Bambi | Page 2

is not adjusted to modern commercial standards. He cannot make money, or he will not--it comes to the same thing."
"I am unable to see why you are elected to take care of him. He must fit his time, or perish. You don't happen to be in love with him, do you?"
"No, I--I think not. He interests me more than anybody. I suppose I am fond of him rather."
"Have you any reason for thinking him in love with you?"
"Mercy, no! He hardly knows I'm alive. He uses me for a conversational blotting-pad. That's my only use in his eyes."
"He's so very impractical."
"I am used to impractical men. I have taken care of you since I was five years old."
"Yes, my dear. But I am not trying to feed the world bread when it demands cheese."
"No, you are distinctly practical. You are only trying to prove a fourth dimension, when three have sufficed the world up to date."
"Yes, but----"
"No buts. If it had not been for me you would have gone naked and been arrested, or have forgotten to eat and starved to death."
"Now, my dear Bambi, I protest----"
"It will do you no good. Don't I remember how you started off to meet your nine o'clock class clad in your pyjamas?"
"Oh, my child!"
"Don't talk to me about impracticality. It's my birthright."
"Well, I can prove to you----"
"I never believe anything you have to prove. If I can't see it, first thing, without any process, it isn't true."
"But if you represent yourself as Y, and Jarvis as X, an unknown quantity----"
"Professor Parkhurst, stop there! There's nothing so unreliable as figures, and everybody but a mathematician knows that. Figures lie right to your face."
"Bambina, if you could coin your conversation----" Professor Parkhurst began.
"I am sorry to find you unreasonable about Jarvis, Professor."
He gazed at her, in his absent-minded, startled way. He had never understood her since she was first put into his hands, aged six months, a fluffy bundle of motherless babyhood. She never ceased to startle him. She was an enigma beyond any puzzle in mathematics he had ever brought his mind to bear upon.
"How old are you, Bambina?"
"Shame on you, and you a mathematician. If James is forty-five, and Bambina is two thirds of half his age, how old is Bambi? I'm nineteen."
His startled gaze deepened.
"Oh, you cannot be!" he objected.
"There you are. I told you figures lie. It says so in the family Bible, but maybe I'm only two."
"Nineteen years old! Dearie me!"
"You see I'm quite old enough to know my own mind. Have you a nine o'clock class this morning?"
"I have."
"Well, hasten, Professor, or you'll get a tardy mark. It's ten minutes of nine now."
He jumped up from his chair and started for the door.
"Don't you want this notebook?" she called, taking up the pad beside his plate.
"Yes, oh, yes, those are my notes. Where have I laid my glasses? Quick, my dear! I must not be late."
"On your head," said she.
She followed him to the hall, reminded him of his hat, his umbrella, restored the notebook, and finally saw him off, his thin back, with its scholarly stoop, disappearing down the street.
Bambina went back to the breakfast table, and took up the paper. She read all the want "ads" headed "female."
"Nothing promising here," she said. "I wonder if I could bring myself to teach little kids one, two, and one, two, three, in a select dancing class? I'd loathe it."
A ponderous black woman appeared in the door and filled it.
"Is you froo?"
"Yes, go ahead, Ardelia."
"Hab the Perfessor gone already?"
"Yes, he's gone."
"Well, he suttinly did tell me to remin' him of suthin' this mohnin', and I cain't des perzactly bemember what it was."
"Was it important?"
"Yassum. Seemed lak I bemember he tell me it was impo'tant."
"Serves him right for not telling me."
"It suttinly am queer the way he can't bemember. Seem lak his haid so full of figgers, or what you call them, ain' no room for nuthin' else."
"You and father get zero in memory--that's sure."
"I ain't got no trubble dat way, Miss Bambi. I bemember everything, 'cepting wot you tell me to bemember."
The dining-room door flew open at this point, and a handsome youth, with his hair upstanding, and his clothes in a wrinkle, appeared on the threshold. Bambi rose and started for him.
"Jarvis!" she exclaimed. "What has happened? Where have you been?"
"Sleeping in the garden."
"Dat's it--dat's it! Dat was wat I was to remin' the Perfessor of, dat a man was sleepin' in the garden."
"Sleeping in our garden? But why?"
"Because of the filthy commercialism of this age! Here I am, at the climax of my big play, a revolutionary play, I tell you, teeming with new and vital ideas, for a people on the down-slide, and a landlady, a puny, insignificant ant of a female, interrupts me to demand money,