“There Is Not Room For Us Both”
“
What shall I do?” Henrietta Marne exclaimed aloud as she looked despairingly at the papers that littered her desk. “Here are half a dozen letters, this morning, that ought to have his immediate attention, to say nothing of all the others that I’ve got stacked away in this drawer. Well, I’ll just have to keep on as I’ve done before and answer them in my own name, saying that Mr. Brand is temporarily out of the city and as soon as he returns, etc. If he doesn’t come back soon,” she grumbled on as she seated herself at the typewriter, “I’ll be as hysterical as Mildred is, though I’m not in love with him.”
She did what she could with the morning’s mail, looking at one envelope as she carefully put it away unopened, with more than a little interest and curiosity, as she saw on its upper corner the firm name of “Gordon and Rotherley.” After she had finished the letter writing she busied herself for an hour with such duties as it was possible for her to take up.
The architect’s suite of offices was on an upper floor of a high building and from its windows one’s vision soared far over the city southward and westward. Henrietta paused now and then in the course of her work to forget her anxieties in the sights and thoughts that greeted her in that wide view. Down below, at the bottom of the street canyons, people and vehicles were rushing back and forth.
But her eyes never rested long upon them. Rather, they traveled slowly out over the mighty plain of roofs, broken by chimneys and spires, by great, square buttes of buildings, by domes, turrets and towers, across the bay, gleaming silver-white or glowing copper-red in the sun, on to where the swelling hills of Staten Island loomed dimly against the horizon.
In the brilliant sunshine a thousand plumes of cloud-white steam waved gaily above the castellated plain of roofs and shook out their tendrils in the breeze. “Peace pipes” Henrietta sometimes called them to herself, as she thought of all that their fragile beauty, forever dissolving and forever being renewed, meant to the city beneath them. She liked to think of them, as she watched them curling and waving upward toward the blue, as a sign and compact of earth’s peace and good-will.
Her bent of mind was much more practical than imaginative, but she could never look out over this scene without feeling her nerves thrill with vague consciousness of the titanic energies ceaselessly grinding, striving, achieving, beneath that surface of roofs and towers. And now, as always when she stopped to gaze from her window for a few moments, she felt her own pulses quicken in response and her own inward being stir, as if those waving white plumes were trumpet calls to activity.
She turned from the window, more restless than before, impatient with the necessity of merely sitting there and waiting. In Brand’s private room the books she had got for him three weeks before still lay ranged upon his desk, in readiness for his return at any moment. In her spare hours she had been reading some of them herself and now she went to get one as the best way in which to put in her time. As she brought it back to her own room her thoughts, as they did a hundred times a day, hovered over and around her various speculations concerning the mystery of her employer’s absence.
“I wonder,” they presently ran, “if it could be possible that he is hiding somewhere in the city just to indulge in some sort of orgy.” And this time denial of such a possibility did not, as formerly, spring up spontaneously in her mind. “I don’t like to think he could be that sort of a man,” she temporized with her budding doubt, “for he always seems so refined and thoroughly nice, and he’s always been such a perfect gentleman to me. But it’s evident that Mr. Gordon, who knows him so well, hasn’t a very high opinion of him, except in his art.”