 | II Grain of Dust. |  |
2. II
MANY and fantastic are the illusions the human animal, in its ignorance and its optimism, devises to change life from a pleasant journey along a plain road into a fumbling and stumbling and struggling about in a fog. Of these hallucinations the most grotesque is that the weak can come together, can pass a law to curb the strong, can set one of their number to enforce it, may then disperse with no occasion further to trouble about the strong. Every line of every page of history tells how the strong — the nimble-witted, the farsighted, the ambitious — have worked their will upon their feebler and less purposeful fellow men, regardless of any and all precautions to the contrary. Conditions have improved only because the number of the strong has increased. With so many lions at war with each other not a few rabbits contrive to avoid perishing in the nest.
Norman's genius lay in ability to take away from an adversary the legal weapons implicitly relied upon and to arm his client with them. No man understood better than he the abysmal distinction between law and justice; no man knew better than he how to compel-
About a fortnight after the trifling incident related in the previous chapter, Norman had to devise a secret agreement among several of the most eminent of his clients. They wished to band together, to do a thing expressly forbidden by the law; they wished to conspire to lower wages and raise prices in several railway systems under their control. But none would trust the others; so there must be something in writing, laid away in a secret safety deposit box along with sundry bundles of securities put up as forfeit, all in the custody of Norman. When he had worked out in his mind and in fragmentary notes the details of their agreement, he was ready for some one to do the clerical work. The some one must be absolutely trustworthy, as the plain language of the agreement would make clear to the dullest mind dazzling opportunities for profit — not only in stock jobbing but also in blackmail. He rang for Tetlow, the head clerk. Tetlow — smooth and sly and smug, lacking only courageous initiative to make him a great lawyer, but, lacking that, lacking all — Tetlow entered and closed the door behind him.
Norman leaned back in his desk chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “One of your typewriters is a slight blonde girl — sits in the corner to the far left — if she's still here.”
“Miss Hallowell,” said Tetlow. “We are letting her go at the end of this week. She's nice and ladylike, and willing — in fact, most anxious to please. But the work's too difficult for her. She's rather — rather — well, not exactly stupid, but slow.”
“Um,” said Norman reflectively. “There's Miss Bostwick — perhaps she'll do.”
“Miss Bostwick got married last week.”
Norman smiled. He remembered the girl because she was the oldest and homeliest in the office. “There's somebody for everybody — eh, Tetlow?”
“He was a lighthouse keeper,” said Tetlow. “There's a story that he advertised for a wife. But that may be a joke.”
“Why not that Miss — Miss Halloway?” mused Norman.
“Miss Hallowell,” corrected Tetlow.
“Hallowell — yes. Is she — very incompetent?
"Not exactly that. But business is slackening — and she's been only temporary — and — — ”
Norman cut him off with, “Send her in.”
“You don't wish her dismissed? I haven't told her yet.”
“Oh, I'm not interfering in your department. Do
“I can use her,” said Tetlow. “And she gets only ten a week.”
Norman frowned. He did not like to hear that an establishment in which he had control paid less than decent living wages — even if the market price did excuse — yes, compel it. “Send her in,” he repeated. Then, as Tetlow was about to leave, “She is trustworthy?”
“All our force is. I see to that, Mr. Norman.”
“Has she a young man — steady company, I think they call it?”
“She has no friends at all. She's extremely shy — at least, reserved. Lives with her father, an old crank of an analytical chemist over in Jersey City. She hasn't even a lady friend.”
“Well, send her in.”
A moment later Norman, looking up from his work, saw the dim slim nonentity before him. Again he leaned back and, as he talked with her, studied her face to make sure that his first judgment was correct. “Do you stay late every night?” asked he smilingly.
She colored a little, but enough to bring out the exquisite fineness of her white skin. “Oh, I don't mind,” said she, and there was no embarrassment in her manner. “I've got to learn — and doing things over helps.”
“Nothing equal to it,” declared Norman. “You've been to school?”
“Only six weeks,” confessed she. “I couldn't afford to stay longer.”
“I mean the other sort of school — not the typewriting.”
