Chapter I (2)

"Oh, of course," acquiesced the Young Doctor. "If I've got to be--if we've got to be--stared at, I mean, it would certainly be quite as comfortable to have something to do."

"Perfectly," smiled the girl. "So as we wait for the ices and the pies let us see what is survived of the toys." And before the Young Doctor could dissuade her she had lifted her awkwardly retied bundle to the level of the table, and was earnestly studying out the relative damages of the green-feathered parrot and the tiny tin railroad train. To confirm apparently what was her own suspicion in the matter she handed the railroad train to the Young Doctor for investigation.

And because the Young Doctor was naturally and sincerely inquisitive about anything that was broken he bent his dark head to the task with a sudden real gasp of relief, and for the next five minutes at least all possible awkwardness between them seemed merged, then and there, into the easy give-and-take argument of a thoroughly familiar and accustomed association.

Once again their small table became the cynosure of all eyes. The dark Young Doctor alone was quite sufficiently striking looking. And the girl in her Norse glow and blondness would have been a marked figure anywhere. But together? And now? At this very minute? So anxious, so painstaking, so brooding? If the room had thought them shy "young lovers" a scant half hour before, goodness knows what it thought them now!

The woman in the corner had most certainly reconstructed her original impressions. On the way out from her own unsocial supper she stopped impulsively just behind the Young Doctor's chair to watch his rather surprising manipulation of the fractured toy engine wheel. Her face was by no means unpleasant, but almost exaggeratedly friendly in a plaintive, deprecating sort of way.

From their focus on the Young Doctor's hands her pale eyes lifted suddenly to the girl's glowing face, and she held out a small paper bagful of pink-frosted cakes.

"Take those home," she said, "instead of the poor broken toys!"

"Why--why, thank you!" laughed the girl.

"How--how old are your little ones?" asked the woman quite irrelevantly.

"Eh?" jerked the Young Doctor. From his joggled hands the little tin railroad train crashed down into his plate.

With her hands clapped playfully to her ears the girl looked thoughtfully up at her accoster.

"Why, Lisa is four," she said quite simply. "And Jonathan is six, and----"

"Oh, have you got a 'Jonathan'?" kindled the woman. Her sallow face was suddenly quite transfigured with light. "And does he look like you?" she cried. "Or," sweeping the table with another deprecating glance, "or does he take after his father?"

"Take after his father?" repeated the girl in frank perplexity. Her own sweeping glance of her companion's face did not seem somehow to elucidate the mystery. "'Take?' 'Take after his father?'" she flamed. "I do not know the idiot--the idio--the--idiom!" she corrected herself triumphantly.

A little bit perplexed herself, the amiable stranger began suddenly to button up her coat. "Well, good night!" she beamed. "Good night! Good night! I hope you may both live to enjoy to the uttermost the full merits of your little family!"

"Eh?" jumped the Young Doctor. White as a sheet he was suddenly on his feet, and for the first time that evening a real-looking smile had twisted itself across at least one side of his thin-lipped mouth.

"Madam!" he bowed, "neither this young lady here nor I have ever laid eyes on each other before! Nor is it remotely probable indeed that in the normal course of events we should ever lay eyes on each other again! But if you persist so," he bowed, with a purely nervous glance at his watch, "but if you persist so--in your--in your--" he floundered futilely. "We shall doubtless be lying in the same grave by midnight!"

Without even a gasp then he snatched up the girl's purse, her suitcase, her hat box, his own coat and hat, and bolted for the cashier's desk.

Close behind him, clasping her scattered toys as best she might to her breast, followed the blonde Norse girl.

Even when they had finally reached the electric light post on the farthest corner of the street, the color was only just beginning to flush back into the Young Doctor's cheek bones.

"If you will now give me the address," he said tersely, "to which I can forward the supper money, I will put you on a street car."

"Oh, the address of course is of perfect simplicity," conceded the girl. "But I do not care for you to put me on a street car, thank you!"

"Why, certainly I shall put you on a street car!" insisted the Young Doctor. He was really quite sharp about it. "Almost everything goes by here--if you only wait long enough," he shifted a bit uneasily, as he set down both box and suitcase with a most decided thump.

Silently then for what seemed to him an interminable time they stood there on the icy, wind-swept curbstone staring out into the passing green, red, yellow, lights.

"Pretty, is it not!" commented the girl at last.

"'Pretty?'" shivered the Young Doctor. "Why, yes, of course, suppose so. But which car?" he laughed impatiently. "For Heaven's sake, don't you know where you want to go?"

