CHAPTER THREE
Every morning at eight Jean crossed the Bay and every night at six she returned. The trains and the boats were always crowded, and very shortly Jean came to know certain faces and to watch for them. She liked to speculate as to what these people did, how long they had been doing it and whether they liked it. When she had made up her mind about a man or woman it always disappointed her to have to readjust her deductions by catching scraps of conversation that upset her theories. She often had to do this, however, because she was always making sweeping generalizations based on tenuous details. There were certain groups that came and went together, and although they seemed to have no connection beyond this short trip twice a day, they always looked eagerly for each other as if in dread of having to make the journey alone. They resented ever having to sit anywhere except in their usual places, and each group surrounded itself with a barrier of self-centered interest that separated it from every other self-centered group.
At first Jean ate lunch with Miss MacFarland and two other women workers, but, as she wrote to Pat, it made her feel "like a mouse nibbling at the edges of a book," and as soon as she could, broke the arrangement, and took her lunch to a nearby park. Here in the seclusion of a thick hedge, little birds came for crumbs and beyond the hedge, unseen people crunched the gravel and Jean caught scraps of their talk, unconnected bits, like scraps of patchwork.
She liked to tell Miss MacFarland about these unseen people, draw pictures of the comedies and tragedies beyond the hedge, because Miss MacFarland always listened so politely and looked so puzzled. Her thick brown eyes searched vaguely for the point of the story, and Jean knew it was only because the cataloguing was well done, that Miss MacFarland did not consider her a lunatic.
But as the weeks passed and the newness of the work dulled to a routine of writing the names of books on cards and putting numbers after them, Jean began to wonder whether in time, she, too, might not come to look vaguely for the point of a story, and prefer to drink strong tea in a stuffy room. At first the idea amused her and she elaborated it in a whimsical letter to Pat, but with the coming of the winter rains, the whimsy died, and the vision of herself in broad-toed shoes and black silesia sleeve protectors, began to follow her home every night. Now the crowds on the boat were damp and peevish and, when the boat docked, each scuttled for his own shelter, indifferent to the others.
But it was on wet Sundays that Miss MacFarland persisted beyond Jean's power to dislodge. Then Tom lounged all day in smoking jacket and slippers, dropping into brief slumber in his chair, while Tommykins cut up the colored supplement of the day's paper on the floor. Martha prepared elaborate meals and went to St. Jude's in the early morning, at four in the afternoon and eight at night. Between cooking and church, she read the lives of Anglican saints, alone in her room.
With the lighting of the street lamps on these wet Sunday nights, the town sank into the stillness of death. Only once, during the evening, did the silence ever part, to let the worshipers from evening service slip through. With soft padding of rubbered feet, a few figures slipped by the window, stealthily, as if afraid of desecrating the holiness of the Sabbath by any motion of their bodies.
At exactly five minutes before ten, Martha came cool-skinned from the dampness. If Jean was in bed, Martha always sat for a few moments on the edge. They never had anything particular to talk about, because nothing ever happened in the interim of her absence. But in these visits, Martha would strip bits of the sermon from their religious setting and offer them off-hand to Jean's intelligence. She never urged Jean to go to service, but Jean knew that in this simulated comradeship on the bed, her mother was trying to keep her in touch with "holy things," to counteract in a small part the godlessness of her days. And sometimes it made her want to cry; the little figure, carefully stripping away the phrases that annoyed, and trying to link up some old, dead form with the rush of life, was so alone in all that meant most to it. Alone with God and unaware of loneliness. So content with nothing.
It was after a particularly depressing Sunday in January that Jean came back to work on Monday morning with so fixed a certainty of becoming in the end like Miss MacFarland, that not even the relief of an unexpected blue sky after days of rain, and respite of lunch in the park had been able to dispel it. Now, in mid-afternoon, she stood by the open window, waiting for Timothy with a fresh supply of books. It was one of those perfect days between rains when sunshine filters clean air, and cool little breezes lurk in the shade. The narrow strip of lawn below the window sent up a spicy sweetness that made Jean resent the walls about her, three more hours of cataloguing and all the restrictions that hemmed one in against one's will. The air had a livingness in it that mocked any gratitude for these few moments she was free to enjoy it. Looking up at the fleecy tufts of white clouds drifting in the blue, Jean felt as a very poor person feels watching the wasteful extravagance of the rich. Something in her called to the perfect freedom of the little clouds, the inexhaustible blueness in the sky, the tingle in the air. She felt stifled, held by something she could not see, kept from something she had never had.