“Oh! Yes,” said she. And once more he saw that extraordinary transformation. She became all in an instant delicately, deliciously lovely, with the moving, in a way pathetic loveliness of sweet children and sweet flowers. Her look was mystery; but not a mystery of guile. She evidently did not wish to have her past brought to view; but it was equally apparent that behind it lay hid nothing shameful, only the sad, perhaps the painful. Of all the periods of life youth is the best fitted to bear deep sorrows, for then the spirit has its full measure of elasticity. Yet a shadow upon youth is always more moving than the shadows of maturer years — those shadows that do not lie upon the surface but are heavy and corroding stains. When Norman saw this shadow upon her youth, so immature-looking, so helpless-looking, he felt the first impulse of genuine interest in her. Perhaps, had that shadow happened to fall when he was seeing her as the commonplace and colorless little struggler for bread, and seeming doomed speedily to be worsted in the struggle — perhaps, he would have felt no interest, but only the brief qualm of pity that we dare not encourage in ourselves, on a
But he had no impulse to question her. And with some surprise he noted that his reason for refraining was not the usual reason — unwillingness uselessly to add to one's own burdens by inviting the mournful confidences of another. No, he checked himself because in the manner of this frail and mouselike creature, dim though she once more was, there appeared a dignity, a reserve, that made intrusion curiously impossible. With an apologetic note in his voice — a kind and friendly voice — he said:
“Please have your typewriter brought in here. I want you to do some work for me — work that isn't to be spoken of — not even to Mr. Tetlow.” He looked at her with grave penetrating eyes. “You will not speak of it?”
“No,” replied she, and nothing more. But she accompanied the simple negative with a clear and honest sincerity of the eyes that set his mind completely at rest. He felt that this girl had never in her life told a real lie.
One of the office boys installed the typewriter, and presently Norman and the quiet nebulous girl at whom no one would trouble to look a second time were seated opposite each other with the broad table desk between, he leaning far back in his desk chair, fingers interlocked behind his proud, strong-looking head, she holding
“Read straight through,” he commanded.
She read, interrupted occasionally by a sharp order from him to correct some mistake in her notes.
“Again,” he commanded, when she translated the last of her notes.
This time she was not interrupted once. When she ended, he exclaimed: “Good! I don't see how you did it so well.”
“Nor do I,” said she.
“You say you are only a beginner.”
“I couldn't have done it so well for anyone else,” said she. “You are — different.”
The remark was worded most flatteringly, but it did not sound so. He saw that she did not herself understand what she meant by “different.” He understood, for he knew the difference between the confused and confusing ordinary minds and such an intelligence as his own — simple, luminous, enlightening all minds, however dark, so long as they were in the light-flooded region around it.
“Have I made the meaning clear?” he asked.
He hoped she would reply that he had not, though this would have indicated a partial defeat in the object he had — to put the complex thing so plainly that no one could fail to understand. But she answered, “Yes.”
He congratulated himself that his overestimate of her ignorance of affairs had not lured him into giving her the names of the parties at interest to transcribe. But did she really understand? To test her, he said:
“What do you think of it?”
“That it's wicked,” replied she, without hesitation and in her small, quiet voice.
He laughed. In a way this girl, sitting there — this inconsequential and negligible atom — typefied the masses of mankind against whom that secret agreement was directed. They, the feeble and powerless ones, with their necks ever bent under the yoke of the mighty and their feet ever stumbling into the traps of the crafty — they, too, would utter an impotent “Wicked!” if they knew. His voice had the note of gentle raillery in it as he said:
“No — not wicked. Just business.”
She was looking down at her book, her face expressionless. A few moments before he would have said it was an empty face. Now it seemed to him sphynxlike.
“Just business,” he repeated. “It is going to take money from those who don't know how to keep or to spend it and give it to those who do know how. The
She was silent.
“Now, do you understand?”
“I understand what you said.” She looked at him as she spoke. He wondered how he could have fancied those lack-luster eyes beautiful or capable of expression.
“You don't believe it?” he asked.