"Of course I know where I want to go!" flared the girl. With a little light touch on his sleeve she pointed off to another electric light post on a side street. "There!" she said. "That little pleasant fifth house from the end! That is where I am at boarding!"

"Well, why didn't you say so!" flushed the Young Doctor. Very vehemently once more he snatched up her suitcase and her hat box.

With a shrug of her fine athletic shoulders the girl laughed right out loud into his frowning eyes.

"When a man is of such a positiveness as you are," she confided impishly, "it is a privilege to reduce his national characteristics. Ever for one single instant do you ask me, 'Have you finish your food?' or, 'Do you want to be put on a car?' But always at your first wish you hurry out and scoot, crying, 'I put you on a car! I put you on a car!'" With a little sniff of scorn she turned on her heel and started off at a fine stride toward the house to which she had just pointed.

It was the Young Doctor now who followed precipitously after.

The street was certainly a quaint, old-fashioned one, and the boarding house in question by no means lacking in a fine though dingy sort of dignity.

But the doorbell that the girl rang and rang brought no reassuring answer. Fumbling anxiously in her purse for a moment, she threw out her hands with a little gesture of dismay.

"It is that I must also have mislaid my key," she frowned. Then like a flash of pale sunshine her smile seemed to drive every possible shadow from her mind. "Oh, well," she cried. "It is after all only a scarce seven o'clock. Some one in not many minutes will surely come. And meanwhile," she glowed. "Of such a fine night! I will just sit down here very happy and take the air!"

"Take the air?" gasped the Young Doctor. Quite unconsciously as he spoke he reached up and drew his fur collar a little bit closer about his neck.

But already the girl had dropped casually down on the top step and opened the throat of her own dark-fur red coat as one who was fairly thirsting for air.

"Good night!" she said briskly.

"Good-by!" said the Young Doctor. Before he had even reached the lower step he was congratulating himself that the incident was now safely ended,--"comfortably ended," he meant, instead of awkwardly, as it might so easily have been. "Foreigners were often so irrational," he considered. Even as he considered, he turned in spite of himself to investigate the sudden unmistakable rustle of a paper bag. His suspicion was frankly confirmed.

"See!" brandished the girl triumphantly. "The little pink cake of the foolish woman!" With an unmistakable chuckle of joy her white teeth met through the treasure.

In the flash of a second, the perfectly idiotic impulse of a joke, the Young Doctor lifted a warning finger at her.

"You realize of course that you are eating a--a misapprehension?" he admonished her with really terrifying severity.

"A misapprehension?" jumped the girl. Very painstakingly then and there she began to explore the remaining piece of cake in her hand, tugging at its sponginess, peering under its frostedness. Then suddenly with a little quick gasp of relief she popped the sweet morsel into her mouth and smacked her lips upon it "Oh, no," she beamed. "It tastes perfectly all right to me!"

Like a word slipping hopelessly down a poem toward whatever chosen rhyme its Poet has already in mind, the Young Doctor suddenly found himself bumping rather perilously close to the one big wild hoot of laughter that had evidently been lurking for him in the situation even from the very first. In a really desperate effort to fend himself as long as possible from such an undignified disaster he hastened in all sincerity to rewrap himself in his stiffest professional manner.

"Well, what about this 'Lisa' and 'Jonathan' business?" he questioned with unmistakable reproach.

"Oh, shucks!" shrugged the girl. "This tiresome Lisa and Jonathan, their whole parents are bakers! But as for me," she lowered her voice, and thrust out her hands with a soft, appealing gesture. "But as for me, until to-night, for four whole weeks I cry such salt into my food I cannot eat! Homesickness, yes!" she nodded with a quick little catch of her breath. "In all the world no one to speak with except one fat lady and one thin lady and Lisa and Jonathan and Peter, and--" In an extra impulse of confidence not unmixed evidently with a certain flare of pride she slid forward a little on the step. "I am Montessori!" she said.

"What?" snapped the Young Doctor. "Why, what nonsense!" he said. "Why, what are you talking about? 'Montessori' is a--a system! And she's an Italian, too, I mean."

"Yes, truly so," conceded the girl. "And in time if the homeache can be assuaged I shall then learn the system--and remain yet a Norwegian."

"Oh, you mean you are a Montessori student?" brightened the Young Doctor.

