The Gray Dawn Part 13

"Noon?" she cried, astonished. "It can't be! But I can't stop now. I think I'll have Wing pick me up a lunch. There's plenty in the house.

It's too much bother to clean up."

Keith demurred; then wanted to stay for the pick-up lunch himself. Nan would have none of it. She was full of repressed enthusiasm and eagerness, but she wanted to get rid of him.

"There's not enough. I wouldn't have you around. Go away, that's a good boy! If you'll leave Wing and me entirely alone we'll be ready to move in to-morrow."

"Where's Gringo?" asked Keith by way of indirect yielding--he had really no desire for a picked-up lunch.

"The little rascal! He started to chew everything in the place, so I tied him in the backyard. He pulls and flops dreadfully. Do you think he'll strangle himself?"

Keith looked out the window. Gringo, all four feet planted, was determinedly straining back against his tether. The collar had pulled forward all the loose skin of his neck, so that his eyes and features were lost in wrinkles.

"He doesn't yap," volunteered Nan.

Keith gave it as his opinion that Gringo would stop short of suicide, commended Gringo's taciturnity and evident perseverance, and departed for the hotel. In the dining-room he saw Mrs. Sherwood in a riding habit, eating alone. Keith hesitated, then took the vacant seat opposite. She accorded this permission cordially, but without coquetry, remarking that Sherwood often did not get in at noon. Immediately she turned the conversation to Keith's affairs, inquiring in detail as to how the settling was getting on, when they expected to get in, how they liked the house, whether they had bought all the furniture.

"You remember I directed you to the auctions?" she said.

She asked all these questions directly, as a man would, and listened to his replies.

"I suppose you have an office picked out?" she surmised.

At his mention of the Merchants' Exchange Building she raised her arched eyebrows half humorously.

"You picked out an expensive place."

Keith went over his reasoning, to which she listened with a half smile.

"You may be right," she commented; "the reasoning is perfectly sound.

But that means you must get the business in order to make it pay. What are your plans?"

He confessed that as yet they were rather vague; there had not been time to do much--too busy settling.

"The usual thing, I suppose," he added: "get acquainted, hang out a s.h.i.+ngle, mix with people, sit down and starve in the traditional manner of young lawyers."

He laughed lightly, but she refused to joke.

"There are a good many lawyers here--and most of them poor ones," she told him. "The difficulty is to stand out above the ruck, to become noticed. You must get to know all cla.s.ses, of course; but especially those of your own profession, men on the bench. Yes, especially men on the bench, they may help you more than any others--"

He seemed to catch a little cynicism in her implied meaning, and experienced a sense of shock on his professional side.

"You don't mean that judges are--"

"Susceptible to influence?" She finished the sentence for him with an amused little laugh. She studied him for an instant with new interest, "They're human--more human here than anywhere else--like the rest of us--they respond to kind treatment--" She laughed again, but at the sight of his face her own became grave. She checked herself.

"Everything is so new out here. In older countries the precedents have all been established. Out here there are practically none. They are being made now, every day, by the present judges. Naturally personal influence might get a hearing for one point of view or the other--"

"I see what you mean," he agreed, his face clearing.

"Join a good fire company," she advised him. "That is the first thing to do. Each company represents something different, a different cla.s.s of men."

"Which would you advise?" asked Keith seriously.

"That is a matter for your own judgment. Only, investigate well. Meet all the people you can. Know the newspaper men, and the big merchants.

In your profession you must cultivate men like Terry, Girvin, Shattuck, Gwin. Keep your eyes open. Be bold and use your wits. Above all, make friends; that's it, _make friends_--everybody, everywhere. Don't despise anybody. You will get plenty of chances." She was sitting erect, and her eyes were flas.h.i.+ng. Her usual slow indolent grace had fallen from her; she radiated energy. Her slender figure took on a new appearance of knit strength. "Such chances! My heavens! if I were a man!"

"You'd make a bully man!" cried Keith. Mrs. Morrell, uttering the same wish, had received from him a different reply, but he had forgotten that.

She laughed again, the tension broke, and she sank back into her usual relaxed poise.

"But, thank heavens, I'm not," said she.

XIII

Affairs for the Keiths pa.s.sed through another week of what might be called the transition stage. It took them that long to settle down in their new house and into some semblance of a routine--two days to the actual installation, and the evenings full of small matters to arrange.