“No,” said she. And suddenly in those eyes, gazing now into space, there came the unutterably melancholy look — heavy-lidded from heartache, weary-wise from long, long and bitter, experiences. Yet she still looked young — girlishly young — but it was the youthful look the classic Greek sculptors tried to give their young goddesses — the youth without beginning or end — younger than a baby's, older than the oldest of the sons of men. He mocked himself for the fancies this queer creature inspired in him; but she none the less made him uneasy.
“You don't believe it?” he repeated.
“No,” she answered again. “My father has taught me — some things.”
He drummed impatiently on the table. He resented her impertinence — for, like all men of clear and positive mind, he regarded contradiction as in one aspect impudent, in another aspect evidence of the folly of his contradictor. Then he gave a short laugh — the confessing
She seated herself at the machine and set to work. As his mind was full of the agreement he could not concentrate on anything else. From time to time he glanced at her. Then he gave up trying to work and sat furtively observing her. What a quaint little mystery it was! There was in it — that is, in her — not the least charm for him. But, in all his experience with women, he could recall no woman with a comparable development of this curious quality of multiple personalities, showing and vanishing in swift succession.
There had been a time when woman had interested him as a puzzle to be worked out, a maze to be explored, a temple to be penetrated — until one reached the place where the priests manipulated the machinery for the wonders and miracles to fool the devotees into awe. Some men never get to this stage, never realize that their own passions, working upon the universal human love of the mysterious, are wholly responsible for the cult of woman the sphynx and the sibyl. But Norman, beloved of women, had been let by them into their ultimate secret — the simple humanness of woman; the clap-trappery of the oracles, miracles, and wonders. He had discovered that her “divine intuitions” were mere shrewd guesses, where they had any meaning at all;
But this girl — this Miss Hallowell — here was a tangible mystery — a mystery of physics, of chemistry. He sat watching her — watching the changes as she bent to her work, or relaxed, or puzzled over the meaning of one of her own hesitating stenographic hieroglyphics — watched her as the waning light of the afternoon varied its intensity upon her skin. Why, her very hair partook of this magical quality and altered its tint, its degree of vitality even, in harmony with the other changes. . . . What was the explanation? By means of what rare mechanism did her nerve force ebb and flow from moment to moment, bringing about these fascinating surface changes in her body? Could anything, even any skin, be better made than that superb skin of hers — that master work of delicacy and strength, of smoothness and color? How had it been possible for him to fail to notice it, when he was always looking for signs of a good skin down town — and up town, too — in these days of the ravages of pastry and candy? . . . What long graceful fingers she had — yet what small hands! Certainly here was a peculiarity that persisted. No — absurd though it seemed, no! One way he looked at those hands, they were broad and strong, another way narrow and gracefully weak.
He said to himself: “The man who gets that girl
“About done?” he asked impatiently.
She glanced up. “In a moment. I'm sorry to be so slow.”
“You're not,” he assured her truthfully. “It's my impatience. Let me see the pages you've finished.”
With them he was able to concentrate his mind. When she laid the last page beside his arm he was absorbed, did not look at her, did not think of her. “Take the machine away,” said he abruptly.
He was leaving for the day when he remembered her again. He sent for her. “I forgot to thank you. It was good work. You will do well. All you need is practice — and confidence. Especially confidence.” He looked at her. She seemed frail — touchingly frail. “You are not strong?”
She smiled, and in an instant the frailty seemed to have been mere delicacy of build — the delicacy that goes with the strength of steel wires, or rather of the spider's weaving thread which sustains weights and shocks out of all proportion to its appearance. “I've never been ill in my life,” said she. “Not a day.”
Again, because she was standing before him in full
As he left the office, unusually late, he saw her still at work — no doubt doing over again some bungled piece of copying. She had her normal and natural look and air — the atomic little typewriter, unattractive and uninteresting. With another smile for his romantic imaginings, he forgot her. But when he reached the street he remembered her again. The threatened blizzard had changed into a heavy rain. The swift and sudden currents of air, that have made of New York a cave of the winds since the coming of the skyscrapers, were darting round corners, turning umbrellas inside out, tossing women's skirts about their heads, reducing all who were abroad to the same level of drenched and sullen wretchedness.
