Ragged Lady, Complete

W >> William Dean Howells >> Ragged Lady, Complete

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"I'm real sorry," said Mrs. Lander. "I presume it's a disappointment for
you, too."

"Oh, not at all," answered Clementina. "I'm sorry we can't do the wo'k
he'a; but I know mocha wouldn't like to. Good-mo'ning,'m!"

"No, no! Don't go yet a minute! Won't you just give me my hand bag off
the bureau the'a?" Mrs. Lander entreated, and when the girl gave her the
bag she felt about among the bank-notes which she seemed to have loose in
it, and drew out a handful of them without regard to their value. "He'a!"
she said, and she tried to put the notes into Clementina's hand, "I want
you should get yourself something."

The girl shrank back. "Oh, no'm," she said, with an effect of seeming to
know that her refusal would hurt, and with the wish to soften it.
"I--couldn't; indeed I couldn't."

"Why couldn't you? Now you must! If I can't let you have the wo'k the way
you want, I don't think it's fair, and you ought to have the money for it
just the same."

Clementina shook her head smiling. "I don't believe motha would like to
have me take it."

"Oh, now, pshaw!" said Mrs. Lander, inadequately. "I want you should take
this for youaself; and if you don't want to buy anything to wea', you can
get something to fix your room up with. Don't you be afraid of robbin'
us. Land! We got moa money! Now you take this."

Mrs. Lander reached the money as far toward Clementina as she could and
shook it in the vehemence of her desire.

"Thank you, I couldn't take it," Clementina persisted. "I'm afraid I must
be going; I guess I must bid you good-mo'ning."

"Why, I believe the child's sca'ed of me! But you needn't be. Don't you
suppose I know how you feel? You set down in that chai'a there, and I'll
tell you how you feel. I guess we've been pooa, too--I don't mean
anything that a'n't exactly right--and I guess I've had the same
feelin's. You think it's demeanin' to you to take it. A'n't that it?"
Clementina sank provisionally upon the edge of the chair. "Well, it did
use to be so consid'ed. But it's all changed, nowadays. We travel pretty
nee' the whole while, Mr. Lander and me, and we see folks everywhere, and
it a'n't the custom to refuse any moa. Now, a'n't there any little thing
for your own room, there in your nice new house? Or something your
motha's got her heat set on? Or one of your brothas? My, if you don't
have it, some one else will! Do take it!"

The girl kept slipping toward the door. "I shouldn't know what to tell
them, when I got home. They would think I must be--out of my senses."

"I guess you mean they'd think I was. Now, listen to me a minute!" Mrs.
Lander persisted.

"You just take this money, and when you get home, you tell your mother
every word about it, and if she says, you bring it right straight back to
me. Now, can't you do that?"

"I don't know but I can," Clementina faltered. "Well, then take it!" Mrs.
Lander put the bills into her hand but she did not release her at once.
She pulled Clementina down and herself up till she could lay her other
arm on her neck. "I want you should let me kiss you. Will you?"

"Why, certainly," said Clementina, and she kissed the old woman.

"You tell your mother I'm comin' to see her before I go; and I guess,"
said Mrs. Lander in instant expression of the idea that came into her
mind, "we shall be goin' pretty soon, now."

"Yes'm," said Clementina.

She went out, and shortly after Lander came in with a sort of hopeful
apathy in his face.

Mrs. Lander turned her head on her pillow, and so confronted him.
"Albe't, what made you want me to see that child?"

Lander must have perceived that his wife meant business, and he came to
it at once. "I thought you might take a fancy to her, and get her to come
and live with us."

"Yes?"

"We're both of us gettin' pretty well on, and you'd ought to have
somebody to look after you if--I'm not around. You want somebody that can
do for you; and keep you company, and read to you, and talk to you--well,
moa like a daughta than a suvvant--somebody that you'd get attached to,
maybe--"

"And don't you see," Mrs. Lander broke out severely upon him, "what a
ca'e that would be? Why, it's got so already that I can't help thinkin'
about her the whole while, and if I got attached to her I'd have her on
my mind day and night, and the moa she done for me the more I should be
tewin' around to do for her. I shouldn't have any peace of my life any
moa. Can't you see that?"

"I guess if you see it, I don't need to," said Lander.

"Well, then, I want you shouldn't eva mention her to me again. I've had
the greatest escape! But I've got her off home, and I've give her money
enough! had a time with her about it--so that they won't feel as if we'd
made 'em trouble for nothing, and now I neva want to hear of her again. I
don't want we should stay here a great while longer; I shall be frettin'
if I'm in reach of her, and I shan't get any good of the ai'a. Will you
promise?"