Jean was decidedly cross. She wondered whether, if she told Miss MacFarland she was ill and wanted to leave earlier, because it was such a lovely day, the thick brown eyes would bore into the truth, and what would happen if they did? Would Miss MacFarland ever forgive an assistant who wanted to stop working because there were little white clouds in the sky?
"Oh Lord!" Jean leaned out the window, drawing deep sniffs of the damp earth.
"Miss Norris."
Jean jerked back quickly and the blood flooded under her fair skin at the sight of the Chief Librarian standing beside her.
"Miss Norris, this is Mr. Herrick. Franklin Herrick of the SundayTimes."
He beckoned to some one still in the shadow of the storeroom and the next moment a tall man with a young face and thick fair hair stood looking at Jean. Jean never knew afterwards whether it was her own embarrassment or not, but in that first glance at Franklin Herrick she had a strange impression of receiving a very distinct picture of something naturally indistinct. He gave a feeling of great physical strength and yet looked as if he would always be too lazy to use it. His eyes were clear, deep blue and far apart, as if he went through life seeing very clearly. But the lower part of his face was heavy and his mouth contradicted his eyes. It was soft and full and not at all hidden under a small, close-cropped mustache. There was something large and curved and whitish about this tall man standing before her, with the faintest touch of amusement in his eyes, that made Jean think of the big gulls that circled over the ferryboat night and morning. She bowed slightly and wished she could stop blushing.
"Mr. Herrick is doing some special work and will need Division Z 21, which I understand is not yet catalogued. If you have no objection he might work down here, as Miss MacFarland tells me you are on Z 21 now and it would save him time."
The Chief Librarian spoke in a dry, thirsty tone and with fixed pauses, so that one got the impression of hearing the punctuation. And although he asked permission, his tone conveyed that Franklin Herrick would work in the basement whether it were convenient to Jean or not.
"That will be all right. I began Z 21 Saturday." Jean felt compelled to say something and at the same time the uselessness of saying it. "There's a small table in the storeroom. I'll have Timothy bring it in."
"Oh, no, please don't do that. It's not necessary—unless you prefer it."
Franklin Herrick spoke rapidly in a high, thin voice. It caught and held Jean's attention as the tinkle of a small bell would have done, if unconsciously she had been expecting a gong. She raised her eyes and looked at him, her own embarrassment gone. Herrick understood. Extraordinarily sensitive to the impression he made, especially on women, he knew that the thin quality of his voice had destroyed his first impression of strength. The feminine timbre of his voice was a trial to Herrick and always made him feel at the mercy of the person who noticed it. He had tried for years to deepen the tone and usually made a conscious effort at a first meeting. But for some reason, coming on this big, fair woman sniffing the air, had made him feel as though he knew her, linked them in mutual understanding against the Chief Librarian and made them seem like old acquaintances. The little incident annoyed him intensely.
He crossed to the table and appropriated one end by pushing back the books in a business-like fashion.
"I do not need much space and this will do. I shall probably be through in a day or two."
At the same instant Timothy appeared whistling, with a truckload of books. At sight of the Chief Librarian he checked the whistle, just as Jean had stopped sniffing, so suddenly that even the Chief Librarian turned and looked curiously.
Jean's eyes met Herrick's, and they smiled. When Herrick smiled at a woman he seemed to include her in something very intimate, something fine and delicate, a little beyond words. In some way it shamed Jean for the surprise she had felt at the quality of his voice. It was as if she had shown surprise at some physical defect.
"If there is anything that Miss Norris cannot do for you, if you will just ring that bell." The Chief Librarian looked vaguely about, lost in a world not his own, and went.
Separated by the length of the table, Jean and Herrick stood looking after him. Then, simultaneously, they looked at each other.
Jean laughed.
"He made me feel as if I were doing something disgraceful."
