“Say, Miss Vanderpoel,” he said, “I hope it won’t make you mad if I own up. Ladies like you don’t know anything about chaps like me. On the square and straight out, when I seen you and heard your name I couldn’t help remembering whose daughter you was. Reuben S. Vanderpoel spells a big thing. Why, when I was in New York we fellows used to get together and talk about what it’d mean to the chap who could get next to Reuben S. Vanderpoel. We used to count up all the business he does, and all the clerks he’s got under him pounding away on typewriters, and how they’d be bound to get worn out and need new ones. And we’d make calculations how many a man could unload, if he could get next. It was a kind of typewriting junior assistant fairy story, and we knew it couldn’t happen really. But we used to chin about it just for the fun of the thing. One of the boys made up a thing about one of us saving Reuben S.’s life—dragging him from under a runaway auto and, when he says, `What can I do to show my gratitude, young man?’ him handing out his catalogue and saying, `I should like to call your attention to the Delkoff, sir,’ and getting him to promise he’d never use any other, as long as he lived!”
Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s daughter laughed as spontaneously as any girl might have done. G. Selden laughed with her. At any rate, she hadn’t got mad, so far.
“That was what did it,” he went on. “When I rode away on my bike I got thinking about it and could not get it out of my head. The next day I just stopped on the road and got off my wheel, and I says to myself: `Look here, business is business, if you ARE travelling in Europe and lunching at Buckingham Palace with the main squeeze. Get busy! What’ll the boys say if they hear you’ve missed a chance like this? YOU hit the pike for Stornham Castle, or whatever it’s called, and take your nerve with you! She can’t do more than have you fired out, and you’ve been fired before and got your breath after it. So I turned round and made time. And that was how I happened on your avenue. And perhaps it was because I was feeling a bit rattled I lost my hold when the chain broke, and pitched over on my head. There, I’ve got it off my chest. I was thinking I should have to explain somehow.”
Something akin to her feeling of affection for the nice, long-legged Westerner she had seen rambling in Bond Street touched Betty again. The Delkoff was the centre of G. Selden’s world as the flowers were of Kedgers’, as the “little ‘ome” was of Mrs. Welden’s.
“Were you going to try to sell ME a typewriter?” she asked.
“Well,” G. Selden admitted, “I didn’t know but what there might be use for one, writing business letters on a big place like this. Straight, I won’t say I wasn’t going to try pretty hard. It may look like gall, but you see a fellow has to rush things or he’ll never get there. A chap like me HAS to get there, somehow.”
She was silent a few moments and looked as if she was thinking something over. Her silence and this look on her face actually caused to dawn in the breast of Selden a gleam of daring hope. He looked round at her with a faint rising of colour.
“Say, Miss Vanderpoel—say–-” he began, and then broke off.
“Yes?” said Betty, still thinking.
“C-COULD you use one—anywhere?” he said. “I don’t want to rush things too much, but—COULD you?”
“Is it easy to learn to use it?”
“Easy!” his head lifted from his pillow. “It’s as easy as falling off a log. A baby in a perambulator could learn to tick off orders for its bottle. And—on the square—there isn’t its equal on the market, Miss Vanderpoel—there isn’t.” He fumbled beneath his pillow and actually brought forth his catalogue.
“I asked the nurse to put it there. I wanted to study it now and then and think up arguments. See—adjustable to hold with perfect ease an envelope, an index card, or a strip of paper no wider than a postage stamp. Unsurpassed paper feed, practical ribbon mechanism—perfect and permanent alignment. “
As Mount Dunstan had taken the book, Betty Vanderpoel took it. Never had G. Selden beheld such smiling in eyes about to bend upon his catalogue.
“You will raise your temperature,” she said, “if you excite yourself. You mustn’t do that. I believe there are two or three people on the estate who might be taught to use a typewriter. I will buy three. Yes—we will say three.”
She would buy three. He soared to heights. He did not know how to thank her, though he did his best. Dizzying visions of what he would have to tell “the boys” when he returned to New York flashed across his mind. The daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel had bought three Delkoffs, and he was the junior assistant who had sold them to her.
