Read the book: «Mixed Faces», page 3

CHAPTER III

Jimmy Gollop, like most commercial travelers of the first flight, not only knew how to wear clothes but what clothes to wear. And on this day of days paid particular care to his appearance. He rather anticipated that the candy girl would appear in some plain, tailormade gown. Her hair, one of her chief charms of personal appearance, was heavy and beautiful, and of a most baffling shade of color that shone brown in darker shadows and yet in full light glinted as if subtly suggesting gold. Jimmy, who had a natural sense for color, pondered over this and decided that the tailormade would be of navy blue and that therefore violets would be the correct thing in the flower line to show his appreciation.

"But how in the deuce am I to send them up to her hotel when I don't even know her name!" he thought.

However, he was sufficiently independent to buy the finest violets he could find and to appear at the hotel entrance with them in his hand. The young lady was not there. Jimmy tried to appear unconcerned, and for a time stood like a rather modern statue of "Cupid bearing flowers." Now and then he peered into the hotel lobby and it seemed to him that whenever he did so the human icicle behind the desk was glaring in his direction as if contemplating a call for the police, or sending a message to the Ladies' Protective Association for Attractive Young Females.

At last when he was becoming fidgety and consulting his watch at intervals of not longer than three minutes, the girl appeared.

"Well, in the name of common sense," she demanded, "why didn't you send your card up, or have the desk call me? I hope you're not in the habit of expecting young ladies to meet you on the corner. I waited and waited, and then was just about to – " She stopped at sight of his lugubrious face, relented, and laughed. "Never mind! Don't take it to heart, and – are those violets for me? You are a dear, after all! I love them." She took them from his outstretched hand and buried her face in them, whilst he, usually so nimble of tongue and ready of word, was striving to overcome this alarming confusion and embarrassment that rendered him about as quick of wit as a soft-shelled clam. In fact, he felt like a jelly fish save that he was twice as incompetent.

"You see," he began lamely, "I didn't quite know what to do. I was afraid that maybe your mother had objected to your going to the horse show, and – "

"Why, you're not afraid of her, are you? You never seemed so before. I thought – I thought you and she were rather good friends." There was a vague tinge of sarcasm in her words and tone but like a wobbly legged pup trying to catch a butterfly he mentally leaped at this offering and began cudgeling his memory in quest of women who ran chocolate shops. Could it be that she was the daughter of the widow Haynes who owned the Bon-Ton in Detroit? Impossible! The widow was not more than thirty. Maybe Mrs. Harris of Miami? No, if Mrs. Harris had a daughter she would have that unmistakable Southern peculiarity of speech. This girl was from somewhere farther north. It couldn't be that she was the daughter of Mrs. Schumann of Milwaukee? Heaven forbid! For Mrs. Schumann was so fat she shook like an unsupported pyramid of blanc-mange whenever she moved.

"I had hopes for you yesterday," a voice aroused him from his lapse. "You acted as if you could talk when you turned loose; but now you're back in your old hopeless form. Come on! Wake up! Oh, I forgot to tell you the great news. Like to hear it?"

"I like to hear you say anything," said Jimmy, hopelessly at her mercy and speaking the truth, and nothing but the truth so help him Bob! and glancing at her with that unmistakable sick-calf expression that seems to be the inevitable accomplishment of all lovers, and that the original Eve must have noticed in the eyes of Adam as he stood lolling around Eden in his red flannel underwear.

"Mamma got an invitation to spend the winter down in St. Augustine with the Charles K. Wilmarths, and she knows I hate them. She wanted to go because, as you know, she thinks she's not at all well, and also because the Charles K. Wilmarths are rather swagger. Either because she wished to get rid of me, or because I raised such a fuss, she compromised. I'm to be allowed to stay here for the next four months and take painting lessons from Jorgensen. I intend to have a studio of my own. I'm to live at the Martha Putnam hotel, which, as you know, never, never allows a man farther through its doors than the waiting room. Happy? I'm so happy I could shout!"

"Then you've no longer any interest in the business?" inquired Jimmy, for the want of something better to say.

