CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
It was late in the afternoon of a cold, clear day two weeks later that Jean stood outside the Grand Central Station and looked at the moving streams of strangers, all touched to faint friendliness by the accident of being in the same city, on the same street, at the same hour as herself. She felt as if she knew them all, but had slipped back noiselessly without warning among them, and as yet they had not seen her.
Jean was smiling to herself, when one of the moving units escaped the stream, and came to a halt beside her.
"Well, Jean Herrick, of all people! I thought you were in California."
Jean turned to encounter the sharp face and mouse-bright eyes of Catherine Lee, whom she had neither seen nor thought of for years, although, during the first winter in New York, Catherine had been the center of a group that met every Sunday evening for tea, usually at Jean's.
"Iwas!"
"When did you get back?"
"About ten minutes ago, and I feel as if I had been dropped from a parachute. I was just debating the Y. W. C. A. or the Martha Washington. I loathe hotels——"
"I say, do you mean you have no plans at all? Because we can put you up at our place if you care to—ten rooms down on Grove Street, a garden the size of a handkerchief, a fountain the size of a lemonade straw, four, free, feminine souls, and an empty attic. Yes?"
"It sounds like a Demonstration. Till I get my bearings, and thank you a thousand times."
"Come on. We'll walk, unless you're tired."
"Of sitting still for a week!"
They swung away, Jean shortening her step to the quick patter of Catherine's. As they went, Catherine told of her work and Jean listened enough to make out that Catherine had built herself a firm place in this city she had once hated: that any woman with brains and grit could force New York to recognize her and that managing concerts and readings paid "like the devil" if you got in right.
The patter of the crisp voice went on until, as they turned into Grove Street, Catherine broke off so sharply, that Jean feared her inattention had been discovered, and was just about to apologize when she caught a flush on Catherine's dry, brown cheeks, and followed her eyes to the heavy-set figure of a man, standing on the curb, throwing pennies into the slush, while a horde of street urchins shouted and fought for them. The man's clumsy body was convulsed with laughter, and he made false motions of throwing, with ungainly sweeps of his arms.
Catherine hurried forward and Jean felt that she wanted to reach the man and put an end to the spectacle. But as they came to the red brick house, with white window facings and green window boxes, the man turned and crossed to them.
"Jean, let me present Philip Fletcher, Nan Bonham's cousin and the nearest thing we possess to a male inmate. Philip, Mrs. Herrick of the Women's Civic Leagues."
Philip Fletcher ripped off his hat with absurd exaggeration and made a low bow. Now that she looked at him closely, Jean saw that the man's features were well cut, his eyes were clear, blue and kind, a trifle too far apart, and that his mouth was weak. Jean's first impression that he might not be quite normal mentally, vanished. He was evidently a simple soul, without dignity, but of a vanity that demanded attention even at his own expense.
He followed them in, and as Catherine led the way up to the attic, Jean heard him go on laughing down the hall and into a room at the end. She was sure that he had often thrown pennies before and would often do it again, and be overwhelmingly amused each time.
"Well, how do you like it?"
The attic ran the whole length of the house and had a big open fireplace at one end. The original windows had been replaced in the front by leaded glass doors, opening on a small balcony. The walls were burlapped and the furniture upholstered in gay chintz. It was a woman's room but it reminded Jean in a way of Flop's, as it might have been if The Bunch had never entered it.
"It's glorious!"
"I'll have a fire lighted right away and the bath's across the hall. There's sure to be plenty of hot water, because the old souse that Philip's wished on us for the last furnace man, nearly explodes the furnace every day." She was at the door, when she turned and added, "Phil's in one of his annoying moods to-night. Don't take it too seriously."
Jean laughed and promised that she would make allowances. But she fancied that Catherine flushed again at this, and wondered whyshetook him so seriously.
An hour later, refreshed by her bath, Jean heard the dinner-bell and went down with a pleasant sense of curiosity to meet the "four, free, feminine souls." They were seated when she entered and Catherine made the introductions, by pointing each out with her forefinger from the head of the table.
"Beth Marshall, that healthy blonde who looks as if she did Swedish exercise every morning, private secretary on Wall Street. That dark, artistic being next, Gerte Forsythe, magazine writer, and furnishes our emotion. Nan Bonham, deceives the world with her white hair, has the soul of a baby and runs the Presbyterian Relief in Brooklyn. Girls, Jean Herrick, head of the Women's Civic Leagues. It's stew, again."
"And, verily, I say unto you, the stew shall follow the roast, and the hash the stew, until the third and fourth generation of them whose parents come from New England."
"Shut up, Phil. Nobody invited you to come to-night, anyhow." Nevertheless Nan's blue eyes twinkled and Jean knew that she found her cousin's humor amusing.
As Jean spread her napkin, she felt Philip Fletcher sizing her up and she knew that Catherine was watching. She tried to think of something flippant that would show she could enter the mood, but before she could think of anything, more to reassure Catherine than from any desire of Philip Fletcher's approval, Gerte claimed his attention, and Catherine, in evident relief, was talking easily again of her own work, as she had during their walk from the station.
Nan joined with Gerte and Philip. Beth ate in placid silence. With this grouping of interests the meal continued, until coffee, which was served in a small basement room, cozily furnished, before an open fire.
Immediately after the coffee, all but Catherine went their way. No one said good-night, or made any mention of seeing Jean again, although Jean was sure that they had liked her. Their "freedom" had hardened to a ritual of incivility. If she stayed for a week or a month, she would see these women, tired, gay, bored, happy, and they would see her in these many moods too. They would call each other by their first names. But, if she left to-night they would probably never think of her again, nor she of them.
Jean stared into the fire, and a little of the feeling that she had had long ago on Flop's balcony, of there being so many people in the world with the threads of their lives all crossing, came back. She thought how strange it was that a few hours ago she had known nothing of these women or Grove Street, and now she was there, and Catherine was explaining the community plan on which the house worked and, finally, asking her if she wanted to come in.
"Of course we'll take a vote on you, it's part of the charter, but it's only a form." She hesitated and added, almost shyly, "I think you would be comfortable and we would really like to have you."
But as Jean began to thank her, Catherine's manner changed.
"Matter of business and—general comfort," she said in her short, snappy way. "Such a lot of people wouldn't fit."
"Then I'm a candidate for the vacancy?"
"We'll notify you formally but I guess, if you want to, you can be one of The Theses?"
"The Theses?"
"As against the rest of the world, The Theses. Gerte's distinction."
Jean laughed remembering the Tiger, not so unlike the thin, dark Gerte, and wondered why people who dabbled in the arts needed these meaningless distinctions between themselves and others.
But later, as she lay on the couch drawn close to the open window in the attic, and looked out across the buildings, rising in the outline of a fever chart as far as she could see, Jean was glad that she had met Catherine and that she was going to live here with them. And although she knew that, at any previous period of her life, it would have been impossible to her, now, contrasted with the lonely nights staring out to the river after Martha's death, the paid hominess of Katy's effort, the smoothly running indifference of these women would be pleasant. She was beginning a new life, in a new manner. And as she dropped to sleep, Jean had a hazy notion of owing something to Franklin Herrick.