"Fine day!" he said, breezily, starting with the one neutral topic of conversation in the world.
"What of it?" said the chauffeur, and went on polishing.
"Well, uh, say, I wanted to have a talk with you."
"I guess there's nothing stopping you. G'wan and have your talk. I can't get away. The old dragon wanted to have a talk with me, too, this morning. So did the housekeeper. Everybody does." And he polished harder than ever.
"Ha, ha!" Which indicates Father's laughter, though actually it sounded more like "Hick, hick!" As carelessly as he could Father observed: "That's how it goes, all right. I know. When I was in the shoe business-"
"Waal, waal, you don't say so, Si! Haow's the shoe business in Hyannis, papa?"
"Hyannis, hell! I've been in business in New York City, New York, for more than forty years!"
"Oh!"
Father felt that he had made an impression. He stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets-as he had not done these six gloomy weeks-threw out his chest, and tried to look like Thirty-fourth and Broadway, with a dash of Wall Street and a flavor of Fifth Avenue.
The chauffeur sighed, "Well, all I can say is that any guy that's lived in New York that long and then comes to this God-forsaken neck of land is a nut."
With an almost cosmic sorrow in his manner and an irritated twist in his suspenders, the chauffeur disappeared into the garage. Father forlornly felt that he wasn't visibly getting nearer to the heart and patronage of Mrs. Vance Carter.
He stood alone on the cement terrace before the garage. The square grim back of the big house didn't so much "look down on him" as beautifully ignore him. A maid in a cap peeped wonderingly at him from a window. A man in dun livery wheeled a vacuum cleaner out of an unexpected basement door. An under-gardener, appearing at the corner, dragging a cultivator, stared at him. Far off, somewhere, he heard a voice crying, "Fif' love!" He could see a corner of a sunken garden with stiff borders of box. He had an uneasy feeling that a whole army of unexpected servants stood between him and Mrs. Vance Carter; that, at any moment, a fat, side-whiskered, expensive butler, like the butlers you see in the movies, would pop up and order him off the grounds.
The unsatisfactory chauffeur reappeared. In a panic Father urged, "Say, my name's Appleby and I run the tea-room at Grimsby Head-you know, couple of miles this side of the Center. It would be pretty nice for our class of business if the Madam was to stop there some time, and I was just wondering, just kinda wondering, if some time when she felt thirsty you c-"
"She don't never tell me when she's thirsty. She just tells me when she's mad."
"Well, you know, some time you might be stopping to show her the view or something-you fix it up, and-Here, you get yourself some cigars." He timidly held out a two-dollar bill. It seemed to bore the chauffeur a good deal, but he condescended to take it. Father tried to look knowing and friendly and sophisticated all at once. He added, "Any time you feel like a good cup o' tea and the finest home-made doughnuts you ever ate, why, you just drop in yourself, and 'twon't cost you a cent."
"All right, 'bo, I'll see what I can do," said the chauffeur, and vanished again.
Father airily stamped along the driveway. His head was high and hopeful. He inspected the tennis-courts as though he were Maurice McLoughlin. He admitted that the rhododendrons were quite extensive. In fact, he liked Grimsby Hill.
He had saved their fortunes-not for himself, but for Mother. He whistled "The Harum-Scarum Rag" all the way home, interrupting himself only to murmur: "I wonder where the back door of that house is. Not at the back, anyway. Never saw even a garbage-pail."
And then for two weeks he sat with Mother in the sun and watched the motors go by.
They were almost ready to admit, now, that their venture was a complete failure; that they were ruined; that they didn't know what they would do, with no savings and a rainy day coming.
They let their maid go. They gave the grocer smaller and smaller orders for bread and butter and cheese-and even these orders were invariably too large for the little custom that came their way.
For a week Father concealed the fact that Mrs. Vance Carter would be coming-not now, but very soon. Then he had to tell Mother the secret to save her from prostrating worry. They talked always of that coming miracle as they sat with hand desperately clutching hand in the evening; they nearly convinced themselves that Mrs. Carter would send her friends. September was almost here, and it was too late for Mrs. Carter's influence to help them this year, but they trusted that somehow, by the magic of her wealth and position, she would enable them to get through the winter and find success during the next year.
They developed a remarkable skill in seeing her car coming far down the road. When either of them saw it the other was summoned, and they waited tremblingly. But the landaulet always passed, with Mrs. Carter staring straight ahead, gray-haired and hook-nosed; sometimes with Miss Margaret Carter, whose softly piquant little nose would in time be hooked like her mother's. Father's treacherous ally the chauffeur never even looked at "The T Room." Sometimes Father wondered if the chauffeur knew just where the house was; perhaps he had never noticed it. He planned to wave and attract the chauffeur's attention, but in face of the prodigious Mrs. Carter he never dared to carry out the plan.
September 1st. The Applebys had given up hope of miracles. They were making up their minds to notify Mr. Pilkings, of Pilkings &Son's Sixth Avenue Standard Shoe Parlor, that Father again wanted the job he had held for so many years.
They must leave the rose-arbor for the noise of that most alien of places, their native New York.
Mother was in the kitchen; Father at the front door, aimlessly whittling. He looked up, saw the Vance Carter motor approach. He shrugged his shoulders, growled, "Let her go to the dickens."
Then the car had stopped, and Mrs. Vance Carter and Miss Margaret Carter had incredibly stepped out, had started up the path to the tea-room.
CHAPTER VII
Father's hand kept on aimlessly whittling, while his eyes poked out like those of a harassed fiddler-crab when he saw Mrs. Vance Carter actually stop. It was surely a dream. In his worry over inactivity he had found himself falling into queer little illusions lately. He was conscious that the chauffeur, whom he had bribed to stop some day, was winking at him in a vulgar manner not at all appropriate to his dove-gray uniform. He had a spasm of indignant wonder. "I'll bet a hat that fellow didn't have a thing to do with this; he's a grafter." Then he sprang up, bowing.
Mrs. Carter rustled up to him and murmured, "May we have some tea, here, and a cake, do you know?"
"Oh yes, ma'am! Won't you step right in? Fine day, ma'am."
Mrs. Carter seemed not to have any opinions regarding the day. Quite right, too; it wasn't an especially fine day; just a day.
She marched in, gave one quick, nervous look, and said, with tremendous politeness: "May we have this table by the window? You have such a charming view over the cliffs."
"Oh yes, ma'am! We hoped some day you'd take that table. Kind of kept the view for you," said Father, with panting gallantry, fairly falling over himself as he rushed across the floor to pull out their chairs and straighten the table-cloth.
Mrs. Carter paid no attention to him whatsoever. She drew a spectacle-case from her small hand-bag and set upon her beetling nose a huge pair of horn-rimmed eye-glasses. She picked up the menu-card as though she were delicately removing a bug-supposing there to be any bug so presumptuous as to crawl upon her smart tan suit. She raised her chin and held the card high.