I don't know whether it was the effect of Mr. Hamilton's visit or not, but I was not so contented after that. Things about the Y. W. C. A. that I had not noticed before now irritated me.
A great many unjust requirements were made of the girls. It was not fair to make us attend certain sermons. Goodness knows, we were tired enough when we got home, and most of us just wanted to go to our rooms; and if we did desire entertainment or relaxation, we wanted to choose it for ourselves. I believe some of these old rules are not enforced to-day.
Then that ten o'clock rule! Really itwasa shame! Just fancy writing feverishly upon some beautiful (to me it was beautiful) story or poem, and all of a sudden the lights going out! That was maddening, and sometimes I swore as Lolly did, and I cried once when I had reached a place in my story that I simplyhadto finish, and I tried to do it in the dark.
So I was determined to move, and Lolly went about looking for rooms for us. I told her I'd like anything she got.
Meanwhile life in the yards began to "get upon my nerves." I never before knew that Ihadnerves; butI knew it now. No one, not even a girl of the abounding health and spirits I then enjoyed, could work eight hours a day at a type-writer and two or three hours writing at night, and be in love besides, and not feel some sort of strain.
And Iwasin love. I don't suppose any girl was ever more utterly and hopelessly in love than I was then. No matter what I was doing or where I was,—even when I wrote my stories,—he was always back there in my mind. It was almost as though he had hypnotized me.
Loving is, I suppose, a sort of bliss. One can get a certain amount of real joy and excitement out of loving; but it's pretty woeful when one must love alone, and that was my case. You see, though I knew I had made a kind of impression upon Mr. Hamilton, or, as he himself put it, he was "interested" in me, still he certainly was not in love with me, and I had little or no hope now of making him care for me.
I realized that he belonged to a different social sphere. He was a rich, powerful man, of one of the greatest families in America, and I—I was a working-girl, a stenographer of the stock-yards. Only in novels or a few sensational newspaper stories did millionaires fall in love with and marry poor, ignorant working-girls, and then the working-girl was sure to be a beauty. I was not a beauty. Some people said I was pretty, but I don't think I was even that. I had simply the fresh prettiness that goes hand in handwith youth, and youth gallops away from us like a race-horse, eager to reach the final goal. No, I was not pretty. I looked odd, and when I began to wear fine clothes, I must have appeared very well, for I had all sorts of compliments paid to me. I was told that I looked picturesque, interesting, fascinating, distinguished, lovely, and even more flattering things that were not true. It showed what clothes will do.
I was not, however, wearing fine clothes at this time. My clothes were of the simplest—sailor shirtwaist, navy-blue cloth skirt, and a blue sailor hat with a rolled-up brim. That was how I dressed until the night Lolly lent me some of her finery.
My only hope lay in pulling myself up by my talent. If I achieved fame, that, perhaps, I felt, would put me on a level with this man. But fame seemed as elusive and as far away as the stars above me.
Then, his insistence that I should be educated and his statement that I was illiterate made me pause in my thought to take reckoning of myself. If, indeed, my ignorance was so patent that it was revealed in my mere speech, how, then, could I hope to achieve anything? I felt very badly about that, and when I read over some of my beloved poems, instead of their giving me the former pride and delight, I felt, instead, a deep-seated grief and dissatisfaction, so that I tore them up, and then wept just as if I had destroyed some living thing.
Yes, I was very unhappy. I kept at my work, doingit efficiently; but the place now appeared hideous and abhorrent to me, and every day I asked myself:
"How much longer can I bear it?"
I remember leaving my desk one day, going to the girls' dressing-room, and just sitting down alone and crying, without knowing just what I was crying about—I who cried so little!
I suppose things would have gone from bad to worse for me but for two things that happened to distract me.
We moved, Lolly and I. I can't say that our rooms were as attractive and clean-looking as the ones we had at the Y. W. C. A., and of course they cost more. Still, they were not bad. We had two small rooms. Originally one large room, a partition had made it into two. By putting a couch in the outer room, we made a sitting-room, and were allowed to have our company there. Whichever one was up the last with company was to sleep on the couch.
Lolly made the rooms very attractive by putting pretty covers over the couch and table, and college flags that some men gave her on the wall, with a lot of pictures and photographs. The place looked very cozy, especially at night, but somehow I missed the cleanly order of my room of the Y. W. C. A.
I wrote a letter to Mr. Hamilton and gave him our new address. I could not resist telling him that I had been very unhappy; that I realized he was right, and that I could never go very far when my equipmentin life was so pitifully small. However, I added hopefully that I intended to read a lot that winter, and that Lolly and I were going to join the library. I could take a book with me to work. There were many intervals during the day when I could read if I wished to; in the luncheon hour, for instance, and on the cars going to and from work. One could always snatch a moment. Didn't he think I would improve myself much by reading?
He did not answer me, but a few days later three large boxes of books came to the house for me.
Lolly and I were overjoyed. We had a great time getting shelves for the books and setting them up. We had Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, Gautier, Maupassant, Carlyle's "French Revolution," and the standard works of the English authors. Also we had the Encyclopædia Britannica. I was so happy about those books that my depression dropped from me in a moment. I felt that if my little arms could have embraced the world, I should have encircled it. It was not merely the delight of possessing books for the first time in my life, but becausehehad chosen and sent them to me.
The second thing that came up to divert me from a tendency to melancholia at this time happened at the yards immediately after that.
One day O'Brien did not come to work till about five in the afternoon. As soon as he came in I noticed that there was something wrong with him. Hishat was tipped over one eye, and his mouth had a crooked slant as he moved his cigar from side to side. Without noticing me, he took his seat, and slightly turned his back toward me. I chanced just then to catch Hermann's eye. He made a sign to me. I could not understand at first what he meant till he lifted an empty glass from his desk, held it to his lips, and then pretended to drain it. Then I knew: Fred had been drinking.