“You don’t know what it means to me, Miss Vanderpoel,” he said, “but if you were a junior salesman you’d know. It’s not only the sale—though that’s a rake-off of fifteen dollars to me—but it’s because it’s YOU that’s bought them. Gee!” gazing at her with a frank awe whose obvious sincerity held a queer touch of pathos. “What it must be to be YOU—just YOU!”
She did not laugh. She felt as if a hand had lightly touched her on her naked heart. She had thought of it so often—had been bewildered restlessly by it as a mere child—this difference in human lot—this chance. Was it chance which had placed her entity in the centre of Bettina Vanderpoel’s world instead of in that of some little cash girl with hair raked back from a sallow face, who stared at her as she passed in a shop—or in that of the young Frenchwoman whose life was spent in serving her, in caring for delicate dresses and keeping guard over ornaments whose price would have given to her own humbleness ease for the rest of existence? What did it mean? And what Law was laid upon her? What Law which could only work through her and such as she who had been born with almost unearthly power laid in their hands—the reins of monstrous wealth, which guided or drove the world? Sometimes fear touched her, as with this light touch an her heart, because she did not KNOW the Law and could only pray that her guessing at it might be right. And, even as she thought these things, G. Selden went on.
“You never can know,” he said, “because you’ve always been in it. And the rest of the world can’t know, because they’ve never been anywhere near it.” He stopped and evidently fell to thinking.
“Tell me about the rest of the world,” said Betty quietly.
He laughed again.
“Why, I was just thinking to myself you didn’t know a thing about it. And it’s queer. It’s the rest of us that mounts up when you come to numbers. I guess it’d run into millions. I’m not thinking of beggars and starving people, I’ve been rushing the Delkoff too steady to get onto any swell charity organisation, so I don’t know about them. I’m just thinking of the millions of fellows, and women, too, for the matter of that, that waken up every morning and know they’ve got to hustle for their ten per or their fifteen per—if they can stir it up as thick as that. If it’s as much as fifty per, of course, seems like to me, they’re on Easy Street. But sometimes those that’s got to fifty per—or even more—have got more things to do with it—kids, you know, and more rent and clothes. They’ve got to get at it just as hard as we have. Why, Miss Vanderpoel, how many people do you suppose there are in a million that don’t have to worry over their next month’s grocery bills, and the rent of their flat? I bet there’s not ten—and I don’t know the ten.”
He did not state his case uncheerfully. “The rest of the world” represented to him the normal condition of things.
“Most married men’s a bit afraid to look an honest grocery bill in the face. And they WILL come in—as regular as spring hats. And I tell YOU, when a man’s got to live on seventy-five a month, a thing that’ll take all the strength and energy out of a twenty-dollar bill sorter gets him down on the mat.”
Like old Mrs. Welden’s, his roughly sketched picture was a graphic one.
” ‘Tain’t the working that bothers most of us. We were born to that, and most of us would feel like deadbeats if we were doing nothing. It’s the earning less than you can live on, and getting a sort of tired feeling over it. It’s the having to make a dollar-bill l
ook like two, and watching every other fellow try to do the same thing, and not often make the trip. There’s millions of us—just millions—every one of us with his Delkoff to sell–-” his figure of speech pleased him and he chuckled at his own cleverness—”and thinking of it, and talking about it, and—under his vest—half afraid that he can’t make it. And what you say in the morning when you open your eyes and stretch yourself is, `Hully gee! I’ve GOT to sell a Delkoff to-day, and suppose I shouldn’t, and couldn’t hold down my job!’ I began it over my feeding bottle. So did all the people I know. That’s what gave me a sort of a jolt just now when I looked at you and thought about you being YOU— and what it meant.”
When their conversation ended she had a much more intimate knowledge of New York than she had ever had before, and she felt it a rich possession. She had heard of the “hall bedroom” previously, and she had seen from the outside the “quick lunch” counter, but G. Selden unconsciously escorted her inside and threw upon faces and lives the glare of a flashlight.
