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Daredevil

<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2> <h3>BUSINESS AND PIE</h3> That Mr. Buzz Clendenning has in the composition of his nature a very large portion of nice foolishness which makes the heart of a lonely person most comfortable. He decided, upon that very first day of our introduction, that I was to be as a small brother to him who was much loved but also to be much joked about a quaintness which he chose to call “French greenness,” and for which I was most grateful because with that excuse I could cover all mistakes that arose from my being a girl who was ignorant of the exact methods of being a man. And, also, that nice attitude towards me was of quite a contagion, for all of the young ladies and gentlemen of the city of Hayesville became the same to me and all of the time my heart was warm and rejoiced at their affection shown in banter and jokes. The morning after that very much enjoyed dinner dance, with which the Governor Faulkner complimented my Uncle, the General Robert, through me, I was standing in front of the mirror in my room without my coat or my collar, endeavoring to reduce the wave in my black hair to the sleekness of that of my beloved Buzz, which had a difficulty because of one lock over my temple whose waywardness I had for the last few years trained to fall upon my cheek for purposes of coquetry and which would persist in trying still to fulfill that unworthy function. And right in the center of my punishment of that lovelock with the stiff brush without a handle, which was twins with another that had come with the gentleman’s traveling bag which I had purchased in New York of the nice fat gentleman in the store of clothing for men, into my room came that Buzz without any ceremony save a rap upon my door which did not allow sufficient time for any response from me. I blushed with alarm at the thought that his entrance might have come at a much earlier stage of my toilet and I made a resolve to lock the door tight in future, at the same time turning to greet him with a fine and great composure. “Say, Bobby, are you in for side-stepping the chiefs at eleven-thirty and going with me to take a nice bunch of calicoes out to the Country Club for a little midday sandwich dance? You can eat a thin ham and fox trot at the same time. Sue and Belle and Kate Keith all want to get on to that long slide you’ve brought over direct from Paree. It stuck in their systems last evening and they want more. Want to go?” “With a greatness of pleasure, but His Excellency has commanded me at eleven o’clock and will I be through the tasks at the hour for escorting those calicoes out to your Club for a dance?” I asked with great delight as I continued my operations with the brush upon the rebellious lock. “You’ll have time if you stop that primping and hustle into your collar and coat. Here, let me show you how to doctor that place where the cow licked you. Why don’t you take both brushes to it? Like this!” With which Mr. Buzz took from my hand the one brush and from the high dressing table the other, for which my ignorance had discovered no use, and did then commence a vigorous assault on my enemy the curl. “What was it you said of a cow, my Buzz?” I questioned him as I made a squirming under the vigor of his attack upon my hair. “When hair acts up like this we call it a cowlick in United States language. See here, L’Aiglon, old boy, this hair looks as if it had at one time been curled. Did you wear it that way in Paris?” And as he asked the question he gave that side of my hair one more vigorous sweep and stood off to admire his work. “No, my Buzz, I assure you that it was the cruelty of that cow you mention, while I was at a very tender age,” I answered with a laugh into his eyes that covered nicely the blush that rose to my cheek at his accusation concerning the lovelock. “Well, knot that tie now in a jiffy and climb into your coat. Let’s get to the Capitol and give the old boys as little of our attention as they’ll stand for, and then beat it for the girls. Bet my chief growls blue blazes at me over the way Sue ragged him about you last night. He’ll issue a command at the point of the bayonet to me to keep you away from the bunch, and I’ll agree just so as to make the slide from under easy. Come on.” And while he spoke to me, that Buzz raced me down the hall of my ancestors and out into his very slim, fast car before I could get breath for speaking. “But suppose His Excellency the Gouverneur Faulkner requires my presence beyond that half hour after eleven o’clock, my Buzz, is it that you will await me for a few short minutes?” I asked of him as we ascended the steps of the Capitol of the State of Harpeth. “Oh, Bill won’t keep you any longer than that. He’ll have twenty other interviews on the string for to-day. Fifteen minutes will be about right for you; you wait for me in the General’s anteroom. I’ll