CHAPTER V.
“Das Ding-an-Sich.”
It was with a heart that knew not whether to be sad or joyful that Louis returned home on that eventful afternoon, upon which he had made such a stride in his young life. Pinkie’s brown eyes had been his lights to rule the day and the night, since either of them could remember; her rosy, audacious, mutinous little face was part and parcel of his very consciousness. Yet, perhaps, just because he could not imagine himself without her, his imagination had never risen to picturing his life with her—at Prices. She was simply his; there was neither past, present, nor future to their life together; only one beautiful, glorious, eternal now.
Upon this state of mind the thought of separation had acted as the jar which was all that was needful to produce crystallization, a jar which any other event might at any moment have supplied; so that the money-king had after all been wise in his day and generation.
But the electricity evolved in the crystallization had given poor Louis a rather severe shock. He had been accustomed to look upon “Prices” as the brief epitome of the time, the picture in little of that which the world ought to be. But as he re-entered it now, late in the afternoon, it seemed strangely altered. The great dining-hall stretched blackly before him; the long lines of tables seeming to reach out to infinity, and the pale windows glimmering like a vanished hope.
Miss Sally met him in the corridor.
“You’re late, Louis,” she said, “and that ain’t usual. Have you had your supper? You don’t mean you went out without your overcoat! Don’t you know these March days ain’t to be trusted? Why, you’re as pale as a ghost.”
“I’m all right, Aunt Sally,” replied the boy patiently. “I didn’t need my overcoat. Yes, I had my supper at Dr. Richards’s.”
“It’s as little as they could do to give you your supper, after you’d been wheeling their son about all the afternoon,” observed Polly.
“I liked it,” said Louis, “and they like to have me to tea. It wasn’t to economize, Aunt Polly, on their side or mine.”
“It had the same effect, though,” said Polly, looking up with a laugh from the great account-book before her; for Miss Sally had drawn him into her own little sitting-room, the room where Susan Price had died. “What you saved on your supper will help to pay your absence fine.”
It was entirely true, and perfectly disinterested in Polly, who was, besides, of twice—nay, ten times—the value to her kind that Rose Randolph was ever likely to be. Yet Louis, hearing now with Pinkie’s ears, as he had seen the great dining-hall with her eyes, turned away sick at heart.
“Is the father at home?” he asked.
“There’s a board-meeting to-night. He’s there. I suppose it’ll be settled about that carpenter’s place. Your father has taken such a fancy to Mr. Clare, Louis. He says he is the very man we want. I don’t know how he knows.”
“I don’t know how I know,” said Louis, “but I do. I think one always does,” he added, so sadly that the women looked at each other meaningly.
“You are tired to death,” said Sally, “that’s what’s the matter; and there’s nothing going on to-night to brighten you up. For a wonder the Hall ain’t been lit, and for another the director is at home, playing on the pianner like mad. You might go to his rooms and have a little music, Louis; that would do you good.”
“I think I’ll go to bed,” said Louis, smiling faintly. “I heard the Herr Musik-Direktor as I came up; he was playing ‘Tannhäuser,’ and I don’t think I could appreciate Wagner to-night. I’ll go to bed, Aunt Sally.”
“Well, so do; but, Louis, by the way, I don’t suppose you saw anything of Gretchen Schaefer?”
“Gretchen? no; that is, not since dinner-time. Why?” asked Louis, with his hand on the knob.
“She was absent at supper, without leave or notice, and hasn’t been seen since. I am afraid Tina has had a bad turn, that’s all. Gretchen would not do such a thing unless she had to.”
“Shall I step around and see?”
“No: you’re tired. I’ll go myself. I ain’t had a breath of air to-day, outside the back yard, and it’ll do me good. Polly, there, has the accounts to do. They ought to been ready for the board-meeting; but Gretchen she’s been so put back in her work lately by Tina’s bein’ sick.”
