§ 5
Una recovered her holiday by going shopping. An aisle-man in the dress-goods department, a magnificent creature in a braided morning-coat, directed her to the counter she asked for, spoke eloquently of woolen voiles, picked up her bag, and remarked, “Yes, we do manage to keep it cool here, even on the hottest days.” A shop-girl laughed with her. She stole into one of the elevators, and, though she really should have gone home to her mother, she went into the music department, where, among lattices wreathed with newly dusted roses, she listened to waltzes and two-steps played by a red-haired girl who was chewing gum and talking to a man while she played. The music roused Una to plan a wild dissipation. She would pretend that she had a sweetheart, that with him she was a-roving.
Una was not highly successful in her make-believe. She could not picture the imaginary man who walked beside her. She refused to permit him to resemble Walter Babson, and he refused to resemble anybody else. But she was throbbingly sure he was there as she entered a drug-store and bought a “Berline bonbon,” a confection guaranteed to increase the chronic nervous indigestion from which stenographers suffer. Her shadow lover tried to hold her hand. She snatched it away and blushed. She fancied that a matron at the next tiny table was watching her silly play, reflected in the enormous mirror behind the marble soda-counter. The lover vanished. As she left the drug-store Una was pretending that she was still pretending, but found it difficult to feel so very exhilarated.
She permitted herself to go to a motion-picture show. She looked over all the posters in front of the theater, and a train-wreck, a seaside love-scene, a detective drama, all invited her.
A man in the seat in front of her in the theater nestled toward his sweetheart and harshly muttered, “Oh you old honey!” In the red light from the globe marking an exit she saw his huge red hand, with its thicket of little golden hairs, creep toward the hand of the girl.
Una longed for a love-scene on the motion-picture screen.
The old, slow familiar pain of congestion in the back of her neck came back. But she forgot the pain when the love-scene did appear, in a picture of a lake shore with a hotel porch, the flat sheen of photographed water, rushing boats, and a young hero with wavy black hair, who dived for the lady and bore her out when she fell out of a reasonably safe boat. The actor’s wet, white flannels clung tight about his massive legs; he threw back his head with masculine arrogance, then kissed the lady. Una was dizzy with that kiss. She was shrinking before Walter’s lips again. She could feel her respectable, typewriter-hardened fingers stroke the actor’s swarthy, virile jaw. She gasped with the vividness of the feeling. She was shocked at herself; told herself she was not being “nice”; looked guiltily about; but passionately she called for the presence of her vague, imaginary lover.
“Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear!” she whispered, with a terrible cloistered sweetness—whispered to love itself.
Deliberately ignoring the mother who waited at home, she determined to spend a riotous evening going to a real theater, a real play. That is, if she could get a fifty-cent seat.
She could not.
“It’s been exciting, running away, even if I can’t go to the theater,” Una comforted herself. “I’ll go down to Lady Sessions’s this evening. I’ll pack mother off to bed. I’ll take the Sessionses up some ice-cream, and we’ll have a jolly time.... Mother won’t care if I go. Or maybe she’ll come with me”—knowing all the while that her mother would not come, and decidedly would care if Una deserted her.
However negligible her mother seemed from down-town, she loomed gigantic as Una approached their flat and assured herself that she was glad to be returning to the dear one.
The flat was on the fifth floor.
It was a dizzying climb—particularly on this hot afternoon.
§ 6
As Una began to trudge up the flat-sounding slate treads she discovered that her head was aching as though some one were pinching the top of her eyeballs. Each time she moved her head the pain came in a perceptible wave. The hallway reeked with that smell of onions and fried fish which had arrived with the first tenants. Children were dragging noisy objects about the halls. As the throb grew sharper during the centuries it took her to climb the first three flights of stairs, Una realized how hot she was, how the clammy coolness of the hall was penetrated by stabs of street heat which entered through the sun-haloed windows at the stair landings.
Una knocked at the door of her flat with that light, cheery tapping of her nails, like a fairy tattoo, which usually brought her mother running to let her in. She was conscious, almost with a physical sensation, of her mother; wanted to hold her close and, in the ecstasy of that caress, squeeze the office weariness from her soul. The Little Mother Saint—she was coming now—she was hurrying—
But the little mother was not hurrying. There was no response to Una’s knock. As Una stooped in the dimness of the hallway to search in her bag for her latch-key, the pain pulsed through the top of her head again. She opened the door, and her longing for the embrace of her mother disappeared in healthy anger.
The living-room was in disorder. Her mother had not touched it all day—had gone off and left it.
“This is a little too much!” Una said, grimly.
The only signs of life were Mrs. Golden’s pack of cards for solitaire, her worn, brown Morris-chair, and accretions of the cheap magazines with pretty-girl covers which Mrs. Golden ransacked for love-stories. Mrs. Golden had been reading all the evening before, and pages of newspapers were crumpled in her chair, not one of them picked up. The couch, where Una had slept because it had been too hot for the two of them in a double bed, was still an eruption of bedclothes—the pillow wadded up, the sheets dragging out across the unswept floor.... The room represented discomfort, highly respectable poverty—and cleaning, which Una had to do before she could rest.
She sat down on the couch and groaned: “To have to come home to this! I simply can’t trust mother. She hasn’t done one—single—thing, not one single thing. And if it were only the first time—! But it’s every day, pretty nearly. She’s been asleep all day, and then gone for a walk. Oh yes, of course! She’ll come back and say she’d forgotten this was Saturday and I’d be home early! Oh, of course!”
From the bedroom came a cough, then another. Una tried to keep her soft little heart in its temporary state of hardness long enough to have some effect on household discipline. “Huh!” she grunted. “Got a cold again. If she’d only stay outdoors a little—”
She stalked to the door of the bedroom. The blind was down, the window closed, the room stifling and filled with a yellow, unwholesome glimmer. From the bed her mother’s voice, changed from its usual ring to a croak that was crepuscular as the creepy room, wheezed: “That—you—deary? I got—summer—cold—so sorry—leave work undone—”
“If you would only keep your windows open, my dear mother—”
Una marched to the window, snapped up the blind, banged up the sash, and left the room.
