Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Corey thought of the words he had overheard from Lapham to the girl. But he said, “She seems to be kept pretty busy.”

  “Oh yes,” said Walker; “there ain’t much loafing round the place, in any of the departments, from the old man’s down. That’s just what I say. He’s got to work just twice as hard, if he wants to keep everything in his own mind. But he ain’t afraid of work. That’s one good thing about him. And Miss Dewey has to keep step with the rest of us. But she don’t look like one that would take to it naturally. Such a pretty girl as that generally thinks she does enough when she looks her prettiest.”

  “She’s a pretty girl,” said Corey, non-committally. “But I suppose a great many pretty girls have to earn their living.”

  “Don’t any of ’em like to do it,” returned the book-keeper. “They think it’s a hardship, and I don’t blame ‘em. They have got a right to get married, and they ought to have the chance. And Miss Dewey’s smart, too. She’s as bright as a biscuit. I guess she’s had trouble. I shouldn’t be much more than half surprised if Miss Dewey wasn’t Miss Dewey, or hadn’t always been. Yes, sir,” continued the book-keeper, who prolonged the talk as they walked back to Lapham’s warehouse together, “I don’t know exactly what it is, — it isn’t any one thing in particular, — but I should say that girl had been married. I wouldn’t speak so freely to any of the rest, Mr. Corey, — I want you to understand that, — and it isn’t any of my business, anyway; but that’s my opinion.”

  Corey made no reply, as he walked beside the book-keeper, who continued —

  “It’s curious what a difference marriage makes in people. Now, I know that I don’t look any more like a bachelor of my age than I do like the man in the moon, and yet I couldn’t say where the difference came in, to save me. And it’s just so with a woman. The minute you catch sight of her face, there’s something in it that tells you whether she’s married or not. What do you suppose it is?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” said Corey, willing to laugh away the topic. “And from what I read occasionally of some people who go about repeating their happiness, I shouldn’t say that the intangible evidences were always unmistakable.”

  “Oh, of course,” admitted Walker, easily surrendering his position. “All signs fail in dry weather. Hello! What’s that?” He caught Corey by the arm, and they both stopped.

  At a corner, half a block ahead of them, the summer noon solitude of the place was broken by a bit of drama. A man and woman issued from the intersecting street, and at the moment of coming into sight the man, who looked like a sailor, caught the woman by the arm, as if to detain her. A brief struggle ensued, the woman trying to free herself, and the man half coaxing, half scolding. The spectators could now see that he was drunk; but before they could decide whether it was a case for their interference or not, the woman suddenly set both hands against the man’s breast and gave him a quick push. He lost his footing and tumbled into a heap in the gutter. The woman faltered an instant, as if to see whether he was seriously hurt, and then turned and ran.

  When Corey and the book-keeper re-entered the office, Miss Dewey had finished her lunch, and was putting a sheet of paper into her type-writer. She looked up at them with her eyes of turquoise blue, under her low white forehead, with the hair neatly rippled over it, and then began to beat the keys of her machine.

  IX.

  LAPHAM had the pride which comes of self-making, and he would not openly lower his crest to the young fellow he had taken into his business. He was going to be obviously master in his own place to every one; and during the hours of business he did nothing to distinguish Corey from the half-dozen other clerks and book-keepers in the outer office, but he was not silent about the fact that Bromfield Corey’s son had taken a fancy to come to him. “Did you notice that fellow at the desk facing my type-writer girl? Well, sir, that’s the son of Bromfield Corey — old Phillips Corey’s grandson. And I’ll say this for him, that there isn’t a man in the office that looks after his work better. There isn’t anything he’s too good for. He’s right here at nine every morning, before the clock gets in the word. I guess it’s his grandfather coming out in him. He’s got charge of the foreign correspondence. We’re pushing the paint everywhere.” He flattered himself that he did not lug the matter in. He had been warned against that by his wife, but he had the right to do Corey justice, and his brag took the form of illustration. “Talk about training for business — I tell you it’s all in the man himself! I used to believe in what old Horace Greeley said about college graduates being the poorest kind of horned cattle; but I’ve changed my mind a little. You take that fellow Corey. He’s been through Harvard, and he’s had about every advantage that a fellow could have. Been everywhere, and talks half a dozen languages like English. I suppose he’s got money enough to live without lifting a hand, any more than his father does; son of Bromfield Corey, you know. But the thing was in him. He’s a natural-born business man; and I’ve had many a fellow with me that had come up out of the street, and worked hard all his life, without ever losing his original opposition to the thing. But Corey likes it. I believe the fellow would like to stick at that desk of his night and day. I don’t know where he got it. I guess it must be his grandfather, old Phillips Corey; it often skips a generation, you know. But what I say is, a thing has got to be born in a man; and if it ain’t born in him, all the privations in the world won’t put it there, and if it is, all the college training won’t take it out.”

  Sometimes Lapham advanced these ideas at his own table, to a guest whom he had brought to Nantasket for the night. Then he suffered exposure and ridicule at the hands of his wife, when opportunity offered. She would not let him bring Corey down to Nantasket at all.

