Part 9

She had been unable to get away in time to buy a berth in the fast train. In order to leave that day, which was imperative, she was forced to take the “two-day” train, and tried to console herself with the thought that its second-rateness would more effectually cover her flight. But the endless trip in coaches that contained unprepossessing persons from the lower social chaos added to the weight that lay on her spirit.

The first night on the train she slept early and long, fatigued by a day full of tasks, but the second she lay staring at the polished red back of the berth above, her shade drawn up, her smarting eyes conscious of the jabbing flashes of light as they passed through sleeping towns, or straining out over dark, shuddering mysteries of country; planning, wondering, trying to anticipate what life would be like one year, two years, five years from to-night. Where should she be; whom should she know? Should she be alive? Yes, she promised herself, she would be that. The one thing she could not admit was that life might end before she had fought it out.

Once she asked herself what Mathilda was doing, for by this time her flight was an old story, the worst of the scene between Ellen and Mathilda was over. But they would be dreadfully unhappy nevertheless, and the pity she could spare to them softened her own sense of wrong. She flashed on the electric light in the berth and looked at her watch. In six hours, had it not been for Victor Hugo, for a little scrawled note written a fifth of a century ago, she would have been meeting Hal Blaydon at the Blythedale platform. And who could say--if she had married Hal and learned the truth afterward--would it have made any difference after all?

It was morning when they got beyond Pittsburgh and, sleepless and discouraged, the grey day greeted her dismally. All she was able to see beyond the window were little grimy houses belonging to coal miners--they painted them a deep red or black in those parts, she supposed because all life was accursed. For long distances nothing caught her eye but these colours of Hell borrowed for earthly use. On a high slope, dingy with slag and coal screenings and dust, there was a black, sorry-looking house, where two children were swinging across the cheap frame porch far above the train. They were singing, and it struck her as the oddest thing she had ever witnessed. There were many houses like it on that coal bank. Where there wasn’t coal there was yellow mud. Where there were not either there were piles of rusty iron. She might come to this herself, to ugliness and hunger. She shuddered and darkened the berth, hiding her face from the vision as though it would sear her beauty and put an end to her youth. Hardly a moment later, it seemed, the porter awakened her from a deep sleep. They were in the Pennsylvania station.

Moira’s mood changed the moment she stood in the rotunda. The powerful magic of the city stirred her. Had it been raining as only it can rain in New York, had the streets been ice-bound or blistering in mid-summer heat, she would have felt that great surge unabated.

But to-day the city was in one of its magnificent sunny moods, laughing at its own comic and gracile charms, whimsical with unreliable winds, one of those startling, extravagant days when a walk in any street has the effect of champagne. On a sudden impulse she ordered the cab to the Ritz. She would enjoy one day, one supreme spell of indifference and the sense of power, one hour at court when the regal town must treat her with its finest smiles and courtesies. She wrote boldly on the register “Mary Smith,” and the simple dignity of the name made it distinguished in that long list of high-sounding titles.

She breakfasted in state in her bedroom, looking over Park Avenue toward the great railroad terminus, the innumerable roofs, which stretched like irregular stepping stones to the river, the gracious bridge uptown. She drove in a barouche to the Metropolitan Museum and then down the Avenue, scenting its fine airs, and lingering on its elegant details in the slow-moving vehicle; the gay pile of the Plaza, like a monument erected to an Empress’ holiday; the pearly home of the Vander-somethings, with its birdlike little statue of the architect in a Rembrandt cap, perched among the décor of its roof; the quaintly painted florist’s building in the forties; broad, gleaming windows wherein the comfort of grizzled millionaires was framed for the public’s delectation; the sleek cathedrals, English and Roman, agreeably sunning themselves--almost tête-à-tête, with an air of after-dinner ease; the occasional brown, old-fashioned banks, which one took at first glance to be dwellings; the Library, squat with sedentary scholarship and stained by too much knowledge of good and evil; the mosque-like corner of the Waldorf; and far down where the Avenue narrowed, pleasant-memoried houses of the older time, and a freshly be-painted little French hotel, bright and impudent as a hat box from the Rue de La Paix.

This last looked so suitable to her state of high spirits that she called to the driver to stop there. Strangely enough she had never been in the Brevoort. She slipped down into the basement café and was soon looking at the multiplied images of people in the mirrors that panelled the walls; among them stocky, dapper bachelors, arty, bearded men, a tall tan young fellow in a Norfolk, seemingly much fascinated with his companion, a much older woman with a weathered elegant face. She liked these. This, she supposed, had something to do with Greenwich Village, though except through picture and story, she knew nothing of it. But as she poured her tea for herself, she felt suddenly it was not the place to be alone. How easy it would be to go upstairs now, to send a telegram to Hal. The unholy notion made her finish her luncheon and leave.

