The Landloper: The Romance of a Man on Foot
frankly stating that icemen were too dirty creatures to allow inside the
door of a respectable house; the women received their ten-cent cubes in
pans and slammed the door in his face.
And through all this Farr preserved his smile.
In this slavery, tongue-lashed by fretful women, sweating under his
burden, he was happy; he could not account for it and did not attempt
to, but he knew it. He accepted the situation.
He received rewards enough to fortify his resolution.
A motherly woman asked him to wait a moment and she mixed for him a
glass of lemonade. That gave him an opportunity to say a few words
to her about drinking-water, modestly and deferentially. She was
interested, and he showed her what the guilty faucet of her tap held in
concealment.
And he saw that she was shocked and after he had warned her he asked
her to tell all the other women whom she knew. She promised to bring the
matter up in her sewing-club.
“And even the fussy women,” he told himself, as he plodded back to his
cart, encouraged by his first experiment, “if I keep calm, if I keep
smiling--I shall find my chance to say something to them after a time.”
A fresh doughnut was given to him by a maid who smiled up at his manly
good looks approvingly, and he was very grateful, for his breakfast had
been a meager one because he had barely enough small coins to make a
jingle in his pocket.
The maid gasped affrightedly when he showed her what was in the faucet,
and immediately set on water to boil to supply the bottles in the
ice-chest.
Furthermore, the maid stated that she knew many other maids who would be
glad to know about such a dreadful thing, and that she would have a word
to say to them on the way to Sunday mass and back.
Farr began to understand more clearly what can be accomplished by a lone
voice, carrying a gospel which can be backed and illustrated by signs
and wonders.
“I'll have them listening to me yet,” he pondered. “I'll never say
another unkind word about a woman's tongue.”
Colonel Symonds Dodd flashed past the ice-cart that afternoon in his
limousine.
Farr laughed aloud at the humor of a thought which occurred to him:
he reflected that he would like to behold Colonel Dodd's face and hear
Colonel Dodd's remarks if somebody told that gentleman that the man
before whom he had quailed and grown pale was now starting what the man
believed was a more effective assault on the dynasty than even a whole
car-load of dynamite bombs could make, even if they were exploded in all
the Consolidated reservoirs. The remarks which would entertain, so Farr
pondered, would come when the colonel was informed that the assault
consisted of a lone iceman making talk to women in kitchens.
“However,” said the iceman to himself, as he checked a nick in a
ten-cent cube at the back of his cart. “I hold that my new motto is all
right, and old Etienne will indorse it, and he knows what self-sacrifice
consists of. It isn't rolling up your eyes and folding your hands and
saying, 'What can I do?' It's saying, 'I'll do what I can!'--and then
keeping your hands busy!”
XV
WHEN A MAID IS COY
Mr. Richard Dodd came wooing.
He waited in his gray car at the curb in front of the First National
Bank block until Kate Kilgour issued forth into the afternoon sunshine.
He called to her, holding open the side door.
“I just had to see you,” he told her. “I have come down from the
capital, doing forty miles an hour. You're more precious than all the
money I have locked up in the vaults.”
He did not find in her eyes any of that acclaimed glad love-light which
eager lovers seek. On the contrary, Miss Kilgour made just a bit of a
face at him and was distinctly petulant.
“I do not want to ride, Richard. I enjoy my walk. I need it after a day
at my desk.”
“But I'm going to take you on a long ride into the country. We'll have
dinner at Hillcrest Inn and we'll--”
“I'll go straight home, if you please.”
“Then come in here with me.”
“Oh, if you insist!” She said it with weary impatience.
“Are you tired?”
“Yes.”
He drove slowly. “I don't want you to work any more. You know I don't.
You know how I feel. Kate, I have published our intentions of marriage.”
Her demeanor till then had been marked by tolerance, a bit pettish. Now
she turned on him the indignant stare of offended womanhood.
“Richard, I have not given you permission to do that.”
“But you are going to marry me!”
“Some day. I will tell you when. I am not ready.”
“You are playing with me.”
“I am not so frivolous.”
“But why do you keep putting it off?”
“A woman who gives herself has the right to say when it shall be.”
“My God!” he raged. “I wish you would wake up.”
She did not answer.
“You don't know what love is. You won't let me touch you.”
“I suppose that your experience has qualified you, Richard,” she
returned, half humorously, half scornfully.
“We are going to be married. Your mother is anxious for you to marry. I
am going to tell my uncle to hunt for another secretary.”
“Be careful how you take liberties with my private business,” she warned
him, sharply.
“You need somebody to take care of it for you. You have promised to be
my wife. You can't give me a single good reason for waiting any longer.”
“But I intend to wait.”
He drove along in angry silence and they left the car together at
the Trelawny Apartments. The car had made a detour in reaching the
curb--avoiding a white wagon at the rear of which an iceman was briskly
pecking in twain a cake of ice.
The girl glanced sharply at the man and turned her head when she reached
the sidewalk in order to survey him more closely. The iceman, peering up
at the windows to locate such signal-cards as might be visible, lowered
his gaze and intercepted the girl's scrutiny. Color came into her
cheeks, but she frowned as if resenting his stare and hurried into the
vestibule, her lover at her heels.