"Yes."

"Well, then!" Mrs. Lander turned her face upon the pillow again in the
dramatization of her exhaustion; but she was not so far gone that she was
insensible to the possible interest that a light rap at the door
suggested. She once more twisted her head in that direction and called,
"Come in!"

The door opened and Clementina came in. She advanced to the bedside
smiling joyously, and put the money Mrs. Lander had given her down upon
the counterpane.

"Why, you haven't been home, child?"

"No'm," said Clementina, breathlessly. "But I couldn't take it. I knew
they wouldn't want me to, and I thought you'd like it better if I just
brought it back myself. Good-mo'ning." She slipped out of the door. Mrs.
Lander swept the bank-notes from the coverlet and pulled it over her
head, and sent from beneath it a stifled wail. "Now we got to go! And
it's all youa fault, Albe't."

Lander took the money from the floor, and smoothed each bill out, and
then laid them in a neat pile on the corner of the bureau. He sighed
profoundly but left the room without an effort to justify himself.

V.

The Landers had been gone a week before Clementina's mother decided that
she could spare her to Mrs. Atwell for a while. It was established that
she was not to serve either in the dining-room or the carving room; she
was not to wash dishes or to do any part of the chamber work, but to
carry messages and orders for the landlady, and to save her steps, when
she wished to see the head-waiter, or the head-cook; or to make an excuse
or a promise to some of the lady-boarders; or to send word to Mr. Atwell
about the buying, or to communicate with the clerk about rooms taken or
left.

She had a good deal of dignity of her own and such a gravity in the
discharge of her duties that the chef, who was a middle-aged Yankee with
grown girls of his own, liked to pretend that it was Mrs. Atwell herself
who was talking with him, and to discover just as she left him that it
was Clementina. He called her the Boss when he spoke of her to others in
her hearing, and he addressed her as Boss when he feigned to find that it
was not Mrs. Atwell. She did not mind that in him, and let the chef have
his joke as if it were not one. But one day when the clerk called her
Boss she merely looked at him without speaking, and made him feel that he
had taken a liberty which he must not repeat. He was a young man who much
preferred a state of self-satisfaction to humiliation of any sort, and
after he had endured Clementina's gaze as long as he could, he said,
"Perhaps you don't allow anybody but the chef to call you that?"

She did not answer, but repeated the message Mrs. Atwell had given her
for him, and went away.

It seemed to him undue that a person who exchanged repartees with the
young lady boarders across his desk, when they came many times a day to
look at the register, or to ask for letters, should remain snubbed by a
girl who still wore her hair in a braid; but he was an amiable youth, and
he tried to appease her by little favors and services, instead of trying
to bully her.

He was great friends with the head-waiter, whom he respected as a college
student, though for the time being he ranked the student socially. He had
him in behind the frame of letter-boxes, which formed a sort of little
private room for him, and talked with him at such hours of the forenoon
and the late evening as the student was off duty. He found comfort in the
student's fretful strength, which expressed itself in the pugnacious
frown of his hot-looking young face, where a bright sorrel mustache was
beginning to blaze on a short upper lip.

Fane thought himself a good-looking fellow, and he regarded his figure
with pleasure, as it was set off by the suit of fine gray check that he
wore habitually; but he thought Gregory's educational advantages told in
his face. His own education had ended at a commercial college, where he
acquired a good knowledge of bookkeeping, and the fine business hand he
wrote, but where it seemed to him sometimes that the earlier learning of
the public school had been hermetically sealed within him by several
coats of mathematical varnish. He believed that he had once known a
number of things that he no longer knew, and that he had not always been
so weak in his double letters as he presently found himself.

One night while Gregory sat on a high stool and rested his elbow on the
desk before it, with his chin in his hand, looking down upon Fane, who
sprawled sadly in his chair, and listening to the last dance playing in
the distant parlor, Fane said. "Now, what'll you bet that they won't
every one of 'em come and look for a letter in her box before she goes to
bed? I tell you, girls are queer, and there's no place like a hotel to
study 'em."

"I don't want to study them," said Gregory, harshly.

"Think Greek's more worth your while, or know 'em well enough already?"
Fane suggested.

"No, I don't know them at all," said the student.

"I don't believe," urged the clerk, as if it were relevant, "that there's
a girl in the house that you couldn't marry, if you gave your mind to
it."

