FROMThe Journaloffice the lake looked blue and calm, disdaining the stray gusts of wind that tossed newspapers and rubbish about in the alleys below Main Street. Horatia had moved her typewriter over to the window so typewriting might be accompanied by some compensations. Langley said it increased her mistakes one hundred per cent, but Horatia insisted that it doubled her inspirations.
“Which is necessary,” she added, “when one is trying to be both brilliant and informational. The two things don’t track.”
She hated typewriting. Her fingers, untrained to accuracy, stumbled and missed their aim and wrote absurdities. But typewriting was one of the things which must be done if she was to do journalistic work, they told her, and Horatia had decided that working on a newspaper was worth a good many sacrifices. She had gone through some of them already in the shape of family protests and disapprovals and if another one was to take the shape of a 1913 Oliver typewriter, that too was to be borne. Gladly borne for the sake of the thrilling contact with unprinted, raw news, with information on a hundred subjects that had never interested her before, for the sakeof the kaleidoscopic picture of the city’s life and means of life, for the caustic brilliant comments of Jim Langley and Bob Brotherton, sitting with their pipes smoking furiously as they uncoiled the truth about some happening, or wrote editorials of things as they ought to be. Out of the terrific tangle of the philosophies and political economies of the world she saw these men draw threads and wind them neatly on a spool of thought. The tangle remained a tangle but a fascinating instead of a discouraging one. It was more what was said than what was written, though enough out of tune with the current hysteric dread of American Bolshevism was published to account for Harvey’s characterization that Langley had “no policy” which meant the fatal lack of the right one. Horatia knew now why Jim Langley’s paper had never appeared in the Grant household. She had seen the president of the Dry-Goods Association of which Uncle George was a pillar denounced in its pages for crooked political dealing. She knew why the advertisements thatThe Journalran were those of obscure stores or coöperative establishments or small firms employing union labor. In two months she had learned more about politics, psychology, philosophy and labor problems than she had known there was to learn. Most of it had come direct from Langley. He had looked a little surprised when she had turned up that Monday morning, whimsically surprised.
“So you came?” he said simply with a thousand implications in his tone.
And she had answered, “I came,” giving therewith the answer to all his implied questionings in her tone. He gave her a desk and told her briefly, almost abruptly, what he thought she could do. She could “cover” certain meetings for them, mostly big lectures and concerts that must be reported, with such theater notices as would be necessary and for the rest, it would be mostly writing up the notes of Bob Brotherton, or Charley Jones, the other reporter, when their work crowded them too much.
“You see,” he explained, “you take no one’s place but you can relieve the pressure on all of us.”
That was the outline of her work but compressed in the outline she found ten and sometimes twelve hours a day of fascination. The two other men had taken her advent rather smilingly but they soon found her useful. She learned to read their handwriting, to decipher their notes, to write a story from their verbal outline. And “in spite of her typewriting,” said Langley, “it is good copy.”
Little by little she had come into the confidences of the office. The men talked freely in front of her, tried to show her how to typewrite, explained their standards, told of their own histories and ambitions. Bob Brotherton had meant to write and was particularly expansive about his wasted ambition when he had been drinking alittle. Horatia came to recognize the effect of liquor in his conversation and to discount it. She liked him too because Langley had told her something of Bob’s miseries, his domestic tragedy of an insane wife and a feeble-minded child, both now in institutions somewhere. And it was impossible to keep from liking Charley Jones, out of college three years and hoping, praying and urging that Labor would come into its own soon. All the problems of the city and of the country, even of the world, were met in the little office by Bob’s literary pessimism, Charley’s cure-all and the philosophical endurance of Langley. Langley never got angry or excited. When the others were tangled as to policy or inner meanings, he hit the truth on the head with some single sentence. Horatia, sitting at her typewriter or at her table with her back to them all, would catch herself listening for his comment and when it came would seize upon it as truth and final.
She had no idea of how much she had changed the office, of how much more work and less idling had come with her. Perhaps because her dogged determined industry made them ashamed, perhaps because her uplifted profile at the window or her apologetic frowning smile at some mistake she had made charmed them, they all worked with a new energy. And they were all amazed at her lack of self-consciousness. They were experienced, each in his own way, and they watched her for those traces of self-consciousness which break down the barriers between business andpersonal relations. But there was none of it. She never blushed, she never seemed afraid. It was all interest—pure interest.
“I can’t get it,” said Bob one day after she had left the office. “She likes it here. What does she see in this decrepit sheet to interest her? She ought to be listening to troubadours under her window, instead of pounding a typewriter.”
“Precisely,” said Langley, a little over-dryly. “She ought, but she wouldn’t. She’s gone on a hunt for her own romance—that’s what the modern young girl does instead of having it brought to her.”
“And she’s found it here?” grinned Bob.
Langley shrugged his shoulders and tilted his pipe.
“Temporarily. The view helps.”
He sent Bob out on an assignment shortly after and then stood before the window watching the darkness close down on the water.
There was no doubt thatThe Journal’saffairs were looking up. A new movement had come into the city—a non-partisan political element who in default of a paper of their own were using his. They were backing a strong man and a comparatively decent one for mayor in the November elections and political advertising had swelled the funds ofThe Journalas much as its advocacy of a strong candidate had increased its circulation. And Langley found his old nerve coming back into his writing. He admitted occasionally to some of his companions that it wasworth while writing if someone was reading what he wrote. But there seemed to be other things that stimulated his thought. He had a way of watching Horatia’s profile, clear and pure against the window, of drinking in the frank admiration in her tone and her face as she talked to him, the sweetness of her impersonality—those things were getting into his writing too. But he never admitted that. So on this October day when Horatia sat struggling with her typewriter, he acted quite as if he was oblivious to her presence.
She rose at last and brought her copy to him and he groaned as usual at the misplaced letters and figures.
“But read it,” said Horatia gaily. “It’s a description of the mass meeting the women got up for our candidate which mentions the name of every lady present who can afford to subscribe to the paper. I’m getting on to the game. And please don’t give me any more to do this afternoon because I want to go.”
“Nice businesslike attitude,” said the editor.
