Chapter 2

"I'm afraid it's not good work," said she. "I'll wait to see if I am to do any of it over."

"No, thank you," said he. And he looked up--to find himself gazing at still another person, wholly different from any he had seen before. The others had all been women--womanly women, full of the weakness, the delicateness rather, that distinguishes the feminine. This woman he was looking at now had a look of strength. He had thought her frail. He was seeing a strong woman--a splendidly healthy body, with sinews of steel most gracefully covered by that fair smooth skin of hers. And her features, too--why, this girl was a person of character, of will.

He glanced through the pages. "All right--thank you," he said hastily. "Please don't stay any longer. Leave the other thing till to-morrow."

"No--it has to be done to-night."

"But I insist upon your going."

She hesitated, said quietly, "Very well," and turned to go.

"And you mustn't do it at home, either."

She made no reply, but waited respectfully until it was evident he wished to say no more, then went out. He bundled together his papers, sealed and stamped and addressed his letter, put on his overcoat and hat and crossed the outer office on his way to the door. It was empty; she was gone. He descended in the elevator to the street, remembered that he had not locked one of his private cases, returned. As he opened the outer door he heard the sound of typewriter keys. In the corner, the obscure, sheltered corner, sat the girl, bent with childlike gravity over her typewriter. It was an amusing and a touching sight--she looked so young and so solemnly in earnest.

"Didn't I tell you to go home?" he called out, with mock sternness.

Up she sprang, her hand upon her heart. And once more she was beautiful, but once more it was in a way startlingly, unbelievably different from any expression he had seen before.

"Now, really. Miss--" He had forgotten her name. "You must not stay on here. We aren't such slave drivers as all that. Go home, please. I'll take the responsibility."

She had recovered her equanimity. In her quiet, gentle voice--but it no longer sounded weak or insignificant--she said, "You are very kind, Mr. Norman. But I must finish my work."

"Haven't I said I'd take the blame?"

"But you can't," replied she. "I work badly. I seem to learn slowly. If I fall behind, I shall lose my place--sooner or later. It was that way with the last place I had. If you interfered, you'd only injure me. I've had experience. And--I must not lose my place."

One of the scrub women thrust her mussy head and ragged, shapeless body in at the door. With a start Norman awoke to the absurdity of his situation--and to the fact that he was placing the girl in a compromising position. He shrugged his shoulders, went in and locked the cabinet, departed.

"What a queer little insignificance she is!" thought he, and dismissed her from mind.

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--or to assist--courts to apply the law, so just in the general, to promoting injustice in the particular. And whenever he permitted conscience a voice in his internal debates--it was not often--he heard from it its usual servile approbation: How can the reign of justice be more speedily brought about than by making the reign of law--lawyer law--intolerable?

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 as you like. . . . No--in this case--let her stay on for the present."

"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 journey so beset with hopeless pitiful things as is the journey through life.

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 sharpened pencil suspended over the stenographic notebook. Long before she seated herself he had forgotten her except as machine. There followed a troubled hour, as he dictated, ordered erasure, redictated, ordered re-readings, skipped back and forth, in the effort to frame the secret agreement in the fewest and simplest, and least startlingly unlawful, words. At last he leaned forward with the shine of triumph in his eyes.

"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 money will go for building up civilization, instead of for beer and for bargain-trough finery to make working men's wives and daughters look cheap and nasty."

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 laugh of the clever man who has tried to believe his own sophistries and has failed. "Well--neither do I believe it," said he. "Now, to get the thing typewritten."

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; that her eloquent silences were screens for ignorance or boredom--and so on through the list of legends that prop the feminist cult.

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 will have Solomon's wives rolled into one. A harem at the price of a wife--or a--" He left the thought unfinished. It seemed an insult to this helpless little creature, the more rather than the less cowardly for being unspoken; for, no doubt her ideas of propriety were firmly conventional.

"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 view, he noted the peculiar construction of her frame--the beautiful lines of length so dextrously combined that her figure as a whole was not tall. He said, "A working woman--or man--needs health above all. Thank you again." And he nodded a somewhat curt dismissal. When she glided away and he was alone behind the closed door, he reflected for a moment upon the extraordinary amount of thinking--and the extraordinary kind of thinking--into which this poor little typewriter girl had beguiled him. He soon found the explanation for this vagary into a realm so foreign to a man of his high tastes and ambitions. "It's because I'm so in love with Josephine," he decided. "I've fallen into the sentimental state of all lovers. The whole sex becomes novel and interesting and worth while."

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. Norman's limousine was waiting at the curb. He, pausing in the doorway, glanced up and down the street, had an impulse to return and take the girl home. Then he smiled satirically at himself. Her lot condemned her to be out in all weathers. It would not be a kindness but an exhibition of smug vanity to shelter her this one night; also, there was the question of her reputation--and the possibility of turning her head, perhaps just enough to cause her ruin. He sprang across the wind-swept, rain-swept sidewalk and into the limousine whose door was being held open by an obsequious attendant. "Home," he said, and the door slammed.

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 what is honest and right and beneficial to my fellow men, I'd probably be plugging home under an umbrella--and to a pretty poor excuse for a home. But I was too wise to do that. I've spent this day, as I spend all my days, in helping the powerful rich to add to their wealth and power, to add to the burdens those poor devils out there in the rain must bear. And I'm rewarded with a limousine, and all the rest of it.

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 York. Once at the Federal Club old Galloway quoted with approval some essayist's remark that every clever human being was looking after and holding above the waves at least fifteen of his weaker fellows. Norman smiled satirically round at the complacently nodding circle of gray heads and white heads. "My observation has been," said he, "that every clever chap is shrewd enough to compel at least fifteen of his fellows to wait on him, to take care of him--do his chores--and his dirty work." The nodding stopped. Scowls appeared, except on the face of old Galloway. He grinned. He was one of the few examples of a very rich man with a sense of humor. Norman always thought it was this slight incident that led to his getting the extremely profitable--and shady--Galloway business.