Chapter 12

It was something of an ordeal to go down to dinner half an hour later, but they met it bravely, walking stiffly into the crowded dining-room, and looking to neither the right nor the left as they followed the headwaiter to their places. The discovery that they had exclusive possession of a small table was a matter of joyful surprise to them both, on which they freely commented. The daintiness of the linen, the gleam of silver, the perfection of the service, and the soft glow of candles under silk shades, filled their simple country souls with awe. It suggested unconjectured expense with a tang of wickedness as well. Off in an alcove, screened by palms, an orchestra played with considerate softness. Mr. Smith smiled a large, expansive smile and leaned back in his chair. The moment was perfect. His apprehensions were over for the time. Maria was with him, she was his, and he was giving her all this. Could an Astor or a Vanderbilt offer more to the woman of his heart? Henry Smith looked at the plush and gilding about him, and read his answer.

He experienced a rude awakening. A silent waiter stood beside him, offering for his inspection an elaborate menu. The letters danced before his eyes as Henry looked at them. What did they mean, anyhow, and how did one pick out what one wanted, he wondered. Or, perchance, was one expected gracefully to consume everything? His momentary self-sufficiency died on the instant, and sickening fears of making a mistake before Maria's eyes again overcame him. A great longing filled him to appear to advantage, to do the thing properly, whatever it was. On a sudden inspiration he leaned toward the waiter.

"Say," he said, confidentially, "you jest bring us two good dinners--the best of everything you've got--and I'll make it all right with yeh." He surveyed the waiter's face anxiously as he spoke, his own clearing as it remained quietly respectful.

"Very well, sir; certainly, sir," said the servant, promptly. "Oysters first, sir, I suppose, and a little green-turtle soup; a bit of fish, perhaps--we've some very nice sole in to-day, sir; a bird--the partridge and grouse are excellent, sir; a salad, and an ice. Any wine, sir? No, sir? Yes, sir." He was gone, and Mr. Smith wiped his perspiring brow. Maria was gazing at him with simple love and trust.

"I declare, Henry," she murmured, "you do it all just 's if you'd be'n doin' it every day of your life. Where'd you learn?"

Mr. Smith made a vague gesture repudiating the charge, but his face shone and he sat straighter in his chair. He dared not boast, for he knew there were crucial moments coming, but so far there had been no catastrophes and his courage grew with each achievement. When Maria looked doubtfully at her oysters, and, joyfully recognizing them, wondered audibly why they were not made into a stew instead of being presented in this semi-nude condition, he was able, after a piercing glance at near-by tables, to set her right with easy authority.

"They eat 'em this way in New York," he said, swallowing one himself and endeavoring, with indifferent success, to look as if he liked it. Maria followed his example, rather gingerly and not as one who ventures on a new joy. Her interest remained equally vague when the soup and fish successively appeared. When the partridge was served, however, with bread sauce and French pease and currant jelly, the gratifying experience of finally "having something really on the plate" moved her to alert appreciation, and she proceeded to eat her dinner with an expression of artless and whole-souled relief. She was able to point out to Henry, as a bit of prandial small-talk, that the orchestra was playing "Nancy Brown"--a classic ditty whose notes had reached even Clayton Centre. It was at this stimulating point of the dinner, also, that she felt privileged for the first time to remove her gloves, glance at the other tables and the clothes of the women, and talk freely to her husband. Hitherto she had "conversed" under pressure.

The waiter, offering her a second helping of jelly, saw, shining in her hair, several grains of rice. The discovery exhilarated but did not surprise him. His mien was one of fatherly interest five minutes later as he presented a small bottle for Mr. Smith's inspection.

"Champagne, sir," he murmured. "Not too dry for the lady's taste, sir. Thought you'd like a glass--special occasion, sir--"

His eloquence died away under the startled look in the bride's eyes, but the groom met his happy suggestion with warm approval.

