XVII
Thefloors were done and dry. Elsie Jennings, who had come in to help, was putting the third coat of black upon the new book-shelves, and Moira was waiting for the delivery of her three last pieces of furniture, which completed the picture, for a time at least. Whether they came as they had been promised or not, the house-warming party was to be held that evening, with Elsie, Jade Sommers, and Arthur, her husband.
Arthur Sommers she had met as a printing salesman, visiting her office, and later had run across with Jade in a restaurant. He was a good sort, in his early thirties, jovial and proud of his plain citizenship, inclined to stoutness and much in love with his wife, the story writer. Elsie ran a shop in which she sold hand-made novelties and small house furnishings, that caught the sightseers from the States and uptown with their faintly futurist air. It was a Saturday in the Spring, and had the party been postponed two days it might have celebrated Moira’s birthday. But she did not divulge that fact.
“There,” said Elsie, “it’s done. And I think three coats will be enough.”
“Not so bad,” replied Moira. She stood making an inspection of her nearly finished home. The apartment itself was a discovery—quite a bargain—one huge room with tall windows, and a tiny bedroom and bath and kitchen closet, in an old five-story house, occupied by a small army of nondescript tenants.
“How good you look to me, old barn!” was her fervent thought, which Elsie, watching her, divined. “If those chairs don’t come pretty soon,” she went on aloud, “they won’t come at all, and somebody will have to sit on the floor. I’m going out to shop for food.”
“Yes, go ahead,” said Elsie. “This box of china has got to be unpacked and washed. I’ll do that in the meantime.”
Moira had been in and out of the building on many occasions during the past week, but her curiosity had been slight regarding her neighbours. She couldn’t afford to be particular about them, so it seemed to her pointless to be curious. As she went downstairs, however, on the way to the grocery, a name on the door to a small room caught her attention.
“Miles Harlindew!” she said, and found her memory flying to years before at Thornhill, and her lips repeating some lines about:
“All shining parallels of track,All brown roads leading up.”
“All shining parallels of track,All brown roads leading up.”
“All shining parallels of track,
All brown roads leading up.”
She had begun to see the man’s verses in the literary magazines when she couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, and many of them had sung themselves into her memory. One or two had given her an experience of discovery. But for the last few years she had found no more of his work. She had imagined him for some reason, as people are likely to think of anybody at all who gets things published, as successful, comfortable, arrived.
“He must be getting along in years,” she thought. “Poor fellow!” For she knew that room corresponded to her bedroom above, a mere cubby-hole, so small that she had to sit on her bed to look in the dressing table mirror.
It was her first party in years, and she did not need the cocktails—which Arthur Sommers had brought in a silver flask—to give her a thrill. She fell in love with her guests and charmed them into something like wonder. So this was the unapproachable Mary Smith!
“Oh, I’ve got distinguished literary neighbours,” she announced. “Miles Harlindew is on the floor below.”
A ripple of amusement greeted her remark.
“But I remember some stunning poems of his,” she went on.
“Oh, yes,” put in Jade, “but nobody knows he’s alive these days. He doesn’t even know it himself.”
“Come off,” said her husband. “I see him often, very much alive. Any man who does his duty violating the Eighteenth Amendment as regularly as Miles, has my vote. What do you say if I get him.”
“If he’s sober,” put in Jade.
Sommers glanced at Moira for consent, and she gave it with a brisk nod. These people knew more about the man than she and no doubt were justified in what they said; nevertheless she felt a vague resentment. What would they say if they knew all there was to be known about herself? Experience had already taught her that beneath the literal and semi-bohemian veneer of her friends there was a stern core of respectability.
Harlindew came and was sober. He was painfully and tiresomely sober, and she heartily wished they had saved some of Arthur’s cocktails. He sat down stiffly and ventured commonplaces when spoken to. She found him a satisfactory physical specimen, showing more years than she expected, in premature lines. He was neither tall nor short, of the type that never acquires flesh, somewhat shaggy behind the ears, with a lop-sided face. One jaw was stronger than the other, one eye keener than the other, one brow more pleasing in conformation than the other—and these inequalities were not all on the same side of his face.