“Everything’s done,” said Horatia, defensively.
“All right.”
“I’ll tell you what I want to do,” volunteered Horatia.
Langley had permitted himself no inquisitiveness but he seemed glad and composed himself to listen.
“My revered uncle and aunt feel so niecelesssince I work all day and sleep all the time that I’m home that they have decided to do a very wonderful thing. They are going to Florida for the rest of the winter to look at beauties which they are getting too old to appreciate. And as it seemed useless to keep the stone house open for me, I am told to go to live with Maud. I don’t want to live with Maud, however, and, truth to tell, I don’t think Maud, though she won’t admit it, wants me to very much. I’m not much help to her and I rile her pool of life. She has admitted that if I could get a ‘cunning little apartment and some girl to live with me,’ I might be more content. And so I have found a cunning little apartment and the friend dropped from heaven to live with me. She is the new woman in the government labor office, Grace Walsh. I heard about her—she was five or six years ahead of me at the University—and I went to see her and she’s very keen about it, living with me, I mean.”
“Where is the cunning place?”
“On Sixth Street. New apartment building. I’m going to meet Grace there now and when we get the pictures hung, you can drop your editorial mantle and come to call.”
Langley flushed a little. It was a long time since he had had such light-hearted invitations flung at him—or so it must have seemed to him. And, vaguely understanding the flush, Horatia was suddenly enraged at the ostracism which had been forced upon him.
“Won’t you walk over and see the place now with me?” she said, impulsively. “It isn’t half a mile.”
She expected him to refuse her. He had not repeated his invitation to lunch since she had been in the office and, courteous as he always was, Horatia fancied that he avoided personal contact with her when he could. But now, to her surprise, he rose.
“I’d like to. I’ve been wanting a walk all day.”
They swung along briskly and this time the sardonic Langley seemed left behind in the office. The new one laughed like a boy and walked as if all the rigidity had melted out of his body. On the street, as they passed people whom he or Horatia knew, his hat was off almost with a flourish as if he greeted the world afresh.
“You act as if you’d dropped all the cares of the world,” laughed Horatia.
“No—I’m still carrying them. But it isn’t the cares of the world that weigh you down. It’s your own little cares. If you have none of those and no ugly scars left by them you can carry the troubles of the world easily enough. What an easy problem to solve Bolshevism is, if you aren’t trying to solve it with a mind diseased by personal aches and worries.”
Horatia did not answer. She hoped he would go on into fuller, more specific confidence. She hated herself for the question that so often cropped up in her mind as to what were the real facts of the Hubbell trouble. She understoodso much of him now that she wanted to know about that. It would be the last link in the chain—no, the last step in the ladder that mounted—whither she did not know. Somewhere in her vaguest thoughts she and Jim Langley understood each other perfectly, scoffed at the rest of the world that did not understand.
But he did not go on. They reached the apartment building, and Horatia, pulling out her latch-key long before it was necessary, rang for the elevator.
“Your friend is there?” asked Langley, suddenly, sharply.
This time it was Horatia’s turn to flush. She dropped from the clouds.
“Of course,” she said, impatiently. “But I like to use my latch-key.”
She rapped on the door where a card already announced the names of Miss Walsh and Miss Grant. There was no answer and she unlocked the door and pushed it open. A note lay on the little table in the hall. Horatia picked it up and read it. Then she turned to Langley with her head a little higher than usual.
“Grace had to go downtown for some things. She’ll be back later. You can come in anyway, can’t you, and let me show you the place?”
His eyes met hers squarely.
“It’s better not,” he said, quietly.
They stood confronting the silly, awkward little situation with varying emotions. His rage at the fact that he couldn’t be natural for fear ofcompromising her—that he had to protect her not from himself but from his reputation, was natural enough. And Horatia raged because she did not know that she dared urge him, and she wanted to.
“It’s absurd,” she cried impatiently. “It’s stupid. It’s beastly. You’ve been abominably treated. Do you think I care what people say?”
His eyes seemed to melt at the championing kindness of her tone—then froze again.
“The oppressed always appeal to the romantic. But you want to make sure of the merits of the oppressed. Some other time, Miss Grant. I enjoyed my walk.”
He was gone immediately and Horatia flung furniture and rugs into place until her anger was cooled. Grace came in half an hour later to find things in amazing order.
“You’ve done everything.”
“I wanted to work,” answered Horatia, briefly.
And then——
“Look here, do I have to have a chaperon every time I want a man to come up here? Do you?”
Grace pulled off her gloves, sat down on the sofa and surveyed the room and the question calmly. She was a calm person, who balanced an unshocked acceptance of any laxity or scandal in the world of literature against an equally uncomplaining acceptance of the restraints of the world of action. And she seemed fond ofHoratia, though Horatia had a feeling of getting acquainted only up to a certain point.
“I suppose not,” Grace said slowly. “People may be a little vicious in their talk if you’re not somewhat circumspect. I wouldn’t advise sessions with married men—or ones with highly colored reputations——”
“What does it matter what people say?” urged Horatia.
“Oh, it doesn’t—and it does. I think it would to you. But the question of having men here alone isn’t likely to arise. For the kind of men you’d want wouldn’t come if they thought your reputation would be endangered. There are a few survivals of romance, and the knightly spirit, and one of the last to go, if it ever goes, will be the care that men take of women’s names. It’s my experience that names rank more highly than bodies in male psychology.”
There was no sign of any remembrance of the episode in Langley’s manner the next day and Horatia found no difference in his attitude towards her. She never saw him outside the office. The curtains were hung in the little apartment. Grace sat up an informal tea-table at which Horatia assisted. Even Maud came occasionally with some of her friends to savor this bachelor life, and they pretended to envy for half an hour. It was a very pleasant apartment and Horatia found that being an intellectual in the city was far different from being an intellectual in the confines of West Park or a highbrow at the University. Not all men were afraid of brains. Charley Jones came and brought young men with him, several friends of Harvey’s came and there were others justifying themselves by this claim or that to a seat near that tea-table where Grace Walsh, looking like a Dutch picture, poured out tea and calm cynical judgments and Horatia, in a yellow silk dress on Sundays and blue serge on weekdays, pressed lemon, cream, tea cakes and joy of living on them.
