“Mind? But for goodness’ sake, why should I? I think it’s splendid.”
Beth relaxed a little.
“Of course he won’t be here to dinner tonight,” she offered.
“But why on earth not?” protested Geraldine and there was a little taut line about her mouth for all her attempt at a smile. “After all, darling, Marthasville’s a small town and he and Tip have to meet sooner or later.”
And then Beth put a question she had longed to ask, but had dreaded to.
“How does Tip feel about — Phil?” she asked.
Geraldine said stiffly, “How should he feel? He doesn’t even know Phil.”
“Darling, you know what I mean — about your being engaged to Phil.”
“Tip doesn’t know it — not yet,” answered Geraldine evenly.
Beth’s anxious eyes flew wide with shock.
“But, Gerry! Why, darling, how can you possibly hope to keep him from knowing? Oh, Gerry, he
must
know — and from you.”
Geraldine put down the salad she was trying to mix, and turned swiftly to her mother.
“Then you feel that, too?” she asked.
“But how else could I feel?”
“Tip’s mother feels it would be sheer cruelty to tell him now — that it might upset him dangerously.”
“Oh, but that’s utterly silly!” protested Beth sharply. “Why, Gerry, you know perfectly well someone will let it out — and to have him find out by accident would be — Oh, Gerry, it would be insane. You mustn’t risk it! Gerry, you’ve got to tell him and let him decide for himself!”
Geraldine nodded. “That’s the way I feel, Mother. I’m going to tell him.”
“Of course, darling, you must!”
Beth could not quite keep her anxious eyes from Tip and Geraldine the rest of the evening; and when they had said good night and were driving back to the big, imposing Parker place, Tip relaxed a little and grinned boyishly at Geraldine.
“I like your dad,” he said happily. “And your mother’s a sweetheart.”
“They’re very nice people,” Geraldine agreed happily.
“And they have a very nice daughter,” Tip told her, with a little caressing gesture. “A very nice daughter. I’m rather fond of her.”
“Thanks, mister,” said Geraldine with a slightly unsteady impishness, and impulsively she added, “Enough to forgive her if she — had a confession to make?”
Tip stared at her, frowning a little, all the boyishness gone from his face. “Are you trying to tell me, Gerry, my girl, that you have a deep, dark secret in your past?”
Geraldine was still for a moment and then she said wryly, “I’m afraid it’s something like that”
“Then I don’t want to hear it,” Tip told her brusquely.
“But, Tip dear — ”
“Whatever it was, you’re forgiven! And if I don’t have to hear what it was, then I don’t have to bother forgetting it! Remember what I said on the train? That if you ever insist on telling all’ then I’ll have to come clean — and, lady, I refuse! Let’s let bygones be bygones, and start over. It’s the only way I’ll have it, Gerry! I mean that!”
He was getting himself worked up. Geraldine set her teeth hard for a moment and then she said evenly, “If that’s the way you want it — only when some kind friend rushes in to warn you of my — er — indiscretion — remember, I tried to tell you!”
Tip relaxed and now his grin was back.
“You couldn’t be indiscreet if you tried. You don’t know how, so forget it. I don’t want to hear it,” he told her firmly.
And so they had gone on from that, day after day, with Tip’s lean, gaunt face filling out, his long, gaunt body taking on a few pounds of badly needed weight. His walks grew longer; he slept better; he looked almost himself again, except that the old gay arrogance was gone forever and he was gentle where once he had been impudent, almost humble where once he had been arrogant.
He came home late for dinner one evening with a light of excitement in his eyes when he joined his mother and Geraldine in the living room, where they had been waiting for him.
“Well, girls,” he said as he came into the room, “I’d like you to pack a lunch-pail for me tomorrow — a couple of hard-boiled eggs, a dry sandwich and a banana. I’m joining the working classes.”
Geraldine and Mrs. Parker exchanged a surprised glance.
“But, my dear boy, what on earth do you mean?” protested Mrs. Parker.
“I mean I’ve got a job, Miss Lucy — a perfectly swell job, and I start in the morning,” said Tip happily and accepted the cocktail Geraldine poured for him.
“A job?” bleated Mrs. Parker. “What sort of a job?”
Tip grinned at her above the dry Martini.
“Now, what a question, Miss Lucy! Where else
would
a Parker get a job but in the mills, of course?”
“But you aren’t strong enough!” Mrs. Parker was angry.
