The Wishing Carpet

MR. ’GENE CAREY was at first petulantly annoyed at the unannounced visit of his young partner. “What’s he want to come bursting in on us like this for, Luke? Why couldn’t he write and tell us, and see if it was convenient? What’s the telegraph for? Now I suppose there’ll be the deuce to pay, when he finds out how behind we are!”

But the superintendent, who had reported promptly, before Peter Parker had made his call, was inclined to take the matter more lightly. Young Mr. Parker, he stated with a curling lip, was not the sort to take an intelligent interest in details; he had come, he said, to please his mother, and he would, Luke felt sure, go—very swiftly—to please himself. “All he wants to do, sir, is fool round and talk to the young ones. He won’t bother us at all. Said himself he was a plumb fool about machinery; didn’t even want me to show him over the mill and explain things. No, sir, I figure that after we just tell him about Ben Birdsall, and how pinched we’ve been, he’ll be satisfied. After all, with his money, this little old mill’s just a drop in the bucket!”

The old gentleman wagged his head. “Yes, but his daddy was mighty careful to count the drops, Luke! There wasn’t one leaked away that he didn’t spot it!”

“Well, this kid isn’t like that, sir. If you want my opinion, he don’t hardly know he’s alive! I think if we just treat him right, and let him poke around to suit himself——”

“We’ll have him to dinner, Lady-bird,” Mr. Carey addressed his daughter. “Or—better still—we’ll have him move right up here from the Bella Vista, that’s what we’ll do! Good idea, Luke?” His henchman heartily approved. “That’ll spike his guns,” the senior partner chuckled. “You go telephone right this minute, Lady-bird! Can’t raise much of a row about things when he’s eating our salt, eh, Luke?”

“No, sir,” his lieutenant approved once more. “I’ll be getting back, sir—million things to see to, and the power was off for an hour just when we’re snowed under with rush orders!”

“Too bad, Luke, too bad! Mighty trying on you, I know that, and you shouldering the burden all alone. But it won’t be long, now! I’m getting out in the garden every day, Luke.” He brightened. “Sounds good—‘rush orders!’ Things certainly are picking up, by the eternal!”

“Yes, sir,” Luke agreed soberly, “but of course you understand that orders don’t always mean profits, sir. We’re so deep in the hole now——”

“I know,” Mr. Carey sighed, “I know ... old Ben Birdsall ... who’d have ever dreamed ... if it’d been my own brother....”

Nancy came back from the telephone to report that Mr. Parker thought it was no end good of them; he would be with them well in advance of the dinner hour.

“Let’s get some young people in to meet him, Lady-bird!” her father beamed. “Let’s give the boy a good time. After all, he’s my friend Parker’s son, and he’s my partner, and even if he is kind of a whipper snapper, why— Who’ll you ask, Lady-bird?”

“I’ll have Cousin Mary-Lou, anyway,” Nancy offered, “and another girl and two men. Dad, dear,” she stood looking at him wistfully with her tender and lyric gaze, “what would you think about asking Luke?”

“Asking him what?”

She colored delicately. “Why—to dinner. He’s been so devoted and faithful and unselfish, Dad, dear——”

The old gentleman stared. “Why, Lady-bird, what an idea! What would your Cousin Mary-Lou think? What would any of your other guests think? What—what are you thinking of Nancy?”

She hung her head. “I’m thinking of how he worships you, Dad, dear, and how he works early and late, and goes without his salary, and never spares himself——”

“I know, I know, I know all that,” he rejoined hastily. “No man ever had a better superintendent, nor more loyal, and when the old Altonia gets on her feet again, I’ll make it up to him, Nancy, I will, by the eternal! He won’t lose by his faithfulness, I promise you that! But when it comes to asking him to dinner, Lady-bird, why—Luke, you know, Luke’s just wild mountain stock, one jump away from the feuds and moonshine. If Dr. Darrow hadn’t taken a fancy to him, and seen how smart he was, as a youngster, he’d still be climbing over the rocks and taking pot shots from behind a tree!”

