Читать книгу Mollie's Substitute Husband - Max McConn - Страница 7

Table of Contents

I have said that Merriam had shifted his chair a little as he lit his second cigarette. A moment later he was looking very hard at a certain pretty woman at a table half way across the room. His heart stopped. At least that is the phrase a novelist seems to be required to use to indicate the sudden pulse of amazement and pleasure and alarm which he certainly felt.

The young woman at whom he was staring had a name which is very important for this story and which I shall presently tell you, but in John Merriam's mind her name was "the prettiest girl," and her other name, which he seldom dared whisper to his heart, was "Mollie June." She was from Riceville--hence the alarm with which his pleasure was mixed,--and during his first four months of teaching, three years before, she had been in his senior class in the High School--the "prettiest girl" in the class and in the school and in the town--and in the State and the United States and the world, if you had asked John Merriam. Advanced algebra with Mollie June in the class had been the most golden of sciences--pleasure squared, delight cubed, and bliss to the nth power. I am not myself absolutely convinced of Mollie June's proficiency in solving quadratic equations, yet the official records of the Riceville High School show that she received the highest mark in the class.

But she was the daughter of James P. Partridge, the owner of all Riceville; that is to say, of the coal mines outside the town, of the grain elevator, of the street car and electric light company, and of the First National Bank. Who was John Merriam, the son of a poor farmer in a southern county, who had worked his way through college and come out with nothing but a B.S. degree, a football reputation that was quite unnegotiable, and three hundred dollars of fraternity debts--an enormous sum,--to mix anything warmer or livelier than a^2-b^2 in his thoughts of a class to which Mollie June Partridge deigned to belong? Even if Mollie June herself did come up to his desk in the assembly room two or three times a week for help in her algebra and spend most of the time asking him about college instead, and join his Young People's Class, which she had previously refused to attend, and allow him to "see her home" from church sociables, and compel that docile magnate, John P. Partridge, her father, to invite the new "professor" to dinner twice during the half year? As well almost might a humble tutor in the castle of a feudal lord have raised his eyes to the baron's daughter.

Almost, but not quite. After all this is a free republic. Even a poor pedagogue is a citizen with a vote and a potential candidate for the presidency--which at least two poor pedagogues have attained. So John Merriam permitted himself to be very happy during those four months and was not in the least hopeless. Only he saw that he must bide his time.

But early in January Mollie June left school, and in a few days it came out that she had left to be married--married to Senator Norman!

Senator Norman was the famous "boy senator" from Illinois--at the time of his election the youngest man who had ever sat in the upper house of Congress. The ruddiness of his cheeks, the abundance of his wavy blond hair, and the athletic jauntiness of his carriage won votes whenever he stumped the State. They went far to counteract malicious insinuations as to the means by which he was rolling up a fortune and his solidity with "interests" which the proletariat viewed with suspicion.

And now, having been a widower for eighteen months--his first wife was older than he and had brought him money,--he had stayed for a week-end during the Christmas holidays with James P. Partridge, who was a cousin of the Senator's first wife and his political lieutenant for a certain group of counties, and had seen Mollie June and wanted her and asked for her and got her, as George Norman always asked for and got whatever he wanted.

All this was, of course, in John Merriam's mind as he gazed across a dozen tables in the Peacock Cabaret at the unchanged profile of the prettiest girl--that is to say, Mrs. Senator Norman. And with it came an acute revival of the desolation of that January and February at Riceville, when he had perceived with the Hebrew sage that "in much learning"--or in little, for that matter--"is much weariness," and that algebra should have been buried with the medieval Arabians who invented it--when even the State championship in basket ball, won by the Riceville Five under his coaching, was only a trouble and a bore.

There is no doubt he stared rudely. At least it would have been rudely if his eyes had held the look which eyes that stare at pretty women commonly hold. But such a look as stood in Merriam's eyes can hardly be rude, however intent and prolonged it may be.

He was merely entranced in the literal sense of that word. Her girlish white shoulders--he had never seen her shoulders before--in Riceville women no more have shoulders than they have legs--the soft brown hair over her ears--even the mode of the day, which called for close net effects and tight knobs, could not conceal its fine softness--the colour in her cheeks, which unquestionably shamed all the neighbouring rosebuds--the quite inexplicable deliciousness of those particular small curves described by the lines of her nose and chin and throat as he saw them in half profile--were more than he could draw his eyes away from for an unconscionable number of seconds. Of her charmingly simple and unquestionably very expensive frock as a separate fact, and of the thin, pale, and elderly, but gorgeously arrayed woman who was her companion, he had no clear perception, but undoubtedly they both contributed, along with the lights and colours and music of the Peacock Cabaret, to the deplorable confusion of his mind.

Out of that confusion there presently arose certain clear images and tones and words, which made up his memory of the last time he had seen and spoken with the present Mrs. Senator Norman.

