 | XV Grain of Dust. |  |
15. XV
BUT it chanced that Norman met her in the street about an hour after Tetlow's call.
He was on the way to lunch at the Lawyer's Club — one of those apparent luxuries that are the dire and pitiful necessities of men in New York fighting to maintain the semblance and the reputation of prosperity. It must not be imagined by those who are here let into Norman's inmost secrets that his appearance betrayed the depth to which he had fallen. At least to the casual eye he seemed the same rich and powerful personage. An expert might have got at a good part of the truth from his somber eyes and haggard face, from the subtle transformation of the former look of serene pride into the bravado of pretense. And as, in a general way, the facts of his fall were known far and wide, all his acquaintances understood that his seeming of undiminished success was simply the familiar “bluff.” Its advantage to him with them lay in its raising a doubt as to just what degree of disaster it hid — no small advantage. Nor was this “bluff” altogether for the benefit of the outside world. It made his fall less hideously intolerable to himself. In the bottom of his heart he
Norman, dressed with more than ordinary care — how sensitive a man becomes about those things when there is neither rustle nor jingle in his pockets, and his smallest check would be returned with the big black stamp “No Funds” — Norman, groomed to the last button, was in Broadway near Rector Street. Ahead of him he saw the figure of a girl — a trim, attractive figure, slim and charmingly long of line. A second
He quickened his step, and when almost at her side spoke her name — “Miss Hallowell.”
She stopped, turned. As soon as she recognized him there came into her quiet, lovely face a delightful smile. He could not conceal his amazement. She was glad to see him! Instantly, following the invariable habit of an experienced analytical mind, he wondered for what unflattering reason this young woman who did not like him was no longer showing it, was seeming more than a little pleased to see him. “Why, how d'ye do, Mr. Norman?” said she. And her friendliness and assurance of manner jarred upon him. There was not a suggestion of forwardness; but he, used to her old-time extreme reserve, felt precisely as if she were bold and gaudy, after the fashion of so many of the working girls who were popular with the men.
This unfavorable impression disappeared — or, rather, retired to the background — even as it became definite. And once more he was seeing the charms of
She was saying: “I've been wondering what had become of you.”
“I saw Tetlow,” he said. “He promised to send me your address.”
At Tetlow's name she frowned slightly; then a gleam of ridicule flitted into her eyes. “Oh, that silly, squeamish old maid! How sick I got of him!”
Norman winced, and his jealousy stirred. “Why?” he asked.
“Always warning me against everybody. Always giving me advice. It was too tiresome. And at last he began to criticize me — the way I dressed — the way I talked — said I was getting too free in my manner. The impudence of him!”
Norman tried to smile.
“He'd have liked me to stay a silly little mouse forever.”
“So you've been — blossoming out?” said Norman.
“In a quiet way,” replied she, with a smile of self-
“Where are you working?”
“With an old lawyer named Branscombe. It's awful slow, as I'm the only one, and he's old and does everything in an old-fashioned way. But the hours are easy, and I don't have to get down till nine — which is nice when you've been out at a dance the night before.”
Norman kept his eyes down to hide from her the legion of devils of jealousy. “You have changed,” he said.
“I'm growing up,” replied she with a charming toss of her small head — what beautiful effects the sunlight made in among those wavy strands and strays!
“And you're as lovely as ever — lovelier,” he said — and his eyes were the eyes of the slave she had spurned.
She did not spurn him now — and it inflamed his jealousy that she did not. She said: “Oh, what's the good of looks? The town's full of pretty girls. And so many of them have money — which I haven't. To
“With Bob Culver?”
She laughed. “I haven't seen him since I left his office. You know, Mr. Tetlow took me with him — back to your old firm. I didn't like Mr. Culver. I don't care for those black men. They are bad-tempered and two-faced. Anyhow, I'd not have anything to do with a man who wanted to slip round with me as if he were ashamed of me.”
She was looking at Norman pleasantly enough. He wasn't sure that the hit was for him as well as for Culver, but he flushed deeply. “Will you lunch with me at the Astor House at one to-morrow?”
“I've got an engagement,” said she. “And I must be going. I'm awfully late.” He had an instinct that her engagement on both days was with the same man. “I'm glad to have seen you — — ”
“Won't you let me call on you?” he said imploringly, but with the suggestion that he had no hope of being permitted to come.
“Certainly,” responded she with friendly promptness. She opened the shopping bag swinging on her arm. “Here is one of my cards.”
“When? This evening?”
Her laugh showed the beautiful deep pink and dazzling
“Let me take you.”
She shook her head. “You wouldn't like it. Only young people.”
“But I'm not so old.”
She looked at him critically. “No — you're not. It always puzzled me. You aren't old — you look like a boy lots of the time. But you always seem old to me.”
“I'll try to do better. To-night?”
