Nothing resulted, and, sighing, she gave over the effort and performed a little daily ceremonial of hers, placing side by side in a row her mementoes of Mr. Bromley — the stub of the pencil he had used, the worn shoe-lace he had broken and carelessly tossed aside, the rosebud she had once asked him to smell, the violets that had dropped from his coat lapel, and the fragment of the amber mouthpiece of his pipe, broken when it fell from his pocket upon the stone steps of the school building. Dreamily, she put them all in a row, touching them gently, one after the other; then she leaned her elbows upon the desk and, with her chin in her hands, thought about life and books in a general way for several minutes.
After that, as the air was warm in the room, she went to the window and opened it. Looking down moodily, she saw her sister Mildred departing. “Going home to mess around with the baby,” Cornelia thought. “That’s her life. How strange she can be contented with it!”
A large red open car went by, sending forth upon the wintry air some cheerful cadences of song as it passed; — young gentlemen collegians merrymaking not indecorously in this holiday time. Cornelia looked down upon the manly young faces, rosy with the wind. “How terrible!” she murmured, dreamily. For they were no part of her mountain; her sister’s baby had nothing to do with Mr. Bromley; neither had the song from the big red car; both were dross.
A negro rattled by upon an ash cart drawn by a lively mule. The negro whistled piercingly to a friend in the distance, and the mule’s splendid ears stood high and eager; he was noble in action, worthy of all attention. Cornelia could not bear him. “Oh, dear!” she said, probably thinking of his master, who was proud of him. “What lives these people lead!”
She was in the act of turning away from this barren window when something far down the street caught her attention. It was the figure of a thin, somewhat middle-aged gentleman in gray clothes, approaching slowly upon the sidewalk. For a moment Cornelia was uncertain; then there appeared for an instant, beneath the rim of his soft hat, twin sparklings of reflected light. They vanished, but Cornelia needed no further proof that the gentleman in gray wore the eye-glasses that completed her identification of him.
She said, “Oh!” in a loud voice, and clapped her joined hands over her mouth to stifle this too-eloquent revelation. Then the bright eyes above the joined hands semicircled impulsively to the bed, where lay her hat and coat as she had tossed them when she came into the room. The impulse that made her look at them increased overwhelmingly; she seized them, put them on hurriedly; opened her door with elaborate caution, tiptoed to a back stairway, descended it noiselessly, and a moment later left the house by a rear door. No one had seen her except the cook’s cat.
XII. HER HAPPIEST HOUR
THUS CORNELIA SAVED herself from replying to intrusive questions about where she was going, and why; but in her impulsive haste she had forgotten something. Upon her desk, upstairs, lay her heart’s secret, her mountain, all in loose sheets of paper. Beside the desk was an open window; — she had left the door open, too, and this was a breezy day. Such was instantly her condition at sight of Mr. Bromley; and with no thought but to have more sight of him, she flitted across the back yard and through an alley gate, leaving calamity brooding behind her.
Mr. Bromley, returning homeward with a book under his arm, after his morning’s browsing in the suburban public library, was not surprised to see one of his pupils emerge from a cross-street before him, since this was the neighbourhood in which most of the school’s day scholars lived; but he wondered why Cornelia Cromwell was so deeply preoccupied. She seemed to look toward him, though vaguely, and he lifted his hand to his hat; but before he could complete his salutation she looked away, apparently unconscious of him. She was walking in a rather elderly manner, with her head inclined forward and her hands meditatively clasped behind her — the right posture for an engrossed statesman philosopher, but not frequently expected of sixteen. At the corner she turned northward upon the boulevard sidewalk, Mr. Bromley’s own direction, and went pensively on before him, some thirty yards or so in advance.
His gait was slow, for that was his thoughtful habit; and the distance between them, like Cornelia’s attitude, remained unvaried until the next crossstreet was reached. Here, without altering that scholarly attitude of hers by a hair’s-breadth, she walked straight into what was the proper path and right-of-way demanded by an oncoming uproarious taxicab.
