He cried out: “You are the greatest old Dad any man ever possessed! What’s the use to wait? Put on the clamps to-day! Let Mr. Spellman see right now whether he can influence Mahala to marry me and to do it soon!”
“Any time you say,” said Martin Moreland, and the pencil came down with a vindictive tap.
“You know,” said Junior, “she’s got this going-to-college bug in her bonnet. There’s no sense to it. She’s got all the education she’s ever going to have any use for. She can get the rest out of books she reads. I’ve come in here this morning to tell you that I’m ready to go to work. So should she. While I’m getting my hand in—and I’ve got a notion of what my job should be and how I could help you to the best advantage—she can go into the kitchen and have Jemima and her mother teach her enough about housekeeping so that she can manage a house as her mother does. I’m dead stuck on the way the Spellmans live. You can’t start the wheels, Dad, too soon to suit me. Let’s try this chariot you’re talking about and see who’s going to be the driver.”
“Very well,” said Martin Moreland. “Tell the bookkeeper to step across the street and say to Mahlon Spellman that I want to see him for a few minutes in my office.”
Mahlon Spellman sat at his desk facing a sheaf of bills—heavy ones from the East for spring dry goods, smaller ones from town connected with Mahala’s graduation. He lifted his head, a harassed look upon his face, when the bookkeeper from the bank delivered Mr. Moreland’s message. Instinctively, his hands reached for his hair, and then paused in arrested motion. How did it come that Martin Moreland was sending for him as if he were a servant? What right had he to undertake to dictate? Nervously glancing at the row of ledgers facing him, and the overflowing pigeonholes before him, a wave of nausea swept his middle.
He got up, and for the first time in years, he put on his hat and left the store without looking in the mirror. He found that his hands were trembling as he climbed the broad stone steps, flanked on either side by huge dogs—big bronze creatures of exaggerated proportions, with distended nostrils that seemed to be scenting dollars instead of any living thing, their chests broad, their abdomens drawn in, their tails stiffly pointing. Cordially Mahlon Spellman hated them. He remembered the day upon which they had stood crated on the sidewalk before the bank and he had said to the banker: “Why dogs, Martin?”
There had been the hint of a snarl in Martin’s voice as he had answered: “You’d prefer the conventional lion, would you, Mahlon? Well, give me a dog of about that size and build every clip. Especially a dog that I’ve trained myself. Watch dogs of the Treasury. Instinct may be all right, but I prefer training when it comes to guarding the finances of the community!”
There was nothing he could do to them with his hands. As Mahlon Spellman passed between the unyielding metal moulded in the form of powerful hunters, he felt as if he were a creature at bay, in danger of being torn and rended by their merciless jaws. He could not remember ever before in his life having wanted to kick anything. He would have considered such a manifestation as extremely distasteful on the part of any gentleman; and he almost recoiled from himself as he stepped over the threshold with the realization strong upon him that he would have given a fine large sum, if he had had it to give, in order to have been able to kick both of those menacing big bronze animals off their pedestals and into the farthest regions of limbo.
In a minute more he was sitting in an easy chair fingering a fragrant cigar and listening to the voice of Martin Moreland speaking so casually that he was quite disarmed. He was talking about the Commencement of the night before—how finely their young people had acquitted themselves; complimenting their schools and their teachers and the ability of the town to get together and handle an occasion like that in such a creditable manner to every one concerned. He was so suave, so extremely casual, so unlike the bronze dogs guarding his doorway, that Mahlon Spellman began watching him narrowly with the impression that there was something back of all this, and when Mr. Moreland looked him straight in the eye with the friendliest kind of a smile and inquired: “Does it impress you, Spellman, that my son and your daughter made the handsomest couple on the floor last night?” Mr. Spellman knew that the crux of the matter had been reached.
He kept fingering the cigar in the hope that the motion might cover the trembling of his hands. His eyes narrowed and he tried to look far into the future. It was with some hesitation that he finally said: “I quite agree with you, Martin.”