"Even so," said the girl. "I cannot wait to learn everything. From here, after I have duly studied little Lisa, little Peter, and all the others, whose minds most happily are of a perfect brightness, I must then go on to the sadder schools, and to that most wonderful place in your Massachusetts where such first brain work of all was made on the little children. It is that in Norway," she winced, "I have a little brother. Our father makes much money," she added with apparent irrelevance. "And spends much and gives much. And once he married him a new wife, and there are many new children. And one of them, this little little brother, so gold, so blue, so pinky, all day long he sits and--isn't," she finished perfectly simply.

"Why--why, that's too bad," said the Young Doctor.

"Yes, very bad," mused the girl. "But some of these ideas here are of a great cleverness. I do not of course get any of it right yet," she acknowledged. "But some of it is quite sporting like a game. With these toys, now," she pointed, "and all glad things like industries, and the live cat, and the dog, and grasses and the flowers, you leave the little child quite loose, it seems, only watching him, watching him very close, one day, two days, a hundred if it seems best. And wherever he shall in finality--in finality--'gravitate,' is it that you say? to the sweet flowers, or the wood blocks, or the gay, smoothen cat, _there_ it is that the one big chance of his salvation will most surely be found. But the engine, or the blocks or the smoothen cat must not be forced on him, it is so you understand? Of such there would make no message to his development. But out of _everything_, it is, that he himself must gravitate to it!"

In the tense sweet earnestness of her up turned face, the eager, unconscious nearness of her occasional gesture, the far remoteness of her subject, the sting of the winter night, the glare of electric light over all, it dawned on the Young Doctor a bit startlingly that he was frowning down into the eyes of a particularly beautiful woman, and for some quite unreasonable reason his cheeks began suddenly to burn like fire. It was as though having all his life long for one conscientious reason or another denied himself "wine when it was red," he found himself now, most humiliatingly, with _ice_ itself going to his head. And just because he was so thoroughly unaccustomed to having anything go to his head, it went quite uproariously in fact, changing for that one moment his whole facial expression. And the instant his facial expression was changed of course he looked like a different man. And the instant he looked like a different man of course he began to act like a different man.

"And does this wonderful theory of yours apply only to poor little children?" he asked with slightly narrowing eyes. "Or am I to infer?" he laughed. "Or am I to infer that after a whole year of flaunting city, a whole year of barren indifference to it, my amazing gravitation to you this evening is positive Montessori proof that with you and you only rests my life's best salvation?"

Then without the slightest intent of doing it, without even the slightest warning to himself that he was going to do it, he swooped down suddenly and kissed her on her lips.

With a little gasp of dismay the girl stumbled to her feet. There was nothing blonde now about her. Towering up on the step just above him she was like a young storm-cloud all flame and shadow!

"Oh, what have I done that you should act thus?" she demanded. With the tears streaming down her face she lashed him with furious accusations. "You are one of these devils!" she cried. "You are a wild persons! Was it my fault?" she demanded, "that my bundles burst from the car? Was it my fault," she demanded, "that restaurants cannot block foolish women from their food? Was it my fault that I paid for your stupid supper?"

Neither defending himself nor seeking relief in flight, but with a face fully if not indeed more shocked than hers the Young Doctor sank down on the step at her feet, and with his head in his hands sat rocking himself to and fro.

"No, it isn't your fault!" he assured her and reassured her. "Nor is it exactly my fault!" he insisted. "But the fault of that damned piano!"

"The fault of that damned what?" quoted the girl a bit stridently.

But the face that lifted to hers was frankly the face of a stricken man. Only a chill added to repentance could have altered so any human countenance.

"On the honor of a man freezing to death!" he attested. "There is no blame to be attached to anything in the world--except to a grand piano."

"What is it that you mean?" puzzled the girl. "I am more furious with you than devils. But I must hear everything."

"I mean," sneezed the poor Young Doctor, "that I am looking for a kind home for a grand piano!" Even to himself his words sounded far away and altogether the words of a stranger. It was indeed as though he had been thrust quite unrehearsed into the leading part of a roaring farce which was already halfway through its evening performance. A fearful spirit of bravado seemed really his one chance of making any possible "get-away" with the whole mad situation. But even an irate audience could not have misjudged for a moment the acute distress and anxiety behind the bravado.

