“Mr. Hildreth, we simply cannot let your verses go unedited.”
He looked at her for a moment in silence. “Can’t you stand my verses?” he inquired. And, as she made no reply: “If you can’t — if they are really as bad as that, why, the public is going to recoil, too, and I’ll doubtless ruin the business for my uncle. He has no more idea of good poetry than I have. I’ll ruin him; and our rivals, The Bunsen’s Baby Biscuit Company, will call me blessed!”
“Your uncle writes you that he likes the advertising verses you send him,” she interrupted cheerily. “He tells you that the verses have made the wafers worth a fortune.”
“Yes, but you always have revised my verses, and he doesn’t know that. Every poem I’ve done for the Honey Wafers Company you’ve revised. It is you who have made them sell all over this continent.”
“What of it?” she answered, amused, “as long as your uncle is satisfied. I don’t mind the trouble of editing your verses — truly I don’t.” She rested her cheek on her wrist, playing the while with her pencil. “I am very happy to do what I can, Mr. Hildreth. Shall we try once more?”
She seemed to grow more disturbingly pretty every day; he permitted himself to look at her long enough to remember that he had something else to do. “Din, pin, gin, sin,” he repeated sullenly. “What the mischief am I to write, anyway?”
“I don’t think we can use ‘sin,’ do you?” she asked, lifting her blue eyes.
Perhaps he found inspiration in them; he looked at them hard; an inward struggle set his mouth in an uncompromising line. And this is what he evolved:
“Bright as blue eyes that are innocent of sin Is the box of tin they’re packed in —
Hildreth’s Honey W—”
“You can’t compare a tin box to blue eyes, Mr. Hildreth! You surely must admit that.”
“Tin is bright, isn’t it? Blue eyes are bright, aren’t they? Well, if one’s bright and the others are—”
She shook her head slowly; her eyes had softened to a violet tint. He noticed that phenomenon, but he did not know that he had noticed it. His brows met in a frown of intense intellectual concentration; for five full minutes he remained rigid in the agony of composition, then, with a long breath, he delivered himself of another verse:
“Soft as the color of blue violets that grow in
The woods, is perfume from the box of tin!
Hil—”
“Oh, dear!” said the stenographer with a sudden little indrawing of her breath.
“If you want to laugh,” he said, flushing, “go ahead. I’m not sensitive.”
“I had no desire to laugh, Mr. Hildreth; it’s far beyond a laughing matter.”
He regarded her gloomily, relighted his cigar, and gazed out of the frosty window. After a moment a smile twitched his mouth.
“I suppose it’s not good — that last idea about ingrowing violets—”
She laughed: she could not help it; he laughed, too.
“How long have we been working together?” he asked, leaning back in his chair. He knew, but he wanted to know whether she knew.
She knew, but she pretended to think very hard before answering, laying her pencil thoughtfully across her lips, immersed in calculation.
“It must be nearly a month, Mr. Hildreth.”
“Impossible!” he exclaimed, pretending surprise.
“Almost,” she insisted. “Let me see; I came to you on the fifth—”
“The ninth,” he said quickly. He was easily beguiled.
“Was it the ninth?” she asked wonderingly — though what there was to wonder at is not clear, the date signalizing nothing in particular except the day they first laid eyes on one another. “I believe it was the ninth, after all. That would make it almost a month—”
“Exactly a month,” he said triumphantly. “This is our first anniversary — and you didn’t know it!”
He stopped; he hadn’t meant to use words of that sort. People employ such expressions for other matters, not to commemorate the date of a purely business engagement.
“What you mean to say, Mr. Hildreth, is that I have been in your employment exactly a month,” she said with amiable indifference.
“Exactly,” he repeated, opening the inlaid cover of a rococo desk and bringing forth a package. Then he rose to his feet and made her a bow, full of the charm of good breeding: “May I venture to offer a little gift in memory of the fortunate event?”
She stood up, surprised, quiet, a trifle perplexed.
“What fortunate event, Mr. Hildreth?”
“The annivers — the — pleasant occasion—” He floundered, and she let him. It irritated him to flounder, for his intentions were above reproach.
“What I mean to say is simple enough,” he snapped. “You’ve practically written my poems for me, and you didn’t have to, but if you hadn’t I either should have ruined my uncle’s business or lost my job, and I’m grateful, and I wanted to give you something to show it — these books—”
She took them, a trifle uncertain, but guided by inherited instinct. She looked at the beautifully bound and dreadfully expensive volumes.
The constraint lasted only a second; she thanked him, glanced at the title-page, where he had written the date and her name, but not his own. His good taste appealing to her, she smiled at him in a delightfully friendly fashion; and the charm of the transfiguration so occupied him that, finding himself staring, he neutralized the rudeness by closing his eyes with a wise look as though intent on pursuing elusive rhymes for commercial purposes.
She seated herself at her little flyaway gilded desk once more; he relapsed into his chair and sat there drumming with his fingers on the golden foliations of the carved arms.
She had, instinctively, picked up her pencil and pad, ready for dictation when the sacred fire should blaze up in him. The fire, however, appeared to be out. There was not a sputter.
