Part 3

So I sat down again, and he looked at me more closely than ever, as if he had noticed how hot and red my face had suddenly got and couldn't understand why it looked that way. Of course he couldn't, either; for I had just remembered that, though I had been a reporter for a whole week, I had forgotten my assignment! It seemed as if I would never learn to be a real newspaper woman. My heart went way down, and I suppose the corners of my mouth did, too; they usually went down at the same time. He asked very kindly what was the matter, and the tone of his voice was beautiful--old and friendly and understanding. I said it was because I was so silly and stupid and young and unbusiness-like. He started to say something and stopped, then sat up and began to talk in a very business-like way. He asked where my money was, and I told him the name of the bank. He looked at his watch and frowned. I didn't know why; but I thought perhaps it was because he wanted me to take it out of there right away and it was too late. It was almost four o'clock. Then he put the tips of his fingers together again, and talked to me the way the cashier at the bank had talked when I put my money in.

He said that the savings-bank was a good place for a girl's money--under ordinary conditions it was the best place. The interest would be small, but sure. Certain investments would, of course, bring higher interest, but no woman should try to invest her money unless she had business training or a very wise, experienced adviser back of her. Then he stopped for a minute, and it seemed hard for him to go on. I did not speak, for I saw that he was thinking something over, and of course I knew better than to interrupt him. At last he said that ordinarily, of course, he never paid any attention to small accounts, but that he liked me very much and wanted to help me and that, if I wished, he would invest my money for me in a way that would bring in a great deal more interest than the savings-bank would pay. And he asked if I understood what he meant.

I said I did--that he was offering to take entirely too much trouble for a stranger, and that he was just as kind as he could be, but that I couldn't think of letting him do it, and I was sure papa wouldn't want me to. He seemed annoyed all of a sudden, and his manner changed. He asked why I had come if I felt that way, and I began to see how silly it looked to him, for of course he didn't know I was a reporter getting a story on investments for women. I didn't know what to say or what to do about the money, either, for Mr. Hurd hadn't told me how to meet any offer of that kind.

While I was thinking and hesitating Mr. Drake sat still and looked at me queerly; the blue sparks in his eyes actually seemed to shoot out at me. They frightened me a little; and, without stopping to think any more, I said I was very grateful to him and that I would bring the money to his office the next day. Then I stood up and he stood up, too; and I gave him my hand and told him he was the kindest man I had met in New York--and the next minute I was gasping and struggling and pushing him away with all my strength, and he stumbled and went backward into his big chair, knocking over an inkstand full of ink, which crawled to the edge of his desk in little black streams and fell on his gray clothes.

For a minute he sat staring straight ahead of him and let them fall. Then he brushed his hand across his head and picked up the inkstand and soaked up the ink with a blotter, and finally turned and looked at me. I stared back at him as if I were in a nightmare. I was opposite him and against the wall, with my back to it, and for a moment I couldn't move. But now I began to creep toward the door, with my eyes on him. I felt some way that I dared not take them off. As I moved he got up; he was much nearer the door than I was, and, though I sprang for it, he reached it first and stood there quietly, holding the knob in his hand. Neither of us had uttered a sound; but now he spoke, and his voice was very low and steady.

"Wait a minute," he said. "I want to tell you something you need to know. Then you may go." And he added, grimly, "Straighten your hat!"

I put up my hands and straightened it. Still I did not take my eyes off his. His eyes seemed like those of Yawkins and the great snake in my dreams, but as I looked into them they fell.

"For God's sake, child," he said, irritably, "don't look at me as if I were an anaconda! Don't you know it was all a trick?" He came up closer to me and gave me his next words eye to eye and very slowly, as if to force me to listen and believe.

"I did that, Miss Iverson," he said, "to show you what happens to beautiful girls in New York when they go into men's offices asking for advice about money. Some one had to do it. I thought the lesson might come better from me than from a younger man."

His words came to me from some place far away. A bit of my bit of Greek came, too--something about Homeric laughter. Then next instant I went to pieces and crumpled up in the big chair, and when he tried to help me I wouldn't let him come near me. But little by little, when I could speak, I told him what I thought of him and men like him, and of what I had gone through since I came to New York, and of how he had made me feel degraded and unclean for ever. At first he listened without a word; then he began to ask a few questions.

"So you don't believe me," he said once. "That's too bad. I ought to have thought of that."

He even wrung from me at last the thing that was worst of all--the thing I had not dared to tell Mrs. Hoppen--the thing I had sworn to myself no one should ever know--the deep-down, paralyzing fear that there must be something wrong in me that brought these things upon me, that perhaps I, too, was to blame. That seemed to stir him in a queer fashion. He put out his hand as if to push the idea away.