“Not to-night,” laughed she. “Let's see — to-morrow's Sunday. Come to-morrow — about half past two.”
“Thank you,” he said so gratefully that he cursed himself for his folly as he heard his voice — the idiotic folly of so plainly betraying his feelings. No wonder she despised him! Beginning again — and beginning; wrong.
“Good-by.” Her eyes, her smile flashed and he was alone, watching her slender grace glide through the throngs of lower Broadway.
At his office again at three, he found a note from Tetlow inclosing another of Dorothy's cards and also the promised check. Into his face came the look that always comes into the faces of the prisoners of despair when the bolts slide back and the heavy door swings and hope stands on the threshold instead of the familiar
It was a boarding house on the west side. And when the slovenly, smelly maid said, “Go right up to her room,” he knew it was — probably respectable, but not rigidly respectable. However, working girls must receive, and they cannot afford parlors and chaperons. Still — It was no place for a lovely young girl, full of charm and of love of life — and not brought up in the class where the women are trained from babyhood to protect themselves.
He ascended two flights, knocked at the door to the rear. “Come!” called a voice, and he entered. It was a small neat room, arranged comfortably and with some taste. He recognized at first glance many little things from her room in the Jersey City house — things he had provided for her. On the chimney piece was a large photograph of her father — Norman's eyes hastily shifted from that. The bed was folded away into a couch — for space and for respectability. At first he did not see her. But when he advanced a step farther, she was disclosed in the doorway of a deep closet that contained a stationary washstand.
He had never seen her when she was not fully
“What's the matter with you?” she cried laughingly. Her eyes sparkled and danced; the waves of her hair, each hair standing out as if it were alive, sparkled and danced. It was a smile never to be forgotten. “Why are you so embarrassed?”
He was embarrassed. He was thrilled. He was enraged — enraged because, if she would thus receive him whom she did not like, she would certainly thus receive any man.
“I don't mind you,” she went on, mockingly. “I'd have to be careful if it was one of the boys.”
“Do you receive the — boys — here?” demanded he glumly, his voice arrogant with the possessive rights a man feels when he cares for a woman, whether she cares for him or not.
“Why not?” scoffed she. “Where else would I see them? I don't make street corner dates, thank you. You're as bad as fat, foolish Mr. Tetlow.”
“I beg your pardon,” said he humbly.
She straightway relented, saying: “Of course I'd not let one of the boys come up when I was dressed like this. But I didn't mind you.” He winced at this amiable, unconscious reminder of her always exasperating
He hid the torment of his reopened wound and seated himself at the center table. She returned to a chair in the window where the full force of the afternoon sun would concentrate upon her hair. And he gazed spell bound. He had always known that her hair was fine. He had never dreamed it was like this. It was thick, it was fine and soft. In color, as the sunbeams streamed upon it, it was all the shades of gold and all the other beautiful shades between brown and red. It fell about her face, about her neck, about her shoulders in a gorgeous veil. And her pure white skin — It was an even more wonderful white below the line of her collar — where he had never seen it before. Such exquisitely modeled ears — such a delicate nose — and the curve of her cheeks — and the glory of her eyes! He clinched his teeth and his hands, sat dumb with his gaze down.
“How do you like my room?” she chattered on. “It's not so bad — really quite comfortable — though I'm afraid I'll be cold when the weather changes. But it's the best I can do. As it is, I don't see how I'm going to make ends meet. I pay twelve of my fifteen for this room and two meals. The rest goes for lunch and car fare. As soon as I have to get clothes — ” She broke off, laughing.
“Well,” he said, “what then?”
“I'm sure I don't know,” replied she carelessly. “Perhaps old Mr. Branscombe'll give me a raise. Still, eighteen or twenty is the most I could hope for — and that wouldn't mean enough for clothes.”
She shook her head vigorously and her hair stood out yet more vividly and the sunbeams seemed to go mad with joy as they danced over and under and through it. He had ventured to glance up; again he hastily looked down.
“You spoiled me,” she went on. “Those few months over there in Jersey City. It made such a change in me, though I didn't realize it at the time. You see, I hadn't known since I was a tiny little girl what it was to live really decently, and so I was able to get along quite contentedly. I didn't know any better.” She made a wry face. “How I loathe the canned and cold storage stuff I have to eat nowadays. And how I do miss the beautiful room I had in that big house over there! and how I miss Molly and Pat — and the garden — and doing as I pleased — and the clothes I had: I thought I was being careful and not spoiling myself. You may not believe it, but I was really conscientious about spending money.” She laughed in a queer, absent way. “I had such a funny idea of what I had a right to do and what I hadn't. And I didn't spend so very much on out-and-out luxury. But — enough to spoil me for this life.”