“I’ve nearly done,” said Polly, with a vigorous dip of her pen in the inkstand; “and if you’re not too tired, Louis, you might wait and leave these books at the board-room, as you go to bed. It’s as near as any other way, and I promised to send them.”
The boy threw himself obediently into a chair, and watched—still with Pinkie’s eyes—while Miss Sally adorned herself with a bonnet and shawl of strange and intricate construction. How the brown eyes would have laughed at Miss Sally’s bonnet, thought Louis.
Then Polly closed her books with a bang. “There, that’s done!” she said. “The Bible says we must bear one another’s burdens; and I’ve had my share of it this day. I hate accounts.”
“Let me do them for you next time,” said Louis, looking down at Polly’s flushed face and tumbled hair, and the soiled gingham apron she had been too busy to change.
“I hope there won’t be a next time,” replied Polly. “If there is, we must get another cashier; that’s all. But Gretchen is real reliable generally.”
“I hope nothing has happened to her,” said Louis uneasily, thinking of two figures that had vanished round a corner in North Micklegard, as the Ark of the Covenant drew nigh. The man was, he felt sure, Frank Randolph, and the girl had on a blue dress, just the color of Gretchen’s Sunday one.
“Oh! nothing ever happens to Gretchen,” said Polly, laughing. “Tina is the one I’m anxious about.”
“So?” said the boy slowly. Twenty-four, nay, twelve hours earlier he would have spoken at once of the blue dress; but—after all, there were plenty of blue dresses in the world;—and—then—were classes so widely separated in America,—Republican America, that—Louis shrunk from formulating, even to himself, the thought in his mind.
He took the books, and carried them away in silence.
His modest tap at the door of the board-room was answered by a summons to enter; and when he deposited his burden upon the plain, deal table, with its covering of oilcloth, round which the managers sat upon much worn wooden chairs,—for there was little effort at luxury at “Prices,”—there was not a face in the room but wore a smile to greet him. They were gray-haired men, all of them, who had known him all his life, and they could not let him go without a pleasant word.
“Have you turned book-keeper, Herr Louis?” asked one. “We missed you at supper-time,” said another. “Ah! he was better employed, perhaps I hope she is pretty.” “Did you give her a good hug and a sounding kiss?” “Ah! leave that to him, he knows very well how these things are managed.” “He has a face to help him better with the girls than any of your advice.”
These were some of the things that were said to him before his father broke in roughly, “Hold your tongues, all of you! would you quite turn the boy’s head? What does it matter, a face! Hands are what we need in shoemaking.”
“The boy looks tired,” said the old president gently; “and you are all wrong, meine Herren. He has been doing works of charity, not courting. I saw you up-town, Louis, with your lame friend.”
“Yes, he enjoyed the ride,” said Louis. “I am glad to be of use to him, Herr President; they have all been so kind to me.”
“Quite right, my boy,” said the old man benignly; and, after a few more words, Louis took his leave.
For perhaps the first time in his life he stepped into the elevator; he who usually ran up the long, steep stairs as fleetly as a gazelle. Then, reaching his own little room, under the roof, he sat down, slowly and heavily, and looked about him. It was spotlessly clean, but with no attempt at beauty, except one or two of Freddy’s drawings; and, to the boy’s new sense of sight, repulsively bare and comfortless. He let his head sink hopelessly upon his hands. Look where he would, there was no place at “Prices” for Pinkie. With his best efforts he could not think her into his workaday world. It was not her fault, of course; the hardy arbor vitæ stands erect amidst the snows from which the rose must be carefully protected. Is the rose to blame? No, it is only a question of corresponding with one’s environment. Pinkie was, clearly and self-evidently, not created or evolved to correspond with any such environment as “Prices.”
He was sitting in the same position when his father entered, half an hour later, with an elate expression, which changed suddenly at sight of Louis’ smile; an old smile on a boyish face.
“So!” said Karl Metzerott; “but it is my blame for sending you as a child among those people! Ah! what a fool I was! What has she done to thee, Louis, to send thee home with a face like that?”
