The Purple Heights Part 15

It was then half-after four, and the train they were to take didn't leave until half-after seven.

"What would you like to do?" he asked.

"Can I go to the movies?"

He thought it an excellent idea. It would give him some idea of the girl's mental processes; the psychology of the proletariat, he thought, could be studied to advantage in their reaction to the movies.

He sat beside her for an unhappy hour while a famous screen comedian did the things with his feet and his backbone for which his managers paid him more in one year than the United States pays its Presidents in ten. At each impossible climax Nancy shrieked with laughter, the loud, delighted laughter of a pleased child. Her enthusiasm for the slapstick artist provoked him, but at the same time that gay laughter tickled his ears pleasantly. There's plenty of good in a girl who can laugh like that! After the grimacing genius there followed a short drama of stage mother-love, in which the angel-child dies strenuously in his little white bed. Nancy dabbled her eyes, and blew her nose with what her captious companion thought unnecessary vigor.

"Ain't it movin'?"

"Yes. Moving pictures," was the cold response. And to himself he was saying, defiantly: "Well, what else could I expect? She's not a whit worse than the vast majority! She's got the herd-taste. That's perfectly natural, under the circ.u.mstances. When I get her well in hand, she will be different."

"You don't like funny things, an' you got no feelin' for sad things," she ruminated, as they left the theater. In silence they walked back to their hotel.

The bulk of her purchases had been sent from the store, and a huge parcel awaited her in her room. It enchanted her to go over these new possessions, to gloat over her new toilet articles, to sniff at the leather of her traveling-kit. The smell of new leather was always to linger subconsciously in Nancy's memory; it was the smell of adventure and of change.

They dined together in Mr. Champney's sitting-room, although she would have preferred the public dining-room. Mr. Champneys was an abstemious man, but the girl was frankly greedy with the nave greed of one who had been heretofore stinted. She had seldom had what she really craved, and at best she had never had enough of it. To be allowed to order what and as much as she pleased, to be served first, to have her wishes consulted at all, was a new, amazing, and altogether delightful experience. Everything was brand-new to her.

She had never before traveled in a sleeping-car. It delighted her to watch the deft porter make up the berths; she decided that the peculiar etiquette of sleeping-cars required that all travelers, male and female, should be driven to bed by lordly colored men in white jackets, and there left in cramped misery with nothing but an uncertain, rustling curtain between them and the world; this, too, at an hour when n.o.body is sleepy. Nancy wondered to see free white citizens meekly obey their dusky tyrant. She got into her own lower berth, grateful that she hadn't to climb like a cat into an upper.

She lay there staring, while the train whizzed through the night.

This had been the most momentous day of her life. That morning she had been the hopeless slavey in the Baxter kitchen, an unpaid drudge with her hand against every man and every man's hand against her.

She had been bullied and beaten, she had eaten leavings, and worn cast-offs. Since her mother's death she had known the life of an uncared-for child, the minimum of care measured against the maximum of labor squeezed out of it. Until to-day her fate had been the fate of those who approach the table of Life with unshod feet and unwashen hands.

And to-night all that was changed. She was here, flying farther and farther away from all she had known. She wondered if she were not dreaming it. Panicky at that, she sat up in her berth, pressed the b.u.t.ton that turned on the electric light, slipped her new kimono about her, and looked long and earnestly at the new clothes within reach of her hand. There they were, real to her touch; there was her fine new hand-bag; and most real of all was the feel of the money in it. Nancy fingered the money, thoughtfully smoothing out the bills.

"As soon as we are settled, you will have your allowance, and I shall of course provide you with a check-book," Mr. Champneys had told her. "In the meanwhile you will naturally want money for such little things as you may need." And he had given her twenty five-dollar bills. She had received the money dumbly. This had been the crowning miracle--for she had never in the whole course of her life had so much as one five-dollar bill to do as she pleased with.

