Chapter 11

"There's this point against mitts," said Sharlee slowly. "Fifi's in bed now, and I'm afraid she's likely to be there for some time. Of course she could not wear the mitts in bed. She would have to tuck them away in a drawer somewhere. Don't you think it might be a good idea to give her something that she could enjoy at once--something that would give her pleasure _now_ and so help to lighten these tedious hours while she must be in her room?"

The mitts were the child of Queed's own brain. Unconsciously he had set his heart on them; but his clock-like mind at once grasped the logic of this argument, and he met it generously.

"Your point is well taken. It proves the wisdom of getting the advice of a woman on such a matter. Now I had thought also of a book--"

"I'll tell you!" cried Sharlee, nearly bowled over by a brilliant inspiration. "A _great_ many men that I know make it a rule to send flowers to girls that are sick, and--"

"_Flowers!_"

"It does seem foolish--_such_ a waste, doesn't it?--but really you've no idea how mad girls are about flowers, or how much real joy they can bring into a sick-room. And, by changing the water often, and--so on, they last a _long_ time, really an incredible time--"

"You recommend flowers, then? Very well," he said resolutely--"that is settled then. Now as to the kind. I have only a botanical knowledge of flowers--shall we say something in asters, perhaps, chrysanthemums or dahlias? What is your advice as to that?"

"Well, I advise roses."

"Roses--good. I had forgotten them for the moment. White roses?"

A little shiver ran through her. "No, no! Let them be the reddest you can find."

"Next, as to the cost of red roses."

"Oh, there'll be no trouble about _that_. Simply tell the florist that you want seventy-five cents' worth, and he will give you a fine bunch of them. By the way, I'd better put his name and address down on a piece of paper for you. Be sure to go to this one because I know him, and he's extremely reliable."

He took the slip from her, thanked her, bowed gravely, and turned to go. A question had risen involuntarily to the tip of her tongue; it hung there for a breath, its fate in the balance; and then she released it, casually, when another second would have been too late.

"How is your work on the _Post_ going?"

He wheeled as though she had struck him, and looked at her with a sudden odd hardening of the lower part of his face.

"The _Post_ discharged me this morning."

"Oh--"

It was all that she could say, for she knew it very well. She had had it from Colonel Cowles two days before it happened, which was three days after the April meeting of the directors. Charles Gardiner West, who was to have raised his voice in behalf of Mr. Queed on that occasion, happened not to be present at all. Having effected the dissolution of Semple and West, he had gone to the country for a month's rest, in preparation for that mapping out of collegiate plans which was to precede his tour of Europe. Hence the directors, hearing no protests from intercessors, unanimously bestowed discretion upon the Colonel to replace the transcendental scientist with a juicier assistant at a larger salary.

"At least," the young man qualified, with a curious mixture of aggressiveness and intense mortification, "the _Post_ will discharge me on the 15th day of May unless I show marked improvement. I believe that improvement was exactly the word the estimable Colonel employed."

"I'm awfully sorry," said Sharlee--"awfully! But after all, you want only some routine hack-work--any routine hack-work--to establish a little income. It will not be very hard to find something else, as good or even better."

"You do not appear to grasp the fact that, apart from any considerations of that sort, this is an unpleasant, a most offensive thing to have happen--"

"Oh, but that is just what it isn't, Mr. Queed," said Sharlee, who quite failed to appreciate his morbid tenderness for even the least of his intellectual offspring. "You have taken no pride in the newspaper work; you look down on it as altogether beneath you. You cannot mind this in any personal way--"

"I mind it," said he, "like the devil."

The word fell comically from his lips, but Sharlee, leaning against the shut door, looked at him with grave sympathy in her eyes.

"Mr. Queed, if you had tried to write nursery rhymes and--failed, would you have taken it to heart?"

"Never mind arguing it. In fact, I don't know that I could explain it to you in a thoroughly logical and convincing way. The central fact, the concrete thing, is that I do object most decidedly. I have spent too much time in equipping myself to express valuable ideas in discriminating language to be kicked out of a second-rate newspaper office like an incompetent office-boy. Of course I shall not submit to it."