It was wonderful to see how the excitement of the new life brought a richer color into Horatia’s cheeks and a glow into her eyes which made every gown the most becoming one. It was amazing to see how her power over men grew. She seemed to toss a mental challenge to every man she met, a challenge not to a combat of words or phrases but to a struggle over the interesting and vital things in the world. She was enjoying herself so much that she tempted them all to discover her secret of enjoyment.
But she allowed nothing to interfere with her work and more and more of her time was spent at the office as the fall days grew shorter and the lake more steadily grey and the work heavier. The November election promised to be a most important one in the history of the city.The Journal’scandidate, Nels Johnson, came and went in the office. He was a heavy little man with a kind shrewd face and a tolerant smile. Horatia liked him and she liked to hear him talk and give opinions for publication. Langley likedhim too, she knew. She could hear them often through the door of his office discussing things which had nothing to do with the election.
“The Reds are rotten, physically and morally, and they run on a single track mentally, most of them,” Langley would say, “but I’ll be damned if they aren’t much more attractive than the slinking crowd that want to put out all the pipes in the country. I’d sooner have an old-style Tammany man than one of these ministerial sneaks.”
And Bob Brotherton, his nose a little red still and his utterance a trifle thick from indulgence in some private store of liquor to which he seemed to have eternal access, would agree. And the candidate for office would agree. And Charley Jones, with some comment on the attempt of the churches to dominate labor, would agree. And Horatia, vigorously nodding at her typewriter, would agree too that she wanted the world run by freedom and not by imprisonments.
But perhaps the nicest moments and hours for Horatia were the evenings in the office when they all worked late and tobacco and accomplishment were thick in the air. Sometimes the reporters would all be out on some errands and Langley would talk to her—always impersonally, never emotionally, but expansively, going back into the history of the city to explain some political anomaly to her and telling her, in spite of himself, about his ideas and plans. She came to respect him more and more and to believe in thefineness of his instincts. But still she never heard him say a word of his personal affairs. She wondered how and where he lived. Somewhere on the other side of the city, she knew, and that was all. He never told her about the old scandal and she never could find out more about it. At a certain point in his career Langley had simply shut his mouth and there was no one else who knew more than Harvey Williams.
Horatia gloried in the growing prestige ofThe Journal. Even Harvey bought it now and Maud’s early opposition had changed into a feeling that Horatia with all her eccentricity was bringing distinction upon them. She never said that to Horatia. But she talked of her “intellectual sister” without embarrassment now on the Boulevard.
MAUD had her own plans for Horatia. She herself was finding life very pleasantly successful and she followed her leaders carefully, trusting no habits of life which they did not trust and indeed regarding all other types of living as either impossible to attain or impossible to endure. She was developing the best possible setting for herself and her family. Her house broke none of the rules laid down in “House and Garden,” with its striped cretonnes and plain linens and comfortable furniture. It was not too ostentatious because the young people around her were not ostentatious, but it was a beginning. And she saw her future before her with delightful clearness through a succession of increasingly expensive automobiles, through a succession of increasingly elaborate gowns up to the day when she would own a great brick house in the city and a winter home in California. She did not take great credit to herself for this ambition. It was due to her own astuteness and Harvey’s cleverness.
So she gave dinner parties to people whom she knew and liked and other dinner parties to people who were useful to her husband, and enjoyed her progress along the reasonable way ofluxury and importance. The things Horatia talked about, odd things picked up in her newspaper office, of a new spirit in the world, of the relentless advance of the hordes of workers, bothered her not at all. She knew that servants were increasingly hard to get and to keep “in their place” and that there were “labor troubles” in some of the manufactories managed by people whom she knew and that “everybody was striking.” But she knew too that Harvey placed the responsibility on the war for much of the trouble, and she had no doubt that, the war being over, those little matters would adjust and allow the right people to run things as they should be run. Horatia talked a great deal but Maud had no doubts about her sister’s ultimate destiny. Somewhere along the line, and not too far along, she meant to marry Horatia to some desirable man. She had discovered that Horatia was an asset at a dinner party just as she was a blight at a bridge. She was one person when she was making inexcusable and enraging blunders at a bridge-table and another when she appeared at a tea, able and willing to talk of the newest local interest or problem to important and serious-minded ladies or when, in some queer effective dinner-dress, she sat with her bright, grave face turned in constant interest to the man beside her.
“Horatia plays up to men awfully well,” Maud told her husband. And was wholly wrong. Horatia was too interested to play up to anyone, man or woman. She had come from her University into a world vastly more stimulating than she had imagined. It was, as Langley had told her, a world tired and worn by war, a world in vast upheaval over the division of material things, but through the weariness and worn places relentless new life, undiscouraged energies were already pushing their way. Since the war young people had come to feel their power and their indispensability; young plans for life and ways of life, less greedy than the old ones, pushed themselves forward, sure that they could not fail as deplorably as the old systems had done. Women were no longer tremulous about their possibilities; an under-supply of men had forced them out of their dependencies and they faced life more sturdily. Men, shocked into the realization that death comes devastatingly to whole generations of the young, faced life more sturdily too, though temporarily with less responsibility, with more desire for immediate pleasures, for immediate achievements, and with an undertone of mental insecurity. The whole world seemed to feel unstable and ready for experiments, any experiments. That was the world which Horatia had found and it mated badly with Maud’s. Maud’s world, Maud’s friends, lived by the rules laid down by old-fashioned success and decency. They held to the old order but not to the spirit of the old order. The spirit of the old order had been far-reaching, far-seeking, anxious to perpetuate its own ideas and to raise generation after generation like itself. But Maud and Harvey had no thought of grandchildren or of the future of their own ideas. Their ideas reached not much farther than the brick mansion and the house in California.
Through their circles and through her own Horatia came and went and everywhere she touched life and tingled with the contact, unconscious that it was she herself who was electric. Langley watched her as she dashed in and out of his office and tried not to do so and on his failure cursed himself under his breath for a doddering fool and worked harder than ever.
