Queed Part 18

Ah! There was a thought. As long as he had this bruise people would be bothering him about it. It was a world where a man couldn't even get a black eye without a thousand busybodies commenting on it.

"If you are certain that its healing will be hastened--"

"Positive!" cried Fifi happily, and vanished without more speech.

One Hour a Day to be given to Bodily Exercise.... How long, O Lord, how long!

Fifi returned directly with white cloths, scissors, and two large bottles.

"I won't take hardly a minute--you see! Listen, Mr. Queed. One of these bottles heals fairly well and doesn't hurt at all worth mentioning.

That's witch-hazel. The other heals very well and fast, but stings--well, a lot; and that's turpentine. Which will you take?"

"The turpentine," said Mr. Queed in a martyr's voice.

Fifi's hands were very deft. In less than no time, she made a little lint pad, soaked it in the pungent turpentine, applied it to the unsightly swelling, and bound it firmly to the young man's head with a snowy band. In all of Mr. Queed's life, this was the first time that a woman had ministered to him. To himself, he involuntarily confessed that the touch of the girl's hands upon his forehead was not so annoying as you might have expected.

Fifi drew off and surveyed her work sympathetically yet professionally.

The effect of the white cloth riding aslant over the round gla.s.ses and academic countenance was wonderfully rakish and devil-may-care.

"Do you feel the sting much so far?"

"A trifle," said the Doctor.

"It works up fast to a kind of--climax, as I remember, and then slowly dies away. The climax will be pretty bad--I'm so sorry! But when it's at its worst just say to yourself, 'This is doing me lots and lots of good,' and then you won't mind so much."

"I will follow the directions," said he, squirming in his chair.

"Thank you for letting me do it, and for the algebra, and--good-night."

"Good-night."

He immediately abandoned all pretense of working. To him it seemed that the climax of the turpentine had come instantly; there was no more working up about it than there was about a live red coal. The mordant tooth bit into his blood; he rose and tramped the floor, muttering savagely to himself. But he would not pluck the hateful thing off, no, no--for that would have been an admission that he was wrong in putting it on; and he was never wrong.

So Bylash, reading one of Miss Jibby's works in the parlor, and pausing for a drink of water at the end of a glorious chapter, found him tramping and muttering. His flying look dared Bylash to address him, and Bylash prudently took the dare. But he poured his drink slowly, stealing curious glances and endeavoring to catch the drift of the little Doctor's murmurings.

In this attempt he utterly failed, because why? Obviously because the Doctor cursed exclusively in the Greek and Latin languages.

In five minutes, Queed was upon his work again. Not that the turpentine was yet dying slowly away, as Fifi had predicted that it would. On the contrary it burned like the fiery furnace of Shadrach and Abednego. But _One Hour a Day to be given to Bodily Exercise!_... Oh, every second must be made to count now, whether one's head was breaking into flame or not.

Whatever his faults or foibles, Mr. Queed was captain of his soul. But the fates were against him to-night. In half an hour, when the sting--they called this conflagration a sting!--was beginning to get endurable and the pencil to move steadily, the door opened and in strode Professor Nicolovius; he, it seemed, wanted matches. Why under heaven, if a man wanted matches, couldn't he buy a thousand boxes and store them in piles in his room?

The old professor apologized blandly for his intrusion, but seemed in no hurry to make the obvious reparation. He drew a match along the bottom of the mantle-shelf, eyeing the back of the little Doctor's head as he did so, and slowly lit a cigar.

"I'm sorry to see that you've met with an accident, Mr. Queed. Is there anything, perhaps, that I might do?"

"Nothing at all,'thanks," said Queed, so indignantly that Nicolovius dropped the subject at once.

The star-boarder of Mrs. Paynter's might have been fifty-five or he might have been seventy, and his clothes had long been the secret envy of Mr. Bylash. He leaned against the mantel at his ease, blowing blue smoke.

"You find this a fairly pleasant place to sit of an evening, I daresay!"

he purred, presently.

The back of the young man's head was uncompromisingly stern. "I might as well try to write in the middle of Centre Street."

"So?" said Nicolovius, not catching his drift. "I should have thought that--"

"The interruptions," said Queed, "are constant."

The old professor laughed. "Upon my word, I don't blame you for saying that. The gross communism of a boarding-house ... it does gall one at times! So far as I am concerned, I relieve you of it at once.

Good-night."

The afternoon before Nicolovius had happened to walk part of the way downtown with Mr. Queed, and had been favored with a fair amount of his stately conversation. He shut the door now somewhat puzzled by the young man's marked curtness; but then Nicolovius knew nothing about the turpentine.

The broken evening wore on, with progress slower than the laborer's in Problem 71, when he decided to build two rods less a day. At eleven, Miss Miller, who had been to the theatre, breezed in; she wanted a drink of water. At 11.45--Queed's open watch kept accurate tally--there came Trainer Klinker, who, having sought his pupil vainly in the Scriptorium, retraced his steps to rout him out below. At sight of the tall bottle in Klinker's hand Queed shrank, fearing that Fifi had sent him with a second dose of turpentine. But the bottle turned out to contain merely a rare unguent just obtained by Klinker from his friend Smithy, the physical instructor at the Y.M.C.A., and deemed surprisingly effective for the development of the academic bicep.