As Norman listened, as he noted — in her appearance, manner, way of talking — the many meaning signs of the girl hesitating at the fork of the roads — he felt within him the twinges of fear, of jealousy — and through fear and jealousy, the twinges of conscience. She was telling the truth. He had undermined her ability to live in purity the life to which her earning power assigned her. . . . Why had she been so friendly to him? Why had she received him in this informal, almost if not quite inviting fashion?
“So you think I've changed?” she was saying. “Well — I have. Gracious, what a little fool I was!”
His eyes lifted with an agonized question in them.
She flushed, glanced away, glanced at him again with the old, sweet expression of childlike innocence which had so often made him wonder whether it was merely a mannerism, or was a trick, or was indeed a beam from a pure soul. “I'm foolish still — in certain ways,” she said significantly.
“And you always intend to be?” suggested he with a forced smile.
“Oh — yes,” replied she — positively enough, yet it somehow had not the full force of her simple short statements in the former days.
He believed her. Perhaps because he wished to believe, must believe, would have been driven quite mad by disbelief. Still, he believed. As yet she was good. But it would not last much longer. With him — or
He said: “There's nothing in the other sort of life.”
“That's what they say,” replied she, with ominous irritation. “Still — some girls — lots of girls seem to get on mighty well without being so terribly particular.”
“You ought to see them after a few years.”
“I'm only twenty-one,” laughed she. “I've got lots of time before I'm old. . . . You haven't — married?”
“No,” said he.
“I thought I'd have heard, if you had.” She laughed queerly — again shook out her hair, and it shimmered round her face and over her head and out from her shoulders like flames. “You've got a kind of a — Mr. Tetlow way of talking. It doesn't remind me of you as you were in Jersey City.”
She said nothing, she suggested nothing that had the least impropriety in it, or faintest hint of impropriety. It was nothing positive, nothing aggressive, but a certain vague negative something that gave him the impression of innocence still innocent but looking or trying to look tolerantly where it should not. And he felt dizzy and sick, stricken with shame and remorse
She began to talk in a low, embarrassed voice:
“Sometimes I think of getting married. There's a young man — a young lawyer — he makes twenty-five a week, but it'll be years and years before he has a good living. A man doesn't get on fast in New York unless he has pull.”
Norman, roused from his remorse, blazed inside. “You are in love with him?”
She laughed, and he could not tell whether it was to tease him or to evade.
“You'd not care about him long,” said Norman, “unless there were more money coming in than he'd be likely to get soon. Love without money doesn't go — at least, not in New York.”
“Do you suppose I don't know that?” said she with the irritation of one faced by a hateful fact. “Still — I don't see what to do.”
Norman, biting his lip and fuming and observing
“Did I say I was in love?” mocked she.
“You didn't say you weren't. Who is he?”
“If you'll stay on about half an hour or so, you'll see him. No — you can't. I've got to get dressed before I let him up. He has very strict ideas — where I'm concerned.”
“Then why did you let me come up?” Norman said, with a penetrating glance.
She lowered her gaze and a faint flush stole into her cheeks. Was it confession of the purpose he suspected? Or, was it merely embarrassment?
“I heard of a case once,” continued Norman, his gaze significantly direct, “the case of a girl who was in love with a poor young fellow. She wanted money — luxury. Also, she wanted the poor young fellow.”
The color flamed into the girl's face, then left it pale. Her white fingers fluttered with nervous grace into her masses of hair and back to her lap again, to rest there in timid quiet.
“She knew another man,” pursued Norman, “one who was able to give her what she wanted in the way of comfort. So, she decided to make an arrangement with the man, and keep it hidden from her lover — and in that way get along pleasantly until her lover was in better circumstances .”
Her gaze was upon her hands, listless in her lap. He
“What would you think of an arrangement like that?” asked he, determined to draw her secret heart into the open where he could see, where she could see.
She lifted frank, guileless eyes to his. “I suppose the girl was trying to do the best she could.”
“What do you think of a girl who'd do that?”
“I don't judge anybody — any more. I've found out that this world isn't at all as I thought — as I was taught.”
“Would you do it?”
She smiled faintly. “No,” she replied uncertainly. Then she restored his wavering belief in her essential honesty and truthfulness by adding: “That is to say, I don't think I would.”
She busied herself with her hair, feeling it to see whether it was not yet dry, spreading it out. He looked at her unseeingly. At last she said: “You must go. I've got to get dressed.”
“Yes — I must be going,” said he absently, rising and reaching for his hat on the center table.
She stood up, put out her hand. “I'm glad you came.”
“Thank you,” said he, still in the same abstraction. He shook hands with her, moved hesitatingly toward the door. With his hand on the knob he turned and glanced keenly at her. He surprised in her face a look of mystery — of seriousness, of sadness — was there anxiety in it, also? And then he saw a certain elusive reminder of her father — and it brought to him with curious force the memory of how she had been brought up, of what must be hers by inheritance and by training — she, the daughter of a great and simple and noble man —
“You'll come again?” she said, and there was the note in her voice that made his nerves grow tense and vibrate.