He sent Horatia home at five o’clock on the afternoon of the election, for they had put out a special edition the day before and he noticed the unnatural flush of her cheeks.
“Come back tonight if you like,” he said. “You can answer the telephones after the returns begin to come in. But there’ll be nothing before ten.”
Horatia went obediently. At the apartment she found an urgent message from Maud. Someone had failed her and would Horatia come to dinner? Horatia called her to beg off and yielded. Maud was very serious about her dinner parties and this one, it appeared, was especially important.
“You can go at ten, if you have to. But don’t leave me with an unbalanced table. There’d be two men sitting next each other. Please.”
Horatia promised and hung up the receiver, smiling a little at the enormity of two men sittingnext each other. But after all it gave her something to do and she was not sorry.
Harvey greeted her admiringly in the living-room.
“How are politics?”
“I’d give a lot to know.”
“Well,” he admitted, “your candidate really does stand a show. It’s amazing the way he has come on, without more backing. The chances are that he’ll run second or third.”
“I think he’ll be first,” said Horatia, and was going on when Maud came in, resplendent in black satin and with her blond hair drawn back from her forehead in perfect waves. She looked Horatia over critically. Horatia’s dress was the color of burnt orange and obviously she had done her hair herself and quickly. But even Maud could not cavil.
“I’ve given you young Wentworth,” she said, with the air of one who confers great benefits, “and don’t talk his arm off about politics. He’s rather sporty—was an aviator—is awfully rich, they’re the grain exporters, you know. And do be nice to him, won’t you?”
“It’s easier to be nice to the poor than the sporty rich. But I’ll try.”
She found it surprisingly easy to be nice after all. Anthony Wentworth had the charm of a young man and the finesse of an older one. He talked on all sorts of subjects—about soldiers and soldiering, not from the point of view Horatia heard most often inThe Journaloffice,the economic standpoint, but from the romantic one. And Horatia, who had given up the hope that there was anything romantic in war, listened to him as he talked of chances and perils and adventures, never for a minute in self-exploitation but for sheer joy in having found a listener who knew what he was trying to say.
“But you got out of it,” she protested. “Why didn’t you keep on flying?”
He smiled a little apologetically.
“I don’t enjoy flying for mere sport—or commercially. There’s no pleasure in it as there can be in driving a car or riding a horse. But to run the risks and take the chances and know there’s a reason why you should is different.”
He relapsed into an attack on his salad and Horatia broke up a cracker and thought of the difference between his ideas of war and the war as it was seen by ex-soldiers who drifted intoThe Journaloffice with gossip and complaints. But she did not pursue the idea, for when the salad was finished Anthony Wentworth had more to say to her, so much that she forgot about the election and thought of how wonderful it would be to travel through all the queer countries of the world with a man who could ride and shoot and drive an airplane and whose hair grew back from his forehead naturally. Maud, from the head of the table, looked at them and even found time to dream a very hasty dream in which she figured largely as the sister-in-law of Mr. Anthony Wentworth.
But in the living-room Horatia remembered and to her horror it was half-past ten. Signalling to Maud, she started to leave the room and was annoyed to find Wentworth following her.
“It’s very early, Miss Grant.”
“I know, but I am just going to work. I work inThe Journaloffice and it’s election night and I meant to get back by ten o’clock. Now it will be eleven.”
He did not show the slightest perturbation at the announcement of her work, but pulled out his watch.
“Not if you let me take you down in my car. Can’t I, please?”
“I’d love it.”
They seemed to fly along the streets and she loved the sureness of his driving. Huddled beside him in her cloak, with the wind in her face, that too was an adventure. The city streets were more crowded than usual and knots of men stood together on the corner, arguing and discussing. AtThe Journaloffice, Horatia noted with satisfaction that there was a crowd around the hall, a large enough crowd to prove the importance ofThe Journalpolitically, she thought. She and Anthony Wentworth pushed through it up to the door of the office and Wentworth followed her in. The tobacco smoke was thick in the room. It was crowded and unfamiliar, with a man sitting at her desk with his feet on her table and Langley laughing rather uproariously at something. As she came in the conversation halted abruptly.Some of the men knew her but to most of them the slim beautiful girl in evening clothes and the tall, immaculate man beside her seemed a curious apparition. There was an awkward moment. Horatia seemed chiefly conscious of Jim Langley’s eyes suddenly eager, suddenly hostile, suddenly cynical again. It was her companion who broke the silence as he greeted Langley cordially.
“Why, I didn’t know what I was getting into, Langley,” he said. “Is it your paper Miss Grant works on? I brought her down because she was in such a hurry to get here——”
To Horatia her hurry now seemed absurd. What had she hurried for? They didn’t need her. She was simply out of place.
“You told me I could answer the telephones.”
She tried to make a joke of it but Langley did not help her.
“Miss Grant is over-conscientious,” he said, half to Wentworth, and then wholly to her, “I am sorry you hurried away from your party.”
“It wasn’t a party,” said Horatia. “I was at my sister’s house for dinner. And please put me to work at something. I know I look silly but I’ll keep my coat on.”
Her self-consciousness had gone and the situation was easy and real again. But the two men who were talking to her looked at each other for the space of a second measuringly. Then with a few casual inquiries as to the progress of the election Wentworth went out.
“You can take the ’phone in my room,” saidLangley. “Tell people who call that returns are only beginning to come in but that Johnson runs second on a count of nine precincts. Emphasize Johnson. I’ll get the news on the other wire and pass it on to you.”
She nodded understandingly and holding her cloak over her shoulders passed through the crowded room with her perfectly friendly disarming smile. It was significant that no one said anything about her or even exchanged a glance or smile after she had passed. Langley, looking on the alert to check any such demonstration, seemed satisfied.
The smoke thickened and the telephone was incessant. Horatia answered innumerable inquiries—of men who gave their names as if it gave them a first right to information—of women who seemed to try to make their anxious voices anonymous. It was amazing how many people cared. And didn’t care! She remembered the nonchalance of the people at Maud’s dinner party—the perfect courtesy of the young ex-aviator towards the triviality of the local election. What did he know or care about the future ofThe Journalor Jim Langley? What did she know—why did she care? She mechanically kept on, answering questions—listening to the voices of the men in the other room, now excited, now indifferent, now voicing an analysis of this or that chance. The smoke was even thicker. It hung like a cloud over the desks and tables—it created an atmosphere of masculinity.Women can not smoke in such a way. It seemed as if the smoke were a cloud of hopes and chances and ideals in which these men were floating.