I suppose I ought not to have spoken to a man in his condition, but I think for the first time in my life there swept over me a great wave of maternal feeling toward this big uncouth boy who had been so good to me. I said:
"Fred!"
He turned around slightly, and looked at me through bleary eyes. His lips were dirty and stained with tobacco, and the odor that came from him made me feel ill. His voice, however, was steady, and he had it under control.
"Nora," he said, "I'm soused."
"You'd better go home," I whispered, for I was afraid he would get into trouble if one of the firm were to see him. "I'll finish your work for you. I know just how."
"I'm not going home tillyoudo," said Fred. "I'm going with you. You'll take care of me, won't you, Nora?"
"O Fred," I said, "please do go home!"
"I tell you I'm going with you. I want to tell you all about myself. I never told you before. Got to tell you to-night."
"I'd rather hear it to-morrow night."
"Don't care what you'd rather. I'm going to tell you to-night," persisted Fred, with the irritable querulousness of a child.
"But I go out on the bus with the girls," I said. "And that leaves at 5:30."
"Tha' 's true," said Fred. "Tell you what I'll do. I'll start off now, and I'll meet you at the end of the yards when the bus comes out. See?"
I nodded. Fred settled his hat more crookedly on his head, and, with an unlighted cigar twisting loosely in his mouth, went staggering down the aisle.
Hermann came over to my desk, and when I told him what Fred had said, he advised me to slip off the bus quickly and make a run for the nearest car. He said if Fred "got a grip" on me, he'd never let go "till he had sobered up."
I asked Hermann how long that would take, and he said:
"Well, sometimes he goes on a long drunk, for weeks at a time. It depends on who is with him. If he can get any one to drink with him, he'll keep on and on, once he's started. Once a prize-fighter just got a hold of him and punched him into sensibility, and he didn't touch a drop for a year afterward. He can, if he tries, sober up in a few hours. He goesmonths without touching a thing, and then all of a sudden he reverts."
Hermann then told me that Fred had once been jilted by a girl in Milwaukee, and that had started him to drinking.
As the bus took us through the yards, I thought how terrible and sad it was for a man who was in such a condition to be left to his own devices. It was just as if one left a helpless baby to mind himself, or threw a poor sick person out upon the street, expecting him to be cured without treatment. What was drink but a disease, anyhow? And I said to myself that I wished I were a prize-fighter. Fred had been good to me. I come of a race, on my mother's side, which does not easily forget kindnesses, and somehow I could think of nothing save how Fred had treated me that first day, and had given me a chance when no one else would.
So when I stepped from the bus, and Fred came lurching toward me, I simply had not the heart to break away from him. All the girls were watching us, and some of the men tried to draw Fred aside by the arm.
He became wildly excited, and said he could "lick any son of a gun in the Union Stock-Yards."
One of the men told me to "beat it" while they took care of Fred; but Fred did look so helpless and so inexpressibly childish as he cried out his defiance, and as I was mortally afraid that they might getfighting among themselves, and, anyhow, though drunk, he was not offensive, I said:
"I'll take him home. I'm not afraid of him."
Some of them laughed, and some protested; but I didn't care anything about any of them except Fred, and I helped him on an open car that went near our house.
I took him to our rooms, and there Lolly tried to sober him by making him black coffee, and Hermann, who came, too,—he had kept right up with Fred and me,—said he'd take care of Fred while Lolly and I got our dinner. We took our meals out.
When we got back,—it was about eight then,—there was Fred sitting on the door-step. Hermann was trying to drag him to his feet, but he wouldn't move, and he kept saying: "Nora's going to take care of me. S-she's m' stenographer, you know."
Hermann explained that our landlady had ordered them out, as Fred had begun to sing after we went. Hermann wanted Lolly and me to go into the house, and he said he'd take care of Fred, even if he had to "land him in a cell" to do it. He said that in such a nasty way that poor Fred began to cry that he hadn't a friend in the world, and that made me feel so badly that I told him that I was his friend, and that I'd take good care that Hermann didn't put him in a cell. Then I had an inspiration.
I suggested that we all take a long street-car ride and that the open air might clear his head, and if itdidn't, we could get off at some park and walk around. Fred exclaimed that walking was the one thing that always "woke" him up.
Lolly said:
"Not for me!" and went into the house.
So Hermann and I, with Fred between us, made for the nearest car. I got in first, then Fred, and then as Hermann was getting on, Fred seized his hat and threw it out into the road. A wind caught it, and Hermann had to chase after it. While he was doing this, Fred pulled the bell-rope, and the car started.
We rode to the end of the line, Fred behaving very well. Here we got off, and we went into the park. I asked Fred how he was feeling, and he said "tip-top," and that he would be all right after walking about a bit.
Wewalked!
At first Fred was garrulous in a wandering sort of way, and he tried to tell me about the girl who had jilted him. He said he had never liked a girl since except me, and then he pulled himself up abruptly and said:
"But don't think I'm stuck on you, because I ain't. I got stuck on one girl in my life, and that was enough for me."
"Of course you're not," I said soothingly, "and I'm not stuck on you, either. We're just good pals, aren't we?"
"Best ever," said Fred, drowsily.
Then for a long time—my! it seemed hours and hours—we just tramped about the park. Curiously enough, I didn't feel a bit tired; but by and by I could tell by the way he walked that Fred was just about ready to drop from exhaustion. He had been up drinking all the previous night and all the day. So presently I found a bench under a big tree, and I tried to make him sit down; but nothing would do but that he must lie down at full length on the bench, with his head on my lap. He dropped off almost immediately into a sound sleep or stupor, breathing heavily and noisily.
I don't know how long we were there. I grew numb with the weight of his heavy head upon my knee. A policeman came along and asked me what we were doing. I told him truthfully that Fred had been drinking, and was now asleep, and I asked him, please not to wake him. He called Fred my "man," and said we could stay there. We did stay there. Nothing I believe could have awakened Fred. As for me, well, I made up my mind that I was "in for it." I thought of trying to go to sleep with my head against the back of the seat, but it was too low. So I had to sit up straight.
