THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM

By ADRIANA SPADONI

BONI AND LIVERIGHT
Publishers
New York

Copyright, 1919,
BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc.

All Rights Reserved

First printing, December, 1919
Second printing, February, 1920
Third printing, April, 1920
Fourth printing, August, 1920
Fifth printing, February, 1921

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

Jean Norris came slowly down the Library steps, passed the Chemistry Building, and took the worn path across the campus to the brush-lined creek. The hot stubble burned through her white canvas shoes and fine, gray dust powdered the mortarboard and black graduating gown she carried over her arm. With one stride she crossed the trickle of water and scrambled up the opposite bank.

"Lord!" She drew a deep breath of the shaded coolness and, taking off the mortarboard, ran the tips of her fingers under the heavy plait of pale brown hair. "Thank God this day is nearly over." She dropped to the carpet of dead leaves under the scrub oak and, with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms clasped about them, looked out through the lattice of green. With definite appraisal her gray eyes went slowly from one building to another, out across the parched campus, past the grateful green of the entrance oaks, to the strip of town beyond and the Bay, glittering in the hot May sun. A tolerant smile flicked the corners of her mouth.

It was over at last. The four long, interminable years had culminated in a series of fitting ceremonies. All day streams of students had flowed through the buildings, swept the campus, overflowed into the town. Well dressed parents from San Francisco and country parents, uncomfortable in their unusual clothes, had rushed helplessly about, harassed by the necessity of remembering many directions, of being in certain spots at certain moments, of not asking foolish questions and so disgracing their children. Flustered and important, the graduating class had appropriated the earth.

Through the throng, instructors and assistant professors had moved with weary, anxious faces as if, in the graduating of each class, they heard another hour strike in the clock of their lives. Committees, distinct with colored badges, exhausted with importance, had misread hours and locations, given directions in college vernacular so explicit that no stranger could understand them, overlapped, performed one another's duties, apologized, pretended it was all going smoothly. Everywhere well-bred, managed confusion had exuded like a fog.

Exactly at twelve, in a silence so intense that even the sun hung waiting in the zenith, the graduating class had wound its last solemn pilgrimage across the campus. First the aged president, bent, as if in scholastic humility, beneath the great weight of his Doctor's scarlet hood. Then the guests of honor, sleek and prosperous men, followed by the professors in order of their rank and departments, and finally five hundred students, two by two, awed by the seriousness of what lay before them.

To Jean it had seemed hours while the aged president piped of Life's ideals, the security of college, the pitfalls of the world. Each May, for twenty years, he had stood so, each year a little more bent, and piped of the world beyond. Parents had furtively wiped their eyes and students made heroic resolves.

Then, with a trembling gesture of his strengthless hands, he had offered the graduating class to Life. One by one they had filed up, received their diplomas and hurried back to their places under scattered puffs of applause from relatives. It had seemed to Jean that it would never end, but forever black gowned figures would be going forward to get slender rolls of white paper.

In the general confusion of congratulations that followed, Jean had caught sight of her mother, slipping unobtrusively away. She had not expected her mother to seek her out, but there was something so small, so self-effacing in the figure hurrying to take up again the endless round of duties which the graduation had momentarily interrupted, that Jean's eyes had filled with tears and she had escaped from the chattering crowds as quickly as possible.

Now it was all over. The deserted campus lay silent in the late afternoon sun, and the empty buildings rested from the ceaseless chatter. So alive was the Future, waiting for the signal to start, that when the clock, hidden in the woodbine of the Library tower, struck four, Jean jumped to her feet, shook her shoulders as if freeing them from the clutch of the years behind, and turned away.

"It may be peaceful—I suppose it is. But so's the grave."

As she came into the cool dimness of the Girls' Rest Hall, Patricia Farnsworth rose from a hammock.

"Well, for the love of Mike, where have you been? I looked everywhere, until I couldn't stand another minute."

"If you looked as violently as you appear to be doing this instant, I don't wonder you didn't find me. Library—off the main line of travel—only safe place to-day."

"Never thought of it. Gee, but I'm all in. I wouldn't graduate twice for a thousand dollars."

Jean threw her cap and gown on a couch and stretched beside them.

"Well, twice wouldn't be so bad, if you did it just for yourself. But when you insist on doing it for the whole class, Pat, of course——"

"Oh, shut up. Somebody's got to do the dirty work. Fond parents loose their moorings and drift worse than sheep."

"'Moored sheep drifting!' Patsy, how on earth did you ever make Hoppy's English?"

Pat giggled down to the depths of her stocky body. "'Moored sheep,' is going some, but honestly they were worse. I told one bewildered old party a dozen times if I told him once, that all exercises were scheduled for out of doors and nothing was taking place in the coal-cellar of North Hall. He had a perfect obsession on the cellar. Wandered into it every time I turned my back."

"Well? How was he to know that everything was being managed—'with an executive precision never before equaled in the handling of so large a class'?"

"Get out. It's all right for you to talk when you wouldn't be on a committee to oblige the President of the United States."

"I would not. Of all the piffling rubbish! If you all feel as badly as you pretend to do at getting out of the cage, why don't you just go and get your diplomas and sneak away to weep in private? And if you're not sorry to get out, and feel like this—this mess of jubilation, why don't you say so? Conventional sentimentality! It makes my tummy turn over."

"You ought to be all turned over and spanked, Jean. Some day you're going to be found frozen stiff in your own logic."

"Pat Farnsworth, I wouldn't mind beginning instanter. I never was so hot in my life. Me for tea. On a day like this my English grandparent bellows for his tea."

"Bellow on, George III. I'll get it. I've been cooling off for an hour." Pat started for the kitchen with the same vigorous efficiency that ran her many committees, paused, and with an almost shy smile at Jean, crossed to the front door and locked it. "We don't want any one butting in, do we?"

Jean had risen and now she put her arm about Pat's shoulder.

"Oh, Patsy," she whispered, "when you're gone——"

"Don't Jean. Don't. Something will turn up. It must."

Jean's lips trembled. "When you say it like that I feel sure myself for a minute. But——"

"Are Tom and Elsie going to stay all summer?"