have to get heroics before instructions. I always do. Now beat it.” With which words my Buzz left me in the wide hall of the great Capitol before a door marked: “Office of the Governor.” Upon that door I knocked and it was immediately opened to me by fine black Cato, whose eyes shone in recognition of me. “Got it in yo’ shoe?” he demanded in a whisper. “Yes, my good Cato,” I responded also in a low tone of voice. “Den pass on in to de Governor; he am waitin’ fer you. You’s safe, chile.” And he escorted me past several gentlemen seated and standing in groups, to another door, which he opened for me and through which he motioned me to pass. “Mr. Robert Carruthers,” he announced me with the greatest ceremony. “Go in, honey,” he said softly and I passed into the room whose door he closed quietly behind me. “Good morning, Robert,” said the Gouverneur Faulkner to me as I came and stood opposite him at the edge of his wide desk. And he smiled at me with a great gentleness that had also humor playing into it from the corners of his eyes and mouth. “I’m afraid that you’ve landed in the midst of a genuine case of American hustle this ‘morning after.’ Here are two lists of specifications, one in English weights and measurements and the other in French. I want you to compare them carefully, checking them as you go and then re-checking them. I want to be sure they are the same. Also make a good literal translation of any notes that may be in French and compare them with the notes in English. Do you think it can be done for me by three o’clock, in time for a conference I have at that hour?” With which request he, the Gouverneur Faulkner, handed me two large sheets of paper down which were many long columns of figures. “Mon Dieu,” I said to myself under my breath, for always I have had to count out the pieces of money necessary to give to Nannette for the washer of the linen at the Chateau de Grez, upon the fingers of my hands, which often seemed too few to furnish me sufficient aid. But in a small instant I had recovered my courage, which brought with it a determination to do that task if it meant my death. “Yes, Your Excellency,” I answered him with a great composure in the face of the tragedy. “You’ll find the small office between my office and that of General Carruthers empty. A ring of the bell under the desk means for you to come to me. I’ll try not to interrupt you. Two rings means to go to the General. That is about all.” With a wave of his hand the Gouverneur Faulkner dismissed me to my death. With my head up in the air I turned from him and prepared to retire to my prison from which I could see no release, when again I heard his summons. He had risen and was standing beside his desk and as I turned he held out his hand into which I laid mine as he drew me near to him. “Youngster,” he said and the smile which all persons call cold was all of gentleness into my eyes, “these are going to be some hard days for us all, these next ten, and if I drive you too hard, balk, will you?” “To the death for you I’ll go, my Gouverneur Faulkner,” I answered him, looking straight into his tired eyes that were so deep under the black, silver-tipped wings of his brows. I did not mean that death I had threatened myself from the mathematics in the paper, but in my heart there was something that rose and answered the sadness in his eyes with again all that savageness of a barbarian. “Then I’ll take you to the point of demise—almost—if I need you,” he answered me with a laugh that hid a quiver of emotion in his voice as something that was like unto a spark shot from the depths of his eyes into the depths of mine. “Go get the papers verified and let me know when you have finished.” And this time I was in reality dismissed. I went; but in my heart was a strange smoulder that the spark had kindled. In the small room that opened off of that of the Gouverneur Faulkner, with a door that I knew to lead into the room of my Uncle, the General Robert, I seated myself at a table by a window which looked down upon the city spread at the foot of the Capitol hill lying shimmering in the young spring mists that drifted across its housetops. I laid down the papers, took a pencil from a tray close beside my hand and then faced the most dreadful of any situation that I had ever brought down upon my own head. I also faced at the same time the smiling countenance of my Buzz, who looked into the door from the room of my Uncle, the General Robert, slipped through that door and closed it gently behind him. “Safe on first base! The old boy of the bayonets has been called to the Governor and he’ll not be back before they both have luncheon sent in to them. I have taken his letters and now I’m off. What did Bill hand you?” “Death and also destruction,” I answered in an expletive often used by my father in times of a catastrophe, and with those words I showed to my Buzz the two long papers. “Shoo, that’s no big job. I looked over and