CHAPTER XX
Dinner at Detchworth Grange was most amusing that evening. One of the
chief reasons -- in fact, it would not be too venturesome to say THE
chief reason -- for Captain Palliser's frequent presence in very good
country houses was that he had a way of making things amusing. His
relation of anecdotes, of people and things, was distinguished by a
manner which subtly declined to range itself on the side of vulgar
gossip. Quietly and with a fine casualness he conveyed the whole
picture of the new order at Temple Barholm. He did it with wonderfully
light touches, and yet the whole thing was to be seen -- the little
old maid in her exquisite clothes, her unmistakable stamp of timid
good breeding, her protecting adoration combined with bewilderment;
the long, lean, not altogether ill-looking New York bounder, with his
slight slouch, his dangerously unsophisticated-looking face, and his
American jocularity of slang phrase.
"He's of a class I know nothing about. I own he puzzled me a trifle at
first," Palliser said with his cool smile. "I'm not sure that I've
'got on to him' altogether yet. That's an expressive New York phrase
of his own. But when we were strolling about together, he made
revelations apparently without being in the least aware that they were
revelations. He was unbelievable. My fear was that he would not go
on."
"But he did go on?" asked Amabel. "One must hear something of the
revelations."
Then was given in the best possible form the little drama of the talk
in the garden. No shade of Mr. Temple Barholm's characteristics was
lost. Palliser gave occasionally an English attempt at the
reproduction of his nasal twang, but it was only a touch and not
sufficiently persisted in to become undignified.
"I can't do it," he said. "None of us can really do it. When English
actors try it on the stage, it is not in the least the real thing.
They only drawl through their noses, and it is more than that."
The people of Detchworth Grange were not noisy people, but their
laughter was unrestrained before the recital was finished. Nobody had
gone so far as either to fear or to hope for anything as undiluted in
its nature as this was.
"Then he won't give us a chance, the least chance," cried Lucy and
Amabel almost in unison. "We are out of the running."
"You won't get even a look in--because you are not 'ladies,'" said
their brother.
"Poor Jem Temple Barholm! What a different thing it would have been if
we had had him for a neighbor!" Mr. Grantham fretted.
"We should have had Lady Joan Fayre as well," said his wife.
"At least she's a gentlewoman as well as a 'lady,'" Mr. Grantham said.
"She would not have become so bitter if that hideous thing had not
occurred."
They wondered if the new man knew anything about Jem. Palliser had not
reached that part of his revelation when the laughter had broken into
it. He told it forthwith, and the laughter was overcome by a sort of
dismayed disgust. This did not accord with the rumors of an almost
"nice" good nature.
"There's a vulgar horridness about it," said Lucy.
"What price Lady Mallowe!" said the son. "I'll bet a sovereign she
began it."
"She did," remarked Palliser; "but I think one may leave Mr. Temple
Barholm safely to Lady Joan." Mr. Grantham laughed as one who knew
something of Lady Joan.
"There's an Americanism which I didn't learn from him," Palliser
added, "and I remembered it when he was talking her over. It's this:
when you dispose of a person finally and forever, you 'wipe up the
earth with him.' Lady Joan will 'wipe up the earth' with your new
neighbor."
There was a little shout of laughter. "Wipe up the earth" was entirely
new to everybody, though even the country in England was at this time
by no means wholly ignorant of American slang.
This led to so many other things both mirth-provoking and serious,
even sometimes very serious indeed, that the entire evening at
Detchworth was filled with talk of Temple Barholm. Very naturally the
talk did not end by confining itself to one household. In due time
Captain Palliser's little sketches were known in divers places, and it
became a habit to discuss what had happened, and what might possibly
happen in the future. There were those who went to the length of
calling on the new man because they wanted to see him face to face.
People heard new things every few days, but no one realized that it
was vaguely through Palliser that there developed a general idea that,
crude and self-revealing as he was, there lurked behind the outward
candor of the intruder a hint of over-sharpness of the American kind.
There seemed no necessity for him to lay schemes beyond those he had
betrayed in his inquiries about "ladies," but somehow it became a
fixed idea that he was capable of doing shady things if at any time
the temptation arose. That was really what his boyish casualness
meant. That in truth was Palliser's final secret conclusion. And he
wanted very much to find out why exactly little old Miss Temple
Barholm had been taken up. If the man wanted introductions, he could
have contrived to pick up a smart and enterprising unprofessional
chaperon in London who would have done for him what Miss Temple
Barholm would never presume to attempt. And yet he seemed to have
chosen her deliberately. He had set her literally at the head of his
house. And Palliser, having heard a vague rumor that he had actually
settled a decent income upon her, had made adroit inquiries and found
it was true.
