Part 11

As the bus took us through the yards, I thought how terrible and sad it was for a man who was in such a condition to be left to his own devices. It was just as if one left a helpless baby to mind himself, or threw a poor sick person out upon the street, expecting him to be cured without treatment. What was drink but a disease, anyhow? And I said to myself that I wished I were a prize-fighter. Fred had been good to me. I come of a race, on my mother's side, which does not easily forget kindnesses, and somehow I could think of nothing save how Fred had treated me that first day, and had given me a chance when no one else would.

So when I stepped from the bus, and Fred came lurching toward me, I simply had not the heart to break away from him. All the girls were watching us, and some of the men tried to draw Fred aside by the arm.

He became wildly excited, and said he could "lick any son of a gun in the Union Stock-Yards."

One of the men told me to "beat it" while they took care of Fred; but Fred did look so helpless and so inexpressibly childish as he cried out his defiance, and as I was mortally afraid that they might get fighting among themselves, and, anyhow, though drunk, he was not offensive, I said:

"I'll take him home. I'm not afraid of him."

Some of them laughed, and some protested; but I didn't care anything about any of them except Fred, and I helped him on an open car that went near our house.

I took him to our rooms, and there Lolly tried to sober him by making him black coffee, and Hermann, who came, too,--he had kept right up with Fred and me,--said he'd take care of Fred while Lolly and I got our dinner. We took our meals out.

When we got back,--it was about eight then,--there was Fred sitting on the door-step. Hermann was trying to drag him to his feet, but he wouldn't move, and he kept saying: "Nora's going to take care of me. S-she's m' stenographer, you know."

Hermann explained that our landlady had ordered them out, as Fred had begun to sing after we went. Hermann wanted Lolly and me to go into the house, and he said he'd take care of Fred, even if he had to "land him in a cell" to do it. He said that in such a nasty way that poor Fred began to cry that he hadn't a friend in the world, and that made me feel so badly that I told him that I was his friend, and that I'd take good care that Hermann didn't put him in a cell. Then I had an inspiration.

I suggested that we all take a long street-car ride and that the open air might clear his head, and if it didn't, we could get off at some park and walk around. Fred exclaimed that walking was the one thing that always "woke" him up.

Lolly said:

"Not for me!" and went into the house.

So Hermann and I, with Fred between us, made for the nearest car. I got in first, then Fred, and then as Hermann was getting on, Fred seized his hat and threw it out into the road. A wind caught it, and Hermann had to chase after it. While he was doing this, Fred pulled the bell-rope, and the car started.

We rode to the end of the line, Fred behaving very well. Here we got off, and we went into the park. I asked Fred how he was feeling, and he said "tip-top," and that he would be all right after walking about a bit.

We _walked_!

At first Fred was garrulous in a wandering sort of way, and he tried to tell me about the girl who had jilted him. He said he had never liked a girl since except me, and then he pulled himself up abruptly and said:

"But don't think I'm stuck on you, because I ain't. I got stuck on one girl in my life, and that was enough for me."

"Of course you're not," I said soothingly, "and I'm not stuck on you, either. We're just good pals, aren't we?"

"Best ever," said Fred, drowsily.

Then for a long time--my! it seemed hours and hours--we just tramped about the park. Curiously enough, I didn't feel a bit tired; but by and by I could tell by the way he walked that Fred was just about ready to drop from exhaustion. He had been up drinking all the previous night and all the day. So presently I found a bench under a big tree, and I tried to make him sit down; but nothing would do but that he must lie down at full length on the bench, with his head on my lap. He dropped off almost immediately into a sound sleep or stupor, breathing heavily and noisily.

I don't know how long we were there. I grew numb with the weight of his heavy head upon my knee. A policeman came along and asked me what we were doing. I told him truthfully that Fred had been drinking, and was now asleep, and I asked him, please not to wake him. He called Fred my "man," and said we could stay there. We did stay there. Nothing I believe could have awakened Fred. As for me, well, I made up my mind that I was "in for it." I thought of trying to go to sleep with my head against the back of the seat, but it was too low. So I had to sit up straight.

