But it was a real gain to her that she did not join the party hurriedly. She might have resisted the urgings of Braun longer—even after she had read largely pro and con, even after she had familiarized herself with the traditional theoretical "objections to Socialism," and, weighing them against the facts of life, which she saw about her, the bent and aged women of thirty, the young men smitten with tuberculosis, the thousands of babies that never grow up, had found them light indeed—she might still have held back longer from the personal and entirely illogical reason that Walter had never joined if it had not been for a dramatic meeting with her old boss—Jake Goldfogle.
His shop had failed in her first strike. She had lost all track of him.
About nine o'clock one bitter winter night she was walking home along Canal Street. The row of pushcarts, lit by flaring oil lamps, were doing a scant business. It was too cold for sidewalk bargaining. She was moved by a deep pity for these men and women, who were forced out on such a night, to hawk their wares. It was not only the victims of the sweat-shop who find living a hard matter. Suddenly her notice fell on a dilapidated pedler, who was holding out a meagre tray of notions. He did not have even a pushcart. A heavy black patch hid one side of his face, but she recognized Jake at once. Her first impulse was to hurry past with averted face. But his shivering poverty—he had no overcoat—checked her.
"Hello, Mr. Goldfogle."
He turned his unbandaged eye on her in bewilderment. His frost-bitten face flushed with resentment.
"Come on and have a cup of coffee," she said. "I want to talk with you."
The idea of coffee stopped the curses which were gathering on his tongue, and, ashamed of his lack of spirit, he followed her. They sat down opposite each other at a dingy little tea-room table. Jake remembered Yetta as a frightened shop-girl. The last time she had seen him, he had threatened her with arrest. He had solemnly sworn that he would never give her back her job. And now she was giving him a cup of coffee. He drank it in silence. Once upon a time he had dreamed of marrying her as though it would be a great condescension.
The coffee warmed him so that he told his story. The failure had been complete. He and his sister and brother-in-law had gone back to the machine. The sister had given out first with the East Side commonplace—a cough. For a while the two men had stuck together, once more a little money had begun to pile up. Then a belt broke; the flying end had caught Jake in the face. He lifted up the black patch and showed Yetta the horrible scar where his eye had been. When he had come out of the hospital, his brother-in-law had disappeared. For a while Jake had hoped to get some compensation out of his employer, but he had fallen into the clutches of a "shyster lawyer," who compromised the case out of court for a hundred dollars and kept seventy-five for his fee. This had happened about a month before. Jake had been dragging out a miserable existence, sleeping in the lowest doss-houses,and of the stock he had bought with his twenty-five dollars, the half-filled tray was all that remained. And if Yetta had not started the strike, he would have been a rich man. "Und I vas in luv wit you, Yetta," he ended.
It happened that she had just received her month's pay, so she was able to buy Jake an overcoat and give him a few dollars for meals and lodging. And the next day she found work for him as a night watchman.
But although his gratitude for this job was voluminous it did not ease Yetta's conscience in the matter. There was something sardonically grotesque in the encounter. It convinced her, more surely than books could ever have done, of the Socialist doctrine that all life is knit into one whole; that Jake, just as much as Mrs. Cohen, had been a victim of a vicious system.
"As long as this bitter industrial competition continues," she wrote to Walter, "there are bound to be such pitiful specimens as Jake. You see a lot in the papers nowadays about how the trusts are eliminating competition. The more I think about that the more horrible it seems. They are eliminating competition in the sales departments, in the distribution of the product, because there the waste is in dollars and cents. But in production—where the competitive waste is only human beings—the struggle is as bitter as ever. The high-salaried, 'gentlemanly' managers of the different plants of a trust coöperate in selling and in buying raw material, but in the actual work of the mills they have to compete to see who can exploit the workers hardest—just as Jake was driven to overwork us girls. I don't see any possible cure except Socialism, and I'm going to join the party."
Many months later, when the courier brought this letter into the camp among the ancient ruins, the exile opened it with feverish hands, ran his fingers down page after page until he came to Mabel's name. It was not until he had read this part several times that he gave any attention to the fact that Yetta had become a Socialist.
It was shortly before her visit to Cos-Cob that Isadore Braun asked Yetta to marry him.
In a way he was almost ashamed of himself for doing so. His tempestuous desire for her was something he could not understand, something which forcibly escaped from the control of reason, to which all his life had been submitted.
Yetta had walked into his cold, impersonal life in an utterly disturbing way. It was as if some sudden leak had let a glare of sunlight into a photographer's dark room. All the care which had been expended in fitting that laboratory for a specific—and valuable—piece of work was rendered useless.
With the methodical forethought of his race and the narrow vision of a fanatic, Isadore had arranged his future. He had planned not only each day's work, but his life-work. With dogged singleness of purpose he had trained himself to be an efficient machine. Such an irrational thing as Love had no place in his scheme. To be sure, he believed that marriage was good. Sometime—say at thirty-five—he would look around for a convenient comrade, a woman of similar ideals and purpose, and they would mate without any seriousderangement in the life of either. But he condemned Romance. It was irrational.
Romance had accepted the challenge and had worsted him. His first interest in the Yetta of the vest-makers' strike had turned into respect and admiration—and finally into something much more serious and dynamic. It was not until he caught himself neglecting some important work to attend a meeting where nothing called him except the chance for a few words with her that he discovered what was the matter with him. Again and again he rallied all his intellectual forces for the combat, but always after a short struggle he found himself flat on his back, with Romance performing the dance of victory on his chest.
At first he tried to comfort himself with the thought that after all Yetta was just such a mate as his intellect would have chosen. She also was a Socialist. But he was too honest with himself to admit this sophistry. It was not because of her theories that the flame burned within him. He would have been just as helpless, just as irrationally enslaved, if she had been a chorus girl. She was not reason's choice, for the intellect is colorless and Yetta was resplendent.
To admit the dominance of this irrational emotion was to abandon all his gods, to turn his back on his only religion. It is hard for most of us to realize the deep tragedy of Isadore's position. Few of us believe ardently in anything. We have a comfortable ability to keep our faith in things we know are false, a lazy credulity for exploded theories. We go on burning our incense at shrines the gods have deserted. We pretend to a love of liberty we do not feel. We are inclined to laugh at the spectacle of a man naïveenough really to care, to rend himself in a passionate quest for Truth—and may God have mercy on such of us.
It was a month or more before Isadore surrendered to unreason. It was a defeat which told on him in shrunken cheeks. There were some who thought he was sick. But he knew better. Absolute reason, the god on whom he had staked his faith, was crumbling. Longman's talk about the lack of logic in life had seemed to him drivel. But now reason—the all-powerful deity—had gone down before the non-intellectual gleam in a young woman's eye, had turned tail and fled before the curve and color of a cheek.