Usually these journeys between office and home or club in the evening gave Norman a chance for ten or fifteen minutes of sleep. He had discovered that this brief dropping of the thread of consciousness gave him a wonderful fresh grip upon the day, enabled him to work or play until late into the night without fatigue. But that evening his mind was wide awake. Nor could he fix it upon business. It would interest itself only in the hurrying throngs of foot passengers and the ideas they suggested: Here am I — so ran his thoughts — here am I, tucked away comfortably while all those poor creatures have to plod along in the storm. I could afford to be sick. They can't. And what have I done to deserve this good fortune? Nothing. Worse than nothing. If I had made my career along the lines of
These thoughts neither came from nor produced a mood of penitence, or of regret even. Norman was simply indulging in his favorite pastime — following without prejudice the leading of a chain of pure logic. He despised self-deceivers. He always kept himself free from prejudice and all its wiles. He took life as he found it; but he did not excuse it and himself with the familiar hypocrisies that make the comfortable classes preen themselves on being the guardians and saviours of the ignorant, incapable masses. When old Lockyer said one day that this was the function of the “upper classes,” Norman retorted: “Perhaps. But, if so, how do they perform it? Like the brutal old-fashioned farm family that takes care of its insane member by keeping him chained in filth in the cellar.” And once at the Federal Club — By the way, Norman had joined it, had compelled it to receive him just to show his associates how a strong man could break even such a firmly established tradition as that no one who amounted to anything could be elected to a fashionable club in New
No, Norman's mood, as he watched the miserable crowds afoot and reflected upon them, was neither remorseful nor triumphant. He simply noted an interesting fact — a commonplace fact — of the methods of that sardonic practical joker, Life. Because the scheme of things was unjust and stupid, because others, most others, were uncomfortable or worse — why should he make himself uncomfortable? It would be an absurdity to get out of his limousine and trudge along in the wet and the wind. It would be equally absurd to sit in his limousine and be unhappy about the misery of the world. “I didn't create it, and I can't recreate it. And if I'm helping to make it worse, I'm also hastening
At his house in Madison Avenue, just at the crest of Murray Hill, there was an awning from front door to curb and a carpet beneath it. He passed, dry and comfortable, up the steps. A footman in quiet rich livery was waiting to receive him. From rising until bedtime, up town and down town, wherever he went and whatever he was about, every possible menial detail of his life was done for him. He had nothing to do but think about his own work and keep himself in health. Rarely did he have even to open or to close a door. He used a pen only in signing his name or marking a passage in a law book for some secretary to make a typewritten copy.
Upon most human beings this sort of luxury, carried beyond the ordinary and familiar uses of menial service, has a speedily enervating effect. Thinking being the most onerous of all, they have it done, also. They sink into silliness and moral and mental sloth. They pass the time at foolish purposeless games indoors and out; or they wander aimlessly about the earth chattering with similar mental decrepits, much like monkeys adrift in the boughs of a tropical forest. But Norman had the tenacity and strength to concentrate upon achievement all the powers emancipated by the use of menials wherever menials could be used. He employed to advantage the time saved in putting in shirt buttons
In his household there were three persons, and sixteen servants to wait upon them. His sister — she and her husband, Clayton Fitzhugh, were the other two persons — his sister was always complaining that there were not enough servants, and Frederick, the most indulgent of brothers, was always letting her add to the number. It seemed to him that the more help there was, the less smoothly the household ran. But that did not concern him; his mind was saved for more important matters. There was no reason why it should concern him; could he not compel the dollars to flood in faster than she could bail them out?
