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Rose Garden Husband

<h2>II</h2> He was gray-haired, pink-cheeked, curvingly side-whiskered and immaculately gray-clad; and he did not look in the least like a messenger of Fate. The Liberry Teacher was at a highly keyed part of her narrative, and even the most fidgety children were tense and open-mouthed. "'And where art thou now?' cried the Stranger to Robin Hood. And Robin roared with laughter. 'Oh, in the flood, and floating down the stream with all the little fishes,' said he—" she was relating breathlessly. "Tea-cher!" hissed Isaac Rabinowitz, snapping his fingers at her at this exciting point. "Teacher! There's a guy wants to speak to you!" "Aw, shut-tup!" chorused his indignant little schoolmates. "Can't you see that Teacher's tellin' a story? Go chase yerself! Go do a tango roun' de block!" Isaac, a small Polish Jew with tragic, dark[Pg 23] eyes and one suspender, received these and several more such suggestions with all the calm impenetrability of his race. "Here's de guy," was all he vouchsafed before he went back to the unsocial nook where, afternoon by faithful afternoon, he read away at a fat three-volume life of Alexander Hamilton. The Liberry Teacher looked up without stopping her story, and smiled a familiar greeting to the elderly gentleman, who was waiting a little uncertainly at the Children's Room door, and had obviously been looking for her in vain. He smiled and nodded in return. "Just a minute, please, Mr. De Guenther," said the Liberry Teacher cheerfully. The elderly gentleman nodded again, crossed to Isaac and his ponderous volumes, and began to talk to him with that benign lack of haste which usually means a very competent personality. Phyllis hurried somewhat with Robin Hood among his little fishes, and felt happier. It was always, in her eventless life, something of a pleasant[Pg 24] adventure to have Mr. De Guenther or his wife drop in to see her. There was usually something pleasant at the end of it. They were an elderly couple whom she had known for some years. They were so leisurely and trim and gentle-spoken that long ago, when she was only a timorous substitute behind the circle of the big charging-desk, she had picked them both out as people-you'd-like-if-you-got-the-chance. Then she had waited on them, and identified them by their cards as belonging to the same family. Then, one day, with a pleased little quiver of joy, she had found him in the city Who's Who, age, profession (he was a corporation lawyer), middle names, favorite recreation, and all. Gradually she had come to know them both very well in a waiting-on way. She often chose love-stories that ended happily and had colored illustrations for Mrs. De Guenther when she was at home having rheumatism; she had saved more detective stories for Mr. De Guenther than her superiors ever knew; and once she had found his black-rimmed eye-glasses where he had left them between the pages[Pg 25] of the Pri-Zuz volume of the encyclopedia, and mailed them to him. When she had vanished temporarily from sight into the nunnery-promotion of the cataloguing room the De Guenthers had still remembered her. Twice she had been asked to Sunday dinner at their house, and had joyously gone and remembered it as joyously for months afterward. Now that she was out in the light of partial day again, in the Children's Room, she ran across both of them every little while in her errands upstairs; and once Mrs. De Guenther, gentle, lorgnetted and gray-clad, had been shown over the Children's Room. The couple lived all alone in a great, handsome old house that was being crowded now by the business district. She had always thought that if she were a Theosophist she would try to plan to have them for an uncle and aunt in her next incarnation. They suited her exactly for the parts. But it's a long way down to the basement where city libraries are apt to keep their children, and the De Guenthers hadn't been down there since the last time they[Pg 26] asked her to dinner. And here, with every sign of having come to say something very special, stood Mr. De Guenther! Phyllis' irrepressibly cheerful disposition gave a little jump toward the light. But she went on with her story—business before pleasure! However, she did manage to get Robin Hood out of his brook a little more quickly than she had planned. She scattered her children with a swift executive whisk, and made so straight for her friend that she deceived the children into thinking they were going to see him expelled, and they banked up and watched with anticipatory grins. "I do hope you want to see me especially!" she said brightly. The children, disappointed, relaxed their attention. Mr. De Guenther rose slowly and neatly from his seat beside the rather bored Isaac Rabinowitz, who dived into his book again with alacrity. "Good afternoon, Miss Braithwaite," he said in the amiably precise voice which matched so admirably his beautifully precise[Pg 27] movements and his immaculate gray spats. "Yes. In the language of our young friend here, 'I am the guy.'" Phyllis giggled before she thought. Some people in the world always make your spirits go up with a bound, and the De Guenther pair invariably had that effect on her. "Oh, Mr. De Guenther!" she said, "I am shocked at you! That's slang!" "It was more in the nature of a quotation," said he apologetically. "And how are you this exceedingly