 | IV Grain of Dust. |  |
4. IV
MANY men, possibly a majority, have sufficient equipment for at least a fair measure of success. Yet all but a few are downright failures, passing their lives in helpless dependence, glad to sell themselves for a small part of the value they create. For this there are two main reasons. The first is, as Norman said, that only a few men have the self-restraint to resist the temptings of a small pleasure to-day in order to gain a larger to-morrow or next day. The second is that few men possess the power of continuous concentration. Most of us cannot concentrate at all; any slight distraction suffices to disrupt and destroy the whole train of thought. A good many can concentrate for a few hours, for a week or so, for two or three months. But there comes a small achievement and it satisfies, or a small discouragement and it disheartens. Only to the rare few is given the power to concentrate steadily, year in and year out, through good and evil event or report.
As Norman stepped into his auto to go to the office — he had ridden a horse in the park before breakfast
In the offices of that great law firm one of the keenest pleasures of the more intelligent of the staff was watching the workings of Frederick Norman's mind —
Such an unique and trivial request as that of Josephine Burroughs being wholly out of his mental habit for down town, he forgot it along with everything else having to do with uptown only — along with Josephine herself, to tell a truth which may pique the woman reader and may be wholly misunderstood by the sentimentalists. By merest accident he was reminded.
As the door of his private office opened to admit an important client he happened to glance up. And between the edge of the door frame and his client's automobile-fattened and carefully dressed body, he caught a glimpse of the “poor little forlornness” who chanced to be crossing the outer office. A glint of sunlight on her hair changed it from lifelessness to golden vital vividness; the same chance sunbeam touched her pale skin with a soft yellow radiation — and her profile was delicately fine and regular. Thus Norman, who observed
He glanced at the clock. Said the client in the amusing tone of one who would like to take offense if he only dared, “I'll not detain you long, Mr. Norman. And really the matter is extremely important.”
There are not many lawyers, even of the first rank, with whom their big clients reverse the attitude of servant and master. Norman might well have been flattered. In that restrained tone from one used to servility and fond of it and easily miffed by lack of it was the whole story of Norman's long battle and splendid victory. But he was not in the mood to be flattered; he was thinking of other things. And it presently annoyed him that his usually docile mind refused to obey his will's order to concentrate on the client and the business — said business being one of those huge schemes through which a big monster of a corporation is constructed by lawyers out of materials supplied by great capitalists and controllers of capital, is set to eating in enormous meals the substance of the people; at some obscure point in all the principal veins small but leechlike parasite corporations are attached, industriously to suck away the surplus blood so that the owners of the beast may say, “It is eating almost nothing. See how lean it is,
An interesting and highly complicated enterprise is such a construction. It was of the kind in which Norman's mind especially delighted; Hercules is himself only in presence of an herculean labor. But on that day he could not concentrate, and because of a trifle! He felt like a giant disabled by a grain of dust in the eye — yes, a mere grain of dust!'' I must love Josephine even more than I realize, to be fretted by such a paltry thing,'' thought he. And after patiently enduring the client for half an hour without being able to grasp the outlines of the project, he rose abruptly and said: “I must get into my mind the points you've given me before we can go further. So I'll not waste your time.”
This sounded very like “Clear out — you've bored me to my limit of endurance.” But the motions of a mind such as he knew Norman had were beyond and high above the client's mere cunning at dollar-trapping. He felt that it was the part of wisdom — also soothing to vanity — to assume that Norman meant only what his words conveyed. When Norman was alone he rang for an office boy and said:
“Please ask Miss Halliday to come here.”
The boy hesitated. “Miss Hallowell?” he suggested.
“Hallowell — thanks — Hallowell,” said Norman.
