T. Tembarom Part 2

"Say, T. T., can you spell?" Jim inquired thoughtfully.

"Spell? Me? No," Tembarom owned with unshaken good cheer. "What I've got to do is to get a tame dictionary and keep it chained to the leg of my table. Those words with two m's or two l's in them get me right down on the mat. But the thing that looks biggest to me is how to find out where the news is, and the name of the fellow that'll put me on to it. You can't go up a man's front steps and ring the bell and ask him if he's going to be married or buried or have a pink tea."

"Wasn't that a knock at the door?" said Steinberger.

It was a knock, and Tembarom jumped up and threw the door open, thinking Mrs. Bowse might have come on some household errand. But it was Little Ann Hutchinson instead of Mrs. Bowse, and there was a threaded needle stuck into the front of her dress, and she had on a thimble.

"I want Mr. Bowles's new socks," she said maternally. "I promised I'd mark them for him."

Bowles and Steinberger sprang from their chairs, and came forward in the usual comfortable glow of pleasure at sight of her.

"What do you think of that for all the comforts of a home?" said Tembarom. "As if it wasn't enough for a man to have new socks without having marks put on them! What are your old socks made of anyhow-- solid gold? Burglars ain't going to break in and steal them."

"They won't when I've marked them, Mr. Tembarom," answered Little Ann, looking up at him with sober, round, for-get-me-not blue eyes, but with a deep dimple breaking out near her lip; "but all three pairs would not come home from the wash if I didn't."

"Three pairs!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Tembarom. "He's got three pairs of socks!

New? That's what's been the matter with him for the last week. Don't you mark them for him, Little Ann. 'Tain't good for a man to have everything."

"Here they are," said Jim, bringing them forward. "Twenty-five marked down to ten at Tracy's. Are they pretty good?"

Little Ann looked them over with the practised eye of a connoisseur of bargains.

"They'd be about a s.h.i.+lling in Manchester shops," she decided, "and they might be put down to sixpence. They're good enough to take care of."

She was not the young woman who is ready for prolonged lively conversation in halls and at bedroom doors, and she had turned away with the new socks in her hand when Tembarom, suddenly inspired, darted after her.

"Say, I've just thought of something," he exclaimed eagerly. "It's something I want to ask you."

"What is it?"

"It's about the society-page lay-out." He hesitated. "I wonder if it'd be rus.h.i.+ng you too much if --say," he suddenly broke off, and standing with his hands in his pockets, looked down at her with anxious admiration, "I believe you just know about everything."

"No, I don't, Mr. Tembarom; but I'm very glad about the page.

Everybody's glad."

One of the chief difficulties Tembarom found facing him when he talked to Little Ann was the difficulty of resisting an awful temptation to take hold of her--to clutch her to his healthy, tumultuous young breast and hold her there firmly. He was half ashamed of himself when he realized it, but he knew that his venial weakness was shared by Jim Bowles and Steinberger and probably others.

She was so slim and light and soft, and the serious frankness of her eyes and the quaint air of being a sort of grown-up child of astonis.h.i.+ng intelligence produced an effect it was necessary to combat with.

"What I wanted to say," he put it to her, "was that I believe if you'd just let me talk this thing out to you it'd do me good. I believe you'd help me to get somewhere. I've got to fix up a scheme for getting next the people who have things happening to them that I can make society stuff out of, you know. Biker didn't make a hit of it, but, gee! I've just got to. I've got to."

"Yes," answered Little Ann, her eyes fixed on him thoughtfully; "you've got to, Mr. Tembarom."

"There's not a soul in the parlor. Would you mind coming down and sitting there while I talk at you and try to work things out? You could go on with your marking."

She thought it over a minute.

"I'll do it if Father can spare me," she made up her mind. "I'll go and ask him."

She went to ask him, and returned in two or three minutes with her small sewing-basket in her hand.

"He can spare me," she said. "He's reading his paper, and doesn't want to talk."

