An Officer and a Lady (13 page)

Mrs. Coit understood at once. For five long months this same photograph had been staring at her from the dressing table in the Girl’s room, on the floor below. To confirm her suspicion, she looked at the mantel, where a picture of the Girl had occupied the place of honor. It was not there.

Mrs. Coit gazed at the picture for a full minute, then without a word completed her dusting and prepared to leave the room. The Boy remained silent. Mrs. Coit, her hand on the doorknob, turned and looked at him hesitatingly. Then, “Have you had a fight with
her
?” she demanded.

The Boy looked up at her despairingly. “What do you care?” he cried. His voice was harsh and shrill with pain.

Mrs. Coit started to answer, then, thinking better of it, turned and fled down the hall, banging the door after her. The Boy snatched up the picture, pulled off its frame, tore it in a dozen pieces, and threw them on the floor.

Fifteen minutes later Mrs. Coit, passing through the lower hall, heard the outer door open, and, looking down the stairway, saw the Boy go out and close the door after him. Then, muttering to herself something about “idiot,” and holding the duster firmly before her after the manner of a fixed bayonet, she proceeded to the Girl’s room and entered with an air of determination.

Here the havoc was even greater. The Girl, reclining limply and disconsolately in an easy chair, eyes inflamed, cheeks marked with tear-tracks and splotches of red, turned and looked at the intruder indifferently.

“I knew it,” said Mrs. Coit, in a tone of deep satisfaction. “Why ain’t you at work?”

The Girl tried to smile. “I have a headache,” she said.

Mrs. Coit snorted contemptuously. “Oh, I know all about it,” she declared. “He just told me. I knew it’d be like this.”

The Girl covered her face with her hands and turned away.

“I knew it’d be like this,” repeated Mrs. Coit.

The Girl made no sign.

“What’d you want to fight about a little thing like that for?” Mrs. Coit asked cunningly.

“It didn’t seem little then,” said the Girl wearily.

Mrs. Coit pressed her advantage, but to no purpose. The Girl refused to give any information; she even refused to become angry. Finally, at the insistence of Mrs. Coit, she dressed herself and prepared to go to the office.

“You’d better walk around a while before you go in,” said Mrs. Coit. “Your face looks like a boiled cucumber.”

After she had gone Mrs. Coit sat in the chair she had left, gazing thoughtfully at some little bits of paper scattered on the floor. What she was thinking, no one could possibly have told. Her face expressed nothing but grimness, her attitude satisfaction; and as she stooped over to gather up the bits of paper her lips settled into what might have been a line of triumphant resolve.

That evening, for the first time in many months, the Boy returned from the office alone. He and the Girl had walked together always—but that was over. However much he loved her, he still felt that she had said to him that which could never be forgiven, especially since it was undeserved. Of course, if she came to him and
asked
forgiveness—he caught his breath at the thought—but that, he was sure, she would never do.

His day at the office had been miserable, and the future, he reflected, held nothing for him but a dreary succession of similar ones. He had decided to leave Mrs. Coif s that very evening, since everything there would be full of bittersweet memories of the one happy period of his life. One has great capacity for grief, as for joy, at twenty-one.

As he was turning the key in the lock of the outer door, a figure came up the steps. It was the Girl.

Without speaking, the Boy opened the door and stood aside politely to allow her to pass. She bowed her head in thanks, and silently began to ascend the stairs to her room.

The Boy’s voice came after her, calling her name. She turned and looked down at him. He was standing by the mail rack, holding a large envelope in his hand.

“Is it for me?” asked the Girl doubtfully.

“No,” said the Boy. “It’s for—us.”

Her face flushed at the familiar pronoun.

The Boy ascended the stairs to where she stood.

“I suppose we must open it together,” he continued coldly. “It’s addressed to both of us.”

The Girl looked on silently while he tore open the envelope. His elbow brushed her arm, and they both started nervously.

Then, as they gazed together at the card the envelope had contained, they blushed almost painfully. The Boy felt his heart mount to his throat; the Girl put up her hand to brush away the mist that suddenly formed before her eyes. Pasted side by side on the card were the two photographs they had that morning torn up and thrown away, and written below in a shaky, curious hand was the inscription:

To two young fools

from an old fool.