“I really can’t see why!” was all she added. She did not look at her mother.
She slapped the living-room into order as though the disordered bedclothes and newspapers were bad children. She put the potatoes on to boil. She loosened her tight collar and sat down to read the “comic strips,” the “Beauty Hints,” and the daily instalment of the husband-and-wife serial in her evening paper. Una had nibbled at Shakespeare, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Vanity Fair in her high-school days, but none of these had satisfied her so deeply as did the serial’s hint of sex and husband. She was absorbed by it. Yet all the while she was irritably conscious of her mother’s cough—hacking, sore-sounding, throat-catching. Una was certain that this was merely one of the frequent imaginary ailments of her mother, who was capable of believing that she had cancer every time she was bitten by a mosquito. But this incessant crackling made Una jumpily anxious.
She reached these words in the serial: “I cannot forget, Amy, that whatever I am, my good old mother made me, with her untiring care and the gentle words she spoke to me when worried and harassed with doubt.”
Una threw down the paper, rushed into the bedroom, crouched beside her mother, crying, “Oh, my mother sweetheart! You’re just everything to me,” and kissed her forehead.
The forehead was damp and cold, like a cellar wall. Una sat bolt up in horror. Her mother’s face had a dusky flush, her lips were livid as clotted blood. Her arms were stiff, hard to the touch. Her breathing, rapid and agitated, like a frightened panting, was interrupted just then by a cough like the rattling of stiff, heavy paper, which left on her purple lips a little colorless liquid.
“Mother! Mother! My little mother—you’re sick, you’re really sick, and I didn’t know and I spoke so harshly. Oh, what is it, what is it, mother dear?”
“Bad—cold,” Mrs. Golden whispered. “I started coughing last night—I closed the door—you didn’t hear me; you were in the other room—” Another cough wheezed dismally, shook her, gurgled in her yellow deep-lined neck. “C-could I have—window closed now?”
“No. I’m going to be your nurse. Just an awfully cranky old nurse, and so scientific. And you must have fresh air.” Her voice broke. “Oh, and me sleeping away from you! I’ll never do it again. I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to you.... Do you feel any headache, dear?”
“No—not—not so much as— Side pains me—here.”
Mrs. Golden’s words labored like a steamer in heavy seas; the throbbing of her heart shook them like the throb of the engines. She put her hand to her right side, shakily, with effort. It lay there, yellow against the white muslin of her nightgown, then fell heavily to the bed, like a dead thing. Una trembled with fear as her mother continued, “My pulse—it’s so fast—so hard breathing—side pain.”
“I’ll put on an ice compress and then I’ll go and get a doctor.”
Mrs. Golden tried to sit up. “Oh no, no, no! Not a doctor! Not a doctor!” she croaked. “Doctor Smyth will be busy.”
“Well, I’ll have him come when he’s through.”
“Oh no, no, can’t afford—”
“Why—”
“And—they scare you so—he’d pretend I had pneumonia, like Sam’s sister—he’d frighten me so—I just have a summer cold. I—I’ll be all right to-morrow, deary. Oh no, no, please don’t, please don’t get a doctor. Can’t afford it—can’t—”
Pneumonia! At the word, which brought the sterile bitterness of winter into this fetid August room, Una was in a rigor of fear, yet galvanized with belief in her mother’s bravery. “My brave, brave little mother!” she thought.
Not till Una had promised that she would not summon the doctor was her mother quieted, though Una made the promise with reservations. She relieved the pain in her mother’s side with ice compresses—the ice chipped from the pitiful little cake in their tiny ice-box. She freshened pillows, she smoothed sheets; she made hot broth and bathed her mother’s shoulders with tepid water and rubbed her temples with menthol. But the fever increased, and at times Mrs. Golden broke through her shallow slumber with meaningless sentences, like the beginning of delirium.
At midnight she was panting more and more rapidly—three times as fast as normal breathing. She was sunk in a stupor. And Una, brooding by the bed, a crouched figure of mute tragedy in the low light, grew more and more apprehensive as her mother seemed to be borne away from her. Una started up. She would risk her mother’s displeasure and bring the doctor. Just then, even Doctor Smyth of the neighborhood practice and obstetrical habits seemed a miracle-worker.
She had to go four blocks to the nearest drug-store that would be open at this time of night, and there telephone the doctor.
She was aware that it was raining, for the fire-escape outside shone wet in the light from a window across the narrow court. She discovered she had left mackintosh and umbrella at the office. Stopping only to set out a clean towel, a spoon, and a glass on the chair by the bed, Una put on the old sweater which she secretly wore under her cheap thin jacket in winter. She lumbered wearily down-stairs. She prayed confusedly that God would give her back her headache and in reward make her mother well.
She was down-stairs at the heavy, grilled door. Rain was pouring. A light six stories up in the apartment-house across the street seemed infinitely distant and lonely, curtained from her by the rain. Water splashed in the street and gurgled in the gutters. It did not belong to the city as it would have belonged to brown woods or prairie. It was violent here, shocking and terrible. It took distinct effort for Una to wade out into it.
The modern city! Subway, asphalt, a wireless message winging overhead, and Una Golden, an office-woman in eye-glasses. Yet sickness and rain and night were abroad; and it was a clumsily wrapped peasant woman, bent-shouldered and heavily breathing, who trudged unprotected through the dark side-streets as though she were creeping along moorland paths. Her thought was dulled to everything but physical discomfort and the illness which menaced the beloved. Woman’s eternal agony for the sick of her family had transformed the trim smoothness of the office-woman’s face into wrinkles that were tragic and ruggedly beautiful.
§ 7
Again Una climbed the endless stairs to her flat. She unconsciously counted the beat of the weary, regular rhythm which her feet made on the slate treads and the landings—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, landing, turn and—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven—over and over. At the foot of the last flight she suddenly believed that her mother needed her this instant. She broke the regular thumping rhythm of her climb, dashed up, cried out at the seconds wasted in unlocking the door. She tiptoed into the bedroom—and found her mother just as she had left her. In Una’s low groan of gladness there was all the world’s self-sacrifice, all the fidelity to a cause or to a love. But as she sat unmoving she came to feel that her mother was not there; her being was not in this wreck upon the bed.
