“I’m selling for a big concern,” he said, “and I’ve got a first-class article to carry. Up to date, you know, and all that. It’s the top notch of typewriting machines, the Delkoff. Ever seen it? Here’s my card,” taking a card from an inside pocket and handing it to him. It was inscribed:
J. BURRIDGE & SON, DELKOFF TYPEWRITER CO.
BROADWAY, NEW YORK. G. SELDEN.
“That’s my name,” he said, pointing to the inscription in the corner. “I’m G. Selden, the junior assistant of Mr. Jones.”
At the sight of the insignia of his trade, his holiday air dropped from him, and he hastily drew from another pocket an illustrated catalogue.
“If you use a typewriter,” he broke forth, “I can assure you it would be to your interest to look at this.” And as Mount Dunstan took the proffered pamphlet, and with amiable gravity opened it, he rapidly poured forth his salesman’s patter, scarcely pausing to take his breath: “It’s the most up-to-date machine on the market. It has all the latest improved mechanical appliances. You will see from the cut in the catalogue that the platen roller is easily removed without a long mechanical operation. All you do is to slip two pins back and off comes the roller. There is also another point worth mentioning—the ribbon switch. By using this ribbon switch you can write in either red or blue ink while you are using only one ribbon. By throwing the switch on this side, you can use thirteen yards on the upper edge of the ribbon, by reversing it, you use thirteen yards on the lower edge—thus getting practically twenty-six yards of good, serviceable ribbon out of one that is only thirteen yards long—making a saving of fifty per cent. in your ribbon expenditure alone, which you will see is quite an item to any enterprising firm.”
He was obliged to pause here for a second or so, but as Mount Dunstan exhibited no signs of intending to use violence, and, on the contrary, continued to inspect the catalogue, he broke forth with renewed cheery volubility:
“Another advantage is the new basket shift. Also, the carriage on this machine is perfectly stationary and rigid. On all other machines it is fastened by a series of connecting bolts and links, which you will readily understand makes perfect alignment uncertain. Then our tabulator is a part and parcel of the instrument, costing you nothing more than the original price of the machine, which is one hundred dollars—without discount.”
“It seems a good thing,” said Mount Dunstan. “If I had much business to transact, I should buy one.”
“If you bought one you’d HAVE business,” responded Selden. “That’s what’s the matter. It’s the up-to-date machines that set things humming. A slow, old-fashioned typewriter uses a firm’s time, and time’s money.”
“I don’t find it so,” said Mount Dunstan. “I have more time than I can possibly use—and no money.”
G. Selden looked at him with friendly interest. His experience, which was varied, had taught him to recognize symptoms. This nice, rough-looking chap, who, despite his rather shabby clothes, looked like a gentleman, wore an expression Jones’s junior assistant had seen many a time before. He had seen it frequently on the countenances of other junior assistants who had tramped the streets and met more or less savage rebuffs through a day’s length, without disposing of a single Delkoff, and thereby adding five dollars to the ten per. It was the kind of thing which wiped the youth out of a man’s face and gave him a hard, worn look about the eyes. He had looked like that himself many an unfeeling day before he had learned to “know the ropes and not mind a bit of hot air.” His buoyant, slangy soul was a friendly thing. He was a gregarious creature, and liked his fellow man. He felt, indeed, more at ease with him when he needed “jollying along.” Reticence was not even etiquette in a case as usual as this.
“Say,” he broke out, “perhaps I oughtn’t to have worried you. Are you up against it? Down on your luck, I mean,” in hasty translation.
Mount Dunstan grinned a little.
“That’s a very good way of putting it,” he answered. “I never heard `up against it’ before. It’s good. Yes, I’m up against it.
“Out of a job?” with genial sympathy.
“Well, the job I had was too big for me. It needed capital.” He grinned slightly again, recalling a phrase of his Western past. “I’m afraid I’m down and out.”
“No, you’re not,” with cheerful scorn. “You’re not dead, are you? S’long as a man’s not been dead a month, there’s always a chance that there’s luck round the corner. How did you happen here? Are you piking it?”
