Читать книгу Red and Black - Grace S. Richmond - Страница 4

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“HARPS and voices!” ejaculated Robert Black, quite unconscious of the source of his poetic expletive, “how are my poor little two hundred and thirty-one books going to make any kind of a showing here?”

Small wonder that he looked dismayed. He had just caught his first sight of the dignified manse study, with its long rows of empty black walnut bookcases stretching, five shelves high, across three sides of the large room. The manse, fortunately for a bachelor, was furnished as to the main necessities of living, but it wanted all the details which go to make a home. Though the study contained a massive black walnut desk and chair, a big leather armchair, a luxurious leather couch, and a very good and ecclesiastically sombre rug upon its floor, it seemed bare enough to a man who had lately left a warm little room of nondescript furnishing but most homelike atmosphere. To tell the truth, Black was feeling something resembling a touch of homesickness which seemed to centre in an old high-backed wooden rocking-chair cushioned with “Turkey red.” He was wondering if he might send for that homely old chair, and if he should, how it would look among these dignified surroundings. He didn’t care a picayune how it might look—he decided that he simply had to have it if he stayed. Which proved that it really was homesickness for his country parish which had attacked him that morning. Why not? Do you think him less of a man for that?

“Oh, yours’ll go quite a way!” young Tom Lockhart assured him cheerfully. “And you can use the rest of the space for magazines and papers.”

“Thanks!” replied Black, rather grimly grateful for this comforting suggestion. He and the twenty-year-old son of his hostess had become very good friends in the two days which had elapsed since Black’s arrival. He had an idea that Tom was going to be a distinct asset in the days to come. The young man’s fair hair and blue eyes were by no means indicative of softness—being counteracted by a pugnacious snub nose, a chin so positive that it might easily become a menace, and a grin which decidedly suggested impishness.

“I’ll help unpack these, if you like.”

Tom laid hold of the books with a will. Black, his coat off, set them up, thereby indisputably demonstrating that two hundred and thirty-one volumes, even though a round two dozen of them be bulky with learning, certainly do fill an inconceivably small space.

“Well, anyhow,” he said, resting from his labours, and determinedly turning away from the embarrassing testimony of the bookshelves as to his resources, to the invitation of the massive desk to be equipped with the proper appliances to work, “a few pictures and things will help to make it look as if somebody lived here. I’ve several pretty good photographs and prints I thought I’d frame when I got here—I’ve been saving them up for some time.”

He exhibited the collection with pride—they had lain across the top of the books. Tom Lockhart hung over them critically.

“They’re bully!” was his judgment. “Not a bit what I’d have expected. Not a saint or a harp among ’em. Oh, gee!—that horse race is great! Where’d you get that? I mean—it’s foreign, isn’t it?”

Black laughed. “That’s just a bit of a hurdle race we had in a little town down South. I’m on one of those horses.”

“You are! Oh, yes—I see—on the front one! Why, say—” he turned to Black, enthusiasm lighting his face—“you’re one of those regular horse-riding Southerners. This is on your family estate, I’ll wager.”

Black’s face flushed a little, but his eyes met the boy’s frankly. “I was born in Scotland, and came over here when I was sixteen. I worked for the man who lived in that house back there at the left. He let me ride his horses. I broke the black one for him—and rode him to a finish in that race. I was only seventeen then.”

Tom stared for a minute before his manners came to the rescue. “That’s awfully interesting,” he said then, politely. Black could see the confusion and wonderment in his mind as plainly as if the boy had given expression to it. If the information had let Tom down a little, the next instant he rallied to the recognition that here was a man out of the ordinary. Tom was not a snob, but he had never before heard a minister own to “working” for anybody, and it had startled him slightly. But when he regarded Black, he saw a man who, while he looked as if he had never worked for anybody, had not hesitated to declare that he had. Tom thought he liked the combination.

“If you could tell me of a good place to get these framed,” Black said, gathering up the photographs and prints as he spoke, “I believe I’ll have it done right away. It’s the one thing that’ll make this big house seem a little more like home.”

“That’s right. And I can tell you a peach of a place—in fact I’ll take you there, if you want to go right now. It’s on our way back home. By the way—” young Tom glanced round the big bare room—“if there’s any stuff you want to get for the house to give it a kind of a jolly air, you know, you’ll find it right there, at Jane Ray’s. She can advise you, too.”

“I don’t suppose I’ll get anything but the frames,” Black answered cautiously, as the two went out together. He had received an advance on his new salary, and therefore he had more money in his pocket than he had ever had before at one time, but he was too much in the habit of needing to count every penny to think of starting out to buy anything not strictly necessary. And already he knew Tom for the usual careless spender, the rich man’s son. Very likely, he thought, this place to which Tom was to take him was the most expensive place in the suburban town. On second thought, he decided to take along only two of his pictures—till he knew the prices he must pay.