unpleasant day, Miss Braithwaite? We have seen very little of you lately, Mrs. De Guenther and I." The Liberry Teacher, gracefully respectful in her place, wriggled with invisible impatience over this carefully polite conversational opening. He had come down here on purpose to see her—there must be something going to happen, even if it was only a request to save a seven-day book for Mrs. De Guenther! Nobody ever wanted something, any kind of a something, to happen more wildly than the Liberry Teacher did[Pg 28] that bored, stickily wet Saturday afternoon, with those tired seven years at the Greenway Branch dragging at the back of her neck, and the seven times seven to come making her want to scream. So few things can possibly happen to you, no matter how good you are, when you work by the day. And now maybe something—oh, please, the very smallest kind of a something would be welcomed!—was going to occur. Maybe Mrs. De Guenther had sent her a ticket to a concert; she had once before. Or maybe, since you might as well wish for big things while you're at it, it might even be a ticket to an expensive seat in a real theatre! Her pleasure-hungry, work-heavy blue eyes burned luminous at the idea. "But I really shouldn't wish," she reminded her prancing mind belatedly. "He may only have come down to talk about the weather. It mayn't any of it be true." So she stood up straight and gravely, and answered very courteously and holding-tightly all the amiable roundabout remarks the old gentleman was shoving forward like pawns on a chessboard before the real game[Pg 29] begins. She answered with the same trained cheerfulness she could give her library children when her head and her disposition ached worst; and even warmed to a vicious enthusiasm over the state of the streets and the wetness of the damp weather. "He knows lots of real things to say," she complained to herself, "why doesn't he say them, instead of talking editorials? I suppose this is his bedside—no, lawyers don't have bedside manners—well, his barside manner, then——" It is difficult to think and listen at the same time: by this time she had missed a beautiful long paragraph about the Street-Cleaning Department; and something else, apparently. For her friend was holding out to her a note addressed to her flowingly in his wife's English hand, and was saying, "—which she has asked me to deliver. I trust you have no imperative engagement for to-morrow night." Something had happened! "Why, no!" said the Liberry Teacher delightedly. "No, indeed! Thank you, and her, too. I'd love to come."[Pg 30] "Teacher!" clamored a small chocolate-colored citizen in a Kewpie muffler, "my maw she want' a book call' 'Ugwin!' She say it got a yellow cover an' pictures in it." "Just a moment!" said Phyllis; and sent him upstairs with a note asking for "Hugh Wynne" in the two-volume edition. She was used to translating that small colored boy's demands. Last week he had described to her a play he called "Eas' Limb", with the final comment, "But it wan't no good. 'Twant no limb in it anywhar, ner no trees atall!" "Do you have much of that?" Mr. De Guenther asked idly. "Lots!" said Phyllis cheerfully. "You take special training in guesswork at library school. They call them 'teasers'. They say they're good for your intellect." "Ah—yes," said Mr. De Guenther absently in the barside manner. And then, sitting calmly with his silvery head against a Washington's Birthday poster so that three scarlet cherries stuck above him in the manner of a scalp-lock, he said something else remarkably real:[Pg 31] "I have—we have—a little matter of business to discuss with you to-morrow night, my dear; an offer, I may say, of a different line of work. And I want you to satisfy yourself thoroughly—thoroughly, my dear child, of my reputableness. Mr. Johnstone, the chief of the city library, whose office I believe to be in this branch, is one of my oldest friends. I am, I think I may say, well known as a lawyer in this my native city. I should be glad to have you satisfy yourself personally on these points, because——" could it be that the eminently poised Mr. De Guenther was embarrassed? "Because the line of work which I wish, or rather my wife wishes, to lay before you is—is a very different line of work!" ended the old gentleman inconclusively. There was no mistake about it this time—he was embarrassed. "Oh, Mr. De Guenther!" cried Phyllis before she thought, out of the fulness of her heart, catching his arm in her eagerness; "Oh, Mr. De Guenther, could the Very Different Line of Work have a—have a rose-garden attached to it anywhere?"