In an hour the doctor soothed his way into the flat. He “was afraid there might be just a little touch of pneumonia.” With breezy fatherliness which inspirited Una, he spoke of the possible presence of pneumococcus, of doing magic things with Romer’s serum, of trusting in God, of the rain, of cold baths and digitalin. He patted Una’s head and cheerily promised to return at dawn. He yawned and smiled at himself. He looked as roundly, fuzzily sleepy as a bunny rabbit, but in the quiet, forlorn room of night and illness he radiated trust in himself. Una said to herself, “He certainly must know what he is talking about.”
She was sure that the danger was over. She did not go to bed, however. She sat stiffly in the bedroom and planned amusements for her mother. She would work harder, earn more money. They would move to a cottage in the suburbs, where they would have chickens and roses and a kitten, and her mother would find neighborly people again.
Five days after, late on a bright, cool afternoon, when all the flats about them were thinking of dinner, her mother died.
§ 8
There was a certain madness in Una’s grief. Her agony was a big, simple, uncontrollable emotion, like the fanaticism of a crusader—alarming, it was, not to be reckoned with, and beautiful as a storm. Yet it was no more morbid than the little fits of rage with which a school-teacher relieves her cramped spirit. For the first time she had the excuse to exercise her full power of emotion.
Una evoked an image of her mother as one who had been altogether good, understanding, clever, and unfortunate. She regretted every moment she had spent away from her—remembered with scorn that she had planned to go to the theater the preceding Saturday, instead of sanctifying the time in the Nirvana of the beloved’s presence; repented with writhing agony having spoken harshly about neglected household duties.
She even contrived to find it a virtue in her mother that she had so often forgotten the daily tasks—her mind had been too fine for such things.... Una retraced their life. But she remembered everything only as one remembers under the sway of music.
“If I could just have another hour, just one hour with her, and feel her hands on my eyes again—”
On the night before the funeral she refused to let even Mrs. Sessions stay with her. She did not want to share her mother’s shadowy presence with any one.
She lay on the floor beside the bed where her mother was stately in death. It was her last chance to talk to her:
“Mother ... Mother ... Don’t you hear me? It’s Una calling. Can’t you answer me this one last time? Oh, mother, think, mother dear, I can’t ever hear your voice again if you don’t speak to me now.... Don’t you remember how we went home to Panama, our last vacation? Don’t you remember how happy we were down at the lake? Little mother, you haven’t forgotten, have you? Even if you don’t answer, you know I’m watching by you, don’t you? See, I’m kissing your hand. Oh, you did want me to sleep near you again, this last night— Oh, my God! oh, my God! the last night I shall ever spend with her, the very last, last night.”
All night long the thin voice came from the little white-clad figure so insignificant in the dimness, now lying motionless on the comforter she had spread beside the bed, and talking in a tone of ordinary conversation that was uncanny in this room of invisible whisperers; now leaping up to kiss the dead hand in a panic, lest it should already be gone.
The funeral filled the house with intruders. The drive to the cemetery was irritating. She wanted to leap out of the carriage. At first she concentrated on the cushion beside her till she thought of nothing in the world but the faded bottle-green upholstery, and a ridiculous drift of dust in the tufting. But some one was talking to her. (It was awkward Mr. Sessions, for shrewd Mrs. Sessions had the genius to keep still.) He kept stammering the most absurd platitudes about how happy her mother must be in a heaven regarding which he did not seem to have very recent or definite knowledge. She was annoyed, not comforted. She wanted to break away, to find her mother’s presence again in that sacred place where she had so recently lived and spoken.
Yet, when Una returned to the flat, something was gone. She tried to concentrate on thought about immortality. She found that she had absolutely no facts upon which to base her thought. The hundreds of good, sound, orthodox sermons she had heard gave her nothing but vague pictures of an eternal church supper somewhere in the clouds—nothing, blankly and terribly nothing, that answered her bewildered wonder as to what had become of the spirit which had been there and now was gone.
In the midst of her mingling of longing and doubt she realized that she was hungry, and she rather regretted having refused Mrs. Sessions’s invitation to dinner. She moved slowly about the kitchen.
The rheumatic old canary hobbled along the floor of his cage and tried to sing. At that Una wept, “She never will hear poor Dickie sing again.”
Instantly she remembered—as clearly as though she were actually listening to the voice and words—that her mother had burst out, “Drat that bird, it does seem as if every time I try to take a nap he just tries to wake me up.” Una laughed grimly. Hastily she reproved herself, “Oh, but mother didn’t mean—”
But in memory of that healthily vexed voice, it seemed less wicked to take notice of food, and after a reasonable dinner she put on her kimono and bedroom slippers, carefully arranged the pillows on the couch, and lay among them, meditating on her future.
For half an hour she was afire with an eager thought: “Why can’t I really make a success of business, now that I can entirely devote myself to it? There’s women—in real estate, and lawyers and magazine editors—some of them make ten thousand a year.”
So Una Golden ceased to live a small-town life in New York; so she became a genuine part of the world of offices; took thought and tried to conquer this new way of city-dwelling.
“Maybe I can find out if there’s anything in life—now—besides working for T. W. till I’m scrapped like an old machine,” she pondered. “How I hate letters about two-family houses in Flatbush!”
She dug her knuckles into her forehead in the effort to visualize the problem of the hopeless women in industry.
She was an Average Young Woman on a Job; she thought in terms of money and offices; yet she was one with all the men and women, young and old, who were creating a new age. She was nothing in herself, yet as the molecule of water belongs to the ocean, so Una Golden humbly belonged to the leaven who, however confusedly, were beginning to demand, “Why, since we have machinery, science, courage, need we go on tolerating war and poverty and caste and uncouthness, and all that sheer clumsiness?”