He tried to propose by letter. Night after night in his dismal, unkempt furnished room, he laid out his writing-paper. Sometimes he scribbled furiously, pouring it all out on paper predestined to be crumpled up and thrown away. More often he chewed the end of his pen in a sort of mechanical tongue-tiedness.
And then one day—to his complete surprise—he proposed to her in the office of the Woman's Trade Union League. They had gone into the committee-room to consult over the "demands" for the Skirt-makers' Union. Yetta had drawn up a rough copy and Isadore was to put them into more legal shape. They were leaning together over the big table under the great picture of Jeanne d'Arc, when the grace of Yetta's wrist intruded between his consciousness and the troubles of the skirt-makers. He was always discovering some such new attractiveness about her.
"Good God!" he exclaimed, straightening up in vexation of spirit.
"What's the matter?" Yetta asked.
Isadore realized that this was neither the time nor the place, that neither of them was in the right mood, but he could not help telling her.
Yetta stopped him as soon as her amazement had given place to understanding. With the simple directness which was her most outstanding characteristic, she refused even to consider his suggestion. Emphatically she did not love him.
For a moment it seemed tremendously important to Isadore to light a cigarette without letting his hand give way to its insane desire to tremble. When it was lit, he looked Yetta squarely in the eyes and knew there was no use in argument.
"Well," he said, after a few puffs, "let's finish up these demands."
The incident brought their cordial intimacy to an end. Yetta no longer called him by his first name. As before, their work threw them frequently together. Yetta, at first, was afraid of a fresh outbreak—and so was Isadore. He had lost faith in his self-control. But no outsider could have guessed the constraint which underlay their comradely intercourse.
Isadore was as much in love as Walter had been with Mabel, but he was of a more masterful disposition. The Work, to which he and Yetta had dedicated their lives, was more important than personal pain. When the business of the day required him to see her, he did not shirk it, but he no longer sought her out. If she did not love him, that ended it. He did not want the hollow mockery of friendship.
Yetta's heart was full to overflowing with her romantic dream of Walter. Isadore, the real, the daily, had no chance. If some one had asked her about him,she would have described him in glowing terms, with an enthusiastic tribute to his unusual loyalty and ability. Her respect for him was deep. There was no man of her race nor near her own age whom she held in such high esteem. But when it came to loving him,—unfortunately he was real.
His proposal had seemed to her almost preposterous. Not that she felt herself too good for him. On the contrary her love for Walter had increased her very real humility. It was the concreteness of his offer that shocked her.
She rarely looked forward to Walter's return, and when she did, it was with no definite visualizing thought of marriage. The concept of sex was vague to her—and decidedly fearsome. Not even Harry Klein, her first lover—and she always thought of him as an incident in a dim and very remote past—had really stirred her woman's nature. He had appealed to her as an instrument, a key by which to escape from her dungeon. The sentiments, which his meagre caresses had raised, had by the fright of the adventure been driven back in dismay.
Sometimes, to be sure, a sort of sweet dizziness overcame her when she remembered how Walter had kissed her hand. The spot below the middle finger of her left hand which his lips had touched was a holy place. But more often she thought of his words. When in her dreams he seemed nearest, he was halfway across the room, in the big leather chair, while she was curled up on the window-seat. She was not yet twenty-one. Her girlhood had been sacrificed to the machine. Orderly, symmetrical development had been impossible. Now that she was a woman in body, inmind, in work, her imagination was still in the first flower of adolescence.
On the mantelpiece of his old room, where she lived, a snapshot of the white men of the Expedition leaned against the cow-faced god of the Haktites. Like Saul of old, Walter towered head and shoulders above his mates. Khaki and a pith helmet are not exactly silver armor—but to Yetta he seemed the Shining Prince. And Isadore wanted her to live with him in an East Side flat.
If falling in love with her had disturbed Isadore, his inability to put her out of his mind after her emphatic refusal troubled him a thousand times more. He got no ease from his pain except in work. The anxiety of his friends increased. But, brushing aside their protests, he sought out ever new activities. He hated to be idle, he came to fear being alone in his room. But not even the most strenuous endeavor to forget relieved him.
In the beautifully illogical way life has, help came to Isadore from a source he would never have dreamed of. He came home early one night to write an article for theForwaertz. To his dismay he found that he had left his notes in the office. The article would have to wait, and here he was with nothing to do, alone in his room, where of all places he found it hardest to escape from the aching hunger of his heart, the sad confusion of his thoughts.
It was not much of a room—an iron cot, a big deal table, a few cheap chairs and bookcases. It was not even decently clean. In the five years he had lived there he had been quite oblivious to its sordidness. But of late it had become abhorrent to him. He wasalready half undressed. The bitter summer heat had driven the tenement dwellers out on the street. The perspiring humanity which crowded the sidewalks offered no comfortable escape.
He turned to his bookcases. But he needed something of more compelling interest than the census and immigration reports to fill the time till sleep would come. Most of his little library were reference books, the rest he had read and reread. On the bottom shelf was a bundle he had never unwrapped. They were books Walter had given him after one of their discussions over the meaning of Life. He had never read them, because he was sure he would find no interest in the hodge-podge, haphazard kind of thinking which Walter seemed to enjoy. He pulled them out now—at least they would offer the interest of novelty. The first book he opened was Henri Bergson'sL'Evolution Créatrice. Walter, as was his custom, had annotated it copiously. On the fly-page he had written, "A superb discussion of the limitations of Pure Reason." The phrase caught Isadore's eye as he listlessly read the note. Was not this "limitation" of reason the very thing that was troubling him?
No book that he had read in years seemed to vibrate so compellingly with a sense of actuality. This was partly due no doubt to the master craftsmanship of the author. But very likely it would have made no impression on Isadore if he had read it when Walter had asked him to. The jar and conflict of the last few months had opened up the compartments of his brain to a long-lost receptivity. The facts of life had shaken his intellectual structure until he was prepared to understand.
This suave and erudite Frenchman was calmly announcing that the Age of Reason was a myth, rationalism a superstition. From every field of human knowledge Bergson was gathering his evidence, from the microscopic data of biology to the gigantic stellar facts beyond our vision, with merciless logic he was proving that the instrument with which we reason is not divine. "The God which has failed you," he said to Isadore, "is a false god. The brain, with which you created it, is only a faulty animal instrument, as liable to error as your eyes, for which you have been compelled to buy rectifying glasses."
While the message of Bergson is iconoclastic, a titanic warfare against the formal gods, it is by no means destructive. It holds a more magnificent, a more humanly satisfying optimism than metaphysics has dared, a promise of greater intimacy with the living truth than cold reason ever formulated. Above all it offered to Isadore to restore his self-respect.
