Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 7

LTHOUGH the dowdy old Massapauk, with its carpeted halls and its creaking rope lift, had completely lapsed into second-rateness under the shadow of its mightier rival, the Stansfield, it liked to cherish the wholly unfounded illusion that it still held the affections of the "conservative element," which had driven to it in traps and victorias in the days of its glory. Tears before, the whole Bellsmith tribe—colored valet, ladies'-maids, old aunts, and all, a company of never less than eight or ten souls—had been accustomed, once every year, to descend upon the Massapauk in a majestic caravan headed, patriarchally, by Arnold Bellsmith the senior and remain there for two or three weeks to escape the nervous ordeal of spring cleaning with its accompanying horrors of scaffoldings and plasterers. It had become almost a rite, a gracious official sojourn, but Arnold Bellsmith had now hardly been inside the place for three or four years and, at sight of him, the old head waiter greeted him with an amazed enthusiasm that was almost pathetic.

It was an enthusiasm that was not lost on Tilly Marshall, and as they passed into the dining-room, with its old steel-engravings and its wooden electric fans like propeller-blades hung permanently from the chandeliers, she stole another and more critical glance at her companion. It had not occurred to her previously to wonder particularly who or what he might be, beyond the doctor's assurance that he might prove amusing and beyond her own hope that he might offer some slight variation to the most dismal succession of months she had ever known in her life. Locating him furtively beyond the footlights during the performance, she had stamped him, by his sleek head and sober dinner-coat, as belonging to the "rising young lawyer type" that she saw incessantly in provincial audiences. His slow and embarrassed but somehow unshakable and authoritative way of speaking in their few brief minutes after the performance had completely dispelled that impression. She had then formed one of those unreasoning but remarkably accurate intuitions that he had something to do with a library. The general words "book-plates" and "prints" had begun to associate themselves with the image she had of him in her mind, but, while head waiters have, no doubt, a decent respect for book-plates, she saw now by the reception accorded Bellsmith at the Massapauk that even her second impression could be true only in some widely associated sense. Oddly enough, the head waiter's attitude prepared her not for the best but for the worst.

"Tell me," she said suddenly, as soon as they were seated and their order given (to the august paternal pad of the head waiter himself), "you don't, by any chance, manufacture commercial fertilizers? Or plumbing supplies?" Bellsmith looked up at her utterly aghast.

"Commercial fertilizers?" he echoed. "What do you mean?"

The girl lauded. "You mustn't mind me if I am impertinent, but I couldn't help seeing, by the way the head waiter treated you, that you are some one important. That's Clue No. 1. Then, when you began to talk there by the dressing-rooms I got the idea that you were a student or a tutor or an artist or something of that kind. That's Clue No. 2, but I have always found that when a man looks like an artist it means that he is a horse-dealer and when he looks like a horse-dealer it means that he is a man-milliner. That's Clue No. 3. So I reason it out that, as you look like a scholar or an artist but as head waiters seem to respect you I must be prepared to face the fact that you make plumbing supplies. Now do you see what I mean?"

Bellsmith smiled faintly. "Yes, I see," he replied; and somewhat to her amazement, for it must be frankly admitted that, with the fine intellectual intolerance of her kind, she had deliberately set out to play over his head, the girl realized that he really did see perfectly.

"No," added Bellsmith, a moment later, "I'm sorry, but I 've never manufactured a single plumbing supply in my life—not one."

The girl waited rather eagerly for him to go on but, with that timid and innocent yet maddeningly unshakable way of his, he merely looked back at her with equal expectancy and, because she had thrown herself into the wrong in the first place, his endurance could naturally be longer than hers.

"Well?" she demanded abruptly.

Again it amazed her (for the first reply might have been an accident) and wholly increased her respect for that he made no attempt to fence. "What do I do?" he suggested simply. "In lieu of plumbing supplies or commercial fertilizers?"

"Exactly," replied the girl, "since the truth must out."

Bellsmith looked down at the menu-card which he held in his hand and blushed uncomfortably.

"I don't do anything," he answered.

Again, for a moment, as if both of them were trying to see which could hold a breath the longest, they sat in that uncomfortable, expectant silence. It lasted almost a minute, and then the girl exploded in complete defeat.

"You 're the most astounding man I ever saw," she exclaimed. "I gave you at least thirty seconds to say it and you didn't."

"Say what?" asked Bellsmith.

The girl made a quick gesture. "You said that you did n't do anything—no work, no career, no nonsense of that kind,—but I was betting mentally ten to one that in another minute you would add something about being ashamed of it or about yours being a useless kind of existence or about having 'plans in the works,' and you did n't say a thing of the kind. You just plain loaf. Is that it?"

Bellsmith looked up in mild astonishment. "And why should n't I? Why should I want to work?"

The girl gave up hopelessly. "I know that you are a professor or something unreal of that kind. I don't want you to be, but anything else is too good to be true."

Yet, curiously, there was no glint of humor in Bellamith's eyes as again he looked down at his menu-card. "Don't you want me to do nothing at all?" he asked quietly.

"Oh, bless you, yes!" answered the girl quickly, "but I just could n't believe it; that's all."

Without explanation both fell into a somewhat languid silence, while a subordinate waiter busied himself for a moment with glasses of ice water and rolls. It was the kind of silence that Bellsmith liked. He imagined possibly that the girl liked it too, but, as the silence continued long after the waiter had left, he felt impelled to say something, at least from good will. He laid down the menu-card and moved a glass.

"Do you shoot people," he asked slowly, "who say, at moments like this, 'I think two people can understand each other better when they 're silent than when they are talking'?"