"Do you care to tell me what you mean to do?"

"Do!" He hit the door-post a sudden blow with an unexpectedly large hand. "I shall have myself elected editor of the _Post_."

"But--but--but--" said the girl, taken aback by the largeness of this order--"But you don't expect to oust Colonel Cowles?"

"We are not necessarily speaking of to-morrow or next day. An actuary will tell you that I am likely to outlive Colonel Cowles. I mean, first, to have my dismissal recalled, and, second, to be made regular assistant editor at three times my present salary. That is my immediate reply to the directors of the Post. I am willing to let the editorship wait till old Cowles dies."

"Tell me," said Sharlee, "would you personally like to be editor of the _Post?_"

"_Like it!_ I'll resign the day after they elect me. Call it sheer wounded vanity--anything you like! The name makes no difference. I know only that I will have the editorship for a day--and all for the worthless pleasure of pitching it in their faces." He looked past her out of the window, and his light gray eyes filled with an indescribable bitterness. "And to have the editorship," he thought out loud, "I must unlearn everything that I know about writing, and deliberately learn to write like a demagogic ass."

Sharlee tapped the calcimine with her pointed fingernails. He spoke, as ever, with overweening confidence, but she knew that he would never win any editorship in this spirit. He was going at the quest with a new burst of intellectual contempt, though it was this very intellectual contempt that had led to his downfall.

"But your own private work?"

"Don't speak of it, I beg!" He flinched uncontrollably; but of his own accord he added, in carefully repressed tones: "To qualify for the editorship of course means--a terrible interruption and delay. It means that _I must side-track My Book for two months or even longer!_"

Two months! It would take him five years and probably he would not be qualified then.

Sharlee hesitated. "Have you fully made up your mind to--to be editor?"

He turned upon her vehemently. "May I ask you never to waste my time with questions of that sort. I never--_never_--say anything until I have fully made up my mind about it. Good-morning."

"No, no, no! Don't go yet! Please--I want to speak to you a minute."

He stopped and turned, but did not retrace the three steps he had taken. Sharlee leaned against the door and looked away from him, out into the park.

The little Doctor was badly in need of a surgical operation. Somebody must perform it for him, or his whole life was a dusty waste. That he still had glimmerings, he had shown this very hour, in wanting to make a gift to his sick little fellow-lodger. His resentment over his dismissal from the _Post_, too, was an unexpectedly human touch in him. But in the same breath with these things the young man had showed himself at his worst: the glimmerings were so overlaid with an incredible snobbery of the mind, so encrusted with the rankest and grossest egotism, that soon they must flutter and die out, leaving him stone-blind against the sunshine and the morning. No scratch could penetrate that Achilles-armor of self-sufficiency. There must be a shock to break it apart, or a vicious stabbing to cut through it to such spark as was still alive.

Somebody must administer that shock or do that stabbing. Why not she? He would hate the sight of her forevermore, but ...

"Mr. Queed," said Sharlee, turning toward him, "you let me see, from what you are doing this morning, that you think of Fifi as your friend. I'd like to ask if you think of me in that way, too."

O Lord, _Lord!_ Here was another one!

"No," he said positively. "Think of you as I do of Fifi! No, no! No, I do not."

"I don't mean to ask if you think of me as you do of Fifi. Of course I am sure you don't. I only mean--let me put it this way: Do you believe that I have your--interests at heart, and would like to do anything I could to help you?"

He thought this over warily. Doubtless doomed Smathers would have smiled to note the slowness with which his great rival's mind threshed out such a question as this.

"If you state your proposition in that way, I reply, tentatively, yes."

"Then can you spare me half an hour to-night after supper?"

"For what purpose?"

"For you and me," she smiled. "I'd like you to come and see me, at my house, where we could really have a little talk. You see, I know Colonel Cowles very well indeed, and I have read the _Post_ for oh, many, many years! In this way I know something about the kind of articles people here like to read, and about--what is needed to write such articles. I think I might make a suggestion or two that--would help. Will you come?"

