David Malcolm

by Nelson Lloyd

CHAPTER XIV

Fifth Avenue was in those days a favorite resort of mine. Every morning I plunged into the rush downtown I dived from the elevated railway station into the tatterdemalion life of Park Row, and when I raised my head above that ragged human maelstrom and climbed to the editorial room of The Record it seemed as though I lifted my body out of a little muddy stream and plunged my mind into a Charybdis which embraced the whole world. Its centre was the same desk which I had so often approached with trembling in the days when I was breaking spears with the ancient office-boy and Mr. Hanks. I was fixed now in a chair opposite Mr. Hanks. I had become an editor. But I was not hurling my spears against the devils that possess poor man. My principal daily task was to read the newspapers with a microscopic eye, to glean from them every hint of news to come and to be covered, to present the clippings to Mr. Hanks ready for his easy perusal, and though in our province we had to do only with events of a local character, the life of the city was so interwoven with that of the whole world that to me our desk seemed a high lookout tower from which we kept an eye on the very corners of the globe. Did I look from the smutted window at my side, it was into the struggling throng on the pavement below or, over the line of push-carts displaying tawdry wares, into the park where the riff-raff seemed to reign, because the riffraff was always there, dozing on the benches. Did I look to the other hand, it was through the great murky room, through air charged with tobacco smoke and laden heavily with the fumes of ink, molten lead, and paper which filtered from the floors below through every open door. In a distant corner, a gloomy figure in the light of a single lamp, I could see the keeper of the "morgue" cutting his way through piles of papers, filing away his printed references to Brown, or Jones, or Robinson, against that day when Brown might die, Jones commit some crime, or Robinson, perchance, do something virtuous. I could see, in nearer prospect, the rows of little desks and the reporters at them, some writing, some reading, some smoking wearily; some young men fresh from college and keyed high with ambition; some old men shabbily dressed and carelessly groomed who had spent their lives at those little desks and asked nothing more than the privilege of ending them there; some of more corpulent minds, like the great Bob Carmody, who were happy in the attainment of a life's ambition to become authorities on base-ball, foot-ball, or rowing. Wherever I looked I seemed to see nothing but the titanic tread-mill and to hear the clatter of its cogs: within, where the presses rumbled deep in the ground below me, where the telegraph clicked in the adjoining room and overhead the typesetting-machines rattled incessantly; without, in the medley of the street, the cries of the hawkers, the clang of car gongs, and the never-ending shuffle of feet. Uptown life seemed on its surface to be lighter, and the curse of Adam to rest more easily on the shoulders of his children.

Of Fifth Avenue this was especially true. It was not a canyon of brick and stone in those days. Trade had just begun its invasion and had gained a foothold only in the few blocks above and below Twenty-third Street, and for the rest it was still a street of homes, where people moved in a more leisurely fashion than in the crowded thoroughfares downtown. The very air was charged with a healthier life, and here amid the opulence one could forget the near presence of the squalid alley. So it had become a habit of mine always to begin my day with a walk uptown, as a gentle tonic for my body and to give my mind a brief but more cheerful outlook than through the smutted office windows. I never tired of the life which I saw about me. And it was about me and I not of it, for though I might pause at a tailor's to examine his fabrics, it was always through his plate-glass window; beyond the window I could afford to go only in the cheaper Nassau Street; and I might stop in front of a picture-shop, but only to o select prints for that dream-land house on the hill, set on the bit of green. Smart carriages rolled by me, manned by immaculate, haughty servants, drawn by horses stepping high in time with the jingle of their harness. At one time I had planned an equipage such as these for myself; but now, computing, from past experience, my future possibilities in finance, I saw them fascinating as ever, yet as far from me as though they dashed through some Martian city, and their occupants as removed from my ken as the inhabitants of the farthest planets. Indeed, even in the commoner throng about me I knew no one. It was seldom that I was called on to doff my hat, and then to some of the queer old women who were moulding away in the corners of Miss Minion's boarding-house or to Miss Tucker hurrying to her school.

One morning in May, as was my custom, I set out for work by my circuitous route, with the intention of walking to Fifty-eighth Street and taking an elevated train downtown. The day was one of the loveliest of spring. The brightest of suns swept the Avenue. In Madison Square the fresh green had burst from the trees overnight, and I should have liked to drop down on one of the benches there, to look upward through the branches into the clouds and forget the enclosing wall of buildings and the tumultuous streets. But I was late, and I had no mind to hurry on such a day. The languor of the spring was in my veins, and I strolled on, almost unconscious of the life about me. Ahead, at the crest of Murray Hill, the city seemed to end, and I to look through a great gate-way into the blue sky, and I fancied myself standing there in that gate-way, with the valley lying at my feet, my valley awakened from its winter's sleep, its hill-sides decked with blossoming orchards, its mountains carpeted with the soft shadows of the clouds. I saw the ridge, its green slope slashed by the white winding road which crossed it. That was the same road up which I had climbed on a May morning long ago, when I hurried to the Professor's aid, and I followed it now to the clearing; I saw the clearing with the Professor leaning on his hoe studying a fleck of cloud, and Penelope watching him silently, fearing to disturb his important meditations. In these busy years Penelope had been rarely in my thoughts; if at all, it was as a little girl with a blue ribbon in her hair, the companion of a few brief weeks of my boyhood. I dared not picture her as growing up, for I had no faith in the influence of Rufus Blight, whom I had always associated with packages of tea and prizes. Penelope grown, I feared, might have become fat and florid, might speak with a twang and wear gaudy hats and gowns. My life in New York, even though I was but a quiet observer, had made me critical of women, and when I could brood unhappily over Gladys Todd's stray wisps of hair I could have little sympathy with the type of the imaginary Penelope Blight. But this morning, when the far-borne freshness of the woods and fields was in the air, and I longed to feel the soft earth beneath my feet, to break from the enclosing walls and to stride over the open fields, I recalled days like this when the wine of spring was in my veins and I had run through the meadows in a wasteful riot of energy; and then a particular day like this when Penelope and I had ridden out of the woods, had come to the ridge-top and looked over the smiling valley. I seemed to feel Penelope's arms drawn tightly around me as I pointed across the friendly land and promised to take care of her. I had had no fear then that she would ever grow corpulent and florid, and now I found myself asking if my boyish intuition might not have been right, and she fulfilled entirely the promise of her girlhood, defying the insidious generosity of time and the vulgar influence of Rufus Blight. Should I ever know? Should I ever see her?