Momentarily Mount Dunstan was baffled. G. Selden, recognising the fact, enlightened him. “That’s New York again,” he said, with a boyish touch of apology. “It means on the tramp. Travelling along the turnpike. You don’t look as if you had come to that—though it’s queer the sort of fellows you do meet piking sometimes. Theatrical companies that have gone to pieces on the road, you know. Perhaps—” with a sudden thought, “you’re an actor. Are you?”
Mount Dunstan admitted to himself that he liked the junior assistant of Jones immensely. A more ingenuously common young man, a more innocent outsider, it had never been his blessed privilege to enter into close converse with, but his very commonness was a healthy, normal thing. It made no effort to wreathe itself with chaplets of elegance; it was beautifully unaware that such adornment was necessary. It enjoyed itself, youthfully; attacked the earning of its bread with genial pluck, and its good-natured humanness had touched him. He had enjoyed his talk; he wanted to hear more of it. He was not in the mood to let him go his way. To Penzance, who was to lunch with him to-day, he would present a study of absorbing interest.
“No,” he answered. “I’m not an actor. My name is Mount Dunstan, and this place,” with a nod over his shoulder, “is mine—but I’m up against it, nevertheless.”
Selden looked a trifle disgusted. He began to pick up his bicycle. He had given a degree of natural sympathy, and this was an English chap’s idea of a joke.
“I’m the Prince of Wales, myself,” he remarked, “and my mother’s expecting me to lunch at Windsor. So long, me lord,” and he set his foot on the treadle.
Mount Dunstan rose, feeling rather awkward. The point seemed somewhat difficult to contend.
“It is not a joke,” he said, conscious that he spoke rather stiffly.
“Little Willie’s not quite as easy as he looks,” was the cryptic remark of Mr. Selden.
Mount Dunstan lost his rather easily lost temper, which happened to be the best thing he could have done under the circumstances.
“Damn it,” he burst out. “I’m not such a fool as I evidently look. A nice ass I should be to play an idiot joke like that. I’m speaking the truth. Go if you like—and be hanged.”
Selden’s attention was arrested. The fellow was in earnest. The place was his. He must be the earl chap he had heard spoken of at the wayside public house he had stopped at for a pot of beer. He dismounted from his bicycle, and came back, pushing it before him, good-natured relenting and awkwardness combining in his look.
“All right,” he said. “I apologise—if it’s cold fact. I’m not calling you a liar.”
“Thank you,” still a little stiffly, from Mount Dunstan.
The unabashed good cheer of G. Selden carried him lightly over a slightly difficult moment. He laughed, pushing his cap back, of course, and looking over the hedge at the sweep of park, with a group of deer cropping softly in the foreground.
“I guess I should get a bit hot myself,” he volunteered handsomely, “if I was an earl, and owned a place like this, and a fool fellow came along and took me for a tramp. That was a pretty bad break, wasn’t it? But I did say you didn’t look like it. Anyway you needn’t mind me. I shouldn’t get onto Pierpont Morgan or W. K. Vanderbilt, if I met ‘em in the street.”
He spoke the two names as an Englishman of his class would have spoken of the Dukes of Westminster or Marlborough. These were his nobles—the heads of the great American houses, and entirely parallel, in his mind, with the heads of any g
reat house in England. They wielded the power of the world, and could wield it for evil or good, as any prince or duke might. Mount Dunstan saw the parallel.
“I apologise, all right,” G. Selden ended genially.
“I am not offended,” Mount Dunstan answered. “There was no reason why you should know me from another man. I was taken for a gamekeeper a few weeks since. I was savage a moment, because you refused to believe me—and why should you believe me after all?”
G. Selden hesitated. He liked the fellow anyhow.
“You said you were up against it—that was it. And—and I’ve seen chaps down on their luck often enough. Good Lord, the hard-luck stories I hear every day of my life. And they get a sort of look about the eyes and mouth. I hate to see it on any fellow. It makes me sort of sick to come across it even in a chap that’s only got his fool self to blame. I may be making another break, telling you—but you looked sort of that way.”
