Treasured Brides Collection (39 page)

“Hey, there, Walton! Some dames up here wantta see ya! Make it snappy!”

Chris dropped his mop in dismay and stared up the stairs.

“I can’t come!” he shouted at the disappearing heels of his informant, but the only answer that came back was another “Make it snappy! The boss hates a mess of ladies around in the way. This ain’t no social tea!”

Angrily Chris started up the stairs, wiping his wet hands on his overalls on each side, and dashing them wildly through his disordered hair. What he meant to do was to get a glimpse from the back of the store and see whether this was some practical joke or not. If the boss had sent for him he would go, of course, but otherwise he would retreat again to the cellar and pretend not to have heard. Surely neither his mother nor Elise would come to bother him.

But Irene Claskey, Ethel Harrower, and Anna Peters had not stayed where they were. They had followed down the length of the store and stood just outside the doorway of the storeroom into which the cellar stairs led. So he came upon them before he realized, and they all clamored at once.

“Hello, Chris! Congratulations!” they screeched.

“So, it’s really true! You’ve got a job! How long will it last?”

“Oh, Chris, but you’re a scream. Whose overalls are those? Did you borrow them from your butler?”

And then they let out wild, hilarious laughter that arrested the attention of everyone in the crowded store.

White with fury, Chris stood glaring at them, his chin lifted haughtily. Every eye was upon him now. Even the boss coming down that way with a grin on his pleasant face. The boss had been fine. He must do something about this.

“Did you want something?” he asked in a clear, stern voice. Even Natalie heard him away up at the front of the store in her little glass den. His voice was so impersonal that you would have thought he was merely addressing a customer.

“Sure we want something!” clanged out Irene, rather enjoying her large audience than otherwise, and openly exulting in Chris’s discomfort. “We’re going to have a high school reunion next Saturday night, and we want you to help us out. We’re having a spree up at the Rabbit Inn on Horndale Pike, and we want you to take a bunch up there.”

“I haven’t got any car!” said Chris shortly.

“Oh, we know that,” went on Irene. “We can get a car if you’ll drive it. Dad said you were a good driver and he’d trust our car with you. We have to start at five o’clock, and we’re meeting at my house—”

But Chris stopped her voluble details with a clear ringing word.

“Nothing doing!” he said firmly. “Sorry to seem unaccommodating, but I have to work. Good afternoon!” And he turned on his heel and vanished down the cellar stairs, shutting the door behind him.

The customers turned back to their bargains with smiles and knowing looks toward the discomfited girls who stared for a moment, and then with many giggles and contemptuous remarks picked their way hilariously out of the store.

Chris stayed down in the cellar the rest of the afternoon and worked like a fiend. He had no mind to go upstairs and be kidded by the entire store force. He made that cellar look like a parlor. The floor was scrubbed clean enough to eat from. Every box and crate was set to mathematical exactness, arranged in logical order. Each row was labeled with a number on the beam overhead and the same number chalked on each counter. The cellar was so systemized that anything could be found in a jiffy. But Chris had been working with only half of his well-trained mind. The other half had been raging, rending him, lashing itself in fury over his humiliation. Those girls!
Fools!
he called them, and took out his revenge on the cellar floor, using up to the handle the bristles of the old scrubbing brush. Never was the cellar floor so clean before.

When all the others had gone home, the boss came down and looked around, well pleased and full of commendation. Chris listened in silence to his comments of praise for the way he had arranged things, and then he burst out.

“I’m all kinds of sorry, Mr. Foster, that those fool girls came around and made a scene. They’re not any special friends of mine and they just wanted to play some kind of joke on me, I guess. I certainly was angry.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Chris,” said the boss, a warm light coming into his eyes. “I understand. Some girls are just naturally made that way. Don’t you worry. You’ve done good work this afternoon. Forget the other. You did ’em up all righty, and I was glad to see it. They hustled away after you left them like a row of little dogs with their tails tucked in. They certainly didn’t get a rise out of you.”

Chris looked up with his heart warming toward this young man who was his superior and grinned. It was the first time he had called him Chris, and somehow he did not resent it. It seemed rather pleasant.