"Yes. This is the supreme chance of mummy's life to make herself uncomfortable, and she won't lose it."

"Don't, Jeany. I hate you when you're bitter like that."

"I can't help whether you do or not. It's true."

Jean's arm dropped from Pat's shoulder and she stood frowning. "I have never been able to make you understand, but nobody who hasn't lived and breathed and petrified in Christian Duty for years could. It's the wickedest, most hellish misconception the brain of man ever conceived to make this rotten scheme of things rottener. It's done more harm in the world than the Seven Deadly Sins put together. It——"

"Don't, Jean."

"You were brought up where religion was a kind of entrée, but with mummy it's the whole meal from soup to fingerbowls. God lives right in the house with us, and interferes in everything we do. Think of it, Patsy. For thirty years, mummy hasn't eaten a meal she didn't cook herself. That translation I'm going to do for Renshaw would give us a couple of weeks somewhere. And are we going? No. Because Tom Morton, who was some distant relative of father's, who's been dead for eighteen years and whom mummy didn't love when he was alive, chooses to appear from nowhere and dump himself and his fool wife and disgusting baby on us, mummy conceives it her duty to stay all summer cooking for them, and waiting on that idiot Elsie because she's going to have another. It makes my soul shiver, it makes me so mad. And I know what will happen. You talk about my logic. It's mummy who has all the logic in our family. Because she's saddled with these she'll say she might just as well have others, and we'll have every slab-chested old maid who comes to summer-school and wants to get the best food in town for nothing. Mummy will roast all July and August and say they were very nice people as long as they don't turn her out of her own house."

"Can't you make her see that——"

"Make her see! What chance have I against God Almighty? You don't understand the basis of the whole business. 'Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.' When He stops loving He stops chastening. So it's up to the believers to get all the chastening there is."

"Don't, Jean. There must be more in it than that." Jean dabbed at her eyes and crossing to the sink filled the kettle for tea.

"Well, maybe there is. But when you live with it you're too near to see it. It's either that, all summer long, waiting for something to turn up out of the blue, or going away to teach. Sometimes I don't know which is worse."

"Now, Jean, we've hashed that over and settled it a million times. It's ridiculous. After all you are rather like mummy, you know. There are millions of things to do when you've got ordinary intelligence, but just because you loathe teaching you've picked it out as the one thing that'll come your way. How about that translation? How do you know it won't lead to something else?"

"Because I want it to so terribly hard, Patsy. I know, Pat, I suppose I do rant, but I guess I've got what Dr. Harper calls 'The Imagination for Pain.' I do want things so hard that I just can't imagine getting them."

"Doesn't say much for your imagination, no matter what Harper calls it. But it isn't that. It's just conceit, not another thing. You're so proud of that analytic brain of yours that you work it on everything. The minute you get a glimpse of some happiness you drag it into that mental laboratory and tear off its flesh, and you never stop until you've busted the poor old skeleton to bits. Why can't you let things go about with their clothes on?"

"I do."

"No, you don't. And when you do get it stripped it isn't any more of a truth than it was with its clothes on."

Pat's color deepened and she looked away in genuine embarrassment, for in the emotional reticence of their friendship they were oddly like two men. At long intervals Pat's love and admiration forced her to try and make Jean see things simply and clearly as she saw them herself.

"And it's such a lonely job, sitting there by yourself prying the barnacles off every old oyster that's been struggling to hold its clothes on ever since the world began."

The mixture of figures was too much for even Jean's very genuine mood.

"Oh, Patsy, you are the joy of my life. But I can't help it if I prefer my oysters without their clothes on."

"Yes, you can. And I hate to think of you not getting every scrap of joy there is in life. Sometimes it seems to me you just won't take things when they're right under your nose. Sometimes, you make me feel like a demented ant running about in a circle, and then again I know I'm right. While you sit round waiting for Life, it's being lived all round you. And yet, when you talk that way you make me feel as if you were sitting away off on a cloud somewhere, playing on a golden flute, while I'm down below leading a circus parade—beating a drum in a cloud of dust."

Jean sputtered into her cup and put it down for safety.

Pat grinned. "Well, the figure may be mixed, but that is precisely the way I feel. And I don't want you to sit up there always."

"But I will do things as soon as I get them to do. I can't pretend a doll's alive when I know it isn't."

"But they'll always be dolls if you go at them like that."

"No, they won't, Patsy. There must be some real live things in the world. And I'm going to get them. Even if I have to fall off my cloud and break my golden flute."

Jean bent and for a moment Pat's arms clasped her. Then they stood apart, smiling.

"All right. Go to it, old girl. Only yell in time so that I can get out from under. I never expect to have more than one drum in my life and I don't want it busted. You're no fairy."

When the dishes were finished they locked up, hung the key on its nail outside among the wistaria, and went. At the corner of the street, Pat turned toward the town, while Jean continued straight on toward the foot of the hills.

From his comfortable rocker on the porch, Tom Morton looked up from the evening paper.

"A great day, wasn't it?" His broad face beamed with unintelligent good humor as he put down the paper preparatory to a chat. "You look terribly important in that rig, Jean. Makes me feel like I don't know how to write my name."

"Well, you won't feel like that much longer. It's the hottest rig ever invented."

"You all did look kind of red round the gills. I say, Jean, who was that girl that got the gold medal? Didn't look to me like she was terrible smart."

"She stood higher than anybody else."

"Wasn't you due for something extra? Seems to me a girl that gets a job helping a professor at his own work must be some bright."

"It's not really much of a job, just a few weeks."

"Graft, them medals, I guess, like everything else. There isn't a field in this country to-day——"

But Jean had disappeared.

In the hall she almost collided with Elsie, trailing wearily from the kitchen with a great bowl of salad. Elsie put down the bowl and caught at her.

"Oh, Jeany! It was too wonderful. I never was so thrilled in my life! I don't believe I ever realized what college could mean before. If I only had had the chance! When I heard that darling old man talking about life—oh, Tommykins has just got to go when he grows up, if we starve to put him through."

"Can't be done without food, Elsie." By a supreme effort Jean succeeded in speaking lightly, but when Elsie showed signs of being about to kiss her, Jean escaped to the kitchen.

