第15章

Tembarom explained, and she studied the blue slashes with serious attention.

"Well," she said in a few minutes, laying the manuscript down, "Ishould have cut those words out myself if--if you'd asked me which to take away.They're too showy, Mr.Tembarom."Tembarom whipped a pencil out of his pocket and held it out.

"Say," he put it to her, "would you take this and draw it through a few of the other showy ones?""I should feel as if I was taking too much upon myself," she said."Idon't know anything about it."

"You know a darned sight more than I do," Tembarom argued."I didn't know they were showy.I thought they were the kind you had to put in newspaper stuff."She held the sheets of paper on her knee, and bent her head over them.

Tembarom watched her dimples flash in and out as she worked away like a child correcting an exercise.Presently he saw she was quite absorbed.Sometimes she stopped and thought, pressing her lips together; sometimes she changed a letter.There was no lightness in her manner.A badly mutilated stocking would have claimed her attention in the same way.

"I think I'd put 'house' there instead of 'mansion' if I were you,"she suggested once.

"Put in a whole block of houses if you like," he answered gratefully.

"Whatever you say goes.I believe Galton would say the same thing."She went over sheet after sheet, and though she knew nothing about it, she cut out just what Galton would have cut out.She put the papers together at last and gave them back to Tembarom, getting up from her seat.

"I must go back to father now," she said."I promised to make him a good cup of coffee over the little oil-stove.If you'll come and knock at the door I'll give you one.It will help you to keep fresh while you work."Tembarom did not go to bed at all that night, and he looked rather fagged the next morning when he handed back the "stuff" entirely rewritten.He swallowed several times quite hard as he waited for the final verdict.

"You did catch on to what I didn't want," Galton said at last."You will catch on still more as you get used to the work.And you did get the 'stuff,'""That--you mean--that goes?" Tembarom stammered.

"Yes, it goes," answered Galton."You can turn it in.We'll try the page for a month.""Gee! Thank the Lord!" said Tembarom, and then he laughed an excited boyish laugh, and the blood came back to his face.He had a whole month before him, and if he had caught on as soon as this, a month would teach him a lot.

He'd work like a dog.

He worked like a healthy young man impelled by a huge enthusiasm, and seeing ahead of him something he had had no practical reason for aspiring to.He went out in all weathers and stayed out to all hours.

Whatsoever rebuffs or difficulties he met with he never was even on the verge of losing his nerve.He actually enjoyed himself tremendously at times.He made friends; people began to like to see him.The Munsbergs regarded him as an inspiration of their own.

"He seen my name over de store and come in here first time he vas sent up dis vay to look for t'ings to write," Mr.Munsberg always explained."Ve vas awful busy--time of the Schwartz vedding, an' dere vas dat blizzard.He owned up he vas new, an' vanted some vun vhat knew to tell him vhat vas goin' on.'Course I could do it.Me an' my vife give him addresses an' a lot of items.He vorked 'em up good.

Dot up-town page is gettin' first-rate.He says he don' know vhat he'd have done if he hadn't turned up here dot day."Tembarom, having "caught on" to his fault of style, applied himself with vigor to elimination.He kept his tame dictionary chained to the leg of his table--an old kitchen table which Mrs.Bowse scrubbed and put into his hall bedroom, overcrowding it greatly.He turned to Little Ann at moments of desperate uncertainty, but he was man enough to do his work himself.In glorious moments when he was rather sure that Galton was far from unsatisfied with his progress, and Ann had looked more than usually distracting in her aloof and sober alluringness,-- it was her entire aloofness which so stirred his blood,--he sometimes stopped scribbling and lost his head for a minute or so, wondering if a fellow ever COULD "get away with it" to the extent of making enough to--but he always pulled himself up in time.

"Nice fool I look, thinking that way!" he would say to himself.

"She'd throw me down hard if she knew.But, my Lord! ain't she just a peach!"It was in the last week of the month of trial which was to decide the permanency of the page that he came upon the man Mrs.Bowse's boarders called his "Freak." He never called him a "freak" himself even at the first.Even his somewhat undeveloped mind felt itself confronted at the outset with something too abnormal and serious, something with a suggestion of the weird and tragic in it.

In this wise it came about:

The week had begun with another blizzard, which after the second day had suddenly changed its mind, and turned into sleet and rain which filled the streets with melted snow, and made walking a fearsome thing.Tembarom had plenty of walking to do.This week's page was his great effort, and was to be a "dandy." Galton must be shown what pertinacity could do.

"I'm going to get into it up to my neck, and then strike out," he said at breakfast on Monday morning.