“Perhaps,” stolidly, “I did.” Then, his voice warming,
“It was jolly good-natured of you to think about it at all. Thank you.”
“That’s all right,” in polite acknowledgment. Then with another look over the hedge, “Say—what ought I to call you? Earl, or my Lord?”
“It’s not necessary for you to call me anything in particular—as a rule. If you were speaking of me, you might say Lord Mount Dunstan.”
G. Selden looked relieved.
“I don’t want to be too much off,” he said. “And I’d like to ask you a favour. I’ve only three weeks here, and I don’t want to miss any chances.”
“What chance would you like?”
“One of the things I’m biking over the country for, is to get a look at just such a place as this. We haven’t got ‘em in America. My old grandmother was always talking about them. Before her mother brought her to New York she’d lived in a village near some park gates, and she chinned about it till she died. When I was a little chap I liked to hear her. She wasn’t much of an American. Wore a black net cap with purple ribbons in it, and hadn’t outlived her respect for aristocracy. Gee!” chuckling, “if she’d heard what I said to you just now, I reckon she’d have thrown a fit. Anyhow she made me feel I’d like to see the kind of places she talked about. And I shall think myself in luck if you’ll let me have a look at yours—just a bike around the park, if you don’t object—or I’ll leave the bike outside, if you’d rather.”
“I don’t object at all,” said Mount Dunstan. “The fact is, I happened to be on the point of asking you to come and have some lunch—when you got on your bicycle.”
Selden pushed his cap and cleared his throat.
“I wasn’t expecting that,” he said. “I’m pretty dusty,” with a glance at his clothes. “I need a wash and brush up— particularly if there are ladies.”
There were no ladies, and he could be made comfortable. This being explained to him, he was obviously rejoiced. With unembarrassed frankness, he expressed exultation. Such luck had not, at any time, presented itself to him as a possibility in his holiday scheme.
“By gee,” he ejaculated, as they walked under the broad oaks of the avenue leading to the house. “Speaking of luck, this is the limit! I can’t help thinking of what my grandmother would say if she saw me.”
He was a new order of companion, but before they had reached the house, Mount Dunstan had begun to find him inspiring to the spirits. His jovial, if crude youth, his unaffected acknowledgment of unaccustomedness to grandeur, even when in dilapidation, his delight in the novelty of the particular forms of everything about him—trees and sward, ferns and moss, his open self-congratulation, were without doubt cheerful things.
His exclamation, when they came within sight of the house itself, was for a moment disturbing to Mount Dunstan’s composure.
“Hully gee!” he said. “The old lady was right. All I’ve thought about ‘em was ‘way off. It’s bigger than a museum.” His approval was immense.
During the absence in which he was supplied with the “wash and brush up,” Mount Dunstan found Mr. Penzance in the library. He explained to him what he had encountered, and how it had attracted him.
“You have liked to hear me describe my Western neighbours,” he said. “This youngster is a New York development, and of a different type. But there is a likeness. I have invited to lunch with us, a young man whom—Tenham, for instance, if he were here—would call `a bounder.’ He is nothing of the sort. In his junior-assistant-salesman way, he is rather a fine thing. I never saw anything more decently human than his way of asking me—man to man, making friends by the roadside if I was `up against it.’ No other fellow I have known has ever exhibited the same healthy sympathy.”
The Reverend Lewis was entranced. Already he was really quite flushed with interest. As Assyrian character, engraved upon sarcophogi, would have allured and thrilled him, so was he allured by the cryptic nature of the two or three American slang phrases Mount Dunstan had repeated to him. His was the student’s simple ardour.
“Up against it,” he echoed. “Really! Dear! Dear! And that signifies, you say–-“
“Apparently it means that a man has come face to face with an obstacle difficult or impossible to overcome.”
“But, upon my word, that is not bad. It is strong figure of speech. It brings up a picture. A man hurrying to an end—much desired—comes unexpectedly upon a stone wall. One can almost hear the impact. He is up against it. Most vivid. Excellent! Excellent!”
