Kitabı oku: «The Trufflers», sayfa 10

CHAPTER XXII – A BACHELOR AT LARGE

YOU are to picture Washington Square at the beginning of June. Very early in the morning – to be accurate, eight-fifty. Without the old bachelor apartment building, fresh green trees, air steaming and quivering with radiation and evaporation from warm wet asphalt, rumbling autobusses, endless streams of men and girls hurrying eastward and northward to the day’s work or turning into the commercial-looking University building at our right, and hard at it, the inevitable hurdy gurdy; within, seventh floor front, large dim studio, Hy Lowe buttoning his collar and singing lustily —

 
“I want si-imp-athee,
Si-imp-athee, just symp-ah-thee!”
 

The collar buttoned, Hy, still roaring, clasped an imaginary partner to his breast and deftly executed the bafflingly simple step of the hesitation waltz over which New York was at the moment, as Hy would put it, dippy. Hy’s eyes were heavy and red and decorated with the dark circles of tradition, but his feet moved lightly, blithely. Hy could dance on his own tombstone – and he would dance well.

At one of the two front windows Henry Bates, of The Courier, otherwise the Worm, in striped, buttonless pajamas caught across the chest with a safety-pin, gazed down at the Square while feeling absently along the sill for the cream bottle.

The third member of our little group of bachelors, Peter Ericson Mann, was away; down at Atlantic City, working on something. Also nursing a broken heart. For everybody knew now that he and Sue Wilde were not to be married.

The desk served as breakfast table; an old newspaper as cloth. There were flaked cereal in bowls, coffee from the percolator on the bookcase, rolls from a paper sack.

The Worm lingered over his coffee. Hy gulped his, glancing frequently at his watch, propped against the inkstand.

“Oh,” observed the Worm, pausing in his task of cleaning his pipe with a letter opener, “I nearly forgot. A lady called up. While you were in the hath tub.”

“This morning?” Hy’s face went discreetly blank.

“Yes, Miss – Miss – sounded like Banana.”

“Miss Sorana.” Hy’s eyelids fluttered an instant. Then he lit a cigarette and was again his lightly imperturbable self. “What an ungodly hour!” he murmured, “for Silvia, of all girls. But she knows she mustn’t call me at the office.”

The Worm regarded his roommate with discerning, mildly humorous eyes. “Who, may I ask, is Silvia? And what is she?”

Hy missed the allusion. “If The Evening Earth were ever to come into possession of my recent letters which I devoutly hope and trust they won’t” – Hy staged a shudder – “they would undoubtedly refer to her as ‘an actress.’ Just like that. An actress.”

“Hm!” mused the Worm, “it’s in writing already, eh!”

Hy shrugged his shoulders. “The old world has to go round,” said he. Then his eyes grew dreamy. “But, my boy, my boy! You should see her – the darling of the gods! Absolutely the darling of the gods! Met her at the Grand Roof. Good lord! figured in cold calendar arithmetic, it isn’t eight days. But then, they say eternity is but a moment.”

“A dancing case?” queried the Worm.

Hy nodded. “After ten steps, my son, we knew! Absolutely knew! She knew. I knew. We were helpless – it had to be.”

At this point Hy pocketed his watch and settled back to smoke comfortably. He always bolted his breakfast by the watch; he always chatted or read the paper afterward; he was always late at the office.

The Worm was studying him quizzically. “Hy,” he said, “how do you do it?”

“Do what?” queried Hy, struggling with a smile of self-conscious elation.

“Oh, come! You know. This!” The Worm gestured inclusively with his pipe. “Ten days ago it was that Hilda Hansen person from Wisconsin. Two weeks before that – ”

Hy raised his hand. “Go easy with the dead past, my son.”

The Worm pressed on. “Morally, ethically, you are doubtless open to criticism. As are the rest of us. That is neither here nor there. What I want to know is, how do you do it? You’re not beautiful. You’re not witty – though the younger among ‘em might think you were, for the first few hours. But the ladies, God bless ‘em! – overlooking many men of character and charm, overlooking even myself – come after you by platoons, regiments, brigades. They fairly break in your door. What is it? How do you do it?”