And it somehow pleased him that he had not remembered her name. How significant it was of her insignificance that so accurate a memory as his should make the slip. When she, impassive, colorless, nebulous, stood before him the feeling of pleasure was, queerly enough, mingled with a sense of humiliation. What absurd vagaries his imagination had indulged in! For it must have been sheer hallucination, his seeing those wonders in her. How he would be laughed at if those pictures he had made of her could be seen by any other eyes!'' They must be right when they say a man in love is touched in the head. Only, why the devil should I have happened to get these crazy notions about a person I've no interest in?'' However, the main point — and most satisfactory — was that Josephine would be at a glance convinced — convicted — made ashamed of her absurd attack. A mere grain of dust.
“Just a moment, please,” he said to Miss Hallowell. “I want to give you a note of introduction.”
He wrote the note to Josephine Burroughs: “Here she is. I've told her you wish to talk with her about doing some work for you.” When he finished he looked up. She was standing at the window, gazing out upon the tremendous panorama of skyscrapers that makes New York the most astounding of the cities of men. He was about to speak. The words fell back unuttered. For once more the hallucination — or whatever it was — laid hold of him. That figure by the window — that
“Am I mad? or do I really see what I see?” he muttered.
He turned away to clear his eyes for a second view, for an attempt to settle it whether he saw or imagined. When he looked again, she was observing him — and once more she was the obscure, the cipherlike Miss Hallowell, ten-dollar-a-week typewriter and not worth it. Evidently she noted his confusion and was vaguely alarmed by it. He recovered himself as best he could and debated whether it was wise to send her to Josephine. Surely those transformations were not altogether his own hallucinations; and Josephine might see, might humiliate him by suspecting more strongly — . . . Ridiculous! He held out the letter.
“The lady to whom this is addressed wishes to see you. Will you go there, right away, please? It may be that you'll get the chance to make some extra money. You've no objection, I suppose?”
She took the letter hesitatingly.
“You will find her agreeable, I think,” continued he. “At any rate, the trip can do no harm.”
She hesitated a moment longer, as if weighing what he had said. “No, it will do no harm,” she finally said.
“Not at all — not in the least,” he stammered, the impulse strong to take the note back and ask her to return to her desk.
When the door closed behind her he rose and paced about the room uneasily. He was filled with disquiet, with hazy apprehension. His nerves were unsteady, as if he were going through an exhausting strain. He sat and tried to force himself to work. Impossible. “What sort of damn fool attack is this?” he exclaimed, pacing about again. He searched his mind in vain for any cause adequate to explain his unprecedented state. “If I did not know that I was well — absolutely well — I'd think I was about to have an illness — something in the brain.”
He appealed to that friend in any trying hour, his sense of humor. He laughed at himself; but his nerves refused to return to the normal. He rushed from his private office on various pretexts, each time lingered in the general room, talking aimlessly with Tetlow — and watching the door. When she at last appeared, he guiltily withdrew, feeling that everyone was observing his perturbation and was wondering at it and jesting about it. “And what the devil am I excited about?” he demanded of himself. What indeed? He seated himself, rang the bell.
“If Miss Hallowell has got back,” he said to the office boy, “please ask her to come in.”
“I think she's gone out to lunch,” said the boy. “I know she came in a while ago. She passed along as you was talking to Mr. Tetlow.”
Norman felt himself flushing. “Any time will do,” he said, bending over the papers spread out before him — the papers in the case of the General Traction Company resisting the payment of its taxes. A noisome odor seemed to be rising from the typewritten sheets. He made a wry face and flung the papers aside with a gesture of disgust. “They never do anything honest,” he said to himself. “From the stock-jobbing owners down to the nickel-filching conductors they steal — steal — steal!” And then he wondered at, laughed at, his heat. What did it matter? An ant pilfering from another ant and a sparrow stealing the crumb found by another sparrow — a man robbing another man — all part of the universal scheme. Only a narrow-minded ignoramus would get himself wrought up over it; a philosopher would laugh — and take what he needed or happened to fancy.
The door opened. Miss Hallowell entered, a small and demure hat upon her masses of thick fair hair arranged by anything but unskillful fingers. “You wished to see me?” came in the quiet little voice, sweet and frank and shy.
He roused himself from pretended abstraction.
