T. Tembarom. Frances Hodgson Burnett

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ kitchen table which Mrs. Bowse scrubbed and put into his hall bedroom, overcrowding it greatly. He turned to Little Ann at moments of desperate uncertainty, but he was man enough to do his work himself. In glorious moments when he was rather sure that Galton was far from unsatisfied with his progress, and Ann had looked more than usually distracting in her aloof and sober alluringness—it was her entire aloofness which so stirred his blood—he sometimes stopped scribbling and lost his head for a minute or so, wondering if a fellow ever COULD “get away with it” to the extent of making enough to—but he always pulled himself up in time.

      “Nice fool I look, thinking that way!” he would say to himself. “She'd throw me down hard if she knew. But, my Lord! ain't she just a peach!”

      It was in the last week of the month of trial which was to decide the permanency of the page that he came upon the man Mrs. Bowse's boarders called his “Freak.” He never called him a “freak” himself even at the first. Even his somewhat undeveloped mind felt itself confronted at the outset with something too abnormal and serious, something with a suggestion of the weird and tragic in it.

      In this wise it came about:

      The week had begun with another blizzard, which after the second day had suddenly changed its mind, and turned into sleet and rain which filled the streets with melted snow, and made walking a fearsome thing. Tembarom had plenty of walking to do. This week's page was his great effort, and was to be a “dandy.” Galton must be shown what pertinacity could do.

      “I'm going to get into it up to my neck, and then strike out,” he said at breakfast on Monday morning.

      Thursday was his most strenuous day. The weather had decided to change again, and gusts of sleet were being driven about, which added cold to sloppiness. He had found it difficult to get hold of some details he specially wanted. Two important and extremely good-looking brides had refused to see him because Biker had enraged them in his day. He had slighted the description of their dresses at a dance where they had been the observed of all observers, and had worn things brought from Paris. Tembarom had gone from house to house. He had even searched out aunts whose favor he had won professionally. He had appealed to his dressmaker, whose affection he had by that time fully gained. She was doing work in the brides' houses, and could make it clear that he would not call peau de cygne “Surah silk,” nor duchess lace “Baby Irish.” But the young ladies enjoyed being besought by a society page. It was something to discuss with one's bridesmaids and friends, to protest that “those interviewers” give a person no peace. “If you don't want to be in the papers, they'll put you in whether you like it or not, however often you refuse them.” They kept Tembarom running about, they raised faint hopes, and then went out when he called, leaving no messages, but allowing the servant to hint that if he went up to Two Hundred and Seventy-fifth Street he might chance to find them.

      “All right,” said Tembarom to the girl, delighting her by lifting his hat genially as he turned to go down the steps. “I'll just keep going. The Sunday Earth can't come out without those photographs in it. I should lose my job.”

      When at last he ran the brides to cover it was not at Two Hundred and Seventy-fifth Street, but in their own home, to which they had finally returned. They had heard from the servant-girl about what the young gentleman from the Sunday Earth had said, and they were mollified by his proper appreciation of values. Tembarom's dressmaker friend also proffered information.

      “I know him myself,” she said, “and he's a real nice gentle-manlike young man. He's not a bit like Biker. He doesn't think he knows everything. He came to me from Mrs. Munsberg, just to ask me the names of fashionable materials. He said it was more important than a man knew till he found out” Miss Stuntz chuckled.

      “He asked me to lend him some bits of samples so he could learn them off by heart, and know them when he saw them. He's got a pleasant laugh; shows his teeth, and they're real pretty and white; and he just laughed like a boy and said: 'These samples are my alphabet, Miss Stuntz. I'm going to learn to read words of three syllables in them.'”

      When late in the evening Tembarom, being let out of the house after his interview, turned down the steps again, he carried with him all he had wanted—information and photographs, even added picturesque details. He was prepared to hand in a fuller and better page than he had ever handed in before. He was in as elated a frame of mind as a young man can be when he is used up with tramping the streets, and running after street-cars, to stand up in them and hang by a strap. He had been wearing a new pair of boots, one of which rubbed his heel and had ended by raising a blister worthy of attention. To reach the nearest “L” station he must walk across town, through several deserted streets in the first stages of being built up, their vacant lots surrounded by high board fencing covered with huge advertising posters. The hall bedroom, with the gas turned up and the cheap, red-cotton comfort on the bed, made an alluring picture as he faced the sleety wind.

      “If I cut across to the avenue and catch the 'L,' I'm bound to get there sometime, anyhow,” he said as he braced himself and set out on his way.

      The blister on his heel had given him a good deal of trouble, and he was obliged to stop a moment to ease it, and he limped when he began to walk again. But he limped as fast as he could, while the sleety rain beat in his face, across one street, down another for a block or so, across another, the melting snow soaking even the new boots as he splashed through it. He bent his head, however, and limped steadily. At this end of the city many of the streets were only scantily built up, and he was passing through one at the corner of which was a big vacant lot. At the other corner a row of cheap houses which had only reached their second story waited among piles of bricks and frozen mortar for the return of the workmen the blizzard had dispersed. It was a desolate-enough thoroughfare, and not a soul was in sight. The vacant lot was fenced in with high boarding plastered over with flaring sheets advertising whiskies, sauces, and theatrical ventures. A huge picture of a dramatically interrupted wedding ceremony done in reds and yellows, and announcing in large letters that Mr. Isaac Simonson presented Miss Evangeline St. Clair in “Rent Asunder,” occupied several yards of the boarding. As he reached it, the heel of Tembarom's boot pressed, as it seemed to him, a red-hot coal on the flesh. He had rubbed off the blister. He was obliged to stop a moment again.

      “Gee whizz!” he exclaimed through his teeth, “I shall have to take my boot off and try to fix it.”

      To accomplish this he leaned against the boarding and Miss Evangeline St. Clair being “Rent Asunder” in the midst of the wedding service. He cautiously removed his boot, and finding a hole in his sock in the place where the blister had rubbed off, he managed to protect the raw spot by pulling the sock over it. Then he drew on his boot again.

      “That'll be better,” he said, with a long breath.

      As he stood on his feet again he started involuntarily. This was not because the blister had hurt him, but because he had heard behind him a startling sound.

      “What's that?” broke from him. “What's that?”

      He turned and listened, feeling his heart give a quick thump. In the darkness of the utterly empty street the thing was unnatural enough to make any man jump. He had heard it between two gusts of wind, and through another he heard it again—an uncanny, awful sobbing, broken by a hopeless wail of words.

      “I can't remember! I can't—remember! O my God!”

      And it was not a woman's voice or a child's; it was a man's, and there was an eerie sort of misery in it which made Tembarom feel rather sick. He had never heard a man sobbing before. He belonged to a class which had no time for sobs. This sounded ghastly.

      “Good Lord!” he said, “the fellow's crying! A man!”

СКАЧАТЬ