“And in all this time,” he mused, continuing his cogitations aloud, “you have never asked me why, in the name of common decency, I insisted on trying to be a poet!”
As she made no reply:
“Have you?” he repeated.
“Of course I haven’t—”
“Is it because you are too civil to hurt a man’s feelings?”
“It is because I am employed by you, Mr. Hildreth—”
“Because you are employed by me? Nonsense! That’s no reason why I should torture a cultivated ear with unspeakable rhymes. I wonder, Miss Grey, what you really think of me?”
She could have told him that she didn’t think of him at all except in a business sense, which would have been an untruth, but the proper answer for him. She thought of several answers, all reserved, indifferent, discouraging the faintest hint of intimacy, and therefore suitable. Then she said: “Would it interest you to know what your stenographer thinks about you?”
He said it would interest him excessively, and he desired information.
“I think,” she said, not looking at him but at her pencil, with which she was tracing arabesques on the pad, “I think that you could do some things much better than — others. Oh, dear! that sounds like Tupper — but it’s true.”
“You mean I’d make a better bandit, for example, than I do a poet?”
“I don’t know what qualification you have for the career you suggest,” she replied demurely.
“I understand you,” he said; “it’s as simple as those profound lines:
“‘A fool is bent upon a twig, but wise men shun a bandit; Which is really very clever if you only understand it.’”
That’s what you intended to say, wasn’t it?”
They were both laughing, she with more reserve than he.
“If a bandit’s life is not a happy one, what must a poet’s life resemble?” he demanded. “Why, it’s a perfect — but the word is inadequate, Miss Grey. Did you ever for one mad moment suppose that I wrote rhymes for the pleasure it gave me?”
“No,” she said, “I didn�
�t.”
“Or did you imagine I was infatuated with the notion that my rhymes gave pleasure to others?” She laughed such a care-free laugh — so sweet, so entirely gay and innocent — that he said impulsively: “I wish you’d let me tell you how it is. I do so hate to appear a fool to you.”
Something checked her mirth, yet it scarcely could be what he said, for his speech and manner were quite free from offense.
“May I tell you?” he asked, conscious of the shadow of constraint between them.
There was something in her silent acquiescence which hinted: “My time is yours, Mr. Hildreth; but, considering the strictly business footing of our relations, hadn’t you better begin to make your third verse?” And no doubt the slight impatient movement of his shoulders meant: “No, I won’t begin my third verse; I desire to unburden to you a soul too long misunderstood.” But the interpretation of her silence and his shrug are purely speculative on my part.
“I’d quit this verse making in a moment if I could,” he said; “but it’s my livelihood. I always loathed poetry, even my own; but I’ve simply got to earn my living.”
“Surely,” she said, with an instinctive glance around the exceedingly ornate apartment, “it would be silly for you to give up making advertising verses for your uncle as long as — as—”
“As long as it permits me to live like this? Do you suppose that this is my apartment? — that anything in it belongs to me? — that my income from my wafer poetry would even pay for a single week’s rent here? There’s the ghastly mockery of it. Why, my salary is just twice what yours is: in other words, I divide with you every week.” She regarded him with amazement.
“Apartment, servants — everything belongs to my uncle. My uncle has views,” he said, waving his hand. “Unfortunately, one of his views is how to bring up his only nephew. Just fancy a man fresh from Harvard flung neck and heels into his uncle’s wafer business on thirty dollars a week!”
“Dreadful,” she motioned with her lips.
“Neck and heels! He said I was to find no favors, no privileges; that I must begin at the lowest rung of the ladder, and, as he knew of nothing lower than poetry, he set me to work writing Honey Wafer ads. I’m to be promoted next year to be the artist that draws pictures for the ads. After that I shall advance through the baking, packing, and truck departments until I become a traveling salesman. Meanwhile, I’ve emerged from my cheap boarding house to keep his servants busy till he returns.”
She sat very still, watching him with her beautiful, serious young eyes.
“Then, some day, I’m to be taken into the concern and become a partner if—”
“If?”
“If I don’t marry.”
“Oh!” she said faintly.
“But if I do—”
There was an ominous pause; then she repeated calmly: —
“If you do?”
“I’m down and out, and he leaves about five millions to the Society for Psychical Research. A nice position for me if I should ever fall in love, isn’t it?”
The pause was longer this time.
“The Society for Psychical Research,” she repeated under her breath.
“Yes. You know — they investigate spooks, and tip tables, and go into trances, and see blond gentlemen coming over the ocean to marry you, and dark ladies hiding around the corner.”
“Is he interested in such things — your uncle?”
“Mad about them. He’s up at his country place now with a bunch of Columbia professors and Sixth Avenue clairvoyants, engaged in crystal-gazing experiments. Later he’s going to lecture about ’em at Columbia University.”
“What is crystal gazing?” she asked innocently.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know exactly. My uncle and a fat clairvoyant in a pink teagown sit at a table and squint into a big globe made of rock crystal; and he tells me that he can sit in his chair up there at Adrintha Lodge and see, in the crystal, everything that he wants to see — including how I’m behaving myself down here in town. He told me that if I ever — ever kissed anybody he’d see it and discharge me.”