"It is just this way," he began all over again. "A perfectly dreadful woman drove me out of my office to-night--with a grand piano!" From the stony expression, however, in the girl's face this did not seem to be just the cue that she was looking for. In the wisest impulse of his life he decided suddenly to throw himself upon her sense of mercy rather than upon her sense of humor. "Truly it is this way!" He jumped up and implored her to believe him. "I am as new as you almost, in this big city. Equally with you perhaps I suffer what you call homeacheness! It is very hard to get a good start in a strange place. Lots of charity chances and all that. But very little money. I had a real patient once, though!" he bragged ironically. "A very rich woman, awfully nice and all that. But I hate her. Every chance that she gets she torments me. She has a sort of theory, I think, that tormenting is very stimulating to the nervous system. It certainly is. We fight like young cats and dogs! And yet as I say she is awfully nice. And when she went away she paid me not only justly but mighty generously for my brief services. It cancelled almost a year's debts. But she was horridly mad because I wouldn't go with her,--as a kind of a trained, tame attendant you know. But I told her I couldn't leave my office. So she sent me a grand piano, the wretch!" he finished with flaming anger.

To the step just below him the girl tripped down and turning about stood peering up into his face with a rather disconcerting intensity.

"Here am I," she gasped, "who suffer and languish for a 'grand piano' as you call it. And you?" As though in real pain she began to wring her slim hands together. "And you? A lady gives you a grand piano and you curse her as a wretchedness!"

"Yes, I know," deprecated the Young Doctor. "But you see there isn't room in my office for both the piano and myself! My office is too small, you see. And with the piano filling up the whole center of the room? Why, it's absurd!" he quickened. "It's rotten! Patients who come don't know whether they've come for a music lesson or to be lanced! And besides," he added as his most culminative grievance, "I don't know one note from another! And the woman knew that I didn't! And worse than anything there are hordes of the most indecent little cupids appliqued or something all over the front of the thing!"

"Surely, something could be done," suggested the girl with a vague sort of farawayness in her blue eyes.

"Yes, that's just it!" remarked the Young Doctor, flushing. "I've already done it!"

Abjectly with his bared head bowed before her he stood as one awaiting just sentence.

"Of a personally," said the girl with her own cheeks spotting bright red. "Of a personally--I do not quite see the connection."

"Why the connection is perfectly clear!" insisted the Young Doctor. "She sent me the piano on purpose to crowd me out of my office! She wanted to crowd me out of my own office! She dared to affirm even that I needed to be crowded out of my own office! She tried to make me mad! She wanted to make me mad! She had the cheek to suggest, I mean, that nothing really interesting ever would happen to me until I once did get good and mad!" As though temporarily exhausted by his tirade he sagged back for a moment against the railing of the steps. His face did look a bit white and his teeth were almost chattering. "Well, I certainly did get good and mad this afternoon," he affirmed with a wry sort of apology. "And because I was so blooming mad I dashed out for a tremendous walk. And because I took such a tremendous walk I developed an appetite like forty tigers. And because I developed an appetite like forty tigers I rushed for the first restaurant I could find. And because I rushed for the first restaurant I could find I happened to see you at the exact moment when----"

"Oh, stop, stop, stop!" laughed the girl with her hands clapped suddenly over her ears. "It is all too much like the--like 'The House that the Jack-Man built!'"

"Well, at least," grinned the Young Doctor, "it seems to be 'The Adventure that the Grand Piano Threatened.'"

"The--the Adventure?" puzzled the girl.

"Why, yes," insisted the Young Doctor. "That's what this Mrs. Tome Gallien prophesied you know, that the piano would bring me an adventure! So you, very evidently, are the----"

"What? I?" stammered the girl. A flush of real pleasure glowed suddenly in her face and faded again as quickly as it had come. "Oh, no!" she said with some hauteur, "You--you----"

"Oh, truly!" begged the Young Doctor. "I'm most awfully sorry for what I did! I can't think what possessed me! I must have gone quite mad for the moment! Why, really," he flushed, "I don't know whether you'll believe me or not--and maybe it's something anyway to be more ashamed of than to brag about,--but truly now," he floundered, "I haven't kissed a girl before since--since I was very little!" With a sudden quick jerk of sheer awkwardness he snatched a card from his pocket and handed it to her. "There! There's my address!" he cried. "And to-morrow if you'll only send me the word I'll jump off the bridge or throw myself under a truck, or make any other sort of reparation whatever that happens to occur to you. But to-night," he grinned, "I've simply got to get warm!" And started down the steps.

But before he had quite reached the sidewalk the girl had overtaken him and placed a detaining hand on his coat sleeve.

"How old is she?" questioned the girl.

"Who?" said the Young Doctor. "Oh, the woman? She's old enough to be your mother."

