The Shuttle Part 36

"Hully gee!" he said. "The old lady was right. All I've thought about 'em was 'way off. It's bigger than a museum." His approval was immense.

During the absence in which he was supplied with the "wash and brush up," Mount Dunstan found Mr. Penzance in the library. He explained to him what he had encountered, and how it had attracted him.

"You have liked to hear me describe my Western neighbours," he said.

"This youngster is a New York development, and of a different type.

But there is a likeness. I have invited to lunch with us, a young man whom--Tenham, for instance, if he were here--would call 'a bounder.'

He is nothing of the sort. In his junior-a.s.sistant-salesman way, he is rather a fine thing. I never saw anything more decently human than his way of asking me--man to man, making friends by the roadside if I was 'up against it.' No other fellow I have known has ever exhibited the same healthy sympathy."

The Reverend Lewis was entranced. Already he was really quite flushed with interest. As a.s.syrian character, engraved upon sarcophogi, would have allured and thrilled him, so was he allured by the cryptic nature of the two or three American slang phrases Mount Dunstan had repeated to him. His was the student's simple ardour.

"Up against it," he echoed. "Really! Dear! Dear! And that signifies, you say----"

"Apparently it means that a man has come face to face with an obstacle difficult or impossible to overcome."

"But, upon my word, that is not bad. It is strong figure of speech.

It brings up a picture. A man hurrying to an end--much desired--comes unexpectedly upon a stone wall. One can almost hear the impact. He is up against it. Most vivid. Excellent! Excellent!"

The nature of Selden's calling was such that he was not accustomed to being received with a hint of enthusiastic welcome. There was something almost akin to this in the vicar's courteously amiable, aquiline countenance when he rose to shake hands with the young man on his entrance. Mr. Penzance was indeed slightly disappointed that his greeting was not responded to by some characteristic phrasing. His American was that of Sam Slick and Artemus Ward, Punch and various English witticisms in anecdote. Life at the vicarage of Dunstan had not revealed to him that the model had become archaic.

The revelation dawned upon him during his intercourse with G. Selden.

The young man in his cheap bicycling suit was a new development. He was markedly unlike an English youth of his cla.s.s, as he was neither shy, nor laboriously at his ease. That he was at his ease to quite an amazing degree might perhaps have been remotely resented by the insular mind, accustomed to another order of bearing in its social inferiors, had it not been so obviously founded on entire unconsciousness of self, and so mingled with open appreciation of the unantic.i.p.ated pleasures of the occasion. Nothing could have been farther from G. Selden than any desire to attempt to convey the impression that he had enjoyed the hospitality of persons of rank on previous occasions. He found indeed a gleeful point in the joke of the incongruousness of his own presence amid such surroundings.

"What Little Willie was expecting," he remarked once, to the keen joy of Mr. Penzance, "was a hunk of bread and cheese at a village saloon somewhere. I ought to have said 'pub,' oughtn't I? You don't call them saloons here."

He was encouraged to talk, and in his care-free fluency he opened up many vistas to the interested Mr. Penzance, who found himself, so to speak, whirled along Broadway, rushed up the steps of the elevated railroad and struggling to obtain a seat, or a strap to hang to on a Sixth Avenue train. The man was saturated with the atmosphere of the hot battle he lived in. From his childhood he had known nothing but the fever heat of his "little old New York," as he called it with affectionate slanginess, and any temperature lower than that he was accustomed to would have struck him as being below normal. Penzance was impressed by his feeling of affection for the amazing city of his birth.

He admired, he adored it, he boasted joyously of its perfervid charm.

"Something doing," he said. "That's what my sort of a fellow likes--something doing. You feel it right there when you walk along the streets. Little old New York for mine. It's good enough for Little Willie. And it never stops. Why, Broadway at night----"

He forgot his chop, and leaned forward on the table to pour forth his description. The manservant, standing behind Mount Dunstan's chair, forgot himself also, thought he was a trained domestic whose duty it was to present dishes to the attention without any apparent mental processes. Certainly it was not his business to listen, and gaze fascinated. This he did, however, actually for the time unconscious of his breach of manners. The very crudity of the language used, the oddly sounding, sometimes not easily translatable slang phrases, used as if they were a necessary part of any conversation--the blunt, uneducated bareness of figure--seemed to Penzance to make more roughly vivid the picture dashed off. The broad thoroughfare almost as thronged by night as by day. Crowds going to theatres, loaded electric cars, whizzing and clanging bells, the elevated railroad rus.h.i.+ng and roaring past within hearing, theatre fronts flaming with electric light, announcements of names of theatrical stars and the plays they appeared in, electric light advertis.e.m.e.nts of brands of cigars, whiskies, breakfast foods, all blazing high in the night air in such number and with such strength of brilliancy that the whole thoroughfare was as bright with light as a ballroom or a theatre. The vicar felt himself standing in the midst of it all, blinded by the glare.