“I’ll never get any stronger loafing, Miss Lucy. I’ll only develop a first-class set of heebie-jeebies to match the ones I brought back with me,” Tip assured her with a trace of grimness in his voice. “It’s a swell job. I’m going to wear overalls and carry a lunch-pail and work my way up from the bottom rung of the ladder until I know as much about the mills as that Donaldson guy.”
At the name, Geraldine was very still, her hands locked in her lap, her eyes on them. She heard Mrs. Parker’s swiftly caught breath but dared not look at her.
“You know, he’s quite a fellow,” said Tip enthusiastically, oblivious to the sudden tenseness in the room. “I like him a lot. He certainly has a head on his shoulders and I bet there isn’t one inch of that factory or a job in it that he doesn’t know like the palm of his hand. He’s a regular — from hairpins to shoelaces.”
Geraldine’s lower lip was caught between her teeth and she did not raise her eyes. But she felt Mrs. Parker’s sharp, angry glance.
“If you want to go into the mills, dear boy, then the thing for you to do is take over Mr. Donaldson’s position as General Manager,” Mrs. Parker insisted stiffly, and was interrupted by Tip’s derisive, gay laugh.
“Oh, Miss Lucy, what foolishment you do talk!” he cried and dropped an arm about her plump shoulders, hugging her hard. “Take over Donaldson’s job? Maybe ten or fifteen years from now when I know half as much as he does about it! Right now, I’m only too relieved to have any kind of a job where I can learn some of the things I need to know.”
Dinner was announced and they went in, Mrs. Parker still protesting half-tearfully, Tip in gay spirits, teasing her, laughing at her, but still determined to begin work tomorrow on a job that would necessitate the wearing of overalls and getting himself very greasy. He seemed to relish the prospect. He was full of eager chatter, and more nearly himself than Geraldine had seen him since he came home.
“Of course, Miss Gerry,” he addressed Geraldine sternly, “I shall expect my devoted wife to be waiting for me at the employees’ entrance when I leave work each evening, and drive me home! I can’t afford to drive up to the gates in a car, and thus set myself instantly apart from all the others in my part of the mills.”
“I’ll drive you in in the morning and come for you in the afternoon, of course, Tip,” she assured him quietly.
He beamed at her. “That’s the kind of wife I like,” he said happily. “The nice, docile, clinging-vine type.”
Mrs. Parker flung Geraldine an exasperated, almost frightened glance but Geraldine made herself smile at Tip and pretend to enter into his mood.
The town accepted, as a typical gesture of the Tip they had known, the fact that he had entered the mills as an apprentice. The fact that he came to work in overalls, and that he brought a lunch-pail like the others in his department was commented on with an affectionate amusement.
His mother was outraged but helpless. There was nothing she could do or say that would alter his mind one single iota. He was as pleased as Punch when, at the end of the first month, he was promoted and given a small raise in pay.
Geraldine drove him in each morning, shopped for the day’s supplies, and came back for him in the evening. A day or so after he had been given his promotion, she saw him come out of the employees’ gate in earnest conversation with someone her heart would recognize in the most dense darkness, surrounded by hundreds of people.
Tip and Phil paused at the gate, talking, and then Tip looked up and saw Geraldine. He said something to Phil, and the two men came towards the car.
Tip was grimy from his day’s work, his grin shining through the dirt, which he had obviously forgotten. Phil was taut and quiet, his eyes holding Geraldine’s for a breathless, shaken moment.
“Hi, Gerry,” Tip greeted her. “You know Mr. Donaldson, of course.”
“I should,” said Geraldine and was surprised that her voice sounded so casual. “I was his secretary. Hello, Phil.”
“Of course, that’s right,” Tip agreed and beamed at them both. “I’m such a nut I guess I’d forgotten. Or maybe it’s that Mr. Donaldson is a being from another world to the fellows in my section, and I sort of forgot that he could be called ‘Phil.’ “
Phil said swiftly, “I can’t think of anything more ridiculous, Mr. Parker, than for you, part owner of the mills, to call me, a mere employee, Mr. Donaldson.”
Tip laughed joyously. “Unless it would be for you, the august General Manager to call a mere hired hand Mr. Parker,” he pointed out.
Phil nodded. “Right, Tip!”
“Good, Phil!” said Tip and the two grinned at each other in frank friendship. “Look, why don’t you come home to dinner with Gerry and me, and we can go a little further into that discussion we were planning?”