With his hoarse warning signal and with his own hoarse voice, the driver raved; she heeded him not. So, taking his life in his hands, he saved her by charging into the curbstone. The wheels providentially mounted and bore him fairly upon the sidewalk; — he crashed down again to the pavement of the boule’ vard and roared onward, Biblically oratorical about women, let hear him who would.
Mr. Bromley rushed forward and seized Cornelia’s arm. “Miss Cromwell!”
She looked up, smiling absently. “Do you think there was any danger?” she asked. “I didn’t notice.”
“Good gracious!” he cried. “Don’t you know you can’t cross streets anywhere, these days, without looking to see what’s coming? What was the matter with you?”
“The matter?” she repeated, vaguely, as she began to walk onward with him. “Why, nothing.”
“I mean: What on earth were you thinking of to step right in front of a—”
“Oh, that? Yes,” she said, gently. “I see what you mean now, Mr. Bromley. I was thinking about life.”
“You were, indeed?”
“And books,” she added.
“Well, I wouldn’t!” he said, for he had long since forgotten his advice to her in the matter. “If I were you, I’d put my mind more upon street crossings, especially during pedestrian excursions.”
She accepted the reproof meekly, not replying, and for some moments walked beside him in silence. Then she said gravely: “I believe I haven’t thanked you for saving my life.”
“What?”
She repeated it: “I haven’t thanked you for saving my life.”
“Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t do anything of the kind.”
“You did, Mr. Bromley.”
“I certainly did not,” he said, astonished that she seemed genuinely to believe such a thing. “The taxicab was banging around all over the sidewalk by the time I reached you.”
“No,” she insisted. “I heard you call my name, and then you took hold of me. If you hadn’t, I’d have gone straight on.”
“Well, you’d have been all right to go straight on, because by that time the taxicab was twenty or thirty feet away.”
“No, I’d have been killed,” she said. “If you hadn’t caught me, I’d have been killed absolutely.”
He stared at her, perplexed, though he knew that people often retain but a confused recollection of exciting moments, even immediately after those moments have passed. Then, with this thought in his mind, he was a little surprised to find that she simultaneously had it in her mind, too.
“Maybe you were a little excited to see a person in danger,” she said. “It might have got you mixed up or something. When things happen so quickly, it’s hard to remember exactly what did happen. You may not know it, but you saved my life, Mr Bromley.”
He laughed. “I didn’t; but if you insist on thinking so, I suppose there’s no harm.”
This seemed to content her; she nodded her head, smiled sunnily, then became grave again. “And to think you’d risk your own life to save — even mine!” she murmured.
“That’s merely absurd, Miss Cromwell. By not the remotest possibility could it be conceived that I placed myself in any jeopardy whatever.”
“Well” — she returned, indefinitely, but seemed to reserve the right to maintain her own conviction in the matter. “I think ‘jeopardy’ is a beautiful word, Mr. Bromley,” she added, after a moment’s silence. “I mean, whether you admit you were in jeopardy or not, it’s a word I think ought to be used oftener because it’s got such a distinguished kind of sound.” Sh
e repeated it softly, to herself. “Jeopardy.” Then, in a somewhat louder voice, but as if merely offering a sample sentence in which this excellent word appeared to literary advantage, she murmured: “He placed his life in jeopardy — for me.”
“I didn’t!” her companion said, sharply. “The word is extremely inappropriate in any such connection.”
“I just used it to see how it would sound,” Cornelia explained. “I mean, whether you did get in jeopardy or anything, or not, on my account, Mr. Bromley, I was just seeing how it would sound if I said it. I mean, like this.” And she began to repeat, “He placed his life in jeopardy—”
“Please oblige me,” Mr. Bromley interrupted. “Don’t say it again.”
His tone was brusque, and she looked up inquiringly to find him frowning with annoyance. She decided to change the subject.
