Читать книгу William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated) - William Dean Howells - Страница 101

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Gaites was going to stay a week with a friend out on the Point; and after the first day he was so engrossed with the goings-on at Kent Harbor that he pretty well forgot about Burymouth, and the piano of Miss Phyllis Desmond lingered in his mind like the memory of a love one has outlived. He went to the golf links every morning in a red coat, and in plaid stockings which, if they did not show legs of all the desired fulness, attested a length of limb which was perhaps all the more remarkable for that reason. Then he came back to the beach and bathed; at half past one o'clock he dined at somebody's cottage, and afterwards sat smoking seaward in its glazed or canopied veranda till it was time to go to afternoon tea at somebody else's cottage, where he chatted about until he was carried off by his hostess to put on a black coat for seven or eight o'clock supper at the cottage of yet another lady.

There was a great deal more society than there had been in his old college-vacation days, when the Kent Harbor House reigned sole in a perhaps somewhat fabled despotism; but the society was of not less simple instincts, and the black coat which Gaites put on for supper was never of the evening-dress convention. Once when he had been out canoeing on the river very late, his hostess made him go "just as he was," and he was consoled on meeting their bachelor host to find that he had had the inspiration to wear a flannel shirt of much more outing type than Gaites himself had on.

The thing that he had to guard against was not to praise the river sunsets too much at any cottage on the Point; and in cottages on the river, not to say a great deal of the surf on the rocks. But it was easy to respect the amiable local susceptibilities, and Gaites got on so well that he told people he was never going away.

He had arrived at this extreme before he received the note from Mrs. Birkwall, which she made his prompt bread-and-butter letter the excuse of writing him. She wrote mainly to remind him of his promise to stay another day with her husband on his way home through Burymouth; and she alleged an additional claim upon him because of what she said she had made Birkwall do for him. She had made him go down to the freight-depot every day, and see what had become of Phyllis Desmond's piano; and she had not dared write before, because it had been most unaccountably delayed there for the three days that had now passed. Only that morning, however, she had gone down herself with Birkwall; and it showed what a woman could do when she took anything in hand. Without knowing of her approach except by telepathy, the railroad people had bestirred themselves, and she had seen them with her own eyes put the piano-case into a car, and had waited till the train had bumped and jolted off with it towards Mewers Junction. All the ladies of her supper party, she declared, had been keenly distressed at the delay of the piano in Burymouth, and she was now offering him the relief which she had shared already with them.

He laughed aloud in reading this letter at breakfast, and he could not do less than read it to his hostess, who said it was charming, and at once took a vivid interest in the affair of the piano. She accepted in its entirety his theory of its being a birthday-present for the young girl with that pretty name; and she professed to be in a quiver of anxiety at its retarded progress.

"And, by-the-way," she added, with the logic of her sex, "I'm just going to the station to see what's become of a trunk myself that I ordered expressed from Chicago a week ago. If you're not doing anything this morning—the tide isn't in till noon, and there'll be little or no bathing to look at before that—you'd better drive down with me. Or perhaps you're canoeing up the river with somebody?"

Gaites said he was not, and if he were he would plead a providential indisposition rather than miss driving with her to the station.

"Well, anyway," she said, tangentially, "I can get June Alber to go too, and you can take her canoeing afterwards."

But Miss Alber was already engaged for canoeing, and Gaites was obliged to drive off with his hostess alone. She said she did pity him, but she pitied him no longer than it took to get at the express agent. Then she began to pity herself, and much more energetically if not more sincerely, for it seemed that the agent had not been able to learn anything about her trunk, and was unwilling even to prophesy concerning it. Gaites left him to question at her hands, which struck him as combining all the searching effects of a Röntgen-ray examination and the earlier procedure with the rack; and he wandered off, in a habit which he seemed to have formed, toward the freight-house.

He amused himself thinking what he should do if he found Phyllis Desmond's piano there, but he was wholly unprepared to do anything when he actually found it standing on the platform, as if it had just been put out of the freight-car which was still on the siding at the door. He passed instantly from the mood of gay conjecture in which he was playing with the improbable notion of its presence to a violent indignation.