It had not been a particularly busy morning for Jane Ray. She was occupied with only one customer at the moment when Robert Black and young Thomas Lockhart came down the side street upon which fronted her shop—a side street down which many feet were accustomed to turn, in search of Jane and her wares.

The customer with whom she was occupied stood with her at the rear of the shop before several specimens of antique desks and chairs. All about were other pieces, some of them proclaiming themselves rather rare. Jane Ray herself also looked rather rare—for a shopkeeper, inasmuch as she did not look like a shopkeeper at all, though the chaste severity of her business attire rivalled that of her latest acquired possession over which that morning she was gloating—a genuine Adam mirror. This mirror reflected faithfully Jane’s smooth, chestnut brown head, her slightly dusky skin with an underlying tinge of pink, her dark eyes which held a spice of mischief in spite of their cool alertness of glance, her faintly aggressive chin—which meant that she could argue with you about the value of her goods and hold her own, and in the end convince you, without making you unhappy about it—which is a rare accomplishment, especially in so young a woman as was Miss Ray.

Robert Black and Tom, the latter self-constituted guide to furnishing a manse with what might be called its superfluous necessities, entered the shop and stood waiting. Jane saw them in her Adam mirror, but she continued to discuss with her other customer the relative merits of a Chippendale desk having all manner of hidden springs and drawers in it, with those of a Sheraton pouch-table, a work-table with a silken bag beneath it, and essentially feminine in its appeal. The customer was making a present to his wife, and had fled to Jane in this trying emergency—as did many another man. Jane always knew.

“Isn’t this some place?” murmured young Lockhart, proudly, hanging over a glass show-case on a cherry gate-table. “Ever get into a woman’s shop that catered to men like this one? Look at this case of pipes—aren’t they stunners? She knows all there is to know about every last thing she sells, and what’s more, she never keeps anything but good stuff. Some of it’s pretty rare, and all of it’s corking. Look at those cats’ eyes!”

But Black had caught sight of certain headlines in a New York daily lying beside the case of semi-precious stones which had attracted Tom. It was a late morning edition, and this suburban town lay too far from New York for the later morning editions to reach it before early afternoon—anyhow, they were not to be had at the news-stands before two o’clock, as Black had discovered yesterday. He seized the paper, wondering how this woman shopkeeper had achieved the impossible. He was a voracious reader of war-news, this Scotsman by blood and American to the last loyal drop of it. But he was not satisfied with America’s part in the great conflict. For this was April, nineteen sixteen, and the thing had been going on for almost two years.

He devoured the black headlines.

“NO BREAK IN THE FRENCH LINES YET.

SEVENTH WEEK OF THE STRUGGLE AT VERDUN

TOTAL GAIN ONLY FOUR TO FIVE MILES

ON A THIRTY-FIVE MILE FRONT.”

He flamed into low, swift speech, striking the paper before him with his fist. Tom, listening, forgot to gaze upon the contents of the case before him.

“Those French—aren’t they magnificent? Why aren’t we there, fighting by their sides? Oh, we’ll get there yet, but it’s hard to wait. Think of those fellows—holding on two long, anxious years! And they came over here—Lafayette and the rest—and poured out their blood and their money for us. And we think we’re doing something when we send them a little food and some tobacco to buck up on!”

“I say—do you want to fight—a minister? Why, I thought all your profession asked for was peace!” Young Tom’s tone was curious. He did not soon forget the look in the face of the man who answered him.

“Peace! We do want peace—but not peace without honour! And no minister fit to preach preaches anything like that! Don’t think it of us!”

“Well, I used to hear Doctor Curtin—the man before you. He seemed to think—— But I didn’t agree with him,” Tom hastened to say, suddenly deciding it best not to quote the pacific utterances of the former holder of the priestly office. “I thought we ought to go to it. If this country ever does get into it—though Dad thinks it’ll all be settled this year—you bet I’ll enlist.”

“Enlist! I should say so!” And Black took up the paper again, eagerly reading aloud the account which followed the headlines of the sturdy holding of the fiercely contested ground at Verdun—that name which will be remembered while the world lasts.

He looked up at length to find that the other customer had gone, and that Miss Ray, the shopkeeper, had come forward. He looked into a face which reflected his own pride in the French prowess, and forgot for the instant that he had come to buy of her or that she was there to sell.

“It’s great, isn’t it—the way they are holding?” she said, in a pleasant, low voice.

“Great?—it’s glorious! By the way—how do you get hold of this late edition so early?”

“Have it sent up by special messenger from the city. Otherwise it would be held over with the rest of the papers till the two o’clock train.”

Tom broke in. “Pretty clever of you, I say, Miss Ray. Just like the rest of your business methods—always ahead of the other fellow!”