Her hazel eyes filled slowly with tears and her chin quivered. “You needn’t scold me about it,” she murmured. “It was only because he’s been so——”

He patted her soothingly. “There, there, Lady-bird, Lady-bug! Now, now! Of course her old daddy understands! It was just that you didn’t stop to think, that’s all!”

“I didn’t—stop—to think,” sobbed Nancy Carey.

They liked young Peter Parker from Pasadena, his senior partner and his senior partner’s daughter, and all their guests. They found him so amazingly juvenile and so merry and amiable and so intriguingly different from any one they had ever known.

“Cousin Mary-Lou,” who was the eighteen months’ widow of gallant Bob Lee Tenafee who had died a gentleman’s clean and speedy death in the hunting field, decided to give a house-party for him at her plantation, “Beulah-land.” Her Cousin ’Gene had dropped a hint in her ear, and Mary-Lou moved swiftly. “You surely don’t want to prowl around that stuffy old mill for more than a day, Peter Parker,” she said in her soft, caressing voice, dropping her r’s in the authentic manner poor Effie Darrow had adored.

“I do not,” he agreed gratefully. “I came at the earnest request of my earnest parent, and after an earnest once over, I shall exit merrily.”

“Then shall we say to-morrow? Can you all come in time for dinner to-morrow?” the young widow gathered up the other diners in her brown and velvety gaze.

“Oh ... not to-morrow, please!” The guest was deprecatory. “I couldn’t stall Eugenia off with one day, you know!”

“Eugenia?”

“My female parent—Madame President, of the Federated Clubs. Surely you’ve heard of Eugenia? An excellent person in her way—” he turned gravely to his shocked host, “and I feel for her an esteem bordering upon affection, but she has the fatal defect of superseriousness. Some one from here very thoughtfully mailed me a marked copy of a jolly little paper called The Torch and——”

“The Torch?” Old Mr. Carey laid down his knife and fork and the choleric flush flooded his convalescent pallor. “Confound them, sir, the greasy——”

“Dad, dear,” Nancy warned him softly, “you’re not to get excited!”

“Miserable, beetle-browed, chicken-livered scum of the earth! Wish to the Lord we didn’t need ’em so desperately! I wouldn’t have a one on the premises! They’re always holding their meetings in dark alleys and plotting and planning, and upsetting the hands. And they dared to send you— Was it the one with a scurrilous article on yourself, my boy?”

Peter nodded. “The very same little valentine!”

“Cousin ’Gene,” Bob Lee Tenafee’s widow wanted to know, very seriously, “are you going to let a thing like that go unpunished? I think it’s abominable.”

The old gentleman brought his good fist down on the table with a resounding thump. “No, Mary-Lou, no, by the eternal! I’m going to run that rascal down if I have to get a detective from New York! I’ll show ’em that they can’t act like Russia in America! I’ll——”

“Oh, please,” said his young partner winningly, “don’t cheat me out of the fun of doing that for myself!”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Why, that I’d like to run the ruffian to cover myself! Alone and unaided!” Mr. Peter Parker looked round the pleasant circle, fervent young ferocity overlaying an inward smile. “It sounds to me like the utterance of a singularly abandoned criminal.”

“I’ll wager a thousand dollars,” Mr. Carey stated handsomely, “that it’s ‘Black Orlo’! He’s the ring-leader.”

“‘Black Orlo’!” Cousin Mary-Lou repeated. “Sounds like bombs and midnight murders, doesn’t it? Why do you keep such a creature about, Cousin ’Gene?”

“I don’t want to, Mary-Lou—the Lord knows I don’t want to, but he’s the leader, as I say, and if we fire him, the whole crew of foreigners’ll walk out with him, so Manders tells me. But as soon as we get things—well, running a little smoother—” the genial old face clouded over with unhappy thoughts of Ben Birdsall— “I’m going to clean house, at the Altonia! Yes, sir, by gad, I’m going to clean house, and sweep out the scum!”