“Thank you,” he said heartily. “It’s great of you to take it that way. One thing’s certain. I didn’t want anything more to do with those girls, never did have much, only we were in the same class at school.”

“Well, they’re no ladies,” said Foster. “Now take our Miss Halsey, she’s a lady. She may not wear such highfalutin’ clothes, nor run around to parties, and she may have to work for her living, but when it comes to acting like a lady, boy, she can put it all over those three. She’s a fine girl.”

“She certainly is,” said Chris heartily, and felt a strange little thrill of pleasure at hearing Natalie commended.

“Well,” said Foster, “guess it’s time for us to quit tonight. You’ve made this cellar look like a palace and no mistake. You’re going to make a go of it here, I can see that already. Well, good night!”

Chris went home that night walking on air. His boss had commended him and had actually hinted that his job was practically a sure thing. He was surprised at himself that he cared so much to keep it.

He had almost forgotten about the unpleasant incident of the girls that afternoon, till suddenly it occurred to him that he had not seen Natalie all day except at a distance. She hadn’t waited on him. Perhaps she had heavy bundles to carry and had to carry them herself with her slender arms. In the only glimpse he had caught of her she looked pale and tired. He wondered if her mother had perhaps been worse and she had been up all night with her. He found a distinct cause for worry in the thought.

Then he began to wonder if Natalie had seen those girls. Of course she must have. She could not have missed them. No one could. That fiendish Irene had taken care of that. Did Natalie think that was the kind of girls he liked? Did she perhaps hear the invitation and think he was going to accept it and take those girls to a class spree at that infamous road house, Rabbit Inn on Horndale Pike? Somehow he did not want Natalie to think he was intimate with those girls.

Of course he had known Irene Claskey and Anna Peters since kindergarten days, but Ethel Harrower was a comparatively new arrival in town with a rather unclassed social standing. None of the girls but Irene and Ethel had taken her up. She used too much rouge and lipstick and smoked a good deal in public. People like Mrs. Walton didn’t consider her nice. Somehow it gave him an unpleasant feeling to think that Natalie had supposed her his friend. Was that the reason Natalie had hurried home? He wished he knew. He would try and get out early the next morning and get a chance to speak to her in the store before people began to come. Though it had been his policy, and hers too, apparently, to keep their distance. Well, perhaps he could catch up to her on the way and get a word with her. He wasn’t just clear what he could say. He was too well bred to just sail in and blast those other girls. Yet he certainly did not want Natalie to think he belonged to that crowd. Well, it wouldn’t be long till tomorrow now and, anyhow, he was glad at what the boss had said. He would tell Natalie that. She would be pleased, too.

So he whistled cheerily as he went up the walk to the little old house that looked so desolate on the outside and was so cheery and shabby inside.

His father looked up at the sound and said to his mother, “Our boy is coming through in good shape after all, Mary.”

And she smiled, mother-wise, and said, “I knew he would, didn’t you?”

They had a cheery supper that night in spite of simple fare. The mother was resurrecting all her old recipes, plain, wholesome food, cheaply bought, and deriving its savory taste and smell from the old deftness in seasoning, the trick of long cooking and careful preparation. Perhaps because of its very difference from what they had been eating for years, its simplicity rather charmed the family. Bean soup was made with tomatoes, potatoes, and celery tops, a “mess of pottage” the mother called it. Brown bread, baked apples and cream, even bread pudding with a dash of chocolate to make it tasty. Hash! Yes, they loved it, Mother’s hash. That was different. Mother could make hash taste like stuffed turkey. It all seemed so good, and they were so hungry from their work. For Elise had found a job looking after two small children afternoons after school, and she came in from riding them up and down the streets in their toy wagon, tired and hungry and happy over the fifty cents she had earned. Elise was standing up well under the family calamity.

When they had finished the bean-tomato soup and the baked apples were served, Chris told them in an offhand sort of way about what the manager had said to him.

Chris couldn’t quite comprehend the look of utter joy in his father’s face. He didn’t see why he should be so moved when he tried to speak.

