Beasleys Christmas Party | Page 6

interlocutor's conversation at a minstrel show."
"Hush!" she warned me, though we were already at a safe distance, and
did not speak again until we had reached the front walk. There she
paused, and I noted that she was trembling--and, no doubt correctly,
judged her emotion to be that of consternation.
"There was no one THERE!" she exclaimed. "He was all by himself! It
was just the same as what you saw last night!"
"Evidently."
"Did it sound to you"--there was a little awed tremor in her voice that I
found very appealing--"did it sound to you like a person who'd lost his
MIND?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know at all what to make of it."
"He couldn't have been"--her eyes grew very wide--"intoxicated!"
"No. I'm sure it wasn't that."
"Then I don't know what to make of it, either. All that wild talk about
'Bill Hammersley' and 'Simpledoria' and spring-boards in Scotland
and--"
"And an eleven-foot jump," I suggested.
"Why, there's no more a 'Bill Hammersley,'" she cried, with a gesture
of excited emphasis, "than there is a 'Simpledoria'!"
"So it appears," I agreed.
"He's lived there all alone," she said, solemnly, "in that big house, so
long, just sitting there evening after evening all by himself, never going
out, never reading anything, not even thinking; but just sitting and
sitting and sitting and SITTING--Well," she broke off, suddenly, shook
the frown from her forehead, and made me the offer of a dazzling smile,

"there's no use bothering one's own head about it."
"I'm glad to have a fellow-witness," I said. "It's so eerie I might have
concluded there was something the matter with ME."
"You're going to your work?" she asked, as I turned toward the gate.
"I'm very glad I don't have to go to mine."
"Yours?" I inquired, rather blankly.
"I teach algebra and plain geometry at the High School," said this
surprising young woman. "Thank Heaven, it's Saturday! I'm reading
Les Miserables for the seventh time, and I'm going to have a real
ORGY over Gervaise and the barricade this afternoon!"

III
I do not know why it should have astonished me to find that Miss
Apperthwaite was a teacher of mathematics except that (to my
inexperienced eye) she didn't look it. She looked more like Charlotte
Corday!
I had the pleasure of seeing her opposite me at lunch the next day
(when Mr. Dowden kept me occupied with Spencerville politics,
obviously from fear that I would break out again), but no stroll in the
yard with her rewarded me afterward, as I dimly hoped, for she
disappeared before I left the table, and I did not see her again for a
fortnight. On week-days she did not return to the house for lunch, my
only meal at Mrs. Apperthwaite's (I dined at a restaurant near the
"Despatch" office), and she was out of town for a little visit, her mother
informed us, over the following Saturday and Sunday. She was not
altogether out of my thoughts, however--indeed, she almost divided
them with the Honorable David Beasley.
A better view which I was afforded of this gentleman did not lessen my
interest in him; increased it rather; it also served to make the
extraordinary didoes of which he had been the virtuoso and I the
audience more than ever profoundly inexplicable. My glimpse of him
in the lighted doorway had given me the vaguest impression of his
appearance, but one afternoon--a few days after my interview with
Miss Apperthwaite--I was starting for the office and met him
full-face-on as he was turning in at his gate. I took as careful invoice of
him as I could without conspicuously glaring.
There was something remarkably "taking," as we say, about this

man--something easy and genial and quizzical and careless. He was the
kind of person you LIKE to meet on the street; whose cheerful passing
sends you on feeling indefinably a little gayer than you did. He was tall,
thin--even gaunt, perhaps--and his face was long, rather pale, and
shrewd and gentle; something in its oddity not unremindful of the late
Sol Smith Russell. His hat was tilted back a little, the slightest bit to
one side, and the sparse, brownish hair above his high forehead was
going to be gray before long. He looked about forty.
The truth is, I had expected to see a cousin german to Don Quixote; I
had thought to detect signs and gleams of wildness, however
slight--something a little "off." One glance of that kindly and humorous
eye told me such expectation had been nonsense. Odd he might have
been--Gadzooks! he looked it--but "queer"? Never. The fact that Miss
Apperthwaite could picture such a man as this "sitting and sitting and
sitting" himself into any form of mania or