But he seemed not to have heard her question. Still at the unopened door, he folded his arms upon his chest and said, speaking rapidly yet with the deliberation of one who has thought out his words in advance:
“I don't know what kind of girl you are. I never have known. I've never wanted to know. If you told me you were — what is called good, I'd doubt it. If you told me you weren't, I'd want to kill you and myself. They say there's a fatal woman for every man and a fatal man for every woman. I always laughed at the idea — until you. I don't know what to make of myself.”
She suddenly laid her finger on her lips. It irritated him, to discover that, as he talked, speaking the things that came from the very depths of his soul, she had been giving him only part of her attention, had been listening
“I must,” said she in a low tone. “It wouldn't do for him to know you were here. He has strict ideas — and is terribly jealous.”
A few seconds of silence, then a knock on the other side of the door.
“Who's there?” she called.
“I'm a little early,” came in an agreeable, young man's voice. “Aren't you ready?”
“Not nearly,” replied she, in a laughing, innocent voice. “You'll have to go away for half an hour.”
“I'll wait out here on the steps.”
Her eyes were sparkling. A delicate color had mounted to her skin. Norman, watching her jealously, clinched his strong jaws. She said: “No — you must go clear away. I don't want to feel that I'm being hurried. Don't come back until a quarter past four.”
“All right. I'm crazy to see you.” This in the voice of a lover. She smiled radiantly at Norman, as if she thought he would share in her happiness at these evidences of her being well loved. The unseen young man said: “Exactly a quarter past. What time does your clock say it is now?”
“A quarter to,” replied she.
“That's what my watch says. So there'll be no mistake. For half an hour — good-by!”
“Half an hour!” she called.
She and Norman stood in silence until the footsteps died away. Then she said crossly to Norman: “You ought to have gone before. I don't like to do these things.”
“You do them well,” said he, with a savage gleam.
She was prompt and sure with his punishment. She said, simply and sweetly: “I'd do anything to keep his good opinion of me.”
Norman felt and looked cowed. “You don't know how it makes me suffer to see you fond of another man,” he cried.
She seemed not in the least interested, went to the mirror of the bureau and began to inspect her hair with a view to doing it up. “You can go in five minutes,” said she. “By that time he'll be well out of the way. Anyhow, if he saw you leaving the house he'd not know but what you had been to see some one else. He knows you by reputation but not by sight.”
Norman went to her, took her by the shoulders gently but strongly. “Look at me,” he said.
She looked at him with an expression, or perhaps absence of expression, that was simple listening.
“If you meant awhile ago some such thing as I hinted — I will have nothing to do with it. You must marry me — or it's nothing at all.”
Her gaze did not wander, but before his wondering eyes she seemed to fade, fade toward colorlessness insignificance.
She said slowly: “You — want — me — to — marry — you?”
“I've always wanted it, though I didn't realize,” replied he. “How else could I be sure of you? Besides — ” He flushed, added hurriedly, almost in an undertone — “I owe it to you.”
She seated herself deliberately.
After he had waited in vain for her to speak, he went on: “If you married me, I know you'd play square. I could trust you absolutely. I don't know — can't find out much about you — but at least I know that.”
“But I don't love you,” said she.
“You needn't remind me of it,” rejoined he curtly.
“I don't think so — so poorly of you as I used to,” she went on. “I understand a lot of things better than I did. But I don't love you, and I feel that I never could.”
“I'll risk that,” said Norman. Through his clinched teeth, “I've got to risk it.”
“I'd be marrying you because I don't feel able to — to make my own way.”
“That's the reason most girls have for marrying,” said he. “Love comes afterward — if it comes. And
She glanced at the clock. He frowned. She started up. “You must go,” she said.
“What is your answer?”
“Oh, I couldn't decide so quickly. I must think.”
“You mean you must see your young man again — see whether there isn't some way of working it out with him.”
“That, too,” replied she simply. “But — it's nearly four o'clock — — ”
“I'll come back at seven for my answer.”
“No, I'll write you to-night.”
“I must know at once. This suspense has got to end. It unfits me for everything.”
“I'll — I'll decide — to-night,” she said, with a queer catch in her voice. “You'll get the letter in the morning mail.”
“Very well.” And he gave her his club address.
She opened the door in her impatience to be rid of him. He went with a hasty “Good-by” which she echoed as she closed the door.
When he left the house he saw standing on the curb before it a tall, good-looking young man — with a frank amiable face. He hesitated, glowering at the young man's profile. Then he went his way, suffocating with jealous anger, depressed, despondent, fit for nothing but to drink and to brood in fatuous futility.
| XV Grain of Dust. | |