“Does he say he can see you?”
“He does.”
“And everything you are doing?”
“Every blessed thing.”
“Do you believe it?” she asked anxiously.
“No, of course not. But I let him think he has me scared to death.”
She leaned forward on the table, clasping both hands under her chin.
“Is that what keeps you on your best behavior?”
It was rather a curious thing to say.
“Suppose,” she added, “that your uncle was looking into his crystal at this very minute. I think, if you please, we’d better stop talking and begin our work.... Don’t you? I think we ought at least to look as though we were busy.”
“You don’t believe that he could see us, do you?” demanded Hildreth.
“No;... but suppose he could? Don’t you think I’d better copy your verses — or be doing something—”
She hastily placed a sheet of paper in the machine, slid it into place, and struck several keys. It was quite unconscious on her part, but when, a moment later, she turned the sheet over she found that she had written his name about sixty times. The portent of this, however, did not then strike her.
Somewhere in the room little silvery chimes sounded the hour.
“Can it be two o’clock already?” she exclaimed. He examined his watch in assumed surprise. “Why, we are just in time!” he said hazily.
“Yes, Mr. Hildreth — in time for what?”
“You — you won’t be offended — where anything but offense is meant — will you?”
She had risen to face him; he, rather red about the ears, began by making a mess of what he was saying; and when she had grasped the import of it she let him go on making a mess until his irritation straightened out matters.
“It’s only that you’ve been so kind to help me do all that advertising poetry, and I’m so tremendously grateful, and it’s our first annivers — our — er — the occasion — You know what I mean. So please stay to luncheon. Will you?”
“Please don’t ask me, Mr. Hildreth—”
“Yes, I will! You simply can’t be offended; you simply cannot mistake my attitude, my meaning—”
“I am not offended. You are very thoughtful — amiable — but I think I ought to go—”
“Our anni — the date, you know — just to celebrate a purely business arrangement which has been so delight — so profitable to me, I mean—”
“No, I could not stay, Mr. Hildreth—”
“But it’s partly for business purposes,” he explained anxiously. “Why, you must know, Miss Grey, that more business is transacted at luncheon than before or after. That’s what great financiers do; they say to the head of a department: ‘Lunch with me, Mr. So-and-so.’ And Mr. So-and-so understands at once.”
“Does that great financier ever say: ‘Lunch with me, Miss So-and-so’?”
“Yes, often and often. And she understands!”
“Are you sure she does?”
“I am. Please let me be sure.”
“Mr. Hildreth, I should — should like to — there, I admit it! But it is not convenable. I know it; you know it; it is not the thing for us to do. I have no business here except as your stenographer. I could not accept.”
“Because you are a stenographer?”
“If I were not in your employment I should not be here with you. You know that.”
“But I should perhaps be at your house if—”
“You are speculating in impossibilities.” She bent her head, smiling across the table at him, and dropping her hand on the books he had given her. “Your kindness must have some bounds; let it end in these bindings; I — I shall remember it with each leaf I turn.” And as he said nothing, but looked rather miserable, she added: “Won’t you?”
There was another interval of silence; she considered his face
anew. The unhappiness in it was evident.
“Do you really want me... to talk business?”
“I want you to stay. Will you?”
She did not answer, though a little tremor touched her lips.
“That’s jolly!” he said gayly, and touched an electric button behind him. And a moment later a maid in cap and apron respectfully piloted her out of sight.
About half past two a Japanese butler served them in the colonial breakfast room, and she laughed at the little silver trifle she found beside her plate — a tiny type-machine made to hold scents in microscopic crystal vials. Her initials were engraved upon it.
“You see,” he said, “I do not regard our poetical partnership lightly, even if you do. What you have done for me is going to enable me to enter the firm one day — aided by your editing my verses.”
“I never before understood,” she admitted, “why you advertised for a stenographer who was a graduate of Barnard College. And — when I applied to you I was perfectly astonished when you asked me so anxiously whether I could rhyme and draw pictures.”
He examined his grape fruit and extracted a minted cherry with great care. Presently he swallowed it.
“I knew from the first instant I saw you that my chance in life had come,” he observed.
“You didn’t know it before you questioned me.”
“Yes, I did.”
“How?”
He looked up at her: “I don’t know how I knew it.” She was apparently interested in the aroma of her wine. “But I knew it,” he ended.
The vintage was doubtless worthy of the serious attention she gave it.
“Do you know what wine that is?” he asked, amused.
“Yes; it is Sarna,” she said simply.
“How did you know?” he exclaimed in amazement.
She lifted the glass with a pretty gesture: “Are you so astonished that your stenographer knows the rarest wine in the world — and the legend concerning it? A most inappropriate wine for such a luncheon, Mr. Hildreth—”
“You are a constant series of endless astonishments to me,” he said. “Where on earth you ever heard of Sarna — and how you should have known it when you saw it — this wine so rare that but one in ten thousand experts ever heard of it—”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 1152