“It’s a gift,” said Hy cheerily, “plus experience.”

The Worm was slowly shaking his head. “It’s not experience,” he said. “That’s a factor, but that’s not it. You hit it the first time. It’s a gift – perhaps plus eyelashes.”

“But, my boy, I sometimes fail. Take the case you were about to mention – Betty Deane. I regard Betty as my most notable miscalculation – my Dardanelles.”

“Not for a minute, Hy. As I’ve heard the story, Betty was afraid of you, ran away, married in a panic. She, a self-expresser of the self-expressers, a seeker of the Newest Freedom, marries a small standpatter who makes gas engines. To escape your hypnotic influence. No – I can’t concede it. That, sir, was a tribute to your prowess, no less.”

Hy assumed an expression of modesty. “If you know all about it, why ask me? I don’t know. A man like me, reasonably young, reasonably hardworking, reasonably susceptible – well, good lord! I need the feminine – ”

“I’m not puzzled about the demand,” said the Worm, “but the supply.”

“Oh, come! There aren’t so many. I did have that little flare-tip with Betty. She promised to go away with me on the night boat. She didn’t turn up; I took that trip alone.”

“It got as far as that, eh?”

“It did. Whatever her reasons she skipped back to her home town and married the maker of gas engines. The Hilda Hansen matter caught me on the rebound. There couldn’t ever have been anything in that, anyway. The girl’s a leaner. Hasn’t even a protective crust. Some kind uncle ought to take her and her little wall-paper designs back to Wisconsin. But this is – different!” He fumbled rather excitedly in his pocket and produced a letter – pages and pages of it, closely written m a nervous hand that was distinguished mainly by unusually heavy down strokes of a stub pen. He glanced eagerly through it, coloring as his eyes fell on this phrase and that. “You know, I’d almost like to read you a little of it. Damn it, the girl’s got something – courage, fire, personality! She’s perfectly wild – a pagan woman! She’s – ”

The Worm raised an arresting pipe. “Don’t,” he said dryly. “Never do that! Besides, your defense, while fairly plausible, accounts for only about three months of your life.”

Slightly crestfallen, Hy read on in silence. Then he turned back and started at the beginning. Finally, looking up and catching the Worm’s interested, critical eyes on him, he stuffed the document back into his pocket, lit a new cigarette, got up, found his hat and stick, stood a moment in moody silence, sighed deeply and went out.

The telephone rang. As the Worm drew the instrument toward him and lifted the receiver the door opened and Hy came charging back.

The voice was feminine. “Is Mr. Lowe there?” it said.

“Gimme that phone!” breathed Hy, reaching for it.

The Worm swung out of his reach. “No,” he said into the transmitter, “he’s gone out. Just a moment ago. Would you like to leave any message?” And dodging behind the desk, he grinned at Hy.

That young man was speechless.

“Who did you say?” Thus the Worm into the telephone. “Mrs. Bixbee?” He spoke swiftly to Hy. “It’s funny. I’ve heard the voice. But Mrs. Bixbee!” Then into the telephone. “Yes, this is Mr. Bates. Oh, you were Betty Deane? Yes, indeed! Wait a moment. I think he has just come in again. I’ll call him.”

But at that name Hy bolted. The door slammed after him. The Worm could hear him running along the outer corridor and down the stairs. He had not stopped to ring for the elevator.

“No,” said the Worm now unblushingly, “I was mistaken. He isn’t here. That was the floor maid.” As he pushed the instrument back on the desk, he sighed and shook his head. “That’s it,” he said aloud, with humility. “It’s a gift.”

CHAPTER XXIII – THE BUZZER

NEW YORK, as much as Paris or Peking, is the city of bizarre contrasts. One such is modestly illustrated in the life of Hy Lowe.

Hy hurried on this as on every working morning eastward across Broadway and through Astor Place to the large five-story structure, a block in length, near the heart of the Bowery, that had been known for seventy years as Scripture House. Tract societies clustered within the brownstone walls, publishers of hymn books and testaments, lecture bureaus, church extension groups, temperance and anti-cigarette societies, firms of lady typists, and with these, flocks of shorter-lived concerns whose literature was pious and whose aims were profoundly commercial. Long years before, when men wore beavers and stocks and women wore hoopskirts, the building had symbolized the organized evangelical forces that were to galvanize and remake a corrupt world.