Gregory twitched irascibly. "I don't want to marry them."

"Pretty cheap lot, you mean? Well, I don't know."

"I don't mean that," retorted the student. "But I've got other things to
think of."

"Don't you believe," the clerk modestly urged, "that it is natural for a
man--well, a young man--to think about girls?"

"I suppose it is."

"And you don't consider it wrong?"

"How, wrong?"

"Well, a waste of time. I don't know as I always think about wanting to
marry 'em, or be in love, but I like to let my mind run on 'em. There's
something about a girl that, well, you don't know what it is, exactly.
Take almost any of 'em," said the clerk, with an air of inductive
reasoning. "Take that Claxon girl, now for example, I don't know what it
is about her. She's good-looking, I don't deny that; and she's got pretty
manners, and she's as graceful as a bird. But it a'n't any one of 'em,
and it don't seem to be all of 'em put together that makes you want to
keep your eyes on her the whole while. Ever noticed what a nice little
foot she's got? Or her hands?"

"No," said the student.

"I don't mean that she ever tries to show them off; though I know some
girls that would. But she's not that kind. She ain't much more than a
child, and yet you got to treat her just like a woman. Noticed the kind
of way she's got?"

"No," said the student, with impatience.

The clerk mused with a plaintive air for a moment before he spoke. "Well,
it's something as if she'd been trained to it, so that she knew just the
right thing to do, every time, and yet I guess it's nature. You know how
the chef always calls her the Boss? That explains it about as well as
anything, and I presume that's what my mind was running on, the other
day, when I called her Boss. But, my! I can't get anywhere near her
since!"

"It serves you right," said Gregory. "You had no business to tease her."

"Now, do you think it was teasing? I did, at first, and then again it
seemed to me that I came out with the word because it seemed the right
one. I presume I couldn't explain that to her."

"It wouldn't be easy."

"I look upon her," said Fane, with an effect of argument in the sweetness
of his smile, "just as I would upon any other young lady in the house. Do
you spell apology with one p or two?"

"One," said the student, and the clerk made a minute on a piece of paper.

"I feel badly for the girl. I don't want her to think I was teasing her
or taking any sort of liberty with her. Now, would you apologize to her,
if you was in my place, and would you write a note, or just wait your
chance and speak to her?"

Gregory got down from his stool with a disdainful laugh, and went out of
the place. "You make me sick, Fane," he said.

The last dance was over, and the young ladies who had been waltzing with
one another, came out of the parlor with gay cries and laughter, like
summer girls who had been at a brilliant hop, and began to stray down the
piazzas, and storm into the office. Several of them fluttered up to the
desk, as the clerk had foretold, and looked for letters in the boxes
bearing their initials. They called him out, and asked if he had not
forgotten something for them. He denied it with a sad, wise smile, and
then they tried to provoke him to a belated flirtation, in lack of other
material, but he met their overtures discreetly, and they presently said,
Well, they guessed they must go; and went. Fane turned to encounter
Gregory, who had come in by a side door.

"Fane, I want to beg your pardon. I was rude to you just now."

"Oh, no! Oh, no!" the clerk protested. "That's all right. Sit down a
while, can't you, and talk with a fellow. It's early, yet."

"No, I can't. I just wanted to say I was sorry I spoke in that way.
Good-night. Is there anything in particular?"

"No; good-night. I was just wondering about--that girl."

"Oh!"

VI.

Gregory had an habitual severity with his own behavior which did not stop
there, but was always passing on to the behavior of others; and his days
went by in alternate offence and reparation to those he had to do with.
He had to do chiefly with the dining-room girls, whose susceptibilities
were such that they kept about their work bathed in tears or suffused
with anger much of the time. He was not only good-looking but he was a
college student, and their feelings were ready to bud toward him in
tender efflorescence, but he kept them cropped and blighted by his curt
words and impatient manner. Some of them loved him for the hurts he did
them, and some hated him, but all agreed fondly or furiously that he was
too cross for anything. They were mostly young school-mistresses, and
whether they were of a soft and amorous make, or of a forbidding temper,
they knew enough in spite of their hurts to value a young fellow whose
thoughts were not running upon girls all the time. Women, even in their
spring-time, like men to treat them as if they had souls as well as
hearts, and it was a saving grace in Gregory that he treated them all,
the silliest of them, as if they had souls. Very likely they responded
more with their hearts than with their souls, but they were aware that
this was not his fault.