She went back by bus and walked about through half a dozen shops, then to a round of galleries, and finally, tired out, to the hotel. The thrill was over as she watched the day die on the house-tops of the East Side, and she almost wished she did not have to spend the night there. She wanted to be at work, after all, the sooner the better; nothing else could save her from boredom and despair. To-morrow she would launch herself on the unknown stream.

She bought a ticket to a Russian variety show, which was just then having a vogue on Broadway, and found forgetfulness between its exotic charm and the night-view from the theatre roof, of the yellow-dappled park, its motors skimming and swerving upon curved ribbons of road. As she turned for a last look at it, standing apart from the crowd filing out, her solitary figure attracted the glances of a score of prosperous-looking men. But she did not see them. She thought:

“This is so vast, what can it matter who one is? The Moira of yesterday is just as small compared to it, as this one here. Why should I care?”

She laughed at this bit of philosophy. It was not particularly comforting, but it helped her to believe that she had given up the past.... In her dreams the visions of the day mingled kaleidoscopically.

Moira knew nothing about New York in a practical way. Her path had always been the narrow round tripped by the fashionable visitor. Therefore, as she sat at breakfast with the “classified” columns of the _Times_ before her she had no idea where she wanted to live. It happened that the first addresses that she jotted down in her notebook were far downtown and to these she went looking for the cheapest single room she could find.

The sights that met her eye filled her with half-humorous, half-tragic emotions. The landladies who greeted her were in the main revolting; she was taken into rooms that smelled, rooms that had cheap iron beds with battered brass knobs, that had carpets with holes in them and frayed lace curtains, grey with dirt, and hideous oak furnishings and coloured calendars on the walls. Three-fourths of them were not cleaned oftener than once a month, she was certain, and she determined to have cleanliness though every other comfort failed.

She found it at last. On the west side of the Village she was attracted by a neat card bearing the words “furnished rooms” on the door of a brick house that looked many degrees better kept than its neighbours. A shy grey-haired woman admitted her. There were several rooms, all spotless, and she selected one reasonably priced, with white painted woodwork and plain furniture that she thought she might manage to live with. When she asked for the telephone to send for her luggage from the hotel, she was shown into the daughter’s room. In one corner of this pure haven was a small, square stand covered with chintz and draped with flowered cretonne. Upon it stood a discarded perfume bottle filled with holy water, a prayer-book and catechism, and a tall white statuette of the Virgin and child, with the monogram M. A. on the rococo base. On the wall above the stand was a black crucifix with the Christ in gilt. Behind the Christ was thrust a little palm cross. Still higher than the crucifix hung a photo-engraving of the Madonna and child from some Italian master, in a gilded frame. The homely simplicity of the scene brought tears to the girl’s eyes....

But she felt a little less benevolent the next day when she asked Mrs. McCabe why there were no mirrors in the bathroom. That lady gazed at her with the sad severity of the timid and replied:

“I don’t know. There just ain’t, and there won’t be.”

In this atmosphere of staggering piety began the career of “Mary Smith.”

XVI

By the end of two years Moira had repaid the last of the five hundred with which she had possessed herself on leaving Thornhill; and accumulated a surplus of her own. From the day she quitted the Munson School of Stenography and Typewriting she had never experienced difficulty in securing a job and in making an excellent impression. The two changes which she had made were of her own volition. For more than six months now she had been secretary to the executive vice-president of a soap company and had become something of an executive herself, on a salary that still had a good margin in which to grow.

This man was typical of the average young organizing and selling marvel of the day, but he had a quality of intelligence in matters outside of business--limited, yet enough to be refreshing after the others she had encountered. Moira did not feel, as she had in other places, that she must suppress all the evidences of her breeding and education. This she had actually attempted to do hitherto; diplomatically ignoring awkward and ungrammatical English, adopting as much slang as she could retain without practice on the outside, and generally pretending to be quite as much the low brow as most of the other girls whose chatter bewildered her in the washroom.

With Barcroft, for the first time, she could permit herself to be natural, and this sense of ease increased her value enormously in “meeting the trade” and handling difficult people in his absence. She checked him up on his errors of dictation without shame, but she had the rare good sense to know just when he was wiser in being wrong. She grew to respect, rather than disdain, the qualities that made men successful in business. They were qualities that did not interest her essentially, yet Barcroft’s mind had mysterious powers of insight that often called for silent applause.