She sat looking at the money, concrete proof of the reality of the change that had befallen her, and wondered, and wondered. With a sigh of content she thrust the hand-bag under her pillow, folded her kimono at the foot of her berth, switched out the light, and presently fell asleep.

In his berth opposite hers, Mr. Chadwick Champneys, more sleepless even than Nancy, was tabulating his estimate of the young woman he had acquired. It ran something like this:

Looks: bad; _may_ improve.

Manners: worse; _must_ improve. Particularly in speech.

Appet.i.te: that of the seventeen-year locust. Must be restrained, to prevent an early death.

Character in general: suspend judgment until further study.

General summary of personal appearance: Nice teeth on which a little dentistry will work wonders. Not a bad figure, but doesn't know how to carry herself; has a villainous fas.h.i.+on of slouching, with her hands on her hips. Plenty of hair, but of terrifying redness; sullen expression of the eyes; fiendish profusion of freckles: may have to be skinned. Excellent nose. Speaks with appalling frankness at times but is not talkative.

What must be done for her? _Everything_.

He groaned, turned over, and after a while managed to sleep.

Sufficient to the day was the red hair thereof; he couldn't afford to lie awake worrying about to-morrow.

He had long since decided upon New York as a residence until all his plans had matured. One had greater freedom to act, and far more privacy, in so large a city. They would stay at some quiet hotel until after the marriage; then he and Nancy would occupy the house he had recently purchased, in the West Seventies. It was a fine old house with a glimpse of near-by Central Park for an outlook, and what he had paid for it would have purchased half Riverton. He wanted its large, high-ceilinged rooms to be furnished as the old house in Carolina had been furnished, this being his standard of all that was desirable. He wished for Peter's wife such a background as Peter's forebears had known; and Peter's wife must be trained to appreciate and to fit into it, that's all!

The New York hotel, with its deft and deferential servants who seemed to antic.i.p.ate her wishes, its luxury, its music, its s.h.i.+fting, splendidly dressed patrons, its light and glitter, filled Nancy with the same wonder that had fallen upon Aladdin when he found himself in the magic cave with all its treasures gleaming before his astounded, ignorant young eyes.

She hadn't thought the whole world contained so many people as she saw in New York in one day. Fifth Avenue amazed and absorbed more than it delighted her. The expressionless expressions of the women, their hand-made faces, their smart shoes, the way they wore their hair, the way they wore their clothes; the men's air of being well dressed, of having money to spend, of appearing importantly busy at any cost; a certain pretentiousness, as if everything were shown at once and there were no reserve of power, nothing held in disciplined abeyance, interested her profoundly. She had a native shrewdness.

"They're just like the same kind of folks back home, but there's more of 'em here," she decided.

The huge policemen she saw at every turn, lordly and ma.s.sive monoliths rising superbly above lesser humanity, filled her with the deepest respect and admiration. The mere policemen in her home town were to these magnificent beings as daubs to t.i.tians, as pigmies to t.i.tans. If in those first days the girl had been called upon to do the seven bendings and the nine knockings before the one New York inst.i.tution which impressed her most profoundly, she undoubtedly would have singled out one of those mastodons a-bossing everything and everybody, with a prize-ham paw.

She was cold to the Woolworth Building, as indifferent to the Sherman monument as Mr. Chadwick Champneys was acridly averse to it, and not at all interested in the Public Library. The Museum of Natural History failed to win any applause from her; the Metropolitan Museum bored her interminably, there was so much of it.

Most of the antiquities she thought so much junk, and the Egyptian and a.s.syrian remains were so obviously the plunder of old graveyards that she couldn't for the life of her understand why anybody should wish to keep them above ground.

Mr. Champneys explained, patiently. He wished, by way of aiding and abetting the education he had in view for her, to arouse her interest in these remains of a lost and vanished world.

She stood by the gla.s.s case that contains the old brown mummied priest with his shaven skull, his long, narrow feet, his flattened nose and fleshless hands, and the mark of the embalmer's stone knife still visible upon his poor old empty stomach. And she didn't like him at all. There was something grisly and repellent to her in the idea that living people should make of this poor old dead man a spectacle for idle curiosity.