It was a still, warm night in September, with scarcely a breeze stirring. I could see the giant branches of the trees on all sides of us. They shot up like ghostly sentinels. Even the whispering leaves seemed scarcely to stir.
I saw the stars in a wide silver sky, staring and winking down upon us all through that long night. I looked up at them, and thought of my father, and I thought of that great ancestor of mine who had been an astronomer, and had given to the world some of its chief knowledge of the heavens above us. It would be strange, I whimsically thought, if somewhere up there among the stars, he was peering down at me now on this microscopic earth; for it was microscopic in the great scheme of the universe, my father had once said.
To sit up all night long in a quiet, beautiful park, under a star-spotted sky, with a drunken man asleep on your lap, after all, that is not the worst of fates.Iknow, because I have done it, and I tell you there have been less happy nights than that in my life.
As we rush along in the whirligig of life, we girls who must work so hard for our daily bread, we get so little time in which tothink. For one cannot think save disjointedly, while working. Now I had a long chance for all my thoughts, and they came crowding upon me. I thought of my little brothers and sisters, and I wistfully longed that I might see them again while they were still little. I thought of my sister Marion, whom I had left in Boston. Had she fared as well as I? She had written me two or three times, and her letters were cheerful enough, but just as I told her in my letters nothing of my struggles, so she told me nothing of hers. Yet I read between thelines, and Iknew—it made my heart ache, that knowledge—that Marion was having an even more grim combat with Fate than I; I was better equipped than she to earn a living. For one's mere physical beauty is, after all, a poor and dangerous asset. And Marion was earning her living by her beauty. She was a professional model, getting fifty cents an hour.
I thought of other sisters, one of whom had passed through a tragic experience, and another—the eldest, a girl with more real talent than I—who had been a pitiful invalid all her days. She is dead now, that dear big sister of mine, and a monument marks her grave in commemoration of work she did for my mother's country.
It seemed as if our heritage had been all struggle. None of us had yet attained what the world calls success. We were all straining and leaping up frantically at the stars of our ancestor; but they still stared aloofly at us, like the impenetrable Sphinx.
It seemed a great pity that I was not, after all, to be the savior of the family, and that my dreams of the fame and fortune that not alone should lift me up, but all my people, were built upon a substance as shifting as sand and as shadowy as mist. For, if what Mr. Hamilton had said was true, there was, alas! no hope in me. Perhaps I was doomed to be the wife of a man like the fat, blond clerk at the yards, or even of Fred. To think now of Mr. Hamilton as a possible husband was to do so with a cynical jeerat my own past ingenuousness. Since that visit of his, I had been awakened, as it were, to the clear knowledge that this man could never be to me what I had so fondly dreamed. Well!
I don't know when the stars began to fade. They just seemed to wink out one by one in the sky, and it grew gray and haggard, as it does just before the dawn. Even in the dark the birds began to call to one another, and when the first pale streak from the slowly rising sun crept stealthily out of the east, these winged little creatures dropped to earth in search of food, and a small, soft, inquiring-eyed squirrel jumped right in the path before me, and stood with uplifted tail and pricked-up head, as if to question my presence there.
Perhaps it was the whistling chatter of the birds that awoke Fred. He said I called to him, but he was mistaken.
He was lying on his back, his head upturned on my lap, and suddenly he opened his eyes and stared up at me. Then slowly he sat up, and he leaned forward on the bench and covered his face with his hands. I thought he was crying, but presently he said to me in a low, husky voice:
"How long have we been here?" and I said:
"All night, Fred."
"Nora Ascough, you're a dead-game sport!" he answered.
It may sound strange, but I really felt very little the worse for that long night's vigil. I went home, took a cold bath, had breakfast in a near-by restaurant (one of those, ten, twenty, twenty-five-cent places), and went to work just the same as ever. What is more, I had a specially hard day at the yards, for of course Fred was not there, and I had to do a good part of his work.
Frank Hermann wanted to know just how I got away from Fred, and I told him just what had happened. He said admiringly:
"Gee! you're one corker, Nora!"
"Fred gave me my job," I said, but I may as well add that I felt rather proud. Not every girl can be called a "dead-game sport" and a "corker."
Hermann said he had told the men about the place who had seen me go home with Fred that he had joined us, and later had himself taken Fred home. I felt grateful to Hermann for that. Personally I cared very little what these stock-yard people thought of me. Still it was good of Frank to undertake to protect me. He was a "good sort," I must say.
One of the girls in the bus said as we were going home that evening that I looked "fagged out," so Isuppose I had begun to show the effects of the night; but I was not aware of any great fatigue until I got on the street car. All the seats were taken, and I had to stand in a crush all the way home, holding to a strap. I was glad enough to get home, I can tell you.
I thought Lolly was in when I saw the light in my room, and that surprised me, because her hours were very irregular. She seldom came home for dinner, and often worked at night.
I suppose it was the surprise and shock of finding him there, and, of course, my real state of weakness, but I nearly fainted when I saw Mr. Hamilton in my room. His back was turned to the door when I went in, as he was looking at the books he had sent me. Then he turned around and said:
"Well, how's the wonderful girl?"
I couldn't answer him, and I must have looked very badly, for he came over to me quickly, took both my hands, and drew me down to the couch beside him. Then he said roughly:
"You see, you can't stand work like this. You're all trembling and pale."
I said hysterically:
"I'm trembling because you are here, and I'm pale because I'm tired, and I'm tired because I've been up all night long."
"What!" he exclaimed.
I nodded.
"Oh, yes. Fred was drunk, and he wanted mewith him; so I walked with him in L—— Park, and then he fell asleep on a bench with his head on my lap."
He jumped to his feet, and looking up, I saw his face. It was so black with astounded fury that I thought he was going to strike me; but I was not afraid of him. I felt only a sudden sense of wonder and pain. His voice, though low, had a curious sound of suppressed rage.
