The Day of Uniting/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
Jimmy Blake was twenty-seven, above medium height, lean of build and of the athletic type which keen tennis produces and which the war hardened and aged a little. There were lines in his thin, brown face which men of twenty-seven do not usually carry, but Jimmy had spent three years behind the controls of a fighting plane and the wings of the Dark Angel had brushed his cheek a dozen times and had departed. The reaction from the hard realities of war had not found expression in a way which is painfully usual. He had fled from the rigors of war to the lazy, go-as-you-please life which a wealthy man could afford. He was a wholesome, normal youth with a wholesome normal respect for his fellows, be they men or women, but he was the stuff from which confirmed bachelors are made and the prospect of spending an evening with the daughter of a master printer neither alarmed nor pleased him.
He went down to dinner when the gong sounded and found the party already at the table, which was Gerald's way. He recognized immediately the white-haired, white-mustached printer, and then he turned his eyes to the girl who sat at Gerald's right hand. And here he had his first pleasant shock. Remembering Sennett's age, he expected a woman of thirty-five and pictured her a little stout and a little awkward.
But this girl could not have been more than twenty-two. She was petite and dainty and dressed with delightful simplicity—the kind of dress that every man admires and so few women have the courage to wear. Her face was delicately molded. The eyes were a deep blue, almost violet, and when they looked up at him gravely, inquiringly, he experienced a queer and not unpleasant thrill.
“This is Mr. Blake,” introduced Gerald. “This is Miss Sennett, Jimmy. You know her father.”
Jimmy shook hands with both and sat down slowly. He could not take his eyes from the girl's face. She fascinated him, though why he could not understand, for he had met many beautiful women, women more stately and more impressive than she, and they had left him cold. She neither flushed nor grew embarrassed under a stare which she might reasonably have regarded as offensive, and Jimmy, recognizing his lapse of manners, turned his attention to the father.
“I was with young Ponter to-day,” said Jimmy.
Mr. Sennett did not seem impressed and the young man gathered that the heir to Ponters' publishing house was not regarded as an admirable member of society.
Jimmy could never recall what they talked about, Delia and he. Her name was Bedelia and she had been christened in the days when Bedelia was really a pretty name and before it had been promoted by the ragtime song writer to its present-day notoriety.
Gerald and Sennett were, of course, absorbed in the book. Old Sennett was, like most printers, a brilliantly knowledgeable man, for the printing trade represents the aristocracy of intellect. He was interesting, too, in another way. He told stories of work done in the locked room where government minutes are printed and which only he and another man occupied in the dark days of the war, when the cabinet secrets he “set” might have been sold to the enemy for fabulous sums.
Gerald and the old man went off to Van Roon's study.
“Now I'm afraid you're going to be bored,” said Jimmy as he showed her to the drawing-room. “I can't play or sing or do anything clever—I can't even give you a selection on the Maggerson calculus!”
Delia Sennett smiled.
“He's a very wonderful man, Mr. Blake,” she said, and he stared at her.
“Don't tell me you're a mathematician, too,” he gasped and she laughed. She had a sweet, low, musical laugh which was music to Jimmy's ears.
“I know nothing about it,” said Delia, “and I've been scared to death lest you were as clever as Mr. van Roon. He's a relation of yours, isn't he?”
Jimmy nodded.
“His mother was my mother's sister. She married a Dutch scientist, or, rather, a scientist with a Dutch name,” he explained. “Jerry and I have lived together in this house since we were kids and you're quite right about his being clever. You were equally discerning when you discovered I was not.”
“I didn't think you were very keen on scientific subjects,” she corrected.
“And I'm not,” said Jimmy. “Are you?”
She shook her head. He tried to keep the conversation on the personal note, but he observed she was uneasy and glanced at her watch.
“By Jove!” he said, suddenly jumping up. “I promised to see you home. Are you in any hurry?”
“I want to be home before ten,” she said, “I have a lesson to give at eight o'clock, to-morrow morning.”
She smiled at his look of astonishment.
“I am a teacher of languages,” she said; “perhaps I don't look as intelligent as that?”
He protested.
“That is why I am interested in Mr. van Roon,” she went on. “Dutch and German are my two best languages. It was awfully disappointing to discover that he was so English.”
Jimmy chuckled.
“That's where you fall down in your analysis, Miss Sennett,” he said. “Jerry talks English, but thinks Dutch! The most terrible thing he does is to make all his notes in shorthand—and in Dutch! How does that strike you for a complicated procedure?”
“Do you know Mr. Maggerson?” she asked a little while later, after he had telephoned to the garage for the car and she was making preparations to depart.
“I'm the only man in the world who doesn't,” said Jimmy. “It is queer how greatness can exist right under your nose without your being aware of the fact. Do you know him?”
She shook her head.
“Daddy knows him well,” she said.
“What is wrong with Jerry's proofs?” he asked, and for a moment she was silent. He thought she did not know, but she undeceived him.
“He has been the victim of a very mean and contemptible action directed against my father,” she said with unexpected vigor. “Father is responsible that every book which goes out of Ponters' is typographically accurate. Daddy's firm prints all the big, scientific books, including Mr. Maggerson's, and daddy has got a bad enemy, a man whom he helped and who has no reason to hate him—oh, it was mean, mean!”