And tied to the card with a piece of faded blue ribbon was an old, well-worn wedding ring!

Fifteen minutes later the Boy and the Girl came down, hand in hand, to the sitting room where Mrs. Coit sat poring over her account books. She rose at their approach.

“Well?” she demanded aggressively.

The Boy, nothing daunted, advanced boldly, holding one hand toward her.

“Here is your ring, Mrs. Coit,” he said, the old happy smile in his eyes. “I thought you might want it back again.”

Mrs. Coit hesitated, and for the first time in the knowledge of Thirty-seventh Street seemed embarrassed.

“That ain’t my ring,” said she finally.

Then occurred the outrage. Perhaps she wouldn’t have minded so much, but just at that moment the Bookkeeper passed through the hall, and, glancing in at the door, saw everything. The Boy threw his arms around Mrs. Coit’s neck, gave her a resounding kiss on either cheek, and, leaving the ring lying on the desk, fled toward the stairs, the Girl following.

Mrs. Coit recovered in time to pursue them to the foot of the stairs.

“Hey, there!” she called, a curious break in the voice she tried to make stern. “Hey, there! You left your room in a pretty fix this morning, you did! Once more like that, and out you go!”

From the floor above came the sound of happy, mocking laughter. Mrs. Coit’s reign had ended.

G
EORGE
S
TAFFORD HAD BEEN—BELIEVE
him—from his infancy a most unique and interesting personality. But if you will believe me instead, he had been nothing of the sort.

I know very well the conclusion at which you will immediately arrive when I say that George Stafford was phlegmatic. But you will be wrong. In these days of extreme specialization, even our adjectives are not free; it has come to the place where nothing can properly be called occult except a science, nothing can be high—in the figurative sense—except ideals, and no one can be phlegmatic except a Dutchman. Nevertheless, in spite of the facts that he was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, that he spoke nothing but United States (being as ignorant of English as he was of Sanskrit), and that his father had made some half a million dollars solely through the benevolent protection of the New York Custom House, George Stafford was phlegmatic. More than that, he was unimaginative, he considered billiards a rather violent form of exercise, and, if the truth be told, he was even a trifle stupid.

To let you at once into the secrets of George’s mind and character, it is only necessary to say that he was spending his vacation at the Hotel Thiersberry, in the Berkshires. With the single exception of an orchestra chair in a New York theater, the Hotel Thiersberry is admitted to be the very dullest spot in all America. It is eminently proper, fearfully expensive, and in the last degree exclusive. “Exclusive” is a terrible word, and the Hotel Thiersberry is a terrible place. And it was here that George Stafford was spending his vacation.

I use the term “vacation” merely for the sake of politeness. For, consulting my dictionary, I find that a vacation is an intermission of stated employment, and it would be absurd to imagine George as consorting with anything so vulgar as stated employment. Not that he was spiritualistic or esthetic or artistic; work—or anything else—could never have disturbed George’s soul; but it would most certainly have disturbed his body. And yet he had an excuse—such as it was—for his use of the word “vacation.” For, having existed through thirty years in a state of habitual and supreme idleness, George had been persuaded by a friend to put on at least the semblance of endeavor, and had submitted to the painting of a sign, “Rainier & Stafford, Architects,” on the door of a modest suite on the fifty-eighth floor of a downtown skyscraper. The check which the elder Stafford drew each month to help pay George’s share of the office expenses was surprisingly small, everything considered.

It was through the influence of Rainier, his partner, that George had been permitted to enter the jealous portals of the Hotel Thiersberry; for the House of Stafford, though favorably known on Mercer Street, was beyond the pale socially. It had not yet arrived. George, though idle, had never been fashionably idle; indeed, that is an art that is seldom acquired as early as the second generation. Thus it was that upon registering at the Hotel Thiersberry George had found himself entering on an entirely new phase of existence.

It was not at all the same as an ordinary hotel. To mention only one peculiarity, George found soon after his arrival, on going into the library to write a letter to his partner, that there was no letter paper. On investigation, he learned that at the Hotel Thiersberry one was supposed to be desirous of using one’s own letter paper. George had none, and he distinctly desired to write a letter; in fact, now that he came to think of it, several of them.