“It is not her fault, father, nor mine, nor any one’s, for that matter.”
“Tell me that! Nothing is her fault at thy age, Louis. Tell me about it, and let me be the judge. Have I not always warned thee? A man’s own senses might tell him that a bit of pink and white wax-work is not the wife for a workingman.”
Louis sighed. “It is true,” he said. “Father, I have thought and thought, but I cannot imagine her here,—or—myself anywhere else. For see! I have grown up at ‘Prices,’ father; these dear friends are my friends, part of my life; if I could leave it, only half of my heart could go with me; if I could rise into her world”—
“Rise? that is, lie, cheat, steal, do anything to get money! For it is money alone that makes equals in that world, my boy; have I not seen it?”
Louis bowed his head once more in sad acquiescence. His thoughts were too chaotic for words, but he felt dimly and confusedly that his father was right. Polly’s mercenariness was a nobler thing than Pinkie’s scorn of expense; nay, if he had known it, even the rough raillery of the board-room, quite as delicate as much schoolgirl teasing. “Prices” might be—was—in essentials the higher world; but since it was not Pinkie’s world the result was practically the same. Louis glanced around the plain, bare room, and thought of Alice’s dainty parlor, of the pink and white nest that sheltered his bird, of which he had once had an accidental glimpse,—and he sighed heavily.
“Why should you fancy her here?” asked Metzerott, interpreting the sigh aright. “She doesn’t suit you, and that’s all there is about it. Rise into her world indeed! I hope your father is an honest man, which is more than can be said of hers!”
“Oh! if you come to fathers!” said Louis proudly. “But there’s more in it than that, if I could only make you see it. I’ve been brought up in both worlds, father, and I know. Ours—yes, we are working for each other at ‘Prices,’ while in hers they work for themselves; that makes us higher; yet in some ways they are higher than us.”
“They’ve more money,” said his father scornfully, “and finer clothes”—
“Not Mrs. Richards,” said Louis; “but it’s in things money won’t buy that I see the difference. I can’t put it into words, but you would understand it, father, if you could see Mrs. Richards standing beside—Aunt Sally, for instance. They are equally good, perhaps, and I love them equally well, so it’s a good example. It’s not Pinkie’s fault, father, it’s just because hers is a different world.”
“Was she so unkind to you to-day?”
“Far from it,” said the boy, a deep flush rising to his fair brow; “but her father—I think because of me—will take her to Paris, and put her into a convent-school. I only saw her a little while, for he took her for a drive, and to supper at his hotel; but—she loves me, father.”
“Does she?” said Karl Metzerott. “But I dare say she does. Poor girl, poor girl.”
He was too wise to say any more. Louis was, he saw, fully alive to the situation, and comment would only wound without helping him. But he was inwardly relieved at the escape from this trouble promised by the Parisian school, which would, he persuaded himself, effectually put an end to the whole affair. They were only children, and would be in love half a dozen times apiece before they were married.
Yet—Louis was his own son,—his who had “loved one woman only,” and clave to her in death as in life. And how dared Henry Randolph scorn his boy, his noble, beautiful Louis, worth a hundred little gypsies, such as the one on whom he had set his young heart? With these mixed and contradictory emotions struggling in his bosom, Karl Metzerott stood for some moments with folded arms, looking down upon his son. Suddenly he laid one large, rough, toil-worn hand very softly upon the bowed head.
“Don’t break thy heart for her, Louis,” he said; “there’s not a woman in the world—now—worth that.”
“Ah! now,” said Louis. “Was there ever, father?”
“Never,” replied the shoemaker sturdily. “Did I break my heart for thy mother—yet if ever woman were worth—but I lived on, and not quite for nothing, nicht wahr?”
“You had me,” said Louis, springing to his feet, and clasping like a child his father’s brown neck; “you had me, and I have you. We won’t break our hearts while we have each other, father.”