Part II
THE OFFICE
CHAPTER IX
THE effect of grief is commonly reputed to be noble. But mostly it is a sterile nobility. Witness the widows who drape their musty weeds over all the living; witness the mother of a son killed in war who urges her son’s comrades to bring mourning to the mothers of all the sons on the other side.
Grief is a paralyzing poison. It broke down Una’s resistance to the cares of the office. Hers was no wholesome labor in which she could find sacred forgetfulness. It was the round of unessentials which all office-women know so desperately well. She bruised herself by shrinking from those hourly insults to her intelligence; and outside the office her most absorbing comfort was in the luxury of mourning—passion in black, even to the black-edged face-veil.... Though she was human enough to realize that with her fair hair she looked rather well in mourning, and shrewd enough to get it on credit at excellent terms.
She was in the office all day, being as curtly exact as she could. But in the evening she sat alone in her flat and feared the city.
Sometimes she rushed down to the Sessionses’ flat, but the good people bored her with their assumption that she was panting to know all the news from Panama. She had drifted so far away from the town that the sixth assertion that “it was a great pity Kitty Wilson was going to marry that worthless Clark boy” aroused no interest in her. She was still more bored by their phonograph, on which they played over and over the same twenty records. She would make quick, unconvincing excuses about having to hurry away. Their slippered stupidity was a desecration of her mother’s memory.
Her half-hysterical fear of the city’s power was increased by her daily encounter with the clamorous streets, crowded elevators, frantic lunch-rooms, and, most of all, the experience of the Subway.
Amazing, incredible, the Subway, and the fact that human beings could become used to it, consent to spend an hour in it daily. There was a heroic side to this spectacle of steel trains clanging at forty miles an hour beneath twenty-story buildings. The engineers had done their work well, made a great thought in steel and cement. And then the business men and bureaucrats had made the great thought a curse. There was in the Subway all the romance which story-telling youth goes seeking: trains crammed with an inconceivable complexity of people—marquises of the Holy Roman Empire, Jewish factory hands, speculators from Wyoming, Iowa dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers, with their dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion, under the city mask. But however striking these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent serf of the Subway.... A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl who waited there each morning. A clean space, but damp, stale, like the corridor to a prison—as indeed it was, since through it each morning Una entered the day’s business life.
Then, the train approaching, filling the tunnel, like a piston smashing into a cylinder; the shoving rush to get aboard. A crush that was ruffling and fatiguing to a man, but to a woman was horror.
Una stood with a hulking man pressing as close to her side as he dared, and a dapper clerkling squeezed against her breast. Above her head, to represent the city’s culture and graciousness, there were advertisements of soap, stockings, and collars. At curves the wheels ground with a long, savage whine, the train heeled, and she was flung into the arms of the grinning clerk, who held her tight. She, who must never be so unladylike as to enter a polling-place, had breathed into her very mouth the clerkling’s virile electoral odor of cigarettes and onions and decayed teeth.
A very good thing, the Subway. It did make Una quiver with the beginnings of rebellious thought as no suave preacher could ever have done. Almost hysterically she resented this daily indignity, which smeared her clean, cool womanhood with a grease of noise and smell and human contact.
As was the Subway, so were her noons of elbowing to get impure food in restaurants.
For reward she was permitted to work all day with Troy Wilkins. And for heavens and green earth, she had a chair and a desk.
But the human organism, which can modify itself to arctic cold and Indian heat, to incessant labor or the long enervation of luxury, learns to endure. Unwilling dressing, lonely breakfast, the Subway, dull work, lunch, sleepiness after lunch, the hopelessness of three o’clock, the boss’s ill-tempers, then the Subway again, and a lonely flat with no love, no creative work; and at last a long sleep so that she might be fresh for such another round of delight. So went the days. Yet all through them she found amusement, laughed now and then, and proved the heroism as well as the unthinking servility of the human race.
§ 2
The need of feeling that there were people near to her urged Una to sell her furniture and move from the flat to a boarding-house.
She avoided Mrs. Sessions’s advice. She was sure that Mrs. Sessions would bustle about and find her a respectable place where she would have to be cheery. She didn’t want to be cheery. She wanted to think. She even bought a serious magazine with articles. Not that she read it.
But she was afraid to be alone any more. Anyway, she would explore the city.
Of the many New Yorks, she had found only Morningside Park, Central Park, Riverside Drive, the shopping district, the restaurants and theaters which Walter had discovered to her, a few down-town office streets, and her own arid region of flats. She did not know the proliferating East Side, the factories, the endless semi-suburban stretches—nor Fifth Avenue. Her mother and Mrs. Sessions had inculcated in her the earnest idea that most parts of New York weren’t quite nice. In over two years in the city she had never seen a millionaire nor a criminal; she knew the picturesqueness neither of wealth nor of pariah poverty.
She did not look like an adventurer when, at a Saturday noon of October, she left the office—slight, kindly, rather timid, with her pale hair and school-teacher eye-glasses, and clear cheeks set off by comely mourning. But she was seizing New York. She said over and over, “Why, I can go and live any place I want to, and maybe I’ll meet some folks who are simply fascinating.” She wasn’t very definite about these fascinating folks, but they implied girls to play with and—she hesitated—and decidedly men, men different from Walter, who would touch her hand in courtly reverence.
She poked through strange streets. She carried an assortment of “Rooms and Board” clippings from the “want-ad” page of a newspaper, and obediently followed their hints about finding the perfect place. She resolutely did not stop at places not advertised in the paper, though nearly every house, in some quarters, had a sign, “Room to Rent.” Una still had faith in the veracity of whatever appeared in the public prints, as compared with what she dared see for herself.
The advertisements led her into a dozen parts of the city frequented by roomers, the lonely, gray, detached people who dwell in other people’s houses.