"There was a feller in our town used to keep stuffed snakes an'

monkeys an' birds, an' dried gra.s.shoppers an' bugs an' things like that in gla.s.s cases; but I never dreamed in all my born life that anybody'd want to keep dried people," she commented disgustedly. "I don't see no good in it: it's sickenin'." She turned her back upon mummied Egypt with a gesture of aversion. "For Gawdsake let's go see somethin' alive!"

He looked at her a bit helplessly. Plainly, this young person's education wasn't to be tackled off-hand! Agreeably to her wishes he took her to a certain famous shop filled at that hour with fas.h.i.+onable women wonderfully groomed and gowned. Here, seated at a small table, lingering over her ice-cream, Nancy was all observant eyes and ears. Not being a woman, however, Mr. Champneys was not aware that her proper education was distinctly under way.

A day or two later he took her to the Bronx Zoo. Here he caught a glimpse of Nancy Simms that made him p.r.i.c.k up his ears and pull his mustache, thoughtfully. He had discovered how appallingly ignorant she was, how untrained, how undisciplined. To-day he saw how really young she was. She ran from cage to cage. Her laughter made the corners of his mouth turn up sympathetically.

There was something pathetic in her eager enjoyment, something so fresh and unspoiled in that laughter of hers that one felt drawn to her. When she forgot to narrow her eyes, or to furrow her forehead, or to screw up her mouth, she was almost attractive, despite her freckles! Her eyes, of an agaty gray-green, were transparently honest. She had brushed the untidy mop of red hair, parted it in the middle, and wore it in a thick bright plait, tied with a black ribbon. She wore a simple middy blouse and a well-made blue skirt.

Altogether, she looked more like a normal young girl than he had yet seen her.

The Zoo enchanted her. She hurried from house to house. Once, she told him, when she was a little kid, a traveling-man had taken her to a circus, because he was sorry for her. That was the happiest day she had ever spent; it stood out bright and golden in her memory.

There had been a steam-piano hoo-hooing "Wait till the clouds roll by, Jenny." Wasn't a steam-piano perfectly grand? She liked it better than anything she'd ever heard. She'd long ago made up her mind that if she was ever really rich and had a place of her own, she'd have a big circus steam-piano out in the barn, and she'd play it on Sundays and holidays--_hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo-hoo_--like that, you know.

And to-day reminded her of that long-ago circus day, with even more animals to look at! She had never seen as many different animals as she wanted to see, until now. She admitted that she sort of loved wild things--she even liked the wild smell of 'em. There was something in here--she touched her breast lightly--that felt kin to them.

There was not the usual horde of visitors, that day being a pay-day.

A bearded man with a crutch was showing one or two visitors around, and at a word from him a keeper unlocked a cage door, to allow a young chimpanzee to leap into his arms. It hugged him, exhibiting extravagant affection; it thrust out its absurd muzzle to kiss his cheek, and patted him with its small, leathery, unpleasantly human hands.

"It's just like any other baby," said the keeper, petting it.

"I sure hope it ain't like any _I_'ll ever have," said Nancy, so navely that the man with the crutch laughed. He looked at her keenly.

"Go over and see the baby lion," he suggested; and he added, smiling, "It's got red hair."

"It can afford to have red hair, so long as it's a lion," said Nancy, st.u.r.dily; and she added, reflectively: "I'd any day rather have me a lion-child with red hair, than a monkey-child with any kind of hair."

Somehow that blunt comment pleased Mr. Champneys. When he took his charge back to their hotel that evening, it was with something like a glimmering of real hope in his heart.

The next day, as he joined her at lunch, he said casually:

"I had a message from my nephew this morning. He will be here in a few days."

She turned pale; the hand that held her fork began to tremble.

"Is it--soon?" she asked, almost unaudibly.