At last there was blessed quiet, and he could write again. The city slept; the last boarder was abed; the turpentine had become a peace out of pain; only the ticking of the clock filtered into the perfect calm of the dining-room. The little Doctor of Mrs. Paynter's stood face to face with his love, embraced his heart's desire. He looked into the heart of Science and she gave freely to her lord and master. Sprawled there over the Turkey-red cloth, which was not unhaunted by the ghosts of dead dinners, he became chastely and divinely happy. His mind floated away into the empyrean; he saw visions of a far more perfect Society; dreamed dreams of the ascending spiral whose law others had groped at, but he would be the first to formulate; caught and fondled the secret of the whole great Design; reduced it to a rule-of-thumb to do his bidding; bestrode the whole world like a great Colossus....

From which flight he descended with a thud to observe that it was quarter of two o'clock, and the dining-room was cold with the dying down of the Latrobe, and the excellent reading-lamp in the death-throes of going out.

He went upstairs in the dark, annoyed with himself for having overstayed his bedtime. Long experimentation had shown him that the minimum of sleep he could get along with to advantage was six and one-half hours nightly. This meant bed at 1.30 exactly, and he hardly varied it five minutes in a year. To his marrow he was systematic; he was as definite as an adding-machine, as practical as a cash register. But even now, on this exceptional night, he did not go straight to bed. Something still remained to be accomplished: an outrage upon his sacred Schedule.

In the first halcyon days at Mrs. Paynter's, before the board question ever came up at all, the iron-clad Schedule of Hours under which he was composing his great work had stood like this:

8.20 Breakfast 8.40 Evolutionary Sociology 1.30 Dinner 2 Evolutionary Sociology 7 Supper 7.20 to 1.30 Evolutionary Sociology

But the course of true love never yet ran smooth, and this schedule was too ideal to stand. First the _Post_ had come along and nicked a clean hour out of it, and now his Body had unexpectedly risen and claimed yet another hour. And, beyond even this ... some devilish whim had betrayed him to-night into offering his time for the service and uses of the landlady's daughter in the puling matter of algebra.

No ... _no!_ He would not put that in. The girl could not be so selfish as to take advantage of his over-generous impulse. She _must_ understand that his time belonged to the ages and the race, not to the momentary perplexities of a high school dunce.... At the worst it would be only five minutes here and there--say ten minutes a week; forty minutes a month. No, no! He would not put that in.

But the hour of Bodily Exercise could not be so evaded. It must go in.

On land or sea there was no help for that. For thirty days henceforward at the least--and a voice within him whispered that it would be for much longer--his Schedule must stand like this:

8.20 Breakfast 8.40 Evolutionary Sociology 1.30 Dinner 2 Evolutionary Sociology 4.45 to 5.15 Open-Air Pedestrianism 5.15 to 6.15 The _Post_ 6.15 to 6.45 Klinker's Exercises for all Parts of the Body 7 Supper 7.20 Evolutionary Sociology

Hand clasped in his hair, Queed stared long at this wreckage with a sense of foreboding and utter despondency. Doubtless Mr. Pat, who was at that moment peacefully pulling a pipe over his last galleys at the _Post_ office, would have been astonished to learn what havoc his accursed fleas had wrought with the just expectations of posterity.

IX

_Of Charles Gardiner West, President-Elect of Blaines College, and his Ladies Fair: all in Mr. West's Lighter Manner._

The closing German of the Thursday Cotillon, hard upon the threshold of a late Lent, was a dream of pure delight. Six of them in the heart of every season since 1871, these Germans have become famous wherever the light fantastic toe of aristocracy trips and eke is tripped. They are the badge of quality, and the test of it, the sure scaling-rod by which the frightened debutante may measure herself at last, to ask of her mirror that night, with who can say what tremors: "_Am I a success?_"

Over these b.a.l.l.s strangers go mad. They come from immense distances to attend them, sometimes with superciliousness; are instantly captivated; and returning to their homes, wherever they may be, sell out their businesses for a song and move on, to get elected if they can, which does not necessarily follow.

Carriages, in stately procession, disembarked their precious freight; the lift, laden with youth and beauty, shot up and down like a glorious Jack-in-the-Box; over the corridors poured a stream of beautiful maidens and handsome gentlemen, to separate for their several tiring-rooms, and soon to remeet in the palm-decked vestibule. Within the great room, couples were already dancing; Fetzy's Hungarians on a dais, concealed behind a wild thicket of growing things, were sighing out a wonderful waltz; rows of white-covered chairs stood expectantly on all four sides of the room; and the chaperones, august and handsome, stood in a stately line to receive and to welcome. And to them came in salutation Charles Gardiner West and, beside him, the lady whom he honored with his hand that evening, Miss Millicent Avery, late of Maunch Chunk, but now of Ours.