She looked out of the taxi-window for an instant, as if recalling something and then said, slowly, "Yes, to tell the truth I have. It means so much. I'll admit that I'm more or less a business person. I like to see things grow bigger and bigger, and sell more and more, and get to mean something. Not that the dollars and cents count so much, after a time, but because a name somehow becomes a standard. Yes, I shall miss what you call the business; but, after all, it will not stop because I'm not there to enthuse over it, and – " She interrupted herself with a half-suppressed laugh – "Mother doesn't look at things exactly as I do. She detests it and is ashamed of it, I have an ideal!"

Jimmy never quite idealized the chocolate trade before; but there was something rather fine in what she said, he thought. After all, maybe it was one form of Americanism that she had voiced, and it became a trifle nobler when he considered that it meant industry, energy, and honesty. To do something and do it well. To be proud of doing something well. To be proud that one wasn't a loafer or a drone, or a parasite on the body economic. He was striving to correlate all this when made aware that the taxi had stopped and that they were at their destination. He actually submitted to an overcharge of a half-dollar inflicted by the hatchet-faced brigand who had jerked his taxi-meter over with a bang before his fares had time to inspect it. And then, resolving to forget everything save the fact that they were entering the Horse Show, and that he was somehow treading in ether because he had found a girl who was different from all others, he became himself again.

"We're not so very late after all," he exclaimed as he glanced up at the big tower clock. "I thought I waited an hour for you. But, anyhow, here we are, and now for it!"

They sauntered in and he was proud to observe that many eyes were turned in the direction of his companion. It made him feel rather egotistical, for there were many girls there well worth looking at, and people don't always go to horse shows to look at horses. Jimmy forgot all about chocolates. Unconsciously he relapsed to his habitual self, and, inasmuch as most any one who is unassuming and entirely natural is entertaining, seemed to keep his companion happy.

"I like it all," she said, in an interval. "I like to look at those in the boxes who came here for nothing else than to be looked at. It makes them happy to see others looking at them. I suppose they must feel for the moment that they are as good as the horses. Some people will make mistakes of that sort, you know, and never learn the truth. And I like the horses for themselves. They are so unlike. So like people. Some of them are shy, some of them nervous, some of them conceited, and others are as self-satisfied as if already they had won the blue ribbons. Funny, isn't it, that I never suspected that you had any interest at all in them?"

"Well, you see," said Jimmy. "We never had much of a chance to understand really what either of us enjoys or dislikes before we met here. It makes a lot of difference when, how and where people meet. I suppose you'll laugh if I tell you when I first fell in love, because it was with a horse. Honestly, it was! I'm in earnest about it. Things didn't come any too easy around our house – I mean Maw's and mine – after my father died. Somehow his death sort of changed me from a boy into a man, and, – well, I just couldn't think of enough ways to keep her from wanting anything. I felt as if I'd have to be a man big enough to fill my father's place and to take care of her. There wasn't a way to make a penny that I didn't consider just on her account. And I got a job after school hours delivering stuff for a grocery store, down in our town. I had to care for and drive a poor old feller with the string halt, and spavins, and I used to wonder why I couldn't get his tail to grow longer. Honestly, I thought all horses' tails were about eight inches long until an old horse trader looked my friend over one day and said, 'Hello! That nag's been docked sometime! He didn't always pull a grocery cart. Shouldn't wonder if there'd been some class and pedigree to him sometime.' Then he had the impertinence to stick his dirty fingers into my friend's mouth and hoist his upper lip and say, 'Methusalem was old, but this plug could make him look like a suckling,' I remember that I was angry, and that I wished that my friend had bitten him. I'd have done it myself if I had been big enough, or a horse. You see, I was proud of that horse, and liked him, and he loved me. As a joke the hostlers down at the boarding stable where we kept him called him Bovolarapus; but I called him Bo for short, because it didn't seem fair that we shouldn't be familiar with each other. I'm sure he thought of me as Jim for short; so I called him Bo. He used to take a kick at anybody else who came near him, but I could put a hot iron on his poor old heels without a single vicious jerk from him. He bit nearly everyone who got too close or too curious, but he'd put his lips up to my cheek and kiss me when something had hurt my feelings, and I'd get into some quiet lane and tell him all about it – sometimes with my arms around his tired old neck! I tell you he was mighty comforting to me when everything went wrong. You won't believe it, but I used to fancy that sometimes he tried to whisper into my ear and that he said, 'Take it quietly, boy! Just do the best you can. I know that sometimes the hill is terribly hard to climb, and bitterly long, but somewhere there is always a top. Don't think of the load, the whip, or the hill, but keep thinking, always, of what it's like on top. Many times they'll hurt you when you're doing your best, because they're cruel, or don't understand. But most of those who drive you – and someone or something must drive you as long as you live, – don't really mean to be hard. It's merely because they don't understand. Sometimes you'll be very tired, and out of breath, and the sweat of hard work will drip and trickle from your ears down over your eyes, and you'll think that another yard is beyond all you can do. But keep on! Stick it! You can always do a little more than you think you can if you've the courage to try. And there's always a top to every hill, lad! It's only up there that you can breathe, and that the load is light, and that there is rest!'"

