A Poor Wise Man

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  CHAPTER VII

  "I wish you'd stop whistling that thing," said Miss Boyd, irritably. "Itmakes me low in my mind."

  "Sorry," said Willy Cameron. "I do it because I'm low in my mind."

  "What are you low about?" Miss Boyd had turned toward the rear of thecounter, where a mirror was pasted to a card above a box of chewing gum,and was carefully adjusting her hair net. "Lady friend turned you down?"

  Willy Cameron glanced at her.

  "I'm low because I haven't got a lady friend, Miss Boyd." He held upa sheet of prescription paper and squinted at it. "Also becausethe medical profession writes with its feet, apparently. I've doneeverything to this but dip it in acid. I've had it pinned to the wall,and tried glancing at it as I went past. Sometimes you can surprise themthat way. But it does no good. I'm going to take it home and dream onit, like bride's cake."

  "They're awful, aren't they?"

  "When I get into the Legislature," said Willy Cameron, "I'm going tohave a bill passed compelling doctors to use typewriters. Take this now.Read upside down, its horse liniment. Read right side up, it's poison.And it's for internal use."

  "What d'you mean you haven't got a lady friend?"

  "The exact and cruel truth." He smiled at her, and had Miss Boyd beenmore discerning she might have seen that the smile was slightly forced.Also that his eyes were somewhat sunken in his head. Which might, ofcourse, have been due to too much political economy and history, andthe eminent divines on Sunday evenings. Miss Boyd, however, was notdiscerning, and moreover, she was summoning her courage to a certainpoint.

  "Why don't you ask me to go to the movies some night?" she said. "I likethe movies, and I get sick of going alone."

  "My dear child," observed Willy Cameron, "if that young man in the sacksuit who comes in to see you every day were three inches shorter andtwenty pounds lighter, I'd ask you this minute."

  "Oh, him!" said Miss Boyd, with a self-conscious smile. "I'm throughwith him. He's a Bolshevik!"

  "He has the Bolshevist possessive eye," agreed Willy Cameron, readily."Does he know you are through with him? Because that's important, too.You may know it, and I may know it, but if he doesn't know it--"

  "Why don't you say right out you don't want to take me?" Willy Cameron'schivalrous soul was suddenly shocked. To his horror he saw tears in MissBoyd's eyes.

  "I'm just a plain idiot, Miss Edith," he said. "I was only fooling. Itwill mean a lot to me to have a nice girl go with me to the movies, oranywhere else. We'll make it to-night, if that suits you, and I'll takea look through the neighborhood at noon and see what's worth while."

  The Eagle Pharmacy was a small one in a quiet neighborhood. During theentire day, and for three evenings a week, Mr. William Wallace Cameronran it almost single-handed, having only the preoccupied assistance ofMiss Boyd in the candy and fancy goods. At the noon and dinner hours,and four evenings a week, he was relieved by the owner, Mr. Davis, atired little man with large projecting ears and worried, child-likeeyes, who was nursing an invalid wife at home. A pathetic little man,carrying home with unbounded faith day after day bottles of liquid foodsand beef capsules, and making wistful comments on them when he returned.

  "She couldn't seem to keep that last stuff down, Mr. Cameron," he wouldsay. "I'll try something else."

  And he would stand before his shelves, eyes upturned, searching,eliminating, choosing.

  Miss Boyd attended to the general merchandise, sold stationery andperfumes, candy and fancy soaps, and in the intervals surveyed the worldthat lay beyond the plate glass windows with shrewd, sophisticated youngeyes.

  "That new doctor across the street is getting busier," she would say.Or, "The people in 42 have got a Ford. They haven't got room for agarage, either. Probably have to leave it out at nights."

  Her sophistication was kindly in the main. She combined it with an easytolerance of weakness, and an invincible and cheery romanticism, asWilly Cameron discovered the night they first went to a moving picturetheater together. She frankly wept and joyously laughed, and now andthen, delighted at catching some film subtlety and fearful that he wouldmiss it, she would nudge him with her elbow.