I must have been looking at the clouds as I asked myself these questions, for I walked right into an elderly woman, a tall, buxom woman who carried in her arms a tiny Pomeranian. The force of our collision made her drop her pet, and for an instant he hung suspended by the leash and choking. I apologized humbly, bowing; but my victim—for such she seemed to think herself—the victim of my premeditated brutality, lifted the frightened dog back to the refuge of her arms, glared at me, turned, and swept on to a modiste's door. Her haughtiness angered me. I held the fault as much hers as mine, for the pavement was not crowded and she seemed to have risen from it just to obstruct my passage. I looked about me to discover whence she had come so suddenly, and in a carriage standing at the curb I found an explanation. I said to myself that if she had emerged from so smart an equipage I had indeed committed lèse-majesté, for it was such a turnout as I had dreamed of in my days of opulent dreaming; it was such a turnout as a poor poet could have used without offending his sense of the beauty of simplicity. The high-headed horses with their shining harness, the smart brougham, so spotless that it was hard to imagine its wheels ever touching the street, the men in their unobtrusive livery, spoke of unostentation in its most perfect and most expensive form. The woman of the Pomeranian, I said to myself, must be surely some grande-dame, a leader in that mysterious circle which I knew only by its name "society." My view of that circle in those days was tinged with the cynicism of one who knew nothing of it; and though at the boarding-house table I was prone to rail at it, secretly I had to admit that my raillery was born of envy. So now it was with a mind filled half with awe and half with envy that I turned to look after the imposing woman with the dog.

For the first time I noticed that she had a companion. First, the companion was but a slender figure in black, smartly clad. I could see only her back, and yet as I carried my eye from the dainty boot which rested on the lowest step to the small gloved hand on the railing, to the small black hat with its blue wings airily poised, I found myself making comparisons between this daintiness and the untidy loveliness of Gladys Todd. I was almost angry with Gladys Todd because she did not dress with such simplicity, not knowing that all her wardrobe cost hardly as much as this unobtrusive gown, this masterpiece of a tailor's art.

Gladys Todd was not long in my mind. It was as though the memory of her was swept away by the turn of the blue wings on which my eyes rested. They moved with a majesty that sent my thoughts hurling down into the past to match them. I matched them with a bit of blue ribbon. It had moved as majestically as they. I almost laughed outright. It was absurd to compare the forlorn child of the clearing with this smartly groomed young woman, and remembering Nathan, the white mule, I looked again to the perfectly turned-out carriage at the curb. You must suspect that there was in my mind, born of a wild hope, a suspicion that I was seeing Penelope Blight. True. But from Nathan, the white mule, to this perfect carriage with the haughty footman at the door was so far a cry that I was about to go on. The girl had turned also, and I found myself halted and staring at her. I was sure that she had been studying my back at that moment when I was looking at the carriage, but being discovered in such interest she gave a start, recovered herself, and with an angry toss of her head sprang up the steps and through the door.

In that moment when our eyes met I was sure that I was face to face with Penelope Blight.

The old Florentine writer, Firenzuola, commends nut-brown as the loveliest color for a woman's eyes, declaring that it gives to them a soft, bright, clear and kindly gaze and lends to their movement a mysteriously alluring charm. These eyes were blue, but in that fraction of an instant when I looked into them, their light was soft and bright, clear and kindly; I was sure that they were the same mysteriously alluring eyes that I had first known years before when I had crawled, wet and cold, from the depths of the mountain brook. Knowing no more I should have spoken her name, my hand was rising to my hat, but the soft and kindly light changed suddenly to hostility, and she was gone.

I hesitated, not knowing what step to take next. With hesitation doubt came. I began to argue. The hostile flash of her eyes angered me. She had tacitly charged me with impertinence, with the manners of a common Broadway lounger. Then I said, had this really been Penelope she must have recognized me, for twelve years could not have obliterated all outward traces of the boy whom she had once known as her only friend. Remembering that time, remembering the forlorn cabin in the mountains and the brown, barefooted girl, remembering the promise of later days given by the sleek vulgarity of Rufus Blight, I said that she could not have grown to this faultless picture of young womanhood. Yet the forlorn hope that I might be mistaken would have held me there awaiting her return had it not been for the haughty footman by the carriage door. He had been a silent observer of what had passed, and seeing me now loitering, staring at the modiste's shop, he cast off his expressionless mask and assumed a very threatening and scowling appearance. Evidently he, too, thought me a street lounger who, not satisfied with nearly killing madam, was bent on thrusting his impertinent attentions on the young mistress. I could not explain to him that I had known the young mistress years ago when she lived in a log hut in a mountain valley. His own perfection as a servant made such an explanation the more incredible; and though loath to abandon the opportunity to convince myself that I was mistaken, I saw nothing left for me but to go my way downtown.