Peter Parker wrote to his mother that night of his charming first impressions; the Careys and their friends like people out of a delightful book; the Carey girl would melt in your mouth, and there was a young widow who filled the eye most pleasantly. How would she like to have him marry a handsome young widow and settle down to be a country gentleman on a plantation? He rather felt himself slipping. The mill wasn’t bad at all; of course, it hadn’t the characteristics of a rest cure or a summer resort, but what would she? And there were certain aspects of it—he grinned over the paper—which he found very fascinating and meant to pursue further. Meanwhile, he was soaking up impressions and having an awfully good time and he was no end glad she’d prodded him into coming, and he was her loving son.

He spent delightful days prowling about, amiable figure in his spotless white with his bright blue tie, driving with Nancy Carey, playing cribbage with his senior partner, riding with Cousin Mary-Lou Tenafee over her gracious acres, dining with the people he had met on his first evening at the Carey’s house, wandering aimlessly through the Altonia, stopping always to talk to Gloriana-Virginia Tolliver and Henry Clay Bean, and making a languid but persistent pursuit of Glen Darrow.

“Look here, young woman,” he admonished her, “do you realize that you are at large but by my clemency?” And then, before the doctor’s daughter could give voice to her indifference as to exposure and her continued and accentuated scorn of him, he held up a benign hand. “Do not tremble, maiden. Your dark treachery is safe with me.” It was the manner of a feudal lord withholding punishment from a criminal vassal, and it infuriated Glen Darrow. “I may, of course, decide later to make an example of you, for what my parent would call the principle of the thing, but I can assure you, for your comfort, that your present exemplary conduct is steadily softening my rage. The respect and admiration which you find it impossible to conceal, the pretty timidity of your approach, your shy advances—” He ceased, and shook his head sadly. “Now, I ask you, Gloriana-Virginia, do you consider it well bred for her to quit the apartment in such a truculent manner, banging the door behind her?”

“Oh, suh,” Gloriana-Virginia pleaded, “Glen, she’s so moughty sweet and mannerly, most whiles! I kaint see why she acts so ornery to yo’all!”

“Do you think it is possible, Glory,” he inquired gravely, “that she doesn’t like me?”

The child hung her head. “’Taint in reason, suh, but Glen, she—she jes pintly b’lieves eva’thing Super tells her.”

“Ah, and Super tells her——”

She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Super, I heard him tell her yo’all was allus hollering fo’ money. I jes’ pintly know that’s a sinful lie, suh. Hit’s true in reason yo’ got to have plenty fo’ yo’ sweet and sightly cloze, but I know in time yo’ wouldn’t never be mean about hit!” She lifted her wise little monkey eyes from a rapturous contemplation of his purple and fine linen to give him a smile of confidence.

That was, perhaps, the thing which enraged the superintendent’s assistant more than anything else—the way in which Gloriana-Virginia and Beany and old Pap Tolliver, and a dozen other mill children adored him. She strove with them, conscientiously, but while they listened obediently they clearly disbelieved her. It was bitterly unjust, she told herself, after all her concern for them, her fight for them, after all that her father had done—to have them follow him as the youngsters of Hamelin had followed the Piper. A silly joke, a supposedly funny grimace, and they burst into shrieks of laughter scarce in their languid lives; a tray of ice-cream cones and they pattered after him like puppies; selling their birthright of hatred for a mess of patronage. Gloriana-Virginia raptly and tediously worshiped him, but there was a small grain of satisfaction in the fact that Henry Clay Bean, though sharing his cousin’s affection for the junior partner, evidently considered him as tiresomely silly as she did herself. Not a giggle, not a chuckle, not a smile, could young Mr. Peter Parker of Pasadena wrest from him, though he tried with the persistence of a vaudevillian plugging a new act.