But the world had somehow evaded this particular galvanizing process. It had plunged wildly on the little heretical matter of applied science; which in its turn had invaded the building in the form of electric light and power and creakily insecure elevators. The Trusts had come, and Labor Unions and Economic Determinism – even the I. W, W. and the mad Nietzschean propaganda of the Greenwich Village New Russianists. Not to mention War. Life had twisted itself into puzzling shapes. New York had followed farther and farther up-town its elevated roads, subways, steel-built sky-scrapers and amazing palaces of liquors and lobsters, leaving the old building not even the scant privilege of dominating the slums and factories that had crept gradually to and around it. And now as a last negligent insult, a very new generation – a confused generation of Jews, Italians, Irish, Poles, Slavs, serving as bookkeepers, stenographers, messengers, door girls, elevator boys – idled and flirted and enacted their little worldly comedies and tragedies within the very walls of Scripture House – practised a furtive dance step or two in the dim stock rooms, dreamed of broiled lobsters (even of liquors) while patient men with white string neckties and routine minds sat in inner offices and continued the traditional effort to remake that forgotten old world.

But if the vision had failed, many a successful enterprise, then and now, thrived under the cover of Scripture House. One had thrived there for thirty years – the independent missionary weekly known to you as My Brother’s Keeper. This publication was the “meal ticket” to which Hy, at rare intervals, referred. On the ground glass of his office door were the words, lettered in black, “Assistant Editor.” To this altitude had eight years of reporting and editing elevated Hy Lowe. The compensating honorarium was forty-five dollars a week. Not a great amount for one whose nature demanded correct clothing, Broadway dinners, pretty girls and an occasional taxicab; still a bachelor who lives inexpensively as to rooms, breakfasts and lunches and is not too hard on his clothes can go reasonably far on forty-five dollars, even in New York.

On this as on other mornings Hy, after a smile and a wink for the noticeably pretty little telephone girl in the outer office, slid along the inner corridor dose to the wood and glass partition. Though the Walrus’ open doorway dominated the corridor, there was always a chance of slipping in unnoted.

He opened and closed his own door very softly; whipped off and hung up his street coat; donned the old black alpaca that was curiously bronzed from the pockets down by thousands of wipings of purple ink: and within twenty seconds was seated at his desk going through the morning’s mail.

A buzzer sounded – on the partition just above his head. Hy started; turned and stared at the innocent little electrical machine. His color mounted. He compressed his lips. He picked up the editorial shears and deliberately slipped one blade under the insulated wires that led away from the buzzer.

Again the sound! Hy’s fingers relaxed. He snorted, tossed the shears on the desk, strode to the door, paused to compose his features; then wearing the blankly innocent expression that meant forty-five dollars a week, walked quietly into the big room at the end of the corridor where, behind a flat mahogany desk seven feet square, sat the Reverend Hubbell Harkness Wilde, D. D.

On the wall behind him lettered in gold leaf on black enamel, hung the apothegm (not from the eloquent pen of Doctor Wilde) – “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Beneath, in a long mahogany bookcase, were hundreds of volumes, every one inserted in gratitude and admiration to the editor of My Brothers Keeper. The great desk was heaped with books, manuscripts, folders of correspondence. Beside it, pencil warily poised, sat Miss Hardwick, who for more than twenty years had followed Doctor Wilde about these offices – during most of every working day taking down his most trivial utterances, every word, to be transcribed later on the typewriter by her three six-dollar-a-week girls. It was from the resulting mass of verbiage that Miss Hardwick and the doctor dug out and arranged the weekly sermon-editorials that you read when you were a Sunday-school pupil and that your non-citified aunts and uncles are reading in book form to this day. They were a force, these sermons. Make no mistake about that! They had a sensational vigor that you rarely heard from the formal pulpit. The back-cover announcements of feature-sermons to come were stirring in themselves. If your mind be “practical,” scorning all mystical theorizings, let me pass on to you the inside information that through sermons and advertisements of sermons and sensational full-page appeals in display type this man whom Hy light-mindedly dismissed with the title of “the Walrus” had collected more than two million dollars in twenty years for those mission stations of his in Africa or Madagascar (or whenever they were). That is slightly upward of a hundred thousand a year in actual money, as a net average!