"Jest the thing," he said, heartily. "It'll do you good, Maria. Doctors give it when people ain't well, so you can take it 'thout any fear. 'N' I guess you're feelin' pretty well, ain't you?" he grinned, broadly, over this flash of humor.

He motioned to the waiter to fill her glass, and that worthy did so and retired behind her to give his courteous attention to the effect.

They drank their champagne, and a faint color came to Maria's pale cheeks. It was really a nice place, this hotel, she decided, and the furnishing of this room was such as palaces might cope with in vain. She had heard of their glories; now she could guess what those glories were. The voices of other guests chatting around her mingled with the music; Clayton Centre seemed very remote. At last she was seeing life.

She felt no embarrassment as they left the table. They strolled slowly down the dining-room and out into the palm-lined corridor on whose plush chairs handsome men and beautifully dressed women sat and chatted with surprising volubility and ease. Intrepidly the newcomers seated themselves side by side where they could listen to the music and watch the strange beings in this strange world. They were out of it all, and even in the exhilaration of the moment they knew it; but their aloofness from others added to the charm of the evening by drawing them closer together. They gloried in the joint occupation of their little island of happiness. For a long time they sat there, for Maria could not be torn away. The music, the costumes and beauty of the women, the delicate perfumes, the frequent ringing of bells, the hurrying back and forth of bell-boys and hotel servants, were indescribably fascinating to her.

The next morning Mr. Smith, sternly recalling himself to the material side of life, had a brief but pregnant chat with the clerk. He and his wife wished to stay a few days at the hotel, he intimated, but it would be advisable, before making their plans, to go somewhat into the question of expense. How much, for instance, was their dinner last night. He had signed a check, but his memory was hazy as to the amount. His brain reeled when the clerk, having looked it up, gave him the figures--$10.85.

"Good Lord!" gasped Mr. Henry Smith. "I guess we'd better go back to-day ef it's goin' to be THAT much!"

He was too limp mentally to follow for a time the clerks remarks, but light gradually broke upon him. He could henceforth take table d'hote meals, paying sixty cents each for breakfast and luncheon for himself and his wife, and one dollar each for their dinner. That would be only four dollars and forty cents a day for all meals--and would make the hotel bills much less than if one ordered by card, unless one was--er--familiar with the prices. It was much less trouble, too. Mr. Smith grasped the point and expansively shook the clerk's hand. His relief was so great that he urged that youth to have a cigar, and the youth in return volunteered information as to points of interest to strangers in New York.

"Better do the town to-day," he suggested. "Just go round and get a general view--Broadway, Fifth Avenue, the shops, and all that. Then to-night you'd better go to the play. I think you'd enjoy 'The White Cat' as much as anything."

Armed with definite information as to the most direct route to Broadway, Mr. Smith sought his bride. He found her in the corridor, watching the people come and go, her thin face flushed and animated.

"Oh, Henry," she cried, eagerly, "I declare I'm having the most interestin' time! Those folks over there--you know, the ones that has the room next to ours--ain't spoke to each other sence breakfast. Do you think they've quarrelled, the poor dears?"

He gave but perfunctory attention to "the poor dears," his duties as prospective cicerone filling his thoughts. Maria's face fell as he outlined their plans for the day.

"Well, if you feel to go, Henry," she said, doubtfully, "but it's SO interestin' here. I feel 's if I knew all these folks. I wish we could stay here this mornin', anyhow, 'n' not git out in those dreadful crowded streets jest yet."

He sat down beside her with a promptness which evoked a startled shriek from an absorbed young person reading near them.

"Then we'll stay right here," he announced, kindly. "We're here, 'Ria, to do jest what you want, an' we're goin' to do it."

She gave him an adoring look, and under its radiance Mr. Smith promptly forgot the small claims of Broadway. Siberia with Maria in it would have blossomed like the rose for Henry Smith, and the wide, cheerful corridors of the Berkeley were far removed from Siberia's atmosphere. Side by side and blissfully happy, they whiled the morning hours away. After luncheon Henry again tentatively touched on sight-seeing.