"Sit down on the sidewalk and read your newspaper, a book, a magazine--any old thing you like," with an exultant laugh.

The names of the dramatic stars blazing over entrances to the theatres were often English names, their plays English plays, their companies made up of English men and women. G. Selden was as familiar with them and commented upon their gifts as easily as if he had drawn his drama from the Strand instead of from Broadway. The novels piled up in the stations of what he called "the L" (which revealed itself as being a New-York-haste abbreviation of Elevated railroad), were in large proportion English novels, and he had his ingenuous estimate of English novelists, as well as of all else.

"Ruddy, now," he said; "I like him. He's all right, even though we haven't quite caught onto India yet."

The dazzle and brilliancy of Broadway so surrounded Penzance that he found it necessary to withdraw himself and return to his immediate surroundings, that he might recover from his sense of interested bewilderment. His eyes fell upon the stern lineaments of a Mount Dunstan in a costume of the time of Henry VIII. He was a burly gentleman, whose ruff-shortened thick neck and haughty fixedness of stare from the background of his portrait were such as seemed to eliminate him from the scheme of things, the clanging of electric cars, and the prevailing roar of the L. Confronted by his gaze, electric light advertis.e.m.e.nts of whiskies, cigars, and corsets seemed impossible.

"He's all right," continued G. Selden. "I'm ready to separate myself from one fifty any time I see a new book of his. He's got the goods with him."

The richness of colloquialism moved the vicar of Mount Dunstan to deep enjoyment.

"Would you mind--I trust you won't," he apologised courteously, "telling me exactly the significance of those two last sentences. In think I see their meaning, but----"

G. Selden looked good-naturedly apologetic himself.

"Well, it's slang--you see," he explained. "I guess I can't help it.

You--" flus.h.i.+ng a trifle, but without any touch of resentment in the boyish colour, "you know what sort of a chap I am. I'm not pa.s.sing myself off as anything but an ordinary business hustler, am I--just under salesman to a typewriter concern? I shouldn't like to think I'd got in here on any bluff. I guess I sling in slang every half dozen words----."

"My dear boy," Penzance was absolutely moved and he spoke with warmth quite paternal, "Lord Mount Dunstan and I are genuinely interested--genuinely. He, because he knows New York a little, and I because I don't. I am an elderly man, and have spent my life buried in my books in drowsy villages. Pray go on. Your American slang has frequently a delightful meaning--a fantastic hilarity, or common sense, or philosophy, hidden in its origin. In that it generally differs from English slang, which--I regret to say--is usually founded on some silly catch word. Pray go on. When you see a new book by Mr. Kipling, you are ready to 'separate yourself from one fifty' because he 'has the goods with him.'"

G. Selden suppressed an involuntary young laugh.

"One dollar and fifty cents is usually the price of a book," he said.

"You separate yourself from it when you take it out of your clothes--I mean out of your pocket--and pay it over the counter."

"There's a careless humour in it," said Mount Dunstan grimly. "The suggestion of parting is not half bad. On the whole, it is subtle."

"A great deal of it is subtle," said Penzance, "though it all professes to be obvious. The other sentence has a commercial sound."

"When a man goes about selling for a concern," said the junior a.s.sistant of Jones, "he can prove what he says, if he has the goods with him. I guess it came from that. I don't know. I only know that when a man is a straight sort of fellow, and can show up, we say he's got the goods with him."

They sat after lunch in the library, before an open window, looking into a lovely sunken garden. Blossoms were breaking out on every side, and robins, thrushes, and blackbirds chirped and trilled and whistled, as Mount Dunstan and Penzance led G. Selden on to paint further pictures for them.

Some of them were rather painful, Penzance thought. As connected with youth, they held a touch of pathos Selden was all unconscious of. He had had a hard life, made up, since his tenth year, of struggles to earn his living. He had sold newspapers, he had run errands, he had swept out a "candy store." He had had a few years at the public school, and a few months at a business college, to which he went at night, after work hours. He had been "up against it good and plenty," he told them. He seemed, however, to have had a knack of making friends and of giving them "a boost along" when such a chance was possible. Both of his listeners realised that a good many people had liked him, and the reason was apparent enough to them.

"When a chap gets sorry for himself," he remarked once, "he's down and out. That's a stone-cold fact. There's lots of hard-luck stories that you've got to hear anyhow. The fellow that can keep his to himself is the fellow that's likely to get there."

"Get there?" the vicar murmured reflectively, and Selden chuckled again.

"Get where he started out to go to--the White House, if you like. The fellows that have got there kept their hardluck stories quiet, I bet.

