“What about the conventions?” she inquired, amused. “Still, after all, what has a girl to do with conventions who lives as I live? Her problem is a great deal simpler than to bother with usages.” There was a defiant smile hovering about eyes and lips — a hint of recklessness in the bright color rising under his gaze: “A girl can’t live and flourish on silence.”
“You always hurry past me when we meet—”
“But surely you didn’t expect me to invite you to a seat on the stairs, did you?”
“I wish you had.”
“Then why didn’t you invite me?” she asked with a gay audacity new to him. For, in the summer sunshine of the moment, she was forgetting all except the pleasure of the moment and its pretense that the old order of things had returned. Sunshine and green grass and the sophisticated city breeze in the leaves above — youth, and ardent health, and one of her own kind to speak to after the arid silence of these sad months — what wonder that she willfully forgot? What wonder that she dared to breathe and laugh again, drifting and relaxing in the moment’s merciful relief from a tension that had benumbed her to the verge of actual stupidity?
Afterwards, in her room, the relaxed strain tightened again. She realized their acquaintance was only an episode — she knew his advent here was but a caprice. But it was an interim that gave her a chance — a brief vacation in which she might breathe for a moment before the inevitable returned again to submerge her. And she meant to enjoy it with all her heart — every moment, every atom of sunshine, every bright second of respite from what she actually dared look forward to no longer.
That first meeting under the ailantus tree was only one of a sequence.
At first, when he came sauntering across the grass, she politely laid aside her work — dissertation on flounces and napkins and old mahogany and the care of infants, and what Heppelwhite knew about table legs, and why Sheraton is usually saluted as Chippendale.
Later, she continued her work unembarrassed as long as she was able to concentrate her mind under the agreeable little shock of pleasure which his advent always brought to her.
“How did you find out all about such things?” he asked curiously, looking over her manuscripts with her shrugged permission.
“All about what things?”
“These — ah — crooked-legged tables and squatty chairs?”
“I had them — once.”
“I see,” he said gravely. Then, with embarrassed hesitation, but very nicely: “There must have been a pretty bad smash-up?”
She nodded.
“Ah — I’m awfully sorry! Hope it’s going to come out all right — some day.”
“Thank you.” But she continued to be brief and uncommunicative, never volunteering anything.
In the days when she became accustomed to his coming to find her under the tree, she ventured to continue her writing, merely greeting him with a nod of confidence and pleasure. And so he fell into the habit of bringing his own impossible plans and elevations to the vacant lot. And often, biting her pencil reflectively, she would cast side glances at him where he lay, flat in the grassy shade, drawing board under his nose, patiently constructing lines and angles and Corinthian capitals and Romanesque back doors. He was a very, very poor draughtsman; even she could see that.
“I’m doing this for a man who means to build a big tower on this lot,” he explained cheerfully. “I’ve a notion he will be delighted with this plan of mine.”
“Oh, is he going to cut down your Tree of Dreams!” she exclaimed, raising her eyes in dismay.
He looked up at the tree, then at her. “By Jove! It is a pity, isn’t it?” he said, “after the jolly hours we have spent out here.”
“Perhaps he won’t build his tower until after — after—”
“After what?”
“After we — you and I have forgotten all about this tree—” She hesitated. Then calmly—” and each other. Which, of course,” she laughed, “means no tower at all.”
He sat so long silent, preoccupied with his drawing, looking at it half dreamily, that she thought he had forgotten her rather foolish observations.
But he hadn’t; for he said in a troubled voice: “There’s a way — a way of taking up big trees. I’ll ask him to do it. I don’t want it chopped down.”
“You’re afraid of angering the dragon!” she said, laughing. “What use could such a man have for an old ailantus tree? Besides, where could he plant it?”
“There’s a place I know of,” he said. “I’ll speak to him.... No; it wouldn’t do to have our Tree of Dreams cut down—”
“It’s not my tree,” she said, looking down at her pencil; “it’s yours.”