"I'm twenty-one," conceded the girl.

"Well, she's fifty," affirmed the Young Doctor.

Across the girl's translucent face a dozen conflicting emotions seemed surging suddenly. "So?" she laughed. "So?" she repeated experimentally, "If only you had not been so--so _bad_," she sighed. "Well, about that piano," she ventured with a certain unwonted shyness. "In a world of so much racket is it not a pity that any harmonies should lie dumb? Is it--is it a good piano?" she asked quite abruptly.

"Why, for heaven's sake, how do I know?" demanded the Young Doctor. "It may be a--a Stradivarius!" he floundered wildly. "But it looks to me like the--like the devil!"

"If I could only see it," whispered the girl, "I could tell in a minute of course."

"If you could only see it?" scoffed the Young Doctor. Then, "Well--well--why not?" he acknowledged a trifle tardily, but with indisputable common sense.

"I have an aunt here," mused the girl, "who has a rheumatism in her elbow, I think it is. On Friday afternoon next--if the rheumatism perhaps should be sufficiently bad?" Flushed with the anticipatory ardor of a musician she lifted her eyes to his.

"Why, capital!" acquiesced the Young Doctor. For the instant the whole suggestion struck him as being extraordinarily apt. "Well, good-by then," he laughed, "until Friday afternoon!" And vanished into the night.

He was still a long, cold distance from home. But by the time he had finally reached there his pulses were ringing with fire rather than with frost. And as soon as he had started a bright roaring flame in his stove, and concocted for himself a most luscious and steamsome drink, and driven his frosted toes into the farthest corners of some moth-eaten old fur slippers, he sat right down in a great spirit of diablerie to tell Mrs. Tome Gallien just what he thought of her.

"I hope you're satisfied!" he began quite abruptly in a firm and emphatic black hand writing. "Driven out into the winter streets by your most charming gift, I have in four short hours walked eleven miles; supped in a conspicuous restaurant with a perfectly strange girl and at her expense; been branded publicly for all time, first as the girl's beau and later as her husband and the father of certain imaginary children; and have also in due time, still included in the original four hours, you understand, kissed said girl 'Good-night' on her own doorstep in the full glare of a city electric light,--and am now at ten-thirty P. M. of the aforesaid Monday evening waiting patiently in my room until Friday afternoon next when, heavily chaperoned by some kind of a relative with rheumatism, the said Adventure will appear to investigate the piano--and myself.

"Once again, in the language of my opening sentence, and with all due respects, I repeat, 'I hope you're satisfied'!"

Then quite contented both in fancy and in fact he settled down to kill time and cure patients until Friday.

But the intervening days it seemed were not to be bereft entirely of sensations either confusing or bizarre.

On Wednesday night he heard from Mrs. Tome Gallien. And by telegram.

"Bungler!" wired Mrs. Tome Gallien. "What in creation have you done? The adventure intended for you does not arrive till Saturday, office, four o'clock."

The message happened to be delivered in writing this time, a flaunting yellow page, and, still clutching it tight by one twittering corner, the Young Doctor dropped down into the first chair he could reach, and with his chin dropped low like an old man's on his breast sat staring for an interminable time into his glowing fire.

Then quite suddenly at nine o'clock, with the funny new smile that he seemed to have acquired somewhere recently, he walked over to his telephone, fumbled a minute with the directory, experimented at least two minutes with Central's temper, located Miss Solvei Kjelland, and addressed her in his most formal manner.

"Miss Solvei Kjelland?" he questioned.

"S-o," said the familiar voice at the other end of the wire.

"This is Doctor Kendrue," he growled. "Dr. Sam Kendrue."

"So?" conceded the voice without a vestige of affright.

"It seems, Miss Kjelland," he stammered, "that there has been some sort of a--of a--well, misunderstanding about Friday afternoon. It is all a mistake, it seems, about your being The Adventure! Mrs. Gallien indeed has just telegraphed to that effect. The 'Real Adventure,' it appears, is not due at my office until four o'clock on Saturday!"

"S-o?" conceded Miss Solvei Kjelland. If she seemed to be swallowing rather extra hard once or twice the sound was not sharply discernible certainly from the little fluttering swallow of the telephone instrument. "So?" she repeated blithely. "Well, that is all right. The piano keeps! And the Saturday afternoon is just as good to me as the Friday! And I am all as curious with joy as you to see what it is, this Adventure that is more nice than me! Good night!"

"Good--night!" admitted the Young Doctor.