It was not so splendid a quest as she had hoped; it was too sharp a revelation of the cannon-food of the city, the people who had never been trained, and who had lost heart. It was scarcely possible to tell one street from another; to remember whether she was on Sixteenth Street or Twenty-sixth. Always the same rows of red-brick or brownstone houses, all alike, the monotony broken only by infrequent warehouses or loft-buildings; always the same doubtful mounting of stone steps, the same searching for a bell, the same waiting, the same slatternly, suspicious landlady, the same evil hallway with a brown hat-rack, a steel-engraving with one corner stained with yellow, a carpet worn through to the flooring in a large oval hole just in front of the stairs, a smell of cabbage, a lack of ventilation. Always the same desire to escape, though she waited politely while the landlady in the same familiar harsh voice went through the same formula.
Then, before she could flee to the comparatively fresh air of the streets, Una would politely have to follow the panting landlady to a room that was a horror of dirty carpet, lumpy mattress, and furniture with everything worn off that could wear off. And at last, always the same phrases by which Una meant to spare the woman: “Well, I’ll think it over. Thank you so much for showing me the rooms, but before I decide— Want to look around—”
Phrases which the landlady heard ten times a day.
She conceived a great-hearted pity for landladies. They were so patient, in face of her evident distaste. Even their suspiciousness was but the growling of a beaten dog. They sighed and closed their doors on her without much attempt to persuade her to stay. Her heart ached with their lack of imagination. They had no more imagination than those landladies of the insect world, the spiders, with their unchanging, instinctive, ancestral types of webs.
Her depression was increased by the desperate physical weariness of the hunt. Not that afternoon, not till two weeks later, did she find a room in a large, long, somber railroad flat on Lexington Avenue, conducted by a curly-haired young bookkeeper and his pretty wife, who provided their clients with sympathy, with extensive and scientific data regarding the motion-picture houses in the neighborhood, and board which was neither scientific nor very extensive.
It was time for Una to sacrifice the last material contact with her mother; to sell the furniture which she had known ever since, as a baby in Panama, she had crawled from this horsehair chair, all the long and perilous way across this same brown carpet, to this red-plush couch.
§ 3
It was not so hard to sell the furniture; she could even read and burn her father’s letters with an unhappy resoluteness. Despite her tenderness, Una had something of youth’s joy in getting rid of old things, as preparation for acquiring the new. She did sob when she found her mother’s straw hat, just as Mrs. Golden had left it, on the high shelf of the wardrobe as though her mother might come in at any minute, put it on, and start for a walk. She sobbed again when she encountered the tiny tear in the bottom of the couch, which her own baby fingers had made in trying to enlarge a pirate’s cave. That brought the days when her parents were immortal and all-wise; when the home sitting-room, where her father read the paper aloud, was a security against all the formidable world outside.
But to these recollections Una could shut her heart. To one absurd thing, because it was living, Una could not shut her heart—to the senile canary.
Possibly she could have taken it with her, but she felt confusedly that Dickie would not be appreciated in other people’s houses. She evaded asking the Sessionses to shelter the bird, because every favor that she permitted from that smug family was a bond that tied her to their life of married spinsterhood.
“Oh, Dickie, Dickie, what am I going to do with you?” she cried, slipping a finger through the wires of the cage.
The canary hopped toward her and tried to chirp his greeting.
“Even when you were sick you tried to sing to me, and mother did love you,” she sighed. “I just can’t kill you—trusting me like that.”
She turned her back, seeking to solve the problem by ignoring it. While she was sorting dresses—some trace of her mother in every fold, every wrinkle of the waists and lace collars—she was listening to the bird in the cage.
“I’ll think of some way—I’ll find somebody who will want you, Dickie dear,” she murmured, desperately, now and then.
After dinner and nightfall, with her nerves twanging all the more because it seemed silly to worry over one dissolute old bird when all her life was breaking up, she hysterically sprang up, snatched Dickie from the cage, and trotted down-stairs to the street.
“I’ll leave you somewhere. Somebody will find you,” she declared.
Concealing the bird by holding it against her breast with a hand supersensitive to its warm little feathers, she walked till she found a deserted tenement doorway. She hastily set the bird down on a stone balustrade beside the entrance steps. Dickie chirped more cheerily, more sweetly than for many days, and confidingly hopped back to her hand.
“Oh, I can’t leave him for boys to torture and I can’t take him, I can’t—”
In a sudden spasm she threw the bird into the air, and ran back to the flat, sobbing, “I can’t kill it—I can’t—there’s so much death.” Longing to hear the quavering affection of its song once more, but keeping herself from even going to the window, to look for it, with bitter haste she completed her work of getting rid of things—things—things—the things which were stones of an imprisoning past.
§ 4
Shyness was over Una when at last she was in the house of strangers. She sat marveling that this square, white cubby-hole of a room was hers permanently, that she hadn’t just come here for an hour or two. She couldn’t get it to resemble her first impression of it. Now the hallway was actually a part of her life—every morning she would face the picture of a magazine-cover girl when she came out of her room.
Her agitation was increased by the problem of keeping up the maiden modesty appropriate to a Golden, a young female friend of the Sessionses’, in a small flat with gentlemen lodgers and just one bathroom. Una was saved by not having a spinster friend with whom to share her shrinking modesty. She simply had to take waiting for her turn at the bathroom as a matter of course, and insensibly she was impressed by the decency with which these dull, ordinary people solved the complexities of their enforced intimacy. When she wildly clutched her virgin bathrobe about her and passed a man in the hall, he stalked calmly by without any of the teetering apologies which broad-beamed Mr. Sessions had learned from his genteel spouse.
She could not at first distinguish among her companions. Gradually they came to be distinct, important. They held numberless surprises for her. She would not have supposed that a bookkeeper in a fish-market would be likely to possess charm. Particularly if he combined that amorphous occupation with being a boarding-house proprietor. Yet her landlord, Herbert Gray, with his look of a track-athlete, his confessions of ignorance and his naïve enthusiasms about whatever in the motion pictures seemed to him heroic, large, colorful, was as admirable as the several youngsters of her town who had plodded through Princeton or Pennsylvania and come back to practise law or medicine or gentlemanly inheritance of business. And his wife, round and comely, laughing easily, wearing her clothes with an untutored grace which made her cheap waists smart, was so thoroughly her husband’s comrade in everything, that these struggling nobodies had all the riches of the earth.