As she entered, Martha Norris emptied the creamed celery into a blue willow dish, and wiped her damp forehead with her apron. Her mouth drooped with fatigue but she smiled. Jean crossed the room quickly and took her mother in her arms.

"Mummy, you're not going to have a bad headache?" She framed the small face in both hands and looked down into her mother's faded eyes.

"Why, no, dear. It's just the heat and the excitement. It's been a big day for me, Jean. Then I got a little late and that always flurries me."

Jean drew her mother closer. "I'm not going to let you work like this any more. You're going to take things easier now I'm through, whether you want to or not."

"Now, Jeany, you know I'd be perfectly miserable idle."

"There's a lot of difference between idleness and this." Jean's hand swept the hot kitchen and the stove covered with pans. "You slave and what for? They don't even thank you."

Martha Norris laid her work-scarred hand on Jean's arm.

"You forget, dear—'Whatever ye do, do it all to the glory of God.' And it means everything, just as it says, even washing pots and pans."

Jean's arms dropped and it seemed to her that the rigid little body within stepped back almost with a sense of release. It was as if her mother had stood so long alone, that any other expression must always be a slight strain.

"Shall I serve the beef, mummy?" Jean picked up an oven cloth and moved to the stove.

"No, dear. It'll spatter and your dress is as clean as when you put it on. If you'll just cube up the cheese—I am getting behind and it's almost six now."

CHAPTER TWO

As Jean had predicted, the summer was a hard one. Martha Norris insisted on taking summer students to board, closing every argument against it with gentle insistence on her own preference.

"If you really want me to be happy, Jean, let me manage the house as long as I can."

That she might some day be physically dependent on others was the one fear that her deepest prayers had not been able to out-root. So Jean yielded.

All summer the house was crowded. The long, hot days were followed by long, monotonous evenings, filled with the complacent mediocrity of the fat Tom, the whinings of the ill-trained Tommykins, the nagging of Elsie.

The boarders ate hurriedly and had no topics of conversation except the schools from which they came and the courses they were taking. For the most part they were women past middle age, all driven by necessity of one kind or another, always striving to get as much for as little as possible. They seemed to Jean to have been cheated of something and to be resentful, some fiercely and some in a timid way that was pitiful. Most of them thoroughly hated their work, which they defended in high-sounding phrases against the attacks of outsiders, and tore to pieces among themselves.

When Jean hoped she would never have to teach, they looked at her venomously and said it was a wonderful work for which few were naturally fitted. They were like wax-works, most of them, rather scarred and worn, wound up and kept going by the fear of a younger generation, a newer output from the educational factories, who might usurp their places.

The only bright spot was the translation with Professor Renshaw. Jean buried herself for hours in the library and even succeeded sometimes in escaping dinner on the ground that it was too far to go home and back again in the evening.

But as the weeks passed and the work neared completion, she found it difficult to keep the hope that every letter from Pat held out:

"Something will happen. It must. You see, Horace will rescue you yet."

"Tell him to hurry," Jean wrote back toward the end of August. "I feel the walls of an ungraded country school closing about me."

With her mother, Jean never discussed the subject, for she knew that every night, to the long list of blessings Martha enumerated and the few favors she asked of Heaven, was added a petition that "a way would be opened up to Jean." It made Jean furious to be prayed over and sometimes she felt that having to teach would be almost compensated by proving the inefficacy of prayer.

But when the release came, Jean forgot her anger, swooped down upon Martha in the kitchen, took the paring knife from her hands, and waltzed her mother about the room.

"Now, mummy, you've simply got to stop. I cannot divulge the greatest news of the age while you pick worms out of an apple."

"There aren't any worms in these. I made Joe take those others back and change them. It was robbery. Well, dear, what is it?"

"Mummy, you've got to promise to be excited. I'm just about ready to go up in smoke."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you. I'd tell the person I wanted to excite what it was about. Did Dr. Renshaw double the check?"

"Better. Heaps."

"He's got more translation. I knew——"

"Oceans better than that."

"Well, I'm sure——" The clock struck five. Martha removed Jean's arms gently but firmly from her shoulders and turned back to the table.

Jean laughed. "I suppose I shall have to let you enjoy it in your own way. Go on and finish. Then wash your hands and sit down on the hardest, most uncomfortable chair and I'll tell you."

"Don't be silly, dear. It doesn't matter what it is, I shall have to have dinner on time to-night, won't I?"

"Yes, I suppose the animals would have to be fed even if the ark was sinking."

Jean sat on the edge of the table and watched her mother trim the pie edges, with sure, quick strokes and her whole attention. When Martha closed the oven door, she glanced at the clock to be sure of the moment. Before the astonishing news that Jean was about to divulge, the pies might be forgotten. Jean laughed aloud.

"Now." Martha smiled as she took the chair Jean indicated. "The court is in session."

"Well," began Jean, "I took that last lot up and he looked it through in that dead-fish fashion of his without a word. He always does, sits there and goggles as if he were just going to pounce on a mistake, and all the time I know it's all right. I didn't expect him to say anything nice, but I thought he might give me an opening and I had my little speech all ready. 'If this has been satisfactory,' et cetera, but I knew if he didn't say anything at all I could never get started. He freezes me clear through."

"The world wasn't made in a day, Jean."

"I know that. But I never could see why. If I could do a miracle at all, I'd have done a whopper."

Her mother's eyes filled with tears and Jean jumped down and knelt beside her.

"I'm sorry, mummy. I didn't mean to hurt you. It was cheap. Only that was such an endless ten minutes until he took a bundle of letters out of his pocket. He said he had something he thought I might be interested in, and then that human fossil actually pawed over those papers three distinct times and grunted and shook his head and wondered whether he'd lost it and began all over again while I stood wondering."

"That seems the usual method of announcing news among scholars." A sly smile twinkled in Martha's eyes.

"But honestly I nearly died. I was trembling like a leaf."

"Jean!"

"Worse. Shaking with ague. Then right out of the bundle he'd looked through a million times, he drew a letter and handed it over. The Mercantile Library in San Francisco wants a cataloguer and asks him if he knows one. The head librarian is a friend of his and he's recommended me. Do you hear, mummy Norris? I've got a job, got a job."