"No," he said, emphatically. "No, _no_! Never think that." He went on more quietly. "That's not it. It's only that you're a lamb among the wolves."

He seemed to forget me, then to remember me again. "But remember this, child," he went on. "Some men are bad clear through; some are only half bad. Some aren't wolves at all; they'll help to keep you from the others. Don't you get to thinking that every mother's son runs in the pack; and don't forget that it's mighty hard for any of us to believe that you're as unsophisticated as you seem. You'll learn how to handle wolves. That's a woman's primer lesson in life. And in the mean time here's something to comfort you: Though you don't know it, you have a talisman. You've got something in your eyes that will never let them come too close. Now good-by."

It was six o'clock when I got back to the _Searchlight_ office. I had gone down to the Battery to let the clean sea-air sweep over me. I had dropped into a little chapel, too, and when I came out the world had righted itself again and I could look my fellow human beings in the eyes. Even Mr. Drake had said my experience was not my fault and that I had a talisman. I knew now what the talisman was.

Mr. Hurd, still bunched over his desk, was drinking a bottle of ginger-ale and eating a sandwich when I entered. Morris, at his desk, was editing copy. The outer pen, where the rest of us sat, was deserted by every one except Gibson, who was so busy that he did not look up.

"Got your story?" asked Hurd, looking straight at me for the third time since I had taken my place on his staff. He spoke with his mouth full. "Hello," he added. "What's the matter with your eyes?"

I sat down by his desk and told him. The sandwich dropped from his fingers. His young-old, dimpled face turned white with anger. He waited without a word until I had finished.

"By God, I'll make him sweat for that!" he hissed. "I'll show him up! The old hypocrite! The whited sepulcher! I'll make this town ring with that story. I'll make it too hot to hold him!"

Morris got up, crossed to us, and stood beside him, looking down at him. The bunches on his jaw-bones were very large.

"What's the use of talking like that, Hurd?" he asked, quietly. "You know perfectly well you won't print that story. You don't dare. And you know that you're as much to blame as Drake is for what's happened. When you sent Miss Iverson out on that assignment you knew just what was coming to her."

Hurd's face went purple. "I didn't," he protested, furiously. "I swear I didn't. I thought she'd be able to get to them because she's so pretty. But that's as far as my mind worked on it." He turned to me. "You believe me, don't you?" he asked, gently. "Please say you do."

I nodded.

"Then it's all right," he said. "And I promise you one thing now: I'll never put you up against a proposition like that again."

He picked up his sandwich and dropped the matter from his mind. Morris stood still a minute longer, started to speak, stopped, and at last brought out what he had to say.

"And you won't think every man you meet is a beast, will you, Miss Iverson?" he asked.

I shook my head. I didn't seem to be able to say much. But it seemed queer that both he and Mr. Drake had said almost the same thing.

"Because," said Morris, "in his heart, you know, every man wants to be decent."

I filed that idea for future reference, as librarians say. Then I asked them the question I had been asking myself for hours. "Do you think Mr. Drake really _was_ teaching me a--a terrible lesson?" I stammered.

The two men exchanged a look. Each seemed to wait for the other to speak. It was Gibson who answered me. He had opened the door, and was watching us with no sign of his usual wide and cheerful grin.

"The way you tell it," he said, "it's a toss-up. But I'll tell you how it strikes me. Just to be on the safe side, and whether he lied to you or not, I'd like to give Henry F. Drake the all-firedest licking he ever got in his life."

"You bet," muttered Hurd, through the last mouthful of his sandwich. Mr. Morris didn't say anything, but the bunches on his jaw-bones seemed larger than ever as he turned to his desk.

I looked at them, and in that moment I learned the lesson that follows the primer lesson. At least one thing Mr. Drake had told me was true--all men were not wolves.

III

THE GIRL IN GRAY

Nine typewriters were stuttering over nine news stories; four electric fans were singing their siren songs of coolness; two telephone bells were ringing; one office boy, new to his job, was hurtling through the air on his way to the night city editor's desk, and the night city editor was discharging him because he was not coming faster; the managing editor was "calling down" a copy-reader; the editor-in-chief was telling the foreign editor he wished he could find an intelligent man to take the foreign desk; Mr. Nestor Hurd was swearing at Mr. Godfrey Morris. In other words, it was nearly midnight in the offices of the _Searchlight_.

I was sitting at my desk, feeling very low in my mind. That day, for the first time in my three weeks' experience as a reporter, Mr. Hurd had not given me an assignment. This was neither his fault nor mine. I had written a dozen good stories for him, besides many more that were at least up to the average. My assignments had taken me to all sorts of places strangely unlike the convent from which I had graduated only a month before--morgues, hospitals, police stations, the Tombs, the Chinese quarter--and I had always brought back something, even, as Mr. Gibson had once muttered, if it were merely a few typhoid germs. Mr. Gibson did not approve of sending me to all those places. Only that morning I had heard my chief tell Mr. Morris the Iverson kid was holding down her job so hard that the job was yelling for help. This was a compliment, for Mr. Hurd never joked about any one who worked less than eighteen hours a day.

