VI
The village fire apparatus had done its best, and departed, and the tenants of the two-family house were assembled in the Gayles’s sitting room, dejected, weary, and silent. Bess lay on the sofa, still weak and[Pg 502] shaken. Angelina was looking over a mass of sodden papers which had once been a portfolio of drawings, and the professor was helping her. Tom Tench sat hunched in an armchair, staring gloomily before him.
The curtains were scorched rags. Through a hole chopped in the ceiling water was still dripping, and the room was devastated; but the worst damage had occurred upstairs. The flames from Tom Tench’s papers heaped upon the ash can had mounted upward, and had caught the curtains at a window that happened to be open. It was bad enough down here, but upstairs there was stark ruin.
“I wonder where Alan is,” said Angelina. “He drove down to the village—to buy something, I suppose; but it’s so late!”
“As a matter of fact,” Tom Tench told her curtly, “he went to find a doctor. He was hurt.”
“Hurt!” cried Angelina and Bess together. “Hurt!” they repeated.
“That’s what I said. He hurt himself. He came back in here—in this jungle—this old curiosity shop—”
“Mr. Tench!” said the professor.
“Oh, it’s your room,” said Tench. “If you like it this way—but Alan fell over one of these antique doodads and cut his head.”
“Boys!” cried Miss Smith, greatly distressed. “Boys!”
The professor glanced up. It was a long time since he had been classified as a boy, and it was pleasing.
“Miss Smith!” he said.
Bess sat up straight. Was it possible? The way her father and Miss Smith were looking at each other!
“I didn’t mean—” Angelina began, somewhat confused, and then: “But it’s true!” she said. “You really are—both of you—but there’s Alan!”
The front door opened, and just at that moment there came from upstairs the most pathetic, tired little voice. It was the cuckoo clock.
“Midnight!” cried Alan. “Look here! Merry Christmas, you people!”
The words might have been a charm, striking every one speechless. They could only look at him, as he stood in the doorway, a bandage around his head, his collar a wet and dirty rag, his face white with fatigue and pain, and a wide grin on it.
“Oh, Alan!” cried his sister. “My dear, dear boy! Your new set of plans—for that yacht—they’re burned up!”
It seemed to Bess that he winced a little, but it was almost imperceptible.
“Then we may starve yet,” he said; “but, anyhow, we’re all right for the present. Look at this!”
He held out a package that he was carrying. Bess took it from him, and opened it gingerly.
“But—” she said.
“It’s the best sort of plum pudding there is,” he said. “I only wish I could have got a bigger one. You’ll like it, all right!”
She stood looking at the round tin in her hands.
“But I’m afraid,” she said, “it—it must be a mistake. You see, it says—” She looked up at him, and her eyes filled with tears. It was too pathetic! His head bandaged, his plans destroyed, his home in ruins, and now this! “It says ‘corned beef’!” she faltered.
Then she could bear no more. Taking the corned beef, she ran into the kitchen, and began to cry there.
Alan came after her. He put his arm about her shoulders, but, this being the second time, she did not seem to notice it very much.
“I am s-so s-sorry!” she wailed.
“Please don’t be!” he entreated. “Two-family houses are a mistake, anyhow. I’ve been staying late at the office, trying my hand at designing a house, for a change. I wish you’d look at the plans!”
“I think I’ll make some coffee,” said Bess, hastily, moving away. Then her glance fell again upon the tin of corned beef.
She looked at him, and their eyes met, and she began to laugh.
“You little angel!” he cried. “I’ve never seen you do that before!”
“I’ve just learned,” said Bess, still laughing.
They had a good deal more to say. They took a very long time in getting a very simple supper; but nobody tried to hurry them. Nobody seemed at all impatient. Indeed, when Bess came in with a tray, they all smiled at her in a new sort of way, as if they, too, had been somehow touched by her gay young laughter.
Nothing could have been more festive than that supper of coffee and corned beef, eaten under a ceiling that still dripped, in[Pg 503] a room with a broken windowpane stuffed with rags, and heaps of charred débris from upstairs piled in the corners. The wind howled outside, but nobody cared.