[Pg 32] Before she was fairly finished she knew what a silly question she had asked. How could any line of work she was qualified to do possibly have rose-gardens attached to it? You can't catalogue roses on neat cards, or improve their minds by the Newark Ladder System, or do anything at all librarious to them, except pressing them in books to mummify; and the Liberry Teacher didn't think that was at all a courteous thing to do to roses. So Mr. De Guenther's reply quite surprised her. "There—seems—to be—no good reason," he said, slowly and placidly, as if he were dropping his words one by one out of a slot;—"why there should not—be—a very satisfactory rose-garden, or even—two—connected with it. None—whatever." That was all the explanation he offered. But the Liberry Teacher asked no more. "Oh!" she said rapturously. "Then we may expect you to-morrow at seven?" he said; and smiled politely and moved to the door. He walked out as matter-of-coursely as if he had dropped in to ask the meaning of "circumflex," or who[Pg 33] invented smallpox, or the name of Adam's house-cat, or how long it would take her to do a graduation essay for his daughter—or any such little things that librarians are prepared for most days. And instead—his neat gray elderly back seemed to deny it—he had left with her, the Liberry Teacher, her, dusty, tousled, shopworn Phyllis Braithwaite, an invitation to consider a Line of Work which was so mysteriously Different that she had to look up the spotless De Guenther reputation before she came! One loses track of time, staring at a red George Washington poster, and wondering about a future with a sudden Different Line in it.... It was ten minutes past putting-out-children time! She stared aghast at the ruthless clock, then created two Monitors for Putting Out at one royal sweep. She managed the nightly eviction with such gay expedition that it almost felt like ten minutes ago when the place, except for the pride-swollen monitors, was cleared. While these officers watched the commonalty clumping reluctantly upstairs toward the[Pg 34] umbrella-rack, the Liberry Teacher paced sedately around the shelves, giving the books that routine straightening they must have before seven struck and the horde rushed in again. It was really her relieving officer's work, but the Liberry Teacher felt that her mind needed straightening, too, and this always seemed to do it. She looked, as she moved slowly down along the shelves, very much like most of the librarians you see; alert, pleasant, slender, a little dishevelled, a little worn. But there was really no librarian there. There was only Phyllis Narcissa—that dreaming young Phyllis who had had to stay pushed out of sight all the seven years that Miss Braithwaite had been efficiently earning her living. She let her mind stray happily as far as it would over the possibilities Mr. De Guenther had held out to her, and woke to discover herself trying to find a place under "Domestic Economy—Condiments" for "Five Little Peppers and How They Grew." She laughed aloud in the suddenly empty room, and then lifted her head to find Miss[Pg 35] Black, the night-duty girl that week, standing in the doorway ready to relieve guard. "Oh, Anna, see what I've done!" she laughed. Somehow everything seemed merely light-hearted and laughable since Mr. De Guenther's most fairy-tale visit, with its wild hints of Lines of Work. Anna Black came, looked, laughed. "In the 640's!" she said. "Well, you're liable to do nearly everything by the time it's Saturday. Last Saturday, Dolly Graham up in the Circulation was telling me, an old colored mammy said she'd lost her mittens in the reading-room; and the first they knew Dolly was hunting through the Woollen Goods classification, and Mary Gayley pawing the dictionary wildly for m-i-t!" "And they found the mittens hung around her neck by the cord," finished the Liberry Teacher. "I know—it was a thrilling story. Well, good-by till Monday, Anna Black. I'm going home now, to have some lovely prunes and some real dried beef, and maybe a glass of almost-milk if I can persuade the landlady I need it."[Pg 36] "Mine prefers dried apricots," responded Miss Black cheerfully, "but she never has anything but canned milk in the house, thus sparing us the embarrassment of asking for real. Good-by—good luck!" But as the Liberry Teacher pinned her serviceable hat close, and fastened her still good raincoat over her elderly sweater, neither prunes nor mittens nor next week's work worried her at all. After all, living among the fairy-stories with the Little People makes that pleasant land where wanting is having, and all the impossibilities can come true, very easy of access. Phyllis Braithwaite's mind, as she picked her way down the bedraggled street, wandered innocently off in a dream-place full of roses, till the muddy marble steps of her boarding-place gleamed sloppily before her through the foggy rain. She sat up late that night, doing improving things to the white net waist that went with her best suit, which was black. As her needle nibbled busily down the seams she continued happily to wonder about that Entirely Different Line. It sounded[Pg 37] to her more like a reportership on a yellow journal than anything else imaginable. Or, perhaps, could she be wanted to join the Secret Service? "At any rate," she concluded light-heartedly, as she stitched the last clean ruching into the last wrist-covering, sedate sleeve, "at any rate I'll have a chance to-morrow to wear mother's gold earrings that I mustn't have on in the library. And oh, how lovely it will be to have a dinner that wasn't cooked by a poor old bored boarding-house cook or a shiny tiled syndicate!" And she went to bed—to dream of Entirely Different Lines all the colors of the rainbow, that radiated out from the Circulation Desk like tight-ropes. She never remembered Eva Atkinson's carefully prettied face, or her own vivid, work-worn one, at all. She only dreamed that far at the end of the pink Entirely Different Line—a very hard one to walk—there was a rose-garden exactly like a patchwork quilt, where she was to be.[Pg 38] <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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