Part 46 (1/2)

”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 advertis.e.m.e.nts, 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 flus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sistance 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 b.u.t.ter 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 s.h.i.+llings and half-crowns and five-cent pieces caused Miss Alicia a mild delirium.