"Do you mean to tell me that you have been out all night with that man?"
I looked into his face, and then I nodded, without speaking. He gave me a hard look, and then he laughed shortly, brutally.
"So you arethatsort, are you?" he said.
"Yes," I returned defiantly, "I am that sort. Fred was good to me. He took me on trust. If I had left him last night, he might have gone on drinking, or a policeman would have arrested him. You can't imagine the state he was in—just like a helpless child."
While I was speaking he kept staring at me. I was so nervous that I wrenched my hands together. And then I saw his face change, just as if it were broken, and in place of that hard, sneering expression there came that beautiful look that I had seen on his face that day on the train when he had asked me if I would like to go to school.
He came over and sat down again beside me onthe couch. He took my hands in his, and held them as if he were warming them. Then I put my face against his arm and began to cry. He didn't say a word to me for the longest time. Then he asked me very gently to tell him all over again just what happened. So I did. He wanted to know if Fred had said anything offensive to me, or if he had been familiar or tried to kiss me. I said, "No; Fred is not that kind." If he had been, he asked me, what would I have done? I didn't know, I told him.
"You'd have permitted him to?" he demanded sharply, and I said I didn't think I would; but then, of course, one couldn't tell what a drunken man might do. He said that that was the whole point of the matter, and that I could see for myself that I had done a very foolish and dangerous thing.
By this time he was walking up and down. After a while, when he had gotten over his excitement and wrath about Fred, he shook up all the sofa pillows on the couch, and made me lie down. When I sat up, he lifted up my feet, and put them on the couch, too. So I had to lie down, and I was so tired and happy that he was there, andcared, that I would have done anything he ordered me to. Then he drew up a chair beside me, and began to talk again on the subject of my going to school. Goodness! I had thought that matter was settled. But, no; he had the persistency of a bull-dog in matters about which he cared.
He said it was nonsense for me to be expending mystrength like this, when I ought to be studying and developing myself. He said association at my age meant everything; that I had the impressionable temperament of the artist, and was bound either to be benefited or hurt by the people with whom I associated.
I let him go on, because I loved to hear him talk, anyway, even though he was so cross about it. He kept frowning at me, as if he were administering a scolding, and driving the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left in a way he had when talking. When he was through, I said:
"If I go to school, will you come to see me, like this?"
"Of course I'll come to see you," he said. "Not—like this exactly; but I shall make it a point of coming to see you."
"Well, would I be alone with you ever?" I asked.
He said, yes, sometimes, but that I ought to know what boarding-schools were like. I smiled up at him at that, and he frowned down at me, and I said:
"I'd rather live like this, with all my besotted ignorance, and have you come to see me, and be with me all alone, just like this, than go to the finest boarding-school in the world."
He said, "Nonsense!" but he was touched, for he didn't say anything more about my going to school then. Instead, he began to urge me to leave my position at the yards. When I said I couldn't do that,he grew really angry with me. I think he would have gone then, for he picked up his hat; but I told him I hadn't had any dinner. Neither, of course, had he, as I had come in about six-thirty. So then I made him wait while I dressed, and he took me out to dinner.
There were a number of restaurants near where I lived, but he knew of a better place down-town; so we went there, by carriage, instead. On the way he asked me where I got the suit I had on, and I told him. Then he wanted to know what I paid for it, and I told him $12. It was a good little blue serge suit, and I had a smart hat to go with it. In fact, I was beginning to dress better, and more like American girls. I asked him if he liked my suit. He said roughly:
"No," and then he added, "it's too thin." After a moment he said:
"I'm going to buy you decent clothes first of all."
I had a queer feeling that so long as I took nothing from this man, I should retain his respect. It was a stubborn, persistent idea. I could not efface from my mind his bitter words of that day on the train, and I wanted above all things to prove to him that I cared for him only for himself and not for the things I knew he could give me and wanted to give me. I never knew a man so anxious to give a woman things as was Mr. Hamilton to do things for me from the very first. So now I told him that I couldn't let himget clothes for me. That made him angrier than ever, and he wouldn't speak to me all the rest of the way. While we were having dinner (he had ordered the meal without reference to me at all, but just as if he knew what I should like), he said in that rough way he often assumed to me when he was bent upon having his way about something:
"You want me to take you with me when I come to Chicago, don't you—to dinner, theaters, and other places?"
I nodded. I did want to go with him, and I was tremendously proud to think that he wanted to take me.
"Very well, then," he said; "you'll have to dress properly."
I couldn't find any answer to that, but I inwardly vowed that I would spend every cent I made above my board on clothes.
I think he was sorry for having spoken unkindly to me, because he ceased to urge me about the school, my position, my lodgings, which he did not like at all, and now my clothes. He made me tell him all over again for the third or fourth time about last night. He kept asking me about Fred, almost as if he were trying to trap me with questions, till finally I grew so hurt by some of his questions that I wouldn't answer him. Then again he changed the subject, and wanted to know what I had been writing. That was a subject on which he knew I would chatterfluently, and I told him how I had actually dared to submit my latest to a mighty publication in New York. He said he wished he were the editor. I said:
"Would you take my stories?"
"You better believe I would," he said.
"Why?"
"Well, why do you suppose?"
"Because you think my stories are good or because you like me—which?"
He laughed, and told me to finish my coffee.
I said:
"You must like mesome, else you wouldn't have cared about Fred."
He tried to frown at me for that, but instead laughed outright, and said if it gave me any satisfaction to believe that, to go on believing it.
My happiness was dashed when he said he had to return to Richmond on the eleven o'clock train. I had been secretly hoping he would remain in Chicago a few days. When I faltered out this hope, he said rather shortly:
"I can only run down here occasionally for a day or a few hours at a time. My affairs keep me in Richmond."
Little things exhilarate me and make me happy, and little things depress me and make me sad. So while I was light-hearted a moment before, I felt blue at the thought of his going. I said to myself that this was how it would always be. He would always come, andhe would always go, and I wondered if a day would ever come when he would ask me to go with him.