A band that had been playing off up in the balcony at the far end stopped, as if waiting for the next event, and abruptly aware that he had said so much, and surprised by his own unmeasured loquacity, he, too, stopped, abashed, and for the first time in his speech looked at her and met her eyes. They were soft, filled with wonder, absorbed. He could not have defined why he was so swiftly ashamed of thus openly flouting that boyhood heart of his upon his sleeve. He could not have explained what strange lapse had overpowered him to thus unbosom long forgotten things. He looked away from her toward the entrance. Men were bringing tall hurdles outward to place them in the arena. The jumpers were coming for exhibit.

"But," she insisted breathlessly, leaning toward him, and her hushed voice sounding distinct from all the murmur surrounding them, "Tell me the rest of it!"

"Tell you the rest of it? There's nothing more to tell! Nothing except – except – " He hesitated, then laughed as if in self-derision. "My friend fell down one day, half way up a hill. The top was there, just above him. The top for which he had so valiantly tried. I, a boy, his only friend, got his tired old head up on my knees and cried. A policeman came and shook his head and went away and phoned. A vet came and said, 'The best thing to do is to shoot him,' and then the policeman pulled out a gun, and went toward Bo's head and bent over the brave and tired old eyes of my friend, and – I fought! Fought so hard that they had to give us a chance, Bo and me. They laughed, but the vet phoned my employers and what they said, I never knew; but I do know that they gave me my friend, and that about midnight I got him home, weak and tottering, and put him out in our back garden, and told Maw all about it. I thought she would understand and she did. She understands everything. Everything! No one else ever could. And so – um-m-mh! Bovolarapus was the first horse I ever owned and the last. We had to go without some few things, Maw and I, to pay pasturage for a year or two until he died, but it doesn't at all matter now. You see he was a sort of inspiration to me because he told me so many things, and – that somewhere, a long way I fear from where I've ever reached, there's a top to the hill. He taught me that be we driver or driven there's a heart of things that has to be learned. That the driver may learn from the driven and that there is always the promise that the driven may drive. And so may God pity the man who thinks that he can drive his world alone, because, as far as I can dope it out, everything in life is made up of give if you would take, and take only when you give. I may be wrong. One never knows. That's the pity of it all. But that's the way it looks to me, and – that's the way communing with a poor old horse taught me, the only game I try to play. It's only when we've lost the true sense of things that we say 'Life's nothing but a horse show – after all!'"

Staring at the arena, and bringing his thoughts back to their surroundings, he waited for her to speak; but for the moment they seemed fixed in a little oasis of silence, embodying but them alone. It was the girl who broke the peculiar stillness.

"I – I – never thought you were like that," she said, almost as if soliloquizing. "I thought you were out for yourself and nothing else! I didn't in the least think you could ever feel anything beyond yourself. You humiliate me – in a way – my stupidity! And I feel like apologizing for my past unkindness, because I didn't; as you say – because I didn't at all understand!"

He couldn't quite grasp it all, although her every word had been audible and distinct. To what did she refer? "Past unkindness?" He strove to think when she had been unkind to him and where. The baffling sense of having forgotten something he should have remembered, again disturbed him and drove him to jest.