“Do you care much for Christmas, Mr. Bromley?” she asked, in the key of polite small talk. “It strikes me as terribly tiresome, myself. I’m positively looking forward to the next school term.”
“Are you?”
“Yes — and oh! there was something I thought of the other day I wanted to ask you. Are you a Republican or a Democrat, Mr. Bromley?”
“Neither.”
“That’s so much more distinguished,” Cornelia said. “I mean it seems so much more distinguished not to be in politics. Do you believe in woman suffrage?”
“No.”
“Neither do I,” she said, and made a serious decision instantly. “I’m never going to vote, myself. The more I think about books and life, Mr. Bromley, the less I care about — about” — she hesitated, having begun the sentence without foreseeing its conclusion— “well, about things in general and everything,” she finally added.
The gentleman beside her looked puzzled; but Cornelia was unaware of the sweeping vagueness of her remark. She was not in a condition to take note of such details, her consciousness being too preoccupied with the fact that she was walking with him who dwelt upon the summit of her mountain — walking with him and maintaining a conversation with him upon an intellectual footing, so to speak. And as she felt that a special elegance was demanded by the occasion, she made her voice a little artificial and obliterated our alphabet’s least fashionable consonant from her enunciation entirely.
She waved a pretty little ungloved hand in a gesture of airy languor. “Most things seem such a baw, don’t you think?” she said.
“Bore?” he inquired, correctly interpreting her effort. “They certainly shouldn’t seem so to you, at your age.”
“My age?” she echoed, and gave forth an affected little scream. “Don’t talk to me about my age! Why, half the time I feel I’m at least a hundred.”
Her companion’s reception of the information was somewhat dry. “Not much more, I trust,” he said, and looked hopefully forward into the distance as if to some goal or terminus of this excursion.
But Cornelia’s exaltation was too high for her to be aware of any slight appearances that might lower it. “Indeed I do,” she insisted. “Why, when I look at the classes of younger girls that have come into the school in the years and years I’ve been there, I feel a thousand. I do, positively, I do assure you.”
From beneath a plaintive brow, Mr. Bromley’s eyes continued to search the distance hopefully, and he made no response.
Then, as he still remained silent, Cornelia did what most people do when their ebulliences are received without encouraging comment — she eased herself by a series of repetitions, enthusiastic at first, but tapering in emphasis until she had settled down again into the casual. “It’s the positive fact; these younger girls do make me feel a thousand — positively, I do assure you! You mayn’t believe it, but it’s the mere simple truth, I do assure you.
It is, I do—” She checked herself, being about to say “I do assure you” again; and although her own ability to use the phrase charmed her, she feared that too much of it might appear to indicate a lack of versatility. She coughed delicately, as a proper bit of punctuation for the unfinished sentence; — then, as further punctuation, uttered sounds resembling a courteous kind of laughter, to signify amusement caused by her own remarks, and thus gradually reached a point where she could regard the episode as closed.
Having successfully passed this rather difficult point, she looked up at him with the air of a person suddenly overtaken by a belated thought that should have arrived earlier. “Oh, by the by,” she said, “I suppose I ought to’ve asked this sooner, but I expect I forgot it because I was a little excited about your risking your li—”
“I did nothing of the kind,” he interrupted, promptly and sharply. “What is it you wanted to ask me?”
“Well, it was this, Mr. Bromley. We got to walking along together after you saved — after I nearly got run over — and I didn’t even ask you where you’re going.”
“I’m on my way to lunch at the Blue Tea Room.”
“You — you are?” Cornelia said in a strange tone. An impulse, rash and sudden, had affected her throat.
She had never before been quite alone with the solitary inhabitant of her mountain’s summit; she had never before walked with him. Her walking was upon air, moreover. She was self-conscious, yet had no consciousness of walking — the rather, she floated in the crystal air of great altitudes; and, rapt in the transcendent presence beside her, she became intoxicated by the experience.