He saw that I was depressed, and began to talk teasingly:
"Do you know," he said—we were now at the steps of my boarding-house—"that you are a very fickle little person?"
"I? Why I'm foolishly faithful," I declared.
"I say you are fickle," he asserted with mock seriousness. "Now I know one chap that you used to think the world and all about, but whom you have completely forgotten. The poor little fellow came to me, and told me all about it himself."
I couldn't think whom in the world he could mean, and thought he was just joking, when he said:
"So you've forgotten all about your little dog, have you?"
"Verley!"
"Yes, Verley."
"Oh, you've seen him?"
I think it gave him all kinds of satisfaction to answer me as he did.
"I've got him. He's mine now—ours, shall we say?"
"Oh, did Dr. Manning give him to you?"
He laughed.
"Not much. Hesoldhim to me."
"He had no right to do that. Verley was my dog."
"But you owed Dr. Manning for your fare from Boston."
"That's true. Did he tell you that?"
"No, but I knew it, and I didn't like the idea of your owing anything to any one except—me," and he gave me one of his warmest smiles when he said that. "I did not see the doctor myself, but a friend arranged the matter for me. By the way, he owes you a considerable little sum over the amount he paid for your fare from Boston, though we are not going to bother collecting it. We'll let it go."
"What do you mean?"
"It seems he considered the dog a very expensive article. I paid him three hundred dollars for Verley, whose high-bred ancestry I very much doubt."
"Three hundred dollars! Oh, what a shame! He wasn't worth anything like that," I cried.
He said after a moment, during which he looked at me very steadily:
"Yes, he was worth that to me: he was—yours."
I caught my breath, I was so happy when he said that.
"Now I know you do like me," I said, "else you wouldn't say things like that."
"Nonsense!" he said.
"Why do you bother about me at all, then?" I asked.
He had put the key in the lock now. He didn'tlook up when he answered that, but kept twisting the key.
"I told you why. I'm interested in you—that's all," he said.
"Is that—really—all?" I asked tremulously.
"Yes," he said in a rough whisper; "that is really all, little girl."
"Well, anyway," I said, "even if you don't love me, I love you. You don't mind my doing that, do you?"
I couldfeelhis smile in the darkness of that little porch as he said:
"No, don't stop doingthat, whatever happens. That would be a calamity hard to bear—now."
It's not much to have permission to love a person, who doesn't love you, but it was a happy girl who slept on the couch that night. Lolly came in after I did, but I made her sleep inside. She wanted to know why on earth I had all the pillows on the couch. I didn't answer. How could I tell her that I wanted them about me becausehehad put them there?
In the morning, on the table, I found half a cigar that he had smoked. I rolled it up in tissue-paper and put it in the drawer where I kept only my most cherished treasures.
Now that the lights no longer went out at ten, I did considerable writing at night. I had to work, however, under difficulties, for Lolly had no end of men callers. She had discouraged men calling on her at the Y. W. C. A., but now that we had a place of our own, she liked them to come. As she gaily put it to me one day: "Beaux make great meal tickets, Nora."
And then, too, she liked men. She told me once I was the only girl chum she had ever had, though she had had scores of men chums, who were not necessarily her admirers as well.
Lolly was a born flirt. Hermann was her slave and her shadow now, and so were several newspaper men and editors who seemed devoted to her. There was only one man, however, for whom she cared a "button," so she told me, and that was Marshall Chambers; and yet, she quarreled with him constantly, and never trusted him.
Lolly's men friends were kind to me, too. They tried many devices to entrap me to go with them. It was all I could do to work at night, for even when I shut myself into the inner room, Lolly was always coming in with this or that message and joke, and tourge me to "come on out, like a good fellow, just for to-night." Though, to do Lolly justice, many a time, when she thought the story I was working on was worth while, she would try to protect me from being disturbed, and sometimes she'd say:
"Clear out, the whole bunch of you! Nora's in the throes of creation again."
However, I really don't know how I managed to write at all there. Hermann came nearly every night in those days, and even when Lolly was out, he used to sit in that outer room and wait, poor fellow, for her to return. He never reproached Lolly, though he certainly knew she did not return his love. Hermann just waited, with a sort of untiring German patience and determination to win in the end. He was no longer the gay and flippant "lady-killer." In a way I was glad to have Hermann there at nights, for I was afraid of Chambers. Whenever he found me alone, he would try to make love to me, and tell me he was mad about me and other foolish things.
I asked him once what he would do if I told Lolly. He replied, with an ugly smile, that he guessed Lolly would take his word before mine.
That marked him as unprincipled, and I hated him more than ever. Of course I never told him I disliked him. On the contrary, I was always very civil and joking with him. It's queer, but I have a good streak of the "Dr. Fell" feeling in me. Hermann and I once talked over Marshall Chambers, and his effortsto make love to me. Hermann said that that was one of the reasons he was going to be there when he could. He said that some day Lolly was going to find out, and he (Hermann) wanted to be there to take care of her when that day came. Such was his dog-like affection for Lolly, that, although he knew she loved this man, he was prepared to take her when she was done with the other.
Occasionally Fred, too, came to see me in the evening, but if I was writing, he would go away at once. My writing to Fred loomed as something very important. He believed in me. Hamilton had called me a wonderful girl, but Fred believed I was an inspired genius. He let me copy all my stories on the type-writer at the office, and would literally steal time for me in which to do it, making Red Top do work I should have done.
Fred was "in bad" at the yards. It seems that his last "drunk" had completely exasperated certain heads of the firm, and there was a general opinion, so Hermann told me, that Fred's head might "come off" any day now.
I was so worried about this that I tried to warn him. He stuck his tongue in one cheek and winked at me. Then he said:
"Nora, I have an A No. 1 pull with old man Smith, and there ain't nobody going to get my job here; but I'm working them for the New York job. I want to go east."