"Don't say that!" he cried in pretended alarm. "You make me feel like the coon who was sentenced for stealing chickens when the judge said, 'You are incorrigible. This is the twenty-seventh time we've had you up for this heinous, fearsome crime. But now you have gone the limit! You stole two black hens on the night of April seventh.' Then he stopped and glared at the nigger who leaned over the dock rail, hopefully, yet frightened, and said, 'I think you should be sentenced to ninety-nine years in the penitentiary!' And the nigger thought it over and looked at the judge, then around the court and gasped, and said, 'Jedge, sah! I thank my Gawd them chickens was black. It must have been the color, sah, that made you so kind, because I reckon if they'd been white you'd have sure had me hanged!'"

But she did not seem to accept it as a joke.

"I have been unkind," she said, with a shake of her head. "I had no idea you could be like – well – like you are. So there! And besides, I don't like to be made fun of."

"I'm not making fun of you," he declared. "I'm making fun of myself. I can't help it. I've a sense of proportion. I know what a mut I am better than anyone else does. It does me good to admit it whenever I get a proper chance."

For another interval she studied him, curiously, looked away, and again turned toward him as if still unconvinced of something, and then said, "Well, if you were wise, you would keep on being just yourself. You've something to learn from horses yet. I believe they are always natural, and unassuming, and sincere. That's a beautiful animal there now, isn't it? Well done! What a jump! Seven bars! That's pretty good for a practice take-off, I should say. What do you think?"

"I'd jump higher than that to remember something I've forgotten," Jim murmured; but his remark went unchallenged, due to a second splendid leap in the arena that was so swift and graceful that it resembled nothing so much as a glistening bay flash, a compound of splendidly correlated muscle, nerve and sinew, and the spectators burst into a storm of applause as the horse, proudly and daintily stepping on springing hocks, lifted a beautiful head, pricked sensitive ears, and stared through big, intelligent eyes at the boxes.

Even the perplexed and infatuated Jimmy forgot his secret questionings and gave himself up to the joys of the display. Event followed event in such rapid succession that he was astonished when the military band struck up its dispersing air, and he and his companion "The Candy Girl" as he had come to think of her, were caught into the leisurely maelstrom that surged slowly toward the exits. He had even forgotten the fact that he had as yet failed to learn his companion's name; but at the hotel entrance maneuvered for another chance.

"Isn't it possible to induce you and your mother to see a show, or hear a concert, or something of that sort to-night?" he asked wistfully.

"I wish we could," she said; "but I'm afraid it's quite impossible. We are dining with some friends."

"What about to-morrow, then?" he insisted, somewhat crestfallen.

"To-morrow we are going to visit some relatives in Connecticut where we shall spend the week-end."

His face, usually so cheerful and optimistic, might have competently served for an artist's study of "Gloom." He felt as if the props had been kicked from beneath a line on which swung all his best linen.

"I've got to get back to my work not later than day after to-morrow," he lamented. "In fact I ought to take the five o'clock flyer west to-morrow afternoon to keep up with my dates. I've sent out my cards that I am coming."

"Then for goodness sake, go!" she insisted. "I'll see you at home – no – I forgot I shall not be there for weeks, or perhaps months. I mustn't let this Jorgensen opportunity go to waste. I'm very keen on it. But you will be in town again and must come and call for me at the Martha Putnam. I shall – I shall look forward to it!"

She suddenly flushed as if she had somehow committed herself, and before he could reply had almost run from him into the hotel lobby. But he had caught a look in her eyes that caused his heart to lose a beat, then to thump like a bass drum in martial band. He was made suddenly aware that he was gawking after her with his mouth hanging open and his eyes bulging, by the delighted snickers of a pair of impertinent door boys and the suppressed comment of one, "Betchu a nickel she's thrown him down! Gee! Ain't he got it bad!"

And Jimmy, turning away with a heavy-villain air of dignity, was ashamed of himself because he had blushed profusely in sight of two mere urchins in brass buttons.

CHAPTER IV

"I suppose," said the buyer for one of the biggest middle Western jobbing houses, addressing a friendly competitor across the table at their club, "that Jim Gollop comes as near to being the synonym for sunshine as any man can be."