The professor rose to his feet.
“This,” he said, “is Christmas Day; and in some respects I may say that it is a—for me, personally—a merry one. I should like to take this occasion to say—Mr. Tom Tench, sir, your cousin, Miss Smith, has—er—shown me an example of—of—” He hesitated for a moment. “Mr. Tench, sir!” he said. “Your hand!”
Tom Tench sprang up and took the proffered hand in a vigorous clasp.
“Gayle!” he said. “Gayle! I—I think I’ll run down and take a look at that furnace![Pg 504]”
MUNSEY’S
MAGAZINE
JULY, 1927
Vol. XCI NUMBER 2
The Old Ways
THE STORY OF A YOUNG MAN WHO FELT QUITE SURE THAT HE WAS A CONQUEROR, BUT WHO CAME TO HAVE SERIOUS DOUBTS ABOUT IT
By Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
IT was bitter bread they had to eat, Mrs. Anders and her daughter.
“You deaf, hey?” bellowed Oscar Anders. “Don’t you hear that bell, hey? No! Ingeborg, you stay where you are! Marie, you go!”
The sight of them standing there, so downcast, filled him with anger.
“You two dumb ones!” he shouted. “Marie, you go!”
Mrs. Anders went. Ingeborg turned to the stove again, and lifted the lid of a saucepan; but she could not see through her tears. From the hall upstairs she could hear her mother’s voice, faltering out her broken English; then the front door slammed. Some one else had gone away, impatient and annoyed, unable to understand her.
Outside the snow was falling—the first snow Ingeborg had seen. It was not like the snow her mother had told her there was in Denmark. There were no sleigh bells here, no dark fir trees to catch and hold a glittering burden, no blazing fire within. This snow was sorrowful and faint, vanishing as it touched the pavement, and through it monstrous trucks thundered by, and people were passing, all hurried, all strangers, never a familiar face.
It was growing dark in the basement kitchen. The gas stove burned with a clear blue flame in its shadowy corner. Mrs. Anders, coming into the room, was almost invisible, but Oscar saw her.
“Well?” he demanded.
She answered him in Danish, and that made him so angry that he banged down the legs of his tilted chair.
“Speak American!” he shouted.
“He don’t vant a r-room,” said Mrs. Anders. “He vent avay.”
“Yes, and everybody’s going to ‘vent avay,’ if you don’t learn some sense! I give you your food, and a nice room, and a pair of shoes last week! A hat, even, for the girl! Everything you take, and bring nothing. The two of you—ach, Gott, so dumb!”
They said nothing, Mrs. Anders and her daughter. They had to endure this, and they did endure it.
“Oscar is a good man,” said Mrs. Anders to herself. “He gives us a home—that I won’t forget. It is a home for me and Ingeborg.”
Six months ago her husband had died. The poor man had been ill a long time, and he left very little. A very bad time that had been, even though the neighbors had been so kind. Then Oscar Anders, her husband’s brother, had sent her the fare to New York, and had written that she and Ingeborg could come to live with him, and maybe could help a little in the rooming house he had just bought.
“That was kind,” said Mrs. Anders to herself. “Oscar is a good man.”
So they had left St. Croix, where Ingeborg had been born, and where Mrs. Anders had lived for twenty years, and they had come to New York; and Mrs. Anders had tried to repay Oscar’s kindness. From six in the morning until perhaps nine at night she worked, keeping the big, old-fashioned house clean and neat, and cooking meals for Oscar. It was hard work, but she did not mind that. What she did mind was any contact with the alien world outside.
She had led a sheltered life in the West Indies, just with her husband and his people. She had never troubled to learn English, and now nobody understood her; and[Pg 506] her timid air and poor clothes won very little patience for her. She was sick with dread when she had to enter a new shop to buy anything. She would return from one of these expeditions and shut the door of Oscar’s house behind her with a long sigh of relief.
