– "I must have, immediately, a thousand envelopes with my name printed in the corner."
With that I drew my pocketbook quickly from my pocket and handed her a bill. She took it doubtfully – but at that moment there was a tremendous bump on the porch, and the voice of Fergus shouting directions. When the two men came in with their burden I was studying a fire insurance advertisement on the wall, and Anthy was stepping confidently toward the door.
I wish I could picture the look on Fergus's face when Bucky presented his book and Anthy gave him a bill requiring change. Fergus stood rubbing one finger behind his ear – a sign that there were things in the universe that puzzled him.
While these thrilling events and hairbreadth escapes had been taking place, while the doomed Star was being saved to twinkle for another week, the all-unconscious Captain had been sitting at his desk rumbling and grumbling as he opened the exchanges. This was an occupation he affected greatly to despise, but which he would not have given over for the world. By the time he had read about a dozen of his esteemed contemporaries he was usually in a condition in which he could, as he himself put it, "wield a pungent pen." He had arrived at that nefarious sheet, the Sterling Democrat, and was leaning back in his chair reading the utterly preposterous lucubrations of Brother Kendrick, which he always saved to the last to give a final fillip to his spirits. Suddenly he dashed the paper aside, sat up straight, and cried out with tremendous vigour:
"Fudge!"
It was glorious; it came quite up to my highest expectations. But somehow, at that moment, it was enough for me to see and hear the Captain, without getting any better acquainted. I wasn't sure, indeed, that I cared to know him at all. I didn't like his new pipe – which shows how little I then understood the Captain!
As I was going out, for even the most interesting incidents must have an end, I stepped over and said to Anthy in a low voice:
"I'll see that you get the address of – my uncle in California."
CHAPTER III
ANTHY
It is one of the strange things in our lives – interesting, too – what tricks our early memories play us. What castles in fairyland they build for us, what never-never ships they send to sea! To a single flaming incident imprinted upon our consciousness by the swift shutter of the soul of youth they add a little of that-which-we-have-heard-told, spice it with a bit of that-which-would-be-beautiful-if-it-could-have-happened, and throw in a rosy dream or two – and the compound, well warmed in the fecund soil of the childish imagination, becomes far more real and attractive to us than the drab incidents of our grown-up yesterdays.
Long afterward, when we had become much better acquainted, Anthy told me one day, very quietly, of the greatest memory of her childhood. It was of something that never could have happened at all; and yet, to Anthy, it was one of the treasured realities of her life, a memory to live by.
She was standing at the bedside of her mother. She remembered, she said, exactly how her mother looked – her delicate, girlish face, the big clear eyes, the wavy hair all loose on the pillow. They had just placed the child in her arms, and she was drawing the small bundle close up to her, and looking down at it, and crying. It was the crying that Anthy remembered the best of all.
And the child that Anthy saw so clearly was Anthy herself – and this was the only memory she ever had of her mother. That poor lady, perhaps a little tired of a world too big and harsh for her, and disappointed that her child was not a son whom she could name Anthony, after its father, tarried only a week after Anthy was born.
"You see," said Anthy, "I was intended to be a boy."
After that, Anthy remembered a little girl, a very lonely little girl, sitting at a certain place on the third step from the bottom of the stairs. There were curious urns filled with flowers on the wall paper, and her two friends, Richard and Rachel, came out of the wall near the dining-room door and looked through the stair spindles at her. Rachel had lovely curly hair and Richard wore shiny brass buttons on his jacket, and made faces. She used to whisper to them between the spindles, and whenever any one came they went back quickly through the wall. She liked Rachel better than Richard.
There was a time later when her hero was Ivanhoe – just the name, not the man in the book. She read a great deal there in the lonely house, and her taste in those years ran to the gloomy and mysterious. The early chapters of an old book called "Wuthering Heights" thrilled her with fascinated interest, and she delighted in "Peter Ibbetson." Sometimes she would take down the volume of Tennyson in her father's library and, if the light was low, read aloud:
As she read, she would thrill with delicious horror.
Then she went away to school, not knowing in the least how much her father missed her; and when she came back, the home of her girlhood seemed dreadfully shabby, small, old-fashioned, and she did not like the iron deer on the lawn nor the cabinet of specimens in the corner of the parlour.
Anthy did not tell me all these things at one time, and some she never told me at all. They were the slow gatherings of many rich friendships in Hempfield, and a few things afterward came to me, inadvertently, from Nort. I shall venture often in this narrative to assume the omniscience of foreknowledge: for it is one of the beautiful things to me, as I write, that I can look at those early hard days in the printing-office through the golden haze of later events.
It was in the vacations from college that Anthy began really to know her father, who was, in his way, a rather remarkable man. Although I never knew him well personally, I remember seeing him often in the town roads during the latter years of his life. He was always in a hurry, always looked a little tired, always wore his winter hat too late in the spring, and his straw hat too late in the fall.
Anthy remembered her father as forever writing on bits of yellow paper: "John Gorman lost a valuable pig last Wednesday"; or "Mrs. Bertha Hopkins is visiting her daughter in Arnoville."
Anthy was secretly ashamed of this unending writing of local events, just as she was ashamed of the round bald spot on her father's head, and of the goloshes which he wore in winter. And yet, in some curious deep way – for love struggles in youth to harmonize the real with the ideal – these things of which she was ashamed gave her a sort of fierce pride in him, a tenderness for him, a wish to defend him. While she admired her handsome uncle, the Captain, it was her father whom she loved with all the devotion of her young soul.
He knew everybody, or nearly everybody, in the town, and treated every one, even his best friends, with a kind of ironical regard. He knew life well – all of it – and was rarely deceived by pretence or surprised by evil. Sometimes, I think, he armoured himself unnecessarily against goodness, lest he be deceived; but once having accepted a man, his loyalty was unswerving. He believed, as he often said, that the big things in life are the little things, and it was his idea of a country newspaper that it should be crowded with all the little things possible.
"What's the protective tariff or the Philippine question to Nat Halstead compared with the price of potatoes?" he would ask.
He was not at all proud, for if he could not get his pay for his newspaper in cash he would take a ham, or a cord of wood, a champion squash, or a packet of circus tickets. One of Anthy's early memories was of an odd assortment of shoes which he had accepted in settlement of an advertising account. They never quite fitted any one.
As he grew older he liked to talk with Anthy about his business, as though she were a partner; he liked especially to have her in the office helping him, and he was always ready with a whimsical or wise comment on the people of the town. He also enjoyed making sly jokes about his older brother, the Captain, and especially about the Captain's thundering editorials (which Anthy for a long time secretly admired, wishing her father had written them).
"Now, Anthy," he would say, "don't disturb your Uncle Newt; he's saving the nation," or "Pass this pamphlet along to your uncle; it will come in handy when he gets ready to regulate the railroads."
He was not an emotional man, at least to outward view; but once, on a Memorial Day, while the old soldiers were marching past the printing-office on their way to the cemetery, Anthy saw him standing