“There was a thing I’ve been thinking I’d ask you, Miss Vanderpoel,” he said just before she left him. “I’d like you to tell me, if you please. It’s like this. You see those two fellows treated me as fine as silk. I mean Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance. I never expected it. I never saw a lord before, much less spoke to one, but I can tell you that one’s just about all right—Mount Dunstan. And the other one— the old vicar—I’ve never taken to anyone since I was born like I took to him. The way he puts on his eyeglasses and looks at you, sorter kind and curious about you at the same time! And his voice and his way of saying his words —well, they just GOT me—sure. And they both of ‘em did say they’d like to see me again. Now do you think, Miss Vanderpoel, it would look too fresh—if I was to write a polite note and ask if either of them could make it convenient to come and take a look at me, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I don’t WANT to be too fresh—and perhaps they wouldn’t come anyhow—and if it is, please won’t you tell me, Miss Vanderpoel?”
Betty thought of Mount Dunstan as he had stood and talked to her in the deepening afternoon sun. She did not know much of him, but she thought—having heard G. Selden’s story of the lunch—that he would come. She had never seen Mr. Penzance, but she knew she should like to see him.
“I think you might write the note,” she said. “I believe they would come to see you.”
“Do you?” with eager pleasure. “Then I’ll do it. I’d give a good deal to see them again. I tell you, they are just It—both of them.”
CHAPTER XXVII
LIFE
Mount Dunstan, walking through the park next morning on his way to the vicarage, just after post time, met Mr. Penzance himself coming to make an equally early call at the Mount. Each of them had a letter in his hand, and each met the other’s glance with a smile.
“G. Selden,” Mount Dunstan said. “And yours?”
“G. Selden also,” answered the vicar. “Poor young fellow, what ill-luck. And yet—is it ill-luck? He says not.”
“He tells me it is not,” said Mount Dunstan. “And I agree with him.”
Mr. Penzance read his letter aloud.
“DEAR SIR:
“This is to notify you that owing to my bike going back on me when going down hill, I met with an accident in Stornham Park. Was cut about the head and leg broken. Little Willie being far from home and mother, you can see what sort of fix he’d been in if it hadn’t been for the kindness of Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s daughters—Miss Bettina and her sister Lady Anstruthers. The way they’ve had me taken care of has been great. I’ve been under a nurse and doctor same as if I was Albert Edward with appendycytus (I apologise if that’s not spelt right). Dear Sir, this is to say that I asked Miss Vanderpoel if I should be butting in too much if I dropped a line to ask if you could spare the time to call and see me. It would be considered a favour and appreciated by “G. SELDEN, “Delkoff Typewriter Co. Broadway.
“P. S. Have already sold three Delkoffs to Miss Vanderpoel.”
“Upon my word,” Mr. Penzance commented, and his amiable fervour quite glowed, “I like that queer young fellow— I like him. He does not wish to `butt in too much.’ Now, there is rudimentary delicacy in that. And what a humorous, forceful figure of speech! Some butting animal—a goat, I seem to see, preferably—forcing its way into a group or closed circle of persons.”
His gleeful analysis of the phrase had such evident charm for him that Mount Dunstan broke into a shout of laughter, even as G. Selden had done at the adroit mention of Weber & Fields.
“Shall we ride over together to see him this morning? An hour with G. Selden, surrounded by the atmosphere of Reuben S. Vanderpoel, would be a cheering thing,” he said.
“It would,” Mr. Penzance answered. “Let us go by all means. We should not, I suppose,” with keen delight, “be `butting in’ upon Lady Anstruthers too early?” He was quite enraptured with his own aptness. “Like G. Selden, I should not like to `butt in,’ ” he added.