After somewhat too obvious a consideration, Queed consented. Sharlee thanked him.

"I'll put my address down on the back of that paper, shall I? And I think I'll put my name, too, for I don't believe you have the faintest idea what it is."

"Oh, yes. The name is Miss Charlie Weyland. It appears that you were named after a boy?"

"Oh, it's only a silly nickname. Here's your little directory back. I'll be very glad to see you--at half-past eight, shall we say? But, Mr. Queed--don't come unless you feel sure that I really want to help. For I'm afraid I'll have to say a good deal that will make you very mad."

He bowed and walked away. Sharlee went to the telephone and called Bartlett's, the florist. She told Mr. Bartlett that a young man would come in there in a few minutes--full description of the young man--asking for seventy-five cents' worth of red roses; Mr. Bartlett would please give him two dozen roses, and charge the difference to her, Miss Weyland; the entire transaction to be kept discreetly quiet.

However the transaction was not kept entirely quiet. The roses were delivered promptly, and became the chief topic of conversation at Mrs. Paynter's dinner-table. Through an enforced remark of Mr. Queed's, and the later discursive gossip of the boarders, it became disseminated over the town that Bartlett's was selling American Beauties at thirty-seven and a half cents a dozen, and the poor man had to buy ten inches, double column, in the _Post_ next morning to get himself straightened out and reestablish Bartlett's familiar quotations.

XII

_More Consequences of the Plan about the Gift, and of how Mr. Queed drinks his Medicine like a Man; Fifi on Men, and how they do; Second Corruption of The Sacred Schedule._

Queed's irrational impulse to make Fifi a small gift cost him the heart of his morning. A call would have been cheaper, after all. Nor was the end yet. In this world it never is, where one event invariably hangs by the tail of another in ruthless concatenation. Starting out for Open-air Pedestrianism at 4.45 that afternoon, the young man was waylaid in the hail by Mrs. Paynter, at the very door of the big bedroom into which Fifi had long since been moved. The landlady, backing Queed against the banisters, told him how much her daughter had been pleased by his beautiful remembrance. The child, she said, wanted particularly to thank him herself, and wouldn't he please come in and see her just a moment?

As Mrs. Paynter threw open the door in the act of making the extraordinary request, escape was impossible. Queed found himself inside the room before he knew what he was doing. As for Mrs. Paynter, she somewhat treacherously slipped away to consult with Laura as to what for supper.

It was a mild sunny afternoon, with a light April wind idly kicking at the curtains. Fifi sat over by the open window in a tilted-back Morris chair, a sweet-faced little thing, all eyes and pallor. From her many covers she extricated a fragile hand, frilled with the sleeve of a pretty flowered kimono.

"Look at them! Aren't they glorious!"

On a table at her elbow his roses nodded from a wide-lipped vase, a gorgeous riot of flame and fragrance. Gazing at them, the young man marvelled at his own princely prodigality.

"I don't know _how_ to thank you for them, Mr. Queed, They are so, so sweet, and I do love roses so!"

Indeed her joy in them was too obvious to require any words. Queed decided to say nothing about the mitts.

"I'm glad that they please you," said he, pulling himself together for the ordeal of the call. "How are you getting along up here? Very well, I trust?"

"Fine. It's so quiet and nice.... And I don't mind about graduating a bit any more. Isn't that funny?"

"You must hurry up and get well and return to the dining-room again, F--F--Fifi--, and to the algebra lessons--"

"Don't," said Fifi. "I can't bear it."

But she whisked at her eyes with a tiny dab of a handkerchief, and when she looked at him she was smiling, quite clear and happy.

"Have you missed me since I stopped coming?"

"Missed you?" he echoed, exactly as he had done before.

But this time Fifi said, shamelessly, "I'll bet you have!--Haven't you?"

Come, Mr. Queed, be honest. You are supposed to have the scientist's passion for veracity. You mercilessly demand the truth from others. Now take some of your own medicine. Stand out like a man. Have you or have you not missed this girl since she stopped coming?