“Oh — it's you?” he said pleasantly. “They said you were out.”
“I was going to lunch. But if you've anything for me to do, I'll be glad to stay.”
“No — no. I simply wished to say that if Miss Burroughs wished to make an arrangement with you, we'd help you about carrying out your part of it.”
She was pale — so pale that it brought out strongly the smooth dead-white purity of her skin. Her small features wore an expression of pride, of haughtiness even. And in the eyes that regarded him steadily there shone a cold light — the light of a proud and lonely soul that repels intrusion even as the Polar fastnesses push back without effort assault upon their solitudes. “We made no arrangement,” said she.
“You are not more than eighteen, are you?” inquired he abruptly.
The irrelevant question startled her. She looked as if she thought she had not heard aright. “I am twenty,” she said.
“You have a most — most unusual way of shifting to various ages and personalities,” explained he, with some embarrassment.
She simply looked at him and waited.
His embarrassment increased. It was a novel sensation to him, this feeling ill at ease with a woman — he who was at ease with everyone and put others at their ease or not as he pleased. “I'm sorry you and Miss
“She made me an offer,” replied the girl. “I refused it.”
“But, as I told you, we can let you off — anything within reason.”
“Thank you, but I do not care to do that kind of work. No doubt any kind of work for wages classes one as a servant. But those people up there — they make one feel it — feel menial.”
“Not Miss Burroughs, I assure you.”
A satirical smile hovered round the girl's lips. Her face was altogether lovely now, and no lily ever rose more gracefully from its stem than did her small head from her slender form. “She meant to be kind, but she was insulting. Those people up there don't understand. They're vain and narrow. Oh, I don't blame them. Only, I don't care to be brought into contact with them.”
He looked at her in wonder. She talked of Josephine as if she were Josephine's superior, and her expression and accent were such that they contrived to convey an impression that she had the right to do it. He grew suddenly angry at her, at himself for listening to her. “I am sorry,” he said stiffly, and took up a pen to indicate that he wished her to go.
He rather expected that she would be alarmed. But if she was, she wholly concealed it. She smiled slightly
“It's all right to be proud, Miss Hallowell. But there is such a thing as supersensitiveness. You are earning your living. If you'll pardon me for thrusting advice upon you, I think you've made a mistake. I'm sure Miss Burroughs meant well. If you had been less sensitive you'd soon have realized it.”
“She patronized me,” replied the girl, not angrily, but with amusement. “It was all I could do not to laugh in her face. The idea of a woman who probably couldn't make five dollars a week fancying she was the superior of any girl who makes her own living, no matter how poor a living it is.”
Norman laughed. It had often appealed to his own sense of humor, the delusion that the tower one happened to be standing upon was part of one's own stature. But he said: “You're a very foolish young person. You'll not get far in the world if you keep to that road. It winds through Poverty Swamps to the Poor House.”
“Oh, no,” replied she. “One can always die.”
Again he laughed. “But why die? Why not be sensible and live?”
“I don't know,” replied she. She was looking away dreamily, and her eyes were wonderful to see. “There are many things I feel and do — and I don't at all understand why. But — ” An expression of startling resolution
A brief silence; then, as she again moved toward the door, he said, “You have been working for some time?”
“Four years.”
“You support yourself?”
“I work to help out father's income. He makes almost enough, but not quite.”
Almost enough! The phrase struck upon Norman's fancy as both amusing and sad. Almost enough for what? For keeping body and soul together; for keeping body barely decently clad. Yet she was content. He said:
“You like to work?”
“Not yet. But I think I shall when I learn this business. One feels secure when one has a trade.”
“It doesn't impress me as an interesting life for a girl of your age,” he suggested.
“Oh, I'm not unhappy. And at home, of evenings and Sundays, I'm happy.”
“Doing what?”
“Reading and talking with father and — doing the housework — and all the rest of it.”
What a monotonous narrow little life! He wanted to pity her, but somehow he could not. There was no suggestion in her manner that she was an object of pity. “What did Miss Burroughs say to you — if I may ask?”