Nan was busy all day long playing with her new toy. The housekeeping was fascinating, and Wing Sam a mixture of delight and despair. Like most women who have led the sheltered life, she had not realized as yet that the customs of her own fraction of one per cent, were not immutable. Therefore, she tried to model the household exactly in the pattern of those to which she had been accustomed. Wing Sam blandly refused to be moulded.

Thus Nan spent all one morning drilling him in the proper etiquette of answering doors. Mindful of John McGlynn's advice, she did this by precept, ringing her own door bell, presenting a card as though calling on herself. Wing Sam's placid exterior changed not. A half hour later the door bell rang, but no Wing Sam appeared to answer it. It rang again, and again, until Nan herself opened the door. On the doorstep stood Wing Sam himself.

"I foolee you, too," he announced with huge delight.

Painstakingly Nan conveyed to him that this was neither an amusing game nor a practical joke. Later in the day the door bell rang again. Nan, hovering near to gauge the result of her training, saw Wing Sam plant himself firmly in the opening.

"You got ticket?" he demanded sternly of the deliveryman outside. "You no got ticket, you no get in!"

Which, Nan rather hysterically gathered, was what Wing Sam had gained of the calling-card idea. After that, temporarily as she thought, Nan permitted him to go back to his own method, which, had she known it, was the method of every Chinese servant in California. The visitor found his bell answered by a blandly smiling Wing Sam, who cheerfully remarked: "Hullo!" It was friendly, and it didn't matter; but at that stage of her development Nan was more or less scandalized.

Nan's sense of humour always came to her a.s.sistance by evening, and she had many amusing anecdotes to tell Keith, over which both of them laughed merrily. Gringo added somewhat to the complications in life. He was a fat, roly-poly, soft-boned, ingratiating puppy, with a tail that waved energetically but uncontrolledly. Gringo at times was very naughty, and very much in the way. But when exasperation turned to vengeance he had a way of keeling over on his back, spreading his hind legs apart in a manner to expose his stomach freely to brutal a.s.sault, and casting one calm china-blue eye upward.

"Can there anywhere exist any one so hard-hearted as to injure a poor, absolutely defenceless dog?" he inquired, with full confidence in the answer.

The iniquities of Gringo and the eccentricities of Wing Sam Nan detailed at length, and also her experiences with the natives. She as yet looked on every one as natives. Only later could she expand to the point of including them in her cosmos of people. Nan was transplanted, and her roots had not yet struck down into the soil. In her shopping peregrinations she was making casual acquaintance, and she had not yet become accustomed to it.

"I bought some darling little ca.s.seroles at Phelan's to-day," she said.

"The whole Phelan family waited on me. Where do you suppose the women get their perfectly awful clothes? Mrs. Phelan offered to take me to her milliner!" or "You know Wilkins--the furniture man where we got the big armchair? I was in there to-day, and he apologized because his wife hadn't called!"

They went to bed early, because they were both very tired.

Keith also had generally pa.s.sed an interesting day. Immediately after breakfast he went to his office, and conscientiously sat a while.

Sometimes he wrote letters or cast up accounts; but there could not be much of this to do. About ten or eleven o'clock his impatient temperament had had enough of this, so he drifted over to the Monumental engine house. After considerable thought he had decided to join this company. It represented about the cla.s.s of men with whom he wanted to affiliate himself--the influential men of the lawyer, Southern-politician, large business men type. There were many of these volunteer organizations. Their main purpose was to fight fire; but they subserved other objects as well--political, social, and financial.

David Broderick, for example, already hated and feared, partly owned and financed a company of ward-heelers who were introducing and establis.h.i.+ng the Tammany type of spoils politics. Casey, later in serious trouble, practically manipulated another.

Among the Monumentals, Keith delighted especially in Bert Taylor. Bert Taylor likewise delighted in Keith. The little chubby man's enthusiasm for the company, while recognized as most valuable to the company's welfare, had ended by boring most of the company's members. But Keith was a new listener and avid for information. He had had no notion of how complicated the whole matter could be. Bert Taylor dissertated sometimes on one phase of the subject, sometimes on another.

"It's drills we need, and the fellows won't drill enough!" was Bert Taylor's constant complaint. "What do they know about hose? They run it out any way it comes; and roll it up anyhow, instead of doing a proper job."