Emma McChesney and Co Part 9

Hortense, the blond stenographer (engaged to the s.h.i.+pping-clerk), noticed it first. The psychology of that is interesting. Hortense knew that by nine-thirty Mrs. McChesney's desk would be clear and that the buzzer would summon her. Hortense didn't mind taking dictation from T.

A. Buck, though his method was hesitating and jerky, and he was likely to employ quite casually a baffling and unaccustomed word, over which Hortense's scampering pencil would pause, struggle desperately, then race on. Hortense often was in for a quick, furtive session with her pocket-dictionary after one of T. A.'s periods. But with Mrs.

McChesney, dictation was a joy. She knew what she wanted to say and she always said it. The words she used were short, clean-cut, meaningful Anglo-Saxon words. She never used received when she could use got. Hers was the rapid-fire-gun method, each word sharp, well timed, efficient.

Imagine, then, Hortense staring wide-eyed and puzzled at a floundering, hesitating, absent-minded Mrs. McChesney--a Mrs. McChesney strangely starry as to eyes, strangely dreamy as to mood, decidedly deficient as to dictation. Imagine a Hortense with pencil poised in air a full five minutes, waiting until Mrs. McChesney should come to herself with a start, frown, smile vaguely, pa.s.s a hand over her eyes, and say, "Let me see--where was I?"

"'And we find, on referring to your order, that the goods you mention----'" Hortense would prompt patiently.

"Oh, yes, of course," with an effort. Hortense was beginning to grow alarmed.

In T. A. Buck's office, just across the hall, the change was quite as noticeable, but in another way. His leisurely drawl was gone. His deliberate manner was replaced by a brisk, quick-thinking, quick-speaking one. His words were brief and to the point. He seemed to be riding on the crest of an excitement-wave. And, as he dictated, he smiled.

Hortense stood it for a week. Then she unburdened herself to Miss Kelly, the a.s.sistant bookkeeper. Miss Kelly evinced no surprise at her disclosures.

"I was just talking about it to Pop yesterday. She acts worried, doesn't she? And yet, not exactly worried, either. Do you suppose it can be that son of hers--what's his name? Jock."

Hortense shook her head.

"No; he's all right. She had a letter from him yesterday. He's got a grand position in Chicago, and he's going to marry that girl he was so stuck on here. And it isn't that, either, because Mrs. McChesney likes her. I can tell by the way she talks about her. I ought to know.

Look how Henry's ma acted toward me when we were first engaged!"

The front office buzzed with it. It crept into the workroom--into the s.h.i.+pping-room. It penetrated the frowsy head of Jake, the elevator-man. As the days went on and the tempo of the front office slackened with that of the two bright little inner offices, only one member of the whole staff remained unmoved, incurious, taciturn. Pop Henderson listened, one scant old eyebrow raised knowingly, a whimsical half-smile s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his wrinkled face.

At the end of three weeks, Hortense, with that display of temperament so often encountered in young ladies of her profession, announced in desperation that, if this thing kept on, she was going to forget herself and jeopardize her position by demanding to know outright what the trouble was.

From the direction of Pop Henderson's inky retreat, there came the sound of a dry chuckle. Pop Henderson had been chuckling in just that way for three weeks, now. It was getting on the nerves of his colleagues.

"If you ever spring the joke that's kept you giggling for a month,"

snapped Hortense, "it'll break up the office."

Pop Henderson removed his eye-shade very deliberately, pa.s.sed his thin, cramped old hand over his scant gray locks to his bald spot, climbed down stiffly from his stool, ambled to the center of the room, and, head c.o.c.ked like a knowing old brown sparrow, regarded the pert Hortense over his spectacles and under his spectacles and, finally, through his spectacles.

"Young folks now 'days," began Pop Henderson dryly, "are so darned cute and knowin' that when an old fellow cuts in ahead of 'em for once, he likes to hug the joke to himself a while before he springs it." There was no acid in his tone. He was beaming very benignantly down upon the little blond stenographer. "You say that Mrs. Mack is absent-minded-like and dreamy, and that young T. A. acts like he'd swallowed an electric battery. Well, when it comes to that, I've seen you many a time, when you didn't know any one was lookin', just sitting there at your typewriter, with your hands kind of poised halfway, and your lips sort of parted, and your eyes just gazing away somewhere off in the distance for fifteen minutes at a stretch. And out there in the s.h.i.+pping-room Henry's singing like a whole minstrel troupe all day long, when he isn't whistlin' so loud you can hear him over 's far as Eighth Avenue." Then, as the red surged up through the girl's fair skin, "Well?" drawled old Pop Henderson, and the dry chuckle threatened again. "We-e-ell?"