“You know,” he said confidentially to Glen on one occasion, “I believe his mother marked him ... she might have been frightened by a funny paper....”

His prime favorites were Glory and a dusky shepherd of sheep, the Reverend Romeo Bird whom he had met in his first ramble through the negro quarters. He spent many long and lazy hours in the sunshine with him, drawing him out on theology and religion. They appeared to have much the same habit of body, young Mr. Parker from Pasadena and the Reverend Romeo, but while the youth was just as peaceful and as stationary in his mind, the dusky preacher was careful and troubled about many things.

He was almost overcome when the strange young gentleman took a seat in a rear pew of his church one Sunday morning, accompanied by Miss Janice Jennings who had brought her grandmother to the Bella Vista for a fortnight on their way home from Florida. She had met him on the green and leafy Avenue of The Hill with a squeal of delight.

“As I live, it’s Peter Pan! ‘The Playboy of the Western World!’ What are you doing here?”

“If it isn’t Babe Jennings!” He reflected her pleasure. “Look what spring has brought us! Greetings and hail!”

“But what, I ask, are you doing here?”

“Plying my trade.”

“That of lotus eater?”

“That of mill owner in good and regular standing! Down there,” he waved a hand toward the Altonia far below them, “toil my minions! I watch ’em. By the sweat of my brow, once removed.”

“’Atta boy! Where are you going now?”

“To the darky church. You can come if you promise not to emit the loud guffaw that speaks the vacant mind.” He fell into leisurely step beside her. “Babe, I’m for this place a million! And the people! Crazy about ’em.”

She considered him darkly. “If you’re crazy about Nancy Carey I’m off you for life.”

“Why?”

“She’s a Dumb Dora.”

“But very easy to look at, you grant me?”

“I grant you. But something less than nothing to listen to. Peter, don’t! Dead above the ears. Wouldn’t get you at all.”

“Like the Ancient Mariner, you feel—Stoppeth one of three?”

“No, that’s too high an average. But speaking of your minions, you have one called Glen Darrow.”

“Ah? Have I?”

He knitted his brows. “Let me see ... sort of secretary to the handsome super, isn’t she?... Red-headed, as I remember.”

“Don’t lie to me, Peter Pan. Any old time that you haven’t noticed Glen Darrow! Listen! I’ve known Glen since we were little squabs in primary school, and I want to tell you—” She told him briskly and vividly, and when she paused——

“Speak on; you interest me,” said Peter Parker.

They were arrived at the little brown church. “Well, that’s the whole scenario, Peter Pan. You’ll have to do your own continuity.”

“Meaning which?”

“Meaning—” she stood still and put one thin hand with its pointed and glistening nails on his arm, and her bright eyes under their plucked brows were steady and serious. “Say, listen, Peter Pan, she’s there a billion, Glen Darrow. What more do you want? Beauty—gobs of it; brains to burn; good blood; pep ’n ginger, I’ll say! And a straight shooter if ever there was one in a crooked world!”

He made a start toward following the dusky worshipers but she held him. “Listen, Peter. What’s the use of fooling round till you’re grabbed off by some bird-headed débutante? They’ll get you yet. Nearly did, myself, remember?”

He nodded cordially. “Rather a narrow squeak, wasn’t it?”

“You heard my panting breath close, close behind you! But if I can’t have you myself——”

“You can’t, darling,” he was gently adamant about it.

“Then there’s only one Jane in all the world I’ll root for! Peter, on the low down, we don’t amount to a terrible lot, you and I and the rest of our breed. And adding two of us together makes it twice as nothing. But if we can close in on something like that, either of us, both of us, though I’ve never yet met a he—one—well, old thing, think it over!”

He steered her into a rear pew. “Yours of the 18th ult. received and contents noted and in reply would say, shall take matter under immediate consideration and keep you advised on same,” he said briskly, just as the Reverend Romeo began to boom the announcements for the week.

