III
The chief drawback to being a shy man is that in the actual crises of real life you are a very different person from the dashing and resourceful individual whom you have pictured in your solitary daydreams. George Finch, finding himself in the position in which he had so often yearned to be—alone with the girl he loved, felt as if his true self had been suddenly withdrawn and an incompetent understudy substituted at the last moment.
The George with whom he was familiar in daydreams was a splendid fellow—graceful, thoroughly at his ease, and full of the neatest sort of ingratiating conversation. He looked nice, and you could tell by the way he spoke that he was nice. Clever, beyond a doubt—you knew that at once by his epigrams—but not clever in that repellant, cold-hearted modern fashion: for, no matter how brilliantly his talk sparkled, it was plain all the while that his heart was in the right place and that, despite his wonderful gifts, there was not an atom of conceit in his composition. His eyes had an attractive twinkle: his mouth curved from time to time in an alluring smile: his hands were cool and artistic: and his shirtfront did not bulge. George, in short, as he had imagined himself in his daydreams, was practically the answer to the Maiden’s Prayer.
How different was this loathly changeling who now stood on one leg in the library of Number 16, Seventy-Ninth Street, East. In the first place, the fellow had obviously not brushed his hair for several days. Also, he had omitted to wash his hands, and something had caused them to swell up and turn scarlet. Furthermore, his trousers bagged at the knees: his tie was moving up towards his left ear: and his shirtfront protruded hideously like the chest of a pouter pigeon. A noisome sight.
Still, looks are not everything: and if this wretched creature had been able to talk one-tenth as well as the George of the daydreams, something might yet have been saved out of the wreck. But the poor blister was inarticulate as well. All he seemed able to do was clear his throat. And what nice girl’s heart has ever been won by a series of roopy coughs?
And he could not even achieve a reasonable satisfactory expression. When he tried to relax his features (such as they were) into a charming smile, he merely grinned weakly. When he forced himself not to grin, his face froze into a murderous scowl.
But it was his inability to speak that was searing George’s soul. Actually, since the departure of Mr. Waddington, the silence had lasted for perhaps six seconds: but to George Finch it seemed like a good hour. He goaded himself to utterance.
“My name,” said George, speaking in a low, husky voice, “is not Pinch.”
“Isn’t it?” said the girl. “How jolly!”
“Nor Winch.”
“Better still.”
“It is Finch. George Finch.”
“Splendid!”
She seemed genuinely pleased. She beamed upon him as if he had brought her good news from a distant land.
“Your father,” proceeded George, not having anything to add by way of development of the theme but unable to abandon it, “thought it was Pinch. Or Winch. But it is not. It is Finch.”
His eye, roaming nervously about the room, caught hers for an instant: and he was amazed to perceive that there was in it nothing of that stunned abhorrence which he felt his appearance and behaviour should rightly have aroused in any nice-minded girl. Astounding though it seemed, she appeared to be looking at him in a sort of pleased, maternal way, as if he were a child she was rather fond of. For the first time a faint far-off glimmer of light shone upon George’s darkness. It would be too much to say that he was encouraged, but out of the night that covered him, black as the pit from pole to pole, there did seem to sparkle for an instant a solitary star.
“How did you come to know father?”
George could answer that. He was all right if you asked him questions. It was the having to invent topics of conversation that baffled him.
“I met him outside the house: and when he found that I came from the West he asked me in to dinner.”
“Do you mean he rushed at you and grabbed you as you were walking by?”
“Oh, no. I wasn’t walking by. I was—er—sort of standing on the doorstep. At least. …”
“Standing on the doorstep? Why?”
George’s ears turned a riper red.
“Well, I was—er—coming as it were, to pay a call.”
“A call?”
“Yes.”
“On mother?”
“On you.”
The girl’s eyes widened.
“On me?”
“To make inquiries.”
“What about?”
“Your dog.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, I thought—result of the excitement—and nerve-strain—I thought he might be upset.”
“Because he ran away, do you mean?”
“Yes.”
“You thought he would have a nervous breakdown because he ran away?”
“Dangerous traffic,” explained George. “Might have been run over. Reaction. Nervous collapse.”
Woman’s intuition is a wonderful thing. There was probably not an alienist in the land who, having listened so far, would not have sprung at George and held him down with one hand while with the other he signed the necessary certificate of lunacy. But Molly Waddington saw deeper into the matter. She was touched. As she realised that this young man thought so highly of her that, despite his painful shyness, he was prepared to try to worm his way into her house on an excuse which even he must have recognised as pure banana-oil, her heart warmed to him. More than ever, she became convinced that George was a lamb and that she wanted to stroke his head and straighten his tie and make cooing noises to him.
“How very sweet of you,” she said.
“Fond of dogs,” mumbled George.
“You must be fond of dogs.”
“Are you fond of dogs?”
“Yes, I’m very fond of dogs.”
“So am I. Very fond of dogs.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Very fond of dogs. Some people are not fond of dogs, but I am.”
And suddenly eloquence descended upon George Finch. With gleaming eyes he broke out into a sort of Litany. He began to talk easily and fluently.