The Grays took Una in as though she were their guest, but they did not bother her. They were city-born, taught by the city to let other people live their own lives.
The Grays had taken a flat twice too large for their own use. The other lodgers, who lived, like monks on a bare corridor, along the narrow “railroad” hall, were three besides Una:
A city failure, one with a hundred thousand failures, a gray-haired, neat man, who had been everything and done nothing, and who now said evasively that he was “in the collection business.” He read Dickens and played a masterful game of chess. He liked to have it thought that his past was brave with mysterious splendors. He spoke hintingly of great lawyers. But he had been near to them only as a clerk for a large law firm. He was grateful to any one for noticing him. Like most of the failures, he had learned the art of doing nothing at all. All Sunday, except for a two hours’ walk in Central Park, and one game of chess with Herbert Gray, he dawdled in his room, slept, regarded his stocking-feet with an appearance of profound meditation, yawned, picked at the Sunday newspaper. Una once saw him napping on a radiant autumn Sunday afternoon, and detested him. But he was politely interested in her work for Troy Wilkins, carefully exact in saying, “Good-morning, miss,” and he became as familiar to her as the gas-heater in her cubicle.
Second fellow-lodger was a busy, reserved woman, originally from Kansas City, who had something to do with some branch library. She had solved the problems of woman’s lack of place in this city scheme by closing tight her emotions, her sense of adventure, her hope of friendship. She never talked to Una, after discovering that Una had no interesting opinions on the best reading for children nine to eleven.
These gentle, inconsequential city waifs, the Grays, the failure, the library-woman, meant no more to Una than the crowds who were near, yet so detached, in the streets. But the remaining boarder annoyed her by his noisy whine. He was an underbred maverick, with sharp eyes of watery blue, a thin mustache, large teeth, and no chin worth noticing. He would bounce in of an evening, when the others were being decorous and dull in the musty dining-room, and yelp: “How do we all find our seskpadalian selves this bright and balmy evenin’? How does your perspegacity discipulate, Herby? What’s the good word, Miss Golden? Well, well, well, if here ain’t our good old friend, the Rev. J. Pilkington Corned Beef; how ’r’ you, Pilky? Old Mrs. Cabbage feelin’ well, too? Well, well, still discussing the movies, Herby? Got any new opinions about Mary Pickford? Well, well. Say, I met another guy that’s as nutty as you, Herby; he thinks that Wilhelm Jenkins Bryan is a great statesman. Let’s hear some more about the Sage of Free Silver, Herby.”
The little man was never content till he had drawn them into so bitter an argument that some one would rise, throw down a napkin, growl, “Well, if that’s all you know about it—if you’re all as ignorant as that, you simply ain’t worth arguing with,” and stalk out. When general topics failed, the disturber would catechize the library-woman about Louisa M. Alcott, or the failure about his desultory inquiries into Christian Science, or Mrs. Gray about the pictures plastering the dining-room—a dozen spiritual revelations of apples and oranges, which she had bought at a department-store sale.
The maverick’s name was Fillmore J. Benson. Strangers called him Benny, but his more intimate acquaintances, those to whom he had talked for at least an hour, were requested to call him Phil. He made a number of pretty puns about his first name. He was, surprisingly, a doctor—not the sort that studies science, but the sort that studies the gullibility of human nature—a “Doctor of Manipulative Osteology.” He had earned a diploma by a correspondence course, and had scrabbled together a small practice among retired shopkeepers. He was one of the strange, impudent race of fakers who prey upon the clever city. He didn’t expect any one at the Grays’ to call him a “doctor.”
He drank whisky and gambled for pennies, was immoral in his relations with women and as thick-skinned as he was blatant. He had been a newsboy, a contractor’s clerk, and climbed up by the application of his wits. He read enormously—newspapers, cheap magazines, medical books; he had an opinion about everything, and usually worsted every one at the Grays’ in arguments. And he did his patients good by giving them sympathy and massage. He would have been an excellent citizen had the city not preferred to train him, as a child in its reeling streets, to a sharp unscrupulousness.
Una was at first disgusted by Phil Benson, then perplexed. He would address her in stately Shakespearean phrases which, as a boy, he had heard from the gallery of the Academy of Music. He would quote poetry at her. She was impressed when he almost silenced the library-woman, in an argument as to whether Longfellow or Whittier was the better poet, by parroting the whole of “Snow Bound.”
She fancied that Phil’s general pea-weevil aspect concealed the soul of a poet. But she was shocked out of her pleasant fabling when Phil roared at Mrs. Gray: “Say, what did the baker use this pie for? A bureau or a trunk? I’ve found three pairs of socks and a safety-pin in my slab, so far.”
Pretty Mrs. Gray was hurt and indignant, while her husband growled: “Aw, don’t pay any attention to that human phonograph, Amy. He’s got bats in his belfry.”
Una had acquired a hesitating fondness for the mute gentleness of the others, and it infuriated her that this insect should spoil their picnic. But after dinner Phil Benson dallied over to her, sat on the arm of her chair, and said: “I’m awfully sorry that I make such a bum hit with you, Miss Golden. Oh, I can see I do, all right. You’re the only one here that can understand. Somehow it seems to me—you aren’t like other women I know. There’s something—somehow it’s different. A—a temperament. You dream about higher things than just food and clothes. Oh,” he held up a deprecating hand, “don’t deny it. I’m mighty serious about it, Miss Golden. I can see it, even if you haven’t waked up to it as yet.”
The absurd part of it was that, at least while he was talking, Mr. Phil Benson did believe what he was saying, though he had borrowed all of his sentiments from a magazine story about hobohemians which he had read the night before.
He also spoke of reading good books, seeing good plays, and the lack of good influences in this wicked city.
He didn’t overdo it. He took leave in ten minutes—to find good influences in a Kelly pool-parlor on Third Avenue. He returned to his room at ten, and, sitting with his shoeless feet cocked up on his bed, read a story in Racy Yarns. While beyond the partition, about four feet from him, Una Golden lay in bed, her smooth arms behind her aching head, and worried about Phil’s lack of opportunity.