"'Tain't far," he said. He consulted the slip of directions the clerk had given him, and went on expansively, "We take the cross-town line at Fifty-ninth Street, transfer to a Broadway car--"

Maria shivered. "My, Henry," she quavered, "that sounds dreadful mixed. I'm afraid we'll get lost."

Henry's own soul was full of dark forebodings, and he inwardly welcomed the respite her words gave him.

"Well, then, don't let's go," he said, easily, "till to-morrow, anyhow. We got plenty o' time. We'll stay here, an' to-night we'll go to see a play."

Like the morning, the afternoon passed sweetly. Henry made the discovery that the hotel cafe at the right of the reception-room was a popular resort for men guests of the hotel, and his researches into their pleasures led to an introduction to a Manhattan cocktail. He returned to Maria's side an ardent convert to her theory that the hotel was the pleasantest place in New York. Subsequently, as he sampled a Martini, one or two men chatted with him for a moment, giving him a delightful sense of easy association with his peers. Maria, in the mean time, had formed a pleasing acquaintance with the parlor maid, and had talked freely to several little children. It was with reluctance that they tore themselves away from the corridor long enough to go in to dinner.

The table d'hote dinner, served in another room, was much less elaborate than the banquet of the night before, but neither of them realized the difference. Good in itself, to them it was perfection, and Maria recognized almost as old friends familiar faces of fellow hotel guests at the tables around her. When the question of the theatre came up she was distinctly chilling.

"We'll go if you want to, Henry," she said, "but the band's goin' to play all evening, an' the maid said some of the young folks has got up a dance in the little ball-room. Wouldn't you like to see it?"

Henry decided that he would. He had, in fact, no rabid wish to see a play, and the prospect of piloting Maria safely to the centre of the town and home was definitely strenuous. He drank another cocktail after dinner, smoked a cigar with a Western travelling man, exchanged sage views on politics with that gentleman, and happily spent the remainder of the evening by his Maria's side, watching the whirling young things in the small ball-room. The happiest of them were sad, indeed, compared with Henry Smith.

The next morning the cheerful voice of the clerk greeted him as he came from the dining-room.

"Where to-day, Mr. Smith?" inquired that affable youth. "How about the Horse Show? You surely ought to look in on that." He wrote on a card explicit directions for arriving at the scene of this diversion, and Mr. Smith, gratefully accepting it, hastened to his bride's side. He found her full of another project.

"Oh, Henry," she cried, "they's going to be a lecture here in the hotel this mornin', by a lady that's been to Japan. All the money she gets for tickets will go to the poor. I guess she'll ask as much as twenty-five cents apiece, but I think we better go."

Sustained by a cocktail, and strengthened by the presence of his Maria, Mr. Smith attended the lecture, cheerfully paying two dollars for the privilege, but refraining from dampening his wife's joy by mentioning the fact. In the afternoon he broached the Horse Show. Maria's face paled. To her it meant an exaggerated county fair, with its attendant fatigue.

"You go, Henry," she urged. "You jest go an' enjoy yourself. I feel too tired--I really do. I'd rather stay home--here--an' rest. We don't really have to do nothing we don't want to, do we?"

Honest Henry Smith, whose working-day in Clayton Centre began at five in the morning and ended at six at night, and whose evenings were usually spent in the sleep of utter exhaustion, found himself relaxing deliciously under her words. It was good, very good, to rest, and to know they didn't HAVE to do things unless they wished.

"I won't, neither, go alone," he announced. "I ain't anxious to go. I'd ruther stay here with you. We'll go some other time."

The white-capped maid smiled as she passed them; the palms nodded as to old friends. The seductive charms of the Berkeley corridors again wrapped them round.

"Going to see some of the pictures to-day?" asked the clerk, on the third morning, cheerfully doing his duty by the strangers as he conceived it. "Better go to Central Park first and the Metropolitan Museum, then to the private exhibitions. Here's the list. Take a cross-town car to Fifth Avenue, and a 'bus to Eighty-first Street, and after the Park a Fifth Avenue 'bus will drop you at the other places."

