Langley’s face was grey and old.
CHAPTER XVII
THE blue of the lake had faded into grey—a grey that looked thick and heavy and that lay impassive under the blasting sunlight. Its coolness was gone and its vigor. Above, in The Journal office, where the shades were drawn down to keep out the heat, the vigor seemed gone too. The machinery went on smoothly enough. At Horatia’s desk a young woman, fresh from a New York school of journalism, was typing an excellent article on what suffrage had done in the recent campaign. At the surrounding desks the reporters struck off brief histories of automobile accidents, police raids, city happenings. In Langley’s room, the pale little stenographer took dictation as he walked up and down and worked out his editorials. There were editorials on the street car franchise, that hardy perennial in city problems, on the new appointment of the city planning commission, on the latest foreign tangle, on the eternal disentangling of the knot of political complications at Washington. Clearcut and well-phrased, his words came on each subject, so that the stenographer hurried to keep up with the flow of his thought, and yet something intangible had gone out of his thinking as out of the office atmosphere. The office was no longer a place of romance—an adventure—a laboratory in which to solve world problems—a crusade against corruption as it had been for the past six months. It was a work-shop, a clean, orderly work-shop—and that was all. They all missed Horatia. During the first week of her absence Bob Brotherton had a maddening way of calling constant attention to it and bewailing it. He needed her for this and for that and he said facetiously that there was no use in sprucing himself up any more. No one cared for him and he would wear old clothes until she came back.
Jim had not realized how much Horatia meant to the staff. His own devotion to her had been so absorbing that he had not noticed the relations of the others. Now a stream of comments about her seemed to be floating about the office all day long. To excuse her outrageously long and indefinite vacation he had been compelled to say that she was not well and the staff felt a shadow over them. They were forever finding things in the day’s work which would have amused Horatia, forever recalling this or that incident which had amused her, forever wishing she were back. Langley alone did not comment on her, but Bob would say wisely when a particularly caustic comment came out of the inner office, “He’s not himself. He misses the young lady. He’s a different man when she’s around.”
With a great deal of wisdom he did not make that remark openly to Langley.
The Journal was prospering more and more. It was no longer a paper to apologize for or worry about. It was getting a very substantial circulation and more and more advertisers. Jim realized that this success was due not only to the paper itself, but also to the fact that there was coming to be a place for a clean paper in the city—that more and more people liked their news straight and unadulterated and wanted to read comment on the news with which they did not necessarily a priori agree. He was stopped more and more often by old friends and urged to come to the “house”; more and more often he found himself deferred to in political discussions at the club as the judgment of last appeal. He liked it all and he improved under it. He kept up scrupulously after Horatia had gone as if to show her that he would not let her work be wasted. Yet there was a change in him and in the quality of his vigor. He was a man working for a principle and not an object, whereas before he had been working for a principle and Horatia. The eagerness had gone out of his eyes. Sometimes after the office was empty he would go into the outer office and sitting at Horatia’s desk write her letters—letters which left him sometimes pale and exhausted and sometimes set and stern. But he had one invariable habit. He tore the completed ink-written papers into tiny pieces and stuffed them into the wastebasket before he left the office and went home. There was also often a curious look on his face as he looked over his mail, and sometimes he would lay an envelope carefully aside until everything else had been attended to and then fall upon it as if he were famished. The envelopes were rather more frequently present at first than later after Horatia had left town.
In the hurt anger of her vacation’s first twelve hours she had quite decided not to write to him at all. During the second twenty-four hours she wrote ten letters and mailed one brief little note saying that she was sorry if she had hurt him and that she wanted above all things not to hurt his work or affect The Journal, stated where several of her copy sheets had been left and urged him to take a vacation himself and get a genuine rest. She ended by saying that Maud wanted her to go with them to a country place near Lake Habitat and that she thought she probably would go. Jim looked a little grim at that because Lake Habitat was where the Wentworth cottage was and he knew Maud. But he read on to her conclusion, a conclusion so honest, so sweet and so suffering that the tears came into his eyes.
“It’s so hard, Jim. I feel empty and faint and I try to move about but I seem like waxwork. Everything seems awfully mixed up in me. Nothing in the world matters except you and yet we mustn’t fling ourselves blindly into sentimental fervors if we really don’t belong together in every way. I can’t write. Good-night—and God bless you.”
That was the last letter of such a kind that Jim received. The next one was merely a note telling him that she was surely going with her sister and giving her address in case her successor on The Journal or Jim, himself, should need her. It was a much more controlled note and of course Jim did not know that it, like its predecessor, had been written after much vain effort and tearing up of letter paper. There had been a day when Horatia, who had been shopping in town alone, had almost gone to The Journal office. She hesitated and trying to gather resolution went into a tea room and ordered some iced drink. The room was crowded and another woman coming in sat down opposite her before they looked at each other. It was Grace Walsh. With no change of color Grace rose, but Horatia put out a detaining hand.
“Don’t move—please.”