"Worse. Something not quite nice." Franklin Herrick chuckled. When Herrick laughed his voice was higher and thinner than when he spoke, but when he chuckled there was something warm and young about it. Herrick had discovered this very early in life and rarely laughed aloud. When women first heard Franklin Herrick chuckle they usually had an impulse to touch him, which impulse they called maternal or were afraid of according to their past experience. Jean, however, had no impulse to touch him, but she noticed the chuckle and liked it.
As she took her place at the table and watched Herrick cross the room for a chair, she felt that the set of his shoulders, the texture of his clothes, the very motions of his body as he lifted the chair, were not external, but expressed something within the man, just as the deft motions of Martha's hands expressed her indefatigable obedience to the drudgery of small things. And Jean liked the thing they expressed. Without defining it in words, she felt that it was something indestructibly young and buoyant and clean. It belonged with his eyes and not at all with the rather heavy lines of his chin and throat.
With a smile, Herrick drew forward a pile of books, and in a moment was hard at work. But only the surface of his brain was concerned with his notes. He knew that, from time to time, Jean glanced at him, and that, for some reason, she had changed her first estimate of him. Vibrant to any criticism, Herrick resented the implication that there had been a readjustment, and yet delighted in the result. For Jean looked as if she usually made up her mind instantly from trifles and seldom changed. She looked stronger and spiritually simpler than any woman he had ever met, as if she had been born and raised in wide spaces and carried the standards of the mountains with her. He could not picture her large, white hands ever trembling, nor her clear, gray eyes clouding with indecision, but he was sure that if he let the least hint of this sureness into his eyes, her fair skin would flush.
It was almost five when Herrick slipped the notes into his pocket and pushed back his chair.
"Through?" The brusqueness of Jean's tone annoyed him, for he had decided to stay and talk for a few moments, and the indifference in her question made him feel that Jean had shut a door he was about to push a little open.
"Yes. For the present. But I shall have to put in some licks to-night." He picked up a volume and looked inquiringly at her. "I don't suppose there would be any objection to taking this out, even if it isn't ready for circulation yet?"
"I don't know. It is against the rules."
"Perfectly good reason for taking it then."
"Just let me have it a moment. I'll make out a slip and number it."
He returned it with the look of one submitting to a foolish respect for childish rules and Jean felt like Miss MacFarland as she wrote Herrick's name and the name of the book on a pink slip. Herrick put it into his pocket.
"Thanks. It will help a lot having this. You can picture me digging my way through it in the small, wee hours, Miss Norris," he added as he took his hat and this time turned to the door.
The assumption that she would think of him at all annoyed her, and kept him in her memory almost constantly for the next two days. Jean laid this to the interruption of the usual routine. Having the mechanical intervals of Timothy's appearance broken by the unexpected advent of a newspaper man, who turned the rules of the library about, gave her several contradictory impressions of himself and ended by making her feel like a child, naturally stood out sharply in her day's work. So for two days Jean continued to think about Herrick and to be annoyed because she did.
On Thursday Herrick appeared suddenly about noon. He was in a great hurry. He returned the book, and took another, which he handed to Jean to note as she had done before. He seemed preoccupied and made no effort at conversation. It was evidently an afterthought that he turned on the threshold and called back:
"Paper goes to press to-day. Haven't time to breathe."
Jean had wondered at his altered manner, but his explanation seemed to accuse her of having shown it. She gave the slightest possible nod to acknowledge that she had heard him and went on with her work.
On Friday Herrick did not come. Jean wondered whether he was through with his work now that the paper had gone to press, and just what special duties going to press involved. It sounded interesting and much more vital than anything connected with a library. An incongruous picture of the Chief Librarian rushing something to press tickled her fancy.
On Saturday, Herrick appeared directly after lunch.
"Well, back again." Something in the tone, the look that accompanied them, showed that he had missed coming, and now entered again into a congenial atmosphere. It seemed to throw them a long way forward in mutual understanding.
"Going to press must be a ferocious business." Jean smiled across the table and made no effort to pretend work. When Jean smiled, something cold in her face melted.
"It is. I always feel as if I had been caught in a cyclone, carried violently round in a circle and deposited in the spot I started from. You see there's the same pother every week, and we're always caught in the same rush. Newspaper work's a rotten grind, anyhow."
"To outsiders it always sounds nerve-racking excitement. What on earth would you do if you had to catalogue books all day?"
"That is pretty bad." Herrick's eyes softened as they always did when he was making a woman understand his understanding.