She was finding in his loud impudence a twisted resemblance to Walter Babson’s erratic excitability, and that won her, for love goes seeking new images of the god that is dead.
Next evening Phil varied his tactics by coming to dinner early, just touching Una’s hand as she was going into the dining-room, and murmuring in a small voice, “I’ve been thinking so much of the helpful things you said last evening, Miss Golden.”
Later, Phil talked to her about his longing to be a great surgeon—in which he had the tremendous advantage of being almost sincere. He walked down the hall to her room, and said good-night lingeringly, holding her hand.
Una went into her room, closed the door, and for full five minutes stood amazed. “Why!” she gasped, “the little man is trying to make love to me!”
She laughed over the absurdity of it. Heavens! She had her Ideal. The Right Man. He would probably be like Walter Babson—though more dependable. But whatever the nature of the paragon, he would in every respect be just the opposite of the creature who had been saying good-night to her.
She sat down, tried to read the paper, tried to put Phil out of her mind. But he kept returning. She fancied that she could hear his voice in the hall. She dropped the paper to listen.
“I’m actually interested in him!” she marveled. “Oh, that’s ridiculous!”
§ 5
Now that Walter had made a man’s presence natural to her, Una needed a man, the excitation of his touch, the solace of his voice. She could not patiently endure a cloistered vacuousness.
Even while she was vigorously representing to herself that he was preposterous, she was uneasily aware that Phil was masculine. His talons were strong; she could feel their clutch on her hands. “He’s a rat. And I do wish he wouldn’t—spit!” she shuddered. But under her scorn was a surge of emotion.... A man, not much of a man, yet a man, had wanted the contact of her hand, been eager to be with her. Sensations vast as night or the ocean whirled in her small, white room. Desire, and curiosity even more, made her restless as a wave.
She caught herself speculating as she plucked at the sleeve of her black mourning waist: “I wonder would I be more interesting if I had the orange-and-brown dress I was going to make when mother died?... Oh, shame!”
Yet she sprang up from the white-enameled rocker, tucked in her graceless cotton corset-cover, stared at her image in the mirror, smoothed her neck till the skin reddened.
§ 6
Phil talked to her for an hour after their Sunday-noon dinner. She had been to church; had confessed indeterminate sins to a formless and unresponsive deity. She felt righteous, and showed it. Phil caught the cue. He sacrificed all the witty things he was prepared to say about Mrs. Gray’s dumplings; he gazed silently out of the window till she wondered what he was thinking about, then he stumblingly began to review a sermon which he said he had heard the previous Sunday—though he must have been mistaken, as he shot several games of Kelly pool every Sunday morning, or slept till noon.
“The preacher spoke of woman’s influence. You don’t know what it is to lack a woman’s influence in a fellow’s life, Miss Golden. I can see the awful consequences among my patients. I tell you, when I sat there in church and saw the colored windows—” He sighed portentously. His hand fell across hers—his lean paw, strong and warm-blooded from massaging puffy old men. “I tell you I just got sentimental, I did, thinking of all I lacked.”
Phil melted mournfully away—to indulge in a highly cheerful walk on upper Broadway with Miss Becky Rosenthal, sewer for the Sans Peur Pants and Overalls Company—while in her room Una grieved over his forlorn desire to be good.
§ 7
Two evenings later, when November warmed to a passing Indian summer of golden skies that were pitifully far away from the little folk in city streets, Una was so restless that she set off for a walk by herself.
Phil had been silent, glancing at her and away, as though he were embarrassed.
“I wish I could do something to help him,” she thought, as she poked down-stairs to the entrance of the apartment-house.
Phil was on the steps, smoking a cigarette-sized cigar, scratching his chin, and chattering with his kinsmen, the gutter sparrows.
He doffed his derby. He spun his cigar from him with a deft flip of his fingers which somehow agitated her. She called herself a little fool for being agitated, but she couldn’t get rid of the thought that only men snapped their fingers like that.
“Goin’ to the movies, Miss Golden?”
“No, I was just going for a little walk.”
“Well, say, walks, that’s where I live. Why don’t you invite Uncle Phil to come along and show you the town? Why, I knew this burg when they went picnicking at the reservoir in Bryant Park.”
He swaggered beside her without an invitation. He did not give her a chance to decline his company—and soon she did not want to. He led her down to Gramercy Park, loveliest memory of village days, houses of a demure red and white ringing a fenced garden. He pointed out to her the Princeton Club, the Columbia Club, the National Arts, and the Players’, and declared that two men leaving the last were John Drew and the most famous editor in America. He guided her over to Stuyvesant Park, a barren square out of old London, with a Quaker school on one side, and the voluble Ghetto on the other. He conducted her through East Side streets, where Jewish lovers parade past miles of push-carts and venerable Rabbis read the Talmud between sales of cotton socks, and showed her a little café which was a hang-out for thieves. She was excited by this contact with the underworld.
He took her to a Lithuanian restaurant, on a street which was a débâcle. One half of the restaurant was filled with shaggy Lithuanians playing cards at filthy tables; the other half was a clean haunt for tourists who came to see the slums, and here, in the heart of these “slums,” saw only one another.
“Wait a while,” Phil said, “and a bunch of Seeing-New-Yorkers will land here and think we’re crooks.”
In ten minutes a van-load of sheepish trippers from the Middle West filed into the restaurant and tried to act as though they were used to cocktails. Una was delighted when she saw them secretly peering at Phil and herself; she put one hand on her thigh and one on the table, leaned forward and tried to look tough, while Phil pretended to be quarreling with her, and the trippers’ simple souls were enthralled by this glimpse of two criminals. Una really enjoyed the acting; for a moment Phil was her companion in play; and when the trippers had gone rustling out to view other haunts of vice she smiled at Phil unrestrainedly.
Instantly he took advantage of her smile, of their companionship.
He was really as simple-hearted as the trippers in his tactics.