It was. To arrange the matter had been one of his reasons for going to
see Mr. Palford during their stay in London.
"I wanted to fix you--fix you safe," he said when he told Miss Alicia
about it. "I guess no one can take it away from you, whatever old
thing happens."
"What could happen, dear Mr. Temple Barholm?" said Miss Alicia in the
midst of tears of gratitude and tremulous joy. "You are so young and
strong and--everything! Don't even speak of such a thing in jest. What
could happen?"
"Anything can happen," he answered, "just anything. Happening's the
one thing you can't bet on. If I was betting, I'd put my money on the
thing I was sure couldn't happen. Look at this Temple Barholm song and
dance! Look at T. T. as he was half strangling in the blizzard up at
Harlem and thanking his stars little Munsberg didn't kick him out of
his confectionery store less than a year ago! So long as I'm all
right, you're all right. But I wanted you fixed, anyhow."
He paused and looked at her questioningly for a moment. He wanted to
say something and he was not sure he ought. His reverence for her
little finenesses and reserves increased instead of wearing away. He
was always finding out new things about her.
"Say," he broke forth almost impetuously after his hesitation, "I wish
you wouldn't call me Mr. Temple Barholm."
"D-do you?" she fluttered. "But what could I call you?"
"Well," he answered, reddening a shade or so, "I'd give a house and
lot if you could just call me Tem."
"But it would sound so unbecoming, so familiar," she protested.
"That's just what I'm asking for," he said--"some one to be familiar
with. I'm the familiar kind. That's what's the matter with me. I'd be
familiar with Pearson, but he wouldn't let me. I'd frighten him half
to death. He'd think that he wasn't doing his duty and earning his
wages, and that somehow he'd get fired some day without a character."
He drew nearer to her and coaxed.
"Couldn't you do it?" he asked almost as though he were asking a favor
of a girl. "Just Tem? I believe that would come easier to you than T.
T. I get fonder and fonder of you every day, Miss Alicia, honest
Injun. And I'd be so grateful to you if you'd just be that
unbecomingly familiar."
He looked honestly in earnest; and if he grew fonder and fonder of
her, she without doubt had, in the face of everything, given her whole
heart to him.
"Might I call you Temple -- to begin with?" she asked. "It touches me
so to think of your asking me. I will begin at once. Thank you --
Temple," with a faint gasp. "I might try the other a little later."
It was only a few evenings later that he told her about the flats in
Harlem. He had sent to New York for a large bundle of newspapers, and
when he opened them he read aloud an advertisement, and showed her a
picture of a large building given up entirely to "flats."
He had realized from the first that New York life had a singular
attraction for her. The unrelieved dullness of her life -- those few
years of youth in which she had stifled vague longings for the joys
experienced by other girls; the years of middle age spent in the
dreary effort to be "submissive to the will of God," which, honestly
translated, signified submission to the exactions and domestic
tyrannies of "dear papa" and others like him -- had left her with her
capacities for pleasure as freshly sensitive as a child's. The
smallest change in the routine of existence thrilled her with
excitement. Tembarom's casual references to his strenuous boyhood
caused her eyes to widen with eagerness to hear more. Having seen
this, he found keen delight in telling her stories of New York life --
stories of himself or of other lads who had been his companions. She
would drop her work and gaze at him almost with bated breath. He was
an excellent raconteur when he talked of the things he knew well. He
had an unconscious habit of springing from his seat and acting his
scenes as he depicted them, laughing and using street-boy phrasing:
"It's just like a tale," Miss Alicia would breathe, enraptured as he
jumped from one story to another. "It's exactly like a wonderful
tale."
She learned to know the New York streets when they blazed with heat,
when they were hard with frozen snow, when they were sloppy with
melting slush or bright with springtime sunshine and spring winds
blowing, with pretty women hurrying about in beflowered spring hats
and dresses and the exhilaration of the world-old springtime joy. She
found herself hurrying with them. She sometimes hung with him and his
companions on the railing outside dazzling restaurants where scores of
gay people ate rich food in the sight of their boyish ravenousness.
