'Oh, is that so!' said Willis.
'I think we can all sit down to supper now,' said Effie May.
In fact she was not only the comeliest but the most sensible of the Lambkins, to Myron's way of thinking.
Between them, Julia and Effie May had produced all the features with which their mother, in her lifetime, had adorned company suppers, and of which Myron had, as a boy, enviously heard from outside. There were not only the traditional Lambkin fried chicken, corn fritters, crab-apple jelly, and ice-cream, but the candied orange-peel and brandied peaches, the last a favourite viand among teetotallers in Black Thread.
But they had not arranged for much conversation.
Mr. Lambkin chewed and gulped, and grumbled that the chicken was tough and that it must be pretty fine for Myron to get back home after living 'round in strange hotels. Herbert champed and belched and talked without stopping, but as no one particularly noticed what he was talking about, that could not be called conversation either. The four children, who were supposed to be fashionably tucked away up-stairs, out of hearing, hung about the landing on the stairs and yapped, 'Maaaa-ma!' And all the rest of the company, including Myron, chewed and said nothing profounder than 'May trouble you pass salt?'
Yet Myron and Effie May were talking incessantly.
When Herbert slammed the table to emphasize a point--it was to the effect that education for children was, or possibly was not, a good idea--Effie winked at Myron. When Mr. Lambkin muttered to Julia something ending '. . . where did you put the toothpicks, then?' Effie giggled softly, and her glance and Myron's crossed.
Herbert had to go down to school-board meeting for half an hour after supper, Julia had a chance then, and Myron understood why he had been invited.
It seemed, according to Julia, that Herbert had a muted affection for Myron; that he regarded him as the best innkeeper since Noah; that the brightest moment in his life was Myron's return to Black Thread; that he had always longed to be a hotel-keeper; and that Myron would do a favour not only to Herbert, to herself, and the entire village and township of Black Thread, but to the travelling public, if he found Herbert a tidy little job in hotel-keeping at three or four thousand a year--for a start.
'I'm sure any hotel-owner would be awfully glad to get a man like him, with his fine education and social position and all his training in caring for children. They must have a terrible time, having to depend on ex-waiters and like that,' gurgled Julia.
Myron took to himself a good deal of credit for not saying 'I am an ex-waiter'. He felt helpless. But as his eye roved desperately round the parlour with its forbidding wall-paper of dark red, it rested on Effie, and she dimpled sympathetically at him, and gave him strength to say brazenly, 'I'll certainly look into opportunities for him the minute I get back to New York, though the business is dreadfully crowded just this minute. If I were he, I wouldn't give up my teaching job for a few months yet.'
Effie May giggled faintly. Julia looked at her savagely, and began to talk about 'our old gang'. They were, it seemed, severally and collectively, a 'bunch of cabbage heads'. This was married to a cat, this other was a cat herself, and the third was a vile housekeeper.
Now the persons of whom Julia thus disposed were precisely the lords and ladies of Black Thread who as princelings had most clung about her on the archducal side porch, and whose grandeur Myron had most envied. Yet he could get no satisfaction out of hearing their former sovereign offering them up to him as sacrifices. He would not have liked it, but he would have felt that life was more integral and logical if she had snapped, 'I love all my old friends implicitly, and you, you pot-walloper, you may have more money than we now, but we consider you as fortunate even to be allowed to sit there in mother's old chair'. He listened miserably, and wanted to smoke--apparently, even at this apex of modernity, 1911, one still did not smoke in a Lambkin parlour--and he escaped before the return of Herbert, although it appeared that Herbert would be agonized at missing his old chum.
Effie May walked to the gate with him.
'I'm glad you haven't turned out a crab, like ole Julia and Bert,' said Effie May. 'Don't they love to knock!'
'You think I'm not so bad?'
'You--I think you're just won'erful!' giggled Effie May.
Won'erful, he was to learn, was her favourite word.
He was delighted to find one person in Black Thread who considered life won'erful.
'Look!' he said urgently. 'I'll be just loafing around, for a few weeks. Can't you and I--we're the young, unmarried generation, apparently--can't we get off into the country?'
'I think that would be won'erful. Some of us kids are going to have a picnic on Lake Nekobee, next Sunday afternoon. Could you come along?'
'I'd love to,' said Myron.
And so he again walked from the Lambkin mansion to the American House, falling into love with a Lambkin daughter.
'She's twenty. Of course I'm pretty mature. Still, at that, I'm only eleven years older. Just right. Trained housekeeper. She certainly would be useful in checking up the housekeeping department in . . . No! I won't have my wife working!' reflected that mature New Yorker, Mr. Myron Weagle.
18
There was peace and healing in the hillside meadow, but no languor, so brisk were the small breezes; and the late spring flowers among stately grasses were bits of scattered enamel--white and purple daisies, buttercups, red clover, and the Pompeian red of devil's paint brush. Myron contentedly brushed the side of his hand against the tickling grasses, as he lay on his back, more relaxed than for years, then clasped the hand of Effie May, sitting up beside him.
This was good, to have a companion in the adventure of leisure. Her presence completed him. He had, in offices, in long talks with Alec Monlux and Mark Elphinstone and Luciano Mora, been so incomplete, the male without the female. And what freshness and goodness there was in the hand of this untainted girl!
He had, he meditated, been reasonably free of viciousness, and most of the guests had been good and decent, yet there had inevitably been so many others--the little hotel thieves, their very pettiness making it the nastier to have to deal with them, the 'skippers' and passers of 'rubber cheques', irritating in their angry roars of innocence, the suicides who so very bloodily brought shame to hotel-rooms, the sneaking immoralists, and the equally unpleasant prudes who objected, publicly, to other people's private immoralities. After the incessant tedium of bickering with such pests, Effie May's gaiety was the water of life.
It would be fun, Myron exulted, to see new great things with an unjaded girl like this--cities and tall towers and mountains. Not much fun to have these by himself, to be unable to share them. Of course her family was a good deal of a pain in the neck, but . . . All the more reason for saving her from them! . . . If he did get an hotel job for Herby, little Herby, the bounding Bert, it would be off in Alaska, with no return ticket! . . . Effie May, the poor kid! To do things for her, to show her the world--yes, and to have her show it to him, with her fresher and less weary eyes, that would give some purpose to life!
'Do you ever want to travel, Effie?'
'Oh, I'd just love to. It would be won'erful!'
'How much have you travelled?'
'Oh, not hardly at all. I drove with Julia and Willis up to Lake Bomoseen. That was before they had to sell the car. And Papa took me to New York once for two days, he had to go on business, my! I wish we'd known where you were, then, that was two years ago, we'd of gone and called on you, would you have been glad to see us?'