It was at and after a miscellaneous kind of young people's entertainment which occurred at the Methodist Church on the evening of that bitter day on which the news of her engagement to Senator Norman had run like a prairie fire through the streets and homes of Riceville, fiercely incinerating all other topics of conversation, and consuming also the joy in life, the ambition, the very youth, it seemed to him, of John Merriam. He would not have gone to that entertainment if he could have escaped. But there were to be charades, and he had arranged and coached most of them and was to be in several. He "simply had to go," as Ricevillians might have said.

She was there with her mother. When had she ever come just with her mother, that is to say, without a male escort, before? That fact alone was symbolical of the closing of the gates of matrimony upon her. Naturally, in his pain he followed his primitive and childish instincts and avoided her.

But he was aware--he was almost sure--of her eyes continually following him throughout the evening, and during "refreshments" she deliberately came up to him and said that her mother was obliged to leave early, and would he see her home? Well, of course, if she asked him, he had to. I am afraid that the tone if not the words of his reply said as much, and Mollie June had turned away with quick tears in her eyes. Yet I question whether she was really hurt by his rudeness. For why should he be rude to-night when he had never been so before unless he--to use the most expressive of Americanisms--"cared"?

For the rest of the evening, as a result of those tears, which he had seen, it was his eyes that followed her, while hers avoided him. But he did not speak with her again until "seeing-home" time arrived.

Mollie June lingered till the very end of everything. Perhaps the little girl in her--for she was barely eighteen--clung to this last shred of the familiar, homely social life of her girlhood before she should be plunged into the frightful brilliance of real "society" in terrific places known as Chicago and Washington--as a senator's wife!

But at last they were walking together towards her home.

"Take my arm, please," said Mollie June.

The boys in Riceville always take the girls' arms at night, though never in the daytime. John ought to have taken her arm before. He took it.

"Have you heard that I am going to be married?" asked Mollie June--as if she did not know that everybody in the county knew it by that time.

"Yes," said John, his tone as succinct as his monosyllable.

But girls learn early to deal with the conversational difficulties and recalcitrances of males under stress of emotion.

"It means leaving school and Riceville and--everything," said Mollie June.

John could not fail to catch the note of pitifulness in her sentence. If the prospective marriage had been with any one less dazzling than George Norman, he might have reacted more properly. As it was, he replied with a stilted impersonality which might have been caught from the bright stars shining through the bare branches under which they walked.

"You will have a very rich and brilliant life," he said.

"I suppose so," said Mollie June.

They walked on, he still obediently clutching her arm, in silence; conversation not accompaniable with laughter is so difficult an art for youth.

Presently Mollie June tried again.

"Aren't you sorry I'm leaving the school--Mr. Merriam?"

"I'm very sorry indeed," responded "Professor" Merriam. "You ought to have stayed to graduate."

"I don't care about graduating," said Mollie June.

Again their footsteps echoed in the cold January silence.

Then Mollie June made a third attempt:

"You look ever so much like Mr. Norman."

"I know it," said Merriam. "We're related."

"Oh, are you?"

"On my mother's side. We're second cousins. But the two branches of the family have nothing to do with each other now."

"He has the same hair and the same shape of head and the same way of sitting and moving," Mollie June declared with enthusiasm, "and almost the same eyes and voice. Only his are----"

"Older!" said John Merriam rudely.

"Yes," said Mollie June.

Distances are not great in Riceville. For this reason the ceremony of "seeing home" is usually termed by a circuitous route, sometimes involving the entire circumference of the "nice" part of the town. But on this occasion John and Mollie June had gone directly, as though their object had been to arrive. They reached her home--a matter of two blocks from the church-before another word had been said.

There Mollie June carefully extricated her arm from his mechanical grasp and confronted him.

He looked at her face, peeping out of the fur collar of her coat in the starlight, and for one instant into her eyes.

She was saying: "I am very grateful to you, Merriam, for all the help you have given me--in--algebra."

He ought to have kissed her. She wanted him to. He half divined as much--afterwards.

But the awkward, callow, Anglo-Saxon, rural, pedagogical cub in him replied, "I am glad if I have been able to help you in anything."

That, I judge, was too much for Mollie June. She held out her little gloved hand.

"Good-bye, Mr. Merriam!"

He took her hand. And now appears the advantage of a college education, including amateur dramatics and courses in English poetry and romantic fiction. He did what no other swain in Riceville could have done. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it! At least he kissed the glove which tightly enclosed the hand.

"Good-bye, Mollie June!" he said, using that name for the first time.

Then he dropped her hand, somewhat suddenly, I fear, turned abruptly, and walked rapidly away.

As to what Mollie June said or thought or felt, how should I know? There was nothing for her to do but to go into the house, and that is what she did.