“Certainly. You sent me, and I'm much obliged to you. I realize it was an opportunity — for another sort of girl. I half tried to accept because I knew refusing was only my — queerness.” She smiled charmingly. “You are not offended because I couldn't make myself take it?”
“Not in the least.” And all at once he felt that it was true. This girl would have been out of place in service. “What was the offer?”
Suddenly before him there appeared a clever, willful child, full of the childish passion for imitation and mockery. And she proceeded to “take off” the grand Miss Burroughs — enough like Josephine to give the satire point and barb. He could see Josephine resolved to be affable and equal, to make this doubtless bedazzled stray from the “lower classes” feel comfortable in those palatial surroundings. She imitated Josephine's walk, her way of looking, her voice for the menials — gracious and condescending. The exhibition was clever, free from malice, redolent of humor. Norman laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks.
“You ought to go on the stage,” said he. “How Josephine — Miss Burroughs would appreciate it! For she's got a keen sense of humor.”
“Not for the real jokes — like herself,” replied Miss Hallowell.
“You're prejudiced.”
“No. I see her as she is. Probably everyone else
He nodded thoughtfully. Then he looked penetratingly at her. “How did you happen to learn to do that?” he asked. “To see people as they are?”
“Father taught me.” Her eyes lighted up, her whole expression changed. She became beautiful with the beauty of an intense and adoring love. “Father is a wonderful man — one of the most wonderful that ever lived. He — — ”
There was a knock at the door. She startled, he looked confused. Both awakened to a sense of their forgotten surroundings, of who and what they were. She went and Mr. Sanders entered. But even in his confusion Norman marveled at the vanishing of the fascinating personality who had been captivating him into forgetting everything else, at the reappearance of the blank, the pale and insignificant personality attached to a typewriting machine at ten dollars a week. No, not insignificant, not blank — never again that, for him. He saw now the full reality — and also why he, everyone, was so misled. She made him think of the surface of the sea when the sky is gray and the air calm. It lies smooth and flat and expressionless — inert, monotonous. But let sunbeam strike or breeze ever so faint start up, and what a commotion of unending variety! He could never look at her again without being reminded of those infinite latent possibilities, without wondering what new
And while Sanders was talking — prosing on and on about things Norman either already knew or did not wish to know — he was thinking of her. “If she happens to meet a man with enough discernment to fall in love with her,” he said to himself, “he certainly will never weary. What a pity that such a girl shouldn't have had a chance, should be wasted on some unappreciative chucklehead of her class! What a pity she hasn't ambition — or the quality, whatever it is — that makes those who have it get on, whether they wish or no.”
During the rest of the day he revolved from time to time indistinct ideas of somehow giving this girl a chance. He wished Josephine would and could help, or perhaps his sister Ursula. It was not a matter that could be settled, or even taken up, in haste. No man of his mentality and experience fails to learn how perilous it is in the least to interfere in the destiny of anyone. And his notion involved not slight interference with advice or suggestion or momentarily extended helping hand, but radical change of the whole current of destiny. Also, he appreciated how difficult it is for a man to do anything for a young woman — anything that would not harm more than it would help. Only one thing seemed clear to him — the “clever child” ought to have a chance.
He went to see Josephine after dinner that night
“You've such an air, Fred,” said she. “You should hear the butler on the subject of you. He says that of all the men who come to the house you are most the man of the world. He says he could tell it by the way you walk in and take off your hat and coat and throw them at him.”
Norman laughed and said, “I didn't know. I must stop that.”
“Don't!” cried Mrs. Bellowes. “You'll break his heart. He adores it. You know, servants dearly love to be treated as servants. Anyone who thinks the world loves equality knows very little about human nature.
She was busy with her gorgeous and trailing wraps and with her cigarette or she would have seen his confusion. He was recalling his scene with the typewriter girl. Not much of the man of the world, then and there, certainly. What a grotesque performance for a man of his position, for a serious man of any kind! And how came he to permit such a person to mimic Josephine Burroughs, a lady, the woman to whom he was engaged? In these proud and pretentious surroundings he felt contemptibly guilty — and dazed wonder at his own inexplicable folly and weakness.