“Thank you, Mr. Lockhart,” Miss Ray answered. “It wouldn’t do to let one’s methods become as antique as one’s goods in this case, would it?”

“Miss Ray, I want to present my friend, Mr. Black.” Tom forgot his new friend’s title as he made this introduction, but of course it didn’t matter. Though Miss Ray seldom attended church anywhere, she could hardly fail, in the talkative suburban town, to know that at the “Stone Church” there was a new man. “He wants to get some of his pictures framed, and of course I led him here,” added Tom, with his boyish grin. He looked at Miss Ray with his usual frankly admiring gaze. No doubt but she was worth it. Not often does a woman shopkeeper achieve the subtle effect of being a young hostess in her own apartments as did Jane Ray. And, as every woman shopkeeper knows, that is the highest, as it is the most difficult, art of shopkeeping.

She scanned the pictures—one that of the hurdle race, the other a view of a country road, with a white spired church in the distance. In no time she had them fitted into precisely the right frames, these enhancing their values as well-chosen frames do. Delighted but still cautious, Black inquired the prices. Miss Ray mentioned them, adding the phrase with which he was familiar, “with the clerical discount.”

“Thank you!” acknowledged Black. “What are they without the discount, please?”

Miss Ray glanced at him. “I am accustomed to give it,” she observed.

“I am accustomed not to take it,” said the Scotsman, firmly. “But I’m just as much obliged.”

She smiled, and told him the regular price. He counted this out, expressed his pleasure in having found precisely what he wanted, and led the way out.

Jane Ray looked after his well-set shoulders, noting that he did not put his hat upon his close-cut, inclined-to-be-wirily-curly black hair until he had reached the street. Then she looked down at the money in her hand. “Wouldn’t take a discount—and didn’t ask me to come to his church,” she commented to herself. “Must be rather a new sort.” She then promptly dismissed him from her thoughts—until later in the day, when the memory was brought back to her by another incident.

It was well along in the afternoon, and she had just sold a genuine Eli Terry “grandfather” clock at a fair profit, and had bargained for and secured several very beautiful pieces of Waterford glass which she had long coveted. A succession of heavy showers had cleared her shop, and she had found time to open a long roll which the expressman had delivered in the morning, when the shop door admitted a person to whom she turned an eager face.

“Oh, I’m glad it’s you!” she said. “Come and see what I have now!”

“Nothing doing,” replied R. P. Burns, M.D., with, however, a smile which belied his words. “I want a present for a sick baby I’m going to fix up in the morning. One of those painted Russian things of yours—the last boy went crazy over ’em. No time for antiques.”

“This isn’t an antique—it’s the last word from the front, and you’ll go crazy over it,” replied Miss Ray. Nevertheless she left the roll and went to a corner in the back of the shop given over to all sorts of foreign made and fascinating wooden toys. She selected a bear with a wide smile and feet which walked, and a gay-hued parrot on a stick, and took them to the big man who was waiting, like Mercury, poised on an impatient foot. While he counted out the change she slipped over to her roll of heavy papers, took out one, and when he looked up again it was straight into a great French war poster held at the length of Jane’s extended arms. He stared hard at it, and well he might, for it was by one of the most famous of French artists, whose imagination had been flaming with the vision of the desperate day.

“Well, by Joe!” Burns ejaculated, his hurry forgot. “I say——”

The poster’s owner waited quietly, lost to view behind the big sheet. Burns studied every detail of the picture, losing no suggestion indicated by the clever lines of the inspired pencil. It was only a rough sketch, impressionistic to the last degree, yet holding unspoken volumes in each bold outline. Then he drew a deep breath.

“Where did you get it?” he asked, as Jane lowered the poster. His eye went back to the roll lying half opened on a mahogany table near by.

“They were sent over by an officer I know—straight from Paris. That isn’t the most wonderful one by half, but I want you to see the rest when you’re not so rushed for time.”

“I’m not particularly rushed,” replied Burns, with a grin. “At least, I can stop if you’ve any more like this. I have to tear in and out of your place, you know, because there’s always some idiot lurking behind one of your screens to leap out and ask me searching questions about patients. If you’ll bar your doors to the public some day, I’ll come and spend an hour gazing at your stuff. Let’s see the posters, please.”

Jane spread them out, one after another, till half the shop was covered. Burns walked from poster to poster, intent, frowning with interest, his quick intelligence recognizing the extraordinary impressions he was getting, his own imagination firing under the stimulus of an art at its marvellous best. Before one of the smaller posters he lingered longest—a wash drawing in colour of a poilu holding his child in his arms, with its mother looking into his face.

“He’s just a kid, that fellow,” he said, in a smothered tone, “just a kid, but he’s giving ’em both up. He won’t come back—somehow you know that. And—it doesn’t seem to matter, if he helps save his country. See here—you ought to do something with these. If the people of this town could see them, a few more of them might wake up to the idea that there’s a war on somewhere.”