When she recited his verses, he was not pleased. He depreciated them vigorously and was very uncomfortable. He called them the errors of his youth. The one thing that he took extraordinary interest in was a talk with Sommers about business. She then watched his gestures and animation with pleasure. They made a change in the man’s whole appearance.
“I’m thinking seriously of going into business,” he announced in a grave voice, and seemed a little disappointed that this statement was not received with greater acclaim. The evening ended, dampened, on the whole, by his presence.
“How fiercely shy he is about his work,” said Moira to the others, as they stood at the door ready to go.
“Big night last night,” said Arthur, in a stage whisper. “Feeling rocky.”
“I hope you don’t meet him somewhere at three in the morning,” added Elsie. “He’ll reel it off to you then until you’ll be sorry.”
Yet she thought more about what she saw of Harlindew, during his short stay in her rooms, than of anything else that had happened that night. He was the only young man she had met in New York whom she wanted to talk to. It was, possibly, a childish delusion, a fancy arising out of the fact that both of them were miserable about something, obviously about something it was impossible to discuss.
A few days later she met him on the stairs, and he blushed and stammered:
“I believe you are the only person alive who still cares anything for my poetry.”
He was gone too quickly for her to answer. She did not see him again for a week, and when she did she invited him to tea. In an hour he was as much at his ease as though he had known her forever, and stayed so long he expressed the fear of having bored her. Soon after that she was seeing him two or three times a week.
He came because she listened to his monologues. Moira found that this was the man’s characteristic. Shy to the point of morbidness in company, she no sooner began to encourage him alone than he talked without end. His ideas were neither very well thought out nor very clearly expressed, but they stimulated her. He poured forth the most curious tag-ends of experience, made extraordinary confessions with few traces of shame, chattered cynically, humorously, passionately and autocratically by turns about writing and all the arts, and then stopped suddenly in the midst of things, frightened to silence by the realization of her presence and the boldness of his own tongue. Only one thing could have enabled him to indulge this luxury and keep coming—a knowledge of her interest, and she gave it honestly. She saw that the inner life of this young man and her own had been similar. He soon passed from Miss Smithto Mary, and from Mary to Madonna, and finding that the last was to his taste, he held to it. Before long he was giving full rein to a natural streak of fantastic high spirits and messing about her place like a privileged person.
She was, for some reason, wholly delighted by all this. The crushed spirit he had shown at their first meeting had seemed tragically inappropriate and she was glad to be drawing anybody out who needed it. The man, set beside most of the people she had known, was a freak, certainly, but he was not an impossible freak. And he differed from such people as Selden Van Nostrand in depth, breadth and sensitive contact with life. With a perfectly conventional background, he had simply, she thought, allowed his spiritual life to express itself in his physical life from an early age. His courtesy was innate and usually unfailing, on some occasions oppressive—but it was a quality she would not have liked to find lacking. His flattery she had to accept as simply as she could; he exhausted his vocabulary in finding terms for her beauty. It seemed an ever-renewed miracle to him, which he had to talk about to enjoy.
“Madonna,” he said one day, “you should be some queen like Margaret of Navarre. I should like to be one of the story tellers of your court. It is a commentary on our beastly times that such a one as you is a stenographer.”
“If I had the courage—as you have—I wouldn’tbe,” she laughed, “but it scares me to think of going my own way.”
“Ah, that is one thing I came to ask you about. I must have told you that I intend going into business.”
“But why?” she asked, “why should you, after all?”
“Well, when we are young we expect all things to come to us. We don’t want them just to-day, but to-morrow?—we’ll whistle and down they will come from the sky. That’s what we think. In my case, however, they haven’t come. Ergo, I have lived disgracefully. Now I must begin to die gracefully by turning to work. Yet isn’t it possible to look upon the grotesque preoccupation of the American male as a trade, a form of artisan-ship, a deed of the left hand? I know a man who sells advertising, and who has more confidence in me than I should dare to have in myself. He is decent enough to think that I can supply what he wants. Why not try it?”
