With the Procession Part 23

Jane was wild with pride and pleasure; her father had given her the results and not the process. "I knew you could, poppy; I just knew you could. We'll start in on the other speech right away, and make it even better than this. We'll show 'em, yet!"

But it was not Marshall himself, for all the inexplicable ease of this success, who chiefly angered Belden. Nor had he any great feeling against Rosamund, having no undue interest in the social rivalries of young girls. Nor was he particularly incensed against her mother, being offended chiefly by the ostentatious and invidious good-will shown her by Mrs. Bates. But against Truesdale Marshall he nourished a hot and rancorous grievance. He did not apprehend Truesdale's att.i.tude towards the town at large, and the young man's manner in his own house (regardless of his insolent utterance) seemed to have carried a half-contemptuous curiosity beyond all decent bounds. "That young c.o.c.kerel--I'll soon find a way to quiet his crowing. What does all his singing and painting and fencing amount to, after all? He couldn't post an item into a ledger; he couldn't even tie up a pound of tea. He can't work off any of his foreign smartness on _me_!"

Truesdale, readily figured himself the reverse of _persona grata_ to the Beldens, and stayed away; but this did not prevent his reception of advices more or less regular from the heart of the Belden household.

"What's that absurd girl up to _this_ time?" he asked one morning, as an envelope, directed in a hand already too familiar, came to the door. He recognized readily enough the sprawling, half-masculine penmans.h.i.+p of Gladys McKenna, as readily as he divined the role which she must imagine herself to be playing. She was pretending herself to be a prisoner in some hostile camp--a hostage in some dismal dungeon; and, despite the close and suspicious watchfulness of those surrounding her, she was still sending her little messages, all the same, to her _preux chevalier_ on the opposing side. In the end her reward would come; she and her knight....

"Ouf!" cried Truesdale, who scented all this cra.s.s and forward romanticism between the trivial lines of her communications; "why does she write, when she hasn't got anything to say?"

Sometimes she _did_ have something to say--a little. To her statements of the disposition of the Belden family towards her correspondent, and to her general recommendation to "beware," would be tagged indications of her own individual movements. "Poor auntie is laid up with the neuralgia, and Ethel has gone visiting in Kenwood, so I am the only one to be sent to Field's for those gloves. Auntie says the best time for the glove counter is about twelve-thirty, when the crowd is smallest."--"Yes,"

mumbled Truesdale, irritably; "and lunch at one."

Or: "They are going to let me go alone to Modjeska tomorrow afternoon--in the street-car; just think of it! I think I shall ask for a seat in the last row--I am so timid about fires." Sometimes she would add "destroy this," or, "burn this." "Most willingly!" Truesdale would exclaim, and throw "this" in the fire at once.

Or, again "Imagine; I am to have a tooth filled. Auntie says I needn't trouble to go away down-town--there is a very good man right on Twenty-second Street. 'Go early,' she says; 'and try to be over with it by eleven, so that you can enjoy your lunch.' Did you ever know of such thoughtfulness?"

"No, I never did," acknowledged Truesdale, grimly.

By these and other such subterfuges did Gladys keep her epistolary hand in, until the time came when she really had something of consequence to communicate.

Once or twice she also regaled him with the comments of the Beldens on the building projects of the Marshalls. Truesdale had the same tepid interest for these advices as for her other notes and comments. He did not consider himself as particularly concerned. At best he was but a bird of pa.s.sage. And it seemed to him a sad error to load one's self down with so dense and stationary a thing as a house.

The conferences over this matter went on, however, regardless of Truesdale's non-partic.i.p.ation. Jane discussed it with her father and mother; and Rosy handled it, and Roger; and Alice came in from Riverdale Park to stay overnight, and to contend with Jane and Rosy through the steak and the griddle-cakes in the morning, as well as to intimate to her father that if he would build out a little library from her parlor, her husband could pay for the carpet and furniture; and Aunt Lydia Rhodes came now and then and fluttered around the question, unsettling points that had been looked on as settled for good and all, and raising other points of her own that needed no consideration whatever. And, at the end of a wearisome and contentious month, the matter--with what seemed to everybody an extraordinary and reckless precipitation, the end once reached--was finally arranged. Tom Bingham was to build them a house in the neighborhood favored by Roger, and was to find an architect for them--a reversal of the usual procedure which afflicted Jane with grave doubts. And on the morning of the earliest day of spring, when the piano-organs were trilling through the side streets, and the flower-men were offering hurried shoppers their earliest verbenas and fuchsias from the tail ends of their carts, Jane walked down to the store to look at the signatures on the contracts for the new house.

