The Annals of Ann Part 11

"Anything!" he echoed. "Even push my paper to the hundred thousand mark--or carry a message to Garcia."

"Especially the message to Garcia! Now _couldn't_ you?" she said with a bright smile. "I could do that myself, without even mussing up my white linen blouse!"

Miss Claxton looked up at them with a puzzled look, and Rufe and Cousin Eunice unhitched hands.

"Miss Claxton," Rufe began with a half-teasing twinkle in his eyes (I had heard father telling him a while ago about Miss Claxton being a knocker), "this little affair about the message to Garcia happened a bit this side of the Eocene age, so maybe you haven't bothered your head about it. I might explain that----"

"n.o.body asked you to, sir," she said, with such a rainbow of a smile at him that I was surprised. If she could smile like that at a married man what would she do at a single one? "I know a lot more things than I look to--with my gla.s.ses on! That carrying the message to Garcia was a brave thing to do, even aside from the risks. It is heroic to do the thing at hand. I'm trying to learn that lesson myself. I'm being a schoolmarm and wearing gla.s.ses to look like one, instead of following my natural bent in the scientific field," she wound up, still smiling.

"What's your ambition?" Cousin Eunice said, looking at her wonderingly.

"Knowing what's to be known about Primitive Man," Miss Claxton answered. "He's the only man I ever cared a copper cent about!"

"Mine's writing a book that will make me famous overnight, I don't want to wait to awake some morning and find myself so," Cousin Eunice said, stooping over to set Waterloo's horse up on his wheels, for he would come unfixed every time Waterloo would yank him over a gravel; and all the time we were talking he kept up a chorus of "Fick horte!

Fick horte!"

Rufe said his ambition was never to see an editor's paste-pot again, and he was turning to me to ask what mine is when the conversation was interrupted. I was glad that it was, for I should hate to tell them just what mine is. Somehow it is mostly about Sir Reginald de Beverley, and I'm old enough now to know that he may not be an English lord after all and dress in a coat of mail. He may be just a plain young doctor or lawyer, and we'll have to live in a cottage (only excuse me from a flat, I wouldn't live in a flat with Lord Byron) and maybe we'll just have chicken on Sunday. But as long as he has brown eyes and broad shoulders and lovely teeth I shall manage to do with crackers and peanut b.u.t.ter through the week. A woman will do _anything_ for the man she loves.

But I didn't have to tell them all this, for just then we heard the gate click and saw our friend, Mr. Gayle, coming up the walk.

"There comes old Zephyr," Rufe said with a laugh. "It was the biggest lie on earth to name him Gayle. Even Breeze would have been an exaggeration."

"He's awfully smart," I told Rufe, for I hate to have my friends laughed at. "I know you and Julius joke about him on account of his gentle ways and broad-brimmed hats! Father says it's better to have something _under_ your hat than to have so much style in its looks!"

"Well, he has something under his hat," Cousin Eunice said, "and hat enough to cover twice as much. But I think those old-timey things are becoming to him!"

"What is the subject about which he knows so much?" Miss Claxton asked, following him with her eyes until Dilsey let him in at the front door.

"Heaven," Rufe answered her, "and h.e.l.l. He writes deep psychological stuff for the magazines and they pay him ten cents a word for it. He must spend his dimes building model tenements, for he certainly doesn't buy new hats with them."

"What does he say about Heaven and the other place?" Miss Claxton asked, much to our surprise, for we had thought she didn't care about anything but earth.

"He says they're both in your own heart. The Heaven side comes up when you've done a decent job at your work--and loved your office boy as your own nephew!"

"And----" Miss Claxton kept on.

"And the h.e.l.l part comes into the limelight when you've done anything mean, such as----"

"Spanking your Waterloo when the telephone bell makes you nervous--_not_ when he's bad," Cousin Eunice said, gathering Waterloo up in her arms and loving him. "Him's a precious angel, and mudder's a nasty lady to him lots of times."

"Aunt Mary is sending him out here to find us," Rufe said, as we saw Mr. Gayle coming out of the dining-room door. "I hope she's filled him so full of egg-nog that we can have some fun out of him!"

He had on a Sunday-looking suit of black clothes and a soft black tie in honor of the day, and was really nice-looking as he came up toward us. And Miss Claxton threw away the last one of her pebbles, no matter what they had on their insides, and commenced wiping her hands vigorously with her handkerchief.

"Thank goodness!" I thought as I watched her. "I shall go straight up-stairs and wipe the dust off my diary with my petticoat!"

I reckon Rufe and Cousin Eunice both thought that Mr. Gayle and Miss Claxton had met before, for they didn't offer to introduce them, but I knew they hadn't, so I was the one that had to do it. I had forgotten how _The Ladies' Own Journal_ said it ought to be done, and I was kinder scared anyway; and when I get scared I always make an idiot of myself. So I just grabbed her right hand and his right hand and put them together and said, "Mr. Gayle, do shake hands with Miss Claxton!"

Well, they shook hands, but the others all laughed at me. Cousin Eunice said she was sorry she didn't know they hadn't met before, or she would have introduced them. But Mr. Gayle smiled at me to keep me from feeling bad.