She darted in and out among horses and vehicles to find carriages
after the theater or opera, where everybody was dressed dazzlingly and
diamonds glittered.
"Oh, how rich everybody must have seemed to you--how cruelly rich,
poor little boy!"
"They looked rich, right enough," he answered when she said it. "And
there seemed a lot of good things to eat all corralled in a few
places. And you wished you could be let loose inside. But I don't know
as it seemed cruel. That was the way it was, you know, and you
couldn't help it. And there were places where they'd give away some of
what was left. I tell you, we were in luck then."
There was some spirit in his telling it all--a spirit which had surely
been with him through his hardest days, a spirit of young mirth in
rags--which made her feel subconsciously that the whole experience
had, after all, been somehow of the nature of life's high adventure.
He had never been ill or heart-sick, and he laughed when he talked of
it, as though the remembrance was not a recalling of disaster.
"Clemmin' or no clemmin'. I wish I'd lived the loife tha's lived,"
Tummas Hibblethwaite had said.
Her amazement would indeed have been great if she had been told that
she secretly shared his feeling.
"It seems as if somehow you had never been dull," was her method of
expressing it.
"Dull! Holy cats! no," he grinned. "There wasn't any time for being
anything. You just had to keep going."
She became in time familiar with Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house and
boarders. She knew Mrs. Peck and Mr. Jakes and the young lady from the
notion counter (those wonderful shops!). Julius and Jem and the hall
bedroom and the tilted chairs and cloud of smoke she saw so often that
she felt at home with them.
"Poor Mrs. Bowse," she said, "must have been a most respectable,
motherly, hard-working creature. Really a nice person of her class."
She could not quite visualize the "parlor," but it must have been warm
and comfortable. And the pianola--a piano which you could play without
even knowing your notes--What a clever invention! America seemed full
of the most wonderfully clever things.
Tembarom was actually uplifted in soul when he discovered that she
laid transparent little plans for leading him into talk about New
York. She wanted him to talk about it, and the Lord knows he wanted to
talk about himself. He had been afraid at first. She might have hated
it, as Palford did, and it would have hurt him somehow if she hadn't
understood. But she did. Without quite realizing the fact, she was
beginning to love it, to wish she had seen it. Her Somerset vicarage
imagination did not allow of such leaps as would be implied by the
daring wish that sometime she might see it.
But Tembarom's imagination was more athletic.
"Jinks! wouldn't it be fine to take her there! The lark in London
wouldn't be ace high to it."
The Hutchinsons were not New Yorkers, but they had been part of the
atmosphere of Mrs. Bowse's. Mr. Hutchinson would of course be rather a
forward and pushing man to be obliged to meet, but Little Ann! She did
so like Little Ann! And the dear boy did so want, in his heart of
hearts, to talk about her at times. She did not know whether, in the
circumstances, she ought to encourage him; but he was so dear, and
looked so much dearer when he even said "Little Ann," that she could
not help occasionally leading him gently toward the subject.
When he opened the newspapers and found the advertisements of the
flats, she saw the engaging, half-awkward humorousness come into his
eyes.
"Here's one that would do all right," he said--"four rooms and a bath,
eleventh floor, thirty-five dollars a month."
He spread the newspaper on the table and rested on his elbow, gazing
at it for a few minutes wholly absorbed. Then he looked up at her and
smiled.
"There's a plan of the rooms," he said. "Would you like to look at it?
Shall I bring your chair up to the table while we go over it
together?"
He brought the chair, and side by side they went over it thoroughly.
To Miss Alicia it had all the interest of a new kind of puzzle. He
explained it in every detail. One of his secrets had been that on
several days when Galton's manner had made him hopeful he had visited
certain flat buildings and gone into their intricacies. He could
therefore describe with color their resources--the janitor; the
elevator; the dumb-waiters to carry up domestic supplies and carry
down ashes and refuse; the refrigerator; the unlimited supply of hot
and cold water, the heating plan; the astonishing little kitchen, with
stationary wash-tubs; the telephone, if you could afford it,-- all the
conveniences which to Miss Alicia, accustomed to the habits of
Rowcroft Vicarage, where you lugged cans of water up-stairs and down
if you took a bath or even washed your face; seemed luxuries
appertaining only to the rich and great.
