XVI
Bythe 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 muchthe 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 youngand 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 sympatheticallyabout 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 allabout 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 loversad 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 denythese 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.