I knew he hated to see me idle now, even for a few hours, and I did not like it myself. But we both had to bear it, for this had been one of the July days when nothing happened in New York. Individuals were born, and married, and died, and were run over by automobiles, as usual; but, as Mr. Hurd said, "the element of human interest was lacking." At such times the newspapers fill their space with symposiums on "Can a Couple Live on Eight Dollars a Week?" or "Is Suicide a Sin?" Or they have a moral spasm over some play and send the police to suppress it. The night before Mr. Hurd had sent Gibson, his star reporter, with a police inspector, to see a play he hoped the _Searchlight_ could have a moral spasm over. Mr. Gibson reported that the police inspector had left the theater wiping his eyes and saying he meant to look after his daughters better hereafter; so the _Searchlight_ could not have a spasm that time, and Mr. Hurd swore for five minutes without repeating once. He was wonderful that way, but not so gifted as Col. John Cartwell, the editor-in-chief, who used to check himself between the syllables of his words to drop little oaths in. Such conversation was new and terrible to me. I had never heard any one swear before, and at first it deeply offended me. I thought a convent girl should not hear such things, especially a girl who intended to be a nun when she was twenty-one. But after a week or two I discovered that the editors never meant anything by their rude words; they were merely part of their breath.

To kill time that evening I wrote a letter to my mother--the first long one I had sent her since I left my Western home. I wrote it on one side of my copy paper, underlining my "u's" and overlining my "n's," and putting little circles around all my periods, to show the family I was a real newspaper woman at last. When I finished the letter I put it in an office envelope with a picture of the _Searchlight_ building on the outside, and began to think of going home. But I did not feel happy. I realized by this time that in newspaper work what one did yesterday does not matter at all; it is what one does to-day that counts. In the convent we could bask for a fortnight in the afterglow of a good recitation, and the memory of a brilliant essay would abide, as it were, for months. But full well I knew that if I gave Mr. Hurd the biggest "story" of the week on Thursday, and did nothing on Friday, he would go to bed Friday night with hurt, grieved feelings in his heart. This was Friday.

However, there was no sense in waiting round the office any longer, so I put on my hat and left the _Searchlight_ building, walking across City Hall Park to Broadway, where I took an open car up-town. I was getting used to being out alone late at night; but I had not ceased to feel an exultant thrill whenever I realized that I, May Iverson, just out of the convent and only eighteen, was actually part of the night life of great, wonderful, mysterious New York. Almost every man and woman I saw interested me because of the story I knew was hidden in each human heart; so to-night, as usual, I studied closely those around me. But my three fellow-passengers did not look as if they had any stories in them. They were merely tired, sleepy, perspiring men going home after a day of hard work. I envied them. I had not done a day's work, and I felt that I hardly deserved to rest. This thought was still in my mind when I left the car at Twenty-fifth Street and walked across Madison Square toward the house where I had rooms.

It was after midnight and very hot. The benches in the park still held many men--most of them the kind that stay there because they have no place else to go. There were a dozen tramps, some stretched at full length and sound asleep, others talking together. There were men out of work, trying to read the newspaper advertisements by the electric light from the globes far above them. Over the park hung a yellow mist that looked like fog but was merely heat, and from every side came the deep mutter of a great city on a summer night. The men around me were the types I had seen every time I crossed the Square, and, though I was always sorry for them, they no longer made me feel sick with sympathy, as they did at first.

But on a bench a little apart from the rest sat a girl who interested me at once. I noticed her first because she was young and alone, and then because she seemed to be in trouble. She was drooping forward in her seat, with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, staring hard at a spot on the ground in front of her. I could not see what it was. It looked like an ordinary brown stain. I usually walked very fast when I was alone at night, but now I slackened my pace and strolled toward the girl as slowly as I dared, studying her as I went. I could not see much of her face, which was in the hollow of her joined hands, but the way she was sitting--all bunched up--showed me that she was sick or discouraged, or both. She wore a gray dress with a very narrow skirt, and a wide, plain lace collar on the jacket. The suit had a discouraged air, as if it had started out to be smart and knew it had failed. Her hat was a cheap straw with a quill on it that had once been stiff but was now limp as an unstarched collar, and the coil of hair under it was neat and brown and wavy. Her plain lingerie blouse was cut low at the neck and fastened with a big black bow, and when I was closer to her I saw that both her shoes were broken at the sides. Altogether, she looked very sick and very poor, and when she changed her position a little to glance at a man who was passing, something about her profile made me think of one of my classmates at St. Catharine's.