verified this one myself yesterday in ten minutes. Hello, this other one is in French. Just run it through and if it is to tally, call it; and I’ll hold this one. We can do it in fifteen minutes. Go ahead from the top line across.” And my Buzz held the paper in his hand as he seated himself in readiness upon the corner of my desk beside me. “Oh, my Buzz, I have such a mortification that I cannot add one to another of these long figures. When I place one number to another I must use my fingers, and in this case you see that it is impossible.” Tears I did not allow in my eyes, but they were in my voice, and I looked into the eyes of my Buzz with a great terror. “What is it that I shall do? I am in disgrace.” “You complete edition of a kid, you, don’t you know I can do it for you? That is, if you know what all these kilo things stand for in English. Do you?” As he spoke, that kind Buzz put his hand on my shoulder with a nice rough shake. “I do know from my governess, Madam Fournet, and I will write it all down for you, my Buzz, for whom I feel so much gratitude for help,” I answered with quickness. “Stow the gratitude and write ’em all out. It will take us about an hour but it is good to keep calicoes waiting occasionally,” he said, and did thereupon seat himself beside the table and draw to himself the two sheets of paper, while I quickly wrote out the table of French weights and measurements translated into English. I did very much enjoy that hour in which my Buzz labored with a pencil and a great industry while I called to him the list of long figures and then verified as he showed me the units upon the page in the French language. He made jokes at me between workings while he attended his cigarette and we, together, had much laughter. “There are just three places where these figures disagree and I have marked them carefully, L’Aiglon,” he said as at last he laid down both pieces of the paper. “These French specifications and figures that floored you, represent the ideal mule in bulk and these United States figures promise the same multitude in scrub. I thought as much. You just run in there to Bill with them and then forget you ever saw them, and we’ll be on our way to the girls in ten minutes. Bobby, I mean it when I say that men in your and my positions of trust just forget facts and figures the minute we get out of sight of our chiefs. And we forget the chiefs too, believe me. Now run along and come out to the car on the same trot.” “Is it of honor not to tell to the Gouverneur Faulkner that you assisted me in this task, my Buzz?” I asked of him with anxiety. “No need to tell him—it’s all in the same office and will come to me for filing. Don’t say anything that will bring on talk that keeps us from Sue and the gang. Just run!” With which advice my kind Buzz disappeared through the door into the office of my Uncle, the General Robert, as I softly opened the door of the room of the Gouverneur Faulkner and entered into his presence. And in that presence I found also my Uncle, the General Robert, in a very grave consultation with the Gouverneur Faulkner. “The papers completed, Your Excellency,” I said in a very low and meek tone of my voice as I laid the papers beside him on the table and prepared to take the running departure that my Buzz had commanded of me. “Bless my soul, are you here and at work, young man? I thought you were asleep after all that gallivanting, and was just preparing to blow you up out of bed over the telephone,” exclaimed my Uncle, the General Robert, with great fierceness of manner but also a great pleasure of eyes at the sight of me in the character of such a nice Secretary to the Gouverneur of Harpeth. “Robert arrived five minutes after I did and ten minutes before you came into the building, General,” said that Gouverneur Faulkner, with a twinkle of great enjoyment in his eyes. “He’s done a day’s work before we have begun. Will you have your luncheon sent up from the restaurant with ours, Robert? Just order the usual things for us and any kind of frills you care for. Shall I say snails?” “I thank Your Excellency deeply but I am engaged that I luncheon and dance with Mr. Buzz Clendenning in his club in the country if I may be given permission to go,” I answered as I laid my fingers with affection on the arm of my Uncle, the General Robert, as I stood beside him. “Nonsense, sir! You’ll not join those jackanapes in their gambols during business hours. Order yourself up a slice of pie and a glass of buttermilk along with mine and sit down here to listen to matters of business by which you can profit. Luncheon and dancing! No, pie and business, I say, pie and business!” And the fierceness of my Uncle, the General Robert, made me retire several feet away from him in astonishment and in the direction of the Gouverneur Faulkner. “Now, General, don’t tie the boy down to pie and the company of two musty old gentlemen like ourselves. He’s earned a dance. You may