The girls that waited at table saw that he did not distinguish in manner
between them and the girls whom they served. The knot between his brows
did not dissolve in the smiling gratitude of the young ladies whom he
preceded to their places, and pulled out their chairs for, any more than
in the blandishments of a waitress who thanked him for some correction.

They owned when he had been harshest that no one could be kinder if he
saw a girl really trying, or more patient with well meaning stupidity,
but some things fretted him, and he was as apt to correct a girl in her
grammar as in her table service. Out of work hours, if he met any of
them, he recognized them with deferential politeness; but he shunned
occasions of encounter with them as distinctly as he avoided the ladies
among the hotel guests. Some of the table girls pitied his loneliness,
and once they proposed that he should read to them on the back piazza in
the leisure of their mid-afternoons. He said that he had to keep up with
his studies in all the time he could get; he treated their request with
grave civility, but they felt his refusal to be final.

He was seen very little about the house outside of his own place and
function, and he was scarcely known to consort with anyone but Fane, who
celebrated his high sense of the honor to the lady-guests; but if any of
these would have been willing to show Gregory that they considered his
work to get an education as something that redeemed itself from discredit
through the nobility of its object, he gave them no chance to do so.

The afternoon following their talk about Clementina, Gregory looked in
for Fane behind the letter boxes, but did not find him, and the girl
herself came round from the front to say that he was out buying, but
would be back now, very soon; it was occasionally the clerk's business to
forage among the farmers for the lighter supplies, such as eggs, and
butter, and poultry, and this was the buying that Clementina meant. "Very
well, I'll wait here for him a little while," Gregory answered.

"So do," said Clementina, in a formula which she thought polite; but she
saw the frown with which Gregory took a Greek book from his pocket, and
she hurried round in front of the boxes again, wondering how she could
have displeased him. She put her face in sight a moment to explain, "I
have got to be here and give out the lettas till Mr. Fane gets back," and
then withdrew it. He tried to lose himself in his book, but her tender
voice spoke from time to time beyond the boxes, and Gregory kept
listening for Clementina to say, "No'm, there a'n't. Perhaps, the'e'll be
something the next mail," and "Yes'm, he'e's one, and I guess this paper
is for some of youa folks, too."

Gregory shut his book with a sudden bang at last and jumped to his feet,
to go away.

The girl came running round the corner of the boxes. "Oh! I thought
something had happened."

"No, nothing has happened," said Gregory, with a sort of violence; which
was heightened by a sense of the rings and tendrils of loose hair
springing from the mass that defined her pretty head. "Don't you know
that you oughtn't to say 'No'm' and 'Yes'm?"' he demanded, bitterly, and
then he expected to see the water come into her eyes, or the fire into
her cheeks.

Clementina merely looked interested. "Did I say that? I meant to say Yes,
ma'am and No, ma'am; but I keep forgetting."

"You oughtn't to say anything!" Gregory answered savagely, "Just say Yes,
and No, and let your voice do the rest."

"Oh!" said the girl, with the gentlest abeyance, as if charmed with the
novelty of the idea. "I should be afraid it wasn't polite."

Gregory took an even brutal tone. It seemed to him as if he were forced
to hurt her feelings. But his words, in spite of his tone, were not
brutal; they might have even been thought flattering. "The politeness is
in the manner, and you don't need anything but your manner."

"Do you think so, truly?" asked the girl joyously. "I should like to try
it once!"

He frowned again. "I've no business to criticise your way of speaking."

"Oh yes'm--yes, ma'am; sir, I mean; I mean, Oh, yes, indeed! The'a! It
does sound just as well, don't it?" Clementina laughed in triumph at the
outcome of her efforts, so that a reluctant visional smile came upon
Gregory's face, too. "I'm very mach obliged to you, Mr. Gregory--I shall
always want to do it, if it's the right way."

"It's the right way," said Gregory coldly.

"And don't they," she urged, "don't they really say Sir and Ma'am,
whe'e--whe'e you came from?"

He said gloomily, "Not ladies and gentlemen. Servants do. Waiters--like
me." He inflicted this stab to his pride with savage fortitude and he
bore with self-scorn the pursuit of her innocent curiosity.

"But I thought--I thought you was a college student."

"Were," Gregory corrected her, involuntarily, and she said, "Were, I
mean."

"I'm a student at college, and here I'm a servant! It's all right!" he
said with a suppressed gritting of the teeth; and he added, "My Master
was the servant of the meanest, and I must--I beg your pardon for
meddling with your manner of speaking--"

"Oh, I'm very much obliged to you; indeed I am. And I shall not care if
you tell me of anything that's out of the way in my talking," said
Clementina, generously.