Inside the house there were Oscar and the lodgers, all so cross! Well, let them be; she knew she did not deserve it. She was a respectable woman, and the mother of Ingeborg, and that was something to be proud of. Such a neat little woman, too—small and spare, with a long nose and a thin face with two spots of red on the high cheek bones; but only Ingeborg looked at her kindly now. Her man was gone, and she had nobody but Ingeborg, who was still a child to her mother.
“Oh, thou dear little one!” thought Mrs. Anders, looking at her daughter. “Thou little Ingeborg—so dear!”
Ingeborg was making the coffee. Oscar was a good man, but he ought not to call Ingeborg “dumb.” That was not right. Just think what the girl could do in the house—so clever and quick at cooking, fine ironing, sewing, anything you wanted done—
“The bell!” shouted Oscar. “Ach, Gott, she grows deaf now, the dumb old woman!”
“Ach, I don’t hear dot,” said Mrs. Anders hastily. “I go, Oscar!”
She hurried up the stairs, whispering to herself the English words she might need. She opened the front door, and there was another young man. So many of them came!
“Room?” he asked curtly.
“Nice room,” said Mrs. Anders. “Top floor. Seven dollars. I show you.”
“Seven?” said he. “Well, I’ll take a look.”
Mrs. Anders had already begun to mount the stairs, and he followed her. On the top floor she opened a door and showed him a bare little room, very clean.
“Seven dollars?” he repeated.
Mrs. Anders was terribly anxious to let the room, because Oscar said it was her fault that nobody had taken it yet. Perhaps seven dollars was too much for it. She knew nothing about such matters; only she did so want to let it.
“Ver-ry goot room!” she said, and looked about for advantages to praise. “Heatness!” she said, touching her worn shoe against the register, from which came a tepid current of air. “Vater!” And she turned on the tap in the wash basin.
Still the young man did not seem impressed.
“Well, see here,” he said. “What about—”
The rest of his question Mrs. Anders could not understand.
“Excoos?” she said, straining every nerve to catch his meaning. She saw that he was growing impatient. A formidable young man he was, big and blond, with eyes like blue ice, and a dogged jaw.
“Vait, plis!” she cried. “Yoost a minoot!”
“No!” he said, but Mrs. Anders was already hastening down the stairs.
He called after her, but she paid no attention. Down the last dark flight she stole, and looked into the kitchen, and behind Oscar’s back made a signal to her daughter. Ingeborg came out into the passage. They dared not even whisper, for fear of their tyrant; but Mrs. Anders pointed up the stairs, and Ingeborg followed her like a shadow.
The young man had not waited. He had come down into the hall, and was about to let himself out of the front door, when Ingeborg spoke.
“Is there something you want to ask about, please?”
He turned and looked at her. The hall was dim, with only a single gas jet high overhead, but he could see her well enough. She was small, and looked very slight in her plain, dark dress. Her dark hair was wound in braids about her head. Her face was pale and wide-browed, with clear, dark eyes that looked back at him steadily. A colorless, quiet little thing; what was there in her to catch at his heart?
“Yes,” he said curtly. “I wanted to know if I could get my breakfast here, and what you’d charge.”
Ingeborg explained the question to her mother in Danish, and then told the young man:
“I’ll find out, if you’ll please wait a moment.”
His blue eyes followed her as she moved away. Then he turned his head and looked out through the glass of the door. Mrs. Anders watched him, terribly anxious.
“Such a fine young man!” she thought. “So tall, and such a beautiful, rich overcoat! I only hope he’ll take that room![Pg 507]”
Now there came a great bellowing from downstairs. She could understand those words. Oscar was angry, and shouting at little Ingeborg.
“Excoos!” she cried. “Yoost a minoot!”
“No!” he said with a frown. “Never mind, anyhow—I’ll take the room, without breakfast. I’ll be back later.”
He opened the door and let himself out. Mrs. Anders stood in the hall, with tears in her eyes. She had not understood what he said. She thought he had gone away, as so many others went away, angry because she was so dumb.