For a moment Martha did not answer. She sat with her head bent and her tired hands at rest in her lap. Then she looked up and smiled.

"When do you begin?"

"I'm going over to see about it to-morrow."

"You're not absolutely sure?"

"Yes, I am. I'm going to be sure to-night even if I never get it."

"Now, Jean. You——"

"Don't, mummy, please don't. Don't tell me any more about patience and the right thing coming. I've got to get this or I'll die."

"It takes a lot to kill." Martha spoke quietly, and getting up, went over to the oven.

Jean felt as if a spring inside her had cracked and wondered why it was always so when she tried to talk to her mother. Outwardly Martha Norris was the least emotional person in the world but she managed to extract a lot of it from those near her. The most casual conversation usually ended in a tensity out of all proportion to its importance and left Jean with a sense of the futility of trying to make things different.

It was with a distinct effort that Jean put her arms again about her mother.

"Now, mummy, I am going to get it. What's more, I'm going to move you over to the city, into a place that won't be big enough for you to have any duty to any relative of anybody's. So there. Now kiss me, like a nice, obedient mother should."

Martha smiled, and standing on her tiptoes kissed her big daughter. Jean went whistling from the room.

When she had gone Martha Norris closed her eyes for a moment and a look of perfect faith and devotion flooded her. In such moments she was beautiful, like some frail saint, glowing with the fire of self-surrender, strengthened beyond the power of human understanding. But no human being had ever seen Martha alone with her God.

The next morning Jean left the house early. The sun touched the Bay to millions of glittering points, and beyond it, wrapped in a haze of smoke and coming heat, the waiting city sprawled on her hills. Jean could feel it, a magnet drawing her and all these strangers massed together on the sunny deck.

As the boat neared the dock she went and stood in the stern and looked back at the little town, a mere spot at the base of the Berkeley hills. In her very definite sense of escape there was a touch of sadness. She was like a person who, having escaped from a terrible catastrophe, looks back from a point of safety and mingles with his sincere gratitude, a regret for some small souvenir he has been unable to take with him. She thought of Elsie in her dragging kimono waiting on Tom at breakfast; of the dead, habitual kiss they would exchange when he started to look for the job he never found; of Tommykins, bewildered in his disordered world of alternate slapping and petting. And of her mother, trotting about in her endless routine. She was sorry for them all.

Waiting in the outer office of the Chief Librarian, Jean felt the Future coming towards her, stepping swiftly through the stillness, a stillness vibrant with accomplished purpose, the secure accomplishment of many thousands of books. So sharp was the feeling that, when at last footsteps moved behind the door marked "Private," Jean rose as if about to face a mysterious force, made suddenly material for her understanding.

"This is Miss Norris?"

The Chief Librarian stood before her. He was tall and thin and gray, with long bony hands that looked as if they would always be cold. He was like a new chisel, straight and narrow and sharp-edged. He waved Jean back to her seat and took one himself. Then he sat, staring beyond her, as if his progress through the silent realms of spirit had been rudely halted by this collision with a corporeal body.

"You've done library work before?" The question came so unexpectedly that Jean started.

"No." The monosyllable reverberated through the ordered stillness. She felt as if she had thrown a stone at the Chief Librarian.

"Um." In the mental isolation of his daily life, this misfortune arrested his pity. "I believe you did some Latin translation for Dr. Renshaw?"

"Yes, the Odes of Horace."

"Promising—quite. But of course Horace is not library work." The tone conveyed that this was not Horace's fault, however. "Still, in this work you will find, Miss Norris, that every scrap of human knowledge is profitable. I might almost say necessary. It is its wonderful variety, roots in all fields, that makes our work so interesting."

"It must."

"Exactly. Now the question is, Miss Norris, would you be willing to begin at the bottom, sorting? Cataloguing comes next, and then——" But as if fearing that he was being carried away in an excess of enthusiasm, he qualified. "Of course that is if we find it mutually satisfactory."

"I should be willing to begin anywhere. And I have done a little sorting and cataloguing. The library I used for Horace was in something of a mess, and I had to straighten it out before I could begin."

"Exactly. But you will understand, Miss Norris, that no part of our library is in a mess." The shadow of a smile touched his lips and was gone. It was as if a cosmic joke, millions of miles off, had been softly whispered to him. "And now, as I have a very busy morning, I will hand you over to my assistant, Miss MacFarland."

He touched an electric button in the wall. With no preliminary sound the outer door opened.

"Miss MacFarland, this is Miss Norris, recommended by Dr. Renshaw. She will help at first with the new consignment."

His tone admitted Miss MacFarland to the depths of his official being. She nodded.

"Will you come with me?"

Without waiting for Jean to answer she began moving noiselessly away on her broad, rubber-soled shoes. She was very slight and gave an effect of deep brownness. She wore a brown serge skirt and a brown silk waist with a brown Scotch pebble pin. She had brown eyes that looked muddy through the thick, myopic glasses, and a braid of dank, brown hair framed her narrow face.

Through the big reading room, empty at this hour, Jean followed, down a rear stairway, along a narrow cemented hall into a storeroom, dim with a ground-glass window protected by an iron grating. Miss MacFarland indicated the great number of packing cases by a nod as she wound her way among them to a farther door. She might have been a guide in the underworld leading the latest spirit to its appointed task. She opened a door, and a sudden glare of morning sunshine filled the place.

"This is the room you will use for the present."

There were two large windows open now on a tiny strip of lawn that ran along this side of the building. A redwood table and bench took up one end of the room. There was nothing else in it except six huge packing cases.

"I'll send you down an apron and sleeve protectors and have Timothy unpack the cases."

She looked about to make sure she had forgotten nothing, and moved toward the door.

"Is there any special rotation you want the cases opened in?"

Jean asked it to pretend experience more than from any idea of its mattering. But she saw by the expression behind the thick glasses that it did make a difference and that Miss MacFarland had forgotten to tell her.

"I was going to tell Timothy, but perhaps I had better mark them."

From the pocket of her black apron she drew a piece of red chalk.