"Why, Pop Henderson!" exploded Miss Kelly from her cage.

"Why--Pop--Henderson!"

In those six words the brisk and agile-minded Miss Kelly expressed the surprise and the awed conviction of the office staff.

Pop Henderson trotted over to the water-cooler, drew a br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.s, drank it off, and gave vent to a great exhaust of breath. He tried not to strut as he crossed back to his desk, climbed his stool, adjusted his eye-shade, and, with a last throaty chuckle, plunged into his books again.

But his words already were working their wonders. The office, after the first shock, was flooded with a new atmosphere--a subtle, pervasive air of hushed happiness, of tender solicitude. It went about like a mother who has found her child asleep at play, and who steals away atiptoe, finger on lip, lips smiling tenderly.

The delicate antennae of Emma McChesney's mind sensed the change.

Perhaps she read something in the glowing eyes of her sister-in-love, Hortense. Perhaps she caught a new tone in Miss Kelly's voice or the forewoman's. Perhaps a whisper from the outer office reached her desk.

The very afternoon of Pop Henderson's electrifying speech, Mrs.

McChesney crossed to T. A. Buck's office, shut the door after her, lowered her voice discreetly, and said,

"T. A., they're on."

"What makes you think so?"

"Nothing. That is, nothing definite. No man-reason. Just a woman-reason."

T. A. Buck strolled over to her, smiling.

"I haven't known you all this time without having learned that that's reason enough. And if they really do know, I'm glad."

"But we didn't want them to know. Not yet--until--until just before the----"

T. A. Buck laid his hands lightly on Emma McChesney's shoulders. Emma McChesney promptly reached up and removed them.

"There you are!" exclaimed Buck, and rammed the offending hands into his pockets.

"That's why I'm glad they know--if they really do know. I'm no actor.

I'm a skirt-and-lingerie manufacturer. For the last six weeks, instead of being allowed to look at you with the expression that a man naturally wears when he's looking at the woman he's going to marry, what have I had to do? Glare, that's what! Scowl! Act like a captain of finance when I've felt like a Romeo! I've had to be dry, terse, businesslike, when I was bursting with adjectives that had nothing to do with business. You've avoided my office as you would a small-pox camp. You've greeted me with a what-can-I-do-for-you air when I've dared to invade yours. You couldn't have been less cordial to a book agent. If it weren't for those two hours you grant me in the evening, I'd--I'd blow up with a loud report, that's what. I'd----"

"Now, now, T. A.!" interrupted Emma McChesney soothingly, and patted one gesticulating arm. "It has been a bit of a strain--for both of us.

But, you know, we agreed it would be best this way. We've ten days more to go. Let's stick it out as we've begun. It has been best for us, for the office, for the business. The next time you find yourself choked up with a stock of fancy adjectives, write a sonnet to me. Work 'em off that way."

T. A. Buck stood silent a moment, regarding her with a concentration that would have unnerved a woman less poised.

"Emma McChesney, when you talk like that, so coolly, so evenly, so--so darned mentally, I sometimes wonder if you really----"

"Don't say it, T. A. Because you don't mean it. I've had to fight for most of my happiness. I've never before found it ready at hand. I've always had to dig for it with a shovel and a spade and a pickax, and then blast. I had almost twenty years of that--from the time I was eighteen until I was thirty-eight. It taught me to take my happiness seriously and my troubles lightly." She shut her eyes for a moment, and her voice was very low and very deep and very vibrant. "So, when I'm coolest and evenest and most mental, T. A., you may know that I've struck gold."

A great glow illumined Buck's fine eyes. He took two quick steps in her direction. But Emma McChesney, one hand on the door-k.n.o.b, warned him off with the other.

"Hey--wait a minute!" pleaded Buck.

"Can't. I've a fitting at the tailor's at three-thirty--my new suit.

Wait till you see it!"

"The d.i.c.kens you have! But so have I"--he jerked out his watch--"at three-thirty! It's the suit I'm going to wear when I travel as a blus.h.i.+ng bridegroom."

"So's mine. And look here, T. A.! We can't both leave this place for a fitting. It's absurd. If this keeps on, it will break up the business. We'll have to get married one at a time--or, at least, get our trousseaux one at a time. What's your suit?"

"Sort of brown."

"Brown? So's mine! Good heavens, T. A., we'll look like a minstrel troupe!"

Buck sighed resignedly.

"If I telephone my tailor that I can't make it until four-thirty, will you promise to be back by that time?"

"Yes; but remember, if your bride appears in a skirt that sags in the back or a coat that bunches across the shoulders, the crime will lie at your door."

So it was that the lynx-eyed office staff began to wonder if, after all, Pop Henderson was the wizard that he had claimed to be.