“It is yours,” he insisted. “You found it, and I found you under it.”
“Oh, it’s mine because I found it?” she mocked gayly, “and, I suppose, I’m yours because you found me under it.”
Her tongue had run away that time. She checked her badinage, picked up her pencil with an admirable self-possession that admitted nothing, and scribbled away in calm insouciance. Only the heightened brilliancy of her cheeks could have undeceived the adept. Smith was no adept; besides, he was thinking of other matters.
“Do you know,” he said solemnly, “that I am going away for about a week?”
She congratulated him without raising her head from her writing pad. That was pure instinct, for the emotion she had detected in Smith’s voice was perfectly apparent in his features.
Smith gazed at her for a long time, during which she grew busier and busier with her pencil, and more oblivious of him.
The intellectual processes of Smith were, at times, childlike in their circuitous simplicity.
“Do you think I’m a good draughtsman?” he asked.
“I don’t know; are you?” she asked, numbering a fresh sheet of her pad.
“Why, you’ve seen my drawing!” he reminded her, a little hurt. “I think I am a good draughtsman. I could probably earn about a hundred and twenty dollars a month.”
“You are very fortunate,” she murmured, rubbing out a sentence.
“A hundred and twenty dollars a month is enough for anybody to marry on,” he continued. “Don’t — you think so?”
“It is probably sufficient,” she said carelessly.
“Do you think it is?”
“I haven’t considered such matters very seriously,” she said. “It will be time when I am earning a hundred and twenty dollars a month. And I’m not likely to earn it if you continue to interrupt me.”
Smith turned red; presently he tucked his drawing board under his arm and stood up.
“I’m going,” he said. “Good-by.”
She nodded her adieux pleasantly, scarcely raising her head from her work.
But when Smith had disappeared she straightened up with a quick, indrawn breath and stared across the grass at the blank, brick walls. After a long while she dropped her tired shoulders back against the trunk of the Tree of Dreams, reclining there inert, blue eyes brooding in vacancy.
Meanwhile, Smith had locked up his room, gone home for the first time in two months, telephoned for a stateroom on the Western Limited, and sent for Kerns, who presently arrived in an electric cab.
“I’m going to Illinois,” said Smith, “to-night.”
“The nation must know of this,” insisted Kerns; “let me telegraph for fireworks.”
“There’ll be fireworks,” observed Smith—” fireworks to burn, presently. I’m going to get married to a working girl.”
“Oh, piffle!” said Kerns faintly; “let’s go and sit on the third rail and talk it over.”
“Not with you, idiot. Did you ever hear of Stanley Stevens, who tried to corner wheat? I think it’s his daughter I’m going to marry. I’m going to Chicago to find out. Good heavens, Kerns! It’s the most pitiful case, whoever she is! It’s a case to stir the manhood in any man. I tell you it’s got to be righted. I am thoroughly stirred up, and I won’t stand’ any nonsense fro
m you.”
Kerns looked at him. “Smith,” he pleaded in sepulchral tones; “Smithy! For the sake of decency and of common sense—”
“Exactly,” nodded Smith, picking up his hat and gloves; “for the sake of decency and of common sense. Good-by, Tommy. And — ah!” — indicating a parcel of papers on the desk— “just have an architect look over these sketches with a view to estimating the — ah — cost of construction. And find some good landscape gardener to figure up what it will cost to remove a big ailantus tree from New York to the Berkshires. You can tell him I’ll sue him if he injures the tree, but that I don’t care what it costs to move it.”
“Smith!” faltered Kerns, appalled, “you’re as mad as Hamlet!”
“It’s one of my ambitions to be madder,” retorted Smith, going out and running nimbly downstairs.
“Help!” observed Kerns feebly as the front door slammed. And, as nobody responded, he sat down in the bachelor quarters of J. Abingdon Smith, a prey to melancholy amazement.