It was a still, warm night in September, with scarcely a breeze stirring. I could see the giant branches of the trees on all sides of us. They shot up like ghostly sentinels. Even the whispering leaves seemed scarcely to stir.

I saw the stars in a wide silver sky, staring and winking down upon us all through that long night. I looked up at them, and thought of my father, and I thought of that great ancestor of mine who had been an astronomer, and had given to the world some of its chief knowledge of the heavens above us. It would be strange, I whimsically thought, if somewhere up there among the stars, he was peering down at me now on this microscopic earth; for it was microscopic in the great scheme of the universe, my father had once said.

To sit up all night long in a quiet, beautiful park, under a star-spotted sky, with a drunken man asleep on your lap, after all, that is not the worst of fates. _I_ know, because I have done it, and I tell you there have been less happy nights than that in my life.

As we rush along in the whirligig of life, we girls who must work so hard for our daily bread, we get so little time in which to _think_. For one cannot think save disjointedly, while working. Now I had a long chance for all my thoughts, and they came crowding upon me. I thought of my little brothers and sisters, and I wistfully longed that I might see them again while they were still little. I thought of my sister Marion, whom I had left in Boston. Had she fared as well as I? She had written me two or three times, and her letters were cheerful enough, but just as I told her in my letters nothing of my struggles, so she told me nothing of hers. Yet I read between the lines, and I _knew_--it made my heart ache, that knowledge--that Marion was having an even more grim combat with Fate than I; I was better equipped than she to earn a living. For one's mere physical beauty is, after all, a poor and dangerous asset. And Marion was earning her living by her beauty. She was a professional model, getting fifty cents an hour.

I thought of other sisters, one of whom had passed through a tragic experience, and another--the eldest, a girl with more real talent than I--who had been a pitiful invalid all her days. She is dead now, that dear big sister of mine, and a monument marks her grave in commemoration of work she did for my mother's country.

It seemed as if our heritage had been all struggle. None of us had yet attained what the world calls success. We were all straining and leaping up frantically at the stars of our ancestor; but they still stared aloofly at us, like the impenetrable Sphinx.

It seemed a great pity that I was not, after all, to be the savior of the family, and that my dreams of the fame and fortune that not alone should lift me up, but all my people, were built upon a substance as shifting as sand and as shadowy as mist. For, if what Mr. Hamilton had said was true, there was, alas! no hope in me. Perhaps I was doomed to be the wife of a man like the fat, blond clerk at the yards, or even of Fred. To think now of Mr. Hamilton as a possible husband was to do so with a cynical jeer at my own past ingenuousness. Since that visit of his, I had been awakened, as it were, to the clear knowledge that this man could never be to me what I had so fondly dreamed. Well!

I don't know when the stars began to fade. They just seemed to wink out one by one in the sky, and it grew gray and haggard, as it does just before the dawn. Even in the dark the birds began to call to one another, and when the first pale streak from the slowly rising sun crept stealthily out of the east, these winged little creatures dropped to earth in search of food, and a small, soft, inquiring-eyed squirrel jumped right in the path before me, and stood with uplifted tail and pricked-up head, as if to question my presence there.

Perhaps it was the whistling chatter of the birds that awoke Fred. He said I called to him, but he was mistaken.

He was lying on his back, his head upturned on my lap, and suddenly he opened his eyes and stared up at me. Then slowly he sat up, and he leaned forward on the bench and covered his face with his hands. I thought he was crying, but presently he said to me in a low, husky voice:

"How long have we been here?" and I said:

"All night, Fred."

"Nora Ascough, you're a dead-game sport!" he answered.