“As soon as some English ones come I’ve sent for I intend to have an exhibition, here in my shop, and sell them—for the benefit of French and Belgian orphans. I expect to get all kinds of prices. Will you auction them off for me?”

“You bet I will—if I can do it explosively enough. I’d do anything on earth for a little chap like that.” He indicated a wistful Belgian baby at the edge of a group of children. “Here are our youngsters, fed up within an inch of their lives, and these poor little duffers living on scraps, and too few of those. Oh, what a contrast! As for ourselves—we come around and buy antiques to make our homes more stunning!”

He looked her in the eye, and she looked steadily back. Then she went over to an impressive Georgian desk, opened a drawer and took out a black-bound book. Returning, she silently held it out to him. It was a text book on nursing, one of those required in a regulation hospital course.

“Eh? What?” he ejaculated, taking the book. “Studying, are you—all by yourself? How far are you?” He flipped the pages. “I see. Are you serious?—You, a successful business woman? What do you want to do it for?”

“Absolutely serious. This country will go into the war some day—it must, or I can’t respect it any more. And when it does—well, keeping an antique shop will be the deadest thing there is. I’ll nail up the door and go ‘over there.’”

“And not to collect curios this time?” His bright hazel eyes were studying her intently.

“Hardly. To be of use, if I can. I thought the more I knew of nursing——”

“You can’t get very far alone, you know.”

“I can get far enough so that when I do manage to take a course I can rush it—can’t I?”

“Don’t know—hard to cut any red tape. But all preparation counts, of course. Well—I’ll give you a question to answer that’ll show up what you do know.”

He proceeded to do this, considering for a minute, and then firing at her not one but a series of interrogations. These were not unkindly technical, but designed to test her practical knowledge of the pages—which according to the marker he had found—she had evidently lately finished. The answers she gave him appeared to satisfy him, though he did not say so. Instead, closing the book with a snap, he said:

“When you sail my wife and I will be on the same ship. We’d be there now if we had our way—it’s all we talk about. Well——”

And he was about to say that he must hurry like mad now to make up for time well lost, when the shop door opened to admit out of a sharp dash of rain a customer who was trying to shelter a flat package beneath his coat. For the second time that day Robert Black was bringing pictures to be framed; in fact, they were the rest of the pile which he had not ventured to bring the first time, lest Miss Ray’s prices be too high for him.

Red gave him one look, and would have fled, but Black did not make for the big doctor with outstretched hand—in fact, he did not seem to see him. At the very front of the shop stood a particularly distinguished looking Hepplewhite sideboard, its serpentine front exquisitely inlaid with satinwood, its location one to catch the eye. It caught Black’s eye—but not because of any cunning design of maker or shopkeeper. Having filled the available space in the rear of the shop with her war posters, Jane had worked toward the front, and the last and most splendid of them she had propped upon the sideboard. In front of it Black now came to a standstill, and Red, intending to leave the place in haste at sight of the minister he was in no hurry to meet, involuntarily paused to note the effect upon the “Kid”—as he persisted in calling him—of the poster’s touchingly convincing appeal.

It was a drawing in black and white of a French mother taking leave of her son, that subject which has employed so many clever pens and brushes since the war began, but than which there is none more universally powerful in its importunity. The indomitable courage in the face of the Frenchwoman had in it a touch beyond that of the ordinary artist to convey—one could not analyze it, but it gripped the heart none the less, as Red himself could testify. He now watched it grip Black.

Without taking his eyes from the picture Black propped his umbrella against a chair, laid his hat and his package upon it, and stood still before the Frenchwoman and her boy, unconscious of anything else. And as he stood there, slowly his hands, hanging at his sides, became fists which clenched themselves. Red, observing, his own hand upon the big wrought-iron latch of the door, paused still a moment longer. The “Kid” cared, did he? How much did he care, then? Red found himself rather wanting to know.

Black looked up at last, saw the other man, saw that he was the quarry he was so anxious to run down, but only said, as his gaze returned to the poster, “And she’s only one of thousands, all with a spirit like that!”

“Only one,” Red agreed. “They’re astonishing, those Frenchwomen.” Then he went on out and closed the door behind him.

After he had gone he admitted to himself that since his wife was a member of this man’s church, and Black probably knew that fact, he himself might have stayed long enough to shake hands. At close range his eyesight, trained to observe, had not been able to avoid noting that Black was no boy, after all. There had been that in the face he had momentarily turned toward Red to show plainly that he was in the full first maturity of manhood. It may be significant that from this moment, in whatever terms Red spoke of the minister at home when he was forced by the exigencies of conversation to mention him at all, he ceased to call him “the Kid.” So, though Black did not know it, he had passed at least one barrier to getting to know the man he meant to make his friend.