"Ah!" she said to herself, thoughtfully; "we _are_ moving--faster than I antic.i.p.ated, and not precisely in the direction I had fancied."

She was in no degree elated; she experienced, on the contrary, a distinct feeling of depression.

XIV

During those active weeks which followed the decision of the family to surrender their old home to business and to contrive another one in a new neighborhood towards the south, Jane had taken her full share in all the debates and consultations. Hers, indeed, was the personality which impressed itself most strongly upon the young architect whom Bingham brought forward to evolve the plans, elevations, and specifications upon which he himself was to work. In matters architectural Jane was a purist of the purists, a theorist of the theorists; she fought this young man steadily on points of style, and never abandoned her ground until the exigencies of practicalities, reinforced by the prejudices of her mother and the unillumined indifference of her father, proved too strong to be withstood. "Well," she would say, "if we have got to sacrifice Art to steam-heat and speaking-tubes...." The young man was both amazed and exasperated by her spirit and her pertinacity; he could only be kept in trim and in temper by Bingham's frequent a.s.surances that she was a very clever girl--and a very well-meaning one, after all.

Jane saw the plans composed, discomposed, recomposed, and, finally, accepted as a working basis; then, in the interval between this and the actual commencement of construction, she turned back a diverted attention to her lunch-club.

This inst.i.tution, at the start, had required her attendance and ministrations but once a week. At present she was on hand twice a week, and in the near future she was to be there still more frequently. Every kind of co-operative endeavor, whether it involves the politics of a ward, the finances of a bank, or the refreshment-table of a church social, falls in the end on the shoulders of two or three people, and Jane's undertaking was no exception. And as it became more a matter of personal endeavor, it became, at the same time, more a matter of personal pride. She frequently asked people to call and inspect it, and she was coming more and more to feel that if the line of natural evolution were followed out, then her own lunch-room for girls would be developed into a home for working-girls by her father.

"There, poppy," she said to him one evening, as she put several sheets of paper into his hands; "that's my notion of what could be done on a hundred-foot lot. I haven't drawn the front yet, but here's the plan for down-stairs, and another for one of the upper floors."

The germ of Jane's unexpected architectural facility was to be found, perhaps, in Susan Bates's table-cloth drawings; and it had developed during her long labors on those big brown sheets which Bingham's young man had brought so many times both to house and store.

"But if you really want some notion of the front," she went on, "I can give it to you fast enough." She turned over one of her sheets and began to draw on the back of it. "Pooh! architecture's easy enough! It'll be about five stories high." She sketched the five stories with five or six lines. "In red brick--Romanesque style like this." She gave a broad sweep with the pencil, grouping several rapidly evolved windows under a wide, round arch. "And the cornice will be brick and terra-cotta; no galvanized iron--_that_ I will not have. And a good-sized terracotta panel here over the doorway, to tell who we are--like that."

She outlined a large oblong, and filled it with an indefinite jumble of curly-cues.

Her father looked at the drawing, and laid it back on the table with a wan and patient smile. "Some other time, Jennie; we'll think about it when we haven't got so many other things on hand. Isn't the new house enough for now?"

Jane studied her father's face for a moment, and then thrust the drawings aside with a sudden and remorseful sweep. For he looked tired and worn, and in the slight pallor of his face she noted the deepening of old wrinkles and the appearance of new ones. "You poor old pa!" she cried, "I didn't mean to worry you. It can wait, of course; and the more we learn about building in the meanwhile the better we shall be prepared for this when the time comes round."

She looked into his eyes; they seemed to her both haggard and appealing.

"I declare, you look just dragged out. Poor pal--just bother, bother, bother. Something at the store?"

"There's always something at the store," he said, looking away. "I haven't been feeling very well all day. I guess I didn't get my full share of sleep last night."

Yes, there was always something at the store, and this time it was an affair between Belden and the South town a.s.sessor. Belden--largely on his own account, certainly without anything like a consultation--had undertaken to secure a revaluation of the warehouse property; and he had been so successful (through the use of arguments by which an a.s.sessor may be moved) as to get a figure even lower than that of the previous year, despite the increased value of the building. Unfortunately, he had selected the very time when the scandalous inequality in a.s.sessments was engaging the attention of an ambitious evening paper; and this paper had just printed a cut of the enlarged building in juxtaposition to some small retail grocery in a remote ward and precinct, which was a.s.sessed in a ratio ten times as great--a vivid ill.u.s.tration of the manner in which the rich were favored at the expense of the poor. Marshall felt himself put forward as a criminal--a malefactor; he was a.s.sured, furthermore, that a man who offered a bribe was worse than the man who accepted it.