That made me feel just as badly, for, if Fred was transferred to the New York branch, what would become of me? I could not go, too, and I disliked the thought of working under another.
I felt so badly about it that I wrote to Mr. Hamilton, who had not been to see me for three weeks. I suppose if I had not been working so hard, I should have felt worse about that, because I had thought he would be sure to come and see me again soon. But he did not; nor did he even write to me, though I wrote him four letters. My first letter was a very foolish one. It was this:
I know you do not love me, but I do you.Nora.
I know you do not love me, but I do you.
Nora.
I felt ashamed of that letter after I mailed it. So then I sent another to say I didn't mean it, and then I sent another immediately to say that I did.
Then, for a time, as I received no answers, I didn't write to him, but tried to forget him in my writing. It's a fact that I was fairly successful. Once I started upon a story, my mind centered upon nothing else; but as soon as I was through with it, I would begin to think about him again, and I suppose he really was in my mind all the time.
But to get back to Fred. I wrote Mr. Hamilton that Fred was likely to be transferred to the New York office, and in that event he would take me with him. Of course it would be a fine opportunity for me, asall the best publishing houses and magazines were in New York, and I would have a chance to submit my work directly to the editors. Then, too, if Fred was placed in charge of the New York offices, it would be much pleasanter than in the stock-yards, since there would be merely a handful of clerks. He never answered that letter, either. I wondered why he never wrote to me. His silence made me blue and then reckless.
Lolly, who by this time knew all about Mr. Hamilton, offered me her usual consolation and advice. The consolation was a cigarette, but I didn't care for it at all. Cigarettes choked me every time I tried to smoke them, and I couldn't for the life of me understand why she liked them. She must have smoked a dozen packages a day, for she smoked constantly. Her pretty fingers were nicotine-stained, and I've known her even in the night to get up and smoke. So I could not accept Lolly's consolatory cigarette. I did, however, follow her advice in a way. She said:
"Nora, the only way to forget one man is to interest yourself in another—or many others."
So toward the end of the month I began to go about with some of Lolly's friends.
They took me to dinners, theaters, and some social and Bohemian clubs and dances. At one of these clubs I met Margaret Kingston, a woman lawyer, who became my lifelong friend. I don't know how old she was, but to me then she seemed very "grown-up."I dare say she was no more than forty or forty-five, though her hair was gray. She was a big woman physically, mentally, and of heart. Good-humored, full of sentiment, and with a fine, clear brain, I could not but be attracted to her at once. She was talented, too. She wrote, she painted, she was a fine musician, and a good orator. She was a socialist, and when very much excited, declared she was also an anarchist. With all her talents, possibly because of a certain impractical and sort of vagabond streak in her, she was always poor, hard up, and scraping about to make both ends meet.
She came over to the table where I was sitting with Lolly and Hermann and a newspaper man, and she said she wanted to know the "little girl with the black eyes." That was I. We liked each other at once, just as Lolly and I had liked each other. I form attachments that way, quickly and instinctively, and I told her much about myself, my writing, etc., so that she became at once interested in me and invited me to her house. She said she "kept house" with another "old girl."
I went to see them that very next night. They had a pretty house on G—— Avenue. Mrs. Kingston took me through the place. I suppose I looked so longingly at those lovely rooms that she asked me if I wouldn't like to come and live with them. She said she needed a couple of "roomers" to help with the expenses, andoffered me a dear little room—so dainty and cozy!—for only seven dollars a week, with board. There were to be no other boarders, so she said; but there was a suite of two rooms and a bath in front, and these she intended to rent without board. She laughingly said that as these rooms were so specially fine, she'd "soak the affluent person who took them" enough to carry our expenses. I wanted badly to move in at once, but I was afraid Lolly would be offended, so I said I'd see about it.
On that very first visit to Mrs. Kingston, who asked me, by the way, to call her "Margaret"—she said she felt younger when people called her that; and if it didn't sound so ugly, she would even like to be called "Mag"—I met Dick Lawrence, aTribunereporter.
One never knows why one person falls in love with another. See how I loved Hamilton despite his frankly telling me he was only "interested" in me. Dick Lawrence fell in love with me, and just as Hermann was Lolly's shadow, so Dick became mine. He was as ambitious as I, and quite as impractical and visionary. He wrote astonishingly clever things, but never stuck at anything long enough to succeed finally. He was a born wanderer, just like my father, and although still in his early twenties, had been well over the world. At this time the woes of Cuba occupied the attention of the American press, and Lawrence was trying to get out there to investigate conditions. This was just prior to the war.
I never really thought he would go, and was much astonished when only two weeks after I met him he turned up one night for "two purposes," as he said. The first was to tell me that he loved me, and the second to bid me good-by. Some newspaper syndicate was sending him to Cuba. Dick asked me if I would marry him. I liked him very much. He carried me away with his eloquent stories of what he was going to do. Moreover I was sorry to think of his going out to hot and fever-wracked Cuba, among those supposedly fiendish Spaniards; also he reminded me of Verley Marchmont, so that I could not help accepting him. You see, I had given up all hope of hearing from Mr. Hamilton again. He had not answered my letters. I was terribly lonesome and hungry for some one to care for me. Dick was a big, wholesome, splendid-looking boy, and his tastes were similar to mine. Then he said he'd "move mountains," if only I'd become engaged to him. He appeared to me a romantic figure as I pictured him starting upon that perilous journey.
The long and short of it is, that I said, "All right." Whereupon Dick gave me a ring—not a costly one, for he was not rich—and then, yes, he kissed me several times. I won't deny that I liked those kisses. I would have given anything in the world to have Mr. Hamilton kiss me; but, as I said, I had reached a reckless stage, where I believed I should not see him again, and next to being kissed by the man you love,it's pleasant to be kissed by a man who loves you. However, that may be with his strong young arms about me and his fervent declaration that he loved me, I felt comforted and important.
Meantime Lolly came in soon after we were engaged, and she had a party of men with her. Dick made me promise to tell no one. He sailed the next morning for Cuba. I never saw him again.