Things went well—then badly. Horatia’s philosophy melted away. Nothing mattered except success, Johnson’s success. She felt a strange exhilaration at the fact that they didn’t know—couldn’t know yet—and that there might be whole precincts which would go exclusively for Johnson. The men at the tables labelling the 39th as Catholic—“nothing there”—“maybe 40 in the 27th,” irritated her. Why did they frighten themselves with all these calculations?
She looked up at Langley, who had come in with a report.
“He’s got to win—he’s gone so far. Things couldn’t be so contrary as to let him lose now.”
Suddenly he smiled at her.
“Incurable romanticist,” he said, and went out again.
At twelve o’clock things were in utter confusion—at one o’clock it was clear as daylight. If Johnson had not won he had so nearly done so that only a trick of luck would defeat him. His chances were good.
At half past one he looked secure and the office was slowly emptying. The telephone calls had nearly ceased. The last of the politicians departed, hoping to get a bit of stray news at the city hall and promising to telephone it as soon as possible. Horatia still sat at Langley’s desk—her head on her hand—her cloak thrown back—dreaming of what this might mean and mixing her dreams with a hundred irrelevancies.
“Well,” said Langley, “we’ve won, I think.” His voice was very quiet and yet there was a new sureness in it.
Horatia got up a little wearily, dragging her cloak.
“I have never been so glad of anything,” she answered.
He came behind her to lift the wrap and put it about her shoulders.
“I must take you home.”
It was very quiet. All the excitement seemed to have given way to stupor. In the hazy office they spoke slowly and Horatia felt vaguely unreal.
“Aren’t you glad?” she pressed for an answer.
“Very.” He spoke tenderly, as if to reassure a child, folding the wrap lingeringly over her shoulders.
“And you’ll be happier now?”
“Happier—romanticist—what’s happiness?”
“It’s everything,” said Horatia.
She looked up at him and the dark circles under her eyes and the pallor of her cheeks made her suddenly pathetic. A tremendous tenderness woke in Langley’s face. Tenderness and pain. The cynicism which had guarded his emotions seemed to slip away.
“I’m happy just to be near you—near you.”
He drew her gently back against him and bent towards her lips. They met his—so sweetly, sosoftly, with the innocence of their touch matching the wonder in her eyes. Wonder that love had dawned on her life.
He did not speak—only held her. It was she who broke the silence.
“All the wonderful things in the world are coming true.”
But at that he released her, lifting her face in his hands.
“You’ve brought me back to life. You’ve made me come back when I was afraid to come—and when I hated to come. You’ve made me want to try all over. And there’s not a thing in the world I can do for you—nothing to offer you—nothing.”
She felt suddenly grown-up and maternal.
“Isn’t it enough to—love me?” she asked, hesitating a little.
“My love!” He scorned it.
“It’s a strong, beautiful love.”
He turned away drearily.
“You romance—you can’t help romancing. No, it’s not beautiful; it’s strong, God knows, but not beautiful. Don’t you see, Horatia—don’t you see I’m a spent sort of person. I can’t take your youth and loveliness. I haven’t a right. You belong to someone young and fine like yourself.”
“I belong where I love.” Horatia was impatient of argument. She was a woman in love and a hundred instincts pulled at her heart.
Langley paled at the words. Then again he held her close to him—despairingly close.
“Anything in the world I have,” he breathed. “And now I must take you home.”
They went out into the quiet street and went along swiftly, Horatia too happy for silence or leisurely walking.
“There are more stars and the wind is a wind of joy,” she exulted.
Langley said nothing but at her door he kissed her again—gently and sweetly.
“Good-night, my love, good-night. You must sleep well. And I’ll never, never hurt you or let you hurt yourself.”
“Can’t you stop worrying?” begged Horatia. “Can’t you just love? I don’t even think.”
“I’ll try.”
When she looked at her face in her mirror the exaltation of it startled her.
“Love makes you beautiful,” she thought and slipped into her bed to lie ecstatically still, thinking of nothing except the touch of lean brown hands and the smell and touch of his rough coat. And her mind sang hymns to the wonder of love.
* **
She was for telling everyone at once but Langley demurred. Going to the office next morning she lingered to enjoy her own anticipations. It was different now. All restraints were over between them, she thought.
He was not there. That was the first disappointment. Later, when he came in, there were other men with him and his greeting was as formal as it had been the day before. She bent over her work, went out on assignments with her mind repeating and repeating every quiver of incident of the night before. At five o’clock she was alone again and he came in. But instead of going to the inner office he came to her desk and as she looked up she saw that his face was suffering, greatly stirred.
“Horatia,” he asked, “did you mean it—do you mean it now—in daylight?”
She lifted her arms towards him and was swept off her feet.
“My God,” she heard him say, “I was so sure you couldn’t have meant it. I can’t fight any longer.”
“Do you know that every footstep of yours about this office has sounded in my heart?”
“My arms are so weary with waiting.”
“I never hoped—but once in a while I dreamed, although I had no right—no right at all.”
He was a wonderful lover, so wonderful that he silenced her own enthusiasms.
But again he grew fearful.
“You don’t see me as I am, Horatia. Now close your eyes. I can’t have you looking at me, I might exaggerate. Listen. I am thirty-five. I have no great enthusiasms—except you. I have no money to speak of, no home—my faith in my feeble talents is shaken—my faith in theworld isn’t settled. I’m not even strong physically. There’s nothing, Horatia.”
“There’s you.”
“There’s me, transfused and illuminated by your feeling for me, by your wonderful romance, by the brightness of your own spirit. But if you withdraw it——”
“Silly—it isn’t true, and if it were I shan’t withdraw it ever. Because it’s love and can’t be withdrawn.”
“Love is perishable.”
“Not my love.” The splendid perennial dogmatism spoke again.