The third morning of his vacation found George in the library, writing letters. He had bought the paper the day before, in a shop in the village, five miles away. He was half-ashamed to use it, and it was indeed very unusual paper; but the shop had contained nothing else that was even possible. This that he had finally chosen was tinted a magnificent purple, and there was embossed in flaming gold at the top of each sheet the figure of an animal that greatly resembled a cow, holding in its hoofs what appeared to be a bundle of kindling wood. It was one of those atrocities which you may see in any stationery shop window; and even George, deficient in taste as he was, had been almost tempted to buy a linen tablet instead.

George was writing on the large mahogany table in the center of the library. Seated opposite him was the lank and angular Mrs. Gerard-Lee, copying a list of synonyms from Graves; for Mrs. Gerard-Lee was an authority. Over by a window were young Mr. Amblethwaite and Miss Lorry Carson, engaged in a hot dispute concerning the proper shape of legs, it being understood that the legs were supposed to be attached to a Pelton saddler; while in front of the door leading to the veranda were gathered a half-dozen old females representing at least twelve hundred pounds avoirdupois and about twelve million sterling. “How Mother would enjoy this!” thought George. And he wrote:

I just overheard Mrs. Scott-Wickersham say that she returned to America a month later than usual in order to attend the Duchess of Wimbledon’s masque ball. And yet she doesn’t seem—

At this moment George became aware of the fact that someone was standing at his right elbow. Turning, he beheld a middle-aged lady of impressive build and a somewhat florid countenance peering through a lorgnette at the sheets of letter paper lying before him. At his movement, her gaze slowly traveled from the paper to his upturned face.

“Sir,” she said, “what is your name?”

“What?” said George, taken aback. “My—oh, yes, my name—of course, certainly, my name.” Then, somewhat recovering himself, “Stafford is my name,” he said with dignity.

His questioner regarded him with a look of triumph. “It is he,” she said to herself, aloud. “I am sure of it, since he can’t remember his name.” Whereupon she winked at George distinctly, even painfully.

Now, George had learned in the last three days that one must be willing to undergo a certain amount of humiliation when one is breaking into the Hotel Thiersberry. But to have a strange lady stand before you and make remarks about you to your face and wink at you was too much. He opened his mouth to protest, but before he could speak, the lady continued. “Mr. Stafford,” she said, “I am Mrs. Gordon Wheeler, of Lenox; and this is my daughter.… Cecily, Mr. Stafford.”

Whatever protest George had decided to utter was drowned in amazement as Mrs. Gordon Wheeler stepped aside to make way for her daughter. For the first time in quite ten years he became conscious of the blood in his veins. While he stood half-dazed by the vision of loveliness disclosed by Mrs. Wheeler’s timely eclipse, Cecily, her cheeks a delightful rosy pink, stepped up to him with outstretched hands.

“Mr. Stafford,” she said in a low, sweet voice. And then she stopped, as if finding it impossible to express her feelings in words.

“My dear girl,” said George, taking the hands and holding on to them, “if you will sit in this chair for a few minutes, till I finish my letter, I shall be ready to talk to you. I trust your mother sleeps in the afternoon?”

“Good heavens!” said Mrs. Wheeler. “Here I am with an unmarried daughter, and the man accuses me of sleeping! My dear sir, it is impossible. In these days of the vulgar competition of the
nouveau riche,
one must be constantly on one’s guard. However, I often close my eyes.”

“I am sure you do,” said George approvingly; and then, under his breath, “Goodness knows they need it!”

“You will eat at our table?” asked Mrs. Wheeler.

“Certainly,” said George, “and thank you.”

After Mrs. Wheeler had gone, it took George a full hour to finish the letter to his mother. Within two minutes, Cecily, seated beside him, became impatient and began lassoing the toe of her slipper with the cord of her handbag; and George, wanting an excuse to gaze at the slipper, which was worth it, offered a wager that she couldn’t do it once in ten.

“That is very silly,” said Cecily, “as I have been walking and am covered with dust.”