§ 5
He came clattering down the aisle of desks to her one May afternoon, and begged, “Say, Miss Golden, I’m stuck. I got to get out some publicity on the Governor’s good-roads article we’re going to publish; want to send it out to forty papers in advance, and I can’t get only a dozen proofs. And it’s got to go off to-night. Can you make me some copies? You can use onion-skin paper and carbon’em and make anyway five copies at a whack. But prob’ly you’d have to stay late. Got anything on to-night? Could you do it? Could you do it? Could you?”
“Surely.”
“Well, here’s the stuff. Just single-space that introductory spiel at the top, will you?”
Una rudely turned out of her typewriter a form-letter which she was writing for S. Herbert Ross, and began to type Walter’s publicity, her shoulders bent, her eyes intent, oblivious to the steady stream of gossip which flowed from stenographer to stenographer, no matter how busy they were. He needed her! She would have stayed till midnight. While the keys burred under her fingers she was unconsciously telling herself a story of how she would be working half the night, with the office still and shadowy, of how a dead-white face would peer through the window near her desk (difficult of accomplishment, as the window was eight stories up in air), of how she was to be pursued by a man on the way home; and how, when she got there, her mother would say, “I just don’t see how you could neglect me like this all evening.” All the while she felt herself in touch with large affairs—an article by the Governor of the State; these very sheets that she was typing to go to famous newspapers, to the “thundering presses” of which she had read in fiction; urgency, affairs, and—doing something for Walter Babson.
She was still typing swiftly at five-thirty, the closing hour. The article was long; she had at least two hours of work ahead. Miss Moynihan came stockily to say good-night. The other stenographers fluttered out to the elevators. Their corner became oppressively quiet. The office-manager gently puttered about, bade her good-night, drifted away. S. Herbert Ross boomed out of his office, explaining the theory of advertising to a gasoleny man in a pin-checked suit as they waddled to the elevator. The telephone-girl hurried back to connect up a last call, frowned while she waited, yanked out the plug, and scuttled away—a creamy, roe-eyed girl, pretty and unhappy at her harassing job of connecting nervous talkers all day. Four men, editors and advertising-men, shouldered out, bawling over a rather feeble joke about Bill’s desire for a drink and their willingness to help him slay the booze-evil. Una was conscious that they had gone, that walls of silence were closing about her clacking typewriter. And that Walter Babson had not gone; that he was sharing with her this whispering forsaken office.
Presently he came rambling out of the editorial-room.
He had taken off his grotesque, great horn-rimmed glasses. His eyes were mutinous in his dark melancholy face; he drew a hand over them and shook his head. Una was aware of all this in one glance. “Poor, tired boy!” she thought.
He sat on the top of the nearest desk, hugged his knee, rocked back and forth, and said, “Much left, Miss Golden?”
“I think I’ll be through in about two hours.”
“Oh, Lord! I can’t let you stay that late.”
“It doesn’t matter. Really! I’ll be glad. I haven’t had to stay late much.”
For quite the first time he stared straight at her, saw her as a human being. She was desperately hoping that her hair was smooth and that there wasn’t any blue from the typewriter ribbon daubed on her cheeks!... He ceased his rocking; appraised her. A part of her brain was wondering what he would do; a part longing to smile temptingly at him; a part coldly commanding, “You will not be a little fool—he isn’t interested in you, and you won’t try to make him be, either!”
“Why, you look as fagged as I feel,” he said. “I suppose I’m as bad as the rest. I kick like a steer when the Old Man shoves some extra work on me, and then I pass the buck and make you stay late. Say! Tell you what we’ll do.” Very sweet to her was his “we,” and his intimacy of tone. “I’ll start copying, too. I’m quite considerable at machine-pounding myself, and we can get the thing done and mailed by six-thirty or so, and then I’ll buy you a handsome dinner at Childs’s. Gosh! I’ll even blow you to a piece of pie; and I’ll shoot you up home by quarter to eight. Great stuff! Gimme a copy of the drool. Meanwhile you’ll have a whole hour for worried maiden thoughts over going out to eat with the bad, crazy Wally Babson!”
His smile was a caress. Her breath caught, she smiled back at him fearfully. Then he was gone. In the editorial office was heard the banging of his heavy old typewriter—it was an office joke, Walter’s hammering of the “threshing-machine.”
