The Grain of Dust Part 23

Norman, his hand still on Tetlow's shoulder, was staring ahead with a terrible expression upon his strong features.

"If she could see the inside of me--the part that's the real me--I think she would love me--or learn to love me. But she can only see the outside--this homely face and body of mine. It's horrible, Fred--to have a mind and a heart fit for love and for being loved, and an outside that repels it. And how many of us poor devils of that sort there are--men and women both!"

Norman was at the window now, his back to the room, to his friend. After a while Tetlow rose and made a feeble effort to straighten himself. "Is it all right about the vacation?" he asked.

"Certainly," said Norman, without turning.

"Thank you, Fred. You're a good friend."

"I'll see you before you go," said Norman, still facing the window.

"You'll come back all right."

Tetlow did not answer. When Norman turned he was alone.

IX

In no way was Norman's luck superior to most men's more splendidly than in that his inborn tendency to arrogant and extravagant desires was matched by an inborn capacity to get the necessary money. His luxurious tastes were certainly not moderated by his a.s.sociations--enormously rich people who, while they could be stingy enough in some respects, at the same time could and did fling away fortunes in gratifying selfish whims--for silly showy houses, for retinues of wasteful servants, for gewgaws that accentuated the homeliness of their homely women and coa.r.s.ened and vulgarized their pretty women--or perhaps for a night's gambling or entertaining, or for the forced smiles and contemptuous caresses of some belle of the other world. Norman fortunately cared not at all for the hugely expensive pomp of the life of the rich; if he had, he would have hopelessly involved himself, as after all he was not a money-grubber but a lawyer. But when there appeared anything for which he did care, he was ready to bid for it like the richest of the rich.

Therefore the investment of a few thousand dollars seemed a small matter to him. He had many a time tossed away far more for far less. He did not dole out the sum he had agreed to provide. He paid it into the Jersey City bank to the credit of the Chemical Research Company and informed its secretary and treasurer that she could draw freely against it. "If you will read the by-laws of the company," said he, "you will see that you've the right to spend exactly as you see fit. When the money runs low, let me know."

"I'll be very careful," said Dorothea Hallowell, secretary and treasurer.

"That's precisely what we don't want," replied he. He glanced round the tiny parlor of the cottage. "We want everything to be run in first-cla.s.s shape. That's the only way to get results. First of all, you must take a proper house--a good-sized one, with large grounds--room for building your father a proper laboratory."

Her dazed and dazzled expression delighted him.

"And you must live better. You must keep at least two servants."

"But we can't afford it."

"Your father has five thousand a year. You have fifteen hundred. That makes sixty-five hundred. The rent of the house and the wages and keep of the servants are a charge against the corporation. So, you can well afford to make yourselves comfortable."

"I haven't got used to the idea as yet," said Dorothea. "Yes--we _are_ better off than we were."

"And you must live better. I want you to get some clothes--and things of that sort."

She shrank within herself and sat quiet, her gaze fixed upon her hands lying limp in her lap.

"There is no reason why your father shouldn't be made absolutely comfortable and happy. That's the way to get the best results from a man of his sort."

She faded on toward the self-effacing blank he had first known.

"Think it out, Dorothy," he said in his frankest, kindliest way. "You'll see I'm right."

"No," she said.

"No? What does that mean?"

"I've an instinct against it," replied she. "I'd rather father and I kept on as we are."

"But that's impossible. You've no right to live in this small, cramping way. You must broaden out and give _him_ room to grow. . . . Isn't that sensible?"

"It sounds so," she admitted. "But--" She gazed round helplessly--"I'm afraid!"

"Afraid of what?"

"I don't know."

"Then don't bother about it."

"I'll have to be very--careful," she said thoughtfully.

"As you please," replied he. "Only, don't live and think on a ten-dollar-a-week basis. That isn't the way to get on."

He never again brought up the matter in direct form. But most of his conversation was indirect and more or less subtle suggestions as to ways of branching out. She moved cautiously for a few days, then timidly began to spend money.