He had to refill his lamp before he finished the book. And when he had reached the end, he could not sleep. A strange bodily unrest seized him. He wanted to get away. When the heavens opened and a great light shone upon Saul of Tarsus, he felt at once the need of going out to some distant desert place to rearrange his life in accordance with the new light. Isadore also had need of an Arabia.
Some time before he had received an invitation to visit a Socialist magazine writer named Paulding at his lake-side camp in the Adirondacks. Although Isadore knew the invitation had been sincere, that he would be welcome, he had refused it, because in his troubled frame of mind he had been frightened by thebare idea of idleness. He had been afraid to leave the rush of work. Now there was nothing he wanted more. So as dawn was breaking over the city, he packed his bag, putting in with care the books Walter had given him, and telegraphing that he had changed his mind, set out.
It was the first real vacation he had ever taken. All the "country" he had seen had been from car windows and the crumpled patches one encounters on labor-union picnics. The camp was the barest of log-cabins. Mrs. Paulding was also a writer, and all the mornings his hosts were busy over their typewriters. So Isadore was much by himself. It was an entirely new experience for him to chop firewood. It took a week or more before he lost his diffidence before the pine trees. It was even longer before he became sufficiently familiar with the canoe to enjoy being out of sight of the landing. Paulding was an enthusiastic nature lover, and the struggles and adventures of the myriad animals of the forest and the lake which he pointed out were like enchanting fairy stories. Isadore had read such things in books, but it was endlessly strange for him to watch them in process. And all this strangeness helped him to the rest which, in spite of his denials, he desperately needed.
Gradually, as the weeks slipped by, he fought his way to a new outlook on life. Bergson and the pragmatists had shaken him out of his intellectual rut. His dogmatism had resulted from his manner of life. He had begun to think about social problems before he had come into intimate contact with social facts. His development had been the opposite of Yetta's.She had begun with facts and had judged all theories by them. He, having accepted a philosophy while still in the cloistered life of college, had been too busy preaching it to have much time to observe the complex reality of life. Bergson and his love for Yetta had jolted him out of this attitude. He was man enough to see his error and correct it.
When he returned to the city in the fall, his comrades noticed the change in him. His former domineering conviction that he was right had given place to a gentler, more tolerant, and smiling self-confidence. He was no longer a doctrinaire. He was less cocksure, but more certain. His native sympathy with suffering humanity, which had been the real motive of his Socialism and which for years he had suppressed as sentimental, came to life again. It was in his public speaking that the new man showed clearest. He no longer made his appeal solely to reason; there was more red blood in his discourse, more pulsing life in his words. He had come to see that his hearers must feel as well as think. His Socialism had lost some of its sharp definitions, some of its logical simplicity, but it had come to bear a closer similitude to life.
One day, shortly after his return, while walking, down the Bowery with a friend, he stopped and gave a nickel to an alcoholic-looking tramp. His friend expostulated. Such erratic almsgiving was worse than useless. It encouraged vagrancy; it was unscientific, unreasonable. Suddenly Isadore realized the change which had come over him. He grinned defiantly. "The poor devil," he explained, "looked as if he wanted a drink." His friend was scandalized. But if Walter had heard of the incident, he wouldhave rejoiced as the Angels in Heaven rejoice when a lost lamb finds the fold.
The change in Isadore had been more concrete than the acceptation of a new outlook on life. Up in the mountains he had questioned not only his metaphysics, but his habits. He had pondered over the practical tactics of Socialism as well as its philosophy. The loosening of his fundamental concepts had solidified his attitude towards practical problems. The rather diffuse propaganda work he had been doing no longer satisfied him. He wanted to concentrate on one tangible thing. And it seemed to him that what the movement needed more than anything else was a daily English paper. Back in New York, with a new and unconquerable enthusiasm, he set himself to this task.
But if his new point of view had healed his intellectual humiliation, it in no wise softened the torture of Yetta's indifference. Day after day, month after month, he lived with the ache of his love. But he came to laugh more readily, became less of a machine and more of a man.
It was several months after Yetta's refusal before he reopened the subject. He did it by a letter—so worded that it required no reply. He would not bother her, he wrote, with repeated urgings. He could not see the use of pleading. They were grown up, too serious-minded to act such a comedy. But he wanted her to know that he was steadfast. If in the future her regard for him grew into the love he hungered for, he trusted that she would tell him. And so the matter rested.
Other suitors sprang up a-plenty, and their noisy importunity made Yetta very thankful to Isadore for his dignified reserve.
The second summer after Walter had left, a desperate and successful strike of the cloak-makers brought Yetta's name once more into the papers. Mrs. Karner used the opportunity to open a new line of work to Yetta.
Mr. Karner ownedThe Star—the "yellowest" paper in the city. It was not only vulgar to the edge of obscenity, it was notoriously corrupt in politics. Being a one-cent paper, it of course posed as a "friend of the working-man," but it stood—unless the other side had collected an unusually large campaign fund—for Tammany Hall and the traction interests.
One morning at breakfast—while the cloak-makers' strike was a "live" news item—Mr. Karner spoke enviously of a woman who gave sentimental advice to love-lorn damsels on the magazine page of his keenest rival.
"I wish I could find some counter attraction," he said. "Our circulation among working girls is pitiful."
"Why don't you try Yetta Rayefsky?" Mrs. Karner suggested. "All the East Side girls know her. Do you happen to be advocating trade-unions this month?"
"Mildly—as usual."
"Yetta is keen on that. You remember her. Shewas out at Cos-Cob last summer. Rather caught your eye, I think."
"That little Jewess? She was good-looking. Has she any other qualifications as a journalist?"
Mrs. Karner shrugged her shoulders.
"I thought you prided yourself on developing raw material."
Two days later Yetta was summoned to Mr. Karner's office. She went to the appointment, wondering what the great newspaper man could want of her—hoping that she might interest him in her girls.
"Glad to see you," Mr. Karner said cordially as she was ushered into his beautifully furnished sanctum. "This cloak-makers' strike is a big story. But we're not making the most of it. There's more in it than news copy.
"There ought to be something for our magazine page. I don't know whether you've ever read it, but it's the page that gets the women. They're not interested in arguments—not much in facts. It's the human interest story—something to make them cry—that gets over with them. About their own people. If they say 'That's just like Sadie or Flossie,' it's the right thing for us. We're always looking for that kind of copy.
"There must be some stories in this strike. Couldn't you give us two or three?"
Yetta was surprised at the offer and decidedly uncertain.
"It won't do any harm to try," he urged her.
He pressed a button, and when a rotund, merry-looking man appeared, he introduced him.