Apprehension settled over Henry Smith, rudely disturbing his lotos-eater's sense of being. He felt almost annoyed by this well-meaning but indefatigable young man who seemed to think folks should be gadding all the time. His manner was unresponsive as he took the addresses.

"I'll see what my wife says," he remarked, indifferently.

His wife said what he believed and hoped she would say.

"We ain't goin' home till to-morrow afternoon," she observed, "an' we can see Central Park to-morrow mornin' if we want to. They's a woman here that does up hair for fifty cents, an' I thought if yeh didn't mind, Henry, I'd have her do mine--"

Henry urged her to carry out this happy inspiration. "She can't make yeh look any nicer, though," he added, gallantly. Then, as Maria surrendered herself and their room to the hairdresser's ministrations, he visited the bar, chatted with his friend the clerk, and smoked a good cigar. Afterward he selected a comfortable chair in the corridor where he was to meet Maria, stretched his long legs, dozed, and found it good to be alive.

A befrizzled Maria, whose scant hair stood out in startling Marcel waves, confronted him at luncheon-time. A sudden inspiration shook him to his depths.

"Don't you want to go down-town and have your picture took?" he urged. "Let's have ours done together."

Maria was proof against even this lure. She had a better idea.

"They's a photograph man right here in the hotel," she chirped, joyously. "He's next to the flower-shop, an' we can go right in through that little narrow hall."

They went, subsequently carrying home with them as their choicest treasure the cabinet photograph for which they had posed side by side, with the excitement of New York life shining in their honest eyes. In the evening the clerk suggested a concert.

"It's a fine one, at Carnegie Hall, right near here," he urged, cheerfully, "and Sembrich is to sing, with the Symphony Orchestra. You can get in for fifty cents if you don't mind sitting in the gallery. You really ought to go, Mrs. Smith; you would enjoy it."

Mrs. Smith turned upon him an anxious eye.

"How far did you say 'twas?" she asked, warily.

"Oh, not ten minutes' ride. You take the car here at the corner--"

But the mention of the car blighted the budding purpose in Maria's soul.

"I feel real tired," she said, quickly, "but if my husband wants to go--"

Her husband loudly disavowed any such aspiration.

"We got a long journey before us to-morrow," he said, "an' I guess we better rest."

They rested in the Berkeley corridor, amid the familiar sights and scenes. The following morning found them equally disinclined for sight-seeing. Seated in their favorite chairs, they watched the throngs of happy people who came and went around them. Henry had added to the list of his acquaintances two more travelling men and the boy at the news-counter. His wife had heard in detail the sad story of her chambermaid's life, and a few facts and surmises about fellow-guests at the hotel.

Maria drew a long sigh when, after they had paid their bill the next day and bade farewell to the clerk and other new friends, they climbed into the cab which was to take them to the station.

"My, but it was interestin'!" she said, softly; adding, with entire conviction, "Henry, I 'ain't never had such a good time in my hull life! I really 'ain't!"

"Neither have I," avowed Henry, truthfully. "Wasn't it jest bully!"

On the train a sudden thought occurred to Mrs. Smith.

"Henry," she began, uneasily, "s'pose any one asks what we've SEEN in New York. What'll we tell 'em? You know, somehow we didn't seem t' git time t' see much."

Henry Smith was equal to the emergency.

"We'll say we seen so much we can't remember it," he said, shamelessly. "Don't you worry one bit about that, Maria Smith. I've always heard that weddin' couples don't never really see nothin' on their weddin' towers, anyhow--they gad an' gad, an' it don't do no good. We was wiser not to try!"

X

THE CASE OF KATRINA

My memory of Katrina goes back to the morning when, at the tender age of ten, she was violently precipitated into our classroom. The motive power, we subsequently learned, was her brother Jacob, slightly older than Katrina, whose nervous system had abruptly refused the ordeal of accompanying her into the presence of the teacher. Pushing the door ajar until the opening was just large enough to admit her, he thrust her through, following her fat figure for a second with one anxious eye and breathing audibly in his excitement. The next instant the cheerful clatter of his hob-nailed boots echoed down the hall, followed by a whoop of relief as he emerged upon the playground.