  “No, indeed!” she said. “I am not going to have them think we’re running after him. If he wants to see Irene, he can find out ways of doing it for himself.”

  “Who wants him to see Irene?” retorted the Colonel angrily.

  “I do,” said Mrs. Lapham. “And I want him to see her without any of your connivance, Silas. I’m not going to have it said that I put my girls at anybody. Why don’t you invite some of your other clerks?”

  “He ain’t just like the other clerks. He’s going to take charge of a part of the business. It’s quite another thing.”

  “Oh, indeed!” said Mrs. Lapham vexatiously. “Then you ARE going to take a partner.”

  “I shall ask him down if I choose!” returned the Colonel, disdaining her insinuation.

  His wife laughed with the fearlessness of a woman who knows her husband.

  “But you won’t choose when you’ve thought it over, Si.” Then she applied an emollient to his chafed surface. “Don’t you suppose I feel as you do about it? I know just how proud you are, and I’m not going to have you do anything that will make you feel meeching afterward. You just let things take their course. If he wants Irene, he’s going to find out some way of seeing her; and if he don’t, all the plotting and planning in the world isn’t going to make him.”

  “Who’s plotting?” again retorted the Colonel, shuddering at the utterance of hopes and ambitions which a man hides with shame, but a woman talks over as freely and coolly as if they were items of a milliner’s bill.

  “Oh, not you!” exulted his wife. “I understand what you want. You want to get this fellow, who is neither partner nor clerk, down here to talk business with him. Well, now, you just talk business with him at the office.”

  The only social attention which Lapham succeeded in offering Corey was to take him in his buggy, now and then, for a spin out over the Mill-dam. He kept the mare in town, and on a pleasant afternoon he liked to knock off early, as he phrased it, and let the mare out a little. Corey understood something about horses, though in a passionless way, and he would have preferred to talk business when obliged to talk horse. But he deferred to his business superior with the sense of discipline which is innate in the apparently insubordinate American nature. If Corey could hardly ha
ve helped feeling the social difference between Lapham and himself, in his presence he silenced his traditions, and showed him all the respect that he could have exacted from any of his clerks. He talked horse with him, and when the Colonel wished he talked house. Besides himself and his paint Lapham had not many other topics; and if he had a choice between the mare and the edifice on the water side of Beacon Street, it was just now the latter. Sometimes, in driving in or out, he stopped at the house, and made Corey his guest there, if he might not at Nantasket; and one day it happened that the young man met Irene there again. She had come up with her mother alone, and they were in the house, interviewing the carpenter as before, when the Colonel jumped out of his buggy and cast anchor at the pavement. More exactly, Mrs. Lapham was interviewing the carpenter, and Irene was sitting in the bow-window on a trestle, and looking out at the driving. She saw him come up with her father, and bowed and blushed. Her father went on up-stairs to find her mother, and Corey pulled up another trestle which he found in the back part of the room. The first floorings had been laid throughout the house, and the partitions had been lathed so that one could realise the shape of the interior.

  “I suppose you will sit at this window a good deal,” said the young man.

  “Yes, I think it will be very nice. There’s so much more going on than there is in the Square.”

  “It must be very interesting to you to see the house grow.”

  “It is. Only it doesn’t seem to grow so fast as I expected.”

  “Why, I’m amazed at the progress your carpenter has made every time I come.”

  The girl looked down, and then lifting her eyes she said, with a sort of timorous appeal —

  “I’ve been reading that book since you were down at Nantasket.”

  “Book?” repeated Corey, while she reddened with disappointment. “Oh yes. Middlemarch. Did you like it?”

  “I haven’t got through with it yet. Pen has finished it.”

  “What does she think of it?”

  “Oh, I think she likes it very well. I haven’t heard her talk about it much. Do you like it?”

  “Yes; I liked it immensely. But it’s several years since I read it.”

  “I didn’t know it was so old. It’s just got into the Seaside Library,” she urged, with a little sense of injury in her tone.

  “Oh, it hasn’t been out such a very great while,” said Corey politely. “It came a little before DANIEL DERONDA.”

  The girl was again silent. She followed the curl of a shaving on the floor with the point of her parasol.

  “Do you like that Rosamond Vincy?” she asked, without looking up.

  Corey smiled in his kind way.

  “I didn’t suppose she was expected to have any friends. I can’t say I liked her. But I don’t think I disliked her so much as the author does. She’s pretty hard on her good-looking” — he was going to say girls, but as if that might have been rather personal, he said— “people.”

  “Yes, that’s what Pen says. She says she doesn’t give her any chance to be good. She says she should have been just as bad as Rosamond if she had been in her place.”

  The young man laughed. “Your sister is very satirical, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t know,” said Irene, still intent upon the convolutions of the shaving. “She keeps us laughing. Papa thinks there’s nobody that can talk like her.” She gave the shaving a little toss from her, and took the parasol up across her lap. The unworldliness of the Lapham girls did not extend to their dress; Irene’s costume was very stylish, and she governed her head and shoulders stylishly. “We are going to have the back room upstairs for a music-room and library,” she said abruptly.

  “Yes?” returned Corey. “I should think that would be charming.”