Mrs. Bellowes departed before Josephine came down. So there was no relief for his embarrassment. He saw that she too felt constrained. Instead of meeting him half way in embrace and kiss, as she usually did, she threw him a kiss and pretended to be busy lighting a cigarette and arranging the shades of the table lamp. “Well, I saw your `poor little creature,' ” she began. She was splendidly direct in all her dealings, after the manner of people who have never had to make their own way — to cajole or conciliate or dread the consequences of frankness.
“I told you you'd not find her interesting.”
“Oh, she was a nice little girl,” replied Josephine with elaborate graciousness — and Norman, the “take
“Tetlow makes 'em clean up,” said Norman, a gleam of sarcasm in his careless glance and tone. And into his nostrils stole an odor of freshness and health and youth, the pure, sweet odor that is the base of all the natural perfumes. It startled him, his vivid memory of a feature of her which he had not been until now aware that he had ever noted.
“I offered her some work,” continued Josephine, “but I guess you keep her too busy down there for her to do anything else.”
“Probably,” said Norman. “Why do you sit on the other side of the room?”
“Oh, I don't know,” laughed Josephine. “I feel queer to-night. And it seems to me you're queer, too.”
“I? Perhaps rather tired, dear — that's all.”
“Did you and Miss Hallowell work hard to-day?”
“Oh, bother Miss Hallowell. Let's talk about our-selves.” And he drew her to the sofa at one end of the big fireplace. “I wish we hadn't set the wedding so far off.” And suddenly he found himself wondering whether that remark had been prompted by eagerness — a lover's eagerness — or by impatience to have the business over and settled.
“You don't act a bit natural to-night, Fred. You touch me as if I were a stranger.”
“I like that!” mocked he. “A stranger hold your hand like this? — and — kiss you — like this?”
She drew away, suddenly laid her hands on his shoulders, kissed him upon the lips passionately, then looked into his eyes. “Do you love me, Fred? — really?”
“Why so earnest?”
“You've had a great deal of experience?”
“More or less.”
“Have you ever loved any woman as you love me?”
“I've never loved any woman but you. I never before wanted to marry a woman.”
“But you may be doing it because — well, you might be tired and want to settle down.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No, I don't. But I want to hear you say it isn't so.”
“Well — it isn't so. Are you satisfied?”
“I'm frightfully jealous of you, Fred.”
“What a waste of time!”
“I've got something to confess — something I'm ashamed of.”
“Don't confess,” cried he, laughing but showing that he meant it. “Just — don't be wicked again That's much better than confession.”
“But I must confess,” insisted she. “I had evil
He put his arms round her and drew her to his shoulder. And the scene of mimicry in his office flashed into his mind, and the blood burned in his cheeks. But he had no such access of insanity as to entertain the idea of confession.
“It was that typewriter girl,” continued Josephine. She drew away again and once more searched his face. “You told me she was homely.”
“Not exactly that.”
“Insignificant then.”
“Isn't she?”
“Yes — in a way,” said Josephine, the condescending note in her voice again — and in his mind Miss Hallowell's clever burlesque of that note. “But, in another way — Men are different from women. Now I — a woman of my sort — couldn't stoop to a man of her class. But men seem not to feel that way.”
“No,” said he, irritated. “They've the courage to take what they want wherever they find it. A man will take gold out of the dirt, because gold is always gold. But a woman waits until she can get it at a fashionable jeweler's, and makes sure it's made up in a fashionable way. I don't like to hear you say those things.”
Her eyes flashed. “Then you do like that Hallowell girl!” she cried — and never before had her voice jarred upon him.
“That Hallowell girl has nothing to do with this,” he rejoined. “I like to feel that you really love me — that you'd have taken me wherever you happened to find me — and that you'd stick to me no matter how far I might drop.”