This brother and sister had come to New York fifteen years before, when he was twenty-two and she nineteen. They were from Albany, where their family had possessed some wealth and much social position for many generations. There was the usual “queer streak” in the Norman family — an intermittent but fixed habit of some one of them making a “low marriage.” One view of this aberration might have been that there was in the Norman blood a tenacious instinct of sturdy and self-respecting independence that caused a Norman occasionally to do as he pleased instead of as he conventionally
Norman's father had developed the “queer streak.” Their mother was the daughter of a small farmer and, when she met their father, was chambermaid in a Troy hotel, Troy then being a largish village. As soon as she found herself married and in a position with whose duties she was unfamiliar, she set about fitting herself for them with the same diligence and thoroughness which she had shown in learning chamber work in a village hotel. She educated herself, selected not without shrewdness and carefully put on an assortment of genteel airs, finally contrived to make a most creditable appearance — was more aristocratic in tastes and in talk than the high mightiest of her relatives by marriage. But her son Fred was a Pinkey in character. In boyhood he was noted for his rough and low associates. His bosom friends were the son of a Jewish junk dealer, the son of a colored wash-woman, and the son of an Irish day laborer. Also, the commonness persisted as he grew up. Instead of seeking aristocratic ease, he aspired to a career. He had
“Don't do it, Ursula,” Fred advised. “If you must sell out, sell for something worth while.” He laughed in his frank, ironical way. “Fact is, we've both made up our minds to sell. Let's go to the best market — New York. If you don't like it, you can come back and marry that fat-wit any time you please.”
Ursula inspected herself in the glass, saw a face and form exceeding fair to look upon; she decided to take her brother's advice. At twenty she threw over a multi-millionaire and married Clayton Fitzhugh for love — Clayton with only seventeen thousand a year. Of course, from the standpoint of fashionable ambition, seventeen thousand a year in New York is but one remove from tenement house poverty. As Clayton had no more ability at making money than had Ursula herself, there was nothing to do but live with Norman and “take care of him.” But for this self-sacrifice of sisterly affection Norman would have been rich at thirty-seven. As he had to make her rich as well as himself,
There had been a time in Norman's career — a brief and very early time — when, with the maternal peasant blood hot in his veins, he had entertained the quixotic idea of going into politics on the poor or people's side and fighting for glory only. The pressure of expensive living had soon driven this notion clean off. Norman had almost forgotten that he ever had it, was no longer aware how strong it had been in the last year at law school. Young men of high intelligence and ardent temperament always pass through this period. With some — a few — its glory lingers long after the fire has flickered out before the cool, steady breath of worldliness.
All this time Norman has been dressing for dinner. He now leaves the third floor and descends toward the library, as it still lacks twenty minutes of the dinner hour.
As he walked along the hall of the second floor a woman's voice called to him, “That you, Fred?”
He turned in at his sister's sitting room. She was standing at a table smoking a cigarette. Her tall, slim figure looked even taller and slimmer in the tight-fitting black satin evening dress. Her features faintly suggested her relationship to Norman. She was a handsome woman, with a voluptuous discontented mouth.
“What are you worried about, sis?” inquired he.
“How did you know I was worried?” returned she.
“You always are.”
“Oh!”
“But you're unusually worried to-night.”
“How did you know that?”
“You never smoke just before dinner unless your nerves are ragged. . . . What is it?”
“Money.”
“Of course. No one in New York worries about anything else.”
“But this is serious,” protested she. “I've been thinking — about your marriage — and what'll become of Clayton and me?” She halted, red with embarrassment.
Norman lit a cigarette himself. “I ought to have explained,” said he. “But I assumed you'd understand.”
“Fred, you know Clayton can't make anything. And when you marry — why — what will become of us!”
“I've been taking care of Clayton's money — and of yours. I'll continue to do it. I think you'll find you're not so badly of. You see, my position enables me to compel a lot of the financiers to let me in on the ground floor — and to warn me in good time before the house falls. You'll not miss me, Ursula.”
She showed her gratitude in her eyes, in a slight quiver of the lips, in an unsteadiness of tone as she said, “You're the real thing, Freddie.”
“You can go right on as you are now. Only — ” He was looking at her with meaning directness.
She moved uneasily, refused to meet his gaze. “Well?” she said, with a suggestion of defiance.
“It's all very natural to get tired of Clayton,” said her brother. “I knew you would when you married him. But — Sis, I mind my own business. Still — Why make a fool of yourself?”
“You don't understand,” she exclaimed passionately. And the light in her eyes, the color in her cheeks, restored to her for the moment the beauty of her youth that was almost gone.
“Understand what?” inquired he in a tone of gentle mockery.
“Love. You are all ambition — all self control. You can be affectionate — God knows, you have been to me, Fred. But love you know nothing about — nothing.”
His was the smile a man gives when in earnest and wishing to be thought jesting — or when in jest and wishing to be thought in earnest.
