第40章

Meantime, Mallory Tompkins, as I say, was a mighty intellectual fellow.You could see that from the books on the bamboo bookshelves in the sitting-room.There was, for instance, the "Encyclopaedia Metropolitana" in forty volumes, that he bought on the instalment plan for two dollars a month.Then when they took that away, there was the "History of Civilization," in fifty volumes at fifty cents a week for fifty years.Tompkins had read in it half-way through the Stone Age before they took it from him.After that there was the "Lives of the Painters," one volume at a time--a splendid thing in which you could read all about Aahrens, and Aachenthal, and Aax and men of that class.

After all, there's nothing like educating oneself.Mallory Tompkins knew about the opening period of all sorts of things, and in regard to people whose names began with "A" you couldn't stick him.

I don't mean that he and Mr.Pupkin lived a mere routine of studious evenings.That would be untrue.Quite often their time was spent in much less commendable ways than that, and there were poker parties in their sitting-room that didn't break up till nearly midnight.

Card-playing, after all, is a slow business, unless you put money on it, and, besides, if you are in a bank and are handling money all day, gambling has a fascination.

I've seen Pupkin and Mallory Tompkins and Joe Milligan, the dentist, and Mitchell the ticket agent, and the other "boys" sitting round the table with matches enough piled up in front of them to stock a factory.Ten matches counted for one chip and ten chips made a cent--so you see they weren't merely playing for the fun of the thing.Of course it's a hollow pleasure.You realize that when you wake up at night parched with thirst, ten thousand matches to the bad.But banking is a wild life and everybody knows it.

Sometimes Pupkin would swear off and keep away from the cursed thing for weeks, and then perhaps he'd see by sheer accident a pile of matches on the table, or a match lying on the floor and it would start the craze in him.I am using his own words--a "craze"--that's what he called it when he told Miss Lawson all about it, and she promised to cure him of it.She would have, too.Only, as I say, Pupkin found that what he had mistaken for attraction was only respect.And there's no use worrying a woman that you respect about your crazes.

It was from Mallory Tompkins that Pupkin learned all about the Mariposa people, because Pupkin came from away off--somewhere down in the Maritime Provinces--and didn't know a soul.Mallory Tompkins used to tell him about Judge Pepperleigh, and what a wonderfully clever man he was and how he would have been in the Supreme Court for certain if the Conservative Government had stayed in another fifteen or twenty years instead of coming to a premature end.He used to talk so much about the Pepperleighs, that Pupkin was sick of the very name.But just as soon as he had seen Zena Pepperleigh he couldn't hear enough of them.He would have talked with Tompkins for hours about the judge's dog Rover.And as for Zena, if he could have brought her name over his lips, he would have talked of her forever.

He first saw her--by one of the strangest coincidences in the world--on the Main Street of Mariposa.If he hadn't happened to be going up the street and she to be coming down it, the thing wouldn't have happened.Afterwards they both admitted that it was one of the most peculiar coincidences they ever heard of.Pupkin owned that he had had the strangest feeling that morning as if something were going to happen--a feeling not at all to be classed with the one of which he had once spoken to Miss Lawson, and which was, at the most, a mere anticipation of respect.

But, as I say, Pupkin met Zena Pepperleigh on the 26th of June, at twenty-five minutes to eleven.And at once the whole world changed.

The past was all blotted out.Even in the new forty volume edition of the "Instalment Record of Humanity" that Mallory Tompkins had just received Pupkin wouldn't have bothered with it.

She--that word henceforth meant Zena--had just come back from her boarding-school, and of all times of year coming back from a boarding-school and for wearing a white shirt waist and a crimson tie and for carrying a tennis racket on the stricken street of a town--commend me to the month of June in Mariposa.

And, for Pupkin, straight away the whole town was irradiated with sunshine, and there was such a singing of the birds, and such a dancing of the rippled waters of the lake, and such a kindliness in the faces of all the people, that only those who have lived in Mariposa, and been young there, can know at all what he felt.

The simple fact is that just the moment he saw Zena Pepperleigh, Mr.Pupkin was clean, plumb, straight, flat, absolutely in love with her.

Which fact is so important that it would be folly not to close the chapter and think about it.