When Smith had been gone a week Kerns wrote him, when he had been gone two weeks he telegraphed him, when the third week ended he telephoned him, and when the month was up he prepared to leave for darkest Chicago; in fact he was actually leaving his house, suit case in hand, when Smith drove up in a hansom and gleefully waved his hand.
Smith beckoned him to enter the cab. “I’m going home to put on my old clothes,” he said. “It’s all right, Tom. I’ve been collecting old furniture, tons of antique chairs and things. They were pretty widely scattered at the sale two years ago—”
“What sale, in the name of sanity?” shouted Kerns.
“Why, when Stanley Stevens failed to corner wheat he shot his head off before they pounced on his effects. I managed to find most of the things. I’ve sent them to my place, Abingdon, and now I’m going to ask her to marry me.”
“Oh, are you?”
“Certainly. And, Kerns, if she will have me it will be for my own sake. Do you know what she thinks? She thinks I’m a draughtsman at thirty dollars a week. Isn’t it delightful? Isn’t it perfectly splendid?”
“Dazzling,” whispered Kerns, unable to utter another word.
Smith’s progress was certainly rapid. When he arrived at the door of his tenement lodgings he fairly soared up the stairs, flight on flight, until he came to the top.
The door of his neighbor’s room stood open and he impulsively crossed the hallway, but there were only two men there moving out a table, and his slender blue-eyed neighbor was nowhere visible.
“What’s that for?” he inquired. “Is Miss Stevens moving?”
“No, but her table is,” said one of the men. Something about the proceeding kept Smith silent. He saw one of the men drop his end of the table, close the door, lock it, and hang the key on a nail outside.
“That isn’t safe,” said Smith. “I’ll take charge of the key until Miss Stevens returns.”
He unhooked it, and, turning, let himself into his own room, but left the door ajar.
Two flights down the table drawer dropped out, dumping a pile of yellow manuscript on the stairs.
“Glory!” panted one of the movers; “that’s hers. Take it up and leave it with the guy in the glasses, Bill.”
And so it happened that Smith, standing outside on his fire escape for a breath of air, returned to find a mass of yellow manuscript littering his bed.
Wondering, he picked up the first sheet, saw his own name in her handwriting, stared, and sat down in astonishment to read. Suddenly his face burned fiery red, and, as long as he sat there, the deep color remained throbbing, scorching him anew with every page he turned.
After a long while he dropped the sheets and returned to the first page. It was dated in June, the day after his arrival.
He was slowly beginning to understand the matter now. He was beginning to realize that this manuscript had been placed in his room by mistake; that it had never been intended for him to read; that, if it had been written with a purpose, it had never been used for any purpose.
Then he remembered the moving of her table. Clearly the men had found it and, as he had assumed possession of her key, no doubt they had returned and flung the papers on his bed.
“In that case,” said Smith thoughtfully, “I think I’ll go down to the ailantus tree, and see if, by any chance, she is there.”
She was there, seated in a chair, very intent on her writing pad. He was quite near her before she noticed him, and then she seemed dazed for a moment, rising and holding out her hand mechanically, looking at him in silence as he held her fingers imprisoned.
“I did not think you would return,” she said. “It is a month — at least—”
“Are you glad to see me?”
“Of course,” she said simply, reseating herself. “Have you been well?”
“Yes; and you?”
“Perfectly, thank you.”
He looked around at the long grass withered in patches; at the leafless tree. “Do you remember our first encounter here?” he said.
“Perfectly. You told me that there was a dragon under the tree, and a Chinese bird sat in its branches. That was in August, I think. This is November. Look up at the branches. All the leaves are gone. Only the silvery cocoons are hanging in clusters everywhere.” And, bending slowly above her work again, “When are you going to turn our Tree of Dreams into a tower of bricks?”
But he only sat silent, smiling, watching her white fingers flying over the pad on her knees.