"Yes, and that's why he succeeds so well. Somehow when I'm tired, or depressed, I like to see Jim Gollop coming through the door. And he's about the only commercial traveler I would ever say howdy to at those times. He's like a tonic, Jim Gollop is. He just seems to radiate good will, and friendliness, and optimism wherever he goes. I think I noticed that surprising faculty of his more on this last round of his than ever before."

The manager looked up thoughtfully, and said, "Come to think of it, I noticed that, too. Not that he wasn't always cheerful, and persistent, and smart enough in his business, but this last time he seemed to fairly outdo himself. I asked him if his aunt was dead. 'Why?' says he. 'Oh, you're so happy I thought maybe you'd fallen heir to an unexpected fortune,' I told him."

"What did he say?"

"Said 'Old man, I've found something that beats that all hollow. I've found the philosopher's stone. I've found the back door at least to the house of happiness.' And I'll swear I don't believe he was joking, although it's sometimes hard to tell when Jimmy is in earnest."

"Humph! Must be in love," said the other man.

"Well, he might be worse off," said the manager. "If he draws as luckily as I did – well – You've met my wife and kiddies."

And it did seem as if Jimmy, making his long rounds, was meeting with inordinate success; for life smiles on those who smile and the happy salesman is like the Happy Warrior, because all things, sooner or later, come to his feet. The art of salesmanship is the art of winning, and there is no such animal as a successful drummer with a perpetual grouch. But just the same the astute Jimmy's progress was not so easily profitable from the personal point as he had conceived, and as he had ardently hoped. He had left New York in his customary optimism with the boastful prediction, "I'll learn the candy girl's name, and where she lives when she's at home, and when her birthday is, and all about her, before I get back. And on the day I get her name I'll telegraph an order to a New York florist to take her the biggest bunch of violets she ever saw."

At the end of the first week he felt that the next week must surely bring the coveted information, and at the end of the second week he made a bet with himself that he'd find it out in the third. Then when the third week proved equally barren, he doubled the stakes and lost them on the fourth week.

"Anyhow," he communed with himself, "I'm more than half way through, and shall win on the next stretch."

But his hopes, increasing as his tour of elimination progressed, began to turn to anxieties as his margin for developments narrowed until he was almost feverishly eager in his pursuit when he entered his last and final week. Everywhere he went there were the same old names and the same old faces. One or two customers had sold out, but invariably they were men. It was on his last day, when hope had waned, that he found what he hoped was a clue. Mrs. Ellen Sturgis, of Lansing, Michigan, who, according to his blue book, was "quite a lady, credit A1, tall, good dresser, very quiet, somewhat standoffish, fond of horses, because, owns her own trap outfit and nice little cob," had sold out and gone to parts unknown.

"Didn't she leave any address?" inquired Jimmy of the new owner, who was an affable, elderly gentleman given to loquacity.

"Not with me. Probably at the post office. Hope I can do as well with this business as she did, and I think I can do better. But she made money here, all right. Of course she had a society pull to start with because you see she was the widow of a man who was thought to be pretty well heeled until he died; then she had to go into business to support herself, and all the best people in the town patronized her and – anyone can do business with that kind of a pull."

Jimmy closed his order and loitered around the mirror-garnished shop until he got an opportunity to talk with a girl whose face was familiar.

"Let me see," said Jimmy, thoughtfully, "Didn't Mrs. Sturgis have a daughter who was 'most always here?"

"Nellie? Sure. You remember her, don't you? Nice looking girl with brown hair and wonderful teeth. We all liked Nellie a lot more than we did her mother. Stuck-up old dame, I called her. But Nellie was all to the good."

Jimmy suddenly developed a mad desire to get away from there. He got as far as the corner and was tempted to turn into an alleyway and do a brief but sprightly dance on his own; but decided that he would lose no time in finding the telegraph office.