"The political economies are needed in a hurry and they are in this crate. Then the histories, natural science, miscellaneous, fiction and poetry. If you get into difficulties you can telephone up."

When she had gone Jean stood for a moment just where she was.

"Oh Patsy, a corpse has a sense of humor compared to a librarian! But it's nine a week."

CHAPTER THREE

Every morning at eight Jean crossed the Bay and every night at six she returned. The trains and the boats were always crowded, and very shortly Jean came to know certain faces and to watch for them. She liked to speculate as to what these people did, how long they had been doing it and whether they liked it. When she had made up her mind about a man or woman it always disappointed her to have to readjust her deductions by catching scraps of conversation that upset her theories. She often had to do this, however, because she was always making sweeping generalizations based on tenuous details. There were certain groups that came and went together, and although they seemed to have no connection beyond this short trip twice a day, they always looked eagerly for each other as if in dread of having to make the journey alone. They resented ever having to sit anywhere except in their usual places, and each group surrounded itself with a barrier of self-centered interest that separated it from every other self-centered group.

At first Jean ate lunch with Miss MacFarland and two other women workers, but, as she wrote to Pat, it made her feel "like a mouse nibbling at the edges of a book," and as soon as she could, broke the arrangement, and took her lunch to a nearby park. Here in the seclusion of a thick hedge, little birds came for crumbs and beyond the hedge, unseen people crunched the gravel and Jean caught scraps of their talk, unconnected bits, like scraps of patchwork.

She liked to tell Miss MacFarland about these unseen people, draw pictures of the comedies and tragedies beyond the hedge, because Miss MacFarland always listened so politely and looked so puzzled. Her thick brown eyes searched vaguely for the point of the story, and Jean knew it was only because the cataloguing was well done, that Miss MacFarland did not consider her a lunatic.

But as the weeks passed and the newness of the work dulled to a routine of writing the names of books on cards and putting numbers after them, Jean began to wonder whether in time, she, too, might not come to look vaguely for the point of a story, and prefer to drink strong tea in a stuffy room. At first the idea amused her and she elaborated it in a whimsical letter to Pat, but with the coming of the winter rains, the whimsy died, and the vision of herself in broad-toed shoes and black silesia sleeve protectors, began to follow her home every night. Now the crowds on the boat were damp and peevish and, when the boat docked, each scuttled for his own shelter, indifferent to the others.

But it was on wet Sundays that Miss MacFarland persisted beyond Jean's power to dislodge. Then Tom lounged all day in smoking jacket and slippers, dropping into brief slumber in his chair, while Tommykins cut up the colored supplement of the day's paper on the floor. Martha prepared elaborate meals and went to St. Jude's in the early morning, at four in the afternoon and eight at night. Between cooking and church, she read the lives of Anglican saints, alone in her room.

With the lighting of the street lamps on these wet Sunday nights, the town sank into the stillness of death. Only once, during the evening, did the silence ever part, to let the worshipers from evening service slip through. With soft padding of rubbered feet, a few figures slipped by the window, stealthily, as if afraid of desecrating the holiness of the Sabbath by any motion of their bodies.

At exactly five minutes before ten, Martha came cool-skinned from the dampness. If Jean was in bed, Martha always sat for a few moments on the edge. They never had anything particular to talk about, because nothing ever happened in the interim of her absence. But in these visits, Martha would strip bits of the sermon from their religious setting and offer them off-hand to Jean's intelligence. She never urged Jean to go to service, but Jean knew that in this simulated comradeship on the bed, her mother was trying to keep her in touch with "holy things," to counteract in a small part the godlessness of her days. And sometimes it made her want to cry; the little figure, carefully stripping away the phrases that annoyed, and trying to link up some old, dead form with the rush of life, was so alone in all that meant most to it. Alone with God and unaware of loneliness. So content with nothing.

It was after a particularly depressing Sunday in January that Jean came back to work on Monday morning with so fixed a certainty of becoming in the end like Miss MacFarland, that not even the relief of an unexpected blue sky after days of rain, and respite of lunch in the park had been able to dispel it. Now, in mid-afternoon, she stood by the open window, waiting for Timothy with a fresh supply of books. It was one of those perfect days between rains when sunshine filters clean air, and cool little breezes lurk in the shade. The narrow strip of lawn below the window sent up a spicy sweetness that made Jean resent the walls about her, three more hours of cataloguing and all the restrictions that hemmed one in against one's will. The air had a livingness in it that mocked any gratitude for these few moments she was free to enjoy it. Looking up at the fleecy tufts of white clouds drifting in the blue, Jean felt as a very poor person feels watching the wasteful extravagance of the rich. Something in her called to the perfect freedom of the little clouds, the inexhaustible blueness in the sky, the tingle in the air. She felt stifled, held by something she could not see, kept from something she had never had.

Jean was decidedly cross. She wondered whether, if she told Miss MacFarland she was ill and wanted to leave earlier, because it was such a lovely day, the thick brown eyes would bore into the truth, and what would happen if they did? Would Miss MacFarland ever forgive an assistant who wanted to stop working because there were little white clouds in the sky?

"Oh Lord!" Jean leaned out the window, drawing deep sniffs of the damp earth.

"Miss Norris."

Jean jerked back quickly and the blood flooded under her fair skin at the sight of the Chief Librarian standing beside her.

"Miss Norris, this is Mr. Herrick. Franklin Herrick of the Sunday Times."

He beckoned to some one still in the shadow of the storeroom and the next moment a tall man with a young face and thick fair hair stood looking at Jean. Jean never knew afterwards whether it was her own embarrassment or not, but in that first glance at Franklin Herrick she had a strange impression of receiving a very distinct picture of something naturally indistinct. He gave a feeling of great physical strength and yet looked as if he would always be too lazy to use it. His eyes were clear, deep blue and far apart, as if he went through life seeing very clearly. But the lower part of his face was heavy and his mouth contradicted his eyes. It was soft and full and not at all hidden under a small, close-cropped mustache. There was something large and curved and whitish about this tall man standing before her, with the faintest touch of amusement in his eyes, that made Jean think of the big gulls that circled over the ferryboat night and morning. She bowed slightly and wished she could stop blushing.

