Part 10 (2/2)

We were two years building it. And there was a garden--a real jim-dandy flower and vegetable garden--and there were twenty-seven fruit-trees. But my wife--” the wail deepened--”my wife--she just would live in a hotel! Couldn't stand the 'strain,' she said, of 'planning food three times a day'! Not--'couldn't stand the strain of earning meals three times a day'--you understand,” the wailing voice added significantly, ”but couldn't stand the strain of ordering 'em.

People all around you, you know, starving to death for just--bread; but she couldn't stand the strain of having to decide between squab and tenderloin! Eh?”

”Oh, Lordy! You can't tell me anything!” snapped the other voice more incisively. ”Houses? I've had four! First it was the cellar my wife wanted to eliminate! Then it was the attic! Then it was--We're living in an apartment now!” he finished abruptly. ”An apartment, mind you!

One of those blankety--blank--blank--blank apartments!”

”Humph!” wailed the first voice again. ”There's hardly a woman you meet these days who hasn't got rouge on her cheeks, but a man's got to go back--two generations, I guess, if he wants to find one that's got any flour on her nose!”

”Flour on her nose?” interrupted the sharper voice. ”Flour on her nose? Oh, ye G.o.ds! I don't believe there's a woman in this whole hotel who'd know flour if she saw it! Women don't care any more, I tell you!

They don't care!”

Just as a mere bit of physical stimulus the crescendoish stridency of the speech roused Barton to a lazy smile. Then, altogether unexpectedly, across indifference, across drowsiness, across absolute physical and mental non-concern, the idea behind the speech came hurtling to him and started him bolt upright in his chair.

”Ha!” he thought. ”I know a girl that cares!” From head to foot a sudden warm sense of satisfaction glowed through him, a throb of pride, a puffiness of the chest. ”Ha!” he gloated. ”H--”

Then interruptingly from outside the window he heard the click of chairs. .h.i.tching a bit nearer together.

”Sst!” whispered one voice. ”Who's the freak in the 1830 clothes?”

”Why, that? Why, that's the little Edgarton girl,” piped the other voice cautiously. ”It isn't so much the '1830 clothes' as the 1830 expression that gets me! Where in creation--”

”Oh, upon my soul,” groaned the man whose wife ”would live in a hotel.” ”Oh, upon my soul--if there's one thing that I can't stand it's a woman who hasn't any style! If I had my way,” he threatened with hissing emphasis, ”if I had my way, I tell you, I'd have every homely looking woman in the world put out of her misery! Put out of my misery--is what I mean!”

”Ha! Ha! Ha!” chuckled the other voice.

”Ha! Ha! Ha!” gibed both voices ecstatically together.

With quite unnecessary haste Barton sprang to the window and looked out.

It was Eve Edgarton! And she did look funny! Not especially funny, but just plain, every-day little-Eve-Edgarton funny, in a shabby old English tramping suit, with a knapsack slung askew across one shoulder, a faded Alpine hat yanked down across her eyes, and one steel-wristed little hand dragging a mountain laurel bush almost as big as herself. Close behind her followed her father, equally shabby, his shapeless pockets fairly bulging with rocks, a battered tin botany kit in one hand, a dingy black camera-box in the other.

Impulsively Barton started out to meet them, but just a step from the threshold of the piazza door he sensed for the first time the long line of smokers watching the two figures grinningly above their puffy brown pipes and cigars.

”What is it?” called one smoker to another. ”Moving Day in Jungle Town?”

”Ha! Ha! Ha!” t.i.ttered the whole line of smokers. ”Ha!--Ha! Ha!

Ha!--Ha!”

So, because he belonged, not so much to the type of person that can't stand having its friends laughed at, as to the type that can't stand having friends who are liable to be laughed at, Barton changed his mind quite precipitately about identifying himself at that particular moment with the Edgarton family, and whirled back instead to the writing-room. There, by the aid of the hotel clerk, and two bell-boys, and three new blotters, and a different pen, and an entirely fresh bottle of ink, and just exactly the right-sized, the right-tinted sort of letter paper, he concocted a perfectly charming note to little Eve Edgarton--a note full of compliment, of grat.i.tude, of sincere appreciation, a note reiterating even once more his persistent intention of rendering her somewhere, sometime, a really significant service!

Whereupon, thus duly relieved of his truly honest effort at self-expression, he went back again to his own kind--to the prattling, the well-groomed, the ultra-fas.h.i.+onables of both mind and body. And there on the s.h.i.+ning tennis-courts and the soft golf greens, through the late yellow afternoon and the first gray threat of twilight, the old sickening ennui came creeping back to his senses, warring chaotically there with the natural nervous reaction of his recent adventure, till just out of sheer morbid unrest, as soon as the flower-scented, candle-lighted dinner hour was over, he went stalking round and round the interminable piazzas, hunting in every dark corner for Mr. Edgarton and his daughter.

Meeting them abruptly at last in the full glare of the office, he clutched fatuously at Mr. Edgarton's reluctant attention with some quick question about the extraordinary moonlight, and stood by, grinning like any bashful schoolboy, while Mr. Edgarton explained to him severely, as if it were his fault, just why and to what extent the radii of mountain moonlight differed from the radii of any other kind of moonlight, and Eve herself, in absolute spiritual remoteness, stood patiently s.h.i.+fting her weight from one foot to the other, staring abstractedly all the time at the floor under her feet.

Right into the midst of this instructive discourse broke one of Barton's men friends with a sharp jog of his elbow, and a brief, apologetic nod to the Edgartons.

”Oh, I say, Barton!” cried the newcomer, breathlessly. ”That wedding, you know, over across at the Kentons' to-night, with the Viennese orchestra--and Heaven knows what from New York? Well, we've shanghaied the whole business for a dance here to-morrow night! Music! Flowers!

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