“Look here, Friend Myself,” reflected Walker Farr, “it's time you woke
up!” He sighed and swung a chunk of ice upon his shoulder. “But what
else can I expect? Come on, Humility, and give me a soft word or two. I
was hoping I'd never see her again.”
“Youse take those two front numbers--ten and twelve--Mrs. Kilgour and
Mr. Knowles,” advised his helper. “Package-entrance is around behind.”
Farr toiled up the stairs, carrying one ice cube on his shoulder, with
another swinging from tongs. There was but one door to the Kilgour
apartment and the girl and Dodd stood in front of it; they had evidently
waited in the corridor after emerging from the elevator, and the young
man was detaining her, talking earnestly.
The girl opened the door with her latch-key, and with an apology he
stepped in front of the pair and entered.
“Well, I'll be--” blurted Dodd. “So that's what he is--a cheap,
low-lived iceman!”
Mrs. Kilgour came into her vestibule and led the way to the kitchen, for
Farr stood irresolutely in the doorway, awaiting directions as to his
burden. Following her, the young man noted her house-dress, beribboned
over-much, her rouged face, her bleached hair, and wondered how such
a woman could have beguiled Andrew Kilgour, as he felt he knew that
sacrificing hero from what Citizen Drew had said.
“Say, that's the plug-ugly who insulted us in the woods. I'll never
forget that face,” stormed Dodd, making no effort by lowered tones to
conceal his sentiments from the iceman. “Where else am I going to run
across him? He needs a horse-whipping. If there weren't ladies present
I'd give him one.”
“The man seems to be minding his own business,” said the girl, coldly.
Farr heard her. There was a hint of contempt in her tones, and the young
man humbly accepted the scorn as directed toward him. He lifted the ice
into the box and received his coin from the languid woman, who seemed to
pay as little heed to his presence as she did to Dodd's threats.
She seemed to be more especially interested in herself, and when Farr
departed was fondling into place the masses of her hair before a mirror
in the vestibule. Through the space formed by the portieres he saw Dodd
reaching eager hands to the girl, her presence having apparently charmed
away his thoughts of vengeance.
The iceman went humbly on his way.
He was meditating on the sacrifice of Captain Andrew Kilgour; he
remembered that stalwart men are willing slaves of the weakest women. He
wondered how much of the honesty of the father was in the daughter. He
tried to console himself by insisting that it was not there. He had
had only a limited opportunity to study Richard Dodd. However, he was
convinced that his unflattering estimate of that young man was surely
justified; and so certain was he that the character of Dodd must be
patent to all he went back to his tasks with a lowered estimate of the
girl who would select such a man as husband. And yet out of the dust of
the highway the profile of her face had touched him as his heart never
had been touched before; he had plucked the rose and had plodded on
behind the little sister of the rose. He wondered what strange impulse
had touched him. She must be merely like all the rest. Her graciousness
in that first meeting had tempted him to believe that she was different.
Now some consciousness, equally as intangible, suggested to him that she
was selfishly selling herself for ease. His thoughts were pretty
much mixed, he acknowledged. But as he went on, bearing his burdens,
listening to the petty tyrants who may ruthlessly taunt the man who
comes in by the back door, he was aware that he had full need of much
ministration from his new friend, Humility.
In the sitting-room of the Kilgour flat Richard Dodd was telling the
mother that he had made application for a marriage license.
“And I have waited long enough,” he declared. “Mother Kilgour, you must
convince Kate that we are to be married within a week.”
And he gave the mother a look which made her turn pale and twist her
ringed fingers nervously.
“Kate, what is the use?” she pleaded. “You are acting like a child. You
love Richard. You know you love him. You tell me often that you love
him! Richard is such a dear boy!” She said this fawningly, with evident
intent to placate the sullen young man. Her tone, her air suggested the
nervous embarrassment of a debtor who seeks to put off a creditor with
flattery and fresh promises. “Now be a darling child and say that we'll
have the wedding next week without any fuss or feathers.”
“I am not ready to get married, and I simply will not be married just
yet,” declared the girl, her red lips compressed.
“You don't love me!” complained Dodd.
“I like you, Richard,” admitted the girl, frankly, without any
coquettishness. “I have never cared for anybody else. You have been good
to me, except when you were foolish.”
“Foolishness--that's what she calls being so much in love with her
that I can't keep my hands off her,” said Dodd to the mother. “Mother
Kilgour, you haven't talked to Kate as you should. She doesn't know what
love is.”
“Oh, I'll find out all about it, and then we'll be married--when I'm
ready to become a wife,” said the girl, with an indulgent smile. “All
at once I'll wake up, just as you have been begging me to do, and then
we'll simply run away and be married and live happily for ever after.”
“I don't like this stalling,” growled Dodd, brutally.
“I'll leave you two children together,” said the mother. “I'm sure
you'll come to an understanding.” She went away, showing relief.
“Sit down here on the divan with me, sweetheart,” pleaded the young man.
But without removing her hat she went to the piano and began to play.
“Please come!” he entreated.
She smiled at him over her shoulder and made a pretty _moue_.