"Mr. Herrick is doing some special work and will need Division Z 21, which I understand is not yet catalogued. If you have no objection he might work down here, as Miss MacFarland tells me you are on Z 21 now and it would save him time."

The Chief Librarian spoke in a dry, thirsty tone and with fixed pauses, so that one got the impression of hearing the punctuation. And although he asked permission, his tone conveyed that Franklin Herrick would work in the basement whether it were convenient to Jean or not.

"That will be all right. I began Z 21 Saturday." Jean felt compelled to say something and at the same time the uselessness of saying it. "There's a small table in the storeroom. I'll have Timothy bring it in."

"Oh, no, please don't do that. It's not necessary—unless you prefer it."

Franklin Herrick spoke rapidly in a high, thin voice. It caught and held Jean's attention as the tinkle of a small bell would have done, if unconsciously she had been expecting a gong. She raised her eyes and looked at him, her own embarrassment gone. Herrick understood. Extraordinarily sensitive to the impression he made, especially on women, he knew that the thin quality of his voice had destroyed his first impression of strength. The feminine timbre of his voice was a trial to Herrick and always made him feel at the mercy of the person who noticed it. He had tried for years to deepen the tone and usually made a conscious effort at a first meeting. But for some reason, coming on this big, fair woman sniffing the air, had made him feel as though he knew her, linked them in mutual understanding against the Chief Librarian and made them seem like old acquaintances. The little incident annoyed him intensely.

He crossed to the table and appropriated one end by pushing back the books in a business-like fashion.

"I do not need much space and this will do. I shall probably be through in a day or two."

At the same instant Timothy appeared whistling, with a truckload of books. At sight of the Chief Librarian he checked the whistle, just as Jean had stopped sniffing, so suddenly that even the Chief Librarian turned and looked curiously.

Jean's eyes met Herrick's, and they smiled. When Herrick smiled at a woman he seemed to include her in something very intimate, something fine and delicate, a little beyond words. In some way it shamed Jean for the surprise she had felt at the quality of his voice. It was as if she had shown surprise at some physical defect.

"If there is anything that Miss Norris cannot do for you, if you will just ring that bell." The Chief Librarian looked vaguely about, lost in a world not his own, and went.

Separated by the length of the table, Jean and Herrick stood looking after him. Then, simultaneously, they looked at each other.

Jean laughed.

"He made me feel as if I were doing something disgraceful."

"Worse. Something not quite nice." Franklin Herrick chuckled. When Herrick laughed his voice was higher and thinner than when he spoke, but when he chuckled there was something warm and young about it. Herrick had discovered this very early in life and rarely laughed aloud. When women first heard Franklin Herrick chuckle they usually had an impulse to touch him, which impulse they called maternal or were afraid of according to their past experience. Jean, however, had no impulse to touch him, but she noticed the chuckle and liked it.

As she took her place at the table and watched Herrick cross the room for a chair, she felt that the set of his shoulders, the texture of his clothes, the very motions of his body as he lifted the chair, were not external, but expressed something within the man, just as the deft motions of Martha's hands expressed her indefatigable obedience to the drudgery of small things. And Jean liked the thing they expressed. Without defining it in words, she felt that it was something indestructibly young and buoyant and clean. It belonged with his eyes and not at all with the rather heavy lines of his chin and throat.

With a smile, Herrick drew forward a pile of books, and in a moment was hard at work. But only the surface of his brain was concerned with his notes. He knew that, from time to time, Jean glanced at him, and that, for some reason, she had changed her first estimate of him. Vibrant to any criticism, Herrick resented the implication that there had been a readjustment, and yet delighted in the result. For Jean looked as if she usually made up her mind instantly from trifles and seldom changed. She looked stronger and spiritually simpler than any woman he had ever met, as if she had been born and raised in wide spaces and carried the standards of the mountains with her. He could not picture her large, white hands ever trembling, nor her clear, gray eyes clouding with indecision, but he was sure that if he let the least hint of this sureness into his eyes, her fair skin would flush.

It was almost five when Herrick slipped the notes into his pocket and pushed back his chair.

"Through?" The brusqueness of Jean's tone annoyed him, for he had decided to stay and talk for a few moments, and the indifference in her question made him feel that Jean had shut a door he was about to push a little open.

"Yes. For the present. But I shall have to put in some licks to-night." He picked up a volume and looked inquiringly at her. "I don't suppose there would be any objection to taking this out, even if it isn't ready for circulation yet?"

"I don't know. It is against the rules."

"Perfectly good reason for taking it then."

"Just let me have it a moment. I'll make out a slip and number it."

He returned it with the look of one submitting to a foolish respect for childish rules and Jean felt like Miss MacFarland as she wrote Herrick's name and the name of the book on a pink slip. Herrick put it into his pocket.

"Thanks. It will help a lot having this. You can picture me digging my way through it in the small, wee hours, Miss Norris," he added as he took his hat and this time turned to the door.

The assumption that she would think of him at all annoyed her, and kept him in her memory almost constantly for the next two days. Jean laid this to the interruption of the usual routine. Having the mechanical intervals of Timothy's appearance broken by the unexpected advent of a newspaper man, who turned the rules of the library about, gave her several contradictory impressions of himself and ended by making her feel like a child, naturally stood out sharply in her day's work. So for two days Jean continued to think about Herrick and to be annoyed because she did.

On Thursday Herrick appeared suddenly about noon. He was in a great hurry. He returned the book, and took another, which he handed to Jean to note as she had done before. He seemed preoccupied and made no effort at conversation. It was evidently an afterthought that he turned on the threshold and called back:

"Paper goes to press to-day. Haven't time to breathe."

Jean had wondered at his altered manner, but his explanation seemed to accuse her of having shown it. She gave the slightest possible nod to acknowledge that she had heard him and went on with her work.

On Friday Herrick did not come. Jean wondered whether he was through with his work now that the paper had gone to press, and just what special duties going to press involved. It sounded interesting and much more vital than anything connected with a library. An incongruous picture of the Chief Librarian rushing something to press tickled her fancy.