Their relations developed into friendliness, and she felt his honest admiration without the fear that it would lead to complications. She had never yet herself encountered the boss-turned-lover--and the case was reputed to be so common that she felt far from flattered. She tried to account for it on the score of her natural dignity, her quiet mode of dressing, her application to work, and her reticence; but these did not explain. She was not conspicuously dignified--when it seemed to her good to laugh she did so. Nor did she dress unattractively, much as she respected her budget. And her efficiency was not nearly so obtrusive as some brands of it she had observed. Moreover these qualities, she believed, in a young and good-looking woman, would only make her more pleasing to men. She mocked at the whole business; it was another of those favourite American panics, like the white slave traffic, the German spy-hunt, and the innumerable other horrors that supported the newspapers and bred the violence of mobs.

She congratulated herself, nevertheless, that in spite of Barcroft’s understanding and deference, nothing of that sort was remotely likely to happen. She had found a good post, agreeably within her powers and therefore easy, and she would be able to keep it indefinitely, with the hope of a steadily mounting salary. Then one evening they fell into a conversation after office hours. It ranged everywhere from the staging of Arthur Hopkins to the value of rotogravure as an advertising medium, from the proper length of skirts to the latest novel, and Barcroft broke into the discussion suddenly by making love to her. He too was a victim, as it appeared, of the quarrelsome and haphazard home.

She had often asked herself, with some bitterness, what advantage her early life gave her in such a career as she now had to follow. She found it in this instance the most useful equipment she could have. Another girl would have thrown up the job. She managed adroitly to save it. She was not at all shocked by Barcroft’s love-making. She felt sorry for him; she talked to him sympathetically about his troubles, and in the end they were better friends than ever. Moreover, he was not long afterward grateful to her ... the wife had come out victor over her lord ... the yoke was again pleasing to his neck.

Her life outside of the office was so devoid of romance that this brush with it at the soap company was not unpleasant. She had occupied more than one furnished room since the start at Mrs. McCabe’s, and in her wanderings she had come necessarily in contact with the Village life, but she did not adopt its easy associations. She discovered very early that the Village was the gossip shop of the country. National--and international--news travelled fast there from tongue to tongue, concerning people even slightly known or connected with the known. You could not say when you would walk into one of its restaurants and find at the next table a prominent matron of your city. A half a dozen times she had dodged or stared down old acquaintances on the upper Avenue.

There were girls she met from day to day, willing to become her friends--attractive girls who were doing interesting things. A few good cronies of this sort would have lightened her solitary evenings and perhaps helped her to find work more congenial than business. But friendships, to be worth while, had to be frank. She knew she would be tempted defiantly to tell all about herself, and she shrank from doing so. Native resourcefulness made it easy to draw the line of separation, but pride made it hard. She realized that her aloofness was causing criticism. In the two restaurants where she took most of her evening meals--because they were cheap and clean--the talk was not sympathetic. If one was free to have lovers _ad lib._ in the Village one was obviously not free to dispense with friends entirely. She seemed a snob.

There were times when she gave herself up to storms of grief. It grew to be an act of self-preservation, a part of her philosophy of endurance. Long spells of weeping, or of a weary, helpless state of the spirit that was more thoroughly a surrender and resignation than tears. Again and again she would cry through the darkness for Hal with the plaintive voice of a sick child--and even for the kind ghost of Mathilda Seymour. If she felt ashamed of these indulgences, she argued that there could be no harm in them. Her old friends could not hear her. She was alone in all those little rooms, completely cut off from anything familiar, from all but the fluttering, unreal, poignant memories of her beautiful childhood. Waves of passionate self-pity swept over her; she rebelled aloud against the bitter meanness of her betrayal; the awful burden of carrying her secret alone.

In the end it was wise that she did not deny these moods when they came to her and did not try to control them. From them she rose calm and clear-headed, charged with newly stored courage. They were spiritual baths, which cleaned her, a sort of self-asserting prayer. When they had gone not a vestige of rebellion was left in her; she felt grown in stature, ready to carry her fate like a flag. For a day or two afterward she would be sentimental and overfull of feeling. She would go out of her way to help beggars and walk a block to give dimes to the hurdy-gurdy man; and comfort the little girls in the filing room if they weren’t feeling well, or had just been called down by the head clerk.

One thing that these rituals of solitary suffering gave her was the buoyant, happy consciousness of artistic power, and she longed to return to painting. Until now it had seemed impossible. She could not command the space, the office robbed her of daylight, materials were too costly. Now she began to dream of creating a studio--the opportunity to work might be managed somehow, once she had acquired the facilities. She saved more sedulously, giving up a part of her pleasures, an occasional new book and a theatre now and then, furbishing clothes for herself despite her hatred of the needle.

XVII

The floors were done and dry. Elsie Jennings, who had come in to help, was putting the third coat of black upon the new book-shelves, and Moira was waiting for the delivery of her three last pieces of furniture, which completed the picture, for a time at least. Whether they came as they had been promised or not, the house-warming party was to be held that evening, with Elsie, Jade Sommers, and Arthur, her husband.