He was serious. Then, “I want a promise from you, Horatia. If the time comes when you don’t see it with all this enthusiasm you’ll tell me—won’t you—freely, knowing that already you’ve given me more than I deserve—and that I won’t be hurt or angry—will you?”
At his insistence she promised.
“When can we be married?”
“Not too soon, Horatia—not till you know me, not as an editor but as a man, a man who makes mistakes and is stupid.”
“I don’t care about that silly scandal.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean the scandal. I meant until you know more of the little things about me—that I have a nasty, early-morning temper—that I can be trivial over the kind of dinner I get.”
She put her hand over his mouth.
“Such things matter,” answered Langley sagely. “Well—you’ve promised anyway.”
THE next day was Sunday. Horatia told Maud her news after dinner as they sat on Maud’s comfortable veranda. She was neither surprised nor disappointed at Maud’s reception of the news. There was just about as big a storm as she had expected. Maud, having laid the worrying ghost of Langley, was enraged at its reappearance.
“And Anthony Wentworth was so taken with you the other night,” she wailed. “Don’t you ever want to get anywhere? You little fool——”
Horatia had quite forgotten about Anthony. For a moment she did wonder vaguely what he would think. But she was too absorbed in herself to wonder about such trivialities. Her whole being was full of an exaltation which seemed to run stirringly through every vein. Her ignorance of emotion made everything more amazing. There did not seem much resemblance in what she was feeling to anything she had ever read or talked about. Her love was so warm, so alive, so much hers——
“I really think you could have had Anthony Wentworth.” Maud harped desperately on her own disappointment.
“Iwishyou wouldn’t talk that way about a man I’ve met only once. It’s indecent, Maud. It’s disgusting.”
“It’s indecent to engage yourself to a man who is twice as old as you are—who’s been the talk of the city! At your age! It will ruin you! It’s impossible! Talk to Harvey and you’ll see.”
Horatia permitted herself a smile.
“I knew when you went down there that something dreadful would happen,” Maud went on. “I should think you’d see the fatality of mixing up with a man like that.”
“Please, Maud, stop; there’s no sense in being so violent. It’s my affair after all.”
“It’s a family affair. I didn’t marry a man who’d disgrace us all.”
Horatia turned from coaxing tolerance into sudden hauteur.
“Nor shall I.”
Maud was politic enough to abandon a hopeless cause. She laid a hand on her sister’s unresponding shoulder.
“You get me all worked up. I don’t blame you really. You’re so young and inexperienced. And he is fascinating. So people say. But he hasn’t a thing to offer you.”
“Marriage to me isn’t a question of offerings.”
Maud looked skeptical.
“Marriage, my dear,” she said, “isn’t a matter of love in the moonlight purely. And the question of bread and butter is pretty important.”
“I can earn my bread and butter.”
“Not after you’re married.”
“Just as I’m doing now. I wouldn’t think of not working. That’s been the whole trouble with marriage,” went on Horatia, recalling some of her early college theories. “It’s been an exploitation on both sides. It ought to be a partnership.”
She wasted her breath. Maud, convinced that Horatia was merely talking, returned to the main issue.
“I’m sure you’ll see, dear, if you’ll be reasonable, how utterly impossible this is. He’s not young and——”
“For heaven’s sake, Maud, why attack all sides at once? Isn’t it bad enough to destroy his character without also attacking him on the score of age?”
“You haven’t made any plans for marriage, have you?”
“When we marry we’ll do it without planning. I’ll not hang around waiting for guest towels.”
Maud cheered at this lack of definiteness.
“Well,” she said, “there’s no use in being hasty. Take your time and think it over. But remember that marriage is a very serious thing.”
“And very expensive,” Horatia added satirically.
“Bring him up to call. I’d like to meet him and talk to him.”
“He never makes calls.”
“He used to.”
Horatia flushed a little again.
“Did he tell you about Mrs. Hubbell?” asked Maud with some eagerness.
“If you are going to be spiteful, Maud, I shall not come here any more at all. I am not bothering about—Jim’s—past personal affairs nor the fact that a lot of old gossips have nothing better to do than to pry into them.”
“Well, I’d never marry a man without finding out a little something about his past. And such a past! It’s all very well to be high and mighty, Horatia, but when a man has been a co-respondent!”
But Horatia had put on her hat and gone down the steps. Maud ceased with a gesture and looked after her sister thoughtfully.
Horatia went home to her apartment and threw herself down to fume in rage. Grace Walsh laughed. Horatia, in ardent need of a confidante, had told her about Jim that morning and Grace guessed where Horatia had been.
“What did you expect? What you want to do is to make Langley a social asset. Don’t growl so. I mean what I say. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be. Turn the tables on Mrs. Williams.”
Grace’s own attitude had not brought much satisfaction to Horatia. Her modernism apparently involved cutting the roots of all sentiments. Love and marriage were to her states which were productive of many epigrams—interesting studies. She had a stock of opinions about such things made of a blend of W. L.George, Havelock Ellis, W. G. Robinson and the more skeptical modern specialists in sex literature. A rather brilliant conversationalist when discussion hinged upon such things, in the face of an emotional awakening like Horatia’s she had little to say. But she had not been satirical. A little questioning, non-committal—her attitude satisfied nothing in Horatia’s heart.
“Your sister,” she went on, “only approves of something quite fashionable in matrimony and Jim Langley is a bit out of style.”
Horatia laughed and telephoned Jim, first at his rooms and failing there, tried the office, where she located him. There was a delicious sense of possession in conversation with him now.
“I want to go out in the country to shake off a lot of foolish talk. Can’t you come?”
The very tone of his voice over the wire brought back the glow in her heart but he told her that it must be later, that he was busy.
“Then I’ll come down too and work and we’ll pretend that the office is the country.”
He welcomed that suggestion. She put on a different dress, her choicest one, which she had meant to save for a very special occasion with Langley. But then she meant today to be a special occasion. She meant to ask him about this Hubbell affair. She should know about it so that she could contradict false impressions, correct them. It was essential that these silly wonderings in her own mind should be laid to rest too.
