第94章

"I wanted to fix you--fix you safe," he said when he told Miss Alicia about it."I guess no one can take it away from you, whatever old thing happens.""What could happen, dear Mr.Temple Barholm?" said Miss Alicia in the midst of tears of gratitude and tremulous joy."You are so young and strong and--everything! Don't even speak of such a thing in jest.What could happen?""Anything can happen," he answered, "just anything.Happening's the one thing you can't bet on.If I was betting, I'd put my money on the thing I was sure couldn't happen.Look at this Temple Barholm song and dance! Look at T.T.as he was half strangling in the blizzard up at Harlem and thanking his stars little Munsberg didn't kick him out of his confectionery store less than a year ago! So long as I'm all right, you're all right.But I wanted you fixed, anyhow."He paused and looked at her questioningly for a moment.He wanted to say something and he was not sure he ought.His reverence for her little finenesses and reserves increased instead of wearing away.He was always finding out new things about her.

"Say," he broke forth almost impetuously after his hesitation, "I wish you wouldn't call me Mr.Temple Barholm.""D-do you?" she fluttered."But what could I call you?""Well," he answered, reddening a shade or so, "I'd give a house and lot if you could just call me Tem.""But it would sound so unbecoming, so familiar," she protested.

"That's just what I'm asking for," he said--"some one to be familiar with.I'm the familiar kind.That's what's the matter with me.I'd be familiar with Pearson, but he wouldn't let me.I'd frighten him half to death.He'd think that he wasn't doing his duty and earning his wages, and that somehow he'd get fired some day without a character."He drew nearer to her and coaxed.

"Couldn't you do it?" he asked almost as though he were asking a favor of a girl."Just Tem? I believe that would come easier to you than T.

T.I get fonder and fonder of you every day, Miss Alicia, honest Injun.And I'd be so grateful to you if you'd just be that unbecomingly familiar."He looked honestly in earnest; and if he grew fonder and fonder of her, she without doubt had, in the face of everything, given her whole heart to him.

"Might I call you Temple -- to begin with?" she asked."It touches me so to think of your asking me.I will begin at once.Thank you --Temple," with a faint gasp."I might try the other a little later."It was only a few evenings later that he told her about the flats in Harlem.He had sent to New York for a large bundle of newspapers, and when he opened them he read aloud an advertisement, and showed her a picture of a large building given up entirely to "flats."He had realized from the first that New York life had a singular attraction for her.The unrelieved dullness of her life -- those few years of youth in which she had stifled vague longings for the joys experienced by other girls; the years of middle age spent in the dreary effort to be "submissive to the will of God," which, honestly translated, signified submission to the exactions and domestic tyrannies of "dear papa" and others like him -- had left her with her capacities for pleasure as freshly sensitive as a child's.The smallest change in the routine of existence thrilled her with excitement.Tembarom's casual references to his strenuous boyhood caused her eyes to widen with eagerness to hear more.Having seen this, he found keen delight in telling her stories of New York life --stories of himself or of other lads who had been his companions.She would drop her work and gaze at him almost with bated breath.He was an excellent raconteur when he talked of the things he knew well.He had an unconscious habit of springing from his seat and acting his scenes as he depicted them, laughing and using street-boy phrasing:

"It's just like a tale," Miss Alicia would breathe, enraptured as he jumped from one story to another."It's exactly like a wonderful tale."She learned to know the New York streets when they blazed with heat, when they were hard with frozen snow, when they were sloppy with melting slush or bright with springtime sunshine and spring winds blowing, with pretty women hurrying about in beflowered spring hats and dresses and the exhilaration of the world-old springtime joy.She found herself hurrying with them.She sometimes hung with him and his companions on the railing outside dazzling restaurants where scores of gay people ate rich food in the sight of their boyish ravenousness.

She darted in and out among horses and vehicles to find carriages after the theater or opera, where everybody was dressed dazzlingly and diamonds glittered.

"Oh, how rich everybody must have seemed to you--how cruelly rich, poor little boy!""They looked rich, right enough," he answered when she said it."And there seemed a lot of good things to eat all corralled in a few places.And you wished you could be let loose inside.But I don't know as it seemed cruel.That was the way it was, you know, and you couldn't help it.And there were places where they'd give away some of what was left.I tell you, we were in luck then."There was some spirit in his telling it all--a spirit which had surely been with him through his hardest days, a spirit of young mirth in rags--which made her feel subconsciously that the whole experience had, after all, been somehow of the nature of life's high adventure.

He had never been ill or heart-sick, and he laughed when he talked of it, as though the remembrance was not a recalling of disaster.

"Clemmin' or no clemmin'.I wish I'd lived the loife tha's lived,"Tummas Hibblethwaite had said.

Her amazement would indeed have been great if she had been told that she secretly shared his feeling.

"It seems as if somehow you had never been dull," was her method of expressing it.