She had been drinking ginger-ale. He urged her now to “have a real drink.” He muttered confidentially: “Have a nip of sherry or a New Orleans fizz or a Bronx. That’ll put heart into you. Not enough to affect you a-tall, but just enough to cheer up on. Then we’ll go to a dance and really have a time. Gee! poor kid, you don’t get any fun.”
“No, no, I never touch it,” she said, and she believed it, forgetting the claret she had drunk with Walter Babson.
She felt unsafe.
He laughed at her; assured her from his medical experience that “lots of women need a little tonic,” and boisterously ordered a glass of sherry for her.
She merely sipped it. She wanted to escape. All their momentary frankness of association was gone. She feared him; she hated the complaisant waiter who brought her the drink; the fat proprietor who would take his pieces of silver, though they were the price of her soul; the policeman on the pavement, who would never think of protecting her; and the whole hideous city which benignly profited by saloons. She watched another couple down at the end of the room—an obese man and a young, pretty girl, who was hysterically drunk. Not because she had attended the Women’s Christian Temperance Union at Panama and heard them condemn “the demon rum,” but because the sickish smell of the alcohol was all about her now, she suddenly turned into a crusader. She sprang up, seized her gloves, snapped, “I will not touch the stuff.” She marched down the room, out of the restaurant and away, not once looking back at Phil.
In about fifteen seconds she had a humorous picture of Phil trying to rush after her, but stopped by the waiter to pay his check. She began to wonder if she hadn’t been slightly ridiculous in attempting to slay Demon Rum by careering down the restaurant. But “I don’t care!” she said, stoutly. “I’m glad I took a stand instead of just rambling along and wondering what it was all about, the way I did with Walter.”
Phil caught up to her and instantly began to complain. “Say, you certainly made a sight out of yourself—and out of me—leaving me sitting there with the waiter laughing his boob head off at me. Lord! I’ll never dare go near the place again.”
“Your own fault.” This problem was so clear, so unconfused to her.
“It wasn’t all my fault,” he said. “You didn’t have to take a drink.” His voice fell to a pathetic whimper. “I was showing you hospitality the best way I knew how. You won’t never know how you hurt my feelin’s.”
The problem instantly became complicated again. Perhaps she had hurt his rudimentary sense of courtesy. Perhaps Walter Babson would have sympathized with Phil, not with her. She peeped at Phil. He trailed along with a forlorn baby look which did not change.
She was very uncomfortable as she said a brief good-night at the flat. She half wished that he would give her a chance to recant. She saw him and his injured feelings as enormously important.
She undressed in a tremor of misgiving. She put her thin, pretty kimono over her nightgown, braided her hair, and curled on the bed, condemning herself for having been so supercilious to the rat who had never had a chance.
It was late—long after eleven—when there was a tapping on the door.
She started, listened rigidly.
Phil’s voice whispered from the hall: “Open your door just half an inch, Miss Golden. Something I wanted to say.”
Her pity for him made his pleading request like a command. She drew her kimono close and peeped out at him.
“I knew you were up,” he whispered; “saw the light under your door. I been so worried. I didn’t mean to shock you, or nothing, but if you feel I did mean to, I want to apologize. Gee! me, I couldn’t sleep one wink if I thought you was offended.”
“It’s all right—” she began.
“Say, come into the dining-room. Everybody gone to bed. I want to explain—gee! you gotta give me a chance to be good. If you don’t use no good influence over me, nobody never will, I guess.”
His whisper was full of masculine urgency, husky, bold. She shivered. She hesitated, did not answer.
“All right,” he mourned. “I don’t blame you none, but it’s pretty hard—”
“I’ll come just for a moment,” she said, and shut the door.
She was excited, flushed. She wrapped her braids around her head, gentle braids of pale gold, and her undistinguished face, thus framed, was young and sweet.
She hastened out to the dining-room.
What was the “parlor” by day the Grays used for their own bedroom, but the dining-room had a big, ugly, leather settee and two rockers, and it served as a secondary living-room.
Here Phil waited, at the end of the settee. She headed for a rocker, but he piled sofa-cushions for her at the other end of the settee, and she obediently sank down there.
“Listen,” he said, in a tone of lofty lamentation, “I don’t know as I can ever, ever make you understand I just wanted to give you a good time. I seen you was in mourning, and I thinks, ‘Maybe you could brighten her up a little—’”
“I am sorry I didn’t understand.”
“Una, Una! Do you suppose you could ever stoop to helping a bad egg like me?” he demanded.
His hand fell on hers. It comforted her chilly hand. She let it lie there. Speech became difficult for her.
“Why, why yes—” she stammered.
In reaction to her scorn of him, she was all accepting faith.
“Oh, if you could—and if I could make you less lonely sometimes—”
In his voice was a perilous tenderness; for the rat, trained to beguile neurotic patients in his absurd practice, could croon like the very mother of pity.
“Yes, I am lonely sometimes,” she heard herself admitting—far-off, dreaming, needing the close affection that her mother and Walter had once given her.
“Poor little girl—you’re so much better raised and educated than me, but you got to have friendship jus’ same.”
His arm was about her shoulder. For a second she leaned against him.
All her scorn of him suddenly gathered in one impulse. She sprang up—just in time to catch a grin on his face.
“You gutter-rat!” she said. “You aren’t worth my telling you what you are. You wouldn’t understand. You can’t see anything but the gutter.”
He was perfectly unperturbed: “Poor stuff, kid. Weak come-back. Sounds like a drayma. But, say, listen, honest, kid, you got me wrong. What’s the harm in a little hugging—”
She fled. She was safe in her room. She stood with both arms outstretched. She did not feel soiled by this dirty thing. She was triumphant. In the silhouette of a water-tank, atop the next-door apartment-house, she saw a strong tower of faith.
“Now I don’t have to worry about him. I don’t have to make any more decisions. I know! I’m through! No one can get me just because of curiosity about sex again. I’m free. I can fight my way through in business and still keep clean. I can! I was hungry for—for even that rat. I—Una Golden! Yes, I was. But I don’t want to go back to him. I’ve won!
“Oh, Walter, Walter, I do want you, dear, but I’ll get along without you, and I’ll keep a little sacred image of you.”