As she entered the office a woman sitting at Horatia’s own desk, dangling a dry pen from lazy white-gloved fingers, looked up at her and then questioningly at Langley opposite.
She was a delicately blonde person with a close-fitting black hat, smartly trimmed with black paradise feathers and a French veil. The rest of her was in harmony with the black and pale yellow of her head. She looked—not faded—but cleverly artificial, as if created in the image of some lovely picture. Her face was raised in delicate expectancy for Langley’s move.
Horatia felt suddenly blundering. She was conscious of herself, awkward, and before she had time to collect herself Langley introduced her.
“Miss Grant—one of my colleagues onThe Journal—Mrs. Hubbell.”
Horatia had guessed the identity of the lady before he spoke. She half-hesitated. But Mrs. Hubbell was in languorous command at once.
“I knew you must be working under stimulus, Jim,” she smiled.
Horatia felt affronted and bereft of repartee, but Langley inclined his head gravely.
“I am.”
Mrs. Hubbell waived that point and continued.
“I’ve just come back to town and I’m so eager to meet people. I’ve quite gotten out of touch. I have taken a little apartment in Hanover Street, Miss Grant, and I hope you’ll come to see me there. I can promise you tea, music anda place where gossiping women are absolutely not admitted—and only those can come who are above gossip or else tremendously gossiped about.” She smiled a little plaintively, thus delicately dealing with her own situation.
Horatia rather liked it. Perhaps there was more in this Mrs. Hubbell than she imagined. She was lovely to look at anyhow.
“And we must find a place to dance, Jim,” said Mrs. Hubbell, turning to him again.
“But I’m working hard, Rose. I’ve not much time to be frivolous.”
How queer it was, thought Horatia, to hear him call another woman by her first name. Of course last night was the first time he had called her ‘Horatia,’ but it had seemed—— She wasn’t quite sure what it had seemed.
“Then you will come to see me, Miss Grant?”
Oddly insistent, thought Horatia.
“I would love to.”
“Do you always work on Sunday—both of you?”
Mrs. Hubbell’s questions came lightly but they were questions that had to be answered.
“Miss Grant was going to take me for a walk.”
An astute glance flashed under the black hat from Horatia to Langley.
“Then why don’t you walk out my way now? Towards the South Shore and stop for tea? It’s a lovely walk. I’ve just come back, of course, and my apartment isn’t really comfortable yet, but I can usually brew a good cup of tea, can’t I, Jim? And you deserve it after working over my tiresome affairs this afternoon. I bounce in on him with my usual tangle of papers that need signing and he shows me where the dotted lines are and tells me whether I’m renewing my mortgages or signing a Bolshevik constitution. Come, both of you, walk out with me. Won’t you?”
Horatia, finding decision left to her, tried to think quickly of a way out. But Langley did not help her and she hesitated too long to do anything but acquiesce.
They walked badly, for Mrs. Hubbell was hampered by her conversation and the tightness of her skirts and seemed continually to be appealing to Langley for petty gallantries. Horatia, who liked to walk swiftly and silently, found herself again unhappily awkward, moving badly and getting ahead of the others. It annoyed her that Langley had not told Mrs. Hubbell that they were more to each other than office companions, and yet she could not think what he should have said. They reached the apartment with Horatia rather dreading the rest of the encounter.
But Mrs. Hubbell pushed open her door with an apologetic smile, revealing a large living-room of most unusual charm. The ceiling was very high and the walls held few pictures so that the two great soft blue couches, armchairs and stools were comfortably spaced. A long narrow table between the windows held two delicately shaded lamps and many books. Horatia hadn’t connected Mrs. Hubbell with books and while that lady went to remove her hat and “find tea,” Horatia stood by the table examining the titles of the volumes. It was all very up-to-date material, much of it feminist—sparkling novels, plays.
“She doesn’t read them,” said Langley lightly, watching Horatia. “She has them here because she entertains the people who read or write them sometimes. But she doesn’t know that she doesn’t read them. I imagine she absorbs a deal through the covers.”
“I’m sorry she spoiled our walk,” said the man under his breath, “and you’ll forgive me if I seemed odd. But I’d hate to have her the medium through which to announce our—feeling.”
“I told Maud.”
“Your sister—was she horrified?”
She smiled at him humorously. “Quite.”
Their hostess came in. She had taken off her hat and the great coil of flaxen hair was even more effective than Horatia had guessed. She looked like a Saxon princess, thought Horatia—no, the lovely servant of a princess, the one who is mistress of the king.
She had not been long in town but they were not her only callers. Three men came in while they were there and one woman, a slim, well-dressed unhappy looking woman called Mrs. Boyce, or Kathleen, who smoked constantly and contributed cynicisms. She stared frankly at Horatia and the men showed great interest inher too. Horatia sat on a straight oak chair, her color a little heightened by the attention and implied admiration and not displeased. She was conscious vaguely that Mrs. Hubbell thought she was an asset. Well—asset or not, it was interesting. Mrs. Hubbell listened to everyone and talked little generalities, sometimes foolish, sometimes keen. It appeared that two of the attendant men were married. No one asked after their wives but there were references to engagements which must be kept. With an odd sort of informality they did not seem to consider that Mrs. Hubbell was included in some activities they mentioned. Nor did she seem to expect to be included. But when they spoke of theaters and of dancing, she became an immediate authority.
“I teach them to dance,” she said mockingly to Horatia, “these heavy awkward men—and then they run off and forget me.”
“Did she teach you, Jim?”
“Absolutely.”
Langley had a half-mocking, half-indulgent attitude towards Mrs. Hubbell that was new to Horatia. She had never seen him alternate his grave courtesy to women with anything except his new attitude towards herself.