“I am fond of Airedales and wire-haired terriers and bulldogs and Pekingese and Sealyhams and Alsations and fox-terriers and greyhounds and Aberdeens and West Highlands and Cairns and Pomeranians and spaniels and schipperkes and pugs and Maltese and Yorkshires and borzois and bloodhounds and Bedlingtons and pointers and setters and mastiffs and Newfoundlands and St. Bernards and Great Danes and dachshunds and collies and chows and poodles and. …”
“I see,” said Molly. “You’re fond of dogs.”
“Yes,” said George. “Very fond of dogs.”
“So am I. There’s something about dogs.”
“Yes,” said George. “Of course, there’s something about cats, too.”
“Yes, isn’t there?”
“But, still, cats aren’t dogs.”
“No, I’ve noticed that.”
There was a pause. With a sinking of the heart, for the topic was one on which he felt he could rather spread himself, George perceived that the girl regarded the subject of dogs as fully threshed out. He stood for a while licking his lips in thoughtful silence.
“So you come from the West?” said Molly.
“Yes.”
“It must be nice out there.”
“Yes.”
“Prairies and all that sort of thing.”
“Yes.”
“You aren’t a cowboy, are you?”
“No. I am an artist,” said George proudly.
“An artist? Paint pictures, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Have you a studio?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Yes. I mean, near Washington Square. In a place called the Sheridan.”
“The Sheridan? Really? Then perhaps you know Mr. Beamish?”
“Yes. Oh, yes. Yes.”
“He’s a dear, isn’t he? I’ve known him all my life.”
“Yes.”
“It must be jolly to be an artist.”
“Yes.”
“I’d love to see some of your pictures.”
Warm thrills permeated George’s system.
“May I send you one of them?” he bleated.
“That’s awfully sweet of you.”
So uplifted was George Finch by this wholly unexpected development that there is no saying what heights of eloquence he might not now have reached, had he been given another ten minutes of the girl’s uninterrupted society. The fact that she was prepared to accept one of his pictures seemed to bring them very close together. He had never yet met anybody who would. For the first time since their interview had begun he felt almost at his ease.
Unfortunately, at this moment the door opened: and like a sharp attack of poison-gas Mrs. Waddington floated into the room.
“What are you doing down here, Molly?” she said.
She gave George one of those looks of hers, and his newly-born sangfroid immediately turned blue at the roots.
“I’ve been talking to Mr. Finch, mother. Isn’t it interesting—Mr. Finch is an artist. He paints pictures.”
Mrs. Waddington did not reply: for she had been struck suddenly dumb by a hideous discovery. Until this moment she had not examined George with any real closeness. When she had looked at him before it had been merely with the almost impersonal horror and disgust with which any hostess looks at an excrescence who at the eleventh hour horns in on one of her carefully planned dinners. His face, though revolting, had had no personal message for her.
But now it was different. Suddenly this young man’s foul features had become fraught with a dreadful significance. Subconsciously, Mrs. Waddington had been troubled ever since she had heard them by the words Molly had spoken in her bedroom: and now they shot to the surface of her mind like gruesome things from the dark depths of some sinister pool. “The sort of man I think I should rather like,” Molly had said, “would be a sort of slimmish, smallish man with nice brown eyes and rather gold-y, chestnutty hair.” She stared at George. Yes! He was slimmish. He was also smallish. His eyes, though far from nice, were brown: and his hair was undeniably of a chestnut hue.
“Who sort of chokes and turns pink and twists his fingers and makes funny noises and trips over his feet. …” Thus had the description continued, and precisely thus was the young man before her now behaving. For her gaze had had the worst effect on George Finch, and seldom in his career had he choked more throatily, turned a brighter pink, twisted his fingers into a more intricate pattern, made funnier noises and tripped more heartily over his feet than he was doing now. Mrs. Waddington was convinced. It had been no mere imaginary figure that Molly had described, but a living, breathing pestilence—and this was he.
And he was an artist! Mrs. Waddington shuddered. Of all the myriad individuals that went to make up the kaleidoscopic life of New York, she disliked artists most. They never had any money. They were dissolute and feckless. They attended dances at Webster Hall in strange costumes, and frequently played the ukulele. And this man was one of them.
“I suppose,” said Molly, “we’d better go upstairs?”
Mrs. Waddington came out of her trance.
“You had better go upstairs,” she said, emphasising the pronoun in a manner that would have impressed itself upon the least sensitive of men. George got it nicely.
“I—er—think, perhaps,” he mumbled, “as it is—er—getting late. …”
“You aren’t going?” said Molly concerned.
“Certainly Mr. Finch is going,” said Mrs. Waddington: and there was that in her demeanour which suggested that at any moment she might place one hand on the scruff of his neck and the other on the seat of his trousers and heave. “If Mr. Finch has appointments that call him elsewhere, we must not detain him. Good night, Mr. Finch.”
“Good night. Thank you for a—er—very pleasant evening.”
“It was most kay-eend of you to come,” said Mrs. Waddington.
“Do come again,” said Molly.
“Mr. Finch,” said Mrs. Waddington, “is no doubt a very ba-husy man. Please go upstairs immediately, Molly. Good na’eet, Mr. Finch.”
She continued to regard him in a manner hardly in keeping with the fine old traditions of American hospitality.
“Ferris,” she said, as the door closed.
“Madam?”
“On no pretext whatever, Ferris, is that person who has just left to be admitted to the house again.”
“Very good, madam,” said the butler.