"Mr. Brace, this is Miss Rayefsky. She has justpromised to send us some copy about the cloak-makers' strike for your magazine page."
They discussed it for a few minutes, and when Yetta had gone, Karner kept Brace a moment.
"My wife," he said, "thinks we could train this Rayefsky girl to write. If we could get some one to put a crimp in Lilian Leberwurtz' 'Balm for Busted Bussums,' it would help a lot. Look over her copy when it comes in. Buy enough anyhow to pay her for her trouble. And if it shows any promise, see what you can make of her. And keep me informed."
Yetta floated out ofThe Staroffice on clouds. In a sudden flame of enthusiasm she pictured herself as a great author. But as she went home a horrible doubt struck her—she might fail. The doubt increased as she laid out a sheet of paper.
After much hesitation and several false starts, she decided to stick as closely as might be to reality. She wrote the story of one of her girls who, although she worked on the highest-priced opera-cloaks, was so poor that she had never worn any wrap but a frayed old shawl.
It was natural for Yetta to be simple and direct. The copious notes she had written in connection with her study had taught her some familiarity with her pen. Above all, her public speaking had helped her. It had taught her to think ahead and plan her climax in advance. The women who would read the magazine page were—or had been—shop-girls, such as the audiences she spoke to night after night. And Mr. Brace had told her to write just as she talked.
At last she mailed three sketches. Within twenty-four hours she received a letter from Mr. Brace askingher to come and talk them over. She had a difficult time looking unconcerned as she enteredThe Staroffice. Her stories had seemed rather good when she had finished them, but they had so sunk in her estimation by this time that she wished she had not written them. This sinking process was most rapid during the few minutes she was kept waiting on a bench in the big reporters' room outside the glass door of Mr. Brace's private office.
There were long tables on two sides of the room; they were divided off into sections by little railings. Most of the places were filled by reporters writing feverishly on yellow copy paper or banging away at typewriters. Boys and men rushed about, carrying copy or proof in and out of the various glass doors about the room. Almost every one looked curiously at Yetta and the others on the waiting bench. There were three people ahead of her: a woman who looked like an actress, a white-haired old man, with a beard almost to his belt. He held a heavy manuscript on his knees with great care, evidently afraid some one would steal it. Next to her was a perspiring young curate in a clerical collar.
Presently Mr. Brace ushered a disappointed poet out of his office and called "Miss Rayefsky." "By appointment," he added, as those who were ahead of her moved restlessly in protest.
He pulled up a chair for her beside his desk, and picking up his blue pencil, began a little lecture on the advertising rate of the magazine page. It was ten cents a word. His blue pencil scratched out a sentence from one of her stories. It would certainly not do any one a dollar and a half's worth of good. It beganto look to Yetta as if there would be nothing left except blue pencil marks. But he glowed with pleasure during the process. When he had come to the end, he announced with pride that he had killed at least twenty-five dollars' worth of padding. She wished he would let her go quickly. She was afraid she might cry if he jeered at her any more.
"I hope we can arrange for some more of this soon," he said abruptly, handing her a check.
It was for seventy-five dollars! She had never had so much money at one time before in her life. And she had earned it in four days!
But this was a small matter beside seeing her story in print that afternoon. Here was a tangible sign of her progress to send Walter. She was just reaching the end of his outline of study, and she was already writing for the papers! Her pride was somewhat tempered as she reread her story and realized how much it had been improved by Mr. Brace's vigorous slashing.
Her new sense of importance became almost oppressive when, a few days later, they offered her a contract at what seemed to her a magnificent salary—to conduct a column on Working-girls' Worries.
Mabel also was enthusiastic about it. It was a great and unexpected chance to give publicity to their work of organizing women.The Starhad more than a million readers. Yetta could never have hoped to reach so large an audience with her voice.
But when Isadore saw the flaring posters which blossomed out on the East Side, announcing that Yetta Rayefsky was writing daily and exclusively forThe Evening Star, he was mightily disturbed. Suchconscienceless journalism as Mr. Karner's seemed to him the worst crime of our civilization. He could hardly believe that Yetta had thrown in her lot with it. It shook him out of his reserve, and he rushed over to her room.
In her new pride, in the excitement of her new career, Yetta seemed more disturbingly beautiful to him than ever. Face to face with her he forgot all his carefully thought-out arguments.
"Oh, Yetta," he blurted out, "is it really true that you're going to work on that dirty paper?"
"They have offered to let me conduct a column for working girls, and I've accepted," she replied defiantly.
"You know it's a dirty paper," he stuck to his point. "Dirty in every way,—in its news, in its advertisements. Most of all in its rotten politics. These yellow journals are the worst enemy Socialism has to face. They mislead the people. They're paid to. All the editors are crooked—sold out. But Karner's the worst."
"I haven't anything to do with their news nor their advertising, nor with Mr. Karner's politics—I've been talking to working girls as hard as I know how for the last two years. Suddenly I get a chance to speak louder, so that thousands will hear. I might just as well refuse to speak in some of the East Side halls, because on other nights they are used for rotten dances."
"Oh, Yetta," he broke in, "you don't know what you are doing. I know it isn't the salary that makes you do it. But that's sure to be big. And Karner's not a philanthropist; he's not giving you money for nothing. He's buying something. You've got togive him his money's worth. He's buying your name. He's after circulation. He's using your name—have you seen the posters? He's using your popularity, Yetta, to sell his dirty paper to our people. He's paying you to persuade our working girls to read the filthiest paper in New York. Yetta, you don't realize what it means. It's a sort of betrayal—"
"Are you through?" she interrupted angrily.
"No, I'm not. I've got to say it all. Not because it's you and me, Yetta, but Comrade to Comrade, because we're both Socialists. They won't let you say what you want to. No capitalist paper could, least of all this rotten one. If the class struggle means anything at all, it means that they are our enemies. They won't pay you to fight against them. They'll tie you up with some sort of a contract and gag you. They are bribing you, fooling you with the promise of a big audience. But they won't—can't—let you say what you believe."
"Mr. Braun," she said, trying hard to keep her temper, but at the same time to annihilate him, "I've talked this over with a number of friends. They all urged me to accept. So you see there is room for difference of opinion. You are the only one who has opposed it. Much as I respect your opinion in most matters, in this case I must—"
"No. You must not!" he stormed, jumping up and losing control of himself more than ever before. "I say you must not."
"What right have you—"
"Right? Who's got a better right? You know I love you. I'd rather a thousand times see myself disgraced than you, Yetta. What do Mabel Train andthe other women care? They see a chance to advertise their pet scheme. What do they care about your reputation, your self-respect? They think it will be good for their little Trade Union League. But I see you, Yetta—selling yourself to a bunch of crooks—not being able to do the good you want to—and always with the shame of it on you! Oh, it's too terrible."