We have had a momentary glimpse of Doctor Wilde. That was at the Crossroads Theater, where his runaway daughter was playing a boy in Jacob Zanin’s playlet, Any Street. But the Walrus was then out of his proper setting – was merely a grim hint of a forgotten Puritanism in that little Bohemian world of experimental compliance with the Freudian Wish.

We see him in his proper setting here. The old-fashioned woodcut of him that was always in the upper left corner of sermon or announcement was made in 1886 – that square, young, strong face, prominent nose, penetrating eyes. Even then it flattered him. The man now sitting at the enormous desk was twenty-nine years older. The big hooked nose was still there. The pale-green eyes were still a striking feature; but they looked tired now. There was the strip of whisker on each cheek, close-clipped, tinged now with gray. He was heavier in neck and shoulders. There were deep lines about the wide, thin, orator’s mouth. Despite the nose and eyes there was something yielding about that mouth; something of the old politician who has learned to temper strength with craft, who has learned, too, that human nature moves and functions within rather narrow limits and is assailed by subtle weaknesses. It was an enigmatic face. Beneath it were low turnover collar, the usual white string tie and a well-worn black frock coat.

Doctor Wilde was nervous this morning. His eyes found it difficult to meet those of his mild-faced assistant in the old alpaca office coat.

“Miss Hardwick – you may go, please!” Thus Doctor Wilde; and he threw out his hands in a nervous gesture.

For an instant, sensing some new tension in the office atmosphere, Hy caught himself thinking of Sue Wilde. She had a trick of throwing out her hands like that. Only she did it with extraordinary grace. In certain ways they were alike, this eccentric gifted man and his eccentric equally gifted daughter. Not in all particulars; for Sue had charm. “Must get it from her mother’s side,” mused Hy. He knew that the mother was dead, that the house from which Sue had fled to Greenwich Village and Art and Freedom was now presided over by a second wife who dressed surprisingly well, and whose two children – little girls – were on occasions brought into the office.

His reverie ended abruptly. Miss Hardwick had gathered up her note-books and pencils; was rising now; and as she passed out, released in Hy’s direction one look that almost frightened him. It was a barbed shaft of bitter malevolence, oddly confused with trembling, incredible triumph.

“Sit down, please!” It was Doctor Wilde’s voice. Hy sat down in the chair that was always kept for him across the huge desk from the doctor. That gentleman had himself risen, creaked over to the door, was closing it securely.

What had that queer look meant? From Miss Hardwick of all people! To Hy she had been hardly more than an office fixture. But in that brief instant she had revealed depths of hatred, malignant jealousy – something!

The doctor sank heavily into his own chair. Hy, mystified, watched him and waited. The man reached for a paper-weight – a brass model of his first mission house from Africa or Madagascar or somewhere – and placed it before him on top of the unopened morning’s mail, moved it this way, then a little that way and looked at it critically. Hy, more and more startled, a thought hypnotized, leaned forward on the desk and gazed at that little brass house. Finally the doctor spoke:

“I have an unpleasant duty – but it is not a matter that I can lightly pass over – ”

Hy paled a little, knit his brows, stared with increasing intensity at that mission house of brass.

“For a long time, Mr. Lowe, I have felt that your conduct was not – ”

“Oh,” thought Hy, in a daze, “my conduct was not – ”

“ – was not – well, in keeping with your position.”

“With my position.” Hy’s numb mind repeated.

“This is not a matter of a particular act or a particular occasion, Mr. Lowe. For a long time it has been known to me that you sought undesirable companions, that you have been repeatedly seen in – in Broadway resorts.”

Hy’s mind was stirring awake now, darting this way and that like a frightened mouse. Some one had been talking to the doctor – and very recently. The man was a coward in office matters; he had been goaded to this. The “for a long time,” so heavily repeated, was of course a verbal blind. Could it have been – not Miss Hardwick. Then Hy was surprised to hear his own voice:

“But this is a charge, Doctor Wilde! A charge should be definite.” The words came mechanically. Hy must have read them somewhere. “I surely have a right to know what has bcen said about me.”