When I told Lolly about my engagement she laughed, and told me to "forget it." She said Dick had been on her paper a while, and she knew him well. She said he never took girls seriously, and although he did seem "hard hit" by me, he'd soon get over it once he got among the pretty Cuban and Spanishseñoritas. That was a dubious outlook for me, I must say. Just the same, I liked to wear his ring, and I felt a new dignity.
It's queer, but in thinking of Mr. Hamilton at this time I felt a vindictive sort of satisfaction that I was now engaged. It was good to know that even if he didn't love me enough to answer my letters, some one did.
One day Fred came in very late from luncheon. I thought at first from something strange in his attitude that he had been drinking again, but he suddenly swung around in his seat and said:
"Do you know Mott?"
"No. Who is he?"
"Manager of the —— Department."
"I don't know him by name," I said. "Point him out to me."
Fred said ominously:
"That's him; but he's not looking quite his usual handsome self."
I saw a man several departments off who even from that distance looked as if his face and nose were swollen and cut.
"Then you never went out with him?" demanded Fred.
"Why, of course not," I declared. "I've never been out with any yards men except you and Hermann. You know that."
"I thought so. Now look a-here," and he showed me his fists. The skin was off the knuckles, and they had an otherwise battered look.
"That son of a blank," said Fred, "boasted that you had been out with him. I knew that he lied, for no decent girl would be seen with the likes of him; so I soaked him such a swig in the nose that he'll not blow it again for a month."
I tell this incident because it seems to be a characteristic example of what certain contemptible men say about girls whom they do not even know. I have heard of men who deliberately boasted of favors from girls who despised them and who assailed the character of girls who had snubbed them. This was my first experience, and my only one of this kind. That a man I had not known existed would talk lightlyabout me in a bar-room full of men seemed to me a shameful and cruel thing. That a man who did know me had defended me with his fists thrilled and moved me. At that moment I almost loved Fred.
This incident, however, thoroughly disgusted me with everything connected with the yards. I made up my mind that I would go with Fred to New York. We talked it over, and he said that even if the firm would not send me, he himself would engage me after he was settled there. So I began to plan to leave Chicago, though when I paused to think of Mr. Hamilton I grew miserable. Still, the thought of the change excited me. Lolly said I'd soon forget him—I knew I wouldn't—and that there was nothing like a change of scene to cure one of an infatuation of that kind. She always called my love for Hamilton "infatuation," and pretended never to regard it as anything serious. She said I was a hero-worshipper, and made idols of unworthy clay and endowed them with impossible attributes and virtues. She said girls like me never really loved a man at all. We loved an image that we ourselves created.
I knew better. In my love I was simply a woman and nothing else, and as a woman, not an idealist, I loved Hamilton. I never pretended he was perfect. Indeed, I saw his faults from the first, but despite his faults, not because of them, I loved him.
Fred was to leave for New York on the first of November, and that was only a week off. The firm had decided to retain me, after all, in the Chicago offices, but I was determined I would not remain there, and planned to go to New York as soon as possible, when Fred would immediately engage me. He said he'd "fire" any girl he had then for me.
I had been saving from week to week for my fare and a set of furs. My suit, though only two months old, had already begun to show wear, and it was thin, as Mr. Hamilton had said. The girls at the yards were already wearing furs, but furs were beyond my purse for months to come. Lolly had beautiful furs, black, silky lynx, that some one had given her the previous Christmas.
It was now five weeks since I had seen Mr. Hamilton, and two since Dick had gone. I had had a few letters from Dick. They were not exactly love-letters. Dick's letters were more, as it were—well, written for publication. I don't know why they seemed like that to me. I suppose he could not help writing for effect, for although he said tender things, and very brilliantly, too, somehow they did not ring true to me.
I did not think very seriously of our engagement, though I liked my ring, and showed it to all the girls at the yards.
My stories came back with unflattering regularity from the magazines to which I sent them. Lolly, however, gave two of my stories to her paper, and I was to be paid space rates (four dollars a column, I think it was) on publication. I was a long time waiting for publication.
Dissatisfied, unhappy, and restless, as I now really was, I did not even feel like writing at night. I now no longer ran up-stairs to my room, with an eager, wishful heart, hoping thathemight be there. Alas! I felt sure he had abandoned me forever. He had even ceased, I told myself, to be interested in me.
Then one night he came. I had had a hard day at the yards. Not hard in the sense of work; but Fred was to leave the following day, and a Mr. Hopkins was to take his place. We had spent the day going over all the matters of our department, and it's impossible for me to say how utterly wretched I felt at the thought of working under another "boss" than Fred.
So I came home doleful enough, went out and ate my solitary dinner in a nearby restaurant, and then returned to the house.
He called, "Hello, little girl!" while I was opening the door.
I stood speechlessly staring at him for a moment,so glad was I to see him. It seemed an incredible and a joyous thing to me that he was really there, and that he appeared exactly the same—tall, with his odd, tired face and musing eyes.
"Well, aren't you glad to see me?" he asked, smiling, and holding out his hand.
I seized it and clung to it with both of mine, and I wouldn't let it go. That made him laugh again, and then he said:
"Well, what has my wonderful girl been doing?"
That was nearly always his first question to me.
"I wrote to you four times," I said, "and you never answered me once."
"I'm not much of a hand at letter-writing," he said.
"I thought that you'd forgotten me," I told him, "and that you were never going to come and see me again."
He put his hand under my chin, raised my face, and looked at it searchingly.
"Would it have mattered so much, then?" he asked gently.
"You know very well I'm in love with you," I told him desperately, and he said, as always:
"Nonsense!" though I know he liked to hear me say that.
Then he wanted to inspect me, and he held me off at arm's-length, and turned me around, too. I think it was my suit he was looking at, though he had seen it before. Then he made me sit down, and said we weregoing to have a "long talk." Of course I had to tell him everything that had happened to me since I had seen him. I omitted all mention of Dick!
