Under the Country Sky
Page 13
CHAPTER XIII
A COPYIST
The old study of David Warne was a square, austerely furnished room onthe second floor of the manse, opposite the sleeping-room now occupiedby Mr. Jefferson. It contained several plain bookcases, filled mostlywith worn old volumes in dingy yellow calf or faded cloth. An ancienttable served for a desk, with a splint-bottomed chair before it. On thewalls hung several portrait engravings, that of Abraham Lincolnoccupying the post of honour among them. The floor was covered with arag carpet of pleasantly dimmed colours, and an old Franklin stove, withwidely opening doors and a hearth with a brass rail, completed thefurnishing of the room.
This was the place now swept and dusted and warmed for the joint laboursof the writer of books and his new assistant. Mr. Jefferson had movedthe materials of his craft to the new working quarters: he had broughtup wood for the fire and had made that fire himself, according to thecustom he had inaugurated soon after his arrival. The day and hour forthe beginning of that which James Stuart insisted on designating as apartnership had arrived. At ten o'clock that April morning, whenGeorgiana's housework should have reached a stage when she could safelyleave it for a more or less extended period, the study door was to closeupon the two and shut them away undisturbed for the first details oftheir affair in common.
Georgiana had been up since before daybreak, planning and executing asystem which should make all this possible. Now, at a quarter beforeten, with all well in hand, she flew to her room for certain personaltouches which should transform her from housewife to secretary. Twominutes before the clock struck she surveyed herself hurriedly in hersmall mirror.
"You really look very trim and demure," she remarked to her image. "Yourcolour is a bit high, but that's exercise, not excitement. Still, youare a little excited, you know, my dear, and you must be very carefulnot to show it. It's a calm, cool, business person the gentleman wants,George, not a blushing schoolgirl. It would spoil it at once if youshould look conscious or coquettish. So now--remember. And forget--forthe love of your new occupation--forget that Miles Channing is comingagain to-night--again, after one short week! What does it matter if heis? Run along and be good!"
Half a minute left in which to run downstairs, kiss Father Davy on hiswhite forehead, and receive his warm "Bless you, dear, and bless the newwork. May you be very happy in it!" and to walk quietly upstairs againand knock at the door of the study. It opened under Mr. Jefferson'shand, and to the cheerful sound of snapping wood on the open hearth ofthe old Franklin stove he bade her enter.
His smile was very pleasant, his steady eyes seemed to take note ofeverything about her in one quick glance, as he said with a wave of hishand: "Welcome to my workshop! You see I've swept up all the chips, butwe'll soon make more."
"You manage to keep your workshop remarkably free from chips," shecommented. "You must have a great system of order."
"Pretty fair. I should be hopelessly lost if I let this mass of materialbecome disordered. Will you take this chair? Must we begin at once ormay we talk a little first?"
"I think we had better begin. You know there are just two free hoursbefore I must be back downstairs, if you are to eat, this noon."
He laughed and she noted, as she had noted many times before, how younghe looked at such moments, grave as his face could be when in repose.
"Very well," he agreed. "I have no doubt you will work at this task asyou do at the loom, with all your might, and I shall have to lengthenmy stride to keep up with you. But that promises well. One is likely tofall into habits of soldiering when one works alone. You have no ideahow carefully I have to keep certain favourite books out of sight when Iwant to accomplish big stretches of work. And in this room--hardluck!--I see so many old treasures that I'm going to have a bit oftrouble in resisting temptation."
His eyes led hers to the old bookcases. She nodded. "It's a shabby oldcollection, but it's very dear to father's heart."
"It well may be. Gibbon, Hume, Froude, Parton--Lamb, Johnson,Carlyle--Hugo, Thackeray, Reade, and Trollope--Keats, Shelley, and therest. What matters the binding? Some time I must read you a passage ingood old Christopher North that appeals to me tremendously. No, not now,Miss Warne; I see I must fall upon my task without delay or you will beslipping away on the plea of bad faith on my part. Well----"
He turned his chair toward the table and took up a notebook. His facesettled instantly into an expression of serious interest.
"I am going to ask you first," said he, "to copy in order upon a freshsheet each reference which you find marked with a red cross, so that thereferences may be all together. Be very exact, please, and verylegible. German and French words are easily misread by the typist whowill put this work finally into copy for the printer."
Georgiana, glancing at the first marked reference, found cause to creditthis statement, for it read:
Cagnetto: Zur Frage der Anat. Beziehung zwischen Akromegalie u. Hypophysistumor, Virchow's Archiv., 1904, clxxvi., 115. Neuer Beitrag. f. Studium der Akromegalie mit besonderer Beruecksichtigung der Frage nach dem zusammenhang der Akromegalie mit Hypophysenganggeschwulste, Virchow's Archiv., 1907, lxxxvi., 197.
"It would be best to print the words as clearly as I can, wouldn't it?"she suggested, suppressing her desire to laugh.
"That depends on your handwriting. Try a line and let me see, please."
When she had shown him a specimen of the peculiarly readable scriptwhich she had cultivated in college, he signified his approval with ahearty "Good! That's a splendid hand for work, the hand of a workman, infact. I congratulate myself. Go ahead with the jaw-breakers, onlyverifying each reference before you leave it."
Thus the new task began, and thus it continued day after day--not alwaysquite the same, for Georgiana soon recognized that her employer wasdiversifying her labours as much as he consistently could by changingthe nature of the copying. Now and then he refreshed her endurance andrested her tired hand by asking her to read aloud to him several justfinished pages of his own writing, walking the floor meanwhile orsitting tipped back in his chair with closed eyes while he listened withears alert for error of statement or infelicity of phrase, and shewondered at the character of the words she read.