“Chris, Son, that is great. You’ve won a bigger battle this week than ever you won in school or on the football field. You’ve got into the game of life now, and you’ve begun to conquer yourself. You’ve made good in a game you didn’t like and didn’t want to play, and under circumstances that were most trying. Don’t think I haven’t understood.”

“But Dad,” interrupted Chris, “I—you—”

“It’s no use trying to deceive me, boy,” said the father, laying his hand tenderly on his son’s arm. “Your mother and I knew how hard it was for you to give up college and go to work. That kind of hard, uninteresting work, too, and to which you were so unaccustomed. We dreaded it for you more than you possibly could for yourself. We had great ambitions for you, Chris. You know that. You are our only son, and there was no height too high for us to dream of your scaling. But I’ve come to see, through my own humiliations, that one cannot grow strong without being humble. One cannot do great things while self-interest rules. You, my son, have gained one great victory this week over self. I hope it may go on. There are still greater heights to scale. You will have setbacks. You’ll find that self is a hard thing to conquer. It will come alive. But if you have really found that you can set self aside and do the thing well that is hardest for you, you have reached a great place in life. There is but one thing higher than that, and that is to let the Lord Christ come in and take self’s place. If you can learn those two things, I’ll know why God let all this reversal come to us. I have known all along that there must be some reason why we should thank Him for what has come, and now I begin to see a possible reason.”

Chris looked at his father in amazement, a deep embarrassment upon him, a sudden feeling that he had always been a failure as a son in his father’s eyes.

“Why, Dad,” he said huskily, deeply moved, “I didn’t know—I never thought—that you felt that way.”

“Well, I do, Son, and your mother feels that way, too. Go on and win the game of life. Let Christ come into your life as the ruling power, and we will be too proud to contain ourselves.”

Chris thought about it when he went up to bed, thought how his father had spoken in much the same way Natalie had talked. In fact, there were three of them, for there was that minister who had said we must thank God for hard things. The minister, and Father, and Natalie! All saying the same thing. Was it possible that God had been sending these things into his life for a special purpose? Possible that God, a great God—if there really was one—had thought enough of his little individual life, among all the lives of the earth, to turn the affairs of a great bank upside down, and bring changes into other people’s lives, with any thought of its affecting him in his relationship to himself, to life, and to God Himself? And yet, most of the professors and students at college felt that if there was a God at all, He was only a sort of impersonal force. Well, it was worth thinking about. Somehow, the idea did not make him angry either, as it had done a week ago.

He went to sleep thinking about what Natalie had told him of that missionary’s life and bitter disappointments, thinking of Natalie’s face when she had said, “What He permits must be best for us.” And what was that other phrase she used in speaking about the missionary? “He’s only an ordinary man with a great God.”

The last thing he remembered, as he dropped away into slumber, was the earnestness in Natalie’s eyes as she had said it and the way her soft hair fell about her forehead. And he decided that the first thing in the morning, he would tell her what the boss said to him last night. She had got the job for him; she had a right to know that he was making good with the manager.

He hurried through his breakfast, and away, that he might catch her and walk with her to the store, but when he passed her corner, he saw only an ugly-looking young boy standing there, with his hat down over his eyes, peering out and up the street. A quick look ahead told Chris that Natalie had already got the start of him and was far on her way.

The boss was just unlocking the door as he reached the store, and although it was early, Natalie slipped into her glass den at once, with only a little distant smile for Chris, and went to work as if she were very busy.

Chris felt a distant drooping of his spirits. Now, why did Natalie have to act like that? Was it just because those other girls had come in and asked for him? Was she perhaps ashamed of him because he had had such visitors? She didn’t want to be known as having anything to do with him? Well, if she felt that way, he wouldn’t bother her. He held his head high and went to the boss for his orders, unhappiness in his heart and eyes.

They put him to measuring out sugar in small quantities in paper bags. All day long he measured out sugar and rice and put them up in small packages. He worked with set lips and said nothing to anybody. The other men in the store tried to kid him about the “dames,” as they called them, who had come to visit him, but he maintained an unsmiling silence. If they wanted to be ugly to him, let them. He could keep to himself.