Arthur Sommers she had met as a printing salesman, visiting her office, and later had run across with Jade in a restaurant. He was a good sort, in his early thirties, jovial and proud of his plain citizenship, inclined to stoutness and much in love with his wife, the story writer. Elsie ran a shop in which she sold hand-made novelties and small house furnishings, that caught the sightseers from the States and uptown with their faintly futurist air. It was a Saturday in the Spring, and had the party been postponed two days it might have celebrated Moira’s birthday. But she did not divulge that fact.

“There,” said Elsie, “it’s done. And I think three coats will be enough.”

“Not so bad,” replied Moira. She stood making an inspection of her nearly finished home. The apartment itself was a discovery--quite a bargain--one huge room with tall windows, and a tiny bedroom and bath and kitchen closet, in an old five-story house, occupied by a small army of nondescript tenants.

“How good you look to me, old barn!” was her fervent thought, which Elsie, watching her, divined. “If those chairs don’t come pretty soon,” she went on aloud, “they won’t come at all, and somebody will have to sit on the floor. I’m going out to shop for food.”

“Yes, go ahead,” said Elsie. “This box of china has got to be unpacked and washed. I’ll do that in the meantime.”

Moira had been in and out of the building on many occasions during the past week, but her curiosity had been slight regarding her neighbours. She couldn’t afford to be particular about them, so it seemed to her pointless to be curious. As she went downstairs, however, on the way to the grocery, a name on the door to a small room caught her attention.

“Miles Harlindew!” she said, and found her memory flying to years before at Thornhill, and her lips repeating some lines about:

“All shining parallels of track, All brown roads leading up.”

She had begun to see the man’s verses in the literary magazines when she couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, and many of them had sung themselves into her memory. One or two had given her an experience of discovery. But for the last few years she had found no more of his work. She had imagined him for some reason, as people are likely to think of anybody at all who gets things published, as successful, comfortable, arrived.

“He must be getting along in years,” she thought. “Poor fellow!” For she knew that room corresponded to her bedroom above, a mere cubby-hole, so small that she had to sit on her bed to look in the dressing table mirror.

It was her first party in years, and she did not need the cocktails--which Arthur Sommers had brought in a silver flask--to give her a thrill. She fell in love with her guests and charmed them into something like wonder. So this was the unapproachable Mary Smith!

“Oh, I’ve got distinguished literary neighbours,” she announced. “Miles Harlindew is on the floor below.”

A ripple of amusement greeted her remark.

“But I remember some stunning poems of his,” she went on.

“Oh, yes,” put in Jade, “but nobody knows he’s alive these days. He doesn’t even know it himself.”

“Come off,” said her husband. “I see him often, very much alive. Any man who does his duty violating the Eighteenth Amendment as regularly as Miles, has my vote. What do you say if I get him.”

“If he’s sober,” put in Jade.

Sommers glanced at Moira for consent, and she gave it with a brisk nod. These people knew more about the man than she and no doubt were justified in what they said; nevertheless she felt a vague resentment. What would they say if they knew all there was to be known about herself? Experience had already taught her that beneath the literal and semi-bohemian veneer of her friends there was a stern core of respectability.

Harlindew came and was sober. He was painfully and tiresomely sober, and she heartily wished they had saved some of Arthur’s cocktails. He sat down stiffly and ventured commonplaces when spoken to. She found him a satisfactory physical specimen, showing more years than she expected, in premature lines. He was neither tall nor short, of the type that never acquires flesh, somewhat shaggy behind the ears, with a lop-sided face. One jaw was stronger than the other, one eye keener than the other, one brow more pleasing in conformation than the other--and these inequalities were not all on the same side of his face.

When she recited his verses, he was not pleased. He depreciated them vigorously and was very uncomfortable. He called them the errors of his youth. The one thing that he took extraordinary interest in was a talk with Sommers about business. She then watched his gestures and animation with pleasure. They made a change in the man’s whole appearance.

“I’m thinking seriously of going into business,” he announced in a grave voice, and seemed a little disappointed that this statement was not received with greater acclaim. The evening ended, dampened, on the whole, by his presence.

“How fiercely shy he is about his work,” said Moira to the others, as they stood at the door ready to go.

“Big night last night,” said Arthur, in a stage whisper. “Feeling rocky.”

“I hope you don’t meet him somewhere at three in the morning,” added Elsie. “He’ll reel it off to you then until you’ll be sorry.”

Yet she thought more about what she saw of Harlindew, during his short stay in her rooms, than of anything else that had happened that night. He was the only young man she had met in New York whom she wanted to talk to. It was, possibly, a childish delusion, a fancy arising out of the fact that both of them were miserable about something, obviously about something it was impossible to discuss.

A few days later she met him on the stairs, and he blushed and stammered:

“I believe you are the only person alive who still cares anything for my poetry.”