Ellen Glasgow - The Romance of a Plain Man

A virgin martyr refusing to sacrifice a dove to Venus might have uttered her costly heresy in such a voice and with such a look; but the General met it suavely with a flourish of his wide-brimmed hat and a blandishing smile. He was one of those gentlemen of the old school, I came to know later, to whom it was an inherent impossibility to appear without affectation in the presence of a member of the opposite sex. A high liver, and a good fellow every inch of him, he could be natural, racy, charming, and without vanity, when in the midst of men; but let so much as the rustle of a petticoat sound on the pavement, and he would begin to strut and plume himself as instinctively as the cock in the barnyard.

"But what would you do with a vote, my dear Miss Matoaca," he protested airily. "Put it into a pie?"

His witticism, which he hardly seemed aware of until it was uttered, afforded him the next instant an enjoyment so hilarious that I saw his waist shake like a bowl of jelly between the flapping folds of his alpaca coat. While he stood there with his large white cravat twisted awry by the swelling of his crimson neck, and his legs, in a pair of duck trousers, planted very far apart on the sidewalk, he presented the aspect of a man who felt himself to be a graduate in the experimental science of what he probably would have called "the sex." When I heard him frequently alluded to afterwards as "a gay old bird," I wondered that I had not fitted the phrase to him as he fixed his swimming, parrot-like eyes on the flushed face of Miss Matoaca.

"If that's all the use you'd make of it, I think we might safely trust it to you," he observed with a flattering glance. "A woman who can make your mince pies, dear lady, need not worry about her rights."

"How is George, General?" asked Miss Matoaca, with an air of gentle, offended dignity. "I heard he had come to live with you since his mother's death."

"So he has, the rascal," responded the General, "and a nephew under twelve years of age is a severe strain on the habits of an elderly bachelor."

The corners of Miss Matoaca's mouth grew suddenly prim.

"I suppose you could hardly close the door on your sister's orphan son," she observed, in a severer tone than I had yet heard her use.

He sighed, and the sigh appeared to pass in the form of a tremor through his white-trousered legs.

"Ah, that's it," he rejoined. "You ladies ought to be thankful that you haven't our responsibilities. No, no, thank you, I won't come in. My respects to Miss Mitty and to yourself."

The gate closed softly as if after a love tryst, Miss Matoaca disappeared into the garden, and the General's expression changed from its jocose and smiling flattery to a look of genuine annoyance.

"No, I don't want a paper, boy!" he exclaimed.

With a wave of his gold-headed cane in my direction, he would have passed on his way, but at his first step, happily for me, his toe struck against a loosened brick, and the pain of the shock caused him to bend over and begin rubbing his gouty foot, with an exclamation that sounded suspiciously like an oath. Where was the roguish humour now in the small watery grey eyes? The gout, not "the sex," had him ignominiously by the heel.

"If you please, General, do you remember me?" I enquired timidly.

Still clasping his foot, he turned a crimson glare upon me. "Damnation! – I mean Good Lord, have mercy on my toe, why should I remember you?"

"It was on Church Hill almost four years ago, you promised," I suggested as a gentle spur to his memory.

"And you expect me to remember what I promised four years ago?" he rejoined with a sly twinkle. "Why, bless my soul, you're worse than a woman."

"You asked me, sir, if I wanted to grow up and be President," I returned, not without resentment.

Releasing his ankle abruptly, he stood up and slapped his thigh.

"Great Jehosaphat! If you ain't the little chap who was content to be nothing less than God Almighty!" he exclaimed. "I've told that story a hundred times if I've told it once."

"Then perhaps you'll help me a little, sir," I suggested.

"Help you to become God Almighty?" he chuckled.

"No, sir, help me to be the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad."

"Then you'll be satisfied with the lesser office, eh?"

"I shall, sir, if – if there isn't anything better."

Again he slapped his thigh and again he chuckled. "But I've got one boy already. I don't want another," he protested. "Good Lord, one is bad enough when he's not your own."

Whether or not he really supposed that I was a serious applicant for adoption, I cannot say, but his face put on immediately an harassed and suffering look.

"Have you ever had a twinge of gout, boy?" he enquired.

"No, sir."

"Then you're lucky – damned lucky. When you go to bed to-night you get down on your knees and thank the Lord that you've never had a twinge of gout. You can even eat a strawberry without feeling it, I reckon?"

I replied humbly that I certainly could if I ever got the chance.

"And yet you ain't satisfied – you're asking to be president of a damned railroad – a boy who can eat a strawberry without feeling it!"

He moved on, limping slightly, and like a small persistent devil of temptation, I kept at his elbow.

"Isn't there anything that you can do for me, sir?" I asked, at the point of tears.

"Do for you? Bless my soul, boy, if I had your joints I shouldn't want anything that anybody could do for me. Can't you walk, hop, skip, jump, all you want to?"

This was so manifestly unfair that I retorted stubbornly, "But I don't want to."

He glanced down on me with a flicker of his still charming smile.

"Well, you would if you were president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic and had looked into the evening paper," he said.

"Are you president of it still, sir?"

"Eh? eh? You'll be wanting to push me out of my job next, I suppose?"

"I'd like to have it when you are dead, sir," I replied.

But this instead of gratifying the General appeared plainly to annoy him. "There now, you'd better run along and sell your papers," he remarked irritably. "If I give you a dime, will you quit bothering me?"

"I'd rather you'd give me a start, sir, as you promised."

"Good Lord! There you are again! Do you know the meaning of n-u-i-s-a-n-c-e, boy?"

"No, sir."

"Well, ask your teacher the next time you go to school."

"I don't go to school. I work."

"You work, eh? Well, look here, let's see. What do you want of me?"

"I thought you might tell me how to begin. I don't want to stay common."

For a moment his attention seemed fixed on a gold pencil which he had taken from his waistcoat pocket. Then opening his card-case he scribbled a line on a card and handed it to me. "If you choose you may take that to Bob Brackett at the Old Dominion Tobacco Works, on Twenty-fifth Street, near the river," he said, not unkindly. "If he happens to want a boy, he may give you a job; but remember, I don't promise you that he will want one, – and if he does, it isn't likely he'd make you president on the spot," he concluded, with a chuckle.

Waving a gesture of dismissal he started off at a hobble; then catching the eye of a lady in a passing carriage, he straightened himself, bowed with a gallant flourish of his wide-brimmed hat, and went on with a look of agony but a jaunty pace. As I turned, a minute later, to discover who could have wrought this startling change in the behaviour of the General, an open surrey, the bottom filled with a pink cloud of wild azaleas, stopped at the curbing before the grey house, and the faces of Miss Mitty and Sally shone upon me over the blossoms. The child was coloured like a flower from the sun and wind, and there was a soft dewy look about her flushed cheeks, and her very full red lips. At the corner of her mouth, near her square little chin, a tiny white scar showed like a dimple, giving to her lower lip when she laughed an expression of charming archness. I remember these things now – at the moment there was no room for them in my whirling thoughts.