She began to type again, with mechanical rapidity, not consciously seeing the copy, so distraught was she as she murmured, “Oh, I oughtn’t to go out with him.... But I will!... What nonsense! Why shouldn’t I have dinner with him.... Oh, I mustn’t—I’m a typist and he’s a boss.... But I will!”
Glancing down the quiet stretches of the office, to the windows looking to westward, she saw that the sky was a delicate primrose. In a loft-building rearing out of the low structures between her and the North River, lights were springing out, and she—who ought to have known that they marked weary, late-staying people like herself, fancied that they were the lights of restaurants for gay lovers. She dismissed her problem, forgot the mother who was waiting with a demand for all of Una’s youth, and settled down to a happy excitement in the prospect of going out with Walter; of knowing him, of feeling again that smile.
He came prancing out with his copies of the article before she had finished. “Some copyist, eh?” he cried. “Say, hustle and finish. Gee! I’ve been smoking cigarettes to-day till my mouth tastes like a fish-market. Want to eat and forget my troubles.”
With her excitement dulled to a matter-of-fact hungriness, she trotted beside him to a restaurant, one of the string of Vance eating-places, a food-mill which tried to achieve originality by the use of imitation rafters, a plate-rack aligned with landscape plates, and varnished black tables for four instead of the long, marble tables which crowded the patrons together in most places of the sort. Walter verbosely called her attention to the mottoes painted on the wood, the individual table lights in pink shades. “Just forget the eats, Miss Golden, and you can imagine you’re in a regular restaurant. Gosh! this place ought to reconcile you to dining with the crazy Babson. I can’t imagine a liaison in a place where coffee costs five cents.”
He sounded boisterous, but he took her coat so languidly, he slid so loosely into his chair, that she burned with desire to soothe away his office weariness. She forgot all reserve. She burst out: “Why do you call yourself ‘crazy’? Just because you have more energy than anybody else in the office?”
“No,” he said, grimly, snatching at the menu, “because I haven’t any purpose in the scheme of things.”
Una told herself that she was pleased to see how the scrawny waitress purred at Walter when he gave his order. Actually she was feeling resentfully that no saw-voiced, galumphing Amazon of a waitress could appreciate Walter’s smile.
In a Vance eating-place, ordering a dinner, and getting approximately what you order, is not a delicate epicurean art, but a matter of business, and not till an enormous platter of “Vance’s Special Ham and Eggs, Country Style,” was slammed down between them, and catsup, Worcestershire sauce, napkins, more rolls, water, and another fork severally demanded of the darting waitress, did Walter seem to remember that this was a romantic dinner with a strange girl, not a deal in food-supplies.
His wavering black eyes searched her face. She was agitatedly aware that her skin was broken out in a small red spot beside her lips; but she hoped that he would find her forehead clear, her mouth a flower. He suddenly nodded, as though he had grown used to her and found her comfortable. While his wreathing hands picked fantastically at a roll and made crosses with lumps of sugar, his questions probed at that hidden soul which she herself had never found. It was the first time that any one had demanded her formula of life, and in her struggle to express herself she rose into a frankness which Panama circles of courtship did not regard as proper to young women.
“What’s your ambition?” he blurted. “Going to just plug along and not get anywhere?”
“No, I’m not; but it’s hard. Women aren’t trusted in business, and you can’t count without responsibility. All I can do is keep looking.”
“Go out for suffrage, feminism, so on?”
“I don’t know anything about them. Most women don’t know anything about them—about anything!”
“Huh! Most people don’t! Wouldn’t have office-grinding if people did know anything.... How much training have you had?”
“Oh, public school, high school, commercial college.”
“Where?”
“Panama, Pennsylvania.”
“I know. About like my own school in Kansas—the high-school principal would have been an undertaker if he’d had more capital.... Gee! principal and capital—might make a real cunning pun out of that if I worked over it a little. I know.... Go to church?”
“Why—why, yes, of course.”
“Which god do you favor at present—Unitarian or Catholic or Christian Science or Seventh-Day Advent?”
“Why, it’s the same—”
“Now don’t spring that ‘it’s the same God’ stuff on me. It isn’t the same God that simply hones for candles and music in an Episcopal Church and gives the Plymouth Brotherhood a private copyright revelation that organs and candles are wicked.”
“You’re terribly sacrilegious.”
“You don’t believe any such thing. Or else you’d lam me—same as they used to do in the crusades. You don’t really care a hang.”
“No, I really don’t care!” she was amazed to hear herself admit.