“I wonder,” she said carelessly, “how long you are going to stay here this time.”
“I wonder, too,” he said.
“Don’t you know?” she asked, raising her eyes and laughing faintly.
“No, I don’t. Besides, why should I leave this lodging house? I like it.”
“Can’t you afford to leave — after all that lucrative tower designing?”
He said, looking at her deliberately: You know perfectly well that I can afford to.” Something in the quiet voice and gaze of the man startled her, but only a delicate glow of rising color in her cheeks betrayed any lack of self-possession. “I don’t think I understand you,” she said.
“I think you do,” he insisted, seating himself at her feet in the grass.
She wrote a word or two on her pad, then looked down to meet his changed smile. A moment more, and she resumed her work in flushed confusion.
“You know who I am,” he said calmly. “I didn’t think you did until an hour ago. Shall I tell you what happened an hour ago?”
She managed to meet his gaze without expression, but she did not answer.
“Then I will tell you what happened,” he continued.
“Some men carried out a table from your room. A few moments later one of the men deposited a lot of loose manuscript which he had, I suppose, found in the table drawer. This all occurred while I was out on the balcony. When I returned to the room I found the papers on my bed. I could not avoid seeing my own name at the head of this breezy newspaper article. It is very cleverly written.”
Wave after wave of scarlet flooded her face.
“So you have known who I am all this time?” he nodded slowly.
“Y-yes.”
“It was a good chance — a legitimate chance for an article. You thought so, and you wrote it. The papers would have given it three columns and double leads.... Why didn’t you use it?” The tears flashed in her eyes. “I did not use it for the same reason that I am here with you now! Some things can be done, and some cannot. Good-by.”
Good-by?” he repeated slowly.
He stepped back; she passed before him, halted, turned, and spoke again, steadying her voice which broke deliciously in spite of her: “I did not mean to ridicule you. When I wrote that article I had known you only a day or two — and I was desperate — frightened — half-starved. The chance came, and I took it — or tried to. But I couldn’t. I never could have. So — that is all.”
“I knew all that, too,” he said
. “I only thought I’d speak of it. I wanted to ask you something else—”
She had halted.
“Ask it,” she said, exercising every atom of self-command.
“Won’t you turn around?”
“No. I — I cannot. What is it you wish, Mr. Smith?”
“Ah — about this tree. It’s to be taken up, I believe. They’ve a method of doing it, you know. I — ah — have considered arrangements.”
She made no movement.
“Fact is,” he ventured, “I’ve a sort of a country place in the Berkshires. Do you think that our tree would do well in the Berkshires?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Smith.”
“Oh, I thought, perhaps, you’d be likely to know!”
There was a pause of a full minute. “Is that all?” she asked, turning toward him with tear-flushed self-possession — but she had no idea that he was so close to her — no idea of what he was doing with her hands so suddenly imprisoned in his.
“Can you stand such a-a m-man as I am?” he stammered, the ancestral sentimental streak in the ascendency. “Would yo — ah — mind marrying me?”
Her face was pale enough now.
“Do you ‘mean you love me?” she said, dazed. And the next moment she had released her hands, stepping toward the tree.
“Yes, I mean that,” he repeated; “I love you.”
“But — but I do not love you, Mr. Smith—”
“I — I know it. P-perhaps you could try. D-do you mind trying — a little—”
He had followed her to the ailantus. She retreated, facing him, and now stood backed up against the tree, her hands flat against the trunk behind her.
“Couldn’t you try?” he asked. “I love you — I love you dearly. I know you’re younger — I know you think me m-more or less of a—”
“I don’t!”
“I suppose I really haven’t many brains,” he said; “but yours are still intact.”
Her blue eyes filled and grew starry.
“Did you read that entire article?” she asked unsteadily—” did you?”
“Yes — in bits — before I knew you had not meant me to.... I guess I am the sort of a man you make fun of—”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 1145