“I would! I would!” she cried, tears in her eyes. “Oh, I didn't mean that, Fred. You know I didn't — don't you?”
She tried to put her arms round his neck, but he took her hands and held them. “Would you like to think I was marrying you for what you have? — or for any other reason whatever but for what you are?”
It being once more a question of her own sex, the obstinate line appeared round her mouth. “But, Fred, I'd not be me, if I were — a working girl,” she replied.
“You might be something even better if you were,” retorted he coldly. “The only qualities I don't like about you are the surface qualities that have been plated on in these surroundings. And if I thought it was anything but just you that I was marrying, I'd lose no time about leaving you. I'd not let myself degrade myself.”
“Fred — that tone — and don't — please don't look at me like that!” she begged.
But his powerful glance searched on. He said, “Is
“'Would you like to think I was marrying you for what you have? — or for any other reason whatever but for what you are?' ”
[Description: Greyscale illustration by A. B. Wenzell. A man and woman in evening dress on a settee. He is trying to embrace her, while she tries to push him away.]“No — no,” she cried, wildly agitated. “Fred, dear we love each other. You know we do. I don't use words as well as you do — and my mind works in a queer way — Perhaps I didn't mean what I said. No matter. If my love were put to the test — Fred, I don't ask anything more than that your love for me would stand the tests my love for you would stand.”
He caught her in his arms and kissed her with more passion than he had ever felt for her before. “I believe you, Jo,” he said. “I believe you.”
“I love you so — that I could be jealous even of her — of that little girl in your office. Fred, I didn't confess all the truth. It isn't true that I thought her — a nobody. When she first came in here — it was in this very room — I thought she was as near nothing as any girl I'd ever seen. Then she began to change — as you said. And — oh, dearest, I can't help hating her! And when I tried to get her away from you, and she wouldn't come — — ”
“Away from me!” he cried, laughing.
“I felt as if it were like that,” she pleaded. “And she wouldn't come — and treated me as if she were queen and I servant — only politely, I must say, for Heaven knows I don't want to injure her — — ”
“Shall I have her discharged?”
“Fred!” exclaimed she indignantly. “Do you think I could do such a thing?”
“She'd easily get another job as good. Tetlow can find her one. Does that satisfy you?”
“No,” she confessed. “It makes me feel meaner than ever.”
“Now, Jo, let's drop this foolish seriousness about nothing at all. Let's drop it for good.”
“Nothing at all — that's exactly it. I can't understand, Fred. What is there about her that makes her haunt me? That makes me afraid she'll haunt you?”
Norman felt a sudden thrill. He tightened his hold upon her hands because his impulse had been to release them. “How absurd!” he said, rather noisily.
“Isn't it, though?” echoed she. “Think of you and me almost quarreling about such a trivial person.” Her laugh died away. She shivered, cried, “Fred, I'm superstitious about her. I'm — I'm — afraid!” And she flung herself wildly into his arms.
“She is somewhat uncanny,” said he, with a lightness he was far from feeling. “But, dear — it isn't complimentary to me, is it?”
“Forgive me, dearest — I don't mean that. I couldn't mean that. But — I love you so. Ever since I began to love you I've been looking round for something to be afraid of. And this is the first chance you've given me.”
“I've given you!” mocked he.
She laughed hysterically. “I mean the first chance I've had. And I'm doing the best I can with it.”
They were in good spirits now, and for the rest of the evening were as loverlike as always, the nearer together for the bit of rough sea they had weathered so nicely. Neither spoke of Miss Hallowell. Each had privately resolved never to speak of her to the other again. Josephine was already regretting the frankness that had led her to expose a not too attractive part of herself — and to exaggerate in his eyes the importance of a really insignificant chit of a typewriter. When he went to bed that night he was resolved to have Tetlow find Miss Hallowell a job in another office.
“She certainly is uncanny,” he said to himself. “I wonder why — I wonder what the secret of her is. She's the first woman I ever ran across who had a real secret. Is it real? I wonder.”
| IV Grain of Dust. | |