The girl looked at him in incredulous delight. "I do," she answered. "I shoot them at sight."

"That's nice," replied Bellsmith, "because, you know, I should have had to shoot you a minute ago if you had said, 'A penny for your thoughts'!"

The girl made no reply. She now was looking down, and for a moment Bellsmith almost thought she was angry. Could it be possible—it couldn't—that she had actually been on the point of saying just that? He studied the top of her hat as it was bowed toward him. There was dust in the folds of the ribbon, and he wondered that a person as meticulous as she could have overlooked that, but it made her curiously and rather dearly human. Then, slightly, she changed her position, and he saw that her eyes were brimming with tears.

Nothing had ever given Bellsmith the quick shock through his whole body that was given him by the sight of those tears. He looked gruffly away; then, when he thought that he had given her a decent interval, he cautiously looked back again. The girl was now staring straight before her, but the tears were still in her eyes and she made no attempt to conceal them.

"Oh! I'm a fool!" she exclaimed, "but, thank heaven, you will never know what I was crying about."

But she herself knew that that statement did not ring true, and she added, almost with a grudging anger, "Or do you know what I am crying about? I suppose by some insane chance you do know exactly."

Bellsmith looked down, fiery red. "Without any of the usual apologies for which you would shoot me," he said in a very low voice, "you find it rather agreeable to be with white people, to talk English—once more."

He looked at her cautiously, hesitating at his daring, but she was choking now. With a quick, almost incongruously feminine movement, she began fumbling hastily in her hand-bag for a handkerchief and, when she found it, without any concealment at all, she dabbed her eyes. His own remark she either forgot or left wholly untouched. She smiled in a way that was meant to be obviously and conventionally forced.

"Please do remember that I really have been sick for months," she said harshly and rapidly. "That's why I had to go to see Dr. What's-his-name. Now quick! Say some obvious anticlimax before we two idiots sob on each other's shoulders."

Bellsmith, who had been looking at her alarmed, but merely because he feared that she might break down physically, smiled wryly.

"Anticlimax!" he asked. "That's easy. I've had one in mind for some time. Where in the world did you get such a horrible name as 'Tilly'? Is it really your name?"

The girl laughed with relief. "Thank you! That's just what I wanted. Tilly? My real name? No, it not. It's Helen. The Marshall is genuine."

Bellsmith, in his life, had never known moments like these—whimsical moments such as he lived by the hour in his own lonely reveries but had never dreamed could be shared with any one. At his own success he was like a man who had never known that he could box but was having a dream in which he was amazed to discover that he was a champion—Dempseys and Sharkeys collapsing before him. He heard himself going on and on.

"But if you had to pick a name," he continued, "why not 'Arbutus' or Pearl'? Those are, if anything, worse."

"I know it," said the girl, "but I couldn't help it. 'Tilly' was wished on me in the first show I was ever in. A man named Fred Winckle was directing it, and he said that 'Helen Marshall' sounded nondescript, like a little school-girl with a red bow. He was a great admirer of Vesta Tilly, so he just put me down as 'Tilly Marshall' on the program. I didn't know anything about it until I saw it, but it's stuck ever since and I don't know that he wasn't right. For instance, you couldn't think of me now as named Helen Marshall if you tried. Honestly, could you?"

Bellsmith shook his head. "Oddly, I could n't. And it's funny, too. I almost think I like 'Tilly' the best."

The girl retorted automatically, "But you said you thought 'Tilly' a horrible name."

"Shoot!" snapped Bellsmith quickly.

The girl blushed. "You 're quite right. Yes, you must shoot me. Ready! Aim! By the way, it would shock you, would n't it, if I should say, 'I now proceed to bare my breast'?"

"Yes, I think it would, " admitted Bellsmith.

"That's good," said the girl. "I hoped it would. But," she added, "it's always understood, isn't it, that I can say 'I am now going to murder my mother' or 'damn' or things like that and there won't be any shock at all?"

"Yes, that's understood perfectly," replied Bellsmith.

And possibly there was something said after that—there must have been,—but if there was neither of them remembered it. All that either of them did remember was suddenly finding themselves staring into each other's eyes, the girl's eyes opened wide with that searching unswerving look that Bellsmith had first seen in her, Bellsmith's own eyes incredulous and frightened. Before his mind began suddenly tumbling a riotous procession of all the things that the Bellsmiths did think about in crises—the majestic form of old Bellsmith senior, the prim, unrelenting mouth of old Aunt Lucille, the ponderous, unchanging house on Main Street, the fat and efficient little banker with a round stomach and a beard like King Edward's who always came in when danger threatened the family and said, "Well, now; well, now."

At the same time, gradually crowding out even these pictures, there swept over him that weakening, frightening, caving-in feeling that had stabbed him when he had seen the girl's tears. He had never known that emotion before, but he knew that he recognized it. Under the table his hands were gripping each other and his forearms were trembling.

Then suddenly, as if in lieu of the fat family banker and guardian, the old head waiter came bustling up with a steaming chafing-dish and—dear, old soul—the beaming feeling that he was doing a kindly thing.

As if coming out from a dream world, a state in which he had been held for hours, Bellsmith suddenly heard the clatter and noise of the dining-room starting up around him and made out shapes of men and women leaning over tables, talking nonchalently [sic]. Looking across the table he saw the girl watching him with amused, understanding eyes.

"I'm glad you did n't ask me," she said quietly.

"Why?" asked Bellsmith.

"I don't know," said the girl, "and I don't want to know. I think it is because I still want it ahead of me."