XIX

It may sound strange, but I really felt very little the worse for that long night's vigil. I went home, took a cold bath, had breakfast in a near-by restaurant (one of those, ten, twenty, twenty-five-cent places), and went to work just the same as ever. What is more, I had a specially hard day at the yards, for of course Fred was not there, and I had to do a good part of his work.

Frank Hermann wanted to know just how I got away from Fred, and I told him just what had happened. He said admiringly:

"Gee! you're one corker, Nora!"

"Fred gave me my job," I said, but I may as well add that I felt rather proud. Not every girl can be called a "dead-game sport" and a "corker."

Hermann said he had told the men about the place who had seen me go home with Fred that he had joined us, and later had himself taken Fred home. I felt grateful to Hermann for that. Personally I cared very little what these stock-yard people thought of me. Still it was good of Frank to undertake to protect me. He was a "good sort," I must say.

One of the girls in the bus said as we were going home that evening that I looked "fagged out," so I suppose I had begun to show the effects of the night; but I was not aware of any great fatigue until I got on the street car. All the seats were taken, and I had to stand in a crush all the way home, holding to a strap. I was glad enough to get home, I can tell you.

I thought Lolly was in when I saw the light in my room, and that surprised me, because her hours were very irregular. She seldom came home for dinner, and often worked at night.

I suppose it was the surprise and shock of finding him there, and, of course, my real state of weakness, but I nearly fainted when I saw Mr. Hamilton in my room. His back was turned to the door when I went in, as he was looking at the books he had sent me. Then he turned around and said:

"Well, how's the wonderful girl?"

I couldn't answer him, and I must have looked very badly, for he came over to me quickly, took both my hands, and drew me down to the couch beside him. Then he said roughly:

"You see, you can't stand work like this. You're all trembling and pale."

I said hysterically:

"I'm trembling because you are here, and I'm pale because I'm tired, and I'm tired because I've been up all night long."

"What!" he exclaimed.

I nodded.

"Oh, yes. Fred was drunk, and he wanted me with him; so I walked with him in L---- Park, and then he fell asleep on a bench with his head on my lap."

He jumped to his feet, and looking up, I saw his face. It was so black with astounded fury that I thought he was going to strike me; but I was not afraid of him. I felt only a sudden sense of wonder and pain. His voice, though low, had a curious sound of suppressed rage.

"Do you mean to tell me that you have been out all night with that man?"

I looked into his face, and then I nodded, without speaking. He gave me a hard look, and then he laughed shortly, brutally.

"So you are _that_ sort, are you?" he said.

"Yes," I returned defiantly, "I am that sort. Fred was good to me. He took me on trust. If I had left him last night, he might have gone on drinking, or a policeman would have arrested him. You can't imagine the state he was in--just like a helpless child."

While I was speaking he kept staring at me. I was so nervous that I wrenched my hands together. And then I saw his face change, just as if it were broken, and in place of that hard, sneering expression there came that beautiful look that I had seen on his face that day on the train when he had asked me if I would like to go to school.

He came over and sat down again beside me on the couch. He took my hands in his, and held them as if he were warming them. Then I put my face against his arm and began to cry. He didn't say a word to me for the longest time. Then he asked me very gently to tell him all over again just what happened. So I did. He wanted to know if Fred had said anything offensive to me, or if he had been familiar or tried to kiss me. I said, "No; Fred is not that kind." If he had been, he asked me, what would I have done? I didn't know, I told him.

"You'd have permitted him to?" he demanded sharply, and I said I didn't think I would; but then, of course, one couldn't tell what a drunken man might do. He said that that was the whole point of the matter, and that I could see for myself that I had done a very foolish and dangerous thing.

By this time he was walking up and down. After a while, when he had gotten over his excitement and wrath about Fred, he shook up all the sofa pillows on the couch, and made me lie down. When I sat up, he lifted up my feet, and put them on the couch, too. So I had to lie down, and I was so tired and happy that he was there, and _cared_, that I would have done anything he ordered me to. Then he drew up a chair beside me, and began to talk again on the subject of my going to school. Goodness! I had thought that matter was settled. But, no; he had the persistency of a bull-dog in matters about which he cared.