"Got her! Got her at last!" he jubilated mentally. "Now for the violets, then it's me for the hotel, and the long letter apologizing for not writing sooner and – um-m-mh! – I'll tell her I broke my wrist in Ashtabula. That's a good place to break one's wrist in. No – that won't do. She'd wonder why I didn't dictate a letter to some blonde hop-o-my-thumb in some nice quiet hotel. How about the flu? Um-m-mh – afraid that wouldn't square up with my keeping on the road. Urgent and continual business sounds too cold – considering how warm I feel. I must never tell her the truth that I'd forgotten her name, and what she looked like, and be the boob I am by admitting that I'd never paid enough attention to her before then to take notice of her. Girls don't like to think that anyone could possibly forget them after one good, square look. Hurts their vanity, I reckon. And she's not the sort I can write to and say, 'Kid, you made a hit with me and I'm your little stick of candy from now until I go to some place so hot I melt!' No, I've got to get some excuse that'll get by, or – go out into somebody's town park and cut my throat. I'm hit so badly it hurts! And if anything goes wrong with this deal it's – it's all off with Yours Truly. It just seems to me that would be the one thing I've ever had happen that I couldn't recover from!"

He had thought of her so much, by day and night, that he entertained a strange sense of familiarity, as if he had known and loved her all through life. So vivid were his impressions that he could not forget little inflections of her musical voice, tiny feminine gestures, stray sparkles of her eyes, the very echoes of her modulated laughter. All the weeks of his search, forever arousing in him by disappointment an increased determination, were but additions to their acquaintanceship. All the smothered, dormant sentiment accumulated throughout his life had been exploded, as by a spark, to burst into a brilliancy that filled his entire horizon. Life was filled with dazzling and unexpected stars of shining gold. There was but one moon in all his heavens, a warm, friendly, almost mystic moon that rendered gentle and fine everything upon which it bestowed benignancy. His universe could scarcely note the extinguishment of a sun. He had never paused to analyze it, but had fallen upon the truth that the love of a man of thirty-four makes or breaks far more irrevocably than does the evanescent love of a boy. The latter patient recovers amazingly. The former seeks a hospital alone, and the soul of him dies!

Jimmy found less difficulty in telegraphing an extravagant order for violets to be sent to "Miss Nellie Sturgis, care Martha Putnam Hotel, New York," than he did in the composition of a suitable letter of apology.

"I've never been so darned particular about what kind of stationery I used before," he thought, as he stared at the display in a shop and cogitated over what was the best. "In fact, come to think of it, hotels have paid for all I've ever used, and most times I didn't care much whether it came in reams or in rolls. Just so it would show where the lead pencil had traveled across. About all I ever thought of a letter was that one begins writing in the upper right hand corner, writes straight across, then goes back to the left hand again and does it over until the page is full, then turns it over and does some more, and at last thinks whether he ought to sign 'Yours truly,' 'Yours sincerely,' 'Your friend,' or 'Your old pal.'"

He wished now that he had time to secure something in blue with his monogram embossed either in the corner or the center, and with some special envelopes to match. Ordinary paper, purchasable from a regular shop, didn't seem good enough to be handled by those slender white fingers he had longed to kiss. There was nothing good enough for them, and anything less than the unattainable good enough might soil them.

"Dear me! What a particular, hard-to-please old crank!" said the young thing who served him after he, the traveling ray of sunshine, had departed with the most exclusive box of paper in the shop under his arm.

The fortunate, but to Jimmy Gollop unappreciated, fact is that this world is at the present moment filled with men who have tried to write just such letters, and that probably it always has been so since the first cave man tried to write an excuse to the first cave girl on a block or stone. Probably that cave man, too, lied with laborious misgivings. Probably he pleaded everything from urgent business to a broken head, or explained that the posts were delayed because for thirty-four days a dinosaurus had been blocking the traffic. And probably, just as now, the cave girl knew he lied, pouted, sulked, and then forgave him. Perhaps in those vigorous days she swore. Perhaps some of them do now. There are things of which, alas! one can never be certain.

At 6:32 o'clock, p.m., after fortifying himself with dinner, James Gollop retired to the writing room of the hotel and began. At 7:35 o'clock James Gollop thought he could write better in the privacy of his room where there were no distractions intervened by a lot of fools who should have been born dumb, but were unfortunately gifted with speech that was devoted to subjects that were of no importance at all in comparison with the epistolatory efforts of one James Gollop. By midnight the persistent correspondent had used a box of stationery, and had composed letters enough to have formed a book in the style of the "Ready Letter Writers' Friend," containing everything from letters of condolence to congratulation, and from stern business to effusive sentiment The sole letter missing might have been one pertaining to the birth of twins. And this was what he mailed: