Part 16 (1/2)
”You bet I see!” said Quin sympathetically as he hurried out to inform the senior member of the firm that the junior member awaited his pleasure.
What happened at that interview was recounted to him by Miss Leaks, the little drab-colored stenographer, who had returned from lunch when the storm was at its height.
”It's a wonder Mr. Ranny don't kill that old man for the way he sneers at him,” she said indignantly to Quin, ”Why, _I_ wouldn't take off him what Mr. Ranny does! But then, what can he do? His mother keeps him here for a mouth-piece for her, and Mr. Bangs knows it. It's no wonder he drinks, hitched up to a cantankerous old hyena like that. He never can stand up for himself, but he stood up for you all right.”
”For me?” repeated Quin. ”Where did I come in?”
”Why, he said it was a shame for a man like you to be doing the work you are doing, and that he for one wouldn't stand it. He talked right up to the boss about patriotism and our duty to the returned soldier, until he made the old tyrant look like ten cents! And then he come right out and said if Mr. Bangs couldn't offer you anything better he could.”
”What did he say to that?” asked Quin.
”He curled up his lip and asked Mr. Ranny why he didn't engage you for a private secretary, and if you'll believe me Mr. Ranny looked him straight in the eye and said it was a good idea, and that he would.”
”A private secretary!” Quin exclaimed. ”But I don't know a blooming thing about stenography or typewriting.”
”Don't you let on,” advised Miss Leaks. ”Mr. Ranny doesn't have enough work to amount to anything, and he's so tickled at carrying his point that he won't be particular. I can teach you how to take dictation and use the typewriter.”
The following week found Quin installed in the smaller of the two private offices, with a t.i.tle that in no way covered the duties he was called upon to perform. To be sure, he got Mr. Ranny's small affairs into systematic running order, and, under Miss Leaks's efficient instruction, was soon able slowly but accurately to hammer out the necessary letters on the typewriter. He was even able at times to help Mr. Chester, the melancholy bookkeeper whom the other clerks called ”f.a.n.n.y.”
Through working with figures all his life Mr. Chester had come to resemble one. With his lean body and drooping oval head, he was not unlike the figure nine, an a.n.a.logy that might be continued by saying that nine is the highest degree a bachelor number can achieve, the figures after that going in couples. It was an open secret that the tragedy of Mr. Chester's uneventful life lay in that simple fact.
In addition to Quin's heterogeneous duties at the office, he was frequently pressed into service for more personal uses. When Mr. Ranny failed to put in an appearance, he was invariably dispatched to find him, and was often able to handle the situation in a way that was a great relief to all concerned.
One day, after he had been with the firm several weeks, he was dispatched with a budget of papers for Madam Bartlett to sign. It was the first time he had entered the house since the night of the accident, and as he stood in the front hall waiting instructions, he looked about him curiously.
The lower floor had been ”done” in peac.o.c.k blue and gold when Miss Enid made her debut twenty years before, and it had never been undone. An embossed dado and an even more embossed frieze encircled the walls, and the ceiling was a complicated mosaic of color and design. The stiff-backed chairs and ma.s.sive sofas were apparently committed for life to linen strait-jackets. Heavy velvet curtains shut out the light and a faint smell of coal soot permeated the air. Over the hall fireplace hung a large portrait of Madam Bartlett, just inside the drawing-room gleamed a marble bust of her, and two long pier-gla.s.ses kept repeating the image of her until she dominated every nook and corner of the place.
But Quin saw little of all this. To him the house was simply a background for images of Eleanor: Eleanor coming down the broad stairs in her blue and gray costume; Eleanor tripping through the hall in her Red Cross uniform; Eleanor standing in the doorway in the moonlight, telling him how wonderful he was.
He had written her exactly ten letters since her departure, but only two had been dispatched, and by a fatal error these two were identical. After a superhuman effort to couch his burning thoughts in sufficiently cool terms, he had achieved a partially successful result; but, discovering after addressing the envelope that he had misspelled two words, he laboriously made another copy, addressed a second envelope, then inadvertently mailed both.
He had received such a scoffing note in reply that his ears tingled even now as he thought of it. It was only when he recalled the postscript that he found consolation. ”How funny that you should get a position at Bartlett & Bangs's,” she had written. ”If you should happen to meet any member of my family, for heaven's sake don't mention my name. They might link you up with the Hawaiian Garden, or the trip to the camp that night grandmother was hurt. Just let our friends.h.i.+p be a little secret between you and me.”
”'You and me,'” Quin repeated the words softly to himself, as he stood there among the objects made sacred by her one-time presence.
”Madam Bartlett wishes you to come upstairs and explain the papers before she signs them,” said a woman in nurse's uniform from the stair landing, and, cap in hand, Quin followed her up the steps.
At the open door of the large front room he paused. Lying in royal state in a huge four-poster bed was Madam Bartlett, resplendent in a purple robe, with her hair dressed in its usual elaborate style, and in her ears pearls that, Quin afterward a.s.sured the Martels, looked like moth-b.a.l.l.s.
”You go on out of here and stay until I ring for you,” she snapped at the nurse; then she squinted her eyes and looked at Quin. She did not put on her eye-gla.s.ses; they were reserved for feminine audiences exclusively.
”What do they mean by sending me this jumble of stuff?” she demanded, indicating the papers strewn on the silk coverlid. ”How do they expect me to know what they are all about?”
”They don't,” said Quin rea.s.suringly, coming forward; ”they sent me to tell you.”
”And who are you, pray?”
”I am Mr. Randolph's er--er--secretary.”