Bellboys from the Bella Vista, smart housemaids in exuberant sport clothes, comfortable laundresses and cooks, grave men and women with yellow skins and tragic eyes, toothless old crones who swayed ceaselessly to and fro and kept up a constant wailing, clean and shining children with round and solemn eyes. It was singularly peaceful in the small brown house of the Lord ... it was a good place to think, and to feel things out.... The fervor of the rich, teary voices....

The Reverend Romeo prayed violently on a text of his own. “Yo’ mus’ go by de junction ob de church!” Tirelessly he pursued his simile home to its lair. On the journey through life whose terminals were Heaven and Hell they must go by the junction of the church, and they must keep their tickets—applied religion—in their hands. “Keep yo’ ticket in yo’ han’!” he thundered. “Ain’ I seen yo’ on de earf’ly train, when de conductor come atter yo’ ticket, an’ yo’ hunt in dis pocket an’ in dat pocket, an’ fumble an’ fuss and look in yo’ hat, an’ break out in col’ sweat? Das’ des’ de way wif yo’ religion. Yo’ ’low yo’ got hit, kaze yo’ sho had hit once, but tain’ whar yo’ kin fine hit easy!” He reinforced himself with a swelling breath. “Yo’ mus’ keep yo’ ticket in yo’ han’!”

All through the long and fervid sermon grizzled old negroes in the forward benches ejaculated their approval. “Now, yo’ say hit!”—“Das de Gawd’s trufe!” One aged man in the quaint high hat of another day sat leaning far forward, his ear cupped in his hand, and at a point which pleased him he would give vent to a strange, wild cry, beginning on a high, shrill note and ending on a bark—“Eeeeeee-OW!” A witch-like woman, bent almost double, chanted a psalm like a low dirge.

“Yo’ all come hyar to hyar ’bout Heaben,” boomed the shepherd, “but I des’ pintly don’ b’leeve yo’ raidy fo’ dat talk! Yo’ hone fo’ to hyar ’bout de Golden Streets, when de Police gotter lead yo’ froo de streets ob dis town. Yo’ crave to hyar ’bout de shinin’ robes ob white, an’ yo’ gwine pawn yo’ raggety coat fo’ er swig ob gin!”

“Eeeeee-OW!” barked the patriarch in the high hat.

“We-is-kill’-fo-dy-sake-all-de-day-long,” wailed the old woman.

“Yo’ honin’ to hyar me speechify ’bout de Pearly Gates, an’ yo’ kaint negotiate froo yo’ own gate at night! We was shapen in iniquity an’ bawned in sin! Dere’s no cullud man is puffick! Dere’s no white man is puffick!” Several of the forward sitters screwed round in their seats to regard Peter Parker with chastened triumph, and the Reverend Romeo announced the collection. In order to praise the liberal and shame the stingy, the names of contributors and their contributions would be read aloud. The choir sang meltingly above the noise of shuffling feet and clinking coins, and the ancient crone announced that she wished to stand on the sea of glass, harping on the harps of God. The clerks stood forward and read the result of the harvest.—“An’ tain dolluh from de white gennelmun!” There was a rustle of gratification, and then an aggrieved rumble from the rear, and a hasty addition. “An’ B’rer Napoleon Butler, tain cents!”

There was a vehement hymn to conclude. “Wash me,” the dusky congregation sang, “and I shall be whiter than snow!” Ah, that was like them, the visitor considered. Not snow-white, after a life of ebony, but whiter than snow!

(Thus young Mr. Peter Parker of Pasadena, unaware that the exuberance of language was the Psalmist’s and not their own.)

Taking a cordial farewell of Miss Jennings at the Bella Vista, he thanked her warmly for the big little idea she had given him. He would take pains to observe the young woman.

“Yeah—you never noticed her till I called your attention to her, did you, old dear?” she derided him. “So’s your old man! Well, go to it, Peter Piper! Snappy days!”