“You mean Josephine? Oh, yes, I suppose you do care for her in a way — in a nice, conventional way. She is a fine handsome piece — just the sort to fill the position of wife to a man like you. She's sweet and charming, she appreciates, she flatters you. I'm sure she loves you as much as a girl knows how to love. But it's all so conventional, so proper. Your position — her money. You two are of the regulation type even in
“Maybe you don't understand,” said Norman.
“If Josephine were poor and low-born — weren't one of us — and all that — would you have her?”
“I'm sure I don't know,” was his prompt and amused answer. “I can only say that I know what I want, she being what she is.”
Ursula shook her head. “I have only to see you and her together to know that you at least don't understand love.”
“It might be well if you didn't,” said Norman dryly. “You might be less unhappy — and Clayton less uneasy.”
“Ah, but I can't help myself. Don't you see it in me, Fred? I'm not a fool. Yet see what a fool I act.”
“Spoiled child — that's all. No self-control.”
“You despise everyone who isn't as strong as you.” She looked at him intently. “I wonder if you are as self-controlled as you imagine. Sometimes I wish you'd get a lesson. Then you'd be more sympathetic. But it isn't likely you will — not through a woman. Oh, they're such pitifully easy game for a man like you. But then men are the same way with you — quite as easy. You get anything you want. . . . You're really going to stick to Josephine?”
He nodded. “It's time for me to settle down.”
“Yes — I think it is,” she went on thoughtfully. “I can hardly believe you're to marry. Of course, she's the grand prize. Still — I never imagined you'd come in and surrender. I guess you do care for her.”
“Why else should I marry?” argued he. “She's got nothing I need — except herself, Ursula.”
“What is it you see in her?”
“What you see — what everyone sees,” replied Fred, with quiet, convincing enthusiasm. “What no one could help seeing. As you say, she's the grand prize.”
“Yes, she is sweet and handsome — and intelligent — very superior, without making others feel that they're outclassed. Still — there's something lacking — not in her perhaps, but in you. You have it for her — she's crazy about you. But she hasn't it for you.”
“What?”
“I can't tell you. It isn't a thing that can be put into words.”
“Then it doesn't exist.”
“Oh, yes it does,” cried Ursula. “If the engagement were to be broken — or if anything were to happen to her — why, you'd get over it — would go on as if nothing had happened. If she didn't fit in with your plans and ambitions, she'd be sacrificed so quick she'd not know what had taken off her head. But if you felt what I mean — then you'd give up everything — do the wildest, craziest things.”
“What nonsense!” scoffed Norman. “I can imagine
There was mysterious fire in Ursula's absent eyes. “You remember me as a girl — how mercenary I was — how near I came to marrying Cousin Jake?”
“I saved you from that.”
“Yes — and for what? I fell in love.”
“And out again.”
“I was deceived in Clayton — deceived myself — naturally. How is a woman to know, without experience?”
“Oh, I'm not criticising,” said the brother.
“Besides, a love marriage that fails is different from a mercenary marriage that fails.”
“Very — very,” agreed he. “Just the difference between an honorable and a dishonorable bankruptcy.”
“Anyhow — it's bankrupt — my marriage. But I've learned what love is — that there is such a thing — and that it's valuable. Yes, Fred, I've got the taste for that wine — the habit of it. Could I go back to water or milk?”
“Spoiled baby — that's the whole story. If you had a nursery full of children — or did the heavy house-work — you'd never think of these foolish moonshiny things.”
“Yet you say you love!”
“Clayton is as good as any you're likely to run across — is better than some I've seen about.”
“How can you say?” cried she. “It's for me to judge.”
“If you would only judge!”
Ursula sighed. “It's useless to talk to you. Let's go down.”
Norman, following her from the room, stopped her in the doorway to give her a brotherly hug and kiss. “You won't make an out-and-out idiot of yourself, will you, Ursula?” he said, in his winning manner.
The expression of her eyes as she looked at him showed how strong was his influence over her. “You know I'll come to you for advice before I do anything final,” said she. “Oh, I don't know what I want! I only know what I don't want. I wish I were well balanced — as you are, Fred.”
| II Grain of Dust. | |