Cornelia had fallen in love with Mr. Bromley sublimely, instantly, upon that day when he told her to think about books and life; — there seemed to be no other reason, though her own explanation defined him as the only man who had ever spoken to her inner self — and now that she found herself alone with him for the first time, she could not bear for that time to be brief. She was already expected at home for lunch, and she knew that her unexplained absence might cause more than mere comment in her domestic circle. Her impulse was, therefore, something more than indiscreet, taking all circumstances and the strictness of her mother into account. But the exciting moment had prevailed with Cornelia before she took anything into account.
“To lunch at the Blue Tea Room?” she cried. “Why, Mr. Bromley, so am I! That’s just where I was going. Isn’t that queer? Why, we can have lunch together.”
The hopeful gleam passed out of Mr. Bromley’s expression, though perhaps the bright eyes looking up at him so eagerly were able to interpret his gloom as merely the thoughtfulness habitual to a scholar. His was not a practical mind; he had no thought that Cornelia’s lunching with him might have any result save to spoil the cozy hour he had planned for himself with his book as a table companion. To him she was one of the hundred pupils at the school — a little girl who had lately developed odd mannerisms and airy affectations, for no reason except that many little girls seemed to pass through such phases — and so far as his interest in her as an individual human being was concerned, Cornelia might as well have been eight years old as sixteen. He saw nothing, except that he would have to listen to her instead of reading his book, for, since she meant to lunch at the Blue Tea Room, she would probably talk to him anyhow, whether they sat at the same table or not.
“Ah — if such be the case, very well,” he said, without enthusiasm. “Very well, Miss Cromwell.” Then he added hastily, “I mean to say” — and paused hoping to think of something that might avoid the proposed tête-à-tête; but he failed. “I mean to say — ah — if you wish, Miss Cromwell.”
“Do I!” she exclaimed, breathlessly; but the radiant face she showed him only gave him the idea that she was probably excited by the prospect of waffles.
Yet, when waffles — the Blue Tea Room’s specialty — were placed, as a second course, upon the small blue-and-white painted table between her and Mr. Bromley, Cornelia showed no avidity for them. She had resumed her elegant manner, and but toyed with the food. Her elegance, indeed, was almost oppressive to her companion; — she told the blue-aproned waitress, whose cultivation was betokened by horn-rimmed spectacles, that forgettin
g to bring butter was a “dreadful baw.” She said “baw” as frequently as she could, in fact; and she appeared to view the people at the other tables through a frigid though invisible lorgnette.
Her disdain of them as plebeians, beings unknown and not to be known, was visible in her expression; — so much so that it made Mr. Bromley uncomfortable; and here was a small miracle in its way; for in reality she did not see the other people in the room at all distinctly. They were only blurred planes of faraway colour to her; she was but dimly aware of their outlines, and failed to recognize two of them whom she knew very well.
For Cornelia all life and light centred upon the little painted table at which she sat with Mr. Bromley. The world to her was like a shadowy room at sunset, when through a window a last shaft from the rosy sun illumines one spot alone, making it glorious, and all else dim and formless. Mi. Bromley and she sat together in this golden glow, an aura that shimmered out to nothing all round about them, so that there was no definite background; and for anything more than two or three feet away she was astigmatic.
Elation sweet as music possessed her. She was not only lunching at a restaurant with a Distinguished Man, quite as if she were a prima donna in Paris, but that Distinguished Man was Mr. Bromley — Mr. Bromley himself, pale with studious wisdom, yet manly, and incomparably more exciting than the symbol of him drawn with five lines and a dot upon her mountain. She had sometimes trembled when she looked at that emaciated symbol: What wonder could there be that she became a little too elegant, that her laughter rang a little too loudly, or that she showed herself disdainful of lowly presences in a dim background, now, when she sat facing her Ideal made actual in all his beauty?
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 369