I had tried to pass her, but now my feet would not take me. It was simply impossible to ignore a girl who looked like Janet Trelawney and who seemed to be in trouble. I saw when I got nearer that she was not Janet, but she might have been--and, anyway, she was a young girl like myself. We were taught at the convent that to intrude on another person's grief, uninvited, is worse than to intrude at any other time. Mere sympathy does not excuse it. But this looked like a special case, for there was no one else around to do anything for the girl in gray if she needed help. However, I did not speak to her at once. I merely sat down on the bench beside her and waited to see if she would speak to me.

She raised her head the minute she felt me there, and sat up and stared at me with eyes that were big and dark and had a queer, desperate expression in them. It seemed to startle her to know that some one was so near her, but after she had looked at me her surprise changed to annoyance, and she moved as if she meant to get up and go away. That full glance at her had shown me what she was like. She was not pretty. Her face was dreadfully pale, her nose was ordinary in shape, and her firmly set, thin lips made her mouth look like a straight line. I did not see how I could have thought of Janet Trelawney in connection with her. However, I felt that I could not drive her away from her seat, so I stopped her and begged her pardon and asked if she was ill or had hurt herself in any way, and if I could help her.

At first she did not answer me. She merely sat still and looked me over slowly, as if she were trying to make up her mind about me. The longer she looked the more puzzled she seemed to be. It had been raining when I left home in the morning, so I had on a mackintosh and a little soft rainy-day hat. I knew I did not look impressive, and it was plain that the girl in gray did not think much of me. At last she asked what I wanted, and her voice sounded hard and indifferent--even rude. I was disappointed in that, too, as well as in her face. It would have been more interesting, of course, to help a refined, educated girl. There was no doubt, however, that she needed help of some kind, so I merely repeated in different words what I had said to her at first. She laughed then--a laugh I did not like at all--and stared at me again in her queer way, as if she could not make me out. She seemed to be more puzzled over me than I was over her.

She kept on staring at me a long time with her singular eyes, that had dark circles under them. At last she asked me if I was a "society agent" or anything of that sort, and when I said I was not she asked how I happened to be out so late, and what I was doing. Her voice was as queer as her eyes--low and husky. I did not like her manner. It almost seemed as if she thought I had no right to be there, so I told her rather coldly that I was a reporter on the _Searchlight_ and that I was on my way home from the office. As soon as I said that her whole manner changed. I have noticed this quick change in others when they hear that I am a newspaper woman. Some are pleased and some are not, but few remain cold and detached. The girl in gray actually looked relieved about something. She laughed again, a husky, throaty laugh that sounded, however, much nicer and more human than before, and gave me a good-natured little push.

"Oh," she said, "all right. Better beat it now. So-long." And she waved me away as if she owned the park bench. I hesitated. I was sorry now that I had stopped, and I wanted to go; but it seemed impossible to leave her there. I sat still for a moment, thinking it over, and suddenly she leaned toward me and advised me very earnestly not to linger till the roundsman came to take my pedigree. She said he was letting her alone because he knew she was only out of the hospital two days and up against it, but the healthy thing for me was to move on while the walking was good.

I was sorry she used so much slang, but of course the fact that she was unrefined and uneducated made her situation harder, and demanded even more sympathy from those better off. What she had said about the hospital and being "up against it" proved that I had done right to stop.

I told her I was going home in a few minutes, but that I wanted to talk to her first if she did not mind, and that there was no reason why I could not sit in the park if she could. She looked at me and laughed again as if I had made a joke, and the laugh brought on an attack of coughing which kept her busy for a full minute. When she had stopped I pointed out my home to her. It was on the opposite side of the Square, but we could see it quite plainly from where we sat. We could even see the windows of my rooms, which faced the park. The girl in gray looked up at them a long time.

"Gee!" she said, "you're lucky. Think of havin' a joint to fall into, and not knowin' enough to go to it when you got a chance." She added, "It wouldn't take me long to hop there if I owned the latch-key."

I asked her where she lived, and she laughed again and swung one knee over the other as we were taught in the convent not to do, and muttered that her present address was Madison Square Park, but she hoped it would not be permanent. Then she got up and said, "So-long," and started to go. I got up, too, and caught her arm. Her last words had simply thrilled me. I had read about girls being sick and out of work and being dismissed from the hospital with no money and no place to go to. But to read of them in books is one thing, and to see one with your own eyes, to have one actually beside you, is another thing--and very different. My heart swelled till it hurt; so did my throat. The girl shook off my hand.

"Say," she said, and her voice was rude and cross again--"say, kid, what's the matter with you? You ain't got nothin' on me. Beat it, will you, or let me beat it. I can't set here and chin."