CHAPTER XIII
MORE “SIDE-LINES”
ON the afternoon of her arrival Babbie had tea, alone and very early, at the Tally-ho. Just after Nora had served her, Mr. Thayer appeared. He came over to Babbie’s table to shake hands, as a matter of course, and he lingered over the process until the very least Babbie could do was to invite him to share her repast.
“I met a cousin of yours,” she informed him, “at the week-end party I’ve just come from—Mr. Austin Thayer. I saw a lot of him, and we got quite chummy.”
“Austin’s a fine fellow,” agreed Mr. Thayer cordially, “but he and I disagree about so many things—we don’t hit it off at all.”
“No,” said Babbie serenely, crushing a slice of lemon relentlessly with her tiny wooden spoon—Japanese spoons, for the Japanese teas were the latest innovation at the Tally-ho. “Your cousin Austin thinks you are ‘a very foolish boy,’ to quote his own words. We discussed you at dinner last evening.”
Mr. Thayer flushed. “And did you defend me just a little?” he asked. “Because if you didn’t, considering what Austin has called me now and then, I don’t see how there could have been much discussion.”
“Well, if you make a point of it, it wasn’t a discussion,” Babbie told him coldly. “It was an—an exchange of experiences. He told me what he knew about your past life, and I told him the very little I know about your present activities.”
Mr. Thayer smiled a perfunctory smile. “It must have been a desperately dull dinner. My affairs are never the least bit exciting. Next time you meet Austin at anybody’s week-end, make him talk about himself.”
“Oh, he did that too,” Babbie explained, “sitting out dances the first evening. He’s had piles of fascinating experiences. If I were a man I think I should go in for the same sort of thing exactly. I love the way he pounces down on the Stock Exchange, straight out of a South African jungle, and after he’s made two or three millions calmly departs again to climb Mount McKinley, or motor through Tibet. And when his two millions are spent, he builds a town or sells a gold mine, and then buys a castle on the Hudson and a car and a motor-boat, and tries another kind of fun. He doesn’t bother with employees and fiddling little plans for making them ‘safer and happier,’” Babbie quoted maliciously.
“No, he doesn’t,” returned Mr. Thayer with asperity. “They mobbed him once in Chicago, because he’d cornered the wheat supply and the price of bread had nearly doubled.”
“Was that the time he made five millions in three months?” asked Babbie blandly.
That evening, while Babbie, in a ruffly pink negligee, sat cross-legged on Madeline’s couch, eating fudges and playing with the ploshkin, she explained to her two friends that the week-end party had “bored her to tears.”
“There wasn’t a possible man there, and Margot kept pairing me off with a fright of a millionaire who was always getting you into a corner and making you listen to wild tales of gigantic business ventures he’d pulled off. I detest business. Money should be seen and not heard,” ended Babbie sententiously.
But the next afternoon she rushed out of Flying Hoof’s stall, where she was being entertained at tea by some adoring freshmen, to inform Mr. Robert Thayer that his cousin Austin had sent him kind regards.
“In a note, you know.” She fluttered it before him tantalizingly. “We’re both invited to another house-party, you see. He wants to know if I’m going to accept.”
“And are you?” ventured Mr. Thayer. “That is, if I may ask, by way of showing a cousinly interest in Austin’s happiness.”
“Most certainly not,” snapped Babbie fiercely.
“Ah, I beg a thousand pardons! I was only joking, Miss Hildreth.”
“I’m most certainly not going, I mean,” Babbie explained amiably, after a moment of frowning perplexity, and swept back to her tea-party, leaving a completely bewildered young man behind her.
He relieved his feelings by telling Betty the good news about the club-house.
“I’ve bought that big, old-fashioned place across the street from the factory. We couldn’t have begun building before April, and it seemed out of the question to delay so long. Besides, this is just the thing, or it will be in a month, when the architect and his minions have finished with it. I told him that you people changed a barn into a tea-shop in ten days, and if he can’t alter a few partitions, paper a few walls, and get in the furniture in a month, he needn’t expect any more work from yours truly. So bring on your college girls, find out who wants to teach what and to whom, and tell me which ones are to go on the pay-roll and which are ready to give their services. I’ll send you a list of the prospective pupils, with ages and nationalities attached.” He paused and looked sharply at Betty. “Are you tired to-night, Miss Wales?”