On Saturday, Herrick appeared directly after lunch.

"Well, back again." Something in the tone, the look that accompanied them, showed that he had missed coming, and now entered again into a congenial atmosphere. It seemed to throw them a long way forward in mutual understanding.

"Going to press must be a ferocious business." Jean smiled across the table and made no effort to pretend work. When Jean smiled, something cold in her face melted.

"It is. I always feel as if I had been caught in a cyclone, carried violently round in a circle and deposited in the spot I started from. You see there's the same pother every week, and we're always caught in the same rush. Newspaper work's a rotten grind, anyhow."

"To outsiders it always sounds nerve-racking excitement. What on earth would you do if you had to catalogue books all day?"

"That is pretty bad." Herrick's eyes softened as they always did when he was making a woman understand his understanding.

Jean felt that without meaning to she had told this stranger a great deal about herself. Almost as if she had told him of her mother, of Tom and Elsie and Tommykins and the long, interminable Sundays. She flushed. Instantly the understanding vanished from Herrick's eyes and he shrugged indifferently.

"I suppose anything we have to stick at feels the same way."

"Did you get your work done the other night?" Jean asked it after a pause in which she wondered what she could say that wouldn't sound as if she had been thinking about him.

"Oh yes, indeed. But it was a hard pull. If you knew me better, Miss Norris, you would congratulate me on that achievement." He looked like a mischievous boy expecting to be punished.

Jean smiled in sympathy. "What on? Sticking to a disagreeable job till it's done?"

"Well, put that way, it does sound rather bald. But you see The Bunch was having a blow-out and little Franklin had to stay in his attic and work. Maybe if you knew what The Bunch can do in the way of highjinks, even you'd be sorry for me."

"Maybe I would. Are they such terribly enticing affairs?"

"Oh, sometimes we get a bit rowdy, but usually we're perfectly harmless—just conversation and music and food and meeting each other. We're congenial and interested in the same things, and keep each other from getting into a rut. Sometimes when one of us goes away or comes back, or sells a picture or an article, we have an extra celebration. That's all."

"It sounds—awfully interesting."

Herrick leaned across the table and said in a boyish, hesitating fashion:

"We do have some pretty good times. If you think you'd care for it, I'd like immensely to bring you round some evening."

"I'd love to." Jean was a trifle breathless.

"Some of us have made good and some of us are—popularly nobodies. There's Matthews and Harcourt, landscape, and Fletcher has done some fine things in bronze. Tolletson's in drama production and Freeman, Gerald Freeman, is going to be heard of with short stories. Maybe you know his stuff. He had a story in Scribner's last month. Then there are the girls, none of them are exactly famous yet; and the rest of us just jog along."

But Jean had stopped listening at Gerald Freeman's name. She had read the story and sent it to Pat. Its delicate subtlety had haunted her for days. And now she was being asked to meet him and others like him. She was being asked as if it were a favor to the big man with the kind eyes, sitting across the table. Jean tried to keep the excitement out of her voice as she answered.

"Yes, I read that story. It was so very—perfect."

"Yes. His things are that, those half elusive, dream things. They always make me think of small, finely carved ivories."

"I should like to meet him very much."

"Well, Freeman himself isn't here now. He's getting too famous to stay long in one spot, but—there's the rest of us."

Jean felt that she had been rude in her special interest and added quickly: "I'd be just as pleased meeting 'the rest of us.'"

"Then we'll settle it right now. Saturday's the best night. The unfortunates don't have to get up early, and we generally have more hilarity than just the usual nightly dinner. Could you come to-night?"

"I'm afraid I can't to-night."

Jean had never wanted to do anything so much in her life, but she could not picture herself ringing up her mother and saying that she would not be home to dinner.

"It is rather short notice. How about next Saturday? Have you that free?" Herrick saw that she wanted to come and wondered why she couldn't.

Under her pleasure that the invitation had not been postponed indefinitely, Jean had an almost irresistible desire to laugh at the idea of her having any night that was not free.

"Yes. Next Saturday's all right."

"Then I'll call for you about seven?"

"I don't live on this side."

The difficulties of meeting some one at seven, when she would be through by half past five, occurred to her, and she wondered where girls met men and how she could pretend this was not as new and exciting a situation as it was.

"Great. You get through about five, don't you? I'll call here and we'll find some way to kill the time between."

"Fine." Jean made the monosyllable as comradely as she could, and flattered herself that she had carried it off very well.

Herrick turned to the books and in a few moments was hard at work.

Jean's confusion had delighted him, and destroyed the slight annoyance he had felt at being carried away by such a foolish impulse as to ask her at all. It would be delicious to watch the reactions of this shy woman in the sophisticated world of The Bunch. He decided to say nothing about her beforehand, and enjoy to the full their surprise when he appeared,—a little late, he would see to that—with Jean in tow.

"She'll hit them like a blast of north wind. I shouldn't wonder if Kitten doesn't actually shiver."

The prospect of watching The Kitten shiver pleased Herrick immensely.

CHAPTER FOUR

Exactly at half past five Herrick came. The thick hair had been freshly cut, and he wore a suit that Jean had not seen before. He looked young and very happy and full of joy in life. As they came down the library steps and joined the after-matinée crowds, it seemed to Jean that Herrick stood out from other men, bigger, cleaner, stronger. There was something in him, burning below the flesh, that whitened and sharpened him, so that the lines which were sometimes dull and heavy when he bent intently over the books across the table, were now finely cut. He walked beside her as if he were walking lightly on springy ground, and the memory came back to Jean how, the first time she had seen him, she had thought of a gull, a strong, white gull, poised in flight. It was impossible to believe that it was only two weeks ago, and that she had seen him, in all, not more than seven or eight times.

Herrick made no effort at conversation as they threaded their way through the crowds. He was not at all sure of his ground with Jean, for his first interest had deepened in the two weeks to an intensity that surprised him. To be interested in a woman who was not obviously pretty, whose life lay well within the circle that The Bunch called the Outland, who made no effort to attract him, who never, by the slightest feminine trick, tried to rouse his interest, a woman who had been through college and was earning her own living and yet had something cloistered about her. She piqued Herrick's curiosity. One by one he had seen his small efforts drop like spent arrows against the wall of her sincere but unemotional interest.