As a matter of fact, if the young man was angry with any one, it was with himself, for his own folly. He ran down the steps and set off along the street as if he were in a hurry to get away from that house.
He had to wait at a crossing for the traffic to pass. On the opposite corner he could see the snow swirling about the street lamp in a little tumult; and it reminded him of something he had loved when he was a child. His mother had had a glass ball with a paper landscape in it, and when the ball was shaken a fierce snowstorm would fill the tiny world inside it. He remembered it so well, and somehow the thought of it made him recall other memories of his boyhood days, faint and sad and beautiful—the jingle of sleigh bells, a glimpse of the lighted window of a little house among the snow-covered hills, the long hoot of a train speeding swiftly through the dark.
He did not want to think of the past. He walked faster, but those thoughts went along with him, and in them, all the time, was the face of little Ingeborg. He had never seen her before, yet she seemed familiar to him, like a figure from his own past, or from a dream.
That pale face of hers, with its steadfast eyes—it was like a picture in his old fairy tales of a snow queen, dressed in fur, driving off in a sleigh shaped like a swan, and looking back sorrowfully over her shoulder. It was like a face he had seen long, long ago, at some window. It was the face of the beloved maiden who is always waiting, in every tale, in every dream—waiting her deliverance.
Not for him! He would not have it so. He had chosen another road, and nothing should stop him. What did he care for that girl—a little, shadowy, humble thing like that?
He thought of Mabel, with her pearls about her throat, and her red lips, and he laughed aloud. Who, seeing Mabel, would look again at that other? Not he!
He went back to his old room and packed his bag; then he walked over to a little Italian restaurant for his dinner. He had minestrone and ravioli—queer food for that blond son of vikings; but he was used to things like that. He had eaten stranger food in more unlikely places—in Naples, in Calcutta, in Marseilles. He had seen the world—the beauty of it and the worst of it.
He took his time over his dinner, and it was nearly nine o’clock when he ran up the steps of Oscar Anders’s house and rang the bell. Nobody came to open the door. The young man set down his heavy bag, and frowned impatiently. He was cold and wet, he was tired, and for some reason he did not feel happy. He rang again.
Then she came. She opened the door, and he entered and threw down his bag. He did not want to look at her, but he could not help seeing her. She was wearing a white blouse with a funny little plaid bow at the collar, and a long, dark skirt. She was altogether foreign in those clothes, with her dark braids about her head, and her subdued air—foreign, and yet in some way familiar to him, and dear.
“Well!” he said, with his masterful smile. “Here I am!”
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” she replied.
“What about?”
“My mother didn’t understand you. She thought you weren’t coming back.”
“I told her I was.”
“But she doesn’t understand English very well. She thought—I’m so sorry—but just a little while ago we let the room.”
“What?” said he. He was angry now. “I should have paid, eh? Somebody came along with money—”
“No,” she said. “It was a mistake.”
“Ingeborg!” shouted a great voice.
The girl started a little, but she did not turn.
“I’m very sorry,” she said.
As she spoke, she looked straight at the young man, and she let him see that she really was sorry—as if she were his friend, and really anxious about him. Though she was so young and slight, there was a fine dignity about her.[Pg 508]
“All right—I don’t care,” he said. “I can find another room.”
“There’s a telephone here,” she suggested. “You could—”
“No!” he interrupted roughly.
“Ingeborg!” shouted the voice again. From the basement stairs there appeared a great, fierce old head with grizzled brows and mustache. “You!” cried Oscar. “What you doing here, hey? Who’s this?”
“He came to see about a room,” said Ingeborg.
“Well, we have no room for him.”
“All right! Your daughter just told me—”
“Daughter? She’s no daughter of mine. You, Ingeborg, get downstairs! When there comes a man, you shall call your mother. You hear me? Get downstairs!”
The girl turned away, toward the stairs; and at sight of her mute submission a great anger rose in the young man. Not even a glance over her shoulder for him, not a smile at that old bully! She was just one of those foreign girls, with no pride.