He said it was nonsense for me to be expending my strength like this, when I ought to be studying and developing myself. He said association at my age meant everything; that I had the impressionable temperament of the artist, and was bound either to be benefited or hurt by the people with whom I associated.

I let him go on, because I loved to hear him talk, anyway, even though he was so cross about it. He kept frowning at me, as if he were administering a scolding, and driving the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left in a way he had when talking. When he was through, I said:

"If I go to school, will you come to see me, like this?"

"Of course I'll come to see you," he said. "Not--like this exactly; but I shall make it a point of coming to see you."

"Well, would I be alone with you ever?" I asked.

He said, yes, sometimes, but that I ought to know what boarding-schools were like. I smiled up at him at that, and he frowned down at me, and I said:

"I'd rather live like this, with all my besotted ignorance, and have you come to see me, and be with me all alone, just like this, than go to the finest boarding-school in the world."

He said, "Nonsense!" but he was touched, for he didn't say anything more about my going to school then. Instead, he began to urge me to leave my position at the yards. When I said I couldn't do that, he grew really angry with me. I think he would have gone then, for he picked up his hat; but I told him I hadn't had any dinner. Neither, of course, had he, as I had come in about six-thirty. So then I made him wait while I dressed, and he took me out to dinner.

There were a number of restaurants near where I lived, but he knew of a better place down-town; so we went there, by carriage, instead. On the way he asked me where I got the suit I had on, and I told him. Then he wanted to know what I paid for it, and I told him $12. It was a good little blue serge suit, and I had a smart hat to go with it. In fact, I was beginning to dress better, and more like American girls. I asked him if he liked my suit. He said roughly:

"No," and then he added, "it's too thin." After a moment he said:

"I'm going to buy you decent clothes first of all."

I had a queer feeling that so long as I took nothing from this man, I should retain his respect. It was a stubborn, persistent idea. I could not efface from my mind his bitter words of that day on the train, and I wanted above all things to prove to him that I cared for him only for himself and not for the things I knew he could give me and wanted to give me. I never knew a man so anxious to give a woman things as was Mr. Hamilton to do things for me from the very first. So now I told him that I couldn't let him get clothes for me. That made him angrier than ever, and he wouldn't speak to me all the rest of the way. While we were having dinner (he had ordered the meal without reference to me at all, but just as if he knew what I should like), he said in that rough way he often assumed to me when he was bent upon having his way about something:

"You want me to take you with me when I come to Chicago, don't you--to dinner, theaters, and other places?"

I nodded. I did want to go with him, and I was tremendously proud to think that he wanted to take me.

"Very well, then," he said; "you'll have to dress properly."

I couldn't find any answer to that, but I inwardly vowed that I would spend every cent I made above my board on clothes.

I think he was sorry for having spoken unkindly to me, because he ceased to urge me about the school, my position, my lodgings, which he did not like at all, and now my clothes. He made me tell him all over again for the third or fourth time about last night. He kept asking me about Fred, almost as if he were trying to trap me with questions, till finally I grew so hurt by some of his questions that I wouldn't answer him. Then again he changed the subject, and wanted to know what I had been writing. That was a subject on which he knew I would chatter fluently, and I told him how I had actually dared to submit my latest to a mighty publication in New York. He said he wished he were the editor. I said:

"Would you take my stories?"

"You better believe I would," he said.

"Why?"

"Well, why do you suppose?"

"Because you think my stories are good or because you like me--which?"

He laughed, and told me to finish my coffee.

I said:

"You must like me _some_, else you wouldn't have cared about Fred."

He tried to frown at me for that, but instead laughed outright, and said if it gave me any satisfaction to believe that, to go on believing it.