There is a notion widely spread abroad that people who have little money know more about the art of spending money and the science of economizing than those who have much. It would be about as sensible to say that the best swimmers are those who have never been near the water, or no nearer than a bath tub. Anyone wis.h.i.+ng to be convinced need only make an excursion into the poor tenement district and observe the garbage barrels overflowing with spoiled food--or the trashy goods exposed for sale in the shops and the markets. Those who have had money and have lost it are probably, as a rule, the wisest in thrift. Those who have never had money are almost invariably prodigal--because they are ignorant. When Dorothea Hallowell was a baby the family had had money.

But never since she could remember had they been anything but poor.

She did not know how to spend money. She did not know prices or values--being in that respect precisely like the ma.s.s of mankind--and womankind--who imagine they are economical because they hunt so-called bargains and haggle with merchants who have got doubly ready for them by laying in inferior goods and by putting up prices in advance. She knew how much ten dollars a week was, the meaning of the twenty to thirty dollars a week her father had made. But she had only a faint--and exaggeratedly mistaken--notion about sixty-five hundred a year--six and a half thousands. It seemed wealth to her, so vast that a hundred thousand a year would have seemed no more. As soon as she drifted away from the known course--the thirty to forty dollars a week upon which they had been living--Dorothea Hallowell was in a trackless sea, with a broken compa.s.s and no chart whatever. A common enough experience in America, the land of sudden changes of fortune, of rosiest hopes about "striking it rich," of carelessness and ignorance as to values, of eager and untrained appet.i.te for luxury and novelty of any and every kind.

At first any expenditure, however small, for the plainest comfort which had been beyond their means seemed a giddy extravagance. But a bank account--_and_ a check book--soon dissipated that nervousness. A few charge accounts, a little practice in the simple easy gesture of drawing a check, and she was almost at her ease. With people who have known only squalor or with those who have earned their better fortune by privation and slow acc.u.mulation, the spreading out process is usually slow--not so slow as it used to be when our merchants had not learned the art of tempting any and every kind of human nature, but still far from rapid. A piece of money reminds them vividly and painfully of the toil put into acquiring it; and they shy away from the pitfall of the facile check.

With those born and bred as Dorothy was and elevated into what seems to them affluence by no effort of their own, the spreading is a tropical, overnight affair.

Counting all she spent and arranged to spend in those first few weeks, you had no great total. But it was great for a girl who had been making ten dollars a week. Also there were sown in her mind broadcast and thick the seeds of desire for more luxurious comfort, of need for it, that could never be uprooted.

Norman came over almost every evening. He got a new and youthful and youth-restoring kind of pleasure out of this process of expansion. He liked to hear each trifling detail, and he was always making suggestions that bore immediate fruit in further expenditure. When he again brought up the subject of a larger house, she listened with only the faintest protests. Her ideas of such a short time before seemed small, laughably small now. "Father was worrying only this morning because he is so cramped," she admitted.

"We must remedy that at once," said Norman.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'It has killed me,' he groaned."]

And on the following Sunday he and she went house hunting. They found a satisfactory place--peculiarly satisfactory to Norman because it was near the Hudson tunnel, and so only a few minutes from his office. To Dorothy it loomed a mansion, almost a palace. In fact it was a modestly roomy old-fas.h.i.+oned brick house, with a brick stable at the side that, with a little changing, would make an admirable laboratory.

"You haven't the time--or the experience--to fit this place up," said Norman. "I'll attend to it--that is, I'll have it attended to." Seeing her uneasy expression, he added: "I can get much better terms. They'd certainly overcharge you. There's no sense in wasting money--is there?"

"No," she admitted, convinced.

He gave the order to a firm of decorators. It was a moderate order, considering the amount of work that had to be done. But if the girl had seen the estimates Norman indorsed, she would have been terrified.

However, he saw to it that she did not see them; and she, ignorant of values, believed him when he told her the general account of the corporation must be charged with two thousand dollars.

Her alarm took him by surprise. The sum seemed small to him--and it was only about one fifth what the alterations and improvements had cost.

Cried she, "Why, that's more than our whole income for a year has been!"