"She's either the most subtle thing that God ever made, or else——" Herrick did not know what else. But he would find out.

When they had left the more crowded streets behind, Herrick stopped and looked at his watch.

"It's only six, and it's not much good getting to Giuseppe's before seven. What shall we do? Go round to Chinatown and have tea, or would you like to go up to Flop's studio? He's the father of The Bunch, you know, and maybe you'd feel as if you knew him better if you saw some of his stuff first."

He stood looking down at her with a smile that consulted only her preference, and showed none of his own eagerness that she should choose the latter. When Franklin Herrick was trying to break through the reserves of a woman, he looked like Sir Galahad going to battle. It always filled the woman with a rush of tenderness, and a longing to stand for something fine and real in his life.

"Besides, I'd like to show you some of Flop's stuff for its own sake, and we won't get a chance after dinner, when the whole Bunch is there. We are a noisy lot, Miss Norris. You must be prepared for anything."

"Oh, I can make a lot of noise myself. And I'd like awfully to see the pictures."

"This way, then. We'll go down through The Coast, if you don't mind. It's quicker."

His tone apologized for the street into which he turned, in a way that made Jean want to laugh at the idea of her needing protection, and at the same time delighted her. She had never been in this part of the city before, and she looked about her with interest.

Skirting the edge of Chinatown, beyond the boundaries of the big bazaars, they touched the poorer fringe of the Latin quarter, where dirty black-eyed babies tumbled in dark doorways, and tired women with bundles of food under their shawls hurried by, dragging hungry, screaming children by the hand. Here the narrow streets struggled up steep hillsides, as if in a forlorn hope of reaching quiet above. Everywhere was dust and noise and the harsh voices of men screaming at each other in the rough Sicilian dialect.

Then down through the sordid section that lies between the White World and the Yellow, where mean, gray houses cling hopelessly together, like the poor for comfort and outcasts for respectability. Where the tides of Barbary Coast wash the world beyond, Herrick paused. Then he plunged in.

It was early and The Coast had not yet come to life, but to Jean it was filled with the rumblings of the swelling tide. A drunken sailor lurched from a dance-hall. A mechanical piano ground out a popular rag. A painted woman with sodden, indifferent eyes looked from a window and laughed shrilly. Other women, powdered to a deathly whiteness, turned to stare after Jean and Herrick. Their eyes were sometimes scornful, sometimes curious. When they brushed close to Jean she felt herself turn a little cold and sick.

Once when she was a small child, while playing in the garden Jean had accidentally plunged her foot through the planking of an unused well and had felt the cold blackness sucking up. For months after she had had a terror of that end of the garden, and could feel the bottomless blackness drawing her. Now the same feeling reached out from these painted women, and Jean drew a little closer to Herrick. There was something horrible and black and hidden, the same black oozing mud that lay at the bottom of the old well. These men and women who moved and talked like herself and Herrick were down there, crawling about. She drew nearer still to Herrick. For the first time he touched her, slipping his hand under her elbow.

"We'll soon be out of it."

Then he began to talk of his work at the library. He had another week of it before he would be through.

"And I'll be glad of it in many ways. If I had to go on much longer digging that dry rot out of books I'd quit my job."

"But in a way you put life in it, rearrange it, make it your own."

Herrick laughed. Like the echo of a memory Jean's repugnance to that high, thin laugh returned. But it seemed trivial now that she really knew him.

"There's nothing to make one's own in the whole business. It hasn't any permanence. Not a scrap of reality. It is not my work."

Herrick had said this so often that he believed it, and his voice was bitter with reproach. "You see it's not so bad so long as you don't want with your whole soul to do something else. It's the knowing and not being able to get at it that's hell."

Jean remembered her hatred of teaching and the misery of that last college year. And she had only known what she hated and not at all what she wanted. What was it that this man wanted so much that the thought of it changed his voice and made him seem suddenly older? She longed to ask, but felt that he had expected her to understand and she did not want to fail him. The next moment he answered it himself.

"Several years ago I mapped out a novel and I've never had time to start it. I can't work sneaking moments. I'd have to have a straight sweep—and so I don't start it. But it gnaws there just the same."

"'Gnaws.' That's exactly what things do when they have no outlet."

He turned quickly. "Do you write, too?"

"No."

"But there's something you want to do. You couldn't understand if there weren't."

Jean shook her head. "It's mostly concerned with not wanting to do things. I have no special talent."

"How do you know? Have you tried anything?"

The irritation at her modesty was flattering. Jean flushed.

"No. But I have no faith in hidden genius. I'm twenty-four, you know, and it would have showed before this."

Herrick felt that she would have confessed to thirty-four just as readily. Her frankness repelled him.

"I don't know about that. I don't believe that we all instinctively know what we want to do. Most of us have to live some time and be hurt a lot before we find out very much about ourselves."

"I suppose we do," she said humbly.

Herrick thrilled at the note in Jean's voice. But he went on in the same serious way as if he were being forced almost against his judgment to let Jean into his confidence.

"For years the longing to get things down on paper haunted me, but I only knew that I was miserable and felt stifled. It wasn't till I came to the city, here, that the puzzle suddenly fitted into place." He stopped and made a quick sweeping gesture with both hands. "Wouldn't it be great to get all this, all the heat and noise and mud and life, to get the whole hot, seething pain on paper! God, what a picture!"

Something came into Jean's throat and hurt.

"It would be glorious." She felt that Herrick had been granted a fineness of spiritual vision she could never hope for. It coarsened her that she had seen only the dirt and squalor of the vice, while the man beside her had grasped something beneath that linked it up with reality even as they both knew it, a kind of cosmic unity too finely toned for her ears.

"You must do it. You must. Don't let an impulse like that die. It's worth any sacrifice, anything. Can't you really get at it?"

Herrick looked quickly away. "Perhaps," he said shortly, "some day, if the conditions are right, I may."

He did not take Jean's arm again and in a few moments they came to an old loft building with a dark, yawning entry.

"Here we are." They turned into the blackness, and Jean felt it close about them.