The scent and warmth and glow of a glorious morning filled the hour. Combining themselves with a certain normal human gaiety which surrounded the mere thought of G. Selden, they were good things for Mount Dunstan. Life was strong and young in him, and he had laughed a big young laugh, which had, perhaps tended to the waking in him of the feeling he was suddenly conscious of—that a six-mile ride over a white, tree-dappled, sunlit road would be pleasant enough, and, after all, if at the end of the gallop one came again upon that other in whom life was strong and young, and bloomed on rose-cheek and was the far fire in the blue deeps of lovely eyes, and the slim straightness of the fair body, why would it not be, in a way, all to the good? He had thought of her on more than one day, and felt that he wanted to see her again.
“Let us go,” he answered Penzance. “One can call on an invalid at any time. Lady Anstruthers will forgive us.”
In less than an hour’s time they were on their way. They laughed and talked as they rode, their horses’ hoofs striking out a cheerful ringing accompaniment to their voices. There is nothing more exhilarating than the hollow, regular ring and click-clack of good hoofs going well over a fine old Roman road in the morning sunlight. They talked of the junior assistant salesman and of Miss Vanderpoel. Penzance was much pleased by the prospect of seeing “this delightful and unusual girl.” He had heard stories of her, as had Lord Westholt. He knew of old Doby’s pipe, and of Mrs. Welden’s respite from the Union, and though such incidents would seem mere trifles to the dweller in great towns, he had himself lived and done his work long enough in villages to know the village mind and the scale of proportions by which its gladness and sadness were measured. He knew more of all this than Mount Dunstan could, since Mount Dunstan’s existence had isolated itself, from rather gloomy choice. But as he rode, Mount Dunstan knew that he liked to hear these things. There was the suggestion of new life and new thought in them, and such suggestion was good for any man—or woman, either—who had fallen into living in a dull, narrow groove.
“It is the new life in her which strikes me,” he said. “She has brought wealth with her, and wealth is power to do the good or evil that grows in a man’s soul; but she has brought something more. She might have come here and brought all the sumptuousness of a fashionable young beauty, who drove through the village and drew people to their windows, and made clodhoppers scratch their heads and pull their forelocks, and children bob curtsies and stare. She might have come and gone and left a mind-dazzling memory and nothing else. A few sovereigns tossed here and there would have earned her a reputation—but, by gee! to quote Selden—she has begun LIVING with them, as if her ancestors had done it for six hundred years. And what I see is that if she had come without a penny in her pocket she would have done the same thing.” He paused a pondering moment, and then drew a sharp breath which was an exclamation in itself. “She’s Life!” he said. “She’s Life itself! Good God! what a thing it is for a man or woman to be Life—instead of a mass of tissue and musc
le and nerve, dragged about by the mere mechanism of living!”
Penzance had listened seriously.
“What you say is very suggestive,” he commented. “It strikes me as true, too. You have seen something of her also, at least more than I have.”
“I did not think these things when I saw her—though I suppose I felt them unconsciously. I have reached this way of summing her up by processes of exclusion and inclusion. One hears of her, as you know yourself, and one thinks her over.”
“You have thought her over?”
“A lot,” rather grumpily. “A beautiful female creature inevitably gives an unbeautiful male creature something to think of—if he is not otherwise actively employed. I am not. She has become a sort of dawning relief to my hopeless humours. Being a low and unworthy beast, I am sometimes resentful enough of the unfairness of things. She has too much.”
When they rode through Stornham village they saw signs of work already done and work still in hand. There were no broken windows or palings or hanging wicket gates; cottage gardens had been put in order, and there were evidences of such cheering touches as new bits of window curtain and strong-looking young plants blooming between them. So many small, but necessary, things had been done that the whole village wore the aspect of a place which had taken heart, and was facing existence in a hopeful spirit. A year ago Mount Dunstan and his vicar riding through it had been struck by its neglected and dispirited look.
As they entered the hall of the Court Miss Vanderpoel was descending the staircase. She was laughing a little to herself, and she looked pleased when she saw them.
“It is good of you to come,” she said, as they crossed the hall to the drawing-room. “But I told him I really thought you would. I have just been talking to him, and he was a little uncertain as to whether he had assumed too much.”
“As to whether he had `butted in,’ ” said Mr. Penzance. “I think he must have said that.”
The Shuttle: By Frances Hodgson Burnett Page 34