"Yes," said the little Doctor, rather hollowly, "I ... have missed you."

Fifi's smile became simply brazen. "Do you know what, Mr. Queed? You like me _lots_ more than you will say you do."

The young man averted his eyes. But for some time there had been in his mind the subtle consciousness of something left undone, an occasion which he had failed to meet with the final word of justice. Since he had been in the room, a vague, unwelcome resolve had been forming in his mind, and at Fifi's bold words, it hardened into final shape. He drew a deep breath.

"You referred to me as your friend once, F--Fifi. And I said that I was not."

"I know."

"I was--mistaken"--so he drained his medicine to the dregs. "I ... am your friend."

Now the child's smile was the eternal motherly. "Lor', Mr. Queed, I knew it all the time."

Queed looked at the floor. The sight of Fifi affected him most curiously to-day. He felt strangely ill at ease with her, only the more so because she was so amazingly at home with him. She wore her reddish-brown hair not rounded up in front as of old, but parted smoothly in the middle, and this only emphasized the almost saintly purity of her wasted little face. Her buoyant serenity puzzled and disconcerted him.

Meantime Fifi was examining Queed carefully. "You've been doing something to yourself, Mr. Queed! What is it? Why, you look ten times better than even four weeks ago!"

"I think," he said drearily, "it must be Klinker's Exercises. I give them," broke from him, "_one hour and twenty minutes a day!_"

But he pulled himself together, conscientiously determined to take the cheery view with Fifi.

"It is an extraordinary thing, but I am feeling better, physically and mentally, than I ever felt before, and this though I never had a really sick day in my life. It must be the exercises, for that is the only change I have made in my habits. Yet I never supposed that exercise had any such practical value as that. However," he went on slowly, "I am beginning to believe that there are several things in this world that I do not understand."

Here, indeed, was a most humiliating, an epoch-making, confession to come from the little Doctor. It was accompanied with a vague smile, intended to be cheering and just the thing for a sick-room. But the dominant note in this smile was bewildered and depressed helplessness, and at it the maternal instinct sprang full-grown in Fifi's thin little bosom. A passionate wish to mother the little Doctor tugged at her heart.

"You know what you need, Mr. Queed? Friends--lots of good friends--"

He winced as from a blow. "I assure you--"

"Yes--you--DO!" said Fifi, with surprising emphasis for so weak a little voice. "You need first a good girl friend, one lots older and better than me--one just like Sharlee. O if only you and she _would_ be friends!--she'd be the very best in the world! And then you need men friends, plenty of them, and to go around with them, and everything. You ought to like _men_ more, Mr. Queed! You ought to learn to _be_ like them, and--"

"Be like them!" he interrupted, "I am like them. Why," he conceded generously, "I am one of them."

Fifi dismissed this with a smile, but he immediately added: "Has it occurred to you that, apart from my greater concentration on my work, I am different from other men?"

"Why, Mr. Queed, you are no more like them than I am! You don't do any of the things they do. You don't--"

"Such as what? Now, Fifi, let us be definite as we go along. Suppose that it was my ambition to be, as you say, like other men. Just what things, in your opinion, should I do?"

"Well, smoke--that's one thing that all men do. And fool around more with people--laugh and joke, and tell funny stories and all. And then you could take an interest in your appearance--your clothes, you know; and be interested in all sorts of things going on around you, like politics and baseball. And go to see girls and take them out sometimes, like to the theatre. Some men that are popular drink, but of course I don't care for that."

Fifi, of course, had no idea that the little Doctor's world had been shattered to its axis that morning by three minutes' talk from Colonel Cowles. Therefore, though conscious that there never was a man who did not get a certain pleasure from talking himself over, she was secretly surprised at the patience, even the interest, with which he listened to her. She would have been still more surprised to know that his wonderful memory was nailing down every word with machine-like accuracy.