It was Katrina's bearing as she stood, thus rudely projected into our lives, endeavoring to recover her equilibrium, and with thirty pairs of eyes fixed unswervingly upon her, that won my heart and Jessica's. Owing to a fervid determination of our teacher to keep us well in view, we sat in the front row, directly facing her. Having, even in our extreme youth, a constitutional distaste to missing anything, we undoubtedly stared at Katrina longer and harder than any of the others. We smiled, too, largely and with the innocent abandon of childhood; and Katrina smiled back at us as if she also tasted a subtle flavor of the joke, lost to cruder palates. Then she shifted her tiny school-bag from one hand to the other, swept the room with a thoughtful glance, and catching sight of frantic gestures I was making, obeyed them by walking casually to an empty seat across from my own, where she sat down with deepening dimples and an air of finality.

Several moments subsequently our teacher, Miss Merrill, aroused herself from the trance into which she apparently had been thrown by the expeditiousness with which this incident was accomplished, and coming to Katrina's side, ratified the arrangement, incidentally learning the new pupil's name and receiving from her hand a card, written by the principal and assigning her to our special grade. But long before these insignificant details were completed, Jessica and I had emptied Katrina's bag, arranged her books in her desk, lent her a pencil she lacked, indicated to her the boy most to be scorned and shunned, given her in pantomime the exact standing of Miss Merrill in the regard of her pupils, and accepted in turn the temporary loan of the spruce-gum with which she had happily provided herself. At recess the acquaintance thus auspiciously begun ripened into a warm friendship, and on the way home from school that night we made a covenant of eternal loyalty and love, and told one another the stories of our lives.

Jessica's and mine were distressingly matter-of-fact. We were both supplied with the usual complement of parents, brothers, and sisters, and, barring the melancholy condition that none of them, of course, understood our complex natures, we had nothing unusual to chronicle. But Katrina's recital was of an interest. She was, to begin with, an orphan, living with two brothers and an old uncle in a large and gloomy house we had often noticed as it stood with its faded back turned coldly to Evans Avenue. Seemingly her pleasures and friends were few. Once a month she went to the cemetery to put flowers on her father's and mother's graves. Katrina herself seemed uncertain as to whether this pilgrimage properly belonged in the field of pleasure or the stern path of duty; but Jessica and I classified it at once, and dropped an easy tear. We hoped her uncle was grim and stern, and did not give her enough to eat. This, we felt, would have made the melancholy picture of Katrina's condition most satisfyingly complete. But when we sought eagerly for such details, Katrina, with shameless indifference to dramatic possibilities, painted for us an unromantic, matter-of-fact old German, kind to her when he remembered her existence, but submerged in his library and in scientific research. We further learned that they ate five meals a day at Katrina's home, with "coffee" and numerous accompaniments in between. Moreover, Katrina's school-bag bulged at the sides with German cakes of various shapes and composition. Our stern disapproval of these was tempered in time by the fact that she freely shared them with us. We were not surprised to discover also, though these revelations came later, that the old house-keeper had difficulty in keeping buttons on the child's frocks, and that Katrina was addicted to surreptitious consumption of large cucumber pickles behind her geography in school hours. These were small faults of an otherwise beautiful nature, and stimulating to our youthful fancy in the possibilities they suggested. Unquestioningly we accepted Katrina as a being to be loved, pitied, and spared the ruder shocks of life. Lovingly we sharpened her pencils, cheerfully we covered her books, unenthusiastically but patiently we wrote her compositions; for Katrina's mind worked slowly, and literature was obviously not her forte. In return, Katrina blossomed and existed and shed on us the radiance of a smile which illumined the dim school-room even as her optimistic theories of life leavened our infant pessimism.