Jean felt that without meaning to she had told this stranger a great deal about herself. Almost as if she had told him of her mother, of Tom and Elsie and Tommykins and the long, interminable Sundays. She flushed. Instantly the understanding vanished from Herrick's eyes and he shrugged indifferently.
"I suppose anything we have to stick at feels the same way."
"Did you get your work done the other night?" Jean asked it after a pause in which she wondered what she could say that wouldn't sound as if she had been thinking about him.
"Oh yes, indeed. But it was a hard pull. If you knew me better, Miss Norris, you would congratulate me on that achievement." He looked like a mischievous boy expecting to be punished.
Jean smiled in sympathy. "What on? Sticking to a disagreeable job till it's done?"
"Well, put that way, it does sound rather bald. But you see The Bunch was having a blow-out and little Franklin had to stay in his attic and work. Maybe if you knew what The Bunch can do in the way of highjinks, even you'd be sorry for me."
"Maybe I would. Are they such terribly enticing affairs?"
"Oh, sometimes we get a bit rowdy, but usually we're perfectly harmless—just conversation and music and food and meeting each other. We're congenial and interested in the same things, and keep each other from getting into a rut. Sometimes when one of us goes away or comes back, or sells a picture or an article, we have an extra celebration. That's all."
"It sounds—awfully interesting."
Herrick leaned across the table and said in a boyish, hesitating fashion:
"We do have some pretty good times. If you think you'd care for it, I'd like immensely to bring you round some evening."
"I'd love to." Jean was a trifle breathless.
"Some of us have made good and some of us are—popularly nobodies. There's Matthews and Harcourt, landscape, and Fletcher has done some fine things in bronze. Tolletson's in drama production and Freeman, Gerald Freeman, is going to be heard of with short stories. Maybe you know his stuff. He had a story inScribner'slast month. Then there are the girls, none of them are exactly famous yet; and the rest of us just jog along."
But Jean had stopped listening at Gerald Freeman's name. She had read the story and sent it to Pat. Its delicate subtlety had haunted her for days. And now she was being asked to meet him and others like him. She was being asked as if it were a favor to the big man with the kind eyes, sitting across the table. Jean tried to keep the excitement out of her voice as she answered.
"Yes, I read that story. It was so very—perfect."
"Yes. His things are that, those half elusive, dream things. They always make me think of small, finely carved ivories."
"I should like to meet him very much."
"Well, Freeman himself isn't here now. He's getting too famous to stay long in one spot, but—there's the rest of us."
Jean felt that she had been rude in her special interest and added quickly: "I'd be just as pleased meeting 'the rest of us.'"
"Then we'll settle it right now. Saturday's the best night. The unfortunates don't have to get up early, and we generally have more hilarity than just the usual nightly dinner. Could you come to-night?"
"I'm afraid I can't to-night."
Jean had never wanted to do anything so much in her life, but she could not picture herself ringing up her mother and saying that she would not be home to dinner.
"It is rather short notice. How about next Saturday? Have you that free?" Herrick saw that she wanted to come and wondered why she couldn't.
Under her pleasure that the invitation had not been postponed indefinitely, Jean had an almost irresistible desire to laugh at the idea of her having any night that was not free.
"Yes. Next Saturday's all right."
"Then I'll call for you about seven?"
"I don't live on this side."
The difficulties of meeting some one at seven, when she would be through by half past five, occurred to her, and she wondered where girls met men and how she could pretend this was not as new and exciting a situation as it was.
"Great. You get through about five, don't you? I'll call here and we'll find some way to kill the time between."
"Fine." Jean made the monosyllable as comradely as she could, and flattered herself that she had carried it off very well.
Herrick turned to the books and in a few moments was hard at work.
Jean's confusion had delighted him, and destroyed the slight annoyance he had felt at being carried away by such a foolish impulse as to ask her at all. It would be delicious to watch the reactions of this shy woman in the sophisticated world of The Bunch. He decided to say nothing about her beforehand, and enjoy to the full their surprise when he appeared,—a little late, he would see to that—with Jean in tow.
"She'll hit them like a blast of north wind. I shouldn't wonder if Kitten doesn't actually shiver."
The prospect of watching The Kitten shiver pleased Herrick immensely.