“I don’t know that it is necessary to be specific,” said the doctor, apparently now that the issue was joined, finding his task easier.

“I must insist!” cried Hy, on his feet now. He was thinking – “What has she told him? What does she know? What does she know!”

“Sit down!” said Doctor Wilde.

Hy sat down. His chief moved the mission house a trifle to square it with the edge of the desk.

“To mention only one occasion,” went on the doctor’s voice – “though many are known to me, I am well informed regarding the sort of life you are known to be leading. You see, Mr. Lowe, you must understand that the office atmosphere of My Brother’s Keeper is above reproach. Ability alone will not carry a man here. There are standards finer and truer than – ”

A rhetorical note was creeping into the man’s voice. He turned instinctively to sec if Miss Hardwick was catching the precious words as they fell from his lips; then with his eyes on her empty chair he floundered.

The telephone rang. Hy, with alacrity grown out of long practise in fending for his chief, reached for it.

“Oh, Mr. Lowe – ” It was the voice of the pretty little telephone girl: “It’s a lady! She simply won’t be put off! Could you – ”

“Tell him,” said Hy with cold solemnity, “that I am in an important Conference.”

“I did tell her that, Mr. Lowe.”

“Very well – ask him to leave his number. I can not be disturbed now.”

He hung up the receiver. “Doctor Wilde,” he said in the same Solemn tone. “I realize of course that you are asking for my resignation. But first I must know the charge against me. There has been an attack on my character. I have the right to demand full knowledge of it.”

“To mention only one occasion,” said the doctor, as if unaware of the interruption, still fussing with the mission house, “you were seen, as recently as last evening, leaving a questionable restaurant in company with a still more questionable young woman.”

So that was all he knew! Hy breathed a very little more easily. Then the telephone rang again, and Hy’s overstrained nerves jumped like mad. “Very well,” said he to the pretty telephone girl, “put him on my wire.” And to his chief: “You will have to excuse me, Doctor. This appears to be important.” He rose with extreme dignity and left the room.

Once within his own office he stood clinging to the door-knob, breathing hard. It was all over! He was fired. He must begin life again – like General Grant. His own telephone bell was ringing frantically. At first he hardly heard it. Finally he pulled himself together and moved toward the desk. It would be Betty, of course. She ought to have more sense! Why hadn’t she stayed up-state with that new husband of hers, anyway! Wasn’t life disastrous enough without a very much entangled, contrite Betty on his own still more entangled hands.

But the voice was not that of Betty. Nor was it the voice of Silvia. It was a soft little voice, melodious, hesitating. It was familiar, yet unfamiliar.

“Oh,” it said, “is that you? I’ve had such a hard time getting you.”

“I’m sorry!” breathed Hy. Who was she?

“Are you awfully busy?”

Hy hesitated. Deep amid the heaped and smoking runs of his life a little warm thing was stirring. It was the very instinct for adventure. He looked grimly about the room, to be his office no longer. He didn’t care particularly what happened now. His own voice even took on something of the strange girl’s softness.

“Not so awfully,” said he. Then groping for words added: “Where are you now?”

“Up at the Grand Central.”

“Goodness! You’re not going away – now?”

“Yes – going home. I feel awfully bad about it.”

A silence intervened. Then this from Hy:

“You – you’re not alone up there?”

“All alone.”

What a charmingly plaintive little voice it was, anyway! The healthy color was returning to Hy’s cheeks.

“Well,” said he – “well, say – ”

“Yes?” she murmured.

“How long – when does your train go?”

“Oh, could you? I didn’t dare ask – you seemed so busy!”

“I could be there in – well, under fifteen minutes.”

“Oh, good. I’ve got – let me see – nearly half an hour.”

“Be by the clock in the main waiting-room Good-by!”

Hy slammed down the receiver; tore off the alpaca coat and stuffed it into the waste basket; got into his street coat; observed the editorial shears on the desk; seized them, cut the buzzer wires, noted with satisfaction the nick he made in one blade; threw the shears to the floor and rushed from the office.