I told him about Fred's wanting me to join him in New York, and he remarked:
"Fred can jump up. You're not going."
I did not argue that with him. I no longer wanted to go. I was quite happy and contented now that he was here. I didn't care whether he returned my love or not. I was satisfied as long as he was with me. That was much.
He always made me tell him every little detail of my life, and when I said I found it difficult to write, because of so many men coming to see Lolly,—I didn't mention that they were coming to see me, too!—he said:
"You're going to move out of this place right away. We'll look about for rooms to-morrow."
So then I knew he was not going back that night, and I was so glad that I knelt down beside him and cuddled up against his knee. I wished that he would put his arm about me, but all he did was to push back the loose hair that slipped over my cheek, and after that he kept his hand on my head.
He was much pleased with my description of the rooms at Mrs. Kingston's. He said we'd go there the next day and have a look at them. He said I was to stay home from work the next day, but I protested that I couldn't do that—Fred's last day! Unless Idid just what he told me, it exasperated him always, and he now said:
"Then go away from me. I don't want anything to do with a girl who won't do even a trifling thing to please me."
I said that it wasn't trifling, and that I might lose my position; for the new man was to take charge to-morrow, and I ought to be there.
"Damn the new man!" he said.
He was a singularly unreasonable man, and he could sulk and scowl for all the world like a great boy. I told him so, and he unwillingly laughed, and said I was beyond him. To win him back to good humor, I got out some of my new stories, and, sitting on the floor at his feet, read them to him. I read two stories. When I was through, he got up and walked up and down, pulling at his lower lip in that way he had.
"Well," I challenged, "can I write?"
He said:
"I'm afraid you can." Then he took my manuscripts from me, and put them in his pocket.
It was late now, for it had taken me some time to read my stories, but he did not show any signs of going. He was sitting in our one big chair, smoking, with his legs stretched out in front of him, and although his eyes were half closed, he was watching me constantly. I began to yawn, because I was becoming sleepy. He said he supposed I wanted him to get out. I said no, I didn't; but my landlady probably did.She didn't mind our having men callers as long as they went before midnight. It was nearly that now. He said:
"Damn the landlady!" just as he had said, "Damn the new man!" Then he added, "You're not going to be run by every one, you know."
I said mischievously:
"Just by you?"
"Just by me," he replied.
"But when you stay away so long—"
It irritated him for me to refer to that. He said that there were certain matters I wouldn't understand that had kept him in Richmond, and that he had come as soon as he could. He added that he was involved in some lawsuit, and that he was being watched, and had to be "careful." I couldn't see why he should be watched because of a lawsuit, and I asked:
"Would you be arrested?"
He threw back his head and laughed, and said I was a "queer little thing," and then, after a while, he said very seriously:
"It's just as well, anyway. We mustn't get the habit ofneedingeach other too much."
I asked:
"Do you think it possibleyoucould ever needme?" To which he replied very soberly:
"I need you more than you would believe."
Mr. Hamilton never made a remark like that, which revealed any sentiment for me, without seeming toregret it a moment later. Now he got up abruptly and asked me which room I slept in. I said generally in the inner one, because Lolly came in late from her night work and engagements.
"I want to see your room," he said, "and I want to see what clothes you need."
He knew much about women's clothes. I felt ashamed to have him poking about among my poor things like that, and I grew very red; but he took no notice of me, and jotted down some things in his notebook. He said I would need this, that, and other things.
I said weakly:
"You needn't think I'm going to let you get me clothes. Honestly, I won't wear them if you do."
He tilted up my chin, and spoke down into my face:
"Now, Nora, listen to me. Either you are going to live and dress as I want you to, or I am positively not coming to see you again. Do you understand?"
"Well, I can get my own clothes," I said stubbornly.
"Not the kind I want you to have, not the kindIam going to get you."
He still had his hand under my chin, and I looked straight into his eyes.
"If you tell me just once," I said, "that you care for me, I'll—I'll—take the clothes then."
"I'll say anything you want me to," he said, "if you'll do what I tell you."
I took him up at that.
"All right, then. Say, 'I love you,' and you can buy pearls for me, if you want to."
He gave me a deep look that made me thrill, and I drew back from his hand. He said in a low voice:
"You can have the pearls, anyway."
"But I'd rather have the words," I stammered, now ashamed of myself, and confused under his look.
"Consider them said, then," he said, and he laughed. I couldn't bear him to laugh at me, and I said:
"You don't mean it. I made you say it, and therefore it has no meaning. I wish it were true."
"Perhaps it is," he said.
"Is it?" I demanded eagerly.
"Who knows?" said he.
Lolly came in then. She did not seem at all pleased to see Mr. Hamilton there, and he left soon after. When he was gone, she told me I was a very silly girl to have taken him into my room. I told her I hadn't; that he had just walked in. Lolly asked me, virtuously, whether I had ever seenherlet a man go in there, and I confessed I had not. She wanted to know whether I had told Mr. Hamilton about Dick. Indeed, I had not! The thought of telling him frightened me, and I besought Lolly not to betray me. Also I took off Dick's ring. I intended to send it back to him. It was impossible for me to be engaged to him now.
Lolly said if she were I, she wouldn't let Mr.Hamilton buy clothes for her. She said once he started to do that, he would expect to pay for everything for me, and then, said Lolly, the first thing I knew, people would be saying that he was "keeping" me. She said that I could take dinners, flowers, even jewels from a man,—though in "high society" girls couldn't even do that; but working-girls were more free,—and I could go to the theater and to other places with him; but it was a fatal step when a man began to pay for a girl's room and clothes. Lolly added that once she had let a man do that for her, and—She blew out a long whiff of smoke from her lips, saying, "Never more!" with her hand held solemnly up.
So then I decided I couldn't let him do it, and I felt very sorry that I had even weakened a little bit in my original resolve not to let him spend money on me. I went to sleep troubled about the matter.