Phil hesitated and while he did not look at Geraldine, she knew that he was waiting for some word from her to indicate her wish.
“Please do, Phil,” she said steadily. “We’d be so glad if you would.”
“You see? Now you’ve no excuse,” said Tip happily and swung open the car door.
“Unless, of course, he may have an engagement for the evening,” Geraldine almost desperately offered Phil a way out if he wanted it.
Phil looked at her and answered quietly, “No, I have no engagement.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” demanded Tip eagerly. “Here, you ride up front with the Missus and I’ll sit in back as befits a common day laborer, in all the glory of his greasy overalls.”
Geraldine laughed a little as Phil got into the car.
“To hear him boast about those overalls, no man in London-cut dinner attire was ever more fashionably dressed,” she said.
“Oh, the Navy taught us that a little grease and grime and a suit of dungarees never hurt any man,” said Tip lightly. “And I’ve never had more fun in my life. Gosh, its great to find out what makes thing go round at the mill.”
Phil turned to address him from the front seat.
“You know, of course, that there are easier ways to learn, Tip.”
“But none as certain and sure,” said Tip firmly. “That’s something else I learned in the Navy. You can learn to fire a big gun, or fly a ship just from looking at a chart, but until you’ve taken the gun, or the plane, apart and put it back together again and photographed in your mind where every tiny bolt and nut fits, and what each bit of mechanism does — you don’t really
know!”
“Have it your own way, feller,” Phil laughed.
“Don’t worry, he will. He’s a bit on the stubborn side,” Geraldine said lightly, though her hands were clenched so tightly on the steering wheel that her knuckles were white with the strain.
Mrs. Parker fluttered into the big, cool reception hall to greet her son, and was prettily distressed at sight of his untidiness, as she called it. Tip laughed and threatened her smooth, delicately powdered cheek with a grimy forefinger, as she cried out and drew back. And then over Tip’s shoulder she saw Phil and went stiff and white.
Tip said gaily, “Miss Lucy, this is Mr. Donaldson — Phil Donaldson, from the mills. Or maybe you two have met?”
Mrs. Parker nodded her smartly dressed head, her eyes glacial.
“We’ve met,” she said and added stiffly, “How do you do, Mr. Donaldson?”
“Good evening, Mrs. Parker,” said Phil politely.
Tip grinned at his mother and made an impish pass at her with his grimy hand. “Don’t mind Miss Lucy, Phil. She’s shocked to the core that her son should yearn to get himself greasy and dirty learning things at the mills. She should have seen me in boot camp — on second thought, maybe it’s as well she didn’t. The shock might have proven disastrous.”
He turned to Phil and said cordially, “Go in and make yourself at home, old man, while I get upstairs and into a hot tub. Be with you shortly.”
He took the stairs two at a time, and Geraldine murmured an excuse and followed him. She felt she must have a few moments to pull herself together before she could face the evening.
“My, my but you’re a pretty girl, Miss Gerry,” Tip greeted her later upstairs. “The prettiest girl I ever saw! I kind of like you!!”
Geraldine managed a smile that he accepted as answer to his nonsense, and when they went into the living room, Tip’s arm lay carelessly about her slender waist.
Mrs. Parker saw that and her eyes flashed triumphantly to Phil. But Phil was looking down at the cigarette he was just lighting and had apparently seen nothing.
If there was an inescapable tension about the evening, Tip was unaware of it He was in gay spirits and he and Phil talked man talk, occasionally turning to Geraldine for a comment out of her own knowledge of affairs and machinery at the mills. After dinner, the two men disappeared into the library where they were to discuss some suggestion Tip had made for speeding up a certain operation in his department that would mean a saving of money.
It was late when they emerged and Mrs. Parker, tight-lipped and frankly worried, had gone to bed.
“There’s no need for you to drive me back to town, Tip,” Phil was saying as they came out of the library. “The taxi will be here in a few minutes, and I’ll be home before you could get the car out again.”
And so, within a few minutes he was gone, and Tip came back to the terrace where Geraldine waited.
The terrace was her favorite part of the house in summer. Built up a little above the garden, paved with wide flagstones, set in a crazy-quilt pattern, with little close-clipped paths of grass holding them together, the terrace overlooked the rose garden, and, beyond, the sweep of meadow that was visible from Geraldine’s window.