He sank down in the chair, his head in his hands. Yetta's hard words melted as she saw how he was suffering.
"I'm sorry we can't agree on this, Comrade," she said. "We do on most things. Of course I may be making a mistake. But I've got to do what seems right to me—haven't I?"
"Yetta," he said, looking up at her suddenly, "are you in love with Walter Longman?"
She stiffened up at the question, but Isadore cut short her indignation.
"Oh, I know, Yetta. Just loving you doesn't give me a right to ask that question. But sometimes I've thought you loved Walter. He's my best friend. He wouldn't want you to go into this."
He looked at her tensely. It was a minute before she took up his challenge.
"I care a great deal for Walter's good opinion," her voice was low, but even. "I am quite sure he would be glad I had this chance. But even if he thought it was unwise for me to accept it, he would not try to browbeat me."
Isadore had shot his last bolt, it had rebounded on his own head. He fumbled for his hat.
"Good night, Yetta," he said.
"Good night, Mr. Braun."
The first month, Mr. Brace went over Yetta's contributions in detail, cramming into her all the advice he could think of. About the time his stock of journalistic epigrams ran out, the reports from the circulation manager were so favorable, that he decided he could give his attention to other things. Mr. Brace, like all good newspaper men, was a mystic in such matters. God only knows what the public will like. It was his business to scatter seeds. If they took root and grew into "circulation," he had sense enough to leave them alone. And Yetta's column had "caught on."
At the end of three months the contract was renewed with a substantial increase in salary. The posters which advertised her work became more flamboyant. The size of her mail grew daily. The letters dealt with all the worries working girls are heirs to. Some of them were frivolous, most were commonplace. But once in a while among the misspelt, poorly written scrawls, there would be a throbbing story of life. Such letters tore at Yetta's heart—giving her new determinations, new enthusiasm for her work. As their number increased Yetta knew that her audience, her influence, was growing. The Fates were smiling at her. She was earning more money than she had ever hoped. Better still, she had as much time as before for the League work. She was rarely kept in the office after noon. It did not occur to her that she might have demanded an increase in salary on the ground of the free advertising she was givingThe Starby her frequent speeches.
She was disappointed, however, not to be able to establish more cordial relations with her fellow-workers.These newspaper people, men and women, worked under as great a strain as any sweat-shop girls, but they seemed more foreign to her—to her class—than the rich uptown women she had met through the League. They had many good qualities which she appreciated—theiresprit de corps, their hearty, open manners, the camaraderie with which they lent each other money. But they were shot through with a cynicism which shocked her. The whole situation was typified in the case of Maud Ripley, a special story writer, who tried to "take her up."
She was a tired-eyed, meagre woman of near forty. She was brilliant. Every one in the office referred to her for facts and figures instead of going to the encyclopædia. Some of the things she wrote appealed strongly to Yetta, others were utterly futile. Besides her signed articles, mostly interviews with prominent foreigners,—she was fluent in half a dozen modern languages,—she composed "The Meditations of a Marriageable Maid." She was rather proud of this cheap wit.
She seemed to like Yetta, but always introduced her as "The Star'snew sob-squeezer." Apparently she saw nothing in the new recruit but a successful pathos writer—a rising star in the profitable business of starting tears.
This attitude, which Yetta encountered on all sides, hurt her. She read some of "Lilian Leberwurtz'" writings. She had discovered that the real name of this woman with whom she was expected to compete was Mrs. Treadway. It was hopeless slush; it sickened her. She tried vainly to picture the type of woman who could write such drivel seriously.
"Dine with me Sunday," Miss Ripley asked her one day. She always talked in the close-packed style of a foreign correspondent who telegraphs at a dollar a word. "My flat. People you ought to know."
Yetta was essentially inclusive, she did not like to turn her back on any proffered friendship. So at one the next Sunday she rang the bell of the uptown flat where Maud lived alone. There was one woman and three men in the parlor.
"Who are they," Yetta whispered as she was brushing her hair in Maud's bedroom.
"Matthews writes 'best sellers'—doesn't expect his friends to read them. Conklin has money—afford to write high-brow books that don't sell. Have to read between the lines. I'm too busy. Potter's a decadent poet. A bore, but all the rage. Mrs. Treadway—Lilian Leberwurtz—motherly old soul. Never know to look at her that she's the best-paid woman in the game—come on."
Of course Yetta was most interested in Mrs. Treadway. She would hardly have called her motherly, although she sometimes referred to her son in Harvard and frequently used the phrase—"when you get to be my age."
She was a large-bosomed, gaudy person with an almost expressionless face. Her gown looked cheap in spite of its evident expensiveness, and her jewellery was massive. But it was not her appearance nor her ponderous condescension which troubled Yetta. Mrs. Treadway in her first half-dozen words showed herself to be utterly sophisticated. She did not try to hide the insincerity of her work—she seemed to glory in it. Her first concern was to make it apparent thatshe was not such a fool as one would judge from her sentimental advice.
Matthews exuded prosperity from his lavender socks up to his insistent tie—but the brilliancy did not seem to go higher. Conklin was apologetic in comparison. His face was spare, and when he was amused, deep curved wrinkles formed on either side of his mouth like brackets. The parenthetical effect of his smile was heightened by the fact that the rest of his face remained sombre. The poet looked his part.
When Yetta arrived, they were all looking at the latest number ofLa vie parisienne. Mrs. Treadway was shaking—like a gelatine pudding—over the predicament in which one of Fabriano's naked women was portrayed. Potter began a ponderous argument on the humor of Audrey Beardsley's lines and the wit of Matisse's color. He pronounced Fabriano "too obvious." He was happily interrupted by the announcement of dinner.
The conversation rambled on through the meal. No one stuck to a subject after their epigrams had run out. Nobody was deeply interested in anything. Much of it dealt with things about which Yetta was proud of her ignorance.
The dinner was almost a disaster to her. "Of course," she told herself as she walked home, "this group is not typical. There are people, there must be people, who take their writing seriously." But the attitude of Maud Ripley and her friends had shocked Yetta deeply. The worst of it was that they respected her in a way—because she was "making good." But the fact that she was in earnest did not interest them. She would not have dropped the least in theiresteem if she had been utterly insincere. She felt as if she had been insulted.
The next day a new incident increased Yetta's feeling of foreignness in the office. She was waiting in the reporters' room for a chance to see Brace. Cowan, the gray-haired sporting editor, was telling whimsical stories of the "old days" when he had been a cub. Although older in years than the others, he was the youngest-hearted of them all. Yetta felt more drawn to him than to any one else onThe Star.
Suddenly a curly-haired Irishman, O'Rourke, burst in. He always entered a room with a deafening bang.