"How convenient! How wonderful! Dear me! Dear me!" she said again and
again, quite flushed with excitement. "It is like a fairy-story. And
it's not big at all, is it?"
"You could get most of it into this," he answered, exulting. "You
could get all of it into that big white-and gold parlor."
"The white saloon?"
He showed his teeth.
"I guess I ought to remember to call it that," he said, "but it always
makes me think of Kid MacMurphy's on Fourth Avenue. He kept what was
called a saloon, and he'd had it painted white."
"Did you know him?" Miss Alicia asked.
"Know him! Gee! no! I didn't fly as high as that. He'd have thought me
pretty fresh if I'd acted like I knew him. He thought he was one of
the Four Hundred. He'd been a prize-fighter. He was the fellow that
knocked out Kid Wilkens in four rounds." He broke off and laughed at
himself. "Hear me talk to you about a tough like that!" he ended, and
he gave her hand the little apologetic, protective pat which always
made her heart beat because it was so "nice."
He drew her back to the advertisements, and drew such interesting
pictures of what the lives of two people--mother and son or father and
daughter or a young married couple who didn't want to put on style--
might be in the tiny compartments, that their excitement mounted
again.
This could be a bedroom, that could be a bedroom, that could be the
living-room, and if you put a bit of bright carpet on the hallway and
hung up a picture or so, it would look first-rate. He even went into
the matter of measurements, which made it more like putting a puzzle
together than ever, and their relief when they found they could fit a
piece of furniture he called "a lounge" into a certain corner was a
thing of flushing delight. The "lounge," she found, was a sort of cot
with springs. You could buy them for three dollars, and when you put
on a mattress and covered it with a "spread," you could sit on it in
the daytime and sleep on it at night, if you had to.
From measurements he went into calculations about the cost of things.
He had seen unpainted wooden tables you could put mahogany stain on,
and they'd look all you'd want. He'd seen a splendid little rocking-
chair in Second Avenue for five dollars, one of the padded kind that
ladies like. He had seen an arm-chair for a man that was only seven;
but there mightn't be room for both, and you'd have to have the
rocking-chair. He had once asked the price of a lot of plates and cups
and saucers with roses on them, and you could get them for six; and
you didn't need a stove because there was the range.
He had once heard Little Ann talking to Mrs. Bowse about the price of
frying-pans and kettles, and they seemed to cost next to nothing. He'd
looked into store windows and noticed the prices of groceries and
vegetables and things like that--sugar, for instance; two people
wouldn't use much sugar in a week--and they wouldn't need a ton of tea
or flour or coffee. If a fellow had a mother or sister or wife who had
a head and knew about things, you could "put it over" on mighty
little, and have a splendid time together, too. You'd even be able to
work in a cheap seat in a theater every now and then. He laughed and
flushed as he thought of it.
Miss Alicia had never had a doll's house. Rowcroft Vicarage did not
run to dolls and their belongings. Her thwarted longing for a doll's
house had a sort of parallel in her similarly thwarted longing for "a
little boy."
And here was her doll's house so long, so long unpossessed! It was
like that, this absorbed contriving and fitting of furniture into
corners. She also flushed and laughed. Her eyes were so brightly eager
and her cheeks so pink that she looked quite girlish under her lace
cap.
"How pretty and cozy it might be made, how dear!" she exclaimed. "And
one would be so high up on the eleventh floor, that one would feel
like a bird in a nest."
His face lighted. He seemed to like the idea tremendously.
"Why, that's so," he laughed. "That idea suits me down to the ground.
A bird in a nest. But there'd have to be two. One would be lonely.
Say, Miss Alicia, how would you like to live in a place like that?"
"I am sure any one would like it--if they had some dear relative with
them."
He loved her "dear relative," loved it. He knew how much it meant of
what had lain hidden unacknowledged, even unknown to her, through a
lifetime in her early-Victorian spinster breast.
"Let's go to New York and rent one and live in it together. Would you
come?" he said, and though he laughed, he was not jocular in the usual
way. "Would you, if we waked up and found this Temple Barholm thing
was a dream?"
Something in his manner, she did not know what, puzzled her a little.
"But if it were a dream, you would be quite poor again," she said,
smiling.
"No, I wouldn't. I'd get Galton to give me back the page. He'd do it
quick--quick," he said, still with a laugh. "Being poor's nothing,
anyhow. We'd have the time of our lives. We'd be two birds in a nest.