“Aren’t you writing anything nowadays, Miles?”
“Nothing,” he said, with a shrug. “Book reviews! What are book reviews? Every time I have to go to see an editor and ask for a book, it makes me feel as though selling hairpins from house to house is more respectable. Besides, the literary world has forgotten me. I only fill up space.”
“Nonsense,” said she vehemently. “And you’re wrong about business. Business is pretty awful. I suppose you’ll have to find that out for yourself.”
“Therearemore delightful occupations, true. I have always had an ambition to be a cab-driver. It is the sole profession in which one becomes a licensed eavesdropper. Excellent for the literary man. You know people mind the cabby no more than if he were the horse. I mean a horse-cab, of course ... only in such leisurely vehicles do people expose their souls, their most intimate secrets. But I haven’t the cabby’s training. From things you have said, I fancied you knew horses.”
“A little. When I was a young girl I had some playmates who owned them.”
“Noble beasts. I’m sure they would break the neck of any poor fool who had condescended to Pegasus.”
“The trouble with you, Miles, is that you don’t condescend often enough, nor persistently enough. You ought to be writing poems at this moment. You should have been doing it these last five years.”
“The impulse to creation begins with a peculiar tickling of the tummy that I haven’t felt for ages.”
Her eagerness to start him writing usually came to nothing in some such joke. At other times he would grow more serious.
“No, Madonna, I cannot. The blossom of lifeis gone—only the bare stalk is left. It may flower again, but it must be watered and fed. My affair with poetry has ended like so many marriages—in disillusion. That is rough, when one realizes that poetry demands the hardest labour for the smallest return of any occupation on earth. It takes all one’s youth, at the expense of practical things—and one is left with a handful of frail results that are hardly more substantial than memories. But the greater the early love, the more complete must be the separation, and one must recognize it when it comes. One must renounce; in that lies the only hope of renewal. People are mistaken about life being a steady progress from youth to age, anyway. It’s a constant shuttling from age to youth and back again. We all grow senile about every seven years, and then young again. I am in a senile period. Why should I do poetry the dishonour of pursuing her in such a state? Bah, it is better to do anything else. You mustn’t be impatient with me. I do not flower very often—but neither does the century plant. And it is counted among the world’s wonders.”
“Well,” she said consolingly, “perhaps you are right. Better a little that is good than a lot that is indifferent. All I know is that there are reputations built on no more talent than yours.”
“If I could believe that,” he said thoughtfully, “I should not surrender. But I can’t believe it.I shall have to squeeze business for a time, as one squeezes an orange—for the golden juice. I shall hoard it, as if every ounce meant a golden hour. Then we shall see. My God! Madonna,” he burst forth. “Fifty dollars a week—there in my hand,every week. Think of it. All my life fifty dollars has seemed like the other side of the moon.”
The next day he began the work of which he had talked so much. She had known him a month. Now for some time, she was to see little of him. He left early and returned late, and with the long summer evenings at hand, she began to paint.
It was very hard to drive herself to work. Her hands were stiff; her senses were clumsy, and her first efforts resulted in little more than a waste of valuable materials. She needed everything—models, encouragement, criticism. These even Elsie or Miles could have furnished after a fashion, but she dared not ask them—she was not ready for that. She contented herself with trials at still life, with experiments, with attempts at self-portraiture.
Then slowly the love of simply applying the brush, the fever of trying and trying again for the effects she wanted, the joy of feeling momentary hints of power, and of succeeding now and then with some little thing, quickened her interest, until the time came when she found herself standing up to her canvas until it had grown almost dark.
She went with Elsie one night to the theatre and when they returned to Elsie’s rooms, Moira confessed that she had begun to work. They talked until three in the morning. She came away elated, and still sleepless, not the least bit tired. The mere divulging of her modest ambitions had started her blood bounding, and she swung buoyantly down the street.
A block or two from her house she heard voices, and against the glow of a lamp she saw the figure of a policeman leaning over a man who lay on the pavement luxuriously supporting his head from the flagging with folded arms.