She expounded her little thesis in considerable detail, and at the end he said:--

"As I've told you, Fifi, my first duty is toward my book--to give it to the cause of civilization at the earliest possible moment. Therefore, the whole question is one of time, rather than of deliberate personal inclination. At present I literally cannot afford to give time to matters which, while doubtless pleasant enough in their fashion--"

"That's what you would have said about the exercise, two months ago. And now look, how it's helped you! And then, Mr. Queed--are you happy?"

Surprised and a little amused, he replied: "Really, I've never stopped to think. I should say, though, that I was perfectly content."

Fifi laughed and coughed. "There's a big difference--isn't there? Why, it's just like the exercise, Mr. Queed. Before you began it you were just _not sick_; now you are _very well_. That's the difference between content and happiness. Now I," she ran on, "am very, very happy. I wake up in the mornings _so_ glad that I'm alive that sometimes I can hardly bear it, and all through the day it's like something singing away inside of me! Are you like that?"

No, Mr. Queed must confess that he was not like that. Indeed, few looking at his face at this moment would ever have suspected him of it. Fifi regarded him with a kind of wistful sadness, but he missed the glance, being engaged in consulting his great watch; after which he sprang noisily to his feet, horrified at himself.

"Good heavens--it's ten minutes past five! I must go immediately. Why, I'm twenty-five minutes behind My Schedule!"

Fifi smiled through her wistfulness. "Don't ask me to be sorry, Mr. Queed, because I don't think I can. You see, I haven't taken up a minute of your time for nearly a month, so I was entitled to some of it to-day."

You see! Hadn't he figured it exactly right from the beginning? Once give a human being a moment of your time, as a special and extraordinary kindness, and before you can turn around there that being is claiming it wholesale as a matter-of-course right!

"It was so sweet of you to send me these flowers, and then to come and see me, too.... Do you know, it's been the very best day I've had since I've been sick, and you've made it so!"

"It's all right. Well, good-bye, Fifi."

Fifi held out both her tiny hands, and he received them because, in the sudden emergency, he could think of no way of avoiding them.

"You'll remember what I said about friends, and _men_--won't you, Mr. Queed? Remember it begins with liking people, liking everybody. Then when you really like them you want to do things for them, and that is happiness."

He looked surprised at this definition of happiness, and then: "Oh--I see. That's your religion, isn't it?"

"No, it's just common sense."

"I'll remember. Well, Fifi, good-bye."

"Good-bye--and thank you for everything."

Into her eyes had sprung a tenderness which he was far from understanding. But he did not like the look of it in the least, and he extricated his hands from the gentle clasp with some abruptness.

From the safe distance of the door he looked back, and wondered why Fifi's great eyes were fixed so solemnly on him.

"Well--good-bye, again. Hurry up and get well--"

"Good-bye--oh, good-bye," said Fifi, and turned her head toward the open window with the blue skies beyond.

Did Fifi know? How many have vainly tortured themselves with that question, as they have watched dear ones slipping without a word down the slopes to the dark Valley! If this child knew that her name had been read out for the greater Graduation, she gave no sign. Sometimes in the mornings she cried a little, without knowing why. Sometimes she said a vague, sad little thing that brought her mother's heart, stone cold, to her mouth. But her talk was mostly very bright and hopeful. Ten minutes before Queed came in she had been telling Mrs. Paynter about something she would do in the fall. If sometimes you would swear that she knew there would never be another fall for her, her very next remark might confound you. So her little face turned easily to the great river with the shining farther shore, and, for her part, there would be no sadness of farewell when she embarked.

By marvelous work, Queed closed up the twenty-five minutes of time he had bestowed upon Fifi, and pulled into supper only three minutes behind running-time. Afterwards, he sat in the Scriptorium, his face like a carven image, the sacred Schedule in his hands. For it had come down to that. Either he must at any cost hew his way back to the fastness of his early days, or he must corrupt the Schedule yet again.

Every minute that he took away from his book meant just that much delay in giving the great work to the world. That fact was the eternal backbone of all his consciousness. On the other balance of his personal equation, there was Buck Klinker and there was Fifi Paynter.