He might have added too, that Belden was showing some disposition to divert the house from its old conservative paths into the wild courses of speculation. His dash and daring found an outlet in an endeavor to manipulate the tea market, with less eye, perhaps, to profit than to prestige--to primacy in the trade. The old man had given but a half-hearted a.s.sent; he felt the credit, if any were involved, would outrun the profit, and that the promise of profit was too little to justify all the worry and care.

Nor was Jane's own enterprise, meanwhile, wholly free from difficulties.

There were distinctly days when the postponement of the millennium seemed indefinite--when there appeared to be enough human nature remaining in the world to secure the present state of things for many years to come.

"It's a good deal more complicated than I thought," she confessed to her aunt Lydia, upon calling, one day, to invite her to visit the inst.i.tution and to inspect its workings. "Now, Miss Casey and Miss Erlanger, for example, get along together all right, because Miss Casey is the cas.h.i.+er in an insurance office, and Miss Erlanger is the stenographer for a railroad president. Both of them kind of edge off from some of the salesladies; and the salesladies are pretty nearly as bad among themselves. Miss Maddox, who sells gloves on the first floor of Bernstein's Bazaar, never quite wants to sit at the same table with Miss Slopinka, who sells bolts and padlocks in the bas.e.m.e.nt. So we have to trim and fuss and compromise all the time; in fact, we've been obliged to take in another room or two. However, that makes all the more to see."

Jane then added a few words to cover what she conceived to be the etiquette of such a call. Aunt Lydia was not one of the kind to find any force in a delicate intimation; so Jane said what she had to say as plainly and pointedly as possible.

"Don't call during the rush; you'd only be in the way. And don't look at the girls as if they were natural history specimens in gla.s.s cases. And don't whatever else you do, be flip--"

"Flip? What a word! Where did you get it--there?"

--"and gus.h.i.+ng, and effusive, and as condescending as if you had come down sixteen pairs of stairs. I lost three girls the day after Mrs. Bates brought Cecilia Ingles up. 'Why did you do it?' I asked her. 'I want her to see things,' she told me; 'I want to make a good earnest woman of her.' I hope she won't do it again. I sha'nt encourage many visitors after this. I don't think it helps a place like that to be made into a show."

"Well, I don't know," returned her aunt. "Wouldn't it be a good idea to have entertainments and things, to bring the different sections of society together? I should be very glad to help," she added, as she debated the probable partic.i.p.ation of Susan Bates and Cecilia Ingles.

"No, I'm not going to have any picnic business," returned Jane. "That's all nonsense. I'm going to keep this thing within its own lines."

"I suppose I could bring Bertie with me," suggested the chastened Lydia.

"She thinks you're a perfect little tin thing-a-ma-jig on wheels."

"Yes," said Jane, "she can come; only don't bring a whole raft with her."

"I won't," Mrs. Rhodes rea.s.sured her; "only one more besides. You wouldn't mind a third?"

"No, I shouldn't mind just one."

Then Lydia Rhodes made an immediate request of Truesdale to act as escort; _he_ was her third. She took, in this malapropos manoeuvre, the same delight that a child experiences through the consciousness of being engaged in some mischievous wrong.

"Lunch with us at Fields," she directed him, "and then we shall get around in time to see Jane wiping off her tables and putting away her crockery. We go very simply--we wear sackcloth and ashes. As for the portrait--that can wait a day or two."

Then she told Bertie very solemnly that they were to begin a study of the philanthropies of a great city. But Bertie took her own view of the expedition; Truesdale's partic.i.p.ation made it seem rather like an excursion into fairy-land. Now, more than ever, was she under the glamour of this young man's accomplishments; now, more than ever, did she feel the embellis.h.i.+ng and decorative qualities of his presence. Not only had she heard the composer sing his own songs; she had lately seen him paint his own picture--and hers. "Why can't you do a little water-color or something of Bertie?" his aunt had suggested to him one day, upon encountering him in an att.i.tude of graceful negligence before the exposition of his own pictures. "It would please her so much. Do you know"--lowering her voice as she looked towards the girl over her shoulder--"the dear child has been down here eight or ten times to see these things? Fancy how much it would please her to watch you actually at work--on a portrait of herself, too."

Truesdale glanced sidewise towards Bertie, who stood in painstaking scrutiny before one of the outlying pictures of his group. A pair of art students in their careless working clothes, stood a little apart with their eyes on the same work.

"Terrible knowing, ain't it?" remarked one.

"Yep," rejoined the other; "awful lot of snap."

"Just knocks it right out, doesn't it?"