap striped shirt, with his black hair still wet on his forehead. These three well fed, well clothed creatures, with their vigorous voices, completely filled the room--filled, he thought, the whole world, squeezing him out of it.

In an affectionate and blasphemous manner Bradley reproached his friend for deserting him the night before.

“You ought to thank me,” said his friend, “for leaving you in the care of that peach of a girl!”

“What peach of a girl?” asked Bradley, pleasantly surprised.

The friend recounted the circumstances. No one observed Mr. Ritchie’s rage and dismay.

“I went there just now to make inquiries,” the friend went on, “and she told me where I’d find you. Bradley, old son, if you’re a man and a brother, you’ll go there at once and thank her! She’s a beautiful girl, and--”

“Here!” interrupted Ritchie. His voice was so strange that they all turned to look at him. “Leave her out!” he cried. “You can thank me!”

Bradley was smitten with compunction. He began thanking Ritchie with energy, introduced his friends, and invited him to dinner.

“No!” said Ritchie. Like many teetotalers, he had acquired the habit of saying “no” somewhat ungraciously. “No! But you can just leave her out!”

Again he was thanked by all of them, and at last they left his room; but he knew that Madeline would not be left out. He felt certain that they would go at once to Compson’s Chophouse. He could see them talking to Madeline. He knew how she would admire their dress, and their silly language, and their frivolous and disgusting manners.

“_All right!_” he said to himself. “You’re welcome to ’em; but you don’t catch _me_ going there any more, to be made a fool of. Not much!”

Suddenly he decided that he wanted no dinner--not at Compson’s, or at any other place. He threw himself down on his cot, with a scornful laugh that sounded like a sob. Fellows like that always got everything. They thought they owned the earth--and very likely they did.

V

Young Bradley was not subtle or astoundingly clever, but he did know better than to go to thank a beautiful girl in the company of his two friends. He went alone.

He was instantly struck down, completely conquered, by Madeline’s haughty glance. It was the first time he had met a haughty girl. He found most girls very much otherwise. He was accustomed to the ardent pursuit of mothers and aunts, and not much coyness on the part of their protégées. He had no conception of Madeline’s idea of man as a dangerous and persistent hunter, with woman as his prey. In his circle the girls did the hunting and he the evading.

He was captivated by her severity. She refused to go out with him that evening; so he came again the next evening.

“Please come!” he entreated. “I’ve got the car outside. I’ll wait for you as long as you like, and then we’ll run up to a little place on the Post Road.”

“No, thank you,” said Madeline. “I never go out with strange gentlemen.”

“How am I going to stop being a strange gentleman if you’ll never go out with me?” he complained.

Madeline didn’t know, and didn’t care to encourage strange young men by trying to explain. She knew perfectly well that he would come back.

To be sure, he did, and this time he was dreadfully insistent. Now perhaps the cause of Madeline’s hauteur was the take-it-or-leave-it attitude of the men she knew. Certainly she had never before encountered a persistent suitor, or one who was not offended by rebuffs. Customers inclined to gallantry were very much annoyed if not encouraged. Even Mr. Ritchie was fatally ready to be insulted; but this young fellow didn’t care in the least. Let her be haughty, captious, even cruel, still he was charmed and delighted.

Though she did not think this quite manly, Madeline could not withstand the cajolery of the handsome and good-natured boy. She was thrilled with pride that this splendid creature should come to seek her in Compson’s lowly chophouse. She was secretly overwhelmed when he brought her orchids. She didn’t really resent the innuendoes of the other girls. They were simply jealous because no such hero ever had or ever would come to seek them.

In her heart she was grateful, almost humble. She regarded her incomparable Bradley with something very like awe. To placate Compson, he would order coffee and pie while he waited to talk to her; and his manner of eating and drinking, the way he rose and remained standing when she approached, all the careless ease and grace of him, were a marvel and a joy. Moreover, even in her most fervent admiration, she had never lost the protective tenderness she had felt the first time she had seen him. She worried about him, about his health and his morals.

This was really the reason why she finally consented to go out with him--so that she could talk seriously and firmly, and perhaps reclaim him.

“Well, you can be waiting for me to-morrow at nine o’clock,” she said. “You’d better go along now.”