The nature of Selden’s calling was such that he was not accustomed to being received with a hint of enthusiastic welcome. There was something almost akin to this in the vicar’s courteously amiable, aquiline countenance when he rose to shake hands with the young man on his entrance. Mr. Penzance was indeed slightly disappointed that his greeting was not responded to by some characteristic phrasing. His American was that of Sam Slick and Artemus Ward, Punch and various English witticisms in anecdote. Life at the vicarage of Dunstan had not revealed to him that the model had become archaic.
The revelation dawned upon him during his intercourse with G. Selden. The young man in his cheap bicycling suit was a new development. He was markedly unlike an English youth of his class, as he was neither shy, nor laboriously at his ease. That he was at his ease to quite an amazing degree might perhaps have been remotely resented by the insular mind, accustomed to another order of bearing in its social inferiors, had it not been so obviously founded on entire unconsciousness of self, and so mingled with open appreciation of the unanticipated pleasures of the occasion. Nothing could have been farther from G. Selden than any desire to attempt to convey the impression that he had enjoyed the hospitality of persons of rank on previous occasions. He found indeed a gleeful point in the joke of the incongruousness of his own presence amid such surroundings.
“What Little Willie was expecting,” he remarked once, to the keen joy of Mr. Penzance, “was a hunk of bread and cheese at a village saloon somewhere. I ought to have said `pub,’ oughtn’t I? You don’t call them saloons here.”
He was encouraged to talk, and in his care-free fluency he opened up many vistas to the interested Mr. Penzance, who found himself, so to speak, whirled along Broadway, rushed up the steps of the elevated railroad and struggling to obtain a seat, or a strap to hang to on a Sixth Avenue train. The man was saturated with the atmosphere of the hot battle he lived in. From his childhood he had known nothing but the fever heat of his “little old New York,” as he called it with affectionate slanginess, and any temperature lower than that he was accustomed to would have struck him as being below normal. Penzance was impressed by his feeling of affection for the amazing city of his birth. He admired, he adored it, he boasted joyously of its perfervid charm.
“Something doing,” he said. “That’s what my sort of a fellow likes—something doing. You feel it right there when you walk along the streets. Little old New York for mine. It’s good enough for Little Willie. And it never stops. Why, Broadway at night–-“
He forgot his chop, and leaned forward on the table to pour forth his description. The manservant, standing behind Mount Dunstan’s chair, forgot himself also, thought he was a trained domestic whose duty it was to present dishes to the attention without any apparent mental processes. Certainly it was not his business to listen, and gaze fascinated. This he did, however, actually for the time unconscious of his breach of manners. The very crudity of the language used, the oddly sounding, sometimes not easily translatable slang phrases, used as if they were a necessary part of any conversation—the blunt, uneducated bareness of figure—seemed to Penzance to make more roughly vivid the picture dashed off. The broad thoroughfare almost as thronged by night as by day. Crowds going to theatres, loaded electric cars, whizzing and clanging bells, the elevated railroad rushing and roaring past within hearing, theatre fronts flaming with electric light, announcements of names of theatrical stars and the plays they appeared in, electric light advertisements of brands of cigars, whiskies, breakfast foods, all blazing high in the night air in such number and with such strength of brilliancy that the whole thoroughfare was as bright with light as a ballroom or a theatre. The vicar felt himself standing in the midst of it all, blinded by the glare.
“Sit down on the sidewalk and read your newspaper, a book, a magazine—any old thing you like,” with an exultant laugh.
The names of the dramatic stars blazing over entrances to the theatres were often English names, their plays English plays, their companies made up of English men and women. G. Selden was as familiar with them and commented upon their gifts as easily as if he had drawn his drama from the Strand instead of from Broadway. The novels piled up in the stations of what he called “the L” (which revealed itself as being a New-York-haste abbreviation of Elevated railroad), were in large proportion English novels, and he had his ingenuous estimate of English novelists, as well as of all else.
“Ruddy, now,” he said; “I like him. He’s all right, even though we haven’t quite caught onto India yet.”
The Shuttle: By Frances Hodgson Burnett Page 29