In fact, within a year after Caroline’s catastrophic visit to the bookshop the only thing in it that preserved any semblance of being up to date was Miss Masters. Miss McCracken had followed in the footsteps of Mr. Moonlight Quill and become an intolerable dowd.
For Merlin too, from a feeling compounded of loyalty and listlessness, had let his exterior take on the semblance of a deserted garden. He accepted the red felt skull-cap as a symbol of his decay. Always a young man known as a “pusher,” he had been, since the day of his graduation from the manual training department of a New York High School, an inveterate brusher of clothes, hair, teeth, and even eyebrows, and had learned the value of laying all his clean socks toe upon toe and heel upon heel in a certain drawer of his bureau, which would be known as the sock drawer.
These things, he felt, had won him his place in the greatest splendor of the Moonlight Quill. It was due to them that he was not still making “chests useful for keeping things,” as he was taught with breathless practicality in High School, and selling them to whoever had use of such chests—possibly undertakers. Nevertheless when the progressive Moonlight Quill became the retrogressive Moonlight Quill he preferred to sink with it, and so took to letting his suits gather undisturbed the wispy burdens of the air and to throwing his socks indiscriminately into the shirt drawer, the underwear drawer, and even into no drawer at all. It was not uncommon in his new carelessness to let many of his clean clothes go directly back to the laundry without having ever been worn, a common eccentricity of impoverished bachelors. And this in the face of his favorite magazines, which at that time were fairly staggering with articles by successful authors against the frightful impudence of the condemned poor, such as the buying of wearable shirts and nice cuts of meat, and the fact that they preferred good investments in personal jewelry to respectable ones in four per cent saving-banks.
It was indeed a strange state of affairs and a sorry one for many worthy and God-fearing men. For the first time in the history of the Republic almost any negro north of Georgia could change a one-dollar bill. But as at that time the cent was rapidly approaching the purchasing power of the Chinese ubu and was only a thing you got back occasionally after paying for a soft drink, and could use merely in getting your correct weight, this was perhaps not so strange a phenomenon as it at first seems. It was too curious a state of things, however, for Merlin Grainger to take the step that he did take—the hazardous, almost involuntary step of proposing to Miss Masters. Stranger still that she accepted him.
It was at Pulpat’s on Saturday night and over a $1.75 bottle of water diluted with vin ordinaire that the proposal occurred.
“Wine makes me feel all tingly, doesn’t it you?” chattered Miss Masters gaily.
“Yes,” answered Merlin absently; and then, after a long and pregnant pause: “Miss Masters—Olive—I want to say something to you if you’ll listen to me.”
The tingliness of Miss Masters (who knew what was coming) increased until it seemed that she would shortly be electrocuted by her own nervous reactions. But her “Yes, Merlin,” came without a sign or flicker of interior disturbance. Merlin swallowed a stray bit of air that he found in his mouth.
“I have no fortune,” he said with the manner of making an announcement. “I have no fortune at all.”
Their eyes met, locked, became wistful, and dreamy and beautiful.
“Olive,” he told her, “I love you.”
“I love you too, Merlin,” she answered simply. “Shall we have another bottle of wine?”
“Yes,” he cried, his heart beating at a great rate. “Do you mean—”
“To drink to our engagement,” she interrupted bravely. “May it be a short one!”
“No!” he almost shouted, bringing his fist fiercely down upon the table. “May it last forever!”
“What?”
“I mean—oh, I see what you mean. You’re right. May it be a short one.” He laughed and added, “My error.”
After the wine arrived they discussed the matter thoroughly.
“We’ll have to take a small apartment at first,” he said, “and I believe, yes, by golly, I know there’s a small one in the house where I live, a big room and a sort of a dressing-room-kitchenette and the use of a bath on the same floor.”
She clapped her hands happily, and he thought how pretty she was really, that is, the upper part of her face—from the bridge of the nose down she was somewhat out of true. She continued enthusiastically:
“And as soon as we can afford it we’ll take a real swell apartment, with an elevator and a telephone girl.”
“And after that a place in the country—and a car.”
“I can’t imagine nothing more fun. Can you?”
Merlin fell silent a moment. He was thinking that he would have to give up his room, the fourth floor rear. Yet it mattered very little now. During the past year and a half—in fact, from the very date of Caroline’s visit to the Moonlight Quill—he had never seen her. For a week after that visit her lights had failed to go on—darkness brooded out into the areaway, seemed to grope blindly in at his expectant, uncurtained window. Then the lights had appeared at last, and instead of Caroline and her callers they showed a stodgy family—a little man with a bristly mustache and a full-bosomed woman who spent her evenings patting her hips and rearranging bric-à-brac. After two days of them Merlin had callously pulled down his shade.
No, Merlin could think of nothing more fun than rising in the world with Olive. There would be a cottage in a suburb, a cottage painted blue, just one class below the sort of cottages that are of white stucco with a green roof. In the grass around the cottage would be rusty trowels and a broken green bench and a baby-carriage with a wicker body that sagged to the left. And around the grass and the baby-carriage and the cottage itself, around his whole world there would be the arms of Olive, a little stouter, the arms of her neo-Olivian period, when, as she walked, her cheeks would tremble up and down ever so slightly from too much face-massaging. He could hear her voice now, two spoons’ length away:
“I knew you were going to say this to-night, Merlin. I could see—”
She could see. Ah—suddenly he wondered how much she could see. Could she see that the girl who had come in with a party of three men and sat down at the next table was Caroline? Ah, could she see that? Could she see that the men brought with them liquor far more potent than Pulpat’s red ink condensed threefold?…
Merlin stared breathlessly, half-hearing through an auditory ether Olive’s low, soft monologue, as like a persistent honey-bee she sucked sweetness from her memorable hour. Merlin was listening to the clinking of ice and the fine laughter of all four at some pleasantry—and that laughter of Caroline’s that he knew so well stirred him, lifted him, called his heart imperiously over to her table, whither it obediently went. He could see her quite plainly, and he fancied that in the last year and a half she had changed, if ever so slightly. Was it the light or were her cheeks a little thinner and her eyes less fresh, if more liquid, than of old? Yet the shadows were still purple in her russet hair; her mouth hinted yet of kisses, as did the profile that came sometimes between his eyes and a row of books, when it was twilight in the bookshop where the crimson lamp presided no more.
And she had been drinking. The threefold flush in her cheeks was compounded of youth and wine and fine cosmetic—that he could tell. She was making great amusement for the young man on her left and the portly person on her right, and even for the old fellow opposite her, for the latter from time to time uttered the shocked and mildly reproachful cackles of another generation. Merlin caught the words of a song she was intermittently singing—
“Just snap your fingers at care,
Don’t cross the bridge ’til you’re there—”
The portly person filled her glass with chill amber. A waiter after several trips about the table, and many helpless glances at Caroline, who was maintaining a cheerful, futile questionnaire as to the succulence of this dish or that, managed to obtain the semblance of an order and hurried away….
Olive was speaking to Merlin—
“When, then?” she asked, her voice faintly shaded with disappointment. He realized that he had just answered no to some question she had asked him.
“Oh, sometime.”
“Don’t you—care?”
A rather pathetic poignancy in her question brought his eyes back to her.
“As soon as possible, dear,” he replied with surprising tenderness. “In two months—in June.”
“So soon?” Her delightful excitement quite took her breath away.
“Oh, yes, I think we’d better say June. No