Of course she discovered at once what was the general subject of thebook. No essay was this, no work of fiction, no "history of art," asStuart had scornfully suggested. It could be only the sternest ofresearch and experience which dictated such sentences as these:
The especial dangers to be contended with are that the ethmoid cells may be mistaken for the sphenoids; that we may go too low and enter the pons and medulla; that, laterally, we may enter the cavernous sinus, and above, that we may injure the optic nerve.
It was all more or less of a puzzle to her, but it was one which hertaskmaster never explained further than the revelations of each dayexplained it. She understood that he was a scientist, that heundoubtedly had been an operator in some surgical field or was puttinginto shape the work of another in that field, but what he now wasbesides a writer of technical books she had no manner of idea.
"But I really enjoy it, Father Davy," she insisted, when she came downto him one day with hotly flushed cheeks and shaking hand after aparticularly protracted siege of copying involved and incomprehensiblematerial. "It's monotonous in a way, but it's intensely interesting,too. Mr. Jefferson is so absorbed in it, it's fun to watch him. To-dayhe was as happy as a boy over a letter he had just received from aProfessor Somebody, a great authority in Vienna. It seemed it absolutelyconfirmed some statement he had made in a monograph he wrote last yearwhich had been challenged by several scientists. The way he fell towriting his next paragraph after he had read that letter made oneimagine he was writing it in his own heart's blood. He read it aloud tome." She laughed appreciatively at the recollection.
"Could you make anything of it?" inquired Mr. Warne with interest.
"Not very much. It was about the pituitary body;--oh, I've come to havea great awe of the pituitary body, it seems to
be responsible for somany things. He chuckled over it like a boy, and said to me, 'Forgivethese transports, Miss Warne, but this is food and drink to me. I wish Icould explain it to you so that you might rejoice over it with me. Someday I will, when we are not so busy.' I hope he will. There's enoughthat I do understand to make me interested."
"I see you are--and rejoice, my Georgiana. Do you remember what MaxMueller says, echoed by many another, '_Work is life to me; and when I amno longer able to work, life will be a heavy burden?_'"
He smiled as he said it, but his daughter read the seldom-expressedlonging in the cheerful voice and laid her cheek for an instant againsthis. "He's quite right. And you have your work, Father Davy, and you'redoing it all the time. I think you preach much more effectively now thanyou did in the pulpit, even when you don't open your mouth. And when youdo open it angels couldn't compete with you!"
They laughed softly together, though Mr. Warne shook his head. "It's acurious thing," he mused, "that the weaker the body gets the harder doesthe mind have to strive to master it. But, thank God--'_so fight I, notas one that beateth the air_.'"
"'Not as one that beateth the air,'" murmured the girl. "I should saynot, Father Davy. As one that delivereth hard blows on his own body, hispoor, tired body. Oh, if I had one tenth the self-control----"
At which she ran away, as was quite like her, when emotion suddenly gotthe better of her. The darkest cloud on this girl's life was the frailtenure of her father's existence. The rest could be endured.
The work in the upstairs study went steadily on, in spite of the factthat James Stuart railed and that Miles Channing came at least once inseven days, driving the sixty miles in a long, swiftly speeding carwhich brought him to the door of the manse before the early May sunset,and which took him back when the shadows lay black upon the silent road.Two hours in the morning, three in the afternoon, Georgiana gave to therigid performance of the tasks Mr. Jefferson set her, while outsidebelow the windows at which she worked lay her garden, beloved of heraffection, beseeching her not to neglect it.
It was hard sometimes not to betray how she longed to be outside, as shewrote on and on, copying the often difficult and uninteresting languageof the more technical part of her employer's construction. And oneafternoon, lifting her eyes to let them dwell on a great budding purplelilac tree, with the warm breath of the breeze which had drifted acrossthe apple orchard fanning her cheek, and all the notes of rioting springin her ears, she did draw in spite of herself one deep sigh of longingwhich she instantly suppressed--too late.
Her companion looked up quickly, noted the flush in the cheek and thehint of a weary shadow under the dark eyes, and suddenly pushed asidehis paper. Then he drew it back, blotted it carefully, laid it with apile of others, and capped his pen. He wheeled about in his chair toface his assistant.
"Put down your work, please," he commanded gently; "precisely where youare. Don't finish that sentence."
Georgiana looked up, astonished. "Not finish the sentence?"
"No. Did you never stop in the middle of a sentence?"
"I'm afraid I have. But I didn't suppose you ever did."
"I don't. But I want you to. Please. That's right. You will know whereto start it again to-morrow."
"To-morrow?" In spite of herself her eyes had lighted as a child'smight.
"Even so. To-day we are going for a drive in all this beauty--if I canfind a horse and some kind of a vehicle, and you will go with me. It'sonly three o'clock. We can have a long drive between now and the hourwhen you invariably disappear to make magic for our appetites. How aboutit?"
"I can keep on perfectly well, you know," she said, with pen stillpoised above her paper.
"But I can't." He was smiling. "Now that the other plan has occurred tome, I can't keep on."
"Did you see inside my mind?" queried Georgiana, putting away hercopying with rapid motions.
"Suddenly I did. I've been rather blind, a hard taskmaster. I've beenconscious of what was going on outside when I went for my walks, but thework is absorbing to me and I have kept you too steadily at it. We bothneed a rest," he added as she shook her head.