  "What d'you think of that?" she would say. "D'you get it? He thinks he'sgetting her--Alice Joyce, you know--on the telephone, and it's a privatewire to the gang." She was rather quiet after that particular speech.Then she added: "I know a place that's got a secret telephone." But hewas absorbed in the picture, and made no comment on that. She seemedrather relieved.

  Once or twice she placed an excited hand on his knee. He was veryuncomfortable until she removed it, because he had a helpless sort ofimpression that she was not quite so unconscious of it as she appeared.Time had been, and not so long ago, when he might have reciprocated herlittle advance in the spirit in which it was offered, might have takenthe hand and held it, out of the sheer joy of youth and proximity. Butthere was nothing of the philanderer in the Willy Cameron who sat besideEdith Boyd that night in body, while in spirit he was in another state,walking with his slight limp over crisp snow and sodden mud, but throughmagic lands, to the little moving picture theater at the camp.

  Would he ever see her again? Ever again? And if he did, what good wouldit be? He roused himself when they started toward her home. The girl waschattering happily. She adored Douglas Fairbanks. She knew a girl whohad written for his picture but who didn't get one. She wouldn't doa thing like that. "Did they really say things when they moved theirlips?"

  "I think they do," said Willy Cameron. "When that chap was talking overthe telephone I could tell what he was saying by--Look here, what didyou mean when you said you knew of a place that has a secret telephone?"

  "I was only talking."

  "No house has any business with a secret telephone," he said virtuously.

  "Oh, forget it. I say a lot of things I don't mean." He was a littlepuzzled and rather curious, but not at all disturbed.

  "Well, how did you get to know about it?"

  "I tell you I was only talking."

  He let it drop at that. The street crowds held and interested him. Heliked to speculate about them; what life meant to them, in work and loveand play; to what they were going on such hurrying feet. A country boy,the haste of the city impressed him.

  "Why do they hurry so?" he demanded, almost irritably.

  "Hurrying home, most of them, because they've got to get up in themorning and go to work."

  "Do you ever wonder about the homes they are hurrying to?"

  "Me? I don't wonder. I know. Most of them have to move fast to keep upwith the rent."

  "I don't mean houses," he explained, patiently. "I mean--A house isn't ahome."

  "You bet it isn't."

  "It's the families I'm talking about. In a small town you know all aboutpeople, who they live with, and all that." He was laboriously talkingdown to her. "But here--"

  He saw that she was not interested. Something he had said started anunpleasant train of thought in her mind. She was walking faster, andfrowning slightly. To cheer her he said:

  "I am keeping an eye out for the large young man in the sack suit, youknow. If he jumps me, just yell for the police, will you? Because I'llprobably not be able to."

  "I wish you'd let me forget him."

  "I will. The question is, will he?" But he saw that the subject wasunpleasant.

  "We'll have to do this again. It's been mighty nice of you to come."

  "You'll have to ask me, the next time."

  "I certainly will. But I think I'd better let your family look me overfirst, just so they'll know that I don't customarily steal the silverspoons when I'm asked out to dinner. Or anything like that."

  "We're just--folks."

  "So am I, awfully--folks! And pretty lonely folks at that. Somethinglike that pup that has adopted me, only worse. He's got me, but Ihaven't anybody."

  "You'll not be lonely long." She glanced up at him.

  "That's cheering. Why?"

  "Well, you are the sort that makes frie
nds," she said, rathervaguely. "That crowd that drops into the shop on the evenings you'rethere--they're crazy about you. They like to hear you talk."

  "Great Scott! I suppose I've been orating all over the place!"

  "No, but you've got ideas. You give them something to think about whenthey go home. I wish I had a mind like yours."

  He was so astonished that he stopped dead on the pavement. "My Scottishblood," he said despondently. "A Scot is always a reformer and apreacher, in his heart. I used to orate to my mother, but she likedit. She is a Scot, too. Besides, it put her to sleep. But I thought I'doutgrown it."

  "You don't make speeches. I didn't mean that."