Guess most of 'em had plenty during election, if they were the kind to lie awake sobbing on their pillows because their feelings were hurt."

He had never been sorry for himself, it was evident, though it must be admitted that there were moments when the elderly English clergyman, whose most serious encounters had been annoying interviews with cottagers of disrespectful manner, rather shuddered as he heard his simple recital of days when he had tramped street after street, carrying his catalogue with him, and trying to tell his story of the Delkoff to frantically busy men who were driven mad by the importunate sight of him, to worried, ill-tempered ones who broke into fury when they heard his voice, and to savage brutes who were only restrained by law from kicking him into the street.

"You've got to take it, if you don't want to lose your job. Some of them's as tired as you are. Sometimes, if you can give 'em a jolly and make 'em laugh, they'll listen, and you may unload a machine. But it's no merry jest just at first--particularly in bad weather. The first five weeks I was with the Delkoff I never made a sale. Had to live on my ten per, and that's pretty hard in New York. Three and a half for your hall bedroom, and the rest for your hash and shoes. But I held on, and gradually luck began to turn, and I began not to care so much when a man gave it to me hot."

The vicar of Mount Dunstan had never heard of the "hall bedroom" as an inst.i.tution. A dozen unconscious sentences placed it before his mental vision. He thought it horribly touching. A narrow room at the back of a cheap lodging house, a bed, a strip of carpet, a washstand--this the sole refuge of a male human creature, in the flood tide of youth, no more than this to come back to nightly, footsore and resentful of soul, after a day's tramp spent in forcing himself and his wares on people who did not want him or them, and who found infinite variety in the forcefulness of their method of saying so.

"What you know, when you go into a place, is that n.o.body wants to see you, and no one will let you talk if they can help it. The only thing is to get in and rattle off your stunt before you can be fired out."

Sometimes at first he had gone back at night to the hall bedroom, and sat on the edge of the narrow bed, swinging his feet, and asking himself how long he could hold out. But he had held out, and evidently developed into a good salesman, being bold and of imperturbable good spirits and temper, and not troubled by hypersensitiveness. Hearing of the "hall bedroom," the coldness of it in winter, and the breathless heat in summer, the utter loneliness of it at all times and seasons, one could not have felt surprise if the grown-up lad doomed to its narrowness as home had been drawn into the electric-lighted gaiety of Broadway, and being caught in its maelstrom, had been sucked under to its lowest depths. But it was to be observed that G. Selden had a clear eye, and a healthy skin, and a healthy young laugh yet, which were all wonderfully to his credit, and added enormously to one's liking for him.

"Do you use a typewriter?" he said at last to Mr. Penzance. "It would cut out half your work with your sermons. If you do use one, I'd just like to call your attention to the Delkoff. It's the most up-to-date machine on the market to-day," drawing out the catalogue.

"I do not use one, and I am extremely sorry to say that I could not afford to buy one," said Mr. Penzance with considerate courtesy, "but do tell me about it. I am afraid I never saw a typewriter."

It was the most hospitable thing he could have done, and was of the tact of courts. He arranged his pince nez, and taking the catalogue, applied himself to it. G. Selden's soul warmed within him. To be listened to like this. To be treated as a gentleman by a gentleman--by "a fine old swell like this--Hully gee!"

"This isn't what I'm used to," he said with genuine enjoyment. "It doesn't matter, your not being ready to buy now. You may be sometime, or you may run up against someone who is. Little Willie's always ready to say his piece."

He poured it forth with glee--the improved mechanical appliances, the cuts in the catalogue, the platen roller, the ribbon switch, the twenty-six yards of red or blue typing, the fifty per cent. saving in ribbon expenditure alone, the new basket s.h.i.+ft, the stationary carriage, the tabulator, the superiority to all other typewriting machines--the price one hundred dollars without discount. And both Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance listened entranced, examined cuts in the catalogue, asked questions, and in fact ended by finding that they must repress an actual desire to possess the luxury. The joy their att.i.tude bestowed upon Selden was the thing he would feel gave the finis.h.i.+ng touch to the hours which he would recall to the end of his days as the "time of his life."

Yes, by gee! he was having "the time of his life."

Later he found himself feeling--as Miss Vanderpoel had felt--rather as if the whole thing was a dream. This came upon him when, with Mount Dunstan and Penzance, he walked through the park and the curiously beautiful old gardens. The lovely, soundless quiet, broken into only by bird notes, or his companions' voices, had an extraordinary effect on him.

"It's so still you can hear it," he said once, stopping in a velvet, moss-covered path. "Seems like you've got quiet shut up here, and you've turned it on till the air's thick with it. Good Lord, think of little old Broadway keeping it up, and the L whizzing and thundering along every three minutes, just the same, while we're standing here! You can't believe it."