Betty shook her head. “I’ve lost something, and I’m being foolish and worrying over it.”
“You work too hard,” Mr. Thayer decreed. “When I’m overworked I always lose my gloves. It’s a sure sign. You’re not to be bothered with those lists. But the trouble is, I don’t know the college girls. There’s got to be somebody for a go-between. Could I hire one of the hire-able ones for a sort of secretary?”
Betty considered. “Midyears are making everybody awfully busy now and it wouldn’t do to wait ten days or so, till they’re over, would it? Besides, this thing will have to be managed just right to give it a good start. Why don’t you ask Babbie? She’s awfully good at things like that, and awfully interested in the club-house idea.”
“Is she?” gasped Mr. Thayer.
Betty nodded. “She says she thinks the finest thing a rich man can do is to look after the men and women who are making his money for him.”
“She said that?” gasped Mr. Thayer again. Then he looked pleadingly at Betty. “Would you ask her to take charge, please? I think she’d do it quicker for you.”
And he hurried off, leaving Betty to piece together all the things Babbie had said and done in connection with Mr. Thayer, and all that he had said and done in connection with Babbie. Her final conclusions were, first, that Mr. Thayer was afraid of Babbie; second, that Babbie was interested in Mr. Thayer’s work, but not in Mr. Thayer; and third, that Madeline was therefore mistaken, owing to an over-romantic tendency developed by the writing of a great many love-stories.
In any case Babbie readily agreed to post notices about the opening of the stocking factory’s classes, see that the most promising volunteer teachers got the most difficult pupils, interview the Student’s Aid officers about the paid instructors, and be present during the evenings of the first week to make sure that each teacher found her class and that things ran smoothly.
“It’s a good excuse to delay going South until next month,” she said. “Mother is just as bored by Southern resorts as I am, but she hasn’t the strength of mind to break off the habit of going to them. So she’ll be secretly relieved, and as proud as Punch, too, to think that I’m bossing a big evening-school. Mother’s purely ornamental herself, so she admires the useful type of woman. I must write her immediately about the tea-shop’s latest departure. Betty, can’t you induce Mr. Thayer to serve coffee and sandwiches to the ones that learn their lessons nicely, and then the tea-shop will be making something out of my school.”
“Wait till we get our dinners started, before we begin on nine-o’clock lunches,” Betty advised her.
“I shall order the very grandest dinner you can imagine for the opening night,” declared Babbie enthusiastically, “so you must manage to start before I leave.”
“We can have new menu cards now,” put in Madeline. “I never did like the color of these, and besides I think Bob Enderby ought to put a gift-shop in one corner of the design he drew for us. It certainly ought to be noticed in some way on the menu.”
“I think he ought to add a night-school too,” declared Babbie playfully, “and a notice that Betty does tutoring. If we’re broadening out so much, we ought to let people know all about it.”
“Just because you happen to be running it, the night-school isn’t a branch of the tea-shop, Babbie,” demurred Madeline. “Wait until Mr. Thayer actually promises to buy the sandwiches before you consider it a part of the ‘eats’ business.”
“Well, it’s an outgrowth of it,” retorted Babbie. “The tea-shop is responsible for the club-house.”
“Oh, if we’re going to put all that the tea-shop is responsible for on the menu,” Madeline began, with a provoking little smile, “we should have to put on a picture of a broken h——”
“Come, girls,” interposed Betty, hastily, foreseeing another blundering reference from Madeline to Mr. Thayer’s devotion to Babbie, “don’t quarrel about unimportant little things like menu cards, but let’s discuss what we shall serve and what new china we need.”
“Oh, new china!” cried Madeline in great excitement. “I hadn’t thought of that! I shall go to New York to buy it. Now, whoever said the fat little mustard jars were an extravagance? We shall use them a lot for dinners.”
Betty banged the table for order. “Now how many dinner plates shall we buy to begin with?” she inquired in businesslike tones.
Madeline banged the table noisily in her turn. “I know something much more important than dinner plates,” she declared ostentatiously. “Do let’s be businesslike, Betty, and systematic. Your haphazard methods jar upon my order-loving soul.”
Betty waited resignedly.