They went down-stairs together and found the room empty. Tembarom turned up the lowered gas, and Little Ann sat down in the cozy-corner with her work-basket on her knee. Tembarom drew up a chair and sat down opposite to her. She threaded a needle and took up one of Jim's new socks.

"Now," she said.

"It's like this," he explained. "The page is a new deal, anyhow.

There didn't used to be an up-town society column at all. It was all Fifth Avenue and the four hundred; but ours isn't a fas.h.i.+onable paper, and their four hundred ain't going to buy it to read their names in it. They'd rather pay to keep out of it. Uptown's growing like smoke, and there's lots of people up that way that'd like their friends to read about their weddings and receptions, and would buy a dozen copies to send away when their names were in. There's no end of women and girls that'd like to see their clothes described and let their friends read the descriptions. They'd buy the paper, too, you bet.

It'll be a big circulation-increaser. It's Galton's idea, and he gave the job to Biker because he thought an educated fellow could get hold of people. But somehow he couldn't. Seems as if they didn't like him.

He kept getting turned down. The page has been mighty poor-- no pictures of brides or anything. Galton's been sick over it. He'd been sure it'd make a hit. Then Biker's always drinking more or less, and he's got the swell head, anyhow. I believe that's the reason he couldn't make good with the up-towners."

"Perhaps he was too well educated, Mr. Tembarom," said Little Ann.

She was marking a letter J in red cotton, and her outward attention was apparently wholly fixed on her work.

"Say, now," Tembarom broke out, "there's where you come in. You go on working as if there was nothing but that sock in New York, but I guess you've just hit the dot. Perhaps that was it. He wanted to do Fifth Avenue work anyway, and he didn't go at Harlem right. He put on Princeton airs when he asked questions. Gee! a fellow can't put on any kind of airs when he's the one that's got to ask."

"You'll get on better," remarked Little Ann. "You've got a friendly way and you've a lot of sense. I've noticed it."

Her head was bent over the red J and she still looked at it and not at Tembarom. This was not coyness, but simple, calm absorption. If she had not been making the J, she would have sat with her hands folded in her lap, and gazed at the young man with undisturbed attention.

"Have you?" said Tembarom, gratefully. "That gives me another boost, Little Ann. What a man seems to need most is just plain twenty-cents- a-yard sense. Not that I ever thought I had the dollar kind. I'm not putting on airs."

"Mr. Galton knows the kind you have. I suppose that's why he gave you the page." The words, spoken in the shrewd-sounding Manchester accent, were neither flattering nor unflattering; they were merely impartial.

"Well, now I've got it, I can't fall down," said Tembarom. "I've got to find out for myself how to get next to the people I want to talk to. I've got to find out who to get next to."

Little Ann put in the final red st.i.tch of the letter J and laid the sock neatly folded on the basket.

"I've just been thinking something, Mr. Tembarom," she said. "Who makes the wedding-cakes?"

He gave a delighted start.

"Gee!" he broke out, "the wedding-cakes!"

"Yes," Little Ann proceeded, "they'd have to have wedding-cakes, and perhaps if you went to the shops where they're sold and could make friends with the people, they'd tell you whom they were selling them to, and you could get the addresses and go and find out things."

Tembarom, glowing with admiring enthusiasm, thrust out his hand.

"Little Ann, shake! " he said. " You've given me the whole show, just like I thought you would. You're just the limit."

"Well, a wedding-cake's the next thing after the bride," she answered.

Her practical little head had given him the practical lead. The mere wedding-cake opened up vistas. Confectioners supplied not only weddings, but refreshments for receptions and dances. Dances suggested the "halls" in which they were held. You could get information at such places. Then there were the churches, and the florists who decorated festal scenes. Tembarom's excitement grew as he talked. One plan led to another; vistas opened on all sides. It all began to look so easy that he could not understand how Biker could possibly have gone into such a land of promise, and returned embittered and empty-handed.

"He thought too much of himself and too little of other people,"

Little Ann summed him up in her unsevere, reasonable voice. "That's so silly."

Tembarom tried not to look at her affectionately, but his voice was affectionate as well as admiring, despite him.