"Never mind," he said, "I'm sure Ann's introduction is as good as anybody's. What she lacks in form she more than makes up for in sincerity."

I thought it was nice of him to say that, but I was so embarra.s.sed that I got away from them as soon as I could. I went out to the kitchen to see if Mammy Lou was ready to stuff the turkey. Lares and Penates were on the floor playing with two little automobiles that Julius had brought them. Mammy Lou was fixing to cut up the liver in the gravy.

"Please don't," I began to beg her, "I'll go halves with Lares and Penates if you'll give it to me!"

"You don't deserve nothin'," she said, trying to look at me and not laugh. "I seen you out thar by the side gate, aggin' 'em on! Reckon you're in your glory, now that you've got a pair of 'em to spy on and write it all out in that pesky little book!"

"Oh, they ain't a pair!" I told her, slicing up the liver into three equal halves.

"They soon will be if they listen to you!"

"Never in this world! She says she never has cared for anybody but a person she calls 'Primitive Man!'"

"Dar now! I bet he fooled her!" she said with great pleasure, for next to a funeral she likes a fooling, and she is always excited when she forgets and says "Dar now." "If he has," she kept on, "she'd better do the nex' best thing and marry Mr. Gayle. He's got as good raisin' as ary man I ever seen, although he's a little pore. But they's _some_ things I don't like about fat husban's--they can't scratch they own back!"

I was glad to keep her mind on marrying, for I thought I'd get a chance at the gizzard too, but she watched it like she watches her trunk-key when her son-in-law's around. I told her to go to the window and see what they were doing now, and she did it, poor old soul! When she came back the gizzard was gone, but she was so tickled that she didn't notice it.

"They've done paired off and gone down by the big tree to knock mistletoe out'n the top," she told me, her face s.h.i.+ning with grease and happiness. "I knowed 'twould be a match! Needn't nuvver tell no n.i.g.g.e.r of my experience that folks is too smart to fall in love!

Ever'body's got a little _grain_ o' sense, no matter how deep it's covered with book-learnin'."

"Oh, they don't have to be smart at all," I told her, talking very fast to divert her mind from the gravy. "Father says if the back of a girl's neck is pretty she can get married if she hasn't sense enough to count the coppers in the contribution box."

"An' he tol' the truth," she said, stopping still with her hands on her hips like she was fixing for a long sermon. "An' furthermore, if she's rich she don't need to have neither. But marryin' for riches is like puttin' up preserves--it looks to be a heap bigger pile beforehan' than afterwards. An' many a man marries a rich girl expectin' a automobile when he don't git nothin' but a baby buggy!"

Mr. Gayle has been coming over so early every morning since that first morning that he met Miss Claxton, and staying so late that I haven't had much time to write. I've been too busy watching. I've often heard Doctor Gordon say that diseases have a "period of incubation," but I believe that love is one disease that doesn't incubate. It just comes, like light does when you switch on the electricity. This morning Mr.

Gayle came so early that Rufe went into the sitting-room and began to poke fun at him, as usual.

"h.e.l.lo, old man," he said, shaking hands with him. "I'm surely glad to see that it's _you_. Thought of course when the door-bell rang so soon after breakfast that it was an enlarged picture agent!"

"No, I'm far from being an enlarged anything," the poor man said, wiping off the perspiration from his forehead, for he must have walked very fast. "In fact, I'm feeling rather 'ensmalled,' as our friend, Ann, might say. I have never before so realized my utter unworthiness!"

"Bosh," Rufe said, slapping him on the shoulder in a friendly way.

"Why, man, you're on to your job as well as anybody I ever saw. Why, your last article in _The Journal for the Cognoscenti_ made me give up every idea of the old-fas.h.i.+oned Heaven I'd hoped for--a place where a gas bill is never presented, and alarm clocks and society editors enter not!"

"Mr. Clayborne would have been worth his weight in platinum as court jester to some melancholy monarch in the middle ages," Miss Claxton said, looking up from her crochet work which mother is teaching her and Cousin Eunice to do, because it has come back into style, to smile at Mr. Gayle.

"I'm not what Ann calls 'smart'!" he said in answer to her, "but I remember enough history to know that the other name for jester is fool. I shan't stay where people call me such names!" So he got up and went out, which gave Cousin Eunice and Waterloo and me an excuse to go too. So we left the lovers alone.

"Well, he's what I call a d.a.m.n fool," Rufe said in a whisper as soon as the door was closed so they couldn't hear. "Coming over here every few minutes in the day, 'totin' a long face,' as mammy says, and hasn't got the nerve to say boo to a goose!"

"Saying boo to a goose wouldn't help his suit any," Cousin Eunice said; "besides, well-regulated young people don't get engaged in three days!"

"What ill-regulated young people you and I must have been!" Rufe said, then dodged Waterloo's ball which she threw at him, saying what a _story_! It was nearly two weeks before they got engaged.

"I advocate getting engaged in two hours when people are as much in love as those two we've just left. Gayle hasn't red blood enough in him to stain a _chigoe's unders.h.i.+rt_!"