"Thank you; I think I won't wait any longer for Mr. Fane."

"Why, I'm su'a he'll be back very soon, now. I'll try not to disturb you
any moa."

Gregory turned from taking some steps towards the door, and said, "I wish
you would tell Mr. Fane something."

"For you? Why, suttainly!"

"No. For you. Tell him that it's all right about his calling you Boss."

The indignant color came into Clementina's face. "He had no business to
call me that."

"No; and he doesn't think he had, now. He's truly sorry for it."

"I'll see," said Clementina.

She had not seen by the time Fane got back. She received his apologies
for being gone so long coldly, and went away to Mrs. Atwell, whom she
told what had passed between Gregory and herself.

"Is he truly so proud?" she asked.

"He's a very good young man," said Mrs. Atwell, "but I guess he's proud.
He can't help it, but you can see he fights against it. If I was you,
Clem, I wouldn't say anything to the guls about it."

"Oh, no'm--I mean, no, indeed. I shouldn't think of it. But don't you
think that was funny, his bringing in Christ, that way?"

"Well, he's going to be a minister, you know."

"Is he really?" Clementina was a while silent. At last she said, "Don't
you think Mr. Gregory has a good many freckles?"

"Well, them red-complected kind is liable to freckle," said Mrs. Atwell,
judicially.

After rather a long pause for both of them, Clementina asked, "Do you
think it would be nice for me to ask Mr. Gregory about things, when I
wasn't suttain?"

"Like what?"

"Oh-wo'ds, and pronunciation; and books to read."

"Why, I presume he'd love to have you. He's always correctin' the guls; I
see him take up a book one day, that one of 'em was readin', and when she
as't him about it, he said it was rubbage. I guess you couldn't have a
betta guide."

"Well, that was what I was thinking. I guess I sha'n't do it, though. I
sh'd neva have the courage." Clementina laughed and then fell rather
seriously silent again.

VII.

One day the shoeman stopped his wagon at the door of the helps' house,
and called up at its windows, "Well, guls, any of you want to git a numba
foua foot into a rumba two shoe, to-day? Now's youa chance, but you got
to be quick abort it. The'e ha'r't but just so many numba two shoes made,
and the wohld's full o' rumba foua feet."

The windows filled with laughing faces at the first sound of the
shoeman's ironical voice; and at sight of his neat wagon, with its
drawers at the rear and sides, and its buggy-hood over the seat where the
shoeman lounged lazily holding the reins, the girls flocked down the
stairs, and out upon the piazza where the shoe man had handily ranged his
vehicle.

They began to ask him if he had not this thing and that, but he said with
firmness, "Nothin' but shoes, guls. I did carry a gen'l line, one while,
of what you may call ankle-wea', such as spats, and stockin's, and
gaitas, but I nova did like to speak of such things befoa ladies, and now
I stick ex-elusively to shoes. You know that well enough, guls; what's
the use?"

He kept a sober face amidst the giggling that his words aroused,--and let
his voice sink into a final note of injury.

"Well, if you don't want any shoes, to-day, I guess I must be goin'." He
made a feint of jerking his horse's reins, but forebore at the entreaties
that went up from the group of girls.

"Yes, we do!" "Let's see them!" "Oh, don't go!" they chorused in an
equally histrionic alarm, and the shoeman got down from his perch to show
his wares.

"Now, the'a, ladies," he said, pulling out one of the drawers, and
dangling a pair of shoes from it by the string that joined their heels,
"the'e's a shoe that looks as good as any Sat'd'y-night shoe you eva see.
Looks as han'some as if it had a pasteboa'd sole and was split stock all
through, like the kind you buy for a dollar at the store, and kick out in
the fust walk you take with your fella--'r some other gul's fella, I
don't ca'e which. And yet that's an honest shoe, made of the best of
material all the way through, and in the best manna. Just look at that
shoe, ladies; ex-amine it; sha'n't cost you a cent, and I'll pay for youa
lost time myself, if any complaint is made." He began to toss pairs of
the shoes into the crowd of girls, who caught them from each other before
they fell, with hysterical laughter, and ran away with them in-doors to
try them on. "This is a shoe that I'm intaducin'," the shoeman went on,
"and every pair is warranted--warranted numba two; don't make any otha
size, because we want to cata to a strictly numba two custom. If any lady
doos feel 'em a little mite too snug, I'm sorry for her, but I can't do
anything to help her in this shoe."

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