"Gee," he said—"some story this morning. A greenhorn bank-examiner, who didn't know his A B C, dropped into Ex-Governor Billings' bank yesterday and found a pretty mess. The old boy never had a bank-examiner come in unexpectedly like that before in his long and useful life. It nearly gave him apoplexy. And he just putting up his name for the Senate. But this blundering bank-examiner was not such a fool after all. The story goes that Billings had to come across with an awful wad to hush him up."
"Why? Did the examiner find something wrong?" Yetta asked.
"Yes, my child," O'Rourke said with playful pity. "He was that foolish."
"What did he find?" Yetta persisted.
"Unsecured loans. Billings had been lending himself the depositors' money, using his calling card as collateral."
"What'll happen to Billings?"
"It's a shame for you to go around town without a nurse," O'Rourke teased her. "It was decided a longtime ago that Billings was to be the next United States Senator from the glorious State of New York. A little accident like this can't be allowed to interfere."
"It's a rotten shame," Cowan said. He was old enough not to have to try to appear blasé. "They're going too strong—putting over a crook like that on the people. Everybody with any memory knows his record. In the good old days when yellow journalism was just beginning, before we got so respectable we couldn't print the truth, we showed Billings up—how he came through for the railroads on that Death Avenue grade crossing."
"Oh, that's ancient history. It's only six months ago—" another reporter began. One after another they added details to the Ex-Governor's record of infamy. But that afternoon's paper contained a eulogistic article on his patriotic achievement. An editorial which Yetta knew O'Rourke had written praised him to the skies, and said the people of the State were to be congratulated that so worthy a man had consented to accept the nomination. Yetta could not understand the psychology of these men who, having in hand the evidence to defeat an unworthy candidate for public office, did not use it. This was worse than cynicism—it was shameful.
As she was leaving the office a few days later, Cowan rode down in the elevator with her.
"If you don't mind, Miss Rayefsky," he said, when they had dodged the cars and had safely reached City Hall Park, "I'd like to give you a little advice. Perhaps I'm butting in where I'm not wanted. But you see, my youngest daughter is older than you are. And I guess breaking into a new job and a new crowd isn'tthe easiest thing in the world for a girl. I won't mind if you do snub me."
"Let's sit down a minute," Yetta said. "I'd like to talk to you. I certainly do feel lost."
"Well—" He was evidently embarrassed. He seemed to give up hope of being tactful and dove into his subject. "I overheard one of the men say that you'd been to a dinner at Maud Ripley's. She's a clever woman. But I'd not like to see one of my daughters tie up with her."
"I didn't enjoy myself," Yetta said. "I'm not going again."
"Good. That's all I had to say. She probably wouldn't do you any harm—certainly wouldn't try to. But newspaper men don't think much of her—except her brain. Excuse me for butting in."
He started to get up, but Yetta detained him. She was very deeply touched by his kindly interest in her.
"There are a lot of things I would like to ask you, if you've the time."
She began on the affair of the Ex-Governor. Why did not Cowan and O'Rourke and the others use their knowledge against him? The answer to that was simple. They would lose their jobs. Karner and Billings were friends. But this did not satisfy Yetta. They argued it out for half an hour. Nobody saw the defects and limitations of journalism more clearly than Cowan, and yet he was utterly loyal.
"If my son doesn't turn out a newspaper man, I'll disown him," he said emphatically. "Now don't you go and get sore on newspaper work because it isn't all honest. It's one whole lot better than when I began. The Press is the hope of Democracy, and it is also itsmeasure. Of course Karner's ethics are a bit queer. But no crookeder than the people will stand for. He'd be honest if it paid.
"The people can have just as good and clean a paper as they really want. They get better and more democratic ones to-day than they did twenty years ago, and when they want one that is really straight, they'll get that.
"Of course it's bad if you want to look at it that way. It's a compromise game. But there isn't any class of people in the country who are doing more for progress than this bunch of cynical newspaper men. They are the real patriots. Every new recruit pushes the flag a little farther forward. But you've got to make up your mind to compromise."
"I haven't had to do it yet," Yetta said.
"Perhaps not yet. But sooner or later you will have to, if you're going to play the newspaper game."
"That's the trouble with you people," Yetta exclaimed, as if she suddenly saw a light, "you call it a game. I'm not playing with life. I've got to consider myself and my work serious. I won't compromise. If it's the rule of the game—why, I'll quit playing it."
The surprising thing was that she was not asked to compromise. Mr. Brace seemed to take very little interest in what she wrote. When he spoke to her about it, it was to make some technical suggestion about the use of "caps" or "italics." No party Socialist could have accused her contributions of lack of orthodoxy. She was giving her readers the straight gospel. Day after day Isadore read them and wondered.
Mrs. Karner also wondered. Coming home late onenight, she encountered her husband in the hallway; he had just shown out some friends who had been playing poker. She swept by him with a curt "Good night." He was a little drunk. But she stopped halfway up the stairs.
"I say, Bert. Explain to me the mystery of Yetta Rayefsky. Her column this afternoon is straight Socialism. What does it mean? Has a ray of light penetrated into the subterranean gloom of your office? Has the editorial staff fallen in love with her?"
Karner had been winning and was in good spirits.
"That's so. I've forgotten to thank you for suggesting her. She's a gold mine."
"Yes. But how canThe Starstand the tone of decency she gives it?"
"Don't worry," he winked profoundly. "There'll be money enough for your trip to Europe. A column and a half won't hurt us."
"But why do you let her do it? What's the answer?"
"As simple as A B C. I'm surprised you don't see it yourself. The little lady's bugs on sweat-shops. And sweat-shops don't advertise. See? As long as she sticks to the East Side, she can damn any one she likes to. And as for Socialism—the girls don't vote."
"It was stupid of me not to understand," Mrs. Karner said as she went on up to her room. "Goodnight—Cynic."
She never realized how much her jibes stung her husband.
"Damn the women," he muttered. "She married me for my money and don't like the way I earn it."
Mr. Karner had loved his wife more than anything—except the pleasure of cutting a figure in the world.His paper made him a power in the community. Presidential candidates bid for his support. No one had dared to blackball him when he had recently put up his name at a club which was supposed to be composed of gentlemen. But his wife neither respected nor feared him. He stood gloomily in the hallway—the fumes of champagne making things oscillate gently—wondering whether he dared to go to her room. He decided he was afraid, and, calling for his hat and coat, went out.
But to the other people who were asking the same question which Mrs. Karner had put to her husband, no answer was given. Isadora's daily amazement at Yetta's outspoken Socialism gradually grew into a conviction that he had been wrong. He wrote her a loyal letter of apology, and Yetta in a condescending reply forgave him.