go, Robert, and I wish—I wish my heels were light enough to go with yours,” that kind Gouverneur said in my behalf. “Light heels, light head! And I say he shall—” And another explosion of fierceness was about to arrive from my Uncle, the General Robert, when I said with great and real humility: “It will be my great pleasure to sit at the feet of you and His Excellency, which are not light for dancing, my Uncle Robert, and eat a large piece of pie and also milk.” I spoke with a sincerity, for suddenly I knew that there would be nothing at that dance of girls in the club of my Buzz that I would so desire as to sit near to that Gouverneur Faulkner, in whose eyes came that sadness when he spoke of the dance for which he had not the light feet, and eat with him and my Uncle, the General Robert, a piece of that American pie of which I had heard my father speak many times. “Why, he means it, General,” said the Gouverneur Faulkner with a great softness in his eyes that answered the affection that was in mine that pleaded for the pie and a place at his side. “Run, youngster, run, before the General says another word. You are dismissed. Go!” And with a great laugh the Gouverneur Faulkner rose, put his arm around my shoulder and put me out of that room before my Uncle, the General Robert, could begin any more words of remonstrance. And I ran away from that door to my Buzz in the waiting car with both light and reluctant feet. The two hours that I spent with my Buzz at his club in the country with what he called in front of their very faces, bunches of calico, passed with such a rapidity that I felt I must grasp each minute and remonstrate with them for their fleetness. That Mademoiselle Sue was even much more lovely in her gray costume of golf with a tie the color of the one worn by my Buzz, than she had been in her chiffon of the dinner dance, and the beautiful Belle was much the same, with an added gayety and charm, while I discovered a very sweet Kate Keith and a Mildred Summers who was not of a great beauty but of many interesting remarks which induced much laughing. With them were that Miles Menefee whom my Buzz had recommended to me, and also several young gentlemen of America whom I liked exceedingly. One Mr. Phillips Taylor took me by my heart with a great force when, as we were all seated on the steps of the wide porch eating the promised sandwich and consuming breath for another dance in a very few minutes, he said to me: “Say, Mr. Robert Carruthers, my mater wants to see you over in the east card room directly. She says she had it on with your father in their dancing school days and it was only by the intervention of some sort of love ruckus that you and I are not brothers or maybe what would be worse, brother and sister. If that had happened you would have had to be it. I wouldn’t. But that’s not our quarrel.” “You couldn’t have been a woman unless you had received a much better finishing polish before being sent to bless the earth, Phil, dear,” said that funny Mademoiselle Mildred Summers, and that Mr. Phillips Taylor returned the insult by lifting her off of her feet and gliding her halfway across the porch verandah in the beginning of one tango dance to the music that was again to be heard from the hall within the building. “Mildred and Phil fight like aborigines, and their love for combat will lead to matrimony in their early youth if they are not reconciled to each other soon,” said lovely Sue as she fitted herself into my arms for our tango. “After this dance with you will you lead me to that Madam Taylor, the friend of my father, beautiful Sue?” I asked of her. “It makes happy my heart to see one who loved him.” And as I spoke, the longing for my father that will ever be in my heart made a sadness in my voice and a dimness in my eyes. “I think everybody loved him just as we are all beginning to—to like you, Bobby dear,” said that sweet girl as she smiled up at me in a way that sent the dimness in my eyes back to my heart. “I am very grateful that you like me, lovely Sue,” I said with great humility. “I will endeavor to win and deserve more and more of that liking, until it is with me as if I had been born in a house near to yours, as is the case with my dear Buzz and also that funny Mildred.” “I couldn’t like you any better, Bobby, if you had torn the hair off of my doll’s head or broken my slate a dozen times,” she laughed at me again as we slid together the last slide in the dance. “Now come over and be introduced to Mrs. Taylor. You have only a few minutes, for you and Buzz must both be back at the Capitol at two. I feel in honor bound to the State to send you both back on time.” And while she spoke she led me across the hall of the clubhouse and into a room full of ladies, who sat at card tables consuming very beautiful food while also preparing to resume playing the cards. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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