You can look out those eleventh- story windows 'way over to the Bronx,
and get bits of the river. And perhaps after a while Ann would do -
like she said, and we'd be three birds."
"Oh!" she sighed ecstatically. "How beautiful it would be! We should
be a little family!"
"So we should," he exulted. "Think of T. T. with a family!" He drew
his paper of calculations toward him again. "Let's make believe we're
going to do it, and work out what it would cost - for three. You know
about housekeeping, don't you? Let's write down a list."
If he had warmed to his work before, he warmed still more after this.
Miss Alicia was drawn into it again, and followed his fanciful plans
with a new fervor. They were like two children who had played at make-
believe until they had lost sight of commonplace realities.
Miss Alicia had lived among small economies and could be of great
assistance to him. They made lists and added up lines of figures until
the fine, huge room and its thousands of volumes melted away. In the
great hall, guarded by warriors in armor, the powdered heads of the
waiting footmen drooped and nodded while the prices of pounds of
butter and sugar and the value of potatoes and flour and nutmegs were
balanced with a hectic joy, and the relative significance of dollars
and cents and shillings and half-crowns and five-cent pieces caused
Miss Alicia a mild delirium.
By the time that she had established the facts that a shilling was
something like twenty-five cents, a dollar was four and twopence, and
twenty-five dollars was something over five pounds, it was past
midnight.
They heard the clock strike the half-hour, and stopped to stare at
each other.
Tembarom got up with yet another laugh.
"Say, I mustn't keep you up all night," he said. "But haven't we had a
fine time - haven't we? I feel as if I'd been there."
They had been there so entirely that Miss Alicia brought herself back
with difficulty.
"I can scarcely believe that we have not," she said. "I feel as if I
didn't like to leave it. It was so delightful." She glanced about her.
"The room looks huge," she said--"almost too huge to live in."
"Doesn't it?" he answered. "Now you know how I feel." He gathered his
scraps of paper together with a feeling touch. "I didn't want to come
back myself. When I get a bit of a grouch I shall jerk these out and
go back there again."
"Oh, do let me go with you!" she said. "I have so enjoyed it."
"You shall go whenever you like," he said. "We'll keep it up for a
sort of game on rainy days. How much is a dollar, Miss Alicia?"
"Four and twopence. And sugar is six cents a pound."
"Go to the head," he answered. "Right again."
The opened roll of newspapers was lying on the table near her. They
were copies of The Earth, and the date of one of them by merest chance
caught her eye.
"How odd!" she said. "Those are old papers. Did you notice? Is it a
mistake? This one is dated" She leaned forward, and her eye caught a
word in a head-line.
"The Klondike," she read. "There's something in it about the
Klondike." He put his hand out and drew the papers away.
"Don't you read that," he said. "I don't want you to go to bed and
dream about the Klondike. You've got to dream about the flat in
Harlem."
"Yes," she answered. "I mustn't think about sad things. The flat in
Harlem is quite happy. But it startled me to see that word."
"I only sent for them--because I happened to want to look something
up," he explained. "How much is a pound, Miss Alicia?"
"Four dollars and eighty-six cents," she replied, recovering herself.
"Go up head again. You're going to stay there."
When she gave him her hand on their parting for the night he held it a
moment. A subtle combination of things made him do it. The
calculations, the measurements, the nest from which one could look out
over the Bronx, were prevailing elements in its make-up. Ann had been
in each room of the Harlem flat, and she always vaguely reminded him
of Ann.
"We are relations, ain't we?" he asked.
"I am sure we often seem quite near relations--Temple." She added the
name with very pretty kindness.
"We're not distant ones any more, anyhow," he said. "Are we near
enough--would you let me kiss you good night, Miss Alicia?"
An emotional flush ran up to her cap ribbons.
"Indeed, my dear boy--indeed, yes."
Holding her hand with a chivalric, if slightly awkward, courtesy, he
bent, and kissed her cheek. It was a hearty, affectionately grateful
young kiss, which, while it was for herself, remotely included Ann.
"It's the first time I've ever said good night to any one like that,"
he said. "Thank you for letting me."
He patted her hand again before releasing it. She went up-stairs
blushing and feeling rather as though she had been proposed to, and
yet, spinster though she was, somehow quite understanding about the
nest and Ann.