My happiness was dashed when he said he had to return to Richmond on the eleven o'clock train. I had been secretly hoping he would remain in Chicago a few days. When I faltered out this hope, he said rather shortly:

"I can only run down here occasionally for a day or a few hours at a time. My affairs keep me in Richmond."

Little things exhilarate me and make me happy, and little things depress me and make me sad. So while I was light-hearted a moment before, I felt blue at the thought of his going. I said to myself that this was how it would always be. He would always come, and he would always go, and I wondered if a day would ever come when he would ask me to go with him.

He saw that I was depressed, and began to talk teasingly:

"Do you know," he said--we were now at the steps of my boarding-house--"that you are a very fickle little person?"

"I? Why I'm foolishly faithful," I declared.

"I say you are fickle," he asserted with mock seriousness. "Now I know one chap that you used to think the world and all about, but whom you have completely forgotten. The poor little fellow came to me, and told me all about it himself."

I couldn't think whom in the world he could mean, and thought he was just joking, when he said:

"So you've forgotten all about your little dog, have you?"

"Verley!"

"Yes, Verley."

"Oh, you've seen him?"

I think it gave him all kinds of satisfaction to answer me as he did.

"I've got him. He's mine now--ours, shall we say?"

"Oh, did Dr. Manning give him to you?"

He laughed.

"Not much. He _sold_ him to me."

"He had no right to do that. Verley was my dog."

"But you owed Dr. Manning for your fare from Boston."

"That's true. Did he tell you that?"

"No, but I knew it, and I didn't like the idea of your owing anything to any one except--me," and he gave me one of his warmest smiles when he said that. "I did not see the doctor myself, but a friend arranged the matter for me. By the way, he owes you a considerable little sum over the amount he paid for your fare from Boston, though we are not going to bother collecting it. We'll let it go."

"What do you mean?"

"It seems he considered the dog a very expensive article. I paid him three hundred dollars for Verley, whose high-bred ancestry I very much doubt."

"Three hundred dollars! Oh, what a shame! He wasn't worth anything like that," I cried.

He said after a moment, during which he looked at me very steadily:

"Yes, he was worth that to me: he was--_yours_."

I caught my breath, I was so happy when he said that.

"Now I know you do like me," I said, "else you wouldn't say things like that."

"Nonsense!" he said.

"Why do you bother about me at all, then?" I asked.

He had put the key in the lock now. He didn't look up when he answered that, but kept twisting the key.

"I told you why. I'm interested in you--that's all," he said.

"Is that--_really_--all?" I asked tremulously.

"Yes," he said in a rough whisper; "that is really all, little girl."

"Well, anyway," I said, "even if you don't love me, I love you. You don't mind my doing that, do you?"

I could _feel_ his smile in the darkness of that little porch as he said:

"No, don't stop doing _that_, whatever happens. That would be a calamity hard to bear--now."

It's not much to have permission to love a person, who doesn't love you, but it was a happy girl who slept on the couch that night. Lolly came in after I did, but I made her sleep inside. She wanted to know why on earth I had all the pillows on the couch. I didn't answer. How could I tell her that I wanted them about me because _he_ had put them there?

In the morning, on the table, I found half a cigar that he had smoked. I rolled it up in tissue-paper and put it in the drawer where I kept only my most cherished treasures.

XX

Now that the lights no longer went out at ten, I did considerable writing at night. I had to work, however, under difficulties, for Lolly had no end of men callers. She had discouraged men calling on her at the Y. W. C. A., but now that we had a place of our own, she liked them to come. As she gaily put it to me one day: "Beaux make great meal tickets, Nora."

And then, too, she liked men. She told me once I was the only girl chum she had ever had, though she had had scores of men chums, who were not necessarily her admirers as well.

Lolly was a born flirt. Hermann was her slave and her shadow now, and so were several newspaper men and editors who seemed devoted to her. There was only one man, however, for whom she cared a "button," so she told me, and that was Marshall Chambers; and yet, she quarreled with him constantly, and never trusted him.