“Of course, I’m terribly crude and vulgar, but then what else can you be in dealing with a bunch of churches that haven’t half the size or beauty of farmers’ red barns? And yet the dubs go on asserting that they believe the church is God’s house. If I were God, I’d sure object to being worse housed than the cattle. But, gosh! let’s pass that up. If I started in on what I think of almost anything—churches or schools, or this lying advertising game—I’d yelp all night, and you could always answer me that I’m merely a neurotic failure, while the big guns that I jump on own motor-cars.” He stopped his rapid tirade, chucked a lump of sugar at an interrogative cat which was making the round of the tables, scowled, and suddenly fired at her:
“What do you think of me?”
“You’re the kindest person I ever met.”
“Huh? Kind? Good to my mother?”
“Perhaps. You’ve made the office happy for me. I really admire you.... I s’pose I’m terribly unladylike to tell you.”
“Gee whiz!” he marveled. “Got an admirer! And I always thought you were an uncommonly level-headed girl. Shows how you can fool’em.”
He smiled at her, directly, rather forlornly, proud of her praise.
Regardless of other tables, he thrust his arm across, and with the side of his hand touched the side of hers for a second. Dejectedly he said: “But why do you like me? I’ve good intentions; I’m willing to pinch Tolstoi’s laurels right off his grave, and orate like William Jennings Bryan. And there’s a million yearners like me. There ain’t a hall-bedroom boy in New York that wouldn’t like to be a genius.”
“I like you because you have fire. Mr. Babson, do you—”
“Walter!”
“How premature you are!”
“Walter!”
“You’ll be calling me ‘Una’ next, and think how shocked the girls will be.”
“Oh no. I’ve quite decided to call you ‘Goldie.’ Sounds nice and sentimental. But for heaven’s sake go on telling me why you like me. That isn’t a hackneyed subject.”
“Oh, I’ve never known anybody with fire, except maybe S. Herbert Ross, and he—he—”
“He blobs around.”
“Yes, something like that. I don’t know whether you are ever going to do anything with your fire, but you do have it, Mr. Babson!”
“I’ll probably get fired with it.... Say, do you read Omar?”
In nothing do the inarticulate “million hall-room boys who want to be geniuses,” the ordinary, unshaved, not over-bathed, ungrammatical young men of any American city, so nearly transcend provincialism as in an enthusiasm over their favorite minor cynic, Elbert Hubbard or John Kendrick Bangs, or, in Walter Babson’s case, Mr. Fitzgerald’s variations on Omar. Una had read Omar as a pretty poem about roses and murmurous courts, but read him she had; and such was Walter’s delight in that fact that he immediately endowed her with his own ability to enjoy cynicism. He jabbed at the menu with a fork and glowed and shouted, “Say, isn’t it great, that quatrain about ‘Take the cash and let the credit go’?”
While Una beamed and enjoyed her boy’s youthful enthusiasm. Mother of the race, ancient tribal woman, medieval chatelaine, she was just now; kin to all the women who, in any age, have clapped their hands to their men’s boasting.
She agreed with him that “All these guys that pride themselves on being gentlemen—like in English novels—are jus’ the same as the dubs you see in ordinary life.”
And that it was not too severe an indictment to refer to the advertising-manager as “S. Herbert Louse.”
And that “the woman feeding by herself over at that corner table looks mysterious, somehow. Gee! there must be a tragedy in her life.”
But her gratification in being admitted to his enthusiasms was only a background for her flare when he boldly caught up her white paw and muttered, “Tired little hand that has to work so hard!”
She couldn’t move; she was afraid to look at him. Clattering restaurant and smell of roast pork and people about her all dissolved in her agitation. She shook her head violently to awaken herself, heard herself say, calmly, “It’s terribly late. Don’t you think it is?” and knew that she was arising. But she moved beside him down the street in languor, wondering in every cell of her etherealized body whether he would touch her hand again; what he would do. Not till they neared the Subway station did she, woman, the protector, noting his slow step and dragging voice, rouse herself to say, “Oh, don’t come up in the Subway; I’m used to it, really!”
“My dear Goldie, you aren’t used to anything in real life. Gee! I said that snappily, and it don’t mean a thing!” he gleefully pointed out. He seized her arm, which prickled to the touch of his fingers, rushed her down the Subway steps, and while he bought their tickets they smiled at each other.
Several times on the way up he told her that it was a pleasure to have some one who could “appreciate his honest-t’-God opinions of the managing editor and S. Herbert Frost.”