Jimmy speculated as to the character of the meanness and who was the unfortunate man who had called the flush to Bedelia's face and that bright, hard look to her eyes. She went to the study to say good night to her father and Jimmy waited on the porch. Presently the car came purring down the drive and stopped before him.
“It's all right, Jones,” said Jimmy, as the chauffeur got down. “I shan't want you. I'm taking the car to London, and I shall be away about half an hour.”
The chauffeur had disappeared when Delia Sennett came out.
“What a beautiful car!” she said. “Are you going to drive?”
Jimmy was on the point of answering when an interruption occurred. He had become suddenly conscious that there was a man standing in the drive. The red rear light illuminated dimly for a second, the pattern of a trouser and then the light from the open door illuminated the stranger, and at the sight of him Delia shrank back with a little cry. The man was young and poorly dressed. His puffed, unshaven face was set in a horrible grin, and Jimmy realized that he had been drinking.
“Hello, Delia, darling!” chuckled the stranger. “Is this your new young man?”
She did not reply.
“What are you doing here?” asked Jimmy sternly.
“What am I doing? I'm looking after my girl, that's what I'm doing!” said the man, with a hiccup.
He lurched forward and put out an unsteady hand to grab the girl's arm, but Jimmy had made a quick and an accurate guess. This was the “mean man.” He knew it instinctively and, gripping the stranger's arm, pushed him back.
“Let me go!” roared the man, and struggled to free himself.
There was a quick step in the passage, and old Joe Sennett came out into the night, peering out in his short-sighted way.
“I thought I heard you. What are you doing here, Tom Elmers?”
“I'm looking after Delia, that's what I'm doing. Let go of me, will you!” snarled Elmers, struggling to free himself from the grip on his arm.
“Who is this man, Mr. Sennett?”
“He's a worthless blackguard!” Old Joe's voice trembled with anger. “He's the hound who's tried his best to ruin me! I'll deal with him!”
“Go back, Mr. Sennett,” said Jimmy quietly. “Now, look here, Elmers, are you going to stop this nonsense? You've no right here and nobody wants you.”
The girl had been a silent spectator, but now she came from the shadows.
“Mr. Elmers, I think you ought to go,” she said. “You have done enough mischief already.”
Suddenly, with a wrench, Tom Elmers broke away from Jimmy's restraining hand and with a cry that was like a wild beast's sprang at her. Before he could touch her, her father had leaped at him and flung him back against the car with such violence that he slipped down on to the running board and sat gasping and breathless, staring up at the old man.
“Now get out,” said Joe, “and don't let me ever see you near me or mine again, or I'll kill you!”
The shock seemed to have sobered the man and he got up slowly and, with his head on his chest and his grimy hands thrust into his pockets, lurched into the darkness and out of sight. Jimmy stood looking after him and wondered. That this was the girl's lover or ever had been, was a preposterous suggestion and one which, for some reason, he resented.
“I think we'll go back and have some very strong coffee!” he said. “Miss Sennett, you look just as white as a sheet.”
The incident had the effect of spoiling what he thought would be a pleasant tête-à-tête drive, for old Sennett changed his plans and decided that he would work no more that night, but the change of arrangements gave Jimmy an opportunity of learning the inward meaning of this extraordinary scene.
“Tom Elmers is a printer,” said Joe, when they were sitting back in the drawing-room. “I knew his father and took the boy into the office for the old man's sake. A very clever boy, too, I'll say that for him, one of the cleverest mathematical compositors I know. There aren't many men who can 'set' problems. It requires a special training and a special knowledge of typography. We use an extraordinarily small 'face' of type for that work. Tom did his job very well. He used to come to our house fairly frequently. Then he started in to make love to Delia, and that's where his visits to our house ended. The boy was headstrong, willful, and vicious, too, Mr. Blake,” he added, looking Jimmy in the eye. “I didn't mind his threats, but when I found him monkeying with type in order to get me into trouble, I discharged him from the works.
“We print several important trade newspapers, and one day just as we were going to press with one I found that somebody had altered a paragraph so that it libeled the biggest advertiser in the paper! I traced that paragraph back to Tom. He'd handled it, and he'd altered it after proofs were passed—I gave him half an hour to get out, but before he had gone, I know, as Mr. van Roon knows, that he must have spent hours fooling with type that was ready to go to the foundry, resetting whole pages so that the stuff read stupidly or scurrilously.”
So that was the story, and Jimmy, for some extraordinary reason, was relieved. He was almost gay as he drove them on the way to Ambrose Street, Camberwell, where they lived and the girl who sat by his side on the journey was so far affected by his good spirits that she was cheerful when he left her. Indeed, the only man who was not cheerful that evening was Gerald van Roon.
“I wish to Heaven you hadn't abducted my printer,” he grumbled. “Those infernal proofs have got to be gone through, and Sennett had promised to stay until they were finished.”
“What do you think of her?” asked Jimmy, and Gerald frowned.
“Think of her?” he repeated, puzzled. “Oh, you mean the girl?” He let his queer head fall on one side and looked at Jimmy—he was a head taller than his cousin. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “a nice girl. I like her father very much.”
“Her father!” snorted Jimmy, and went to bed.