“The most important thing is an assistant for you,” Madeline went on. “You can’t do more than you are doing now. If we serve dinners, there will be more marketing, more accounts, more to see to all around the place, and longer hours for the cashier.”
“Oh, of course Betty must have an assistant,” chimed in Babbie, “and a bigger salary. It’s not fair for us to be making such good profits when she works so hard.”
“You’ll make more, even with a good many extra expenses, if the dinners go as I think they will,” put in Betty, forcing her associates to listen, while she explained what could be done if the average dinner check was so-and-so, the average attendance so-and-so, and the additional expenses kept down to this and that.
“All right; let’s serve dinners by all means,” said Babbie gaily. “I hate averages, because as far as I can see they never come out the way you want them, but I’m all for expansion. Mummy will like it too. She’s awfully proud of us. Now Betty can do a go-as-you-please on the details, can’t she, Madeline? We only bother by putting in our oars; we’re such ignoramuses.”
Empowered to choose her own assistant, Betty spent two days anxiously considering various possibilities. If only it were fall, and Katherine or Rachel were free to try this unconventional way of earning a living! And then, just at the crucial moment, when she had almost decided to ask a junior who was working her way through college to come and try the work for the rest of the term, arrived a letter from Emily Davis, with moving pathos behind its story of a bitter disappointment bravely accepted.
“I can’t blame my old eyes,” Emily wrote, “because they’ve served me long and well, and I’ve overdriven the poor beasties shamefully. So now they balk, and the doctor says they just must be humored. They’ll hold my position in the school for me until next fall. In the meantime I’m hunting for any honest means of livelihood that doesn’t require eyes. I should cry a few tears at having to give up this perfectly splendid position that I was so elated to get; but crying is very bad for the eyes, so I smile and smile and keep on thinking how in the world I can manage to earn my bread and butter until next September. This summer, if worse comes to worst, I can wait on table at a seaside resort. Please don’t think I’m hinting for a chance to do it at the Tally-ho. I should hate to explain to everybody I know at Harding how it happens that I’m back at an underclass girl’s last resort—I, who was a star tutor way back in my junior year, and who meant to come to our reunion in June a star teacher, with all the money I borrowed to go through college paid back, and enough left for board at my sister’s through a restful summer. And now the oculist’s bill is gobbling up everything in sight.
“What a growl! But this is a safety-valve letter, Betty. As you are earning your living too, I feel extra sure you’ll understand.”
“What she means is, she feels sure that I won’t offer her money,” Betty reflected shrewdly. “And isn’t it just splendid that I can offer her a good position!”
For of course Emily was the very one to be assistant manager. To be sure, Betty hated the clerical work, and had planned to have her assistant take charge of the accounts. But the keeping of those was a small thing compared to having dear old comical Emily Davis back, with her famous “stunts,” her cheerful fashion of meeting defeat and failure with a smile, and her marvelous ability to work twice as hard as any one else and yet always appear calm and collected and unhurried. Betty had a feeling that Emily would insist upon attending to the lamps and the stove. She wouldn’t let her do it all, of course—she knew too well how hard it was—but just a little help would be such a relief.
Of course Babbie and Madeline were as eager as Betty to have Emily join the tea-room’s force, and Emily could not have resisted the combined logic and pleading of the three letters they sent her, even if she had wanted to. So she wrote back post-haste a grateful acceptance of their offer and promised to be on hand within a fortnight.
There remained still the ploshkin project to consider. The tea-room’s uninvested capital would just about buy the extra china and other equipments needed for the dinner service. Betty was averse to asking Mrs. Hildreth or Mrs. Bob for more money, and the profits had been divided in January, so they were not available. But Betty had kept her emergency fund intact all winter, as her father had advised, and she had added to it appreciably from her salary, her tutoring money, and her work for the gift-shop department. It was now well on toward spring, and the tea-shop had fully proved its money-making capacities.
“So, if you don’t mind, I should like to have the ploshkins made with the money that father gave me, if it’s enough—and it will be if Madeline can get them done at about what she and Mary thought would be a good investment. Then I’ll sell them here, and give the shop a small commission, as the college girls did when we sold their things before Christmas.”
This was perfectly satisfactory to everybody, and Madeline departed gaily to pay visits in Bohemia, see editors, match china, and get ploshkins manufactured—a potpourri of assorted activities that thoroughly delighted her variety-loving temperament.