The Subway, plunging through unvaried darkness, levitated them from the district of dark loft-buildings and theater-bound taxicabs to a far-out Broadway, softened with trees and brightened with small apartment-houses and little shops. They could see a great feathery space of vernal darkness down over the Hudson at the end of a street. Steel-bound nature seemed reaching for them wherever in a vacant lot she could get free and send out quickening odors of fresh garden soil.
“Almost country,” said Walter.
An urgent, daring look came into his eyes, under the light-cluster. He stopped, took her arm. There was an edge of spring madness in his voice as he demanded, “Wouldn’t you like to run away with me to-night? Feel this breeze on your lips—it’s simply plumb-full of mystery. Wouldn’t you like to run away? and we’d tramp the Palisades till dawn and go to sleep with the May sun glaring down the Hudson. Wouldn’t you like to, wouldn’t you?”
She was conscious that, though his head was passionately thrown back, his faunlike eyes stared into hers, and that his thin lips arched. Terribly she wanted to say, “Yes!” Actually, Una Golden of Panama and the Gazette office speculated, for a tenth of a second, whether she couldn’t go. Madness—river-flow and darkness and the stars! But she said, “No, I’m afraid we couldn’t possibly!”
“No,” he said, slowly. “Of course—of course I didn’t mean we could; but—Goldie, little Goldie that wants to live and rule things, wouldn’t you like to go? Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes!... You hurt my arm so!... Oh, don’t! We must—”
Her low cry was an appeal to him to save them from spring’s scornful, lusty demand; every throbbing nerve in her seemed to appeal to him; and it was not relief, but gratitude, that she felt when he said, tenderly, “Poor kid!... Which way? Come.” They walked soberly toward the Golden flat, and soberly he mused, “Poor kids, both of us trying to be good slaves in an office when we want to smash things.... You’ll be a queen—you’ll grab the throne same as you grab papers offn my desk. And maybe you’ll let me be court jester.”
“Why do you say I’ll—oh, be a queen? Do you mean literally, in business, an executive?”
“Hadn’t thought just what it did imply, but I suppose it’s that.”
“But why, why? I’m simply one of a million stenographers.”
“Oh, well, you aren’t satisfied to take things just as they’re handed to you. Most people are, and they stick in a rut and wonder who put them there. All this success business is a mystery—listen to how successful men trip themselves up and fall all over their foolish faces when they try to explain to a bunch of nice, clean, young clerks how they stole their success. But I know you’ll get it, because you aren’t satisfied easily—you take my work and do it. And yet you’re willing to work in one corner till it’s time to jump. That’s my failing—I ain’t willing to stick.”
“I—perhaps—— Here’s the flat.”
“Lord!” he cried; “we got to walk a block farther and back.”
“Well—”
They were stealing onward toward the breeze from the river before she had finished her “Well.”
“Think of wasting this hypnotizing evening talking of success—word that means a big house in Yonkers! When we’ve become friends, Goldie, little Goldie. Business of souls grabbing for each other! Friends—at least to-night! Haven’t we, dear? haven’t we?”
“Oh, I hope so!” she whispered.
He drew her hand into his pocket and clasped it there. She looked shyly down. Strange that her hand should not be visible when she could feel its palm flame against his. She let it snuggle there, secure.... Mr. Walter Babson was not a young man with “bad prospects,” or “good prospects”; he was love incarnate in magic warm flesh, and his hand was the hand of love. She was conscious of his hard-starched cuff pressing against her bare arm—a man’s cuff under the rough surface of his man’s coat-sleeve.
He brought her back to the vestibule of the flat. For a moment he held both her arms at the elbow and looked at her, while with a panic fear she wondered why she could not move—wondered if he were going to kiss her.
He withdrew his hands, sighed, “Good-night, Goldie. I won’t be lonely to-night!” and turned abruptly away.
Through all of Mrs. Golden’s long, sobbing queries as to why Una had left her alone all evening Una was patient. For she knew that she had ahead of her a quiet moment when she would stand alone with the god of love and pray to him to keep her boy, her mad boy, Walter.
While she heard her voice crisply explaining, “Why, you see, mother dear, I simply had to get some work done for the office—” Una was telling herself, “Some day he will kiss me, and I’m not sorry he didn’t to-night—not now any more I’m not.... It’s so strange—I like to have him touch me, and I simply never could stand other men touching me!... I wonder if he’s excited now, too? I wonder what he’s doing.... Oh, I’m glad, glad I loved his hands!”