  But he was very crestfallen during the remainder of the way, and rathersilent. He wondered, that night before he went to bed, if he had beendidactic to Lily Cardew. He had aired his opinions to her at length, heknew. He groaned as he took off his coat in his cold little room at theboarding house which lodged and fed him, both indifferently, for the sumof twelve dollars per week.

  Jinx, the little hybrid dog, occupied the seat of his one comfortablechair. He eyed the animal somberly.

  "Hereafter, old man," he said, "when I feel a spell of oratory comingon, you will have to be the audience." He took his dressing gown froma nail behind the door, and commenced to put it on. Then he took it offagain and wrapped the dog in it.

  "I can read in bed, which you can't," he observed. "Only, I can't helpthinking, with all this town to pick from, you might have chosen afellow with two dressing gowns and two chairs."

  * * * * *

  He was extremely quiet all the next day. Miss Boyd could hear him,behind the partition with its "Please Keep Out" sign, fussing withbottles and occasionally whistling to himself. Once it was the "Long,Long Trail," and a moment later he appeared in his doorway, grinning.

  "Sorry," he said. "I've got in the habit of thinking to the fool thing.Won't do it again."

  "You must be thinking hard."

  "I am," he replied, grimly, and disappeared. She could hear the slightunevenness of his steps as he moved about, but there was no morewhistling. Edith Boyd leaned both elbows on the top of a showcase andfell into a profound and troubled thought. Mostly her thoughts were ofWilly Cameron, but some of them were for herself. Up dreary and sordidby-paths her mind wandered; she was facing ugly facts for the firsttime, and a little shudder of disgust shook her. He wanted to meet herfamily. He was a gentleman and he wanted to meet her family. Well, hecould meet them all right, and maybe he would understand then that shehad never had a chance. In all her young life no man had ever proposedletting her family look him over. Hardly ever had they visited her athome, and when they did they seemed always glad to get away. She had metthem on street corners, and slipped back alone, fearful of every creakof the old staircase, and her mother's querulous voice calling to her:

  "Edie, where've you been all this time?" And she had lied. How she hadlied!

  "I'm through with all that," she resolved. "It wasn't any fun anyhow.I'm sick of hating myself."

  Some time later Willy Cameron heard the telephone ring, and takingpad and pencil started forward. But Miss Boyd was at the telephone,conducting a personal conversation.

  "No.... No, I think not.... Look here, Lou, I've said no twice."

  There was a rather lengthy silence while she listened. Then: "You mightas well have it straight, Lou. I'm through.... No, I'm not sick. I'mjust through.... I wouldn't.... What's the use?"

  Willy Cameron, retreating into his lair, was unhappily conscious thatthe girl was on the verge of tears. He puzzled over the situation forsome time. His immediate instinct was to help any troubled creature,and it had dawned on him that this composed young lady who manicured hernails out of a pasteboard box during the slack portion of every day wastroubled. In his abstraction he commenced again his melancholy refrain,and a moment later she appeared in the doorway:

  "Oh, for mercy's sake, stop," she said. She was very pale.

  "Look here, Miss Edith, you come in here and tell me what's wrong.Here's a chair. Now sit down and talk it out. It helps a lot to getthings off your chest."

  "There's nothing the matter with me. And if the boss comes in here andfinds me--"

  Quite suddenly she put her head down on the back of the chair and beganto cry. He was frightfully distressed. He poured some aromatic ammoniainto a medicine glass and picking up her limp hand, closed her fingersaround it.

  "Drink that," he ordered.

  She shook her head.

  "I'm not sick," she said. "I'm only a fool."

  "If that fellow said anything over the telephone--!"

  She looked up drearily.

  "It wasn't him. He doesn't matter. It's just--I got to hating myself."She stood up and carefully dabbed her eyes. "Heavens, I must be a sight.Now don't you get to thinking things, Mr. Cameron. Girls can't go outand fight off a temper, or get full and sleep it off. So they cry."

  Some time later he glanced out at her. She was standing before thelittle mirror above the chewing gum, carefully rubbing her cheeks with asmall red pad. After that she reached into the show case, got out a lippencil and touched her lips.

  "You're pretty enough without all that, Miss Edith."

  "You mind your own business," she retorted acidly.