But trouble came as Christmas was approaching. Some ladies from the Woman's Consumers' League called on Yetta, and, after praising her work for factory women, tried to enlist her aid in the cause of the department-store girls, who are so shamefully overworked in the season of holiday shopping. They wanted her to speak at a mass meeting. It was not hard to interest Yetta in such a cause.
"Give me some of the facts," she said, after she had promised to speak, "and I'll run some stories about it inThe Star."
But her first department-store article did not come out. It had been "killed" in favor of a receipt for preserving the gloss on finger-nails. A copy-reader, being wise in newspaper business and anxious to gain favor, had run to the advertising manager with theproof. The advertising manager had rushed angrily to Mr. Brace. Brace had gone to Mr. Karner. Mr. Karner had thrown it into the wastepaper basket and suggested the finger-nail story.
When Yetta called up Mr. Brace about it, she found him inclined to treat the matter as a joke. "After all," he laughed, "you know there are limits. You can't take a man's money for advertisement on one page and spit in his eye on another. There is plenty of work for your scalping knife among people who don't advertise."
Yetta began to understand. It was her first introduction to serious temptation. In six months newspaper work had got into her blood. Besides the pleasant thrill of it, there was the usefulness. There were hundreds of girls who depended on her largely. It was hard to give up such an audience. And it was pleasant work—well-paid. It was a wonderful thing for a sweat-shop girl to have climbed so high. Should she go on "playing the game"? For a while she tried to shift the responsibility to other shoulders. What would people think? She knew what Mabel and Isadore would think. Mabel would tell her to compromise. Isadore the opposite. What would Walter think? And then it suddenly came to her clearly that it didn't matter at all what anybody else thought. She had to decide it by herself. Whatever happened, she would always have to live with herself. Self-respect was more important than the regard of even the closest friend. They were asking her to do just what she had emphatically told Cowan she would never do. She put on her hat and went to Mr. Karner's office.
"This matter does not concern me," he said. "Iemploy Mr. Brace to edit the magazine page, and I trust his ability and judgment. If he considered it unwise to run your article, that ends it."
"Mr. Karner, ifThe Staris afraid to touch department stores, I'll resign."
He spun round in his chair.
"Afraid? That's strong language."
"It's very easy to prove it unjustified," she said quickly.
He looked at her sternly for a few minutes, taking her measure. It was his ability at this process which had enabled him to build up his paper from a third-rater to its present position.
"Miss Rayefsky, you want a flat answer. We're in business to make money. We won't attack our heaviest advertisers."
Yetta got up.
"Don't be in a hurry. Nobody gets a chance to resign from my staff twice. Think this over for a couple of days. We've been satisfied with your work; I hoped you were. I hoped that you thought what you were doing was worth while. You can go on doing it indefinitely as far as I can see. You're about to throw up this work because you can't do the impossible. It isn't justThe Star. It's a limitation of journalism. No editor in the city could print that story."
"Within twenty-four hours I'll mail it to you in print," Yetta said, moving towards the door.
"So!" he growled. "That's it, is it? Somebody else has offered you a better contract. You forget, of course, that we taught you how to write—that we advertised you—made you. You forget all that as soon as somebody else offers you—"
But Yetta had slammed the door in his face.
Back in her room, she called up Isadore and told him the story.
"I'm mailing you the article to print inThe Clarion."
So she made the honorable amend.
"I was half wrong, anyhow," he tried to comfort her. "I never would have believed they'd let you free as long as they did. And besides—you've learned to write. I hope you'll give us some more."
What hurt Yetta most was that a cable had come from Teheran saying that Walter had started homeward. He would hear of the mess she had made.
Mr. Karner, when he received the Socialist paper, with Yetta's article in it, vented some of his profane rage on his wife. The quarrel which resulted brought Mrs. Karner to life.
When the Archæological Expedition reached Constantinople, the married men were met by their wives.
To the suburbanite who comes home after each day's work, the dinner is likely to seem as important as his spouse. The waiting wife has a deeper significance for the sailor and explorer. For three years these men had seen no white women, except in a Scotch Mission compound, four days' ride from their camp.
The Marquise d'Hauteville was much younger than her husband. She was a daintily gowned Parisienne of theQuartier St. Germain. She was on the dock with her two boys, seven and four. The sight of her explained to Walter the nervous impatience which had kept the Chief pacing the deck restlessly ever since they had left Batoum.
Dr. Bertholet, the querulous specialist in measuring skulls, suddenly began to smile when he caught sight of Madame—a fatbourgeoisein black silk, who looked likela patronneof a café. Beckmeyer, the German authority on the ancient religions of Persia, waved his handkerchief wildly to a flaxen-haired Gretchen. They had lost a son while he was away, and when thegang plank was down, they rushed into each other's arms and sobbed like children.
The unmarried men stood on one foot and then on the other until the first transports had quieted and were then presented to the ladies. The Marquis gave them a rendezvous in Paris for the next week. It was understood that the married men were to have a few days with their families before the expedition should formally report its return.
Delanoue, Vibert, and Walter rushed their baggage through the customs and had just time to catch the Orient Express. All three of them were in a hurry to reach Paris. The two Frenchmen were like bathers on a spring-board about to dive into the sea. They let their imaginations run riot, trying to devise a suitable orgy to recompense them for their three years of deprivation. Delanoue wished them both to be his guests. He proposed to lead them to his favorite restaurant and order everything on the bill of fare. Afterwards they would invade Montmartre. Unless Paris had seriously deteriorated, he felt sure he could make them realize how sad and colorless were the wildest dreams of the Arabian Nights.
Vibert gleefully accepted the invitation. But Walter quietly refused. He also was in a hurry to reach Paris—he hoped to find a letter from Mabel. When the train reached theGare de l'Est, in spite of their jibes at his Puritanism, he left them.
At the Consulate he found three packages of mail. He hurried to a hotel and opened them eagerly. There was only one letter from Mabel, hardly more than a note. Yetta, she wrote, had told her that he had started homeward. She hoped the Expedition had beensuccessful. She would be glad to see him again. She was, as usual, very busy, but both she and Eleanor were well.
What a fool he had been made by hope! He had not been able to accept her definite refusals—he remembered them all now. These three years he had shut his eyes to reality and had lived in a baseless hope. A man needs something more than routine work to keep him going. In all the idle moments scattered through his busy, exciting life—the minutes before he fell asleep, the times some jackal's cry had waked him in the night, all the intervals of waiting—he had thought of Mabel. And always he had asked himself if their long intimacy was to lead to nothingness. It seemed impossible. Surely she would feel his absence, miss him from her life and want him back. His friendship must have meant something to her. She was proud and hard to change. But time would work the miracle. She would call to him. It seemed to be written in the stars, in the glory of the desert dawns, in the haunting afterglows of the sunset.
