Angela's Business

by Henry Sydnor Harrison

Mrs. Flower's decisive remark was that she must get on with her household duties. She gave Charles her limp hand again, again mentioned her daughter's distress, if she missed him; she bestowed upon him another pretty and somewhat significant smile; and then faded out of the Call, leaving behind a vague impression of feminine inadequacy and a button missing from her black waist.

So the young man was left with the worthy Doctor, who could speak so sarcastically to a defenseless woman, his wife. And for a space he found the tête-à-tête heavy going, indeed, and was more oppressed than ever with the essential meaninglessness of it all.

Angela's father did not look like a brute, but only dryer, queerer, shabbier, than before. He jerked his neck more, looked more unrelated to his environment. He was very civil, but he cocked his eye too much toward the ceiling, felt too little responsibility as to keeping a conversation going. Charles's efforts (hearty enough, despite the counter-feelings going on within him) seemed to bound off dead from that juiceless, withdrawn manner. Having refused a cigar (there was a little talk about smoking, but he couldn't keep it going), he proposed for discussion the Doctor's son Wallie, his education, abilities as a chemist, skill as a lamp-repairer, etc. The topic promised well, and did well for a couple of minutes, but petered out mysteriously and beyond resurrection. The Doctor's work out at the Medical School yielded almost nothing; the weather enjoyed but a brief and fitful run. Presently, Charles found himself fairly driven to Mary Wing, and her imminent departure to lead her own life; and this subject won a real success, though not of a sort he could take much satisfaction in. It quickly developed that Angela's parent held ante-bellum views on Woman, which he put forward with some dry zest, in the strange backhanded fashion noted by Charles in their previous meeting. After a very few exchanges, the old eccentric was delivering himself of paragraphs like this:—

"Ah, you throw out that suggestion? An interesting idea!—quite so!" (Charles had thrown out no suggestion of any sort.) "Your observation is that the Lord has formed woman specifically for the needs of family and the home—quite so!—and that efforts to change her destiny seem to result in constitutional perversion? Well, sir, I dare say the physicians would support your contention there, too. Who knows?"

Even "Marna," even Mary Wing, had never made Charles so conservative as this. Oddly enough, he found the Doctor's criticisms unwelcome; it was his turn to let a subject die from malnutrition. In the pause, he considered whether he had not called long enough now. About to rise, he chanced to note a worn volume of Henderson's "Stonewall Jackson" lying open on the table, and asked, with little hope, if the Doctor had read it. The old codger replied: "I am reading it now for the seventh time, sir." And to the young man's agreeable surprise, he at once uncocked his eye from the ceiling (where he seemed to have meant to leave it permanently), and began to talk along almost like a regular person.

During the remainder of the Call, conversation flowed very satisfactorily. It appeared that the War was one of this old codger's subjects, even as Woman was Charles's; and he talked well, too, now that he cared to, criticizing strategy as one having authority, revealing, behind that spare, intensely conservative manner, flashes of broad outlook and incisive speech which might have helped to explain why the Medical School had been glad to draw this man from Mitchellton to its staff. But the truth was that Charles Garrott heard scarcely a word of this excellent discourse. Once he had got Angela's father fairly going, he became captured and fascinated by a totally independent line of thought.

In short, the young man's gaze had returned to almost the first thing he had definitely noticed in the Home, to wit, the ash-tray on the Doctor's mantel.

The ash-tray was really a large saucer, or small plate, and the intriguing and really exciting thing about it was that it contained the remains of scarcely less than a dozen cigars. Just before he made the lucky remark about Henderson's "Life," the caller had inadvertently discovered two more cigar-ends, poised perilously on the mantel's edge; this it was that had started him reacting yet again. For, considering that the Doctor was out a large part of the day, lecturing, it appeared incredible that he could have achieved such astonishing results since morning. Rather, the mantel had the air of having stood undisturbed for some little time....

"If those men," he was saying, "had but shot another way, that night at Chancellorsville—"

"Ah, sir! the vast 'ifs' of history. And none bigger than that, it may be. Yet, as I say ..."