"Why, look here!" he almost shouted to a man in a silk cap and greased overalls who was contemplating the inscription on the slope of its cover, "what's that piano doing here?"

The man seemed to accept him as one having authority to make this demand, and responded mildly, "Well, that's just what I was thinking myself."

"That piano," Gaites went on with unabated violence, "started from Boston at the beginning of the week; and I happen to know that it's been lying two or three days at Burymouth, instead of going on to Lower Merritt, as it ought to have done at once. It ought to have been in Lower Merritt Wednesday afternoon at the latest, and here it is at Kent Harbor Saturday morning!"

The man in the silk cap scanned Gaites's figure warily, as if it might be that of some official whale in disguise, and answered in a tone of dreamy suggestion: "Must have got shifted into the wrong car at Mewers Junction, somehow. Or maybe they started it wrong from Burymouth."

Mrs. Maze was coming rapidly down the platform toward them, leaving the express agent to crawl flaccidly into his den at the end of the passenger-station, with the air of having had all his joints started.

"Just look at this, Mrs. Maze," said Gaites when she drew near enough to read the address on the piano-case. She did look at it; then she looked at Gaites's face, into which he had thrown a sort of stony calm; and then she looked back at the piano-case.

"No!" she exclaimed and questioned in one.

Gaites nodded confirmation.

"Then it won't be there in time for the poor thing's birthday?"

He nodded again.

Mrs. Maze was a woman who never measured her terms, perhaps because there was nothing large enough to measure them with, and perhaps because in their utmost expansion they were a tight fit for her emotions.

"Well, it's an abominable outrage!" she began. She added: "It's a burning shame! They'll never get over it in the world; and when it comes lagging along after everything's over, she won't care a pin for it! How did it happen?"

Gaites mutely referred her, with a shrug, to the man in the silk cap, and he again hazarded his dreamy conjecture.

"Well, it doesn't matter!" she said, with a bitterness that was a great comfort to Gaites. "What are you going to do about it?" she asked him.

"I don't know what can be done about it," he answered, referring himself to the man in the silk cap.

The man said, "No freight out, now, till Monday."

Mrs. Maze burst forth again: "If I had the least confidence in the world in any human express company, I would send it by express and pay the expressage myself."

"Oh, I couldn't let you do that, Mrs. Maze," Gaites protested. "Besides, I don't suppose they'd allow us to take it out of the freight, here, unless we had the bill of lading."

"Well," cried Mrs. Maze, passionately, "I can't bear to think of that child's suspense. It's perfectly heart-sickening. Why shouldn't they telegraph? They ought to telegraph! If they let things go wandering round the earth at this rate, the least they can do is to telegraph and relieve people's minds. We'll go and make the station-master telegraph!"

But even when the station-master was found, and made to understand the case, and to feel its hardship, he had his scruples. "I don't think I've got any right to do that," he said.

"Of coarse I'll pay for the telegram," Mrs. Maze interpolated.

"It ain't that exactly," said the station-master. "It might look as if I was meddling myself. I rather not, Mrs. Maze."

She took fire. "Then I'll meddle myself!" she blazed. "There's nothing to hinder my telegraphing, I suppose!"

"I can't hinder you," the station-master admitted.

"Well, then!" She pulled a bunch of yellow telegraph blanks toward her, and consumed three of them in her comprehensive despatch:

Miss Phyllis Desmond,

Lower Merritt, N. H.

Piano left Boston Monday P. M. Broke down on way to Burymouth, where delayed four days. Sent by mistake to Kent Harbor from Mewers Junction. Forwarded to Lower Merritt Monday.

"There! How will that do?" she asked Gaites, submitting the telegram to him.

"That seems to cover the ground," he said, not so wholly hiding the misgiving he began to feel but that she demanded,

"It explains everything, doesn't it?"

"Yes—"

"Very well; sign it, then!"

"I?"

"Certainly. She doesn't know me."

"She doesn't know me, either," said Gaites. He added: "And a man's name—"

"To be sure! Why didn't I think of that?" and she affixed a signature in which the baptismal name gave away her romantic and impulsive generation—Elaine W. Maze "Now," she triumphed, as Gaites helped her into her trap—"now I shall have a little peace of my life!"