  “We expected to have book-cases, but the architect wants to build the shelves in.”

  The fact seemed to be referred to Corey for his comment.

  “It seems to me that would be the best way. They’ll look like part of the room then. You can make them low, and hang your pictures above them.”

  “Yes, that’s what he said.” The girl looked out of the window in adding, “I presume with nice bindings it will look very well.”

  “Oh, nothing furnishes a room like books.”

  “No. There will have to be a good many of them.”

  “That depends upon the size of your room and the number of your shelves.”

  “Oh, of course! I presume,” said Irene, thoughtfully, “we shall have to have Gibbon.”

  “If you want to read him,” said Corey, with a laugh of sympathy for an imaginable joke.

  “We had a great deal about him at school. I believe we had one of his books. Mine’s lost, but Pen will remember.”

  The young man looked at her, and then said, seriously, “You’ll want Greene, of course, and Motley, and Parkman.”

  “Yes. What kind of writers are they?”

  “They’re historians too.”

  “Oh yes; I remember now. That’s what Gibbon was. Is it Gibbon or Gibbons?”

  The young man decided the point with apparently superfluous delicacy. “Gibbon, I think.”

  “There used to be so many of them,” said Irene gaily. “I used to get them mixed up with each other, and I couldn’t tell them from the poets. Should you want to have poetry?”

  “Yes; I suppose some edition of the English poets.”

  “We don’t any of us like poetry. Do you like it?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t very much,” Corey owned. “But, of course, there was a time when Tennyson was a great deal more to me than he is now.”

  “We had something about him at school too. I think I remember the name. I think we ought to have ALL the American poets.”

  “Well, not all. Five or six of the best: you want Longfellow and Bryant and Whittier and Holmes and Emerson and Lowell.”

  The girl listened attentively, as if making mental note of the names.

  “And Shakespeare,” she added. “Don’t you like Shakespeare’s plays?”

  “Oh yes, very much.”

  “I used to be perfectly crazy about his plays. Don’t you think ‘Hamlet’ is splendid? We had ever so much about Shakespeare. Weren’t you perfectly astonished when you found out how many other plays of his there were? I always thought there was nothing but ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Richard III.’ and ‘King Lear,’ and that one that Robeson and Crane have — oh yes! ‘Comedy of Errors.’”

  “Those are the ones they usually play,” said Corey.

  “I presume we shall have to have Scott’s works,” said Irene, returning to the question of books.

  “Oh yes.”

  “One of the girls used to think he was GREAT. She was always talking about Scott.” Irene made a pretty little amiably contemptuous mouth. “He isn’t American, though?” she suggested.

  “No,” said Corey; “he’s Scotch, I believe.”

  Irene passed her glove over her forehead. “I always get him mixed up with Cooper. Well, papa has got to get them. If we have a library, we have got to have books in it. Pen says it’s perfectly ridiculous having one. But papa thinks whatever the architect says is right. He fought him hard enough at first. I don’t see how any one can keep the poets and the historians and novelists separate in their mind. Of course papa will buy them if we say so. But I don’t see how I’m ever going to tell him which ones.” The joyous light faded out of her face and left it pensive.

  “Why, if you like,” said the young man, taking out his pencil, “I’ll put down the names we’ve been talking about.”

  He clapped himself on his breast pockets to detect some lurking scrap of paper.

  “Will you?” she cried delightedly. “Here! take one of my cards,” and she pulled out her card-case. “The carpenter writes on a three-cornered block and puts it into his pocket, and it’s so uncomfortable he can’t help remembering it. Pen says she’s going to adopt the three-cornered-block plan wi
th papa.”

  “Thank you,” said Corey. “I believe I’ll use your card.” He crossed over to her, and after a moment sat down on the trestle beside her. She looked over the card as he wrote. “Those are the ones we mentioned, but perhaps I’d better add a few others.”

  “Oh, thank you,” she said, when he had written the card full on both sides. “He has got to get them in the nicest binding, too. I shall tell him about their helping to furnish the room, and then he can’t object.” She remained with the card, looking at it rather wistfully.

  Perhaps Corey divined her trouble of mind. “If he will take that to any bookseller, and tell him what bindings he wants, he will fill the order for him.”

  “Oh, thank you very much,” she said, and put the card back into her card-case with great apparent relief. Then she turned her lovely face toward the young man, beaming with the triumph a woman feels in any bit of successful manoeuvring, and began to talk with recovered gaiety of other things, as if, having got rid of a matter annoying out of all proportion to its importance, she was now going to indemnify herself.

  Corey did not return to his own trestle. She found another shaving within reach of her parasol, and began poking that with it, and trying to follow it through its folds. Corey watched her a while.

  “You seem to have a great passion for playing with shavings,” he said. “Is it a new one?”

  “New what?”

  “Passion.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, dropping her eyelids, and keeping on with her effort. She looked shyly aslant at him. “Perhaps you don’t approve of playing with shavings?”

  “Oh yes, I do. I admire it very much. But it seems rather difficult. I’ve a great ambition to put my foot on the shaving’s tail and hold it for you.”

  “Well,” said the girl.