The last months this dream had been more concrete than any reality. When he reached Paris after his long exile, he would find her summons. Perhaps she would come there to meet him. There was only this cold and formal note.
In his barren hotel room he sounded the very depths of loneliness. Of all his recent comrades he alone was unwelcomed. He thought of the dainty Marquise d'Hauteville and her children. They had stopped off at Semmering in the Austrian Alps. He did not know where the Bertholets were celebrating their reunion. Beckmeyer and his Gretchen had gone up to their village home on the edge of the Black Forest. Andsomewhere on the side ofLa Butte joyeuse, Delanoue and Vibert were finding companionship and a hearty welcome. Here he was in his dismal hotel room, alone with the Dead Hope he could not forget, a misfit, a mistake—une vie manquée.
The winter night fell over Paris, but he was too gloomy to notice the darkness. It was the cold which at last stung into his consciousness. He went to bed like a man who had been drugged.
The next morning he was awakened by a batch of reporters. Somehow the news that the Expedition had returned had leaked out. The reporters had heard some vague rumors of "the siege" when for two weeks the fanatics had attacked the camp, and how Walter, dressed in native clothes, had slipped through the lines and brought relief. But he refused to talk, taking refuge behind the etiquette which requires subordinates to hold their peace until the chief has spoken.
He had hardly got rid of the reporters, when Delanoue and Vibert broke in with an incoherent account of their adventures. They were both drunk and decidedly tired. While Walter was shaving, Delanoue fell asleep on his bed, Vibert on his lounge. And they were not quiet about it.
The coffee went cold in Walter's cup. What should he do? It was impossible to spend the morning listening to uneasy grunts and snores. Where should he go? On previous visits to Paris he had enjoyed himself. He knew many people. But he did not feel that they would amuse him this time. Anyhow it was too early to make calls. His coffee was hopelessly cold. He was trying to overcome his listlessness and ring for more, when thechasseurbrought him apetit bleueand theannouncement that a new swarm of reporters wanted to see him.
"Hello, hello, Mr. Walter Longman," thepneumatiqueran. "The morning papers announce your advent. Come around for dejeuner. By all means come. I'll lock the door. I warrant the newspaper men are hounding you. If you are one half as agreeable as you used to be, you'll rescue from the very bottom of boredom an unfortunate woman who signs herself
Your friend
Beatrice Maynard Karner."
Walter had hardly thought of Mrs. Karner since leaving America. But five minutes after he had torn open the despatch, he had dodged the reporters and was out on the sidewalk. It was his intention to call a taxi and go at once to Mrs. Karner's, but he realized abruptly that it was much too early. He had an hour and a half to kill before time for dejeuner. He sat down in one of the Boulevard Cafés and tried to interest himself in the papers. But once more the ugly mood came to him. He let his coffee grow cold again. He sat there glowering at an indefinite spot on the polished floor—wondering dully if there was any further interest left for him in life. He felt so unsocial that he gave up the idea of going to Mrs. Karner's. He would be bored. But as lunch time approached he became disturbed at the idea of eating alone. Certainly anybody's company would be better than his own.
Mrs. Karner welcomed him gayly. She seemed bent on being merry. There was a subtle change in her manner of dressing. She was less of agrande damethan she had been in New York. She was feeling her wayback to her youth. There was a dash of reckless uncertainty in her manner as of a boy at the beginning of his vacation or a convict just released.
"How I envy you all the excitement you've been having! Tell me about it."
He had just started to reply when dejeuner was announced and they went out to the dining-room. He hardly remembered what they talked about—details of the Expedition mostly. But when the meal was ended and they went back to the salon, Mrs. Karner stretched out on achaise longueand he sat down on the ottoman by the open fire. A constraint fell on them. For lack of a better remark he said—
"I've a pocket full of choice Caucasian cigarettes. Won't you try one?"
She accepted his suggestion, but he could think of nothing further to say.
"You're not exactly cheerful to-day," she said. "Anything wrong?"
He made a vague gesture.
"Bad news from home?"
"Home?" He tried to make his tone flippant. "Is there any such place?"
"Fine!" she said. "You're coming on, Walter. Your worst fault used to be your belief in such superstitions."
It was her turn now to hide her seriousness behind the mask of flippancy.
"Do you notice anything particular about the furniture in this room?"
"It's fine old Empire."
"Well, it doesn't matter whether it'sEmpire, orLouis Seize, orHenri Quatre, orChinois. It isn'tGothic! That's the important point. Yes," she went on in answer to the question in his eyes, "I'm expecting the final papers any day. I'll take my maiden name. Beatrice Maynard."
She threw back her head and blew out some rings of the fragrant smoke.
"It took me a long time to learn this trick," she said, as if it were a very serious matter. "The man who kept the Morgue onThe Startaught me—in the old days."
But Walter hardly heard her irrelevant words. He was thinking of the implications of her smash-up, and overlaid on these thoughts was the impression that her throat was very beautiful. He had never noticed it before.
"Fine cigarettes, these," she commented, still watching the smoke rings to avoid meeting his eyes.
But Walter did not reply. A sudden pity for her flooded him. How hopelessly lost they both were, splashing about aimlessly in the great muddle of life. They sat silent for many minutes, staring blankly at the dead past and the future which promised to be stillborn.
It is strange how much we sometimes know of other people which has never been told. Mrs. Karner, although Walter had never taken her into his confidence, knew with amazing clearness the import of his barren romance. And he, in the same way, sensed what was wrong with her, felt the deadening tragedy which lay behind her mocking words.
She—frightened by the feeling that in this poignant silence they were becoming dangerously intimate—brought their reveries to an abrupt end by jumping up.
"We're a sorry couple, aren't we? We've messed things up frightfully, and we want to cry. It's much better business to laugh. Let's shake hands and cheer up."
The wide sleeve of her morning gown fell back from her arm as she stretched out her hand to him. Her skin seemed inordinately, preposterously white to him as he stood up. But the thing which impressed him most was the intricate network of tiny blue veins on the inside by the elbow.
"In France," he said, "I claim French privileges."
As she did not pull her hand away when he raised it to his lips, he kissed the blue veins inside her elbow. He did not realize what he was doing—what he had done—until he heard the sharp intake of her breath. The look on her face made the blood pound in his temples.
It was only a matter of seconds that they were both silent. But it seemed an interminable time.
Walter looked down into the glowing fireplace—struggling with the thing which burned within him more hotly than the coals. After all—why not? It is horrible to be lonely.
"You foolish boy," she said, with an uneasy laugh, "I didn't mean to be taken so literally."
"I guess it's the only way for us—if we want to cheer up."