No one spoke of Mr. Hubbell or of trouble. This room, so much a source of scandal to so many people, showed within itself only good feeling and security. There was nothing awkward or forced in anyone’s tone or manner. The conversation was of dancing, places to dance and to eat, theaters, novelties in New York entertainments. And they talked of things and people which were behind the times and of modern points of view, reminding Horatia oddly of the talk which went on in her own apartment with Grace, and yet this talk seemed to lack a solidity, and a depth, which she felt in Grace’s conversations. However, in its way this was commendable and on the right track. Horatia had an enormous respect for people of new ideas and she contrasted the “let live” of this room with the gossiping group on Maud’s porch—and believed she deeply preferred this. And as they easily included her, she found herself enjoying it immensely. It was Langley who suggested going. He had been friendly but aloof a little, and only Mrs. Hubbell talked much to him. She had a special little air of appropriation for him, as if she leaned on him, mentally and spiritually, as she had leaned on his arm during their walk. And he responded with a cynical gallantry which was too trivial to be taken seriously and too deft to be insulting. Horatia marvelled at this new glimpse of him. He was no longer the man who saw clear issues in politics, who wrote angry philippics about the abuse of men, women and governments. This tall, easy-mannered man bending over a tea-table was entirely different. He seemed at ease in his pose and Horatia had a vision of him as he must have been before he had given up society so abruptly—how soughtafter, how fascinating he must have been. There was a trace of the philanderer——
“Now,” said Horatia, emerging from the elevator and the repeated requests of Mrs. Hubbell to be sure to come to see her often, “let’s walk—and walk fast.”
“It’s a shame to have taken you there,” said Langley, “but I thought it might be an experience and you like experience. She came to see me unexpectedly—you came in, and I couldn’t just see a way to explain to her that we would prefer to walk alone without giving her something to get her claws into.”
“Claws—bad as that?”
“No—not really. She’s really quite harmless most of the time, but she has times when she is dangerous.”
“She’s very good-looking.”
“Always good-looking—always amusing—and she’s had on the whole a raw deal.”
“Jim,” Horatia spoke warmly out of the gathering darkness, “what is it about you and Mrs. Hubbell? Who is she?”
He hesitated and for a moment Horatia thought with a little fear that he was going to evade her question. But he began to speak quietly.
“Mrs. Hubbell, Horatia, is just a woman—not much more than that. She didn’t live here until after her marriage, and I met her through her husband, who was one of my best friends. He met her somewhere out West and marriedher and he was one of the most tremendously—tremendously in love persons that I ever saw. He was absolutely swayed by all that daintiness and delicateness that you saw this afternoon.
“After they had been married about a year or so she began to see a good deal of other men than Jack. I was there a good deal—so were lots of others. It was a pleasant place to go and none of us realized that Jack was jealous—except perhaps Rose—I don’t know. Anyway, he got hold of a fool letter that I wrote”—he stopped and Horatia was ashamed of her curiosity and passionately eager to gratify it further.
“The letter didn’t mean anything at all. But Jack came to ask me—to accuse me of inconceivable outrages towards him. I denied them, of course, but he was crazy—he wouldn’t believe me—and he sued Rose for a divorce and named me. Of course for her sake I should have fought it through and I think I could have cleared up Jack’s mind as well as the situation, but three weeks later Jack killed himself. The thing that gave the affair so much publicity was his suicide.
“It left his wife and me in a rotten unjustified situation. But for his sake we decided to let the matter drop. There was nothing on our consciences and she was very game. She said she didn’t care to clear her skirts by dragging poor Jack’s feeling into publicity after he was dead. And that he had paid the biggest price. Of course I had really, however innocently, created the situation, so I felt more cut up than I can evertell you. So we let the matter drop and people thought what they liked.”
Horatia was quiet. They walked along under the darkened trees for a long way in silence.
“So you know what no one else knows,” said Jim. “It is a big confidence.”
“Of course.”
“And I like to confide in you.”
She thanked him by a pressure of her hand his arm.
“You know, Jim,” she told him, “that whole thing needn’t have happened so easily. Most of the trouble in the world comes from these women who work men up so terribly and have nothing in the world to do except love and marry.”
“There’s a lot to that job if it’s done right.”
“Not enough. I want love and—marriage, but——”
He held her closer to his side in the darkness and her voice caught for a minute.
“Horatia, you are so heavenly sweet——”
Afterwards Horatia was to remember that evening and to try in vain to recapture its charm and warmth. She felt it then as the beginning of many wonderful evenings. Jim’s story had been saddening but reassuring. It had stolen none of her romance. They were closer than before. They went back to Horatia’s rooms and Grace Walsh, having helped to provide supper, left them alone afterwards. Horatia told the usual callers, who telephoned, that she would not be home and laughed joyously at her casual lying.
She was altogether so joyous, so anticipatory, flying about the little kitchen, setting a table in front of the fire, for the apartment boasted a real fireplace, washing dishes, flinging gay comments about her, that she radiated it to the others. Langley’s face relaxed and he laughed as she had never seen him laugh. But after Grace had gone out a sudden shyness fell upon them both. Then Horatia slipped down before the fire on a hassock and Jim came to sit beside her.
“Tell me wise things,” she begged.
“It’s you who know wisdom.”
“I know how we shall live when we are married. I was thinking of it this afternoon. I want a place without too much household machinery—awfully few napkins and pillowcases. But such a happy sunny place—with lots of light and color. And I want to make you so comfortable but it won’t take all my time. I want to work too.”
“Working after you’re married is hard. I’m not sure——”
“It’s the only solution,” said Horatia firmly. “Otherwise you get soft. I want to work. To come home at night feeling tired and glad to get home—to meet you and not be bored with myself and my home.”
“I want to care for you, Horatia, as I have never cared for anything.”
“I don’t want care—I want love—love——”
A cloud came over Langley’s face—the faintest frowning cloud.
“Of course,” said Horatia somewhat irrelevantly, “even if I work, I don’t mean I shan’t want children. I do want them.”
He caught her in a quick, stirred embrace.
“What do you know about children?” he mocked. And then, under his breath—“Darling, darling, I want them too. But I shall be a poor father—and husband.”
And then again they fell silent and in the glow of the fire every now and again he pressed his lips to the hollow of her hand or held her hand against his cheek. They were very happy.
Mrs. Hubbell was quite forgotten. She was sitting in her living room just then, before the spinet desk in the corner, reading and methodically sorting letters and placing them in drawers and pigeon-holes. There was one letter she hesitated over. Once she made a gesture as if to tear it across. Then she reconsidered and placed it in the desk again.