XV
Theonly things she saw at first were as dreary and tragic as herself. It began the moment she left Thornhill, with her last vision of Ellen’s agonizing, tear-stained face hiding at her window on the circular drive. Then came the ride alone, through hot rows of dusty, dull brick houses; the terror-inspiring sight of lives straitened and stagnant through poverty; the abysmal reek of the neighbourhood, near a glue factory, where she left her car in the garage, with instructions to return it on the morrow, and engaged an express man to take her trunk; the long file of weary, hopeful people with little green bills in their hands at the bank—worshippers in the modern temple; the immigrants at Union Station, sprawling on the circular benches about the pillars, hemmed in by their squalid baggage and children; the herding of exhausted, stupid families from the country trains to the street-cars and from the street-cars to the trains; the smoke-patined inferno of the city sweating in the heat after the clean beauty of her home....
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 takethe “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 HalBlaydon 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 citystirred 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 paintedflorist’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. Howeasy 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?â€
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.... Inher 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 theTimesbefore 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.â€
In this atmosphere of staggering piety began the career of “Mary Smith.â€