“Come on, now, get up,” said the officer. “I’ve fooled long enough. If you don’t get up I’ll take you where you’ll have a long rest.”
The voice that replied was unmistakably Miles Harlindew’s. “Preposterous,” he said, running his consonants together. “I am lying on m’own prop’ty. It was legally d’vised to me by God the Father. Six feet by three of solid earth. That’s my allotment. You’ve spoiled it by putting concrete on it, but I’ll be a good fellow. Won’t complain. It’s all right. Just go away.”
“Get up, I tell ya.”
“What! Can’t a man lie on his own pat-patrimony, you blamed ass? It’s goin’ to be mine f’r eternity, and I choose to use it now!”
“We’ll see who’s a blamed ass, young feller. Come on!”
Moira interrupted as the patrolman was about to grasp Harlindew’s shoulder.
“Officer,” she said hurriedly, “I know this man. He lives in the same house I am in. I think I can get him to go with me, if you won’t take him.”
“Sure. That’s all right. I don’t want him if he’ll get out of here. I’ve had this bird before, and it might go hard with him.”
“Thank you,” she said fervently. Miles was on his feet in a second, a little unsteady but effusively polite, repeating the words “divine Madonna” in a voice that must have carried to many windows.
“Officer,” he said, “meet Madonna—no, meet Ariadne. Ariadne, the night is a labyrinth—you bring me a thread.”
At his door he insisted upon going up with her—“just for a second”—and she could not refuse him. He sat on the couch, pursuing a strange, disjointed tale of the day’s adventures. He told twice about a steel-worker he had met in a bootlegger’s house, who once had worked on the Woolworth, forty stories up. “Said he never went up on the steel in the morning without three whiskies—if he had he’d a fallen off,” said Miles. “That’s good—if he had he’d a fallen off.” The idea seemed to fill him with extraordinary delight. But other things were on his mind also. Some one he called “the damn buzzard at the office” came in for a large share of abuse.
“If you want to see the damned buzzard to-morrow, you’d better go downstairs and sleep,” she suggested. “You won’t feel much like work.”
“Work? Never mind work.... Valuable man.... Know my own value.... Not at all sleepy, anyway....” A moment later while she was out of the room he stretched full length on the couch and fell asleep.
She did not have the heart to wake him in the morning. If her own racket, as she flew about preparing to leave, had no effect upon his deep unconsciousness, it would probably take too much effort anyway. At noon, however, she found him just beginning to stir about, making coffee in her little kitchen, for which he apologized, but with no sheepishness. He seemed, on the contrary, to find excessive enjoyment in having awakened in a strange place, invaded by a lovely hostess. She took the rôle of cook out of his hands.
“Well,” he said when they were seated, “I suppose I am in a pickle. Must say something to Jones. Wonder what it’ll be. All’s fair, I imagine, in war and business. Any old alibi goes.”
“But you’re a valuable man, Miles, you know,” she mocked, “as you said several times last night.”
His smile was a trifle wan. It was too soon by all means to bid good-bye to the other side of the moon—that regular fifty a week.
“You know, I’ve never had to be anywhere Ididn’t want to be, in ... in God knows when,” he declared. “Not easy to get the habit. But I’m doing well down there. Honest, I’m sort of proud about it.”
Moira thought that he seemed to be worrying very little about his remissness, not even very actively at work on the problem of finding an excuse. And it was late, even for that. She almost hated to undeceive him, it concerned him so slightly. Finally she said:
“I telephoned your Jones. I told him you were too ill to come down. Was that right?”
But obviously this service was in his eyes incalculably great. The look he gave her made her want to laugh. She had not thought it possible for a man to be so pathetically helpless, so profoundly grateful for an act of friendly foresight.
“How did it happen, Miles?”
“Oh, I think the monotony got on my nerves. Then yesterday everything went wrong; and I thought five o’clock would never come. Eight hours! By Jove, it sometimes seems like eight years.”
“Yes, it does,” she replied, remembering her first months of it.
“Do you get used to it?” he asked anxiously.
“Oh, yes, it comes to be a good deal like breathing.”